“You can go. But fair warning...it might not be fun and you’ll definitely get wet. Might want to see if Essie has a raincoat you can use.”
She nodded and slipped into the house to see what she could find. Maybe she’d find her common sense. Essie seemed to have plenty of that. She might lend some, in case Lissa’s had taken a long leave of absence.
Essie did have a raincoat. When Lissa stepped back outside, Marcus had disappeared. She heard a truck start and waited on the front porch as he drove to pick her up.
She stepped off the porch expecting to race across the lawn to the vehicle. Instead, he pulled close and jumped out to open the door for her.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she told him as she climbed in.
In response, he closed the door and hurried back to the driver’s side. “I do have some manners.”
“I know you do.” She met his gaze. “Let’s try to be friends.”
“I’m trying,” he told her in his low, gruff voice. “You have to give a guy a few days to figure things out and get over feeling like he’s had his legs kicked out from under him.”
“I know.” She pulled her seat belt around and he reached over to click it into place for her. “Thank you.”
“I’m not going to take him from you,” he said as they headed down the long driveway back to the main road.
The sting of tears took her by surprise. She wiped at them, and when he handed her a handkerchief, she shook her head.
“I’m fine.”
“Yeah, of course you are.” He shoved the handkerchief into her hand. “I know he needs you. I know he doesn’t need a scarred-up, dysfunctional cowboy for a dad.”
“I think you’re wrong,” she said, and the words took her by surprise. It was more than a platitude; it was the truth.
“I’m not wrong.” He pulled onto the road. “I know myself better than anyone. I want him to know that I’m his dad. I want to spend time with him. But he needs you in his life.”
“I think he might need us both. As the adults in his life, we have to find the best way to give him stability.”
There was silence except for tires humming on wet pavement. Lissa studied the strong profile of the man sitting next to her. She couldn’t see the left side of his face, but she wondered about the scar on his cheek. He glanced her way, caught her staring.
“Was the scar from bull riding?” she asked.
“It’s a gift from my father,” he said simply and kept driving.
“What?”
“The scar on my face. My father did that. I’ve always heard that the fruit doesn’t fall far from the vine. If that’s the case, I’m his son and I can’t outrun the fact that his DNA is in me. I’m not going to subject another kid to the life we led when he was alive.”
Lissa’s heart constricted. It made her sad that he believed that about himself, that he would be a father like his own. But what could she tell him? She didn’t know him well enough to reassure him otherwise.
She thought of another old saying and she smiled. “The proof is in the pudding.”
“What?” He gave her a quick glance and then returned his focus to the road, steering around water that covered their lane.
“I don’t know what it means. But if you want to throw out old sayings, I thought I’d toss out one of my own.”
He grimaced and made a grunting noise that might have been a chuckle. “I think the point of a saying is that it should fit the situation. My dad was evil,” he told her. “He wasn’t a good person. I’m his son. The fruit doesn’t fall far from the vine.”
“But the proof is in the pudding,” she repeated. “I don’t know what proof is in the pudding, but I’m saying we should look at who you are and how you really treat those around you instead of insinuating you’re evil just because your father was.”
“That’s real nice of you to think that.” He hit his blinker and a moment later turned onto the back road that led to his place. “But I’m sure Sammy filled you in on exactly the kind of person I am. If you thought differently, you would have found me a little sooner. Sammy would have called me the day she found out she was pregnant. So there’s the proof that is in the pudding.”
“So Oliver is destined to be a horrible person, a terrible man and a bad father because your dad was a terrible person?”
He grinned at that. “Oh, good one. I think you get the point for this set. No, he isn’t destined to be bad. He had Sammy and he has you. You’ll make sure he grows up to be a decent person.”
At one point Lissa could have left town, taken Oliver, and that would have been the end of it. But she had stayed and now their lives seemed to be intertwined. And the nurse in her, the person who cared and wanted to fix others, wouldn’t let her walk away.
She knew better than to take Marcus on as a project. She knew one or both, maybe all three of them, would be hurt in the process.
But she was committed. She had a few weeks to show him he could be a decent father, that he wasn’t destined to be his father’s son any more than Oliver was. If they believed in redemption, and she knew they both did, then they had to believe hearts could change and the past didn’t have to control the future.
Rather than finding reasons he couldn’t have Oliver, she would help him to discover the reasons he could.
It seemed like the perfect plan as long as she could keep her own heart intact in the process. Marcus might be rough around the edges, but he was also chivalrous and kind. And when he smiled, she forgot that a relationship with a broken man was the last thing she wanted.
Chapter Five
From his parking spot next to the house, Marcus could see the normally lazy creek already out of its banks. With the rain still coming down, it would only get higher. He got out of the truck and Lissa joined him, standing so close that for a moment he was distracted by her. And that couldn’t happen.
He needed to move his tractor and ATV to higher ground. The barn sat on a slight rise, and he didn’t think water would get in there.
