Sweet Blessings (Love Inspired) (7 page)

If Granddad were here, he'd have liked this place. He would have said no town could be half bad if it
had a train going through it. His grandfather had always longed to travel, and maybe that was what trains always meant to him, but he'd been a farmer with his feet rooted firmly in Texas soil.

This cozy rural town reminded Heath of his summer trips to stay with his grandparents. Not the terrain—there was no mistaking Montana with her mountains and lush rolling valleys for the dry brown flat expanse of central Iowa. But this place, too, was a one-street town, where folks went just a little bit slower, were kinder, and knew their neighbors. In that way, it felt familiar—not like home, no, never that, but a good place to stay for a while.

The phone rang somewhere up near the cash register. Down the aisle, Amy hopped up, chewing on a long French fry, and jogged to catch it. She told the twins to relax as she skirted the counter, reached down and popped up with a handheld receiver. She brightened like creek water when sunlight hits it and turned her back, her voice a warm melody.

He ate everything on his plate—he was hungrier than he'd thought. He polished off a tall glass of frothy root beer and considered. The waitresses had given him a fair cut of the tips. He had cash enough, added with what he'd had in his wallet, to see him through the rest of the week or so, if he was careful. He wasn't in a bad position, not bad at all.

There was no reason to accept Amy's job offer. This place, while it reminded him of better times in
his life, had too many families. Too many friendly people. He'd leave, it was the best decision.

Still, it was with regret that he pushed out of the chair and took his plate back to the kitchen. He would have liked working here.

Amy shouldered through the doors and took his plate from him before he could add it to the stack Jodi, the other waitress, was rinsing.

“Hey, where are you going?” Amy looked friendly enough, he decided, but there was a hard set to her face. She slipped a key into his palm.

He stared at it, confused. “A key? What for?”

“To the room upstairs. I thought—I mean Rachel and I thought—that you might want to stay there. You did want the job, right?”

Amy watched, heart racing, trepidation rushing through her bloodstream. Heath studied the plain, ordinary key, as if she'd offered him a handful of radioactive waste.

Maybe he thought this was charity, too, since he was touchy on the subject. “The apartment can be part of your pay, if you want it. It isn't much, but it's clean and furnished. Why don't you go take a look at it and decide it you want to stay there, even just for the night instead of in another motel room.”

“You seem pretty sure of this. You were worried about me running off and leaving you shorthanded.”

“It's still a concern of mine, but Rachel has faith in you. She said she liked the cut of your character,
helping us out the way you did last night, and stepping in today when others wouldn't have. Besides, she also pointed out that we're shorthanded now, that's the problem. We'll solve it by hiring you. Do we have a deal?”

He looked around, took his time before he answered. “I know I made a donkey's behind of myself when we first met, and I'm sorry for the way I acted. I won't do it again. If you can put the way I treated you behind us, then I'd like to work here.”

Should she be surprised that he'd apologized again? She didn't have a lot of experience with an honest apology from a man—well, those from her brother didn't count, and brothers were brothers. She knew she could trust him. But what about Heath—could she trust him?

She studied him, trying to see more than what he appeared to be. With the slant of the sun through the door, burnishing his powerful frame with vivid light, he was startling. He was a big man—not bulky with thick muscles, but not lean either. There was a latent power that seemed to burn in him, leashed and waiting.

His hair wasn't black, as it had appeared last night in the dark, but a rich bitter-chocolate-brown. His high forehead and strong cheekbones were not harsh, but intelligent and well-defined. Although he was handsome, his features were set in an unmistakable expression that said, “Keep away.” He was a private man and a self-sufficient one.

“I can put it behind us.” Amy understood, too, having pride. “Go check out the room. Let one of us know if you need anything, all right?”

He was already shaking his head, already pushing through the door. “I don't need anything. When did you want me to start?”

“How about you come in around four? Rachel's in the kitchen tonight, and she'll walk you through the prep and train you on the grill. Is that all right?”

