Moonlight Road. Робин Карр

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СКАЧАТЬ wants to know if you’re getting married.”

      Luke choked on his beer and began to violently shake his head.

      “Actually, not that I know of. George is very considerate—he said if it was important to me to do that, he would certainly understand. But I think we’ll just wing it.”

      Aiden laughed sentimentally. “Have you ever winged anything in your life?” he asked his mother.

      “I don’t think so,” she said. “And if you’d asked me a year ago if I ever would, I would have said no. Emphatically no. But here we are. Aiden, how is Shelby doing?”

      “Big as a house,” he said, winking at his sister-in-law. “She says she’s feeling good and is very excited about the dishes. Oh—and Luke says that if things don’t work out with George, he just wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if you didn’t agree to come and live with him.”

      Luke shot to his feet, his eyes as big as dinner plates. His cheeks actually reddened and he shook his head again.

      “Tell him I’ll go to a nursing home first—he’s a pain in the butt even to visit, much less live with!”

      “This is very unlike you, you know,” Aiden said with a kind of tenderness he reserved only for his mother.

      “I know. Isn’t it perfect?”

      “As long as you’ve thought it through,” he said.

      “Of course I have, Aiden. Now, don’t hesitate to call if you want to discuss it further.”

      “I won’t. And would you like Luke to call if he has concerns to discuss?” he asked, lifting one dark brow toward his brother.

      “Actually, no. But thank him for the offer. Luke is not exactly the man I’d take relationship advice from, although he has certainly landed on his feet. Hasn’t he?”

      “Absolutely. And yet you’re willing to discuss it with me?” Aiden asked her. “I haven’t hit any home runs lately.”

      “I suspect you just haven’t been up to bat enough, sweetheart,” she said with a laugh. “Now, I have to run. Give everyone my best and I’ll see you in a week or ten days, something like that.”

      “Please be careful, Mom.”

      “Have you ever known me to be careless? Now, enjoy yourself until I get there and turn the whole family upside down with my wild ways.”

      He laughed as he said goodbye. Then he looked at Luke, who seemed to be fuming.

      “I can’t believe you told her I wanted her to live with us,” Luke said.

      “Listen, if you’re going to tell her how to live, you have to be prepared to be responsible for her living conditions. Big step, Luke. Lucky for you, she’s not interested.”

      “I can’t believe this,” Luke said. “Our mother, who was almost a nun, living in sin with a retired Protestant minister?”

      Aiden cocked his head to one side and shrugged. “She’s sixty-three and he’s seventy. There’s probably not nearly as much sin involved as they’d like.”

      There were a number of things in addition to a terrible headache that put Erin in a cranky mood. Like the fact that they had shaved a little bit of her hairline in the middle of her forehead to put in three tiny stitches. She wasn’t planning on going anywhere except her hideaway in the woods, but still! She was very particular about her hair. Now she had the opposite of a widow’s peak—very ugly.

      And she didn’t feel like spending the night in a hospital, wearing a hospital gown. Gown? They should not insult high fashion by calling this rag a gown. Her absolute worst painting clothes were nicer.

      And she had a roommate. The roommate, who had had a hysterectomy and was staying two nights, had visitors. She was staying two nights, lived ten miles away and her entire freaking family had to come to the hospital to visit her? And there was apparently no rule about how many visitors one could have.

      If she ever saw that vagrant again, she was going to bean him with a flowerpot.

      By now she had been informed by a very testy emergency-room nurse that he wasn’t exactly a vagrant, but rather a man who had just left the navy and was visiting a relative in Virgin River. So he was a perfectly respectable bad-smelling, horrible-looking, out-of-work man with nothing better to do than impersonate a serial killer, sneak up on her and scare her to death.

      It was possible that she was crabby in general. The whole escape-to-the-mountains-alone-for-the-summer idea was probably not the best one she’d ever come up with. At the time she’d thought of it, it had seemed the most logical thing to do. Erin was a woman who had never learned how to achieve that serene, Zen-like acceptance of what the universe tossed at her, and she had reason to believe she’d better figure that out. A summer on a beautiful isolated mountaintop, out of the Chico, California, heat, away from all the pressures of her professional life, should show her how to slow down, learn to relax and enjoy doing nothing. It was time to develop a strong sense of autonomy and remind herself that hers was the life she chose. And she was in a big hurry to get all that nailed down. Besides, it was cheaper than going to Tibet.

      There were very logical reasons Erin was wound a little tight; the habit of overachieving could take its toll. When Erin was eleven, her mother died. That left her the woman of the house, with a grieving father, a four-year-old sister, Marcie, and a two-year-old brother, Drew. She wasn’t solely responsible for them; her dad was still the parent, albeit a little less conscious right after his wife’s death. And there had to be a babysitter during the day while Erin went to school.

      But Erin rushed home from school to take over and had a ton of chores in addition to child care. She felt it was up to her to be the mother figure in their lives whether they liked it or not. As a matter of fact, as her siblings got older, she concentrated harder on their needs and activities than her own, from soccer to piano lessons to making sure they got good grades and didn’t live on junk food. She rarely went out, never seemed to have a boyfriend, skipped all the high-school events from football and basketball to the dances. She did, however, always make the honor roll. She had decided at an early age that if she couldn’t be f-u-n, she would be s-m-a-r-t.

      She was twenty-two, a new law-school freshman, and still living at home so she could keep an eye on the kids who were then thirteen and fifteen, when their father died during a routine knee-replacement surgery. Erin was again in charge. Not that much had changed, besides missing her dad dreadfully. But technically, she was even more in charge than before, because being over twenty-one, she actually had custody.

      Friends and colleagues were in awe of all she’d been able to accomplish. After her younger sibs had survived their teen years, she’d helped her sister, who was married to a marine who had been wounded in Iraq and had lingered in a vegetative state for years in a nursing home before he died. She’d gotten her younger brother through college and medical school. And during this time she’d built herself a sterling reputation as an attorney in a very successful firm. The local paper wrote some sappy article on how she was one of the most amazing and desirable single women in the city—the head of a household that depended on her, brilliant in tax and estate law, gorgeous, clearly the woman to catch.

      It had made her laugh. She could count on one hand the number of dates she’d СКАЧАТЬ