Child of Their Vows (Harlequin Super Romance)

by Joan Kilby

  “I’m thinking I should have done a load of laundry before we left so Beth’s judo outfit would be clean for her training session Monday.”

  “No kids, no jobs, no chores.”

  “But, Max, that’s our life,” Kelly protested, only half joking.

  “Look at that.” He paused at the observation deck, with its view of the falls—a foaming spill of white water dropping nearly three hundred feet down the cliff face. “It’s more spectacular than I remembered.” Max took in a deep breath that made his chest rise beneath his plaid flannel shirt. “This is wonderful. Fresh air, exercise, good food, great sex…” He pulled Kelly close and breathed in the scent of her hair. “And my best gal by my side.”

  She slipped her arms around his waist. “Your only gal, don’t you mean?”

  He kissed her forehead and the tip of her nose and would have continued on down to her mouth.

  “Max,” Kelly began, interrupting him. “Did you mean what you said last night about not wanting a boy?”

  Her speculative tone and searching gaze put him immediately on guard. He’d reacted too strongly to her innocent suggestion that he wanted a son. She’d take it as a sign he was hiding something. As he was. “Why wouldn’t I mean it?”

  “I’ve always wondered,” she went on, undeterred by his feeble protest, “if you weren’t a teeny bit disappointed we had all girls.”

  He wanted to reassure her that wasn’t the case; hell, he wished he could convince himself. But the words stuck in his throat. The letter from Randall had brought his emotions too close to the surface for him to be able to lie.

  Avoiding eye contact, he muttered something unintelligible and returned to the path that led to the river.

  “Max!” Kelly hurried after him, sending twigs and small stones skittering. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I asked you something important, and instead of answering, you stride off without a word. I want to know what’s wrong.”

  “There’s nothing wrong. Just forget it.”

  “You never talk about your feelings,” Kelly complained. “This weekend is an opportunity to work out some of the kinks in our relationship. You can’t just walk away from an emotionally difficult subject.”

  “Feelings. You always want to talk about feelings.”

  He strode on. Talking about that stuff made him uncomfortable; it highlighted what was wrong with their relationship, instead of focusing on what was right. And whenever Kelly started discussing their problems, he felt he’d failed her somehow. Not that he would ever admit it.

  She called again, exasperated. “Max!”

  “If you would quit working or cut back your hours,” he yelled over his shoulder, “we might not have kinks in our relationship.”

  Throwing a blatant red herring in her path was a dirty trick, but he hadn’t yet figured out what he was going to do about Randall, and until he did, he didn’t want to talk about sons, real or hypothetical.

  “That is so unfair!” She kicked her booted foot at a rotting stump beside the path, scattering crumbling bits of decaying wood.

  He shrugged and kept on walking. “You wanted to know what I thought.”

  “You’re avoiding the real issue,” she insisted. “You want another child and I…I’m not ready.”

  He snapped a dry twig off a branch in passing and flung it down the hillside, where it snagged on a bush. “You keep saying ‘maybe’ and ‘later,’ but later never comes and maybe means nothing. Face it, you have no intention of having another baby.”

  “I never said that!”

  “You didn’t have to.” Fed up, he increased his pace.

  Max felt her angry silence bombard his back as they descended toward the valley floor around hairpin turns in the narrow path. Gradually his temper cooled. He could put their spat from his mind, if not the cause of it, but he knew Kelly would continue to dwell on the problem until they made up.

  With a sigh, he stopped again, took her in his arms and rubbed her nose with his. “I forgive you.”

  She snorted, half amused, half annoyed, but wholly unrelenting. “Max, you know we should talk more.”

  “Aw, Kel, it’s too nice a day to hash things over. Come on, we’re almost at the river.”

  Reluctantly she gave up the fight. “Oh, all right.”

  Another hundred feet and the trail led them out of the woods to the edge of the tumbling river. Silenced by the roar of water and awed by the grandeur of the falls, they turned to each other. His hands lightly touching her waist, he kissed her, putting all the tenderness he could into the soft pressure on her lips, and he felt her irritation dissolve in the misty air.

