Bluestone & Vine Read online

  It’s about belonging. Bailey’s words echoed through Seth’s mind as he stared at his friend, wishing he could ignore the blatant truth staring him right in the face, but ... no. “Well, I don’t need mother-henning. And, before you say anything more, I’m not saying I don’t want Bailey there. Or Jake. I love having them around. I rely on them. What I was getting at was that now that she’s breeding the goats, and is thinking about finding ways to show them, maybe sell them—which Addie has said she’ll oversee, so don’t worry—it would be smarter for her to have them closer to home.”

  Sawyer unlaced his hands and sat forward, propping his elbows on his desk and pressing his lips against his folded fingers. “So, this is about Pippa, then,” he said at length.

  Seth just swore under his breath and stood up. “I should have just gone straight to Addie.”

  “You want the goats at Bailey’s place because then Pippa will be at Bailey’s place. Are you sure you don’t want me figuring out how to move Dex there, too? I understand he’s taken quite a shine to your Irish songstress.”

  “Irish song—she’s not my Irish anything.”

  “Oh, I think there’s a good chance she’s your Irish everything, but you’re just too stubborn to admit it.”

  Seth shocked them both by saying, “No, I’m not too stubborn to admit it. I just don’t know how to make it work and keep her, and I don’t think I could stand watching her walk away if we let this go any further.”

  Sawyer recovered from his surprise first. “Further?” He grinned, unrepentantly. “So, it’s gone ... somewhere then? When? You booted her out to Noah’s cabin like a day after she got here. Chicken-shit move, by the way.” He flapped pretend wings.

  “Bite me.” Seth turned to go.

  “Seth,” Sawyer said, all teasing gone. He waited for Seth to turn back around. “Teasing aside, if she’s it for you, don’t spend your energy on finding ways to shut it down. Spend that energy on figuring out how to give it—give her—your best chance.” He stood now, and the commanding-officer aura overtook the best-friend ribbing. “You stepped in when Sunny and I couldn’t figure things out. When I thought the obstacles were insurmountable, as did she. We owe you. We want you happy.”

  “Sunny lived hours away, not an ocean and a continent,” Seth reminded him. “And one of you isn’t a world-famous singer.”

  “And yet, in the end, I would have been willing to work with that, too, to have what we could have, versus having nothing at all.” Sawyer sighed when he saw he wasn’t getting anywhere. “All I’m saying is, when we started working toward something, instead of against it, solutions were found.”

  “And if we don’t find a solution?” Seth asked him, quite sincerely. “What then? And if you’re about to say, ‘be thankful for what time you had,’ save your breath. We’re not cut out for that. I wouldn’t do that to her, and I sure as hell am not going to do that to myself. I didn’t risk my life every single day for years on end and miraculously survive, just to come home and torture myself over what any sane person would assess and say is a no-win situation.”

  “We’re Rangers,” Sawyer said. “You wore the green beret, same as me. We made it our business to run toward no-win situations, and get the win anyway. What happened to that guy?”

  “That guy is no longer serving his country. He’s serving his desire to build something worthwhile with his own two hands. Something that has a chance in hell of being a success. We didn’t run into situations we knew we had no chance of winning, Sawyer. Which is why we’re both standing here right now. I’m not about to change that rule now.”

  “And I think the very fact you frame it that way, like it’s life or death, should be telling you exactly how important it is to find that win. If you can’t get that this is also life or death, the life being the one you might have, and the death being the one you’ll never know, well ... I don’t know how else to make you see it.” Sawyer sighed, and said, “As to the other, if Addie okays it, I think we can figure something out with the goat pens. But at least be honest with yourself about why you’re going to all this trouble.”

  Seth looked at Sawyer then, and knew that while his friend and former CO looked resigned, what he felt was disappointment. In Seth.

  “You’re also going to have to be the one to explain it to Bailey,” Sawyer reminded him, as if the disappointment wasn’t enough of a direct hit. “And you know damn well she’s going to see right through it, too. So, good luck with that. You’ll either piss her off because you’re using her so you don’t have to face your own problems, or hurt her feelings for pretty much the same reason, or—and this gets my vote—she’ll be both.”

