Jack didn’t respond, for which she was grateful. After all, what was there to say? Aaron Fitzgerald’s stubborn, temperamental ways were legendary in the county. People either accepted them or had nothing to do with the man. But Katie was his daughter, and her choices weren’t so clear.
Later that evening Katie sat on the front porch steps of the Darby house. She knew that she and Shane should make their way home, but Hattie had challenged the boy to beat her at video games, and Katie hadn’t wanted to refuse his pleading look. Any underlying hope she’d had that she and Jack could spend a little time together had been quickly squashed by him shooing her out of the kitchen so he could take care of cleaning up. So she found herself alone in the relative silence of the night, staring at stars that had been her frequent companions since she’d been a child.
At least the heavens looked the same from this vantage point, she thought humorously. Sometimes the Darby ranch seemed to be at the other end of the universe…or so she’d believed when she was growing up. Keeping her budding relationship with Jack a secret had consumed much of her energy. Still, she’d managed.
How many times had she, as a teenager, stared at the stars and wished Jack would join her, or that she could join him? She’d wanted to sit next to him, to talk, maybe even hold hands. Now, many years later, she found herself wishing for the same thing—that a specific handsome man would step onto the porch and share the solitude with her. Compared to the turmoil at her house, this was paradise.
But instead of Jack’s even footsteps, the quiet was broken by the sound of a car engine. Lights swept across the porch, then the engine was silenced and a car door opened. Katie recognized the woman even before she spoke. A tall, leggy brunette stepped out into the night. Shopping bags filled her arms, but they didn’t slow her down as she hurried to the front porch.
“What are you doing here?” Nora Darby demanded. “I know you’re my mother’s physical therapist, but your work is done for the day.”
Nora was only a couple of years younger than Katie. She had the Darbys’ dark good looks and was pretty enough to be a beauty queen. The two women had known each other all their lives, yet Nora would rather have her tongue ripped out than offer a civil greeting.
Katie sighed. “Hello, Nora. Your mother is making amazing progress. She’s going to be back to normal in no time.”
Nora glared. “You’ve eaten dinner here, haven’t you? Dammit, I don’t make this food for the likes of you.”
“And I didn’t even choke on it,” Katie said lightly. “That must be disappointing to you.”
The screen door squeaked open behind her. Jack stepped onto the porch. “Nora, Mom raised you better than this, and we both know it. Katie is our guest. Besides, what’s she ever done to deserve your rudeness?”
Nora glared at them both. “I don’t have to explain myself to either of you.”
She hurried up the stairs, swept past her brother and entered the house. The screen door slammed shut behind her.
Katie turned to look at Jack. “Shane’s in there. Do I have to worry?”
Jack shook his head as he settled next to her on the top step. “No. Nora won’t say a word in front of the boy. For all her faults, she’s crazy about kids.” He jerked his head toward the house. “Sorry about that.”
“It’s nothing compared to what Aaron would say if he found you on our front porch.” She drew her knees to her chest and tried not to notice how good it felt to have Jack sitting next to her. The heat from his body seemed to surround her in a cocoon of safety. She wanted to lean against him, resting her head on his shoulder. She wanted him to put his arm around her and just hold her. This wasn’t about sexual desire, although she had her share of that. This was about two friends finding a bit of the past tied up in the present.
Instead she rested her arms on her knees and stared at the sky. “I was just thinking about how peaceful it was here, compared to my house. But I take that back.”
“Nora doesn’t believe in keeping her opinion to herself. But you know that Hattie and I don’t share it.”
“I do know that. You’ve both been very kind to Shane and me.” She shifted so that she was leaning against the railing and able to look at Jack. “Besides, Nora has her reasons.”
“You mean David?”
“What else?” Katie sighed. “They rocked both families by falling in love. My father threatened to disinherit David for proposing to Nora, then a few weeks before the wedding David shows up married to another woman who is already pregnant with his child. If I were Nora, I would have ripped his heart out. Under the circumstances, I think she’s been very forgiving.”
Jack wore a white shirt tucked into jeans. The pale fabric glowed in the light from the fixture by the front door. But his features were in shadow, and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
“Did you mind?” she asked. “Them being engaged, I mean. Not David dumping her.”
“I wanted to beat the crap out of your brother,” he admitted. “He treated my sister badly. She deserved better.”
“I know. It was so not like him. I never understood what happened.”
There was a minute of silence, then Jack stretched his long legs in front of him and shrugged. “No, I didn’t mind them being engaged. Why should I? I was involved with you.”
As if she didn’t remember. “I always thought that David and Nora being involved kept the heat off us,” she admitted, staring straight ahead instead of looking at him. The personal subject made her feel shy somehow. “I’m sure we weren’t as subtle as we thought. All those long glances and secret touching. Someone might have noticed. Except both families were so caught up in what was going on with David and Nora.”
“It was a different time,” he said. “We were young.”
“I don’t want to go back in time, but there are some things I miss about those days. It was so much easier to know what I wanted and how to get it.”
“Aren’t you sure now?”
