Hidden Summit

“Back in the days before motherhood, I had been known to stop at a tavern or two. I vaguely remember....” Then she laughed.
    “I would love to have you over to test the porch. Invite Mrs. Hutchkins and Puff,” Leslie said.
    “We’ll be in touch,” Nora said. “Come on, Adie, let’s log those miles! See you later, Leslie.”
    She watched them go and thought that Nora couldn’t be twenty-six, and here she was, a mother of two with no husband. Of course she hadn’t asked if there was a man somewhere, but she got the impression there wasn’t.
    And then she heard the phone in the house ringing and dashed for it. Only two people called her—her mother and Conner.
    “Hey, baby,” he said in his low, sexy voice. “I caught you before work.” He laughed. “Caught you alone without work crews in the trailer, so you can talk dirty to me.”
    “Conner!”
    “I’m alone at the moment, which is hard to manage around here. What are you wearing?” he teased.
    “Oh, stop,” she said with laugh. “Tell me about Katie and the boys.”
    “Ah, the boys—not a real quiet pair, that’s for sure. We’ve been doing a lot of wrestling and I think my sister is about to throw us out of the house. This is a small house, about the size of yours—just two bedrooms and a small living room, which we manage to fill up completely when the three of us are rolling around on the floor. And they get wound up and can’t settle down. She’s gone to run them around the park to see if she can wear them out a little. She took the day off today to spend time with me and to cook a nice dinner for me and her boss…the boss she says is keeping things very professional while she’s working up a crush on him. I’m going to get a chance to look him over.” Then he chuckled again.
    “You sound…you sound so wonderful,” she said. But the image she conjured of him hugging his younger sister and rolling around on the floor with his nephews made her wonder how he was going to make himself leave them. “It must feel so good to be reunited with them.”
    “They should have me completely worn out by Sunday, when I leave. Speaking of Sunday—are you checking the news?”
    “I look online every day,” she said.
    “They published my name before the preliminary hearing, but I haven’t seen it again in reference to the pending trial. And no picture. At least not yet.”
    “Why would they publish your name?” she asked with a tinge of anger.
    “It’s not malicious, Les. It’s part of public record. They needed the name of the witness to get the search warrant to collect all the other evidence. It was news. Once something like this happens to you, you begin to notice things, like the names of victims published, if they’re not minors. I’m just grateful they haven’t run a picture yet, because I look an awful lot like Danson Conner. And if I can keep all my Virgin River friends from figuring this out before the trial…”
    “But, Conner, no one from around here would wish you any harm!”
    “Of course not. I just don’t want pretrial publicity to lead to you.”
    “I don’t know what you mean....”
    He took a breath. “I don’t want your safety compromised to get to me. You don’t watch cop shows, do you?”
    “No. Lately I haven’t watched anything but you.”
    “Well, don’t start watching them now. In another week and a half, this will be over, and I’ll be back.”
    “Are you sure, Conner?”
    “What do you mean, am I sure?”
    “It’s going to be so hard for you to leave your sister and nephews.”
    “It was always going to be hard,” he said. “When she married Charlie, she was only twenty-six, and off she went to Fort Bliss in Texas. Less than a year later he brought her back to me, pregnant, and left her with me while he deployed. For the past five years I’ve tried to prepare myself for the day she’d meet the right guy. The chances have always been good that she and the boys would move away.”
    “You sound more like a father than a brother,” she said.
    “I felt like that sometimes,” he said. “Maybe I got a little stodgy—I had a lot of responsibility at a young age....”
    “You’re not stodgy now....”
    “Until now, I was tied to that store. It was our legacy—I had to make it work to ensure the future. Not just mine, but the whole family’s, because there was an equal chance Katie wouldn’t meet the right guy and move away....”
    “It’s different now,” she said.