The Heart of Hill Country

by Sherryl Woods

  Hattie? Clint thought incredulously. Hattie, who’d been having a tough time scraping together food money when he’d met her?

  Suddenly, though, dozens of tiny evasions began to make sense. Her familiarity with ranching, despite her claim that she’d never set foot on one, took on new significance. She’d pitched in with chores as if she’d done them before, but she’d sworn she was just a quick study. He’d been too glad of the willing help to cross-examine her. Now it seemed as if his tendency to live and let live had been a big mistake. He should have started asking questions the day she appeared in that bar.

  If she’d lied about her name and her background, what else had she lied about? Who the hell was Hattie Jones, after all? Had she even been pregnant when she’d left or had that been just another in the series of lies? Maybe she’d just been testing the depth of his affections and he’d failed the test, so she’d moved on to greener pastures.

  Then again, she was awful close to home. If she’d been avoiding it for all these years as Betsy claimed, what would bring her back if not the impending birth of a baby? An heir to all this Adams wealth that Betsy had been describing? There was only one way he could think of to get answers.

  “Can you tell me exactly how to get to her parents’ place?”

  “Better yet, I’ll show you,” Betsy offered. “I’ve got a whole week off and I was planning on heading over to Los Pinos for Christmas as soon as my shift ends at one. My car’s been conking out on me a lot lately, though. If I can hitch a ride with you, I’ll take you straight to their front door.”

  She winked at him. “And just in case things don’t work out, I’ll point the way to my folks’ place. It’s not as fancy as theirs, but you’ll be welcome.”

  Clint didn’t want to give her any false expectations. Betsy was a nice woman, but she was no Hattie. Who knew, though? Once he’d decided whether or not to strangle the woman who’d walked out on him, a straight shooter like Betsy might start looking pretty good.

  “Let’s see how this turns out,” he said. “If this Angie Adams is the right woman, I’ll owe you.”

  “Sugar, it’s not your wallet I’m interested in.” Her expression turned resigned. “But a few bucks is all you’re likely to part with, isn’t it? You really do have it bad, don’t you?”

  He wasn’t about to admit just how bad. He settled for offering a warning. “Betsy, you don’t want anything to do with a man like me. Just ask your old friend Angie. I’m sure she’d be eager enough to tell you all my flaws.”

  “Sugar, working in a place like this, I learned a long time back to be a good judge of character. You look just fine to me. Besides, Angie never did know when she had it good. Wait till you see that spread she grew up on. If she could turn her back on that, she doesn’t have the sense the good Lord gave a duck. You’d be better off with a woman who appreciates you.”

  There was a time, Clint thought, when no one had appreciated him better than Hattie had. It was his fault that that had changed. In one lightning-quick moment of frozen panic, he’d destroyed all they’d had together. He was willing to accept responsibility for that much, anyway.

  Or was he entirely to blame? Maybe Hattie was just the kind of woman who had to keep on moving on, who’d instigate a fight so she could go. Maybe she was just a natural-born liar. Could be he wasn’t the first man she’d run out on or the first one she’d lied to.

  After months of feeling angry and lonely by turns, he was about to find the woman who’d tied him in knots. He’d settle things with her once and for all. For the first time they would put all their cards on the table and decide where they stood. He’d find out if she was even capable of telling the truth.

  He hoped so. He really did, because no conniving, lying woman would get the chance to raise a child of his. If he didn’t like what he discovered, their baby would be going back to Montana with him. She could bet the whole fancy Adams ranch on that.

  3

  Coming home had been a hundred times worse than Angela had anticipated and a thousand times better.

  She had seen first shock, then joy register on her parents’ faces as they’d realized who was ringing their bell and waking them out of a dead sleep. If she’d kept her old key, she could have crept in unnoticed and greeted them over breakfast in the morning, when she had her own emotions under better control. As it was, she’d dragged them out of bed, stunned them first with her return, then dismayed them with a refusal to answer a single question about the baby she was so obviously carrying. The tearful reunion had taken on a confrontational tone very quickly.

