Sweet Laurel Falls (7 page)

She untwisted her striped purple scarf and shrugged out of her
coat before he had a chance to help her, then hung both on a rack nestled
between ceiling-high shelves.

“A bookstore and coffeehouse. That seems a far cry from your
dreams of writing the great American novel.”

She seemed surprised that he would remember those dreams. “Not
that far. I still like to write, but I mostly dabble for my own enjoyment. I
discovered I’m very happy surrounded by books written by other people—and the
readers who love them.”

“It’s a bit of a dying business, isn’t it?”

She frowned and stopped to align an untidy shelf of paperback
mysteries. “I don’t believe a passion for actual books you can hold in your
hands will ever go away. We have an enormous children’s section, which is
growing in popularity as parents come to realize that children need to turn real
pages once in a while instead of merely flipping a finger across a screen. Our
travel section is also very popular, as is the young adult fiction.”

She shrugged. “Anyway, I’ve made sure people come to the store
for more than just books, though it’s still the best place in town to find
elusive titles. We’ve become a gathering spot for anyone who loves the written
word. We have book groups and author signings, writer nights, even an evening
set aside a couple times a month for singles.”

“You’ve really built something impressive here.”

She paused and looked embarrassed. “Sorry. You hit a hot
button.”

“I don’t mind. I admire passion in a woman.”

In a
person
. That’s what he meant
to say. In a
person
. Anyone. But it was too late to
take the word back. Maura sent him a charged look and suddenly the bookstore
felt over-warm. He had a random, completely unwelcome memory of the two of them
wrapped together on a blanket up near Silver Lake, with the aspens whispering
around them and the wind sighing in the pine trees.

She cleared her throat and he thought he saw a slight flush on
her cheeks, but he figured he must have been mistaken when she went on the
offensive. “What is this whole business about sticking around town for a few
weeks, Jack? You don’t want to be here. You hate Hope’s Crossing.”

He didn’t want to take her on right now. He ought to just smile
politely, offer some benign answer and head over to browse the bestseller shelf,
but somehow he couldn’t do that.

“If I want to see my daughter—the daughter you didn’t tell me
about, remember?—I’m stuck here, aren’t I?” he said quietly.

“Not necessarily. Why can’t you just wait and visit Sage in
Boulder when she returns to school? Or have her come visit you in San Francisco.
You don’t have to be
here
.”

“I’m not leaving. Not until after Christmas, anyway.”

“You’re just doing this to ruin my holidays, aren’t you?”

He could feel his temper fray, despite his efforts to hang on
to the tattered edges. “What else? I stayed up all night trying to come up with
ways to make you pay for keeping my daughter from me. Ruining your holidays
seemed the perfect revenge for twenty years of glaring silence. That’s the kind
of vindictive bastard I am, right?”

“I have no idea,” she shot back. “How am I supposed to know
what kind of bastard you are now?”

“Insinuating I was a bastard twenty years ago to knock you up
and leave town.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You must have thought it, though, a million times over the
years.”

That
was the core of the anger that
had simmered through him since that life-changing moment after his lecture. What
she must have thought of him, how she must have hated him to keep this from
him.

For twenty years their time together had been a cherished
memory, something he used to take out and relive when life seemed particularly
discouraging.

He had wondered about her many times over the years. His first
love, something good and bright and beautiful to a young man who had needed that
desperately.

To know that she must have been cursing his name all that time
for leaving her alone with unimaginable responsibility was a bitter pill.

“You didn’t
tell
me, Maura. What
the hell was I supposed to do?”

“Not forget me, as if you couldn’t wait to walk away from
everything we shared. As if I meant nothing to you!”

As soon as she blurted out the words, she pressed a hand to her
mouth as if horrified by them.

“I loved you,” he murmured. “Believe whatever else you want
about me, but I loved you, Maura.”

“Yet you hated your father and Hope’s Crossing more.”

“Maura,” he began, knowing he had no defense other than youth
and idiocy and his own single-minded resolve to make something out of his life
away from this place. Before he could figure out how to finish the sentence,
chimes rang softly on her front door and a new customer came in.

