Chapter Ten

The last thing Lori wanted to hear the evening following the argument with Shade was the phone ringing in the hilltop house. It had been hard enough pulling herself together and going back to carry on a semicivilized conversation with Ruth. She’d been grateful for work and even more grateful when Vicky showed up with her suitcases to take over the chore of being there for Ruth. Lori had worked almost until dark and then had driven home without being aware of having placed her hands on the steering wheel.

If Shade was calling to say anything more about Vicky’s unreliability and her lack of judgment, she simply wasn’t going to be able to listen to him. It was bad enough knowing what he thought of her now. What would be impossible to hide from him was the empty, frightened feeling that she’d lost something that had become terribly, terribly precious to her.

The voice at the other end of the line was masculine but from her past, not her splintered present. “You’re almost as hard to track down as I am. I tried this number last night but didn’t get any answer.”

“Dad! Oh, my God, where are you?” Lori reached for the stool next to the kitchen phone and sat down heavily. “I didn’t expect—I was hoping I’d hear from you.”

“You know how it is,” Black Bob went on, his voice gravelly from disuse. “I never know where I’m going to be. I wish I could have been around when you and Brett split up, but I probably couldn’t have done anything to help.”

You could have been there to hold on to, Lori thought, but didn’t voice the thought. Black Bob prided himself on raising an independent daughter. It simply wouldn’t have occurred to him that she wasn’t as sure of her maturity as he was. “Are you near here?” she asked. “Brett forwarded your last letter to me.”

“I’m right here in town, girl. I called Brett the other day. He gave me your address. The fact is, I’m between jobs and planning on going into the Cascades this weekend to check out a job I heard about. How would you like to spend the weekend with your old man? If you haven’t forgotten how to fish, that is. We could do some of the things we used to.”

Black Bob wanted her to spend the weekend fly-fishing in some of the Cascade streams. Lori hugged herself silently, blinking back tears. “I —I’d like that very much. I haven’t done much fishing lately. I’m a little rusty.”

“You’ll remember quick. Look, I’m staying at the motel here next to the freeway. Noisiest damn thing you ever saw. You want to give me some direction so I can get to your place?”

“What if I meet you there, Dad?” she suggested. “I’ll throw a few things in a suitcase, and we can take off tonight. Remember how we used to drive into the mountains at night and I’d keep from falling asleep by looking for bears? Indulge me. I need to do that again.”

“Are you okay?” Black Bob sounded confused. “I thought you’d grown past that kind of thing.”

“Not tonight. Can’t you humor me a little? I’ll be there in less than an hour.”

He still had a couple of arguments against Lori’s spur-of-the-moment plans, but she brushed them aside. A house was a house, she told him. There wasn’t anything here he’d want to see.

Probably not, Lori admitted as she was throwing jeans and sweatshirts into a suitcase. As long as the roof didn’t leak and there were enough blankets for their beds, Black Bob figured things were pretty good. It wasn’t that he didn’t think his daughter didn’t deserve better than a trailer with rusting walls, but Black Bob had never had a home to settle into and give his personal stamp, so he couldn’t really know that it was what most people wanted out of life. He’d take one look at Shade’s elaborate home with its broad expanse of windows and wonder if Lori was trying to make up for something she’d missed out on while growing up. Black Bob had done the best he could by his daughter.

Lori was ready to lock up when she made an impulsive move she didn’t pretend to understand. She dialed Shade’s number and spoke into the answering machine “I’m taking Friday off,” she said in clipped, impersonal tones. “My father’s in town, and I need to spend some time with him. I’ll make up the time next week.”

She hung up. Was there anything else she should be saying, something about wanting to talk to Shade after she got back, she wondered. No. She hurt too much. It was time to draw back into herself, to take comfort in the solitude that had always been a part of her.

Lori was thinking about her father, wondering if he’d missed having a woman in his life, as she negotiated the turns leading down the mountain. Funny, they’d never talked about the deep ramifications of Black Bob being a single parent. There must have been times when he wanted someone to talk to, to hold next to him. For the first time in her life she wondered if Black Bob was as resourceful, independent and in control as the child living with him had thought. Or, if she mentioned the carved-out hollow in the pit of her stomach, maybe he would understand what she was talking about.

