A Cold Creek Reunion Page 5

  When she was younger, she used to tell him everything. They had talked about the pressure her parents placed on her to excel in school. About a few of the mean girls in her grade who had excluded her from their social circle because of those grades, about her first crush—on a boy other than him, of course. She didn’t tell him that until much later.

  They had probably known each other clear back in grade school, but she didn’t remember much about him other than maybe seeing him around in the lunchroom, this big, kind of tough-looking kid who had an identical twin and who always smiled at everyone. He had been two whole grades ahead of her after all, in an entirely different social stratosphere.

  Her first real memory of him was middle school, which in Pine Gulch encompassed seventh through ninth grades. She had been in seventh grade, Taft in ninth. He had been an athletic kid and well-liked, always able to make anyone laugh. She, on the other hand, had been quiet and shy, much happier with a book in her hand than standing by her locker with her friends between classes, giggling over the cute boys.

  She and Taft had ended up both taking a Spanish elective and had been seated next to each other on Señora Baker’s incomprehensible seating chart.

  Typically, guys that age—especially jocks—didn’t want to have much to do with younger girls. Gawky, insecure, bookish girls might as well just forget it. But somehow while struggling over past participles and conjugating verbs, they had become friends. She had loved his sense of humor and he seemed to appreciate how easily she picked up Spanish.

  They had arranged study groups together for every test, often before school because Taft couldn’t do it afterward most of the time due to practice sessions for whatever school sport he was currently playing.

  She could remember exactly the first moment she knew she was in love with him. She had been in the library waiting for him early one morning. Because she lived in town and could easily walk to school, she was often there first. He and his twin brother usually caught a ride with their older brother, Ridge, who was a senior in high school at the time and had a very cool pickup truck with big tires and a roll bar.

  While she waited for him, she had been fine-tuning a history paper due in a few weeks when Ronnie Lowery showed up. Ronnie was a jerk and a bully in her grade who had seemed to have it in for her for the past few years.

  She didn’t understand it but thought his dislike might have something to do with the fact that Ronnie’s single mother worked as a housekeeper at the inn. Why that should bother Ronnie, she had no idea. His mom wasn’t a very good maid and often missed work because of her drinking, but she had overheard her mom and dad talking once in the office. Her mom had wanted to fire Mrs. Lowery, but her dad wouldn’t allow it.

  “She’s got a kid at home. She needs the job,” her dad had said, which was exactly what she would have expected her dad to say. He had a soft spot for people down on their luck and often opened the inn to people he knew could never pay their tab.

  She suspected Ronnie’s mom must have complained about her job at home, which was likely the reason Ronnie didn’t like her. He had tripped her a couple of times going up the stairs at school and once he had cornered her in the girls’ bathroom and tried to kiss her and touch her chest—what little chest she had—until she had smacked him upside the head with her heavy advanced-algebra textbook and told him to keep his filthy hands off her, with melodramatic but firm effectiveness.

  She usually did her best to avoid him whenever she could, but that particular morning in seventh grade, she had been the only one in the school library. Even Mrs. Pitt, the plump and kind librarian who introduced her to Georgette Heyer books, seemed to have disappeared, she saw with great alarm.

  Ronnie sat down. “Hey, Laura the whore-a.”

  “Shut up,” she had said, very maturely, no doubt.

  “Who’s gonna make me?” he asked, looking around with exaggerated care. “I don’t see anybody here at all.”

  “Leave me alone, Ronnie. I’m trying to study.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think I will. Is that your history paper? You’ve got Mr. Olsen, right? Isn’t that a

  coin-ki-dink? So do I. I bet we have the same assignment. I haven’t started mine. Good thing, too, because now I don’t have to.”

  He grabbed her paper, the one she had been working on every night for two weeks, and held it over his head.

  “Give it back.” She did her best not to cry.

  “Forget it. You owe me for this. I had a bruise for two weeks after you hit me last month. I had to tell my mom I ran into the bleachers going after a foul ball in P.E.”

