What she really needed was a keeper. No, what she really needed was a reality check. Or...a safety hatch.
She picked up her phone and scrolled through her old emails until she found the one she wanted. After staring at the message for a full minute, she typed in a short paragraph, took a deep breath and pushed ‘send.’
***
Two days later, Finn flew to Springfield for his last event until the Copper Mountain Rodeo at the end of the month. He and Kate didn’t discuss what had happened between them. In fact, he’d made himself scarce, as he had earlier in the week. Staying away wasn’t what he wanted. But he guessed, from the way she avoided his eyes when she talked, that was what she wanted.
He couldn’t figure her out. One minute, she was fine and the next, she was pulling away. She was driving him crazy. There was no changing the past. Nor would he, if he could. Regrets were a waste of time. Without those broken roads he’d taken in his life, he wouldn’t have his children. Or the ranch. Or a second chance with Kate right now. But from the looks of things, he’d done something to blow it with her. The sex had been good. Better than good. No, something else kept her hiding behind those walls of hers. And he was beginning to wonder if he’d ever find a way over them.
He stared out over the indoor arena, jam-packed for the final round of bull-riders that had started less than an hour ago. A dull roar of noise came from the stadium. The pungent odor of animals and the sweaty smell of fear and anticipation permeated the temporary back pens where the riders who’d already completed their rides hung out, watching the competition on closed circuit television. He only knew a handful of them and was fine with that.
He’d scored high in the short go round and for the finals tonight he’d drawn a top rated bull—High Jinx—which, he knew from experience, was both a blessing and a curse. That bad boy had bucked off every rider but one in the last twenty rides and if he kept that up, he’d be well on his way to making the Built Ford Tough Series World Finals in Las Vegas in December as one of the top athlete bulls. Finn just didn’t particularly want to help him along. But a good ride on High Jinx meant a high score and that, he needed to win.
“Heard you drew the devil himself,” said a voice from behind him.
He turned to find his old friend, Brody Walker, standing beside him. Brody was a two-time world bull riding champion and one of the toughest riders he knew. Already here, he was ahead in points, but not too far to catch. They’d known each other since the two of them were practically kids and enjoyed a healthy sense of competition, but also friendship. He was one of the nicest guys he knew on the circuit, but he never underestimated Brody’s potential to steal prize money away from him.
“Yeah,” Finn said. “I’ll give ol’ High Jinx a run for the money, though.”
Brody slapped him on the back with a big smile. “I won’t say I don’t wish I’d drawn him, ’cause I do. I got a bone to pick with High Jinx after the last time I rode him. Threw me at seven point nine-five.” He shook his head. “You ever been on his back before?”
“First time.”
“Well, you want my advice? Keep in mind, that old joker will move into your hand outta the chute, but then he’s just as like to turn back on ya and spin you down the well if you ain’t careful.”
“Thanks for the tip,” he said. “I’ll keep that in mind. You on Ghost Dancer?”
“Yeah. Rank bastard. But you might as well go home right now, buddy, since I got this one all sewed up.”
Finn laughed. “We’ll see about that, pal.”
Brody flicked a quick look into the stands and for the first time, Finn wondered if nerves were working on him. “Janie’s here with my girls. They’re up there in the stands.” He gestured proudly up to the section, pointing them out. “Man. I do love that woman. You know what I mean?”
He did.
“You bring your kids?” Brody asked.
He shook his head. “Not this time.” Brody had met them twice, but on the street, coincidentally, never at an event.
“Yeah. Makes me a little nervous, too, havin’ ’em here. So, what’s your excuse? What’s got you so distracted anyhow?”
Was he that easy to read? He must be slipping. “Me?”
“Got that miles away look in your eye. And that ain’t a good thing, my friend.”
Miles away with Kate and the twins. This was why he was giving bull riding up. Even Brody could see it. Past times, nothing could have broken his laser-like focus when competing. But his plate was full of pieces teetering on the brink, and he was the only one who could catch them if they fell. “I’ve got a lot on my mind, I guess,” he admitted.
