He knew a large part of his contentment came from Angie.
“Daddy, Daddy,” Christine called. “She said we can go up into the attic.”
“Why don’t you go ahead. Angie and I want to look at the pictures.”
“Okay,” Christine called over her shoulder as she scrambled up the steep, narrow stairway.
“Has she worn you out?” he asked Angie.
“Just the reverse. I’ve been itching to get on a horse all day.”
“If you had two or three of your own like her, you’d probably feel different.”
Their eyes met. There seemed to be a new warmth between them. He’d never thought of more children. Now he did. Angie’s children.
They wandered along the picture gallery, commenting on likes and dislikes. Angie was the perfect companion. She was the calm, steadying influence that balanced his temper and Christine’s impetuosity. She knew just what to do, when to react, when to ignore him. It was as though she’d known him her whole life.
They kissed in front of a landscape. They held hands as they looked at a Louis Seize vase. They kissed again while the guide chattered on about carved paneling and heart-of-pine floors.
“What are you doing that for?” Christine asked. She had caught them ignoring a mahogany drum table.
“I like Angie,” Dillon said.
“But why are you kissing her?”
“I kiss you because I like you, don’t I?”
“Oh.” That seemed to answer Christine’s question, and she was ready to go.
Dillon wished he could answer his own questions as easily. How was he going to separate the Angie at his side from the Angie who wanted to buy his farm? He couldn’t. They were one and the same. He didn’t know how he was going to deal with that.
THE IRONY OF DRIVING down the curving lane toward Weddington Farms in a shining silver Rolls-Royce escaped G. E. Trent. He was already focused on what waited at the end of the lane, already playing out a scene he had rehearsed in his head a million times these past twenty-nine years.
What he would say to her. Her tears. Her excuses. His disdain.
He knew already, of course, that it would never be the way he had imagined it. And that was what made his heart thump as wildly as it had when he’d been barely twenty. He’d had no idea then what he was walking into; he had no more idea now.
On first sighting, the house looked the same. Sprawling elegantly on a slight rise, white and shuttered, finished off with tidy sunrooms on either end, shaded by towering magnolias.
But as he drew closer he realized how different things were. The decades had taken their toll on the house, as they had on him. The paint was peeling in places, the shutters needed reattaching at this corner or that, and one of the columns appeared to be rotting at the top. His first reaction was regret, until he reminded himself that this deterioration was exactly what he’d hoped for. It was what made it possible for him to arrive like this with every certainty he would drive away the winner.
No matter how much he told himself that, however, he didn’t feel it in his gut. There he felt every inch the ragtag interloper he’d been a lifetime ago.
He parked near one of the magnolias and got out slowly, still taking in the scene before him—the overgrown garden, the subtle signs of decay. He’d never imagined the sight of the place would fill him up so, would take him back so easily to who he’d been and how he’d felt. He wandered toward the back for a look at the barns and paddocks, in no real hurry now to see her. Seeing the place was enough.
He knew immediately that it was her, boot hooked over the lowest rung of the paddock fence. He knew from the shape of her hips in that denim skirt, though they were fuller now. He knew the toss of her head, with its short, dark curls. And he knew the flirty motion with which she reached across the fence and pulled down the brim of the hat on the young man in the paddock. And he knew her laugh, that lilting trill he had chased across bars and ballrooms, always hoping it would be hers and always disappointed.
Yes, it was Harper, still flirting with the farmhands.
“Some things never change,” he said, loud enough for her to hear.
She stepped off the fence, turning so slowly that he knew she had recognized his voice. He watched her face for her reaction and discovered that some things had changed. Harper Weddington had learned to mask her feelings.
“Well, Trent,” she said so coolly he couldn’t begin to guess whether her unconcern was genuine or not, “I always knew you’d be back. I just never thought it would take you twenty-nine years.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Collins, South Carolina, 1968
SHE KNEW he would come back. He simply had to.
Day after day, she huddled in the window seat in her bedroom and stared down at the winding lane, hoping—praying—to catch a glimpse of his rusty old Chevy. Night after night, she listened for the uneven rumble of its engine.
With each day, with each night, her anxiety grew. What was she going to do?
Summer passed. She managed to hide the truth, although everyone wondered what had come over Harper.
“You’re not yourself,” Leandra said.
“You’re up to something,” Sam said.
“You are too weird for words,” Annie Kate said.
Only Floretha knew the truth, and she finally convinced Harper to tell her parents. Three days before she was to leave for college, an oversize sweatshirt covering the jeans that would no longer zip, Harper put on her don’t-give-a-damn mask and dropped the bomb during Sunday dinner.
“Congratulations,” she said so casually she was proud of herself. Inside, everything churned around in such a fury she felt certain none of her insides were in the right place.
Sam looked across the table at Leandra, who barely looked up from the chicken cordon bleu. “For what?”
Harper smirked. “You’re going to be grandparents. In about three months.”
Leandra actually dropped her fork. Sam turned so red in the face Harper thought he might actually explode.