“Not at all.”
“I am,” he said flatly. “I have everything I want right here.”
She didn’t know how he meant the words. She doubted that he intended them to wound, but they did. If he had all he needed, then she wasn’t necessary to his happiness. Not that she should be. They were old friends, nothing more. Except…there had been a time when the sun had risen and set in his eyes. She thought he’d felt the same.
She felt the distance between them that had existed since she’d first seen him when she moved back. It was as if they’d never shared a past or any kind of affection. They were strangers, and he wasn’t interested in changing that.
She told herself she agreed with him. That being with a man wasn’t part of her plan. She had to make a life for herself and her son, and she didn’t need the complication of getting involved. Except she didn’t exactly believe what she was saying. Without meaning to, she asked the question that had been on her mind since she’d seen him in Dr. Remington’s office.
“Are you still mad at me?”
Chapter Five
K atie watched, but Jack didn’t give anything away. His posture didn’t change, nor did his body language. She might as well have asked about the weather.
“I was never mad,” he said after a while.
Katie raised her eyebrows. “Of course you were. You had to be furious with me. I was the one leaving for college, when you should have already been there for a year. I got to go away while you were stuck on the ranch. Worse, I wanted you to come with me. I know now that I was tempting you with what you could never have. You had to be angry. I was angry with you.”
That got a reaction out of him. He turned to face her, his gaze narrow, his mouth set in a thin line. “You’ll have to explain that to me. What? You were annoyed that I couldn’t drop everything to come with you? Not that it made any difference. You’re the one who promised to love me forever. And you took all of six months to find some other man and marry him. So what happened, Katie? You get hitche
d to the first guy who asked you out?”
She’d wanted to know that he still remembered the past, and now she had her answer. Rage radiated from him, much as the sexual heat had years before. Fire flashed in his dark eyes, but the flames had everything to do with broken dreams and nothing to do with desire.
“Just about.” She whispered her confession. “But it’s not what you imagine, Jack. I didn’t love him.”
“That’s supposed to make it better?”
Silence stretched between them. She wanted to touch him, as she had wanted to before. But this time she wanted the physical contact so that she could know it was going to be okay between them. While she’d been going through the torture that was adolescence, Jack had been her best friend. All the years apart hadn’t changed the fact that she missed him.
He drew in a deep breath. “I was angry,” he said grudgingly. “But not in the way you think.”
“Then how? I know I hurt you by getting married. I didn’t mean to.”
“Hurt me or get married?”
His steady gaze unnerved her. She looked past him to the barn. “Both, I guess. I can’t regret Shane. He’s the best part of me.” She smiled. “I know that’s a cliché. All mothers think the same thing, but it’s really true. Shane has been my miracle. So that’s the one positive thing that came out of my very brief marriage.”
“He’s a good kid.”
“Thanks. I know I get to take a little of the credit, but most of it is him.” She risked glancing at Jack. His expression didn’t seem quite so hard. “I thought it would be different,” she admitted. “My life, my future. I wanted you to leave the ranch and come with me. I wanted us to be in a place where we could admit our feelings in public. I was very young and selfish. I’m sorry for that.”
She paused, but he didn’t speak. She wondered what he was thinking. Did her confession matter to him? Did the past still live or had he put it so far behind him that he couldn’t remember what it looked like anymore?
“We were both young,” he said slowly. “I knew you wanted me to go with you, and I couldn’t.”
“I see that now, but at the time all I could think was that you didn’t love me enough. Or at least not as much as I loved you.” She grimaced. “That was my interpretation of events. As for marrying the first young man who asked me out, I think I wanted to know that there was someone who wanted to marry me even if you didn’t. I had something to prove.”
“In what way?”
She still couldn’t look at him. She turned her attention to Nora’s car—a dark shape in the starlight. But it wasn’t enough to distract her from the whispers of pain. So long ago Jack had been her world. He’d hurt her desperately, not just by refusing to leave the ranch to be with her, but before.
“You changed,” she said in a whisper. “After you graduated from high school. You were different. Withdrawn. Looking back now, I can see that you were probably making the transition from teenager to adult. Suddenly you weren’t the football hero anymore—you were in charge of a working ranch. Old Bill Smith retired and your mom was busy with the other kids. So you had to go it alone. But I didn’t recognize that…at least not in time. I thought you were rejecting me.”
“Never that, Katie.” He hesitated. “You’re right about the rest of it, though. After high school everything was different.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s not your fault.”
“I guess.”
“You thought about this a lot,” he said.
She shrugged. “I’ve had plenty of time to work it out. Sitting up through the night with a sick child gives one a chance to revisit the past.”
“Was he sick a lot?”
“No. Nothing like me who caught every bug in a hundred mile radius and then some. Shane’s a healthy kid, and I’m grateful. I meant the usual stuff. Colds, fevers.”
She looked at him again and found him studying her face. She returned the interest, examining features she’d thought about over the years, noticing the changes and the similarities. Time had been kind to him, turning him from a good-looking teenager to a handsome man.