  “Dammit, I want to know who’s responsible for the condition you’re in,” her father had bellowed loudly enough to raise the rafters.

  “I am,” she had replied quietly.

  He glared at her. “Unless things have changed a helluva lot more than I realized, you didn’t get pregnant on your own. Where’s the father of this baby? Are you married?”

  Angela regarded him in stoic silence.

  “Luke, that’s enough,” her mother had said eventually, when it was clear they were at a standoff.

  As always, her touch on his cheek was more effective at quieting him than her words. Angela had always envied them that, the ability to communicate with a touch, a glance.

  “Can’t you see she’s worn-out and shivering?” her mother had chided. “It must be below freezing outside. Come into the kitchen right this second and let me make you some hot chocolate.”

  “I’d rather have tea,” Angela said, casting a wary look at her father’s grim expression as he followed them into the kitchen. “Herbal, if you have it.”

  “Of course I have it,” her mother said as she filled the teakettle with water and put it on the stove. “Consuela insists we keep wild blackberry tea in the house just for you. It was always your favorite.”

  “How is she?” Angela asked, smiling, relieved by the chance to change the topic. “I thought for sure she’d be retired by now. She must be what? Eighty-something?”

  “Eighty-two and as spry as ever. She wears me out and she flatly refuses to retire,” her mother said. “She says she won’t have someone else in her kitchen. She’ll be over the moon in the morning when she finds out you’re home. She’s been baking your favorite cookies for the past week. She swears something told her you’d be back this year. Nothing we said could dissuade her.”

  Guilt rippled through Angela. Consuela had been far more than a housekeeper. She had been the grandmother Angela had never had. She’d taken a terrible chance not staying in touch with her. At Consuela’s age anything could have happened and Angela would never have known.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch, especially this past year. I’m sorry I didn’t let you know I was coming.”

  “Nonsense. It doesn’t matter. You’re here now.” Her mother glanced at her father. “Isn’t that right, Lucas?”

  His stony expression softened just a fraction. “Of course we’re glad you’re home, angel. We’ve missed you.”

  Tears welled up in her eyes at the hurt she heard in his voice. “I’m sorry,” she said, her own voice choked. “I’m sorry for everything.”

  “Oh, baby, you don’t have anything in the world to apologize for. You may not believe it, but we both understood exactly why you felt you had to go. Didn’t we, Luke?”

  “That’s true enough. We didn’t like it, but nobody knows better than we do what it takes to be an Adams in these parts,” he said, his expression wry. “I fought it in my way. Your uncles fought it in theirs. You just ran a little farther than the rest of us.”

  “The bottom line is we love you,” her mother said. “And we are both very glad you’re home again where you belong.” She hesitated. “You are here to stay, aren’t you?”

  Angela wished she could claim that she was just passing through, that she had a home and a life of her own to get back to on
ce the holidays were over, but she couldn’t. “If you’ll have me,” she said, no longer able to control the tears that had been threatening ever since she’d crossed the threshold.

  Her father reached over and brushed the dampness from her cheeks. “There was never any doubt about that. Never.”

  Angela could feel their love warming her, chasing away all the fears and loneliness of the past few months. Once she had felt smothered by that love, choked by the overly protective nature of her whole extended family, from Grandpa Harlan and her strong-willed uncles right on down to the two people in this room. Not anymore. She realized now just how desperately she had been longing for this kind of unconditional acceptance. For the past couple of months her nesting instinct had been kicking in with a vengeance.

  After her father’s initial outburst, her parents had held their questions about the baby she was expecting. They had filled her with hot tea and thick ham sandwiches and a half-dozen Christmas cookies before sending her off to bed in the room that hadn’t changed a bit since she’d left it behind. Consuela had kept it swept and dusted, but the old concert posters were still on the walls, and her menagerie of stuffed animals still tumbled across the bed.

