The Promise of Rayne Page 26

  “Thanks for your cooperation, folks,” her uncle Tony’s voice boomed through the PA system. “Please head to the high school, and we’ll keep you updated through the evening.”

  Celeste pulled her shirt over her nose, genuine panic in her voice. “Where is the high school?”

  “Follow Teddy.” Rayne called out to Teddy, asking him to hold up. “He’ll lead you, and I’ll be right behind you.”

  Celeste hurried after the man she’d fired her first day at Shelby Lodge.

  “Rayne,” Tony called, “I need to head up the road to the Gourleys’ place. They’re my last stop on Ramsey. You did well, kiddo.” Tony’s thick mustache twitched, exposing a toothy grin. “Now get to your car and take off, will ya? Gia will be waiting for you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The last two cars vacated the lot, and Tony whipped a U-turn, heading in the direction of the Gourleys’. Halfway to her car, Rayne felt a sickening knot form in the base of her belly. What she was running away from nearly dropped her to her knees.

  The lodge.

  Her granddaddy’s lodge.

  An invisible pulley cinched her waist, tugging her back a step, and then another, until the only thing in front of her was a past she couldn’t bear to leave behind.

  Just a minute. I only need a minute.

  She shot through the lobby again and into the kitchen, pulling down the empty boxes Delia stored in the pantry. Sweat dampened her palms and the back of her neck as she tossed them to the ground and unhooked her family’s heritage from the wall of Shelby history. The tattered maps, the first sketch of Shelby Falls, her great-great-grandmother Nettie’s portrait, the award-winning plaques, and—

  “Rayne!” The urgency in Levi’s voice constricted every muscle in her body, but still she couldn’t stop. Not until she was done. Not until she’d made it to Cal’s study to collect the albums and the journals.

  “I just need another minute to—”

  “We don’t have another minute!” His boots thumped behind her. “We need to leave, now.”

  “There’s too much here, I can’t leave it all behind.”

  “The fire’s close. Just on the other side of the old logging road.” He touched her back. “I had to walk away from the farm, and you have to walk away from the lodge. There are more important things than—”

  She yanked the last frame from the wall, her throat choked with tears as her grandfather’s face stared back at her. “None of this can be replaced.”

  Levi tore the picture from her grasp. “Neither can you.”

  “He’s right.” Ford materialized in the doorway. “Your grandfather’s legacy isn’t attached to this building.”

  Her gaze flitted between the old farmer and her memorialized hero, a man whose picture she’d passed a dozen times a day in this lobby, a man who’d kept her secrets and heard her sorrows, a man who’d planted a dream in her heart and died before he could watch it bloom.

  A man with the same kind eyes and the same cleft chin and the same humble spirit as Ford Winslow.

  Air squeezed from her lungs, leaving her chest hollow and heartsick. “You look like him.”

  “Yes.” A single word that flattened her world.

  A thousand questions leapt to her lips, yet only three words could slip past the sob building in her throat. “You’re his son.”

  “Yes, Rayne.”

  Light and sound seemed to fade out intermittently while her mind and heart stuttered to a stop.

  Ford Winslow was her family.

  Her blood family.

  Her uncle.

  “All these years . . . all these years you’ve lived next door, and I never knew.” She swallowed down the rising regret.

  “Cal made it so you couldn’t know,” Levi interjected.

  Ford held her gaze. “Yet I prayed that someday you would.”

  “Truth always leaves a trail,” she whispered.

  Somewhere deep inside her, somewhere buried under decades of deceit, she’d known her curiosity had been more than childish wonder. She’d felt a draw to the farm on that very first day with Levi, and she felt it still.

  Levi dropped the frame inside the box and tucked her into his side. “Sweetheart, I promise there are answers for all your questions, but we need to leave. Now.” Levi planted a firm hand to her hip and led her toward the open doorway.

