While Belle was still in the kitchen, Mila made her way to the family room and immediately spotted the dress. Hard to miss. It was huge, taking up nearly the whole sofa, and it wasn’t an especially nice shade of green. Obviously, Belle was going for the jail-visiting scene where Scarlett had worn a curtain.
Mila checked the time after a few minutes crawled by, and she was about to leave a note for Belle to let her know that she’d had to go. However, the sound of a vehicle stopped her, and she glanced out the front window and saw the school bus driving off. That meant she’d get to see Tate before she had to leave.
She heard voices. Except Tate wasn’t alone when he was coming up the porch steps to the house.
There was a girl with him.
A girl with purple and red hair.
“This way,” he whispered to her. “Keep quiet so they won’t hear us.”
And he led the girl in the direction of his bedroom.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SEX. WITH MILA.
Even though it was obvious that Billy Lee was headed his way to talk to him, Roman wasn’t sure he’d be able to manage anything as complex as human speech. All of his brain had gone straight to his dick.
Not a good place for his brain to be since he needed it right now.
And what he needed was to be rethinking this stupid idea of having sex with Mila. If he wanted something that risky in this life, he should just climb up in the barn loft, jump into a pile of hay and play dodge the pitchfork.
“Looks like old times,” Billy Lee greeted him. “You were always with the horses. Garrett was always off with the cows. Though I suspect in your brother’s case, it was more of a way for him to be by himself.”
Roman suspected the same thing. While he was suspecting, he added that Billy Lee was here on some kind of fishing expedition. Maybe to find out if Roman had plans to make ranch work permanent.
“I’m not staying,” Roman said right off, shaking Billy Lee’s hand when he offered it.
The man smiled. “I figured as much, but I thought I’d ask for your mother’s sake.” He hitched his thumb toward the house. “I just told Mila thanks for running interference for you with Lucian.”
Lucian via Dylan. Roman still wasn’t happy about that, but yeah, their lawyer had called him earlier that morning to say the lawsuit was off. He should have mentioned it to Mila, but his brain had started to go south from the moment she rounded the corner of the guesthouse and he’d seen those tears in her eyes.
Then the heat.
Yep, that was the way to make him forget something. But Roman hadn’t forgotten what Mila and he had talked about.
“Did you ever spend any time with Vita when you were younger?” Roman asked. Not very subtle, but Billy Lee wasn’t much for subtleties. He was a numbers man. Great with spreadsheets and cost margins. People and conversation, not so much. That probably explained why he was still single.
Roman expected the man to be surprised, though, by the question, Billy Lee clearly wasn’t. Roman had seen bull calves look more comfortable after having their balls clipped than Billy Lee was looking right now.
“Did Vita say something to you?” Billy Lee countered.
In a general sense, answering a question with a question wasn’t a good sign. So, Roman just laid it out there for him. “Did you knock up Vita? This would have been about nine months or so prior to Mila being born.”
Now, there was some surprise, and Billy Lee actually staggered back a step, along with putting his hand over his heart. “Shit.”
That wasn’t a good answer, either. Well, it wasn’t good if Billy Lee had plans to deny Roman’s knocking-up theory.
Billy Lee shook his head. “Vita never told me she was pregnant.” He shot a glance back at the house. “Is Mila my daughter?”
“You tell me. Do the math and figure it out.”
Of course, that was asking a lot even from a math person because it had been over three decades ago.
“Shit,” Billy Lee mumbled after thinking about it a few moments. “It’s possible, I guess.”
Roman wasn’t even going to address the part about Vita not looking like someone Billy Lee would take to his bed. He was just going to assume that Vita hadn’t always looked like an eighty-year-old woman.
Or that alcohol had been involved.
“I thought Frankie was her father,” Billy said, still shaking his head.
“No. Vita recently confessed to Mila that she gave birth to her and met Frankie shortly thereafter. Vita said Mila’s father was from right here in Wrangler’s Creek, and you lived here back then.”
Billy Lee nodded. “And the timing could work. Hard to believe it, but Vita was once an attractive woman. Not nearly so strange as she is now, either. She had plenty of men interested in her. Also, I was drinking a lot in those days.”
Bingo. Alcohol had played a part.
But there was something that Billy Lee had said that Roman latched on to.
“Plenty of men were interested in Vita?” Roman repeated.
“Yes.” He didn’t hesitate, either. “She had this whole hippie love-child thing going on then. Long hair, fresh face, and she used to make her own wine.”
Again, alcohol. But was Billy Lee saying Vita had slept around? If so, then this might be the start of a very long search. Still, it was a start.
“So, here’s what you’re going to do.” Roman put his arm around Billy Lee’s shoulders because the man didn’t look too steady on his feet. “You’ll need to take a paternity test. Mila, too. You can get a test for yourself, swab the inside of your cheek and then, once Mila has done hers, a lab can compare the DNA.”
Roman waited to see if Billy Lee would balk at any part of that.
“You sure know a lot about this,” Billy Lee remarked.
“I did some reading right after Mila learned she had a father here in Wrangler’s Creek. Mila needs to know the truth,” Roman added just in case Billy Lee was still thinking about balking.
