He’d smiled. “Maybe we’ll camp out there, too. Cord and I used to do that when we got older.”
“You mean you had girls out there.” She laughed.
A crooked grin played on his lips. “Yeah, we did, but most times it was just Cord and me. We’d talk about the future and how we’d run the ranch together. We’d both wanted big families, to have them all know each other, and to be as close as we were.” He huffed a cynical laugh. “Didn’t really turn out that way, though.”
The heartache that filled that last statement and the forlorn note in his voice had tightened her throat and made her eyes sting. But he wouldn’t have appreciated her sympathy.
“Maybe things aren’t as bad as all that.”
He shook his head. “They’re bad enough that I’ll never go back.”
She cupped his cheek in the low light. “I’m sorry, Cade.”
He shrugged. “No need to be.”
“You obviously miss it…and you brother.”
“Yeah, well, that was all a long time ago. Things have changed. Our parents are gone and there’s no reason for both of us to stay. Besides, the way things went, those old, childish dreams would’ve never come true anyway.”
Tears had filled her eyes, but she didn’t let him see them. His hurt had been palpable, radiating outward. She’d felt the heavy pressure of it and for her, it had been unbearable.
All that pain must be crushing him.
Even now as she turned away from the glass door and headed into the kitchen to make some tea, she fought the burn of unshed tears.
The container where she kept the tea bags was empty so she opened the cupboard where she normally kept a backup, but the two boxes she’d thought she bought weren’t there. The bright yellow of her favorite tea brand would’ve been hard to miss among the other duller shades that lined the shelves.
She frowned and searched again, moving a few other items to ensure that the tea hadn’t gotten shuffled behind something, but to no avail. Stepping back with her hands on her hips, she glanced around the room but the missing tea boxes were nowhere to be seen. Shaking her head, she went to the garage to grab a secondary backup from the shelves out there.
That had been happening a lot lately—her forgetting things or misplacing them and then not remembering where. Like her jacket the other day. She’d thought she left it slung over a chair in the dining room one night, only to find it hanging from the hook by the front door the next morning. Or her muck boots—which she always left in the mudroom—that she found outside the front door last week. She’d found her hair brush on her bedside table rather than in her bathroom drawer one day and that same morning she found the coffee grounds that she always kept in the freezer, in the refrigerator instead.
“I must be losing it,” she muttered to herself as she refilled the tea container, put the box with the remaining sealed bags in its regular place, and returned to pour her tea.
She’d attributed most of the missing or moved items to her absentmindedness, but some hadn’t made sense, even with her distraction over Cade. Thinking that he may have moved a few things too, she’d asked him about it, but he’d denied it and she believed him. She had wracked her brain, trying to remember moving those items or placing them there temporarily and just forgetting to return them to their rightful places—which she assumed she’d done—but she couldn’t clearly recall how any item had gotten to where she’d found it.
Taking up her tea mug and chocking up all the oddities to her own forgetfulness, Addie headed toward the front room, intending to spend an hour or two with a good book. She just pulled one from the bookshelf when she heard a knock at her front door. She had thought she heard something from the kitchen earlier, but when no one entered, she’d assumed she’d been so eager for Cade to return that she’d imagined it.
It was too soon yet for Cade or Jorje to be back and she wasn’t expecting any visitors today. A jolt of alarm shot through her, but then she pushed it aside. If someone wanted to hurt her, they wouldn’t knock politely at the front door. It wasn’t locked after all. But even though she’d never had to lock it before, maybe she should start remembering to do that.
Shaking her head, she set her tea on the coffee table and went to see who had stopped by.
When she opened the door, her eyes widened and her heart stuttered in her chest. Sweeping his snowflake-dotted black cowboy hat from his head, the good-looking man on her doorstep awarded her with such a charming smile that she felt her body begin to heat. Yet, something wasn’t quite right. She opened her mouth to ask why he had knocked instead of coming in, but he didn’t give her a chance.
“Howdy, ma’am,” he said politely. “I’m looking for Caden Brody. I heard he might be working out here?”
At first, all Addie could do was stare. Everything was the same—the brilliant blue eyes, the coffee-brown hair, even the way he grinned was reminiscent of Cade—but something about his eyes was different, the length of his hair, even the way he stood. All of a sudden, realization hit her. “You must be…Cordell?”
His smile grew and his earnest expression filled with hope. “Cord, please, and yes, I am. That must mean I have the right place…?”
“Yes, you do,” she said and noted the look of relief that crossed his face, “but Cade’s not here right now. He won’t be back for a while. Would you…like to come in for some tea…or coffee?” she amended, remembering how Cade had cringed at tea. “He should be back in an hour or two.”
“Sure,” he replied slowly. “I don’t want to put you out, ma’am, but that would be great.”
She stepped back and held