In the space of three seconds Lori was no longer thinking. She was trying to survive. The Mustang was traveling a little too fast to negotiate the right turn in the road. Lori stabbed at the brakes, felt her foot slam into the floorboard and pumped rapidly, trying to restore a flicker of life into the ancient brakes. This time there was no response, no pressure to let her know that the reluctant brakes had been coaxed back to life.

Lori gripped the steering wheel and hunched forward, steering her runaway car around the turn. Somehow she managed to negotiate the turn without going over the edge, but before she could take a breath, the road made an equally sharp turn to the left. This time she had to keep the Mustang from straying over the center line and crashing into the high dirt bank to the left. Or should she, Lori thought wildly, her mind speeding ahead to the turn beyond. By that time she would be going far in excess of the speed limit. It would take a miracle to keep the car on the road and away from the steep drop-off.

The decision was made in the space of a single heartbeat. Lori gritted her teeth, said a silent apology to her beloved car and turned the steering wheel toward the dirt bank. The car hit the bank a glancing blow, grinding dirt and rocks into the left front fender. Lori was thrown out of her seat by the impact, but she refused to let go of the steering wheel. The car was still moving, tires crunching in the dirt shoulder. Again she pulled the steering wheel to the left, determined to use the bank to stop the car’s forward motion.

This time her desperate tactic worked. She heard the left headlight shatter and accepted the harsh vibration that shook her body. She screamed involuntarily as the Mustang slammed to a stop.

Her body was thrown forward and to the left, her left knee striking the door. Lori barely noted the pain that seared through her knee and up her leg. The only thing she dared think about was holding on to the steering wheel, making sure the car wasn’t going to escape again.

Because her heart was pounding crazily in her ears, it was close to a minute before she realized the engine had died. She was sitting inside a stationary car, surrounded by a silence that was just as jarring as the earlier sound of grinding metal and squealing tires.

Lori dropped her head to the steering wheel, her emotions going beyond tears. Her entire body was filled with adrenaline that escaped into her lungs and veins. She couldn’t even tell if she was injured. At least the Mustang was jammed against the side of the mountain instead of careening over a cliff.

What now? Lori tried to ask herself. She couldn’t open the left door because the car was jammed solidly against the bank. It was ridiculous to think the car was capable of moving again, but she was filled with an irrational need to get out of what had nearly been a death trap.

Lori slithered across the seat and reached blindly for the handle on the right front door. She swung her body around and was starting to step out when she was brought to a halt by a repeat of the earlier pain that had seared her left leg. Lori grabbed her knee, gasping. Because she was wearing jeans, she couldn’t see what the injury might be, but she could imagine flesh turning purple, a joint rapidly swelling.

“Damn!” she swore, mad at everything and everyone. Not only wasn’t her car going anywhere, but now it looked as if she wasn’t, either. It wasn’t fair!

After gathering her courage, Lori made a tentative attempt to stand up. Her knee still throbbed enough to set her teeth on edge, but at least it didn’t buckle under her. She tried to take a step. For her troubles, she painfully learned that walking wasn’t in the cards. “Damn!” she repeated and clung to the car door, feeling rather like a bird with a broken wing—a very painful, crippled wing.

It wasn’t until she saw the headlights of an approaching car that she became aware that her mouth was twisted into a less than attractive grimace. The car was coming down the hill, sedately duplicating the journey she’d taken without brakes. The car pulled off the road onto the shoulder behind her Mustang, and an older couple got out. Lori tried to turn around to face them properly, but her knee refused to do her bidding. She was forced to cling to the open door, her left leg a useless appendage.

“Are you all right?” the woman asked. “My goodness, are you alone?”

“I’m afraid so.” She wasn’t going to cry! “My brakes gave way. It was either hit the bank or risk going over the edge. How does my car look?”

“Forget your car,” the man said as he stepped up next to Lori. “Are you hurt?”

“My knee has felt better,” she admitted.