Jack smiled slowly. The corners of his eyes crinkled, and her stomach lurched in response. She found herself leaning toward him, wanting to hear whatever magic words fell from his firm lips.
Down girl, she told herself. While she was able to control her reaction around other men, Jack still had the ability to make her go weak at the knees. It probably had something to do with him being her first love.
“I’ve spent time with Shane and seen you with him. I know he’s your son,” Jack said. “But I have to admit I have trouble thinking of you as the mother of a ten-year-old.”
She splayed her hands, palms up. “That’s me.”
He drew one leg to his chest and rested his arm on his raised knee. “You and Shane both mentioned you were having difficulties with your dad. Is that any better?”
“Not really.” Katie looked at the stars, even though she knew there weren’t going to be any answers there. “My father doesn’t appreciate Shane. All he sees are the differences between them. But I’ve talked to my contractor, and our new house will be ready in seven weeks. I’m guessing we can hold out that long.”
“Tell me about the house,” he said.
Jack listened as Katie talked about three bedrooms and an eat-in kitchen. He couldn’t relate to living anywhere but on the Darby ranch. At one time he and Katie had planned a future together. Who would have thought things would turn out so differently?
“You’re nothing like Aaron,” Katie was saying. “You’ve lived similar lives on the same land, doing the same kind of work, but you’re very different men.”
“I’m like my father,” Jack said flatly, knowing that was the heart of the problem. When he’d been a boy everyone had said he was exactly like Russell Darby—charming, fun-loving. But all that had changed when he’d realized what his father had done by walking out on his family without once looking back. Since that day Jack had struggled to destroy everything his father might have taught him.
“You’re not like him at all,” Katie protested. “You have physical features from both your parents, but in temperament, you’re much more like your mother.”
Her words pleased him. He’d worked hard to make them true. He smiled faintly. Trust Katie to see him as he wanted to be seen. She’d always believed the best in him. When he hadn’t thought he could do anything right, when he’d been all of sixteen and had been trying to grasp the extent of his responsibility, Katie had been the one to convince him he could do it if he wanted to. Her trust and faith had given him the strength to keep trying.
But there were things about him that she couldn’t know. Ways in which he’d come far too close to being Russell Darby—a man who’d walked out on a ranch, a wife and seven children.
He looked at her with the porch light turning her blond hair the color of gold. She wore a sweater over slacks. The soft clingy fabric of her top showed him that she was still as curvy as he remembered. Growing up, she’d been his fantasy. Despite time and distance and good sense, he found himself wondering how it would be between them tonight. They were different. Not children who had fallen in love, but adults who understood the logistics of what went where and how good it could be…even between strangers.
She tilted her head. “You should have asked me to stay.”
He knew what she meant. That summer, when she’d been leaving for college and had wanted him to go with her. Instead of refusing, he should have asked her to stay here…with him.
“No,” he said.
“Yes.” She leaned toward him. “I would have done it. I would have done anything for you. I loved you—you were my world.”
He swore under his breath. “Your world, as you call it, was out in front of you, waiting to be explored. You knew everything there was to know about Lone Star Canyon. You deserved more than this. You wanted more than this.”
He knew all about wanti
ng. Once he’d had wants and dreams, but they’d faded until he could barely remember what they’d been. Once he’d wanted a wife and a family. Not anymore. Love didn’t last, and women didn’t stay.
“Interesting that despite your plans for my destiny, I ended up right back here,” she said. “I wish you hadn’t been so self-sacrificing. I think we could have made it.”
He dismissed her comment. “It doesn’t matter.” But what he wanted to say was, “Don’t talk about it.” Because revisiting the past would start to hurt. He might not remember his hopes for the future, but the pain was still fresh. The pain of having to be in the one place he didn’t want to be; the pain of giving her up, of being nineteen and completely alone and responsible for the well-being of his family. The pain of spending every minute of his life not being his father. Of figuring out he was always going to be alone.
“When you tell me it doesn’t matter I start to think I wasn’t very important to you at all,” she confessed. Her gaze settled somewhere in the center of his chest. She tucked a few loose curls behind her ear and tried to smile. “Silly, huh? It was a long time ago. But it’s weird to think you’ve forgotten it all so easily.”
Without realizing what he was going to do, he reached out and grabbed her upper arms. “What do you want from me, Katie? To know that having you walk away ripped out my guts? That I almost didn’t make it without you?” He shook her slightly. “Guess what? I did make it, because no matter how dramatic it seems at nineteen, no one dies of a broken heart.”
Her eyes sparkled, and for a moment he thought she might be fighting tears. “I know,” she whispered. “I’m being silly. It’s just after all this time, I’m sorry you weren’t my first. Dumb, huh?”
Dumb and wonderful and Lord almighty, how had she known exactly where to stick the knife? He felt the sharp blade slide between his ribs with a surgeon’s precision.
“I wish things had been different,” she went on as if she couldn’t see the bleeding. “I wish you remembered it the way I did and that it had been important to you the way it had been important to me.”
The Rancher Next Door Page 6