“Wow, there’s a lot of power in that water.” Lissa whistled low as they walked toward the creek.
“Yeah, enough to tear down a building or move a vehicle.”
“Will it rise up to your house?”
He glanced back at the hundred-year-old home. “I guess it’s probably gotten up there more than once. But that old house is solid.”
He got lost for a minute, thinking of the Brown family who had lived there for nearly a century. Passed down from generation to generation, they’d built onto this house as the family grew. The house had history. A good history. He guessed that was what he liked about the place. It was rambling, ancient, but folks had been happy here. He couldn’t imagine losing it this way.
“You okay?” she asked, her voice soft.
“Yeah, I’m good. Just thinking about that house. I’d hate for anything to happen to it.”
“It means a lot to you, this house? Has it always been in your family?”
This was why he avoided conversation. People wanted to dig into his past, figure him out. Women were especially bad about digging. The scar. His voice. Those things attracted women who liked fixer-uppers.
He didn’t need fixing.
But she was giving him that intent, questioning look, so he would give her the story she wanted.
“The house and property belonged to the Browns. When I was a kid, I used to walk down here, escaping my house and my dad. Mattie Brown made the best peanut butter cookies. And tea. She used to make me some kind of herbal tea. I don’t know what she put in it, but it helped...”
He caught himself and shook his head. She didn’t need that much information about his life. “I enjoyed visiting. They were a decent family. They liked each other. When it came up for sale, after all the kids moved away, I decided it shouldn’t go to a stranger.”
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br /> She was walking toward the back of his house, and he followed. The rain started to come down in sheets again and thunder rumbled in the distance. A second later the two of them were running. He reached the back door first and opened it for her. They stepped inside, dripping wet. It was a small space and they were face-to-face, both with water dripping. She swiped at her face with her hand, and then she touched his face, her hand brushing across the scar that he’d prefer most people didn’t notice.
He stilled beneath her hesitant touch and she withdrew her hand. He grabbed a towel off the shelf over the washer and handed it to her.
“Liked each other?” she asked as she handed him the towel.
He blinked, confused.
“The people who lived here?” she clarified.
“I guess families should like each other, shouldn’t they?”
In all the years he’d known Mattie and George Brown, he’d never seen them raise a hand to a person or an animal. George had worked with Marcus, teaching him to train horses. He hadn’t realized back then that George was teaching him patience. Old and a little hard of hearing, George had taught Marcus to trust. There had been few people in his life whom he’d given that trust to.
The one person he still didn’t trust, not completely, was himself. He didn’t trust himself to not be like his own father.
“I had a neighbor.” Lissa’s voice broke into his thoughts, bringing him back to the present. “I called her Tía Theresa. She wasn’t my aunt, but she would have been a wonderful aunt. She lived in the apartment next to ours. When things got rough in our apartment, I would sit in the stairwell. Theresa would join me on the steps, bringing me cookies or food.” Lissa took a breath, then went on. “She told me about her husband—he’d been a police officer. He’d always treated her right, she said. Never laid a hand on her. Some men are like that, she would tell me. Some men don’t hurt their women or their daughters. Not that the men my mother had in our apartment were husband or father. They were just the men she brought home.”
The words she’d spoken hung between them. He didn’t have to ask. He knew she’d been hurt.
“She hot-lined my mother,” she said after a while. “She’s the reason the state took me into custody and I went to live with the Simms family. Sammy and I were foster children together. It changed our lives. Because of the Simms, we had a family. I still have them.”
He stood up, uncomfortable with the stories they were sharing and needing to shake off whatever it was about her that rattled him. He shook his head at that. He wasn’t a liar, not even to himself. What it was about her was possibly everything. From her smile to the soft way she spoke and then her story. It connected them in a way he hadn’t expected.
Or wanted.
The only way to sever the connection was to send her and his son packing and never see them again. That had seemed like a good idea, until it hadn’t. As much as he didn’t trust himself to be the man anyone would count on, he also didn’t want to be the dad who walked out on his son.
He’d learned a long time ago that some things took hard work, and it appeared that parenting would be added to that list. He might not have learned the art of parenting from his own mother and father, but that didn’t mean he had an excuse for not trying.
“I need to start moving equipment before that creek comes up any farther.” He pulled a jacket off the hook by the door.
He thought she’d stay put. Instead, she grabbed the rain jacket she’d borrowed from Essie.
“I’ll help.”
Of course she would.
He gave her a long look, shook his head and walked out the door. He walked fast, letting her hurry to catch up with him.
She laughed, the sound light and a little breathless. “Oh, wow, you’re running because we shared our stories and that let me in a little too close for comfort, didn’t it? Emotion is your Kryptonite. You’re better with the surface stuff. A smile, a joke, a teasing look, maybe dinner.”
“I don’t do one-night stands, if that’s what you’re insinuating.” He checked back to see if she was keeping up. “I don’t do relationships. Period. I haven’t dated since Sammy.”
