A Mother's Love (16 page)

“I'm happy I could do it,” he answered and realized with some shock that he meant the words—and that he was actually looking forward to coming back, especially if it meant seeing her again.

O
NE HAZARD OF WORKING
in a small grocery store in a sleepy town was that she usually had far too much time on her hands.

Christa sat at the untidy desk in her second-floor office at Sully's, gazing out the glass window that overlooked the sales floor at the few customers moving through the aisles.

Business was slow in the typical afternoon lull, though she knew it would heat up again in an hour or so, when people started poring over the contents of their cupboards and refrigerators and recipe boxes to find something to cook for dinner.

She was supposed to be working on the time schedule for the next two weeks. But as they had far too often, her thoughts kept straying in one uncomfortable direction.

All afternoon she couldn't seem to stop thinking about Jace McCandless. It was completely ridiculous.

She was a grown woman—a mother of a fifteen-year-old, for heaven's sake! She was far too old for a silly crush and she had no business obsessing over him like some giddy junior high student. Next thing she knew, she would be writing his initials on the time sheets and surrounding them with cute little curlicue hearts.

She certainly knew better. In the first place—and on a
completely superficial level—he was way, way out of her league. His last girlfriend had been the lead singer of a Grammy-winning country music group, and the one before that a Hollywood starlet.

Not that she read the tabloids or anything, but she worked in a grocery store, for heaven's sake. She couldn't exactly miss his sexy features when she was running him across the checkout scanner, usually with some equally beautiful person wrapped around him.

With the whole world to choose from, why would he possibly have any interest in a thirty-four-year-old who lived with her mother, ran her family grocery store and had a U-Haul stuffed full of emotional baggage?

Even more important than what
he
might be looking for in a woman were all the reasons
she
ought to be running as fast as her legs would take her in the opposite direction.

He was a player, a sexy, irresponsible cowboy, and hadn't she had enough of that particular breed of man? The last thing she needed right now in her chaotic, messed-up life was a distraction like Jace McCandless. This afternoon just proved it.

She had a hundred things to do, a thousand pressures bearing down on her, but here she sat mooning over him.

She knew all that, knew she shouldn't be thinking about him at all. But she couldn't deny that something inside her had been irresistibly drawn to him, to the warm light in his eyes and the broad, comforting strength in those shoulders.

She sighed, grateful when the phone on her father's scarred old wooden desk bleated a distraction from her thoughts.

She recognized her mother's phone number on the caller
ID and picked up after the second ring. “Hi, Mom. I was going to call you in a moment. How's everything at home?”

She and Ellen alternated days at the store so one of them could be home with Hope at all times.

Ellen was great with the employees and the customers, but she hated anything to do with ordering or inventory or payroll.

Sage Flats was five miles from the nearest town, literally five miles from any other sign of civilization except far-flung ranches. For three generations now Sully's had served as a combination gas station, grocery store and gathering spot for not only the residents of town but also outlying ranchers who didn't want to drive the half hour to Park City when they only needed a gallon of milk.

Her whole childhood had been tied up in this store—evenings and weekends and holidays spent mopping the floors and stocking the candy aisles and, later, checking out customers. Back then, she had hated the provincial, old-fashioned feel of it and couldn't wait to leave.

Since she had returned after her father's death, she was surprised to find her perspective had undergone a massive paradigm shift. Now she found amazing comfort in the familiar—in the quiet, steady rhythm of life in a small town.

“Been a good day so far. Quiet,” Ellen answered in the brisk, no-nonsense voice that had driven Christa crazy when she was a teenager. Then again,
everything
about her mother had rubbed her like metal scraping metal in those days, from her poodle perm to her unshakable faith in the goodness of people to the way she couldn't seem to put on lipstick without leaving a little smudge on her teeth.

Fifteen years ago, when she had been a stubborn, foolish girl, she never would have believed she could come to rely
so heavily on her mother, but she would have been completely lost those first days after the accident—really, the entire last five months—without Ellen's quiet strength.

