скачать книгу бесплатно
So she told him, anyway. Go figure. “Do you remember me?”
He gave her a puzzled look. “From…?”
“High school. Middle school. Grade school. Church, when my father still let me go. When your mother still made you go.” She shrugged. “From growing up two years apart in the same small town for sixteen years.”
Ethan didn’t need to think about his answer. For all he remembered, she could have sprung into existence full-grown yesterday, with absolutely zero contact between them before then. He didn’t offer the response immediately, though. It seemed cruel to be so quickly certain that she hadn’t existed in his world—in their mutually shared world—for all those years.
But finally he couldn’t delay any longer, and so he shook his head. “No, I don’t. I’m sorry.”
“I’m the most forgettable person in Heartbreak. People who have known me all my life don’t know my name. My own father called me ‘girl’ rather than make the effort to remember ‘Grace.”’ Her smile was thin and bitter. “He called his dog ‘girl,’ too. He took her with him when he left.”
For a moment she seemed lost in that thought. Missing the father who’d apparently never loved her? Maybe regretting all the years she’d spent with a man who’d walked out when she needed him?
At least it gave them something in common—they’d both had lousy fathers. And they both wondered whether he could do better. And she had good reason to think her child would be better off with no father at all.
“That day last summer was the first time in my life that I was free of his control.”
It was an outrageous statement, but she said it so flatly that he knew it was true. Ethan couldn’t imagine living a life so restrictive. From the time he was fifteen, he’d taken such freedom that his life had been virtually without rules. Sometimes he’d wished his mother would put her foot down and hold him to the same rules she’d held Guthrie to. He’d figured that she thought he wasn’t capable of living up to them, so why even try.
“So you transformed yourself into someone else—” beautiful, sexy, sultry Melissa “—and determined to live all you could in that one day.” How many firsts had she experienced? First bar, first drink, first dance? Definitely first kiss. Sweet, a bit awkward, as if she’d expected their noses to bump or their mouths not to fit. It had taken only one kiss to convince her that wasn’t the case. The next had been sweet and steamy, full of promise, and at the motel, virgin or not, she’d delivered on that promise.
And he had definitely been her first man. Her only man, he suspected. There was something old-fashioned and satisfying about that knowledge.
“And that’s why you disappeared in the middle of the night.”
She shook her head. “Not in the middle of the night. Early, just before dawn.”
She was right, of course, Ethan thought, because in the middle of the night, they’d been making love again. She’d liked it better the second time. He’d fallen asleep wondering how much more she was going to enjoy the third time, only to awaken alone. The only thing she’d left behind was the faint scent of her cologne perfuming the sheets wrapped around him.
It was the first time in years that the roles had been reversed. He was the one who woke early and slipped away. He was the one who didn’t want to face goodbyes, demands, recriminations. He was the one who kept his sexual encounters as anonymous and short-term as possible.
And Grace had shown him how it felt to be the one walked out on.
“So…I woke up alone, and you…?”
“Went home. Washed the color and the curls out of my hair. Scrubbed the makeup off. Gave the clothes back to my friend. Put away the memories and prepared to convince my father that I’d been a good girl while he was gone.”
“And he believed you.”
“For a while. One day I was over there—” she gestured to the shelves that flanked the side windows “—getting something off the top shelf for Miz Walker and…I don’t know. The light was right. My clothes were a little snug. Something about the way I was standing… He realized I was pregnant.” She lowered her hand to her stomach in a touch that Ethan suspected was totally reassuring. “A few weeks after that, he left town. But before he left, he signed the store and the house over to me.”
There was more to the story than that. Ethan was sure. Jed Prescott never gave anyone anything but grief. He wouldn’t have spit on his neighbors if they were on fire. He wouldn’t even call his only child by her name. He certainly wouldn’t have voluntarily given her everything he’d worked a lifetime for, especially after she’d disappointed him.
But if she wanted to leave it at that, who was he to push it?
Just the only man she’d ever been intimate with.
The father of her baby.
A virtual stranger.
“So, how’s business?”
