Bad News Cowboy (21 page)

He returned to the couch, sitting next to her, his denim-clad thigh pressed against her blanket-covered knee. She wanted to say something, to use words to connect them now that their bodies were separated. She poked at the woven elk on the blanket, considering, flashing back to the conversation they'd been having right before they'd stopped talking altogether.

“I don't remember our mother at all.” The words slipped out before she'd fully committed to speaking them. Jack had that effect on her. Always had. “Sometimes I think maybe that's a good thing. How can you miss something you don't even remember?” She swallowed hard, her throat getting tight. She resented the emotion that was creeping over her. It was messing with all of the good things Jack had just made her feel. And she didn't like feeling anything on the subject at all. “But...at least if I had a memory, it would be clear. The pain, I mean. Instead it's just this weird ugly black hole that opens up inside of me sometimes. At the strangest moments. Not on Mother's Day or anything like that. Just sometimes when I see a woman taking care of a child. I remember one time I saw a little girl pestering her mother in the store, and the woman looked so tired. And she was frustrated, it was obvious. Obvious that parenting wasn't easy or fun all the time. But she was there, Jack. She stayed. And I... I just stood there staring. Wondering why my mom couldn't stay for me. I don't have an image of her in my mind, nothing specific to even be angry at. But sometimes I am.” She cleared her throat. “I don't even feel like I have the right to be. Eli and Connor gave up everything to take care of me. They are the ones that should be angry. I didn't lack for much, because of the way they handled things. Why should I feel sad at all?”

She searched his face, because part of her really wanted an answer to that question.

Jack was staring straight ahead, his jaw clenched tight, his gaze distant. “The way I figure, if people have a right to leave, if they have the right to never show up at all, we have the right to be as angry as we want to be. Appreciating what Connor and Eli did for you doesn't mean you can't be hurt by why they had to do it.”

“Are you angry?” she asked, the question almost a whisper.

“All the time.”

She studied his profile. Strong, visually perfect. Straight nose, square jaw, dark brows and a fringe of lash that somehow never, ever made him look feminine. He appeared to have it all together. He seemed happy, carefree. Her brothers had often commented that Jack never had to try, that good things fell in his lap, that luck followed him around like a slobbering puppy.

But he was angry. And in that moment she saw it. In the hard lines of his face, the tension in his muscles.

All the time.

He was angry all the time.

“You don't show it,” she said, her words strangled.

“You don't show yours, either.”

“I don't feel like I deserve it.” She sucked her lower lip between her teeth. “How would it make Eli and Connor feel if they knew...?”

“Screw them, Kate.” He turned to her, his eyes blazing. “This isn't about them. Your feelings aren't about them.”

“But they—”

“Right. They're wonderful. And they love you and they cared for you, but shit, that doesn't mean that everything was fine. It doesn't mean that being raised by your teenage brothers was as good as two functional parents would have been. Of course you're angry. Of course you are.”

He spoke with such strength, such conviction, and she knew that beneath those words, that vein of anger running through them, was rage for himself.

She had a feeling she would have to show hers first. That he needed permission to let his out. Well, hell, so did she. So maybe they could give that to each other.

“I am angry,” she ground out, “because...because my mom left and what the hell was I supposed to do when I needed a bra? Or...or pads or tampons or whatever? Ask my brother's wife. Ask a school nurse.” She should have been embarrassed, but she was too upset to feel embarrassed. She had never talked to anyone about this before, had barely let herself feel it. “I sure as hell wasn't going to talk to my drunk dad. Sometimes Eli and Connor would need him to pick me up from something. And he would...get drunk and forget. I remember being in junior high and sitting there waiting. Teachers just look at you all sad and kids wonder who gets forgotten. What must be wrong with you.”

“He was a drunk, Katie. That's why he forgot.”

Her throat became impossibly tight, an ache spreading down from her chin to her chest, blooming outward. “I don't think he really forgot.”

“Of course he did.”

She shook her head. “No. I think he hated me. I think he was punishing me.” She felt as though she'd just ripped back the skin on her chest and exposed a dark, ugly secret that lurked beneath. Exposed all her blood and organs and a darkness she'd never wanted anyone else to see.

“Why would you think that?” Jack asked. And she was glad he hadn't tried to tell her she was wrong.

“I reminded him of her. Not because I looked like her, but because I was... I was the reason she left. I was an accident. The kid they weren't supposed to have. The one that tipped it over into being unmanageable. The one that made her leave.” Her voice broke and she forgot to be horrified by the show of emotion. “I'm the one who made her leave.”