He saw the man out of his peripheral vision for only a fleeting
instant, but something made him shift his head for a better look. Instantly, he
wished he hadn’t. Did his father have a freaking tracker on him?

CHAPTER FIVE

“I
S
THAT
BOOK
ON
SPELUNKING
here yet?” Harry Lange
growled before he had even walked all the way through the doorway, as if every
employee had been lined up inside merely waiting for him to make an entrance. “I
could have had it a week ago if I had ordered the damn thing online.”

His words were directed at Maura, Jack realized. Harry must
have seen her when he walked inside. It took another beat for his father to
recognize
him,
but Jack knew the instant he did.
Harry’s jaw sagged and ruddy color leached from his aging features as if
somebody had just slugged him in the gut.

Maura looked from Harry to him and quickly stepped forward.
“I’m not sure, Mr. Lange. I’ll have to ask Ruth. She’s the one who handles the
special orders. If you can wait a few moments, I’ll see if I can find her.”

Harry didn’t seem to have heard her. He continued to stare at
Jack, mouth slack and his eyes awash with a hundred tangled emotions Jack didn’t
want to see.

So much for slipping into town and back out again without
seeing his father. Twice in the space of an hour must be some kind of cosmic
joke.

The familiar raw fury for his father welled up, but now that he
was confronted with the actual man instead of only memories, it seemed muted,
somehow—as if the color and heat had bled from it as well.

“J-Jackson?” Harry’s voice sounded strangled, as if he were
choking on one of the little mints from the checkout at Dermot Caine’s café.

“Harry.” The single word came out clipped, cold.

“I…hadn’t heard you were in town.”

“It was a spur-of-the-moment thing.” One he was quickly coming
to regret.

“I see. How long will you…” His voice trailed off, and Jack
began to think maybe the pale cast to his features was from more than just
surprise.

“I’m still working that out.”

For politeness’ sake, he should probably move closer to his
father so they didn’t have to raise their voices to be heard a dozen feet apart,
but he couldn’t seem to generate the necessary forward momentum. Lord knew,
Harry wouldn’t be the one to budge. That much apparently hadn’t changed.

Maura was finally the one to move first. She took a step
forward. “Mr. Lange, are you all right?” she asked suddenly, taking another few
steps.

“I… No. Not really. Damn it.”

His father lurched as if someone had struck him from behind. He
knocked a hip against a display table of new releases and swept a hand out to
steady himself, scattering books to the floor. Even so, he was unable to keep
his balance. Jack could see him start to head to the floor, but he was too far
away to reach him in time. Maura was closer, but even she couldn’t prevent Harry
from toppling. A hard crack sounded above the bustle from the coffee bar as the
side of his head made contact with the edge of the table before he slumped to
the ground.

“Mr. Lange!” Maura exclaimed, kneeling next to the prone
figure.

“Is he okay?”

“I don’t know. He was standing there one minute, then hit the
ground the next. Mr. Lange!”

She turned his father onto his back, and his aging features
were ashen and still. Was he dead? Had Jack managed to knock him off just by
showing up in town? He froze for a moment, aware of his own strange mix of
emotions—shock and dismay and most surprising, a completely unexpected
regret.

“He’s unconscious!” Maura said. “Come on, Mr. Lange. Wake
up.”

“He hit the edge of the table pretty hard.”

“Give me your coat.”

“Why?”

“Just give it to me, Jack!”

He reluctantly handed over the custom-sewn leather jacket he
had picked up during his time in Italy. She bunched it up and tucked it under
Harry’s head. Even that bit of commotion didn’t make his father snap out of
it.

“Come on, Harry, this is stupid. Wake up.” His father’s eyelids
fluttered a little at his voice, but his eyes didn’t open.

If he had ever imagined a reunion with his father—which he
absolutely
hadn’t
—he was pretty sure this wasn’t
what he would have predicted, with his father sprawled out on the ground looking
lifeless and ashen.

“Harry!” he barked.

That seemed to do the trick. Harry’s eyelids jerked a few
times, and seconds later he finally opened his eyes fully. They were dazed and
blank for a moment before they sharpened, his gaze fixed on Jack with shades of
that same stunned disbelief. “What…happened?”

