Sage Creek Read online

  “Family sticks together.” Diana brought over the platter of sauce-laden meatloaf surrounded by garlic mashed potatoes and set it down. “That man better never show his face around here or he’ll really get a piece of my mind.”

  The table was set with a robin’s egg blue tablecloth and her mother’s prettiest blue and yellow dishes. Matching napkins were folded atop each plate. Sophie’s gaze was drawn to the bouquet of wildflowers filling an oval white vase in the center.

  It all looked so festive and inviting.

  Mom’s trying so hard to make this easier for me.

  But nothing was easy these days.

  Sophie needed to lift her own mood, or else fake it, for her mother’s sake. Which meant not thinking about Ned or about how she had to find a job, or wondering how she was going to restart her life.

  “Everything looks great. You made too much food, though, Mom.” Especially since these days I have the appetite of a flea. She slid into a chair, reached for the salad bowl. “How’s Gran?”

  “Same as always.” Diana gave a tiny smile at the mention of her mother. “She still has more energy than a windstorm and still thinks good always wins out in the end. Not such a bad philosophy, I guess. She’s coming to dinner tomorrow night. Be prepared, she’s planning to tell you how to fix your love life.”

  “What love life? I’m done with a love life.”

  “Not if your grandmother has anything to say about it. I give her a week at most before she seriously gets on your case.”

  “Maybe coming home wasn’t such a great idea.” Seeing her mother’s alarmed expression, Sophie regretted her flip words. She felt a rush of warmth for her mother, for this house, for the Montana night that seemed to enfold them, at least at this moment, in a cocoon of safety.

  “I’m just joking.” She hugged her mom. “I’d rather be here than anywhere else in the world right now.”

  And she meant it.

  After putting away her clothes and storing her suitcase in the back of her walk-in closet, Sophie gazed around her small, high-ceilinged room brimming with knickknacks and memories. The familiar lemon scent of Pledge, freshly washed cotton sheets, and fresh air wafting through the open window stirred her senses.

  With the soft white lace curtains rustling in the breeze, she realized how little these four walls had changed since she’d left the ranch for college. She was twenty-nine now, single again, and staring at the remnants of innocence and childhood.

  From the photographs and posters hung on the walls to the peach and yellow quilt folded neatly over her double bed, the room whisked her back through time, to days when she and her best friends Lissie Tanner and Mia Quinn spent almost every minute together, and if not together, gabbing on the phone.

  All of her old stuffed animals from kindergarten through senior year in high school, including the huge stuffed lizard Wes had won her at the state fair, still slouched on the top shelf of her oak bookcase, which took up half a wall, and her creaky old six-drawer dresser occupied the other half.

  Her mother had told her at dinner that Lissie—now Lissie Norris—was pregnant. And that Mia was throwing her a baby shower a week from Saturday.

  I’ll look for a gift in town tomorrow.

  She was thrilled for Lissie and Tommy—they’d been together since high school and had been trying to have a baby for over a year.

  But suddenly, the hollowness inside Sophie became a hard, tangible ache in her chest. So many of her friends were pregnant or had babies now. She’d gone to all of their baby showers. Watched them hug and feed and bathe their infants, bundling them into tiny coats and hats, strapping them into strollers and car seats, caring for them with a joy and total intensity that Sophie could only yearn for.

  Soon, Ned had told her, over and over. Be patient. We’ll start trying soon. In six months. Then it was another six.

  Then a year.

  The timing needed to be perfect, according to him. And that meant after his career was firmly on track, rolling along in the ideal groove. After he landed a cable or network job and could cut his ties with the local affiliate crap Ned felt was so beneath him.

  Her ex-husband had been a local news producer on WBBK in San Francisco, and he was good at his job. Damned good. Under his direction, the nightly news ratings had climbed from third place to number one in just under a year. But Ned had wanted more, a whole lot more. He wanted to become executive producer of a cable or network news show, one that was big and important and would get national attention—and that would thrust him into the big time.

