Mountain Song Read online

  MOUNTAIN SONG

  By

  Ruby Laska

  Copyright 2012 by Ruby Laska

  Discover other titles by Ruby Laska at http://rubylaska.blogspot.com/

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  About Ruby Laska

  CHAPTER ONE

  “You’re too thin,” Claudia Canfield’s grandmother pronounced, eyes narrowed, from her nest of starched white linens. “Don’t you ever eat?”

  Claudia sighed, massaging a temple that had been throbbing ever since her plane left the ground that morning.

  “Bea, I’ve been here all of three minutes. I don’t want to talk about me. I want to talk about you. How we’re going to get you put back together as quick as we can, and get you home where you belong.”

  “Fine with me. I never have been able to tolerate hospitals. Full of deadly germs, you never know—”

  Bea stopped mid sentence as her face flushed with color. Alarmed, Claudia squeezed the cool small hand she was holding and bent closer.

  “Bea? Bea, are you all right?”

  A very slight nod of the head was all the response she got; Bea’s gaze drifted somewhere over her shoulder. Claudia pressed her thumb into the pulse points of Bea’s wrist and was rewarded with a regular beat.

  “Um, I have a bit of a surprise for you,” Bea murmured, inclining her head in the direction of the door.

  Claudia swiveled in the hospital-issue plastic chair.

  And nearly toppled out of it.

  Filling the frame of the cramped room’s door, Andy Woods stood dressed in green-blue scrubs, clutching a clipboard to his chest as if it were a shield. She recognized him immediately, but the reaction that followed was anything but clear. Panic was the dominant note, panic edged with surprise and wariness.

  But even in that complicated tangle, her brain registered one more item: what a compelling looking man Andy still was. Five years had done little to change him. A trace of gray tinged his unruly jet-black hair, and the furrows between his brows and at the corners of his mouth were deeper than ever. But his forearms were still powerful, his rigid stance hinting at the caged, raw energy packed into his frame. And his flint-gray eyes were guarded, inscrutable, as always.

  For a moment, surprise briefly segued into a scowl before Andy arranged his features in a neutral expression. Clearly he wasn’t one bit happier to be in the same room with Claudia than she was.

  “Andy?” Claudia managed, her throat suddenly dry. She blinked her eyes hard several times. Maybe he was an illusion, a blip in the synapses of her exhausted brain. After all, she had been up half the night, then skipped breakfast before the four-hour flight, the mix-up at the rental car counter, and a long drive through the mountains.

  Though if she were going to go around conjuring up people from her past, Andy Woods would rank somewhere at the bottom of her list. It wasn’t for nothing that she’d pushed his memory deep down inside, down into a remote corner of her soul that she was determined to keep buried forever.

  And she just might have succeeded—had been doing pretty well in fact, damn it—until he showed up in Bea’s hospital room. Terrible sense of timing fate had, Claudia reflected, not for the first time in her life.

  Fate...or Bea. Claudia wouldn’t put it past her tenacious grandmother to have schemed the whole meeting. Although a hip and wrist fracture seemed like drastic measures to get her in the same room with Andy. They meant a whole mess of trouble for a seventy-eight-year-old woman—especially one who had nursed a hatred for hospitals for most of those seventy-eight years.

  Chalk one up for the old Canfield stubborn streak.

  “Hello, Claudia. I guess I might have figured Bea was up to something. I...expected your father,” Andy said, his voice heavily weighted with resignation. He made an awkward motion with his hand, extending it as though he meant to take hers in a formal shake, then letting it drop. “You’re looking well, Claudia.”

  Andy spoke her name in the same tone he might have employed to say “taxes” or “root canal”. Not at all he way she remembered him saying it, once upon a time.

  “Dad couldn’t get away for a couple of days. I mean, since Bea’s already patched up, for the most part. But you’ll forgive me,” she managed, forcing her chin up a notch and slipping into the cool tone she’d found worked so well with some of her more difficult colleagues. “It’s been such a long day. It’s good to see you too...we’ll have to catch up on things sometime.”

