But underneath that was something else—some sort of implication that Ian was, in fact, the kind of guy who would jerk a woman around. If Ian hadn’t told her himself that he hadn’t always been the best boyfriend, Lacy would have wondered if June knew something else, something that Ian hadn’t told her.
But Ian had been up front with her about his failings, about how he was trying to do better. She wanted him to stay with her and he wanted the same. On his way home from Bismarck this weekend, he was going to stop at his father’s ranch and load up his belongings. He was moving in on a more permanent basis. They might not have the weekends as long as rodeo season was going on, but they still had the rest of the week together.
“Don’t worry,” she promised June. “I won’t.”
“Good.” June smiled widely and nodded, sending her swath of long, black and very straight hair falling forward over her shoulder. Lacy was suddenly gripped with jealousy over June’s hair. “You know,” June said in a casual voice, “there aren’t too many women at these things...”
It was Lacy’s turn to grin. Sure, getting in good with Ian’s relatives was a plus. But when was the last time Lacy had had a female friend? One who understood bulls and rodeos? “After I get Rattler out, you want to grab some dinner?”
“That’d be awesome.”
So that was how Lacy came to be folded into Ian’s family. His cousins were helping get Straight Arrow bulls to the rodeos. She was hanging out with June. She met Travis Younkin and hung out with Mitch and Paulo when they could make a rodeo and—and she had people she could count on, people who accepted her as she was. People who liked her.
And after all that, then she went home to Ian.
It wasn’t the family she’d been born into, nor was it the family that had raised her.
But as the summer progressed and they settled into a routine, it began to feel like her family. She spent every moment of the workweek with Ian, working by his side during the day and spending her nights in his arms.
She didn’t want it to be over.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Hi, Ian. Thank you for sending the Rocket Raccoon backpack for Eliot! He felt supercool (his words) for the first day of school—a picture is below. Chris and I talked about it and we think it would be fun to come see you perform (?) in the rodeo. We appreciate the offer of the tickets as well—we checked online and the event is already sold out! Eliot is excited to finally meet his buddy Ian. It’d be best to meet up before the show, if that’s possible. The show will end way past Eliot’s bedtime and if he doesn’t get to meet you first, he won’t be able to sit still! See you in a few weeks, Rayanne.
IAN STARED AT his phone in a state of complete, total numbness.
“Ian?” Lacy said, twisting around to look at his phone. “Did you hear me?”
“Huh?”
“I said, is everything all right?” She paused the movie they’d been watching. “Are you okay?”
Okay? No. He was not okay. He was ecstatic and terrified and the world was getting a little dark on the corners.
He was going to meet his son. This was, hands down, great news.
But—oh, and the but was huge.
He hadn’t told Lacy about Eliot yet.
“Ian?”
He looked up at her, fully aware that, on some level he probably looked like a fish trying to breathe air. He had to tell her. He had to. “I...” Dammit, after all this time and he still couldn’t get the words out.
Lacy sat up, her eyes wide with concern. “Ian, you’re scaring me. What’s wrong?”
“I have something to tell you.”
Lacy—sweet, beautiful, adopted Lacy—sat there on her couch, her forehead creased with worry as she waited for him to string together more than three syllables. “Okay. Is it bad?”
“I—No. See—Okay.” She put her hand on his shoulder, but that didn’t help.
He stood up and began to pace. He should have told her earlier; that much was clear. Oh, God—he hoped she wouldn’t hate him for this. “When we go to Vegas, I want you to meet my family.”
“But I already did. I’ve met your dad and your cousins and...” Her voice trailed off. “Unless you have a—a different family?” The way she said it—as if he had a secret wife in Vegas—did not bode well.
“I—” Ian was not a coward. He faced down bulls and offensive linemen and angry ex-girlfriends without even blinking an eye. Fear was an unfamiliar feeling—but there was no mistaking it this time. He was afraid. He did not like it.
He held out his phone, with the message from Rayanne still on the screen. “Here.”
She took the phone and read Rayanne’s note. “I don’t understand. You’re—what? Pen pals with a kid? Like, a fan or something? Why is that freaking you out?”
“The picture.” He hadn’t even seen it yet, but he knew the photo of Eliot would say what he couldn’t.
As she scrolled down, Ian felt as if he was going to be sick. This wasn’t fear, he tried to tell himself. He didn’t want to be afraid of telling her about Eliot. He was proud of the boy. He’d done the right thing by his child.
“He’s cute,” she said. Then she gasped. Her head shot up as she stared at Ian, then back at the picture of Eliot in his first-day-of-school outfit. “He—does he look like you?”
“Yeah.”
This time, when she looked at him, Ian saw exactly what he’d been trying not to be afraid of. Lacy was somewhere between pissed and disappointed. Both. He didn’t know which was worse.
“Why does he look like you, Ian?”
“Because he’s my son.”
There. He’d said it. The words were out. There’d be no more hiding the fact. This was what he’d wanted, right? Someone else who knew about Eliot, who could look at the pictures and read the letters and be proud of the boy?
But the way Lacy’s eyes widened in shock—no, horror? Not what he wanted. Not even a little bit.
