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Sara straightened, managing a half smile. “Cold, slightly bruised Chinese food?”
Janey shrugged. “Nothing a microwave couldn’t fix. And it beats leftovers, which is what was on the menu since I was dining solo tonight.” Jessie, her nine-year-old daughter, was across the street having dinner with Mrs. Halliwell. Jessie didn’t have any grandparents, Mrs. Halliwell didn’t have any grandchildren, and it gave Janey a night off, so everybody got something out of the arrangement.
She pushed back from the table and went to the fridge, returning with a half gallon of ice cream and a bottle of chocolate syrup. “And since you brought the main course, the least I can do is supply dessert.”
Sara took a spoon and the chocolate syrup, scooting her chair closer to Janey’s so she could be in easier reach of the calorie comfort. “What would I do without you?”
“I don’t know.” Janey took a big spoonful of ice cream, closing her eyes and moaning in sheer delight. “I can tell you one thing, though. Without you I’d still be a size eight. I’ve eaten so much ice cream in commiseration that none of my pants fit anymore. But you, you rat, haven’t gained an ounce.”
“Embarrassment burns a lot of calories,” Sara said around a mouthful of ice cream. “I’m thinking of writing a diet book.”
“I don’t think it’ll catch on.”
“It’s not the most pleasant way to lose weight.”
Janey shook her head. “It’s just that most women can’t stick to a diet for six days. You’ve been embarrassing yourself over Max ever since you came to Erskine.”
“Six years.” Sara set her spoon in the carton and sat back in her chair. Hearing it like that made the egg roll and ice cream in her stomach simmer and stir unpleasantly. Not that it wasn’t the truth, but having the past half decade of her life boiled down to that one basic truth made her feel like throwing up.
She’d met Max Devlin when she was nineteen, a bright-eyed, eager sophomore at Boston College. Max had been a senior, there on a track scholarship, and her student advisor; he’d always known somehow when she needed a sympathetic ear or a comforting shoulder, and he’d never failed to provide it—for the short time he could.
Before midterms, Max received news that his grandfather had died suddenly. Sara had ached for him, but even if she could have found a way to help him through his grief, there’d been no opportunity. He’d lost his father to a riding accident before he’d graduated from high school, and his mother had remarried and moved to Europe. With his grandfather gone, there’d been no one to run the ranch, and Max had been faced with a choice—sell or stay home. He never came back to Boston.
Time passed, Max married, and Sara convinced herself that what she’d felt for him was nothing but gratitude for the kindness he’d shown a shy, sheltered young woman out on her own in the world. They’d kept in touch, but the frequency had dropped significantly; Max didn’t have a lot of free time on his hands.
Not that Sara did, either. After graduating from college with a degree in education, her father convinced her to take a job in his company, training men and women with master’s and doctorate degrees how to use software systems they fobbed off on their admins anyway.
When Max’s marriage ended, leaving him with a two-year-old to look after and a ranch to run, Sara hadn’t hesitated. She’d arrived in Montana, a city girl so far out of her element she’d wondered how the ranchers punched cows without hurting their hands. She’d only planned to stay long enough to help Max get things under control, but every time she mentioned leaving, he got such a look of abandonment on his face she hadn’t had the heart to go through with it. In the end, it was her heart that had kept her there.
Looking back now, she could barely remember the decisions she’d made in those first confusing weeks after she realized she was in love with Max. Not that she regretted taking a job teaching third grade; she’d always longed to teach children anyway. Her new job was so much more rewarding than what she’d been doing in Boston. And it had just made sense for her to move into the old, unused bunkhouse on Max’s ranch so she could be closer to Joey. And Max. Someday, she’d hoped, he would fall in love with her and make them a family.
But it seemed that Julia had taken something with her, after all, when she’d walked out of Max’s life. His heart.
“I’m sorry, Sara,” Janey said, “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
Sara dismissed that nonsense with a wave of her hand. “My feelings aren’t hurt, Janey. I’m just beginning to wonder what I’ve been doing here all these years.”
“Sounds like you’ve been talking to your mother again.”
Sara looked up, surprised. “I talk to my mother every week.”
“And she always campaigns for you to move back to Boston, so what’s different this time?”