  Another awkward silence. Claudia shot a glance at Bea, who lay propped up in her angled bed, wearing a trace of a grin.

  Like the Cheshire cat.

  “Did...has Bea mentioned that she’s been under my care?” Andy’s casual gesture across the room included the white-haired figure who’d been silently watching their exchange from the hospital bed.

  “No. As a matter of fact, until a few minutes ago I didn’t even know you were back in Lake Tahoe.” And if Bea hadn’t taken a spill yesterday, Claudia might never have found out.

  Grandmother Bea. Claudia glared at her beloved grandmother, whose sudden silence seemed a little too convenient. In the minutes since Claudia had arrived at the hospital, the old lady had kept up her end of the conversation quite well, barely letting Claudia get a word in. She’d complained about the hospital, the nurses, about being stuck in a bed when the mountains were coming into the height of the spring bloom.

  But she hadn’t said a thing about Andy.

  “All right, Bea, what do you have to say for yourself?” Andy said reproachfully.

  The old woman managed a faint shrug. “Oh, dear, Andrew, did I neglect to tell you about Claudia’s visit? I’m afraid we elderly are given to these lapses.”

  “You’re as sharp as a tack, Bea,” Andy growled, “and you and I both know that you only ‘forget’ things when it suits your purpose.”

  “Speaking of forgetting to tell people things,” Claudia interrupted pointedly. “I should think—”

  “Oh, now, let’s not waste time arguing about who told who what and focus on what’s important. Isn’t it wonderful that the two of you are being reunited!” Bea lifted her tiny wrinkled hands from the covers and pressed them together in a gesture of childlike glee. “How long has it been, you two? Four years? Five?”

  “Nobody’s being reunited,” Claudia snapped. “I’m here to help you get on your feet again, and that’s it. I just have a couple of days to spare and I plan to spend every minute of them with you, like it or not, so I won’t have time for old acquaintances.”

  Claudia regretted her word choice immediately. As dismayed as she was to see him again, she could hardly get away with calling Andy an acquaintance. She needed to pull herself together or risk letting him see how upset she was. “I’m sorry,” she amended, forcing a steady gaze on Andy. “What I meant was, as much as I would like—”

  “I’m swamped, myself,” Andy interrupted, his expression hard and unreadable. “I’ve been here for hours and my day is just beginning.”

  “Oh, Andy, you work entirely too hard,” Bea said. “You always have. Always with your nose in a book, always staying up until all hours of the night.”

  “Med school isn’t exactly a walk in the park,” Andy said. “They don’t give out diplomas for good intentions.”

  “Yes, well, was it really necessary for you to be first in your class? Andrew, my dear, when will you learn that you don’t need to be the very best at everything? Sometimes good enough is good enough.”

  “If I was just ‘good eno
ugh’, Bea, odds are I wouldn’t have known about that new procedure you and I were discussing earlier.”

  Chastened, Bea eased back into the soft pillow and frowned.

  “Well, I know that. And I do appreciate your skill. I trust you—unlike the rest of these butchers around here. I wouldn’t let any of them near me.”

  “Yes, yes, you’ve shared your contempt of my colleagues,” Andy said, a ghost of a grin appearing at the corners of his mouth. “They’re all scared of you, Bea.”

  Watching the spirited exchange between them, Claudia felt a twinge of jealousy. She had no idea that they’d remained close.

  Actually, she had no idea that Andy had come back to live in Lake Tahoe. Never in five years of letters, calls, and visits back East had Bea ever even mentioned Andy.

  Well, of course, there was the small fact that Claudia had forbidden her to. I never want to hear his name again, she’d said, and for once Bea had done as she was told.

  “Bea,” she muttered under her breath, “you are a piece of work, you know that?”

  Turning to Andy, she made sure her features were neatly arranged in her best all-business expression. “Andy, I’ve been up since before dawn, and I’m exhausted, so I’ll be going soon. I hope it’s not too much of an imposition for me to ask you to come back a little later? I’d like to talk privately with Bea.”

