There was no word from Danny the next day. Annie tried to pretend that she didn’t care one way or another. That she was relieved not to have to deal with having Danny coming around. But the truth was that not hearing from him had her concerned and wondering if something had gone wrong.
Again.
Had he decided to go back to that dude ranch in Colorado, the one he said he worked on? Or had he decided, after seeing her twice, that he was making a huge mistake starting things up again? That he was actually opening up a can of worms that was best left unopened and buried somewhere back in the distant past?
It was the not knowing that was putting her on edge, so much so that she found people were talking to her twice because she’d drifted off.
It was happening, she realized. She was letting Danny get to her, just as she had let his disappearance get to her twelve years ago.
C’mon, Anne, you’re better than this. You’re not a teenager anymore. You’re a grown woman and a mother with responsibilities. Your world isn’t supposed to revolve around whether or not Danny Stockton turns up on your doorstep.
She forced herself to focus on her work and remained at the reception desk, working straight through her lunch break.
But no matter what she told herself, all that day it felt like every fiber of her being kept waiting for Danny to turn up, first at the clinic and then later, at her home.
He didn’t.
By the middle of the second day, she’d almost convinced herself that Dan Stockton had gone from her life just as abruptly as he had turned up.
Now she just had to make her peace with it. She told herself she could—but it was far from easy. So far that when Hank came by her house later that afternoon to pick Janie up for an overnight stay, he asked her, “Something wrong, Anne?”
“Nothing more than usual,” she answered evasively. “They were shorthanded at the clinic today, and between the house calls the vets had to make to the different ranches and the pets people brought in themselves, things have been pretty hectic all week.”
She noticed Hank peered closely at her face and figured she was in trouble. She’d never been one to maintain a poker face. “That the only thing bothering you?” he wanted to know.
She tossed her head as she looked up, doing her best to bluff her way through this. “Why? What else would there be?”
She could both feel and see Hank studying her. It was all she could do not to shift uncomfortably.
“Maybe an old flame turning up without any warning,” he suggested.
Rather than deny anything, she decided to brazen it out and hopefully make Hank back off. “That’s not really any of your concern, Hank.”
But Hank obviously saw it another way. “Yes, it is. Daniel Stockton ran out on you when you needed him most,” he insisted angrily.
“Stop!”
She didn’t want Hank saying anything about Danny that Janie could accidentally overhear. She wasn’t ready to tell her daughter about the circumstances of her birth and she certainly didn’t want the girl to find out by hearing Hank talking about it.
“That’s all in the past,” she informed him sternly. “And as far as I’m concerned, that’s exactly where it belongs.”
But the expression on his face told her that Hank was far from convinced. “Are you sure, Anne?”
She moved closer to him, but not out of any desire to rekindle something between them. There had never been anything between them except for respect and gratitude on her part. But she didn’t want what she was about to say to Hank to be overheard.
“As far as Janie knows, you’re her father and she’s always going to think of you that way.” She lowered her voice even more as she added, “You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
He looked relieved to hear her say that. “I love that little girl, Anne,” he told her, emotion brimming in his voice.
“I know, Hank, and she loves you. That’s never going to change.”
He looked over Anne’s shoulder as Janie came into the room, backpack in tow. His whole countenance changed, lightening up right before her.
“Well, speak of the devil,” he declared in a louder, more jovial voice.
“I’m not the devil, Dad,” Janie protested as she came over to join him.
“Well, sometimes you act like a little devil,” Hank teased affectionately.
They had a good relationship, Anne observed. She couldn’t remember Hank ever raising his voice or saying a cross word to Janie. She found herself almost wishing that Hank really was Janie’s father. Things would have been a lot simpler that way.
“I’m all ready to go, Dad,” Janie announced, impatient to leave.
Hank took her backpack from her and pretended that he found it extremely heavy. Suppressing a grunt, he said, “I can see that.”
“Be good and listen to your dad,” Anne instructed her daughter.
Janie rolled her eyes. “Yes, Mom.” Turning to Hank, she confided, “She thinks I’m a baby.”
“You’ll always be my baby,” Anne interjected, deliberately giving the girl a big hug.
Janie groaned and squirmed, acting as if she was being subjected to corporal punishment. The second Anne released her, Janie deliberately moved out of her mother’s reach.
Pretending not to notice and giving no indication that it hurt, Anne walked Hank and her daughter to the door.
