That’s when Hatch recognized him. By his voice. And in the way he carried himself. “Jeager?”
Son of a bitch.
She’d gone for an older guy. Jeager had a couple years and a couple gray hairs on Hatch, at least.
He was ex-Special Ops, at that.
“Hatch?”
Theirs was a small community of operatives. At any given time there were only so many Navy SEALs in service.
They’d served around the same time.
And right after he’d gotten out, Hatch had done some contract work for BlackWatch.
Courier work. Cairo, Egypt, mostly.
The father ran the company back then.
“You two know each other?” Angela looked as if she was about to faint. And dammit, Hatch wasn’t going to catch her if she fell. But he moved in closer just the same.
“I guess we do at that.” Jeager eyed him carefully.
Hatch folded his arms and tucked his hands into his armpits to keep from punching the guy.
Here it was, after midnight, and they were standing out in the middle of the yard. Hatch supposed he should offer to put him up for the night.
In Ryder’s room.
But before he could make the gesture, Angela came up with a different solution. “Why don’t I take you over the boarding house? You’ll be more comfortable there.”
ANGELA FOUND THE KEY Maddie kept underneath the flowerpot on the front porch. It wasn’t breaking-and-entering if she’d been informed of its existence and invited to use it at any time.
She led the way to the rosebud room, because it was the one room she knew she could find her way to in the dark. Besides Hatch’s room. And she wasn’t about to let Jake stay there.
“Kind of weird, huh?”
That Hatch had been a contract employee with BlackWatch at one time? And that they had both been with the Teams. She hadn’t realized just how compartmentalized her life had become until her fiancé and husband came face-to-face and realized they knew each other.
“Yeah, kind of,” she agreed, keeping her voice to a whisper. She didn’t want to wake Maddie. If Maddie was even home yet.
Jake dropped his bag to the floor.
“Missed you.” He pulled her to him for a kiss.
Which quickly turned into an I-want-to-show-you-just-how-much-I’ve-missed-you kiss. Even though it had been only a couple days.
Angela extracted herself. “Not here,” she pleaded. “This is his aunt’s house. It wouldn’t be right.”
Respectful was the word she’d been looking for.
But really, it was just too weird.
Especially since Hatch had told her he hadn’t slept with anyone else.
“Not here, not at the ranch. I should have driven you to the Red Carper Inn up the road while I had the chance,” Jake teased. Or maybe he wasn’t teasing.
And maybe he should have.
There was one flaw to her logic in bringing him here. She couldn’t just drop him off and have Maddie wondering about the strange man in her house. And Angela couldn’t spend the night with him.
“I’m going to be right across the hall,” she said. She didn’t have any other choice. And not so much as a toothbrush with her.
They kissed a final good-night kiss.
And she crossed the hall, half expecting Hatch to be completely moved out, now that he’d had his own place for a while. But the room was just as she remembered it.
Which really sucked. Except that she didn’t feel all that bad about using his toothbrush or raiding his drawers for something comfortable to sleep in. She was, however, disappointed to find the scrapbook she’d made him all those years ago. Until she opened it and discovered he’d added pages chronicling these past six years.
Then she felt like a snoop, looking at pictures of her and Ryder. And occasionally, ones with him in them.
She stopped digging and opted for a plain white T-shirt. And a pair of boxer shorts that hung somewhere around her hips. His clothes smelled like clean laundry, but the pillow when she crawled in bed smelled like Hatch. That fresh clean Irish Spring scent she’d once had a hard time identifying.
Rolling onto her back, she turned her head away from the memories. And then rolled right back.
What made her think she could spend a night in this room and not think about that night? And really, how dare he try and turn it all around, to make it about her leaving.
A person had a right to her feelings even if those feelings weren’t reciprocated. She should have just said it, and to hell with him.
I love you.
I’m sorry you don’t like the word. Or is it that you don’t trust the word? Or maybe it’s that you don’t trust the feelings?
