Thunderstruck

  By B.J. Daniels

  Copyright 2011 B.J. Daniels

  Smashwords Edition

  Table of Contents

  Thunderstruck

  The Perfect Neighbor

  A Fortunate Encounter

  Lubbock Kane adjusted his tie for the hundredth time and smoothed down his cowlick. Neither the tie nor the cowlick wanted to behave, but that wasn’t what was bothering him as he looked out at the church full of wedding guests. Any minute Clancy would be coming down the aisle.

  Was this really going to happen?

  He glanced at his best friend standing quietly beside him. Beau Drummond looked resolved. Beau had a way of taking everything in life with a carefree attitude. Lubbock didn’t believe for a minute that that was the case today.

  Beau was so handsome in a tux that the girls in the front row were giggling and blushing. For a moment, Lubbock felt that old familiar pang of jealousy seize his heart. Then the organist hit the first chords of the wedding march and like everyone else’s in the room, Lubbock’s gaze riveted on the bride.

  This was it. He only hoped Clancy had picked the right man.

  It had been spring the first time he saw her. Down on the riverbank where the water pooled dark and clear. And the air smelled new-green and held a promise as bright as a sunrise.

  At first, Lubbock thought it had been destiny. Later he realized it was just dumb luck from the beginning.

  She came out of the young cottonwoods just downstream and onto the sunlit boulders that flanked the river bottom. Lubbock watched the afternoon light flicker off the water and play in her brown curls.

  When he’d bought his farmstead six months before, he’d heard that the old Miller place downriver was empty. Apparently it wasn’t anymore, he thought idly as he watched her.

  She moved gracefully along the round stones following a chain of granite. Water rushed by on each side of her but she seemed unconcerned. When she reached a large, smooth boulder deep in the river’s current, she stopped, sat and, wrapping her arms around her legs, lowered her chin to her knees, her back to him.

  Even at a distance, Lubbock could see the pain. He recognized it easily, intimately familiar with the affects of a broken heart. If there was a cure for heartache, he knew it was space and time and the need to be alone.

  He slipped back through the brush and left the woman to her healing.

  It had been his best friend, Beau Drummond, who’d talked him into moving to Ross Creek.

  “You want small-town? I know just the place for you.”

  The moment Lubbock saw the tiny Western town, he knew it was where he wanted to settle. All during college he’d heard Beau talk about what it was like growing up in Ross Creek.

  When Lubbock had seen it, he felt as if he’d come home.

  He found the old farmstead on the river with a barn he could use for a woodworking shop and went into business. With several larger cities within a hundred miles, business was good. He had settled into a peaceful, contented life while Beau went off to South America to perform medical miracles.

  Lubbock didn’t think about the woman he’d seen on the river until the night of the big storm. He’d been working on a set of kitchen cabinets for a customer in his shop when the sheriff called. The telephone rang a little after midnight.

  “Sorry to bother you so late,” the sheriff said. “You still got lights out there?’

  A flash of lightning lit the sky. Lubbock glanced out the window to see the wind lean the cottonwoods over the riverbank. Limbs thrashed the dark water as thunder rumbled dully and the lights flickered.

  “Yes, but probably not for long. Why? What’s wrong?”

  “We just got a call from Clancy Danner just down the river from you at the old Miller place. Sounded scared. She’s all alone and it seems her lights are out. I’ve got to run Margaret Howe over to Burnt Ridge to the hospital. Her contractions are five minutes apart and since this is her sixth and Harold is working in Butte, I’ll be welcoming a baby into the world before we reach Aspen Creek Bridge if I don’t hurry. Can you go over and check on Clancy?”

  Lubbock untied his nail apron and dropped it on a sawhorse. “Don’t worry. I’ll go see what I can do.”

  The night was black except for the occasional flash of lightning. Lubbock followed the trampled animal trail along the riverbank, weaving in and out of the trees. He’d walked instead of driven because it was much shorter than the winding dirt road through the foothills, but he now realized he had little chance of getting there before the storm hit.

