Chuckling, she rolled to her back. How in the heavens was she going to get her noodly legs to function enough to be any help to Rachel?
Matt flopped onto the bed next to her and kissed her forehead. “How about I stay around Catcher Creek today? Tonight after Tommy goes to sleep, we can do this again before I hit the road.”
She bit her lip, considering. She had study group tonight and she wasn’t quite sure why she hesitated to tell Matt. He already knew her secret, but she supposed old habits died hard.
She mentally shook some sense into herself. “I have virtual study group every Sunday night at eight, so that won’t work unless you stayed super late. But that’s not a good idea because neither of us has gotten much sleep the past few nights and I don’t like the thought of you making a three-hour drive in the middle of the night while exhausted.”
“I hate to admit it, but you make a good point.”
“How about you plan on staying next weekend with me and Tommy at Kellan’s house? We’ll still be there house-sitting.”
“When does that start?”
“Today. After I get Tommy from the sitter’s house at nine, we’ll come back here and do more chores, then plan on being at Kellan’s ranch before nightfall. His dog, Max, will be wanting his dinner by then. The ranch hands and his foreman are taking care of the livestock, but Kellan wanted someone around at night to keep Max company.” She slid her fingers over his arm and took his hand. “Even though tonight won’t work, you’ll still spend the day with us, right?”
He hesitated. “Are you sure it’s the right thing for Tommy? You and I are pretty brand-new.”
A hollow space opened up inside her. Had he just insinuated what she thought he had? Was he hedging his bets? She took her hand back and pushed to a seated position. “I don’t understand. Tommy already loves you. He talks about you all the time. Heck, you cut up his chicken at the rehearsal dinner and taught him the Watermelon Crawl.”
“I know, and I really like the little guy, but everything changes now, doesn’t it? Now that we’re dating, I don’t want to confuse him.”
She drew a steadying breath and took his hands, hoping to make him see the fallacy of his logic. “That’s like heading into a relationship expecting it to fail,” she said gently. “It’s no different than a wedding pre-nup. I’d never introduce Tommy right away to a new boyfriend I’d been set up with on a blind date or a guy I met online, somebody I needed to vet first. But it’s different with you. I’m sorry if it scares you, but I’m in this to try for forever.” A new humiliating possibility occurred to her. What if his reluctance wasn’t about a fear of commitment, but about a disinterest in it? “Please tell me this wasn’t about the thrill of the hunt for you.”
He seemed genuinely appalled. “Hey, it’s not like that with me.”
“But?”
“But nothing. No hidden agenda. I’ve dated women with kids before, so I know the drill. That’s what they all said. They didn’t want me to confuse their kids or get their hopes up or anything until we . . . you know.”
What they all said? she wanted to ask. How many is all?
She had no delusions that a good-looking, hot-blooded sex god of a man like Matt wouldn’t have a dating history. But acknowledging the existence of a trail of ex-girlfriends was vastly different from lumping her into the same general group as them.
“You know the drill?” she asked instead. “Are girlfriends like boot camp, or are we more of the fire-drill variety?”
He winced. “Fine. Not the best choice of words.” His thumb depressed each finger, cracking each knuckle in turn. “Look, I’m trying not to push you too fast. I have a history of making that kind of mistake, okay?”
Again with being roped into the same corral as his exes. Buzzing with frustration, she couldn’t get her brain to stop repeating Matt’s voice in his SUV, spouting from memory the most romantic line she’d ever heard a man say.
True love is not about finding a person you can live with. It’s about finding the person you can’t live without.
Zap, like lightning, she was furious and frustrated. All of a sudden the happiness her two sisters had found seemed nigh impossible. How had they managed to find men who were crazy about them when the reality of modern dating was so completely FUBAR?
Whoa there, girl. Your scars are showing. She threw the breaks on her toxic line of thought and aimed her face at the ceiling, closing her eyes. Stupid daddy issues. A part of her would always be that girl who was ready to battle, to fight against being ignored or shoved aside or minimized. It was such bullshit that she had to keep dragging that anchor when she was a self-sufficient single mom on the verge of being a college graduate forging a new career as an engineer. A goddamn engineer, for Pete’s sake.