Five minutes later Lori was settled in the back of the couple’s car, her suitcase beside her. She’d almost cried out as they helped her hobble over to their car, but the woman was a true mother hen, and the man took charge so easily that she was willing to put herself in their hands. They tried to convince her to let them take her to the hospital, but Lori couldn’t stop thinking about Black Bob. She hadn’t seen her father in over a year. Right now she wanted to be a little girl again, with her father making all the decisions. She gave the couple directions to the motel and assured them that she would call a tow truck to move her car.

Black Bob didn’t even blink when her misadventure was revealed to him. “I never could get her to understand what cars need,” he said as he was swinging her into his arms and carrying her into his motel room. “Thanks for everything you’ve done, but we can handle things now,” the big, dark bear of a man said to the middle-aged couple.

Wasn’t that just like her father, Lori acknowledged as he was making arrangements to have a tow truck haul the Mustang to the garage Shade had told her about. Father and daughter had always done for themselves without outside help. The established order wasn’t going to change now.

“You aren’t going to be much account as far as fishing is concerned,” he pointed out as he was rolling ice cubes from the ice machine into a white towel. “This wouldn’t be some scheme so you wouldn’t be shown up for the tenderfoot you’ve become?”

“You think I planned this?” Lori laughed, liking the sound of her laughter. Black Bob had never coddled his daughter. Now that her adrenaline level was coming back to normal, she realized she didn’t need coddling. “If that wasn’t the dumbest thing—”

“You don’t have anyone to blame but yourself,” Black Bob said. “Now how about sliding out of those jeans so we can see the damage?”

With her father to lean against, Lori was able to stand long enough to unzip her jeans and ease the denim past her hips. When she saw her knee, her first reaction was to silently cuss Shade. If he hadn’t lost his temper and refused to talk to her, the brakes might have been fixed by now.

But that wasn’t the whole truth. Lori had breathed enough fire of her own. She couldn’t really blame him for wanting to have nothing to do with her.

Pain shooting up her leg when she tried to bend her knee stopped that kind of thinking. Her knee more closely resembled a basketball than a joint. The entire area around the bone was a vibrant purple, with the potential for becoming even darker. It was so swollen that even if there hadn’t been any pain, Lori knew she wouldn’t have been able to bend the joint.

“Well, now, I’ve seen prettier things in my life,” Black Bob observed as he plunked a towel filled with ice on her knee. “Keep it there,” he ordered when Lori winced. “You want to get the swelling down.”

“Damn! What am I going to do?”

“You aren’t going fishing, that’s for sure. I’ll tell you what. We’ll spend the night here and then go into the Cascades in the morning.”

Lori nodded. Her father hadn’t changed. A person didn’t go to the hospital unless they were losing blood faster than it could be replaced. A banged-up knee meant a slight change of plans, not a cancellation. Despite her trepidation at the thought of trying to get any sleep tonight, Lori admitted she had no desire to argue with her father. She’d never once gone to the hospital in all the years she was growing up. In fact, her father had only gone once himself, and that was only because his foreman had insisted he needed stitches. Lori had only three days to spend with her father. They weren’t going to be spent in an emergency room.

Father and daughter talked until far into the night. There were stretches of comfortable silence intermingled with the words while Lori studied her father, finding herself in him. He hadn’t aged since she saw him last, not really. Gray flecks now softened the solid thatch of black hair, and maybe his skin was a little drier, but his eyes still danced with the mystery of being alive. The only thing that wasn’t right about the evening was that Lori kept wishing Shade were here, seeing the same things she was. Shade, she knew, would like Black Bob. Her father didn’t fit any mold. He was an individual, a maverick. For some strange reason Shade had been attracted to a younger, female version of that maverick.

But not anymore, Lori kept telling herself. Words, an argument, had put an end to that.

It wasn’t until they were in Black Bob’s battered old pickup the next morning that Lori told her father about Shade Ryan. “He’s establishment, Dad,” she explained. “He wears a suit and tie sometimes and has to court specialized organizations for the society’s financial base. Yet he has another side to him that’s very antiestablishment. He used to live in an isolated house with every modern convenience except curtains. He flirts outrageously with an old lady and has been a weight trainer for years. He loves barn owls and was fascinated when I told him about what you’ve done with your life.”

“And you love him?”

