Renegade Father (12 page)

He gave a rueful smile. “Except for today, when you headed out onto that ice.”

She made a face, then smiled back at him and for a moment she looked exactly like the beautiful, vibrant girl he had kissed on the shores of Butterfly Lake so many years before.

He wanted to kiss her again. The need punched him in the chest, in the gut. He wanted to tug her toward him and consume that mouth, to taste her sweetness and feel her come to life in his arms.

He could do none of those things. Kissing her the morning after Dolly's poisoning had been a disastrous mistake, a mistake he had just spent one week regret-ting—at least when he wasn't reliving every moment of it in bittersweet detail.

He needed to let go of her fingers. Now.

He knew it perfectly well. But knowing it and doing it were two vastly different things. He couldn't seem to make his muscles cooperate, couldn't seem to do anything but sit there and stare at her while her fingers fluttered in his.

It didn't help his self-control any knowing both of them were just a couple of layers away from being bare, that there was tantalizing skin somewhere underneath that brightly colored wool.

He cleared his throat, fully intending to retreat. Before he could move, though, his gaze met hers and the awareness blooming there in those soft green depths was more than he could withstand.

He thought of how close she had come to death out there on the ice, how this brave, foolish woman would have perished for a cow, and he knew he couldn't fight it anymore.

Just a quick kiss, he promised himself. That's all he wanted. Just enough to get it out of his system so he could once more regain his balance and remember all the reasons they shouldn't be doing this.

But the instant his lips met hers, everything changed.

Her mouth was warm and willing beneath his and she made a soft, erotic little sound of welcome. Red-hot desire scorched through him at the sound, at the sweet taste of her, and he groaned and deepened the kiss.

Their mouths tangled in an explosion of need, hers soft and yielding, his hard and demanding.

They knelt chest to chest, hip to hip, and he was vaguely aware of the blanket slipping from his shoulders when her trembling fingers wandered up to splay against his bare chest. He had to close his eyes as sensation after sensation poured over him.

She was alive—they were both alive—and his body cried out with the need to celebrate that in the most elemental of ways.

Between the loose folds of the poncho he easily found the soft curve of her breast. She inhaled sharply when his fingers caressed her bare skin.

She went rigid in his arms and for one brief, terrible moment he thought she was going to pull away from him. But then her body seemed to sigh in surrender, to melt against him.

With their mouths entwined, with the fire popping and hissing beside them, he pushed her back to the blanket on the floor. She went willingly, sliding her arms around him to hold him close. His chest rubbed against the wool covering her and even that friction was too much. He wanted—needed—to feel skin on skin.

She must have had the same instinct. Before he could do anything to pursue the need, she broke the connection of their mouths to whip the wool over her head.

His breathing harsh, he gazed at her in the soft glow of the lantern. She was exquisite, with ivory skin and fine, delicate bones. His hands felt entirely too rough, too big, to touch such fragile skin. But how could he stop when she arched against him like that, when she gasped his name as his fingers closed around her?

One corner of his mind, the sensible part, warned that this was madness, that he was torturing himself with something he would only regret later. The rest of him told the killjoy to shut the hell up.

His body surged with need as he kissed her again, as his hands caressed her skin. He wanted to taste that skin, those taut, hard peaks. Before he could, though, the roar of a snowmobile coming up the hillside pierced the thin walls of the shack.

Both of them froze for one brief, charged second. Then Joe, shocked back into his senses, drew back. He grabbed the ruana from the floor and yanked it back over her head, forcing himself not to look at her face, at the condemnation he was afraid he would find there.

What the hell had he just done? It was bad enough he'd kissed her at all, but in another few moments he would have taken things much, much further. After a few more of those heated caresses he wouldn't have
been able to stop himself from taking her right there on the floor.

“Annie, I…” He raked a hand through his hair, not sure what he wanted to say. “I'm sorry” would have been a blatant lie. He should have been sorry and he knew he would have plenty of regrets later. But now all he could feel was the pulse of desire still pounding through him.

