Christine Rimmer - A Hero for Sophie Jones Read online

  "But … you've changed. If you were like that, you're not like that anymore."

  "Sophie. You are impossible. Not only an innocent, but a romantic, as well. I'm the same man I always was. And whatever this thing is between us, it couldn't last. Frankly, as a general rule, innocence bores me. And romance, as far as I'm concerned, is for starry-eyed fools."

  Sophie stared up at him. She yearned to keep arguing with him, keep on defending him.

  But it was painfully clear he didn't want to be defended.

  And her doubts kept crowding in, reminding her that he had never once said he loved her, though she'd declared her own love repeatedly. That he really had lied to her from the very first.

  Five whole days. That was the simple truth. Five whole days in which he had constantly misled her, in which he hadn't uttered a single word about his real aim in coming to the Mountain Star.

  Sin could see those doubts in her eyes. He understood that he had lost her—and knew that it was no more than he deserved. "Listen," he heard himself say. "I have a deal for you."

  Sophie closed her eyes. He could see it was all too much for her. She needed time to absorb what he'd told her, time to figure out what to do.

  He gave her no time. "Sophie, look at me."

  She opened her eyes. He had never seen her look so weary. "What deal?"

  "You stay current on your lease and things will go on here just as they have been. You can pass out free lunches for the next decade—and more. I'll see to it." The words came out of his mouth without him even knowing he would say them. But once they were out, he knew he would abide by them. "Goodbye, Sophie."

  He turned on his heel and headed for the door. Behind him, he heard her cry out softly, "Wait…"

  He paused, fool that he was, and turned around again. She had risen to her feet.

  She took a step toward him. "Tonight. We were going to talk tonight. Would you have told me all this then?"

  The fool inside him sang out, Yes! Everything. I meant to tell it all.

  Sin ordered the fool to silence, and asked coldly, "What does it matter?"

  "I … it would be something."

  "Innocent," he said, infusing the word with all the considerable cynicism at his command. "That's what you are."

  "Please. I just want to know. Did you plan to tell me tonight?"

  He hesitated on the verge of the truth, but finally answered, "No." Another lie. The kindest one, really.

  After all, he had planned to get rid of her. And then, once he'd met her, over and over he had planned to tell her the truth. He had never done either. So what did his intentions really mean in the end?

  Nothing. Nothing at all.

  She caught her lower lip between her teeth. "Oh." Her whole sweet body seemed to droop. "I see."

  He turned again. And went through the curtain, the desperate fool inside him hoping against hope that she'd call him back once more.

  But she said nothing. And so he kept on walking, across the plank floor of her makeshift lobby and out the open barn doors.

  Back where he'd left her, Sophie stood listening. She heard Sin's footsteps retreating. And then she heard nothing except the birds singing outside, and that pigeon she could never get rid of, suddenly taking flight up there in the rafters over her head.

  She remembered the projector.

  She'd been trying to fix it.

  She turned and went to the ladder, started to climb. Halfway up, she stopped. She wanted to be outside. She needed to be outside. The projector would just have to wait.

  Carefully, she descended. She felt so … slow suddenly. Like someone trying to walk through deep water. Or someone very old and frail.

  Outside, the sun shone down and a gentle breeze stirred the pines, making them whisper and sigh to each other, a sound she'd always loved, a sound that had always created a sensation of lightness inside her.

  Now she didn't feel light. She felt heavy. Numb.

  She walked under the rows of maples, past the stables. Skirting the lawns of the main house, she moved into the shadows of the oak grove, passing through it and then out—across the open pasture, and down to the creek. To the special place. Their special place, hers and Sinclair's. Sin.

  He had told her to call him Sin.

  "I don't know you," he'd said that first night.

  "You know me," she had replied. And he had. He had known so much about her. He had paid to learn about her; he'd had her followed for six weeks. Someone had been watching her. Some detective, keeping tabs on her, recording all the details of her life.

