by Anna Adams
It had surprised her how quickly Ben had come to feel at home here, and she was no longer looking forward to the day she had to take him back to Vermont. Not that she would tell Owen that.
She and Ben had made their life in Vermont. They had their own routines, their own home. She’d worked hard to create a safe, happy life for him. Having contact with his father could add to that happiness, but Ben belonged in Vermont.
Lilah skidded a little in the still-falling snow as she reached the fork in the road that led to Bliss Peak in one direction and Suzannah Gage’s inn in the other. Lilah headed toward the inn and soon reached Suzannah’s white picket fences, reinforced with wire to keep in the goats and sheep and cows.
Movement caught her eye. The goats were stampeding. There must have been at least ten, and when they all got excited about the same thing... She was laughing until she saw a small, dark head, just taller than the goats.
Just one dark head. No tall high school senior hot on his heels. Ben, on his own.
Lilah glanced over her shoulder at the mountain stream to her left. She had to warn Ben before he ran straight into it with his gang of goats. She stopped the truck, not caring that she was leaving it in the middle of the road. Running with careless speed, she took the fence like a hurdler. She hardly noticed the sting as she went over.
She skidded into the herd of goats, readily picking out her son’s laughter above their noisy bleating.
“Mommy,” he said, veering toward her. “I didn’t know you were here.”
She knelt, and he ran straight into her, knocking her into the snow, which spilled down her collar and beneath her shirt. Ben sprawled over her, and he struggled to get up.
“I wanted to win the race. I was beating the goats.”
And headed straight into icy water. “I saw that,” she said, gasping for breath. “Where’s Uncle Chad?”
“He’s exercising with those big bags of goat food Grandma Suzannah keeps in her shed.”
“Exercising? The muscle-bound—I’ve never heard of a worse idea.” She reached up and tugged Ben’s hood forward, covering his ears. “Do you know there’s a stream right behind us?”
“Can we go see it?”
He hopped off her and grabbed her hand, but she yanked him back. “Ben, buddy, you almost ran straight into that stream. You might have been hurt.” How to make him see the danger without traumatizing him?
“Nah,” he said, “I’m fine. Is that Own’s truck?”
She glanced at the vehicle. The engine was still running and the driver’s door stood wide open. “It is. We’d better get it home.”
“You’re bleeding,” Ben said. “Look at your hand.”
She lifted it up. She’d taken off her gloves to drive, and there was a cut in her palm. She must have caught a sharp part of the fence as she jumped over it.
“I’ll be okay.” She scooped up snow and used it to wash her hand, when what she really wanted to do was crush him close to her, overwhelmed by relief that he was unharmed. She’d been right. Owen and his family had ignored her every concern and put her son in danger.
Ben might have drowned or, at the very least, suffered from hypothermia. She pressed her little boy’s head to her throat so he couldn’t see her fear.
Chad might find himself learning some new moves for the football field when she got her hands on him.
“Mommy, I can’t breathe.”
She inhaled deeply and stood, taking Ben’s hand. “Where’s your glove?”
“In my pocket. Gomer keeps stealing it.”
She couldn’t stop thinking about the danger Ben had been in. “I know you were having fun running with the goats, but if you didn’t see the stream, you might have fallen and not been able to get out again. I wouldn’t want that to happen to you.”
“I wasn’t gonna fall in the water. That’s just silly.”
“Buddy, you need to listen to me.” She knelt in the snow beside her son, who averted his face.
“I’m not a baby, and I want to play with the goats.”
Lilah felt a chill that was bone deep. What had happened to her reasonable child? “I don’t want you to run out of Grandma Suzannah’s house unless someone’s with you. You might have been hurt.”
“You always say that, and I don’t get hurt.”
“If I hadn’t caught you, you might have.”
Lilah noticed that the goats had all veered away from the stream and were making the slow trek back toward the barn, their coats speckled with fresh snow.
“The goats don’t like getting wet,” Ben said. “They won’t go in the stream. But me and Gomer ran, and then they all chased us.”
“It’s not just the goats, Ben,” she said, frustrated. “I don’t want you running around in the snow outside Grandma’s house by yourself.”
“Owen takes me outside,” he said.
He was pushing his boundaries, which had vastly expanded. “You are not to leave Grandma’s house unless I say you can.” That should cover all the possibilities. “Do you understand?”
“You worry too much.” He started trudging toward the truck, but Lilah stood frozen in her tracks. She wondered which Gage he’d heard that line from. Shoving her anger aside, she hurried after Ben, suddenly having visions that he might jump in the cab and knock the truck out of park, hurtling it forward.
For a moment she wondered if she might be losing her mind. Maybe she should listen to her son.
She was obsessed with his safety, though. She’d never escape her own dark memories, and she didn’t want Ben to ever experience the same pain.
Once they got back to the house, she intended to speak with Chad about his lax child care. What had she been thinking, coming down here in the first place?
CHAPTER TEN
BEN UNDID HIS seat belt and jumped out of the truck the second Lilah turned off the engine. She caught up with him.