  The farmer slipped past her and lifted the box she’d packed full of Shelby history. He carried it to his truck. Only now, the relics of her past seemed far less important than the reality of her future.

  Before Levi closed her inside her car, he pressed his lips to her forehead, instructing her to follow them to the shelter.

  She pulled out of the lot and glanced in the review mirror one last time. Dense plumes of orange-tinged smoke rose up from behind the lodge. Grief choked her heart and streamed from her eyes, not only for the lodge she stood to lose but for time she’d never get back.

  For the family she’d lost to eighteen years’ worth of lies.

  The sky’s fiery tantrum had calmed by the time Levi arrived at the high school, Rayne never more than a car length behind. There were no more flashes of lightning or peals of thunder, yet even still, chaos abounded. People lingered all around, some volunteers, some evacuees, and some who simply sipped on crisis like a round of cheap beer.

  Hands shoved deep into his pockets, Levi balanced on a cement barrier, waiting for Rayne to process eighteen years of falsities from the driver’s seat of her car. A pale light from the high school’s foyer spilled over the blacktop and onto her hood, illuminating her face—Levi’s only focal point for the last ten minutes. He promised himself he wouldn’t rush her, wouldn’t force her to make another choice on his timeline.

  Like the people who waited in the shelter and those who’d been displaced all around Shelby Falls, Levi had also resolved himself to wait.

  Not only on the fire reports to come.

  But for Rayne.

  Her mind had to be a mess, her emotions scattered and charred like the ash in the wind, but whatever she needed, be it time or space or heart-sucking details, he’d be here. She’d spoken the words, solved the mystery, unlocked a secret he’d been bound to keep. And as soon as she was ready, he’d be the one to fill in the gaps.

  There were so few outcomes he could control tonight, but only one consumed him. The second she opened her car door, his lungs constricted.

  Basked in hazy moonlight, she stepped toward him, the gesture a mile marker in the marathon of uncertainties to come.

  She lifted her chin and their gazes locked.

  “I’ve been so wrong.” Her humility tore through him. “I’ve hated a man I should have loved, and I’m in love with a man who should hate me.”

  His gaze trailed to her tear-stained cheeks. “Hating you is the furthest thing from my mind, Rayne Shelby.”

  “But I’ve thought so many awful things about him. Said so many awful things—been so naive—”

  “No. Stop.” Though Ford had drilled the importance of grace into Levi’s brain a thousand times, it had never felt so relevant than in this moment. He reached for her, brushing her hair away from her face and anchoring his hands on his shoulders. “You’re the one who found this truth, Rayne. You’re not naive. You don’t get to blame yourself for what you couldn’t know. This didn’t happen—we didn’t happen—so that you could focus on eighteen years of regret. This is about what you do with the next eighteen years. And the next after that.”

  “You’re right.” She emptied her lungs with a sigh. “My grandfather, he had an affair, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. William had an affair.”

  With a resolute nod, she searched his eyes. “It’s the only story I could come up with that matched what I know about the secret meeting and Cal’s paranoia over the family image—” She shook her head. “I’m trying to make sense of it all.”

  He chose his next words carefully. “There’s a lot to make sense of, but I’ll answer wh
atever I can. You’ve already figured out the biggest piece of the puzzle.” The piece that freed him from his promise, and Ford from his prison of silence. “From what I know, the affair was short-lived, and when it was over, your grandfather’s lawyer paid the woman off. She left the state and moved to Nevada.”

  “Did he know she was pregnant?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that; I’m not even sure Ford knows. The lawyer handled everything, and the Shelby family—and the public—was none the wiser.”

  “Then how did Ford meet my grandfather?”

  “His mother battled cancer through most of his teenage years, and even though she’d put a savings account aside for him, she knew he would need more than just financial support. She wrote William a letter during her treatments, asking him to watch over their son in the case of her death. Ford was nineteen when she died.”

  Two wailing ambulances shot down the main drag, and their conversation was muted by the sounds of disaster all around them.

