If You Believe

Then he turned and walked away.

She stared after him. She wanted to look away and knew she should, but she couldnt.

Something had changed with them today. It had started when hed come to her bedroom. Not to fight with her or scare her or tease her, but simply to say that he understood what it meant to feel lost and alone.

It meant so much to her, that moment of intimacy, perhaps more than any moment she could remember in the last ten years. Hed reached out to her, however tentatively, and touched her soul. It was a kindness she wouldnt have expected from a man like him.

A man like Stephen, she thought immediately, but the thought carried no weight this time, no sting. And no truth.

Mad Dog wasnt like Stephen. True, they were both footloose wanderers who couldnt stay put, but where Stephen was dishonest and self-centered, Mad Dog was honest and caring.

He wasnt like Stephen.

She squeezed her eyes shut, feeling a breathless sense of panic. She wanted to believe he was like Stephen, needed to believe he was like Stephen. Then she could keep him at arms length. Without the negative comparison, she didnt know what to do, how to handle him, how to protect herself.

But he wasnt like Stephen, she knew that now. Knew it with a certainty that terrified her.

"Oh, no . . . " She brought a cold hand to her mouth. Please, God, she thought, dont let me start feeling that way again. Dont let me think he might be different.

But it was too late. God help her, it was too late.

Rass leaned back against the oak tree and drew his legs up to his chest. Curling his arms around his ankles, he stared down at the farm hed helped to build with his own two hands.

Sadness tightened his chest. A dull pain throbbed in his left shoulder.

Theres so much left to do.

So many things hed never gotten around to.

A small, wistful smile pulled at his lips. The loafing shed had been the first thing hed built. What did he know about building—a geology professor from New York?

But hed found the supplies—books, nails, hammers—and hed done his best.

The first effort had fallen down in a hard rain. The second lasted almost through the winter. And the third, well, it was still hanging on to existence by a thread.

Hed been able to laugh about it, then and now, because of Greta. He remembered standing alongside her during the rainstorm, both of them soaked through to the skin, rain streaming down their faces as the shed crashed to the ground.

The memory of her throaty laughter rang through his mind, reminding him how they had stood there, hand in hand in the drenching rain, and laughed at his failure.

But where had Mariah been that day? Questions like that plagued Rass more and more as he got older.

He had so many memories of Greta, and so few of Mariah. Somehow theyd excluded her. They hadnt meant to. Jesus, they hadnt meant to. . . .

It was just that theyd come together so late in life. Neither of them had ever thought theyd fall in love, and it had been such a precious, all-consuming gift. Theyd never expected to have children, never wanted to, and with Gretas age, theyd never worried about it.

Then Mariah had come, all red-faced and crying and demanding.

Theyd loved their daughter, deeply and completely. But had they ever told her, ever showed her in the thousand tiny, wordless ways they showed each other? God help him, he couldnt remember. . . .

She was lonely now, so damned independent. Exactly the woman two middle-aged parents had raised her to be. Strong, defiant, aware of her own intelligence.

But they hadnt taught her how to love or how to be loved.

He felt another sharp, twisting pain in his heart at the thought. God, how could they have been so blind?

He shook his head, staring through stinging eyes at the dull brown grass.

Shed never called him daddy, not even as a child. She went straight from "father"