by Wilde, Lori
“It’s not that.”
“What is it then?”
Tears sprang to her eyes as she remembered that night at Kelly’s. Matt had taken her out on a date to celebrate his acceptance into specialized law enforcement training in El Paso. The news had shattered her because he would be gone for months.
At the bar, an outburst between two drunken cowboys fighting over the female bartender, Jackie Spencer, had drawn Matt’s attention. Characteristically, Matt had intervened. One of the cowboys had pulled a gun. They tussled. And Matt ended up getting shot in the arm. The memory echoed in her brain—the fear, the agony, the apprehension, followed by sheer gratitude that he was alive.
Carried on a river of emotion, they’d made love when he was released from the hospital. What a bittersweet time that turned out to be.
“Remember the night we made love?”
Matt’s eyes narrowed, darkened. “Remember it? I think about it every single day. I thought I’d found my one and only. I thought we were on our road to happily-ever-after and then you pulled the rug out from under me.”
Savannah had thought that too, but life had other plans.
“I can’t get you out of my head. For the past two years, there’s been no one else. I had a few dates, but no one could compare to you. I haven’t…” He gulped visibly. “Been with anyone else since we broke up.”
He hadn’t made love to another woman since her? Savannah put a hand to her throat. She thought about mentioning that she’d seen him with Jackie Spencer when she drove to El Paso to tell him she was pregnant, but she wasn’t ready to reveal that quite yet. Had she really gotten it wrong? He’d led Jackie into his apartment…
“While you,” His voice deepened. “Well, you married Gary, didn’t you? How long was it before you hopped from my bed into his? A month?”
“It wasn’t like that between Gary and me, Matt.”
“What was it like, Savvy? How could you run so hot for me one minute, then turn so cold the next? You claimed it was my job, but you’d made peace with what I did for a living before then. Just because I got shot breaking up a bar fight—”
“You could have been killed.”
“Still, you made love to me after that fight, when I got out of the hospital. If you had such doubts, wouldn’t me getting shot have been the deal-breaker? Instead, you waited until after we had sex to break up with me. For the past two years, I haven’t been able to puzzle that out. What made you go from making love to me to dumping me, to marrying Gary? It was impulsive and erratic, and not like you in the least. You wouldn’t take my calls, wouldn’t answer my texts, wouldn’t give me a chance to make things right. I would have changed my career for you.”
“I couldn’t let you do that.” There was truth to that. She could not ask him to give up the job he loved for her. It wouldn’t have been fair to either one of them.
“Help me understand, Savannah because I really want to know so that I don’t blow it with you a second time. What did I do that was so wrong?” The anguish on his face tore a hole in her heart.
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Matt. You’re not to blame.” She shifted from foot to foot, her stomaching tightening.
“Then who is to blame? Tell me, Savannah. Tell me what happened.”
“Do you want to know what happened?”
“I do. Please, tell me what went wrong. The not knowing has driven me crazy for two long years.”
She looked him in the eyes. She felt as if she wanted to crawl right out of her own skin. Here it was. The secret she’d been keeping from him. The time was now. No more dodging. Truth will out.
“It wasn’t like that between Gary and me...” Moistening her lips, she managed to croak past the constriction in her throat. “Because we never had sex.”
“What do you mean?” Matt blinked as the information hit him. “You have a baby. How could you have a baby if you and Gary didn’t have sex?”
“That night you and I made love?” A surge of courage pushed through her, and she finally told him what she should have told him two years ago. “I got pregnant.”
12
The news rocked Matt to his core. He stood there with his mouth hanging open.
Savannah had gotten pregnant the night they made love? With his baby? Cody was their child?
“Cody,” he rasped, stunned. “Is my son?”
She wrapped her arms around her as if warding off blows. Nodding, she whispered, “He is your son.”
Gobsmacked, Matt’s knees gave way, and he dropped to the blanket, his butt hitting the ground. I have a son.
The first emotion to hit him was deep, intense joy.
I have a son.
The second wave of emotion was disbelief.
I have a son?
The third was shock.
I have a son.
By the time he’d started fully processing the information, reality seeped in. I have a fifteen-month-old son.
All this time, Savannah had known he had a son, and she’d kept the information from him.
The fourth lick of emotion was hurt. How could she not tell him? Followed quickly by anger. What the hell, Savvy? What the hell?
“Matt?” She wrung her hands. “Are you okay?”
He stared up at her, slowly shook his head, and drilled her with his gaze. “No,” he said. “I’m not okay. I’m not okay at all. Not by a long shot.”
Tears glistened in her eyes, and she’d knotted her fingers together. She was hurting, too.
Well, she should, the contrary side of him said. She was in the wrong. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he ground out the words through clenched teeth and popped to his feet. He crossed his arms and loomed over her.
Her bottom lip trembled, her shoulders slumped, and all the fight went out of him.
He wanted to pull her into his arms and comfort her. Savannah was not a cruel person. If she’d kept his son from him, he felt sure she’d had a good reason. Although right now, he couldn’t fathom why.
They stared at each other.