  “When William reached out to Ford, he did so as a friend of Ford’s late mother, not as a father figure. William secured a construction job for him with one of his close friends in town, and then eventually, he hired him to work the grounds at the lodge. Your grandfather was still governor and living in Boise, so he was only at the lodge every few months to check in. It wasn’t until your grandmother Betty became too unstable that your grandfather stepped down from politics and made the lodge his permanent home.”

  Rayne squinted her eyes and bobbed her head as if trying to connect the timeline. “That was a few years before I was born.”

  “Ford worked with William at the lodge and on Shelby land for nearly twenty-five years. They were close.”

  The acrid scent of smoke thickened and she coughed into her elbow. “But wait—did Ford know he was my grandfather’s son all that time?”

  “No,” Levi said, working to detach his feelings on William’s cowardice from his answer. “Your grandfather kept that secret from Ford until after your grandmother passed away.”

  She gaped, blinked, and then shook her head. “But that was only a few months before his heart attack.”

  “I know.” Levi paused as a car passed them in the parking lot. “William asked for Ford’s forgiveness for keeping the truth from him so long, and he vowed to make it right. He told Ford he’d met with his lawyer and had added him to the will, made him a co-heir along with his three other children. He’d divided the assets of his estate into equal quarter shares. William asked Ford to give him time to connect with each of his children privately before it went public.”

  “But there was never an announcement made,” she said.

  “No. William met with Cal soon after, told him the truth along with the changes he was making to his estate and will. You can imagine how well that went over.”

  “It had to be a horrible shock but—” Rayne touched her fingers to her lips. “Wait, how long after that meeting did . . .”

  “Your grandfather’s heart attack happened the following week. Ford was working with him in the orchard when he collapsed. There was nothing he could do.”

  She squeezed her eyes closed.

  “I’m sorry.” He pressed a kiss to the arch of her brow. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “I want—I need to know. The meeting . . . Cal must have told my father the truth since he was there.”

  “Yes. Cal was the executor of the will, but he needed a majority. He made Ford an offer of double the price of Ford’s share if he agreed to leave town. But Ford didn’t want Cal’s money. He’d barely wrapped his head around the idea that his closest mentor and friend had actually been his father, much less the shock of his sudden death. He had no desire to leave the land they’d worked on together for so many years. But Cal assured him that no matter what kind of deal they struck, Ford would never be welcomed by their family. He called him a blemish on the Shelby name, and on William’s legacy.” Levi tempered his anger. “After hours of Cal’s badgering, Ford relented and accepted Cal’s final offer.”

  “The farm for a nondisclosure agreement,” Rayne supplied.

  “Ford would never force himself on your family, but I think a part of him always believed that someday Cal and Randall would have a change of heart.”

  “So all these years, all these years, Cal made Ford out to be the scam artist who played on my grandfather’s grief-stricken heart and stole from the next generation of Shelbys, when Ford is a Shelby, a rightful heir. Oh, Levi . . .” She rested a hand to his chest, the heat of her palm searing through the thin fabric of his shirt.

  “Ford refused to bring dissention to William’s family, even if that meant he would never be known by them. By you.”

  Rayne turned her face, her gaze drifting to the movement at their right where several Red Cross workers unloaded water bottles off a nearby truck. When she spoke again, her voice was far away, as if buried under layers of thought and debris.

  “I loved my grandfather, the way a little girl loves a knight in shining armor, but that’s all I ever saw of him, the shiny parts. I think I’ve fictionalized William Shelby for so long that I never quite saw him as a real person, with real flaws and real struggle and real regret.” Another strong, smoky breeze whipped through the parking lot, and Rayne cleared her throat. “But still, I have to believe that all his talk about truth having a trail was because of Ford. He was the trail.” She paused as a group of teens passed them and entered the high school. “I can’t force my family to see Ford the way you do, Levi, but I can change the way I see him.”

  Levi folded her into his arms and cradled the back of her head, her cheek pressed to his chest.