  “I’ll figure it out,” Seth told Sawyer. “Don’t say anything to Addie.”

  Sawyer chuckled then, and the tension between them evaporated, as it always did. “Oh, trust me, if you decide to go that route, it’s going to be all you, brother.”

  Seth put his hand on the knob, paused, and turned back. “I appreciate what you’re saying,” he said. “And that you’re returning the favor you think I did for you and Sunny. I mean that. If I screw this up, that’s on me. But, end of the day, it’s my life, my future. Hers, too. I hope you can respect my choices, even if you don’t agree with them.”

  “Always,” Sawyer said, without hesitation. “I’m standing on the other side of that hurdle. I just wish you could see the view from here. If you could, you’d do whatever it took to jump over.”

  It wasn’t until Seth opened the door that he realized at some point during their conversation, the music had stopped. He knew that partly because of the silence, but mostly because Drake Clarkson was standing on the other side of the door.

  Seth also realized that he and Sawyer hadn’t modulated their conversation at all, and standing beside Drake was Pippa. From the look on her face, she’d heard way too much.

  “Sorry, man,” Drake said, looking miserable. “I thought Sawyer would want to meet Miss MacMillan. I . . .” He trailed off, because what was there to say?

  “It’s okay,” Seth told Drake. “I’m sure he would.” Seth stepped back so Drake could go on into Sawyer’s office, then Seth moved through the doorway, pausing beside Pippa. “Pippa—”

  “It’s okay, Seth,” she said, no bite in her tone, nor embarrassment. In fact, it was the utter lack of emotion that gutted him. “You’d already made it clear outside, earlier. And you don’t have to talk to Bailey. I’ll take care of it. And she’ll be good with it. I promise you. Addie and I will see to that.”

  He simply stared at her, feeling like he was the small one, and she was the one towering over him.

  “If you don’t mind,” she said, “I really would like the chance to say hello to Sawyer.”

  Seth stepped aside and she moved into the office, then turned, and very quietly closed the door between them.

  * * *

  “I thought I told you to take care of that girl.” Mabry’s voice was still hardly more than a rasp following two additional surgeries to finish repairing his leg. “Good dang thing I can’t get out of this bed.”

  “You’re doing fine from right where you are,” Seth said resignedly. The past four days had included a call from Addie on Saturday, disinviting him to Sunday supper, saying she only wanted “folks who had the sense God gave them” sitting at her table. Then there’d been the brief conversation with Sunny on Monday when he’d gone out to the greenhouse with some leftover lumber he was donating for use as shelving. She’d been more sad than annoyed, which somehow felt even worse. She’d told him she wished she had the right words and wisdom to share with him, as he’d had for her when she’d been grappling over whether or not to start a serious relationship with Sawyer.

  Then there was the glare he’d earned from Bailey yesterday when she’d come to tend her goats. Apparently, Pippa hadn’t been quite as successful in keeping her promise there as she’d hoped, though Seth could have told her that. Shoot, even Hattie Beauchamp, the older woman who owned and ran
Bo’s, the only diner in town, had shaken her head and made a tsking sound when she’d stopped by his booth to top off his coffee just that morning. The only one who hadn’t castigated or counseled him at this point was Will, and that was probably only because Seth hadn’t seen him as yet.

  “I won’t even ask how you heard,” Seth said, pulling up a chair so he could sit beside Mabry’s hospital bed. It had been a week and a half since the accident, and the old man had finally been upgraded to stable and was out of intensive care. Seth had been by to talk to Maggie numerous times, both at the hospital and the farm, to see if there was anything he could do to help, as well as get updates on Mabry’s condition. Today was only the second day Mabry had been allowed to have visitors. Maggie had kept it to just her and his grandsons for the first day. Seth had been the next one on Mabry’s request list.

  “Maggie told me,” Mabry said. “Pippa’s been helping her, running errands in exchange for using old Bluebell. They talk. Maggie likes her.” He smiled then. “That was my wife’s buggy, you know. That’s what she called that old Chevy. Her bluebell buggy.” The old man paused to clear his throat, his voice sounding a little thicker when he continued. “I’m happy to see it in use again. Haven’t let anyone drive it since Annie passed.”

