Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [58]
“I grew up in North Carolina. People can make a change when they have to.”
She wondered if he meant his moving to Yellowstone, or maybe coming to the mountain. He ducked his head a bit and she liked that shyness in him. Not shyness, exactly, for he’d been perfectly poised doing the ranger thing.
Minutes stretched into an hour. The quiet felt companionable, the only sound the wind stirring the stunted white pines.
To check her watch, Clare had to take her hand from Steve’s. A glance that she tried to hide said she’d stayed too long to make her date with Deering in West Yellowstone. Part of her was sorry, for Deering was the first man who’d made her aware of herself as a woman in a long while.
But today Steve made her feel special, too. Briefly, she considered telling him about Frank’s death. With his own history of loss, he might be a good man to talk with.
Even as she thought how to begin, she discarded it, as she’d decided not to speak of his family. Reluctance to share her shame ran deep.
Just as she didn’t care to tell she’d also been married . . . and lost a man she’d once loved.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
August 13
Georgia Deering looked at the silent telephone in the hallway of her house. She had not talked to her husband in three weeks.
She went out, down the high stairs of the Victorian, and walked the few blocks to Lava Hot Springs’s Main Street. Window boxes of petunias decorated the Wagon Wheel Restaurant. Proprietor Howard Silvernail waved from behind his antique glass case filled with gum and mints.
Georgia ducked to avoid some of the T-shirts rigged on a clothesline outside Hannah’s Souvenirs. The Portneuf Inn across would be her competition when she and Deering opened their B & B.
At a table of books outside the public library, she selected three Dr. Suess for her nephew’s three-year-old. It wasn’t too late for her and Deering, with her turning thirty-nine, but it felt that way with Deering’s older brother John being twice a grandfather.
Off the main drag, Georgia climbed up into residential streets, a mix of neat old brick and wooden houses. Most of the yards had that rich emerald lawn and burgeoning rainbow of summer flowers that seemed impossible during Idaho’s long winter. She turned in at the wrought iron gate in front of John and Anna Deering’s two-story. Lace curtains fluttered, welcoming. Stone steps led up to the porch.
It was hard to believe that twenty-one years had passed since eighteen-year-old Georgia had come to dinner at this house where her married friend Anna lived. She had squeezed in next to the wall beside John’s brother, who was on his way back to Vietnam for a second tour. He flew helicopters and said he planned to make a career of it. That scared her, but she had no doubt that if she fell for a pilot she could persuade him to stop flying.
Deering had passed her the potatoes and before the evening was over had driven her up into the dark, pine-smelling forest. He’d pulled off at a pocket-sized turnout, cut the engine and lights. It had been quiet while they savored the night.
They got out. He took her hand and helped her through a forest awash in silver moonlight. A winding swath of thinned grass climbed beside a gurgling stream. A little farther, a meadow surrounded a pool.
Georgia bent and found that it was a thermal spring. Deering’s spare frame hunkered down beside her. “Warm, like you,” he murmured. In a breathless instant, his lips brushed her neck and the world changed.
Anna Deering came to her screen door in jeans and a big denim shirt that hung to her knees. She and John had returned last night from Yellowstone, a vacation planned before the fires. The somber look in her normally bright blue eyes and the way she bit her bottom lip said she had talked to Deering.
Here it comes, Georgia thought. When it came to family, sides were taken when trouble was only a sniff on the wind.
Anna pushed open the door. The spring made the same aching sound it had for years. “Oh, honey,” she choked.
Georgia’s tears