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She blew out a breath. “Babies kick, but I guess you wouldn’t have a clue about that.”
He studied her from under those sun-gold eyebrows. “You’re bitter. I can’t say that’s a big surprise.”
“What do you expect, Bowie?”
“Of you? Nothing. Of myself? A lot more than I used to.”
What was that supposed to mean? Her pulse pounded hard in her ears and her stomach felt queasy. She wanted to jump up and order him out of her house. Instead, she rose with slow care and went to the coffeepot. It was still dripping. But there was more than enough for a cup. She filled a mug, carried it back to the table and pushed it across to him.
“Thanks.” He took it and sipped.
She lowered her bulging body into the chair again. “Look, can we just get real here?”
He rested one rough-knuckled hand on the tabletop. She watched as he traced a seam in the wood. And then he slanted her another of those strange calm looks. “I am being real.” His voice stayed level, as composed as his expression. It scared her a little. Was this really Bowie sitting across from her? Bowie Bravo never stayed calm.
“What’s up?” she demanded. “Just tell me. Why are you here?”
He took his sweet time answering that one, first picking up the cup again and taking another sip, then setting down the cup, then tracing that seam in the tabletop some more. “I figured it was about time I got to know my son.”
Long past time, she thought, but she didn’t say it. Over the years, she’d learned a little self-control, too. “Why now, exactly?”
“I’ve been—” he seemed to seek the right words “—trying to decide when the best time would be. Finally, I realized there was no good time.” No good time. Well, at least she agreed with him there. “So I chose today.” He added, “I heard you lost your husband. Matteo Rossi was a good man.”
“Yes, he was,” she shot back too fast and too angrily. New Bethlehem Flat, aka “the Flat” to everyone who lived there, had a population of around eight hundred. The Rossi family was an old and respected name in the Flat. Matteo had run Rossi’s Hardware Emporium for half of his life. And before him, his father, Christopher, had owned the store.
Bowie said, “I’m…sorry that he’s gone.”
“So am I—and Johnny won’t be home from school for hours yet.” And the last thing he’ll be expecting is to see you here. And really, how could this be happening? What exactly was happening? She still didn’t get it. Her heart was working overtime, beating a sick rhythm under her ribs, the rhythm of dread. If he tried to take Johnny away…
But he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. No court in the world would give him custody of the son he’d made no effort to visit in almost seven years.
And no matter how much she might wish that he could have just stayed away, well, she knew what was right: he should know his son.
And Johnny needed to know him.
She asked, “How long are you going to be in town?”
“I’m keeping it open-ended.” He leaned toward her a little.
She sat back, maintaining the distance between them. “Staying with your mom, at the B and B?”
“I’m not sure where I’ll stay, Glory.”
“Well, aren’t you just a font of useful information?” It came out really sour-sounding. She turned to the window and watched the swirling snow beyond the glass, knowing she had to get a grip. Nothing would be gained by her playing the bitch about this. The past was a foreign country now. And so far, even though he wasn’t telling her much about what his plans might be, he’d been perfectly civil. More so than she’d been, certainly.
“Glory, I’m sorry. I really am. Sorry about all of it, the thousand-and-one ways I messed things up.” His voice was full of sadness.
She had no doubt he meant every word of what he’d just said. Still, she didn’t look at him. “A letter, you know?” she said to the white world outside the window. “A letter now and then. It would have meant so much to him. You couldn’t even manage that?”
“Things were bad at first. I had to get sober and it wasn’t easy. I told myself that when I was sober for two years, when I had some kind of handle on myself, on my behavior, I would get in contact, start trying to work things out. But then you married Matteo…”
She made a low, furious sound in her throat. “Oh, that’s your excuse, then? That it’s my fault you never got to know Johnny. My fault because I got married.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But it’s what you meant.”
“No, Glory. It’s not what I meant. What I meant is I knew enough about Matteo Rossi to realize that he would be a good husband. I knew he was gentle and patient and kind. And he brought in a good income. He was pretty much everything that I’d never been. I thought that it would be the best thing, to stay away. To let you have a life, you know? Not to cause you any more trouble.”
“A son needs to know his father.” She hated to say it. It only supported his claim on Johnny, however late in time he’d returned to make that claim. Still, it was the truth.
“I see that now.” His voice was soft. Reasonable.
She wanted to pop him a good one right in his too-well-remembered face. “He’s a little kid,” she accused. “He doesn’t understand why his dad went away before he was even a year old, why you never came back. All a little kid knows when his dad disappears is that it must somehow be his fault.”