  From the bed came a coughing fit as Bea drew in too much breath at once, then managed to lift herself up a little. “Now, now, Claudia,” she said in her most wheedling tone, “I’m suddenly exhausted. This has all been too much for me. Andrew, I know you can save all your poking and prodding until later, dear. Give an old lady a break. Now since I’m going to have a little rest, why don’t you two go off somewhere and have a cup of coffee?”

  Andy rubbed his forehead as though his own head were suddenly splitting. “Bea, I’m in the middle of rounds. I know this will be difficult for you to believe, but I have other patients, too. And as much as I enjoy your company, my number one concern here is helping sick people get better, not my social life.”

  “And I’m not letting you off so easily,” Claudia added. “I’ve spoken to you twice since your fall. How is it that you forgot to tell me about—about this?” She gestured vaguely in Andy’s direction, feeling suddenly foolish.

  “But sweetheart, you knew Andrew was in medical school. For goodness sakes, he spent every minute he wasn’t with you studying.”

  “Oh, come off the innocent act,” Claudia retorted, her face flooding with color at her grandmother’s casual reference to their love affair. “You know what I meant. I think you might have thought to mention that he was your personal physician.”

  “My dear Claudia,” Bea said, summoning a look ablaze with fire to her still-beautiful features, and training the full power of her blue-eyed gaze upon her granddaughter. “You of all people should know that I keep the confidences with which my loved ones entrust me.”

  Under her grandmother’s scrutiny, Claudia felt her indignation wither. Bea’s pointed reminder was a low blow, perhaps, but it was true nonetheless: she was the one person in the world Claudia would trust with her deepest secret.

  And had, for that matter.

  “Of course, Bea,” she murmured, feeling the color seep into her face. She darted a glance at Andy, and found him looking at her openly, though his eyes revealed nothing.

  She meant to look away. Andy was a stranger to her now; it wouldn’t do to stare. And yet curiosity won out over propriety, curiosity and the remnants of an old familiarity, a time when his face was hers to read whenever she wished.

  Claudia met his gaze, then let her eyes travel over his tired face, reacquainting herself with the sharp planes of jaw and chin and brow, the unruly black hair that he never had seemed able to keep out of his eyes. There were a few lines around his eyes now, in addition to the deep chasms etched permanently between his brows, at the corners of his mouth. Frowning in concentration, she thought—how often had she come upon him that way, bent over his books as though he were trying to force the words off the page and into his brain by sheer will?

  Though back then her presence had erased the lines, made him break into a smile that melted her every time. A smile that made him look like any other guy who was in love and carefree, as though for just a moment he wasn’t carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.

  She might have liked to see that smile again. Just once for old times’ sake. But it appeared to have gone into retirement.

  “I know you’re surprised to see me, but I did grow up here, you may remember,” Andy finally said.

  “Yes, but you always...the way you used to feel about this place, I just assumed you would have moved on.”

  “Things change,” Andy said, his face suddenly darkening, his voice slipping to an even lower register.

  That voice, deep and ragged as an old smokers’, triggered something inside Claudia. A tremor raced through her body, starting deep within her belly and stretching out through her limbs, as though the words themselves caressed her skin. Fatigue tinged his words, roughened them here and there in a way that no one would notice unless they’d listened with an ear fine-tuned with the fervor of a lover. And no one could have ever studied a man more passionately than she had once studied Andy, determined to drink in every aspect of him until she’d forged a connection so strong nothing could break it.

  But that was another time. Even though only five years had passed, it might has well have been decades. She’d been barely more than a child then, and Andy—well, he’d been driven by his own demons.

  Still, despite their fire, those demons hadn’t managed to propel him out of Lake Tahoe. There had to be some story there.

  Too bad there would never be an opportunity for her to hear it, she thought, forcing her attention to her grandmother and her back squarely to her ex-lover.

