he answered, his tone oddly reserved.
Emmy’s mom must have heard it, too, because she ended the hug and linked her arm through Declan’s to turn him toward the porch. “Come in. I want to know how you really are. And I know you must want to see Kit. And every time Trinity looks at the picture of her daddy, I point you out standing next to him and tell her who you are—she calls you Decan. Let’s see if she recognizes you in person.”
Then over her shoulder, Karen Tate said, “Go on up and have your shower, Em. I’ll keep Decan occupied.”
As her mother urged Declan to the porch steps, Emmy noted his slight limp.
For his part he didn’t cast her so much as another glance. Which irked Emmy even more.
She let them get all the way through the door before she followed, thinking about what had seemed like nothing but a generous idea when Mandy had said she wanted to volunteer for the Red Cross mission to Afghanistan that Emmy had been assigned to follow and photograph four and a half years ago.
And how much her sister’s life and her own had been altered when Topher Samms and Declan Madison had become their military escorts.
“You’re going to stay at Topher’s farm?”
Declan was sitting at the kitchen table with his sister, Kinsey, in the farmhouse where they’d grown up. Kinsey had made him breakfast, and while she was at it, he’d told her about his visit to the Sammses’ place the day before. About the long talk he’d had with Topher’s mother-in-law that had made it clear Emmy Tate needed his help.
“I know you thought it would be fun for us all to be back here,” he said. “To stay in the house together one more time before it gets packed up and sold—”
“I keep scheduling times to come and clear it out, but something always interferes. So while we still have it—and it isn’t packed up yet—I wanted to get married here.”
“Sure. But come on—this place will be bursting at the seams by the wedding next week. Me, you, your groom and his mother are already here. Conor and Maicy, and Liam and Dani and the twins are all coming... This place just isn’t that big. What difference does it make if I bunk in the workout room downstairs or down the road? I’m just five minutes away. And I need to do what I can for Topher’s family. Whatever I can. I owe him that...”
“I know that’s important to you,” his sister admitted.
It was. He felt responsible for his best friend’s death, and that meant it was on him to step in on whatever Topher had left behind. Even more than his sister’s wedding, that driving need was what had brought him back to the small town where he’d been made to feel like the scum of the earth growing up.
“It’s bad over at the Sammses’ place, huh?” his sister asked. “It’s so strange that the storm totally missed us but decimated them. I guess we dodged the bullet.”
“It’s definitely bad over there,” he confirmed. Karen Tate had described three fields full of spring plants wiped out, the orchard torn apart, the family vegetable garden gone, the roof and one side of the house and the barn shredded, the chicken coop battered and untold damage on the apiaries.
“The farm has been in the Samms family for six generations, and Topher—and Mandy—loved that place,” he went on after outlining the problems. “They were dedicated to keeping it in the family, to raising the kids there, to passing it down to them.” And had his friend been alive, Declan knew that there was nothing Topher wouldn’t have done to meet that goal.
“It can’t happen the way Topher and Mandy planned now,” he said, hearing the ragged edge that came into his own voice as guilt weighed him down. “The kids aren’t going to grow up on the farm—Mandy made her sister their guardian—”
“Emmy—that’s her name, right? Mandy’s sister? You rescued her in Afghanistan?”
“I dug her out of some rubble when a bomb hit a school she was in taking pictures of kids for the Red Cross,” he confirmed.
“You say that like it was no big deal, but you saved her life.”
He shrugged that off. “I was just doing my job,” he said as if he hadn’t been frantic to get her out from under that debris. Because even though it hadn’t been the same love at first sight for them as it had been for Topher and Mandy, before that school had been hit, he’d had a few laughs with Emmy, he’d liked her.
But that was water far, far under the bridge now.
“Anyway,” he continued, “she doesn’t know squat about farming. She lives and works in Denver, and her mother says that’s where she plans to take Trinity and Kit. But she wants to keep the farm in the family so the kids have the option of running it when they grow up, which means she’s figuring on leasing it. Only nobody’s going to take it on until she gets it cleaned up. And she needs an extra pair of hands and someone who knows their way around a farm to do that.”
“Are you well enough for farm work?” Kinsey was a nurse and very protective of his health right now.
“I’m fine. The knee is a little stiff, but I’m keeping up on the physical therapy exercises for it. The farm work will just help get me the rest of the way back in shape. I have to wait for my review with the Medical Evaluation Board anyway before I can get the go-ahead to get back to my unit. Might as well be productive in the meantime.”
His sister didn’t look convinced, but he knew his body. He knew how hard he’d worked in rehab not just on regaining the use and strength of his leg, but with weight training on the rest of his body so he’d be ready and able to return to duty.
“Plus there’s the kids,” he said then. “Mandy’s mom has been staying at the farm, but she told me she’s leaving today. Mandy’s dad has been holding down the fort at their travel agency, but her mom really needs to get back. The timing is rough. Before the hail hit, there was someone serious about leasing the farm—he was set to take over so Emmy could take the kids to Denver with her mother this weekend. But he backed out once he saw the hail damage.”
“So now they have to start all over trying to find someone else?”
“That’s what Karen said. She also said that Emmy is good with the kids but she was in over her head with the farm even before the storm, when other farmers were lending her a hand here and there—”
“But now other farmers have to regroup from the hail themselves,” Kinsey said.
“Right. So she has to clear the damage, replant the fields, take care of the animals and, with her mother leaving, do all the household stuff and take care of Trinity and Kit, too. Plus Karen said Kit is colicky—whatever that is—and he cries a lot at night... There’ll be some help from babysitters coming in during the day, but Emmy will be on her own for one sleepless night after another and—”
Declan sighed. “Bottom line—there’s a big need for help over there, for more than two hands. So I’m going to work with Emmy to do what I can.”
As long as he didn’t go over there today and find her standing on the front porch with a shotgun to run him off the property.
It had been her mother—not Emmy—who had told him what was going on. In fact, Emmy had looked like she wanted to strangle her mother when she’d come downstairs after her shower to discover just how candid Karen had been.
And when he’d offered his services, Emmy couldn’t have been more against it. She’d flatly and fervently refused his help.
The two women had gone back and forth for a while. But Karen had held her ground and eventually Emmy had conceded, even to the idea of him moving into the basement so they could trade off nights being up with Kit.
But