  With the big budgets, he’d told Sophie, pacing across the bamboo floor of their Potrero Hill condo, wound up the way he used to get before a final exam in college. Not to mention big players, big media attention—and big money.

  Sophie wasn’t sure exactly when the cute, brown-haired guy with the serious eyes and a cleft in his chin, with the perfect manners and a double major in journalism and business, the guy she’d studied with in the library, gobbled pizza with at Dewey’s, lived with in a tiny studio apartment off campus their senior year, and married ten months later, had morphed into a man with tunnel vision—burrowing straight ahead toward his career goals and forgetting the life and family and home he’d promised to build together with her.

  Maybe it was sometime after her own small bakery business, Sweet Sensations, had taken off, becoming as popular as her cinnamon buns, which flew off the shelves every morning and were gone by noon.

  Sophie had gradually expanded the offerings in her shop beyond baked goods and coffees. She’d added a couple of soups and a handful of sandwiches and several unique gourmet salads to the menu, and eventually, at the suggestion of her friend Rosa, she’d begun taking on some catering jobs.

  Somehow, over the next few years, the orders ratcheted up until she had to add staff and take out a loan for more equipment and supplies.

  Sophie Sinclair’s Sweet Sensations soon earned a designation as one of San Francisco’s top three go-to caterers for upscale corporate events. Her business had grown beyond her most optimistic daydreams. Written up in local gourmet magazines, in newspaper food columns and online reviews, Sweet Sensations had flourished, and the clients had poured in.

  But all along, Sophie had been prepared to hire managers and as much staff as were needed to take over, just as soon as she and Ned got pregnant.

  She’d been craving a baby ever since she turned twenty-five. Day after day, she’d found herself smiling at every infant and toddler she encountered at the grocery store or the movies, or being swung by the hands by his or her parents down the street, and the ache of wanting a child of her own filled her with a pang that was almost physical.

  But things hadn’t gone the way she’d hoped. They’d originally planned to start trying for a family early in their marriage, but Ned had changed his mind, persuading her that they should get more established in their careers first. So they’d put it off.

  By Sophie’s twenty-eighth birthday, her biological clock was in full racing mode, turning her yearning for a child into a longing that reached into the deepest parts of her heart.

  But by then, Ned’s head—and a lot more of him than that, Sophie reflected bitterly—was fixated elsewhere.

  Cassandra Reynard, to be exact.

  The vice-president of the cable network that was tops on his list, and that had been considering hiring him for months, was carrying Ned’s child. The baby Sophie had longed for.

  And to top it off, Ned was enough of a bastard to blame her for the destruction of their marriage.

  “You caused this, Sophie,” he’d had the nerve to tell her on the phone two weeks after she accompanied a pregnant friend to the obstetrician, only to find her own husband seated in the waiting room, holding hands with another woman.

  Cassandra Reynard, a red-haired, Julia Roberts lookalike, had still been nauseous at the beginning of her second trimester.

  “All you could think about was what you needed—a baby. You couldn’t let u
p on the pressure, Sophie. You didn’t give a damn about my needs, my goals. Just because your stupid bakery took off like a firecracker, you thought it should be easy for me too. You have no idea what I’ve been going through to give us a shot at the life we wanted—”

  “I definitely know what you’ve been going through, Ned.”

  “Don’t—”

  “Sleeping your way to the top must be terribly hard work. Pure torture.”

  “I was doing this for us, Sophie. Things just got out of control. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”

  “Is that what you call it?”

  “Sophie, look, I gotta go. Cassandra’s beeping in, I’ll get back to you.”

  Her hands were shaking so much as she punched off her cell that she dropped the phone on the floor.

  For a moment, she’d struggled to fight back her sobs, then had given in to them and let the tears burst from her. She’d snatched up her leather notebook and a pen as tears streamed down her cheeks, and had sat down to scribble an addition to her list.

  Imagine Ned as a football. In the center of the stadium. And it’s kickoff time at the Super Bowl.

  A sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob escaped her throat. A counselor at a group divorce session she’d attended at the library a few days before had suggested the participants keep a list of thoughts that made them feel good—or bad—so they could get in touch with their inner selves as a way to relieve stress and deal with anger toward their former spouses.