His expression darkened. “I used to think that when I was a kid.” His voice wasn’t so gentle now and his square jaw was set. “I wanted my father to come back. I blamed myself that he didn’t. But then I grew up and I learned more about him, enough to be glad I’d never met the rotten bastard.”
“That was a completely different situation. You are not your dad.”
“I’m just saying it’s not absolute, Glory. Given who I was when I left town, Johnny was better off not knowing me.”
“I don’t believe that.” She spoke low, with heat. “I’ll never believe that.”
“Just stop. Just think for a minute.” His blue gaze pinned her.
“Stop and think about what?”
“You said you understood, don’t you remember? You said that you were okay with it, when I left.”
“I did understand. It’s a small town. People make judgments. And here in the Flat, you were everybody’s favorite screwup. You could never get anything right. They all expected you to mess up again, no matter how hard you tried not to. And you never disappointed them. I understood that you needed to get away, to get out from under that judgment, to figure out for yourself who you are, really. What I didn’t expect was never to hear another word from you.”
“You heard from me.” He said it to the window.
“Checks in the mail are not ‘hearing’ from you.”
Bowie sipped his coffee. He stared blankly out at the storm, the same way she had done a few moments before. Finally, he set the cup down—a little harder than necessary—and he turned his gaze on her again. “It’s not like you ever came looking for me, not like you gave me any kind of sign that you wanted me around.”
She met his eyes and she refused to look away. “It wasn’t my job to make you feel wanted. It was your job to be a father to your son.”
A muscle in his jaw twitched, but he kept his voice strictly controlled. “You don’t give an inch, do you, Glory? You never did.”
“I couldn’t afford to. I had a son to raise.”
“Ouch,” he said, too softly. And then he continued, “The good news is, I do get what my job is. And I’m ready to do it, to be a father to my son. You’re not chasing me off this time, no matter what you say or what you do.”
Her temper flared. “Meaning I chased you out of town before? You know that’s not true.”
“How many times did you refuse me, Glory? A hundred? A thousand?”
She stared him down. “Tell me to my face right this minute that you think a marriage between us would have been a good thing. You go ahead, Bowie Bravo. You tell me that lie.”
He had the grace to look away. And then he brought up his big, rough yet heartbreakingly graceful hands, and scrubbed them down his face. “I didn’t come here to do this, to play the blame game. I honestly didn’t.”
“Then stop,” she commanded in a hissing whisper. “Just…stop.” She shoved back her chair and lumbered upright. Too bad that once she was on her feet, she didn’t know what to do next. So she turned and went to the counter. She got the coffeepot, brought it back to the table, held it up.
“Great. Yeah,” he said.
She refilled his cup. It was an awkward moment, standing there beside him, pouring with her arm extended at an odd angle. She had to turn a little to the side so that her bulging stomach wouldn’t touch him. She didn’t think she could have borne that right then, to have her stomach and her baby inside it—Matteo’s baby—touching Bowie Bravo.
She managed to pour without spilling and also without any part of her body making contact with his. That accomplished, she took the pot back to the coffeemaker. Then she turned, leaned against the counter and told him, “You should know that Johnny and Matteo were close. Johnny loved his stepdad a lot.”
Bowie gave one slow nod of his close-cut golden head. “That’s good. For Johnny. And Johnny is the one who matters.”
She took one step toward the table again—and that was when the contraction hit.
A full-blown, hard-labor contraction. Starting at the top of her uterus, it moved down and around, like huge and powerful hands, tightening, pressing.…
Stunned at the suddenness of it as much as at the pain, she cried out, “Oh!” and staggered.
“My God. What the…” Bowie shot to his feet and started for her. “Glory…”
She clutched her belly with one hand and put out the other to ward him off. “I…no.” She tried to deny the reality of what was happening. Anything to get him to stay back, not to touch her. “Really, I’m fine, I…” The sentence died unfinished. All she could do was groan deep in her throat as the contraction kept squeezing, as it got even stronger. It had her in a vise grip, until she couldn’t hold herself upright any longer. She had to turn and bend over the counter to keep from sinking to her knees.
“Glory…” He came at her again and that time, she didn’t have the presence of mind to back him off. All at once, he was there, touching her, putting his arms around her, supporting her as she rode out the pain.
There was a minute—or two or three—an endless, animal space of time when she didn’t even care that Bowie Bravo had his hands on her again. All she knew was the pain, all she cared about was to ride it, to get through it and come out on the other side.
When it finally faded and left her panting for breath, the relief was the sweetest thing she’d ever experienced. By then, she was sweating and holding on to him. She couldn’t help it. She needed someone to hold on to and he was the only one there.
“Better?” he asked so softly. He was stroking her hair by then. It felt way too good.