Large, strong hands cradled her cheeks. She opened her eyes to see Matt looking down at her, his face close enough to kiss. His gaze burned with intensity. “Jenna, I’m all in. You said you were waiting for me to notice you, but my mind and my heart have been stuck on you since the first time we met. You, me, and Tommy—it’s what I want. But I just . . .” He gave a tight shake of his head, distress infusing his features.
Like a second jolt of lightning, Tara’s plea for her not to break his heart came back to her. “My mind and heart are stuck on you too.” She spread her palms over his collarbone. “Which is why it’s time for you to tell me why you’re so afraid of us.”
Chapter Ten
Matt’s jaw tightened, his eyes grew sharp. “That’s a fair question. You’re right—I am afraid of us, and it has to do with the injuries I promised to explain today. But is now the right time? Rachel’s expecting you.”
“This is more important.”
Nodding, his lips a stiff, thin line, he stretched to his back next to her. “When I was in my early twenties, I was gung-ho into long-distance road cycling. Seventy-five or a hundred-mile routes were my norm, sometimes farther. One Sunday when I was twenty-two, I was hit by a truck near San Ysidro. Not hit so much as run over.”
“You were badly hurt.”
His brows flickered as he huffed. “The bike caught somewhere on the truck’s undercarriage and it dragged me along the road until the driver realized what he’d done. I was impaled by the bike frame. Most of the skin on my groin, left leg, and lower back sloughed off.”
Aching for what he’d gone through and trying not to visualize the accident or what it’d done to his body, she reached for his hand and took a firm hold of it.
“I blacked out and when I came to three days later, I was in a hospital ICU. They’d patched me up during a fifteen-hour marathon surgery, then induced a coma so I could heal. For the first week after I was brought back to consciousness, my family and I spent every waking moment thanking God I was alive and hadn’t lost any limbs or suffered brain damage.”
Jenna didn’t see what his accident had to do with his fear of relationships, but she was horrified at what he’d lived through and profoundly grateful that he had indeed lived.
“But then, once I was stable and off the heaviest pain meds, a urologist paid me a visit.”
He sat and swung his legs off the bed.
Jenna stared at his scarred backside, her heart sinking. A urologist? Clearly, something had gone terribly wrong during the accident, but she’d spent a lot of quality time with his goods in the past twelve hours and knew they were in excellent working order. “You were injured . . . down there? Worse than your skin coming off?”
He grabbed a sheet of paper from the pad on her nightstand and crumpled it. “According to the doctor, my groin looked so messed up and the procedure to fix the area was so delicate that before the plastic surgeon did his thing, the urologist was called to draw sperm out to save in case they weren’t able to put me back together down there.”
He attempted to make a basket into the trash can under the window, but missed. Shaking his head, he ripped another paper, crushed it in his palm, and attempted another shot.
Jenna scramb
led up and knelt behind him. She wrapped her arms around him and pressed her lips to his shoulder. “They obviously put you back together just fine. So what was the problem?”
“The problem was that there was no mature sperm to take. Lo and behold, I was born with a freak genetic anomaly called Sertoli-cell-only syndrome—SCO. It’s permanent and untreatable.” He threw the paper at the trash can again. This time, it went in. For the first time since he’d said the word urologist, he looked her in the eye. “I was a mangled piece of raw meat after that collision. I was impaled, of all the nasty things, so who would’ve guessed that the accident’s most monumental, long-term effect on my life was finding out I could never father a child?”
Oh. Wow. Reaction was everything. He twisted his neck and looked at her, studying, gauging. Giving her no time to craft the perfect expression, or even decide what it was. “There’s more to life than having children.”