  “I’m sorry, Mabry. I didn’t know. We just thought—”

  Mabry waved a hand. He looked frail now. The liver spots on his hands stood out in stark relief, and the lines in his face, earned from decades of working in the sun, seemed even more deeply grooved. “No, I intended her to use it. Annie’d be happy. Probably cross with me for not getting her buggy out and about sooner.”

  “Well, that’s very kind of you. I can tell you that Pippa loves that old Chevy.” Seth’s smile grew. “And I promise she’s driving it on the right side of the road. In fact, you’d think she’d been driving around here all her life.”

  Mabry smiled, then coughed again. Seth picked up the cup of water on Mabry’s bedside table, but the old man waved it away. Seth had always thought of Mabry as being timeless, but he looked every one of his eighty-four years right now.

  “Once I saw her toot around on that snowmobile, and hearing about her brother, I knew she’d be fine,” Mabry said. “A stuntman. Can you beat that,” he went on, wonder in his voice. “Did she tell you about him?” He shook his head. “Made me wonder what a fella had to do in life to land in that kind of occupation.”

  “Be half crazy?” Seth offered with a chuckle, then leaned forward in alarm when Mabry’s laugh led to a long, watery bout of coughing. “Can I call the nurse for you?”

  Mabry shook his head, but this time he did motion to the cup of water with a bent straw sitting in it. Seth picked it up, and angled the straw so Mabry could take a sip.

  “Damn tubes they put down my throat,” Mabry said. “Feels like they scoured the inside with sandpaper. Can’t get that tickle out. Tried to tell them if they’d let me have something stronger than water, with a little body to it, I might heal a darn sight faster.” He motioned for another sip, then leaned back on his pillow once Seth had set the cup down. “Think I’ve got the twins talked into smuggling me in a nice chocolate milkshake. We’ll see how that pans out.”

  Seth grinned. Mabry might look like he was one step away from death’s door, but Seth knew the old man was too stubborn to go quietly. “I’ll see if I can lend a hand there.” And he would, just as soon as he consulted with Mabry’s team of nurses.

  “I appreciate that,” Mabry said. He rested for a few moments, and Seth sat back in his chair again. “So,” he said, at length, “is it that you’re blind, or just plain stupid then?”

  Seth let his head drop back and closed his eyes. So much for getting around that particular lecture. As a reply, he said, “Pippa and I agree on this. We’re adults, and in charge of our personal lives. I’m sure she appreciates, as do I, that everyone is so concerned about our well-being, but—” Seth broke off as Mabry’s earlier words came back to him. “Wait, are you saying Pippa talked to Maggie about me? About us?”

  “As I understand it, there is no us. And if you and Pippa were really being so gosh-darn adult, you’d be talking to each other like normal people do—and by normal, I mean people who don’t have their heads stuck up where the sun don’t shine.” Mabry shook his head. “It amazes me that you kids today manage to procreate at all, given how scared you are by the least little thing.”

  “I hardly think living an ocean apart, leading lives that couldn’t be less alike, is a little thing,” Seth said, then swore under his breath for being drawn into defending his choices. Again. “She hasn’t been here two weeks yet. We hardly know each other.”

  Mabry waved a frail hand. “Sometimes it takes years to see it. Other times, you know it the instant you lay eyes on one another. That’s how it was for Annie and me. I knew the first night I kissed her I was going to marry her. Shoot, I knew the first time I made her laugh.”

  Everything about Mabry’s statement resonated in a place so deep inside Seth he couldn’t refute it. Memories flashed like a series of rapid-fire photographs through his mind. Pippa laughing with him, Pippa doing her little curtsies, Pippa scolding Dex, giggling with Bailey, batting her lashes at him and asking for a Shetland pony. He’d known her less than twenty-four hours then, and his heart had definitely already felt a wobble.

