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Summer Gold
By Elizabeth Lowell Barbara McCauley Harlequin Enterprises Ltd.
Copyright © 2003 Harlequin Enterprises Ltd.
All right reserved. ISBN: 0373218133
Chapter One
Sweet Wind, Wild Wind by Elizabeth Lowell Relax, Lara Chandler told herself silently. Carson has never set foot on the Chandler homestead - and he never will. He hates even the thought of you. You're safe here.
As Lara heard her own thoughts, she smiled ruefully. She really didn't need to worry about running into Carson Blackridge, on or off the small piece of land that was surrounded by the Rocking B's lush range. Carson had made it very plain the last time he was with Lara that he had seen more than enough of her. Even years afterward the memory of the moment when she had offered herself and he had turned away made her blush and then pale. She had tried to exorcise the memory, but she had failed. Every time a man had done more than hold her hand or kiss her gently, the memory rose, freezing her.
Lara forced herself to take one deep breath, then another, trying to shake off the tension that had come over her ever since she had agreed to return to the Rocking B to write an informal history of a century of life on a Montana cattle ranch. With hands that trembled, she turned toward her suitcase, opened it and began to unpack with the efficient motions of someone accustomed to shuttling between two homes.
At least, normally Lara was efficient. Today her fingers seemed numb. The third time she dropped the mascara applicator that she rarely used on her thick black eyelashes, she made an exasperated sound. It had been four years since that humiliating incident with Carson. She should have gotten over it by now. But she hadn't. Four years wasn't long enough. She came from a long line of people for whom the past was very much a part of the present. Nor was there a safe place in the future for her to hide from the past. Whether she liked it or not, the past would always be there, all around her, inside her.
She had grown up listening to her grandfather's tales of the Rocking B as it had been a century before. As a child, the years separating her from the past had seemed insurmountable, a barrier as high as the glacier-carved mountains that surrounded and defined the ranch itself. As she grew up, the years shrank until they became as understandable, and almost as tangible, as the progression of the seasons.
Finally Lara had come to love the turning and returning of the years, grandparents seeing the faces of the past reborn in their grandchildren, the family stories told and retold until they became an informal history. She loved the larger human history as well, history written across the land itself, the extended family of mankind with its own rituals, its own unique patterns of disappointments and dreams passed from generation to generation.
History was a living part of Lara's personal life, and the Blackridges' Rocking B ranch was the center of it. She hadn't "agreed" to come back to do research so much as she had been compelled by her own needs.
Lara stood with her hands full of brightly colored underwear and looked around the room that her great-grandfather had built for the birth of his first child. To Jedediah Chandler, a free hundred-year lease must have seemed like a permanent grant. A homestead, not a leasehold. Yet in the end the land was only leased from the Blackridge family, not owned by the Chandlers, and the lease had expired two years ago. Larry Blackridge had extended the lease for the lifetime of Cheyenne Chandler, Lara's grandfather.
But Cheyenne was gone, and the homestead had passed into Blackridge hands. No more Chandlers would live in the expanded, often-repaired and much-loved family home that lay in the center of the Black-ridges' Rocking B ranch. The name of the little valley would go on, however, passed from generation to generation as stories were told about the past. It had been called the Chandler homestead for the past century. It would be called that in a hundred years. The names of Blackridge and Chandler had become part of the Montana landscape itself.
Which meant that Carson Blackridge was very much a part of Lara Chandler, no matter how hard she tried to ignore him, especially there in the midst of the Rocking B. Every time she turned around, she would think of him, remember him, remember what he had done to her. He was part of her personal history - in many ways, the most important part.
"Fine," Laura muttered to herself. "So write a paper about Carson and file it under M for Mistake. Or Miserable. Misogynist, how about that?"
She sighed and gave up trying to characterize Carson in a single polite word. It would have been easier to forget him if he had made her unhappy while they were together. He hadn't. Having him close, seeing his rare smiles come more frequently while he was with her, talking with him, touching him, laughing with him ... Miserable? Hardly. For a few short months she had lived in the center of rainbows, and sunlight had been a river of gold pouring into her outstretched hands.
"Sure," said Lara in a clipped tone. "Pigs flew then, too. Remember?"
Swiftly she emptied the suitcase, wondering with every movement if she had made a mistake coming back. There was nothing to tie her to the Rocking B but memories and a history that had no place for her. Her grandfather was dead. Her mother was dead. And the man who had never called her daughter was also dead.
Lara's hands hesitated as she remembered the call that had come to her aunt's house two months before. She had answered the phone. Carson's deep, gritty voice had told her that Larry Blackridge was dead. Hearing Carson's voice again after four years had been like being dropped into fire. She had barely heard the words he was saying for the sudden roar of blood in her ears. And then the words had penetrated. The man who had adopted Carson and never called him son, the man who had fathered Lara and never called her daughter, the man her mother had loved well but not wisely - Lawrence Blackridge was dead.
To this day Lara didn't remember what she had said to Carson, or if she had said anything at all. Her next memory was of standing in the thin March twilight staring at the phone in her hand. A wailing sound was coming from the receiver. For an instant she had wondered if the phone were mourning her dead father. Finally she realized that she had simply kept the phone off the hook too long.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Summer Gold by Elizabeth Lowell Barbara McCauley Copyright © 2003 by Harlequin Enterprises Ltd.
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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