Meet Me In Texas

“Father? Hardly, Sam.”

“Well, old enough to be her uncle.”

“I think that she’s a healthy young woman and all that that implies. Why shouldn’t she be happy to have the opportunity to be around an intelligent man with more to talk about than hot cars and cattle prices like the boys around here? You heard her. It’s not like she plans to seduce him. Besides, you know how single-minded she is.”

“Single-minded. Is that a euphemism for stubborn as a Missouri mule?”

“One and the same,” Lynn said.

“I always thought her strong will was a good thing when she was pushing herself through school, then vet technician classes. Right up until—”

“She started applying it to us, right?”

Sam sighed. “She was never the same after the kidnapping.”

“Nobody would be after something like that. I certainly wasn’t.”

“Of course not. It affected all of us. And on top of everything else, you had to go through labor and delivery without me. No, I just meant Allison changed so drastically. Not that it wasn’t for the good, but I have to admit I never expected the level of determination we’ve seen. She knows what she wants and won’t settle for anything less. Obstacles are only minor problems to be overcome as far as Allison is concerned. She just doesn’t think there’s any barrier she can’t breach, and I worry that sooner or later she’ll come up against one that’s too strong even for her. I know I sound like a paranoid father, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she ends up with a broken heart one day, and it’ll more than likely be over a man.”

“Let’s hope not.” But as Lynn spoke, a slight shiver ran through her.

“What was that?” Sam asked. “Did you just get one of your feelings?”

“Sam—”

“I saw you shiver. Was it about Allison?”

As a rule, Lynn wasn’t one to keep secrets, especially from her husband, but over the years she had discovered that sharing her gift for precognitive feelings wasn’t always a good idea. The darned things scared her enough. There was no reason to alarm the people she loved unnecessarily.

“No,” she told her husband.

“You sure?”

“You know; I do get a real honest-to-God, plain old ordinary shiver once in a while,” she shot back. “It’s not always necessary to start looking up to see if the sky is falling.”

“Okay, okay.” Sam raised both hands as if in surrender. “I admit I get a little paranoid when I see you shiver.”

Lynn sighed, knowing her sarcasm had been uncalled for. “I know, and I love you for it.”

He slipped an arm around her waist, and kissed her on the cheek. “You look tired, and I noticed you had another one of those headaches today. Are you feeling all right?”

“Oh, I’m no more tired than usual.”

“You had your yearly gynecological checkup not long ago, didn’t you?”

“Three weeks.”

“And everything was fine?”

“Why shouldn’t it be?”

“No reason, I just wanted to be sure you weren’t having any problems.” He winked and gave her a slight nudge in the ribs. “We’re not getting any younger, you know.”

Of all the times for him to tease her about growing older, Lynn thought. “Speak for yourself,” she said, trying to match his light mood even though it was miles away from how she felt.

“Well, before they come to take us to the senior home, what do you say we wobble upstairs to our bed and pretend we’re twenty again?”

Lynn reveled in the physical side of her marriage and it pained her now to deliberately avoid intimacy, but she knew she couldn’t make love to Sam without revealing everything that was on her mind, and she wasn’t ready to do that.

“Hank is still up,” she said, avoiding eye contact.

“He’s thirteen. He knows to go straight to bed after the movie.”

“I know, but I have to get some craft materials together. I’m taking over Maggie Langley’s Sunday school class tomorrow.”

“I see.” There was no mistaking the disappointment in his voice.

Lynn hated not being up front with him, but she had no choice.

“All right, then,” he said after a long pause. “Good night.”

“Good night, sweetheart.”

She actually heaved a sigh of relief when she saw Sam turn the corner at the top of the stairs and head toward their bedroom. He was right; she’d had one of her “feelings,” as he liked to call them, and it had concerned Allison. As she’d watched the stepdaughter she had come to love as her own disappear up the stairs, apprehension had grown in the pit of Lynn’s stomach until it was a knot. She’d experienced an almost overpowering urge to race up the stairs to Allison’s room and tell her to be careful, but she had no idea of what. Yet the warning hovered at the edge of her mind. Not for the first time, she wished she had never inherited some of her Grandpa Hank’s “shine,” which seemed to come to her as brief premonitions. Then again, a little of it might be very helpful at the moment.

