Currant Creek Valley

by RaeAnne Thayne

  He was angry. Heat flared in his eyes, and his jaw had hardened. He looked every inch a soldier—big, tough, scary.

  “I love you,” he said once more, and she could see he was fighting to tamp down his temper. “Maybe if I say it enough times you’ll finally believe me.”

  She had no choice, she realized, gripping Leo’s leash so tightly she could feel the imprint of it on her palm. She had to tell him. Everything. Every terrible detail. Then he would finally see she wasn’t the kind of woman who deserved him.

  “You can’t love me, Sam. You don’t even know me.”

  “I think I know you better than anybody.”

  “Not this.”

  She drew in a ragged breath that seemed to slice her lungs and blurted out the words she had never spoken aloud.

  “I had a baby. I had a baby and he died. Because of me.”

  * * *

  THROUGH THE EDGES of the temper he rarely let get away from him, Sam heard her words as if from a long distance away. A baby. She had given birth to a baby who had died.

  He hadn’t expected that one. Shock froze him for just a moment but then he forced himself to speak.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t... It’s ugly. So ugly.”

  He didn’t need to hear—didn’t want to hear, but he sensed she needed to tell him, for reasons he didn’t quite understand.

  He glanced back at his house and then at her. “Ethan could wake up. I need to be there. Will you come back and tell me? We can sit on the porch.”

  “I don’t talk about it. Ever. To anyone. Not even... My family doesn’t even know.”

  How could she have kept something like that a secret from her big, boisterous, loving family? His heart ached that she had carried that burden alone.

  “It’s your choice. Tell me or don’t. Nothing you have to say will change the way I feel about you anyway.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “Not unless you tell me.”

  This was the reason she didn’t let him close. Somehow he knew it. Just that afternoon, Claire had told him Alex kept part of herself separate. This. This was the part she didn’t share with anyone.

  He wanted to scoop her up and hold her close and tell her his shoulders were strong enough to help her carry any burden.

  “Come on up to the porch, so I can hear my son if he wakes up. I can keep the light off if you want.”

  Confidences always seemed easier in the dark, something he had learned in some pretty dark and ugly places in the desert.

  She drew in a breath that sounded shaky and hollow, as if she wasn’t drawing air deeply enough into her lungs. “Yes. I...need to tell you.”

  They walked up his sidewalk without talking or touching, her dog leading the way. She stood for a moment on the porch, her hands tightly clasping the dog’s leash.

  “Can I get you something to drink?”’

  She shook her head, her features in shadow. She didn’t seem to quite know what to do, what to say, so he made the first move, taking the ladder-back chair and leaving her free to sit on the porch swing.

  After a moment’s hesitation, she sat stiffly. The chains rattled a little with the shift in weight then stilled.

  She unhooked the dog’s leash and Leo immediately moved to Sam for affection. He petted him for just a moment then surreptitiously pushed him to Alex, sensing she needed the dog more than he did right now.

  “This must have happened during your time in Europe,” he finally prodded.

  In the dim light, her eyes were huge against her shadowy features as she stared at him. “How did you know that?”

  “You said you hadn’t told your family. The way I see it, as close as you all are, as much as they love you, the only way you could have kept something like a pregnancy from them would be by living across the world.”

  “Yes. I...I was in culinary school.”

  She was quiet for another moment and then she pulled her knees up onto the swing and wrapped her arms around them, drawing into herself. “I was so stupid. From the very beginning.”

  He let the silence linger. When she spoke, her voice was crisp, almost as if she had detached herself from the story.

  “As part of my training, I worked in various restaurants in France and then Italy, learning different techniques. It was a wonderful adventure and I loved every minute of it. About a year into it, I started work at a restaurant near Florence when I...fell in love. Or thought I did. Marco was the chef and he was...brilliant. In the kitchen and out of it. Just this...irresistible force.”

  She drew in another breath. “We had to keep our growing relationship a secret, of course. It would cause friction among the staff if people knew about us. Resentment, petty jealousies, that sort of thing. The political games played in a fine kitchen are as complicated and cutthroat as the Borgias.”

  “I’ve heard that.”

  “Maybe that was part of the excitement, the forbidden aspect of it. For several months we lived that way, with him sneaking into my little flat in the middle of the night or taking me away for weekends in the countryside.”

  She paused. “And then I discovered I was pregnant.”

  She was silent for a long moment while a breeze blew through, rustling the leaves of the tree beside the porch.

  “I was thrilled,” she finally said. “Beyond thrilled. I had all these ideas that we would marry, I would move to Italy permanently and we could run this wonderful restaurant together. It was a magical time. In my head, anyway. I didn’t tell him right away. Even then maybe I sensed something wasn’t quite right between us, but I told myself I wanted to wait until the moment was perfect. He could...have these moods sometimes, which I told myself was all part of his passionate, creative genius.”

  Sam figured he had left his violent days behind him when he took his discharge, but right now he was struck by a fierce urge to rip a certain passionate genius into tiny, creative little parts.