“Maybe she’s right. Maybe Max won’t ever see me as more than a friend.”
Janey’s spoon clattered to the tabletop, her mouth and eyes going wide in overdone shock—which went ignored.
“Besides, Joey’s always been my excuse for staying, and he’s been self-sufficient for a while now,” Sara said, admitting it aloud for the first time, although she’d been thinking it more and more often. “Max really doesn’t need me around anymore, and my contract is up for renewal this year….”
“He’d be devastated if you went away.”
“Would he?”
“You’re a huge part of his life, Sara. He loves you.”
“As a friend.” Sara threw herself out of her chair, pacing the generous confines of the kitchen. “I want more, Janey. I want it all. What if he never wants the same from me?”
“Maybe he won’t, but you’ll never know unless you push him to make a choice.”
Sara snorted softly. “You know Max. If I force him to choose, I’ll lose his friendship.”
“Or gain his love. Look, Sara, in some ways your mom is right. You’ve spent six years—”
“‘Wasted’ is how Mom put it. I’ve wasted six years.”
“So it’s time to take the bull by the horns and tell Max how you feel.”
“Like you’re doing with Jessie’s father?”
“That’s different.” Janey slumped in her chair, scooping up a huge, half-melted glob of ice cream and letting it drip back into the carton. “I called him when I found out I was pregnant. He never called me back.”
“He should still know he has a daughter.”
“We’re talking about you.”
“Not anymore,” Sara said, then gave a little bittersweet laugh. “We’re quite a pair, Janey. Two young, attractive women with nothing to do but sit around and feel sorry for ourselves. There has to be a bright side to this.”
“There is—for Ben & Jerry’s.”
“Seriously, Janey. It’s time we stopped moping around and did something about what’s wrong with our lives. There have to be a couple of men out there who want a home and family—”
“Whoa!” Janey held her hands up, palms out. “I have a home, and Jessie is the only family I need. Despite my recent tendency to wallow, I see no reason to shackle myself to some burping, farting, dirty-laundry machine.”
Sara dropped back into her chair, tracing the pattern on the antique lace tablecloth with one fingernail. “Aren’t you ever lonely?”
“Sure, but that’s no excuse to get married. It’s a known fact that ninety-nine percent of men completely stop talking within five days of their own wedding anyway.”
“I’m not buying it.” Sara had learned early on that Janey’s tough exterior was only a defense mechanism to protect her soft heart. “You want to meet someone and get married as much as any woman. You just aren’t ready to admit it yet.”
“If I ever do, slap me.”
Janey put on a belligerent face, but the look in her eyes nearly brought Sara to tears.
“But, hey,” Janey continued, sitting up suddenly. “You definitely need to change a few things. It’s only a matter of time before someone’s seriously injured or you’re completely bankrupt or both.”
“Yeah, a short time,” Sara agreed. “I almost wish…” She let the thought hang, then shook her head.
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Uh-uh,” Janey said. “I just ingested a couple thousand calories for you. Spit it out.”
“Well…there was this moment when I was superglued to Max—Stop smirking, Janey.”
“You have to admit it’s funny.”
Sara couldn’t help grinning a little. “Okay, so it was funny. After. But there was this moment where I almost wished I could—” She swallowed, then said the rest on a rush. “I almost wished I could stop loving Max.”
Janey burst out laughing, holding her stomach and sliding down in her chair.
Sara crossed her arms and glared until her best friend got herself under control. “It sounds stupid, but the way I feel about Max is the root of all my problems. If I could stop loving him so desperately and just accept that he’ll only ever be my friend, I could still be a part of Joey’s life, but I could be happy, too. The only problem is, how do I do it?”
Janey put her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her hands. “Considering my ex-boyfriends, falling out of love was never a problem for me. But Max is such a great guy. And he is drop-dead gorgeous. Just seeing him is enough to make any woman fall in love.” She shot Sara a teasing look out of the corner of her eye. “I’d be tempted to go after him myself, but thankfully I don’t see him all that often.”
Sara leaped out of her chair. “That’s it!”
“What?”
“It just might work.” She began to pace, gnawing on a thumbnail.
“What?”
“All my accidents happen when Max is around, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, if I stop seeing him, I won’t have any more accidents.”
“And how does that make you fall out of love with him?”