“Life is full of unexpected events. We make our choices, right or wrong, and we live with them,” she said.
He tightened his jaw, his body wired with adrenaline spilling through his bloodstream. “Yes, and Cody and I are living with your choices.”
“Let me explain.”
He clenched his jaw so hard it hurt, trying to hold onto his anger. “I’m listening.”
The weighted topic was too heavy for such a lighthearted, bucolic location. Picnic by the creek, desert mountain in the distance.
She pressed a hand to her mouth, her eyes haunted. Her hair curled down her long, slender neck. Matt quelled the sudden urge to lean over and feather a kiss on that cool, white spot. Would he ever stop desiring her?
If only he could let go! For two years, he’d tried to accept her rejection, and for a while, he thought he’d accomplished that goal. He’d dated other women, but nobody special. He’d thrown himself into his work and had risen rapidly through the hierarchy. He’d always known he wanted to stay in the field, had shunned any thoughts of a desk position, but now, looking at Savannah, his mind toyed with the idea.
What if he, Savannah, and Cody could become a real family?
The yearning was so intense, it almost knocked him down again.
When she said nothing, he took the bull by the horns. “You used my job, the fact that I got shot, to break up with me.”
She nodded, her eyes swimming with unshed tears. “Your job is dangerous.”
“But you could accept that.”
“I had to. It’s who you are,” she said. “I knew it was part of the package of loving Matt Forrester.”
Loving.
So she had loved him, even though she’d never said it back to him. Did she love him still? That battered old hope kicked around in him again. He loved her more than ever, but that didn’t lessen the pain of her betrayal.
Cody sat on the blanket, gnawing on a cookie, and beaming up at them w
ith his beautiful baby smile. He had no idea about the drama going on above him. It was all Matt could do not to scoop the child into his arms and just walk away with him. Let her see what the loss felt like. But of course, he could not hurt her like that.
He looked down at the boy, and his heart just broke. He’d missed Savannah’s pregnancy, Cody’s birth, all those little firsts. First smile. First tooth. First word. First steps.
Cheated. He’d been cheated.
“Why?” The word tore from his throat like a war cry. “Why?”
Savannah hitched in a breath, her hands clenched at her sides, her entire body shuddering at the force of her inhale. “After you got shot, the day after we made love, I discovered I carried the BRCA1 gene.”
“The what?” Confused, he scratched his head.
“The hereditary breast cancer gene that killed my mother. I’ve got it.”
Matt’s blood instantly ran cold. Fear rocked his spine. “What does that mean?”
“Inheriting the BRCA gene means I have close to a seventy-five percent chance of developing breast cancer and close to a fifty-percent chance of getting ovarian cancer.” Savannah sounded so calm. “I didn’t know it ran in our family because my mother was adopted. It was only after she got diagnosed that we found out.”
“I… I…” He had no idea what to say. To mumble that he was sorry seemed woefully inadequate. She’d been hiding this from him for two years. “I didn’t know that’s the kind of breast cancer your mother had.” He rubbed his brow. “I didn’t know you got tested.”
“I didn’t want to worry you.” She stuck her hands in her pockets and toed the blanket with her bare foot. “You were getting ready to take that training in El Paso.”
“You should have told me.”
“Would you have gone to El Paso if I had?”
He shook his head.
“Don’t you see? I couldn’t be the one who stopped you from going after your dreams.”
“Don’t you think that should have been my decision to make?”
“I was watching my mother die of breast cancer. I couldn’t, wouldn’t put you through that with me.”
“Again, that was my decision to make.” It felt as if she’d inserted a giant screwdriver into the center of his chest, twisting it as far as it would go.
“We weren’t married, Matt. I could not ask that of you.”
“We would have been married if you hadn’t shut me out.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t shut you out, Matt. I set you free.”
“Let me get this straight,” he said, unable to keep the anger from his voice. “You sent me away for my own good because you loved me too much to marry me?”
“Yes.”
“I’m guessing the same didn’t apply to Gary?”
“As I said, my relationship with Gary wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like, Savvy?” he repeated.
Regret flittered across her face. “I’m getting to that. My doctor urged me to have a bilateral mastectomy and a hysterectomy as soon as possible. The surgeries would greatly increase my chances for long-term survival, and I needed to be here for Ginger. She’d tested negative for the BRCA1 gene. I couldn’t put her through what we went through with Mom. I was all prepared to have the surgery—”
“This was right after you broke up with me?”
“Yes.”
He’d been in El Paso, drowning his sorrows in his training while she’d been here dealing with her health crisis. He’d been feeling sorry for himself while the woman he loved had been struggling. He was an ass.
But you didn’t know.
He should have known. He should have tried harder. Should have fought to find out why she’d really broken up with him instead of tucking his tail between his legs and hightailing it out of Rascal to nurse his hurt feelings. At the time, the detective training in El Paso had been a godsend, and then the police department had offered him a job afterward, so he’d just stayed.
“Why didn’t you call me? I would have been there in a shot.”
“One, you were in the middle of your training, and I didn’t want to interrupt that—”
“I want the real reason,” he growled.
