by Anna Jeffrey
Dahlia didn’t look up, unwilling to face another you-didn’t-give-me-a-chance glare.
“They’re pretty girls,” he said. “Look like their mother.”
Dahlia stared at the photographs of Luke’s daughters, now fifteen and sixteen. Never having seen even a picture of their mother, she couldn’t confirm or deny a resemblance, but his daughters had his stark blue eyes.
Just as it appeared Joe would.
Dear God. These girls were her baby’s half-sisters. The realization was as shocking as a slap.
Her gaze lingered on the third photo that had come out of the wallet. “And how’s Jimmy?”
Luke’s eyes settled on the picture, too, and she saw a glimmer of sadness. “He’s still in that school in Boise. They tested him a few months ago. They say he’s about as good as he’s ever gonna get. He’ll always need supervision, but he’s learning to be independent, taking on a little responsibility.”
Dal-la. Jimmy, with his limited abilities, had pronounced her name in two broken syllables. She almost blubbered again. “His health’s okay, then. I mean, the heart condition . . .”
Luke shrugged. “About the same.”
Recalling Jimmy’s life expectancy had been placed somewhere around twenty and thinking of Joe, healthy as a horse and normal, aroused a queer feeling of guilt.
The air conditioner clicked on, scattering chill bumps down her bare arms. Then again, maybe it wasn’t the cool air at all. She handed the photographs back to him and rubbed her palms up and down her arms. “I’m sorry about that, Luke. I truly am.”
“Nothing for you to be sorry about. It’s none of your doing.” He slipped the pictures back into the wallet sleeves.
“But I remember him. He’s such a sweet little boy.”
Luke made circle on the tabletop with the wet bottom of his glass, then looked up and smiled. “Boy, you should see him now. He’s getting tall. Seems like he’s grown a foot in just a year. I stopped off to see him on my way to the airport this morning. He read me a story.”
“That’s good that he’s learning to read, right?
“Yeah, it is. We didn’t know if he ever would.”
“And—and your father? You said he’s crippled?”
“Bull pinned him to the fence during branding. Banged him up pretty good. Broke his leg and some ribs. He’s still not over it.” Luke leaned back in his chair and sighed, a man resigned to the burdens he carried, had always carried, alone. “He’s different now. Doesn’t care much about anything anymore. He mostly takes care of small details that aren’t too complicated. Don’t know what I’d do without Mom. She’s always been the strong one. ’Course, she can’t do what she used to, now that she’s sick—”
“How long are you planning to visit?” Dahlia interrupted. Luke and his problems. If she listened, she might care.
“Can’t stay long. Bad time of year to be gone.”
Another punishing silence passed while the air conditioner blew and the clock on top of the TV ticked relentlessly.
“We’ve made a good cross in that boy, Dahlia. DAM Ranches is his legacy. Just as it became mine when Matt—” He paused, holding her gaze. “Bring the baby and come back with me.”
What? She had no name for the emotion that pushed a primal part of her to remember where she had stashed her suitcase. She shunned that traitorous urge. His seductive voice had already coaxed her into thorny territory and the fifteen pound result was sleeping down the hall. Besides, this was the man who thought he had all the kids he wanted or needed. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am.”
“Perhaps you should have called first, Luke. You’ve made a long trip for nothing.”
“I’m the father of your son. I’m not denying it for a minute. We’re a family.”
“You didn’t feel that way last summer.”
“You don’t know how I might’ve felt.”
“You’re right. You never told me.”
Bewilderment spread over his face, as if he couldn’t believe she could be so dense. “I figured you knew. I didn’t think I had to tell you.”
Her jaw went slack. She splayed her hand across her chest as tears burned her eyes again. “My God, how could I have known? You broke up with me. Sent me packing.”
“No. I told you we oughtta cool it. I had problems to deal with. But you didn’t even let me know why you left town in such a hurry. Didn’t say a word about your dad.”
