скачать книгу бесплатно
“Matt, really. I’m fine. I was just sleeping, and I want to go back to bed.”
He pushed an impatient hand through his hair, then shoved the hand into the pocket of his slacks. Cathie Baldwin in a bed?
No, he would not go there.
“Cathie, I’ve been thinking this door really is too flimsy. I should replace it with something stronger.” He’d done all the locks when she’d moved in, but that didn’t seem like enough now. “So breaking down the door wouldn’t bother me at all.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Try me,” he shot back, unleashing every bit of worry he’d had over her safety in those two little words.
The door cracked open. Through the narrow opening, he peered into the darkness and saw nothing more than the outline of her face.
“It’s pitch-black in there,” he complained.
“I told you I was sleeping. And now you’ve seen me. You can go.”
“Me? Or your mother, Cath? Take your pick, but one of us is going to be inside that apartment, if not tonight, tomorrow.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“We’ve been through this already with the door. You know I would.”
She fumbled with the chain lock and finally stepped back to let him inside.
He looked her over from head to toe. She angled her face away from him, hiding behind a curtain of light brown hair sprinkled with blond sunshine. It was the beginning of December, but unseasonably warm. She had on a big sweatshirt in Carolina blue, the color of one of the local college sports teams, and a ragged pair of faded blue jean shorts. He couldn’t quite make himself stop staring at the lean expanse of skin, from her thighs all the way down to bare feet and dainty, pink-tinted toenails.
Damn. Matt tugged at his tie, then reached for the tiny lamp on the table in the corner and flicked it on.
Cathie winced at the flood of light and quickly turned away. “I suppose if you’re staying, I could at least offer you some coffee.”
She headed for the kitchen. She hadn’t made it far when he caught her by the arm and spun her around. Flicking on the overhead light, he saw that her eyes were puffy and red, her face pale, a trail of tears on her cheeks.
Irritation gave way to fury at anyone who dared hurt her. He’d always been protective of her. It had been there right from the beginning, when he was fifteen and she was eight, with pigtails, gaps in her teeth and skinned knees, an optimist to the core, forced to endure both the pampering and the supreme torture of being the youngest and the only daughter in a family of four boys.
So what the hell were her brothers doing, scattering themselves from one end of the earth to the other, when she needed someone? It was all too easy, staring at her poor, sad face, to imagine the myriad of ways in which a young woman alone in a strange town could be hurt.
“Why don’t you tell me what’s upset you,” he said in a tightly controlled voice.
She stood there trying in vain to hide her feelings. Give it up, Cath, he thought. She’d always been so easy to read.
“Come on. Tell me,” he said softly, for a minute finding and slipping into that old, easy manner between them from the days when she’d been his champion, the one who could always be counted on to take his side in anything and seemed absolutely determined to draw him into the world of her big, boisterous, affectionate, nosy family. Where he would never belong. He’d never belong anywhere. It had always been so clear to him. Why she didn’t see it, he’d never understand.
“Matt, please,” she pleaded, her eyes big and wide and blue, swimming in moisture, her lashes spiked together.
Even in the woman, there were the best qualities of the little girl. She could totally disarm him with nothing but a look in her eyes.
“Please what?” he said, caught, unable to walk away.
“Please leave it alone.”
“Can’t do it.” Matt suffered from an unfortunate, long-standing urge to touch her, even in the smallest, most inconsequential of ways. Though he certainly knew better, he reached for her. Her lashes fluttered down as the pad of his thumb brushed across one of her wet eyelids, and then the other.
It was so nice to touch her.
Matt dried her tears as best he could with the back of his hand. Pale and utterly still, Cathie stood there, not even breathing, her lips slightly parted, her cheeks pale and damp.
She looked like she had that long-ago night. Heartbroken and very, very sweet. Another memory he’d tried hard to forget rushed to the surface. The feel of her lips pressed to his, of sweet, impossibly shy kisses, innocence so pure it was hard to imagine in the world he knew. She’d gotten him into the back of a pickup in a secluded valley on her parents’ farm, taking him completely by surprise, absolutely convinced that she was in love with him and that they belonged together.
He’d had a hard time convincing her they didn’t and had gotten the hell away from her as fast as he could. Okay, almost as fast as he could. He was a man, after all, and she’d practically laid herself bare on a platter in front of him. She’d been embarrassed and hurt. He’d been gruff and insulting, because she’d scared him half to death because of the way she’d tasted, the way she’d felt beneath him and the way he’d wanted her.
Should have gone to jail fifteen years ago, he thought soberly.
