Courting Trouble by Maggie Marr Page B

stars. With an impossible grin that matched her own because they’d actually pulled off him climbing the pine tree beside the house and shimmying through the window without being caught, he’d climbed into her bed wearing only his jeans. The zipper beneath her fingertips had slipped down with ease and he’d shucked off his Levi’s. There’d been no need for a quilt to keep warm that night.
    Damn.
    What if… Why play that game?
    For most of her adult life she had managed to evade two things she feared most: Cade Montgomery and Powder Springs.
    “Aunt Tulsa?”
    “Hmmm?” Tulsa turned toward the doorway where Ash stood backlit by the hall light. There stood the reason that Tulsa had braved Cade Montgomery and all her memories of Powder Springs. Ash. Ash’s safety. Ash’s future.
    “Can I come in?”
    “Of course, honey.” Tulsa threw back the covers and patted the spot next to her on the bed. Ash scampered across the room, looking more like a seven-year-old little girl in her nightgown than an adolescent.
    “You put up the stars, didn’t you?” Ash tucked herself under the covers. She smelled fresh, like lavender soap. Her long dark hair spread out over the pillow.
    “I did. The summer before high school.”
    “I wondered how old you were when you did it. Did you like junior high?”
    “Hated junior high. I was a walking hazard. The worst two years of my life.”
    “But you liked high school?”
    “Most of it. I had more fun than should have been allowed, but your great-grandma was really good about knowing what to get upset about and what to let slide.” Tulsa spread her fingers out over the surface of the quilt, hand-stitched by Grandma Margaret. “She took good care of us when… well…” Tulsa’s heart dropped in her chest. “…when there wasn’t anyone else.”
    “Do you miss her?”
    “Grandma Margaret? Sometimes, I miss—”
    “I meant your mom.”
    Tulsa’s heart clutched with the word. Her rib cage tightened and an achy feeling etched with pain lay just behind her lungs. Mom. Connie. Her mother was a shadow that drifted in and out of her childhood. How could Tulsa miss what she barely knew?
    But she did.
    She missed what a mother was supposed to be to a girl. Tulsa opened her mouth to speak, to answer, to respond to her niece in some intelligent way, but a hard lump lodged in her throat and tightened its grip, a stranglehold on her words. She couldn’t begin to explain to Ash all that Connie was and all that Connie couldn’t be—hell, Tulsa couldn’t explain it to herself.
    In the dark of the room, Tulsa closed her eyes and breathed deep. With a steady breath the pain loosened in her heart. With a steady breath the grip on her ribs relaxed. With a steady breath the lump in her throat dissolved. Tulsa opened her eyes and turned her head toward Ash. She couldn’t discuss her own mother… not now… quite possibly not ever.
    Finally, softly, Tulsa said, “You know your mom tries awful hard to do right by you.”
    “Like getting arrested for shooting a shotgun at Dad?”
    “That’s not exactly what happened. I believe your father never came out of the house.”
    “And that makes it okay?”
    “It most definitely does not make it okay, and I bet if you asked your mom she’d say that shooting at your Grandma Hopkins’s house was perhaps the dumbest thing she ever did.”
    Ash shook her head back and forth and her long hair whispered across the pillow. “She’d say it was the second dumbest.”
    “Really? And what was the dumbest?”
    “That’s easy.” Ash stared at the stars on the ceiling. “According to Mom, the dumbest thing she ever did was sleep with my dad.”
    Tulsa’s heart cracked with Ash’s words. The sweet girl was right. Savannah would say her relationship with Bobby Hopkins was her biggest mistake, but Ash left out one very important fact.
    “It’s ironic then that the best thing to ever happen to your mom came out of the stupidest thing she ever