Jack leaned in, folding her up into his strong arms, holding her against his bare chest. “You didn't make her leave. Best argument she could make in her defense is that her demons chased her away. Though in my experience, demons like you where you're at. The better to torment you. She walked with her own two feet, and nobody made her. Certainly not a two-year-old girl who deserved her mother. There was nothing for you to earn, Kate. That's the kind of thing we're supposed to be given from the moment we come into the world. The love of our parents. I've earned a lot of bad things in life based on my own actions. But I didn't earn my father's abandonment. Not right at first.”

“Are you talking about when you met him? A few weeks ago.”

She hadn't asked him about that. Not since that night. Because he hadn't brought it up, and she wanted to respect his silence. But they had gone somewhere past careful respect in the past few minutes. She was open; she was exposed. And she craved something similar from him. So that she didn't feel like she was alone, sitting here on his couch with her heart out in the open.

“I didn't know my father. I still don't. But I've known who he was since I was eighteen.”

“You...you have? Do Connor and Eli know that? Does anyone know that?”

“No. Because I found out who my father was the day his attorney offered me a payoff to never tell anyone. They thought I knew. I didn't. But I took the money. And I signed their nondisclosure or whatever the hell it was. I paid to make myself disappear. I sold myself.” She wished that she could see his face, but he was still holding her close. She wondered if the look in his eyes matched the bleak tone in his voice. “It wasn't luck that made me rich. It was my father.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

J
ACK
DIDN
'
T
KNOW
why he was sitting here opening a vein and bleeding all over Kate. Maybe because she had gone first. Because he wanted her to know she wasn't alone. Because for the first time he didn't feel alone.

A strange shift had happened in his life, and he could hardly figure out how or why. Eli and Connor had been his best friends for as long as he could remember having friends. And he'd never even been tempted to talk to them about this. In turn, they'd never spoken about the way they felt. With their mom leaving, their dad a drunk, their entire life focused on the responsibility of caring for Kate and the ranch. Of course they hadn't. They were men and men didn't talk about their feelings.

And he'd never had a long-term relationship with a woman. Never been in a situation where he wanted to talk to women about anything but which position they liked best.

Kate was different. She was different from those women, and she was different from a friend.

She was Kate. That was the beginning and end of it.

“Your dad gave you money in exchange for you...keeping yourself a secret?” Kate's tone was incredulous, and he couldn't blame her.

“Yes. And I took it. It was all the child support money my mother had refused all of our lives. And then some. I was so angry, Kate. So angry when I found out, because we had lived in that trailer that was falling down around us for all of my life. Because she wouldn't take his money. Because she had too much pride. She was disappointed to discover that I didn't suffer from the same problem.”

“Is that why she...?”

“Why we don't speak? Why she moved into a different trailer about fifty miles away? Yeah, I think so.” He laughed, leaning his head back, tightening his hold on Kate, suddenly very aware of the warmth of her body pressed against his. “I traded a lot of things for that money. My relationship with her. My fantasy of ever having a relationship with my old man. My fantasy that he was somehow decent, just unable to be with us for some reason. My self-respect. It's tough to feel proud about that kind of decision. So I felt like I better make damn sure I used that money well.”

“That's why you ended up in the rodeo.”

“Something I never would have been able to afford to get into otherwise. Without it, I don't know. I would probably be working at the gas station store or working as a hired hand for Eli and Connor. Sometimes I think that might've been better. There's a lot of honor in something like that. Working for every bit of what you have instead of getting ahead of the game by taking a handout.”

“That isn't what you did. What your father had was yours.”

He shrugged. “Is it? I mean, I get that legally he owed us a certain amount. I get that morally you could make the argument that what a parent has also belongs to their children. But I'm not sure that in reality it made his money mine.”

“You were eighteen. Of course you took it. And you should have. Look what you got because of it!” She waved her hand around, indicating the large living room around them. The high ceilings with natural log beams running across them, the expansive windows that provided a view of the mountains, of the spread that Jack owned. His land. “You can't regret it. You achieved your goal. You made what you needed to.”

“It doesn't always feel like it. I mean, I have all of this, and I'm happy to have it. I love my house. I'm proud of it. I'm not going to pretend that I'm somehow above the money, not when it's created the kind of life I always wanted. But I do wonder what would've happened if I had just told him to go screw himself. I think that's what my ranch is, honestly.”

He was treading a dangerous line, one that risked violating legal papers he'd signed. He wasn't sure he cared. He prized this moment over any of that. This moment of honesty like he'd never had before.

“I'm still listening,” Kate said, her way of asking for more.