  Love always protects. The scripture came to him unbidden. Something he’d never been shown in his younger years, but it stabbed him through the chest with clarity now. This precious gift in his arms, this woman he loved with a ferocity he couldn’t explain . . . he wanted to protect her. Always. Her trust. Her heart. Her life.

  He slackened his hold just enough to glimpse her face. “Whatever tomorrow brings, I have everything I need. Right here. With you.”

  Her eyes shone bright in the darkness. “I love you, Levi.”

  She stretched on her tiptoes, her hands curled around his biceps, his arms wrapped around the curve of her waist. He captured her mouth with his, her lips warm and expectant, as if they’d been waiting for his return. As if they’d known he would return.

  She threaded her fingers through his and sighed. “We should probably go inside.”

  He stared at their joined hands. “Lead the way.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Hand in hand they entered the shelter as a united front, a scenario Rayne never could have imagined. The double takes and behind-the-back whispers followed them inside the building the way smoke clung to their clothing, hair, and skin. But the scrutiny didn’t rattle her. Whatever happened tonight, whatever outcome befell them, she wasn’t going to let him go. Not again.

  Despite the midnight hour, fluorescent lights hummed overhead, their glow not quite strong enough to chase away the shadows of apprehension etched into every face. Levi tugged her toward the huddle gathered around a black roll-away TV cart near the admin offices. She searched the crowd, taking a mental inventory of the residents she knew by name. When she lifted onto the balls of her feet to catch sight of the screen, Ford caught her eye. What must he think of her?

  Levi released her hand and instead wrapped a protective arm around her shoulders. His fingertips stroked a rhythmic path from her bicep to her elbow, his gaze glued to the scrolling updates along the bottom of the emergency channel.

  “What does it say?” Her view was blocked by the couple in front of them.

  “There were four fires started from lightning tonight.” The dread in his words sank to the bottom of her stomach. “It’s too dry, the woods are too brittle. Perfect fire fuel. They closed Ramsey Highway.”

  Their road. The only road that spanned between the farm an
d the lodge. The tight bob of his throat told her there was more. Something else. Something worse.

  “What?” she whispered.

  “Fire crews have pulled out of the Ramsey Creek area due to dangerous conditions.”

  “They’ve evacuated? But what does that mean?”

  “They’re relying solely on the night helicopters to drop the fire retardant.” The undefined tension in his face held. “They’ve lost four structures in the area already.”

  All the condolences she’d offered over the last couple weeks, the families she’d assisted, and the stories she’d heard reverberated throughout her mind. Her intentions had been well meaning, her words genuine, yet not even the sincerest of hearts could bridge the gap between sympathy and empathy. The difference was clear now. One watched the fire from a safe distance, while the other stood amid the flames, dreams and futures burning all around them.

  She pressed into his side, as much to hold him up as to keep herself upright. She studied his profile, wishing she could do more, wishing she could fast-forward the agony of their wait ahead. No matter what Levi said, or how strong he appeared, losing the farm would devastate him and Ford. The screen flashed a solid blue before returning to the channel’s regular programming.

  A chilling hush fell over the room. Dazed expressions mixed with anxious fidgeting—twirling of hair, rubbing of arms, tugging of necks. A sign with a painted red arrow pointed down the hallway to her left to the sleeping area, yet nobody made a move for it. Who could sleep at a time like this?

  “I’d like to say a prayer for Shelby Falls.” The deep voice swung her gaze to the far side of the foyer. Ford’s hat was in his hands. The worn leather curled over his fingers like an orange peel. “God hears all prayers, but scripture encourages us to join together in agreement. If anybody would like to join me, seems now would be a good time.”

  The swell in her chest propelled her feet toward the circle forming around Ford’s outstretched hands. The sight both humbled and strengthened her as she settled into place across from him. Several Red Cross volunteers joined in, along with a few residents who’d lingered outside the doors.