The Cowboy's Big Family Tree
Page 19
Georgette followed, arms crossed tightly over her chest. “Go ahead and think you’re not just like your mama. Was a time I thought I wasn’t just like my mama, too. But here you are. Knocked up by some walk-away joe. Just who do you think is going to take you in when they learn you got yourself pregnant?”
Kelly blinked hard and kept going, carefully navigating the creaking steps that she’d pounded up and down all of her life. “I can take care of myself.” She wasn’t going to allow herself to think otherwise. If she did, she’d want to curl up and disappear. And she wouldn’t do that now, not when she had a fledgling life inside her.
Behind her, Georgette gave that I-told-you-so huff of hers. “Guess you proved that, all right.” She followed Kelly right out to the front porch of the small two-story house Georgette had inherited from her mother.
There was a deep ache inside Kelly’s chest. She blamed it on the weight of carrying all of her belongings in one single trip and quickened her pace down the porch steps. The suitcase banged against her leg, and a few hangers slid out of her grasp. “I guess that’s my problem, isn’t it?”
She stepped over the dresses lying in the dirt, aiming blindly for the pickup truck that had been old even when she’d bought it five years earlier with the money she’d earned working at the grocery store. She set down the suitcase long enough to open the door and shove her hangers and beach bag across the threadbare bench seat.
“When you learn you can’t handle your problem, don’t come crawling back to me,” Georgette yelled.
“Don’t worry, Mama.” Her voice was choked. She hefted the suitcase into the truck bed. It landed with a terrible bang, but at least the latches stayed closed. “I won’t be back.”
Georgette wasn’t listening, though. “You’d be better off at least trying to pass off that kid as Buchanan’s baby! Least you’d get some money outta your mistake!”
Kelly’s chest ached even more.
She got behind the wheel, turned the key with a shaking hand until the engine cranked and drove away. When she dared a glance in the rearview mirror, all she saw was the plume of dust kicked up from her tires.
She swiped a hand over her wet cheek. “I won’t be back,” she said through her teeth.
She didn’t know where she was going.
She just knew that anywhere was better than her mother’s house.
But where could she go? She’d been working at Doc Cobb’s for a year now since leaving the grocery store and had saved up some money, but with a baby on the way, she would need to conserve every penny she could.
She braked when she reached the highway and stared down the empty road toward Weaver.
She could find a place to live in town. Keep working for Doc Cobb. He was a pediatrician. Nobody liked babies and children more than her genial boss. But whether Kelly wanted to admit it or not, her mother was right about one thing. Gossip was going to dog her every footstep when it became obvious that she was pregnant and there was no daddy standing by her side. More important than that, though, was the baby. And that same gossip was going to follow her child the same way it had always followed her.
She was not going to repeat her mother’s mistakes.
And she damn sure was not going to beg Caleb Buchanan for one single thing.
She exhaled, wiped her cheeks again, looked down the empty highway one more time and hit the gas.
Copyright © 2016 by Allison Lee Johnson
ISBN-13: 9781488002816
The Cowboy’s Big Family Tree
Copyright © 2016 by Meg Maxwell
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