by Dianne Drake
“You chilly?” he asked.
“Nope,” she lied. “Just enjoying the scenery.”
“Well, the spring colors were one of the few things I liked when I lived here. That, and all the rocks and canyons where you could climb.”
“You liked to climb?”
“Still do. Just haven’t had the opportunity for, well—since I moved away. Did have some training in the army, which wasn’t much of a deal considering all the real climbing I was used to.”
“Maybe when you’re here, you’ll be able to get some in.” She looked off in the distance at the red rock that seemed to be jutting out of nowhere. What would it be like to be able to simply go up the side of it? In her life, there had never been time for activities or athletics or anything like that. She’d had meal time, and tutoring time, play time, reading time, bedtime. On the weekends, but not too often, she’d been granted mother time, maybe an hour or two when she’d been allowed to tag along with her mother on appointments. But never time to simply go climb a rock or look at pretty flowers.
So maybe Matt didn’t have the best of it here—she really didn’t know that story, or maybe he’d been so overwhelmed he hadn’t known how to look for the best of what he’d had. Whatever the case, she was enjoying the ride, enjoying the image in her mind of him climbing up one of those gigantic rocks.
“I hope so. Although I’ll be out of shape.”
“You look in pretty good shape to me,” she blurted out, even though she hadn’t meant to.
“Army life will do that to you. But if I keep up my cowboy medicine for long...” Matt sighed heavily. “They’ll probably have to put me back through some basic training before they let me back out on the battlefield again.”
“You really do want to go back to the battlefield? I’ve consulted with several military medical personnel who couldn’t wait until their rotation was over. All of them said the work got to them, so many casualties and things that couldn’t get fixed. And the gunfire in the distance. Or never knowing when the hospital might come under siege or they might have to evacuate. It was a consistent story, Matt. And here you are, totally the opposite. So why?”
“Because somebody has to do it, and I can. I do well under pressure. And I can shut out pretty much everything but what I’m doing at the moment. I got used to doing that when I was a kid. My old man yelled a lot. I learned to shut him out and concentrate on something else. Guess it carried over with me to the military.” He slowed the truck, then made a right-hand turn onto something that once might have been called a road. Today it was barely a path with some gravel. Winding for miles. No end in sight. The sign at the turn-off read only “Tolly Ranch Road.”
“Tolly?” she asked. “They give these roads names?”
“Nope. Tolly is my patient. His trailer is at the end of the road. Only one out this way. So the names you see on the roads are actually the names of the people who live on them. Normally, it’s one person or family per road.”
“And these roads are how long?”
“Sometimes eight, maybe ten miles.”
“With no one else living on it.”
“No one, and nothing. It’s deserted out here, Ellie. Lonely. Barren.”
“Why do they stay?”
“Open grazing for their cattle. They don’t have to own the land. They can lease it from the government, and the cost is a fraction of what they’d have to pay to buy it and pay the taxes. The stipulation is they must have a base from which to operate, and since they don’t own the property they won’t build on it because, technically, what they might build there would belong to the government as it’s on government-owned property. Hence the cowboy trailers. They’re not permanent. Rundown, yes, since they’re not permanent residences and usually just a place to sleep for the night. But they serve their purpose.”
As they proceeded down Tolly Ranch Road, Matt slowed the truck to almost a crawl. It was only precautionary, as the road wasn’t bumpy like many of them were. “This is a pretty good road—Doc Granger left a road evaluation with each patient chart, so I’d know what I might be getting myself into. Some will be truck-worthy, others I can take a motorcycle, and some may require a horse. This is one of the better ranch roads, but just in case, there’s a pillow in the back you can use if you need to support your back. And if it gets too rough, tell me.”
“Thanks,” she said, grabbing hold of the pillow because, yes, she was starting to have back spasms. She’d had them before—nothing serious. And these, right now, weren’t too bad. But just in case... “As long as what I do doesn’t put the baby at risk, everything’s fine.”
“Our baby,” he reminded her.
That it was. Their baby. And the sound of it wasn’t so bad. In fact, she rather liked it. Of course, that wasn’t going to happen, not in the real sense. Still—she shut her eyes and for a moment envisioned a pink, frilly nursery. Pretty little-girl clothes hanging in the closet. Stuffed animals and dolls everywhere. And a music box with a ballerina spinning and spinning and spinning inside, like the one her nanny had given her, and her mother had taken away because it had been too foolish for her child.
For a moment, a melancholy mood slipped down over Ellie and she was sitting in a rocking chair in that nursery, holding her baby. But her mother’s words came back to haunt her—too foolish. And the image disappeared. But was it foolish? Nothing inside her told her it wasn’t, but nothing inside her told her it was either. She liked the dream, though. It made her feel contented in a way nothing else did.
“So, how far off the road is Tolly?” she asked, opening her eyes and trying to concentrate on the scenery.
“We go just a couple miles on this road, then we take a cut-off back about another five. Are you sure you’re OK?” he asked, slowing the truck even more as a black-and-white cow wandered to the side of the road and simply stood there, looking at them. Ellie grabbed her phone and took a picture before they proceeded. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, bringing you with me,” he continued.