Lori should have been ready for that question. Just the same, she wasn’t ready to answer it directly. “I don’t know,” she tried. “I admit there are times when he’s very important to my life, but after what happened with Brett, I’m not sure I’m ready for another relationship. What if Shade wants me to make nice talk with the women in the historical society’s booster club? I can just see myself sitting there trying to hide the dirt under my fingernails and feeling like I’m going to scream if I can’t get outside. I tried that once before and failed.” Lori turned toward her father, moving her left leg gingerly. Some of the swelling had gone down, but she was a long way from doing any running on it. “I need more time by myself before I make any kind of a decision.”

“Well, we’re going to have that, all right,” Black Bob pointed out. “I don’t think this foreman I’m going to see has hired any crew yet. It’s going to be damn quiet in the woods.”

Lori touched her father’s arm. “Why do you think I said yes to this weekend? You and I haven’t done this for years. I’ve missed it.”

After that the conversation left serious subjects. Lori told Black Bob about Ruth Kadin and what she’d learned about the farm’s evolution through the years. She mentioned that she thought Black Bob and Ruth would find a common ground, but her father didn’t seem much interested in meeting the elderly woman. “What do I know about farming?” he asked. “You know I’ve never been any good at small talk.”

Lori didn’t feel compelled to fill Black Bob’s pickup with words. While she was growing up, there had been whole days when she and her father hadn’t said more than a half-dozen words to each other. The conversation last night and this morning was the longest sustained one father and daughter had ever had.

In a way it was sad. Two people who’d spent so much time together should have had more to say to each other, but that was the way Black Bob was—silent. Lori had always been comfortable with that, but marriage and getting to know Shade had changed her. She now accepted that people who spent time together spent a great deal of that time talking to, communicating with, each other. True, too much of her time with Brett had been wasted in arguments, in discovering how little they had in common.

It wasn’t that way with Shade. From the day she met him, Lori had found things she wanted to talk to him about, to share. Even their disagreement about Vicky had been a form of communication. Their communication could have come about because everything was so right when they made love, but Lori doubted that. She’d never seen herself as a sexual creature, someone who could shut off her brain when some man asked her to go to bed with him. Sex with Brett had been acceptable because she admired his intellect. Sex with Shade—there simply weren’t words to describe the total sense of fulfillment that permeated the act.

But something had gone wrong. Shade resented her interference in Vicky’s life, because maybe he felt only he was capable of dealing with it. Had she been wrong to step in that way, she asked herself. But she’d felt so good about solving both Ruth’s and Vicky’s problems that maybe she’d missed something vital that Shade had been trying to communicate. That could have been the problem. She wasn’t tuned in to Shade, after all.

Lori glanced over at Black Bob. She hadn’t told her father why her marriage failed because she didn’t think he would understand such things as different backgrounds, standards and beliefs that couldn’t be changed. And, after all, she was Black Bob’s daughter.

How much of you is in me? she asked her father’s profile. I believe you’re happier alone than with someone. Maybe I’m the same way and just haven’t accepted that yet. Maybe—maybe Shade knows that about me.

Yes, Shade was willing to talk to her, joke with her, make love with her even, but maybe that was where the line had been drawn. She’d failed at her marriage. Wasn’t that enough proof of her inability to interact with a man beyond a physical level?

Lori gave herself a mental shake. This searching and self-doubt were doing no earthly good. She only had her father for this weekend. She was determined to make the most of her short hours with him. There was the rest of her life to figure out where she was headed. “Do you really think you’ll get the job?” she asked as a way of breaking the silence.

“Sure,” Black Bob said confidently. “I probably know more about working in the woods than this character I’m going to see. You know what a guy told me last year? He was the owner of some big logging operation He told me he’d hire me in a minute to oversee the operation. Offered me more money than I’d know what to do with.”

“Why didn’t you take the job?”

Black Bob turned toward his daughter as if she’d asked him why he didn’t want to cut off his leg. “I’d have to boss men around, do the hiring and firing, take care of payrolls and deal with accountants and stuff. Are you kidding? All that time talking and on the phone and filling out forms? You know me, Lori. I don’t like people that much.”

