through the grapevine our local hero has returned,” Caroline said with a look so sly he had to wonder what he possibly might have let slip about his barely acknowledged feelings toward their neighbor. “Maybe you ought to ask Magdalena Cruz on a date.”
A snort sounded in the kitchen and he looked over to find his youngest brother, Seth, lounging in the doorway. “Maggie? Never. She’d probably laugh in his face if he dared asked.”
Seth sauntered into the kitchen and planted himself on one of the bar stools.
Caroline bristled. “What do you mean? Why on earth wouldn’t she go out with Jake? Every woman in the county adores him.”
Though he was touched by her defense of him, he flushed. “Not true. Seth’s the Romeo in the family. All you have to do is walk outside to see the swath of broken hearts he’s left across the valley.”
“Does that swath include Magdalena Cruz’s heart, by any chance?” Caroline asked.
Seth snorted again. “Not by a long shot. Maggie hates everything Dalton. Always has.”
“Not always,” Jake corrected quietly.
Caroline frowned at this bit of information. “Why would she hate you? Oh, I’ll agree you can be an annoying lot on the whole, but as individuals you’re basically harmless.”
“You never knew dear old Dad.”
Seth’s words were matter-of-fact but they didn’t completely hide the bitterness Jake and his brothers all carried toward their father.
“I don’t know all the details,” Jake said. “I don’t know if even their widows do—but Hank cheated Viviana Cruz’s husband Abel in some deal the two had together. He lost a lot of money and had to work two jobs to make ends meet. Maggie blamed us for it, especially after her father died in a car accident coming home from his second job one night.”
“Oh, the poor thing.” Caroline’s eyes melted with compassion.
“Maggie left town for college a few years after her dad died. She studied to become a nurse and along the way she joined the Army National Guard,” Jake went on. “The few times she’s been back over the years, she usually tries to avoid anything having to do with the Cold Creek like a bad case of halitosis.”
Unless one of the Daltons happens to stumble on her in the middle of the night, he thought.
“Hate to break it to you, Carrie, but you might as well take her right off your matchmaking radar.” Seth grinned around a cookie he’d filched from the jar on the counter.
Caroline looked disappointed, though still thoughtful. “Too bad. From all her mother says, Lieutenant Cruz sounds like quite a woman.”
Oh, she was that, Jake thought a short time later as he drove away from the ranch. Their conversation seemed to have opened a door in his mind and now he couldn’t stop thinking about Maggie.
He was quite certain she had no idea her impact in his life had been so profound.
If not for her, he wasn’t sure he would even have become a doctor. Though sometimes it seemed his decision to pursue medicine had been blooming inside him all his life, he could pinpoint three incidences that had cemented it.
Oddly enough, all three of them involved Maggie in some way.
Though the Rancho de la Luna was next door, he hadn’t noticed Maggie much through most of his youth. Why should he? She was three years younger, the same age as Seth, and a girl to boot. A double whammy against her, as far as he’d been concerned.
Oh, he saw her every day, since she and the Dalton boys rode the same school bus and even shared a bus stop, a little covered shack out on the side of the road between their houses to protect them in inclement weather.
Her father constructed it, of course. It never would have occurred to Hank Dalton his sons might be cold waiting outside for the bus in the middle of a January blizzard.
Even if he thought of it, he probably wouldn’t have troubled himself to make things easier on his sons. Jake could almost hear him. A little snow never hurt anybody. What are you, a bunch of girls?
But Abel Cruz had been a far different kind of father. Kind and loving and crazy about his little girl. Jake could clearly remember feeling a tight knot of envy in his chest whenever he saw them together, at their easy, laughing relationship.
Maggie had been a constant presence in his life but one that didn’t make much of an impact on him until one cold day when he was probably eleven or twelve.
That morning Seth had been a little wheezy as they walked down the driveway to the bus. Jake hadn’t thought much about it, but while they were waiting for the bus, his wheezing had suddenly developed into a full-fledged asthma attack, a bad one.
Wade, the oldest, hadn’t been at the stop to take control of the situation that day since he’d been in the hospital in Idaho Falls having his appendix out, and Marjorie had stayed overnight with him.
Jake knew there was no one at the Cold Creek, and that he and Maggie would have to take care of Seth alone.
Looking back, he was ashamed when he remembered how frozen with helplessness and fear he’d felt for a few precious seconds. Maggie, no more than eight herself, took charge. She grabbed Seth’s inhaler from his backpack and set the medicine into the chamber.
“I’m going to get my mama. You stay and keep him calm,” he could remember her ordering in that bossy little voice. Her words jerked him out of his panic, and while she raced toward her house, he was able to focus on calming Seth down.
Seth had suffered asthma attacks since he was small, and Jake had seen plenty of them but he’d never been the one in charge before.
He remembered thinking as they sat there in the pale, early-morning sunlight how miraculous medicine could be. In front of his eyes, the inhaler did its work and his brother’s panicky gasps slowly changed to more regulated breathing.
A moment later, Viviana Cruz had come roaring down the driveway to their rescue in her big old station wagon and piled them all in to drive to Doc Whitaker’s clinic in town.
That had sparked the first fledgling fire inside him about becoming a doctor.
The second experience had been a year or so later. Maggie and Seth had still been friends of sorts, and the two of them had been tossing a baseball back and forth while they waited for the bus. Jake had been caught up in a book, as usual, and hadn’t been paying attention, but somehow Maggie had dived to catch it and landed wrong on her hand.
Her wrist was obviously broken, but she hadn’t cried, had only looked at Jake with trusting eyes while he tried to comfort her in a slow, soothing voice and carried her up the long driveway to the Luna ranch house, again to her mother.
The third incident was more difficult to think about, but he forced his mind to travel that uncomfortable road.
He had been fifteen, so Maggie and Seth would have been twelve. By then, Maggie had come to despise everything about the Daltons. They would wait for the bus at their shared stop in a tense, uncomfortable silence and she did her best to ignore them on the rides to and from Pine Gulch and school.
That afternoon seemed no different. He remembered the three of them climbing off the bus together and heading toward their respective driveways. He and Seth had only walked a short way up the gravel drive when he spotted a tractor in one of the fields still running and a figure crumpled on the ground beside it.
Seth must have hollered to Maggie, because the three of them managed to reach the tractor at about the same moment. Somehow Jake knew before he reached it who he would find there—the father he loved and hated with equal parts.
He could still remember the grim horror of finding Hank on the ground not moving or breathing, his harsh face frozen in a contortion of pain and his clawed fingers still curled against his chest.
This time, Jake quickly