Mrs. Smithton had been regrettably busy. All of Mack’s things had been moved into the room. The place was thick with flowers and candles, and a ridiculous amount of petals had been strewn about.
“Oh my,” Lana said, her voice nearly a gulp.
“Mrs. Smithton reads too many novels,” Mack said, then wished he’d hadn’t. Just when he thought this couldn’t get more difficult. Lana looked pale. “Lana,” he began, moving toward her to catch her if she fainted.
“You haven’t changed your mind…have you?”
“Lana…I am not the kind of man to…” Land sakes, how to say this? “To take what…what ought only to be…freely given.”
She stilled, her defiance melting into a frailty that took some corner of his heart and ran off with it. “I was afraid once you could…you’d want to…”
Now that was just plain cruel. Of course some part of him wanted. Any man with blood still running in his veins wanted, and she was a beautiful woman.
The irritating, obstinate, distractingly rose-scented widow of his lost friend. He’d better think of something to do, and fast. Out of somewhere in the mists of his jumbled thoughts, he remembered a game his father would play with him when he was sick or in pain. Surely, this was the most absurd use of such a distraction. “How about we talk?”
“Talk?”
“Think of three questions you’ve always wanted to ask me. The hardest ones you can think of. I promise to give you a truthful answer.”
She began pulling off her gloves, eyes scrunched up in thought. Another minute of excruciating silence went by, both of them fidgeting like youngsters. As traces of her usual demeanor returned, she straightened, looked him in the eye and asked, “Are you sorry?”
That was Lana. Always needing to know where she stood, always making sure you knew where you stood with her. Absolutely no mystery with this woman. He gave the question a respectful moment of thought, wanting to word his answer carefully. “No,” he said, sure he meant it. Still, he couldn’t resist adding, “not yet.”
She managed a small laugh at that, and he was glad to see it. Much of the tension had left the room, and he was glad of that, too. It was late—past ten—and the sun was finally starting its descent behind the mountains. He watched her walk to the window, the fading orb attracting her attention the way it had caught his.
“Mack,” she said, her voice soft, “why here? Why in this…”
He knew the term she’d bitten back. She’d used it too many times since Jed’s death. “You were going to say ‘God-forsaken place,’ weren’t you?”
She leaned against the window frame, looking like an oil painting in that fancy dress up against the sunset and curtains. “As a matter of fact, I was.” She sighed. She tilted her face back to him and added, “Mrs. Mack Turner had better not say such things, hmm?”
Mack leaned against the bedpost, suddenly exhausted. “I’ve heard worse. But it isn’t the talk that bothers me so much as the idea. This place is anything but God-forsaken.”
“All those lives. All those people and things lost and broken up on the trail. Jed. Your own brothers, both of them. ‘God-forsaken’ fits, harsh as it is. I just don’t see what you see.”
Mack walked to the window, still keeping a safe distance from her. In the deepening sunset, the mountains fit the “majestic” description so often employed in the pamphlets enticing men up here. He’d used the word himself when convincing Jed, hadn’t he? “They look grand now, from here.”
She made a small grunt. “From here you can’t see all the trash and abandoned equipment and dead horses. Those mountains are still only hungry beasts to me, eager to swallow men up whole.”
Mack took a step closer to her, pointed to the peak he knew was closest to Treasure Creek. Its permanent veil of snow gleamed rose-gold in the sunset. “Not all of it. Parts are still clean. Untouched. A fresh start. That’s what Treasure Creek was—is—for me. A chance to get a fresh start, to build something solid from the ground up. In a place where there isn’t much of that. Remind folks that God didn’t forsake one inch of a place like this.”
She turned away from the window, looking at him with her head cocked analytically to one side. “Why does a man like you need a fresh start? Seems you’ve done…fine so far.”
“Comes a point in a man’s life where he’s made money, he’s made a name for himself, but he wants to know he’s made a difference. Left something better than how he found it.”
Lana’s laugh had a dark edge. “And you couldn’t leave someplace farther south better than how you found it?”
“Sometimes you don’t choose your challenges. Sometimes your challenges choose you.” He suspected he was talking about more than Treasure Creek at the moment.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she said quietly.
“It’s rather easy,” he lied, thinking it would be anything but. “You get the bed, I get the floor and we both smile a lot in the morning.”
Chapter Five
Mack winced as the ornate clock on his mantel struck eleven the next evening. Georgie, as he had done every hour since arriving at his new home, offered eleven loud “bong!”s in reply.
Lana watched Mack clamp his hand over the little gold chimes and roll his eyes. He was doing his level best to be civil when he inquired, “Does he ever sleep?”
Mack’s exasperation made her laugh. She’d had that very thought so many times over the past two months, she’d almost come to believe Georgie was incapable of it. Teena Crow, the Tlingit healing woman, had offered her teas to help, but Lana didn’t trust those strange native concoctions. As if aware the conversation had turned to him, Georgie walked over and poked Mack in the knee. This brought Mack to squat down to the boy’s height and consider Georgie with the narrow-eyed impatience of someone who had their last nerve stomped upon half an hour ago. “It’s bedtime, George,” Mack commanded, pointing up at the clock for emphasis.
“No.”
Mack caught Lana’s eyes over Georgie’s head. Do something about this, his expression silently shouted. “Ah, but it is. Your mama knows it is, too.”
The great Mack Tanner, flummoxed by a toddler. Were she not so bone-tired herself, she’d have found it amusing. Wound up by all the excitement and the new surroundings of Mack’s large cabin, Georgie was about as compliant as a mule. A very cranky, very curious, very irritating little mule. “I do indeed,” Lana said, dropping the socks she’d just managed to wrestle off Georgie’s feet and dragging herself to the chair by the small fire. Sinking into it, she patted her lap several times. “Come up here and…” She’d meant to ask Mack to bring her one of the children’s readers from the stack of books they’d purchased, but the question suddenly raised the issue of what to call Mack now.
“Ugle Ack,” Georgie barked pointing in Mack’s direction.
“Uncle Mack,” Mack replied, sensing not only her unspoken question, but Georgie’s unsolicited pronouncement. Mack was Georgie’s godfather, and Jed had referred to Mack always as “Uncle Mack” to the boy. For months Georgie could only manage “Ack,” which was