“Get your head in the game, my friend. I intend to win this fair an’ square from you.”
“Cowboy up,” Finn told Brody with a grin.
The other man touched his hat brim with a smile that was always full of mischief. “We’ll have a beer when this is done. I wanna hear what’s got you so all fired tangled up. But I’m up first. I got my lucky thirteen cents in my pocket. We’ll see who comes out on top.”
“Only thirteen?” he replied with a grin. “I got at least a quarter.”
Brody smiled back. “Luck, man.”
“You, too.” And he meant it.
***
“Cutter, Caylee, this is Monday,” Kate said, introducing Jake and Olivia’s sweet dog, who couldn’t seem to get close enough to the twins to lick them thoroughly. The kids laughed and hugged Monday around the neck until, panting with dog happiness, the animal surrendered and rolled over onto her back for belly rubs in the grass beside the gazebo at Marietta’s Crawford Park.
Monday had the profile of a German shepherd and the buff, grey-point coloring of a Siamese cat. Jake had found her as a puppy in Afghanistan when he was a rescue helicopter pilot, and brought her back from there after recovering from the wounds he’d received there. She was nothing short of a love-bug now and clearly deprived in the miniature person category.
“I think you’d better get her some of those,” Kate advised, gesturing at the children. “Chop, Chop. You two are not getting any younger.”
Olivia cast an assessing look at Jake. “I know. I plucked a grey hair out of his head today. Just the opening salvo of a landslide of decrepitude closing in.”
“Hey—!” Jake complained, curling an impressive bicep for their mutual benefit.
“Oh.” Olivia patted his arm. “Well, in that case, maybe there’s still a little time. That is, after we get that pesky wedding behind us.”
They’d been engaged for four months, but that wasn’t enough time to plan a summer wedding, which Olivia wanted. So they’d put the event off until the next summer. But she’d moved in with him in the meantime and that seemed to make life doable for them both.
Jake leaned in to Kate. “That’s the first and last time you’ll hear her say the words ‘wedding’ and ‘pesky’ in the same sentence.”
Olivia tsked. “He loves the whole wedding planning thing. Oh, yeah. Napkin choices? We just can’t stop going back and forth.” To which Jake shook his head behind her, making both Olivia and Kate laugh.
With a kiss on Jake’s cheek, Olivia turned to her sister. “Speaking of time passing—”
“Were we?” Kate asked, innocently.
“—Jaycee is already suspicious of what’s going on with you and I’m not sure how much longer I can hold her off. She actually asked me about you the other day after stopping by your empty apartment one evening and I had to...hedge. Of course, they’re going to the Copper Mountain Rodeo barbeque dinner and dance in town next weekend and expect that you’ll be sitting with the rest of the family.”
“A barbeque!” Cutter crowed, apparently listening to every word. “I love barbeque!”
“I hate barbeque,” Caylee said, sinking into an unreasonable pout. Her brother rolled his eyes.
“What?” Olivia gasped. “That’s practically impossible.”
“Caylee prefers vegetables to meat,” Kate informe
d her.
“Ohhh. Well, guess what? They have vegetables there, too. Lots and lots. And dancing. And pretty things to wear.”
Caylee brightened. “Can I wear a twirly dress?”
“Ugh,” groaned Cutter and his sister sent Kate a secret grin over Cutter’s annoyance.
“Only if you promise your dad a dance after dinner,” Kate said. Caylee, for one, looked ridiculously pleased with that idea.
They ran off to throw the ball for Monday. When they were out of earshot, she said to Olivia, “We haven’t even discussed attending yet.”
“Of course you will. You have to. Finn’s riding in the rodeo.”
“But Dad and Jaycee don’t know anything about us yet.”
“My point.”
“Don’t you think it’s better if we just keep everyone on the dark about this whole thing? I mean...there’s no need to upset everyone for nothing.”
“Is what’s between you two nothing?”