  “Finally, when I was three months along and starting to show—six or seven months after we began seeing each other—I set the stage. I cooked him my very best meal, I spent a week’s salary on a new dress, I even had the pastry chef at the restaurant prepare Marco’s favorite dessert. Semifreddo with grappa-poached apricots. You’ll never see that in my restaurant, by the way.”

  An owl hooted somewhere on the Currant Creek but other than that, it felt as if they were alone in the night.

  “You can probably guess what happened next. I finally told him about the pregnancy over dessert. He...wasn’t happy. Said I was a stupid American girl and why did I have to ruin everything. He said all manner of things about me, worst of all that my alla bolognese was bland.”

  This would have made him laugh under other circumstances but right now he couldn’t find anything about this story funny.

  “Only then did I realize he was right. I had been incredibly stupid. As he finally so clearly pointed out, we would never be together. All this time while I had been dreaming of the time we could make our relationship public—when we could start our happily-ever-after together—he had been going home every night when he left my bed to sleep beside his wife. The wife I had no idea existed until that night.”

  He remembered that first day he had met her at Brazen, when she had grilled him so intently about whether he was married or not before she would consider dating him. The pain of that treachery and how she had unknowingly betrayed another woman must be etched deeply inside her.

  “I have no excuse. I should have seen it a million times over, I just... I guess I didn’t want to see. I wanted to blame the language barrier, since my Italian was terrible and he refused to speak English, but really it was my own stupidity.”

  “You were a young woman living in a foreign country and you made a mistake.”

  “I wasn’t that young. Twenty-five. Not some naive teenager. I was certainly old enough to suspect something when the man who claimed to love me would only see me in secret.”

 
He was willing to bet the charming Italian son of a bitch was probably older, with worlds’ more experience. She had probably transferred all her pain over losing her father to him, but he wasn’t sure she would appreciate that insight right now.

  “That’s not the worst of it,” she said, her voice small.

  “What happened?”

  “He fired me. Well, technically I quit before he could, but he told me he didn’t want me to come back to his ristorante ever, with much dramatic gesturing and throwing things around. And since the apartment was owned by the ristorante, of course I had to leave there immediatamente.”

  Now he really wanted to find the bastard. Anybody who could throw a pregnant young woman out into the street deserved the full force of an angry ex-Ranger trained in hand-to-hand combat.

  “I couldn’t see any other choice in the matter so I packed my things and I left Florence. What else could I do?”

  “You didn’t come home to Hope’s Crossing, though.”

  “No. I couldn’t. I... My older sister Maura had had a baby on her own when she was a teenager, my niece Sage, and I saw how hard that was for her. I heard the whispers and the way certain people looked down on her for it. Call me selfish, but I didn’t want to go through that or put my family through it. I didn’t want to tell my family what an idiot I had been and I certainly didn’t want the baby. My heart was broken and I didn’t want any part of Marco in my life.”

  “Completely understandable.”

  “I had some vague idea of giving the baby up for adoption, maybe, but I needed to work to survive, so I took a job at a restaurant near Bologna. A terrible place, with a horrible little man for a chef.”

  The breeze sighed through the treetops and she sighed along with it. “I worked sixteen-hour days, six days a week. Some days I forgot to eat. I didn’t go to a doctor. I just wanted to pretend the whole thing hadn’t happened. I had loved him so much and I still couldn’t believe he didn’t want me. That he could hurt me like my...” Her voice trailed off abruptly.

  “Like your father did,” he finished, wishing he could reach out and touch her. An arm around her shoulder, a hand on her arm. Anything.

  “Claire does have a big mouth,” she said after a moment.

  “She cares about you.”

  “Yes. I couldn’t believe he could hurt me like my father. He abandoned us, and Marco basically did the same.”

  This was why she was so careful to keep her relationships light and casual. The men in her life had been assholes, all of them, and she wanted to remain in control so she didn’t have to risk being hurt.

  He had no idea how he could heal a lifetime of disappointments.

  “You should know,” he said carefully, “nothing you’ve told me makes me suddenly discover I can’t possibly be in love with you.”

  She looked at him, her face pale and lovely against the shadows around her and completely solemn. “Oh, just wait.”

  The dog moved closer to her, resting his chin on her leg, and her hands absently moved through his fur.

  “When I was about six months along, still working sixteen-hour days on my feet in a hot, crowded restaurant kitchen and not taking any kind of care of myself or the baby, I started having pain under my rib cage. Severe pain.”

  He ached for her, for what he sensed was coming.

  “It went on for two days. I didn’t go to a doctor. In fact, I continued working and told myself it would pass. On the second day, I fainted just before the dinner rush while I was slicing tomatoes for the insalata caprese and I started hemorrhaging all over the floor.”

  His own blood ran cold thinking of her, a young woman alone in a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language well in dire need of medical attention.

  “I was rushed to the hospital where it turned out the pain I had been so stubbornly ignoring had been a placental abruption. The baby didn’t survive. I nearly didn’t.”