He rotated his neck. “Okay, yeah, except I want children. I want a family. I know that sounds petulant, like I’m dwelling on the one thing in life I can never have, but even beside that, my situation has made dating”—he swirled his tongue in his mouth as though searching for the right word—“challenging. I mean, when is the right time to bring up something like that? The first date, the tenth? There’s no good way. I’ve dated women who swore it didn’t matter to them right up until it did.”
“Fathering a child and being a dad are two totally different things. Just because you can’t do one doesn’t mean you’re barred from doing the other. Any kid would be lucky to have you as a dad. My kid would be lucky to have you as a dad.”
His expression was distant, like he’d heard it all before and didn’t believe a word of it. He slapped his hand over the wallet on the nightstand and flipped it open, then tossed three pictures of children on the pillow.
“Who are they?”
“Brandon, Stephy, and Jordy. Stephy and Jordy are siblings. I had long-term, monogamous, live-in relationships with their moms when I was in my twenties. Stephy and Jody’s mom left me to get back together with the kids’ biological father. And Brandon’s mom and I just weren’t meant to be for a lot of reasons. When each of the relationships didn’t work out, I had to say good-bye to these wonderful, innocent kids who I’d fallen in love with and thought I was going to be a dad to. It destroyed me, knowing I’d never see them again.”
Jenna was getting it now, his hang-ups about relationships, why he hadn’t asked her out months ago. This was the storm she’d seen in him, the reason Tara had warned her against breaking his heart. People were so fragile. Even big, strong men like Matt who seemed to have the world on a string were made of glass. As she was. As it turned out her parents had been, and her sisters. Carson, too.
Matt fingered the edge of one of the pictures. “I’ve got this fight going on inside me. I’m an optimistic, happy person. Always have been and that’s who I’m determined to be. I never want to forget about what a beautiful place this world is or how lucky I am to be alive, but sometimes it’s hard not to turn cynical. I have triggers and when they hit, it’s like a battle zone inside me.”
“Last night at the wedding. You got upset at your dad after Kellan’s announcement that Amy was pregnant. Was that a trigger?”
“Yes, big-time. My dad knew it, too, and he was trying to console me, but I’m so tired of everyone in my family looking at me with pity. I went outside to get away from all the happiness and celebrating. That’s when I realized I was letting fear and bitterness get the better of me.”
“That’s why you kissed me.”
He rolled his gaze from the photographs to her. “It wasn’t why I kissed you. I kissed you because I’ve wanted to since the moment I first laid eyes on you. But the epiphany I had last night broke the chains that were holding me back from going after what I really wanted. Who I wanted.” He swallowed. “I want you in my life. I hope forever. But I’ve learned the hard way that what I want only goes so far.”
He gathered the photographs in his hand. “You have to do me the courtesy of telling me up front if you can’t handle the fact that I could never give you children if things worked out between us. If there’s any part of you that thinks it’ll be an issue down the road, you’ve got to let me go. Please. I know that’s a lot to ask, but I’m not sure I could survive losing you and Tommy.”
This wasn’t supposed to be happening, making decisions that would ripple out for the rest of her life with a man she’d never even been on a date with. She was all in. She’d said it; she believed it. But she wanted more kids, siblings for Tommy. Could she be okay with adoption? She’d like to think she would be, but she’d never given it much thought.
Her instinct was to suggest they take it slower than this. One step at a time. But he was right. If she let him into Tommy’s life as a father figure, she didn’t take that lightly, either. Nor did she take it lightly that Matt was placing his heart in her hands for safekeeping.
And so she would think about children with Matt, even though she was ninety-nine percent sure she already knew her answer. His experience might dictate his fears, but her experiences had informed her choices, too.
She hugged him with all her strength. “I promise I’ll think about it, but I’m smart enough to cherish what’s right in front of me instead of making plans for what I don’t have and might never get anyhow.”
