Redwood Bend

Dylan stood and put out his hand. “Thanks, Lang. Can you manage without me while I stay behind?”

“You have to ask?”

“This is your chance to file a complaint with management.”

Lang just gave a snort of laughter. “You going to bed?” Lang asked.

“I might sit here awhile.”

“Kill the fire,” Lang reminded him. “See you in the morning. I expect a good send-off.”

Four

Katie laughed at what seemed like a perfect life shaping up. She’d had a great dinner with her brother last night—burgers on the grill with Leslie. She took her boys to the new Virgin River school, introduced them to Miss Timm, the teacher, and signed them up for the summer camp program. They needed at least one program to keep them busy, and to keep them from becoming bear food. She couldn’t watch them every second. Then she went back to her enchanted cabin in the woods and installed the newly purchased TV in the loft, hooking it up to the satellite dish. Then she changed her oil.

How sexy, she thought. Well, after a major trip, that was a good idea, and these were the kinds of things it was always hard to find time for. When she’d finished and used a cone to pour the oil into an empty plastic milk container for discarding, she relaxed on her porch with a soda. She drank it out of the can and put her feet up on the porch rail. A small shaft of sunlight on the porch warmed her bare legs; it was nice to finally be in shorts again. Summer in the mountains would be so much more comfortable than the hot, steamy summers of Sacramento had been.

The hood of the SUV was still up, the jug of oil sitting next to the oil-coated pan on the ground and she thought, I am seriously demented, because I consider this a flawless life. Time for everything. No rush. Someone else watching the boys for a while. Isolated in the woods, surrounded by the beauty of nature. In fact, if it hadn’t been marred by the growl of an engine, she would think she was in the Garden of Eden.

And then he drove his motorcycle right into her yard.

She didn’t move a muscle, but took a drink of her cola as he, hidden behind the dark visor of his helmet, revved his engine a couple of times.

Then he shut down and got off the bike, dragging off the helmet. She gave herself a lot of credit for not sharply inhaling at the shock of his good looks. He swaggered toward her, peeling off his gloves. He had that swagger thing down; it was probably due to the constriction of the tight jeans around his hips. She took another slow slug of the soda. “Lost?” she finally asked.

“Just checking out the back roads,” he answered. “Car trouble?”

“Nope. Everything’s fine.”

“You usually park with the hood up like that?”

“I just changed the oil,” she informed him. “Lots of miles on that car in the last few months. I just moved here from Vermont.”

He grinned at her and touched his cheek, indicating the oil on hers. “You might’a got a little on you, there.”

“Yeah?” she asked, returning the grin. “I’ll clean up later. I thought you left. I heard the gang pulled outta town.”

“The boys left,” he said, slapping his gloves into the palm of his hand and looking around her clearing. “I’m hanging out for a couple of days. Taking a closer look at this place. Interesting area.”

“Don’t you have a job?” she asked, unable to keep the sarcasm from her voice.

“Right now this is my job,” he answered. “Don’t you have a job?”

She gave him that one, laughing. “Besides mothering five-year-old boys? Not yet,” she said, finally taking her feet off the rail and standing up. She tugged on her shorts; they’d been riding up. “Want a Coke?”

“Why not.” He shrugged.

“Can okay?”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

She disappeared into the cabin and was back in seconds with a cold can. She handed it to him and he studied it briefly. “Diet,” he finally said.

“Well, if I sat on a vibrating machine all day, I probably wouldn’t have to watch my weight, either. By the way, who pays you to do that? I might be interested in that job.”

He came up on the porch and casually took the second chair, propping his feet up on the rail as hers had been. He wore leather pointy-toed cowboy boots; she wore old beat-up tennis shoes with a little oil on them.

“I probably wasn’t clear. The bike was recreation while I was riding with my friends but it’s now transportation—I’m here on business.” He popped the top on the can and took a drink. He made a face.

She returned to her seat, put her feet back on the rail. “What kind of business?”

