by Hope Navarre
They both fell silent for a long time. Finally, he pushed his hat back and rested one boot on the bottom rail of the fence. “What happened after that?”
She let out a long sigh. At least he was willing to listen to her side of the story without getting angry.
“I told Colin about my decision, and he asked me to marry him. He begged me, really. He said he wanted a child more than anything in the world, my child, and I believed him. I think he knew he wasn’t going to beat his cancer.”
Robyn bit her lip as the memories of those tragic final days played out in her mind. She gave a quick shake of her head to dispel them and continued, “As enlightened as the world is today, I still didn’t relish the idea of telling my parents I was pregnant. Colin, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to tell his. Clara had been in frail health for years. Colin needed to give his mother something to live for. He wanted to give her a grandchild, but he knew time was against him. I was the answer he’d been praying for. He needed me, and I needed someone who needed me. So we got married.”
“And you let everyone believe my son was the son of another man. It was that easy?”
“Easy?” She took several long strides along the fence before she stopped. She crossed her arms tightly and turned to face him.
“Easy? No, it wasn’t easy. Chance was born a month after Colin died. Every time Edward or Clara saw something about him that reminded them of Colin, I wanted to crawl away and die. What a cruel trick I was playing on them. They tried to help me out with money while I was in school, but I couldn’t take it. I know they only wanted to help, but each gift, each savings bond for the baby, each suggestion that Chance was sure to want to follow in his father’s footsteps and study science was salt in a wound of guilt that never healed.”
“So why didn’t you tell them?”
“Because—” Her voice cracked, and she pressed a hand to her trembling lips. “Because Colin made me promise. He was dying. He made me promise I’d never tell. I didn’t tell anyone until after I saw you being wheeled into the emergency room. I knew then that I had made a terrible mistake.”
* * *
NEAL COULD SEE Robyn struggle to control her tears. He wanted to take her in his arms and kiss away all the hurt he’d caused. They’d hurt each other enough. Nothing could bring back those lost years. If he took it, he had the chance now to make amends, but he stood on one side of the fence, and she stood on the other. If they were going to stop hurting each other, they would have to both be on the same side.
She had become a strong and independent woman, and she wouldn’t come to him for comfort. She’d followed him around from the time she had learned to walk and begged for his attention, and he had taken her love for granted.
Well, not anymore. Not ever again. The time for talking was past. He turned and walked toward the gate. This time it was up to him.
Robyn saw him walking away. Panic engulfed her. He had to understand. He had to forgive her. She had to make him stay and listen to how sorry she was. How could she?
A coiled lariat hung over a fence post beside her. She grabbed it, shook out a loop, put one foot up on the fence and let fly. She’d once been the best heeler in the county.
Neal never knew what happened until he found himself facedown in the dirt with a rope around his boots. “What the hell?”
Robyn came over the fence and jerked the rope tight before he could loosen it. With purposeful strides, she moved to stand over him.
“What was this for?” he demanded.
She jerked hard on the rope. “You’re not going anywhere until I’ve had my say. You are going to listen to me, and you are going to hear me.”
He rested back on his elbows. “All right, Robyn. Have at it.”
“I’m sorry!” she shouted. “Do you hear me? I’m sorry for taking Chance away from you.”
“I hear you loud and clear.”
“Chance loves you. He needs you to be part of his life. He deserves it and so do you.”
“All right,” he agreed slowly. “I’m living here. I fully intend to see my son as often as I can. I would love to adopt him so there will never be a question in his mind about whether or not his father loves him. Did you have something else you wanted to say, or can I get up now?”
She drew a deep breath. “Yes, I have more to say. I love you, and I need you to be part of my life, too. I don’t want to face a future without you in it. You complete me in so many ways that I can’t even count them all. That’s it. I love you.”
“Sounds like you want me to marry you.”
“Well, yes.”
“Okay.”
She stared down at him for a long moment as his reply sank in. “Okay? Just like that?”
“Can I get up now?” A grin tugged at the corner of his mouth.
“Ah, yes. Did you just say okay, you’ll marry me?”
He slipped the rope off his boots and stood to face her. “Come here.” He held open his arms.
With a glad cry, she flung herself against him. “I thought you were going to walk away again. I had to make you stay and listen to me.”
“I was going to go around to the gate. I didn’t think I could leap over the fence. My ribs are still sore.”
She pulled away and stared at him in horror. “Oh, my God, did I hurt you?”
He pulled her back into his embrace. “It only hurts when you aren’t kissing me.”
Joy welled up in her heart and overflowed. “I can fix that. I’m a nurse,” she whispered.
Cupping his face, she kissed him with all the pent-up longing of the past lonely years.
He broke off the kiss and held her close. “I love you, Robyn, but there is something you should know.”