“You don't have to say anything,” she said, her voice low. “I understand. We were both overwrought from what happened out there on the ice. Both just glad to be alive. It doesn't mean anything.”

Tell that to his heart, he thought as he went to open the door for their rescuers.

“H
ere. This is all of it. Are you happy now?”

With an inward sigh, Annie took the stack of papers from her daughter's outstretched hand and refrained from warning her to watch her snippy tone of voice. “Thank you,” she murmured instead.

Leah's posture screamed impatience, from the frustrated set of her jaw to the way she shifted from foot to foot in those expensive high-tops she insisted on buying with her baby-sitting money, shoes that were totally impractical for a snowy Montana winter.

“This will just take a moment,” Annie said.

“You're going to make me late for the bus.”

If Leah had given her the homework forty-five minutes earlier, when Annie had first asked to see it, being late for the school bus wouldn't even be an issue.

Again she swallowed the words, knowing they would only spark full-scale fireworks. “You still have at least ten minutes before the bus comes. It shouldn't take me
that long to review your work. And if you miss the bus, I promise I'll drive you into town.”

“What about me?” C.J. asked around a mouthful of oatmeal topped with enough strawberry jam to draw every grizzly in Montana.

“You have no excuse, young man. I already looked at your homework last night, so if you miss the bus you're walking.” She smiled at him to let him know she was teasing.

He grinned back. “Maybe I'll ride one of the horses to school like you did in the old days.”

Annie laughed. “I'm not
that
old. We had school buses in my day.”

Before C.J. could answer, Leah gave a loud, impatient sigh. Annie raised an eyebrow at her daughter's lack of subtlety but returned to the stack of homework papers.

“This is excellent!” she said after a few moments. “Leah, I can't believe this! You haven't missed a single question.”

“I was lucky.”

“No you weren't. You worked hard. I'm so proud of you! It took me months to figure out integers and you've conquered it in just a few days. Way to go! I knew you could do it.”

A flush sneaked over the high cheekbones Leah inherited from her father. “It's just a stupid math assignment,” she mumbled, thrusting the homework back into a folder then shoving it all into the big, slouchy bag she carried. “Get over it.”

Though her words were irritated, Annie knew her daughter well enough to tell she was pleased by the praise.

“I won't get over it. I hope this teaches you that you
can handle every one of your classes if you just put a little work into it. I'm proud of you,” she said again.

“Does that mean I can ride Stardust again?”

For a moment, Annie almost gave in to the naked pleading in her voice. Leah loved that horse more than she loved anything and Annie knew the last month of being without her had been torture.

On the other hand, she wasn't sure if a few isolated weeks of turning in homework on time—due to much hounding from her mother—really qualified as bringing up her grades.

She hated this part of parenting. She hated being the disciplinarian, the enforcer, especially when her instincts cried out to do everything she could for her children to make up for a past filled with such stress.

She wanted to be the best-friend kind of mom who made pancakes with blueberry syrup every morning, the kind of mom who could spend all her time doing everything within her power to make her children happy. She wanted to be able to give them anything they could ever want.

But she knew that would accomplish nothing. If anything, Leah and C.J. needed loving structure and rules more than ever now. They needed to know what was expected of them and what wouldn't be tolerated.

In the end, she waffled. “We'll talk about it. Let's see how you do on your social studies quiz today and then we can discuss it tonight.”

With a quick, happy smile that reminded Annie painfully of the sweet girl her daughter had been just a short time ago, Leah picked up her bag and hurried out the door.

“Hey, wait up!” C.J. pushed away his oatmeal bowl, threw on his coat and grabbed his backpack.

“'Bye, Mom,” he shouted over his shoulder on his way out the door, leaving behind sudden, disconcerting silence.

Annie moved to the kitchen window and watched them walk toward the mailbox where the bus would pick them up.

