tightly on to his splintered ego, Buck might have made an attempt to reach out to this shadowy vision of his past, envelop her in his arms and offer her a measure of comfort on this sad, dreary day.
Bewildered by the very idea, he abruptly announced, “I’ve got to feed the stock. Make yourself at home.”
Melodie glanced at him sharply. Was the remark intended to be as caustic as it had sounded? Surely he wasn’t worried that she was going to throw him out of the only home he’d ever known? Or herself for that matter. While it was true that she had lived in finer places since she’d moved away, none had ever earned the privilege of feeling like a real home.
“I’ll do that,” she replied evenly, starting toward her old room with the same confidence with which she had approached the cupboards earlier, certain that nothing in this old house had changed at all.
But what she discovered behind that familiar closed door was enough to send her reeling.
Chapter Two
“I suppose you expected me to stay in the bunkhouse forever?”
Melodie snapped her jaw back into place before attempting to address the question. The way Buck was leaning up against the wall prejudging her was so patently insolent that she didn’t dare give him an honest reaction. She didn’t think she could endure much more of his scoffing.
“Of course not,” she lied.
It was, after all, a perfectly logical arrangement. Melodie simply couldn’t bring herself to accept the fact that her mother had actually moved Buck into her old room. So secure had she been in the belief that this little house was impervious to change that it unnerved her to realize all vestiges of her presence had been completely erased from the room that had at one time been the center of her universe.
She had opened the door expecting to see everything in its place: her old stuffed animals, a prized collection of ceramic horses, a beloved Western doll with a leather fringed skirt and vest, her trophies lined up on the shelf along one wall, a coveted rodeo queen sash draped over the head-board of her twin bed, the embroidered quilt her mother had stitched with equal amounts of love and patience one Christmas when money was particularly scarce—all the special things that marked the passage of her youth.
Instead Melodie was met by stark walls devoid of anything more personal than a trophy fish mounted above Buck’s four-poster bed. The room was tidy enough, she’d give him that. As neat as an orphan’s scrapbook. She suspected that her mother was responsible for the only personal touch in the room: a handmade afghan folded neatly on the foot of a bed that quite simply overwhelmed the small area.
“Just tell me when you want me to move out.”
Startled by the straightforwardness of Buck’s overture, Melodie hastened to reassure him that she had no intention of uprooting him.
“N-never,” she stammered over the tripping of a heart too easily moved to sentimental palpitations. “I’ll just put my things in Mom’s room.”
Despite the glibness of her response, Buck’s occupancy in her old room did present Melodie with a new and unfathomable set of problems. She couldn’t imagine sleeping in the very next room to the man whose heart she had accidentally broken without ever fully explaining herself. A man who had every right to hate her guts. A man whose presence still had the power to make her very soul tremble.
For one thing, the walls were paper-thin! she thought to herself.
People were bound to talk, Buck thought to himself.
Indeed, gossip traveled faster than a brush fire in this small community where everything was everybody’s business. Pushing himself away from the wall, Buck came to stand within inches of Melodie. So close that he could smell her uniquely feminine scent. That haunting blend of leather and lace, sagebrush and musk, stirred memories of a time when the world was as new to them as to a colt surveying life for the first time on wobbly legs.
“Aren’t you worried about your reputation, Little Bit?” he queried, cocking an eyebrow at her.
Her reputation! Melodie almost laughed out loud. If he only knew how little that tattered rag mattered to her.
“You were always a lot more worried about that than I was.” Hearing the trace of bitterness in her voice, she hastened to add, “Besides I’m well past worrying what anyone else thinks, Buck.”
Even you, she silently added.
Once upon a time she had allowed concern for fickle virtue to throw away a life with the gentle man who refused to bed her for the manipulative opportunist who had. What she had endured throughout the travesty of her marriage left Melodie numb to the threat of public ridicule.
She risked a small smile. “What about you? Are you worried about a wicked widow besmirching your honor?”
Buck snorted his derision at the idea.
“Once you’ve been dragged through the mud down the streets of this one-horse town, you get used to it.”
Falling into his amber-colored eyes was like diving to the bottom of a glass of expensive bourbon, aged with pain. Melodie yearned to reach out and caress his rough cheek with an equally work-roughened hand, to smooth away his sorrows with a well-chosen, heartfelt apology.
I am so sorry, she longed to say, knowing she was the one responsible for his humiliation.
But sorry was such a useless word. It could neither bring back her mother, nor Randall, nor change the course of a life shaped by one horrible mistake.
Melodie opened her mouth to respond, but no words came out.
Buck left her standing there feeling rather like a guppy. The front door closed behind him with a sigh of regret. As if afraid of disturbing a single dust mote, she trod softly across what was now Buck’s room. Melodie took a deep breath before entering. Assailed by the trace fragrance of lilacs that had been Grace’s signature scent, she was instantly taken back to a vision of her mother as a young woman. Eyes the same vivid blue as her daughter’s twinkled in a face as yet unlined by time.
“Oh, Mama,” she whispered crossing the room in a few short steps. Sinking into the old brass bed, she felt her mother’s ghost stir. Underlying the sweet, reminiscent essence of lilacs was the residual smell of medicine. And the lingering odor of death.
How could she possibly stay in this room?
Looking around, she found it more a shrine than a bedroom. The walls were covered with pictures of Melodie at all ages, each precocious stage immortalized on film. The only photograph in the room that did not prominently feature Melodie was Grace’s wedding picture. From the bedstand, the father Melodie could not remember was blissfully unaware of his impending death. Tromped beneath a rodeo bull’s hooves, this stranger had left his young wife and three-year-old daughter a rugged patch of land and little else.
Melodie was struck anew with awe for her mother’s fortitude. A single woman raising a child and managing a ranch by herself had been unheard of at the time. An unlikely feminist, Grace Fremont had instilled in her daughter a sense of self-reliance that Melodie prayed would see her through yet another difficult time.
Grace’s remedy for just about any given situation was a homemade concoction she’d perfected. The primary ingredients were tenacity, hard work and faith in God. In the end it hadn’t been enough.
Melodie winced. It grieved her to think of her mother dying on the same bed in which she’d given birth to her only child. An ungrateful brat the world denounced for abandoning her in her time of greatest need. It pained her to think of her mother struggling from the beginning to the end of her hard-fought existence with little more comfort than could be derived from her well-worn Bible. The school of hard knocks had taught Melodie that one might as well wish upon a star as put her faith in a God who allowed good people to suffer so horribly with emotional and physical cancers.
Not that she had any special bragging rights to a better life herself, coming home as she did