Upon a Midnight Clear (Legend, Colorado 2)

On the day it had been confirmed that his playing days were behind him, she'd packed and gone back to Tennessee—with a quick stop at a Nevada divorceatorium—leaving Cale with the boys, the nanny, and the house, which he promptly sold, sending her a check for exactly half. She'd sent him a copy of the divorce decree in his birthday card, and he hadn't heard from her since.

Waking in her old room—the room she had shared with CeCe as a girl—never failed to bring Quinn face-to-face with the past. At dawn she had yawned and stretched and turned over, hopeful for a few extra hours of sleep on this first day of her Christmas vacation. But every time she closed her eyes, another memory would call itself forth. In this room she had written poetry and love letters and long wordy pages—alternating between bliss an

d despair—in a diary. When she was twelve, she had argued with CeCe and divided the room in half with an imaginary line neither of them had dared to cross for weeks. Later that same year she and Sunny sat on the edge of this very bed and watched as CeCe transformed herself from ranch hand to princess as she dressed for the sophomore dance at the high school down in the valley. Two years later, Quinn herself had been dressed in a flowing dress of palest lavender and had put her hair up and had felt very much the sophisticate on the arm of Caleb McKenzie.

That had been their first real date, after months of casual "hi" exchanged in the hallways at school or at the ball field where Quinn had trailed behind her father and brother, ostensibly to watch Sky play, though Quinn couldn't have said what position Sky played. She'd never taken her eyes off Cale. When he'd shyly asked her to be his date for the big dance at school that spring, she'd thought the heavens had opened up and dropped the most precious of gifts into her waiting arms.

The dance had been everything a first big dance should be. Quinn and Cale had danced and talked and danced and talked, and finally—finally!—had kissed in the backseat of the car Billy De Witt had borrowed from his big brother for the occasion. Later Cale had admitted that the only reason he hadn't wanted to double-date with Sky—who was, after all, his best friend—was because he'd been afraid that Sky would have decked him if he'd caught him kissing his little sister the way Cale had been planning to.

They had been inseparable after that, Quinn recalled. Quinn and Cale. For his remaining two years of high school, and his first two years of college, she and Cale had been desperately in love and the very best of friends. They had known each other's secrets, each other's dreams. Cale had been her first and best and biggest love. It had never occurred to Quinn that they wouldn't always be together. They had planned such a wonderful life, and she couldn't wait to begin it.

Though Cale had been hounded by professional teams from the time he'd been a junior in high school, he'd accepted a scholarship at Montana State down in Bozeman because it was close to home, and to Quinn. By his sophomore year, he'd known he couldn't wait much longer to marry her. As young as she and Cale were, Quinn had been confident that her parents would support them in their wedding plans—after all, her mother hadn't been much older than Quinn when she'd married.

No one had been more surprised than Quinn when her parents were appalled by their seventeen-year-old daughter's announcement that she and Cale would be getting married the week following her high school graduation. But she had it all worked out, she had told them tearfully when they flatly refused to give their blessing to her plans. She and Cale would both go to Montana State, and when he graduated in two years, she would simply transfer to a college in whatever city he'd be playing professional baseball.

"Quinn, for heaven's sake, you're only seventeen," Catherine had sighed. '

"Mom, I love Cale____"

"I'm sure that you think you do, sweetheart. But your father and I really believe that you're simply far too young to make a decision like this. Quinn, you've barely been out of Montana. You need to see more of the world—go places and do things."

"The only place I want to go is to Bozeman with Cale. The only thing I want to do is marry him."

"Quinn, listen to me." Catherine had sat on the edge of her daughter's bed. "Give yourself a little more time. At least wait two years…"

Two years! They might just have well as asked her to wait two lifetimes.

And so Cale had contacted the coach for the Baltimore team who had been pursuing him and the deal was struck. He would leave Montana, but he'd be taking Quinn with him. They'd get married as soon as they hit Maryland. Hap and Catherine would come around, Quinn had promised. She would enroll in a college nearby while Cale tried to make his mark in professional baseball. Life would surely be wonderful.

Quinn had never stopped wondering if, in fact, life would have been as blissful as those dreams, if he hadn't stood her up.

She had waited at the cabin that day until after dark, until she could no longer deny the fact that he had decided not to take her with him after all. She had gone home and forced herself to inquire casually if Cale had called. He had not.

Quinn had slowly climbed the stairs to her bed in the second-floor loft and, as quietly as she could, cried until there were no more tears left to be shed. The next day she had ridden out into the hills and, in a gesture her seventeen-year-old heart had thought suitably dramatic, threw his high school ring off the side of Boldface Rock, and had vowed never to speak his name again unless she had to. Too embarrassed to tell her family that she had been stood up, she had pretended that she and Cale had broken up following an argument, and she had refused to do more than mutter a vague reply or shrug noncommittally when asked about him. Eventually, the questions stopped, and as far as her family was concerned, the entire episode was past history. Which was exactly what Quinn wanted them to think

Of course, over the years it had been impossible to avoid knowing that he'd made his mark on the sport he loved. Quinn had stopped watching the game altogether and never read the sports pages. She didn't want to know where he was playing or how he was doing, but, of course, the local paper followed his every move, complete with photographs, from every game-winning play to his marriage to a former beauty queen from some Southern state a few years earlier.

"Looks like Cale finally settled down," her mother had told her tentatively on the telephone. "Saturday's paper had a picture of him and his bride right on the front page."

"How nice for Cale," Quinn had replied flatly, then inquired after the health of one of Sky's mares that had been sick the week before. Later she had hung up the phone and licked her wounds in private, as she had always done.

From time to time, Quinn caught a glimpse of him as he was being interviewed on television, and for that one moment, time would stand still, and he would still be her Cale, but only for a moment, only until she collected her wits and changed the channel. Oh, if hard-pressed, she'd have grudgingly admitted that she was proud of him, proud for him, that he'd managed to overcome an uncertain start in life and had followed his dream. On the other hand, she'd never been able to forgive him for letting her give her heart so completely, only to break it.

And she'd never once, in the twelve years that had passed, awakened in that bed in her old room without thinking of him and the nights she had spent crying for him. And somehow, all these years later, the memories still had the power to hurt.

I guess he just didn't know how to tell me that he'd changed his mind about me, she thought as she threw her legs over the side of the bed and reached for her robe.

It would be really nice if, just this once, I could get through a holiday season without having to hear about him.

She sighed, knowing that was unlikely. Cale McKenzie was the only bona fide, home-grown celebrity to come out of Larkspur, Montana. Sooner or later, over the next two weeks, someone—more accurately, lots of someones, family and friends alike—would be certain to bring up his name.

It's okay, she reassured herself as she rummaged through her suitcase for her jeans and a clean sweatshirt, I can handle it. I always have.

As if to convince herself, she forced herself to whistle a merry Christmas tune as she headed off down the hall toward her morning shower.

* * *

Chapter Three