“I don’t know,” Sara said, her elation dimming a bit at the thought of how empty her life was going to be when Max didn’t fill it anymore. “I only know that seeing him all the time keeps me hoping. Maybe if he’s out of my life physically, my heart will forget about him.” It didn’t make any sense, even to her own ears, but she was desperate.
“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.” Janey got up and hugged her hard, then handed her a tissue.
“So how are you going to stop seeing him when you live about five feet from his back door? And when the man relies on you for everything but sex, and you’d be giving him that, too, if he’d ever asked.”
“Jeez, Janey, just say what you think.”
“You don’t want to know what I really think. And you haven’t answered my question.”
“I guess I’ll just have to avoid him,” Sara said with a shrug. “And when he asks for something, I’ll just say no.”
“Would you like me to write it on the back of your hand so you don’t forget how to spell it?”
“I think I can manage,” Sara said. “I have to.”
Chapter Three
After the Chinese food and ice cream, they’d moved on to Jack Daniel’s, the only man, according to Janey, who really knew how to comfort a woman. Sara was usually a rum-and-Coke woman, heavy on the Coke, or maybe a Baileys Irish Cream if she was feeling especially adventurous, but she had to admit Janey was right this time. The first shot of whiskey burned her throat and turned her stomach. The second still had her gasping for air, but it hit her bloodstream like a warm massage. By the third she was singing “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” and doing her tap routine from when she was eleven years old. It wasn’t the song she’d tap-danced to—the two didn’t even go together very well—and she had to imagine the tapping sounds because her loafers didn’t really do the job on Janey’s linoleum. But that song just demanded some life-affirming action and the one she’d chosen wasn’t going into effect until she saw Max.
Her pleasant buzz started to fade after that. By the time Janey, who’d appointed herself deignated driver and switched to coffee early on, pulled into Max’s driveway, Sara was already rethinking her get-it-over-with-now strategy.
“Shhh,” she said to Janey, putting her finger over her pursed lips when the tires crunched and popped on the gravel drive. It didn’t do anything to lessen the noise but it made her feel better.
“Having second thoughts?”
“Second? It’s more like…” She looked at her hands, fingers spread, then lifted her feet, one at a time. “I can’t count that high just now.”
Janey chuckled.
“I know that laugh,” Sara mumbled. “You don’t think I’ll do it, but I will. I’ll just do it tomorrow.”
“I don’t think you’ll remember any of this tomorrow.” Janey turned off the lights and eased past Max’s house.
She pulled up in front of the old bunkhouse Sara had converted into a little cottage, complete with a white picket fence and a generous garden, the frost-browned vines and bare trees decorated like a graveyard for Halloween. Every year when Sara put up the wooden gravestones with funny sayings, she’d secretly dedicated one to her perpetually broken heart. Well, that was going to change. “When New Year’s Day rolls around, I won’t need a resolution,” she said to Janey. “I’ll already be over Max.”
“From the look of things, you won’t have to wait till tomorrow to get started on that resolution.”
Sara twisted around in her seat, this way and that, groaning when she realized what Janey was talking about. Either Bigfoot was coming toward her car or Max was. She would’ve preferred Bigfoot. A three-hundred-pound ape-man with an unpredictable temperament would’ve been much easier to face.
Janey glanced over at Sara, muttering, “I’ll buy you a couple of minutes to get it together, then you’re on your own,” and she popped out of the car, crossing her arms on the top of the door.
Max pulled up short when he saw it was her rather than Sara. He turned toward the passenger side of the windshield, but the way Janey was staring at him was a challenge he couldn’t ignore. “Don’t you have someplace else to be?” he asked her.
“Jessie is spending the night at Mrs. Halliwell’s.”
Max frowned. “That doesn’t explain why you’re here.”
Janey lifted up a shoulder, and gave him a crooked smile. “Moral support,” she said. “And entertainment—at your expense, hopefully.”
Max just shook his head. They had a…unique relationship. No matter what he said or did, Janey would roll her eyes or huff out a breath, as if he had absolutely no clue about anything. Max wrote if off as a kind of younger sister/older brother thing that came from knowing each other their entire lives. If it had been anything else, Janey would’ve told him, he figured. She was nothing if not outspoken.
