You Belong to Me Read online

  “We’re going to monitor Nate’s pulse and blood pressure for a few minutes. My feeling is that the antihistamine is going to work just fine. But everything you told me about his history with bee stings leads me to believe that he has a cumulative allergic reaction going on here. I’m going to give you a prescription for an anaphylaxis emergency kit. What the kit contains is a shot, a single dose of epinephrine. Nate is probably too young to use it on himself, but I still want to include him. I want both of you to know how it’s done and what symptoms we need to be watching for, just in case he gets stung another time.”

  Serena concentrated through the whole conversation and demonstration. But a half hour later, as she drove home with Nate curled next to her on the truck seat, she couldn’t stop remembering Blake’s sudden change in attitude. Not toward her son. But definitely toward her.

  She turned left on Willow Brook, zoomed through town to get to l7, then aimed west toward the Crazy Mountains. Only a few miles from home, she knew how much the meeting with Blake had affected her. Her heart was still drumming, her palms still slick with anxiety.

  She tried to concentrate on driving. A stretch of brilliant fireweed blossoms blanketed the mountain meadow to her north. The south valley, though, was fenced for pasture. Blue larkspur poked up around the fence, and the rolling green-brown graze land was sliced by a skinny stream that caught the diamond sunlight every now and then. Cattle grazed, looking half asleep. Someone’s tractor raised plumes of dust from a quarter mile away. Then there was nothing, all signs of traffic and people disappearing when she took the last turn toward home.

  And still her heart was pounding.

  Part of the problem, Serena assured herself, was simply the shock of finding Blake in Whitehorn. She’d never expected to see him again at all.

  Seven years ago, when Blake had left for California, she’d known he’d never planned to return to Montana—and for darn sure, he’d never wanted to practice medicine anywhere near a small town. In all those years they hadn’t seen or spoken to each other. They’d been friends—more than friends—which had made it inappropriate for her to contact him again once she’d heard he was engaged.

  The thing was, though, today he’d initially seemed warmly and honestly happy to see her. Until halfway through the conversation.

  You’re not one to borrow trouble, she reminded herself. He was being businesslike. Doctorlike. He gave all his attention to Nate, which is exactly what he was supposed to do, exactly what you wanted him to do. His behavior never had to mean that something was suddenly wrong…

  But there was, she feared.

  Oh, God, there was.

  “I’m never going back to him, Mom,” Nate suddenly piped up, his voice fretful and groggy.

  “Oh?” Ahead, she could see their place. The yard was an oasis of cool shade. Squirrels scampered between the horse chestnut trees lining the driveway. Behind the house she could see the stand of paper birch, their trunks so white, their leaves fluttering in the sunlit wind, and curving further back was her pride-and-joy water garden, which, unfortunately, had turned into the pride and joy for deer, raccoon, jackrabbits and every other critter that wanted a cool rest stop from time to time. Whiskey recognized the truck and barked a greeting, but the old red setter was too lazy to get up. One black-and-white-spotted stray kitten was curled up under Whiskey’s paw.

  Animals kept showing up at her doorstep. She couldn’t understand it.

  She turned into the drive, and swiftly cut the engine with a studied look at her son. “If you still feel dizzy, I can carry you in, lovebug. And what’s this, you didn’t like Dr. Blake? I thought you guys were getting on pretty well.”

  “Yeah, at first. But he gave me a shot. Dr. Carey doesn’t give me shots. I’m never going back to him— Quit it, Mom, I can walk. Sheesh.”

  She was willing to let Nate walk into the house under his own steam. But she ran around to his side of the truck and stayed closer than arm’s length, just in case. “Nate, I thought you understood what was happening there. You needed the shot, because you had a serious reaction to the bee sting. Dr. Blake was just doing what any good doctor would have done. If Dr. Carey had been there, she’d have done the same thing.”

  “I don’t care. I’m never going to back to the doctor’s as long as I live. Any doctor. And nobody can make me.”

  It was going to be a long evening, Serena thought dryly. Nate was the most perfect son a mother could have. Priceless, precious and precocious. But when he didn’t feel well—no different than any other male—he liked every female in his vicinity to pay, and preferably to pay big.

