Harlequin Heartwarming May 2016 Box Set (84 page)

After they polished off the pizza and the server had refilled their cups a second time, they each tossed several bills on the table and walked out to the parking lot.

“We need to do this again,” Jack said. His mind felt clearer than it had in weeks. “Soon.”

Paul pulled out his phone, swiped the screen to bring up his calendar. “Two weeks from now?”

“Sounds good.” Jack plugged the date into his calendar, too.

Minutes later, Jack sat behind the wheel of his Jeep and reflected on the evening's conversation. Until tonight, he hadn't understood why he wasn't freaking out about the baby. Now he knew. The baby was changing everything for the better. Two months ago, the death of a longtime friend had forced him to examine who he was, what he was doing with his life, why he felt as though something was missing. What was missing was a life. Now, in fewer than twenty-four hours, everything looked crystal clear. He was in love with Emily. It was that simple.

He couldn't pinpoint the precise moment it had happened but, looking back, it had started at Annie and Eric's wedding. She'd had a glass of champagne, possibly two, and had seemed a little light-headed when he'd walked her onto the dance floor. With her cheek resting against his shoulder and her eyes closed, she had swayed in his arms to “You Send Me.” And at the time, like Sam Cooke, he'd been sure it was an infatuation. Now he needed to prove to her it was more than that. He'd never been good at compromise, but Paul was right about that, too. He knew precisely what form that compromise would take. First thing tomorrow morning, he would put his plan in motion.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A
NNIE
HAD
BEEN
RIGHT
. Sunday dawned clear and bright, and the warm afternoon sunshine made it a perfect day for a horseback ride and a picnic by the pond. She had filled a pair of saddlebags with food, and Emily knew that the meal would be delicious. Now, helping CJ saddle up Honey and Heathcliffe while surreptitiously watching Jack watch them with uncertainty, she was more grateful than ever her big sister had suggested this date. He had been less than enthusiastic, but for whatever reason he had agreed to go along with her plan.

Since the moment Emily had laid eyes on Jack, back on that fateful first day of high school, she had been love-struck. He was taller than the other boys and ten times better looking, but there'd been more to it. Even as a teenager, when most of the other guys had been awkward or insecure, or both, Jack had exuded a quiet confidence. Right now, though, he looked nervous. He had never ridden a horse before, and it showed.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” he asked as she led her mare, Honey, into the cross ties and slid the saddle pad across her back. “What if you fall?”

“We're going for a trail ride. I'm not going to fall.” Emily laid the saddle over the pad and snugged the cinch around Honey's girth.

“What if I fall?”

She smiled at him. “Nobody falls off a horse on a trail ride.” Which wasn't exactly true, as CJ could attest. Hardly anyone ever did, but he didn't need to know that.

Emily unclipped the cross ties, patted Honey's shoulder and led her out of the stable and into the yard. Without looking back at Jack, she stuck her foot into a stirrup and swung herself up and onto the saddle. Before long, her expanding belly wouldn't allow her to perform a move like that. She held the reins in one hand and rubbed her horse's shoulder with the other while she waited.

“Would you like to use the mounting block?” CJ asked Jack, indicating the wooden platform that beginners accessed by a short set of steps.

Jack frowned, looking insulted.

CJ laughed. “All right, then. Up you go. I'll adjust the length of your stirrups after you're in the saddle.”

From her vantage point on Honey's back, Emily watched with amusement as Jack made two attempts to get his left foot in the stirrup, stumbling both times. Heathcliffe angled his head, trying to get a look at what was going on, rolling his eyes sideways so the whites showed.

Emily allowed herself a secret little smile. One hundred percent of Jack's attention was focused on the horse, so he wasn't paying attention to her anyway.

“Not as easy as it looks.” CJ waved him aside and set a plastic mounting stool on the ground next to Heathcliffe. “Better to use this than spook your horse.”

Jack acquiesced. A moment later, he sat in the saddle while CJ adjusted the stirrups. By the time he looked over to Emily, she had composed herself and dialed back her grin to a smile.

CJ patiently demonstrated how to hold the reins and made Jack walk Heathcliffe around the ring until she was satisfied he could guide the horse without confusing the poor animal, gently rein him in, and nudge him into action again.

“Okay. That was good,” CJ said. She led Heathcliffe next to Honey, patted both horses' hindquarters. “Off you go, you crazy kids. Be sure to stay out of trouble.” And then with a saucy toss of her long blond ponytail, she disappeared into the stable, chuckling at her inappropriateness.