He went around to the other side of the car. At least with Sara, he knew where he stood. “I figured you were at Janey’s,” he said once she’d rolled the window down. “I wish you’d called, though.”
Sara tried to defend herself, but she had to put her head down first. Jack Daniel’s, loyal and thoughtful guy that he was, suddenly wanted to come to her rescue, and not in a good way. Then again, throwing up at Max’s feet would definitely send him running in the other direction. Or maybe not.
Considering the kind of man he was, Max would almost certainly see her tucked up safely in bed, maybe sit with her for a while to make sure she wasn’t going to get sick and choke on her own vomit. The picture that went along with that thought—minus the vomit—had her sitting up in her seat. Smiling. Max in her bedroom, inches away from her bed. Within easy touching distance. All she’d have to do was take his hand, invite him into her bed and indulge every fantasy she’d ever had. It might mean losing him forever—or it might mean that he’d finally acknowledge her real feelings and consider the possibility that he could grow to love her, too. It was a risk she’d never been willing to take before, but with Jack Daniel’s to help her…
Jack was supposed to help her do something else, Sara thought fuzzily, something entirely different. Wasn’t he? Her head spun like a roulette wheel, risk opposite caution, fear across from courage, all of them separated by big sections of necessity. By the time Max knocked on her window, necessity had shoved all those other pesky options out of the picture.
Sara took a deep breath and looked up at him. Her heart lurched like it always did, but only a little. It was too heavy to give a really good lurch.
He opened the door and offered to help her out. Sara ignored his hand. She waited until he dropped it and stepped back before she levered herself out of the car, awkwardly but on her own.
“You okay?” he asked, all concern, from the deep timbre of his voice to the slight frown between his eyes.
She nodded.
“I was getting worried, Sara. After this afternoon…” He reached for her again.
She held up both hands to ward him off, bending into the car to gather her purse and her courage. And then her balance. She had something to say to Max. It wasn’t going to be easy, but it had to be done or he’d never give her the space she needed to get over him. Just once, she told herself. If she did it right, she’d only have to do it once. She straightened slowly, grabbing on to the open door so she wouldn’t have to wait for her head to stop spinning. “Max—”
“Why don’t you come in the house? We’re eating popcorn and watching The Mummy for the umpteenth time.”
The Mummy was one of her favorite movies, but not for the action or the really amazing special effects, or even the bumbling hero and endangered heroine. She always found herself hoping those two dead Egyptians in love for thousands of years would find a way to be together.
“Come inside,” Max said softly, homing in on her indecision. “Joey is worried about you, too.”
Sara closed her eyes, stifling the intentionally rude thing she’d been about to say. She’d forgotten about Joey. Max would eventually understand why she’d had to stop being his friend until she could be only his friend. But she was going to have to be very careful about how she alienated the father if she was going to avoid hurting the son. She turned to face him, taking a step forward so he couldn’t possibly misunderstand her. “I don’t wanna watch a movie. I’m going t’bed.”
Max took a step back, waving a hand in front of his face. “Are you drunk?”
And she’d enunciated so carefully, too. “Maybe just a li’l.”
He glared over at Janey. “This is your idea of making her feel better?”
“Now I have somewhere else to be,” Janey said. She slid into the car and fired it up.
Max took Sara’s purse and slid his hand under her elbow, steering her out of the way as Janey peeled off in a small shower of gravel. “Leave it to Janey to get you drunk.”
Sara wrenched her arm out of his hand, then had to catch herself before she spun completely around. “It’s not Janey’s fault. I got myself drunk.”
“She should’ve called me. I’d have come to get you.” He tried to take her arm again.
Sara stepped back and, just for good measure, snatched her purse from his hand. It took her two tries, but it still felt good. “Janey’s not responsible for me, Max. Neither are you.”
He stopped in midstride. “I know that, Sara,” he said, his voice very deep and solemn. Hurt. “But I think of you as a—”
“Don’t say it!” She winced as her own screeching voice cut through her head like a railroad spike. Apparently she was getting started on the hangover already. Great. That meant she was sobering up. But drunk or sober or somewhere in between, she had to finish what she’d started before Jack deserted her entirely. “I’m not your sister, Max. I’m thirty, no twenty-nine, years old and more’n capa-capa—I’ve been making my own decisions and my own mistakes for a long time.