  Two more cats pounced when they stepped inside. Nuisance was a white Persian who’d walked in three years before and refused to leave, and George was a scrawny calico who’d had kittens this spring in spite of impossible odds.

  “Are you thirsty, Nate? And how’s the tummy—could you eat anything?”

  “I want to go get the Wild Warriors game.”

  “And we’ll do that, tomorrow. I promise. But I’m not about to take you shopping when you don’t feel well.”

  “I feel fine. And I want Wild Warriors. Why can’t I have it now? Why?” Her son glared at her with blurry eyes, so dizzy he didn’t even know he was swaying. “My arm hurts. And I don’t love you anymore. I did, but now I don’t. I’ll p’bably never love you again. You let that horrible doctor give me a shot.”

  Even in his terrible two’s, Nate had never pulled tantrums on her. His temperament had always been happy, always loving toward animals, always patient and gentle by nature. But when he was sick, nobody or nothing was going to sway him out of being testy.

  Serena ran and kept running. She brought him lemonade—doctored up with a cherry—turned on the VCR to his favorite movie, made mac and cheese because that was sacred food to her son, fetched Whiskey, Nuisance, and two toys from the bedroom that he wanted next to him on the couch.

  Around eight he finally dozed off, and as she carried him into his bedroom, he was snoring little-boy breathy snores, snuggled against her shoulder. It was still daylight. She laid him down, cuddled Brer Rabbit next to his tummy, then soothed the dinosaur sheets around his chin, tucking everything in. Carefully. The alligators could get in unless the covers were tucked just so—which Nate had explained to her many, many times—so the proper kind of tucking-in was a mom job that Serena took very seriously.

  Afterward, she anticipated hurling herself on the couch and crashing in front of a mindless sitcom. Not only was she beat, but the moments after Nate went to sleep were invariably the most peaceful ones in her day.

  Not tonight. Restlessly she prowled from window to window, thinking she wanted a shower and a mug of tea and just some plain old quiet time, yet unable to settle down to doing anything. Except pace.

  Her home had always soothed her—not that anything about the place was fancy. Seven years ago Serena could have found some way to stay in medical school if material riches had mattered to her, but thankfully she’d discovered how much she loved teaching, and her teacher’s salary stretched all she needed it to. The house was an L-shaped ranch. The farthest room in the back was her bedroom, followed by a bath, then Nate’s room, then a third bedroom they used as a study, and then the huge kitchen that took up the seat of the L. Down a few steps from the kitchen was an open living area, with a circular brick fireplace plunked in the middle.

  For so many years Serena had never thought about having Cheyenne blood, yet lately she kept noticing her heritage showing up in so many unconscious ways. She’d chosen cinnamon and vanilla colors, clay floors, lots of light, lots of plants. The deck outside her bedroom doors was where she and Nate fed critters and puttered and grew things. Their kitchen table was a long pine slab where they rarely had room to eat, because—like today—they were building volcanoes and crystal gardens and waiting for the latest shaving-cream pictures to dry.

  Absently Serena tugged off the band that held her braid together and started finger-threading the
long strands loose. Her hair reached almost to her waist. An inappropriate length for a woman her age, she thought, but she was too blasted vain to cut it. During the day she always pinned or braided it, anyway. It was just now, the end of the day, when she let it loose. She fetched a brush and started working it through as, from the west porch, she watched the sun start to set.

  She remembered when her parents died. She’d been almost four. One morning her mom and dad were there, everything to her, and that afternoon a grandparent-aged white couple—strangers—had come to pick up her and her two older brothers. Over the years folks had asked her if it wasn’t confusing, being Cheyenne and being raised white. But it never had been. Not for her. She’d never felt any particular ties to the nearby Native American reservation, yet on the inside she’d always felt content and secure, being Native. Her sensitivity toward nature and the earth, and the spirituality of being that renewed her—those things were all Cheyenne. Yet love was love, and she’d been so deeply and positively loved by her adoptive family that she often thought of herself as white, too. For Serena, there was no contradiction.