  “Want me to do it again?” she asked with much more bravado than true courage.

  His beady gaze narrowed. “Try it, you little bitch, and I’ll take more from you than just your freaking history paper.”

  “This history paper?”

  At Taft’s hard voice, all the tension coiled in her stomach like a rattlesnake immediately disappeared. Ronnie was big for a seventh grader, but compared to Taft, big and tough and menacing, he looked like just what he was—a punk who enjoyed preying on people smaller than he was.

  “Yes, it’s mine,” she blurted out. “I would like it back.”

  Taft had smiled at her, plucked the paper out of Ronnie’s greasy fingers and handed it back to Laura.

  “Thanks,” she had mumbled.

  “You’re Lowery, right?” he said to Ronnie. “I think you’ve got P.E. with my twin brother, Trace.”

  “Yeah,” the kid had muttered, though with a tinge of defiance in his voice.

  “I’m sorry, Lowery, but you’re going to have to move. We’re studying for a Spanish test here. Laura is my tutor and I don’t know what I would do if something happened to her. All I can say is, I would not be happy. I doubt my brother would be, either.”

  Faced with the possibility of the combined wrath of the formidable Bowman brothers, Ronnie had slunk away like the coward he was, and in that moment, Laura had known she would love Taft for the rest of her life.

  He had moved on to high school the next year, of course, while she had been left behind in middle school to pine for him. Over the next two years, she remembered going to J.V. football games at the high school to watch him, sitting on the sidelines and keeping her fingers crossed that he would see her and smile.

  Oh, yes. She had been plenty stupid when it came to Taft Bowman.

  Finally, she had been in tenth grade and they would once more be in the same school as he finished his senior year. She couldn’t wait, that endless summer. To her eternal delight, when she showed up at her first hour, Spanish again, she had found Taft seated across the room.

  She would never forget walking into the room and watching Taft’s broad smile take over his face and how he had pulled his backpack off the chair next to him, as if he had been waiting just for her.

  They hadn’t dated that year. She had been too young and still in her awkward phase, and anyway, he had senior girls flocking around him all the time, but their friendship had picked up where it left off two years earlier.

  He had confided his girl troubles to her and how he was trying to figure out whether to join the military like his brother planned to do, or go to college. Even though she had ached inside to tell him how she felt about him, she hadn’t dared. Instead, she had listened and offered advice whenever he needed it.

  He had ended up doing both, enrolling in college and joining the Army Reserve, and in the summers, he had left Pine Gulch to fight woodland fires. They maintained an email correspondence through it all and every time he came home, they would head to The Gulch to share a meal and catch up and it was as if they had never been apart.

  And then everything changed.

  Although a painfully late bloomer, she had finally developed breasts somewhere around the time she turned sixteen, and by the time she went to college, she had forced herself to reach outside her instinctive shyness. The summer after her freshman year of college when she had finally decided to g
o into hotel management, Taft had been fighting a fire in Oregon when he had been caught in a flare-up.

  Everyone in town had been talking about it, how he had barely escaped with his life and had saved two other firefighters from certain death. The whole time, she had been consumed with worry for him.

  Finally, he came back for a few weeks to catch up with his twin, who was back in Pine Gulch between military assignments, and she and Taft had gone for a late-evening horseback ride at the River Bow Ranch and he finally spilled out the story of the flare-up and how it was a miracle he was alive.

  One minute he was talking to her about the fire, something she was quite certain he hadn’t done with anyone else. The next—she still wasn’t sure how it happened—he was kissing her like a starving man and she was a giant frosted cupcake.

  They kissed for maybe ten minutes. She wasn’t sure exactly how long, but she only knew they were the most glorious moments of her life. When he finally eased away from her, he had looked as horrified as if he had just accidentally stomped on a couple of kittens.

  “I’m sorry, Laura. That was… Wow. I’m so sorry.”

