The Next Mrs. Blackthorne (Bitter Creek Book 6)

by Joan Johnston

  He was going to have to humble himself. He was going to have to grovel—if necessary. He was going to have to give Libby the chance to hurt him as badly as he’d hurt her all those years ago. And pray that he could free the love she’d once felt for him from whatever deep, dark place she’d buried it.

  Clay felt his stomach turn over. So much was at stake. He felt like he was walking through a mine-field, and any wrong move could end in disaster. He headed for the kitchen to get something hot for Libby to drink, and she followed after him.

  “Hot tea? Coffee? Cocoa?” he said, as he looked through the cupboards.

  “Cocoa sounds great,” she said. “Let me help.”

  Clay was surprised how easily they moved around the kitchen together, searching through cupboards and drawers to find what they needed to make the packages of instant cocoa he’d found.

  “Porch swing?” he asked when they each had a cup of cocoa in hand.

  “Sure,” she replied.

  She followed him to the wide back porch, which had a second-story veranda above it, from which hung a white wooden swing. He didn’t turn on a porch light, so the only light came through the screen door from the kitchen. He sat down on the swing, setting his cocoa on a nearby table, and waited for her to sit beside him. Instead, she settled in one of a pair of pecan rockers that were situated nearby.

  Clay told himself he couldn’t expect miracles. That he had to be patient, even though patience wasn’t one of his virtues. He had to consider Libby’s wants and needs—and her fear that he would hurt her again. Maybe the best thing was to keep the focus of any discussion on Kate and Jack and let things between the two of them happen as they would.

  “Tell me about the wedding dresses,” he said.

  Libby balanced her cocoa in both hands and set the rocker in motion with her foot before she spoke. “I know she’s a grown-up. She’s in college, after all. But when I saw her in those wedding gowns, I couldn’t ignore the fact that she isn’t my little girl anymore. Soon she’ll be married and on her own.”

  “And you’ll be all alone,” Clay said, when she didn’t say it herself.

  “My life is very satisfying,” Libby said.

  “Even without a man in it,” Clay finished again.

  “Yes. Infinitely more comfortable, I think, than yours without a woman in it.”

  Clay smiled. “Touché. Tell me about Kate being flippant when she was trying on dresses. What was that all about?”

  “Trying on wedding gowns should be fun,” Libby said, keeping the rocker moving, making a pleasant creaking sound against the wooden porch. “But Kate didn’t seem to really care whether she found a dress she liked or not.”

  “Which means what?” Clay asked.

  “I think she was flippant about trying on dresses because she’s having second thoughts about getting married.”

  “That’s good news,” Clay said. “Isn’t it?”

  “Maybe. What if Jack didn’t have to work this weekend? What if they’ve decided to spend the weekend together in Austin, and they let us come here because they didn’t want us around?”

  “There’s another scenario that also works,” Clay said. “What if Jack having to work is an excuse Kate gave us because she was too embarrassed to admit he opted out of a weekend with her and her parents?”

  “That’s certainly a possibility,” Libby said. “I just wish we knew which scenario is the right one. I hate to think of Kate being hurt, but I’d rather Jack dumped her now than after they’re married.”

  “I hate to think of my daughter being a fling for some playboy ex–football hero,” Clay said.

  “Would you rather he married her?” Libby said wryly.

  Clay grimaced. “I suppose when you put it that way, a fling has its merits.”

  Libby laughed. “I can’t believe we’re discussing our daughter’s love life.”

  “Better hers than ours.” Clay hadn’t meant to sound embittered, but he was having a hard time biting his tongue. He was a man of action. It was hard to pretend there was nothing wrong, hard to pretend they were just two ordinary parents discussing their child.

  The silence grew until Clay realized he could hear the cicadas and the rustle of the wind through the bushes and the distant lowing of the Santa Gertrudis cattle his family raised on the ranch.