  The only negative she felt from her growing-up years was an awareness of how hard her foster family had struggled to support her. She hated being beholden. The home she’d made for Nate, with Nate, reflected all those parts of her. A respect for nature. A love for growing things. A need to possess only those things that she really loved, really used. The chunk of sapphire—native to the Montana mountain country—on the coffee table in front of her was testament to that part of her. She’d never wanted a fancy necklace, only the stone as it was found in nature.

  She picked up the sapphire and plunked it down again. She tried rebrushing her hair, then fitfully tossed the brush down, too. All the things that normally comforted and soothed her weren’t working tonight. The only thing she could think about—and worry about—was Blake Remmington.

  And somehow, when she heard the rap on her door at the first hush of night, she knew who her caller had to be. And her heart leaped—with both fear and anticipation.

  Two

  Blake rapped on Serena’s door a second time, then stepped back and waited. So typical of a Montana summer, the early August night was hot and dry. Unbreathably hot. And parch-your-throat dry. Still, holding the weather responsible for his mood was like blaming a rattlesnake for being temperamental.

  Stay calm, he kept telling himself. But he felt hot, edgy, and strung tighter than a rubber band threatening to snap. This whole year had been one nonstop crisis after another. Three months before, he’d come back to Whitehorn because of a phone call from Garrett Kincaid—a man who should have been a stranger but instead had turned out to be his real grandfather. That was the first emotional bomb. Then came the shock of realizing that the man he’d called “Dad” his entire life was no kin at all. Worse yet was discovering that his real father was Garrett’s son, Larry, a philandering womanizer who’d not only cheated repeatedly on his wife, but left bastards in his wake the way Hansel and Gretel trailed bread-crumbs. A trail that included Blake and his twin brother, Trent.

  Lately Blake felt as if he’d fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole—only this wasn’t Wonderland. For thirty-two years he’d believed certain things about himself and his life, and now he discovered they were all lies. He couldn’t seem to stop feeling blindsided and confused.

  A few weeks back when Carey Hall Kincaid had invited him to join her pediatrics practice, he’d leaped at the idea, thinking that if he stayed in Whitehorn for a while he could glue the pieces of his life back together, figure out where he belonged, get down to the truth.

  But then he’d re-met Serena that afternoon.

  If his life had been blindsided by a few emotional bombs before, they now seemed like nothing. Pip-squeak trouble. Seeing her again had knocked him off his feet.

  He rapped on her front door again, then shifted impatiently on his feet. She was home. She had to be. Her aging red pickup was parked in the drive, her son was sick and it was almost nine o’clock. All the evidence added up—she was here for sure.

  He glanced around, thinking that the place reminded him so much of Serena that it hurt. The house was a far drive from town, chunked down in the middle of nowhere, a private slice of heaven with a rolling, dipping landscape out her back door and a breathtaking view of the Crazy Mountains. When he’d first stepped out of his black Acura, an Irish setter with graying whiskers had immediately loped toward him. A real heroic watchdog, the setter had walked toward Serena’s door and then promptly flopped onto his back for a tummy rub. Now a cat showed up. A mangy calico with a crackly purr and a scarred ear, who refused to quit winding seductively around his legs. He sneezed. Damn cat only rubbed harder.

  Stay cool, he told himself. Stay cool, stay calm. Do the right thing.

  Blake wanted to handle this coming confrontation in the right way, but seeing this place just reminded him of how Serena used to be. A hopeless critter lover. A helpless sunset addict. She was a nature lover from the get-go, the kind of girl who’d run barefoot in dew-drenched grass, lick the rain with her tongue, and was just always happy. Natural. Easy to be with.

  Remembering made it hard to hold on to his tight, edgy, angry mood…and then Serena was suddenly there, standing in the doorway. Taking his breath away. Just looking at her made him even more roiled up and unsettled.