Her gaze narrowed. “Fine for Heartbreak.”
“I—” His face flushed hot, and he turned away, pretending interest in the store to hide it. “I have some money set aside if…”
“No, thank you.”
Something about the prim tone of her voice raised his defenses and made him face her again. “It’s not tainted. I didn’t steal it or win it in a crooked card game, or scam some poor sucker out of it. I earned it at an honest job, tending bar in Key West. I’ve been working since I left here last summer, and I’ve saved everything I didn’t need to live on.”
She looked embarrassed, too. “I didn’t mean—I’m fine right now. I don’t need money.”
“What do you need?”
She thought about it a moment, then shrugged. “Nothing.”
That sounded damn near perfect, he thought bitterly. That was all he was, and all he could offer. Nothing.
The bell over the door rang, drawing their attention that way. The man who came through the door was white-haired and stoop-shouldered, and though Ethan hadn’t seen him in ten years, he would have recognized him anywhere. It wasn’t easy to forget the man who’d laid his mother to rest a good fifty years before Ethan was ready to let her go.
“Pastor.” Grace eased to her feet, pulled her sweater tighter across her front and went to stand at the counter. If Ethan were asked, from a purely analytical standpoint, he would say she was trying to hide her pregnancy from the old man. But seven months was a lot to hide, especially on someone as delicate as she was. “What can I do for you?”
“Mama wanted me to pick up two gallons of paint, and she wants it to match the green on this paper.” The old man laid a swatch of wallpaper on the counter between them. “She’s redoing the guest room again. Our son and his wife are coming for a visit next month to help us celebrate our forty-fifth anniversary, and she seems to think the house needs to look different every time they come.”
“I’ll mix this up for you,” she said with a flash of a smile before grabbing the paper and walking off with it.
Pastor Hughes turned his attention Ethan’s way. “Ethan.” He bobbed his head in a disapproving nod. “I heard you were back. It’s been a long time.”
“Not long enough, from what I understand.”
“What brings you home this time?”
Ethan shoved his hands into his jeans pockets, then lifted his shoulders in a shrug as he parroted the preacher’s words. “It’s been a long time.”
“I didn’t realize you and Grace were friends.”
Not friends. Not even acquaintances. Just accomplices in a night’s sins that had changed both their lives. But of course he couldn’t tell the preacher that. “We went to school together. I couldn’t come back and not say hello.”
Pastor Hughes looked as if he didn’t quite accept the explanation, but he didn’t look as if he suspected the truth. No, that would surely widen his old blue eyes with shock and distaste, with a self-righteous This-is-no-more-than-we-expect-from-you for Ethan and a dismayed How-could-you-with-him for Grace.
“Where have you been this time?” Pastor Hughes asked.
“Florida.”
“I understand it’s warm there this time of year. Too warm, perhaps?”
Ethan felt the damned guilty flush start again. “I wasn’t run out of town, if that’s what you’re asking. I left on my own.”
“And how long will you be staying?”
“That depends.” He watched Grace set two paint cans on the counter in the distant corner. With quick, efficient movements, she pried the tops off the cans, then began measuring in tints. He would offer his help for no other reason than to get away from the preacher, but he couldn’t help her. He knew nothing about mixing paints or matching colors. He knew nothing about anything but causing trouble. Certainly nothing about making it right.
“I assume Grace has told you about her predicament.”
Afraid of what might show in his face if he continued to watch her, Ethan turned his gaze back to the preacher. “Her predicament? You mean being pregnant?”
“And unmarried. Abandoned by both her own father and the baby’s father. Left to suffer the consequences alone.”
He hadn’t abandoned her, he wanted to protest. He knew too well how that felt, had been through it with his father, with Guthrie, even with his mother. God help him, he would never do it to someone else.
But Grace had made it pretty clear that neither she nor her baby needed him, that she didn’t want him. So if he left again, that wasn’t abandonment, was it? Even if it felt like it?
“She can’t be the first unwed mother Heartbreak’s ever seen,” he said, injecting a touch of scorn into his voice to cover his guilt.