  She remembered shaking her head, smiling at him, her heart aching with love. “What took you so blasted long, Taft Bowman?” she had murmured and reached out to kiss him again.

  From that point on, they had been inseparable. She had been there to celebrate with him when he passed his EMT training, then paramedic training. He had visited her at school in Bozeman and made all her roommates swoon. When she came home for summers, they would spend every possible moment together.

  On her twenty-first birthday, he proposed to her. Even though they were both crazy-young, she couldn’t have imagined a future without him and had finally agreed. She missed those times, that wild flutter in her stomach every time he kissed her.

  She sighed now and realized with a little start of surprise that while she had been woolgathering, she had weeded all the way around to the front of the building that lined Main Street.

  Her mom would probably be more than ready for her to come back and take care of the children. She stood and stretched, rubbing her cramped back, when she heard the rumble of a pickup truck pulling alongside her.

  Oh, she hoped it wasn’t Taft coming back. She was already off-balance enough from their encounter earlier and from remembering all those things she had purposely kept buried for years. When she turned, she saw a woman climbing out of the pickup and realized it was indeed a Bowman—his younger sister, Caidy.

  “Hi, Laura! Remember me? Caidy Bowman.”

  “Of course I remember you,” she exclaimed. Caidy rushed toward her, arms outstretched, and Laura just had time to shuck off her gardening gloves before she returned the other woman’s embrace.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  Despite the six-year difference in their ages, they had been close friends and she had loved the idea of having Caidy for a sister when she married Taft.

  Until their parents died, Caidy had been a fun, bright, openly loving teenager, secure in her position as the adored younger sister of the three older Bowman brothers. Everything changed after Caidy witnessed her parents’ murder, Laura thought sadly.

  “I’m good,” Caidy finally answered. Laura hoped so. Those months after the murders had been rough on the girl. The trauma of witnessing the brutal deaths and being unable to do anything to stop them had left Caidy frightened to the point of helplessness. For several weeks, she refused to leave the ranch and had insisted on having one of her brothers present twenty-four hours a day.

  Caidy and her grief had been another reason Laura had tried to convince Taft to postpone their June wedding, just six months after the murders, but he had insisted his parents wouldn’t have wanted them to change their plans.

  Not that any of that mattered now. Caidy had become a beautiful woman, with dark hair like her brothers’ and the same Bowman green eyes.

  “You look fantastic,” Laura exclaimed.

  Caidy made a face but hugged her again. “Same to you. Gosh, I can’t believe it’s been so long.”

  “What are you up to these days? Did you ever make it to vet school?”

  Something flickered in the depths of her eyes but Caidy only shrugged. “No, I went to a couple semesters of school but decided college wasn’t really for me. Since then, I’ve mostly just stuck around the ranch, helping Ridge with his daughter. I do a little training on the side. Horses and dogs.”

  “That’s terrific,” she said, although some part of her felt a little sad for missed opportunities. Caidy had always adored animals and had an almost uncanny rapport with them. All she used to talk about as a teenager was becoming a veterinarian someday and coming back to Pine Gulch to work.

  One pivotal moment had changed so many lives, she thought. The violent murder of the Bowmans in a daring robbery of their extensive American West art collection had shaken everyone in town really. That sort of thing just didn’t happen in Pine Gulch. The last murder the town had seen prior to that had been clear back in the 1930s when two ranch hands had fought it out over a girl.

  Each of the Bowman siblings had reacted in different ways, she remembered. Ridge had thrown himself into the ranch and overseeing his younger siblings. Trace had grown even more serious and solemn. Caidy had withdrawn into herself, struggling with a completely natural fear of the world.

  As for Taft, his answer had been to hide away his emotions and pretend everything was fine while inside he seethed with grief and anger and pushed away any of her attempts to comfort him.

  “I’m looking for Taft,” Caidy said now. “I had to make a run to the feed store this morning and thought I would stop and see if he wanted to head over to The Gulch for coffee and an omelet.”