  Sophie shivered at the thought. She sat on that big dark rock that stuck out into the stream—the rock on which he had kissed her, where she had pleaded with him to come to her bed—and she shivered through her numbness.

  "You know me," she had told him.

  And he had.

  It was she who had not known him. And that woman. That awful, cold woman: Willa Tweed.

  Sin had said he didn't love that woman. Yet he had once meant to marry her. They must have shared something together—desire, perhaps. No doubt Sin must have wanted Willa Tweed once.

  Just as he had wanted Sophie.

  Sophie rubbed her hands down her shivery arms. Romantic, he had called her. As if it were an insult. And an innocent.

  Well, maybe she was. An innocent romantic.

  But surely, after what had happened today, she'd never be quite so naive or sentimental again.

  She'd been right to let him go, she was sure of it. Because he'd been right. In the end, they were much too different from each other. It couldn't have lasted.

  She understood that now.

  He had said she could keep the Mountain Star.

  Could she really believe that?

  Time would tell. She'd go on as she always had. And if he came back with his offer to buy out her lease, well, she'd deal with that when the time came. At least now she understood completely what would happen if she refused.

  Sophie lay back on the rock. It was a hard bed, but she didn't expect comfort right then. She closed her eyes, listened to the water rushing, the birds singing their midday songs, and wished she could just stay numb forever.

  Because she had a terrible feeling that when the numbness passed, the pain of her heart breaking would be impossible to bear.

  * * *

  Chapter 11

  « ^ »

  Her arms full of last night's sheets, Sophie descended the back stairs. She went straight to the pantry area, which also did duty as a laundry room. She set the sheets on the dryer, put detergent in the washer, and then loaded the sheets in on top. She started the cycle and closed the lid.

  Upstairs, Midge was supposed to be making up the last of the beds. Sophie knew she ought to trudge back up there and make certain that Midge kept on task. So far that morning, the maid had been utterly useless.

  It was a matter of love over duty. Last night, Midge's boyfriend had finally proposed and Midge had accepted. So today, the maid had her mind on wedding announcements and not on getting the beds made.

  Sophie started for the stairs again, then stopped when she got to the base of them. She looked up the narrow, dim stairwell—and remembered.

  That first night. Sinclair so grim and distracted as she showed him the lower floor. And then, on those very stairs, grabbing for her, burying his face in her hair. And herself, holding on, promising him that it would be all right…

  Sophie closed her eyes in a vain attempt to block out the memory. She turned from the stairwell. Midge was happy. Happiness was rare enough in life. If the beds at the Mountain Star didn't get made until later than usual today, it wouldn't be the end of the world.

  Really, Sophie knew she ought to go back over to her office in the spare room of the guest house. She ought to boot up her trusty old Macintosh and balance the accounts.

  She ought to. And she would. In a few minutes.

  She wandered toward the kitchen. Myra was making her famous blackberry jam tod
ay. The smell of the cooking berries hung sweet and heavy in the air. Sophie followed that late-summer scent.

  When she reached the doorway, she saw Myra over at the stove, stirring a big, steaming kettle. Caleb stood beside her.

  "What's wrong with her?" Caleb spoke quietly—a man who didn't want to be overheard. "She hasn't been herself for three or four days now."

  Myra went on stirring. "Since he stopped coming round—have you noticed?"

  "I noticed." Now Caleb sounded grim. "He's run out on her, hasn't he?"

  "She's not talking."

  "I'd like to talk to him."

  Sophie spoke up then, her tone falsely bright. "Please, don't even think about it."

  Both of her employees whipped around. "Sophie B.," they muttered in unison. She would have smiled at their guilty expressions—if she'd been in a smiling mood.

  "We were just…" Myra hesitated, then finished rather lamely, "…worried about you."

  "Don't be. I'm fine."

  Caleb jumped in. "That's not true. We all know it's not. You drag around here lookin' miserable. We just want to help."

  Sophie waved a hand in front of her face. "There's nothing you can do. Honestly. I will be fine. In a while."

