Radclyffe - Homestead

“I like your optimism.”

Ella shot her a smile. “Good.”

Tess studied Ella as she drove. She appeared relaxed behind the wheel but was so clearly aware of everything around her. In control, she radiated strength. Everything about her was attractive. Tess recognized her attraction and sensed Ella’s interest. What she wasn’t sure of was what she wanted to do about it. “You should know I don’t have any real experience dating.”

Ella’s brow lifted and she glanced in Tess’s direction. “I find that pretty hard to believe.”

“Why?”

“I would have thought you’d been on plenty of dates. You’re smart and interesting and quite beautiful.”

Tess laughed softly. “I was thinking something very similar about you.”

“Thank you,” Ella said quietly, her eyes on the twisting road again. “But having established that you’re not a big dater, are you uncomfortable?”

“I’m only uncomfortable because I’m not more uncomfortable.”

Ella grinned. “I don’t usually make women uncomfortable—at least I don’t think I do.” She reached across the console and took Tess’s hand. “And I certainly don’t want to make you uncomfortable. So if I do, just say so.”

Tess looked down at their linked fingers. Except for brief exchanges with friends a lifetime ago, she’d never held anyone’s hand but Clay’s. Ella’s hands were different than Clay’s. Her fingers were longer, slimmer, but just as strong. Just the week before, she’d held Clay’s hand in the restaurant. Her skin didn’t tingle now the way it had when Clay touched her, but Ella’s hand was warm and gentle and confident, like her. Tess tightened her fingers through Ella’s. “All right.”

“All right, what?”

Tess laughed. “All right, I’ll tell you if something makes me uncomfortable.”

Ella drew their joined hands onto her thigh and held them there as she drove. She nodded. “That sounds like a perfect plan.”

* * *

“We don’t have to stay,” Ella said softly.

Tess stared at the lodge, frozen on the front seat of the SUV. Lost in time. She was seventeen again, on her own, out of place, unsure of her welcome. She gazed down the long slope to the lake, where the huge two-story boathouse with its big square windows opened wide reigned over the beach, and she was there on the dock in the moonlight, waiting for Clay. Anticipation and excitement made her giddy. The roar of a motorcycle engine set her heart racing. She looked past the log lodge and its wraparound porch to the cabins nestled in the woods and heard Clay come in behind her while she cleaned. They’d tumbled onto the just-made bed and she’d let Clay—

“Tess!” Leslie raced across the porch, her smile electric. The door behind her opened and Dev, older, more handsome than Tess remembered, followed Leslie with a welcoming smile on her face.

“You all right?” Ella murmured.

“Yes,” Tess said and stepped out. The scent of the water, the cool fingers of breeze trailing over her skin, the glint of sun on the lake’s surface were so familiar, she half expected to turn and see Clay coming down the twisting drive on her motorcycle. Her heart ached at the memory. And then Leslie was down the stairs, calling her name again, arms open for a hug.

Ella stepped up beside her and Tess took her hand. Ella squeezed her fingers, and the past disappeared.

* * *

“She seems very nice.” Leslie stood next to Tess at the railing an hour after lunch.

“She is,” Tess said, watching Dev and Ella tinker with the outboard motor on one of the boats moored at the long dock next to the boathouse. “Thanks for letting us barge in on your day.”

“I couldn’t be happier.” Leslie squeezed Tess’s shoulder. “I wasn’t sure you’d ever come for a visit.”

Tess tightened her hold on the railing, struggling to keep the past from invading the present. While the four of them had sat around a picnic table under the trees sharing the sandwiches she and Leslie had thrown together in the big kitchen in the lodge, she’d let the easy conversation sweep her along like a boat drifting in the current. “I didn’t think I would, either, but I’m glad that I did. I had some great times here, and it’s nice to remember that.” She turned, rested her shoulder against the thick porch post hewn from a massive pine, and smiled at Leslie. “You were one of my best friends. Probably my best friend. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you that summer.”

“God, we were young.”

Tess nodded. “We were. So many changes, so fast. Everything so intense.”

“Everything got so crazy at the end,” Leslie murmured, a distant expression on her face as her eyes followed Dev.

Tess had the feeling Leslie wasn’t seeing Dev the way she looked now, tall and tanned and strong and laughing, but the lanky, dark-eyed brooding girl she’d been.

“What happened after I left that summer?” Tess asked.

“I made a colossal mistake,” Leslie said, her eyes brimming with pain, “and I hurt Dev terribly.” She smiled wryly. “One of the major miracles in my life is that she forgave me, and somehow we found our way back to each other.”

“From the way she looks at you,” Tess said gently, “I don’t think she ever went very far away.”

“Maybe not, but we lost a lot of years that I wish I could get back.” Leslie sighed. “But maybe everything happened when it was supposed to.”

“Do you believe in fate?”

“I don’t know,” Leslie said. “I believe in the connections that we make, and the strength of those bonds to persist over time, maybe even beyond time.”

“I wonder what it would’ve been like if I hadn’t gone back to the farm and you hadn’t gone away to school, and Dev and Clay hadn’t disappeared.”

“Maybe we’d be at the same place,” Leslie said. “Or maybe we’d be completely different people.” She paused. “Why did you leave?”

“It all seems so much less earth-shattering now,” Tess said, shaking her head. “Ray—my stepfather—showed up late that afternoon, the day of the party, and said I had to go home. He needed me on the farm. That I had to get my things and leave right then.”

Leslie’s eyes narrowed. “Did he say why it was so urgent?”

