Shelter Mountain. Robyn Carr
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still warm…”
“I’m sorry about before, Jack. I’m a little embarrassed.”
He looked up at her, saw a sweet, docile face—the face of a devoted young mother, a pregnant woman running to protect her unborn baby. And, as he had been instructed by Mel, he imagined an enforced barricade, deprivation, regular beatings, fear of death—for years. It was not only hard to imagine a young woman like Paige, so helpful and tender, going through something like that, it was impossible to imagine the kind of man who might subject her to it. “Don’t worry about that, okay? We all have our moments.”
“No, we don’t. Only I—”
He cut her off, laughing. “Oh, don’t go there. Don’t go the ‘only I have this baggage’ route. Ask Mel—not long before I married her, I had a fantastic meltdown. Come to think of it, so did she!” Then he frowned slightly. “On second thought—could you take my word for it?”
Paige tilted her head. “She wouldn’t want to be asked about that?”
“Nah, I don’t think she’d mind. It just pisses me off—the way she never tells me anything, and I just lay it all out there. I don’t know how she does it.”
“That’s okay, Jack.” She laughed. “I won’t ask. I apologize, however.”
“No need, Paige. I just hope you feel better.”
John took the supply list, Chris and Paige to Eureka. They went to Target first so the groceries wouldn’t go bad in the truck while they shopped. She bought a few things—underwear, jeans, shirts. John held Chris’s hand outside the dressing room while she tried things on. They stopped at the bookstore. John spent some time in the history section, picking up a couple of books—the same type she’d seen on his bookshelf. Then when he came to the children’s section to see if they were ready to go, Paige put up the books they’d been looking at and said, “Okay.”
“Maybe we should get a new book or two,” he said.
“We have his favorites,” she said.
“We could use two new ones,” he said. “Okay if I do this?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said.
Maybe the best part of the outing was the drive. She’d come into Virgin River at night, in the rain, and except for her quick trip to Grace Valley along the back mountain roads, hadn’t seen much of the countryside. John took them for a little drive along the high cliffs of the Pacific Coast—so different up here in the north than in L.A. He passed through a redwood grove, then up into the mountains toward Virgin River.
She looked over at him as he drove; he was grinning. “Why are you smiling?” she asked him.
He turned to look at her. “I’ve never been shopping with a woman before,” he said. “I didn’t hate it.”
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