Heard It Through the Grapevine

by Teresa Hill

  He’d had a hard time convincing her they didn’t and had gotten the hell away from her as fast as he could. Okay, almost as fast as he could. He was a man, after all, and she’d practically laid herself bare on a platter in front of him. She’d been embarrassed and hurt. He’d been gruff and insulting, because she’d scared him half to death because of the way she’d tasted, the way she’d felt beneath him and the way he’d wanted her.

  Should have gone to jail fifteen years ago, he thought soberly.

  “What’s gotten you so upset that you’re sitting in the dark crying your eyes out?” he asked.

  “There…uh,” Cathie stumbled over the words. “There’s nothing you can do, Matt. Nothing anyone can do.”

  He held his breath as he asked, “Are you sick?”

  “No.”

  He swore softly. For a minute, crazy things had gone through his head. That she was dying. That he might never see her smiling face again. Never hear her laugh.

  Of course, she wasn’t dying. She was just making him crazy, as usual.

  “Not sick? Okay. What else? Flunking out of school?”

  “No.”

  That was highly unlikely, given the fact that she’d worked so hard to get here. Her father had fallen ill with a heart condition during her senior year of high school. His heart transplant had nearly wiped out the family financially. All of her brothers had been either in college or committed to the military, and Matt knew they’d helped out monetarily, as much as they could. But Cathie had been the only one left at home. The years she’d normally have spent in college, she’d spent helping her mother care for her father, helping run the family bed-and-breakfast, taking courses at the local community college when she could.

  He knew it was still a struggle financially and held out a brief hope that this could be about money. “Need me to loan you fifty bucks until payday?”

  “No,” she insisted. “It’s nothing like that.”

  “Okay. You want to play Twenty Questions? I’ll play.”

  “Matt, please, just go,” she said, with that quality in her voice that always had him wanting to give her anything in this world. Except this.

  “Sorry, but you’re a mess, Cath. You need somebody, and in case you haven’t noticed, I’m the only one here.”

  “This isn’t your problem,” she argued.

  “Your mother made it my problem, and you know the way she works. If she doesn’t hear from me soon, she’ll call and ask how you are, and I’m not going to lie to her. I’ll tell her you’re a wreck, that you wouldn’t tell me anything, and the next thing you know, she’ll be pounding on your door. Is that what you want?”

  “No,” she insisted. “I just need some time to figure everything out. Could you just go away and give me some time?”

  It was an entirely reasonable request, and hard as it was to believe, she was an adult. But he’d didn’t think he’d ever seen Cathie looking so fragile or so hurt. He doubted he could have walked away from her now if his life depended on it.

  “Sorry. Can’t do it. Tell me what’s wrong.”

  She eased to the right, her hip resting against the kitchen counter, which put her face fully into the light for the first time. It looked like she’d been crying for hours. A white-hot anger simmered in his gut, and he knew he’d been asking the wrong question. Not what was wrong with her, but who? Who had done this to her?

  “This is about a guy, isn’t it?” Looking utterly miserable, Cathie let her gaze meet his for a second. She blinked back fresh tears and looked away. “Want me to go beat him up?”

  “It wouldn’t help.”

  “I could call all of your brothers and the five of us could have at him.”

  “My brothers would kill him.”

  “That depends,” he said quietly. “What did this guy do to you?”

  Cathie didn’t say anything. He was afraid she was crying again. Matt was considering his options when something on the kitchen counter caught his eye.

  It was a small, rectangular box. Not able to believe what he was seeing, he swept past her and picked it up.

  It was one of those home pregnancy tests.

  In Cathie’s kitchen?

  He turned to look at her. Really look. In his eyes, she’d hardly changed since that night when she was sixteen. So it always surprised him when he saw evidence that she had indeed grown up. He ran the numbers in his head. Her eight, to his fifteen. Her sixteen, to his wise-in-the-ways-of-the-world twenty-three. He was thirty now, which meant she was twenty-three.

  Matt had a bad habit of still thinking of her as sixteen. This was Cathie Baldwin, after all. The good girl whose life could not have been more different from his. Matt’s hard-living, hard-drinking, never-met-a-fight-he-didn’t-like father had died when Matt was barely old enough to remember him. His mother had taken it badly, which to her meant drowning her sorrows in a bottle, too.

  Matt ran wild, eventually living on the streets, headed for disaster, when he bungled the theft of Cathie’s mother’s car. For reasons he would never understand, rather than let him go to jail, the Baldwins had offered to take him into their home, something that had surely saved his worthless hide. Matt would not repay a debt like that by lusting after the Baldwins’ only daughter.

  Besides, he’d always known what life had in store for her. A nice guy. A really nice one. Respectable. Wholesome. Not a single skeleton in his closet. Not a single arrest. Someone from a good family. Not necessarily well-to-do, but kind, God-loving people. She’d have a nice little house in the mountains her family called home, teach Sunday school and raise a half-dozen kids, and she’d be happy and well-protected her whole life.

  But it hadn’t worked out that way. Another man had slept with her. Carelessly? Casually? Thoughtlessly? And that man had either failed to take the time to protect her or hadn’t cared enough to do so.