  The lamplight behind her highlighted that exquisite profile, the proud cheekbones, the tender mouth. She’d undone the tidy braid from this afternoon and her hair was now a loose shower of raven-black silk swaying way past her shoulder blades. No man could look at that hair and not want to touch. She’d never said her exact height, but he’d always figured it around five-seven—tall enough yet she was so lithe, so slight, so light on her feet that she could walk up to a deer without making a sound. Blake had seen it happen.

  And those liquid brown eyes of hers had turned him into butter before. Hot butter. When push came to shove, everything about Serena turned him on—and had from the instant he’d laid eyes on her.

  Still, seven years ago, he’d been twenty-five—a boy, really, a man untried in life. He should have long gotten over his adolescent hormonal response to her. Obviously he was wrong. But hell, he seemed to be wrong about everything in his life right now, so what was new?

  “Blake?” She pushed open the screen to let him in. “I heard the knock, but I thought I imagined the sound. I can’t believe it’s you out here. Whiskey, let him by.”

  The Irish setter was not only a complete failure as a watchdog but switched loyalties without a qualm. He ignored Serena’s command and hurled himself in front of Blake’s path, apparently filled with exuberant hope that he’d get his tummy scratched again. Another cat showed up, a hoity-toity white Persian, prancing around as if waiting for him to acknowledge royalty—or risk getting tripped. Even a saint would be hard-pressed to maintain a serious mood, but damn, there was nothing humorous about this visit—or his situation. “I realize I should have called before stopping by, Serena. But I just wanted to be sure that Nate was okay.”

  Almost as quickly as she met his eyes, her gaze shied swiftly away. She scooped up the cat, tried to push Whiskey out of his way, and once the whole group had been herded inside, closed the screen door. “Nate’s much better. Your stopping by is way beyond the call of duty, but I’m glad you did. It’s just good to see you again. I was so worried about Nate this afternoon that there just wasn’t a chance to ask how you were, how life’s been treating you. Listen, could I get you something to drink?”

  “Yeah, if you have something cold and it isn’t too much trouble. Is he asleep?”

  “Yes. In fact, the medicine hit him like a sledgehammer.”

  Again, Blake felt knocked for six. Her easy welcome was just like old times, her natural smile the last thing he’d expected. There seemed no worry in her expression, no hint of guilt.

  “Well, some grogginess is a normal side effect of the medicine. With any luck, he’ll sleep soundly
through the night. But as long as I’m here, I’ll check in on him—if you don’t mind.”

  “Heavens, of course I don’t mind.”

  By the time she’d led him through the house to the boy’s bedroom, Blake figured he’d seen the whole house except for her sleeping area. The inside struck him as just as unsettling as the outside—and for the same reason. It stabbed his nerves how much he remembered about Serena, and how much the place had her personal stamp, from the circular hearth in the living room to the heaped projects in the kitchen to the colors, the coral of clay and bark-browns and splashes of natural turquoise. Most people used coffee tables for books. She used hers for a collection of crusty rocks—sapphires, amethysts, geodes, crystals, garnets. All raw stones, nothing made into jewelry or necessarily of gem quality, but the facets caught the lamplight and made the jewels glow. Plants bloomed in the room wherever there was light, waterfalls of green splashing from every surface. Kids’ toys were liberally strewn around.

  Damn. The whole place reminded him of how comfortable they’d been as friends back in medical school, the dozens of times he’d stopped by just because being with her had always been so easy. Back then her place was cluttered, but always with such strange, interesting stuff, a haven where he could put up his feet and never feel stressed or as if he had to put on the dog.

  Tonight, though, he didn’t want to see or think anything positive about Serena. Still, for a few seconds, that particular problem completely disappeared from his mind. The instant he walked into Nate’s room, he felt an emotional slug direct to his heart.

  Even in the shadowed room, he could make out whale wallpaper, dinosaur sheets and Lego rockets on the dresser. While the living room had a clay-tile floor, she’d carpeted her son’s room with a thick, luxuriously soft rug. And the boy himself… Blake couldn’t see him clearly, but somewhere in all the stuffed animals crowding the bed was hair with a distinctive cowlick and the specific shape of a nose and chin and forehead. Again Blake felt his heart clutch. And then slam.