Look at him? he thought, in a cold sweat. He’d been looking at him for the past week. Talking to him. Touching him. And all along, he’d been a part of him? Flesh and bone of him?
Pictures flashed in his mind: the shape of Evan’s face, his jawline, even his ears. Familiar. How could he not have seen it? Was it because he hadn’t wanted to see it? Rafe bowed his head and squeezed his eyes shut. No, she’d told him Evan was Tom’s. Hadn’t she? He’d seen the picture—Evan and Tom fishing. Father and son. So much alike. And he’d believed—
“He’s eight, Rafe. And four months. He’s yours. You’re his father.”
Had all the air been sucked out of the room? His chest refused to expand. Rafe blinked, calculating a twelve month calendar and counting backward through the years.
Dear God.
Anger, hot and explosive burned through him. “All this time—” he gritted out, staring at her in disbelief. “And you didn’t...you couldn’t have—”
She covered her mouth with her hand. “I’m...I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? You’re sorry? Dammit, Carly, when the hell were you planning to tell me? As you were walking out the door for the second time?”
She shook her head miserably. “Rafe...please—”
“Damn you.”
She flinched as if he’d struck her. He wanted to, God help him! All these years!
A son. He had a son?
Carly steepled her hands over the bridge of her nose muffling a cry. “I’m sorry, Rafe. I...oh, God...I tried to tell you. I wanted to tell you.”
His legs felt mired in concrete. His pulse wanted to pound, but it felt thick and slow. “You wanted to tell me? Nine years?” he said through clenched teeth. “Nine god-damn years, and you couldn’t find a single opportunity?”
“I did try. I called you a month after we—” She closed her eyes. “A woman answered the phone.”
His mind reeled. “A woman! Are you saying you didn’t tell me because a woman answered my phone? Christ, Carly, it could have been a cleaning lady, for all I know.”
“But it wasn’t. We both know that she was in your bed.”
Numbly Rafe’s mind thumbed backward nine years, to a time he’d worked hard to forget.
Yes, he remembered. He’d forgotten that other woman’s name, after all these years, but he hadn’t forgotten the shock of Carly’s call or the fact that she’d waited a full month to call him. “You never said anything about being pregnant.”
“I—I never got that far.”
“Damn,” he muttered, remembering in some back room of his mind that he might have, possibly, cut her off. “And that was it? You spent your twenty cents and you figured your responsibility was done?”
She edged around the desk. “Rafe, you’re angry right now—”
He heard her squeak of fear as he shoved a ladder-back chair out of his way and sent it crashing to the floor. His mouth had a cruel slant to it. “You don’t think I have a right to be?”
She looked around desperately for an escape route as he moved toward her.
“I just find out that I’ve got a son and I’ve missed the first eight years of his life because you found it inconvenient to tell me about it?”
“Not inconvenient. It was a choice. I made it and I had to live with it.” Her eyes burned red, and she fought back tears, but they leaked out the corners of her eyes. “And if I had told you? Trapped you into a marriage you didn’t want with a child you didn’t want? Would it have made you stop running? From us and what we could have had?”
“You left me, dammit! I came home and you were gone. Lock, stock and barrel.”
Her mouth quivered with emotion. “You walked out of our relationship long before I did, Rafe. You just hung around to watch from a safe distance as it crumbled. I told you I wanted children. You didn’t. You made that perfectly clear. You didn’t want any of it, Rafe. Not marriage, not a family—”
“And who the hell gave you the right to decide that I shouldn’t know I had one?”
“A child isn’t something you can take or leave, Rafe, or some...some abstract idea that might or might not be interesting to you. I did what I thought was best for Evan. But don’t you think for a minute that I haven’t asked myself every day of his life if I’d done the right thing!”
Rafe’s eyes did a slow, contemptuous rake down the length of her. As if he’d stripped her naked, she crossed her arms over her chest and hugged herself. He leaned close, his voice almost a whisper.
“Tell me, Carly, did Tom even know you had a bun in the oven when you got him to marry you? Or did he die thinking Evan was his?”
