The Widow of Conard County Read online

  God, it would be nice if he could stay on track with anything besides painting. Like dealing with a mess he’d just made with a woman he liked, rather than stomping off and leaving her probably feeling like...well, something not nice.

  “Back to the house,” he ordered himself. If he had to talk to himself every step of the way, he wasn’t going to get lost following some other train of thought. “Sharon. Talk to Sharon.”

  He didn’t even want to think about what he probably looked like striding across the fields toward the distant light of the house, mumbling the same words to himself over and over again. At least there was no one to see.

  “Talk to Sharon.” It was the only guidepost he had right now.

  When he got back to the house, he found her in the kitchen sitting at the table with a cup of coffee. She didn’t look happy. In fact, she almost glared at him.

  For an instant, he wasn’t sure why. Then, “Talk to Sharon,” popped out of his mouth and he corralled his wandering thoughts again.

  “Yes,” she said acidly, “by all means, talk to me.”

  “About what?” Stupid question, judging by the way her mouth dropped open.

  “About why you kissed me and then looked like I was an ax murderer.”

  “You couldn’t possibly know that.”

  She gaped. “Couldn’t know what?”

  “How someone would look at an ax murderer.” As the words slipped past his lips, he had the strong feeling he had just said the worst thing possible. Now he was in for it, but what the hell did ax murderers have to do with this?

  Then she astonished him. First, a little sound escaped her, like a small bubble, then she erupted laughing.

  Now he was truly perplexed. “What’s so funny?”

  “You’re right. I couldn’t possibly know how anyone would look at an ax murderer.”

  He desperately needed to know something. “Which one of us is talking crazy? Me?”

  “Both of us, I think,” she said, wiping at her eyes, her voice still breaking on a laugh.

  He came farther into the kitchen and she waved him to a seat. “Grab some coffee and sit down.”

  “I thought you were mad.”

  “Now I’m not so sure. Didn’t you come in saying you wanted to talk to me? So let’s talk.”

  He got the coffee and sat facing her across the table. And like a bomb out of nowhere, he suddenly remembered the way she had felt crushed against him, her mouth open to him, so welcoming and warm. His groin ached and he forced himself to look down before he proved his stupidity once again.

  “Why,” he managed to ask, “did you think I looked at you like an ax murderer?”

  “Because you looked so horrified after you kissed me. It was a great kiss, Liam, but it was just a kiss.”

  Just a kiss? He didn’t know if he liked that, but he quelled a rush of disappointment that maybe she hadn’t felt anything like what he’d felt while holding her and kissing her. Best to just listen. His mouth was capable of getting him into a whole lot of trouble.

  “What happened?” she asked finally. “Why did you stop kissing me and leave so fast?”

  “It wasn’t you,” he said with certainty. “I’m sorry I made you feel bad.”

  “So I didn’t do something wrong? I didn’t repulse you?”

  Shock rippled through him. This was worse than he had guessed. “God, no! It was me. Just me. Guilt, I guess.”

  “Guilt?” Her face seemed to sag a bit. “Chet,” she said quietly.

  He didn’t answer because she was right. Chet. He’d felt a sudden shaft of pain, a fear that he was betraying his friend. His best friend. Even though he knew as sure as he knew anything that Chet wouldn’t feel that way.

  “Chet will always be part of both of us,” she said quietly. She ran her finger over the tabletop, drawing an invisible pattern. “Always.”

  “Yes.”

  A few minutes passed. Talk to her. The command remained with him, but he couldn’t figure out what to say. It angered him that he couldn’t remember how to deal with this, hated that he sensed he should know how but that some door in his mind was barricaded. With a major effort of will, he stilled the burgeoning frustration. Focus on Sharon. Focus on how to make her feel better.

  As if he knew.

  “Maybe,” she said slowly, “you should read the letter he sent me. The one you traveled so far to bring me.”

  “That’s private.”

  “Somehow I think you need to read it as much as I did.”

  Private words. Words his best buddy had intended only for his wife’s eyes. He moved uncomfortably on the chair as she rose and went to get it. It felt like trespassing into a place he didn’t belong, but it was Sharon’s letter now, and if she really felt he should read it...

  The limitations on his judgment struck him again. Sometimes he just plain didn’t know how to evaluate things, or whether his reactions were the right ones. So maybe he should just go with what Sharon thought was right. If she felt he needed to see that letter, maybe he did.

  Maybe he’d find some peace in it. Or some resolution. Even just a simple answer to questions that never quite fully formed in his head.

  She returned and handed him the envelope he’d carried so far and for so long, the one stained with blood from his own wounding. A strong wave of emotions ripped through him at the sight of it. Flashes of memory hit him squarely in the heart: watching Chet write this, taking it with some joking about it, then watching Chet laugh as he wrote his own. Finding the letter crumpled in his duffel when he’d recovered his memory. Feeling it like the heaviest of burdens, a duty left uncompleted. The constant ache for a friend lost.

  A searing, heart-wrenching, gut-wrenching need that had driven him to take to the road to finish this one last favor for a friend.

