Her dad was supposed to live to a ripe old age and go on running the school until he was ready to turn it over to someone else himself.
She was supposed to be married. She was supposed to have a big family to bring back and raise in Northbridge so her father could be included, so her father could revel in his role as grandfather. She was supposed to finish her own life here in Northbridge. And she was supposed to do it all with Rob.
But that wasn’t the way things had worked out.
And if there was one thing she’d learned in the last year of having her whole life turned topsy-turvy, it was that she had to deal with whatever came of the latest topsy-turvy turn.
“So deal,” she told herself. But that was easier said than done.
Still, she was determined to manage to the best of her ability.
So she took one more deep breath, blew it out and opened her eyes.
If there was a cleaner gas station bathroom in the country, Clair had never been in it and just the sight of that spotless space made her smile.
Northbridge.
Where else would the station owner’s mother come in to personally scrub the restroom and keep a crocheted doily across the top of the toilet tank?
Clair pushed off the door and after using the pristine facilities, she grabbed the heart-shaped, strawberry-scented soap from a ceramic dish on the edge of the sink to wash her hands. Then she dried them with paper towel taken from a roll held on the wall by a dispenser with two brown bears perched atop either end of the bar.
And all the while she kept thinking, only in Northbridge….
She tossed the used paper towel into a wicker basket, and glanced at herself in the mirror above the sink.
It had been a long drive from Denver, through Wyoming to Montana, and she’d been traveling since dawn. It was now after eight o’clock, and she decided she looked like someone who had been behind the wheel of a car all that time.
Some repair work was in order, she decided.
She grabbed a tissue and blotted her face, paying particular attention to her forehead since she’d just had her very wavy, honey-blond hair cut short—including the bangs that were now barely below her hairline and left most of her brow showing.
With that done, she opened her purse and removed a small makeup bag. After applying a light dusting of blush onto the crests of her high cheekbones and into the hollows below them, she passed the brush lightly along the underside of her jawline.
She was grateful to have the skin and the bone structure she had—neither would put her on the cover of a magazine but at least her complexion had always been clear and between her cheekbones and jawline there was some definition.
She wished her eyelashes were longer though, and reapplied mascara to help give the illusion that they were. And as she did, she was glad to see that the whites around her almost-purple irises weren’t bloodshot as they had been the week before when the latest topsy-turvy turn her life had taken had kept her from sleeping for several nights.
A light coating of lip gloss didn’t alter the natural pink of lips that she also wished were a bit fuller. And for about the hundredth time since she’d had her hair cut, she wondered if it had been wise to go so drastically from shoulder-length to a curly cap that the stylist had proclaimed sporty and cute and so much more au courant than the way she’d been wearing it.
Actually, what she was wondering was what Ben Walker would think of her haircut. But she curbed that thought the minute she realized she was having it. Rob hated short hair and would have had a fit—which had probably influenced her decision to do it. But once she had gone ahead with the new style, it had seemed liberating to do something for herself. She certainly wasn’t going to start fretting over the approval or disapproval of another man.
“Sporty and cute and au courant,” she said, finding that repeating the hairstylist’s words and taking stock of her new look somehow helped bolster her. It also helped remind her that she was her own woman now. Strong enough to have withstood a lot in the past year. Resilient. Capable. Competent. She could take care of herself and whatever else she needed to take care of. So what if things hadn’t turned out the way they were supposed to? She could handle it. She could handle anything.
At least she hoped she could when her stomach did the little lurch it had been doing for the past few weeks, and she remembered that the latest topsy-turvy turn was a big one.
But still, now that she had actually arrived in Northbridge, and had freshened up and reassured herself that she would be okay, she felt better than she had driving into town.
Even if she was back in Northbridge to hand over her father’s school.
Even if she was divorced.
Even if she’d made one of the biggest miscalculations of her entire life when she’d spent the night with Ben Walker in June and became pregnant with his baby…!
The Northbridge School for Boys was just outside of town to the west. When Clair turned off the road onto the drive that led up to it, she stopped the car so she could have a moment to look at the place her father had loved.
The original house was a flat-faced, three-story wooden box painted pale yellow and trimmed in white. The building stood about a quarter of a mile from the road in a circle of elm trees that seemed to protect it.
The house and trees blocked the view of the barn, chicken coop, pigsties and paddocks behind the main building that made the school a working ranch. The small caretaker’s cottage where she and her father had made their own home was also to the rear of the main house and out of sight from the front approach.
Clair stopped between two matching white rail fences that bordered the drive on both sides. Within the confines of those fenced pastures there were horses to her right and dairy cows to her left. The fence gave way to a circular drive, and a lush green lawn carpeted the ground to the flower beds that decorated the space immediately in front of the house.
Those who didn’t know what the place was or didn’t get close enough to read the small brass plaque that announced it was the Northbridge School for Boys would never guess it wasn’t merely the pastoral estate of a gentleman farmer.
But that had suited her father. He’d always said that even though it might be an institutional facility, he wanted it to be homey and welcoming and something the boys would learn to take pride in. And because that wasn’t always a simple task with troubled kids, his tool-box had been at the ready to make repairs—always assisted by whoever had wreaked the damage.
This was the first time Clair had been to the school since her father’s untimely death from a sudden heart attack. She hadn’t been able to face staying there alone when she’d come to the reunion, but she’d planned to at least drive out and have a look at things.
Instead she’d made her abrupt departure from the bed-and-breakfast, from Northbridge—and from Ben Walker—without ever doing that.
But now that she was there she was pleased to see that the place the Realtor had said was beginning to show some signs of neglect over the past year, looked as well tended as it had when her father had been at the helm.
No doubt that was thanks to Ben Walker. The Realtor had told Clair that as soon as the sale had closed he’d begun to work on the place so he could open this month.
He’d also moved in—again, according to the Realtor who had told her that Ben Walker would be living on-site just as she and her father had. But the Realtor had also said that Ben Walker would give up the cottage to Clair while she was there, to spare her the expense of the bed-and-breakfast. During that time, he would stay in the main building.
So there she was.
Inside, Ben Walker was waiting for her.
She