Her stinging slap knocked his head sideways. With the speed of a striking snake, Rafe grabbed her wrist and jerked her toward him. Her flesh gave beneath his fingers. Her breath came fast and hard, and her breasts brushed against his rigid forearm with each rise and fall. But the steel had returned to her eyes, the kind he’d expect to see in a courtroom. Gone was the fear, and any trace of uncertainty. In their place was perfect, hollow control.
His mouth lifted in what anyone else might have mistaken for a smile. “Well, at least you were honest with one of us,” he said, releasing her arm without gentleness.
“Where are you going?” he heard her ask as he tore his hat and black duster from the rack beside the door.
“Out,” he said, jerking the door open and fitting the Stetson on his head. “Oh, and, darlin’? Don’t wait up.”
The door rattled in its frame, knocking two picture frames beside it askew.
Carly stood listening to the fading sound of Rafe’s truck as it disappeared down the road, spitting gravel. Somehow, she remained standing, breathing. She felt like a scooped-out pumpkin whose guttering candle flickered inside. For years she’d anticipated this moment, knowing it would come. Her rehearsed lines were nowhere to be found, and her pride was a smudge on the floor.
Slowly, she slid down beside the desk, bracing her back against it and stretching her plaster-encased leg out in front of her. She dropped her face into her hands.
An awful, overwhelming fatigue sucked at her. Or maybe it was regret. Too late, a voice said. No going back.
It was over, and he hated her. No surprise. He had every right. In his place, she supposed she would hate him, too.
It didn’t matter, she told herself, pressing the heels of her hands to her eyes. All that really mattered was Evan, and what all this would do to him.
Evan.
“Oh, God,” she moaned to the air as her palms grew wet. Evan was in the middle of this, where he’d always been. Only now everything was changed. Never again would it be just the two of them. Whatever Rafe decided to do about this, his specter would be there between them. She only prayed that he could put aside his hatred of her for the sake of his son.
But as evening shadows closed in on her and the sky rumbled with thunder, Carly feared she’d made a terrible, irreversible mistake. One that they would all spend a lifetime paying for.
Durango, the tourist mecca of western Colorado, preferred to deny the existence of places like the Blue Lagoon Saloon in its travel brochures. Its location on the fringes of Durango city limits made that convenient. A locals’ hangout, the bar had passed its prime years ago, and looked most at home with a handful of chopped Harleys parked out front. It wasn’t the sort of place Rafe regularly frequented, but he’d come here because he craved anonymity and a place in which to lose himself.
Inside, faded flocked wallpaper, curled at the corners, covered the parts of the walls that beer-advertising mirrors didn’t. A handful of worn tables and chairs sat in some semblance of order in the center of the room, while a jukebox and four Naugahyde-clad booths—one of which Rafe had occupied for the better part of the evening—lined the far side of one wall.
The red-headed cocktail waitress, whose name, she’d informed him, was Susie, slid a neat shot of whiskey toward the center of his growing stack of empty shooters. He’d formed a hexagon with the empties, and now h
e considered how the new addition might expand the design.
“You sure you want another one, honey?” she asked, leaning with both forearms against his table, so that the tomato-red wraparound top she wore gapped intentionally at her ample cleavage. Rafe didn’t even pretend not to look.
Her cocoa-colored eyes went soft with concern for him.
“You look like you’ve had enough.”
He wasn’t gonna touch that one.
Instead, he appeared to think hard about her advice for a moment. Then, with a shrug, he said, “Nope, not yet.” With a disarming smile for Susie, he knocked back the shot in one gulp. He made a face as it burned down his throat. He waited for this last shot to take its effect, but—nothing. He felt appallingly, annoyingly sober.
Susie shook her head in sympathy. “Oh, honey, whoever she is, I hope she knows what she’s throwin’ away.”
He didn’t want to talk about her. He didn’t want to talk at all. Holding up his empty glass, he said, “One more time, Susie.”
“Look, sweetie,” she said slowly, patting his hand as if he were dim-witted. “We close in twenty minutes. Why don’t you just set here a while, drink some nice, hot coffee, and let me call you a cab?” The bartender floated into Rafe’s line of vision, carrying, coincidentally, a steaming cup. Susie set it down in front of him. “You oughtn‘ta be drivin’ in your condition.”