  “I don’t know if I can,” he murmured.

  She reached across the table. “I’ll read it to you.”

  An old anguish rose in him, eased a little by time, but as familiar as an old shoe. “Sharon...”

  She looked at him, her gaze liquid. “All right. He told me to move on, Liam. He told me that if I didn’t, I’d turn his heaven into hell.”

  God, that sounded like Chet. The garrote of grief cut at his throat, making speech almost painful. “He was amazing.”

  “In what way?”

  He shook his head a little, swallowing repeatedly, trying to ease the ache that strangled him. “He was a good man.” Inadequate words. Liam had seen how war twisted some people, but not Chet. “Like helping those farmers and herders.” How did he explain what that meant in a place where any man, even one with a herd of goats, could be a mortal enemy? Where you could trust no one, really, except your buddies? But some part of Chet refused to be corrupted.

  “I see the same thing in you,” Sharon said.

  He started to shake his head, but stopped himself. It was an argument he couldn’t have simply because he didn’t feel capable of arguing such a thing. How would he know what kind of man he was? He knew what he was capable of, which was a whole different thing. But Chet had been capable of those things, too. A soldier had to be.

  “Are you moving on?” His gift for saying exactly what popped into his head seemed to be still with him. As soon as he heard the question emerge, he realized it might sound exactly wrong, but it was too late. It was out there now, and he tensed, awaiting her response.

  “I think I am.” Her voice was low, very quiet. “I think I am,” she repeated more firmly. “Part of me died with Chet, Liam, but there’s still a lot of me left. A lot of life ahead of me. I’m beginning to feel...well, I want goats. I want a piece of that dream we were going to build together, because it was my dream, too.” She touched the letter that lay on the table, caressing it with her fingertips. “I’ll never be able
to thank you enough for bringing this to me. I needed to hear him say it.” Then she looked straight at him. “You needed to hear him say it, too.”

  Echoes of the mental conversation he’d had with Chet a little while ago reverberated in his head. But then he’d known Chet almost as well as he’d known himself. When you faced death at a man’s side over and over again, you got to know him in ways that really mattered.

  “Maybe so,” he finally said. Although it was what he would have expected of Chet, she was right. Knowing he’d actually said it to her meant a whole lot to him.

  “It was different over there,” he said, although he wasn’t quite sure why. “We lived faster. Didn’t look back too much, didn’t look forward any further than we had to. Except every now and then on a quiet night, we’d talk about home.”

  She listened intently. Then when he fell silent she asked, “I know what Chet’s dreams were, mostly, but what were yours?”

  “I don’t know. Honest to God, if I had any, I don’t remember them now.”

  “That’s okay. It wasn’t exactly a plan-making situation most of the time.”

  “Not those kinds of plans, anyway.” He thought it over, straining to recall something, anything, because it seemed somehow weird to him that he hadn’t had any plans. But a big blank answered him. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  “That’s kind of where you are now, isn’t it?”

  The reminder didn’t exactly please him, but he couldn’t deny the truth of it. “I’ll figure something out.”

  “I know you will. Take your time. I’m happy having you here and you’re an incredible help.”

  That made him feel good enough to crack a small smile. “I’m glad.” He liked feeling useful, and it had been a while. A long while. “So I shouldn’t feel guilty about wanting you?”

  It was a stupid thing to say, but he couldn’t help enjoying the way color rose from her collar to flood her face with pink. Or the way she pressed her palms to her cheek.

  “You’re so blunt,” she said.

  “I warned you.”

  Embarrassed as she clearly felt, she still laughed. “Yes, you did.”

  “If you hate it...”

  “Did I say I did? It just takes some getting used to. Most people are more...circuitous. But that’s not necessarily a good thing.”

  “As long as I don’t upset you.”

  “You might have noticed that when you do I let you know.” She dropped her hands as her blush faded. “Do you want to work on your reading tonight?”

  Her change of direction caught him by surprise, and it took him a moment to follow. He was still getting used to the way things could suddenly shift, but it seemed he was getting a bit better at it. And actually, maybe it was a good thing, because it had been a stressful conversation, the kind of thing that not so very long ago could have sent him on a long walk to avoid the anger or frustration.

  “You know what I can’t stand?” he asked suddenly.

  “What?”

  “The way I react to stress and tension now. I used to handle a lot of it.”

  “I imagine you did. And now?”

  “Now I get angry or frustrated, or just walk away.”

  She hesitated so visibly that he could see it. She had questions she wanted to ask.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “You have to deal with me. What do you want to know?”

  She chewed her lip, then asked, “How much of that is from the injury, and how much from the emotional difficulty of dealing with it?”

  “I don’t know, Sharon. They weren’t clear on that. Or if they were, I sure didn’t get it. Maybe they didn’t know, either. There’s all this stuff that gives me fits right now. Painting the barn is easy. Fixing that door I broke was a sweat. It was like staring right in the face of the things I can’t do anymore.”

  “That would be stressful, all right.”

  “It’s maddening sometimes. But it’s reality and I have to learn to deal with all these new limits.”

  “And maybe discover ways you’re not limited. Like painting the barn.”

