“I didn’t mean to bring up a hard topic,” he muttered. “Sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?”
True, he had no reason to be sorry. It wasn’t as if it were his fault. Like her being sorry that his dad had died. But he could hear the fighting edge to her question.
“You didn’t take my mother away from me or stare at me in the lunchroom on Mommy and Muffins mornings, when the other kids’ moms were there while you were alone at the end of the table. You didn’t have to sit around the Christmas tree, celebrating everything without her. You didn’t—”
“Hey now,” he said, reaching up to take her arm. He had definitely rubbed a sore spot he hadn’t intended to rub, and his heartache intensified.
She turned at his touch, and he climbed up to stand beside her, having reached a stretch of trail that flattened out a degree.
“I don’t know what any of that was like. I can’t imagine. But I’m sorry you went through it.”
Dammit, were her eyes red rimmed? She wiped a finger stubbornly across them as her gaze bounced around him, refusing to look at him. “I just don’t talk about her.”
“Come here, baby,” he said, dragging her up against him.
He called every woman that he held in his arms “baby,” but as the word passed his lips this time, he felt a strange tug on his heart. Baby. It was such a personal thing to say, especially when he was trying to comfort someone, not seduce them, and he’d passed the phrase around for cheap his whole adult life.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” he said, rubbing her back roughly. “I just want to know about you.”
She let him hold her, but she felt rigid, like a fence post cemented in the ground. This woman had a kid. She was a mom. He hadn’t been ready for that this morning. The women with babies on their hips always carried some damage. But when he’d listened to Rose, talking so patiently to her boy through her open screens while unaware that he stood outside, he could tell right away she spoke to a kid and that the kid was probably hers.
Sheis different from the others. Good lord, he wasn’t ready to face that he was capable of letting a woman clip his wings. His brothers had told him many a time that he was fair game to Cupid’s arrow, too, but he’d told them both to F off. Ty had married a woman who’d up and abandoned their two little boys when both had still been in diapers. A lot of good marrying a woman he’d loved had done him. And Travis’s high school sweetheart, a girl who had promised herself to him, had run away after the false news had arrived that Trav’s entire unit had been destroyed, as if to add insult to injury.
Settling down with “the one” proved to be a helluva lot more hazardous these days than keeping his left hand free of a wedding ring—not everyone’s marriage could be a rock like his parents’ had been. Wedding rings caused heartache and court-ordered mediation. And yet here he stood, holding this beautiful woman who’d taken him completely by surprise, overlooking one of the most beautiful canyons to cut through the West Texas desert, the finest of the Legacy—his legacy.
He’d never brought a girl to his spread. He’d sure as hell never done anything like go hiking with one.
And yet his banter with Rose, standing in his kitchen yesterday as he’d practically dared her to touch him when she’d reached for a coffee mug, bracing her to the wall after teasing her about her sexy-as-hell lace bra in her cheap camper had felt so damn natural. So good. He’d never given a girl like her a chance. But now that he was holding her, he wondered… Ty’s life was hard. But Ty swore that his kids made everything worth it. Could a kid make it worth it to him, too?
Sage.
“Where’s Sage’s daddy?” he croaked.
She pulled away from him as if he’d tried to burn her, but she seemed to have her composure now. “Who knows?” She shrugged, looking everywhere but at him. “I met him in a club. Did a thing with him. Things didn’t go as planned. Reality checked,” she said matter-of-factly, as if checking off a list, but he could feel the layers of hurt that lurked beneath the statement.
Protectiveness, like that which had burgeoned as she’d talked about Howard and his “free love” shit, burgeoned now, as he listened to her distant words. He might hardly know his little rose of Texas, but one thing was certain: He needed to stop asking her questions about other dudes. It was pissing him off to hear about them.
“Did he force you or date rape you or some shit?” Goddammit, he needed to clean up his language, too. His brothers were right. Growing up required a lot of damn changes. “Sorry. I curse a lot.”
“I noticed.” She smiled wryly up at him. “And no. He didn’t. I was too wild for my own good until I realized I was pregnant.”
Hell, that anger was gaining fuel again.
“What does that mean? Why do you keep saying crap like you’re taking the blame?”
“I’m not, Mister Need-to-Stick-My-Nose-in-Another’s-Business,” she snapped. “I didn’t know him and never saw him again. All I knew was his name. I had Child Support Services track him down when Sage was just a baby, but when they found him, he asked to sign over his rights. He didn’t want my kid and didn’t want anything to do with me. Turns out he’d married his fiancée, and his fling with me had been during his bachelor party. It wasn’t anything he wanted his wife to know about.
“So I’ve got a son, and I’ve worked my ass off to make sure my father never has to support us even if it means living in a crappy student apartment. I pay all my own bills. I put myself though college and grad school courtesy of student loans and every scholarship I could get my hands on. I apply for a research grant every year to make this field school happen. I graduated with highest honors. I love what I do. I love this art and this land. And I’m determined to never let having a kid stand in my way of success nor allow Sage to suffer through life without a mom because I can’t support him. I know what it’s like not to have a mom, and it’s worse when you know she’s out there but you can’t get to her and she can’t get to you. And Sage…I don’t know what he’d do if I couldn’t support him anymore. He’s a special needs kid, and losing me would mess with him pretty badly. I—”
“Whoa, gear down, there,” he said. “I can tell you’ve worked your ass off. No need to prove yourself. Hey…” He reached out, rubbed her arms up and down, but backed off. Yeah, this woman had baggage. But he felt something here. A need to ease her distress. A need to make her see that she wasn’t damaged goods in spite of the damage that had been dished out to her. “How about you show me the site. ’Kay?”
Stop asking her about her little black book, man. What right do I have to be jealous?
Jeez, it sure as hell was jealousy, which was laughable. He, with a bra still jammed in the back seat of the Beast and more notches on his bedpost than he’d kept track of, was jealous of the guys who’d had this beautiful, smart, and driven woman in their grasp. He had no right to act like some bull in heat marking his female. And yet he was equally angry at the douchebags who’d thrown her away, too. Couldn’t they see how lucky they’d been?
“Then you can get back to your young Padawans at camp and learn them some archaeology. I’ll get out of your way and go cue up the home theater for your upcoming Indiana Jones binge.”