As the information slipped out, he rubbed a hand over his face and groaned.
“Really?” Now her tone was wistful, as if she’d just learned the one great truth.
“Really,” he bit out. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have work to do.”
“Why?” she prodded, and he knew what she meant.
“Because it’s raining, and if I don’t move some equipment, it could get flooded.”
“Dating.”
“Yeah, I knew what you meant. I just hoped I could sidetrack you. And you know why I don’t date. I’ve been working on my life and that meant not dragging someone else into the mess.”
“How’s that going?”
“You can see for yourself.” He hurried under the roof of the equipment shed. She was right there with him.
“Yes, I can see.”
She was standing too close and he almost forgot his vow to work on himself and not get tangled up in relationships that always ended with someone getting hurt. He didn’t want to hurt her. And he didn’t want their relationship to be awkward, not when it might hurt Oliver.
Step one in being a dad meant putting his son first. Ahead of his own crazy, mixed-up emotions. If he kissed her—and he was tempted—that would confuse the issue. It would put his priorities off balance.
Trouble was, he really wanted to kiss her. And she was looking at him like she might want to kiss him back.
The right thing to do here was to put distance between them. Self-sacrifice at its best. “I need to get busy.”
“How can I help?” she asked.
She could go back to Essie’s. Or even to San Antonio. She grinned at him knowingly, as if she could read his thoughts. That smile was becoming familiar. It showed that she’d survived her childhood and she still found things to laugh about. Still found ways to enjoy life. She enjoyed goading him.
“You could let me get some work done,” he grumbled.
“I can’t leave. I don’t have a car.” She patted his chest with the palm of her hand. “Let’s get something straight, cowboy. I’m not chasing after you the way the girls did back in your rodeo days. I’m here to help you build a relationship with your son. End of story. The last thing I want is a damaged male with an overinflated ego.”
Of course he was the last thing she would be looking for in a man. The ego she’d talked about took a bit of a hit, but he shrugged it off. Instead of arguing, he climbed into his tractor and leaned down, reaching for her left hand. She took the offer and he pulled her into the cab of the tractor with him. “Don’t get any ideas. I’m not letting you drive a piece of equipment that cost me a small fortune.”
“I wasn’t going to ask.” She said it sweetly and he knew she’d been tempted.
As they drove through the field, he used the tractor to pick up a bale of hay.
“How much land do you have?”
“Five hundred acres,” he answered.
“That’s no small amount.” She had been watching the landscape roll past. Now she turned to look at him. “You’ve done well with bull riding.”
“Yeah, I’ve done well. I made good investments.”
“Did you?” She didn’t push. Her gaze darted to the rain-soaked fields, the cattle grazing at the top of the hill. “And here I thought you couldn’t climb out of the bottle long enough to feed yourself, let alone a couple hundred head of cattle.”
“Thanks for the compliment.”
“In a way it is. I was wrong about that. You obviously feed your cattle.”
“Yes, I feed my cattle. And I haven’t been climbing in any bottles. Not for several years.”
“Did you ever want to do anything else, other than ride bulls or ranch?�
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To her it probably seemed like a logical question. People must have other dreams and ambitions. She didn’t know what it meant to grow up with Jesse Palermo controlling a person’s every action. As a kid he hadn’t dreamed of anything other than escaping.
“Nope, it’s always been this for me. I’m dyslexic.” The admission slipped out. Not normally what he considered a conversation starter.
“I didn’t know that,” she responded.
“It isn’t as if I tell everyone I meet.” Or anyone, really. His siblings knew. Essie knew.
“Are you saying that is why you didn’t have other goals?”
“No, it’s just a part of who I am. I spent my childhood acting out, getting in trouble and definitely not studying.”
It was only lately that he learned he knew about more than livestock. He had a gift with the stock market. He’d invested his earnings and he’d seen a pretty decent return on his investment in the last couple of years.
He didn’t know her well enough to trust her with that information. Trust. That was something he was working on.
His phone rang, saving him the trouble of having to answer the questions he knew she would have asked. She was that type of female, the kind that couldn’t let anything rest. He would have liked to say that bothered him, but it didn’t.
Sitting next to her, he didn’t feel much like Marcus Palermo, the brawling bull rider. He felt like someone who ought to be thinking about growing up.
* * *
Lissa half listened to the phone call as the tractor bounced across the field. Rain that had let up returned, heavier, bouncing off the windshield of the tractor. Deftly, as if he didn’t have to think through the actions, Marcus moved big, round bales of hay. After several minutes he ended the call and turned the tractor back toward the barn. He drove through the open gate and up the drive to park on a hill a distance behind the house.
“I paid too much to have that tractor taken downstream.”
“Do you think that will happen?”
“They’re expecting a pretty good crest at midnight tonight, and if this rain doesn’t stop, it’ll get even higher. They’re stacking sandbags in front of some stores in town, hoping to keep the water out.”
The Rancher's Secret Child Page 6
