Read Online Close to Home by Lisa Jackson - Free Book Online Page B

said.
    â€œCuz that old coot was nearly sixty when Cam’s dad was born, or something like that. Gramps had himself a much younger wife.”
    Clint had heard enough. He glanced at his watch. “Gotta run,” he said, hoping to cut off any more gossip about the Stewart clan. “On my lunch break.”
    She nodded. “Course.”
    Clint rained a smile on Holly and saw something in her melt inside. He’d known she’d had a thing for him all those years ago, and it hadn’t completely gone away, not even with a fifteen-plus-year marriage to Cameron, the owner of the store, and four stepping-stone sons.
    She clicked on an ancient walkie-talkie. “Clint Walsh is on his way down to pick up his order. You got it ready?” she almost screamed into the receiver before releasing the “speak” button. Static and a crackling “Yep” confirmed the message had gotten through to the loading area. To Clint, Holly added, “Cam’ll have your order ’round back, in the lower lot. As always.” She winked at him, and he was reminded of the girl she’d been in high school, sassy and smart, quick with a come-on smile and captain of the cheerleading squad.
    â€œThanks.” Clint was already near the front door, his boots heavy against floorboards that had weathered over the course of a century under the tread of farmers, loggers, ranchers, and builders. At this “feed and more” store you could buy anything from lumber to penny nails, livestock feed, landscaping tools, and the like. In the spring baby chicks were kept in a special pen complete with water, feed, and heat lamps. For a few weeks, they peeped loudly enough to drown out the country music that played over tinny speakers hidden near the exposed rafters.
    Outside, he zipped his jacket against an unseasonable cold front, then climbed into his truck and was greeted by Tex, his half-grown dog of indeterminate heritage. With black and white bristly hair and a long nose, the slightly hyper pup had shown up one day and just stayed. Clint hadn’t minded. “I missed you too. Now sit,” he ordered, and the dog obeyed, happily sticking his head out the open passenger window. The pickup he’d named the Beast started on the third attempt, its engine finally sparking and coughing before catching.
    Driving down a steep hill, he put any lingering thoughts of Sarah Stewart, or whatever her name was now, out of his mind. The less he thought about her, the better it was for everyone, Sarah included. She’d gone to the local Catholic school, and he the public high school, but as Holly had said, they had been neighbors and known each other since childhood. As they’d grown and Sarah had changed from a tomboy who kept to herself to a gorgeous woman who could give as well as she got, he’d looked at her in a new way. Theirs had been a blistering attraction, but it had also been a mistake.
    Nosing his truck into the gravel lot, he then backed up so the bed of his truck was only inches from the raised loading dock of the feed store.
    Cam and his oldest boy, Eric, were already waiting with his order: ten sacks of feed, a new shovel, and five fence posts to replace those that had rotted near his machine shed. “Stay,” Clint said to Tex. The mutt watched through the open window as Clint climbed out of the truck.
    Together Clint, Cam, and Eric loaded the bed of the GMC with his purchases, and then he was off, waving to the man who’d been brave enough to marry Holly Spangler, who had also been known as the biggest flirt in Wasco County.
    From the parking lot, he drove up the sharp hillsides of the town that had been named for Sarah’s ancestors and was jokingly referred to as “a poor man’s Seattle” because of its steep terrain. With the Beast’s engine grinding, Clint took the back county road into the hills to his own spread, a hundred and eighty acres of ranchland and