Jack couldn’t seem to say anything, frozen in place by the
years of bitterness and hatred he had fed and nurtured for this man.

“You fell,” Maura finally answered.

She tugged and pulled the jacket to a better position under the
old man’s head and seemed unfazed when he batted away her hands.

“Get away from me,” he snapped. “I just need to catch my
breath.”

She eased away, picking a cell phone out of her pocket. “Fine.
You should know we charge extra for napping in the middle of the store.”

“Smarty.”

She gave him a tart look even as she started hitting buttons on
her phone.

“What are you doing? Put that away! I hope you don’t think I’m
going to let you take a picture of me for all your girlfriends to cackle
about.”

Jack noted with concern that, despite his protests, his
father’s voice still sounded feeble and his features hadn’t lost that pallid
cast.

“I hadn’t planned to take a picture, no. But that’s a great
idea.”

“What are you doing, then?”

“Calling nine-one-one. You need to go to the emergency room to
be checked out.”

If anything, that made Harry look even more horrified. “Forget
it. I’m fine. I just lost my balance, that’s all.” He tried to scramble up, and
Jack finally had to move forward to help Maura keep him in place.

Harry gave a sharp intake of breath when Jack grabbed his arm
and gazed at him with an expression he couldn’t decipher.

“You passed out in my store,” Maura said sternly. “I’m not
about to leave myself open to some future lawsuit where you claim negligence.
I’m calling the paramedics. You can fight it out with them.”

Harry jerked his gaze away from Jack to summon a halfhearted
glower, but he subsided back against the cushion of his jacket. Really? He was
going to give in without a fight? For the first time, Jack began to wonder if
something was seriously wrong with Harry’s health.

“This is just want you wanted, isn’t it?” Harry said bitterly.
It took a moment for Jack to realize the words were directed at him. “It
probably gives you no end of pleasure to come back after all these years and see
some weak, pathetic old man on the floor at your feet.”

Any concern and sympathy he might have briefly entertained for
Harry dried up like the Mojave in August. “You’re not that old.”

Harry frowned at him and gave Maura a nasty look in turn. “At
least help me up. I’m fine. I don’t need to be lying on the damn floor. Help me
to one of those chairs over there.”

She looked undecided, then gazed around the crowd of curious
customers that had begun to gather around.

“If we do, will you promise to stay put instead of trying to
juke around us and run out to avoid the EMTs?”

“Very funny. I’m not running anywhere. Now help me up.”

She sighed and reached for one of Harry’s arms, gesturing for
Jack to take the other. He would have liked to ignore her. Hell, he would have
liked to yank his eight-hundred-dollar Milano leather jacket out from under
Harry’s head and make his own escape from Dog-Eared Books & Brew, but common
decency—as well as a completely ridiculous desire not to look like a bigger ass
to her than he already did—compelled him to step forward and grab Harry’s other
arm.

His father was still not quite seventy. Jack imagined without
the pallor he would still be fairly hale and hearty. Still, the old man felt
almost frail as he and Maura supported him toward a plump armchair in the nearby
travel section.

“What’s going on?”

At the new voice, he looked over and found Sage gazing at the
three of them in puzzled consternation.

“Mr. Lange is feeling a little under the weather,” Maura
replied. “He passed out.”

“I didn’t pass out,” Harry snapped. “I just lost my balance. If
you left a person with half a foot of aisle room in this place, I would have
been fine.”

“See, that definitely sounds like you’re blaming me. Should I
be calling my lawyer?” Maura returned.

“I’m not going to sue anybody.”

Don’t believe him,
he wanted to
tell Maura. If Harry saw any advantage to himself in a given situation, he
wouldn’t hesitate to lie, steal and betray to get his way.

“O. M. G.!”

Maura blinked at Sage’s sudden exclamation. “What?”

“If Jack is my father, that means Mr. Lange is my
grandfather!”

He bit back a four-letter word. Of all the moments for Sage to
blurt out that little bit of information!

Harry’s eyes widened and he looked back and forth between the
two of them. Maura was the one who had turned pale now. She looked as if she
wanted to disappear behind a bookshelf, and Jack wanted to join her.