Lori slid closer to her father, gritting her teeth against the pain in her knee. “You like me,” she teased.

“That’s because you’re like me, kid. You and I, we think alike.”

There it was again! There was no way Lori was going to escape a serious look at her life this weekend. Even as she was telling her father about the slide show she’d seen on historical logging and Shade’s suggestion that Black Bob do an oral history for the historical society, Lori was thinking about how torn she was between being with her father and seeing Shade. But maybe it didn’t matter after all. Lori had gone off with her father without consulting with Shade first. If she’d done that with Brett, he would have ranted at her until she felt like the most disloyal wife alive. Could she blame Shade if he felt as if he’d been deserted, she asked herself. That was what Brett had always hit her with when she asked for time away from him.

It wasn’t until they reached the logging operation that Lori was able to put her questions on hold. With the use of a wooden staff, she was able to hobble painfully around the camp, poking into the corners of her memory. The sight of a mammoth Caterpillar clinging to the side of a mountain took her back to her eighth year, when Black Bob first let her sit on his lap while he ran one. The weather-scarred trailer the foreman was staying in wasn’t any bigger than several her father had owned. Although inside it was an office and not a home for two people, even that was a familiar memory. Lori had been in a dozen trailers like this. The sight of an overflowing ashtray, a table cluttered with maps, order forms, forest-service permits, were more links with the past.

When Black Bob had shaken hands with the foreman and then offered to drive Lori over to a previous clear-cut now filled with seedling pine trees, Lori touched base with another part of her growing up. She’d always had a fascination with growing things, especially new life poking its way through the ground fertilized with pine needles and rotting wood. She slipped out of the truck and made her gimpy way over to the new growth. She thought of the evening she and Shade had spent hunting mushrooms in a site almost identical to this one, but refused to let the thought stay long enough to threaten her mood. “Remember how we used to come back to logging operations in the spring and make ourselves sick on morel mushrooms?” she asked.

“You miss it, don’t you?”

Lori leaned closer to the ground, making out the difference between established growth in the seedlings and the pale, growing tips of the struggling trees. She ran her fingers over the new growth, loving the velvet softness. “Yes, I miss it.” Then, taking her thoughts a step further, she said, “But I love what I’m doing now. Dad, I’m having so much fun at the farm. I’m working with living things, out-of-doors. There are all kinds of chickens and peacocks and geese at the farm. They aren’t the same as deer and bears and chipmunks, but I get the same pleasure from seeing farm animals as I did seeing mountain wildlife.”

“Not me,” Black Bob observed as he helped Lori back to the pickup. “I don’t know the first thing about farms. All I know is felling trees and running heavy equipment.”

I’ve gone beyond your experience, haven’t I? Lori thought, not knowing what to do with that revelation.

They spent the rest of the day taking the four-wheel-drive truck along logging roads and jeep trails. There were times when it was all Lori could do to keep from crying out when her father hit a particularly deep rut, but she wasn’t going to put a stop to what was happening. This day was for a precious step back in time, a return to her childhood and the experiences that had shaped the woman she’d become.

They spent the night in a cheap, quiet motel in a little town at the base of the mountains, and in the morning Black Bob went looking for a trailer to replace the one he’d left in Washington. As Lori waited for her father to dicker with the salesman, she tried to remember how many different trailers they’d lived in over the years. Most of them had been so ancient that they couldn’t stand being hauled to more than one or two logging sites. The old was always being replaced by another, not newer but closer to the current logging operation. Not many other girls would have been content with that kind of housing, but she’d never rebelled. Old, rusting trailers were simply how Black Bob and his daughter lived.

Lori wasn’t much help when her father and the salesman hooked the trailer up to the back of his pickup. She sat in the passenger’s seat, gingerly rubbing her aching and still-swollen knee. For the first time she wondered if her Mustang was at the auto-repair shop. Maybe the shop owner had gotten in touch with Shade. If that was true, maybe Shade was asking himself questions he couldn’t possibly answer about what she was doing, whether she was all right.

Lori groaned and threw her head back on the truck seat. All Shade knew was that she’d left a message saying she’d gone off with her father for the weekend. He’d have no idea whether she’d wrecked her car before or after leaving the message, whether she’d been injured, where she was right now.