Crossing the kitchen to a small table by the back door, Lynn opened a shoe box filled with the craft items she’d already collected. Another fib she’d told her husband. For a woman who prided herself on honesty, she’d been telling lies and half truths for days, but she had good reason. Or at least she thought she did. Now, however, the guilt over not sharing news of her pregnancy with Sam was threatening to overwhelm her.

Pregnant. At her age.

Not that she was over the hill, but she would be forty in three months. Forty and pregnant. That was something totally unexpected, and under normal circumstances might even be joyful. But there had been a problem with her blood test. The doctor had used words like questionable results and abnormalities.

That had caused her enough concern, but when she heard him say, “It’s possible we may be dealing with Down’s syndrome,” she had felt real fear.

She’d wanted to rush home to Sam, cry in his arms and have him comfort her. She’d wanted that desperately until she realized that she would simply be transferring her fears to him and the children. It was bad enough that she had to go through three weeks of anxiety until she could have the test to confirm or rule out Down’s syndrome. But it would have been unfair to burden the rest of her family with the nerve-jangling wait. Her husband, her children—the people she loved most and who loved her—would suffer needlessly. So she’d kept her own counsel, but it was beginning to take a toll on her, and she wasn’t sure she could hold out another week until the test. But she had to. Until she knew the results of that test, she had decided to keep the news of her pregnancy to herself. Meanwhile, she’d gone over the options in her mind. Over and over them. It had been a shock to learn she was pregnant, but the news that her baby might be born with a handicap that could range from mild to severe had shaken her—to the point she considered terminating the pregnancy.

She’d desperately wanted other children after Hank was born, but when two miscarriages followed, it didn’t seem to be in the cards. And now…

Be careful what you wish for, Lynn thought. And because more children had been her fondest wish, terminating the pregnancy, no matter how the tests turned out, didn’t feel right to her. If the time came to make a decision, Sam’s opinion would count for a lot, but she couldn’t see him choosing that option. Meanwhile, carrying this secret around was eating away at her like acid.

Lynn put her hand on her stomach. “Dear Lord,” she whispered, “please let my baby be healthy. And give me strength to make it one more week.”

TWO HOURS AFTER she’d heard Lynn come upstairs to bed, Allison lay in the dark, wide-awake, her mind so filled with thoughts of Del she couldn’t possibly sleep. She wasn’t given to dramatics, but if she had to describe what had happened the moment he came through the doors of the clinic, she would say that it was like having viewed the world ever so slightly tilted, only to have it righted in a heartbeat. It sounded hokey, but there it was. Suddenly she felt as if everything was in the right place; everything fit. And she was infused with a kind of energy she’d never experienced. Not a frenzied kind of energy, but a powerful, steady flow of warmth, vitality and a thrilling sense of well-being.

She sat up in bed.

And balance.

That was it. Balance. Ever since the kidnapping and the journey of self-discovery that followed, she had moved forward, eager to embrace life. And while she knew in her heart she was moving toward her goals, she had never felt steady, balanced. But the instant she looked up and saw Del, that feeling disappeared. She hadn’t realized it until this very moment, but for the first time in years she felt as if she was standing on bedrock. Call it Kismet, Fate, serendipity or whatever, but all her instincts told her Del Rickman’s return wasn’t a coincidence. Not for her, at least. They had a connection. He had altered the course of her life all those years ago, and his influence had been almost as strong as her parents’. Not that she thought of him as a parental figure. Certainly not after meeting him face to face again. She hadn’t exaggerated one bit when she’d told her folks he was the most interesting man she’d met in ages. As far as she was concerned, Del Rickman was a man in a town full of boys.