She loved them so fiercely, sometimes she couldn't breathe around it.

She worried constantly about whether she was making the right choices in their upbringing. It would have helped so much to have someone else to share both the burden and the joy.

Not that her divorce changed anything in that department—she had always been on her own when it came to parenting. Charlie took no more notice of either one of them than he would a couple of insects crawling on the sidewalk.

She sometimes wondered what she would have done if he had. She knew she wouldn't have stayed in the marriage if he had threatened to hurt them in any way.

She wouldn't have hesitated, would have just gathered them up and escaped even if it meant handing over the Double C to him. Her children were far more important than the ranch.

But she had fooled herself into thinking the way Charlie treated her was separate from the children, that it had no impact on them.

It was a stupid and shortsighted conclusion, she could see that now. Of
course
they had been affected. How could they not be?

He had never hit her in front of them but they had to have seen the bruises. She just hoped she had been able to come to her senses in time before it could scar them forever.

C.J. reached down now behind his sister's back to scoop up a handful of snow. A smile quirked the edges of her mouth as she watched him form a snowball then take aim. Uh-oh. He was asking for trouble.

The missile hit Leah square in the middle of her back. From here, Annie could see her mouth open in a shriek, then she whipped around to glare at her little brother. C.J. giggled, even when Leah scooped up a snowball of her own and headed toward him.

Annie smiled softly. She sometimes had a hard time believing a union so twisted and ugly could have produced something as wonderful as C.J. It was a miracle, really.

She had been so afraid when she found she was pregnant that she would never be able to love this child who had been conceived through violence and force.

Oh, how she was wrong. From the moment she felt him move inside her, she had loved him. She had ceased to care how he had come to be.

He was so funny and sweet, with more compassion in his little heart than anyone else she had ever known. If anything, he was
too
compassionate. He felt things more keenly than others and she worried sometimes that he was too vulnerable to the inevitable cruelties of life.

All mother birds worried about their baby chicks falling out of the nest and tumbling to the ground. She just had to do her best to make sure he had the skills he would need to fly.

And he was going to have to fly now if he wanted to get away from his sister.

Snowball in hand, she came after him, laughing and more carefree than Annie had seen her in a long time. C.J. dodged around the big spruce tree out front but Leah was faster and sneakier. She went around the other
direction for a frontal attack and launched the snowball at him. It hit him square in the face and Leah bent over with laughter.

C.J. just grinned at his sister, snow dripping from his face, as the bus pulled up to the mailbox with a screech of brakes Annie could hear even from inside.

Leah's long dark hair swung out behind her as she climbed onto the bus, her brother right behind her. She wasn't wearing a hat again, Annie observed with a sigh. It was a constant battle between them, just like everything else had turned into these days.

Her daughter had grown up in the last year. She was becoming a beautiful, willowy young woman with her father's dark eyes and high cheekbones. Annie was amazed Leah and Joe couldn't see what was so glaringly obvious to her, but she thanked God for it every day.

Sometimes the weight of her secret felt like a thousand boulders she carried around with her every single waking moment. But it was a weight she must continue to carry alone. If either of them found out, she knew it would be devastating for everyone involved.

Neither one of them would forgive her for years of deception. Any more than she could forgive herself.

Even knowing she had had no choice—either in keeping the news of her pregnancy from Joe or in maintaining the pretense all these years that Charlie was Leah's father—she knew she would never be free of the remorse.

She sometimes felt as if the guilt would burn a raw, gaping hole in her stomach. She would rather endure it, though, would rather try to calm it with wagonloads of antacids, than have to face Joe and Leah with the truth.

The school bus pulled away, leaving only a wisp of
diesel exhaust in the cold morning air. She watched until even that dissipated, then turned away from the window.

She had too much to do to stand here all day worrying about things she couldn't fix.

She spent the morning doing as little housework as she could get away with so she could turn her attention to the omnipresent paperwork of the ranch.

