Chapter 29

Once Maxine and Sam had cried themselves out, Maxine took Sam to Bryan's room. Quinn, Nate and Jake were just coming out of the room having dropped off the last of Sam's boxes.

Sam was hugged by both Quinn and Nate and she thanked them for bringing in her things. Jake stood by, rubbing the back of his neck.

"I need a shower before dinner," Jake said and headed to his own room. Maxine watched her youngest son disappear as he shut the door behind him.

Quinn and Nate headed to their own rooms and Sam noted where everyone's rooms were in relation to Bryan's. Maxine pointed at a door across the hall.

"That's the bathroom for this wing of the house," Maxine told her. "Unfortunately, you have to share it with three men. I'll warn them to make sure they keep it clean."

"It's okay," Sam murmured, not wanting to cause any problems.

"You don't know them like I know them," Maxine warned her. "I'll also warn them that they must wear clothes if they come out of their rooms."

Sam blanched, then blushed furiously.

"Exactly," Maxine nodded. "They are used to just strutting around as naked as the days they were born."

Sam gulped, then blushed again. She wouldn't have minded if she were living here with Bryan as they had planned. Sam had loved looking at Bryan's naked body. She had loved touching his naked body.

Sam broke out of her reverie when Maxine put her hand on Sam's arm and led her into Bryan's room. Sam was overcome with emotion. Her eyes teared up and she tried to blink away the tears. She ignored her boxes of things on the floor and just looked at Bryan's things.

She noticed the pictures of him on top of the dresser and turned to look at Maxine. That's when Sam noticed that she was alone in the room. Maxine had backed out of the room and shut the door quietly.

Sam threw herself down on Bryan's bed. Oh gosh, it smelled like him! She had so missed his smell. Sam sobbed. Her grief racked her body. Everyone in the house paused as they heard her weeping.

Her heartbreak seemed to shake the walls of the sturdy house. Maxine sat at the kitchen table and wept. Jake, Quinn and Nate stopped what they were doing and listened to the young woman as she mourned the man she had loved and whose child she was carrying. Each of them wondered if anyone loved them enough to weep over them like that if they had died. Besides their mother, they doubted it.

Jake went across the hall to the bathroom and stood outside Bryan's door momentarily as he listed to Sam as she cried. It broke his heart to hear it. Shaking his head, he went into the bathroom and shut the door. He couldn't help her. She had to let out the grief she had been holding inside. He could be there to comfort her, but letting go of the grief was up to her.

The hot water felt good on his body but made his hands hurt. Once he was clean, he shut off the hot water and just let the cool water run over his hands. They were looking better, but still hurt. Not for the first time, he wondered if they were permanently damaged and whether or not he'd ever gain full use of them again.

Since the fire, he mostly supervised the work needed on the ranch. He had a hard time gripping a rope or anything else he needed to grip. Again, he wondered if it wouldn't have been better for him to have perished in the fire instead of Bryan.

He shut off the cool water and started to towel himself off. Sam certainly would have been happy if that's the way it had been. Oh he knew she would be sorry and mourn him as her friend, but he doubted she would have been eaten up by grief as she was with losing Bryan.

Jake hated to think about it, but as he stood and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror, he wished for a second that it had been him. Because he had lived, he was sentenced to a life without a love of his own. To Jake, that was almost worse than losing his life in the fire.