“She seems worn-out from yesterday,” her mother went on, “even though she was still talking a mile a minute about horses. The occupational therapist could barely get her to settle down and work this afternoon. She fell asleep on the way home from therapy, but she's up now, watching TV.”

“How did school go?”

“Her teacher said she's almost passed off a couple of her goals. She wondered if you want to schedule another IEP meeting to discuss new ones.”

Christa sighed. More decisions she didn't feel at all qualified to make in the new reality they had been thrust into. Hope attended school only half a day, since that was all the stamina she could muster. Even then, she was in a life-skills classroom—what in Christa's generation had been called “special education”—working on regaining basic skills in hopes that she would be close to grade level when school started again in the fall.

“Oh, I almost forgot why I called. Can you bring home some cilantro?” Ellen broke into her thoughts. “I'm making black bean soup for dinner and forgot to pick some up.”

She scribbled a message to herself on a sticky note and stuck it on her computer. “Okay. Cilantro. Anything else?”

“That should do it, I think. Thank you, dear. You remember that tomorrow night it's my turn to host the Busybees, right?”

She barely caught herself before groaning. Just what she needed—a house full of chattering quilters who spent more time gossiping than they did working any needles. “I'd forgotten. Hope and I will stay out of the way. Maybe we'll watch a DVD in my bedroom or something.”

“You don't have to do that. It's your house, too. I'm sure the girls would love to have you both come out and join us. We're working on the most beautiful Shooting Star pattern. I can't wait for you to see it. The star is pieced with graduated diamonds of rust and orange and peach against a blue background and it looks like the whole thing is exploding in the night sky.”

Ellen continued talking about her passion, quilting, but Christa was only half listening now. Through the glass of her office she could see a customer standing at the checkout but no sign of a cashier.

Sully's usually got by with only one cashier during the afternoon lull, who stocked shelves between ringing up groceries. During busy times—when more than two customers were in the store—Christa would step out of her office to lend a hand as needed.

But she couldn't see Michelle Roundy, the cashier on duty, who had just finished her second year of college and was home for the summer.

She scanned the store and finally found her in a cereal aisle, her back to the checkout counter while she conversed with a tall man in a cowboy hat. Because of the angle, she couldn't see who it was, but even from here she could see Michelle putting out the vibe—tucking her hair behind her ear, tilting her head, touching the man's arm as she smiled.

She sighed, not at all in the mood to play the big, bad boss interrupting a promising flirtation. “Mom, I've got to go,” she said. “Looks like the afternoon rush is hitting.”

“Okay. Don't forget the cilantro. Oh, and maybe some of those blue corn chips you ordered last week.”

Christa hung up and hurried down the office stairs just
as the bell on the checkout counter dinged with what sounded like increasing impatience.

She approached the pair in the cereal aisle without sparing a glance at the object of the cashier's attention. “Michelle, would you like me to check for you? It looks like Mrs. Salazar is ready.”

Michelle's smile slid away and a flush instantly climbed her cheeks. “Oh! I'm so sorry, Christa. I guess I wasn't paying attention to the bell. I've got it.”

She gave one last flustered smile to the object of her flirtation, then hurried away, leaving Christa alone with the man.

He tilted his black Stetson back and her stomach suddenly danced a little jig. No wonder Michelle had been fluttering around him like a pretty little moth. Few women had the strength to resist Jace McCandless's rugged, gorgeous features.

She did, though. She had been immunized a long time ago against charming cowboys.

Right?

She forced a polite smile. “Mr. McCandless. Hello.”

“Jace, please,” he said with an aw-shucks kind of smile that played exactly right in all the ad campaigns he did. “I'm not sure who you're talking to when you call me mister.”

She wondered if that self-deprecating smile fooled anyone. It certainly didn't her. He had to be smart as the proverbial whip to turn a few good years on the rodeo circuit into his kind of fortune.