  He rose from the swing and crossed the porch to sit on the railing that surrounded it, closer to Libby. “I miss being here.”

  “Didn’t you tell me you left Bitter Creek to go to college and never came back? If you liked it so much—”

  “Not being the eldest son, there was never any chance I was going to be the one running Bitter Creek,” he said. “Trace was always destined for that role. It’s ironic that he ended up running a cattle station in Australia and Summer, the youngest of us, and the only girl, ended up in charge of the ranch.”

  “Would you have wanted to be a cattleman?” Libby asked.

  “I might have enjoyed it. As I said, I wasn’t given much choice.”

  “You could have found a job that would keep you in Levi’s and boots,” Libby said. “Owen became a Texas Ranger.”

  Clay had sometimes envied his twin. He certainly respected him. “My mother had different plans for me.”

  “I never think of you as someone who would let someone else run his life.”

  “I don’t think I realized my becoming president was her dream and not mine, until I was a long way down the road to achieving that goal,” Clay admitted.

  “I never wanted to become a mother,” Libby said into the silence. “I did enough mothering as a child in my father’s household to last me a lifetime.”

  Clay worked to keep the shock off his face. Before he could figure out how to respond to such a momentous statement, she was speaking again.

  “I mean, there was never a mother figure in my life to make me think that being a mother was a good thing. King married my mother, a woman he didn’t love, and she presented him with two offspring, North and me. When she died—of heartbreak, I sometimes think—he married his second wife.

  “Lenora didn’t last long. Once she realized King wasn’t going to open his wallet for her, and that he expected her to take care of two little kids, she asked for an annulment. King married Sassy next, and you know how that turned out. She took Breed with her when she left.

  “King’s third wife, Jill—or fourth, depending on how you count—presented him with three children in five years, my half brothers and sister, Taylor, Gray, and Victoria. But King’s eye was already wandering, and Jill decided in a fit of pique to divorce him. Of course, she didn’t want anything to do with King’s Brats, who’d become infamous in the neighborhood for causing trouble. She left them behind when she hit the road with a big divorce settlement.

  “I stepped into the role of mother. Until I met you, and had a daughter of my own.”

  “Why didn’t your father hire a nurse or a nanny or whatever people do—”

  “When they don’t want anything to do with their children?” Libby said.

  Clay shrugged. “People who can’t be home with their kids need outside help. There’s no crime in—”

  “I know that,” Libby interrupted. “King did hire a nanny. But there’s a big difference between a caretaker and a mother.”

  Clay arched a brow, “So the nanny was the caretaker, and you became the mother?”

  “Someone had to love them!” she said fiercely.

  “Who loved you?” Clay said quietly.

  It took her a while to answer. “King loved us all…in his own way. When he married Sassy, I thought maybe I’d been given a reprieve. Before Sassy started drinking, she was a wonderful mother to all of us. Then Breed was born, and that was the end of that.”

  Libby fell silent.

  Clay tried to imagine how awful it must have been for Libby to lose her own mother so young, and then have King divorce the only one of his wives who seemed interested in mothering. “I’m sorry you—”
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  “It’s all water under the dam,” Libby interrupted. “I didn’t tell you all that so you’d feel sorry for me.”

  Clay wondered how he’d managed to spend the better part of a summer with Libby twenty years ago and never understand the kind of life she’d led before she’d entered his. “Then why are you telling me all this now?”

  “I want you to understand why I hated you—your family, all Blackthornes—so much. Why I seduced you. How I could plot and plan and manipulate to make you fall in love with me, knowing every minute I was with you that I intended to walk away, leaving you brokenhearted—if such a thing was possible. I didn’t know if you even had a heart.”

  Libby set her untouched cocoa down on a small table between the two rockers and scooted forward in the rocker. “Jackson Blackthorne had stolen Eve DeWitt away without a care for the heartbreak he left behind. I blamed Blackjack—North and I blamed him—for how unhappy our mother was. And for the succession of mothers that came and went, women with whom King couldn’t be happy, because they weren’t Eve DeWitt.”

