we shouldn’t have teased her,” Julie told Libby.
“Of course we should have teased her,” Libby said. “She’s our little sister.”
Julie looked speculative. “If you married Austin,” she ruminated, turning to Paige, “we could have a triple wedding, and you wouldn’t have to worry about hoops and lambs and bustles, because you’d be wearing a bridal gown.”
Paige flung both hands out from her sides. “Why didn’t I think of that?” she scoffed. “I’ll just marry Austin. To hell with my goals, my plans, my personal standards. To hell with everything!”
Julie reached out to touch Paige’s arm. “Honey,” she said softly, “we didn’t mean to upset you—”
Paige drew in a deep, sharp breath, let it out slowly. Shook her head. “It’s all right, I just—I just need some time alone, that’s all.”
Having said that, she left Garrett’s glam second-story apartment—one of three such spaces comprising that floor of the house and part of a third—and to their credit, neither Julie nor Libby called her back or tried to follow.
Downstairs, Paige crossed the main kitchen, retrieved her jacket and purse from the guest apartment and slipped out through the back door. It was dark, and stars glittered from horizon to horizon in great silvery splotches of faraway light.
On the other side of the courtyard wall, the kids were laughing, the dogs were barking, while the men talked in quiet voices.
Paige couldn’t make out their words, wouldn’t have tried. She needed quiet to collect her scattered thoughts, get some perspective. So she walked to her car—which she’d parked near the barn instead of in the garage as she usually did, flustered, at the time, because of Austin’s close proximity—got in and started the engine.
She drove down the long driveway, through the open iron gates, and out onto the highway, headed for town. She switched on the radio, choosing a classical spot on the dial instead of her favorite country station. Paige felt too raw to listen to country music at the moment, and she was woman enough to admit it, by God.
This last thought made her smile.
Drive, she told herself. Don’t think about him.
Between the soft piano concerto flowing out of the dashboard speakers and the semihypnotic effect of driving alone over a rural road, cosseted in purple twilight and under a canopy of stars, Paige was finally able to relax a little—and then a little more.
It was as though Austin McKettrick possessed his own magnetic field; the farther she got from him, the easier it was to breathe, to reason. To simply be.
Reaching the outskirts of town, Paige slowed down, drove automatically toward the house where she and Libby and Julie had grown up, with their dad. Libby had lived there, before and after Will Remington’s death from pancreatic cancer, with her dog, Hildie, and had run the Perk Up Coffee Shop to support herself.
Now, thanks largely to their mother, Marva, and her questionable driving skills, the shop was gone, along with the mom-and-pop grocery store that had once stood beside it, the lot totally empty.
Rumor had it that a bank would be built on the site, but as Paige bumped along the alley toward the detached garage behind the old house, she saw no signs of construction.
After parking her car in the narrow space the garage afforded, Paige got out, walked to the back gate and let herself into the yard.
Here, there were definitely signs of construction. The old cupboards, newly pulled away from the kitchen walls, stood near the porch, seeming to crouch under blue plastic tarps. The bathtub, so outdated that it was probably about to come back into style again, rested in one of the flowerbeds, with the matching green toilet perched inside it.
Paige sighed as she let herself in through the back door and drew in the scents of sawdust and new drywall. She flipped on the overhead light and was gratified, and a little surprised, that it worked.
The kitchen, twice its former size, boasted a new slate-tile floor and an alcove set into a semicircle of floor-to-ceiling windows, but it was a long way from usable.
Paige shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket and moved farther into the house.
The living room was all new; the floors were hardwood and the molding around the edges of the raised ceiling had been salvaged from an old mansion in Dallas. There was an elegant marble fireplace, with an antique mantel, and the windows, like the ones in the kitchen, stood taller than Paige did.
Black against the night, the glass threw her reflection back at her—a trim woman in jeans, a T-shirt and a jacket, with dark, chin-length hair and the saddest eyes.
A lot of changes had been made, but this was still the place—the very room—where her dad had died.
It was the same house her mother had left, for good, when she and Libby and Julie needed her most.
The same house where she’d waited in vain for Marva to come back. Where she’d cried over Austin McKettrick and grieved after her father’s death.
Julie and Libby had both signed their shares over to her. And she would live here, a spinster, growing stranger and stranger with each passing year. Adopting dozens and dozens of cats, and playing bingo three nights a week, cutting beer cans into panels, punching holes in the sides and crocheting them together into hats.
Paige sank down onto the raised hearth of the fireplace and tried to make up her mind whether to laugh or cry. It was a tough choice.
AUSTIN WAS ONLY half listening to his brothers’ conversation that evening, there in Garrett’s small, well-lit courtyard; a big part of his mind was on Paige. He’d heard her car door slam, listened as she started the engine, and it had been all he could do not to let himself out through the gate and run down the driveway after her, like some damn fool in a bad movie.
Lounging at the picnic table, watching the kids and the dogs dash around in the grass, Austin sipped his beer and savored the smoky scent of beef cooking on an outdoor grill.
Julie and Libby came down the back steps from Garrett’s terrace, Libby carrying a salad, Julie holding a tray of empty glasses and a pitcher of iced tea. While Austin couldn’t rightly think of a place he’d rather be just then, he wished Paige hadn’t left.
Remembering his manners—better late than never, he supposed wryly—he rose, crossed the yard and took the tray out of Julie’s hands.
Julie thanked him. She and Libby exchanged glances, and both of them looked flustered.
Austin carried the tray back to the picnic table, set it down and turned to see both his brothers watching him.
When he realized that they thought he might have done himself permanent injury by carrying the tray, he gave a brief, ragged chuckle and shook his head.
Tate and Garrett had the good grace to look chagrined, and went back to turning steaks and talking ranch business.