The coffee’s strong scent wafted to him like a slap of cold air. Well, hell, he thought. He’d been eighty-sixed! Couldn’t they see he was nowhere near drunk enough yet?
“Go on, now,” Susie urged in a motherly voice. “Take a sip. You’ll thank me in the mornin’.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said, hoping she’d go away. “Fine.” He took a sip of the dark brew to pacify her. She smiled with a little nod, having done her good deed for the night, and drifted off to another table with her cork-topped tray.
For a long time, Rafe stared into the dark coffee, not really seeing it. Instead, Carly’s voice echoed in his head
He’s yours, Rafe. Your son. Not Tom’s.
His hand tightened around the warm mug and he cursed her again. How could she? he asked himself for the hundredth time. How could she have kept it from him all these years? Who the hell was she to decide for him? She’d been afraid of rejection, she’d said. A muscle jumped in his clamped jaw. She’d never given him the chance to prove her wrong. It went to the heart of the very thing that had killed their relationship in the first place.
Trust.
She didn’t trust him. He sure as hell couldn’t trust her. And there they were, at opposite ends of the same story, with Evan in the middle.
He thought of the blond-haired boy who’d looked at him with Carly’s eyes. His son. His blood. It struck him then that Evan was his only blood relation. Not, of course, counting his faithless mother, who’d ditched him and his father when Rafe was just about Evan’s age and had never been heard from since. For all he knew, she was dead, too.
He’d learned young not to count on others, and he supposed that was why he’d chosen rodeoing as a career. No one to count on or blame but himself. No one to be responsible for. No one to answer to. He was happy being alone. It suited him.
Another lie, in a long string of lies he’d told himself over the years. He’d gotten used to being alone. That was the real truth. Then, just when he had all his cards stacked tenuously atop one another, Carly had shown up and punched a hole in his paper house.
You walked out of this relationship long before I did, her voice echoed. You just hung around to watch from a safe distance while it crumbled.
Had he? Hell, that ship had sunk beneath them, but she’d been the one to bail. And even if there was any truth to the words, right now, he didn’t give a damn. He didn’t want logic muddying up his personal sense of betrayal.
Rafe plunged his fingers through his hair, pressing against the back of his skull, where violence simmered like a throb.
“Well, if it ain’t Rafe Kellard,” a voice beside him said, in a tone that made Rafe look up with slow malice. Sometimes, he mused, life was good.
The bloated cowboy standing beside his table grinned goadingly at Rafe with tobacco-stained teeth set in a face only a mother could truly appreciate. He opened up his considerable stance to encompass the handful of captive onlookers scattered across the bar. “Rafe Kellard,” he announced, “the ex-world champion bull rider! What’s the matter, Kellard? Drinkin’ over your loss o’ nerve?”
Swamp-Tooth hooted at his compatriot nearby, who laughed with drunken appreciation.
Rafe twirled his cup between his fingers, a smile of pure malice creeping to his mouth. Go on, he thought. I dare ya.
“Hell,” Swamp-Tooth went on, oblivious to his own personal safety. “I seen women take bigger hits than you and come back. But not you. Why is that, Kellard? That bull knock the nerve right outa you? Too yellow to get back up again?”
Rafe felt the rush of his blood as he got slowly to his feet, his gaze pinned on Swamp-Tooth and the appealingly broad plane of his jaw. The whiskey pumped through him like warm courage. “Hey, don’t hold back, pal. Say what you really think.”
“I lost a lot o’ money on you that night,” Swamp-Tooth growled, backing up a step.
“’Zat right?” Rafe said evenly, though the room was doing a slow spin.
“That’s...that’s right. Practically ruined me, you bastard.”
Rafe made a tsking sound between his teeth. “Now that’s a real shame. What’d you say your name was?”
His eyes narrowed. “I didn’t.”