She ducked her head, mumbled, “I was afraid you wouldn’t want me without my breasts, without my ovaries. You deserve a whole woman, Matt.”
“It was awfully high-handed of you to decide what was right for me. To decide what I deserved.”
“I didn’t feel worthy of you, okay? I had a dying mother and a scary prognosis for my own future. I was going to lose the parts of me that made me feminine. I was struggling with body issues, okay?”
“So you had the surgery?” His gaze dropped to her breasts, his heart in his throat.
She nodded. “But not then. When I went in for testing before the surgery, they discovered I was pregnant.”
Aw hell, the poor girl. “That’s when you should have called me, Savannah.” His voice came out gritty and dark. “Why didn’t you come to find me when you learned you were pregnant?”
She looked utterly wretched. “I did.”
“When?” He wrapped his hand around her upper arm, pulled her closer, and drilled her with his eyes.
“A month after you left. I got in the car and drove to El Paso. I looked up your address, parked on the street and waited for you to come home. And you did. With Jackie Spencer. I saw you two together. You put a hand to her back and guided her into your apartment.”
Matt groaned. Tasted bile. He had let Jackie live with him for a few weeks when she moved to El Paso until she could find a place of her own, but he had not slept with her. Although it wasn’t from lack of trying on Jackie’s part. He’d just been too in love with Savannah to give up hope. He supposed he’d never given up hope. He had no idea what she’d been dealing with.
“Jackie was staying with me, but we weren’t together. I did not sleep with her, Savannah.”
Her eyes widened, and her mouth formed a startled O. “Really?”
“Really.” God, his emotions were all over the place—regret, shame, sadness, hurt, yearning, but at the bottom of them, all was hope. Hope that they could repair the mess they’d made of their relationship.
He saw the same hope on her in the way she leaned closer and pulled her bottom lip up between her teeth.
“So, Gary,” he said, his breathing ragged. “What was that all about?”
“I met Gary at a cancer support group with Mom. He guessed I was pregnant when I kept running to the bathroom to throw up, and he didn’t believe my food poisoning excuse. He was so sweet and kind. Then he offered me a proposition. Marry him and give him a legacy. He was dying. He had no one except his half-brother, who was in prison for murder. He didn’t want sex from me. He just wanted someone to be there with him in the end. His only request was that I let people believe that Cody was his son.” This time she couldn’t stop the tears from rolling down her cheeks.
“You cared for Gary.”
“I wouldn’t have made it without him. Mom died not long after that. Ginger and I moved to the ranch. Gary paid for everything.”
His heart was breaking right in two for her. For what she’d had to go through. “You eventually had the bilateral mastectomy and your ovaries removed?”
Nodding, she placed a hand to her lower abdomen. “The last surgery was six months ago.”
“Oh, Savvy,” he said. “I am so sorry. I should have been there.”
“It was my fault. My stubborn pride. When I saw you with Jackie Spencer, I sort of lost my mind.”
“I was pigheaded, too. Hurt and feeling sorry for myself. I should have checked on you. Especially when I heard your mother died. I—”
Cody started crying.
“Too much sun for one day,” she murmured and looked relieved for the interruption. “It’s time for his nap.”
He wanted to reach out to her, draw her to his chest, kiss her like he did when they were younger, but there was too much betwe
en them to bridge that gap so easily. He hadn’t been there for her, even though he hadn’t known how badly she needed him. She hadn’t trusted him enough to come to him, no matter what.
And that was the bottom line, wasn’t it? The shakiness of trust between them. They had desire, attraction, and yearning. Oh, so much damn yearning, but without trust, they did not have a foundation to build upon.
If they were to find their way back to each it other, it was going to take time. He couldn’t rush it.
“May I carry him?” he asked, reaching for Cody.
Silently, she nodded and handed him his son.
Matt stared at the boy. Cody studied him with a serious expression on his face as if trying to puzzle out who he was. “I’m your Dad,” Matt said.
“Da?” Cody asked.
“Da,” Matt confirmed with a nod of his head.
“Dada?” Cody reached out to pat his cheek. “Dada.”
Matt glanced over at Savannah. She dabbed away tears with a napkin she’d packed for the sandwiches. He wanted to say something that could make it all better, but there were no magic words to fix this.
They trailed back to the house, forlornly dragging their supplies with them. Even Cody sensed the mood. He whimpered and rubbed his eyes with tired little fists. The perky atmosphere that had started the afternoon dissipated, scattered to the wind like dandelion seeds.
13
As they neared the house, Matt spotted Clem loping between the barn and the ranch hands’ cabin. A half-formed plan hatched in the back of his mind. A plan to use Clem as a foil to trap Larkins and Thompson. His instincts told him those two career criminals were behind the thefts, and Clem was merely a pawn.
A very useful pawn.
“Savvy,” he said. “You take Cody and go on into the house. Clem and I are going to have a discussion.”
She started to protest, he could see it in the stubborn tilt of her chin, but she must have thought better of it because she finally nodded. Setting down the empty picnic basket, she took her son from his arms.