“No, sad to say she’s not. Which doesn’t make her situation any less fortunate.”
Her misfortune was not running the other way when she met him that night. It was not telling him to go to hell when he’d invited her to the motel. It wasn’t the baby. She insisted she wanted the child, even though it was his child, and he believed her.
He wanted to believe her.
Before the pastor could say anything else, Grace returned with the paint. She rang it up, then waited while the old man wrote out a check. As soon as he was gone, she let out a long sigh.
“I know the good pastor doesn’t think highly of wayward sons. I take it he’s not much kinder to unwed mothers,” Ethan said flatly.
She tilted her head side to side, stretching the muscles in her neck. “Actually, he is. He sees me as an innocent victim, taken advantage of and betrayed by some unrepentant scoundrel.” Abruptly, her gaze widened, as if she’d belatedly seen the insult in her words, and she opened her mouth to apologize.
“I’ll admit to the scoundrel part,” he said, his tone more casual than his emotions. “But I’ve always been repentant.”
“Just not enough to stop being a scoundrel.”
“Not until recently.”
“Why recently?”
“It was time,” he said with a careless shrug, but that wasn’t the real answer. He’d started trying to change because one morning he’d awakened from a three-day drunk and realized that he’d sold his brother’s ranch—his livelihood, his family history, the one thing Guthrie loved most in this world. The fact that land fraud was taken seriously in Oklahoma ranching country hadn’t concerned him, nor had the fact that he could go to prison for it. He’d been in jail before. It hadn’t been his favorite place, but truth be told, it hadn’t been his least favorite, either.
It was the idea that he’d committed the ultimate betrayal against Guthrie that had sobered him. Virtually anything else in the world could eventually be forgiven, but stealing his brother’s land was unforgivable.
He’d thought he might have a chance to set things right without Guthrie even finding out, and so he’d headed for Atlanta to find David Miles, the smug businessman who’d been one of the easiest marks Ethan had ever fleeced. He hadn’t had much of a plan—to admit that the sale was fraudulent, return what was left of the money and face whatever consequences Miles wanted to dish out.
In Atlanta, though, things had gone from bad to worse. He learned that Miles had been killed in an accident, leaving his wife and twin daughters penniless and homeless. The last anyone had heard, they were on their way to Oklahoma to claim the only thing left them—the ranch. Guthrie’s ranch.
Ethan remembered sitting in a seedy motel on the outskirts of the city, trying to gather the courage to pick up the phone and call his brother. But his hands had trembled and his throat had closed off. Even if Guthrie would have talked to him, he wouldn’t have been able to say a word.
And what words could he have offered? I’m sorry? I didn’t think you’d ever find out? I’ll never do it again? He’d said them all so many times before that they didn’t mean a thing.
In the end, it had worked out well, for Guthrie, Olivia and the girls, at least. They’d turned tragedy into triumph—had fallen in love, gotten married and created a new family that was a million times better than the old families that had let them down.
Maybe it had worked out well for Grace, too. Instead of making that phone call from Atlanta to Heartbreak, he’d made the drive, arriving in time to catch the last few minutes of Guthrie and Olivia’s wedding. He’d given Miles’s money to Olivia, given Guthrie the deed to the portion of ranch that had been his for a time, then left them to celebrate their wedding with their friends while he sought the comfort of a few beers and a willing woman in the bar in Buffalo Springs. And there he’d met Grace.
In the end, everyone involved—Guthrie, Olivia and Grace—had gotten the one thing they valued most. A family. Someone to love, someone to love them.
That was the one thing Ethan had always wanted, too.
It was the one thing he didn’t think he would ever get.
Chapter 3
Because many of her customers dropped in on their lunch hours, Grace couldn’t close up at noon. Instead, she’d gotten in the habit of bringing something from home to eat in what she jokingly called the break room. During her father’s reign, it had been a storeroom, but she’d cleaned it out, added a compact refrigerator and microwave, purchased cheap from Reese’s nephew, who’d just graduated from college, and a tiny table and chairs picked up at a yard sale. In a few more months, she planned to bring the playpen she’d bought at the same garage sale so the baby would be able to nap there, undisturbed by the activity in the store.