But you made me feel that way. So what are you going to do about it, huh? Huh?
But it was too late.
Those feelings were no longer relevant. She was no longer that young, or that naive. She’d changed her fairy tale so that it at least had some basis in reality.
Jake was her reality. And he was amazing.
So why was she in a bedroom across the hall from her fiancé, trying to push her husband from her mind? The AC kicked in and the temperature dropped dramatically. The room felt like a meat locker.
She got up to adjust the thermostat.
Seventy-two degrees wasn’t all that cold, but she boosted it up a couple notches. Shivering, she tiptoed back to bed and buried herself deeper beneath the covers.
The rattle and hum of the air conditioner threatened to keep her awake. It was the middle of summer, for crying out loud. Most people slept with air-conditioning. She wondered how many of them were sleeping alone.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
HATCH HAD JUST RETURNED from taking the boys to Grainger’s so Ryder could show off his third place ribbon when Angela and Jeager showed up in the rental car. Hatch locked on to Angela across the hood of his truck. She could barely meet his eye.
“Who’s that?” Ryder asked.
“Friend of your mom’s.” It wasn’t Hatch’s place to say.
This is Mommy’s friend Hatch.
And that was Mom’s fiancé, JJ.
“Oh,” the boy said, quickly losing interest even as she was motioning him over. “Do you think we could take Mom to see the fawns again tonight?”
He roughed the boy’s hair. “Why don’t you go see what your mom wants? Maybe she’d got plans for this evening.”
He didn’t have to ask where she’d spent last night. He knew she’d taken her fiancé to Maddie’s. But like an idiot, Hatch had waited up half the night for her return.
Just to talk.
For some reason he’d been under the mistaken impression that she was coming back to the ranch, to sleep in her own room, in her own bed—after she dropped Jeager off.
“Can Alex and I play paintball?” Ryder persisted.
“After you check in with your mom.”
Hatch wanted to be civilized about all this, even though he was feeling anything but. So he turned his attention to work and headed to the pens. When Ryder and Alex slipped past him, heading in the direction of the deer blind, it was the first time Ryder had ever deliberately disobeyed him.
Hatch was about to call the boy back when he decided to join the rebellion. Screw it. If the kid wasn’t ready to meet the new man in his mom’s life, then he wasn’t ready.
“Anything I can do to help?” Jeager asked a while later. They were castrating the bull calves today, with Blue picking them out of the herd, running them through the chute. It took three men, doing it the good old-fashioned way.
Two to hold the calf, one to clamp it.
Hatch already had three men on it.
Besides, he couldn’t see Jeager stepping in cow pies with those three-thousand-dollar Italian leather loafers on his feet.
“Sure,” Smitty said. “Why don’t you hold the hind legs.”
“Oh, okay,” Jeager said. “Sure.”
“Put on some rubber boots first,” Hatch sug
gested. He nodded toward the barn so the man knew which direction to take.
“You really want that city slicker helping?” Stew asked, wrestling the next bull calf down the chute into submission.
“I really want to see him kicked in the nuts,” Smitty said, holding on to the other side.
Hatch put the clamps down on the testicles and squeezed. He released the banded calf to be ear-tagged farther down the chute.
Jeager returned with rubber boots and work gloves, taking up Smitty’s position on Hatch’s left. The foreman had seriously underestimated the ex-SEAL. He made it through the hour without being kicked.
And without allowing Hatch to be kicked. Of course, that was a matter of opinion.
“I didn’t realize you grew up on a farm,” Jeager said.
“Does this look like a farm to you?”
“Is there something you want to say to me, Hatch?”
There was plenty he wanted to say, but he held his tongue. “I think we’re communicating just fine.”
Clamp and squeeze.
RYDER AND ALEX WERE hiding out in the deer blind, playing Mario Cart on their handheld Nintendo DS game systems. They’d been there over an hour and still hadn’t seen the fawns.
