She settled carefully into the front and glanced up at Blaze. He, too, was dressed for the funeral, and he really cleaned up good—a term Bertie liked to use. He wore a gray suit that set off his black skin and those pretty, dark eyes…which looked as if he’d been crying.
She gestured to the other seat. “Come on. Let’s get out of here for a while. I’ll even let you steer.”
He glanced back toward the town square, then to the church where they had just said goodbye to Edith’s body for the last time. “I’ve got things to do at the ranch.”
“You’ve always got things to do.” She picked up a paddle. “Just a few minutes, okay? Come on, Blaze. You never get a break, and we both need one. I promise not to keep you long. I need somebody to talk to, and I don’t want to bug Karah Lee right now. She’s freaking about all this.”
“You think I ain’t?”
“Watch your language. Nobody’s going to believe you’ve got the top scores in your class if you talk like that.”
He sank to the narrow seat of the canoe and unwrapped the rope from the post on the dock.
Fawn knew everyone dealt with grief a different way. She stuffed everything deep down, as if she could hide it from herself for good if she could ignore it long enough. Blaze was one of those people who immersed themselves in the moment and got it all out of their systems.
But then, Blaze had grown up with a dad who loved him. His mom had her own problems and hadn’t ever been there for Blaze, but he and his dad had had a good relationship when his dad was alive. His dad had tried hard to be both father and mother to his only child.
Fawn had never experienced that. Instead, she’d had a father who’d run out on the family, a mother who’d married a lecher—Bertie’s word for him—then blamed her own daughter for being raped. Stuffing emotions away was the only way to survive where Fawn came from. She’d stuffed a lot since Great-Grandma June had died.
Fawn paddled slowly as Blaze guided them across the lake toward the far shore. There, five newly built houses with Victorian gingerbread trim nestled into the side of the cliff, surrounded by gold, bronze and yellow mums and hundred-year-old oaks and cedars. Blaze, Fawn knew, loved to paddle past those houses and dream about having a house like that himself, someday.
In Fawn’s opinion, Blaze deserved a mansion five times larger than any of those houses.
“Did you see Austin Barlow at the funeral?” she asked.
Blaze stopped paddling. “You know him?”
“I met him Saturday. He came into the bed and breakfast to apologize to Bertie just before Jill and Noelle came with the news about Edith.”
“You talked to him?”
“He was looking for a place to stay for a couple of weeks. He said he came to apologize to Bertie for things he did. I asked him if he was going to apologize to you.”
She could tell by the sudden, alarming shift in the canoe that Blaze had leaned forward, and she wished she’d been facing him in the boat so she could see his expression.
“You didn’t.”
“Sure I did.” She placed her paddle across the sides of the canoe and carefully raised a leg to turn around, glad her skirt was full. “He treated you like trash—you told me so yourself. And all the time his own son was doing the things he blamed you for.”
“I figure he’s paying enough already, having his only kid locked away. If you aren’t careful, you’re going to dump us both in the lake.”
“Ramsay’s not locked away. He’s in a boys’ ranch up in northern Missouri.” She swung the other leg around and managed to do it gracefully enough that Blaze’s eyes didn’t pop out of his head, and she didn’t plunge them both into the water.
Blaze frowned at her, his thick black eyebrows nearly meeting in the middle over dark eyes. “You eavesdropping again?”
“Not completely. I talked to Austin Barlow myself.” She picked up her paddle.
“Not completely?”
“I was stuck, Blaze. He started talking to Bertie before he knew I was behind the counter, and when he started telling her all the juicy stuff, I couldn’t bring myself to—”
“Yeah, I know. You eavesdropped. That’s not—”
“Anyway,” she said with a hard glare at him, “he said he came back to town to make up for some of the things he did and said when he was here.”
“Could be he’s had a change of heart in the past couple of years. It happens, you know. People change.” There was a catch in his voice as he stared back across the lake toward the bed and breakfast.
Fawn knew he was still grieving over Edith. He’d be this way for days, maybe even weeks. He was just like this when Pearl Cooper was killed in that sawmill accident last year, and he hadn’t even known her well.
Aside from that flaw, though, she didn’t know a better man. At eighteen years of age—a few months older than she—Blaze wasn’t a kid anymore; he was as mature as most adults she knew.
He kept so busy, she didn’t know how he even found time to breathe. She was busy, too, but as Bertie would say, a body had to take some time to just sit every once in a while, or what was the use of living?
“Maybe he’s come back here to live,” Blaze said. “He owns a house in town, and he’s been renting it out. Maybe he’s decided to pick up where he left off before the mess with Ramsay.”
“But why come back here?” Fawn asked. “Everybody knows about Ramsay here. Why not go where no one knows his past?”
Blaze shrugged. “It’s home. Austin was born and raised here. Maybe he’s just decided to come back home.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“It’s not for me to say what he does.”
“I didn’t ask you to say, I asked how you felt.”
He picked up his paddle and started to steer the canoe again. “Stop ‘shrinking’ and stick to wedding plans, or Karah Lee’s going to send you back where you came from.”
“Where are you taking us?” she asked.
“I’ve got chores at the ranch. I’m taking you back to the dock.”
She sighed and stuck her paddle in the water again. “I can help with chores.”
“You told Bertie you’d help feed the family. Don’t let her down.”
“I know I told her that, but all the ladies from the church are coming over. There won’t be room for me.”
“She’ll want you there,” Blaze said. “She’s hurtin’ enough right now.”
Fawn sighed. Good old Blaze, always thinking of his own responsibilities…and hers. “Okay, fine. Dump me at the dock.” She gave him a dark stare. “I guess when you’re a man in demand, you don’t have a lot of time to spend with old friends.”
He chuckled. “You don’t, either. You’re as bad as I am, what with the wedding to plan, and you’ll probably be needed more at the bed and breakfast now that Edith’s not there to help Bertie. And you know, you do still have school work to keep up with.”
“And after the wedding, I might be looking for a new place to stay.”
“Why would that be?”
“No newlywed couple wants to start their married life with a teenaged kid in the house.”
“That what you needed to talk about?”
“Part of it.” She just wasn’t sure she