  As he followed the bobbing thin yellow beam the flashlight carved through the darkness, his thoughts turned to the woman he’d seen on the river. He was surprised she was still staying at the old farmhouse alone.

  It had been months since he’d seen her that time on the river. He’d expected by now she had healed and had returned to civilization, no longer needing or wanting the loneliness of a life outside a small town.

  The first few splashes of rain struck his shoulders and soaked through his flannel shirt just as he reached the old Miller place.

  Cottonwoods circled the house. Through a break in the trees, Lubbock could see only darkness behind the windows. He shone his flashlight toward the open door of the weathered garage. A bumper glimmered in the light.

  Lubbock climbed the porch steps and knocked hard. The lap siding needed paint. The screen door hung by a single hinge. It thumped against the side of the house with the ebb and flow of the wind. He tried the door.

  “Hello! Anybody home?” he called as he stepped inside.

  She appeared suddenly down a dark hallway carrying a candle in one hand and a hammer in the other. Nervously she pulled a dusty-rose-colored chenille robe around her and shifted the weight of the hammer as she eyed him warily.

  “Who are you? What do you want?” she demanded. The flickering light illuminated her startled, frightened face. Clancy Danner was definitely the woman from the river.

  Lubbock pulled off his cap. “I’m sorry if I frightened you. I’m your neighbor. I live up river. The sheriff called and said you might need some help.” He tried a smile, hoping it would take some of the fear from her eyes. “He was tied up, so I said I’d come check on you.”

  She lowered the hammer a little but didn’t come any nearer. “I was silly to bother him,” she said, eyeing Lubbock with caution. “But I was reading and when the lights went out--.”

  “Probably just the storm, but you could have tripped the breaker. You know where the breaker box is?”

  She frowned, then led him into the kitchen. “I didn’t even think to check. I feel so foolish.”

  “Yep, that’s all it was,” he said, flipping one of the breakers. The lights blazed for an instant, then flashed off again as the breakers tripped. “Too many lights are on.”

  She put down the hammer. “It’s just that I hate storms,” she said, looking embarrassed and she went to turn out some lights. This time when he flipped the breaker, the lights in the kitchen came on and stayed on.

  When Clancy returned, she smiled sheepishly, her gaze meeting his. The raw pain he’d seen earlier that spring had dimmed. Where there had been nothing remarkable about her face before, the smile gave it a radiance that made him want to stare. Her gray eyes sparkled. Tiny dimples formed hollows just below her flushed cheeks. The tossed brown curls caught the light and glistened like burnished wood.

  Outside the rain began to fall in angry slashes against the windowpanes. Lightning flashed and he saw her tense as thunder rumbled in the rafters overhead.

  “Could I offer you a cup of hot tea?” she asked.

  He knew he should make a run for home before the storm got any worse, but something in her tone pleaded with him to stay. While she filled the kettle with water and placed it on a burner, Lubbock studied the kitchen cupboards.

  He ran his fingers along the wood, yearning to strip away the paint so he could see what surprises lay beneath. It was a weakness, wanting to see beneath things, a weakness that had cost him relationships in the past. As he turned to the woman, he wondered who had hurt her and why.

  “You like storms, don’t you,” she said.

  He shrugged. “I don’t mind them.”

  They stood in the kitchen watching from the edges of the faded gingham curtains the rain fell in sheets until the whistle blew on the teapot.

  As she handed him a cup of steaming tea, she smiled again. “You work with your hands.”

  He took the cup, noticing the tiny flecks of black in her eyes, eyes that reminded him of the silver-gray of the sky before the storm. “I’m a carpenter.”

  She nodded. “You build houses?”

  He suppressed a smile. She was just trying to keep her mind off the storm, making idle conversation, but he was willing to talk if it comforted her.