“Good,” Rafe said with a chilling smile, “’cause I prefer to keep this sort of thing between strangers.” His fist caught the other man’s jaw hard, knocking his head backward with a satisfying crack. Swamp-Tooth stumbled backward and crashed into an empty table, splintering it beneath him. Then, like a steer too dumb to get out of the rain, Swamp-Tooth shook his head and charged back at Rafe, bear-hugging him around the waist and sending them both crashing into the booth where Rafe had been sitting. Glasses clanked and scattered beneath them, and he heard Susie shout something to the bartender. Rafe dodged his opponent’s fist, which slammed into the tabletop with a sickening thud.
“Owwww!” Swamp-Tooth roared, his breath fetid with tobacco and alcohol, and took Rafe with him as he rolled to the floor.
Everything seemed to lose order then, as Swamp-Tooth’s friend jumped into the fray, followed by a half-dozen others who simply hungered for a brawl. Glass shattered, wood fractured, and general mayhem ensued. Rafe tossed Swamp-Tooth in the direction of the bar, where he collided with a stack of glassware.
The bartender ducked a thrown beer bottle, which smashed into the neat glass shelves of liquor behind him. The crash was deafening, but Rafe was too busy fending off blows from Swamp-Tooth’s compatriot to worry much about it.
A surprise punch to the gut temporarily blinded him, but not for so long that he didn’t see the wooden chair coming down in his direction. He dodged it easily, then sent his attacker sprawling into a thicket of brawlers, scattering them like ninepins.
Swaying woozily, with adrenaline and alcohol still rushing through him, Rafe looked around for more corners, with his fists up around his chin. He could taste the blood on his teeth. For a moment, he thought, all was right with the world. He felt invincible. Vindicated.
But the moment was fleeting.
In the next few seconds, he heard the sound of sirens and he realized—with an oath—that the day’s bad luck had only begun to rear its ugly head.
The blaring ring of the phone made Carly shoot bolt upright in Rafe’s bed, as if she’d taken a shot from a cattle prod.
“What?” she said to the dark room, still lost in some dream.
The phone rang a second time. Loudly.
Blinking, she looked at the glowing digital readout on the bedstand clock. Two-thirty-seven a.m. She’d been asleep for exactly forty-five minutes. Who in the world would be calling at this time
of night? A dozen awful possibilities flitted through her mind, each worse than the last, and all of them concerning Rafe.
Her heart thumped in her ears, and she fumbled for the receiver in the dark. “Hello?”
A long silence answered her.
“Hello?” she repeated, more urgently.
Finally a voice said, “Is Gus there?”
Carly squeezed her eyes shut with relief. Thank God. At least he wasn’t dead in some ditch somewhere. “Rafe?”
“I wanna talk to Gus,” he said, as if he didn’t know it was her answering his bedside phone.
Irritation made her purse her lips. “He’s not here. He went to Laurie’s for the night.” She heard a mumbled curse on the other end of the line and the squeak of his grip on the handset. Another long silence.
“I won’t do?” Carly asked at last.
“No,” came the gruff reply.
Carly wasn’t in the mood for games. “Fine. Goodbye.” She started to hang up the phone.
“Wait!” he shouted, loud enough for her to put the receiver back to her ear.
“Carly? Don’t hang up.”
Her eyes rolled up to the ceiling. “I thought you didn’t want to talk to me.”
“I don’t,” he said with resignation, “but I only get one phone call.”
She frowned. “I beg your pardon?”
“I said,” he reiterated through gritted teeth, “I only get one phone call.”
“Ahhh...” She paused significantly. “Outa dimes?”
“No. Dammit, Carly, this isn’t funny.”
No, it wasn’t. “Let me guess. Drunk and disorderly?”
He growled some reply.
“Excuse me?”
“I said yes!”
She winced and held the receiver away from her ear. She could hear the alcohol in his voice, and she could hardly miss the anger. “Don’t tell me you got in a fight.”
“Sort of,” he admitted. “Okay, I got in a brawl. I need Gus to come bail me out.”
“Rafe, it’s two-thirty in the morning. You want me to wake Gus and make him trudge down to lockup to bail you out now?”
To Love A Cowboy Page 12