“I think my mom has a new boyfriend.”
“Yeah, that’s what it looks like.” Alex munched on a bag of chips. “Can we go play paintball now? This is boring.”
“Yeah, sure.”
Maybe that guy had gone back to wherever it was he’d come from. He probably didn’t want to meet a kid, anyway. So the boys got up and started walking back to the house.
Yesterday had been better than any birthday present, Ryder decided. They’d been like a real family. He and Blue had taken home a ribbon and that made everyone happy. Then, after Maddie said something about falling in love on a Ferris wheel, he’d had the brilliant idea of letting his parents ride alone so they could fall in love.
He’d thought it worked, too.
They got all gooey-eyed, or as gooey-eyed as Hatch could get, just before the fireworks when Rascal Flatts sang “Bless the Broken Road”—as if that song meant something to them. And they hadn’t spent the day trying hard not to touch each other, as they usually did.
Mom even talked about wanting to go back the rest of the week for the concerts. Everything was perfect. Until they got home and that guy came along and ruined it. Now that sick-to-his-stomach feeling Ryder had from eating too much junk wouldn’t go away. Only he hadn’t eaten much of anything all day.
“There you are.” His mom and Char came up to them as they were leaving the pine grove. She’d probably brought Char along to sniff them out. “You boys can’t wander off like that without permission.”
“I asked Hatch if we could go to the deer blind.” Ryder felt his cheeks grow hot and hoped his mom couldn’t tell he was lying. It wasn’t really a lie, because he had asked.
She frowned at him as if she saw right through him. He petted Char, hoping the black Lab couldn’t sniff out a lie, because Hatch said a dog had to be able to trust its trainer. That’s when Ryder noticed the big shiny ring on his mom’s finger where she sometimes wore that cool horseshoe nail.
He scowled back at her.
“There’s someone I want you to meet.” She steered him toward the corral, where Hatch was talking to that guy.
“Come on, Alex,” Will said. “We’ve got to get home in time for lunch.”
“What about paintball?” Alex asked, as he was led away by his dad.
“Bye, Alex.” Their days for this summer, at least, were numbered. Ryder tried not to let it bother him that they didn’t even get the chance to play with his new paintball guns. “Maybe you could spend the night on Friday.”
He looked at his mom, who didn’t like him extending invitations without permission. He was getting himself into all kinds of trouble today. “We might not be here Friday,” she said in a low, quiet tone.
Last night Mom had wanted to hear more concerts at the county fair. Today she talked as if she didn’t know what she wanted, or was on someone else’s timetable—like when she was a Marine. And had to do what they told her to do.
Hatch didn’t have anybody telling him what to do. And when Ryder grew up nobody was going to tell him what to do, either. He was just a kid, but he knew exactly what he wanted, and it wasn’t meeting this guy.
“Jake, this is my son.” She beamed at them both. “Ryder, Jake is my fiancé. He’s asked me to marry him.”
Some fancy smancy word for the guy with his arm around his mom, about to ruin his life. It meant his mom wasn’t just getting a divorce from Hatch, she was going to marry someone else. But what if Ryder didn’t want another stepdad? He kept stealing glances at Hatch, expecting him to say something, but he was just standing there with his Grim Ripper face from Guitar Hero. Which was better than his Death face from Dante’s Inferno video game.
“Nobody asked my permission.” Ryder ground out the words.
“Ryder,” his mother scolded.
She seemed more embarrassed than upset.
“No, he’s right,” Jake said. “We’re just sort of springing this on him.” Tall and dark like Hatch, the man crouched down to Ryder’s level. Only Ryder wasn’t a little kid any more, and Hatch had quit crouching down to talk to him a long time ago. “I hope you and I can become good friends,” Jake was saying. “And I’d really like your permission to marry your mother. You’ll like it in London. I have a nice flat there—”
London? Who said anything about moving to London?