  High overhead, treetops were moving in the wind, which blew clouds across the sun, but there on the river all was still and warm. They walked along the gorge until they came to a large flat rock where they could sit side by side, looking toward the falls.

  From her day pack Kelly removed the lunch the hotel had prepared for them. “Want a sandwich?” she asked, speaking over the sound of water. He nodded and she handed him one. “Remember when we came here on our honeymoon? We smuggled our own food into the hotel because we didn’t have the money to buy meals.”

  “How did you get stuck with such a cheap bastard?”

  “I guess I got lucky,” Kelly said, munching happily.

  “Do you still think you’re lucky?” Max tossed a breadcrumb to a junco that had fluttered down onto the next rock. The small gray bird snapped up the crumb in its beak and turned its black head to regard him with one beady eye. Kelly still hadn’t answered. “Never mind,” Max said. “Dumb question.”

  “We were so young when we married,” she said at last. “I was straight out of high school and you were only a year older.” Kelly placed a hand on his jaw, forcing him to look at her. “I can’t imagine life without you.” She shook her head with a wry grin. “Sometimes I can’t imagine life with you, either.”

  He nudged her off balance, then caught her before she toppled. She fell into his arms, laughing. He said, “I’ll never understand why your grandmother allowed you to marry so young. If you’d been my daughter…”

  “She let Geena go to New York on a modeling contract when she was sixteen. How could she stop me from marrying at eighteen? Gran always told us we had good heads on our shoulders and that we should trust our own judgment.”

  “Bulldust. You and your sisters were as headstrong as wild ponies. You always got your way. Erin was the most sensible, but your Gran was as weak as water where you girls were concerned.”

  “Don’t you criticize Gran,” she said, wagging a finger at him. “At least she considered my feelings. Your parents did everything they could to stop us from getting engaged. The moment they heard we wanted to get married after graduation they shipped you off to that job on the dude ranch, hoping you’d forget me over the summer.”

  The bite of sandwich in his mouth suddenly turned dry and lumpy. Why the hell had he brought up the past? “But I didn’t, did I?” he demanded, feeling an urgent need to reconnect with Kelly. He did not want to lose the woman he’d spent more than a decade building a life with.

  She tilted her head, clearly puzzled by his tone. “No,” she said slowly. “You came home even more loving than when you left…if that’s possible.”

  He kissed her, almost desperately, deepening the kiss until she melted against him, as he’d hoped she would, and slid her arms around his neck.

  Finally she drew back, eyes grave. “All right, Max. You’d better tell me all about it.”

  Despite the warm sun, a chill raised bumps on Max’s forearms. How could she know? He’d hidden the letter from Randall deep in the bottom drawer of his office filing cabinet. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re hiding something,” Kelly stated. “You’ve been acting really weird all weekend, guilty and secretive—when you weren’t giving me a tumble, that is.” She crossed her arms. “Spill it.”

  At first Kel
ly thought he would evade this demand for explanations, too. Then before her eyes, Max seemed to shrink from her and turn inward. Her heart sank. Whatever he was hiding must be really bad. He was having an affair. He wanted a divorce. He—

  “I have a son.”

  She stared. She’d heard him speak, but his words had no meaning. “What did you say?”

  “I have a son,” he repeated.

  “That’s impossible. Unless,” she added with a short humorless laugh, “one of the twins had a sex change.”

  “Kelly.”

  “But it’s impossible, Max,” she repeated. “We were married right out of high school. How could you have a child I don’t know about?”

  “I got a letter from him yesterday.” Max crumpled the plastic wrap his sandwich had come in and compressed it into a tiny ball. “His name is Randall Tipton. He’s thirteen years old and he lives in Wyoming.”

