When Gen lifted her face to him, there were tears in her eyes. “Oh, Jake.” She sighed, reaching up for his other hand. “I always wondered if you weren’t pushing us out because you really didn’t want us there.”
Jake hadn’t thought he’d survive this. He did. He sat down, settling Amanda next to him, and faced his family with the first real truth he’d ever shared with them.
“I wanted you free of the cycle,” he said, taking his little sister by the hands. “You deserved choices, all of you. I wouldn’t trade a minute of it, knowing that you’re doing what you want.”
“But what about you?” Gen demanded. “You’re not doing what you want.”
Jake could actually offer her a smile. “I’m doing exactly what I want,” he told her. “Even if I were Einstein I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else than right where I am. I wouldn’t do anything but raise and break horses.”
“But you’d read,” Zeke prodded.
Jake took a second to restore himself with the sight of Amanda sitting next to him. Even exhausted and disheveled, even caught beneath the glaring hospital fluorescents that sapped skin color, she looked more alive than anyone Jake had ever known. More beautiful. The classiest woman he’d ever known, and it wasn’t until she was in ripped jeans and a T-shirt that he’d really understood it.
“Yes,” he finally admitted to Zeke, thinking how he wanted to go visit those isolated sites where Zeke dug out pottery shards and arrowheads. “I’d read. But that seems to be the next major project to be undertaken at the Diamond K.”
He felt the tension seep out of Amanda at his words and took his turn holding her hand.
“I’m sorry, Amanda,” he apologized. “I haven’t been fair to you, either.”
“We can make amends later,” she assured him.
He met her gaze then, excluding everyone, everything else. Bathing in that green, offering his own strength where he’d thought he’d had none, his promises when he’d thought she wouldn’t want them. Far away from his ranch, from the peace and majesty of his mountains and the chatter of his stream, Jake Kendall rediscovered its worth in the eyes of a woman.
“I don’t know, Zeke,” Gen quipped dryly. “Next we’ll be hearing that this here writer woman has him going to the theater or something.”
“Museum of Modern Art,” Jake offered, never taking his gaze from Amanda’s now amused one. “New York.”
She nodded. “I know a great little restaurant nearby.”
His brother and sister made rude noises, and that made Jake smile even more.
Nurses came and went. The doctor stopped in, as bedraggled and sweat-soaked as one of Jake’s old hats, to say that Lee had made it through surgery. He still wouldn’t promise anything, but he did offer to let them see her when she woke up enough to appreciate their presence. Jake stood silently, Amanda’s arm holding him up as the doctor and Gen dueled with medical terminology.
Somewhere beyond the windowless walls of the waiting room the night struggled to morning, and the day shift filtered in. And still, they waited.
By the time the nurse came back, Jake had to wake Amanda from where she’d fallen asleep with her head in his lap. He fingered her hair where it lay tangled across his leg and bent down to her ear.
“Hello, Amanda.”
Her smile was quick and telling even before she opened her eyes. “Hello, Jake.”
“We can go in and see Lee. Wanna come?”
She bolted up so fast he almost lost a couple of teeth.
“What do they say?” she demanded, pushing her hair back out of her eyes with trembling hands.
Gen was already on the nurse’s heels, with Zeke quickly following.
“They say, come on in and see your sister before we throw you out. Now, come on.”
Jake still held on to her hand. He did it selfishly, knowing that he wasn’t prepared for seeing Lee like this. Knowing that he was still depending on this small, slim woman next to him for his strength, that somehow he always would. Even so, he walked in feeling better than he had in years. Curiously at peace for what he’d gone through in the last twenty-four hours.
There was equipment everywhere, all of it beeping and blinking and threatening. There were monitors and IV bags and pumps, and a nurse checking everything. And in the middle, nestled in a stark white bed and swathed in bandages, Lee almost disappeared into the white sheets. Jake’s heart lurched when he saw how pale she was, how small and young and suddenly fragile. He held on to Amanda, and made it on in.
“You don’t have to go to all this trouble just to get us home,” Zeke assured the girl. “A phone call would have done.”
Gen was too busy checking settings and harassing the nurse for a proper greeting just yet.
