Peggy Nicholson - Kelton's Rules

“Huh.” Old Whitey leaned over to spit his tobacco in the grass. “Thought she wanted her vehicle repaired so she could lay tracks out of Trueheart. Said something about gettin’ to Sedona.”

“Things have changed,” Jack muttered. Don’t make me say what, old man.

“What?”

Great. Jack rubbed the back of his neck. “Well…Abby would be smart to settle here for the winter.” Jack forged on, feeling as if he were trudging head down into a dust storm. “She’s never built anything and she thinks she’ll build an adobe by the fall? Ain’t gonna happen.”

“Gal’s pretty spunky.”

“Yep, but take it from a divorce lawyer, she’s smack-dab in the middle of the Divorce Crazies. She’ll change her mind ten times in the next ten months. Meanwhile, till she’s over this phase, Trueheart’s a safer, saner town to raise her son than Sedona’ll ever be. Last thing Abby needs is to get lost in a power vortex.”

“Hmm.” Whitey chewed thoughtfully, then said, “Sure you know which end of the branding iron you’re grabbing?”

Jack cocked his head. “Meaning?”

“Meanin’ if anybody gets burned around here, it might not be Abby.”

Dear Reader,

In this fifth story in my series about the town of Trueheart, Colorado, Abby Lake is a woman caught up in that wonderful/terrifying phase of life I call the “Divorce Crazies.” I hope you’ve never experienced it yourself, but if you have, you know it’s a time of extreme vulnerability and extreme creativity.

Since (through no fault of her own) her last effort at making a good life failed, Abby’s determined to get it right this time for herself and her young son, Skyler. She’s changing everything—her job, her home, her attitude toward men, love and marriage. She means to grab life and happiness with both hands before they slip away.

To Abby’s wary new neighbor, lawyer Jack Kelton, it seems that Abby “hasn’t a clue what she wants—but she’ll be flying off in all four directions at once, looking for it.”

Jack may have a point. I remember the first year of my own divorce: buying a handyman’s-special house on the East Coast one week (I wasn’t that handy), then flying to California the next to learn if a man I hadn’t seen for fifteen years might be The One. (He wasn’t.) Darting back to my new house to buy forty of everything (paper towels! canned beans! flashlight batteries!) as if I could build a wall with all those supplies between me and the cold scary world.

And so forth for the rest of that crazy year, till at last I met someone who taught me to calm down and smile again. So here I give you Abby Lake, on her way to learning how to smile again in the town of Trueheart, Colorado. As always, hope you enjoy!

Peggy Nicholson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Ron, for all the times

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“MO-O-OM, WE SHOULD GO back!” Perched on the bench seat behind his mother, Skyler smacked the Colorado road map.

“Sweetie, I know I took a wrong turn, but see what a gorgeous place we’ve found. Can you believe those mountains?” Abby Lake took one hand off the school bus steering wheel and waved to the right where distant peaks caught the late-afternoon sun. “Just wonderful, huh?”

Framed in her rearview mirror, Skyler was pink-faced and scowling. He pushed his glasses up his short nose and glared straight ahead at the two-lane country road. “You should’ve asked me before you turned. I’m the navigator.”

“You and DC looked so comfy back there, I didn’t have the heart to wake you.” Buckled in behind her on the one bench seat remaining in the stripped-out bus, Skyler had drifted off. He’d been smiling in his sleep, hugging DC-3, the enormous white tomcat that lay cradled against his chest.

Abby hadn’t seen her son smile like that in two months or more. She’d drunk in the sight, feeling like a wanderer in the desert who’d stumbled upon a stream at last—and knelt to scoop cool, clear water with both hands. Because maybe that smile meant the worst was behind them. Skyler would find his happiness again. And then, please God, he’d forgive her.

Stealing glimpse after glimpse in her mirror, memorizing the tender curve of her child’s mouth, the shape of the cat’s ear and the spray of his whiskers—she planned to sketch this scene tonight, once they stopped—somehow she’d missed her road, somewhere west of Durango.

“We should go back!”

“It’s sort of difficult to turn this beast.” Used to a compact car, Abby was still amazed by the huge turning radius of the ancient half-size bus. And it must be leaking power-steering fluid—a tight turn elicited a screeching protest that set her teeth on edge. Never should’ve bought this thing. “Besides, I think we’re coming to a town up ahead—Trueheart, if we’re where I hope we— Where I believe we are. If so, we can angle southwest again toward Cortez.” She reached behind her to pat his map someplace in the vicinity of the tiny dot with the charming name of Trueheart. “So we haven’t lost too many miles.”

“I mean we should go back to New Jersey. We should go home. This is stupid. I hate this place!”