Kate’s gaze fell on the twins, who were tugging the ball from Monday’s mouth and whose giggles and smiles had already slipped inside her heart to a place she kept private, a place that squeezed hard at the thought of leaving them. She squinted off at the courthouse—away from Olivia’s and Jake’s searching looks.
Dark clouds had suddenly begun to gather in the distance over Copper Mountain and she thought of Finn driving home from the airport in bad weather. She’d texted him last night after the event and hadn’t heard back, which she assumed meant bad news. She was already worried about him. But she couldn’t have it both ways. She couldn’t want him to share his life with her if she wasn’t willing to do the same in return.
So was their fake marriage nothing? Her throat clogged unexpectedly. Yes. Nothing permanent, anyway. And while their made-up relationship lasted, she was...she was—what? Not going to let it change her?
It already has, a small voice informed her. Too late. Because she’d had a taste of something sweet and whether she deserved sweet or not, whether she was the type of girl who could stick around for that kind of solidness, the possibility of such a thing had crept in and settled around the place that still protected a seed of hope for such a thing.
“Kate?”
She turned back to Olivia, who was watching a woman who’d been walking across the park, stop and talk to the twins.
Kate knew instantly who she was.
“Oh, hell, no. Excuse me,” she said and ran toward the twins and the woman who’d walked out on them four years ago.
Chapter Eight
“Cutter! Caylee!” Kate refrained from screaming, but the words came out as imperatives.
She reached them just as Monday had placed herself protectively between the kids and their long-lost mother. They jerked a look at her in alarm and when she reached them, she grabbed them both by the shoulders and turned them toward Olivia and Jake. Melissa, who’d been crouched beside them, stood then and glared at Kate.
“Jake is missing Monday and he wants to show you a trick. You two go on over now.”
“But,” Cutter said, “we were just talking to—”
“I know. It’s all right. You go on over there now. Both of you.”
Melissa shoved her hands in her pockets as they hurried toward Jake with the dog, then turned her scowl on Kate.
Up close, she was still—perish the thought—pretty, but with an edge like a knife blade. She didn’t do much smiling, or if she did, it was the kind that was muted by Botox.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Kate demanded.
She had the nerve to look affronted. “Talking to my children.”
This was bad. This was very bad. “What did you say to them? Are you stalking us?”
“Kate, isn’t it? The ‘nanny’? I suppose they don’t know who you really are, either.”
Cold fingered down her spine. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Melissa shrugged. “C’mon, Kate. We both know you’re no nanny. So why the subterfuge with the kids?”
A thousand retorts flitted through Kate’s mind, but she weeded all of them out as potentially disastrous. So she said, “I don’t owe you any explanations, Melissa. Stay away from the kids.” She turned to walk away, but Melissa spoke again.
“Does he know you took that teaching job in Missoula?”
Kate turned and blinked in shock. No one knew. Not a single person except for the principal of that school, whom she’d sworn to secrecy.
“How’s that gonna work with your ‘marriage’? Not to mention raising the kids together, which apparently was the whole point. Wasn’t it?” Melissa was smiling now, the same way she had on the street that day when Kate had run blindly into them. Like she’d won.
“Did you hack me? Did you?”
A thin smile curved her mouth. “I have resources, Kate. And not just money. My new husband—”
“—must not give a damn that the woman he married was the kind who would ditch her own children for a party life.”
Melissa’s expression flattened. “And you’re so perfect. That must be why Finn chose me over you.”
Instead of backing away, Kate stalked toward the woman, who glanced around her before she began to back up herself. “You don’t know who you’re messing with here, Melissa. If you think you can go around snooping into our lives, you’re dead wrong. My father is a very, very good attorney. Or did your little snitch miss that? He will pin your ass to the wall if he finds you’ve illegally invaded my privacy or—”
“Is any of what I just said untrue? No?” She laughed. “Good luck suing me for speaking the truth. And do you think the judge will really care once he finds out you both lied to him?”
