Finding His Lone Star Love (Harlequin Special Edition)

by Amy Woods

  “It may have crossed my mind a time or two,” she admitted, her voice thin. She seemed unable to shut him out. Sam was so easy to be around, so free of expectations or assumptions about her. He made her want to be herself.

  “Can I ask you something, then?” Sam turned from the telescope to gaze at her, his eyes molten in the thin sliver of light that sneaked into the control room. Lucy realized suddenly that she hadn’t bothered to flip on the main switch. Noticing the dimness sent a shiver up her spine. She’d never thought of the place as an aphrodisiac—awesome, yes, but never romantic. But with the few stray rays of sunlight casting a haze over Sam’s amber-colored eyes, the thick, warm air surrounding them, and the room’s modest size an unexpected intrusion, Lucy’s heart doubled its pace.

  “Sure,” she said, hoping her voice sounded convincing, when what she really felt was apprehension. It was almost impossible to keep her true feelings from him. Every time she opened her mouth in response they came spilling out, as though set free from a flooded dam.

  “Obviously, this—” he gestured at the room “—is your passion. It’s clearly what you love. You’re intelligent, strong and hardworking, so if you wanted to go to space, what stopped you?”

  Lucy concentrated on his question. It was something she’d thought long and hard about many, many times before and the answer had always seemed obvious— because of Shiloh. But coming from Sam, who didn’t know her history, was like hearing it anew, and the answer was no longer quite so clear. When Jennifer dropped Shiloh off on Lucy’s doorstep all those years ago, Lucy’s life had screeched to a halt. One day she was a bright, promising college student studying to become an astronomer, and the next she was a new mom, having missed the crucial step of deciding to become one. But was that really the reason she hadn’t fulfilled her dream? Or would she have given in to fear if the opportunity had come up?

  She would never know. She would never, ever know what might have been if Jennifer hadn’t made a series of choices that ended up changing Lucy’s future. Somehow that was far worse than getting to make her own choices—right or wrong.

  Lucy looked up at Sam, studying the sincerity in his features. She hesitated for a beat, still uncertain why he wanted to know so much about her past. Finally she decided she’d had enough. She wasn’t going to try to second-guess every single sentence that came out of his mouth anymore. Even though he’d only been in her life for a few days, she had no reason yet to doubt anything that he might say, or to believe that he had any motive other than what he’d indicated, which is that he left his own past behind and was looking for a new life in a small town. If things went any further between them, if they did become friends or perhaps more, if she allowed him to get to know her in a deeper way, then she would ask. She would give him space to share what his life had been like, what had happened to make him decide to start over again. But there would be time for that. For now, she would give him the courtesy of being honest. It hadn’t worked for her before, but this time felt different. Sam was different. There was no real reason to compare him to the dating failures of her past.

  “All sorts of reasons really, the most important of which, of course, is Shiloh. When she came into my life, there was never a question of whether or not I would take care of her. She’s family. But if I’m honest, sometimes I do wish that I could go back and start over, but that would involve Jennifer starting over, as well. She made some choices that I wouldn’t have made myself, but they intersected with my life in a way that didn’t allow me to turn away from them. And at the end of the day, even though things turned out differently than I had planned, I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. Shiloh is my entire life, and she’s wonderful. I’ve never thought of her as anything other than my own child.”

  Sam stood watching her intently, his brow furrowed in concentration. He didn’t interrupt, but stood there patiently waiting for her to say more if that was what she wanted. She liked that so much about him, that she could be completely open and herself, but that there was no pressure to offer any more than she wanted to. Rather, his openness about her gave her space to speak, to be authentic, and already she was getting used to his presence, inching closer to a dangerous line—wishing he would stay.

  “Sometimes we don’t get to choose our own path. Sometimes life just gives us circumstances and we have to make the best of them. And Shiloh’s taught me so much about what’s important in life. She’s the bravest person I’ve ever known. And if Jennifer had not decided to give her to me, to trust me with her care all those years ago, then I wouldn’t have had the blessing of raising such a special kid.”

  Sam looked down at his feet, a grin tracing dimples near his mouth. “She is pretty special, isn’t she?”

  “Yeah, she is.”

  Sam glanced back up at Lucy, his features guarded so that she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “I know it’s not...really any of my business, and I know it made you uncomfortable when I asked before, but...what happened to Shiloh? I mean, how did she end up with her disability?”

  Lucy’s heart raced. “You’re right—it does make me uncomfortable.” She turned away from Sam and moved around to the telescope, running her hand over the cool metal to comfort herself. “But it’s not because you asked. It’s just that it’s hard to talk about.”

  “You don’t have to if you don’t want to, Lucy. I don’t want to do anything to hurt you. I’m just curious about her life. She’s such a vibrant kid, and it just makes me wonder what her life was like before.”