“Nathan West is my father.” He knew he didn't have to impress upon her how important it was she kept it a secret. Knew he didn't have to demand her silence, because she would give it. He believed that down to the core of his being.

She said nothing. She simply went perfectly still in his arms. He listened to the silence for a while. To the sound of her breathing, the tick of the clock that he never looked at on his wall. That the interior designer had insisted go there because that was the kind of thing that went in houses like this. He'd had to hire someone to put furniture, and the blanket Kate was currently wrapped in, in his house. Because he'd lived in a glorified cracker box and he hadn't known where to begin in terms of filling a house this size with things. In part because there were things for houses he hadn't even realized existed.

“Sierra flirts with you,” Kate said, breaking the silence. “That is seriously messed up.”

He laughed—he couldn't help it. Of all the things he'd expected her to say, that wasn't it.

“Oh my gosh,” she continued, “what if you didn't know? This is a really small town. Sierra likes you. She would... If you didn't know...”

“Stop. Stop right there. You're turning this into an after-school special.”

“I'm just saying.”

“I'm sure he never thought it would be an issue. Seeing as I'm sure he never thought one of his daughters would ever want to slum it with me.”

“How can he think that when he wanted your mother? And I don't mean that your mother is slumming it. I just mean that it's awfully hypocritical.”

“Yeah, well. He's a hypocrite. A very comfortable hypocrite, by all appearances.”

“You have brothers and sisters,” she said, her tone muted.

He nodded slowly. “I traded them for this place, too.”

“Well, I suppose, especially when you're eighteen, money means a whole lot more than half siblings who might be as terrible as your dad.”

“That's about the size of it.”

“What happens if you tell?”

“I have to give the money back.”

“Can you?”

He stared straight ahead at a knot on the wooden wall. “Yes. I can. But I've been so focused on building a competing empire and messing with them I haven't really wanted to yet.”

“You got his attention.”

“I guess I did. I think maybe I even scare him.” He swallowed. “It's less satisfying than I imagined it would be.”

“Why?”

He laughed. “Good question. Maybe because it means my dad is a dick. And there's no alternate scenario, no outcome other than that. It just is what it is. And now I can't pretend different.”

“If it helps, my dad is dead. And I lost the chance to yell at him.”

“What's that supposed to help?”

She snuggled deeper against him. “I don't know. Misery loves company?”

“You're pretty good company.”

“Good miserable company.” She yawned and he wished that she could stay the night. He never wished women would stay the night. They never did. But he wanted her to. Because she was different. So he wanted to keep feeling different.

He took hold of a lock of hair, tugging it gently. “You're a pretty fantastic little misery, it has to be said.”

She reached up and covered his hand with hers, slowly locking their fingers together before lowering them so their clasped hands rested on his knee. He wasn't one to sit still. He worked, and when he was with a woman, they went about their business, and then she left. Jack was only still when he was sleeping.

Except now. And he found he didn't want to do anything but sit here. It was the most productive bout of stillness he'd ever been a part of. Whether because of the words that had just been spoken or because of the calmness that came from sitting next to her, he didn't know. But it felt more substantial than a whole day of hard work.

“I suppose you should go,” he said after the minutes had turned the hand on his largely ignored clock halfway around.

“Probably.” She angled her head and he responded to the invitation, bending down and kissing her. They didn't have time for the kiss to be anything else, and there was something deeply sensual and desperate that he couldn't quantify in that. Kissing for the sake of kissing had gone extinct in his life once he'd lost his virginity. He was starting to think that had been some shortsighted stupidity on his part.

He let himself get lost in the softness of Kate's lips, the slow slide of her tongue, the little sighs that rested on the back of her indrawn breaths.

“I have to go. We're all having dinner tonight.”

“I was invited, actually,” he said, feeling a kick of guilt that he hadn't mentioned it before.

She looked at him, her expression hopeful. She wanted him around. It shocked him how much that assurance meant to him. “Are you going to come?”

“I don't have to. If it's weird.”

“It's weird. But I would rather see you again than avoid the awkwardness.”

“I think that's the best compliment I've ever gotten.”

“Good.” She kissed him again, then stood, holding the blanket around her body. “You better come.” She started to collect her clothes and he grabbed hold of the edge of the blanket, tugging hard until he seized possession of it. She squeaked, holding her clothes to her chest as she scurried across the room toward the bathroom.

A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. He wasn't quite sure how Kate managed to take him from one of the hardest subjects he'd ever talked about to smiling in the space of a few minutes. His smile broadened. Because he would see her again tonight, and that was about the best thing he could think of.