The Second Time (8 page)

He watched the action, especially the way the upward reach of her arm stretched the knit fabric of the tanktop across her breasts and their button-hard nipples. The sight disturbed him more than he cared to admit.

“I wasn’t referring to your hairstyle,” Slater murmured dryly. “There’s something innocent about a teenager running around braless. An older woman ends up looking cheap and easy.”

“That’s one man’s opinion.” Dawn refused to be drawn into a debate over the issue. His opinion of her was so low he’d find fault with her no matter how conservatively she was dressed. “I doubt if you’d approve of anything I wore. This afternoon you were critical because I wasn’t dressed in black.”

“You can’t claim to look like a widow mourning the death of her husband—not in that outfit with all your assets on display,” he snapped in disgust.

“I thought we were here to discuss Randy,” she fired back. “If all you want to talk about is
the way I dress, then I don’t see any point in continuing this conversation.” She turned on her heel, knowing he wouldn’t let her leave.

“Dammit! You know it’s Randy.” The admission was reluctantly pulled from him.

Slowly Dawn turned back to face him. This time his gaze swung away from the steadiness of hers. “He is your son,” she reaffirmed what Slater hadn’t been willing to listen to earlier in the day.

“Did you put him up to it?” Slater swirled the bourbon in his glass.

“Up to what?” she frowned.

“Did you put him up to waiting for me here at the office after we talked today?” Slater elaborated on his question, eyeing her in a sidelong look.

“No, I did not.” Her denial was forceful and indignant. “It was all Randy’s idea. I knew nothing about it, and if I had, I would have prevented it.”

“Why?” His head came up as he demanded an explanation of her statement.

“Because I didn’t want him to meet you until we had come to some kind of understanding,” Dawn stated, protective of her child.

“An understanding about what?” Slater challenged. “The identity of his father? Granted, I thought you were lying to me this afternoon, but I am capable of accepting the evidence of my own eyes. There isn’t much doubt that he’s my son. Even Jeeter saw the resemblance.”

She was momentarily distracted by the familiarity
of the name before she remembered the crusty fishing guide, Jeeter Jones. Then her thoughts focused back on the issue at hand.

“Until this afternoon, it never occurred to me that you might deny the possibility you had fathered my child,” Dawn admitted. “I never thought there would be any question about that.” She paused to draw a breath, glancing down at her hands. “But I knew how much you despised me. It doesn’t matter how you feel about me, but I’m not going to let you try to get back at me by hurting Randy. I won’t let you take out your anger on him.”

A silent rage trembled through him before Slater finally exploded. “For eleven years, you keep the existence of our son a secret from me! My son! You’ve kept him from me all this time—and you stand there and justify it by saying you are afraid I’ll hurt him?! My own child?!”

His outrage put her fears to rest, even making them appear foolish in retrospect, but they had been very real to her for a long time.

“I didn’t know how you’d react when you found out,” she admitted. “And I didn’t want to take any chances of Randy being hurt.” She felt almost weak with relief. “It could have been easy for you to use him as a weapon against me.”

Slater was slowly bringing his temper under control. He bolted down the rest of his drink and turned to refill the glass, a whiteness continuing to show along the taut line of his mouth. “If you weren’t the mother of my son, I think I could kill
you for even suggesting I’d do that,” he muttered thickly.

But his threat struck a responsive chord in her own feelings and reassured as opposed to frightening her. This strong love for their son was a primitive bond they shared in common. It suddenly became easier to talk.

“I suppose he asked you a lot of questions today,” Dawn surmised.

“No. Mostly Randy just talked . . . about himself, school, things he liked to do . . . and I just listened.” He stared at his drink, but didn’t taste it. “How long has he known that Simpson wasn’t his father?” It was close to being a loaded question.

“Since I felt he was old enough to understand. He was around five years old at the time. I explained only as much as I thought he could comprehend, then waited for him to come to me with questions when they occurred to him. So actually, his knowledge of you was gained over a period of years.”

“He’s known about me all this time. And you’re only now bothering to inform me about his existence. Didn’t I have the right to know before this?” he accused harshly.