  “But I shouldn’t be kissing you.” Funny, he could lose almost any thought in midtrack without warning, but he seemed to be fixated on that. “It wasn’t just guilt about Chet. Yeah, that was a big piece of it. But there was another part, too. I’m broken. I’m too broken to be kissing a woman.”

  She erupted. “Don’t you say that, Liam O’Connor. Don’t you even think that. Ever again. Do you understand me?”

  He stared into her angry, sparking eyes. “Loud and clear.” For some stupid reason, a smile stretched his face. That didn’t make any sense to him, but there it was, and there was no mistaking the feeling on his face. He guessed he liked it when she got mad. It left no question about where he stood with her. “But that doesn’t change the facts.”

  “What facts? All of us have things we can’t do.”

  “I have more than most.”

  “Well, that depends, doesn’t it? On what you want to do, and the ways you can come up with to work around a problem. You worked your way around those directions for fixing the door. Stop thinking about limitations and start thinking about exploring possibilities.”

  “I’ll bet you say things like that to your students.”

  “Well, yes. Of course I do. Everybody has different abilities and different limitations. Some of my students struggle with basic math. Others struggle with reading, or writing a composition. Some can draw and others can’t. That doesn’t make any of them less valuable.”

  Then she utterly astonished him. She rose and came around the table. “Shove back,” she said.

  So he pushed back from the table. Before he had any idea what she was about, she sat on his lap, wrapped her arms around his neck and looked straight into his eyes. “I want you, too,” she said bluntly.

  He barely caught his breath before she pressed her mouth to his.

  “So take that,” she said, the words a warm whisper against his lips before her tongue found his and engaged in a duel he certainly hadn’t forgotten.

  He was sure this must be wrong for her, but how could something so wrong feel so right? And why was he worrying when she was the one who had initiated this?

  But whatever questions he might want to raise swiftly washed away in a rising tide of overpowering desire. His groin ached, his staff stiffened so fast it was almost painful, and her warm rump pressed against it both answered a need and made it stronger.

  There was no uncertainty in her kiss. More warmth washed through him as he realized she had meant it: she wanted him, too. This time, no questions about Chet or his own inadequacies speared through the hot fog of desire. Elemental need took over.

  He wrapped his arms around her, holding her tight and reveling in being this close to her as much as in the pounding passion she evoked in him. God, it had been forever, and Sharon just made it more special.

  But all too quickly, she pulled back. With effort, he opened his eyes, stifling the urge to groan with each little movement she made in his lap.

  Her lips looked swollen, her eyes hazy and smiling. “Have we got that straight now?”

  Then she slipped off his lap and returned to the far side of the table. He sat stunned and aching, feeling as if he’d just been sideswiped by something huge that he hadn’t seen coming. Feeling as if he were a thirsty man who’d just had a glass of water pulled away from him.

  Yet it seemed, as the hunger began to subside, that it hadn’t been pulled away. Not really. She’d offered something and left it to him to decide. Now? Later? Never?

  He might be messed up, but he wasn’t so messed up that he didn’t sense the dangers here. Don’t toy with her. Whether the warning was his own or Chet’s didn’t matter. It was an important warning. This was not a woman he wante
d to fool with. Or hurt by taking advantage of her.

  He was staring at a minefield, and as the ache eased, he tried to figure out its dimensions. No flings here. No way. But the rest? Was he even remotely ready for something more enduring and deeper?

  Hell if he knew. He was still finding his way through the minefield in his head. All he knew was that passion wouldn’t be enough here.

  Did they have this straight now? The question echoed in his head. Far from it. In fact, he had the feeling matters had tangled up in knots worse than ever.

  He had tumbled in over his head.

  Chapter Eight

  Painting the barn came to a halt. The paint Sharon had chosen was on back order. Everything, Sharon thought, seemed to be on hold. Liam seemed to have withdrawn in some way, probably because she had kissed him, and she couldn’t exactly blame him. She wanted him, yes, but this was getting a bit heavy for both of them.

  It wasn’t just Chet. No. Liam was still struggling to deal with his changed circumstances, and she was just emerging into a world that needed a whole lot of rebuilding in the wake of Chet’s loss. Rebuilding she had seriously neglected.

  They were a couple of walking wounded, she thought without humor. Liam’s withdrawal exhibited more sense than her own behavior. Except, how was she measuring his withdrawal? Just because he hadn’t tried to kiss her again?

  A little space and a little time on that score would serve them both. She’d been alone too long, and maybe she couldn’t trust her judgment. Although she certainly hadn’t felt even the least spark of interest in any man before Liam’s arrival. No, it was specifically Liam who attracted her, but what did attraction amount to? It was a fleeting thing, an unreliable guide.

  She tried to follow his lead. He liked to be busy with his hands, so she made him a list of repairs around the place. He worked his way through it religiously, and when he needed help, he didn’t hesitate to ask.

  She saw in him, however, a growing confidence. With each task that stymied him, they’d go to her computer, find directions, talk them over, and then she would watch as he steadily organized the steps so he could follow through.