  She’d heard her parents’ whispers as they’d gone off to their own room and known that the reprieve from questions wouldn’t last forever. It wasn’t in her father’s nature to let one of his own be hurt without taking action to see that it never happened again. Even as he’d fallen silent after her mother’s soft reproach, Angela had noticed the stubborn, determined jut of his chin. Her mother’s intervention had only managed to delay the inevitable until this morning.

  As Angela stood at the foot of the steps and tried to work up the courage to enter the dining room for breakfast, she braced herself for the new barrage of questions that he’d been forced to hold back the night before. She vowed to tell them as little as she could get away with. She ought to be very good at evasions by now. She’d been practicing long enough. She’d perfected the technique in Rocky Ridge, Montana.

  She drew in a deep breath and stepped into the dining room. Her mother and father looked up when they heard her, and smiles spread across their faces.

  Before she could even summon up a returning smile, she was enveloped in the arms of a plump Mexican woman whose once-black hair had gone almost completely white. There were new lines carved into her olive complexion, but her dark brown eyes sparkled as merrily as ever.

  “Ah, niña, you are home,” Consuela murmured, stroking Angela’s hair back from her face as she had when she was a child. A rapid stream of Spanish that was part welcome, part chastisement followed until Angela laughed and pressed a finger against the housekeeper’s lips.

  “Despacio, por favor,” she pleaded. “Slowly, Consuela. I’ve forgotten every bit of Spanish you taught me.”

  “Then you must practice,” Consuela said briskly. “It will be good for the baby, too. He will grow up bilingual.”

  “He?” Angela said, grinning at the assumption.

  “Of course. I know these things.” Consuela scowled at Luke, who hadn’t bothered to hide his skepticism. “You laugh? Did I not predict the sex of every child ever born in this family, starting with you and your brothers?”

  “That was easy. No girl had been born in the Adams clan for a hundred years,” Luke teased.

  “And what of Cody’s daughter? Or your step-sister?” Consuela countered indignantly. “They were not so easy to predict, yes?”

  “OK, OK, I surrender,” he said. “You know these things.”

  “Indeed,” Consuela said. “Now, niña, what can I fix for you? Waffles, eggs, a Spanish omelet, perhaps?”

  “The omelet,” Angela said eagerly, her hands on her swollen belly. She grinned. “And the waffle. For the baby.”

  “Of course,” Consuela said, bustling off to the kitchen to work her magic.

  Angela sat down opposite her mother, aware of the worried glances she kept casting at her husband. Apparently she was anticipating the flood of questions, just as Angela was. Only Consuela seemed willing to accept her condition as a simple fact of life and not cause for an inquisition.

  “Where have you been for the past year and a half?” her father asked oh, so casually, in what for him was a dramatic show of diplomacy. “Aside from an occasional call to say you were OK, we haven’t heard so much as a word from you since you graduated from college. You never gave us so much as a post office box, so we could contact you.”

  “I was traveling most of that time,” she said. It was the truth as far as it went.

  “Obviously you stayed in one place a little too long,” her father retorted.

  “Luke!” her mother said sharply.

  He scowled. “Dammit, we have a right to know the truth.”

  “Only if Angela wants to tell us,” her mother countered. “She’s a grown woman.”

  The unfamiliar dissension between the two of them set her nerves on edge. Worse, she hated being the cause of it. “I can’t tell you,” she said with regret.

  “What do you mean you can’t?” Luke demanded, bellowing again. “Don’t you even know who the father of the baby is?”

  Angela stared at him in shock. “Of course, I know.”

  “Then is it asking too much to expect you to tell us?”

  “It is if you’re going to go ballistic and start making trouble,” she shot back. “I’m here. The father’s not. That should pretty much settle things.”

  “Nothing’s settled, as far as I can tell. I’d say that trouble you’re afraid I’ll stir up is already here. I’m just trying to figure out how to clean up after it.”

