Every instinct he had was telling Sam that something was definitely up. Bert Evans and Jeremiah had been best friends and fishing buddies most of their lives. There wasn’t much one wouldn’t do for the other. Up to and including trying to pull a fast one. He crossed the yard to the other man and looked down at him. “Is there something I should know?”
Doc ran one finger along the inside of the collar of his shirt and swallowed hard. Still not meeting Sam’s gaze, he shook his head. “Nope, not a thing, boy. Everything’s as it should be.”
“Uh-huh.” Folding his arms over his chest, Sam braced his feet wide apart and simply stood there. Waiting.
Seconds ticked past, and a strong breeze jumped up out of nowhere and rushed through the yard. The older man shifted uneasily on his feet, glanced around the yard, looking everywhere but at Sam.
“He’s faking, isn’t he?”
Bert’s gaze snapped to his and he didn’t even have to say anything for Sam to know that he’d guessed right. Guilt was stamped on the other man’s features.
“Now why would you say that?” The doctor asked, deliberately avoiding answering the question outright.
“Because,” Sam said, scowling now, “it occurs to me that if Jeremiah was really as desperately ill as you two want me to think, you’d have him in the hospital. Or at the very least, have a trained nurse here taking care of him.”
“Maggie’s here,” Doc argued.
“Yes,” Sam said and heard Maggie come up to stand beside him. “And she’s been great with Pop. But she’s not a trained nurse. Not yet anyway,” he conceded, remembering that she was studying to be just that. “So I have to wonder, Doc. Is Jeremiah putting one over on me? Or you?”
The older man cleared his throat, rubbed his jaw, then blew out a breath. When he didn’t speak, Maggie did.
“Dr. Evans,” she said, aligning herself with Sam, “is Jeremiah ill or not?”
He huffed out another breath, swallowed hard, then admitted, “I never wanted to lie to you, Maggie. Or you either, Sam.”
“I don’t believe this,” Maggie muttered.
“I do,” Sam said with a shake of his head. “The old goat tricked us into coming home.”
Instantly Bert’s eyes fired up and his spine straightened as if someone had suddenly shoved a steel pole down the back of his shirt. Shaking an index finger at Sam as if he were still a kid and needed a good dressing-down, the older man said, “It’s a damn shame that old goat had to trick the three of you into coming back to the ranch.” He took a breath and rushed right on before Sam could try to defend himself. “You boys haven’t been back since that summer, and do you think that’s right? Do you think it’s a fair thing to do? Cutting your grandfather out of your life?”
“No, but—” Sam shoved both hands into his pockets and backed up a step. He also noticed that Maggie’s gaze was on him.
“There’s no buts about it, boy,” Doc Evans said. “You three mean the world to that ‘old goat’ in there. Not surprising he’d do whatever he had to do to get you back here, now is it?”
No, it wasn’t. And if the doc’s aim had been to make Sam ashamed of himself, it had worked. But no one could understand just how hard it was to come back to Coleville. To this place that had once meant everything to him. No one could know that coming here, being here, felt as if he was somehow dismissing what had happened that summer. As if he was trying to forget.
“It was an accident,” Doc said, his voice softer now. “But you three have been making Jeremiah pay in loneliness. That isn’t right.”
Sam didn’t trust himself to speak. Guilt roared through him with a sound so thunderous it surprised the hell out of him that the others couldn’t hear it. The doc was right. Jeremiah had been punished for something that wasn’t his fault. Sam and his cousins had each cut this ranch and the old man out of their lives to make living with that summer easier on themselves. But they’d never stopped to consider how their actions affected their grandfather. And what kind of bastards did that make them?
He scrubbed one hand over his face and turned away, suddenly unable to face the accusatory glare in Doc Evans’s eyes. He walked across the yard in long, hurried strides until he reached the edge of the field. Then he stopped and stared. Stretched out for miles in front of him, open land raced toward the horizon. The breeze whistled past him, lifting his hair, tossing dirt into his eyes. Midday sun beat down on him like a fist and made him feel as though he were standing at the gates of hell, feeling the heat reaching out for him.
Appropriate.
Behind him, he absently listened to Maggie thanking Bert for coming and then to the soft sounds of the doctor’s footsteps as he left. Shame still rippled inside Sam and he had no defense against it. The bottom line was he and his cousins had forced their grandfather into faking a serious illness just to get them home.
“Are you okay?”
Maggie came up beside him and laid one hand on his arm. The simple heat of her touch, the gentleness of her voice, eased back the knot of pain lodged in the center of his chest.
“No,” he admitted, never taking his gaze from the horizon. “I don’t think I am.”
She sighed. “What Jeremiah did wasn’t right. He shouldn’t have worried you and your cousins—or me.”
Finally then Sam looked at her, caught the worry in her dark eyes and warmed himself with it. “He shouldn’t have worried you. We had it coming.”
“You’re being really hard on yourself.”
He laughed at that. “Aren’t you the one who’s been telling me that I should never have stayed away?”
“Yes,” she said. “But if anyone should have understood what you were feeling, it should have been Jeremiah.”
“No.” Sam turned to face her and laid both hands on her shoulders. “He couldn’t. Because he doesn’t know all of it.”
“Tell me,” she said, reaching up to cover his hands with her own. “Tell me what happened.”
His fingers tightened on her shoulders, his grip clenching as if holding on to her to steady himself. Maggie sensed the pain radiating from him and wished she could do something to ease it. But there was nothing—not unless he could talk to her. Tell her what it was that kept him in pain. Kept him from the home and the grandfather that he loved.
“Sam…”
He inhaled sharply, deeply, and blew the air out again in a rush. “Every summer we came here. There were four of us. All of us born within a year or two of each other. Our fathers were brothers and we were more like brothers than cousins ourselves.”
His eyes misted, and she knew he was staring into the past, not seeing her at all, though his grip on her shoulders remained strong.
“Me, Cooper, Jake and Mac.” A wistful smile curved one corner of his mouth. “I was the oldest, Mac the youngest. Not that it mattered,” he admitted.
The