“No. I wasn’t used to going against him—never really had.” Tess took a long breath. “And I couldn’t reach Clay. She was supposed to come for me—we had a date—but she was late. I had her phone number, although I’d never called it. She always was the one to set the time and place where we would meet. If I’d been a little less naïve, I might have questioned that. The whole time I was packing to leave here, I kept calling and calling, but she never answered. For days after—” Tess shook her head. “Well. Clay dropped out of sight, and I went home to the farm. I knew you were set to go away to college, and I was just so lost I just—”

“Hey, I get it,” Leslie said gently. “Things were falling apart up here too. Talk about a perfect storm of massive proportions all the way around. But we survived, right?”

Tess shook off the melancholy as Ella turned, looked up the slope toward the lodge, and waved. Tess waved back. The sun slanted through the trees and painted the lawn and lake in glimmering gold. The air vibrated with life, and Tess remembered all the things she loved about this place. She grinned at Leslie. “We did survive, didn’t we.”

“And I’m really glad you’re here,” Leslie said.

“So am I.”

“Hey,” Ella called, standing hipshot with one hand covering her eyes, “everything is in working order down here. Are you ready for a ride?”

“Yes,” Tess called down, and she was ready, finally, to take the past back too. So much of what she’d loved had been buried in pain and loss, and she wanted it back. She’d taken back her dreams of the farm, even when everyone said she would fail, and now she was going to take back the memories of the good times she’d let die with her dreams.

“Tess?” Leslie asked. “Are you coming?”

“Yes,” Tess said quickly, the image of a dark-haired girl on a motorcycle flickering just beyond the edges of her vision. “Yes, I am.”

* * *

Clay called a halt at a little after eight when the light started to die and jagged heat-lightning strikes began marching from the west across the ridge toward the hill above Tess’s house. Ozone tinged the air, heavy and acrid, and the clouds turned blood red as the angry sun finally slid low in the sky.

Kelly, a hard-bodied blonde with a perpetual smile, joined her as the men began closing down the machinery. “Do you think we’re finally getting some rain?”

“I don’t think so,” Clay said, scenting the hot, dry air. “Not yet.”

“I don’t know how these people do it. I don’t think I could stand having my entire livelihood hinge on something like whether it rained or not.”

Clay laughed. “Oh, and your job is so predictable. You just have to chase around after people whose schedules are as changeable as the weather.”

“True.” Kelly grinned. “I have to say, though, this is one of my better recent assignments. I have to thank you for getting me out of the city. If I have to be hot and sweating, I’d much rather be doing it here.”

“Tell me that in a few months.”

Kelly glanced around as she and Clay walked toward the Jeep Kelly had commandeered from the job site to drive Clay around. “What are your plans for the night?”

“I’m not sure.” Clay stopped by the Jeep and checked Tess’s house again. Still dark. Her truck was parked by the barn where it had been all day. Ella hadn’t brought Tess home yet. Since she couldn’t very well sit up here and wait until Tess returned, which was what she really wanted to do, she needed to do something to keep from imagining what the two of them had been doing all day. “Let’s go somewhere and grab something to eat.”

“Sounds great.” Kelly strode around the front of the Jeep and paused by the driver’s door. “Handy that Ella is with Tess—we don’t have to worry about covering her for a while.”

“Yeah.” Clay yanked the door open and dropped onto the seat. Just perfect.

“What’s good here?” Kelly put aside the menu and looked around the Sly Fox. “Besides the beer?”

“Probably just about anything on the menu,” Clay said. “I can vouch for the burgers. Wings are excellent. So are the fries.”

Kelly laughed. “Come here often?”

“Ah…” Clay shrugged and nodded. Like many of the locals, she ended up here most nights for a meal and a beer to purge the dust of the day. Unlike the others, though, she didn’t take part in the casual conversation and friendly gossip that went on around her. She recognized most of the faces but she wasn’t one of them—and while some gave her a quick glance and nothing more before moving on to the next topic, other eyes lingered on hers, challenging or accusing. She didn’t mind—most of the suspicion would magically disappear when the money started flowing in with the gas, and then she’d be on to the next town, all her sins forgiven. Only this time she’d be taking her sins with her. Only Tess could forgive her those, and the time for forgiveness was past.

Tess. She’d caught glimpses of her all week as she’d worked with the crew up on the hill above the farmhouse—early in the morning and late in the evening when Tess walked to the main barn for the milking, at midday when she checked the crops in her ATV, late in the afternoon when she repaired a section of fence out behind the barn. Always from a distance, Tess’s features a little too blurred to read what was in her eyes. That’s how everything seemed between them now, distant and out of focus, when once the welcoming passion in Tess’s eyes had set her heart soaring.

Clay clenched her fists on her thighs as the helpless frustration gnawed a hole through her insides.

“You seem to have a fan at the far end of the bar—big guy, gray hair, midforties, work clothes.” Kelly leaned back in her chair, and to anyone who didn’t know her, she’d seem relaxed. She probably was. She was also watching everyone in the room. She’d been NYPD before coming to work for NorthAm. Like Ella, she was smart and good company. Clay didn’t work with her very often because she rarely needed any more security than Ella could provide.

Clay sipped the beer the waitress had delivered along with the menus and checked the bar. “That’s Pete Townsend.”

“One of the holdouts on the rights?”

“Yeah. And a vocal opponent.”

“He’s on his way to pay his respects.” Kelly eased her chair back, making room to stand if she had to.