“So he—what? He lives with his mom? This—” she looked back down at the screen “—Rayanne?”
“Yes. No. I mean—” He exhaled, trying to find even a drop of his normal swaggering courage. He didn’t find any. “Rayanne is his mom and Chris is his dad. But she’s not his birth mom. They adopted him.”
Lacy didn’t react. She didn’t even blink. He wasn’t sure she was even breathing. He waited for her to say something, to do anything—but nothing. She stared at him as if he’d sprouted wings.
And suddenly, Ian was talking. All the things he’d never said to anyone came spilling out. “I was twenty and I was at college when the papers showed up. I hadn’t talked to Leasha—that’s Eliot’s birth mom—in months. I didn’t know she was pregnant. I didn’t know she was struggling. She was only eighteen and had dropped out and we’d broken up because I’d been cheating on her, anyway.
“I was young and cocky and thought I could do whatever I wanted. I was this football star and I had this huge NFL career ahead of me—I couldn’t give that up to take care of a kid with a woman who hated me. What was I supposed to do?”
“So you just signed the papers,” she said in a scary-flat voice.
“I called the adoption agency first. I asked what was going on. They explained that Leasha had already picked Rayanne and Chris. She’d gone through the whole process. All I had to do to give my kid a good family—a good life—was sign the papers severing my parental rights.”
Finally, she blinked. Which did not help anything because a tear slowly trickled down the side of her face.
“It was the right thing to do, Lacy. Don’t you see? I couldn’t take care of him. I was young and stupid. I would have been a terrible father. But I couldn’t give him up, not entirely. The agency said Leasha didn’t want an open adoption, but if I wanted, Rayanne and Chris were okay with some communicatio
n. They’d send me updates twice a year and pictures. And I send presents for Christmas and his birthday. And I sent that backpack for his first day of school. I sign it ‘Your Buddy, Ian.’ I’ve got a bank account where I save a little money from every paycheck for him for when he grows up—he’s going to go to college, you know? That’s how I take care of him. I never forgot him, Lacy.”
“You have a son.”
“I do.”
“What’s his name?”
“Eliot. Eliot Berger.” She looked back down at the picture of his boy. “They live in Las Vegas. I asked them to come to the show. So I could meet my son.”
“You have a son named Eliot,” she repeated.
“Yes.”
This time, when she looked up at him, there was nothing but hurt in her eyes. “And you didn’t tell me.”
* * *
“I WAS GOING TO,” Ian pleaded. He looked as if a bomb had gone off in the living room—pale and wide-eyed and scared.
Lacy couldn’t look at him. But the other alternative was staring at his phone, at the photo of a little boy who looked so much like Ian it was physically painful.
A little boy he’d given away.
“You have to understand, Lacy—no one knows about him. No one. My dad doesn’t know—June doesn’t know. I know. Leasha knows. Rayanne and Chris know. But that’s it. For the past six years, I haven’t told anyone about him. He’s been this secret I’ve guarded with my life.”
“I told you my secrets,” she heard herself say as if she were speaking from the far end of a very long tunnel. “I told you everything.”
And he hadn’t done the same. All that talk about sharing—he’d held the biggest secret of all back from her.
“I was going to tell you when I realized what was in that box,” he went on, talking faster than she’d ever heard him talk before. “I thought I’d finally found the one person who’d understand what I did, I did out of love for Eliot. You wanted to know how anyone could give away their child like they were nothing. Remember? And I was afraid you’d think that’s what I’d done. That you’d hate me, too.” He fell to his knees in front of her. “He’s not nothing to me. He’s my son. I gave him the best life I could. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Sure,” she said. It made sense. Hothead jock sleeping his way through college knocked up a girl he didn’t care a thing about. Girl didn’t want to live with the painful reminder of her mistake. Hothead jock didn’t want to give up being a hothead jock. And some nice people in Las Vegas got a smiling, happy son out of it. Everyone wins.
She understood in the same way she understood that her birth mom was all of fifteen when Lacy was born and that the right thing had been giving her to Dale and Linda Evans. It was all for the best.
But the betrayal felt fresh all over again. He’d given his son away. And he hadn’t told her.
She didn’t know which part was worse.
“I broke my leg about six weeks after I signed the papers. I wasn’t going to be a football player. I wasn’t going to be a father. I was right back where I started, on my dad’s ranch. I was filled with so much guilt that I stopped dating, stopped sleeping around.”
“Except for me.” How else could she describe their first agreement—no-strings? Friends with benefits? That sounded like sleeping around.
“You’re different.”
She let out a laugh so joyless it was more of a bark of pain. Different? That was her in a nutshell.
“I’m different with you,” he protested. She’d never seen him beg before. It was unsettling. “I’ve been trying to make something of myself. And being a bullfighter—that’s something. Getting to Vegas my first full year out? That’s something. Something a kid would think is cool. I want him to know me, to know where he came from. To be proud of me.”
Ian put his hands on her legs and looked at her with pleading eyes. “I’m finally going to meet him. I want you by my side.” He took in a ragged breath. “I want to be someone you can trust, someone you can depend on. I want to take care of you. All those things I didn’t do six years ago.”