“Like I said, I’m fine. Glad to get out and see all this. I never have time to just...look.”
He smiled. “You know, if you weren’t pregnant, we’d be out on my motorcycle.”
“Might be fun, if you don’t mind the weather. Me, I like my air-conditioning and creature comforts. Nice sound system, contoured seats, a little extra lumbar support. But that’s not you, is it? You get along differently.”
“See those abandoned house trailers over there?” he asked, slowing even more as they passed a small community of about thirty or forty abandoned structures sitting off by themselves. They were all falling down, rusted, looked as if they hadn’t seen true care or maintenance for a couple decades.
“Yes. Why?”
“That’s sort of a dumping ground for cowboy trailers that have gotten too rundown. They drag them down here and leave them. It’s a small patch of private land and they pay the owner a dumping fee. He scraps what he can, sells parts, does some recycling. It’s also where I come from. Lived there from the time I was ten or eleven until I left home when I was sixteen—one trailer or another. Lived in a storage shed a couple miles from here for a year before that, and in the back of my dad’s car even before that. That’s the difference between your world and mine, Ellie. Yours had air-conditioning and creature comforts. Mine didn’t even have running water. In fact, we were merely squatters moving from trailer to trailer, always hoping for one that didn’t have a leaking roof or holes in the floor.”
“From what you’d said, I knew it was bad, but I didn’t know how bad,” Ellie said, taking one look at the trailer dump, then turning her head. She couldn’t picture Matt there. Or anyone. “How did you get by?” she asked.
“Any way we could. Didn’t always have food, but there were people who’d see me or Janice on the street and invite us in for a meal. Plus, we got handouts at the diner. And when we wer
e in school, there was always a hot meal.”
“But the other things—clothes, bathing.”
“We took what we could, wherever we could get it. People gave us hand-me-downs. We could bathe in the sink at the gas station.” Matt’s face betrayed no emotion. Not a flinch, not a frown. “It’s what we knew.”
“But didn’t you also know how other people lived?” she asked, looking for a sign of some feeling yet not seeing it there.
“We did. But we also knew who we were—the two kids who lived at the dump. I got along, but Janice...”
There it was, a quick softening in his eyes. Then a flash of pain. Now, more than ever, she understood why Matt was being so particular about Lucas. He didn’t want him to end up here, the way his mother had. “Did she ever get out?” Ellie asked.
“For a while. We didn’t keep in touch, so I don’t know the details other than she started here then ended here.”
That flash of pain again. Ellie’s heart broke for him. He carried the guilt of his sister, probably had done ever since he’d been a boy. She laid a hand on Matt’s forearm and gave him a squeeze “I’m sorry about...”
He laid his hand atop hers for a moment, then pulled it back, and sped up once they were past the little settlement. She was too stunned by his honesty to know how to respond, so she simply looked at the road ahead, thinking about their differences and similarities. He’d come from nothing while she’d had everything. Yet they both grown up so—alone. No one to care, no one to comfort them. And here they were now, with a child on the way, wondering what was best for him or her. Better than either of them had had—that’s what would be best.
But wasn’t that really just giving up their child to someone they could only hope would provide better? Her ideas about adoption were changing because being around Matt made this whole situation feel more real. Before, it had been an intellectual issue—her safe place. Always deferring to what she knew best.
Except that’s not what she was doing here. Something was turning around in Ellie. Her convictions were weakening. The intellectual was giving way to the emotional, try as hard as she could to stop it. But she couldn’t, and she wasn’t going to blame it on being hormonal. She also wasn’t going to admit that to Matt, because she wasn’t ready to acknowledge these new thoughts to herself yet. “How did that happen?” she finally asked. “How did you end up living like that?”
“No mother. An old man who didn’t work but loved what he found in the bottom of a booze bottle. No one who cared whether two little kids were fed, or clean, or went to school.” Once they were out of sight of the run-down clump of trailers, he turned onto the next road they came to.
“And the owner didn’t say anything?”
“The owner was required to have someone on the property. He sure as hell didn’t want to be there, so he used my dad’s name in exchange for letting my dad have free access to whatever piece of rubbish trailer he wanted to stay in for a while. And I’m not telling you this because I expect pity, or any other kind of emotion from you. It’s so you’ll understand why I’m not giving you what I’m assuming you’d hoped would be a fast decision about the baby. I don’t make fast decisions. Had too many of those made for me over my life, and they didn’t always turn out well. In fact, most of them didn’t when I was younger.”
This wasn’t the way she’d wanted this conversation to go. Wasn’t at all how she’d expected it to happen. “You know, Matt, when I came here I thought since you were in a medical practice, that you’d left the military, or I wouldn’t have even...”
The truth be told, she’d never really given herself over to the possibility that Matt might not want things to work out the way she did. Of course, that was the way she lived her life, ran her business, always got ahead. Ellie assumed herself into what she wanted, then worked hard to get it. Just like she’d assumed Matt would want to raise his child. Except she was pretty sure he didn’t, and there was nothing inside her that wanted to work hard to make it happen.