  “How’s that for being in touch?” Sophie had wiped the tears with the back of her hand and shakily stuffed the notebook into her tote bag.

  She wasn’t sure how, but somehow she’d held it together through the next few months. Packing up the condo, listing it with a Realtor, meeting with lawyers.

  Yesterday, she’d signed her name to a contract officially selling Sweet Sensations to the Cramer Restaurant Group, and faxed it, and her divorce agreement, back to her attorneys.

  Then she’d rolled her luggage into the hall and closed the door forever on the chic San Francisco condo where her marriage had begun—and where it had ended.

  Catching Ned with Cassandra had shaken her out of the dream that they could somehow save their marriage and have the life she’d thought they’d been building. She’d been fooling herself for much too long, ignoring the truth.

  That was over now.

  Grabbing an old comfortable hoodie, Sophie hurried into the hall and down the old stairs. Softly, so as not to wake her mother, she eased open the front door and stepped out into the Montana night.

  The gentle movement of the porch swing did little to soothe her. Pushing the swing with her foot, she breathed in the chilly late-summer air sweeping down from the mountains and forced herself to focus on right now. The sweet tinkling of the wind chimes, the sage-scented breeze. There were insect sounds and mysterious animal scurryings coming from the darkness surrounding the cottonwoods, and a hawk flew high in the night.

  Gradually, she felt the tension in her shoulders ease. She got lost in the beauty of the dark sky and wisp of moon, in the wink of stars above.

  But the familiar gliding motion of the swing soon stirred more memories.

  All of the times she’d sat out here doing homework, struggling to complete extra credit in Geometry so she could eke out more than a D from Mr. Hartigan, the geometry teacher from hell.

  Whispering secrets to Lissie and Mia on the phone. And, when she was even younger—eleven and twelve—curled on this swing, foolishly daydreaming about Lissie’s oldest brother.

  Rafe.

  A faint grimace touched her lips at the memory of Rafe Tanner. She’d never looked twice at Lissie’s other brothers, Jake or Travis, even though both of them were closer to her age and as handsome in their own right as Rafe. But Rafe was seventeen when she was twelve—and not only impossibly older and out of her league, but wildly sexy. At seventeen, he was already six foot three. Lean, dark, and reckless. With eyes so dark a blue they reminded Sophie of a wild indigo sea.

  And like a wild sea, the heartthrob of Lonesome Way High had definitely seemed more than a little bit dangerous.

  There wasn’t a football he couldn’t catch, a horse he couldn’t tame, or a girl he couldn’t get.

  But he was far too mature and cool for skinny, gawky twelve-year-old Sophie. Still, she’d barely been able to speak whenever she was over at Lissie’s house and Rafe came barreling through the kitchen door.

  Of course, that was all before her last encounter with him—that humiliating moment on a hot August day when she was fifteen. An immature and impulsive fifteen—who’d made a complete idiot of herself in Rafe’s beat-up old truck.

  A rush of mortification still swept her whenever she thought about it. Fortunately, she didn’t think about it much. And she hadn’t laid eyes on Rafe Tanner since.

  Sophie couldn’t even begin to picture him as a grown-up. She leaned back against the swing, shaking her head wryly in the darkness just as, out of the blue, a cell phone chirruped.

  The sound wafted down from one floor above. Her mother’s bedroom. The window must be open. But, who’s calling this late?

  Worried that something might have happened to Gran, her feet suddenly hit the porch and she stopped swinging. She was about to rush inside when she heard her mother’s voice, calm and faint above the wind.

  “No, no, I haven’t told her yet.”

  Then, surprisingly, what sounded to Sophie like soft laughter. “Yes, we had a nice dinner. Everything’s fine. She’s going to be just fine. I didn’t have an opportunity to mention anything to her. . . .” A sudden gust of wind drowned the next words. Then: “I know, but there’s no rush. . . .”