  He could feel his insides tremble at the thought of how close she might have come. “But you did.”

  “Yes. More or less intact. Well, less, actually. They had to take out everything to save my life. All the girly parts, I mean.”

  She said the words as if they had some great significance, but he was just a big dumb carpenter and didn’t understand why she thought that would matter to him.

  “And where is the part where you killed your baby?” he asked.

  She stared. “Haven’t you been listening? If I had taken proper care of myself, seen a doctor, stayed off my feet for five minutes, maybe, the baby might have survived. Instead, I was so busy hating myself for my stupidity and naïveté and hating Marco for being an ass and even hating the baby for ruining everything that I let an innocent child die because of it.”

  Again he chose his words carefully. Everything—everything—hinged on him not screwing this up. “Sorry, but I’m not seeing it. You made poor choices, but you didn’t kill your child.”

  She made a strangled noise as if gearing up to argue and he purposely hardened his voice. “I served three tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. I know what it means to kill someone, defending myself or my platoon or the mission. I also know the difference between that and an emotionally battered young woman alone in a foreign country neglecting her health while she tries to survive. Trust me, there’s no comparison.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  DESPITE THE SUMMER EVENING, she shivered at his blunt words.

  He had killed people. She probably shouldn’t have been surprised. He had been a Ranger, after all, but it was hard to reconcile the soldier he had once been with the man who talked to Ethan with such patient gentleness and taught him to use a hammer and was building the world’s best tree house for him.

  You made poor choices but you didn’t kill your child.

  The words seemed to seep inside her, finding all the dark, ugly corners she didn’t want to explore. She had been young, not nearly as sophisticated and urbane as she had wanted to pretend when she took off alone to Europe. She had grown up in a tight-knit family, in a small, conservative town. She had made really stupid choices but she didn’t know anybody who couldn’t say the same.

  The doctors afterward had told her that even with the proper medical care and attention, the placenta had been weak and might have abrupted anyway. She hadn’t wanted to believe them. It was easier to blame herself but now, a dozen years later, she could view that young woman she had been with a little more compassion.

  “In the end,” she whispered now, “when I woke up after the surgery and the doctors told me what had happened and that the baby was dead, I...finally I wanted him again. So much.”

  The tears began to fall and she couldn’t seem to stop them and she stopped trying. She hadn’t cried in forever and now, here in the darkness with Sam, she cried for her empty arms and a young woman’s shattered dreams and all the chances she had lost along the way.

  Sam swore and rose from his chair. Before she could protest, he sat beside her on the porch swing he had hung and pulled her into his arms.

  In some corner of her mind, she knew she should protest but he felt so wonderful—strong, steady, solid—and she couldn’t resist. He held her for a long time while she wept and she was vaguely aware of a light pressure as he kissed the top of her head softly, as he might a child who had come to him with a bad dream.

  The moment was almost unbearably tender.

  “You need to forgive yourself, Alexandra,” he said, his voice low. “Take it from a man who went through a pretty rough time after a few missions, where I second-guessed decisions, my own and others. People make mistakes. You can either let it eat away at you from the inside until you’re hollowed out and have nothing good left. Or you can learn to accept that none of us can change our past. All we can do is move forward and make something better out of the rest of our days.”

  His words resonated with truth. She had blamed herself for too long. It was time to let go, to embrace what she had done with her life in the years since and th
e person she had become.

  Sam had moved forward. He had come from a rough childhood and had made something of his life by serving his country. He had fallen in love, married, then had lost his wife tragically.

  Many men might have become bitter and railed at fate, yet Sam had this core of goodness in him that made him push past the disappointments and sadness and seek out something better for his son than he had experienced.

  To a man like him who had known both the horrors of war and a tumultuous personal life, the quiet streets and quaint houses of Hope’s Crossing must represent unimaginable peace.

  She couldn’t let him leave this place he already loved. She didn’t want to go, either, but how could she stay?

  “For a long time, I thought the fact that I can’t have more children was punishment for my mistakes.”

  “I hope you know better now.”

  “I think some things just happen. Not for a reason, not as some punishment from a higher power, not as part of some master plan. They just are.”

  “You can still be a mother, you know.”

  With his arms still around her, he shifted so she could see his face, and in the pale light on the porch, he looked serious and intense. “I know a certain seven-year-old boy who could use someone like you in his life.”

  “Sam.” She clamped down hard on the wild joy fighting to flutter through her again at the implication behind his words.

  “No. Listen to me. You keep telling me how you’re not what I need, what Ethan needs. Let me tell you all the reasons I think you’re wrong.”

  She couldn’t bear this. How could she possibly push him away again when everything within her wanted to stay right here in his arms?

  “You make me laugh,” he said. “I haven’t laughed in so long. Even before Kelli got sick, I was so busy being a husband and father and a good soldier that I didn’t often pause to just savor each moment. When I touch you, when I see you, when I simply think about you, I’m happy.”