  Matt held the proof in his hand.

  He crushed the box of the home pregnancy test in his hand, taking out a mere shred of his anger on it, then threw it across the room.

  Cathie winced as the box skittered across the floor, then opened a drawer and pulled out a white, plastic stick-like thing. “I’ll save you the trouble of asking. The stick turned blue.”

  Blue? he thought numbly. “Blue’s bad?”

  She nodded hopelessly. “If you’re not finished with college, not married, don’t have a lot of money and your father happens to be a minister, then…yes, blue’s bad.”

  Chapter Two

  Cathie stood there waiting for him to say something, still hardly able to believe he was here.

  One minute, she’d been staring guiltily at the Box and the next, the doorbell had rung. She’d hastily shoved the Box in a drawer, and there was Matt. As if she’d conjured him up out of thin air. As if she’d asked, and the man upstairs had chosen to deliver Matt.

  Cathie fought the urge to go stare up into the sky and say, Excuse me? What is he doing here?

  Obviously, someone had gotten their wires crossed.

  Matt didn’t even want to be in the same room with her.

  All because she’d fallen for him ages ago and then thrown herself at him, when he didn’t want her at all. Which was just about the stupidest thing a woman could do.

  Okay, not as stupid as getting pregnant when she hadn’t finished college and wasn’t married. But that night with Matt ranked right up there on her list of all-time stupid moves. She hadn’t wanted to come here to college because he lived in the same town. But the university had offered her the best financial aid package, and she’d needed all the help she could get.

  Cathie hadn’t chased after him in years, but darned if she didn’t still compare every man she’d ever met to him. Even Tim. If she was honest, she’d admit that Tim reminded her the least little bit of Matt.

  “So,” Matt said finally. “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Cathie, the girl who always had a plan, said. “I just found out, and I’m still trying to make
myself believe that it’s real. That it’s happening to me.”

  “Do you want to marry this guy?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” Though it would make her humiliation complete, she admitted, “I’m not sure it matters. I’m afraid he won’t want to marry me.”

  Beside her, Matt stiffened, a mixture of disbelief, surprise and then anger washing across his face. For a minute, she thought he was going to ask the same question she’d been asking herself in the hours since the stick turned blue. Why in the world was she sleeping with a man who wouldn’t marry her if she was pregnant with his child?

  “He’s…uh.” She closed her eyes and forced herself to start again. “He’s been different the last few weeks. A little…distant, maybe? Distracted. Impatient.”

  Through clenched teeth, Matt said, “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” Around the same time she noted subtle changes in her body that warned her something was wrong, she’d discovered an alarming number of doubts about Tim.

  Matt, the tough guy of old wrapped in a thousand-dollar suit and still looking only faintly civilized, said, “Do you want me to talk to this guy for you?”

  “You’re starting to sound like one of my brothers again.”

  He swore softly. “I’m not one of your brothers.”

  “I know.” She risked another glance in his direction. When she was a little girl, she’d look at him and think he was a wild thing she was going to tame. Like a pup who’d been kicked too many times, always waiting on someone to turn on him.

  Cathie had followed him everywhere when he’d first come to live with her parents. She’d watched him with a kind of fascination as he warily watched her in return. She’d smile and he’d frown. She’d laugh and he’d put that same scowl on his face she’d seen tonight, the one that said she was getting to him.

  Closing her eyes, she let herself remember, just a bit, her and Matt together. God, she thought breathlessly, how she’d missed that boy. Of course, God already knew. She’d certainly told him often enough, back in the days when she was trying to talk him into bringing Matt back to her. She hadn’t done that in years and fought the urge to pull out her Box and say very emphatically that he was not what she had in mind when she asked for help.

  Still, she missed him so much, the lost boy who’d become her best friend. She’d seen more of him tonight than she had in years.

  For just a moment, she let herself imagine a wild-eyed black knight coming to her rescue, making everything right somehow.

  “What?” Matt growled, staring at her through midnight-colored eyes.

  She shook her head and tried to smile, feeling hopelessly sentimental about a relationship she feared meant next to nothing to him. She, on the other hand, needed nothing more than the slightest touch of his fingertips to her cheek to know that she was every bit as attracted to the man as she’d once been to the boy. The awful part was that neither the boy nor the man had wanted her.

  And now she feared she was in the same shape—no, worse—with another man she feared wouldn’t want her or her baby. Obviously, there was a pattern here she should probably figure out, so she didn’t keep repeating this same mistake.

  “Cathie—”

  “Sorry. I was just thinking. And wondering…why did you come here tonight?”

  “I wasn’t going to,” he said. “Mary asked me to come by tomorrow, but I had a meeting tonight. When I got done, I wasn’t too far from here, and…I don’t know. Something just told me this might be a problem that shouldn’t wait. Why?”

  She frowned. Something just told him?

  “No reason,” she lied. No way she was explaining what she’d done to him.

  “Cathie, why don’t you let me talk to this guy for you?”

  Sure. He and Tim could compare notes. Why didn’t you want Cathie? Really? Me, either. She groaned, feeling sick suddenly and swayed on her feet.

  “Easy.” Matt’s hand shot out to grab her. “I’ve got you. Need to sit?”