  Angela trembled at the sound of barely contained rage in his voice. It was exactly what she’d anticipated, what she’d feared she would be stirring up by coming home.

  “Maybe I should go,” she said softly.

  “Absolutely not,” her mother snapped, adding in a rare display of temper, “Luke, that’s enough. Let’s everybody calm down.”

  Her father looked as if he were ready to explode. “Fine. You get the truth out of her, then,” he said, throwing his napkin onto the table and stalking out.

  “Don’t mind him,” her mother apologized. “He’s just worried about you. We both are.”

  “There’s no need to worry. I’m fine.”

  “Sweetie, if you were fine, you wouldn’t have been on our doorstep, half-frozen in the middle of the night. I know you. You came home because you felt you didn’t have anyplace else to go. You have too much pride to have come home otherwise.”

  The all-too-accurate assessment brought the sting of tears to her eyes. “Maybe I just missed you.”

  “Maybe you did, but that alone wouldn’t have been enough to get you back here, not after you made such an issue of staying away,” her mother said dryly. “Now you can tell me what’s going on, or you can tell your father, or you can keep it all bottled up inside.”

  Angela grinned ruefully. “Those are my only choices?”

  “Unless you’d rather tell your grandfather,” her mother retorted. “No doubt he’ll be on his way over as soon as he hears you’re back. He’s expected tomorrow, anyway. I doubt I’ll be able to keep him away. He’s been just itching to put a private eye on your trail for the past year and a half. When he sees you’re pregnant, there won’t be a place on earth the father of that baby can hide.”

  Angela thought of Clint’s efforts to track her down. He was a pure amateur compared to her grandfather, but he’d done a pretty good job of it just the same. “He hasn’t exactly been hiding,” she admitted. “He’s been trying to find me for the last seven months.”

  Her mother’s gaze narrowed. “But you’ve been determined to elude him? Why? Did he abuse you?” she demanded, her voice barely above a horrified whisper. “If that man harmed you in any way—”

  “No,” she said hur
riedly. “He never laid a hand on me.”

  Obviously relieved, her mother’s expression softened. Her gaze fell on Angela’s stomach. “Oh, really?”

  “I meant he never hurt me, not physically.”

  “Why did you run then?”

  “He didn’t want the baby,” she said simply.

  “Are you sure about that?”

  She recalled in vivid detail the humiliation of sitting across that candlelit table from Clint, praying for a whoop of joy, even a smile, only to see that stunned, blank expression on his face. “He all but said it when I told him I was pregnant,” she said.

  “He all but said it,” her mother repeated with a sad shake of her head. “Darling, if he was so anxious to be rid of you and the baby, why has he been chasing after you all this time?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you think you should try to find out? Don’t you owe it to your child?”

  “It’s too late.”

  Her mother looked skeptical. “Tell me one thing, then. Did you love him?”

  “I thought I did,” Angela admitted softly, then forced her gaze to meet her mother’s. “I was wrong. I just want to put it all behind me.”

  For a moment it looked as if her mother was going to argue, but then she nodded. “Well, you’ve certainly always known your own mind. If that’s what you want, I’ll do my best to keep Luke and your grandfather from stirring things up.”

  “It’s what I want,” Angela said firmly and without the slightest hesitation. Even as she spoke, though, a little voice deep inside shouted, “Liar.” She’d heard that same accusation so often the past couple of years that she was able to ignore it one more time.

  * * *

  Four in the morning or not, if he’d had his way, Clint would have started pounding on Angela Adams’s front door the minute he and Betsy got to Los Pinos, but she had persuaded him to wait until a more reasonable hour. She’d also promised to make a call to the ranch to see if the lady in question was, in fact, back home again. Small town or not, her parents hadn’t heard any gossip about it yet, though there’d apparently been plenty of speculation over the years about Angela’s disappearance.