She kept her head buried in his shoulder. “Yeah. Better. For the moment at least.” He smelled good. Clean. Like soap and cedar shavings. Like pine trees in the springtime. He’d always smelled like pine.
“What was that?” he asked. “Are you going to be okay?”
“Yeah, more or less,” she panted and made herself look up at him, at his worried frown and his blue eyes full of questions. She told him, “I’m in labor. The baby’s coming. The baby’s coming now.…”
Bowie’s tanned face blanched. His eyes, too, seemed to lose their color, to grow paler. She looked in those eyes and she thought of his father, for some crazy reason. She’d never seen Blake Bravo in the flesh. He’d made his last visit to the Flat before she was born. But she’d seen the pictures, heard the stories. People said that Bad Blake Bravo, kidnapper, suspected murderer and notorious polygamist, had the kind of eyes you never forgot.
Pale eyes, wolf eyes…
Bowie was staring at her, blinking like a man suddenly wakened from a deep sleep. “Uh, what did you say? Tell me you didn’t say what you just said.”
She had the most ridiculous urge to laugh. “Sorry, I did say it. And it’s true. My baby’s coming.” Strange how absolutely certain she was. But then again, she’d been here before. “It’s just like it was with Johnny. Out of nowhere, with zero warning, I was far gone in labor. He was born an hour and a half after I had my first contraction—one that felt exactly like the one I had just now.”
“You’re not serious.”
“Oh, yes, I am. This baby is coming. And coming fast.”
Chapter Two
“Now?” Bowie cast a desperate glance toward the windows. Outside, the wind gusted and the snow came down harder than ever.
“Yeah, Bowie. Now.” She could almost feel sorry for him. This had to be the last thing he’d expected when he came knocking on her door.
He gulped. “The hospital. I’ve got to get you to the hospital.”
She shook her head. “In this storm, on the mountain roads? It would take forever to get there. And this baby is just like Johnny. This baby is not going to wait.”
He remembered. She could see it in his eyes. He’d been there when Johnny was born—or at least, he’d tried to be there. She’d had Johnny in her mom’s house down the street, upstairs, in the big front bedroom. Bowie had begged her to marry him as she sweated and screamed through one grueling contraction after another. He’d pleaded and he’d coaxed. He’d been drunk, as he usually was back then. His brother Brett, who was the town doctor, had finally gotten him to go away.
But he wasn’t drunk now. He said, “The emergency helicopter. We can have you airlifted.”
“Come on, Bowie, nobody’s flying a helicopter in this.” She flicked a hand toward the storm outside.
“Brett…” He said his brother’s name desperately. She understood that, the desperation. She wanted cool, calm, competent Brett there, with her, and she wanted him now. And when Brett came, so would her sister Angie. Angie was not only Brett’s wife, she was also his nurse. And of her six sisters, Glory had always felt closest to Angie. She could tell Angie anything. They were not only siblings, they were also best friends.
The phone was a few feet away down the counter. Going for it gave her an excuse to escape the scarily comforting circle of Bowie’s arms. She had the number of Brett’s clinic on auto dial, so she punched it up fast.
The receptionist answered on the second ring. “New Bethlehem Flat Clinic. This is Mina.”
“It’s Glory, Mina. I’m in labor. The baby’s coming and coming fast.”
“No kidding? Wow. Right now? Isn’t that a little early?”
Glory gritted her teeth. “Yeah, Mina. It’s two weeks early, but it’s happening. I need Brett and Angie over here at my place, now.”
“They’re out on a call.” A call. Sweet Lord. They were out on a call. Mina chattered on. “Scary, huh, in this weather? But evidently, Redonda Beals and Emmy Ralen just had to go out for their morning walk today of all days. The storm started. Redonda took a fall. Broke her arm in two places. It’s pretty bad, evidently. Dr. Brett is seeing what he can do about it until the weather clears and she can be airlifted to Grass Valley.”
“Can you reach them, tell them I’m going to need them over here, and fast?”
“They should be back soon—I mean, unless the snow keeps up like this.”
“Mina, hello. I asked if you would call them.”
Bowie moved closer, frowning. “Let me talk to her.”
Glory put her palm over the mouthpiece and told him drily, “Thanks, I can handle this.”
He stopped coming toward her, but he kept on frowning.
Mina was gabbing away again. “Now, Glory, I have kids of my own. I know how long labor takes. And I know sometimes you feel it’s urgent when really it’s going to be quite a while.”
Oh, great. Just what she needed. Lectures on childbirth from Mina Scruggs. “Mina, forget it. Are they at Redonda’s? I’ll look up the number and call them myself.”
“Glory, there is no reason to get snippy.”
“I am having my baby, Mina. I am having my baby now.”