But the addition wasn’t necessary. “Of course. I’ll do it as soon as possible.” He groaned, scrubbed his hand over his face. “Could you tell your mother that something came up and that I had to go?”
Billy Lee didn’t wait for Roman to respond. He practically ran to his car, which was parked next to Mila’s. He wasn’t sure why she was still there, but he was apparently about to find out.
Roman opened the back door of the house, and he immediately heard the loud voice. Not Mila’s. But his mother’s.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t tolerate that sort of thing in my house,” Belle was saying.
Roman was instantly pissed. Belle had better not be talking to Mila that way. And she wasn’t. When he followed the sound of her voice to the hall, he saw Tate and a girl he didn’t recognize. Mila was there, too, but she was in between Tate and his mother.
“What’s going on here?” Roman asked.
Tate and Mila groaned. The kind of groans people made when they thought something was about to get worse. Roman figured it was when his mother flung an accusing finger at Tate.
“He brought that girl to his bedroom,” Belle said. “I told him he couldn’t do that.”
“He can’t, but you’re not the one to tell him that. I am.”
Tate and Mila groaned again. The girl looked as if she wanted the floor to swallow her up. Roman wished he could have a do-over and assure her that she wasn’t about to be burned at the stake, but his mother had already lit the proverbial fires.
And she started fanning the flames.
“Tate’s just like you,” Belle went on. “Sneaking around. Bringing girls into his bedroom.”
“They weren’t doing anything,” Mila spoke up. She had one arm around Tate. The other around the girl. “This is Arwen Beaumont, a friend of Tate
’s. She’s in his grade at school.”
Beaumont. Her dad, or rather her stepdad, owned the grocery store.
“We weren’t doing anything wrong,” Tate grumbled, but Roman could already see his son detaching himself from this. He felt he hadn’t been treated fairly.
Something Roman knew all too well when it came to his mother. He didn’t think he was projecting about that, either.
“They were on the floor,” his mother went on. “Mila was just standing outside the door doing nothing about it. She even tried to stop me when I opened the door.”
“I didn’t do anything about it because nothing inappropriate was going on,” Mila argued. “I was just listening at the door to make sure it stayed that way.”
Later, Roman would thank her and then ask her why she hadn’t texted or called him when Tate had taken a girl into his room.
“I was teaching Tate meditation,” Arwen said. “You know, to help when everything starts boiling around inside him. Like now.”
There wasn’t as much anger in her voice as Roman was feeling. In fact, she just seemed embarrassed about being caught in the middle of a family squabble.
So did Mila.
Mila turned to Roman. “Is there anything you need me to do before I go?”
He shook his head. Best if she wasn’t there for the rest of this. She gave Tate a reassuring look, a kiss on the cheek and walked away.
“I should be going, too,” Arwen insisted. She was right behind Mila.
Roman didn’t know how the girl had gotten there, but if she’d walked or ridden a bike, Mila would make sure she got home all right. He could add that to his list of things he needed to thank her for. But there was one person here he wasn’t going to thank. Make that two.
Tate for getting himself into this.
And his mother for making it worse—something she was a pro at doing.
“I still think they were about to have s-e-x,” Belle said the moment Mila and Arwen were gone. She huffed. “It’s not right for a boy to have a girl in his room. Especially when he didn’t get my permission.”
“He didn’t need your permission. He needed mine.” And he didn’t have it. Wouldn’t get it, either, because Roman knew it wasn’t a good idea for two thirteen-year-olds to be behind closed doors. Meditation could lead to sex. Hell, anything, including breathing, could lead to sex at that age.
Because Roman felt some of his own temper reaching that bubbling point, he turned to Tate first. “Go ahead and pack your things while your grandmother and I talk.”
“Pack?” Belle yapped.
“Pack?” Tate echoed. “I don’t want to leave.”
“And I don’t want him to go.” That came from Belle.
Roman wasn’t sure which one to scowl at first. He aimed one at both of them. “Your grandmother just crossed the forbidden zone of parenting,” he said to Tate. “She had no right to yell at you. No right to discipline you.”
He turned to her when she opened her mouth. “This isn’t your house. It’s mine, remember?”
Tears sprang to her eyes, and even though Roman didn’t want to react to them he did. He cursed himself and cursed this fucking situation.
“I don’t want to leave,” Tate repeated. This time, there was a lot more anger than there had been just a few minutes earlier. “I don’t want to switch schools again. I’m tired of you and everybody else running my life!”
He went in his room and slammed the door.
Belle hurried to hers up the hall and did the same thing. That’s when Roman saw Garrett standing there. He wasn’t sure how much his brother had heard. Probably more than he wanted to hear.
Garrett went to him, and Roman steeled himself up for a lecture. Instead, he gave Roman a pat on the back.
“Why don’t you go to the Longhorn and have a beer?” Garrett suggested. “Better yet, drink more than one and have Hermie Walters drive you home when you’re ready.”
Hermie was the town’s only taxi driver and often parked outside the Longhorn just because he knew he’d earn some bucks from someone who’d gone in there to drown his sorrows.
“I’ll stay here and make sure everyone is okay,” Garrett added.