“Of course, noooobody forgets the mistakes, but why can’t you remember that at least eighty—seventy—” She stopped and thought really hard, but she seemed to be having an awful lot of trouble with numbers tonight. “Most of the time I manage to live my life without tripping over anything or gluing myself to anyone. But does anybody notice that? No, you all congregate at the Ersk Inn—and by the way that’s the stupidest name I’ve ever heard for anything—and you sit around and drink beer and talk about when Sara Lewis is going to damage the town again.”
Max rubbed at the spot on his chest where she’d been poking him to make her point, his handsome face creased in lines of confusion. “I’ve spent my share of time at the inn, Sara. You got the sitting around and drinking beer part right, but mostly we just watch whatever sporting event is on the big screen. Hardly anyone ever brings up your name, and I’ve never bought one of those squares.”
“No, but you always seem to be around when someone wins.”
“So it’s my fault?”
Sara sank her teeth into her bottom lip, realizing what she’d said. If Max figured out that he played some role in her clumsiness, he’d wonder why. It was a question she didn’t want him asking. Not now that she’d finally found the strength to let go of her dream instead of sitting around waiting for it to come true while life passed her by. The decision made her sick to her stomach, but empowerment was so liberating—it was as if she’d taken her first deep breath after a lifetime of struggling for oxygen. “No, Max, it’s not your fault. I just want it to stop. I can’t live like this anymore.”
“Aw, Sara.”
She almost stepped into Max’s outstretched arms, one last brotherly hug that she could fantasize meant something else entirely. Instead she stepped around him and headed for her front door. “Just go away, Max.”
“But—”
“Please, just leave me alone.”
She slipped inside and closed the door behind her, then leaned back against it as tears started to stream down her face.
Jack Daniel’s was a whiz at courage, but he wasn’t very good at deadening the pain.
MAX SCOOPED UP one last bucket of grain and dumped it into the trough for the milk cows, then opened the fifty-gallon drum of cracked corn to fill the chickens’ feed pan. Joey usually did both chores, but he and Jason Hartfield had been trading off sleepovers just about every Saturday night, and this weekend was Joey’s turn to stay over there.
He missed Joey, but he knew his son would be back in the morning. Sara wouldn’t.
Oh, she was still living at the ranch, but she hadn’t said more than hello and goodbye since that last unfortunate incident Halloween week. It was almost Thanksgiving. Max was beginning to wonder who was going to cook the turkey. Okay, he allowed, that sounded a little self-serving, but that was what friends did, they took care of each other, compensated for one another’s shortcomings. Sara helped him muddle through the domestic side of life and he did stuff like shovel her walk in the winter, change the oil in her car, chop wood…
The sound of an ax thwacking home drifted to him, and Max realized it had been going on for some time while he’d been moping, a kind of somber background music for his self-pity. It puzzled him for a second. None of his neighbors lived close enough for it to be coming from another ranch, and while they all got along pretty well, none of them liked him enough to just drop by and chop a stack of wood—which meant it had to be Sara. She’d finally emerged from her house.
With an ax in her hand.
He dropped the pan of chicken feed. Cracked corn poured into his boots and scattered over the floor. Max ignored the mess and the discomfort, racing out of the barn and across the yard, plowing through knee-deep drifts of snow. He skidded around the corner of her cottage on one foot, arms flung out for balance, his mouth opened on a shout that would have worked a lot better if he’d had any breath left in his body.
He gulped in a huge, painfully cold lungful of air and yelled “Sara!” just as she lifted the ax.
With a shriek she froze on the upstroke and kept going, the heavy ax dragging her over to sprawl flat on her back. The powdery snow puffed up around her, then drifted back down like her own miniblizzard, dusting her in white, face and all. Max pinned his lips between his teeth and slogged over to help her to her feet.
Sara ignored his hand. Her cutting glare might even have made him feel a little bit chastened if she hadn’t spent the next couple of minutes floundering around in her puffy green coat like a turned-over turtle. She finally managed to roll onto her side, then crawl to her feet, leaving behind a snow angel that looked more like a Lizzie Borden silhouette, complete with murder weapon.