“Okay,” he echoed, although he was speaking to her back. It looked to him like she couldn’t get away fast enough, and honestly, he didn’t blame her. He’d made an effort, Lord knew he’d tried, but there was no way she hadn’t been able to see the shock on his face. Odds were good that he’d hurt her feelings. He was going to have to make up for that later, although he wasn’t sure quite how.
“Trevor! Hey, man, are you listening to me?”
“Sure, little brother, I’m listening. You go right on ahead.”
The two of them continued to talk for another ten minutes or so, during which time Trevor heard a car start up outside and drive away. From the sound, it was moving fast, too—he could hear the gravel from the road flying up and clanging against the car’s undercarriage.
Trevor winced. It sounded like Penny was in a hell of a hurry to get away from the McCall ranch—probably, to get away from him. He was going to need to make amends, for sure, and the idea put him in even more of a sour mood than he’d been in before. He was starting to feel like everything that could go wrong had gone wrong ever since he’d come back home. The idea of lasting through a full year of this made him want to hit something. Hard.
“Hey, Carson?” he interrupted, rubbing his temple with his free hand. To top everything off, he felt a headache threatening.
"Talk to me," Carson said, a favorite catchphrase from their younger years.
"I'm going to have to let you go, if you don't mind. I feel a migraine coming on, and I'd like to nip it in the bud if I can."
“Say no more, brother. I hope you get to feeling better. And hey, you call me anytime, all right? I’m here for you. Pretty soon, I’m going to be there with you, too.”
“Sounds good.” Trevor hung up the phone and sighed with relief. The headache was looming large, but he thought he might still have time to head it off at the pass. A long, hot shower and a couple beers were likely to do the trick, and he thought he had enough time to get those in before Lacey arrived for the day. At least she had given her replacement, Mrs. Beyers, a night off from her training. Beyers would be leaving within the hour, which suited Trevor just fine. He was going to have to talk to Lacey about that woman. If she wanted to quit, that was her business, but she was going to have to keep looking for somebody to fill her shoes. Mrs. Beyers wasn't going to do the trick.
He slipped out of the barn after a quick once-over to make sure everything was in its proper place. Then he headed toward the house, squinting against the setting sun. He was so lost in his own thoughts that he almost walked right into the little girl sitting on the front porch steps, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders to protect her from the late March chill. He jumped back, yowling loudly enough to scare the girl and set her crying.
“What in the—?” Trevor leaned forward, bracing his hands on his knees and breathing hard. Noticing a piece of paper bearing a crude, hurried scrawl pinned to the girl’s jacket, he reached out and removed it gently.
When he saw what was written there, he wanted to start crying himself.
5
“No. This can’t be happening. It can’t. Just, no.”
Lacey wasn't sure how many times she'd spoken the words, or some variation of them, in the last fifteen minutes or so. It had to be a lot. She was pretty sure that if anybody else had been around, they would have said she sounded like a broken record. A crazy broken record at that.
Her mother had told her for as long as she could remember not to do anything that drew too much attention to herself. Don’t dress in anything flashy or provocative. Don’t speak too loudly or make too many jokes. Certainly don’t talk to yourself! She had taken the lessons to heart, maybe learned them a little too well. At the moment, though, talking out loud to an empty car felt like the least of her problems.
“And now I get to go hang out with Mr. Too-Big-for-his-Britches,” she hissed.
Not that she had a real problem with Trevor, per se, but what she wanted to be doing was heading straight to her bed and breakfast to take care of what sounded like a bigger mess than she could ever have imagined.
She had just had a call from her friend, Caroline, who had informed her that the contractor had abandoned ship. Lacey had paid him up front for all the materials he would need as well as for half of his labor, something he had assured her was standard. Instead of doing the job, he had taken off and not shown up at the bed and breakfast again.
As soon as Lacey had gotten off the phone with Caroline, she had called the man and discovered that his phone number was no longer working. She had no way to contact him now and no way to recoup her losses.
“Brave face,” she whispered as she pulled up next to Trevor’s truck. “That’s all you’ve got to do. Put on a brave face and get through this so you can get through the next thing.”
She climbed out of the dilapidated Jeep she had saved six years for and took a deep, shaky breath. The last thing she wanted to do now was play nice with Trevor, and unfortunately, she didn't even have Mrs. Beyers to act as a buffer tonight. She half wished she could call in sick, but it would be less than convincing while standing outside of his house.
As if to punctuate the point, the screen door banged open, and Trevor came striding out onto the porch. He looked around wildly, his eyes wide with something that looked a whole lot like fear to Lacey's untrained eye. He was without his customary cowboy hat, and his thick, almost black hair stood up in all different directions. As she watched, he ran his hand through it again, making the sticking up parts even worse. Something about the look of him made her think of when they were still children and Trevor wasn't getting his way. It almost made her feel sorry for him, except that at the moment, her own worries were about the only thing she had room to be sorry for.
“Lacey! Thank God. I thought you were never going to get here,” he said when he caught sight of her, his eyes growing wider still.
"Never get here? What are you talking about, Trevor? I'm five minutes early," she answered, more defensively than she’d meant to. She may or may not have been crying some on the drive, and she didn't want him to see her reddened eyes or any tear tracks she’d missed in wiping them away and ask her what was wrong. It wasn't something she was ready to talk about. She wasn't sure she would ever be ready to talk about it with Trevor McCall.
"Right, okay," he said distractedly, waving the comment off with an air of impatience that made her bristle all over. "You're right, but I need you to come with me all the same. I've got a situation here. A big one."
Without waiting to see if she would follow, Trevor turned back toward the house, hovering in the open doorway and letting all the heat out instead of going inside. His bizarre behavior was completely unlike what she had come to expect of him in their short time together as adults. Nevertheless, the more closely she watched him, the surer she felt that something had really and truly shocked him. She took another deep breath, willed her heartbeat to slow to something that could pass as a normal rate, and followed after him.
"Maybe it will do me some good," she whispered to herself as she hurried up the porch stairs. The moment she thought about her own awful predicament, though, fresh tears sprang up in her eyes, and she had to shake her head—as if that would be enough to clear it.