  The bottom fell out of Kelly’s world. One moment the sun was shining on her and Max, a unit despite their problems, as solid as the rock on which they were sitting. The next instant she was in free fall, with no hope of safe landing.

  Questions crowded her tongue, clamoring for expression. “But how…? When…? Who is the mother?”

  “Her name is Lanni. She worked at the dude ranch.”

  Spinning, sinking, Kelly spiraled down through a swirling gray void. “You had an affair with another woman while you were engaged to me?”

  “You’d broken off the engagement before I left for the ranch, remember?”

  “Your parents broke it off. I had every intention of marrying you as soon as we had the opportunity. I thought you felt the same.”

  He stared at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. “You said we should go along with their wishes. I left for Wyoming thinking you weren’t going to marry me.”

  “I thought you’d come sweeping back one moonlit night and carry me away, that we would elope or something equally romantic. Instead…” Tears swam in her eyes as she gazed at him, stricken, “You were with this Lanni person.”

  He tried to take her hand. “Forget Lanni. She’s not important.”

  “How can you say she’s not important?” Kelly shrilled, tugging away. “She’s the mother of your child.”

  Kelly wrapped her arms around her shivering body and buried her face in her knees. Max, her anchor, her rock, the husband she thought she knew inside out, had suddenly, nightmarishly, become a stranger.

  “Dear God, Max,” she said in a broken whisper. “What have you done to us?”

  He was silent.

  “Did you know before you got the letter you had a child?”

  “Yes. Although until yesterday I didn’t know he was a boy.”

  “And that made the difference. That’s why you’re telling me now,” she said, struggling to understand.

  “No. It’s the letter.”

  Her stomach heaved; she gripped herself tighter. “All these years you knew you had a child and you never told me.”

  “I wanted to put it all behind me.”

  Suddenly she was furious. She sprang to her feet on the rock. “What gives you the right to put a child behind you? To walk away and forget it ever existed?”

  “Do you think that was easy for me?” he cried. “Do you think I haven’t wondered and worried all these years whether or not he or she was growing up happy and healthy?”

  “How would I know?” she shouted. “You didn’t tell me!”

  Her voice echoed off the cliff face, startling her into awareness of their surroundings. She took a deep breath, then another. “Okay, let’s calm down.” She sat again, forcing herself to ignore the pain that was eating away at her like acid. “You’d better start at the beginning and explain.”

  Max told her the whole story. The dude ranch, Lanni pursuing him, the pregnancy, the subsequent meetings between both sets of parents. Kelly noticed he glossed over the part where he’d capitulated to Lanni’s advances. Fine, she sure didn’t want to hear about that, although it had always been her experience that it took two to tango.

  “Lanni’s family were strong Catholics. They wouldn’t hear of abortion,” Max went on. “My parents gave her money to pay for medical expenses and kept in touch with her parents throughout the pregnancy. The baby was put up for adoption and…” He gazed at his hands, twisted together. “That was the last I’d heard of the child. Like I said, until yesterday I didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl.”

  At the ache in his voice part of her, amazingly, wanted to comfort him for the years of loss. He was a loving and responsible father and she knew he must feel guilt and regret.

  An instant later, her heart hardened. Had he considered her feelings when he’d slipped away from the bunkhouse at midnight for a rendezvous with Lanni?

  A chilly raindrop hit her cheek and she glanced up to see the sun had completely disappeared behind the gray clouds massing around the mountain peaks. “It’s starting to rain. We’d better head back.”

  The rain came on with sudden violence, in driving sheets that turned the dirt trail to mud and the bushes and trees to dripping greenery that slid from their grasp as they pulled themselves up the slippery track. By the time they’d arrived back at the lodge, they were soaked through and cloaked in mud from the knees down.

  In their room Kelly began to haphazardly pile sweaters and underwear into her suitcase, not even bothering to change out of her wet clothes.

  “What are you doing?” Max demanded, toweling his head. His pale hair had turned dark with rain and now stuck out in spikes. “We’re booked for another night.”

