You Belong to Me

by Jennifer Greene

  Carefully he tiptoed closer. Nate didn’t waken, didn’t even stir when he took the boy’s pulse and felt that small forehead for a temperature. Once Blake had assured himself the boy was all right, he meant to exit quickly—he really didn’t want to wake the tyke—yet somehow he found himself frozen for a moment, then two, unable to tear his eyes from Nate, aware Serena stood in the doorway behind him and had to be curious why he was still standing there in the dark.

  Eventually he turned around. He felt Serena staring at his face, studying him, but she could not have seen his expression with the room so draped in darkness. She led him back down the hall to the kitchen, where she paused to fill two glasses with sun tea and ice cubes and sprigs of mint.

  From nowhere she said very quietly, “You think it’s about time we both tried being honest? You could have called if all you’d wanted to know was how Nate was responding to the medication. You had another reason for stopping by.”

  “You’ve got that dead right.” When she handed him the glass, he took several long gulps, because he was afraid his throat was so dry—or he was so damn furious—that he wouldn’t be able to talk. “Let’s go outside.”

  “I don’t want to be out of hearing range of Nate.”

  “I understand. But I don’t want to be where the boy could hear raised voices and be frightened by them, either.”

  She sucked in a wary breath, but then simply motioned him through the living room and out the front door again. Naturally, the whole blasted menagerie of misfit critters had to follow her. Outside, she sat on the porch step, leaving room for him to sit next to her.

  He’d noticed her nonstop since he’d arrived, yet sitting next to her was different. Before, he hadn’t been conscious of her bare feet, the sarong-style denim skirt that showed off her long brown legs, the scooped white T-shirt that loosely, intimately, cupped her breasts. Her choice of clothing was cool and comfortable, nothing fancy. They looked purely feminine on her. Pure woman. Like her. And her voice was softer than a lover’s whisper. “You’re angry, aren’t you, Blake?”

  “I’m not sure ‘angry’ begins to cut it. How about totally furious?” He paused to take a calming breath and the damn dog promptly pushed a wet nose into his palm—as if he were in any mood to pet a critter. Then the prissy Persian put a paw on his thigh, as if expecting him to create space on his lap for her. He needed to concentrate to keep his cool, and the blasted zoo wasn’t helping. “Serena, I happen to be allergic to bee stings. The same kind of allergy that Nate has. The kind that I told you is commonly inherited.”

  “I didn’t know about your allergy.”

  “You had no reason to. The subject never came up in the time we knew each other. But that’s not the point,” he said impatiently. “Even if the bee sting allergy had never come up, I could see right off that Nate may have inherited his good looks from you but he never got that square chin or the shape of his head from you.”

  “No, he definitely didn’t,” she agreed softly.

  “He’s my son, isn’t he, damn it?”

  One word. Again, gently, softly said. “Yes.”

  He surged to his feet as if someone had jabbed him with an electric pole. Somehow the shock was even worse than this afternoon, when, yes, of course he’d figured it out. God knew he hadn’t been anticipating trouble when she’d walked in. He’d barely been able to take his eyes off her, he’d been so glad to see her, feeling a curl of vital awareness and aliveness such as he hadn’t felt since…hell, since the last time he’d been with Serena years before.

  But the age and look of her son had kept distracting him. The boy’s facial features had distracted him even more, until even someone trying to deny the truth as exuberantly as he was couldn’t keep burying his head in the sand. Still, sensing the truth and having her openly admit it were two different things. “How could you not tell me? How could you do this to me, to him? Why the hell didn’t you talk to me when you first realized you were pregnant?”

  Her lips parted as if she wanted to answer him, but her gaze suddenly lit on his face, searching his expression and eyes, as if seeking some way to reply.

  He didn’t want some tactful, thought-out answer. What he really wanted was to smash his fist into a wall—but there wasn’t one handy. “For God’s sake, Serena, it’s not like we were enemies. I thought we were friends. Good friends. I can’t think of any reason why you’d have been afraid to tell me. Did you think I wouldn’t come through? Wouldn’t marry you? That I’d have deserted you without any help if I’d known you were pregnant?”

  “Oh, Blake…you’re so upset.”

  “Of course I’m upset! I just found out that I have a six-year-old son!”

  How was it, Serena thought painfully, that the people you cared about the most were somehow the ones you managed to hurt the worst? Her heart ached. She’d never have willingly hurt Blake. Never.

  Telling him about Nate had just never seemed a simple thing seven years ago—or now.

  Impatiently she snapped her fingers, because Whiskey and George and Nuisance were all snuzzling under his palm to get petted, competing for his attention. The animals all sensed that this was a terribly unhappy human who needed comfort. So did she.

  When the animals realized she meant business, they backed off and settled down. But she couldn’t. She had no idea how to handle Blake. He was still six feet, two inches of towering, injured man who was glowering in the darkness like lightning about to explode.

  “You have every right to be upset—with the situation, and with me,” she said quietly. “It was wrong not to tell you. Terribly wrong. But I made the best choice I knew how to at the time, Blake. The truth is I didn’t know what to do. And then time passed. And the more time passed, I just couldn’t imagine picking up a phone and dropping news like this on you out of the blue.”