“I know you’re mad at me, buddy, but I’m still the mom, and I’m supposed to keep you safe.”
“I wasn’t scared, Mommy.”
“I don’t want you to be scared. I just want you to think twice.” Lilah winced. He was only four years old. “Let’s go inside, and you can take a shower.”
“Now? Do I have to go to bed?”
She shook her head. “You’re shivering, and a shower will help warm you up. And then it’ll be time for dinner.”
Chad met them at the door of the inn, his features slackening with relief when he saw she had Ben.
“Where were you?” he asked his nephew. “I turned around and you were gone.”
Lilah was struck dumb. He’d turned his back on her son.
“Just for a second, Lilah. Really.”
She directed Ben toward the stairs. “Chad, can you wait down here? I’d like to speak to you.”
“I figured you would.”
“Good. See you in a few minutes.”
Lilah took Ben upstairs and turned on a warm shower he didn’t want to take. She pointed at the curtain. “In you go, buddy.”
He sighed, with exaggerated grief. “Okay, Mommy.”
Poor kid. She probably could be a bit overwhelming, but she knew what could happen. One second the world was right. The next, her little boy could find himself in hell.
Just as she had.
Chad was waiting downstairs in his mother’s kitchen with a cup of coffee for her when she’d finished helping Ben and settled him in the living room with one of his books. She hesitated for a moment. Chad was also a kid. But she had to make her point. It was too important. What if the same thing happened when she wasn’t around? “While you were working out with bags of goat feed,” she said, “Ben ran down to the stream with the goats. They could have hurt him. He could have fallen into the water, and he could have en
ded up with hypothermia.”
Chad had the good grace to look ashamed. “I’m sorry. I suddenly got this great idea that I could use the feed bags for a better CrossFit workout than the tires I’ve been using. They’re heavy, and they—”
She nodded, trying to contain her anger. “You had one job.”
Chad bristled. “I have to train for football if I’m going to get a scholarship, and my mom expected me to put the goat feed away.”
“Why are you so determined to pretend this is okay? If you had other things to do, all you had to say was that you couldn’t look after Ben.”
The kitchen door opened. Suzannah entered with an armload of freshly washed linens. “What’s going on with you two?”
“The monster mom thinks I let her down with the Ben-man,” Chad said, and Lilah prayed that the Gage arrogance would never rub off on her son.
“I can barely speak to you right now,” she said. “In fact, I should cool down before I say something I can’t take back. You agreed to watch my boy—your nephew. Then you ignored him so completely that you didn’t notice he was gone until he and I walked into this house together. He almost ran into the stream with the goats, and you wouldn’t have even noticed he was missing.” She covered her face with her hands as visions of what could have happened flashed with too much clarity inside her head. She went to join Ben, but Celia was reading with him, so she headed back upstairs, her feet heavy. She didn’t want to make any more enemies in this household. They thought she was smothering Ben, but she had to take care of him.
Thoroughly disheartened, she sank onto the top step. Voices murmured from below. Doors opened and closed, but no one came up. Not one member of Ben’s new family seemed to care that he could have been seriously hurt, or worse. They were just going about their business as usual.
She went back to her room and closed the door, frustration chasing through her. She let herself cry. Just a little, quietly. She didn’t want the Gages to hear her. Or Ben.
“Lilah?”
A dull tap, and Owen opened the door, looking concerned. She glanced up at him, rubbing hard at her cheeks, trying to dry the tears she’d indulged in.
“You all think I’m crazy. I get that, but I trusted Chad, and Ben ended up being at risk. If that’s being overprotective, then I guess I am. But I don’t see it that way.”
Owen seemed to consider her words. “I do wonder if you’re overprotective a lot of the time, and maybe I should be more understanding of that.” He sat beside her, and she had to shift on the mattress to stop from sliding into him. “But I don’t think you’re wrong about this. Sometimes Ben sounds as if he’s older than Chad, but he’s just a little boy. He doesn’t know the farm. You’re right. He could have fallen into that stream.”
She didn’t know whether to trust him. “Are you saying that to manipulate me?”
He tilted his head the way Ben did when he didn’t understand something. “Why would I try to do that?” He tugged at one of her hands, but she didn’t relax. He wrapped his fingers around her wrist, imparting comfort.
“Maybe to make me feel more comfortable, so I’ll be less critical of your family?”
“I told them I thought you were right in this case, and I suggested we weren’t the best group to judge anyone else’s child-rearing practices.”
“When did you do all that?”
He grimaced. “Chad and my mom came out to the barn to tell me what happened.”
Her temper arced back to life. “They ran all the way to your workplace to vent about me?”
“They went out to do the evening chores in the new dairy barn my mom had built when she started running the place on her own, and Chad texted me that he’d screwed up. I started this way to make sure you and Ben were all right, and they headed my way. We met at the barn. They realized they should fill me in in person because I wasn’t likely to be any happier than you.”
She smiled, though she was still feeling a little shaky. This was the kind of response she’d expected. Maybe Owen could be a good father. “Why couldn’t Chad have told me he felt bad about it? He just acted defensive. All I wanted was awareness that he’d made a mistake, and some hope that it wouldn’t happen again.”