  “I used to. Now I mostly do finish woodwork.”

  She took a sip of her tea, studying him openly over the rim of her cup. “Is that how you hurt your leg?”

  It surprised him that she mentioned his limp. Most people skirted around it, pretending they hadn’t noticed.

  “I hurt it a long time ago,” he said, reaching down to rub the scar that ran along his outer thigh. “It doesn’t bother me except when it rains.”

  She changed the subject and they talked about the storm, country living and finally the town of Ross Creek.

  “You think I’m a city girl, don’t you?” she asked.

  He tried to avoid her eyes and lie, but she smiled and he found hi
mself laughing and confessing that he did.

  “I grew up here. I’ve just been away for a lot of years or I would have remembered to check the breaker box.” She glanced out into the darkness. “I’d also forgotten how much I disliked storms.” A cottonwood limb scraped against the side of the house and she shivered and pulled her robe around her.

  “Coming home though is sometimes the best thing you can do,” she said and took another drink of her tea.

  Later when the rain stopped and the leaves dripped softly, he left. All the way home he thought about Clancy and what had brought her back to the country. He knew she’d come here because of a man. The man who had hurt her.

  Lubbock didn't asked about that man though in the weeks that followed. He found himself at the old Miller place more often than not. At first he just went by to fix her screen door. Later he told himself he just wanted to wipe away the rest of the pain he saw in her eyes. He loved making her smile. Especially at him. When she smiled, she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

  That fall the carnival came to town. Lubbock asked Clancy if she’d like to go and was pleased when she said yes. It was on top of the triple Ferris wheel that he realized he was falling in love with her. It scared him.

  Clancy Danner was still a mystery to him, a contradiction. Here was a woman who panicked in a thunderstorm and yet screamed with delight on the wild, breathtaking carnival rides.

  In many ways, Lubbock thought she was like the thunderstorm. There was a wild abandon about her, a passion waiting to be unleashed – only she held it in check. He wanted to be the man to take this woman in his arms and fire that passion again.

  And yet something stopped him and Lubbock knew it was the thought of the man from her past.

  “It’s over,” she said one night after they’d driven over to Burnt Ridge for dinner. They sat in his pickup beside the river. The cold night air leaked in through his open window, signaling the passing of summer, the passing of time.

  “We were childhood sweethearts and I guess we both just assumed it would last forever. It didn’t.”

  “You loved him?”

  “I don’t anymore.” She looked away but not before he’d seen the lie in her eyes and Lubbock hated him. Hated him for hurting her. Hated him for still holding a piece of her heart.

  “What about you?” she asked, turning back to him. “Have you ever been in love.”

  “Once.” He shook his head, remembering his accident in a way the scar never brought back, remembering how the woman he thought he’d loved had walked out on him. He’d tried for her, for Beau, for everyone who believed their dream for him, but long before he fell from the metal beam far above the city, long before he realized his fall had been deflected and he was hurt but going to live, Lubbock knew he didn’t want to build with cold steel.

  “It wasn’t meant to be,” he told Clancy. “She wanted me to build skyscrapers. I wanted to work with wood in my own carpentry shop in an old barn on a river somewhere.”

  Clancy reached over and took his hand resting on the steering wheel. She turned it, touching first the smooth, sun-browned skin, then the calloused palm.

  “These hands were made to work with wood,” she whispered. Her gaze met his. “And to love a woman.”

  Lubbock felt a pang of longing so intense, he forgot the other man. Forgot the warning sounds of his heart as she lowered her head and kissed his palm.

  He took her in his arms, telling himself he’d never lose his heart again. But of course he was wrong.

  That night Lubbock went to the back of his shop and pulled out the wood he’d been saving. It was teak—a golden cutting that an old woodcarver had given him.

  “I’ve never known exactly what I wanted to do with it,” the old woodcarver had told him. “Maybe someday you will.” Lubbock hadn’t. Until now.