“I don’t care if you want to go back to the rodeo. We’ll wait at home for you, or travel with you, if that’s what you want.”
“No, my riding days are over. I meant it when I said you and Chance were more important. I only rode that last time to prove to myself that I could do it. To conquer my fear.”
His hands dropped away from her. “This concerns Chance.”
Worry creased her brow. “I’m listening.”
“Chance is deaf because of me.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“My father had a brother who was born deaf. Chance inherited his deafness through me. So might any other children we have.”
The glow of her happiness faded from her face as she stared at him. “Do you mean you don’t want more children?”
“No, I don’t mean that.” He crushed her in a tight embrace. “Of course I want more children with you, Robyn. I don’t care if they are deaf or twins like Jake’s or green as eggs and ham. I just want you to know what you’re facing. I’ll understand if you don’t want to take the risk.”
Could she face having another deaf child? The prospect didn’t frighten her as it once had. With Neal beside her, she could face any problem that life dealt her. He was her other half, the piece of her that had been missing for so long.
He held her away and looked into her eyes. “I want another Chance. I want another son or daughter. Hell, I want a dozen Chances, and I want them to grow up on this ranch. My plan is to raise and train horses with Jake and someday buy this spread from him. The place needs a little fixing up, but the thing this ranch needs most is a family. Our family. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to do the asking. Will you marry me, Robyn O’Connor Morgan?”
“Yes,” Robyn whispered, her happiness all but choking her with the emotions that swelled inside her heart.
Neal gazed tenderly at the face of the woman who haunted his dreams, and he marveled at the love that shone in her eyes. Fate had brought him back to her. Now it was up to him to keep her in his arms. Now it would be up to him to show her just how much
he needed her. She would never doubt that again.
“I can’t live without you, Robyn. I know because I tried. I need you. I need your love now and for always.”
“For always?” A beautiful smile trembled on her lips. She arched one eyebrow. “That’s a pretty long time, cowboy.”
“For always and forever, Tweety. For always and forever.”
He bent to kiss her once more. As her soft lips parted beneath his, he knew forever wouldn’t be long enough to show her how much he loved her. But it would be a start.
* * * * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from A PROMISE FOR THE BABY by Jennifer Lohmann.
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CHAPTER ONE
VIVIAN SAT ON an uncomfortable chair in the starkly decorated lobby of her husband’s apartment building and waited for Karl to come home from work. She’d been waiting for hours, her feet propped up by a couple of suitcases, garnering suspicious looks, but the doorman hadn’t kicked her out yet. He’d tried, but she had a marriage certificate that said she was Karl Milek’s wife. Unwilling to throw her out onto the street, he’d also been unwilling to let her into Karl’s apartment.
She was pretty sure he was regretting both decisions. At least Xìnyùn, her father’s blue parrot, had stopped talking an hour ago. His chipper conversation wasn’t welcome in this modern building and his brightness was an unwanted distraction in the white-and-black interior.
Every time someone came through the rotating doors, the February winds whistled and Xìnyùn responded with his own tune, dancing up and down the rainbow ladder in his cage. Not a single person who’d walked past had smiled at Xìnyùn’s antics. Her husband lived in a building as cold as his hands.
She had called his office five times, but “he is in a meeting,” they said. “We will pass on the message,” they said. She didn’t tell them she was his wife. With divorce terms agreed upon, he probably hadn’t told his coworkers about his Vegas mistake. He’d probably figured—as she had—that their secret would keep until the divorce was finalized, and then it wouldn’t matter anymore. They’d be divorced and have moved on with their lives. But now she needed him, and she needed him to be her husband. Outing him to his coworkers seemed a poor way to gain his cooperation.
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
She was supposed to have stayed in Vegas.
The energy in the lobby flared when her husband walked through the door. He was the cold, stiff man she remembered from their morning after, and he didn’t seem to be any warmer with all of his clothes on—and not hungover. Maybe he didn’t notice the freezing temperatures outside. He wore a forest-green scarf wrapped around his neck and a tan wool coat as though they were for show, so the people around him wouldn’t wonder at his ability to walk through snow naked and not get frostbite. No hat covered his brown hair. His hazel eyes were more attractive when not bloodshot, but glasses didn’t soften the sharp planes of his face. She had assumed his face only looked hard when angry—but he didn’t have a reason to be angry. Yet.
She needed Karl to be the man whose eyes had been mostly brown when he’d offered to buy her a drink, but had turned a lush green when she’d brushed her hand against his as she reached for that drink. The man who’d noticed her shiver and tucked her tightly against him as they walked out of the hotel, even though they had both known she wasn’t cold. The man who had made her laugh when she felt as if nothing in her life could ever be funny again.