Sometimes on her days off, Ginger joined her, and some days Shay Rafferty brought two daily specials from her café down the street to share. Though she enjoyed their company with all the saved-up pleasure of a woman who’d long been denied the companionship of other women, today she hoped no one dropped in, not even customers. Today she already had company, she thought, as she took her lunch out of the fridge and put it in the microwave to heat up.
But she wasn’t sure if she wanted to keep Ethan to herself a bit longer, or if she was afraid that seeing him would make everyone remember his last visit home and put two and two together, or if she was…
Stubbornly setting her jaw, she forced the word out. Ashamed. Just a little. He had such a reputation, and she didn’t want it tarnishing her baby before it was even born. Grace didn’t want people to look at her child and say, Oh, that’s Ethan James’s kid. She won’t amount to anything, that’s for sure. Grace didn’t want people shaking their heads when they saw her and repeating some version of what she’d heard plenty of times about Ethan’s mother. Poor Nadine. All she wanted was a father for her son, and all she got was a no-good husband who ran out on her and stuck her with his no-good brat.
She’d gotten enough poor Graces in her life, thanks to her father. She didn’t want Ethan to supply her with more.
The microwave dinged, demanding her attention. She removed the bowl of stew, spooned a portion into a large coffee mug for her lunch guest, then carried both to the table. There was also corn bread, reheated in a damp paper towel, steaming now as butter melted over it, and a half dozen of her favorite cookies for dessert. She believed in eating hearty these days, she thought with a suppressed smile as she realized how easily her lunch for one could feed two.
Of course, she was eating for two and carrying more than enough weight for two.
“So…what are your plans?” Ethan asked as she sat down across from him. The table was so small that her knees bumped his as she settled in. She swore she felt a tingle. He didn’t even seem to notice.
“Plans for what?”
“Living. Working. Making ends meet.” He pointed toward her midsection with a spoon. “After the baby’s born.”
“I plan to continue doing what I’m doing now. There won’t be many changes.”
“A baby changes everything,” he said, as if he knew from experience. Maybe he did. Maybe there were little blond-haired, blue-eyed kids with James blood flowing in their veins all over the country. Maybe that was a part of the trouble he was so famous for leaving in his wake.
If that were the case, then he’d be accustomed to notifications of impending fatherhood, wouldn’t he? But when he’d come in yesterday morning, that definitely wasn’t the impression she’d gotten.
“I can’t afford to let it change everything,” she said as she seasoned her stew. “I’ll still work six days a week. I’ll still live on a budget. I’ll still take care of myself. The only difference is I’ll be taking care of her, too.”
“What about a baby-sitter?”
“I can’t afford one. I’ll bring her to work with me. I’ve got a playpen that’ll fit in that corner. When she’s sleepy, she’ll stay in it. The rest of the time, she’ll be out there with me. It’ll be fine—no different from now, except I’ll have someone to keep me company when it’s slow.”
“And, of course, when it’s not slow, she’ll patiently wait while you take care of customers, order supplies, do the books, straighten the shelves.” He sounded skeptical. “You haven’t spent much time around babies, have you?”
She was embarrassed to admit that the answer was no. The closest she’d ever been to an infant was passing one with its mother in the aisles of the local grocery store. She’d never held one, never fed one, never changed a bottle, but she could learn. There were how-to books covering every subject under the sun, and Callie, the midwife, would teach her enough to get her started. The rest would come naturally. She had maternal instincts, didn’t she? Wouldn’t she give her life to protect this baby? Wasn’t she ready to devote the next twenty years to loving and caring for her?
“And just how much do you know about babies?” she asked crossly. And had any of those babies he’d learned from been his?
“I know that they cry and require a lot of attention. I know they disrupt everything around them when they’re not happy.” He scowled. “I know that raising one alone in a hardware store isn’t a great idea.”