Her defenses sprang up. She had a vivid memory of the scene in the Forest Service parking lot, had tortured herself with his fatal words a thousand times. She wasn’t the bad guy here. Was she?
She glowered across the table. “As a matter of fact, Luke, what you told me, and numerous times I might add, was you didn’t want any more kids.”
“That weekend at the ranch, when we went to the hot springs, when Mom . . .That’s when we got him, wasn’t it?”
Dahlia closed her eyes. Her throat had filled with such a huge bubble she couldn’t speak.
“Wasn’t it?”
She fumbled for her napkin to dab the damn tears she couldn’t seem to stop.
Luke shook his head. “How could you think I didn’t care? If there’s anything I know, Dahlia, it’s how babies are made. We took chances. You know I wouldn’t have done that with just any woman.”
She stared him, blinking. Then why had he ended their relationship? Why hadn’t he gotten in touch with her, given her the tiniest indication he cared about her? If he had, everything now might be so different.
“I’ll bet,” she said coldly.
He pushed his chair back and stood, his fists jammed against his hips. His head lowered and he appeared to study the faded blue floral pattern on the worn linoleum floor. “I was afraid this was gonna be hard.”
She could take no more. She sprang to her feet. Her chair tipped over backward and banged the floor. She leaned forward, her palms flattened on the table. “Hard! Don’t tell me about hard! Hard is taking over a small business that’s floundering and single-handedly dragging it up from bankruptcy. Hard is burying your only living relative when you’re seven months pregnant and your baby’s father is nowhere in sight to even offer a dry shoulder.”
She reached across the table for his plate and silverware and stacked them on top of hers with clattering jerks. “Hard is giving birth alone and taking care of an infant whose father didn’t want you. Do you have any idea what it was like for me, coming back here pregnant and dumped by the man who made me that way? Facing the sniggers and snide remarks from the grocery store’s customers, people who have known me and my dad all our lives?”
She stamped toward the sink, carrying the stack of soiled dishes. “I couldn’t even go to another town to hide my embarrassment. Dad was too sick!”
She dumped the dishes into the sink, grateful it was stainless steel and not likely to break every plate. “Just because the rest of the world accepts unwed mothers as normal doesn’t mean Loretta, Texas, does. This is the Bible Belt. They prayed for me at the Baptist church, for chrissake.”
Luke bent and picked up the tipped over chair, but she strode to it, yanked it from his hands and reset it at the table with a clunk. “Our neighbor even asked me point blank if I knew who my baby’s father was. I’m my dad’s only child. He had faith in me, sacrificed for me. And I”—she shot him a pointed glare—“we humiliated him.”
Good God, I’m raving.
She stomped back to the sink and turned on the faucet full stream, squirted in dishwashing soap. Her eyes stung, but she would not cry again. She had already shed a bucket of tears for Luke McRae.
“You chose your own path, Dahlia,” he said from behind her. “All you had to do was pick up the phone. I would’ve been here like that.”
She heard the snap of his fingers, but didn’t turn to face him. “I don’t believe you.”
She braced for a verbal assault. What came instead was a soft voice. “I can see I shouldn’t have barged in on you. I’m much obli
ged for supper.”
She heard his footsteps as he went to the sofa, pictured him setting on his hat. The front door slammed as she reached for the dishrag.
Luke had never been lost in his life and he wasn’t now, though he didn’t know where he was going. He drove back to town and parked in front of the Handy Pantry. He was shaken. Dahlia’s words had torn through him like a dull knife. He could imagine too well what she had faced in a small town that didn’t look much different from Callister. He felt low about his own contribution to the stress on her dying father.
But a greater worry gnawed at a place deep within. Had he been such an ass that he made her think he would reject his own kid? Or her? Evidently he had, because any fool could see that was what she thought.
He guessed he shouldn’t have come down here assuming so much without laying some groundwork or finding out first how she felt, shouldn’t have been so abrupt stating what he wanted. But he couldn’t have stopped himself. After seeing Joe, then her, the year since the Forest Service parking lot melted away like fog in sunshine. He had been filled with an uncontrollable yearning to sweep her and the baby up and carry them away.
