He found his smile and gestured toward the main house. “Time for grub, everyone!”
A few teens murmured their pleasure; others kept their hollow expressions as they filed out of the barn and toward the house like a chain gang. Max fought a grin. The campers always started out the same, and with God’s grace, usually ended with an 180-degree change. Hopefully this session wouldn’t be an exception. It just took faith, perseverance—and a huge dose of patience.
He ended up at the back of the line, Luke in the lead, with Cody lagging in the middle. The humid Louisiana wind ruffled Max’s hair and loosened his sweaty shirt from his back. Late October still boasted afternoon temps in the seventies, though the nights and mornings were downright chilly. It was the perfect time of year for a camp—the summer sessions made everyone grumpy, and the ice storm that hit last January had holed them up inside for far too long. This would be the last session he offered until next year. He needed a break for the holidays, though he usually just crashed Brady and Caley’s Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations.
A thought stirred. Had Emma ever come home for the holidays? Or her father’s funeral, for that matter? Max had been on edge for the entire week after reading the obituary in the newspaper, half afraid and half hoping he’d bump into her in town.
He never did.
As if she could sense his thoughts, Emma glanced at him over her shoulder, then hung back until she fell in step beside him. He fought his surprise and hoped his shock didn’t register on his face.
“I know this is weird—us showing up like this.” She tucked her hair behind her ears, the familiar gesture from his memories strangely comforting. Except it made him want to do it, too, so he looped his thumbs in his belt loops. “When we got the assignment, I didn’t know—I mean, I didn’t realize that you were...” Her voice trailed off.
“Not weird. Surprising, definitely.” He kept his gaze straight ahead as the campers neared the main house, watching as Luke instructed them to wipe their shoes on the mat before going inside. Sort of pointless on a ranch, but Nicole insisted, so Luke had picked up the habit. “One of the other counselors handles the paperwork, so I only ever saw Cody’s name. Didn’t have a chance to put two and two together.”
Her expression paled, and he wondered what he had said. But she pressed on before he could ask. “Cody is a good kid. He just...” She bit her lip, making him glance away again. She always did that, and it’d always been his undoing. Did she have any idea the effect that lingered after all this time? Did she feel it, too?
It didn’t matter. That was a different lifetime, and clearly, they both had other priorities right now.
“He just what?”
She lowered her voice as they neared the cabin. “He just needs some time. Got caught up in the wrong crowd and made some mistakes. I think we caught him early.”
“We?” The word blurted from his lips before he could censor. A boyfriend? Cody’s dad? Was he still in the picture?
Her expression tightened. “Cody’s judge and I.”
Ah. Not a boyfriend. He didn’t want to acknowledge the relief he felt creeping through his stomach.
He held the screen door open for her to enter behind the stream of teens, but she resisted, stepping in front of him so her back was turned to the rest of the crowd. “Just so you know, I’m taking a leave of absence from work and staying at my mom’s while Cody is here. I wanted to be nearby—just in case.”
Max frowned. Just in case what? She changed her mind about the camp? Or was she that worried about Cody making it through the program? So many questions. Yet only one escaped his mouth. “What do you do?” It’d been years since he’d looked her up on the internet, at the start of the social media hype, but her pages were all set to private. Not surprising. Even less surprising—he didn’t have any of those pages for himself.
She shot him a look he couldn’t quite interpret, her voice lowering to a near whisper. “I’m a child psychologist in Dallas.”
He almost snorted. Child psychologist. And yet Cody... He didn’t have to state the obvious. If Emma was anything like he’d remembered, she’d probably beaten herself up about that enough. She was good at emotional pummeling.
Just ask his heart.
* * *
Max Ringgold had done well for himself. Emma almost didn’t even recognize the muscular, smiling cowboy that had greeted her and Cody on the front porch and now sat across from her at the dinner table. Hard to reconcile this Max with the one she’d known years ago, as a naive teenager about to head for college. That’d been a daredevil, moody, flirty Max. This was a successful Max. A contented, living-for-a-purpose, fulfilled Max.
Scared her to death.
The shock that had racked her body when he lifted that hat brim earlier had almost knocked her in the dirt. How did someone like Max come to lead a camp for troubled teens? He was a troubled teen. Apparently he was drawing water from the “been there, done that” well. Had he really transformed so completely? It seemed that way.
Yet for all his success, there was something in his eyes when he looked at her that didn’t seem all that complete.
She knew the feeling.
She winced as Cody stabbed at the green beans on his plate with more force than necessary. The campers and parents were sharing dinner together in the main house before the adults left for the night. During their tour, she’d seen a large working kitchen with a temporary live-in cook Max affectionately dubbed Mama Jeanie, a dining room with a picnic bench–style, carved wooden table big enough for everyone to eat together, and a bathroom that surprisingly smelled like peaches and cinnamon. Max’s quarters were upstairs, the only part of the house he deemed permanently off-limits.
To the back of the dining hall was a room with a locked door, which Max and the other counselor Luke let everyone peek into briefly—the recreation center. Treadmills, an old-fashioned Pac-Man arcade game, an air hockey table and a large-screen TV with different game systems were just a few of the treats she glimpsed before Max shut the door, explaining the rec room was incentive and a reward for good behavior, only. That is, the kids had to earn it.
Emma liked this setup already, though she could tell by the tight line of Cody’s mouth he didn’t necessarily agree.
She tried to send him a silent warning with her eyes as he continued to scrape his fork against his plate, forming a rhythm he nodded his head to. The dark-haired teen sitting to his right immediately picked up the grunge-band sound, tapping his knife against the side of his half-empty water glass and stomping his foot under the table. An older teen girl with blond curls snorted and rolled her eyes at them.
“Cody.”
He ignored her, as usual, and the parents continued to eat as if nothing had changed, as if their ears weren’t suffering from the high-pitched screeching sounds. Maybe that was part of why their kids were there in the first place. Did their efforts to be noticed always go ignored? Not acknowledging cries for attention wasn’t always the best course of action. They weren’t innocent toddlers playing the drop-the-spoon-from-the-highchair game. They were miniature adults who needed positive reinforcement—and consequences for negative behavior.
Well, these parents might think ignorance was bliss, but she wasn’t that kind of mom. “Hey!”
She looked over in surprise as her firm voice mixed with Max’s gruffer tone. They’d spoken at the same time. He glanced at her, amusement flickering in his caramel-colored eyes, then back to the kids.
“All right. That’s enough.” His deep voice left no room for argument, and if that hadn’t been enough, the I-mean-business glare he turned on them would have been. He was establishing his authority from the beginning,