“Have fun, you two,” she told them.
“Oh, we will,” Hank promised, saying the words more to Janie than to her. “Tell your mother goodbye,” he told the girl.
“Bye,” Janie said without bothering to look back in her mother’s direction. She was too eager to begin whatever adventure her father had planned for them.
As was her habit, Anne watched them go. Watched how her daughter skipped beside Hank, the picture of uncomplicated happiness—and the total antithesis of the way she usually behaved when it was just the two of them, without Hank.
Janie’s change in behavior had been recent, no more than about three, four months old. It was around that time that Janie had gotten it into her head to play Cupid and bring Hank and her together. Anne had explained to her daughter a number of times, in as many ways as she could think of, that sometimes parents just couldn’t stay together and that it was far better for all parties involved if parents weren’t forced to live together. But that never seemed to stick in Janie’s mind for more than a few minutes at a time. It certainly wasn’t anything that Janie took to heart.
Anne saw Hank say something to Janie as she got into his car and the child laughed in response.
Anne sighed as she closed the door. She wished that Janie could be that happy around her.
It hadn’t always been like this, she recalled. When it had been the three of them together, Janie had always turned to her first. But ever since the divorce, Hank had slowly become her daughter’s go-to person.
Anne frowned. She supposed she was being a little jealous of Hank. That was something she was going to have to work on. It wasn’t right to feel like that about someone who was so good to—
Her thought pulled up short when she heard the doorbell.
Anne laughed softly to herself. Janie had probably remembered she hadn’t packed one of her video games.
Opening the door, she asked, “Forget something?”
“Yeah. My manners.”
It wasn’t her daughter but Danny standing on her doorstep, just as he had the first time he’d turned up in Rust Creek Falls several days ago.
Damn, was her heart ever going to stop leaping up this way at the very sight of him? Anne wondered, annoyed with herself.
Forcing a smile to her lips, she said, “I hear there’s a current shortage of that.” Then she stepped back from the doorway to let him come in.
Dan crossed the threshold, but went no further into the room. He looked just a touch apprehensive. “Am I interrupting anything?” he asked hesitantly.
“Only my solitude,” she answered truthfully. “Janie just left for a sleepover at Hank’s and I was about to go over some bills I’ve been letting pile up.”
“So in other words, no?” he asked, an engaging smile on his lips. He looked very happy with her answer.
Anne inclined her head. “In other words, no,” she repeated. “Would you like to come in?” she asked, assuming that was why he was here.
“Actually, I was wondering if you’d like to come out,” he told her.
She suddenly realized that the carefree girl who would take off at a moment’s notice at the slightest suggestion from Danny was gone. Instead, she heard herself asking, “Come out where?”
“I was going to ask if you and Janie would like to go horseback riding with me, but since you just said that she’s not here, I’m asking if you’d like to go for a ride with me.”
“Now?” she asked, looking outside over his shoulder. “Isn’t it going to be dark soon?”
“I was thinking of going out for only a short ride,” he explained. “But if you’d rather not, we can do it some other time.”
Temptation won after what turned out to be an extremely short internal debate.
“Sure, why not?” Anne agreed. “As long as it’s a short ride,” she qualified. “Give me a minute.”
Getting her jacket and keys, Anne stepped out onto her porch and looked around. She didn’t see what she was looking for.
“Where are you keeping the horses?” she asked in amusement, fully expecting him to tell her that he’d only been teasing her.
Instead, Danny said, “C’mon and I’ll take you to them.”
Her curiosity definitely aroused, Anne climbed into his Jeep.
Dan drove only a short distance until he arrived at a stable located not that far out of town. Anne hadn’t even known of its existence.
The scope of her world had shrunk a great deal since she’d come back to Rust Creek Falls after college, she thought.
“I thought you might like to go for a horseback ride,” Dan told her, “just like we used to when we were young.”
There were five stalls inside the stable. Three were empty. The other two had horses that were already saddled. She thought that was rather unusual, but made no comment about it.
“Which one’s mine?” Anne asked. She was instinctively drawn to the smaller mount.
Dan nodded toward the horse that was closer to her. “The mare.”
It was a Palomino and she thought the horse was absolutely gorgeous. But something wasn’t right. “There are only two saddled horses,” she noted, turning to face Dan. “I thought you said that you were inviting Janie, too.”
