The Carson Springs Trilogy: Stranger in Paradise, Taste of Honey, and Wish Come True by Eileen Goudge Page B

dirt road to the apiary beyond, where the nuns of Our Lady of the Wayside had been harvesting honey for nearly a century.
    She sighed. “It’s so peaceful.” Coyotes and mountain lions still roamed these hills. She spotted rattlesnakes from time to time, even the occasional black bear. If you left them alone, she’d found, they didn’t bother you. “Sometimes I think everything would be just fine if I could spend the rest of my life on horseback.”
    Hector chuckled. “You’d get awful saddle sore.”
    She thought of Peter. “I can think of worse things.”
    He frowned, and she saw a muscle flicker in his jaw. Laura thought of her mother’s favorite expression: If you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all. Hector had disliked her husband from the start, though she couldn’t recall him ever uttering a single disparaging word. Peter, on the other hand, had been quick to criticize Hector behind his back for acting more like a family member than a hired hand.
    A long moment passed, then he turned to her and said, “You’re better off without him. You just don’t know it yet.”
    She looked at him in surprise. Hector was seldom that blunt…ironically, because he didn’t think it was his place. “Old habits die hard, I guess.”
    “Yeah, like smoking.” He’d given it up last year.
    Laura supposed getting over a divorce was the same in some ways—it got a little easier with each passing day. “I heard Peter and his wife are expecting.” She was careful to strike a nonchalant tone in an effort to hold the pain, circling like a hungry jackal, at bay.
    Hector nodded. “I ran into Farber last week. He mentioned something.” Rich Farber, their family dentist, was an old friend of Peter’s.
    “I guess the ex-wife is always the last to know.” Now the pain did strike, sinking its teeth to the bone. Laura squinted against the tears that welled. The bastard. Would it have hurt him to pick up the phone? Instead, she’d had to hear it from that old busybody Gayle Warrington. “It shouldn’t have surprised me,” she said. “He wouldn’t have married anyone who didn’t want children.”
    “ You wanted them.”
    “The difference is I couldn’t have them.”
    “There were other choices.” Hector’s mouth was flat and unsmiling.
    “Adoption, you mean?” She gave a short, bitter laugh. “I’d have gone for it in a heartbeat, but Peter wouldn’t even consider it. Nothing but his own flesh and blood would do.”
    He shot her a keen glance. “I didn’t know. You never said anything.”
    “I couldn’t talk to anyone. Not even Alice.” How to explain how inadequate she’d felt. Like factory goods marked down as irregular. Even now it was almost too painful to discuss.
    He didn’t say anything, but the compassion in his face eased the pain somehow. She told him then about the girl. How she’d appeared out of nowhere. How fiercely she’d fought back when Ian held her pinned and at the same time how oddly defenseless she’d seemed. Hector listened closely, nodding here and there as if in understanding.
    When she was finished, he asked, “What about her parents?”
    “I don’t even know where she’s from.” Laura recalled Maude’s words. “But from what I’ve seen so far, I’m betting her parents are the problem, not the solution.”
    “She might be in some kind of trouble.”
    “That, or she’s running from it. I couldn’t say for sure, but something tells me she’s been abused.”
    “What makes you think that?”
    “She’s got the look,” Laura said. “Like an animal that won’t take food from your hand, no matter how hungry it is.”
    She ran her hand absently over the ropy scar on Punch’s neck. Four years ago he’d been found cooped in a stall behind a derelict house, half starved and hock-deep in muck, the wound from a too-tight halter infected. The vet wasn’t sure he’d pull through. It had taken months of careful nurturing before he was