What he did was move so fast to get her into a home for unwed mothers in Atlanta that Harper barely had time to say goodbye to Annie Kate. She promised to write and explain what was going on, but she never had the nerve. For the next few months, she sat in the big, dingy old house and watched scared-looking girls come and go. She listened to the girls talk about the life growing inside them and how much they loved their babies and hated to let them go. Harper felt nothing but despair. Although she’d felt the same way at first, now that reality had set in, she hated this baby because she hated its father.
Because it had driven away the man she loved.
When she got out of here, she thought, she would find him. She would make him understand how scared she’d been and how sorry she was.
The baby didn’t come early in November, when she’d expected it. It didn’t come by Thanksgiving, either. Her baby was a Christmas baby.
“Do you want to hold him, just once?” whispered the nurse, who wasn’t supposed to offer that option to the girls from the home.
“No,” Harper said, no longer sullen and angry, just weary and feeling battered.
“Well, he’s a perfect little doll, never mind his being a preemie.”
Something sparked in Harper’s chest. “A what?”
“Premature. Probably four weeks early, the doc said.”
Harper sat straight up in the bed, her weariness suddenly gone. She counted from March in her head and confirmed the date Red’s baby should have been born. “He’s not early. He’s late. He should have been born six weeks ago.”
The nurse laughed merrily and patted Harper’s hand. “Oh, no, darling. Not this one. I know late from early, and this one’s definitely early.”
“You’re sure?”
“Sure as my mother’s Irish.”
Oh, God. If it was true…“I want to see him.”
“That’s my girl. You’ll be glad you did. You’ll see.”
Impatien
t and on edge, Harper waited for the nurse to sneak the baby into her room. Suddenly afraid, she took the tiny bundle in her arms. It was warm, it squirmed and it seemed very little heavier than one of the kittens back home.
“It’s so tiny,” she whispered.
“That’s what I’m telling you, darling.”
With trembling fingers, Harper nudged the blue blanket away from his face. Sandy fuzz covered his pink head, and unfocused blue eyes stared back at her. A delicate notch dimpled his tiny chin. Harper’s heart filled with anguish, then joy. For she knew the truth.
This was Trent’s baby.
HARPER TOOK HER BABY and ran away in the middle of the night.
“You need a name,” she whispered to her newborn son as they rode the Greyhound bus to its next stop. Where hadn’t mattered. She only knew she had to get out of Atlanta, where Sam would surely look for her. “And you need a father.”
The tiny fellow didn’t pay her much attention. He kept dozing off. She started trying out names on him.
“Ethan,” she said, and he grimaced. “Flint.” A yawn. “Jeremy.”
When she said, “Dillon,” he finally opened his eyes and looked at her. “You like that one? Okay, Dillon it is. And next, I’ll find your father. I promise.”
She tried. She had her savings—all the money from graduation and birthday gifts that she had saved to finance her getaway after high school—and she did everything she could that next year to find Trent. Terrified of being alone and completely responsible for this fragile creature, Harper knew she had to find his father. He would know what to do. He had loved her once, and when he saw this little baby who looked more like him every week that passed, what could he do but love them both?
But she had little to go on. He had vanished, it seemed. Even his mother didn’t know where he’d gone.
A year later, broke and defeated, Harper and her son got on another bus. When the bus stopped in Collins, she walked the rest of the way to Weddington Farms.
Sam and Leandra were less than thrilled with her story of the young husband who had died a tragic death. Sam was outraged.
“You don’t think anybody’s really going to swallow this crock of horse manure, do you?” he’d bellowed.
“They won’t dare say otherwise to our faces,” Leandra had replied.
Stymied, Sam had walked over and looked at the sleeping child curled up beside his daughter on the sofa. Gazing from his daughter to his grandson and back again, his expression changed from fury to something approaching hope.
“Always did want a son,” he said at last. “If he doesn’t have too much white trash in him, maybe things’ll turn out.”
Things had turned out. Dillon had been the light of all their lives, serving eventually to begin the healing between father and daughter.
Collins, South Carolina, 1997
NOW, HARPER REALIZED, things were unraveling.
Now, after all those years of wondering where to look for this man who had fathered her child, Harper wasn’t at all glad to be staring him in the face again.
“You don’t look pleased to see me,” he said, his voice tinged with a bitterness she noted right away.
“I might have been,” she said evenly, “if you hadn’t waited quite so long.”
She wondered if he knew. She wondered what had brought him back after such a long time. She wondered how he could still despise her. Unwelcome emotion welled up in her chest.
“I want to know what’s going on here,” he said.
Shep swung his legs over the fence and landed beside Harper. Trent glared at him. “This must be your son.”
Shep tensed, waiting only for a signal that his help was needed to fend off this silver-haired man in the European-cut suit and Italian leather shoes. Harper put a hand on Shep’s arm. “It’s all right.”
“You sure?” Shep asked. “Dillon’ll have my hide if—”
“I’m positive,” she said. “I need to talk to him alone, Shep.”
Trent looked as ready for a scrap as he had looked the day he ran out on her. And she had no intention of allowing that to happen in front of her son’s best friend. She waited for Shep’s reluctant retreat.
