Heaven's Touch Read Free Page B

She’d had to do so much of it throughout her life. Maybe the angels were giving her as many opportunities as she needed to get it right.
    So she tried to let her resentment go. She wasn’t the head-in-the-clouds teenager she used to be. No matter how it seemed, Ben had to have matured, too. So it was with as clear a heart as she could manage that she tried one more time. “Let me take a look at your back. You can’t go home like that.”
    â€œSure I can. My family wouldn’t recognize me if I didn’t have something wrong.”
    Where he could have said those words flippantly, he was steadier. Lines had dug their way into the corners of his eyes, and gave his face character. It was his eyes that had changed. They didn’t light up. They didn’t sparkle.
    She couldn’t stop the cloying sadness that overtook her. A sense of loss overwhelmed her, and suddenly wrestling to forgive him didn’t seem like such a big problem.
    By the looks of it, he’d had a tough road over the years, too.
    He didn’t look at her as he made his explanations and his attempt at an escape and emotional distance. “I’ve gotta get home. Looks like they’re taking the mother to the hospital. She’s lucky. Goes to show alot of folks don’t realize the danger when they’re filling up their tanks.”
    â€œI guess no one really thinks about it. I don’t.” She got the clue. He didn’t want to remember old times. Neither did she. It was sad, the years that stretched empty and lost between them. As much trouble as the teenage Ben had brought into her life, he had brought laughter, too. Where once they had been close, now they couldn’t be more distant. Just two people who stopped to get gas during one summer’s night. They’d keep it polite, the type of conversation two strangers might have.
    She didn’t know what more to say to him. She didn’t know how to broach the past. To ask if he’d gotten married, if he had kids, or if he’d stayed as carefree and independent as he’d always intended to be. What did he do in the military? How had he become injured?
    She was so far removed from the local news. She didn’t live in the same small town any longer. She lived here in Bozeman and went home a few Sunday evenings a month to have supper at her mom’s, but her old life—including an innocent teenage romance with Ben—was so past history, it wasn’t even a shadowed blip on her radar.
    â€œGoodbye,” she said to Ben casually, as if he’d never been special to her.
    As if he’d never been the man she’d once intended to marry.
    As if her heart were whole and her life as it should be, she walked to her car, climbed in and drove off without looking back.

Chapter Two
    C adence Chapman. Wow, that was someone he hadn’t thought about in too long—and on purpose. She could still tie him up in knots, that was for sure. Ben rubbed the back of his neck with one hand as he eased the truck to a crawl.
    The turnout from the paved county road to the driveway was hard to find in the dark. It always had been. Scrub brush, salmonberry bushes and super-tall thistles that had yet to be tamed by a Weedwacker obscured the stake marking the edge of the driveway.
    The tiny red reflector still hung crooked from the stake. It had been that way since he was in second grade. One misty morning while waiting for the school bus, he’d been bored, so he’d tossed rocks at the reflector, knocking it askew until one of the bigger Thornton boys had told him to stop.
    There was a reason he didn’t like remembering. It wasn’t so good coming home. His neck was a tangle of melted-together fibers, his chest a tight ball of confused hurt, which seeing Cadence had caused even after all this time.
    And on top of all that, driving up the road made his guts coil up, negating the fact that he was hungry as all get-out. He had