“What’s gotten you so upset that you’re sitting in the dark crying your eyes out?” he asked.
“There…uh,” Cathie stumbled over the words. “There’s nothing you can do, Matt. Nothing anyone can do.”
He held his breath as he asked, “Are you sick?”
“No.”
He swore softly. For a minute, crazy things had gone through his head. That she was dying. That he might never see her smiling face again. Never hear her laugh.
Of course, she wasn’t dying. She was just making him crazy, as usual.
“Not sick? Okay. What else? Flunking out of school?”
“No.”
That was highly unlikely, given the fact that she’d worked so hard to get here. Her father had fallen ill with a heart condition during her senior year of high school. His heart transplant had nearly wiped out the family financially. All of her brothers had been either in college or committed to the military, and Matt knew they’d helped out monetarily, as much as they could. But Cathie had been the only one left at home. The years she’d normally have spent in college, she’d spent helping her mother care for her father, helping run the family bed-and-breakfast, taking courses at the local community college when she could.
He knew it was still a struggle financially and held out a brief hope that this could be about money. “Need me to loan you fifty bucks until payday?”
“No,” she insisted. “It’s nothing like that.”
“Okay. You want to play Twenty Questions? I’ll play.”
“Matt, please, just go,” she said, with that quality in her voice that always had him wanting to give her anything in this world. Except this.
“Sorry, but you’re a mess, Cath. You need somebody, and in case you haven’t noticed, I’m the only one here.”
“This isn’t your problem,” she argued.
“Your mother made it my problem, and you know the way she works. If she doesn’t hear from me soon, she’ll call and ask how you are, and I’m not going to lie to her. I’ll tell her you’re a wreck, that you wouldn’t tell me anything, and the next thing you know, she’ll be pounding on your door. Is that what you want?”
“No,” she insisted. “I just need some time to figure everything out. Could you just go away and give me some time?”
It was an entirely reasonable request, and hard as it was to believe, she was an adult. But he’d didn’t think he’d ever seen Cathie looking so fragile or so hurt. He doubted he could have walked away from her now if his life depended on it.
“Sorry. Can’t do it. Tell me what’s wrong.”
She eased to the right, her hip resting against the kitchen counter, which put her face fully into the light for the first time. It looked like she’d been crying for hours. A white-hot anger simmered in his gut, and he knew he’d been asking the wrong question. Not what was wrong with her, but who? Who had done this to her?
“This is about a guy, isn’t it?” Looking utterly miserable, Cathie let her gaze meet his for a second. She blinked back fresh tears and looked away. “Want me to go beat him up?”
“It wouldn’t help.”
“I could call all of your brothers and the five of us could have at him.”
“My brothers would kill him.”
“That depends,” he said quietly. “What did this guy do to you?”
Cathie didn’t say anything. He was afraid she was crying again. Matt was considering his options when something on the kitchen counter caught his eye.
It was a small, rectangular box. Not able to believe what he was seeing, he swept past her and picked it up.
It was one of those home pregnancy tests.
In Cathie’s kitchen?
He turned to look at her. Really look. In his eyes, she’d hardly changed since that night when she was sixteen. So it always surprised him when he saw evidence that she had indeed grown up. He ran the numbers in his head. Her eight, to his fifteen. Her sixteen, to his wise-in-the-ways-of-the-world twenty-three. He was thirty now, which meant she was twenty-three.
Matt had a bad habit of still thinking of her as sixteen. This was Cathie Baldwin, after all. The good girl whose life could not have been more different from his. Matt’s hard-living, hard-drinking, never-met-a-fight-he-didn’t-like father had died when Matt was barely old enough to remember him. His mother had taken it badly, which to her meant drowning her sorrows in a bottle, too.
Matt ran wild, eventually living on the streets, headed for disaster, when he bungled the theft of Cathie’s mother’s car. For reasons he would never understand, rather than let him go to jail, the Baldwins had offered to take him into their home, something that had surely saved his worthless hide. Matt would not repay a debt like that by lusting after the Baldwins’ only daughter.
Besides, he’d always known what life had in store for her. A nice guy. A really nice one. Respectable. Wholesome. Not a single skeleton in his closet. Not a single arrest. Someone from a good family. Not necessarily well-to-do, but kind, God-loving people. She’d have a nice little house in the mountains her family called home, teach Sunday school and raise a half-dozen kids, and she’d be happy and well-protected her whole life.
But it hadn’t worked out that way. Another man had slept with her. Carelessly? Casually? Thoughtlessly? And that man had either failed to take the time to protect her or hadn’t cared enough to do so.