Perhaps that man had been an illusion and as fake as the Luxor pyramid, given flesh only by the carnival lights of Las Vegas. That she was even sitting here in the lobby of this apartment building was evidence that she wasn’t as immune to Las Vegas magic as she thought she’d been.
The doorman scurried over to her husband, his arms out in supplication and face creased in apology. Tingles shot down her spine when Karl looked over at her. He showed no hurry as he walked across the lobby to her, his face as blank as she remembered.
“You were the woman calling my office today,” he said in greeting.
“Hello to you, too.” They hadn’t planned on seeing each other again, but there was no reason not to be civil. In theory, theirs was an amicable divorce. “Can we talk somewhere private?”
His eyes took in the pile of suitcases and the birdcage sitting next to them. He didn’t nod or say a word, just picked up the birdcage and a suitcase and walked toward the elevator. Vivian scrambled to her feet, slung her purse over her shoulder, picked up two more suitcases and hurried to follow him, the heels of her boots clicking on the marble floor.
On the elevator ride up to his apartment, Vivian opened her mouth a couple times to speak, but Karl silenced her with a raise of his eyebrow. “You wanted private. We can at least wait until we are in my apartment.”
She closed her eyes and nodded. She’d waited for hours; another couple of minutes wasn’t going to kill her.
In his apartment, she put down her suitcases in the entryway and followed him to the couch, taking the birdcage with her. Dark wood floors made his apartment more welcoming than the lobby, though his furniture looked to be just as uncomfortable. The only sign of softness amidst the leather, glass, steel and stone was a plush rug in the living room. He didn’t even have any curtains to soften the floor-to-ceiling windows. She sat on the couch. He sat in one of the armchairs and looked at her expectantly.
If she was waiting for a greeting of some kind, apparently she would be disappointed.
“I’m sorry to drop in on you like this,” she said, gesturing to the luggage near the door. “I didn’t feel I had any choice.”
“Were the terms of our divorce not sufficient?” His elbows rested on the arms of the chair and he’d laced his fingers together in a bridge over the chest of his charcoal-gray suit. Anyone looking in on the scene through the windows would see Karl’s cocked head and casual pose and imagine they were discussing some local curiosity. Vivian imagined that he must have soon-to-be ex-wives drop in on him as a regular occurrence if he managed to remain so self-possessed about the whole thing.
His absolute composure was the reason she’d answered “sure” when he’d gestured to the doors of the chapel, a half smile on his face, and asked, “Shall we?” She had wanted to be a part of his stability then; it was unfair of her to be irritated by it now. And what if she also wanted the passion they’d shared? Well, that had gotten her into this mess in the first place.
“Yes. I mean, no, they were fine. But I don’t want a divorce right now.”
If she’d shocked him, his only reaction was to lean back in the chair and lift his left foot to rest on his knee. She was glad he hadn’t sat on the couch next to her. She felt crowded enough by him without having to make room for his knees and elbows—and his infinite placidity, which took up far more space than any single lack of reaction should.
Xìnyùn said, “I fold.” At least the parrot showed a reaction.
“I’m pregnant and I want to keep the baby.”
* * *
“HIT ME,” THE bird squeaked.
Karl looked at the blue bird dirtying his coffee table and wondered what was more ridiculous,
his one-night stand/wife telling him she was pregnant or the bird asking to be punched.
If this was his punishment for indulging his emotions with liquor, he would pour every ounce of booze in the apartment down the toilet and shatter the wineglasses. Unfortunately, humoring his impulses was unlikely to allow time to flow backward until he walked into his apartment building and passed through the lobby up to his apartment without a wife—pregnant wife—in the way.
“Are you sure you’re pregnant?” Three weeks ago—his birthday—he’d sat at a hotel bar and gulped down whiskey every time he remembered he was older than his father ever had been or would be, only without a wife or child. Now he had both, and he didn’t want either of them. “Are you sure it’s mine?”
“Yes, I’m sure. About both questions. I don’t make a habit of sex with strangers.” A series of rapid blinks over her light brown eyes—barely a shade darker than her skin—were evidence of her nerves, but she didn’t shrink away from him. She was on a mission and determined to see it through.
“I don’t know anything about you other than you did once have sex with a stranger.” And her maiden name was Yap. He’d learned that from the marriage certificate he’d found under some tiger lilies on a table in his hotel suite.
“I wasn’t the only one in that room.”
No, but he wished to God the man in the hotel room had been someone other than himself. His office was in the middle of a sole-source contract investigation; he didn’t have time for whatever she needed from him. “If the only thing you know about me is that I also did once have sex with a stranger, then I assure you, if you are pregnant with my child, I can change the terms of the divorce. You’ll get sufficient child support.”