She gestured to his shopping cart. “Don't you have people to do this sort of thing for you?”

“You'd think, wouldn't you? I'll confess that I do pay a
personal chef from Park City to stock my freezer with ready-to-eat meals that even a dope like me can heat up. But, believe it or not, I can't always find what I'm craving.”

She raised an eyebrow at the contents of his cart, which included three boxes of cereal high on sugar and low on nutritional value, a box of microwave popcorn and a four-pack of macaroni and cheese.

He followed her gaze and offered up that charmer of a smile again. “I know. Ridiculous, isn't it? Apparently I have all the culinary taste of a twelve-year-old.”

She couldn't help herself, she laughed out loud. “I was thinking more like seven or eight.”

“You have to give me a little credit for some maturity! I left out the Cheez Doodles and baseball card bubblegum packs.”

Oh, that smile was entirely too tempting. A shiver rippled down her spine, and she wanted to stand there all afternoon basking in its glow. Apparently she wasn't as impervious to sexy cowboys as she had hoped.

“It's usually a fleeting craving,” he went on. “By tomorrow I'll likely be back to grown-up, healthy food.”

“But today you'll eat like a king. Or at least like the king of Sage Flats Elementary School.”

His laughter echoed through the store, sending a warm glow shooting through her as brilliant as any star the Busybees could quilt.

“So how's Hope today?” he asked.

She did her best to push away the unwelcome reaction. “I've been working all day, but my mother says she's been tired but happy.”

“Do you think riding helped her?”

“I don't know. Her strength and her balance both seemed better last night when we were doing her exercises.”

He smiled, genuine pleasure in the midnight-blue of his eyes. “Does that mean you'll be taking her back to the therapy center?”

“At this point, I'm willing to try anything that works. If that means I have to swallow my fear, I guess I'll do it.”

The outside door chimed before he could answer. She thought it was Mrs. Salazar leaving with the groceries until she heard a gruff male voice she didn't recognize talking to Michelle.

“I got a truck full of canned goods to deliver. I rang the bell in the back by the stockroom about a half dozen times, but nobody answered.”

This time Christa wasn't successful at hiding her groan. Just her luck. Of course the unexpected delivery would arrive this afternoon, the one day when her usually dependable stocker had gone home sick with a cold at lunchtime.

“Excuse me,” she said to Jace. “I need to deal with this.”

She hurried to the front of the store.

“Hi. I'm the manager on duty. We're shorthanded, but I'll meet you out back to help unload.”

“You know I can't unload any of it, much as I'd like to help you. It's company policy. I can only drive up to your bay.”

She sighed. “I know. I hope you're not in a big hurry. Our forklift is acting up today.”

He shrugged. “You're my last load of the day. I got time.”

If only she could say the same. She thought of the paperwork that would be left undone at her desk and how she would have to take it home with her to finish after she worked through Hope's extensive bedtime routine.

She headed toward the door of the stockroom and almost reached it before she realized Jace was following close on her heels.

“Uh, when you're ready, Michelle can ring you up out front.”

“Fine,” he answered genially even as he continued to follow her.

She stopped, her hand on the swinging door of the stockroom, painfully aware of his heat and strength only a few feet away. He had left his shopping cart behind, she realized.

She frowned. “Mr. McCandless—Jace—what are you doing?”

“Giving you a hand, since that delivery driver appears useless.”

She stared. “You don't have to do that.”

“I know. But I'm going to.”

How could she refuse his help? The idea of unloading a truck full of canned goods—their entire month's supply—by herself and without a forklift was overwhelming.

If Hope's accident had taught her anything, it was the simple, stark truth that she didn't always need to take on the world by herself. Sometimes accepting help graciously was the better choice.

This looked like one of those times. “Oh. Um, thank you, then. It's very nice of you to offer.”

He smiled that sexy, dangerous smile. “Let's get to it.”