  Lucy stopped moving, and turned to face Sam. “To be honest, Shiloh’s life was pretty confusing before the accident, when her mom stopped visiting. Before that, Jennifer would pop in and out on us. We never knew when she would show up or how long she would stay, which is hard on a child. My sister had some problems growing up, but she never really shared them with me until later, and my parents and I didn’t ever talk about it. She always seemed fine to me when we were growing up. She always seemed happy, okay, and of the two of us, she was always the outgoing one, the one most comfortable meeting new people and having new experiences. That doesn’t mean that things were always perfect. She had dark days sometimes, days where she became the complete opposite of her normal self. It was like she would turn in, just fold up inside herself and not let anyone in.

  “My parents didn’t tell me until much later that she had been struggling with bipolar disorder. It made sense to me then, when I looked back. Her manic days, once I knew that’s what they were, were almost scary bright. On those days, she wanted to be and do everything in the world, and there wasn’t anything anyone could say or do to stop her. She would come home from school completely on fire, and drag me away from my homework, and we would have whatever adventure was running through her mind that day.”

  When she stopped talking, Lucy noticed that Sam had moved to sit at one of the computer desk chairs. His hands were folded in his lap and what could only be described as empathy washed softly over his features. That was another thing she could add to the list of things she liked about Sam—he had a way of making her feel as if he was inside her brain, going through her emotions as she spoke about them, but sympathy or pity were never present.

  Over the years, Lucy had got used to those looks from people—the ones that told her when passersby felt sorry for her, or worse, felt sorry for Shiloh. Sam seemed much more interested in knowing her heart, rather than deconstructing her challenges. She continued, becoming more and more at ease by the moment as she shared with him.

  “But when Jennifer got older, her adventures grew more and more dangerous. They started to involve other people—boys especially. Sometimes Jennifer would just feel so much, and not know what to do with it, so she would unleash all her emotions on anyone who paid an ounce of attention to her. And because she was so pretty, still is so pretty, often those people were men. Needless to say, her behavior in such a small town didn’t go under the radar for long. My parents did the best they could to get her
the therapy that she needed, but Jennifer had trouble sticking to her medication regimen, and even though they did their best to get her to take her pills, sometimes Jennifer would pretend to swallow them and spit them out. She said they made her feel weird—she didn’t like the brain fog they caused.

  “They started to fight about it, and, added up with their other differences, I think they just felt completely helpless, and turning to each other didn’t seem to offer answers. It got to be too much for my mom, and one day...she just left.”

  Sam raised his chin and his eyes met Lucy’s, their warmth almost palpable. “Where did your mom go?”

  Lucy shrugged her shoulders. “Your guess is as good as mine,” she said. “She never called, never wrote and never came back.” Lucy rubbed the back of her neck to ease some of the tension that had built there over the workweek. “It was almost as if she completely disappeared, and, without her, I think my dad felt even more powerless when it came to Jennifer.”

  Lucy walked around the telescope, working to even out her breathing and to control the emotion that was welling up inside her. She hadn’t talked about these things in years, not since she had told Tessa what happened with Jennifer, and that was different because her best friend knew her sister—knew the history and didn’t need to hear context to understand. Talking about it to someone new was an odd challenge. But when she thought about it, it was also sort of comforting in a way. Maybe her policy of holding everything inside wasn’t such a great idea after all.

  But then again, she wouldn’t have shared this with just anyone. She had chosen to share it with Sam, partly because he’d asked, but also because, wise or not, she was beginning to trust him.

  She came out from behind the telescope and slowly walked over to where Sam was sitting, pulling out a chair and setting it straight across from him. To her surprise, he reached out and set a hand on top of her hand, squeezing it briefly before letting go. The touch struck her like a splash of cold water, rousing the sleepy nerves under her skin until they stood on edge.

  He didn’t say anything, just offered her an encouraging smile, so she went on.

  “Despite never applying herself, Jennifer was a bright kid. She aced her SATs. When she got accepted to a small college in New York, she and my dad both agreed that it would be a good thing for her to get away from home and have a chance to start a new life. And it was. She did great at first. She was taking her meds, going to class, studying even—” Lucy laughed, remembering how much she’d always had to push to get Jennifer to crack open her books “—then out of the blue, she just stopped. Because she was away from home, it took my dad a long time to figure out what was going on. But then he started getting letters from the college, notifying him that Jennifer was failing her classes. He tried talking to her, of course, but sometimes Jennifer would disappear for days, and no one knew where she was.”

  Sam shifted in his seat, and when Lucy looked up she found lines etched across his forehead that looked to her as if they indicated discomfort, but he just nodded, letting her know it was okay to keep talking.

  “Then one day, Jennifer just showed up at home, pale and weary-looking. She refused to talk about school, telling my dad and me that she just needed a break, but it was too much for her the first semester and that she would go back when she was ready. She told us that she had applied for a deferral, and that she wouldn’t have any problem getting back into school when she wanted to. It wasn’t until a couple of months later that I put two and two together, and I realized that she was pregnant. I begged her to tell me who the father was, or at least to tell him, so that he could have a chance to support her, so that they could support each other through the situation. For the longest time she wouldn’t tell me anything, wouldn’t let me know whether she had spoken to him or not, but one day I pushed her more than I had previously and she said that she had told him. Everything.”