  He began to build a chest, laboring over each piece of wood to coax the grain into symmetric patterns. And on the lid, he began to carve a single perfect rose.

  Some days Clancy would come up the river and bring a picnic lunch. She always sat quietly, seemingly content just to watch him work until the sun balanced on the peaks.

  Then they would go out on the deck and eat with the reassuring sound of the river’s flow behind them.

  Clancy seemed to need time. Lubbock gave it to her. He waited for her to get over that other man. Waited for her to trust him completely.

  He watched her grow stronger each day, loving the changes he saw in her but knowing that she might leave when her heart healed, when her reason for coming back here was no longer valid.

  Beau came through town late that fall. “I thought we could meet for supper.”

  That night Lubbock looked at his friend across the table and marveled as he had so many times before, how he and Beau had become such good friends. They were nothing alike. They never had been.

  Lubbock was a city boy. Beau the farm boy. Beau had grown up along the riverbank just north of Lubbock’s place. Beau had spent his life fighting like hell to get as far away from here as possible. From the beginning, they were going in different directions, only Beau just hadn’t realized it.

  “If you want to build things, build skyscrapers!” Beau’s words echoed those of Lubbock’s first love. But while Beau went off to become a heart specialist, Lubbock got his engineering degree and became an apprentice with an old German woodcarver.

  It had been more than a year since he had seen Beau. Lubbock had heard from him a few times—quick postcards from South America in Beau’s hard-to-read physician’s scrawl. Over supper they discussed South America. Beau talked of the wild country, the poverty, the unusual heart cases he’d gotten to work on.

  But Lubbock heard something in his friend’s voice and wondered what he wasn’t telling him. More to the point, what really had brought him home to Ross Creek.

  “You aren’t having second thoughts about traveling the world performing medical miracles, are you?” he asked.

  “Me?” Beau laughed. “No. This is what I’ve spent my life working toward, what always dreamed of doing. I’m not sure I could ever settle down in one place for long now. How about you? Ross Creek bored you to tears yet?”

  Lubbock shook his head and smiled. “I love it here.” He thought of Clancy and almost told beau about her. Instead, he said, “Come on. I know you didn’t come here just to see me. What brings you back to Ross Creek?”

  Beau looked away. “I do have some unfinished business here.”

  “A woman.” Lubbock laughed. “A woman in every port, right?” He shouldn’t have been surprised that Beau had one here as well.

  “Something like that.” Only Beau didn’t grin the way he usually did when the subject of women came up. “This one’s special, Lubbock. It’s just that it’s taken me a long time to realize it. Maybe too long.”

  Lubbock would never forget that moment, the moment Beau pulled the worn photograph from his wallet and handed it to him.

  Gray eyes like the sky before the storm. Lubbock stared down at the photo of Clancy and felt his heart begin to die.

  C.J. Miller. Years ago Beau had talked about a girl back home, a girl he’d almost seemed serious about. Only she’d married someone else. Clancy Jane Miller Danner. It all came together in that moment.

  On the way home, Lubbock watched a thunderstorm boil up over the mountains. He turned his conversations with Clancy around in his mind. They’d never really talked about their pasts. Lubbock knew she’d been married, but it hadn’t lasted long. He’d known that wasn’t the man who’d hurt her.

  Now he knew who had. Beau Drummond.

  Lubbock stomped on the gas pedal, anger and pain mixing like fuel and fire inside him. If it had been any woman other than Clancy. Any man other this his best friend Beau.

  Lightning lit the sky momentarily blinding him. For a moment, he thought he’d only imagined Clancy's car parked near his house.

  He started to hit the brakes, telling himself he wasn’t ready for this. But there was no reason to put it off.

  She wasn’t on the front porch. As thunder rattled the window, he unlocked the door and stepped inside.

  Clancy hated storms. So where was she?

  He crossed the living room and looked out through the back door to the deck. There she stood beside the river.