“Yep.” His mouth compressed into a tight thin line. Serious, sincere, he met her gaze. The impact of their eyes meeting felt like a jolt of lightning to her soul.

“I don't want you to worry about me,” he assured her. “I work hard. I do my best. I don't want to cause anyone any harm or grief. I just want to be left alone.”

His words weren't harsh, but they were definite. Don't get too friendly, he was saying.

Well, good, because that was her motto, too. She was close to her family and her friends, but that was it. At least this was something she and the loner agreed on—distance. Maybe he knew, too, it was the only way to keep safe.

“Rachel will be waiting for you at four,” she said in agreement.

As if he understood, he gave her a curt nod and disappeared from her sight.

 

Heath didn't set his hopes high as he fit the key into the decades-old knob. From the outside, he
wasn't expecting the place to be much at all. He turned the key until the lock released. No dead bolt, he noticed. Then again, there probably wasn't much crime in a town like this.

The door swung open, giving in to gravity when Heath released the knob and it shuddered to a stop against the wall. He saw only dim shadows, the outline of lemony light ebbing around the pull-down blinds at the windows and noticed the mildew and dust odor of a room long unused.

He decided to leave the door open. Maybe some fresh air would improve the place. It was a good thing he'd known not to expect too much. There'd been a time in his life when he'd gotten so much, he came to take it for granted. His old self, the man he used to be, would have been disappointed for sure over this room where the floorboards beneath his feet groaned and creaked.

He yanked the first blind and it slipped out of his fingers, rolling up with a bang. Bright afternoon light filtered through the screened wood-framed window. Since he wanted fresh air, he tried to open it, but it was stuck. The old paint had gotten damp and tacky. He used a little muscle and the wooden frame began to give. Sunshine seemed to welcome him as he let the fragrant fresh breezes slide past him and into the apartment.

His jaw dropped. Now that he had some light to see better, he couldn't believe his eyes. The front
room was bigger than he'd expected. There were the shadows of bricks at the inside wall and the hollow of a fireplace. In front of that sat a living-room set. Two couches and a chair had to be second-hand, because the style was several decades old, but the furniture was clean and the tan upholstery looked like new. He sat on the nearest couch to test it out, and a little cloud of dust rose from the impact of his weight. But what was a little dust?

The cushions were comfortable. There was a small coffee table if he wanted to put up his feet, and, wait…was that a TV remote? He leaned forward and reached out. Yeah, it was. So, were was the TV?

He hit the power button and in front of him, propped on the end table between the couches was a color thirteen-inch screen. An old Western movie flashed the bright pictures of a cattle round-up. The volume was on low, so it was more of a humming drone in the silence.

It wasn't half-bad, he decided as he scoped out the rest of the room. There were two doors in the end wall, the bedroom and bathroom, he figured. And, behind him on the inside wall near the front door was a dark archway that led into what was probably the kitchen. Amy was right, it was clean and comfortable.

Yeah, he could live here. It was a far better place than anywhere he'd stayed in the recent past, which he thought of as his second life. The old life was gone—he was never going back. He couldn't.

His chest began to seize with pain and he carefully wiped even the mention of his past from his mind. It was some time before his chest relaxed and he could breathe normally again—before the silence surrounding him held no traces of memory.

Outside he heard the rasp of tires on the alley's pocked blacktop and the purr of an engine coming closer. A car door snapped shut, echoing. He listened to the tap of a woman's shoes as she hurried to the back kitchen door, directly beneath his open window. The rasp of the screen-door hinges was preceded by a woman calling out.

“Amy! Amy!” It sounded like the other sister's voice, Rachel, the quieter one. “Help, quick! Emergency!”

Adrenaline shot into his veins—it was a call to action. Like a soldier jumping for his weapon, he was on his feet and had his hand on the doorknob. His attention focused so intently that the outside stimulus fell away. He was ready to roll. The sister needed help.

The screen door slammed shut, and her voice went on. “I can't get this ledger thingy to balance and Paige is gonna flip out when she sees it.”