“No, you can’t marry my mom!”
“Ryder!” This time she snapped at him.
Only Jake seemed amused by Ryder’s show of temper. He pushed back up to his full height. “Okay, so now we both know where we stand.”
“No, it’s not okay. Ryder, apologize this instant.”
“I don’t want to move to London!” London was about as far away from Hatch and Wyoming as they could get. “I want to stay here and live with Hatch.”
“You can’t stay here—”
“Then I want to go live with my real dad!”
ANGELA FELT AS IF she’d been slapped in the face.
Three months after a night of underage drinking, her son’s real dad hadn’t even remembered her name. He’d accused her of lying, of sleeping around. He didn’t want to hear the baby was his. Even though she knew the baby couldn’t be anyone else’s.
She’d made her choice that day. And he’d made his.
Which was why the boy’s birth certificate read “Father unknown.”
Anything she said right now would only escalate the situation. Even Hatch didn’t have his usual calming affect on her son. Ryder stormed off toward the stable.
And both men stood there looking at her.
She turned on Hatch. “I suppose you think there was a better way for me to handle this?” She propped her hands on her hips, daring him to challenge her parenting.
Because that’s what he’d done these past six years. He’d challenged her. Made her a better parent. But there was no such thing as a perfect parent.
She’d had three choices. Break the news over the phone. Tell Ryder when she first arrived, while his temper was still hot. Or wait until things cooled down. Well, excuse her for picking the least confrontational choice.
And for her bad timing.
“I didn’t say anything,” Hatch said. “Are you sure you want to start this fight?”
She’d planned on telling Ryder. She hadn’t planned on Jake showing up, impatient for her divorce proceedings to be over with. Which only showed how much he cared.
If he still cared after seeing what a rotten mother she was. So rotten her own son picked his stepdad over her.
She took a step toward the stables. “Give the boy some room,” Hatch suggested.
ANGELA STORMED OFF in the opposite direction from her son. Hatch and J.J. were left staring at each other. “I’d better go check on her,” Jake said, moving toward the
house.
Hatch wandered into the stable. Even before his vision adjusted to the dim light, he heard the boy crying. Ryder was up against Daisy’s stall with his head bowed, shooing the mare away while she gently nudged him.
Blue was sitting at the boy’s feet.
“You don’t really want to go live with your dad.”
“Yes, I do,” Ryder stubbornly insisted. “You’re my dad. I want to live with you.” He launched himself forward and wrapped him in a fierce hug. “I love you, Hatch.”
Hatch hugged the boy back. “I love you, too.” He brushed his red head, so like his mother’s. And so unlike Hatch’s own. “You do know I’m not your biological dad?”
He felt compelled to ask that. Hatch assumed Ryder knew—the kid had been told—but he didn’t really know what was going on in the boy’s head.
Ryder nodded. Good to know Hatch hadn’t screwed up the birds and the bees that much. “When you’re older, and not just trying to hurt your mom, I’ll help you find your father—if that’s what you want.”
Angela would cringe to hear him say that. But the boy had a right to know. And coming from a male perspective, if Ryder were his son, he’d want to know. She’d just have to get over it.
She and Hatch hadn’t always agreed on how to raise the boy, but they’d always compromised in his best interest.
“What about your mom?” Hatch asked. “You love her. You’d miss her if you came to live with me.”
“She could live with us.” Ahh, so that’s where he was going with all this.
“She doesn’t want to live here,” Hatch acknowledged around the lump in his throat. “But I promise you, I will always be in your life. And you can come visit me whenever your mom will let you. We want her to be happy, don’t we?”
Ryder swiped at his tears and nodded.
“Well, he makes her happy. You make her happy,” Hatch added, tweaking the boy’s nose. “And I have a feeling the two of you are going to get along fine.” He lifted Ryder’s chin so the kid had to look up at him. “Give him a chance and in a few years you’ll have everything you ever wanted.”
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