  “The question is, why you didn’t tell me from the get-go. You got pregnant and I was the father. Where’s the complication in that equation? I had a right to know.”

  “Yes. You did.” It was just terribly hard to think straight when he was so mad. Eyes-colder-than-ice mad. Shoulders-rigid-as-marble mad. She had no fear that Blake would hurt her, ever, but she did think his mood was disturbingly unpredictable at the moment.

  But so was hers. In fact, she’d been having regular galloping heart attacks since last May—she hadn’t seen Blake or known he was coming back to Whitehorn then, but that was when the Kincaid scandal broke in town and she’d heard that Blake Remmington was one of the illegitimate Kincaid heirs. Everyone knew Larry Kincaid had played around, but no one guessed until after his death how many bastard children he’d fathered. Normally Serena never listened to gossip, but she knew it would kill Blake to find out who sired him.

  One of the reasons she’d fallen so hopelessly in love with Blake back in medical school was that, at the core, he was so old-fashioned. A man who really believed in honor. A guy who honest-to-Pete lived by a code. Discovering that he was sired by an irresponsible womanizer like Larry Kincaid had had to hurt him terribly. And Serena understood perfectly why he was so extra upset right now, as well. Finding out about Nate was a huge shock in itself, but worse yet was Blake discovering that he had an illegitimate son—not long after he’d discovered he was one himself.

  She wanted to explain. She needed to explain. But Serena wasn’t positive that Blake would hear anything she said right now. He was pacing around her front yard in the pitch dark like a wounded panther, stalking the shadows, then the light, unable to stand still, maybe hoping that all that pacing would stop him from punching something. Obviously, though, she had to try to communicate, whether it was a worthless effort or not. “I was wrong.”

  “More than wrong, Serena!”

  “All right. More than wrong.” Her eyes tracked him, wishing she could see even the smallest sign of his calming down. There wasn’t one. “Do you remember, Blake? We were both in medical school. Both exhausted all the time from our schedules.”

  “Yeah
, so?”

  “So that was when your mom died, and you came back from the funeral even more exhausted. You wouldn’t talk about it. Not with me. Not with anyone, as far as I knew. But you looked like there was a raw sore inside you that just kept bleeding.”

  “Damn it, Serena! Of course I remember when my mother died. And yeah, I was torn up. But what does that have to do with Nate, or with your not telling me that we had a son together?”

  She whispered, “I was in love with you. Years before that. But you didn’t feel the same way. It’s not like there was a problem. When we ran across each other, you always treated me like a friend, someone you were glad to see, glad to talk to…but that was all. Except that one time, Blake, that one night. I just wanted to be there for you. To love you. To help you through the grieving. You didn’t seduce me. I was the one who was responsible, who came on to you. You weren’t expecting anything to happen.”

  “No, I wasn’t. But it wasn’t like you planned it, either. Neither of us expected that night to happen.”

  Her mind suddenly filled with the memories. No, she hadn’t expected anything sexual to happen, but once she’d offered that first kiss, they’d fallen on each other as if two lit fuses were connecting to the same stick of dynamite. Once lit, nothing was going to stop that bomb from exploding. She said patiently, “Whatever I expected or didn’t, it was still my choice, my responsibility for starting something. I never wanted you to feel any kind of obligation. I wanted to make love with you. It wasn’t your fault.”

  Blake threw up his hands. “Because you offered the first kiss, you think you have more fault? That’s like adding one and one and thinking three is the answer. If I’d just known you were pregnant—”

  She finished the sentence for him. “—you would have asked me to marry you. I know. In fact, I never doubted that for even a second.”

  He looked even more confounded. “Then why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Actually, I tried to tell you,” she said quietly. “It was eight weeks later before I’d taken a pregnancy test and knew. And I went over to your place as soon as I found out. Do you remember a night when it was cold and windy and wild and pouring buckets, you were having cold pizza for dinner—”

  “Yeah, yeah, so?”

  God, he was so impatient. Still so furious. She wrapped her arms around her body, hugging herself for warmth, even though the night was still balmy. “You were happy to see me when I stopped by,” she recalled.

  “We were friends. Of course I was happy to see you. The only reason we hadn’t seen each other more often was because our work schedules were so full.”

  “But you were extra happy that night because you’d won the residency in California, the one you’d applied for in Los Angeles and really wanted. You never wanted to come back to Whitehorn to live. You never wanted a small town practice. The L.A. offer was everything you’d worked for and dreamed of. And by then…well, I’d heard there was a woman in your life.”

  For the first time she saw him hesitate, frown, look not so sure of his ground. “Elaine.”

  “The woman you eventually married.”

  “I wasn’t married then, Serena. I hadn’t known her that long then. And nothing would have happened between me and Elaine if I’d realized that you were pregnant.”

  “Well, how I saw it, Blake, was that my telling would have ruined everything. All your dreams. All the things that were finally going right for you. You were never close with Trent, even if he was your twin brother. Or your dad—and I don’t mean Larry Kincaid, but Harold Remmington, the man you believed was your dad when you were growing up. So there was just your mom, and when she died, that just left you so alone. You paid your own way, took every step alone, expected nothing from anyone. But it was hard, and finally, finally things were starting to come together for you.” She lifted a hand in a gesture that asked for understanding. “I wanted you to have that shot at happiness. I didn’t want to screw it up.”