Emily wished she could blame her flushed face on the warmth of the afternoon sun. “I am
so
sorry. I can't believe she said that. Ugh, I
can't
believe it.”

“Emily, it's fine.” Jack wasn't looking at her because he was fixated on a point on the ground just ahead of Heathcliffe's head, but he was grinning. “And you have to admit, it was kind of funny.”

Funny. Right. Because being pregnant, single and completely skeptical that the father of your baby was in this for the long haul—never mind be willing to honor his totally clichéd reaction to finding out about the baby—was hilarious.
We'll get married
. Right. Because that was always the best solution.

“So...” Jack said, with a hint of accusation.

“What?” It came out shriller than she would have liked. Not that any amount of shrill was ever a good thing.

“When I told you to decide what you'd like to do on our next date, I sure didn't expect this.”

“Believe it or not, it was Annie's idea. She said it's hard to truly get to know someone over dinner at a restaurant, that it's better to do things we love to do.” So this afternoon was meant to be part test—to see if he was willing to be part of her world—and part retribution. Based on their conversations throughout the week, she had a hunch he was withholding something important, although she couldn't imagine what it might be. She would not tolerate being sheltered from whatever he thought she might not need to know. Not for a minute. He could think again.

He had agreed to the date, though. He was here, and he was on horseback. She needed to lighten up.

“So that means you'll go to a White Sox game with me?” And just like that, he turned the table on her.

“Will you buy me a hot dog and popcorn and one of those giant foam fingers?”

“Yes to the food, no to the finger.”

She laughed at that.

“I can see why you enjoy this,” he said. “It's quiet out here. Peaceful.”

“It is, and it's a beautiful afternoon. This is one of my favorite places in the world. Probably my second most favorite place after the gazebo on the riverbank. And this is my first trail ride of the season and...”

“And?”

“I'm glad you're here.” She was. She had dreamed of this moment...this...exact...moment...so many times over the years. “I love it here. This is my favorite season, and green is my favorite color and this...the trees starting to leaf out and the fields coming to life and... I love it here.”

“You sound like a writer.”

Emily decided that might be the nicest thing anyone had ever said to her.

“And I can see why you love it,” Jack said. “I lived here for the first half of my life, but I never saw the countryside from this perspective.”

“That's because you didn't see it from the back of a horse.”

“You could be right. Or maybe I wasn't seeing it from the right perspective, with the right person.”

“And your perspective has changed?” she asked, ignoring, for now, his implication there was a chance she might be the right person.

“I'd say it has.”

They rode in silence for a while, guiding the horses along a narrow gravel access road that sliced between a cornfield and a hay field. It was one of those perfect early summer afternoons. The warmth from the sun mingled with the breeze and stirred up the scents of the dusty road, the freshly tilled soil and the wildflowers that were starting to put on a show.

Emily was beginning to feel more at ease with Jack. The silence was companionable, and it was a relief to not have to fill every second with nervous prattle. It gave her a chance to take in the soothing sounds around her—the crunch of gravel beneath hooves, the chitter of black-capped chickadees, the soft snuffles and whinnying of the horses.

“It sounds like they're talking to one another,” Jack said.

“They are. Honey and Heathcliffe have been stable buddies for years. Their stalls are side by side, and they always graze together in the same paddock.”

“So you've always had horses?”

“For as long as I can remember. The three of us—Annie, CJ and I—grew up with them, but CJ's the one who turned into a real horsewoman. She started winning blue ribbons when she was ten or eleven. We've always boarded horses out here, and she started training them, then offering riding lessons. Then she got the idea to get my dad back on a horse—”

“I used to think it was amazing that your father could ride a horse. Now that I'm on one myself, it's nothing short of miraculous.” Jack sounded no less surprised than anyone else when they discovered Thomas Finnegan was as comfortable in the saddle as he was in his wheelchair.

Emily nodded. “He is amazing. CJ spent a lot of time researching the kind of lift we'd need. By the time she was sixteen, she had started a therapeutic riding program for a couple of kids in town. One child with cerebral palsy and the other has Down syndrome. Word spread quickly, and now CJ's program is known throughout the county and beyond.”

“Wow, that's impressive.”