A ledger thingy? What was a ledger thingy?

His feet stopped moving, and his hand seized the rail. He realized he was already halfway down the stairs, heart pounding, ready to offer assistance however it should be needed, and there wasn't a real
emergency. No one was in danger. No one needed medical attention.

Amy's voice, soft as lark song, answered, confirming the problem. “Paige is so good at bookkeeping she can't see why everyone doesn't understand it.”

“It's like the whole double-posting thing. Why post it twice? I say, add up the numbers from the cash register, subtract it from the checks from the checkbook. But no, there have to be ledgers and accounts payable and amortization schedules.”

“Here's a strawberry soda. Sit down, drink it, relax. What time did Linna say the team party would be over?”

“Four.”

“Good. We have some time before I have to go. Between the two of us, we ought to be able to figure this out before Paige gets back and blows a circuit.”

The sisters sounded less dire as they talked, and now they were laughing easily. He wiped his face with his free hand. He'd walked right into that one, hadn't he? Just like that, he was the old Heath Murdock again. He couldn't stop the past, even in a place like this, hundreds of miles away from home.

He breathed deep, trying to calm down. He took in the surroundings, as if that reminded the deep places in his gray matter that he was in Montana, not Oregon. It was different here. Dry, with a faint haze of dust in the air. And there was the heat of sunshine baking the earth and wildflowers and, farther away,
the growing crops. He was no longer walking the old path. He was no longer a doctor ready to offer aid. He couldn't help anyone.

Not anymore.

The sisters were laughing, and Amy was saying, “Why did you put this here? I can't believe you did that.”

Rachel chuckled, as if she found her own mistakes the funniest thing. “Yeah, it's wrong, I know, but all I can say is that it sounded like a good thing at the time.”

“You are a horrible bookkeeper, Rachel Elizabeth McKaslin.”

“I know. It's not news, so when Paige flips out when she sees what I've done with her books, we'll have to both tell her that I told her so. She just wouldn't listen.”

“Rachel, you do realize we couldn't pay someone to do this bad a job on purpose.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

It was a good-natured conversation. Heath didn't mean to listen in, but his feet seemed to have become cemented to the stair beneath his boots. The sisters went on talking, laughing and joking as if they were the best of friends. The deputy's words came back to him.
I've never met a nicer family…. They're the kind of folks who don't think about getting more than they give.
That would sure be a change in his life, he thought, glad that he was going to stay.

He eased down onto the step and let the filtered sunlight from the reaching branches of the trees next door flicker over him. The rustle of leaves, the distant drone of a tractor, the hum of a passing bumblebee, the warm murmur of voices from inside the restaurant…these sounds soothed at the knot of tension he always carried with him.

He felt better than he had in a long, long while. He took a deep breath, letting the clean country air fill him up. A movement through the leaves caught his attention—it was a kindly-looking elderly lady in the next house down the alley a ways. He watched her amble down her porch in a baggy blouse and jeans. The brightly colored garden gloves on her hands and the wide-brimmed hat shading her face told of her intentions.

It was timeless, the picture she made as she knelt at her flowerbeds and bent to work. Maybe weeding, he decided, as she produced one of those metal claws from behind a bush and attacked the ground. A smoke-gray cat sauntered from the shaded porch and curled around the lady, who took off a glove to scratch beneath the feline's chin.

Heath could almost hear the contented purr. Or maybe it was the memory of how his grandmother used to tend her vegetable garden on hands and knees, humming one of her favorite tunes—she was always humming. And he was reminded of how she'd stop to indulge one pet or the other as well as her
grandson, whose baseballs often went astray in her flowerbeds.

Those were good memories, and he ached from remembering in a different way. He'd been happy as a boy visiting them. And sitting here remembering made the agony within him ease. Not that he'd ever be happy. No, never that.

The sisters were laughing again, their voices closer, coming from the kitchen by the sound of it. There was some clanging and a bang of cupboards, and then a triumphant, “I found it!”