“Yes, you did.” But it had taken her a long time to arrive at that conclusion.

“Then why didn’t you tell me?” Slater demanded. “For eleven years, another man raised my son. There’s eleven years out of his life that I’ll never have!” He was growing angry at the injustice of it. “I thought there wasn’t any
more you could take from me. But you took my son!”

“If I had known I was pregnant with our child, I never would have married Simpson,” Dawn countered to deflect some of his anger. “But I didn’t know it. And when I discovered I was pregnant, I thought it was my husband’s baby. And I was glad, because I was finally giving something back to him after all I had taken.”

“So you passed him off as Simpson’s child,” he accused.

“I believed he was.” She remembered how happy she had been when the doctor had confirmed her suspicions only a couple of months after the wedding. She had been so eager to tell Simpson the news, knowing that he had given up any hope of having an heir and guessing how much he secretly hoped for one whenever he played with his nieces or nephews. She recalled, also, how confused she had been when he had failed to express delight at her news.

“How long before you realized he wasn’t?” Slater wanted to know.

“Almost right away,” Dawn admitted with poignant recollection. “Simpson told me.” Her mouth twisted with the irony of it. “A week after I told him the happy tidings, he came back to tell me his.”

“Which was?”

“Simpson couldn’t have children.” Her voice was low with the remembered shock of that moment. “Some childhood fever had left him sterile. It was a small detail he hadn’t considered important enough to tell me before the wedding. When I informed him we were expecting a baby, he didn’t tell me about his sterility until he had reconfirmed it with his doctor in case some miracle had happened.”

“Why didn’t you get an annulment?” Slater challenged and watched with narrowed and critical eyes.

“And do what?” Dawn asked, because it had occurred to her at the time. “Come back here to you? Pregnant and divorced? After what I’d done to you, you might not have wanted me back. You might not have believed it was your child I was carrying. Even if you had, how would you have taken care of us? You didn’t have a steady job, and all you owned was a broken-down old boat and the clothes on your back.”

“And you didn’t have any faith in my ability to take care of you,” he declared grimly, tipping his
head back to toss down the second drink. “If I had been Simpson and discovered my loving wife was going to have another’s man’s child, I would have thrown you out.”

“Thank heaven you weren’t Simpson,” Dawn murmured with a trace of resentment for his callous attitude. “He had more than enough grounds for divorce, but he was willing to forgive and forget.”

Only later had she learned that there never had been a divorce in the Lord family, and Simpson had been a great one for upholding the family tradition. Still, even if he had felt honor-bound to continue their marriage, it didn’t alter the love and understanding he had shown her, and the kindness he had shown her son. She couldn’t have asked more from a man than Simpson had given her.

“So you stayed with him.” A humorless sound like a laugh lifted the corners of his mouth, widening it into a derisive smile. “Why not? He was filthy rich. That’s why you married him—to get your hands on his money.” He lifted his glass in a mock salute. “I never did congratulate you on your success.”

Dawn ignored the latter, failing again to correct his impression that she had been left a wealthy widow. “That’s why I married him,” she admitted. “But his money had very little to do with the reason I stayed with him, beyond assuring my child would be well cared for. After Simpson explained that he couldn’t be the father of the child I was carrying, I had to tell him
about you. He already knew. I think he even knew why I married him but it didn’t matter. You can imagine how I felt.”

“No, I can’t imagine how you felt.” Slater shook his head, his voice running low with contempt. He deliberately refused to understand or even concede she was capable of remorse.

Nothing would be gained by responding to his caustic retort. Dawn felt more could be accomplished by trying to make him understand the reasons behind some of her actions.

“I remember Simpson telling me that, in a way, he was glad he couldn’t produce children because he wasn’t obligated to make an advantageous business marriage to consolidate wealth since it would require an heir. He was free to marry the girl he loved, which was me.” She bowed her head slightly as she spoke. “He loved me enough to accept another man’s child into his home. I know you’ll find this hard to believe, Slater, but by then, I was tired of hurting people. After hurting so many, I couldn’t hurt Simpson more than I already had. I couldn’t give him my love, because you had it, but I decided that I could give him happiness. So, yes, I stayed with him—out of a mixture of gratitude and guilt—and I worked at being a good wife to bring him some of the happiness he deserved.”