  Lucy put her head in her hands and released a deep breath. She looked straight into Sam’s eyes. “She said he didn’t care—he didn’t want to know the baby, and he wanted Jen to forget she’d ever met him. He wanted nothing to do with either of them, the bastard. I pressed her to get a lawyer, to try to force some responsibility from the guy, but Jennifer demanded that I just let it go. I was livid for a long time, but then I realized something that changed the way I thought about it. If Shiloh’s father wanted nothing to do with her, then he didn’t deserve to know her, and God, he’s missed out. He is the one who lost.”

  Lucy looked up at the ceiling and breathed another heavy sigh. She hadn’t noticed it until now, but relief swept through her, replacing some of the pain that had knitted into her heart over the years. Every word she spoke, each heartache she shared, released more and more tension from her tired body.

  Sam’s silence was thick, permeating the space between them, but she’d gone too far in the story to turn back. She needed to finish telling him.

  “When the baby was born, Jennifer went back on her meds and was actually doing fine for a while. She had moved back to New York into an apartment across the hall from a sweet older lady who watched Shiloh while Jennifer took just two classes and worked the rest of the time. When she called to talk to me, I could tell it was hard on her, but she loved the baby and she was trying as hard as she could, or at least she made it seem that way.”

  Lucy folded her fingers together in her lap.

  “She should have been honest with me, she should have told me that she was having a really hard time, and I would’ve taken a break from school to come up there and help her. But she never opened up to me about that, and I think it was because she was afraid to fail again. I think she felt like she had failed so many times growing up that if she did it once more, it would destroy our dad. But she kept it to herself, and that spring when I came home for break, the doorbell rang one day. When Dad opened it, there was Shiloh, a little note pinned to her clothes, and all we could see of Jennifer was a taxi flying off into the distance. It was years before I heard from her again.”

  Sam’s hands had moved to rest under his chin, and his expression was closed to her—entirely unreadable.

  “Sam, if you want me to, I can stop talking about this. I don’t know why I’ve been going on and on anyway. You’re just...you’re just easy to talk to, I guess.”

  Easy to talk to. Easy for Jennifer to lie to.

  Chapter Six

  Sam’s blood boiled, searing through his veins, firing off adrenaline and anger. Why hadn’t Jennifer told him all of this? Why hadn’t she let him in? And why on earth had she lied to Lucy and allowed her to believe she’d told him about the baby? He would have helped her, would have raised Shiloh on his own if she hadn’t been able to. Yeah, he had been young and stupid and reckless and made his share of bad choices when it came to women. But none of that changed Sam’s right to know his own kid. She was his daughter, too.

  He’d been robbed of so many instances, so many moments filled with experiences he could never get back. Shiloh’s first smile, her first words, her first steps. His heart twisted in pain at the thought of those precious pieces of a life he hadn’t been allowed to share.

  Even as fury surged through him, Sam had a sudden urge to touch Lucy, to ground himself in her gentle stillness.

  He reached over and this time took both of her hands in his. “No, no. It’s okay. I just feel terrible that this happened to you, that you were so young and suddenly had to take on so much responsibility.”

  Responsibility that should have been mine.

  Lucy’s eyebrows knitted above the deep, dark green of her eyes in the increasingly limited light that filtered through the walls of the control room. “It’s fine for you to feel that way,” she said, “but don’t you think for one second that I regret taking care of her. Shiloh might’ve changed my life, but she also gave me new meaning, a stronger purpose than I’d ever had before her. She’s taught me so much about moving forward and accepting change, even when it seems impossible to adjust.” Lucy shook he
r head. “Even if I could go back, I wouldn’t change a thing. She is not what I had planned, but she’s still the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  Sam’s chest filled with an itchy tightness at the thought that he might have upset her, but he needed to know more, even if it was hard on Lucy. He forced himself to ask the question, the one question that he knew he shouldn’t ask, but he couldn’t help it—he had to know.

  “Lucy?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” she mumbled, probably lost in private memories, seeing images from her past with the daughter he’d been denied. He didn’t want to hurt Lucy, but he reminded himself that he did have a right to know.

  “What happened to Shiloh? I mean, why is she in a wheelchair? Why don’t her legs work?”

  Lucy was silent for a moment and Sam gave her the space she needed. He would wait for her, but he wasn’t going to let her walk out of that room until she gave him the answer that he craved. She stood from her chair, bumping his knees with her own as she squeezed out of the small space between them and went to wander around the telescope again. He watched as she walked over to the equipment, touching it again as she had before. He could tell that the smooth metal offered her a sense of peace, some steady footing like a worry stone.

  When he grew impatient, unable to let her move around the room anymore without looking at her face, he stood up as well and walked toward her until he was only inches from Lucy’s back. He could see her shoulders rise and fall as breath entered and left her lungs. His fingers burned to touch her, to run through the coppery spirals of her hair, and his body fought opposing surges of emotion. Part of him wanted her to keep talking, to force her to keep sharing information with him about his daughter. But another side of him wanted nothing more than to give in to his urge to be next to her, to pull her into his arms and do things that would distract both of them from their hearts and heads.