  “I can’t sleep in this bed with you.” She tossed in her cosmetics case with an angry jerk of her wrist. “Not with your affair making a mockery of last night and of every night of our marriage. I want to be with my children.”

  “Kelly, for God’s sake.” He threw down the towel and tried to take her in his arms. “Don’t do this.”

  Shrugging him off, she snapped the locks shut on her suitcase and faced him, chin in the air. “I want to go home.”

  On the drive back to Hainesville, Kelly couldn’t look at Max. In her mind, she replayed endlessly that summer they were apart. How could she not have known he was up to no good? How could she not have gleaned from his infrequent phone calls and hesitant assurances of affection that he had someone else on a string? At the time she’d put his awkwardness down to the difficulty of communicating on the public telephone in the lodge. God, but she’d been naive.

  Max slid his hand onto her knee and squeezed tentatively. “Talk to me, Kelly.”

  “I have nothing to say.” Her voice was as dead as love gone wrong.

  “Come on, you must. What are you feeling?”

  “What am I feeling?” She twisted in her seat to face him. “Now you want to talk. Suddenly you’re interested in feelings. Well, listen up. I’m hurting, Max. I never imagined I could hurt this badly. And I’m angry. I’m so furious I could kill you. While I was sewing my wedding dress, you were sleeping with another woman. While I was counting the days until we could start a family, you were making a baby without me. While I poured out my heart in long loving letters, you were already lying to me. Our whole marriage is a lie.”

  “Kelly, you know that’s not true.”

  Scalding tears heated her already flushed cheeks. “You led me to believe I was your first, just as you were my first. And only. How many other women have you had that you haven’t told me about?”

  “None.”

  “How can I believe you?”

  He didn’t answer. Finally, in a low voice, he said, “I guess you can’t. You have to trust me.”

  With a snort, she threw up her hands. “Trust? What’s that?”

  “Except for that one time, I’ve never lied to you or cheated on you.”

  Kelly rubbed her hands over her face, suddenly exhausted, as though her anger had drained all the energy out of her. “I know. Or do I? That’s the problem. I’ll never know
for sure.”

  Silenced, Max drove on through the rain and the dark. Once or twice she glanced sideways, to see his hands gripping the wheel and his jaw set. He was thinking about Randall. She couldn’t stop thinking about the boy, either.

  She didn’t want to talk, but she had to.

  Her fury had dissipated, leaving behind an icy calmness that frightened her almost as much. “I can’t believe you fathered a baby and didn’t tell me.”

  He took his gaze off the road. “I was eighteen. I was stupid. And too much in love with you to risk losing you by confessing the truth.”

  “And now you’re not.”

  The blaring horn of a passing semitrailer snapped his attention back to the wet highway. “Not what?”

  “In love with me,” she said, exasperated by his inability to grasp the logic. “Now you can tell the truth because you don’t love me anymore and don’t care if you lose me.”

  “For God’s sake, Kelly. That’s not true. It’s only come up because the boy contacted me.”

  He had a son, not by her. Calmness deserted her as hysteria clawed at her throat. “The boy, the boy. He’s the boy you always wanted.”

  “You know I love the girls more than anything. Randall isn’t going to change that.”

  “You’re already saying his name as if you know him. What does he want, anyway?”

  Max shrugged. “Just to see me. He’s curious about his biological parents. And no, I don’t know if he’s contacted Lanni.”

  “Do…do you want to meet him?”

  “Yes. Would that bother you?”

  She stared at him. “Are you crazy? It would tear me apart. It would tear us apart.”

  Max shook his head. “You’re overreacting.”

  “Don’t tell me I’m overreacting,” she warned. “You don’t know how I feel. What are the girls going to think?”

  “They might be pleased to have a big brother.”

  Kelly refused to even contemplate that scenario. “You went straight from me to her.”

  “No, not right away. It was—”

  “Please, I don’t want details.” She stared out the window, watching the dark sodden shapes of trees flicker past. “How long?”