Kate managed not to slap that silly, condescending grin off her face, but just barely. “That’s what all this about, isn’t it? Winning? You can’t bear that Finn is a wonderful father and you’re a pathetic excuse for a mother. Did you ever once call them on their birthdays? Send them a present at Christmastime or even a card? Ever even try to visit them before deciding to yank them away from everything they know and love? You never even asked him if you could visit them. He wouldn’t have denied you. You know that, right? He would have let you see them any time you wanted. Because that’s who he is.”
Melissa cocked her jaw stubbornly at her. “You don’t know anything about me. Or what I’ve been through.”
“What you’ve been through? Oh, poor you! What about what your children have been through without their mother? Or Finn, raising them single-handedly? That man is a rock for those kids. He’s loves them more than anything in this world. He’s the only thing standing between them and that crack in the world that you left behind for them.”
Melissa turned and started to walk away, but Kate grabbed her arm, not finished yet.
“Do you get that?” she asked. “They’re not pawns in your little game of ‘I win’. They’re children. They have feelings and little hearts and they need him every day. Every day. I don’t care if you are sober—so you say. I don’t care if you have all the money in the world. You can never give them what he can. If you care, even a little bit for those children, you’ll let this thing go,” she told her, her voice rising. “You’ll talk to him like a reasonable human being. You’ll do what’s right for someone else, instead of for you”
Melissa’s blue eyes flashed with cold anger. “That’s quite a speech, coming from the woman who’s about to ditch those same children and her new husband herself. You always did think you were better than me, but you know? We’re kind of cut from the same cloth. Aren’t we?”
Kate inhaled sharply, the blow of her words hitting her squarely in the lungs.
Her sister appeared at her side, taking her arm before she could do something she regretted. “Okay,” Olivia said softly. “Okay. Let’s get out of here, Kate.”
Melissa, having no more skin-flaying blades left to fling, turned on her heel and walked away. Rain began to fall in big, fat droplets, splatting on Kate’s arms and face.
Kate opened her mouth to shout after Melissa, but no words came out. Instead, a dark panic swamped her, stealing her breath and making her heart race. She clapped a hand over her mouth and her eyes brimmed. If what Melissa had said hadn’t cut so close to the bone, she would only be angry right now. But the woman’s words had found Kate’s soft underbelly, the place she protected and tried to keep to herself. Worse, she was absolutely right.
The rain began to fall in earnest then, but Olivia stayed right beside her. “Hey. Deep breaths. Are you okay?” she asked, taking Kate by the shoulders.
She shook her head, ignoring the rain, unable to take in oxygen. “No. No. No. I’ve ruined everything, Liv. But—oh, God—I didn’t mean to.” Tears tumbled down her cheeks. Tears she could not control. Sobs erupted from someplace inside her she’d forgotten was even there.
Across the way, she could see Finn’s children watching her with concern from the shelter of the gazebo. Jake was doing his best to distract them with the dog.
“Oh, Kate. Of course, you didn’t. I...I mean, don’t be silly.” Olivia put an arm around her shoulder, then pulled her into a hug. Both of them were soaking wet in a matter of moments. “You haven’t ruined anything.”
But she had no idea. No idea at all that Kate had single-handedly sunk Finn’s chances to keep his children.
***
When she’d only wanted to run back to Finn’s house to hide, Olivia and Jake insisted on dragging her and the children out to lunch at the Main Street Diner. She supposed Olivia was afraid to leave her alone, soggy wreck that she was. She couldn’t admit or even try to explain what she’d done. What would be the point? So they could agree with Melissa about how selfish she had been? How she’d simply given in to her impulsive nature without thinking of the potential consequences?
But how could she have imagined the lengths to which Melissa would go?
To make matters worse, Olivia was...Olivia, who didn’t pry. She simply made her support clear, careful to say nothing in front of the kids. Kate didn’t deserve a sister, much less a friend, like her. Deserving a man like Finn was another matter altogether.
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