A Home Of Her Own

Fearing she might choke on them, Melodie chose her words carefully. “It’s not that. It’s just that she deserved better.”

“Yes, she did,” Buck agreed, biting back the oath scalding his tongue. “She deserved a whole lot better than what you gave her, and I’m not talking about a blasted set of dishes either!”

That cruel accusation caused Melodie to spin around on her heels. Eyes the color of a stinging winter sky snapped with indignation.

“And just what gives you the right to judge me? To sit as both judge and jury on my feelings for my mother?” she demanded.

Matching hers in intensity, Buck’s eyes threatened to burn a hole right through her.

“Years of being by her side, watching her scrimp and save to leave you a ‘respectable’ inheritance, months of holding her hand and watching her waste away from cancer and heartache as she waited for any scrap of attention you might deem to send long-distance.”

“Self-righteous words from the dutiful son my mother never had. Between her sainthood and your martyrdom, I doubt if there would have been enough room at her bedside for a sinner like me!” Melodie snarled in return.

Despite the vehemence of her response, Melodie’s shoulders slumped beneath the weight of her guilt. Sucker punched by Buck’s resentment, she turned aside to hide the depth of her pain. Placing both hands on the dated Formica countertop, she attempted to steady herself. Her hands were still trembling when she reached for the coffeepot and poured herself a cup. As if hoping to somehow warm herself all the way through with its meager heat, she wrapped her fingers tightly around it before turning back around to face her grand inquisitor.

What possible good would come from trying to explain that Randall wouldn’t let her come home? That juggling a demanding job and a manic-depressive husband simultaneously was all she had been able to manage at the time. The excuse sounded pathetic even to her own ears. Squaring her slender shoulders, Melodie strode back to the table with her chin tilted defiantly up. Taking her seat, she brought the cup to her lips to blow away the steam that rose like an incantation from the dark brew.

The silence was deafening. They looked at one another more as strangers separated by strands of barbed wire than as one-time soul mates. Swishing a sip of hot liquid around in her mouth, Melodie forced herself to swallow it along with yet another tough piece of leftover pride.

“Look, Buck,” she began, daring to meet his eyes dead on. “You’re certainly entitled to your feelings, and God knows I owe you a debt of gratitude not to mention a long overdue apology. But it’s unlikely that the years of hurt between us are going to be healed over any cup of coffee. Since we’ve both got a couple of hard days ahead of us, do you think we could postpone our mutual animosity until after the funeral?”

For the first time since she had stepped inside the house, his features visibly softened.

Taking in the hard line of Melodie’s jaw and the way her throat pulsed as it closed around unshed tears, Buck realized just how near she was to breaking down. After years of cherishing the idea, he was surprised to discover how distasteful the actual possibility was.

Unbidden memories tugged at his conscience as he recalled the last conversation he’d had with her mother.

Don’t be too hard on my little girl when she comes home, Grace had begged him on her deathbed. She was awful young when she hurt you, and you don’t know what kind of struggles she’s had to endure these past years.

Buck didn’t dare squeeze the frail hand that clutched his. Grace’s bones were brittle, her skin almost translucent, her eyes dark hollows of concern—ever filled with concern for the daughter who had abandoned them both.

I won’t, he had replied over the bile that rose in his throat.

There was little Buck could refuse Grace. Abandoned as a child by an alcoholic single mother with the morals of an alley cat, he spent years being bounced from foster family to foster family. Grace had literally snatched him off the road to the reform school when she offered him a job.

And a home.

And an opportunity to be accepted for who he was and what he had to contribute to their family. She had treated him as if he truly were her flesh and blood. Although she pleaded with her eyes, Grace had not openly asked him to forgive her daughter. Buck was grateful for that. Some things were simply too reprehensible to warrant forgiveness, and being cheated on was one of them. He wasn’t likely to ever forget the fact that Melodie had made a fool of him. A broken heart is hard enough to heal in private, but when a proud man is made the target of public snickering, it is often easier to simply discard his heart than to attempt resuscitating something damaged beyond repair.

While Melodie waited for a response to her request for a temporary truce, she stiffened her nerves with another shot of caffeine. She could almost feel the strong, black coffee eating away the lining of her empty stomach.

“Fair enough,” Buck conceded grudgingly. “I suppose the least either of us could do for Grace is call a cease-fire for the time being.”

“Thank you,” she said, rising on shaky legs. “I guess I’d better get started unpacking.”

