He glanced around the yard. It looked good. Clean.
He’d taken Ma’s pretty flowered cushions out of plastic in the storage shed and had spruced up her blue wicker chairs on the veranda. Rem’s ancestors had built this two-story home more than a century ago, had built it with brick to last and with gingerbread trim that Rem had repainted white in May.
He’d put a fresh coat of blue paint on the veranda floor and stairs, too.
He’d started on the stable with more white paint, but had only finished the front and the corral side, both of which could be seen from the dining room windows. He still had to paint the far side and the back, but that would come in time.
Gracie lay on the steps like the grand old dame she was, a border collie with too much gray fur among the white and black. She spent a lot of her days sleeping, sometimes in the house, sometimes in the stable.
Two days ago, Rem had planted pansies across the front of the house, in yellow, purple and mauve. What did he know about flowers? If they lasted through the summer, he’d be surprised. They brightened the place, though.
At the rumble of an engine in the driveway, he turned.
The ambulance rode up the long lane, with neither siren nor flashing lights.
Ma. Home at last. Feeling like a kid getting a present, he ran to the steps at the front of the house. He’d missed having her here.
The ambulance swung around in the yard, backed up toward the house and stopped a couple of yards away from him.
The driver jumped out of the vehicle and came around the rear, nodding at Rem, his pressed white shirt almost blue in the sun.
“How is she?” Rem asked.
“Comfortable,” the attendant replied while he opened the door.
“What took so long?”
“Half the staff came out to say goodbye.”
Rem thanked his lucky stars that he lived in a close-knit community. Ma would have loved the attention.
Another attendant jumped down from the patient area and Rem caught his first glimpse of Ma, half sitting in the dark interior. She looked pale, her face immobile, her eyes a little scared.
His chest tightened. Ma, I’ll take care of you. You’ll never go to a home to be taken care of by strangers. I promise.
The attendants lifted the stretcher out of the ambulance and released the legs. Rem stepped close. He took Ma’s hand in his, but it was the paralyzed one, so she might not have felt his touch.
Her eyes flickered to the pansies raising their colorful faces toward the sun and a weak smile cast the ghost of movement across her face then disappeared. She blinked.
On the veranda, she dropped her good arm over the side of the gurney and Gracie stood and licked her fingers. Her glance at the cushions on the chairs brought forth another smile. Rem was glad he’d worked so hard.
After the attendants wheeled her through the front door, Rem ran ahead to open the dining room doors. “In here.”
He’d rented a comfortable hospital bed and had crowded Ma’s treasured dining room set into the closed-in porch at the back of the house. For the past two nights, he’d worked until three in the morning to make Ma a comfortable new bedroom.
After they transferred her from the stretcher to the bed, Rem walked the paramedics out and shook their hands.
“Thanks, guys. I appreciate you taking care of her.”
Any minute now, one of the caregivers should be showing up.
Sure enough, a small blue sedan rode up the lane just moments after the ambulance drove off. Ah, here she was, the first nurse.
Sara stepped out of the car, spit polished and as crisp as a new dollar bill in a white shirt and navy skirt. She pulled a bag out of the backseat and turned toward the house.
Sara? What was she doing here?
She approached the steps then stopped before climbing them.
“Hello, Rem,” she said, her voice as cool as her gray eyes.
His expression flattened. “What are you doing here?” Even to his own ears, he sounded unhappy. “Checking up on me?”
“I’m here to work with Nell. I’m with TLC Outreach.”
“No way. You’re a nurse at the hospital.”
“I have two jobs.”
“What do you need two jobs for?”
“I have student debts to pay down.”
Rem knew Sara well. Again, as with her reasons for returning to Ordinary to live, he got the feeling he wasn’t getting the whole story.
“Why didn’t they send someone else?”
“I volunteered.”
“Why?”
“Rem. It’s Nell. How could I not want to help her?”
Yeah, that part made sense, but, honest to God, this complicated things.
“There will be two of us caring for Nell,” Sara explained. “You’ll have one full-time nurse, and I’ll be working part-time.”
“We’ll see.”
Free of yesterday’s emotional overload, Rem got his first good look at Sara.
She never changed. The conservative clothing did nothing to brighten a dull landscape. With her brown hair pulled back hard enough to draw tears, she looked all business. Would a little lipstick hurt?
Her legs, though… Her legs were her best feature, not long, but damned perfect. Her slightly pigeon-toed walk, that minor vulnerability in a capable woman, had always charmed him, as had her hint of an overbite.
She watched him with a solemn gaze in that unremarkable face. “I’ll try to stay out of your way.”
She climbed the steps to the veranda and gestured with her head toward the hallway. “May I see her?”
Rem stepped aside and she brushed past him.
“Ma’s in the dining room,” Rem said. “You remember where it is?”
She nodded. Of course she would. She’d been here last summer to nurse him after the stabbing at Chester’s. That had been a rough time. He hadn’t forgotten a thing that had happened between them in those days while he recovered.
On the day that Timm had driven him home from the hospital, Sara had arrived to take care of him. After Timm had left, Sara had crawled into bed beside Rem and had held him while he’d slept.
In those days that Sara had nursed him, Finn had stayed with her mom. Rem’s own mother hadn’t said a word about Sara being on the Caldwell ranch and spending so much time in Rem’s room. He suspected that Nell would have loved for them to have married. Maybe last summer she’d hoped it was finally going to happen.
Anyway, Rem had needed a caregiver. Ma had already had a stroke and couldn’t have nursed him back to health.
Then there’d been that night a week or so after the stabbing when they’d made love, carefully so he wouldn’t hurt his healing wound. And tenderly, because they’d both known how easily that biker’s knife could have killed him.
Getting close to him had scared her, though, and she’d packed up, had taken Finn and had run away to Bozeman. The woman was a coward.
When Sara passed him to walk into the house, something scented with lily of the valley swirled around her.
She used to smell like sunshine, fresh air and kid sweat. Now she simply smelled feminine.
Just inside