“He’s eighteen, and he was embarrassed. I was a lot less responsible at his age.”
What could the past four years have been like if Owen had always been this caring, this comforting? “Owen, how can I even consider letting Ben come down here by himself? I mean, without me?”
“You have to. Our relationship ended a long time ago. I love my son, and Ben is learning to love me. No matter how you and I end up, Ben belongs to both of us.”
“You say that as if there were some chance we could be together.” The words stunned her. She hadn’t meant to say them. She hadn’t even thought them before.
Owen looked equally taken aback. And angry. “Don’t embarrass yourself, Lilah, pretending that’s a solution.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that we would ever be more than we are to each other now. I just—the words popped into my head when I was thinking what might have been if we’d both been different.”
He tilted his head as if he were thinking back over their painful past. “Maybe you figure I deserve to be manipulated. Possibly, I do. But first you bring in children’s protection, and now you pretend you regret cutting me out of your life?”
“I didn’t mean we should try being together again.” Had she? Was she so pathetic that a moment of shared understanding with this man made her wonder what she’d given up when she’d turned her back on Owen?
“I know how much you love Ben, but don’t try to make me believe you could care about me again just so you don’t have to allow him time alone with me. You’d hate yourself and me if you did that. It would be like selling yourself.”
“Selling myself. You’re going too far.” She couldn’t believe he’d just accused her of being the worst kind of woman.
“Maybe I haven’t been blunt enough. I’m tired of you trying to play me. Four years ago, you decided to cut me out of my son’s life. You didn’t even tell me you were pregnant. Then, the first night you were here, you brought in lawyers and the sheriff and child protection. None of that worked, so your next step is to pretend you want me back.”
“How could I trust you when the last time I saw you, you could barely stand? I’m not excusing myself, but I was only looking out for my baby.”
“That would be our baby. Ben is mine as much as he is yours. I know you’re a survivor. I get that you’ll try anything to win, but you aren’t winning sole custody of my child.”
“I’m sorry I said anything. It was just words, and they meant nothing.” She lifted her chin. No need to guard it when he’d already landed a couple of figurative punches. “I was surprised by your kindness and understanding when the rest of your family acted as if nothing was wrong. You seemed to have forgiven me.”
“No.”
He never lied. She was starting to dislike that honesty now.
She still believed she’d made the right choice for Ben. Owen was clean and sober now. But what were the odds of him staying that way?
“I can’t forgive you for stealing my son,” he said. “How could I? Ever?”
In some crazy way, she felt abandoned. She understood why he wouldn’t trust her. She wasn’t a woman who trusted easily herself.
She hadn’t considered four years ago that Owen might realize he needed to get sober if he was going to be a father. She hadn’t given him the chance to do it for Ben.
She’d thrown good love away. For herself and for her son. She stood. “Thanks for coming up. I’m fine.”
Rising, he nodded and went to the door. “I’ll come back for Ben after dinner.”
Owen and Ben had been eating with them every night.
“I’ll bring him home,” she said, but then immediately regretted her words. She hadn’t meant to call his cabin Ben’s home. “I’d like to put him to bed tonight.”
* * *
OWEN LEFT BEN tucked into his bunk bed and Lilah sleeping in the chair at their son’s side, her hair soft and silky on her cheeks, her smile more relaxed than he could remember since she’d exiled him from her life.
Downstairs, he walked into the kitchen, prowling. He rubbed his chin, his fingers stinging as they passed over rough stubble.
His eyes went to the cabinet. The one with the wine. That bottle had to be five years old if it was a day. He should have thrown it away when he’d tossed the Bantry gift of wine.
This bottle was his stash, his backup in case the time came when he couldn’t stand sobriety, but it was also his proof that he could have a bottle in the house and not down a drop.
He ended up in front of the cabinet, with his hand on the small, round pull. His fingers closed. And trembled.
His throat constricted. He wanted it. He needed a drink. If it were vodka, it would have been gone years ago. He didn’t like wine as much.
He could like wine tonight. He felt bad about leaving Ben with Chad, and worse about the berating he’d given his brother, but the thing he regretted most was the way he’d insulted Lilah.
One drink. A sip. Maybe he could just breathe in the fragrance of five-year-old, gone-to-vinegar, cheap cooking wine.
No.
Owen slammed his fist against the cabinet and hurried to the front door to put on boots and a jacket and walk out into the cold night. The snow was still coming down, wet now, with thunder and lightning, and he had to slog his way to his truck.
Chaos reigned everywhere in his life, even in this strange weather.
He’d asked his family to meet him at the inn. He’d never told them Lilah’s story, but they kept dismissing her concern for Ben. Maybe if they understood, they’d find some empathy for her.
At the inn he turned quickly into the courtyard parking lot, skidding over his mother’s delicate yellow stone, splashing enough soggy snow that some of it hit his windshield. He parked as close to the house as he could and then jumped out, hopping across the low wall to the porch.