Maybe she owed Shade Ryan more. He’d given her so much more than a job. He’d given her a place to stay, his friendship, his body, her first taste of full womanhood. And what had she given him in return? A message on a recording machine.

Other women didn’t do that to the men in their lives. Other women spent their weekends with their men and found ways to make up for whatever fights they might have had. Other women knew what had to be said and done to rectify whatever had gone wrong.

But Lori wasn’t like the women who existed in her thoughts. She hadn’t had enough of watching how men and women interacted. Oh, yes, Brett had tried to teach her with words and arguments and accusations. Time and time again he’d told her that a man wanted to feel he came first in his wife’s life, that she put her own selfish thoughts aside and did what he wanted her to do to please him.

What was it Shade wanted from her, she couldn’t help but ask. Maybe he deserved, expected, more than a message on a recording machine. Had she failed him too deeply to ever make up for it? Maybe it was possible that Shade understood that she didn’t know how to deal with their argument and needed this weekend alone with her father to try to find out some things about herself.

Oh, Shade, I don’t know, she moaned as Black Bob was paying the salesman. I don‘t know if I’m doing anything right. I just know I have to do what feels right for me. I hope you can understand that!

Lori didn’t find the answer to that question when Black Bob drove her home Sunday night, and she was no closer to an answer when she struggled out of bed Monday morning. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, her father had been in a hurry to get back to the mountains and hadn’t taken time to come into Shade’s house. Together they’d taken a look at the strange car parked in the driveway and read the note from the mechanic explaining that it was a loaner for her to use until the Mustang had been repaired. Lori stayed awake for an hour, worrying how she was going to pay for the repairs. She also wondered whether Shade was footing the bill for the loaner car. It was that thought that finally allowed her to fall asleep. He might be angry at her for meddling in Vicky’s and Ruth’s affairs and leaving for the weekend, but at least he was practical enough to realize she’d need a way to get to work.

If she was capable of working, Lori thought as she was trying to loosen her stiff knee under the shower. The orange-and-purple discoloration was in full bloom, making her grateful for a job that allowed her to work in pants. She was now able to walk around the house without a cane but wasn’t sure how much her knee could handle on the uneven surface around the farm.

To her relief, the loaner was an automatic shift. She eased her left leg into the car and eased her way down the mountain, acknowledging the knot in the pit of her stomach as she passed the spot where she’d plowed into the bank. She thought about Black Bob going to work that morning in mountains much more remote than the ones around her. She’d kissed him as he was getting ready to leave the night before and received his promise that he’d get in touch with her soon about doing an oral history, but neither of them had said anything about what was going to happen with the two of them beyond that. That knowledge cast a shade over Lori’s day, and yet she understood her father enough to know that he didn’t make those kinds of commitments. He’d raised his daughter and given her love and affection. Now it was time for her to go it alone.

I love you, Dad, Lori thought as she reached the bottom of the mountain. I also know how you feel about relationships.

She might be a carbon copy of Black Bob. She could picture herself feeling love and responsibility for a child, but being ready to let go when that child became an adult. The memory of Shade’s eyes searching hers stopped her. Letting go of that man wasn’t something she wanted to think about.

Lori’s first contact with human beings other than her father came when Vicky ran out to the car and insisted that she come in and join her and Ruth for coffee before going to work. “You wouldn’t believe what a bear Shade’s been.” Vicky laughed as she brought coffee for the three of them onto the enclosed front porch. “He came by twice this weekend to make sure I wasn’t burning the place down.”

“Oh, no,” Lori objected. “I’m sure he has more faith in you than that.”

“I’m not sure what the burr under his saddle is. Something has turned him into a bear, all right,” Ruth said. “I’ll tell you one thing. He sure didn’t like not having you around for three days.”

Lori stared into her coffee. Given the fact of their argument the last time they saw each other, Lori would have thought Shade would be relieved to have her out of the way. “Did he say much about me?” she asked tentatively.

“Not much,” Vicky supplied. “He was pretty mad at himself. Something about your accident being his fault and wishing he’d insisted on your brakes being fixed instead of other things.”