“And you gave him my son,” Slater shot the accusation at her, ignoring all else she had told him. “I suppose Simpson passed Randy off as his own.”

“No. For Randy’s sake, he let him take the
family surname, but Simpson never legally adopted him. And it’s your name that is listed as father on his birth certificate,” Dawn explained. “Simpson played the role of Dutch uncle to Randy, but he never usurped your position as his father. He was adamant about that.”

Her answer brought a moment’s silence. When Slater finally spoke, it was with considerably less heat and bitterness. “I guess I owe him something for that.” He set his empty glass on the rattan table and squared around to face her. “Which brings us back to Randy, and what’s to be done now.”

“Not having a father never bothered Randy too much while Simpson was alive.” She threaded her fingers together, spreading them and studying the straight patterns they made. “He needs a father. He needs you.” She looked at him, folding her fingers together in a prayerful attitude that asked for a truce between them.

His gray eyes glittered in a cold, calculating study of her. “I can’t help wondering why you waited until after Simpson was dead before you suddenly decided that Randy needed a father. It can’t be that you were waiting until he died. The man’s been dead for more than two months.”

“Do you think I should have flown out here the day after his funeral?” Dawn bristled at his veiled attack. “There was a small matter of putting affairs in order, not to mention the shock of losing someone I had grown to care about.”

“Of course.” But it was a response that mocked her explanation. Slater wandered idly toward
her, that cool, assessing gaze of his continuing to study her. “At first I had the crazy idea that you’d come back for a much more personal reason. I suppose it shows the size of my ego that I thought you were here to see if we couldn’t get back together again. The second time you were going to marry for love—that’s what you told me the morning you left. And I wanted to believe that you still cherished some love for me.” His voice was growing harder and colder.

How could she tell him that she did when she didn’t know how much of her desire was rooted in nostalgia? Both of them had changed so much. It wasn’t possible to feel the same. But there was unquestionably smoke coming from an old fire and the ashes were still hot.

“Then I found out about Randy,” he said in a tone that indicated the knowledge had changed his thinking. “So you’re here, claiming he needs a father.” His gaze made a slow sweep of her, taking in every curve of her body. “And there you stand—a sexy, young widow with money to burn and no one to tell her how she should spend it, and with eleven years of having to be a good wife behind her. A half-grown son is bound to be an encumbrance.”

“That’s not true,” Dawn protested, stung by his implication.

“Isn’t it?” Slater challenged, stopping in front of her. “You say he needs a father. Are you planning to dump him on me so you can go out and have your fun? It must be difficult to go
husband-hunting with a brat in tow. How much easier it is to pawn him off onto someone else.”

She was trembling with anger, too incensed to voice any kind of denial to such totally false and denigrating accusations. The recourse left to her was completely instinctive, the impulse to strike the words from his mouth.

The lightning arc of her hand aimed for his cheek, striking it with all the force she could put behind it. The blow turned his head to the side, the impact stinging the palm of her hand. Her own temper made her indifferent to the retaliating anger that darkened his expression. If anything, she felt satisfaction seeing the white mark on his jaw slowly turning red where she had struck him.

Dawn had acted with no thought of the consequences, forgetting that violence was invariably answered with violence. She was forcibly reminded of it when her arms were seized and she was yanked roughly against him, his fingers digging into her soft flesh. The murderous light smouldering in his eyes brought a flicker of alarm to her expression.

The glimpse of it made Slater pause. An expression that was both wry and bitter with regret swept across his features, but his gaze continued to bore into her. The grip of his hands had pulled her onto her toes and arched her body against the length of his. Sensitive nerve endings picked up the sensation of her bare thighs pressed to the cotton texture of his slacks and the solidness of
his hip bones ground against hers. The peaks of her breasts were flattened to the hard wall of his chest. Dawn was hardly drawing a breath while her heart beat unevenly, not certain what would happen next.