  “I still don’t understand why the Blackthornes are to blame for King’s behavior,” Clay said.

  “Don’t you see? Your father never loved Eve DeWitt, even when he married her,” Libby accused. “And she committed suicide when she realized your father was going to leave her for the woman he’d loved since the day he married her. The only time I ever saw King cry was the day he heard Eve was dead.”

  “Lots of people don’t end up with the one they love,” Clay said. “Look at us.”

  “Yes, look at us,” Libby said. “You certainly went on with your life without a thought of me.”

  “That’s not fair,” Clay said. He hesitated, then added, “And it’s not true.”

  Libby’s brow furrowed. “If I’m not mistaken, the only thing that kept you from getting married within months of our separation was the bride getting murdered before the wedding.”

  Clay swore.

  Libby covered her face with her hands. “I can’t believe I said that.”

  “It’s true,” Clay said through tight jaws. “And it’s true I married Giselle, and it’s true I got engaged to her sister, Jocelyn. That doesn’t mean I stopped loving you.”

  “Oh, please!” Libby said, rising from her rocker and standing with her hands on her hips confronting Clay.

  He rose and met her toe-to-toe, his hands on his hips. “You wanted to break my heart? Well, goddammit, you did! There, are you happy?”

  Libby looked stunned. “You went on with your life. You got married. You—”

  “So did King. So did my father. That doesn’t mean we didn’t love other women the whole time.”

  Libby put a hand to her brow, as though she were dizzy. Clay reached out a tentative hand to support her and was suprised when she took a step forward and leaned her cheek against his chest. He felt a swell of emotion in his throat when her hands went around his waist and she held him tight. He could feel she was trembling. His arms circled her and he pulled her close, offering the comfort that he hadn’t been able to give her twenty years before.

  “This is all such a mess,” she murmured. “What are we doing here this weekend, Clay? It isn’t possible to go back.”

  “We can go forward,” Clay said.

  Libby leaned back and looked up at him, searching his features for something he hoped she would find there. “In what world?” she asked. “My home and my work is in Wyoming. Your home and your work is in Texas.”

  “I don’t have to be a federal judge. I can quit.”

  “I’d never ask you to do that.”

  “Does that mean you’d be willing to move to Austin?”

  “What would I do with myself?”

  Clay knew what he wanted to say, but he didn’t have the courage to say it. We could have more children. We could raise them together. Instead he said, “Be my wife.”

  She pulled herself from his arms and took a step back. “I think we’ve already established that I wouldn’t be happy passing canapes.”

  “I don’t want a hostess. I want a wife.”

  “I need something to keep me busy. I need—”

  “What about more children? We could—”

  “Are you out of your mind? I’m thirty-five years old.”

  “Last I heard, women your age are still bearing children.”

  Even in the scant stream of light from the kitchen doorway, Clay could see her face was beet red.

  “Who says I want more kids?” Libby demanded.

  “I don’t know if you do or you don’t,” Clay said. “But I’d like a chance to raise kids with you.”

  Libby shook her head. “It wouldn’t work, Clay.”

  He took the steps necessary to catch her up in his arms and pull her close. He looked down into her upturned face and said, “Why not?”

  “We don’t even know if we can live together. By the time we find that out, I will be too old—”

  “The only thing that kept us apart all these years was my stubborn pride,” Clay said. “Even though we haven’t lived together, even though I wasn’t able to be with you when Kate was born, we’ve managed to get along all these years. Even if we decided never to see each other again, we’d always have Kate to bind us together. So why shouldn’t we reach for the gold ring, Libby? Why shouldn’t we make ourselves happy?”

  “Marrying me would make you happy?” she asked skeptically.

  “I know this is sudden—”

  Libby barked a sarcastic laugh. “Unbelievable, is more like it.”