“Oh, Sky, sweetie,” Abby murmured helplessly. Beyond the bug-spattered windshield, the road wavered and blurred. She blinked it clear again. “We can’t go back.” They had no “back” to return to. The divorce settlement had given her the suburban trophy house that Steve had insisted they buy two years ago when he’d left navy aviation to become a commercial pilot. But on a single income, she couldn’t possibly afford to keep a five-bedroom minimansion. Didn’t want it anyway.

Last week she’d sold it for a profit of twenty-thousand dollars, which would be their grubstake for a fresh start. A new life out west.

A life her ten-year-old son hated already.

“We could! We could be home in four days. Dad’s gotta be missing us.”

Want to bet? With Chelsea the Super Stewardess—oh, pardon me, flight attendant—to fly? And a new family on the way? He hasn’t spared us a thought. “Of course he misses you, sweetheart. But he can come visit you anywhere there’s an airport.”

“There’s no airport around here! Nothing but cows and…and cow poop and grass. It stinks!”

Also a sky like a vast, inverted bowl of blue bird feathers. Cerulean. Indigo. Turquoise at the edges. Mountains turning to blazing lumps of coal as the sun rolled down toward a jagged purple horizon. Breathtakingly beautiful country, if her son would only look. “Okay, but Trueheart’s not where we’ll be living, you know. Once we make it to Sedona—”

“I’ll hate that, too!”

Abby sighed, reached back to touch his knee, then grimaced as he flinched away. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that he was glaring out his side window, mouth quivering. Don’t cry, sweetie, oh, don’t! If I’d had any choice in this…

She’d do it all again. Not even for Sky could she have stayed married to Steven Lake once she’d realized the extent of his cheating. What a blind, trusting fool I was! She should’ve seen it coming. Any woman with two eyes in her head—the kind of woman who didn’t muddle her maps and end up blithely wandering off into the wilderness with the sun going down…

But Abby had never been that kind of woman—a woman who paid attention. She was always marveling over a pebble, or a dandelion, or a cloud, when she should’ve been turning out her husband’s pockets every time he returned from a cross-country flight.

“And I hate this stupid ol’ wreck of a bus! The radiator’s boiling over again. Didn’t you look at the heat gauge?”

Abby looked—yelped—and took a foot off the gas. “You’re right!” They’d filled the radiator only this morning and also the day before around noon. The mysterious leak seemed to be gaining on them with every passing mile.

Coasting to a stop—she hadn’t seen another car for ten minutes or more—Abby pulled over to the ragged shoulder of the road and blew out a breath. “Wonderful… Okay, where’s the water jug?” They’d used more water than gasoline, it seemed, these past two days.

“It’s back—” Skyler unbuckled himself and scrambled into the rear of the bus, which was crammed with boxes and baggage and a washing machine and all the other household essentials they couldn’t leave behind. Skyler’s model airplanes. Abby’s books and easel. DC’s litter box. “Uh-oh…”

“What?” She’d stopped on a long, gradual upgrade, so Abby shifted the floor lever carefully into first gear, stepped on the emergency brake pedal, then swung around. “What’s the matter?”

Sky held up an empty five-gallon jug. “The cap came off. Your sketchbook’s all wet.”

Abby clenched her teeth on a groan and closed her eyes. Her sketchbook! She’d had three or four drawings in this one that she felt sure were keepers. She’d intended to mat and frame them once they reached Sedona, then use them as samples in her search for a gallery to handle her work. You couldn’t have found a safer place to put the blasted jug? She managed a shaky smile. “Well… Okay. No big deal.” Now what? “We’ll just have to find some water.” They’d crossed a narrow creek perhaps two miles back, down at the base of this long, long slope. The road had been gradually climbing up from the plains for the last twenty miles.

“I’m sorry.” Sky looked as crushed as she felt.

“Plenty more sketches where those came from.”

“If we’d stayed in New Jersey it never would’ve happened.”

“Well, we didn’t!” She held out her hand for the jug. “We didn’t,” she repeated, lowering her voice. “We’re just going to have to make the best of where we are, kiddo.” She swung open her door a cautious inch or two, checking underfoot for the cat, who also seemed bound and determined to bolt back east. “Want to come along? I think there might be a stream down there.” The roadside pasture also sloped gently down toward a distant line of trees.

“Uh-uh.”

“Well, I’ll lock this door then.” Not that there was anyone within miles to worry about. In fact, the real concern was how they’d find someone to help them if she didn’t locate water. How could a country be so big and so deserted? Not a fence, not a telephone pole, not a house in sight. Just enormous rolling slopes, rising in wave after dusty wave toward the far-off mountains. “I’ll be straight down there, if you change your mind.”

SKYLER STOOD, staring at the ruined sketchbook, while her footsteps crunched on gravel, then faded away. “Darn. Crap. Oh, booger, DC!” He could have found a better place to stow the water. Should have. Had he wanted that to happen, or was he just stupid?