Wild Man Creek (Virgin River #14)(88)

“In a couple of days. After we have dinner at the cabin?”

“Great. I’ll see what I can do to pilfer some of her homegrown stuff to add to the dinner. She’s starting to pull salad out of the ground most nights. I’ll go tell her.”

When Colin walked over to where the women sat on a blanket and talked, Luke turned to Aiden and said. “Big mistake. Big.”

Aiden just smiled. “Me knowing that and you knowing that doesn’t mean a thing. The person who’s going to have to find that out is Colin. And trust me, there’s no telling him.”

“I’m going to have a talk with him,” Luke said.

“Ah, listen, Luke. Let it be. It’s not going to matter. Especially coming from you.”

“The hell!”

Aiden lifted one dark, expressive brow. “You’re the guy who almost let Shelby get away. Don’t act like you know what you’re doing now. If she hadn’t come back from Hawaii and wrestled you to the ground, you’d probably still be one sick, messed-up, half-suicidal son of a bitch. I’m saying let him do what he’s going to do. If you’re going to be there for anyone, consider being there for Jillian. If she cares about him half as much as it appears she does, his leaving isn’t going to feel too good.”

Sixteen

It was very rare for Jack to have any kind of issue and not seek the counsel of Melinda, but on this occasion he was going to forge ahead on his own. He made plans to go fishing with Denny on Saturday. “Not so much biting out there yet,” he told the young man, “but the weather’s been perfect and you never know, one of the big ones might be lurking, waiting for some die-hard like me.”

Between the Fourth of July picnic and the following Saturday Jack did a lot of thinking, a lot of remembering. He thought he might’ve been a little preoccupied, a little on the quiet side, but no one seemed to notice. He thought he’d make good use of the week trying to mentally put all the pieces together, but in point of fact the pieces fell into place immediately when Phil Prentiss had said, Give the kid a foundation he can be proud of….

Susan Cutler had said almost the same thing. She’d said, I wish it had been you, Jack, because you’re a man a little girl or little boy could be proud of….

There were some major reasons he hadn’t been able to place her. First of all she’d been about thirty in the picture Denny gave him, the one of them together when Denny was a little tyke about six or eight years old, and she’d been brunette. The Susan he’d known had been blond. Another reason—he’d been concentrating so hard on a woman he’d been sexually involved with and he really, arrogantly, thought he remembered them all. At least any that had become serious on the woman’s part. It wouldn’t have completely shocked him to learn there was one he was so briefly involved with that she’d slipped his mind, but he thought that any woman who felt that strongly toward him would have left an imprint on his mind. And yet another reason—he hadn’t really known Susan’s last name. He might’ve heard it once, twice at the most. And did he like her? Oh, he thought she was great! But he had never dated her. She had a guy in her life. A guy who was making her life miserable.

Jack and Denny staked out a little piece of river on Saturday and began casting. Fly-fishing was a quiet sport for the most part and Jack waited a long time to begin talking.

“This place has a reputation for father-son talks,” he said. “Rick wasn’t really my son, but I thought of him like you would a son. He counted on me like a kid would a father, that’s for sure. This was the place I brought him when he was sixteen to tell him not to mess with his fourteen-year-old girlfriend. He promised me he wouldn’t, but I gave him some condoms anyway.”

“How’d that work out for him?” Denny asked.

“He got her pregnant.” Denny just whistled. “Then I brought him here to counsel him about not giving in to panic. I told him to come to me with his issues, that I could probably help him somehow, but that he shouldn’t be crazy enough to try to marry some young girl just because she was pregnant, only making one problem into several problems. By that time they were fifteen and seventeen, so…” Jack paused. “So, they ran away to get married.”

“I know Rick’s married, but I guess I didn’t realize he’d been married as a teenager.”

“He wasn’t. I caught up with them, stopped them. He married Liz, the same girl, last fall. That baby from their teenage years, that baby was stillborn. It was horrible for them. They stayed together—all through his Marine career, all through his war injuries and disabilities. They’ve had a rough road, but they love each other a lot. Needless to say, I don’t have a real good track record with the advice I give out on this river….”

“You oughta give yourself an A for effort, Jack. Sounds like you tried to do all the right things.”

“You know, probably the only reason I really thought of Rick like a son was because of his young age when I found him. Just a kid, not even close to grown-up. With you, it’s different—you’re a man. Even without that letter your mom left, even if that hadn’t become a consideration, we were bound to be friends. We think a lot alike. And it goes without saying—I’m proud of you, Denny. Proud of your actions, your behavior. Proud of your ethics. We were gonna be friends who just keep getting to be better friends. You’ve been there for me and my family in an outstanding way. Not only am I attached to you by now, Mel and the kids are, too.”