  She shifted to be free, and he let her go.

  “We were always good together, Libby. What was there between us twenty years ago is still there.”

  “I doubt that,” she said.

  “Let me prove it.”

  She lifted a brow. “You want to make love to me?”

  He was dying to make love to her. But he didn’t think eagerness was going to help his argument any. “Yes.”

  “And this will prove what, exactly?”

  That we’re soul mates. Clay thought it, but he felt foolish saying it. He wasn’t a romantic. He didn’t believe in romantic nonsense. He was too practical a man for that. But he had the example of men around him—his own father and King Grayhawk came to mind—who had loved one woman, and one woman only, for the entirety of their lives. He’d never been able to stop wanting Libby, even when he’d hated her for deceiving him. And he’d long since admitted that it was only because he’d loved her so much that he’d been so devastated by her betrayal.

  “Let me make love to you,” he said. “Afterward, if you still think there’s no hope for us, I’ll take you back to Austin.”

  He watched her face to see what she thought of his proposal. She seemed wary, skeptical, perhaps fearful. He felt his heart sink, because none of those emotions suggested the answer he wanted to hear. “Well, Libby? What’s your answer?”

  “Take me to bed, Clay.”

  15

  The more Libby had listened to Clay, the more desolate she’d felt. He’d said he wanted another chance with her. He’d said he wanted to have children with her and raise them together. If Clay had recognized the truth and forgiven her—or if she hadn’t been so immature—twenty years ago, she would have run pell-mell into his arms. But so much of her life had been lived alone, Libby wasn’t sure she could go back and pick up where they’d left off. She was older now. And wiser. More cynical. Less trusting.

  She was also aware of what was at risk. What if she’d been yearning all these years for a relationship that had died a natural death when Clay had walked away? Would they be able at this late date to forge a life together? More to the immediate point, could Clay’s lovemaking possibly be as wonderful now as it was in her memories?

  Libby had been a virgin when she’d lain with Clay the first time. What if she’d glorified their time together? What if the special something that had existed between them during those youthful, halcyon days had been extingui
shed over time?

  She glanced sideways at Clay, looking for the physical changes time had wrought. His body was still lean and strong, his shoulders broad and powerful. But the silver in his hair, the deep parentheses that bracketed his mouth, and the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes attested to the years that had passed.

  What if making love to him disappointed her? Or—she shuddered at the thought—disappointed him? That would be a great laugh, the two of them languishing for each other when the spark that had brought them together had long since gone out. They’d hurt each other so badly then. Could they come together with love now?

  It was frightening to make herself vulnerable. Had Clay truly forgiven her in his heart? Could she forgive him?

  “Twenty years is a long time,” she said as Clay led her upstairs and down the hall.

  “Too long,” he said. He opened the door to a moonlit bedroom with twelve-foot ceilings and an enormous canopied four-poster bed.

  When Clay reached for the light switch inside the door, Libby put her hand over his. “No lights.”

  “I want to see you,” he said.

  Libby laughed softly and repeated, “Twenty years is a long time.”

  He smiled and said, “There are candles on the mantel. How about if I light them?”

  Candlelight sounded very forgiving. “All right,” she said.

  Libby waited by the door as Clay made his way across the shadowy bedroom and lit a half dozen candles of odd sizes on the wooden mantel. He also bent to set a match to the fire that had been laid in the stone fireplace.

  Libby waited at the doorway until Clay returned and stood before her. The flickering candlelight made the moment seem too romantic, too fraught with expectations. “I don’t think I can do this,” she said.

  “We won’t know until we try.”

  “Does that mean you’re as nervous—as scared—as I am?”

  “I thought Grayhawks were fearless,” he said as he tucked a blond curl behind her ear. “Blackthornes don’t fear anything.”

  “Kiss me, Clay.”

  His lips were soft against hers, but his hands grasped her waist as though he was afraid she would run.