The Pride of Jared MacKade Read Free Page B

illegal.
    “Don’t get to town much, do you?” Jared murmured. “You’d hear different. Ask Connor’s mama about the MacKades sometime, Ms. Morningstar. I’ll leave the papers.” He slipped his sunglasses on again. “You think it over and get back to me. I’m in the book.”
    She stayed where she was, a frown on her face and a cold package of raw chicken in her hands. She was still there when his car’s engine roared to life and her son came darting back down the stairs.
    Quickly she snatched up the papers and pushed them into the closest drawer.
    “What was he here for?” Bryan wanted to know. “How come he was wearing a suit?”
    “A lot of men wear suits.” She would evade, but she wouldn’t lie, not to Bryan. “And stay out of the refrigerator. I’m starting dinner.”
    With his hand on the door of the fridge, Bryan rolled his eyes. “I’m starving. I can’t wait for dinner.”
    Savannah plucked an apple from a bowl and tossed it over her shoulder, smiling to herself when she heard the solid smack of Bryan’s catch.
    “Shane said it was okay if we went by after school tomorrow and looked at the kittens some more. The farm’s really cool, Mom. You should see.”
    “I’ve seen farms before.”
    “Yeah, but this one’s neat. He’s got two dogs. Fred and Ethel.”
    “Fred and—” She broke off into laughter. “Maybe I will have to see that.”
    “And from the hayloft you can see clear into town. Connor says part of the battle was fought right there on the fields. Probably dead guys everywhere.”
    “Now that sounds really enticing.”
    “And I was thinking—” Bryan crunched into his apple, tried to sound casual “—you’d maybe want to come over and look at the kittens.”
    “Oh, would I?”
    “Well, yeah. Connor said maybe Shane would give some away when they were weaned. You might want one.”
    She set a lid on the chicken she was sautéing. “I would?”
    “Sure, yeah, for, like, company when I’m in school.” He smiled winningly. “So you wouldn’t get lonely.”
    Savannah shifted her weight onto her hip and studied him owlishly. “That’s a good one, Bry. Really smooth.”
    That was what he’d been counting on. “So can I?”
    She would have given him the world, not just one small kitten. “Sure.” Her laughter rolled free when he launched himself into her arms.
     
    With the meal over, the dishes done, the homework that terrified her finished and the child who was her life tucked into bed with his ball cap, Savannah sat on the front-porch swing and watched the woods.
    She enjoyed the way night always deepened there first, as if it had a primary claim. Later there might bethe hoot of an owl, or the rumbling low of Shane MacKade’s cattle. Sometimes, if it was very quiet, or there’d been rain, she could hear the bubble of creek over rocks.
    It was too early in the spring yet for the flash and shimmer of fireflies. She looked forward to them, and hoped Bryan wasn’t yet beyond the stage where he would chase them. She wanted to watch him run in his own yard in the starlight on a warm summer night when the flowers were blooming, the air was thick with their perfume, and the woods were a dense curtain closing them off from everyone and everything.
    She wanted him to have a kitten to play with, friends to call his own, a childhood filled with moments that lasted forever.
    A childhood that would be everything hers had never been.
    Setting the swing into motion, she leaned back and drank in the absolute quiet of a country night.
    It had taken her ten long, hard years to get here, on this swing, on this porch, in this house. There wasn’t a moment of it she regretted. Not the sacrifice, the pain, the worry, the risk. Because to regret one was to regret all. To regret one was to regret Bryan. And that was impossible.
    She had exactly what she had strived for now, and she had earned it herself, despite odds brutally stacked against her.
    She was exactly where she wanted