“I had a feeling you’d say no to that if she was home. Besides, I took a chance that her father might have picked her up for the evening,” he confessed. “Turns out I was right.” Taking both horses out of their stalls, he led them outside the stable. “Ready?”
“Ready,” she answered.
Dan handed her the reins to her horse and Anne happily swung into the mare’s saddle. She hadn’t ridden in years. Not since she and Hank had been divorced. Once they had gone their separate ways, her access to horses and even to a ranch became a thing of the past. Although Janie still got to ride whenever she stayed over at Hank’s ranch.
Hank had bought her a pony for her fifth birthday, just shortly before the decision to get a divorce had been made. The pony, Anne suspected, was Hank’s way to ensure that Janie would want to come over and spend time with him.
As if he needed to bribe Janie, Anne thought. The girl worshipped the ground he walked on.
Less than five minutes into the ride and it was as if she had never been off a horse. Anne was exhilarated and revitalized.
Urging her mount into first a brisk walk, then a canter and finally a full gallop, she laughed with glee as the seductive feeling of freedom she always experienced on horseback surged through her veins.
Dan was quietly relieved that she wasn’t asking any questions about where the horses had come from. He didn’t want her to know he’d arranged for Jamie to bring them over in his trailer to what was essentially an abandoned stable, and to get them saddled.
The look on Anne’s face made all this worth it, Dan thought.
He let her set the pace and kept up, happy just to see her like this, with the wind in her hair and nipping at her cheeks, turning them an enticing shade of pink.
The ride was over all too soon. Daylight was beginning to fade. It would be dark before long. Dan called out, “We’d better head back.”
Like a gleeful child, Anne wanted to ask for five more minutes. But at the last moment, she stopped herself. He was right. She couldn’t just ride off into the night the way she used to.
For one thing, they weren’t on Dan’s family ranch and she didn’t know her way around. For another, she wasn’t the girl she’d once been. Freedom in this case belonged to the very young. She’d had her taste of it, but now it was time to go back home.
They brought the horses back to the stable and returned them to their stalls.
“Shouldn’t we take their saddles off?” she asked. She didn’t see anyone in the stable to take care of the animals.
“That’s taken care of,” he told her, not going into details. “Come on, I’ll bring you back to your place.”
Perplexed, Anne got into his Jeep, then waited until he had pulled the vehicle away and was heading to her house before she told him, “Thank you. That was really fun. I’ve forgotten what it was like to have fun,” she confessed.
“You should always be able to have fun,” he told her with sincerity.
She looked at his profile, wondering if he actually meant what he’d just said. And if he did, then why had he ever left her?
Oh, she understood the basic reason that had supposedly compelled him as well as his older brothers to leave town. She knew all about his grandparents and their unwillingness to take in any of the Stockton siblings, much less the three older boys who were legally old enough to be out on their own.
But if Dan meant what he’d just said, really meant it, and if he’d really loved her the way he’d told her that wonderful night they’d spent beneath the stars, then why had he left her? Why hadn’t he found some way for them to remain together?
That question had been eating away at her for twelve years.
“Why’d you leave me, Danny?” she asked quietly.
“I told you why. You already know the answer to that.”
“No, I don’t. Not really,” she said, then placed her hand over her heart. “Not in here.”
He pulled up in front of her house. “You want me to go?” he asked.
“No, I want you to come inside and talk to me. Really talk to me,” she told him. She felt that he needed to give her an explanation, a real explanation, just as much as she needed to hear one.
Turning off the ignition, he began to get out of the vehicle, but then he wavered. “Maybe I’d better not,” he began.
But Annie had anticipated Danny’s possible change of heart and she felt that she had gone too far out on that limb to allow him to make his way back to where it was safe.
To where he could act as if their last night together—their only night together—hadn’t happened. Because it definitely had. Janie was living proof that it had.
She took hold of Danny’s hand and tugged on it, drawing him to her doorstep.
“Maybe you should,” she coaxed. “Remember,” she told him as she unlocked her door and held it open, “confession is good for the soul.”
“That only works if you still have a soul,” he qualified.
“Everybody has a soul, Danny.” Anne closed the front door behind them and then locked it.
“No,” Dan contradicted. “Everyone starts out with a soul. That doesn’t mean that they still have it as time goes by.”
Anne had no idea what he was talking about. All she knew was that something was apparently haunting Danny and she was convinced that he needed to get it off his chest in order to get better.