Who are you? Sophie asked silently, gazing down at the sunscreen-slick woman with the bloodred fingernails, the perfectly coiffed golden-brown hair, the too-youthful swimsuit…the pitcher of martinis on the table beside her. Who are you? Because you aren’t my mother anymore. You can’t be my mother.
“Hello, Mother,” Sophie said at last, when Meredith Colton didn’t respond to her presence. “I’m home.”
Meredith raised a hand, removed her sunglasses, then slid her long legs to one side and stood, looking at Sophie with Sophie’s own huge brown eyes. “Well, so you are,” she said, motioning toward the metal cane in Sophie’s left hand. “Is that going to be around for much longer? I mean, really, it’s so…medical. Couldn’t you find something nicer?”
“It’s good to see you, too, Mom,” Sophie said, giving in to her fatigue and sitting down on the matching chaise. She kept her head down, so that the curtain of her hair slid forward, covering her cheek.
“Don’t be snide, Sophie,” Meredith told her, sitting down again herself and taking hold of her martini glass. “Or hasn’t it yet occurred to you that you’re twenty-seven years old? Old enough to move to San Francisco. Old enough to be out on your own, just as you wanted to be. You wanted to be independent, and I let you be independent. But, obviously, for all that independence, you’re still not so grown up that you couldn’t insist that your doting daddy jump up and run when you wanted him.”
Shock made Sophie lift her head, and she watched in horror as Meredith’s eyes widened at the sight of the scar. She raised a hand to her jaw, but it was too late, because her mother had seen everything there was to see.
Meredith’s upper lip curled in distaste. “Not bad? That’s what your father said. The scar wasn’t bad. Doesn’t the man have eyes in his head? Oh, you poor thing. How are you going to manage, being so horribly disfigured like that? And your father says you sent Chet away? That wasn’t smart, Sophie. How do you expect to get another man with that ruined face? I really think you should— Where are you going? Is this how you were raised? How dare you walk away while I’m speaking to you. I’m your mother!”
But Sophie had gotten to her feet as quickly as she could and was already hobbling back toward the house, wondering what on earth had possessed her to come home. Whoever had said it had been right: You can’t go home again.
At least not to Hacienda del Alegria. The House of Joy?
No, not anymore.
River walked back to the stables after watching Joe’s car drive past, seeing Sophie’s form in the passenger seat.
So. She was home. Healing, but not quite mended. And without a diamond on her third finger, left hand.
Not that he was going to do anything about that, could do anything about that.
Besides, it might only be temporary, some sort of emotional fallout from the mugging. Joe had told him how sensitive Sophie was about the cut on her face, how she refused to see that the scar was fading every day, growing less obvious to everyone but her.
If nobody mentioned the scar, made a big deal about it, Sophie would probably soon be able to deal with the thing, put it behind her, look forward to the surgery that would finish the job the doctor had begun and her healthy body had taken from there. After all, her knee was already so good that the J-brace and crutches were gone.
She’d been in physical therapy in San Francisco almost from the beginning, and now that she would soon be putting aside her cane, the therapy could begin in earnest, building up muscles grown weak from disuse.
Sophie was fine. Fine. And she was going to be even better.
River told himself that every night. She was healing. She was back with her family, who would do everything in their power to help her heal. She’d soon be his own laughing, happy, optimistic Sophie again.
Please, God.
River busied himself in the tack room, making up excuse after excuse not to leave the stables, not to head up to the house. See Sophie.
She’d be too busy for him anyway, with everyone else crowding around, hugging her, kissing her, welcoming her back. Why, he might even take dinner out here with the boys rather than go up to the house for the evening meal. That wasn’t so unusual; he did it all the time.
“Coward,” he muttered under his breath as he hung up the bridle he’d just inspected. “What do you think she’s going to do, buddy? Bite your head off?” He lowered his head and sighed. “Ignore you?”
Okay, so now he was finally getting down to it. She might ignore him—or worse, treat him the same as she did her brothers and sister, her foster siblings. Happy to see him, polite, even loving. But not special.
Not the way they’d been, years ago.
He wouldn’t have made it without Sophie, wouldn’t have survived. He knew it, even if she didn’t.
River had come to the ranch a rebellious teenager—alternately hotheaded and morose, a teeming mass of hate and anger and, often, despair. He lashed out at anyone who came near him, tried to help him, although he didn’t realize until many years later that he kept people at arm’s length because he was too afraid to let anyone into his world, for fear they’d leave him.
He’d been born to a white rancher and a Native American mother whom his father had married only because he’d been careless and put a child in her belly, River. His father resented his Native American wife, and Rafe, her son from a previous marriage, but that didn’t mean he kept his hands off her.
River’s earliest memories were of his mother’s love and his father’s undisguised disgust.
And then his mother left him, died in childbirth when he was only six. His new sister, Cheyenne, was taken in by her maternal grandmother, to be raised on reservation land. Rafe, River’s protector, also stayed on the reservation, because their father didn’t want him, couldn’t control him. But not River. Oh, no, he wanted River. He was six years old now. Old enough to “help” eke out a poor living on that small, decrepit excuse for a ranch. Old enough to do a “man’s” work. Rafe, on the other hand, was old enough to talk back, and so he was left behind, considered worthless, too much the savage for his stepfather to have to face every day.
All the love went out of River’s life when his mother died, when his sister and brother had been taken away. His own life was reduced to caring for and avoiding the slaps from a rotten drunk.
School was a place River went when his father was passed out drunk on the couch and couldn’t stop him, saddle him with another chore. It was at school, when River was nine, that one of his teachers had seen the bruises.
Now his father was gone, left at the ranch while River was removed from his not-so-tender care and placed at the Hopechest Ranch, a haven for children from “troubled homes.”
He’d hated it there. Hated the kindness, the caring, the promise that he was safe now, had nothing to worry about anymore. What did those do-gooders know? He was alone, that was what he was. His mother gone, his Native American family unwilling or unable to take him, his father a brutal drunk who could show up at any moment, drag him back to the ranch.
River found some solace with the horses at Hopechest Ranch, a project initiated by Joe Colton, a charitable contribution he believed would help the children who cared for the horses, learned responsibility through that care, and in return were given something to love.
That was how it began. River James, half-breed and teenage menace, and Joe Colton, rich man, senator, and a man stubborn enough to ignore River’s animosity, his rebuffs, and finally take the troubled teen into his own home.
Joe and Meredith tried their best, they really did. So did the other Coltons. But River held out, held himself aloof from them all, ignoring their kindness while spending his days cutting school and hanging out at the stables. Hacienda del Alegria wasn’t exactly a working ranch, but Joe Colton did raise horses, and that was enough for