She looked at where his hands rested on the tops of her thighs. “And if they’d said no? They weren’t going to come? Were you going to tell me anyway?”
Eyes wide, his mouth opened, and then shut and she knew the answer.
“Right,” she said softly. She stood and stepped around him, then walked down the hallway to their room—her room.
“I didn’t want to upset you,” he called after her.
She paused at the doorway, but she didn’t look back. “I don’t need to be saved from myself. And while I need many things from you, being protected isn’t one of them.”
“Babe,” he said in a strangled voice, but she wasn’t listening.
She shut the door and lay down on the bed.
She’d trusted him with everything—her secrets, her livelihood, her heart. She’d made him her family. She’d dared to think that she’d finally found a place where she made sense in this world. And, fool that she was, she’d thought he’d done the same.
He hadn’t. Instead he’d tap-danced around one simple, unavoidable fact. He had a son that he’d given away.
He hadn’t told her. He hadn’t needed to tell her.
Maybe he wasn’t as different as he liked to think he was.
Maybe she wasn’t, either.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Where are you?
IAN HIT SEND on the text. The odds of Lacy answering him were fifty-fifty. The morning after the fight—if you could even call it that—Lacy had suggested that maybe they take a little break. They were done running to two or three separate rodeos a weekend, after all. Maybe, she’d suggested in a weirdly calm voice, it might do him some good to spend time with his family. His real family.
He’d asked her if that’s what she wanted.
And she’d said yes.
So he’d packed up his things and driven to South Dakota. He’d sat down with his father and told him about Eliot. The same with June and Tony and a couple of other cousins he was close to. They’d all pretty much had the same reaction—shock at first, followed by the hope that Ian would make sure Eliot knew what it meant to be Lakota, make sure he knew he’d always have family out on the grasslands.
Throughout the ten days since he’d left the Straight Arrow, Ian had kept up a steady stream of texts to Lacy. He’d texted her when he’d gotten home. He’d texted her after he told his family about Eliot and told her how they’d reacted. He told her the name of the hotel where he’d booked a room—which was a hard thing to stomach because they were supposed to be sharing a big fancy suite together. Instead, he was rooming with Jack. Again.
Every night he’d text Lacy when he went to bed and tell her how much he missed her and that he hoped she was doing okay. That he wanted to see her in Vegas—just to talk. Those were the texts she tended to reply to. Yes, she was okay. She was glad to hear he was making peace with his family.
But not that she missed him. Not that she wanted him to come back. And there was no mention of getting together.
So he drove to Vegas with June and Travis, checked into his hotel, sent a text to Lacy and buckled down for two days of media interviews. Mark Soleus hadn’t been lying—Ian and June had a lot of interviews. Ian kept having to come up with new ways of saying, “No, it doesn’t bother me that June’s the better bull rider, really,” because by God, reporters were going to keep asking it.
Someone had located a YouTube video of Ian wrestling Rattler to the ground, so he had to explain what the hell he’d thought he was doing a lot, too. And after watching that clip a good ten or fifteen times with reporters at his side, waiting for his reaction, he had to admit—to himself at least—that he had no idea what he’d been thinking. He should have been trampl
ed by Rattler.
When he wasn’t answering the same five questions over and over, he tried to keep himself busy. It wasn’t that hard—either June or Travis always seemed to be around. They knew about the meeting with Eliot, and they knew Ian had come back to the rez without Lacy. If Ian had to guess, he’d say that they’d decided it was best if he wasn’t left alone.
Ian missed Lacy. It was a hell of a thing, really. The only thing he’d ever felt that was even remotely comparable to the pain he felt whenever he thought of her was how he felt looking at pictures of Chris and Eliot together—but this wasn’t the same. Over the years, he’d trained himself not to think about Eliot all the time. It had been enough to know that his boy was happy and healthy and loved.
But Lacy? After living with her for a summer—working cattle with her, taking his meals with her, sharing her bed—there was no place he could go that didn’t make him miss her. Every single thing he did all day long was a painful reminder that she wasn’t by his side—and that it was his own damn fault.
Finally, Wednesday arrived. This was it—the big night. The Future All-Stars rodeo started at six. Eliot’s parents were going to meet Ian behind the chutes at five twenty. That would give them about twenty minutes to visit before Ian had to focus on his job. Twenty minutes seemed like a safe amount of time. If the meeting didn’t go well, then the built-in time limit would keep things from being awkward. But it was long enough that, if it did go well, Ian could pitch the idea of future meetings—like when he hopefully came back to Vegas next year, or like having Eliot come out to the rez and meet the rest of his birth family.
And he still didn’t know if Lacy was coming to the meeting. She was here—that much he knew. She’d arrived yesterday with Rattler—but she hadn’t agreed to meet Ian for dinner.
He could do this, he thought for the four-hundredth time as he set out the presents he had for the Bergers. A stuffed toy bull of No Man’s Land for Eliot. A box of tea for Rayanne and a TCB T-shirt for Chris. Tobacco and paper would have been more traditional but he didn’t think Chris would get the significance.
Harlequin Superromance May 2016 Box Set Page 49