“Well…my friends and I have a small air charter operation in Montana. Very small. A little airport in the middle of a bunch of national parks, great hunting grounds and dude ranches that aren’t doing such a great business right now. People are a little too hard up for fancy vacations. So I’m checking out the area fixed base operations to see if there’s any opportunity around here.”

She sat up a little. “Really? You fly?”

He gave a nod. “I fly. Our airport is a long way from the big airports, so, sometimes people need a puddle jumper. Or a charter to a lodge or something.”

Genuinely interested, she turned and faced him. “Fun,” she said, smiling. “I’d love to do that. Fly planes. Or jump out of them. Fun.”

“Why don’t you?” he asked. Because it never occurred to Dylan that you didn’t pursue any old thing that came to mind.

She laughed indulgently. “Oh, gosh, a little busy, I guess. And my line of work never left a lot of disposable income for extras, like learning to fly or skydive or mountain climbing or…or a lot of things.”

“What line of work is that?” he asked, completely interested.

“Hmm,” she said, taking a drink of her soda. “Well, my dad owned a hardware store, in which I was working on Saturdays by the time I was eleven. By the time I was twenty and had a couple of years of college under my belt, both my parents were gone, and Conner and I were struggling to run the store. He made sure I stayed in school, but I worked as hard in that store as he did until I got married and moved away.”

“In a hardware store?” he asked. Then he gave a little laugh. “She changes tires and changes oil…”

“I do a lot of things. When the boys came along, Conner stuck me with paperwork. I was happier in the store, building things, helping customers learn how to build and repair things, but you know—a person can only do so much.” She whistled and shook her head. “Twins. Couldn’t be twin girls, right? I’m probably better off with boys, given that I enjoy team sports a lot more than things like ballet and origami.”

He looked into her eyes. “You were kind of busy, I guess.”

“I lost Charlie right before they were born,” she said. “If not for Conner, I don’t know what I would’ve done, so when he gets all big brother on me, I let it go. But from twenty-one to twenty-six I worked full-time in that store. I worked as hard as Conner and I did as much, too. I wasn’t some girlie girl who could only do the books. I trained to be a phys ed teacher, but we had a commitment to the store.”

Now, this business about losing Charlie, this brought Dylan upright. His feet came off the rail; he turned toward her, leaning his elbows on his knees and said, “If you don’t mind my asking about Charlie…”

“He was army. He was deployed, I was pregnant, he was killed on a mission, the details of which I’ll never know, and the boys never knew him. But I have medals and pictures and I try to be sure they know about their dad. He was a great guy. He was a hero. When they’re older, they’ll be proud of him.”

Dylan nearly blanched. The closest he would ever come to being that kind of hero would be playing one in a movie. “Army widow,” he said for lack of anything intelligent.

“Army widow.”

He cleared his throat. “And you can do all the guy chores because…”

She looked at him with dead seriousness. “My dad taught Conner and I all the mechanical and maintenance stuff. He was so proud of that—that he didn’t cut me out of the loop. That store was to be in the family for as long as we wanted it to be. And it was to be as much mine as Conner’s. You don’t get a bigger cut for being a boy.” Then she laughed and said, “My mother did none of that stuff, by the way. She was old-fashioned and not very stylish. She cooked and cleaned and tended kids. She could never have been a soccer or softball coach and I might’ve been such a disappointment to her—I pitched girl’s softball rather than sewing or learning to bake. But when I was fourteen she said, ‘Katie, never underestimate the power of red lipstick.’ From that point on I knew when their anniversary was because they went out to dinner alone and she put on the red lipstick.” And she laughed. “My parents were pretty boring,” she added. “But they were in love in their own way. I mean, come on,” she said with a lift of a brow. “Red lipstick! Priceless, right?”

Dylan was transfixed by the smile, the laughter. How did she do that? Talk about dead people, people who had ultimately let her down, even though not by choice, and laugh with such beauty? He wanted that mouth....