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She looked thoughtful. “Perhaps he’s starting to realize never means never.”
“As in his mother’s never coming back? Yeah, I think he is. He asked me the other day if he would forget her. The longest conversation we’ve had in months.”
“Did you tell him he never would?”
“I did. But that’s one reason we came. I thought he should be around someone who never has.”
He’d never seen so much pain and love combined as he saw then in his sister’s eyes. She and David had both fought his illness so hard, only to lose the battle seven years ago. Jackson knew how devastated she’d been at his death, and how hard she’d fought to simply keep going. She’d had every reason in the world to disconnect, but she never stopped trying to function.
He wasn’t sure he had her grit. He wondered if he’d still be mired in this grief in five more years.
“I’m glad you came,” Tris said. “Maybe I can make up a little for being so lost when he was born.”
He didn’t know what to say to that. So instead he hugged her again.
Chapter Three
“Oh, my God.Look, is that... who I think it is?”
Nicole Baylor swallowed her sip of Java Time’s luscious latte before she turned to look in the direction her friend Jessica was staring. She saw a couple of locals, the barber and the woman who was the hostess at Valencia’s restaurant, but neither of them would warrant Jess’s stunned reaction.
The only other thing she saw was the not unusual knot of people a couple of blocks up, next to the statue in front of the library—the towering bronze figure of Asa Fuhrmann, the iconic hero of the actual last stand the town was named for. Even the abbreviated version of the man’s actions that were written on the plaque on the base, about him making a run for more ammunition when the defenders were pinned down, a run that had cost him his life but saved the others, made for attention-grabbing reading.
Then, of course, there was the newer plaque just above the sizeable chunk taken out of the pedestal Asa stood on, explaining more heroics, this time of Police Chief Shane Highwater, who had pulled a survivor out of the flames of an engulfed vehicle that had been stopped from doing even more damage than killing two occupants only by the solid presence of that statue. Nicole had been here that April day, the day of town matriarch Minna Herdmann’s birthday, when practically every resident of Last Stand showed up to honor the centenarian-plus, who amazingly was still with them and likely would be for the town celebration of her birthday again this year. Her hometown was full of fascinating—and when necessary, heroic—people.
“It is,” Jessica whispered, which puzzled Nic because there was no one even close to them. “I swear it is.”
Those last words sent Nic’s gaze back to the three people at the statue as Jessica started walking that way. One was a little boy reading the plaques, a boy who looked painfully thin, as if he’d been sick or something. It was hard to be sure at this distance, Java Time was nearly two full blocks away from the statue, but she thought the woman was someone she’d seen in town occasionally, maybe somewhere else as well. She’d never seen her with a kid, though. And she had no idea why Jessica was so excited.
They crossed Ash Street and were nearly to Oak, now only a block from the statue, when her friend gasped, “It is him. It’s really him. And that must be his little boy.”
Finally, Nic shifted her gaze to the man beside the woman and little boy. He was looking at the child, not the statue, which she found interesting. Tall; she’d put him at at least a foot taller than her current student, the fifteen-and-a-half-hand palomino, so six foot plus. Nice build. Lean, but well muscled. He wore well-fitting black jeans, and a black canvas jacket that appeared to be lined in a blue-and-black plaid wool or flannel, a good choice on this chilly January morning.
She shifted her gaze to his face, now that he’d looked up from the little boy. He had a strong, masculine jaw, thick dark hair beneath a worn baseball cap with a logo she didn’t recognize. A little stubble, but not too much. He was wearing sunglasses, which seemed a little odd on this mostly cloudy, chilly morning, but there could be reasons. She found herself wondering what color his eyes were behind the tinted lenses, which was a bit odd in itself; she didn’t usually speculate about such things. It must be because Jessica seemed to recognize the guy, while she didn’t. All she could be sure of was he wasn’t a local, not because she didn’t recognize him, but because everyone in Last Stand couldjust about quote by heart the story on that plaque he was now reading.
“He’s even more gorgeous in person, isn’t he?”
“I have no idea, because I don’t know who you mean.”
“It’s Jackson Thorpe!”
The name rang a bell, but she didn’t know why. So she asked the obvious. “Jackson Thorpe?”
Jessica stared at her as if she’d just asked who Sam Houston was. “Jackson Thorpe? Austin Holt?”
Now she was confused. “Don’t know that name either. I think I’ve heard or seen the Thorpe name, but—”
“Are you telling me you still don’t watchStonewall?”
It fell into place then. Even she, who spent most of her free time in the evenings reading or watching old favorite movies, had heard about the television series that it seemed everyone but her was rabidly watching. She’d tried it once, just to see what the shouting was about, and because it was set here in the Texas Hill Country, but when the opening credits swept over a few hills with towering, snowy mountains visible in the background, touting it as a place fifty miles southwest of Austin, she’d clicked it off in disgust. She had no patience for Hollywood’s certainty that they could pass anyplace off for anyplace else. Places that really existed, anyway. She wouldn’t have cared if they hadn’t said where their fictional ranch was, but they had, and it ticked her off that it was so blatantly and obviously—to anyone who set foot out of their West Coast bubble—not just wrong, but insulting.
She knew hers wasn’t the typical reaction, but she was Texas born and bred, as were her father and his father and his father before him, and she did not take kindly to either the lies or the myths someone who’d never lived here propagated about her beloved home state.
“You don’t.” Jessica was staring at her now. “The hottest thing on TV, and you don’t even give it a shot?”
“A show filmed in California claiming to show Texas? Darn straight I don’t.”
“But it’s the story that matters,” said Jessica. She glanced toward the statue again. “Well, that and the gorgeous star.” She sighed. “I suppose that’s a girlfriend, although I don’t remember—”