  Caleb fisted both big hands. "Just give me that bastard's phone number. It's all I want."

  "Caleb, stop it."

  "You let me at him."

  "Caleb. Listen. It's nothing you can do anything about. Leave it alone."

  Myra laid her freckled hand on Caleb's arm. "She's right. It's not for you to settle."

  Caleb muttered something truculent, pulled out from under Myra's steadying grip and stalked out. Myra turned back to her cooking blackberries. Sophie dared to come forward, into the room.

  "Caleb only wants to make things right," Myra said carefully.

  "I know. But there really is nothing he can do."

  "He knows that, too. But he doesn't like it one bit." The cook tapped the spoon on the edge of the pot. "And neither do I."

  "I will be all right." Sophie uttered the words way too grimly.

  "Sure you will." Myra shot her a determined smile, then gestured toward the big table in the center of the room. "Now, bring me that tray of sterilized Mason jars."

  The days passed. Sophie went through all the motions that equaled her life. But the joy, the pleasure, seemed leached from it all. Her world had a dullness to it now. It wasn't the way she'd expected to feel. She kept waiting for the real pain of loss to begin, for her heart to break—or else to feel better. Neither seemed to happen. One bleak day passed like the one before it.

  Sinclair never tried to contact her. She mailed off the lease payment. And by the time Labor Day had come and gone, she started to believe he must have meant what he said: if she paid her lease on time, she could keep the Mountain Star.

  That realization should have helped, shouldn't it? But somehow, it didn't. Except to make her feel angry beneath the dullness.

  As if he had bested her somehow. Outdone her in goodness, when he was the one who was supposed to be bad.

  Sometimes, at night, she would wake from sensual dreams of him. She would look out the window at the star-thick Sierra sky, wishing he was there beside her, to caress and kiss her, to ease the ache of wanting him.

  She almost hated him then, for the way her own body betrayed her. She wanted to forget him, to stop remembering, stop yearning.

  To reclaim her life again, the way it used to be, before she had ever laid eyes on him. To return to the time of her own innocence—yes, that was it. To the time when she trusted without question, when she gave without thought of the price it might cost her somewhere down the line.

  Going through the motions. Yes, that was her life now. She still did the things she believed in: the campground remained open; Myra continued to give away food they probably should have saved for the paying customers. Midge quit and Sophie immediately hired someone even more hopeless, a four-months' pregnant, unmarried nineteen-year-old named Bethy, whose boyfriend had recently taken off for parts unknown.

  Bethy was plagued by continuing morning sickness, which seemed to strike about an hour into her shift. Then she'd have to sit down and chew soda crackers—or simply head home to the house she shared with an older sister and the sister's family. That would leave Sophie making beds, washing sheets, sweeping floors—and resenting it mightily.

  Sophie knew that she ought to let Bethy go. And that depressed her further. The girl did need the job. But even Sophie couldn't justify having someone on her limited payroll who never managed to get any work done.

  Worst of all, to Sophie's mind, her theater had stopped giving her pleasure. By the weekend after Labor Day, she was showing the fifth installment in her Randi Wilding Retrospective. It was one of Randi's very best films, Shadowed Heart. The actress played a retarded woman who managed to show a whole town the real meaning of love and sacrifice.

  Sophie had been preparing her introduction to that one for a long time. And then, on Wednesday, September third, Randi Wilding died in a plane crash. The news was all over the papers. It was something Sophie would have cried over once: all that talent and beauty, snuffed out forever. Yet when she heard the news, she felt nothing at all.

  She stayed up late into the night, reworking her introductory speech, trying to put into it all the emotions she couldn't make herself feel.

  When Thursday night came, the theater was packed. Sophie had to use all of her old folding chairs to seat everyone.