“I’m so sorry to dump that all on you, but I can’t . . . I don’t—”
She cut off his struggle for words with a kiss and she kept on soothing him with her lips and stroking his body with her hands until she felt his shoulders relax and his posture ease. “I’ll think about it, I promise. But give me today with you, please. It won’t scar Tommy to spend time with one of his favorite grown-ups. You’re around our family a lot normally, so he won’t think anything of it. Would you do that for me? I’m not ready to let you go.”
He crushed another paper in his hand and tossed another basket that banked off the rim and went wide. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea. You have a lot to consider.”
True, but that wasn’t going to happen until after her full day of chores and mommy business and study group were over. She walked her fingers up his arm. “You could help with the farm chores this morning.”
A sardonic smile accompanied his eye roll. “Now there’s a tantalizing offer.”
She stretched her palms across his pecs, copping a feel. The muscles bunched. “Are you flexing for me?”
“You seem to like it when I do that. You want me to stop?”
“Heck, no.” She squeezed, awed enough by his bulging muscle that she nearly busted out with some country twang—dayam. “What was I saying? Oh, and after the farm chores, I could really use a big, muscly man to help move all our stuff into Kellan’s house.”
“You’d better watch it or there won’t be enough room in your bed for me and my giant ego.” Despite his words, he relaxed then flexed again, making his pecs jump. How could she possibly think of farm chores at a time like this?
As if reading her mind, his attention shot to her nightstand drawer. “Do you hear what I hear?”
She cocked her head, listening. The room was silent save for the buzz of the tractor engine in the distance. “The tractor?”
Her legs were swept out from under her as she was tossed on the bed. Matt looked her over, his dark gaze raking over her body. “I think I hear more banjos . . .”
Under the late afternoon sun, Kellan’s ranch was quiet, save for a handful of workers near the feed sheds and office buildings in the distance and the faraway hum of farm machinery. Grazing cattle dotted the hillsides and pastures.
His rustic wood, two-story house sat in the middle of rolling desertscape and fields of dry, wild grass and shrubs amid his booming cattle business. Matt had been there plenty of times over the years, for parties, meetings about oil rights deals he was helping with, and the like, but he had to admit that the idea of spending the next weekend there with Jenna and Tommy felt w
eird.
Oh well. Kellan wouldn’t care, and as long as Matt and Jenna made use of the guest room for their recreational activities, Matt shouldn’t care either. By next weekend, he’d probably be so desperate to be near Jenna again that he wouldn’t remember his own name, much less whose house they were staying at.
Matt pulled his SUV into the gravel yard between the stable and the house, lining it up next to Jenna’s car. They’d driven separately because he’d be leaving for Santa Fe later that evening, as soon as he could make himself say good-bye and face the week alone. He smiled at Jenna, who was still in the driver’s seat. She made big eyes at him and tipped her head toward the house.
Matt followed her line of sight. Jake sat on the porch steps, a cell phone next to him. He watched Matt’s SUV and Jenna’s car with dull eyes. His hair was a mess and his beard had returned to the mangy look it’d had when they’d picked him up in the Sandia Mountains. Deep scuff marks cut into the dirt below his feet as though he’d been sitting in that same spot for a long time, shuffling his shoes.
Intrigued, Matt left the groceries he, Jenna, and Tommy had picked up from town on their way over in the back of his car and walked across the yard while Jenna unbuckled Tommy from his booster seat.
“Hey, Jake. I thought you were headed to L.A. today.”
“Change of plans.”
Matt took a seat on the porch step next to him. “Is everything okay?”
Jake swallowed and rocked back, his heavy expression focused on Tommy, who was bounding toward him.
“Uncle Jake, what’re you doing here?”
Jake gripped the porch stair as though bracing for impact.
Matt leapt up to intercept Tommy. Snagging him around the middle, he twirled the little boy, setting him down in the opposite direction. “Hey, buddy, why don’t you go see if Kellan’s dog is sleeping in the barn?”
Tommy looked from Matt to his mom, then at Jake, clearly sensing that something was up. Thank goodness he had enough sense to go along with Matt’s suggestion and took off skipping toward the barn.
How to Rope a Real Man Page 14