Page 16 of Blazing Hot Nights
He meant to soothe me with those words, but I had never felt worse about the events of that day. It was my fault, but I couldn’t utter those words out loud. He wouldn’t believe me anyway, so there was no point in wasting my breath. I was still trying to put right in my head that he thought Callie had been boring. I wasn’t expecting that. He had always doted on her as a devoted husband would. He lived to protect her from the wild animals he tried to tame, until that one time he couldn’t.
“Enough heavy stuff,” he said. “I brought something much better.” He gently squeezed my shoulder and then patted my back once, just like the other day. Then, the bag he had set down by his chair was hefted into the air, and he pulled out all the goodies from within it and handed them to me one by one. “Chocolate, marshmallows, and graham crackers,” he said, his eyes twinkling in the firelight. “It’s time for s’mores, angel.”
I raised a brow at the selection of yumminess on my lap. “I love s’mores, but it’s going to be hard to toast those ’mallows without a fork.”
“A fork …?”
“A camp fork.”
“But … a fork? Won’t you burn your hand?”
“Are you serious right now?” I asked him with my eyes wide.
His laughter rang out through the night, and he shook his head while he did it, digging in the bag. He produced a camp fork and extended the handle. “We call them roasting sticks.”
He handed it to me gallantly, and I couldn’t stop the laughter from escaping my lips. “No matter what you call them, the job will get done! Let’s do this!”
Blaze laughed and grabbed the bag of marshmallows, opening it and jamming two marshmallows on the stick for me to toast while he readied the rest of the supplies. Once they were ready, he helped me pull the giant fluff off the fork—one for each of us—and he tapped his s’more with mine. “To Callie,” he said, his smile natural and bright in the night.
I held mine reverently and nodded, my smile not so natural or bright anymore. It was heavy, and the guilt that weighted it I would never shake. “To Callie.”
We each took a bite, but the sweetness churned my stomach. Blaze should be sitting around the campfire next to his wife, a little one on his lap by now.
It was because of me that he wasn’t. Instead, he’d become a widower at twenty-five. Blaze had lost five years of his life to unrelenting grief. Grief I could have prevented if I had just insisted my father fix the fence that day, or if I had just tried to do it myself. I should never have sent Callie out there to be slaughtered. I was the reason he went to bed alone and woke up the same way. The thought of Callie’s sweet face and beautiful laughter had me pitching the sweet treat into the fire as my chin lowered to my chest.
“I’m going to bed,” I whispered, fighting back the tears that once again threatened to fall. I couldn’t make eye contact with this man. The man who had convinced himself that his wife had been boring, just to make it easier to face each day alone. “You can put the fire out when you’re done.”
I stood from the chair and my shoulder slumped, the weight of Callie’s death and Blaze’s pain too heavy to carry tonight. My feet shifted across the gravel, and I walked past Rapunzel without even offering her a pat.
“Heaven,” Blaze called from the fire. “Please, come back and talk to me. We need to talk about Callie.”
“I don’t have anything to say, Blaze. I’ve been out of things to say for years. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.”
“You’re wrong about that,” he yelled as I climbed the stairs to the front of my house. “You have plenty to say, and I’ll make you say them if it kills me!”
I didn’t justify that with a response. I closed the door to my old farmhouse and leaned my forehead against it, hatred for my part in Callie’s death poisoning my heart a little bit more. It was time for that cowboy to stop coming around here. Every time he did, I ended up in tears while he walked away from the battle unharmed.
Was he unharmed though?
No, and I needed to remember that I was the one who harmed him beyond repair. I pushed off the door and trudged to my room. The pain in my chest reminded me that I deserved to suffer with every breath I took. I was the sole reason Callie no longer breathed at all.
Five
“Here goes nothing,” I muttered, parking the UTV and grabbing the package next to me. I’d reminded myself the whole way over that being kind to women was better than aggravating them. You catch more flies with honey, a lesson reinforced to me by Beau that afternoon. To hear him tell it, I was closer than I knew to getting what I wanted from Heaven.
I used to think I knew what I wanted from Heaven Lane: Not a damn thing. Now, I wasn’t so sure. Suddenly, I wanted a whole lot more than I deserved. I wanted more than she could give. That much was obvious. Personal desires aside, I was on the cusp of my professional needs from her, and sweetness would be required to seal the deal. If I didn’t make this happen, I couldn’t say for sure that my father wouldn’t pull the plug on my operation. If he did, that would leave me only two choices: slink back to Texas with my tail between my legs to work on the homestead or stay here and try to make a life for myself without his help. Neither choice was ideal, but after so many years being on my own here, option number one didn’t appeal to me at all.
I strode toward her door, the package under my arm, not surprised when no one answered my knock. It was nine-thirty on a Friday night. I knew where Heaven was, and it wasn’t inside on a beautiful night like tonight. She was sitting out front by her fire again. I could see the smoke wafting above the roofline of the house. My footfalls crunched across the gravel when I walked from the back of the house to the front.
“I’m not in the mood for a fight, Blaze McAwley,” she yelled.
Her words told me she was primed for a fight. All she needed was a worthy opponent.
“How did you know it was me?”
“I could hear that damn noisy utility vehicle coming a mile away!”
Oh yeah, she was aching for a fight, but she wasn’t going to goad me into one tonight. I took a moment to remind myself of my goals and then answered.