  “You’re making it sound like your life wasn’t suddenly screwed up by an unexpected pregnancy.”

  “Actually, it wasn’t, Blake. It changed things, of course. I couldn’t handle med school and a pregnancy both, but I also discovered that I never really wanted to be a doctor. Not like you did. I already had all the science credits, so all I needed was some education courses to get my teaching degree. And I love teaching. The hours are wonderful for Nate, too. And my two older brothers are crazy about him, so it wasn’t like he never had strong male influences in his life.”

  “Serena, I’m not doubting that you’ve been a great mom or that you’ve given him a great life. But your silence meant I never had a chance to be his dad.”

  With her heart feeling heavier than lead, she pushed a hand through her hair and closed her eyes for a second’s breath. “I understand. And it’s been on my heart. That you had the right to know. But as many times as I can apologize, and as bad as I feel that I never told you earlier, all I can say is the truth. At the time I made the best decision I was capable of making. You would have offered to marry me. A Native American woman—and I didn’t know how you felt about that. A woman whose roots were in Whitehorn—a place I understood that you never wanted to live. And then there was the bottom line: you didn’t love me, Blake.”

  “Maybe not. But you were my friend and I thought a lot of you. Love could have come.”

  She shook her head, fiercely, fast. For an instant images of her childhood tore loose like trapped bubbles surging to the surface of the sea.

  Losing her parents had been the most awful thing in her universe, but she’d been blessed by folks and family who loved her. She’d learned to embrace life because of her foster family, but it had always scraped on her heart. The feeling of being beholden, of being taken in by a good family who couldn’t afford her. They’d been extra poor and had to struggle nonstop because of her and her brothers. She remembered their always going without, but even more, she remembered feeling helpless to do anything about it.

  It was a feeling she couldn’t stand as a child. Or now. “I wouldn’t marry you or anyone because you felt beholden or responsible.”

  He’d quit pacing and was just standing there, a leg cocked forward, moonlight showering his shoulders. Now he frowned. “I don’t know what you mean. A child is a responsibility.”

  “Yes. But love isn’t. Or it shouldn’t be.”

  He shook his head, as if exasperated with diverting down this side road when the main highway points were getting lost. “I don’t get you. To me, love and responsibility are part of the same package. And back to something else you said. What’d you mean by that Native American comment?”

  “I believe the woman you married was a blue-eyed blonde,” she said honestly.

  “The woman who I divorced was a blue-eyed blonde. And are you trying to seriously tick me off? We were friends. You think I judged you in some lesser way because of your being Cheyenne?”

  “No, no. I’d never accuse you of prejudice that way, Blake. That wasn’t what I meant at all. I was just trying to be honest.” She hesitated, grappling for the right words. “Seven years ago I might as well have been a hundred years younger. In some ways I really grew up naive. Because I was raised by white foster parents, I honestly had no concept that my being Native American was an issue for some people. It took going to college to get the idea that some anglo guys assumed my morals were freer because I was Native American.”

  “Serena! I never thought that about you! Nor would anyone who even knew you longer than two minutes!”

  “I believe you. But all I’m trying to say is, that until I grew up, I honestly had no comprehension what different cultures meant to some people. And that’s one of the things that troubled me when I got pregnant. Again, I didn’t want you to feel like you had to do something out of responsibility. Because there was that extra problem, too. I don’t know how you could have leaped into a relationship with anyone, with me, without needing time to think about the race thing.”
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  “You are trying to tick me off.” His growl wasn’t unlike Whiskey’s.

  “Marrying someone who’s different is a serious thing.”

  “Well, of course it is. But we’d known each other for years. It’s not like either of us is ‘different’ in any way that matters.”

  The comment was so like him, Serena mused, and suddenly felt hormones singing, stinging, through her pulse just like years ago. The damn man. Blake was a rule-lover while she ran her life freestyle; he was contained where she was emotional. They were never alike. She’d never wanted to fall in love with someone tuned to such a completely different channel. But as bullheaded as Blake could be, he was also good, deep down in his soul. No way he’d let something paltry, such as race or religion, get in the way of his standing up for what he knew was right. It would never occur to Blake that a good man would do otherwise. And everything he’d said reminded her in so many desperate, wonderful ways of why she’d first fallen in love with him…. But that wasn’t getting their problems handled.

  “Blake…” She hesitated. “More than once over the years, I wanted to call you. It’s sat on my conscience all this time, that for your sake, and Nate’s, this should never have been a long-term secret. But until recently, when you came home after Larry Kincaid died, I assumed you were married and settled happily in California. And I felt the same about that—I didn’t want you in my life or in Nate’s life only because you felt an obligation.”

  Something got through to him—maybe her tone, more than what she said. But the belligerence finally seemed to sink out of his shoulders. He scraped a hand through his hair and blew out a sigh. “Finding out so suddenly that I’m a father… I just feel…pole-axed,” he admitted.