  “Well, Bea,” she said sternly, “I hope you’ve been following doctor’s orders for once in your life. Doing whatever it takes to get you out of here and back in the saddle again so I can get back to New Jersey where I belong.”

  Bea made a face. “Do you have any idea what they expect the patients to eat in this place? Plates full of unidentifiable stuff. They keep it all frozen in a giant lump, hack off pieces and serve it, hoping we’re all so sick we’ll eat it without making a fuss.”

  “It’s nutritionally balanced, Bea,” Andy retorted. “Unlike what you usually subsist on. Sunflower seeds and tofu sandwiches and granola—hardly fit for a person of your—”

  “It’s all organic,” Bea interrupted him. Claudia had to smile, knowing how Bea hated any reference to her age. “You’ll see, I’ll outlive you yet.”

  “Still, if you want to get out of here, you should eat what we put in front of you.”

  “I think I’m fully capable of making those decisions,” Bea sniffed. “I don’t care to be treated like a child, Andrew. Not to mention all the indignities I suffer at the hands of these barbarians.”

  “Now Bea,” Andy said, that faint trace of a grin back on his face as he focused on the old woman. Crossing to her side, he took one of her hands in his own large one. “You’ve been treated like a queen, I’ve made sure of that.”

  “Yes, and I pay with blood,” Bea sighed, “and whatever other vital fluids you see fit to drain from my poor body. A couple little fractures, for heaven’s sake. I don’t even know why I’m still being detained here.”

  Excluded from their exchange, Claudia felt the twinge of jealousy again. She had always been Bea’s favored grandchild, doted on since birth. And she didn’t relish sharing.

  Everything seemed to be falling to pieces. Starting with the long trip with all its glitches, Claudia had been losing control of the day little by little. And now the man who’d practically derailed her life was calmly and deliberately wooing away the one woman who she counted on to be always on her side, to be her rock. Her own, personal, private rock.

  “I’m sure Andy is very capable,
” she said, a little stiffly. “Now Bea, just when are you going to be released? You were so vague on the phone.”

  Bea avoided Claudia’s eyes, her mouth curving into a rather lopsided and quite possibly guilty grimace. “Um, I suppose we do need to talk about that. I...didn’t want to burden you with all the details before.”

  “It wouldn’t have been a burden, Bea,” Claudia said, trying to stifle her exasperation. “I just want to know what’s going on.”

  “I have an idea, dear,” Bea murmured, stifling a yawn as her eyelids sunk lower. “Why don’t you talk to Andrew? He’s the professional here, and I really am feeling so exhausted.”

  Andy watched the exchange between the two women with a mixture of unease and surprise. So the old gal hadn’t told Claudia everything. Something was wrong here. Hell, a lot was wrong.

  Starting with the fact that Bea hadn’t even bothered to tell him that Claudia was coming to visit today. That she’d let Claudia walk into this hospital—his hospital, damn it—without even ten minutes’ warning. Leaving him to practically collide with her in the midst of his rounds.

  Unfortunately, he couldn’t really blame Bea, much as he’d like to be able to hold something over her, as ornery as she’d been lately. He’d made it very plain some time ago that he didn’t want to hear anything about Claudia. Not back then when she left. Not ever.

  So it had just about knocked him back half a decade, to see her shiny ash-blonde hair fanned out around her shoulders, to find those golden eyes trained on him.

  “What in hell—” The oath died on his lips, unspoken, as his shock blurred with some other emotion. Five years had brought to maturity the promise of sensuality that she’d worn like an exotic perfume. She’d been little more than a girl then, but now her body was undeniably a woman’s. Even with her five-ten frame folded into the clunky plastic chair, he could tell that the curve of her hips was more pronounced, and her breasts swelled invitingly under her snug knit top. Even her face had filled out, her lips curved in a permanent and very sexy pout, her eyelids heavy over her large eyes, giving her a look that was sleepy and unintentionally seductive at the same time.