  Oh, she loved The Gulch, the town’s favorite diner. Why hadn’t she been there since she returned to town? An image of the place formed clearly in her head—the tin-stamped ceiling, the round red swivel seats at the old-fashioned counter, the smell of frying bacon and coffee that had probably oozed into the paneling.

  One of these mornings, she would have to take her children there.

  “Taft isn’t here. I’m sorry. He left about a half hour ago. I think he was heading to the fire station. He did say something about his shift ending at six.”

  “Oh. Okay. Thanks.” Caidy paused a moment, tilting her head and giving Laura a long, inscrutable look very much like her brother would do. “I don’t suppose you would like to go over to The Gulch with me and have breakfast, would you?”

  She gazed at the other woman, as touched by the invitation as she was surprised. In all these years, Taft hadn’t told his family that she had been the one to break their engagement? She knew he couldn’t have. If Caidy knew, Laura had a feeling the other woman wouldn’t be nearly as friendly.

  The Bowmans tended to circle the wagons around their own.

  That had been one of the hardest things about walking away from him. Her breakup with Taft had meant not only the loss of all her childish dreams but also the big, boisterous family she had always wanted as an only child of older parents who seemed absorbed with each other and their business.

  For a moment, she was tempted to go to The Gulch with Caidy. Her mouth watered at the thought of Lou Archuleta’s famous sweet rolls. Besides that, she would love the chance to catch up with Caidy. But before she could answer, her children came barreling out of the cottage, Maya in the lead for once but Alex close behind.

  “Ma-ma! Gram made cakes. So good,” Maya declared.

  Alexandro caught up to his sister. “Pancakes, not cakes. You don’t have cakes for breakfast, Maya. We’re supposed to tell you to come in so you can wash up. Hurry! Grandma says I can flip the next one.”

  “Oh.”

  Caidy smiled at the children, clearly entranced by them.

  “Caidy, this is my daughter, Maya, and my son,

  Alexandro. Children, this is my friend Caidy. She’s Chief Bowman’s sister.”

  “I like Chief Bow
man,” Alex declared. “He said if I start another fire, he’s going to arrest me. Do you think he will?”

  Caidy nodded solemnly. “Trust me, my brother never says anything he doesn’t mean. You’ll have to be certain not to start any more fires, then, won’t you?”

  “I know. I know. I already heard it about a million times. Hey, Mom, can I go so I can turn the pancakes with Grandma?”

  She nodded and Alex raced back for the cottage with his sister in close pursuit.

  “They’re beautiful, Laura. Truly.”

  “I think so.” She smiled and thought she saw a hint of something like envy in the other woman’s eyes. Why didn’t Caidy have a family of her own? she wondered. Was she still living in fear?

  On impulse, she gestured toward the cottage. “Unless you have your heart set on cinnamon rolls down at The Gulch, why don’t you stay and have breakfast here? I’m sure my mother wouldn’t mind setting another plate for you.”

  Caidy blinked. “Oh, I couldn’t.”

  “Why not? My mother’s pancakes are truly delicious. In fact, a week from now, we’re going to start offering breakfast at the inn to our guests. The plan is to start with some of Mom’s specialties like pancakes and French toast but also to begin ordering some things from outside sources to showcase local businesses. I’ve already talked to the Java Hut about serving their coffee here and the Archuletas about offering some of The Gulch pastries to our guests.”

  “What a great idea.”

  “You can be our guinea pig. Come and have breakfast with us. I’m sure my mother will enjoy the company.”

  She would, too, she thought. She missed having a friend besides her mother. Her best friend in high school, besides Taft, had moved to Texas for her husband’s job and Laura hadn’t had a chance to connect with anyone else.

  Even though she still emailed back and forth with her dearest friends and support system in Madrid, it wasn’t the same as sharing coffee and pancakes and stories with someone who had known her for so long.

  “I would love that,” Caidy exclaimed. “Thank you. I’m sure Taft can find his own breakfast partner if he’s so inclined.”