Matt held the proof in his hand.
He crushed the box of the home pregnancy test in his hand, taking out a mere shred of his anger on it, then threw it across the room.
Cathie winced as the box skittered across the floor, then opened a drawer and pulled out a white, plastic stick-like thing. “I’ll save you the trouble of asking. The stick turned blue.”
Blue? he thought numbly. “Blue’s bad?”
She nodded hopelessly. “If you’re not finished with college, not married, don’t have a lot of money and your father happens to be a minister, then…yes, blue’s bad.”
Chapter Two
Cathie stood there waiting for him to say something, still hardly able to believe he was here.
One minute, she’d been staring guiltily at the Box and the next, the doorbell had rung. She’d hastily shoved the Box in a drawer, and there was Matt. As if she’d conjured him up out of thin air. As if she’d asked, and the man upstairs had chosen to deliver Matt.
Cathie fought the urge to go stare up into the sky and say, Excuse me? What is he doing here?
Obviously, someone had gotten their wires crossed.
Matt didn’t even want to be in the same room with her.
All because she’d fallen for him ages ago and then thrown herself at him, when he didn’t want her at all. Which was just about the stupidest thing a woman could do.
Okay, not as stupid as getting pregnant when she hadn’t finished college and wasn’t married. But that night with Matt ranked right up there on her list of all-time stupid moves. She hadn’t wanted to come here to college because he lived in the same town. But the university had offered her the best financial aid package, and she’d needed all the help she could get.
Cathie hadn’t chased after him in years, but darned if she didn’t still compare every man she’d ever met to him. Even Tim. If she was honest, she’d admit that Tim reminded her the least little bit of Matt.
“So,” Matt said finally. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” Cathie, the girl who always had a plan, said. “I just found out, and I’m still trying to make myself believe that it’s real. That it’s happening to me.”
“Do you want to marry this guy?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” Though it would make her humiliation complete, she admitted, “I’m not sure it matters. I’m afraid he won’t want to marry me.”
Beside her, Matt stiffened, a mixture of disbelief, surprise and then anger washing across his face. For a minute, she thought he was going to ask the same question she’d been asking herself in the hours since the stick turned blue. Why in the world was she sleeping with a man who wouldn’t marry her if she was pregnant with his child?
“He’s…uh.” She closed her eyes and forced herself to start again. “He’s been different the last few weeks. A little…distant, maybe? Distracted. Impatient.”
Through clenched teeth, Matt said, “Why?”
“I don’t know.” Around the same time she noted subtle changes in her body that warned her something was wrong, she’d discovered an alarming number of doubts about Tim.
Matt, the tough guy of old wrapped in a thousand-dollar suit and still looking only faintly civilized, said, “Do you want me to talk to this guy for you?”
“You’re starting to sound like one of my brothers again.”
He swore softly. “I’m not one of your brothers.”
“I know.” She risked another glance in his direction. When she was a little girl, she’d look at him and think he was a wild thing she was going to tame. Like a pup who’d been kicked too many times, always waiting on someone to turn on him.
Cathie had followed him everywhere when he’d first come to live with her parents. She’d watched him with a kind of fascination as he warily watched her in return. She’d smile and he’d frown. She’d laugh and he’d put that same scowl on his face she’d seen tonight, the one that said she was getting to him.
Closing her eyes, she let herself remember, just a bit, her and Matt together. God, she thought breathlessly, how she’d missed that boy. Of course, God already knew. She’d certainly told him often enough, back in the days when she was trying to talk him into bringing Matt back to her. She hadn’t done that in years and fought the urge to pull out her Box and say very emphatically that he was not what she had in mind when she asked for help.
Still, she missed him so much, the lost boy who’d become her best friend. She’d seen more of him tonight than she had in years.
For just a moment, she let herself imagine a wild-eyed black knight coming to her rescue, making everything right somehow.
“What?” Matt growled, staring at her through midnight-colored eyes.
She shook her head and tried to smile, feeling hopelessly sentimental about a relationship she feared meant next to nothing to him. She, on the other hand, needed nothing more than the slightest touch of his fingertips to her cheek to know that she was every bit as attracted to the man as she’d once been to the boy. The awful part was that neither the boy nor the man had wanted her.
And now she feared she was in the same shape—no, worse—with another man she feared wouldn’t want her or her baby. Obviously, there was a pattern here she should probably figure out, so she didn’t keep repeating this same mistake.
“Cathie—”