  “All I know is,” Mabry went on, drawing Seth reluctantly from his thoughts, “back in my day, when a man met a woman who turned his head sideways and his heart upside down, he didn’t go whining about how unfair life was. He went after her and the world be damned.”

  Seth sat there as Mabry’s words settled way down deep inside him and took up permanent residence. No amount of pretending, ignoring, or distracting was going to shake them loose. The truth was like that. Seth smiled, both amused and resigned. Amused that he’d ever really thought he was going to forcibly manage his feelings about Pippa. And resigned for the exact same reason. “You know, Mabry, I’ve been talked to and glared at all week about this, but that’s possibly the frankest, most direct advice I’ve been given yet.”

  “You gonna take it?”

  Seth stood and picked his jacket up off the back of the chair. “If I was going to listen to anyone, it’d probably be you.”

  “So, I take it that’s a no, then.” Mabry shook his head. “Remind me on my hundredth birthday, when you’re old enough to look back and wonder what in the hell you were thinking, letting something this good pass you by, to kick you in your behind with my good leg, and tell you I told you so. And believe you me, I won’t take any pleasure in it, but I’m damn well gonna do it.”

  Seth chuckled. “I don’t doubt that for one second.” Seth offered the old man another sip from the cup, then set it back on the table.

  “Young people these days,” Mabry muttered just as a nurse bustled in.

  “Visiting time is up, I’m afraid,” she said kindly.

  “I was just heading out,” Seth told her.

  “Don’t forget that other little matter we discussed,” Mabry told Seth.

  Seth frowned for a moment, then remembered. The milkshake. “I won’t,” he said, then intercepted a warning look from the nurse that Mabry couldn’t see from behind her. Seth winked at her, then nodded to Mabry. “Don’t give these ladies a hard time now. They’re the only thing standing between you and freedom.”

  “They love me here,” Mabry told him. “Don’t you, Miss Frieda? Best patient they ever had.”

  “Of course, we do,” the nurse said, smiling indulgently at Mabry as she looked over his chart and consulted the tray she’d brought in lined with a row of little plastic cups, each filled with a variety pills.

  Seth let himself out, then let out a long, relieved sigh once he was back outside in the parking lot. Partly because he was free of the hospital itself, but mostly because despite how perilously old and infirm Mabry had looked, Seth had no doubt that if a full recovery could be made, Mabry would make it happen. “Stubborn old peop
le these days,” he murmured, then smiled.

  Seth glanced at his phone to check on the time and nodded. He was set to meet Will up at the vineyard to go over some stone repair work. Will had done much of the stonework restoration on the mill himself, which had been a monumental task. He’d also been the one to talk Sawyer into redoing the mill’s roof with slate shingles rather than the metal roofing that had been original to the century-old building. Seth had agreed with Will and pitched in when he’d made his argument to Sawyer, then wished he hadn’t when all three of them and a handful of other locals had spent days up on that roof under a blazing sun tacking them all into place.

  Seth was going over in his mind the list of things he wanted Will to look at, so he didn’t see Pippa leaning against Bluebell, which she’d parked right next to his big pickup, until he almost tripped over her.

  “How’s Mabry?” she asked without preamble. “Tell me the truth,” she cautioned him. “I want a frank appraisal. I’m going in to see him this afternoon and it’s making me nervous. Maggie said he asked to see me. She also said you were going to visit him this morning. I know you and I aren’t supposed to be talking or whatever, and I kept my promise about not being at the vineyard. But Mabry was in intensive care for so long and with the extra surgeries, I’ve been worried sick about him. Maggie doesn’t show it, but I sense she’s been worried, too, and I knew you’d give me the straight truth.” She lifted her hands and let them fall. “So, here I am. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “Slow down, slow down,” Seth said gently, and started to reach for her without thinking. She sidestepped away before he could touch her, which startled him. “Sorry. I was just . . .” He shook his head. “Never mind.” He took a short breath, then looked up to find her standing several feet away now, arms crossed, but with an intent, worried look on her face. If there was any doubt she’d come here to discuss anything other than Mabry’s condition, that resolved it. This wasn’t about him, about them. Do I want it to be?