“She's pretty amazing, too, although sometimes she's still my annoying little sister.” Her sensibilities still stung from CJ's tongue-in-cheek warning about not getting into trouble.

“What about Annie?”

“She tends to be less annoying.”

Jack laughed. “I meant, how is she with the horses?”

“Oh, right.” Emily steered her thoughts away from CJ's tendency to have her nose in everyone's business and back to their initial conversation. “Annie is Annie, as I'm sure you know. She excels at everything, including take care of the family. I can't remember a time when she wasn't looking after me and CJ, and our dad, of course, and then Eric and Isaac. That's who she is.”

“She was that way at school, too. If anything needed to be done, it was always, ‘Ask Annie.'”

Ask Annie
. Emily liked that. She could use that as a title for a blog post, or maybe even a series of weekly posts.

“That's my big sister, all right. And now, on top of taking care of the family and the house, she has guests to look after, as well. When she opened the B & B, she hired a part-time housekeeper to come in for a few hours every morning. Otherwise, she manages everything pretty much single-handedly. To get back to your question, she's a very accomplished rider, as she is with everything else, but she doesn't have much time for it.”

They were approaching the end of the road where a bank led from the gravel easement to a well-traveled trail through the woods.

“We'll stop here for a bit. Whoa, girl,” Emily said, reining in her horse.

Jack did the same. Emily leaned forward and stroked Honey's shoulder as she came to a stop.

“We'll go single file down the bank,” she said to Jack. “I'll go down first. You can wait up here, then follow me. Keep the reins slack and lean back a little in the saddle. Heathcliffe knows what to do, so let him do all the work.”

She squeezed Honey's sides with her legs, felt the familiar sway as the horse picked her way down the incline. At the base of the slope, she swung Honey around so she could watch Jack and Heathcliffe make their descent. With his killer good looks and broad-shouldered strength, Jack looked as if he was born to ride, but his lack of ease in the saddle gave him away. For a change, it felt good to be the confident one, and she liked that this was something she could teach him. Silly thoughts, but she was having them nonetheless.

“Well done. You look like a pro already,” she said, adopting CJ's approach to teaching riding lessons.

He hiked up one eyebrow, making her smile.

She turned Honey toward the trail as Jack rode up alongside, then they entered the woods together. Sunlight filtered through the canopy of birch and cottonwood, but the air was a few degrees cooler than when they'd been out in the open.

“Not much farther,” she said. “Maybe half a mile to the pond.”

Here, the horses' hooves were quieter on the soft ground. The twitter and chirp of songbirds were abundant, and at one point, a squirrel scolded them from a branch overhead. However, it still felt quiet and calm here.

“So, what about you?” Jack said after they were underway and had resumed their earlier rhythm.

“What about me?”

“One sister's a horsewoman, the other is a homemaker. What's Emily's strong suit?”

Head in the clouds?
Hopeless romantic?
“I guess I'm the bookworm. And I always wanted to be a writer—”

“You are a writer.”

“Not just a writer for the local paper. For as long as I can remember, I've had this dream I would write something...I don't know...more important.”

“News is pretty important.”

“It it, for sure, but it's fleeting. Yesterday's paper is already in the bottom of the birdcage, so to speak, and last week's is long forgotten.”

“What about your blog? My mother was raving about it this morning.” Was he serious or poking fun at her? She couldn't tell from his tone.

“Did you read it?” She loved her blog and was thrilled that more and more people were checking out her posts, but the thought of Jack perusing them gave her heart palpitations.

“I did. It's good. Really good.”

“Thanks. It's mostly stories about small-town life, but they're fun to write.”

“Like the missing garden gnomes.”

Emily laughed. “Correct. When I first heard about the missing items, I knew it would be fun to write about them.” The stories were meant to be lighthearted, and it still surprised her that many people took them so seriously.

“They're charming stories, Emily. Well written, too. Actually, they remind me a little of Garrison Keillor's work.”

“Oh.”
Charming. Well written. Garrison Keillor?
High praise from a man who most likely didn't have time to read much more than police reports and witness statements. “Wow. Well, thank you. As I said before, Ken Bartlett wouldn't let me put those stories in the
Gazette
so I found a work-around.”

“And a good one, considering no actual crimes have been committed.”

Emily shot him a sideways look. “You sound pretty sure about that. Or are you saying it's not okay to steal a car or rob a bank, but it's quite all right to make off with a gnome, a welcome mat or your mother's garden trowel.”