The Outsider Series: The Complete Omnibus Collection

Chapter 9

Chapter Nine

Diana Friessen hurried back to the grocery store where she’d left her groceries. She could have kicked herself for not asking Laura for her phone number or where she lived. She’d arranged to pick Laura and her son up in the morning. Laura insisted on meeting outside the grocery store, which Diana did find odd, but then, she hadn’t been able to pull much personal history from the girl. The girl had a wall so thickly built around her that Diana knew it would take a pick and a whole lot of work to find her way in. But then, Diana knew better than anyone, that when trust was burned, it took everything a person had to open her heart and begin trusting again. She sensed that in this young girl.

Diana hadn’t been hungry when she’d taken Laura and her unusually quiet son to the restaurant. In fact, she’d just left the ranch and her husband, Jed, with their eight-month-old baby, Danny. They’d shared a breakfast of ham and eggs before she headed to town to get groceries early, arriving before the store opened and being let in by the clerk. When she’d pushed her shopping cart filled with groceries down the dairy aisle, she’d spotted the young mom with a little boy wearing a look of desperation she’d recognized, all because of what she’d lived through as a child, growing up dirt poor. She couldn’t help overhearing the young girl pleading with Mr. Harris, the uptight older man who owned this grocery store. He’d been one of many people who’d shunned Diana when she first returned to North Lakewood, all because of who her mother was. The girl needed work, fast. She needed help, and it angered Diana that Mr. Harris could turn his back on that. Diana couldn’t do the same, because she recognized the look of hunger, the way they gazed with such deep longing at the food as if there were an imaginary wall that kept them from reaching in and picking it up. It was a deep pain in their expression that only someone who cared or understood what it was like could see. It was the look of someone who had to go without eating because there wasn’t enough money to buy food. The way the little boy had reached for the cheese, whining and carrying on, Diana knew. She also knew, while she watched Laura and her son, that there was something about him that wasn’t quite right.

She’d been glad when Laura allowed her to buy them breakfast. The girl looked pitiful, her long hair brushed and stuck under an old gray cap. Her worn coat didn’t look all that warm, and it took Diana only a second to realize her zipper was broken. When she sat in that booth in the restaurant, holding the menu and glancing awkwardly at the waitress and then Diana, ordering toast and water only but pancakes for her son, Diana had insisted she try the special, a ham and cheese omelette, and the girl nearly wept before agreeing. When Diana asked her how old she was, the girl had blushed and whispered, “Twenty.” It only took Diana a moment to realize how bad the situation was. She was pale, blond, and thin, with enticing blue eyes that should have belonged to someone far older than her twenty years. Her name was Laura Parnell, a single mother. Laura didn’t part with much. She held a lot of closely guarded secrets and was wearing them like a shield. Diana had to tread carefully, because the last thing she wanted to do was spook her and have her grab her little boy and run. She could see something there just below the surface that was so raw.

When Diana asked her if she knew other Friessens, because she had been visibly bothered when Diana said her name, Laura had blushed furiously and lowered her eyes, saying she’d worked at the Friessen mansion and had been fired by his Mrs. Friessen a few days earlier.

What in the world was she going to have the girl do? Diana worried what Jed would say. The thing was she couldn’t turn her back on this girl and her son. They just needed someone to care enough to help them. She told Laura, who shoveled the eggs in her mouth so fast that Diana knew it may have been a while since her last meal, about the therapeutic riding she and Jed were starting for children with special needs. It was a dream of hers to help these kids, because there was something special and magical that happened when a child connected with a horse. Diana mentioned to her that maybe her son could be part of it while she was working for her and her husband at the ranch. She was creating the job on the fly and hoped the girl was picking up on the fact that Diana didn’t have any idea what she could do. She mentioned the phone; she needed someone to answer it, and there was also so much paperwork when they first started out, just to get their business off the ground.

Diana had to fight the urge to reach across the table and grab this girl’s hand. To tell her it was going to be okay. She could feel, she could smell and see the desperation that she herself had lived through, so her conscience wouldn’t let her walk away. She remembered all too well the pain and hurt of praying every single day for just one person to care, to reach out their hand and help. And Diana intended to do just that.

She parked Jed’s truck beside her silver SUV in front of their older home, which Jed was slowly renovating with a recent addition he’d framed in but hadn’t started building yet for all the kids he hoped they’d have.

“What’d you do, drive to Marysville?” Jed scowled as he strode out of the house, carrying Danny, who grinned and cooed at his mother.

“No, but I did hire a young girl to come and work for us.”

Jed stared at Diana in that hard way of his and handed her their baby. “He’s hungry and doesn’t like the bottle. He wants the real thing.” Jed lifted two paper bags of groceries from the passenger seat and kicked the door closed. “You did what? Diana…” He sounded as if he was exasperated with her. “And what is this girl going to be doing?”

Diana followed her husband in their warm and cozy house. Unzipping her coat, she lifted her sweater to nurse her son. She sat in the rocker as Danny sucked noisily and patted her breast with his hand, making it clear to his mama that he’d been put out. Diana toed off her boots and gazed up at the one man who still had the power to scramble all her reasonable thoughts with just a look. She loved this man more than her next breath. “I don’t know, Jed. But she’s got a little boy, and I overheard her in the grocery store, with a desperation I know, looking for a job. She looked so hungry. I took them for breakfast, too.”

Diana held her breath, waiting for Jed to shout at her because, right now, they didn’t have a plum nickel to spare. It was so tight, she had to be careful what she spent on anything, food, diapers, bargain shopping. She’d always been good at it, and now she was even better. Jed used every extra dime they had to outfit the necessary repairs to the barn, adding in three extra stalls just so they could get the therapeutic riding off the ground.

He set the bags on the table and walked across the floor until he was standing right in front of her, looking down on her. He took off his ratty cowboy hat and ran his fingers through his wavy brown hair. “Diana, I know you better than I think you know yourself. You may as well tell me all of it, because I also know that once you’ve made up your mind about something, nothing will change it. You’ve got a good heart, but you can’t save the world, baby.”

The way he said it had her eyes filling with tears as she rocked Danny and he continued to nurse. Jed pulled the padded stool for the rocker over and sat on it right in front of her and reached over, lifting Diana with Danny in her arms onto his lap. She leaned her head against his shoulder and he slid his arms around her, across the side of her thigh, possessively.

“I love you. I’m sorry.… I know we can’t afford it, but I couldn’t leave her. Who was going to help her?” Her voice caught when her husband sighed.

He tilted up her chin, the baby still latched on, and kissed her. “So, when does she start?”

Diana let out a sigh, and a tear slipped out as she stared into his amazing deep brown eyes, which said everything to her of how much she meant to him. “I love you.”

“Yeah, well, that’s a good thing, since we’re well on our way to the poor house.”

Danny took that opportunity to squeal and smack his lips, milk dribbling from his mouth.

“Jed, I’d go anywhere with you, as long as we’re together.” She leaned against her husband and gazed at her baby, unable to shake her worry for a young girl named Laura and the child she seemed to love so much.