Buck did not respond with so much as a grunt let alone an offer to help her bring in her luggage. Facing his past had proven harder than he’d imagined. In recurring dreams, he’d told this woman exactly what he thought of her, lashing out with brutal honesty until she melted into a puddle of remorse at his feet. Oddly enough, now that the moment had come, he found he simply didn’t have the heart for it. Grace had always maintained that vengeance should be left to the Lord. Maybe she was right. Looking into Melodie’s guarded eyes, Buck saw a glimpse of someone who’d been through hell on earth. He doubted whether anything he had to say would penetrate the protective mask she was wearing. That brittle facade was so firmly fixed in place that he wondered if behind it there remained a single trace of the sweet girl with whom he had once upon a time fallen so desperately in love.

Suddenly his anger was overcome by a staggering sense of loss. What was the use of venting so many years after the fact? What could possibly be gained by inflicting even more pain upon one another now? Having embraced Grace’s faith some time ago, he recalled God’s admonition to forgive others as we would have others pardon our transgressions. Had he not been holding so tightly on to his splintered ego, Buck might have made an attempt to reach out to this shadowy vision of his past, envelop her in his arms and offer her a measure of comfort on this sad, dreary day.

Bewildered by the very idea, he abruptly announced, “I’ve got to feed the stock. Make yourself at home.”

Melodie glanced at him sharply. Was the remark intended to be as caustic as it had sounded? Surely he wasn’t worried that she was going to throw him out of the only home he’d ever known? Or herself for that matter. While it was true that she had lived in finer places since she’d moved away, none had ever earned the privilege of feeling like a real home.

“I’ll do that,” she replied evenly, starting toward her old room with the same confidence with which she had approached the cupboards earlier, certain that nothing in this old house had changed at all.

But what she discovered behind that familiar closed door was enough to send her reeling.

Chapter Two

“I suppose you expected me to stay in the bunkhouse forever?”

Melodie snapped her jaw back into place before attempting to address the question. The way Buck was leaning up against the wall prejudging her was so patently insolent that she didn’t dare give him an honest reaction. She didn’t think she could endure much more of his scoffing.

“Of course not,” she lied.

It was, after all, a perfectly logical arrangement. Melodie simply couldn’t bring herself to accept the fact that her mother had actually moved Buck into her old room. So secure had she been in the belief that this little house was impervious to change that it unnerved her to realize all vestiges of her presence had been completely erased from the room that had at one time been the center of her universe.

She had opened the door expecting to see everything in its place: her old stuffed animals, a prized collection of ceramic horses, a beloved Western doll with a leather fringed skirt and vest, her trophies lined up on the shelf along one wall, a coveted rodeo queen sash draped over the head-board of her twin bed, the embroidered quilt her mother had stitched with equal amounts of love and patience one Christmas when money was particularly scarce—all the special things that marked the passage of her youth.

Instead Melodie was met by stark walls devoid of anything more personal than a trophy fish mounted above Buck’s four-poster bed. The room was tidy enough, she’d give him that. As neat as an orphan’s scrapbook. She suspected that her mother was responsible for the only personal touch in the room: a handmade afghan folded neatly on the foot of a bed that quite simply overwhelmed the small area.

“Just tell me when you want me to move out.”

Startled by the straightforwardness of Buck’s overture, Melodie hastened to reassure him that she had no intention of uprooting him.

“N-never,” she stammered over the tripping of a heart too easily moved to sentimental palpitations. “I’ll just put my things in Mom’s room.”

Despite the glibness of her response, Buck’s occupancy in her old room did present Melodie with a new and unfathomable set of problems. She couldn’t imagine sleeping in the very next room to the man whose heart she had accidentally broken without ever fully explaining herself. A man who had every right to hate her guts. A man whose presence still had the power to make her very soul tremble.

For one thing, the walls were paper-thin! she thought to herself.

People were bound to talk, Buck thought to himself.

Indeed, gossip traveled faster than a brush fire in this small community where everything was everybody’s business. Pushing himself away from the wall, Buck came to stand within inches of Melodie. So close that he could smell her uniquely feminine scent. That haunting blend of leather and lace, sagebrush and musk, stirred memories of a time when the world was as new to them as to a colt surveying life for the first time on wobbly legs.

“Aren’t you worried about your reputation, Little Bit?” he queried, cocking an eyebrow at her.

Her reputation! Melodie almost laughed out loud. If he only knew how little that tattered rag mattered to her.

“You were always a lot more worried about that than I was.” Hearing the trace of bitterness in her voice, she hastened to add, “Besides I’m well past worrying what anyone else thinks, Buck.”

Even you, she silently added.

Once upon a time she had allowed concern for fickle virtue to throw away a life with the gentle man who refused to bed her for the manipulative opportunist who had. What she had endured throughout the travesty of her marriage left Melodie numb to the threat of public ridicule.

She risked a small smile. “What about you? Are you worried about a wicked widow besmirching your honor?”

Buck snorted his derision at the idea.