Page 549 of Summer Heat
All the things she’d had to do without as a child. All the things she’d been desperately afraid Cody would have to do without.
And she couldn’t ask for an arrangement that was any fairer, or with a better man. Lance had shouldered his responsibility easily, fairly, quickly, without undue demands or restrictions. He had the power to do anything he wished, and he had only asked for simple visitation privileges.
So why was she so unhappy this morning?
Lance.
It was Lance. Somehow, his arrival in Red Creek had turned her whole life upside down. What had seemed normal in the past was now intolerable. His vividness, the bold brigh
tness he’d brought into her life, made everything that went before seem drab and gray.
Because it had been drab and gray.
Now Tamara found herself filled with yearning. She wanted to make love more than once every four years. She wanted a partner to share her life with, more children, a job she cared about and that felt important, not just something to pay the rent.
And even more. She wanted a life filled with books and music and stimulating conversation, a real life, not the grinding day-to-day struggle that had marked her own mother’s life.
Slowly Tamara looked around the room, feeling a dawning sense of awareness. Her mother had loved her with a deep, devoted passion, but the struggle had put her in an early grave. Would her mother have succumbed to a disease like cancer so young if her life had been smoother? If she’d had someone to help her, share things with? If she hadn’t had to struggle so hard every single day?
Maybe she would have anyway. Disease was capricious and unfair. But Tamara couldn’t help thinking that life had worn her mother down so much that when the cancer struck she had no reserves left with which to fight it.
Surprised, tears sprung to her eyes. “Oh, Mama, what would you tell me now? What should I do?”
And suddenly Tamara knew. Her mother would say the same things she always had: don’t settle for anything less than exactly what you want. Fight as hard as you can. Don’t ever give up.
For four long years, Tamara had been lost. In retrospect, she saw that she’d been grieving her mother deeply when everything with Valerie happened. That grief, and the unexpected desertion by Eric, had clouded her judgment. She could have gone back to finish her degree, but she’d been too overwhelmed. It was just easier to stay in Red Creek with Cody. In Red Creek where things were familiar, where her mother lingered in the breath of the trees and the sun on the mountains; and in the aisles of the grocery stores.
And here in Red Creek, she had fallen into a rut, a rut of survival that echoed her mother’s life with Tamara. It was an odd tribute, and not surprising, but it was also not at all what her mother would have wanted for her. Her mother had made the monumental effort to move a thousand miles from home to give Tamara a better life than the one she’d known.
And in her rut Tamara might have stayed forever if not for the bold, blindingly bright presence of Lance Forrest, blowing into town like a carnival, exciting and full of laughter.
Smiling, Tamara thought he was also as inconstant as a carnival, but there was nothing wrong with that. It wasn’t a quality a woman wanted in a husband, but he never made any pretenses about that.
Which made it possible to love him as he was.
If she were truly honest, she had to admit she also wanted Lance Forrest. Part of her discontent this morning had to do with the fact that she wanted more than breath to have gone with them to the lake. Just to hear him laugh. Just to see that glittering mischief in his eyes. Just to touch his strong forearm one more time.
“No,” she said aloud. The facts were, he wasn’t marriage material and she wouldn’t try to make him so. There were things you couldn’t do to a person. He was as free as a hawk in the sky. It would be cruel to cage him.
With bittersweet resignation, she knew she would get over him. Someday.
In the meantime, she would accept the gift he’d brought into her life. She would break this dull routine. She would claim the life she wanted.
On the table were her loathed accounting books. Very slowly Tamara smiled.
No more accounting, not another single minute. She didn’t care if it messed up her grade-point average. She loved history and poetry and literature, and she intended to spend her life immersed in them, teaching or researching or whatever she could find. There was no law that said she had to spend her life at a university. She was only a few credits away from her degree. She could make arrangements to study three days a week in Denver to complete them, especially now that she knew Cody had family in town.
Then she could teach. At the high school or the junior high, or even at the community college. They went through teachers like spring snowfall in this climate—people always thought living in the mountains would be glamorous and thrilling, but the reality was, the winters chased a good many of them away within a year.
Feeling exhilarated, Tamara slammed her accounting books closed, picked them up and put them in the trash. As she did it, she laughed.
And inexplicably, found herself in tears at the rush of emotion in her breast. “Oh, Lance,” she whispered. “Why can’t you be the marrying kind?”
Chapter Sixteen
On the shores of Lake Rosalie, Lance taught Cody to fish. The weather was as gorgeous as he had anticipated, well into the fifties by noon. Coupled with the high-altitude sunlight, fierce even at midwinter, they were warm enough to shed their jackets before long, and Lance worried that Cody’s fair skin might burn. He found a baseball cap in his trunk and popped it on Cody’s head.
And all morning, Lance thought about his own father. When the two of them had come out here, Olan became a different man—patient, kind, quiet. In all the times they’d gone fishing together, Olan had only lost his infamous temper once, when Lance fell out of the rowboat and nearly drowned because he’d been showing off.