A wave of fatigue prompted him to dig into his pocket for his watch. Nearly midnight. He sighed. He sorely didn’t want to drive another sixty miles to rent a room—not that he wouldn’t do it—but a trip back and forth used up time, something he had in only a limited amount.
Piggy and Bill had offered him a bed, had told him to come back regardless of the hour. He had no trouble finding their house a few blocks from town. Its windows were dark, but a porch light shone, so he rang the doorbell.
Chapter 25
Six o’clock. Dahlia had overslept by an hour. But that was a small problem compared to the one she saw in her vanity mirror. Her pupils looked like olives caught in red cobwebs and they had a right to. Last night after Luke’s departure, she had cried through washing supper dishes. She had slept little as resentment and memories pushed and pulled inside her.
Leaning closer to the mirror, she examined the darkened pouches under each eye. She hadn’t looked this bad since her last encounter with Luke. What would the store employees think?
Generous application of concealer made little improvement. While she brushed on blush, she wondered if he had slept at Piggy’s. Last night’s outburst that sent him running had been extreme, but she didn’t regret anything she had said or that he left. He had touched all her most private places, emotional as well as physical. Having him sleeping in her house was a torment she didn’t want to endure.
She nursed and bathed Joe, then left him to play in his crib while she dressed. For comfort in what would be a hundred-degree day, she put on a white cotton T-shirt, a denim skirt and tan sandals. Lacking the time or patience for the hair styling process, she brushed back her hair and clasped it with a leather barrette at her nape. She had just hooked silver and turquoise drops into her ears when she heard a knock at the front door.
There she found Luke, looking cool and well rested.
He was wearing his usual Wranglers, medium-new, starched and creased. A pale yellow button-down with white pinstripes looked delicious with his ruddy coloring and cinnamon hair. The old familiar frisson passed down her spine. The pesky question of where he had spent last night leapt to the surface. In Loretta, or most likely the whole state of Texas, beds where a man like him would be welcome were aplenty.
“You gonna invite me in or make me stand out here on the porch?” he asked.
She opened the screen door, stepped aside and allowed him into the house, then followed as he sauntered up the hall toward Joe’s room as if he owned the place.
Her baby boy was in a jovial mood and googled when Luke spoke to him. Luke picked him up and held him and Joe squealed and bicycled his chubby little legs, lapping up the attention. Soon he returned the baby to the crib, then straightened and faced her. “I was hoping we could talk, Dal.I don’t have much time—”
“Nothing new about that, is there? I don’t have much time either, so why inconvenience both of us with useless conversation?”
“You afraid to talk to me?”
She stared at him bug-eyed. She had always been willing to talk. He had been the one with nothing to say.
“Crap,” she mumbled, tramping toward the kitchen. She went to the wall phone and keyed in the Handy Pantry’s number. When Chuck Moore came on the line, she told him she would be late. Then she snatched a banana from a fruit bowl on the counter.
Luke stood a few feet away, which was too close. She moved to the opposite side of the square kitchen and braced her hip against the sink’s edge. I will peel this banana.
“We spent four months eating, drinking and sleeping together and we didn’t talk,” she told him, then bit down hard on the soft fruit, chewed as if it were caramel and swallowed with a gulp. “So now that we’re separated by two thousand miles, we’re going to start up a dialogue? Why bother? You’re off the hook?”
She opened the cupboard door under the sink and threw her banana peel in the trash. “I take responsibility for getting pregnant. And I accept that you can’t help it your family and your ranch came before me.”
“It wasn’t like that.” His head bowed and he appeared to be studying the toe of his boots. “Well…maybe it was. A little.” After a pause, he looked up at her. “But I know now that last summer was special. And I didn’t treat it like it was. I guess I was hoping you might still feel a little something.”