Several hours later, she stood to stretch and realized it was almost lunchtime. Drat. She had planned to make a lunch for Patch.

The old cowboy was laid up in the bunkhouse since Maggie had finally given him an ultimatum—either he took it easy on his hip for a few days while things were slow at the ranch or she was personally going to drag him to the hospital in Billings for a hip replacement.

She hurriedly fixed a lunch, put it all on a tray, then headed outside. The day was colder than normal for early March but she thought she could smell the moist promise of spring.

March 10th. She thought of the date she had been writing on checks all morning. She had less than three weeks before Joe's departure. The bleak realization inevitably reminded her of the day two weeks before when she had fallen through the ice then caught fire in his arms.

Since then he had done his best to avoid her, always choosing any job that would take him away from the ranch. Today he had taken Luke and the Santiagos to a stock sale in Bozeman. But if they hadn't gone there, he probably would have found some other excuse to stay as far away from her as he could.

He hadn't said two words to her after they changed into the dry clothes Manny brought and started the long
ride up the cirque then down the other side to the ranch. And he had barely said even that much in the weeks since.

She didn't have to be a genius to know he regretted kissing her, both times he had done it in the last month. He couldn't have made it more obvious.

It only took her a few moments to reach the bunkhouse but she hesitated on the step. One of her earliest lessons as a young girl growing up surrounded by a bunch of rough men was never to walk unannounced into the bunkhouse.

For all their bluster, cowboys could be as prissy as a bunch of schoolmarms when a woman invaded their territory.

At the same time, she knew if she rang the bell, Patch would try to get up to answer the door and she didn't want him to move more than he absolutely had to. Finally she compromised by knocking once then opening the door a crack.

“Patch? It's Annie,” she called through the door. “Are you decent?”

The grizzled old cowboy's rusty-gate laugh met her question. “Not if I can help it, gal. Not if I can help it.”

She smiled a little at the old joke and pushed the door completely open with her elbow. Inside the trailer was surprisingly homey considering it was decorated in bachelor chic.

Patch was lying on one of the mismatched couches, a soap opera on the big-screen TV and a western in his hand.

He scowled at the tray. “What the hell is that?”

She presented it for his inspection. “Lunch. Leftover chili and corn bread from dinner last night. A little
early, I know, but I had a few extra minutes and figured I might be able to keep you from trying to get up to fix your own.”

His wrinkled old face twisted into a glare. “I can take care of myself. Don't need no little girl doing it for me.”

“You know you're supposed to be resting. Maggie says if you don't take it easy for a few days, you're going to need a hip replacement by summer.”

He tossed his book down in disgust onto the old tack trunk that served as a coffee table in the bunkhouse. “That gal needs to have that kid of hers so she'll keep her nose out of my business. I'm just fine and dandy. Too much to do around here for me to be sitting around on my rear end all day like some big baby. Don't blame me if the whole damn place falls apart.”

“I won't. I promise.” She bit her lip to hide her grin and set the tray next to the discarded western. “Since I went to all the trouble to fix it, you might as well eat it. I'll just put it here and then you can eat when you're hungry.”

“Suit yourself. You always did.”

This time she didn't bother to hide her smile as she bent to kiss his cheek above the handlebar of his mustache.

Her smile faded as she walked the short distance back to the house, back to her lousy paperwork.

Stubborn old mule.

If Patch didn't listen to Maggie and give his hip time to strengthen and heal, he wouldn't be able to ride a horse in another few months. What kind of fix would he be in if he couldn't do the only thing he loved? He would absolutely hate it. How could she convince him?

Worried and distracted, she opened the back door into
the mudroom and walked carefully, trying not to leave tracks on the floor she had just cleaned.

Someone already had, she noticed with a frown. Big ugly smears of mud were all over the floor leading into the kitchen. She opened the door, so busy looking at the mess on her floor that she didn't notice the figure sitting at the kitchen table casually drinking a cup of coffee until he spoke.