  And then, when she got up there in front of them all, her much-rehearsed speech came out sounding utterly flat, totally empty of warmth and compassion. Her audience watched her politely. Some, the ones who visited often, stared with puzzled, slightly worried expressions. In the end, grasping at straws, she threw in a few jokes about the pigeon in the rafters. No one so much as chuckled. She felt only relief when she finally headed for the hayloft to get the darn thing rolling.

  Oggie Jones, whom she hadn't seen since she and Sin visited North Magdalene together, showed up on Friday night. When she sold him his ticket, he asked her how she was doing. She pasted on a smile, and chirped out, "Just fine."

  He leaned toward her, narrowing his eyes. "You don't look so fine. How's that man of yours?"

  A tiny flame of anger licked up inside her. She was getting so tired of having people tell her she didn't look fine, and she didn't need old Oggie Jones asking her about Sin. She did not need that at all.

  "I have no man, thank you." She shoved his change at him. "And, for your information, I meant what I said. I really am fine."

  "Well, pardon me for givin' a damn," the old man growled.

  Tears of confusion and shame stung the back of Sophie's throat. Oh, what was wrong with her, to speak so sharply to dear Uncle Oggie? She wanted to tell him she was sorry, ask him to please forgive her for behaving so badly. But he was already gone, toddling on that manzanita cane of his toward the open barn doors. She turned a quivery smile on her next customer, promising herself that she would smooth things over after the show.

  But then, all through her lifeless introduction, she kept feeling the watchful weight of that beady dark gaze on her. It was nearly as unsettling—though in a totally different way—as the first night Sin had sat in her audience and listened to her opening speech. She had the very unpleasant feeling that Oggie would not let her simply apologize for her rude behavior and be done with it. He was going to bring up the subject of Sin again, she just knew it. And she didn't want to deal with that, not tonight. Not at all.

  At intermission, he made things worse. He hobbled up to the concession stand and ordered exactly what Sin had ordered that first night.

  "Gimme a bowl of popcorn—and maybe some bottled spring water. Yeah, that sounds refreshin', don't you think, gal?"

  She gaped at him. Oggie never bought anything at intermission but coffee, light and sweet.

  He let out one of those cackling laughs of his. She'd always thought that laugh charming and folk
sy.

  Tonight, it just set her nerves jangling like loose pennies in a rolling jar.

  "Come on, popcorn and bottled water. Snap it up, now."

  She shoveled the popcorn into a bowl and gave him the water. He made a big show of counting out exact change. Then he said, "You know, gal, with this cane and all, I don't believe I can carry both the bowl and the bottle. I think you're gonna have to help me back to my seat."

  There were five other customers waiting behind him. Sophie cast them a rueful glance, half hoping that one of them would either complain—or volunteer to help dear old Uncle Oggie themselves. But this was the Mountain Star, so they all smiled in tolerant understanding.

  One of them spoke up. "You go ahead, Sophie B. We can wait."

  Oggie chortled away. "Yeah, they can wait." He flung out a hand, indicating the water and popcorn. "Let's move." He turned and started for the open curtains to the main theater, looking way too happy with himself.

  Sophie was forced to pick up his refreshments and follow in his wake.

  At his seat—on the aisle, thank heaven—he had to make a big event out of laying his cane down just so and settling himself in. Then he winked at her. "Hand 'em over, gal." She passed him the bowl and the bottle of water. "Thank you," he said, nodding his grizzled head like some backwoods potentate. "I surely do appreciate your kindness to an old man." His tiny eyes twinkled merrily.

  She gritted her teeth together and kept on smiling, wishing with all her heart by then that she didn't owe him an apology.

  Shadowed Heart was a real ten-hankie tearfest. By the time the final credits rolled, all the women were sobbing and the men kept surreptitiously swiping at their eyes. Sophie stood by the door as she always did, saying her farewells—farewells that had become a bit perfunctory of late.

  Her guests lined up, still dabbing at stray tears. All except Oggie Jones. He stumped right over to the concession counter, where he made a major production of leaning lazily, looking like a doddery imitation of Sin on that first night.