She saw a plea in his eyes, a look she couldn’t remember ever seeing. Like air leaving a punctured tire, the desire to make the pious speech she had rehearsed countless times fizzled into a sigh. “It was a hundred years ago, Luke.”
A frown creased his forehead. “Look, I’m not gonna make a pest of myself and I’m not gonna beg you. Maybe it’s not like it used to be, but if you still care just a little bit, well…I mean, since we’ve already got the kid and all and he can’t help it ’cause he’s here—wouldn’t it be worth it to give him the best shot we can give him?”
“Such as?”
Luke spread his open hands. “Two parents?”
What was he suggesting—some kind of bizarre living arrangement? Last night she had dismissed a similar remark as a reflex to his seeing his son for the first time. But he had slept on it since then. She crossed her arms under her breasts. “He has two parents who happen to live in two different places. And, I might add, who function on two different wave lengths.”
Luke crossed his arms, too. “You didn’t used to be so close-minded. If we can’t work things out between us, I guess we oughtta try to work something out about Joe.”
We look like gunfighters, she thought, facing each other across the kitchen.
“There’s nothing to work out. You have no rights where Joe’s concerned.”
She hoped her bogus confidence in that remark didn’t show. In truth, she didn’t know his rights. Consulting a lawyer on the question was another of those things she had meant to do but never made the time.
“It may disappoint you, darlin’, but you’re wrong about that.”
The kitchen suddenly felt as chilled as a meat locker. Luke had been in and out of court for years wrangling for custody of his children. If anyone knew his legal parental rights, he did. He would fight her, just as she had secretly feared all along.
“I’m not blind,” he said. “I can see things are hard for you. When I get back to Callister, I intend to get with our lawyer. Draw up support papers. I was hoping—”
“Don’t you dare throw money at me.”
“Then what do you want?”
She stared at him, stumped. Last summer, she thought she knew. Now, here it stood right in front of her all dressed up in cowboy garb and she was confused and upset and unprepared for the way her heart and mind were dueling. “Well one thing I didn’t want was for you to drop out of the sky.”
“Okay, I get that. Then I’ll tell you what I want. And that’s for my son to be in my life
and my family’s.”
She might not know what she wanted, but she knew this much—Luke and the McRae clan weren’t going to travel between Idaho and Texas to be around Joe. “What did you have in mind? Shuttling him back and forth on an airplane every other weekend, like luggage? Maybe we could ship him UPS.”
All of her maternal instincts to protect amplified. Her head began to shake back and forth. “Nuh-unh. No, no. Nada. My little boy isn’t going anywhere without me.”
“Fine. Then, you come with him.”
“Not a chance. My life and his are in Loretta, Texas.”
Luke pushed away from the counter, his fists on his hips, his eyes hot as lasers. “So what’re you gonna do? Turn him into some kind of a damn store clerk?”
Her jaw dropped as she gasped. “Are you demeaning what I do? Are you?”
He rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “No, Dal, I’m—
”Our grocery business might not be as glamorous as your cattle ranch, but it makes our living. And it made my dad’s living for most of his life.”
Luke’s palms raised in surrender. “I shouldn’t have said that. I just meant—”
“I agree. You shouldn’t have said it. But we both know you meant it. I don’t have time to argue. People are waiting for me.”
He resumed his damn John Wayne pose. “Where you taking the boy?”
“Stop calling him ‘the boy’, like he’s some…some abstract object. He goes with me. He nurses several times a day.”
“I’ll go with you, too. Help you keep an eye on him.”
Dahlia huffed out an exaggerated breath. Damn you, Piggy.
At the grocery store, while she went about her tasks, Luke played with Joe and changed his diapers, read to him from Dr. Zeuss, making odd animal noises for each character. When Joe became hungry and fussy, Luke watched intently as he nursed. “You know, I’ve seen plenty of calves and colts suck, but never a baby.”
Stunned, Dahlia looked up at him. “What do you mean?”
“Janet never breast-fed any of our kids.”