Harry did
not
need this
information, something else he could figure out how to manipulate for his own
purposes.

“What did she say?” Harry asked.

“Nothing,” Maura muttered. “Now would be a really good time for
you to go back to sleep.”

“Who are you?” Harry asked Sage, his thick eyebrows arched like
bristly caterpillars.

“My daughter,” Maura said quickly.

He narrowed his gaze. “Your daughter died in that car accident
up Silver Strike Reservoir this spring. I was there, wasn’t I? I saw the whole
thing.”

That was news to Jack. What had been his father’s involvement
in the accident that killed Layla Parker?

“This is my older daughter, Sage.”

He should just keep his mouth zipped here. He knew damn well
telling him about Sage was a mistake—but he also knew Harry well enough to be
certain he would just keep pushing and pushing until somebody told him.

“And mine, apparently,” Jack finally said.

Maura sent him a quick, surprised look, as if she expected him
to deny the whole thing. Harry, on the other hand, just stared.

“Have you taken a DNA test?” he asked.

None of your damn business,
he
wanted to say. He didn’t want his father mixed up in this complicated mess, but
he was coming to realize he didn’t have much control over things. Harry just
might have more contact with Sage than he would. He lived in Hope’s Crossing,
after all. While Jack would be back in San Francisco, Harry would be free to
pick up the phone whenever Sage was in town and meet her for lunch at the café
or the resort or any blasted place he wanted.

“She’s my daughter. I’m convinced of it, and that’s all that
matters.”

Harry opened his mouth to argue, but before he could, the door
to the bookstore burst open, and a pair of burly paramedics hurried inside with
emergency kits and dedicated focus.

“Back here,” Maura called and waved. They shifted directions
and headed toward them.

“I don’t need the damn paramedics,” Harry grumbled.

“Well, you’ve got them,” Maura retorted. “Hey, Dougie.”

One of the paramedics, a guy who looked like he could probably
bench-press half the bookstore, grinned at her. “Hey, Maur. What have we
got?”

“Maybe nothing. I don’t know. I just thought it would be better
to call you to check things out.”

“That’s what we’re here for. What happened?”

“Mr. Lange isn’t feeling well. He had some kind of incident. We
were talking one moment and he fell over the next. I think he was unconscious
for about thirty seconds to a minute.”

“I didn’t pass out,” Harry asserted. “I just lost my
balance.”

“And then went to the Bahamas for the next little while,” Jack
answered.

“Either way, it’s a good idea to check things out,” the other
paramedic said.

“That’s what I figured,” Maura answered. “He hit his head on a
table pretty hard when he fell.”

She stepped away from Harry and let the paramedics do their
thing.

“Is he going to be okay?” Sage asked him, her voice low.

He figured his father would be harassing the paramedics all the
way to the hospital, haranguing them on everything from their driving to the
accommodations. “It’s just a precaution. I’m sure he’ll be fine.”

For the first time, he noticed Sage looked a little pale too.
This had to be weird for her, to find herself suddenly related to the old
bastard.

“I don’t need a stupid gurney.”

“Sorry, Mr. Lange. We have to follow the rules.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“You can always refuse treatment,” Dougie, Maura’s friend, said
to Harry.

Jack fully expected his father would do just that, but after a
pause, Harry shrugged. “No. I’ll come. I don’t want to see the idiots in the
E.R., though. Call Dr. Osaka and tell him to meet us there.”

“Whatever you say, sir.”

A moment later, the paramedics finally succeeded in loading
Harry onto the gurney and rolled him out of the bookstore.

“Are you going to follow the ambulance to the hospital?” Maura
asked.

“He doesn’t need me. He’s made that more than clear.” He turned
to Sage. “So we’re meeting for dinner. What time works for you?”

She still looked a little green around the gills, and he had a
feeling food was the last thing on her mind. “Well, I was thinking I could work
until four or so. Any time after that?”

“Let’s say six-thirty. I’ll pick you up at your house.”

“Great. I’ll see you then.”

He picked up his jacket, shook it off from being on the ground,
then shrugged into it. With a stiff nod to Maura, he headed out into the
snow-crusted streets of Hope’s Crossing.