Then she leveled her toughest gaze on the man she had once wanted to see so desperately and said, “I don’t have time for this.”
She walked toward the house, heart racing. He was at her side before she reached the back door, taking her by the arm and whirling her around to face him.
“Where is Angie?”
Angie. He knew Angie. With every bit of control she possessed, Harper tried to hide the way her heart constricted painfully in her chest. “Oh, is she a friend of yours?”
“She’s my stepdaughter.”
Harper barely caught her gasp before it escaped. Oh, no. Poor Dillon. Poor Christine. Poor Angie, even, for Harper couldn’t believe the girl knew anything about Harper’s connection with Trent.
“Get off my land.”
She stalked into the house, aware that he followed her, aware that they were now alone. Of all days for Floretha to be away. She glanced at the kitchen clock. Barely lunchtime. She couldn’t count on anyone to rescue her. Her thoughts appalled her. The only person she’d ever thought of as a rescuer was bearing down on her, an unwelcome presence in her house.
“You needn’t blame me for all this,” he called out, coming through the dining room as she reached the curving stairs. “You were the one looking for someone to trap. I just happened to be there when you threw the bait out.”
What he said was both fair and unfair, she thought, true and untrue. And no more than she’d said to herself a million times since.
She stood two steps up, looking down at him, and knew there was only one thing she wanted to say to him. The words swelled in her chest, but she knew she had to get them out.
“You’re right.” She couldn’t keep the emotion from thickening her words, but at this point it hardly mattered. “I was a spoiled, selfish child. And I tried to use you because I was afraid. But I loved you. Only you.”
He looked ready to protest, so she let the final words in her little speech tumble out. “And I always have.”
Barely registering his stunned expression, she dashed up the stairs and sought out her room through a blur of tears. She dropped onto the bed, muffling her sobs in her pillows. Surely he would leave now. Surely this was the last thing he wanted to hear.
But God help her, it was true. She had loved him all these years, had held the hope alive in some bright corner of her heart. The hope that he would come back like some returning warrior and beg forgiveness for abandoning her. And here he was, her knight in Gucci loafers, looking a bit weathered around the eyes even if those eyes were still startlingly clear, the silvery curls suited him and his European suit clung to a body that was still trim.
But the years hadn’t healed him. She saw it in his eyes and heard it in his voice, and that was what hurt the most. That they’d sat alone in their different parts of the world, hurting over foolishness perpetrated by a spoiled child.
And now that he was back, it was only a matter of time before he learned the most horrible truth of all. That he had a son he had never seen.
Through her sobs, she heard it then, a thump on her bedroom door, stunning her to stillness. She raised her head and looked back at the door, her hurting heart once again racing.
“Harper!”
Harper felt paralyzed. She couldn’t let him see her like this.
“Harper! I’m warning you! Answer me or I’ll—”
“Go away!”
The house fell silent and she imagined his soft shoes retreating on the worn carpet. She lay back on her bed, tears trickling down the sides of her face.
The next sound was her bedroom door slamming against the wall. She cried out, sat up and saw Trent standing there, glaring at her for all the world like an avenging hero. The moment was so perfect, so dreamlike, Harper almost laughed through her tears.
But before sh
e could respond, he was above her, pinning her shoulders to the bed, his tortured face close to hers. “Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that again.”
“But it’s true,” she whispered. “I’m not sure I knew it myself until now, but it’s the truest thing I’ve ever said.”
“Harper—” The expression on his face grew pained and he closed his eyes tightly. She studied him as he fought whatever emotions warred for control of him. The lines on his face, some deep, some the merest tracing, seemed unreal to her. In her mind, Trent had never aged, had remained forever young and cocky. His silvery curls looked soft to the touch, and the line of his jaw looked as stubbornly sharp as it always had. His thigh, she realized, was resting against hers and his fingers were bruising her shoulders.
“Harper,” he said again, and this time the fight had gone out of his voice. “Why?”
A faint smile stole across her lips as she heard the beginnings of forgiveness in his voice. “I was a silly fool, Trent. A silly, seventeen-year-old fool.”
“Oh, God.”
With no warning, he covered her lips with his harshly, demanding some satisfaction for the years and the betrayal and the pain. She understood everything she felt in his crushing kiss, for she felt it, too, and answered it with her lips. He had never kissed her this way then, when he’d thought her young and inexperienced, but it was the right kiss for now. The right kiss for a man and woman who had caused each other such bitterness, such anguish. Deep and hard and searing, it completed the cleansing that had begun with her words of confession.
Almost imperceptibly, the kiss softened. Trent’s tense body also softened, lowered itself to hers. His weight warmed her. She slipped a hand beneath his jacket and felt the cool, soft cotton of his shirt, pressed her palm to it to absorb the heat and the giving firmness of his flesh.
No dream, she thought. This is real.
Fresh tears spilled from her eyes. She kept touching him, relishing the swell of his back and shoulders. She raised her hips slightly to press the pulse of his erection against her belly.
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