  Uncomfortable, Sophie pushed off the swing and slipped inside. She didn’t want to eavesdrop. But as she hurried up the varnished stairs, she wondered about what she’d heard.

  Had that been Gran on the phone? Or Wes? Or one of her mother’s friends? And what didn’t her mother have the opportunity to mention to her yet?

  They’d spent the entire evening together, and she could have brought up anything on her mind while they were clearing the table, tidying up the kitchen, and having coffee in the living room for almost an hour before Diana invited her out to the old barn—which was now her mother’s workroom—to show Sophie her latest project.

  While Sophie was growing up, most of her friends’ mothers had hobbies like reading, knitting, or gardening, but for as long as Sophie could remember, her mother had made things. All sorts of things. Beaded jewelry, fabric purses, decoupage frames and mirrors, scented soaps, and potpourri.

  Now though, Diana had thrown herself into crafting wind chimes.

  The one tinkling from a hook on the porch was one of her newest creations—a pretty, delicate thing made of dangling copper tubing and nuggets of stained glass, shells, and colored beads.

  There were a half dozen others on her worktable, some constructed of sleek metal tubes, others of wood. With pride, her mother had shown Sophie the finished pieces, each one unique. She’d explained that she planned to sell them at the upcoming fund-raiser for the Lonesome Way Public Library, which was badly in need of renovation.

  But she hadn’t mentioned anything out of the ordinary during the entire evening—so what was that phone call all about?

  By the time Sophie sank into bed, she was too tired to wonder anymore. Except for bathroom breaks and fastfood runs and five hours’ sleep in a dingy motel outside Salt Lake City last night, she’d driven nonstop almost two days straight from San Francisco to Lonesome Way.

  For the first time in months, the moment her cheek touched the pillow, she sank into sleep.

  Chapter Two

  “Sophie, look at you. It’s not fair—you’re as gorgeous as ever. And I’m . . . a cow.” Lissie Norris laughed as she threw her arms around Sophie’s neck and held her close in the wide paved drive of the colonial house on Old Creek Drive.

  “I’ve missed you, Soph. Your mom said you we
re due in last night. It’s a good thing you called first thing this morning or I’d have come hunting for you.”

  Lissie didn’t look to be in much shape for hunting anything besides a dish of ice cream topped with pickles. Her belly was huge, and she was glowing, her dark hair swept into a ponytail and off her pretty oval face. She wore maternity jeans and a big floaty white lace top, with red sneakers on her feet, and her lilting laugh was just as rich and warm as ever.

  She looked beautiful.

  Sophie hugged her back, taking care not to spill the basket of home-baked muffins she’d brought with her. “When is this little munchkin due to make an appearance? In the next hour?”

  “No such luck. Still seven weeks to go—can you imagine? I’ll be the size of a truck.” Lissie grinned. “Come on in and tell me everything. I can’t believe you brought banana walnut muffins. I’ve been craving them for months. I was going to ask your Gran to make me some, but I couldn’t bring myself to bother her. What did you do, get up at dawn?”

  “Something like that. But I always do anyway.” It was true. Sophie hadn’t slept all the way through a single night since the day she found out about Ned and Cassandra.

  Today it had felt good to wake up early, tiptoe down to the ranch kitchen, and bake. To be alone with the mixing bowls and muffin tins, the sun peeking out over the foothills in a burst of glimmering amber.

  She’d put on a pot of coffee and slipped joyously into the ritual of measuring out flour and sugar and baking soda, of mashing bananas and adding walnuts and cinnamon, milk, an egg, and salt.

  She’d had precious little chance to do much baking these past few years, even though it was her passion for baking—thanks to Gran—that had inspired Sweet Sensations in the first place. But the business had grown so much, so quickly, it had become just that—a business. Work.

  Sophie had found herself so consumed with the need to hire more staff, her time so eaten up meeting with managers and accountants and suppliers and corporate clients that she no longer had time to do any hands-on baking in her own company’s kitchens. She hadn’t baked so much as a coffee cake in months, much less anything fancy like her lemon mascarpone layer cake, or pumpkin orange cheesecake with sugar-dreams frosting.