to kiss his mother’s smooth forehead.
“I’m sorry, Mama,” he whispered, for perhaps the thousandth time. “Please come back to us. We need you more than ever.”
Feeling low, he trudged out to his dirty, white pickup truck and slid behind the steering wheel. Then he started the engine and drove out to the ranch. As he turned the truck through the massive gate with its rock columns and metal arch displaying the Colby Ranch brand, Jack thought again of the lovely blonde back there in the hospital.
No doubt, she worried about where she would stay and how she would live until her memory returned. Without money, she really had no options. Grasslands didn’t have a homeless shelter because it didn’t have any homeless. She couldn’t stay at the clinic for long, either, but someone would surely take her in—someone with plenty of room.
Sighing as the imposing ranch house came into view, Jack mentally cataloged the house that he, his mom and two sisters occupied. There was room for her. That didn’t mean that he had to offer a bedroom to the pretty amnesiac, though, even if he had been the one to rescue her from a car wreck.
Of course, it didn’t mean that he shouldn’t, either.
He supposed they could open one of the old, unoccupied cabins on the place, but it didn’t seem wise for a woman with a head wound serious enough to cause amnesia to stay alone. Too bad the hotel in town was closed temporarily because the couple who owned and operated it had been called away on a mission of mercy to help family members who had been burned out by wildfires in the central part of the states. Jack went so far as to consider calling the pastor at the Grasslands Community Church to see if he could find a host for the woman, but in the normal course of things when temporary shelter was needed, the first phone call that the good reverend would make would be to the Colbys.
“Aw, come on, Lord,” Jack grumbled aloud. “Don’t we have enough trouble as it is?”
Unfortunately, the Lord, as was His habit, didn’t say a word. Jack heard Him, nevertheless.
Jack turned the truck through the gate in the wrought-iron fence that separated the main house from the rest of the compound, parked and climbed out, trudging into the house through the carport door. He’d barely set foot in the back hall before Lupita, the housekeeper and cook, stuck her head out of the kitchen.
“Dinner in five minutes.”
“Already?” he asked, hanging his hat on a peg fixed to the wall. He pulled his phone from his pocket to check the time. Man, this day had flown. “I’ll wash up,” he muttered, heading for his room.
For some reason, he swiped his thumb across the bottom of the screen on his phone and watched as the blonde’s photo popped up again. He stopped in the dining room, aware that his sisters—he still couldn’t get over the fact that there were two of them and how alike they looked now that Maddie had taken to jeans and boots—busily laid the table for the evening meal.
“Oh, good, you’re home,” Violet said, smiling as she placed a napkin beside a plate.
“Uh-huh.” Disturbed by his compulsion to stare at the picture on his phone, he tossed the small device down at his regular place. “Y’all ought to know that we could be having company soon.”
“Oh?” Maddie said, closing a drawer in the breakfront. “Who? Have you heard from Grayson?”
Jack made a face at the mention of his brother. “No, I haven’t heard from Grayson, and I don’t expect to. Why would I?”
“He is your twin,” Violet pointed out.
“So? I’m not talking about him. This is someone different.... A person was in a car wreck today.”
“Oh, wow!” Violet exclaimed. “Anyone we know?”
“Some woman who didn’t make the curve at the bottom of Blackberry Hill,” Jack answered carelessly. “She’s going to need a place to stay when Doc says she can leave the hospital.”
“When will that be?” Maddie asked.
He shrugged. “Soon, I expect.”
“Will she need nursing?” Violet queried apprehensively.
“No, nothing like that,” he assured them, more gruffly than he’d intended. “I’ll explain later. If it comes to it, I mean. She might stay somewhere else. Now, I better wash up.”
He walked off toward the back staircase. The very moment that he rounded the corner, he heard Violet say, “I might have known.”
Drawing to a halt at the note of concern in her voice, he retraced his steps to the doorway and saw that she’d picked up his phone and unlocked the screen. She and Maddie stood huddled together beside the dining table, as alike as two peas in a pod, staring down at the photo of the blonde woman now at the clinic.
“She’s probably tall and leggy,” Violet muttered, putting down the phone.
As a matter of fact, she is.
“What makes you say that?” Maddie asked, and Jack mentally echoed the question. Yeah, what makes you say that?
“Because,” Violet answered, “that’s the type Jack goes for.”
Jack darted up his forehead as Maddie surmised, “You’re describing the girl that broke his heart last year, aren’t you?”
Violet nodded. “Long legs, long blond hair, blue eyes.”
Hazel, Jack corrected silently, then he remembered that Violet was describing Tammy, not his car-wreck victim in the wedding veil.
“What happened there, anyway?” Maddie asked.
Jack leaned a shoulder against the door frame and prepared to listen to Violet’s thoughts on the subject, intrigued primarily because they’d never discussed the issue.
“Jack and Tammy dated all throughout high school,” Violet reported. “Then when Jack went off to college, she broke up with him.”
Not exactly. It had been a mutual decision at that point. Jack had wanted the freedom to enjoy his college experience, and Tammy hadn’t wanted to sit home waiting for him to graduate. It had seemed sensible at the time to give each other some freedom. They’d dated off and on over the next four years, then Tammy had gotten involved with someone else. They had broken up when he was transferred. Jack had assumed that she’d objected to moving away from Grasslands, but it had turned out that she’d been unwilling to trade one “nothing town” for another, as she’d put it.
“For a long time, everyone thought Tammy would marry the manager at the ranch supply store,” Violet went on, “but after he left town, she and Jack started dating again. When Jack started fixing up the old Lindley house, everyone thought for sure that they would get married.”
From the moment he’d seen that place as a teenager, Jack had thought he’d like to live there when he grew up and got married, and he’d said as much when his mother had bought the acreage after old man Lindley had died. He hadn’t realized how seriously his family had taken his plans to heart until now.
“That’s the one he’s been working on since I came here, isn’t it?” Maddie asked sadly, and Violet nodded.
Jack had taken refuge at the old house off Franken Road. Gutting the kitchen, replacing floorboards and squaring up the doorways had taken his mind off the turmoil that Maddie’s arrival in their lives had engendered, but he hadn’t meant to make her feel bad by disappearing. It was just his way. He wasn’t used to having two sisters, let alone his mom in a coma and all these questions about a family he hadn’t even known he had. Staying to himself and working hard kept his mind off those problems. He’d rebuilt the staircase after Tammy had left town, but that’s where he’d left it until his mother’s accident. Once it had become obvious that Belle would remain in a coma, Jack had torn out and replaced the bath fixtures at the old house.
“Yes, Jack’s always intended to live