Roman blew out a long breath and was about to say no, that this was his responsibility.
But Garrett continued before Roman could speak. “You remember the times when you’d be so mad at Mom that you wanted to smother her, and yet she’d still come in your room and insist on hashing things out? She could have waited until you both cooled down, but she didn’t. And by hashing out, I mean she would want you to see things her way.”
Roman would like to have said he didn’t have any recollection of that. But he did. Belle had done that too many times to count.
“Remember how things played out?” Garrett went on. “You just got madder. She got madder. And it ended up being a shouting match where you both said things you regretted and you got grounded.”
Again, it had happened.
“Now, what’s the wise choice to make here?” Garrett asked him.
“Smart-ass,” Roman grumbled. But he started walking. Apparently, he was going to the Longhorn Bar.
* * *
“I CAN WALK HOME,” Arwen insisted.
“No. The Busby boys like to toss tacks and such on the road as a prank, and you could step on one.”
Too bad Mila couldn’t think of a better argument to give Tate’s friend, but she really didn’t want the girl to walk. She wanted to drive her so they could talk along the way. Of course, it wouldn’t be a long talk, but Mila just wanted to make sure she’d be okay.
Mila stood there with the passenger’s side door open while Arwen volleyed glances between her car and the road. It wasn’t far, less than two miles to her house, but maybe the threat of the tacks had worked because Arwen finally got in.
“I know you’ve been warned not to take rides from strangers,” Mila added once Arwen had put on her seat belt, “but I’m not really a stranger.”
“I know. You’re the lady who owns the bookstore. The one with the weird mom. People say you’re an old maid, and that your mother will put a curse on people who piss her off.”
Yep, that was her life in a nutshell. Now, she wanted to hear about Arwen’s life so she could figure out if this girl was out to help Tate or mess with his head.
“How did you get into meditation?” Mila asked as she drove away from the ranch. She stayed well below the speed limit so it would give them more time to talk, and she’d take the back way. Again, to give them more time.
Arwen looked at her, huffed. “I don’t like it when adults do that. You know the answer, but you want me to tell you things. Why not just come out and ask what you really want to know?”
Mila nodded. “Fair enough. For the record, though, I actually don’t know how you got into mediation, but I’m hoping you truly believe it’ll be helpful. Tate is my cousin, and I love him. He’s been through a lot, too much, and I don’t want him hurt.”
“I don’t want him hurt anymore, either.” Arwen didn’t snap that or say it in an angry voice. It was a whisper. “I know what he went through because I went through it myself. Can’t believe you haven’t heard gossip about it.” Still no anger, but Mila heard the hurt.
“I treat gossip like white noise. And I’ve had a lot of practice tuning it out.”
She waited to see if Arwen would talk more about what’d happened, but the girl just sat in silence for the next few minutes. “The meditation will help,” she finally said. “If Tate’s grandmother doesn’t want me to teach it to him, then there are plenty of books and videos on the internet.”
Mila frowned, not at Arwen but herself. The only reason she’d dismissed meditation was because Valerie had suggested it. But Mila thought Valerie’s suggestion was minimizi
ng Tate’s situation. She didn’t think Arwen was doing that.
“I know you don’t think much of me,” Arwen went on. “I mean, Tate is rich, and his dad owns a big business.”
“Your dad owns a business, too,” Mila pointed out.
“Stepdad,” she corrected, and she repeated it under her breath. “Since you’ve tuned out the gossip, you might not know that my mom was a cocktail waitress in San Antonio where she met my stepdad. She already had me then, but I was just a baby, like only a year old. I don’t know my real dad. My stepdad divorced his wife to marry my mom, and nine months later, my half sister was born.”
The situation wasn’t identical to Mila’s, but there were some similarities. Frankie had met Vita when Mila was a baby, and a couple of years later, Valerie had come to live with them after her folks had pretty much abandoned her. That hadn’t been an ideal situation for anyone, and Mila got the feeling that Arwen’s life had been much worse than ideal.
But there was another facet to this.
Arwen’s stepfather, Waylon Beaumont, was one of the candidates on Mila’s list. Too bad she didn’t have the man in front of her so she could look at his features the way she had Billy Lee. But what Mila really wanted to do was dismiss him as a possibility. Nothing she was hearing about the guy was making her wish he was her father.
Mila took the turn to Arwen’s house and drove a couple of miles until she reached the place. She pulled into the circular driveway in front of Arwen’s home. It was just on the edge of town, and the third largest house—right behind the Grangers’ and the one that Roman’s great-grandfather had built. On the outside, it looked like a great place to grow up, but Mila had the feeling it hadn’t been for Arwen.
There was a girl sitting on the porch. Mila recognized her as Waylon’s daughter, the one he’d had with Arwen’s mother. She stood, folding her arms over her chest as if she’d been waiting—impatiently—for Arwen.
“Will you be in trouble for going to Tate’s house?” Mila asked her.
“No. That’s my half sister, and she won’t tell anyone. She won’t want to explain why she let me out of her sight.” Arwen opened the car door, but she didn’t get out. “I tried to kill myself, too.”
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