  She nodded, letting herself lean on him as he steered her to the sofa.

  “Better?” he asked once she was sitting.

  “Yes. Thank you.” She had to get him out of here. Fast. He’d seen enough of this little drama that was her life. “And I appreciate the offer, about Tim, but I have to tell him myself. And my mother. My brothers. My father. They’re going to be so disappointed. Matt, I don’t think I’ve ever disappointed them. My father counsels teenagers at the community center on being responsible and careful. How is it going to look when his own daughter ends up pregnant and all alone? And to his congregation? I know some of them will give him grief over this. Plus his heart is…I don’t know. He hasn’t admitted it to me, but something’s going on. He was so sick before. We almost lost him. I don’t want him worrying over me, and for this, he’ll worry night and day.”

  Utterly miserable, she stared up at Matt. He couldn’t have surprised her more when he sat down beside her and put his arm along the back of the sofa, motioning her closer. “C’mere, Cath.”

  She hesitated, knowing she should not let herself get too close. But she needed him so badly right now. “Just for a minute?”

  “Whatever it takes,” he said, his gaze steady and sure.

  Cathie let herself lean against him a little, slipping progressively closer until her face was buried in the warm curve of his shoulder and his arms were clamped tightly around her. A long, deep shiver ran through her—her last-ditch effort at control. And then she was lost, just melting into the heat and the rock-solid strength of him.

  With her face pressed against his neck, with every breath she took, she inhaled a bit more of the essence of him—something dark and dangerous and, after all these years, blessedly familiar. One of his hands stroked her hair tenderly. The other gently kneaded the knot of tension at the base of her spine. She gave up any hope of holding her tears in any longer. He pulled her closer and held on tighter, as if he might be able to hold her tightly enough to stop her body from trembling so badly.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he whispered.

  She didn’t believe that, but it was nice to have him hold her this way. She stayed there for the longest time, feeling safe and not so very hopeless. When she lifted her head, she found his face only inches from hers.

  Deep, blue eyes, so familiar and flecked with gold, stared down at her, his jaw set in a grim line. His hair was shorter than it had been as a teenager, but still as dark, and, if anything, his body was even leaner and more powerful. It was so easy to find herself caught up in that old familiar spell that was Matt.

  His hand settled against the side of her face. Carefully, gently, he wiped the tears from her cheeks in a touch that was so sweet, so tender.

  Just for a moment, something flared in his eyes. If he’d been any other man, she would have sworn he was about to kiss her—the way a man kisses a woman he desires. And then, as she watched, the look drained away. Every little spark simply disappeared.

  Unnerved, Cathie pulled away. Because she wasn’t sure her legs could hold her, she didn’t even try to stand. Instead, she scrambled to the opposite end of the couch. Drawing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around her legs, she watched him as he watched her.

  There were new lines of tension at the corners of those beautiful eyes of his, not even a hint of a smile on his lips. But she could say with absolute certainty that he was every bit as gorgeous at thirty as he had been at fifteen, nineteen, twenty-one, twenty-seven. Not that it mattered. He was simply being kind to her, and she was carrying another man’s child.

  “I’m sorry,” she said finally.

  “It’s all right,” he insisted. “Look, Cathie, there’s no place I have to be tonight. I could stay a while.”

  “Thanks, but I have to make some decisions, and I have to talk to Tim.”

  “All right.” Looking uncharacteristically uncertain, he stood up and headed for the door. “If you need anything…” he said roughly.

  And then Ca
thie couldn’t even look him in the eye anymore. If she did, she’d take him up on his offer and ask him to stay. She felt like such a fool.

  “I really don’t want to leave you like this,” Matt said, sounding like her prickly lost boy, put out with her but, at the same time, still trying to take care of her.

  “I’ll be fine. I’m going to go to bed and hope I can figure some things out in the morning.”

  “Okay. I’ll stall if your mother calls.”

  “Please. I’ll call her tomorrow. Or I’ll go see her and Dad.”

  With the front door open, he hesitated once again. “Cathie, anything. I mean that.” Matt squeezed her hand one last time, released it, then turned and disappeared into the night.

  He was almost home when the phone in his car rang. He snatched it up, thinking Cathie might be calling. “Hello.”

  “Matt? Hi. This is Mary. I’m sorry to bother you, dear, and I know you think I’m just a silly old woman who’s much too protective of her daughter….”

  “You’ve always been a bother,” he said, trying to make light of this while he decided how much to tell her. “But I don’t think you’re silly, and you’ll never be old.”

  “Thank you, dear. I notice you have the tact not to mention my overprotectiveness, and I appreciate that. I don’t suppose you know how my girl is?”

  He closed his eyes and wrestled with his conscience. Cathie had a right to explain herself when she was ready. Still, Matt genuinely liked Mary Baldwin, and he didn’t want to lie to her.

  “I saw her, and you’re right. She has some things on her mind right now.”

  “Things she can’t talk about with her own mother? Matt, is she in trouble?”

  “She has some decisions to make, and I’m sure she’s going to talk to you about this, as soon as she figures it out for herself. Mary, please don’t ask me for any more.”