that not much had changed there.
ALLIE WENT TO bed early after her confrontation with Jason Hudson, but she did not sleep. A wind blew in close to midnight, beating on the house and making the trees creak until the early hours of the morning. Allie finally fell asleep, only to have her alarm ring minutes after she’d dozed off. First day of work. No hitting the snooze.
Yawning, she left the house in her pajamas and coat to do her early morning chores, only to find a few random shingles scattered across the front porch. There were more shingles in the yard. And in the driveway.
Allie had a very bad feeling as she followed the shingles toward the small barn, hidden by the arena—the only building on the property that still had a shingled roof, as opposed to metal. She rounded the corner of the arena then stopped dead. The entire structure lay in a heap of boards, beams and trusses. So much for refurbishing the small barn when they could afford it.
Allie approached the destruction slowly, circling it as if it were a carcass, which in essence it was. It appeared that the roof had been totally lifted off and tossed to the side, twisting the building enough to bring it down. Then she saw the damage to Dani’s arena, the canvas covering impaled by debris.
Allie pressed a hand to her forehead. Her first day of work and...this.
The ranch hated her.
The feeling was mutual.
As soon as she got into the house, she called the insurance agent and left a message, then showered and dressed for work, debating about whether she should move to the Staley house, with its stainless steel appliances and vaulted ceilings. No bad memories. No curses. Dani wouldn’t care.
The ranch would win, but she’d probably be a lot happier.
* * *
OKAY, SO HIS dad didn’t want a sitter and he had made that abundantly clear again this morning when Jason had asked him again about meds. Cool. Jason didn’t want to be a sitter and that hadn’t been his intention when he’d come home. But he also didn’t want to fight with his dad about how he needed to take care of himself.
He glanced at his watch and continued jogging up the mountain, ignoring the sweat rolling down his back and the dull ache in his knee as he tried to shake off the early morning pissing match he’d just had with his father. Sweat helped. It always did. He might be done with football, but he couldn’t imagine life without training. Or a schedule, which he currently lacked.
At least he had a goal. In fact, his entire life had been goal-oriented, as Kate had pointed out the night before. Becoming a professional football player had consumed him since he’d been six and a half, when his dad had first started taking him to games. He’d known then that he wanted to be one of those titans out on the field and even though he’d kept the goal to himself, he’d strived for it. Made smaller goals to achieve; goals that built on one another. Moving to Montana, where his dad had bought a construction company, hadn’t helped, but he’d taken the small school to the state championship two years in a row. That had gotten him a scholarship to a powerhouse football school, and the rest had pretty much been history.
Truly history now.
Enter phase two of his life plan.
Jason slowed his steps as he reached the boundary fence to the Forest Service land, then turned to look out over the Eagle Valley. It was a beautiful little valley, stretching between two mountain ranges with a lake dead-center—a lake with a house on it that his father still wanted him to buy. There was a new resort on the far side of the valley—Timberline—where he’d promised his sister dinner. On the opposite side was the Lightning Creek Ranch, cozied up against the mountains with its broad pastures and fields insulating it from encroaching housing developments.
It would have been the perfect sanctuary, but as Ray had told him the day before, there were other places with acreage for sale. Just none as nicely situated as the Lightning Creek or as close.
Jason stretched for a minute, working through the kinks that were part of the territory after eight years of getting slammed to the ground, then slowly started jogging back down the mountain. What was he going to do with his future other than steer clear of Uncle Jimmy’s dealership and keep an eye on his dad? Even while jogging the thought of a nebulous future made his stomach start to knot. Pretty soon he was going to have to either come up with some kind of plan or invest in antacid stock.
* * *
“I HOPE WE see you tomorrow,” Mrs. Lynn, the school secretary, said with a speculative raise of her eyebrows when Allie turned in her key before going home after the first day of her long-term substitute-teaching contract. “I know things get a little wild in the library on kindergarten day.”
“Couldn’t keep me away,” Allie assured her with a quick smile. It was, after all, a job, with a paycheck, and in truth, the lively kindergarten classes had barely fazed her—possibly because she’d been mulling over the call she’d received from the insurance agent just before lunch. The collapsed barn had been underinsured, and while they would issue a check, it wouldn’t come close to replacing the barn. The only good news was that the damage to the indoor arena was covered and they’d start to work on that claim immediately.
But despite the rough start and the insurance issues, Allie had a surprisingly stress-free day manning the school library. Classes came and went. Teachers, many of whom she already knew, stopped by to say hello and welcome her. She’d eaten lunch with her friend Liz Belfort, who taught second grade at the school, and caught up on the local news. It wasn’t until it was time to head home that she started to feel the familiar stirrings of anxiety, and she knew it was because she fully expected to find a new disaster waiting for her on the Lightning Creek.
She gave a small snort as she drove out of the parking lot. She’d been conditioned to expect the worst there, just as her sister Mel had told her when she’d grudgingly volunteered to hold down the fort while Dani and Jolie were away. It was true. She drove into the driveway and instantly started scouting for fallen trees, escaped livestock, lightning strikes and floods.
Nothing, but she wasn’t totally convinced that the ranch was done with her.
That evening, after finishing her evening chores and checking the pregnant cows, all of whom stubbornly refused to show any sign of calving, Allie poked around the remains of the small barn. It had been built in the 1960s and the wood wasn’t weathered enough to be salvaged for reuse in offices and houses, which was a disappointment. At school she’d managed to convince herself that there might be some salvage potential to help pay the demolition costs, but no. Now, if the big barn blew down, that wood would be worth something—
Allie abruptly stopped the thought. The way her luck was going, the big barn would blow down. Best to focus on getting what was left of the small barn out of there and not wish for trouble in the form of salvageable boards.
* * *
EVEN THOUGH JASON had come home to be near his father, and even though he was immensely grateful that his dad was still alive, they’d already begun to slip into their old roles. Jason managed to keep his mouth shut in situations that would have triggered him in his teens, but he felt his patience beginning to wear thin. He and Max made a daily walk around the neighborhood, with his dad’s two monster Dobermans leading the way. On every walk Max directed the conversation to Jason’s future and the possibility of him working for Jim, no matter how many times he tried
