Page 51 of Hometown Cowboy
“As long as you don’t forget to take the battery out. I wouldn’t put it past the damned thing to start itself up and drive away.”
Ryan swiped at his wet face. He was glad it was only Gabe there. “Who organised it? Was it your mum? Mine?”
“Nup. Surprisingly. Although they did wrangle the CWA into gear to host it.” He glanced sideways at Ryan, a cheeky grin looking back at him. “You’ll never guess.”
If it hadn’t been the Jamesons or his mother, he had no clue.
Maybe… “Cat? Or Mali?”
Gabe laughed and shook his head. “Although Zac and Xander provided free entertainment and got the word out. Think a little more vintage.”
Ryan frowned in confusion. Who on earth had done this? Gabe took pity on him.
“Mildred Appleton.”
All thought blasted from Ryan’s head. Literally leaked out of his ears and into thin air.
“Get out of here.”
Ryan ran a hand down the wheel arch. Not a chip of paint off, anywhere.
He glanced at Gabe, sure it was a joke. Solemn honesty stared back at him.
“No way.”
Gabe nodded. “I know, right? She insisted the town step up and help you. I don’t know, but she seemed… shaken by your accident.”
He followed Gabe up the steps and across the verandah. He stopped in the entryway.
“Are you sure this is my house? Have I stepped into an alternate dimension?”
Gabe placed the light bag next to the wall at the entry to the hallway. “Nope. It’s yours, all right.
Ryan stepped into the room fully and turned slowly.
“But it’s so…clean.”
That earned a bark of laughter from Gabe. “Yeah, well, you had a few people over doing things. There was a working bee.”
Ryan shook his head. Maybe he’d hit it harder than he’d thought.
He wasn’t a dirty person by any means. If he was completely honest, he was a little particular in that sense, if sometimes a bit messy. But the shining, gleaming surfaces that stared back at him everywhere he looked bewildered him. Dust was a given on a working farm. No matter how he’d tried to keep up with it, there had always seemed to be a fine layer of the stuff not even a day later.
“Maybe I should go to hospital more often.”
“Yeah, nah. You scared us all enough for this lifetime. Poor Darb was beside herself.”
That brought Ryan round to face Gabe. Something tugged at the edges of his heart. A vague pain, deep inside. He rubbed at it absently.
“She was really subdued at the hospital. But sometimes she’d come in and her eyes were red, like she’d been crying.”
The unasked question hung there between them—why?
She’d left two days after he’d woken to find he’d lost six months of his life. Gone back to The Crossing.
Gabe couldn’t hold his gaze. To Ryan’s astonishment, a flush of colour rose high on his cheeks. He rubbed at his nape, a dead giveaway that something was up.
“What is it? What’s going on? Why is everyone trying so hard to pretend everything’s okay? What does it have to do with Darby?”