For whatever reason, Matt was bringing out a softer side to her she’d never seen before. And that new side clearly didn’t want her to do what she normally did. “I don’t want to tear up your life,” she said simply.
“I never thought you did,” he said. “I had a right to know, and be involved. I’m glad you didn’t take that away from me. Not sure what to do with that right, though, because if you do go through with your own plans not to raise our child, it puts me in a tough spot.”
It’s your way, Ellie. Only your way. You don’t need anybody else. Grow up and be a strong woman on your own. You don’t need a man to prove anything to or about.
Her mother’s words, her mother’s sentiments. But her mother was so wrong. In fact, Ellie felt anything but that strong woman she’d been raised to believe in. And all because she was seeing something she hadn’t expected to see—a man she simply hadn’t expected. One who’d literally risen from the ashes. A man she was glad was the father of her baby. “Look, I don’t want to pressure you into anything, Matt. That was never my intention. I’m a straightforward businesswoman in everything I do, and I couldn’t have done otherwise with our situation.”
“I appreciate your honesty, but you have to know the honest side of me. I’m going back into the military. Back to being a battlefield surgeon, as I’ve mentioned. And I can’t do that and be a single father. The only reason I’m here now is to make sure Lucas ends up in the best situation possible. I owe that to my sister. The plan was that we’d always get out of here together. The agreement was that the first one to get away would save up until there was enough money to bring the other one along. I was the first one out. Had a few dollars—not enough to get us both out but enough to get me to Vegas. Unfortunately, it took me longer than I thought it would, and by the time I was in a position to help her, I was in the military, finally doing something with my life. And she’d given up waiting. I lost track of her, then got sidetracked with my military duty as well as going to school...”
Matt paused, took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Bottom line, I got my life, she got cancer and died. So, that’s where I am right now. Doing for my sister what I should have done a long time ago, and didn’t. Which may make me look like the perfect person to raise our baby. But I’m not. I’m only fulfilling a promise I didn’t keep by making sure Lucas gets what Janice never had—a good life. I’m sure that isn’t what you want to hear, but I can’t be any less honest with you than you were with me. I know you came here looking for a full-time daddy, but it’s not me, Ellie. I’m sorry.”
Now she was discouraged. Even on the verge of tears. Hormones again? Maybe, maybe not. But just for a little while she’d hoped—well, it didn’t matter what she’d hoped, did it? A home and family. That proverbial house with the white picket fence. She’d seen that for a moment with Matt in Reno, and while that life was never her plan, every now and then she’d caught herself wrapped up in that daydream. With Matt, because he wasn’t the kind of man she typically dealt with. They all had agendas, while all she could see in Matt was honor. More now than before. But she was wrong about that plan of hers, where he would raise their child and someday, in some small way, maybe even include her in their child’s life.
Disappointed in a way she hadn’t expected to be, Ellie slid down in the truck seat, readjusted the pillow, punched it, folded it, punched it some more, and when she couldn’t find a way to make it comfortable, she opened the truck window, threw it out, and spent the last minutes of the truck ride fighting back the hormonal overflow she would not let him see. Not one burning drop of it.
CHAPTER FOUR
ELLIE WAS FIGHTING SOMETHING, and it frustrated Matt to know he was the cause of it. He hadn’t meant to do that, hadn’t meant to just blurt out everything. But he had, and there was no going back now. She wasn’t going to get what she’d come here for and, for some reason, even though he’d caused her mood, what he
wanted to do was pull off the road and simply hold her in his arms. Protect her. Comfort her.
It wasn’t a reaction he’d normally have after being so blunt, but Ellie was different, and she caused different feelings and emotions in him. Because of the baby? Maybe. But also because of her. She seemed like she was always at odds with something in her life, and that was a very tough life to lead. He’d lived it himself for a long time. But he’d found his way. Had Ellie, though? She claimed she had with this business she owned, but he wasn’t so sure because she seemed so exposed to things that hurt or discouraged her. And fought so hard against them.
He’d seen some of that in Reno—she had tried to be so serious even when they’d been in bed. Fighting hard not to show pleasure, even though it had shown through when she’d let down her guard. He smiled, thinking about that first night and her bravado—I’m ready when you are, she’d said as she’d stood across the room from him, practically hiding behind the armoire. He’d wanted to see her step away from that armoire but with respect to her shyness he’d turned off the lights and waited until she’d slipped under the sheets next to him. She hadn’t been tentative then, as he’d expected her to be. In fact, she had been wild, like no other woman in his life had ever been.
The second night had caught him off guard. Ellie had been in his room in bed, waiting, when Matt had come back from the convention. No guards up this time. But they’d talked first. Mostly about insignificant things—at least, insignificant as far as they were concerned. Which had been when he’d discovered he really liked Ellie. In fact, if his situation in the army hadn’t been so difficult, he might have asked to see her again. But he hadn’t because he was going straight back to the war, and he didn’t need the distraction of worrying about the woman he’d left behind, or if she’d be there waiting for him when he finally returned stateside.
