Not as frequently now as in the beginning, but often enough to remind him that neither girl had forgotten her mother or ceased to miss her. Lucas pushed away the memories and tried to resume an interest in the conversation.
“Personally, I don’t know what it is with women and their books,” Glen was saying. “Ellie’s downright excited about this new bookstore.” He shook his head. “I can see what’s going to happen already. Tumbleweed Books is gonna be just like Dovie’s place. I’m gonna feel like a bull in a china shop the minute I step inside. You know what else I figure? She’ll start selling other stuff besides books. There’ll be trinkets and smelly women things, and coffee with stuff in it. Like vanilla.” He shuddered. “I say it’s time a man opened a shop in Promise.”
“Men don’t buy that many books.”
Lucas raised his eyebrows. “Maybe you don’t, Cal, but I happen to read quite a bit.”
“I didn’t say men didn’t read,” Cal objected. “I said they don’t buy books. Did you realize that seventy percent of all books are bought by women?”
“When did you become such an expert on book sales?” his brother asked sarcastically.
“Since I’ve been talking to Annie. She knows about books—used to work in a library. And she knows about business. She did her research before deciding to open her bookstore.”
“Good for her,” Glen said. “But what about a store for us men? Where a guy can smoke a good cigar and buy new boots at the same time.”
That sounded like a great idea to Lucas, but from personal experience he knew that what Cal had said was true. Only it wasn’t limited to books. Women took real pleasure in shopping. And pride—it apparently required great skill to scout for bargains. Hell, whenever he had to buy jeans, he refused to check out prices in three or four stores just to save a few pennies. His time was too valuable to waste on bragging rights for a pair of denims. In his dad’s words, “Women shop. Men buy.” That always made Julia laugh—no, he wasn’t going to think about Julia now.
“It isn’t only the women Annie’s catering to, you know,” Cal continued. “Besides her reader groups, she’s hoping to start a creative-writing group and Saturday-afternoon storytelling for kids. You might be interested in that for your girls. She’s already got Travis Grant lined up.”
This was one of the longest speeches Lucas had ever heard from Cal, and he appreciated the information.
Travis Grant was a local writer with a wide national audience for both his children’s books and adult adventure series. Lucas had been looking for ways to encourage Heather to read, and this sounded perfect. He hadn’t managed to convince her that reading was fun, not a chore. However, getting Heather to read was the least of his worries at the moment.
At Cal’s mention of the girls, Glen turned his attention to Lucas. “How’s it going with your new housekeeper?”
Lucas shrugged. He paid top dollar for Mrs. Delaney and found the woman to be adequate, but little else. She watched the girls before and after school, cooked their dinner and did light housekeeping. Although Mrs. Delaney was kind enough to his children, she didn’t offer them any real comfort. And she wasn’t enthusiastic about much of anything. She didn’t read to the kids or play with them.... He shrugged again.
“That says it all,” Cal muttered.
Lucas nodded in agreement. “Sometimes I think it’d be easier to find myself a wife.”
“Then why don’t you?” Glen asked. “There’s got to be someone within a hundred-mile radius who’d be willing to have you.”
Lucas slapped his hat against his friend’s side, and Glen laughed. Despite his own grin, Lucas saw no humor in his dilemma. His parents, Carl and Elizabeth Porter, had been looking after the girls, but caring for two youngsters had taken a toll on his mother and she needed a break.
His mother felt she was letting him down, but Lucas was the one who insisted his parents travel for a while and enjoy their retirement. They’d done far too little vacationing since he’d moved to Promise with his girls. It was time.
“Things are bound to get better,” Lucas said. He sounded more certain than he felt.
“Yeah,” Glen concurred, and Cal nodded.
For the sake of his sanity, Lucas hoped his friends were right.
Grady Weston had been in a bitch of a mood all afternoon, and he knew why. It was because of Richard and that damn letter. Just when Grady was beginning to feel his life was finally free of his brother, Richard turned up again. Like a bad penny. Interesting how many relevant clichés there were, he thought grimly. A rotten apple. A bad seed. A thorn in his side.
Richard’s most recent effort to weasel his way back into the family’s favor infuriated him. Grady knew he needed to talk to Savannah and soon, otherwise Caroline was going to start asking questions. He’d never been good at hiding his concerns from his wife. He hadn’t mentioned the letter, which meant she’d probably hear about it from Savannah. He wanted to avoid that. Even now, after three years of marriage, he couldn’t shake a niggling fear that was tied to Caroline’s past connection with his brother.
At the end of the day, Grady didn’t head back to the house as was his normal routine. Instead, he turned off the main road toward Laredo and Savannah’s place.
Grady parked the pickup, then walked to the rose garden, where he knew he’d find Savannah. While she prepared the earth for new plantings, three-year-old Laura was busy filling a yellow plastic bucket in the sandbox and nine-month-old Matthew was contentedly chewing on a toy in his playpen.
His sister stopped her work, leaning on the hoe when she saw him approach, almost as if she’d been expecting him. A large straw hat shaded her face, preventing him from reading her eyes. One thing he’d say about Savannah: she certainly had a way with roses. A profusion of color marked the rows—deep reds, pale pinks, whites and yellows. Even from a distance, he caught their scent. Savannah’s roses had an unforgettable fragrance.
She had a thriving mail-order business that specialized in antique roses. She was what some people called a “rose rustler”—or “rose rescuer,” as she preferred to describe it. She visited abandoned farmhouses, old churches and even cemeteries to find long-forgotten roses, many of them a century old. She scoured ditches and detoured onto rambling dirt roads. It wasn’t unheard of for Savannah to drive two hundred miles to track down old roses. More than once, she’d stood up to demolition crews and halted highway construction work. She’d do whatever it took to find and rescue surviving rosebushes. She’d bring them home and restore them to full health and beauty, then propagate them for sale to other rose lovers—whose numbers continually astonished Grady.
“Hi, Grady,” Savannah finally said. She slowly put aside her hoe before walking out of the garden, stopping to scoop Matthew out of his playpen first.
The child offered Grady a toothy grin, showing off four front teeth. In all his years, Grady didn’t think he’d ever seen a youngster who resembled his father as much as young Matthew did, in personality as well as appearance. Even at nine months, Matthew displayed a stubborn strong-willed nature. Although, come to think of it, Caroline said much the same thing about their son, three-year-old