Lori remembered a night that was supposed to be devoted to her car that had turned into a night of lovemaking. “Shade isn’t my mechanic,” she tried to explain. “It’s my fault I neglected those brakes, not his.”

“Tell him.” Ruth shook her head. “That man sure knows how to nurse a guilt complex. He’s probably going to jump all over you, but it’s just because he’s been so damned worried about you.”

Worried. She couldn’t remember anyone ever really worrying about her. Her father had always assumed that things were going to turn out all right, and Brett had been much more concerned with getting her to fit the mold he was trying to carve. She’d never understood the guidelines that said men were supposed to be in charge of cars while women reigned in the kitchen. Lori concentrated on her coffee. She’d never been able to work out a viable marriage contract with Brett. Now, it seemed, she wasn’t doing any better with a man who meant more to her than her ex-husband ever had.

Lori was in the greenhouse separating healthy plants from those that weren’t going to survive and deciding how many glass panes in the greenhouse wall would have to be replaced when Shade’s car pulled up the driveway and parked in front of the house. From her secluded location she could see him turn to look at the loaner car before going toward the farmhouse. Lori returned to her work, her body tense, tears seeking a way to break free. She didn’t know if she could bear not having him near.

He didn’t give her long to think about the answer. She still hadn’t been able to force her mind and hands to return to business before he was pushing the greenhouse door open. Lori turned toward him, carefully bringing her injured leg around with her. Humidity from the greenhouse had already plastered her bangs against her forehead, and she could feel sweat on her upper lip. Lori reached her right hand to the wooden shelf holding some thirty plants in their clay pots, afraid to look down to see if it was shaking.

Shade reached out and absently ran his fingers along the branches of a jade tree. She was here! Safe. “It shouldn’t cost much to have your car repaired,” he said without introduction. That he was able to speak at all amazed him. His moods had swung in a thousand directions since he heard her voice on the recording machine, since seeing her car. “My mechanic friend has always wanted to work on an old Mustang.”

“Thank you for the loaner. I’d be lost without it.”

“Did you have a good weekend?”

“Yes. It was good to see my father again.”

“Did you talk to him about the oral history?” Damn! This wasn’t what he wanted to say at all. He needed to pull her close against him, assure his body that she was really here. But the ghost of an argument still stood between them. He had to respect the rift that argument had created. “Do you think he’ll be interested in the idea?”

“Yes. He’s going to be in the Cascades for several months. I—I hope to see more of him than I have for several years.”

“Maybe I can meet him someday.” Shade was still fingering the jade tree, but there was a tension in his fingers he knew he’d have to control if he wanted to avoid harming the tree. If only he could touch her! It might solve everything. But maybe it would only make things worse.

“Maybe,” Lori said tentatively. “You have to understand my father. He doesn’t like to be nailed down. He’s always done what he wanted, when he wanted. I’m just happy he’s going to be around for a little while.”

“And you think you turned out like him.” Shade’s lips tightened, causing him to admit how wide the gulf between them was. “Black Bob’s always on the move, isn’t he?”

“What’s wrong with that?” Lori snapped. She didn’t want to argue with Shade. Anything but that! But the dark, glowing lights deep in his jade eyes were scaring her. She hadn’t admitted how much she’d missed him until now.

Shade let his hand drop heavily to his side. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Some people believe in putting down roots, developing ties. Others don’t want anything to do with that. I did a lot of thinking about that while you were gone.”

“You did?”

Shade turned away and gave her nothing but his back to stare at. “I didn’t have that much else to think about. You didn’t even bother to tell me about the accident.”

“I—I’m sorry,” she stammered. “But I hadn’t seen my father for so long. I wanted—”

“You had better things to do than get in touch with me. Don’t bother to explain. I understand. Like I said, commitment means different things to different people.” He didn’t understand his anger or his need to hurt her. All he could do was flow with the emotion, allow it the life it was demanding. If he said anything more— No.

Lori didn’t try to stop him as Shade slammed the greenhouse door behind him. Her leg wouldn’t allow her to run after him, and her heart was too deeply wounded to allow her to speak.

Ruth had said Shade was worried about her. It wasn’t that at all. He didn’t want anything to do with her.