The Heart of Hill Country

by Sherryl Woods

  Angela whirled around to find herself face-to-face with the man in question. “I really wish you would stop sneaking up on me.”

  He grinned. “I came in to see if you and Consuela needed any help cleaning up. You shouldn’t be doing dishes on your birthday.”

  “I thought you and my father were off somewhere discussing breeding or something.”

  “Breeding is a touchy subject around here these days,” he said dryly. “We’ve been talking about water rights. It’s a much safer topic.”

  “Very funny. I’m so delighted that you two are getting along so famously.”

  He regarded her with obvious amusement. “You don’t sound delighted. You sound miffed. Why is that, I wonder?”

  “I don’t give two hoots if you and my father become bosom buddies,” she said vehemently.

  “You sure about that, angel? Weren’t you sort of hoping that he’d blow my head off?”

  “The prospect did hold a certain appeal, yes,” she admitted.

  “Niña!” Consuela protested, sketching a cross over her chest. “You should not say such a thing. A lady is always polite to her guests.”

  “He is not my guest. He’s mother’s. I didn’t want him here, remember?”

  Clint grinned at the obviously distraught housekeeper. “I guess the gloves are off.”

  “Oh, go suck an egg,” Angela snapped.

  Consuela regarded her with stern disapproval. “That is not the way you were brought up to behave, niña.”

  She blushed at the rebuke, but she was too angry to let the matter drop. She stared at Consuela in disgust. “For goodness’ sakes, isn’t anybody around here going to take my side? Clint’s been here less than twenty-four hours and everyone is treating him as if he were the prodigal son back from the range wars or something.”

  “Perhaps we just see what is not so plain to you,” Consuela said. “Now go along. I will finish up in here. You two need to talk.” She faced Angela. “And to listen,” she added pointedly.

  Angela sighed.

  “Well?” Clint said, when she made no move to do as she’d been told. “Do you feel like going for a walk?”

  “Not really,” she said stubbornly.

  He chuckled, then said, “It’s snowing.”

  Immediately, just as he’d intended, an image of another night filled her head. They had left the bar where they had met and walked aimlessly through the small Montana town of Rocky Ridge. They had said little as they strolled along, thrilling to new sensations and content merely to have hands clasped. They had walked for an hour or more, both of them afraid to break the spell of unexpected intimacy that had captivated them.

  Clearly uncertain of where things would go from there, Clint had walked her back to her car. Standing there, his hands on her waist, he had bent his head oh, so slowly and kissed her. It had been the sweetest, most innocent of kisses, but it had been the start of something incendiary.

  As he pulled away, his eyes locked with hers, and she had felt the delicate touch of something cold and damp against her cheek. A snowflake. It had melted against her heated flesh practically before she realized what it was. It took another and another before it had registered.

  “It’s snowing,” she had whispered, delighted, her face turned up toward the sky.

  “Nothing’s more beautiful than sitting in front of a fire and watching the snow fall outside,” Clint had said. “Would you like to share that with me?”

  The answer had been easy and as inevitable as that kiss. By dawn, in front of a blazing fire, they had become lovers. And outside, the ground had been covered with the first snow of the season, a fairy-tale dusting of white that had turned the world into a wonderland.

  There had been more snow that winter, blizzards, in fact, but none had been as memorable as the one that had fallen on that first night she had spent in Clint’s arms.

  She gazed into his eyes now and saw that he was daring her to recapture that magic.

  “I’ll get my coat,” she said quietly and started from the kitchen. She turned back, still defiant, but a little sad. “It won’t be the same, you know.”

  His lips curved at her tone. “Maybe not,” he agreed. “Maybe it will be better.”

  * * *

  “Are you warm enough?” Clint asked. The minute they’d gotten outside, he’d started wondering if he’d made yet another foolish mistake dragging Angela out on such a bitter cold night. When he’d noticed the snow falling, it had taken him back to another time, another place, when things between them had been far less complicated. That night had been about discovery and beginnings. Perhaps tonight would be about a new beginning for the two of them, one built on a more solid foundation.

  “I’m fine,” she insisted yet again, her face turned up to the sky.

  Snowflakes landed on her cheeks and melted in rapid succession. They caught in her eyelashes. She looked as ecstatic and as shatteringly vulnerable as if they had just made love. Clint wanted to kiss her so badly his body ached. He forced himself to hold back. Kissing had been the start of their problems. It wouldn’t solve them. As the feisty Consuela had insisted, they needed to talk more than anything else at the moment. Unfortunately he had no idea where to begin. The emotions ripping through him were complex and conflicting.

  He could start with his outrage over her running off. Or he could yell about the risks she’d taken traveling alone, especially these last couple of weeks with the baby almost due. Or he could demand an explanation for the monumental lie that stood between them. That last angered him more every time he thought about it.

  Hattie Jones, indeed! Had she merely plucked the name out of the air on the spur of the moment? He imagined that more than one woman meeting a man for the first time in a bar might fib about her identity until she knew precisely with whom she was dealing. But wouldn’t an honest woman come clean when the flirtation turned into a relationship? Why in hell had Angela perpetuated the lie until the day she’d left him? He had the feeling that any answer she had for that would only infuriate him more, would perhaps deepen his disdain beyond repair.

  “Go on,” she said, breaking the silence.

  He regarded her blankly. “What?”

  “Yell at me. Tell me what an idiot I was to run away. Tell me what a jerk I was for pretending to be Hattie Jones for all those months.”

  “I’m the one who feels like a jerk,” he grumbled, hitting on what galled him most, his own stupidity. “Why didn’t I see that you were lying?”

  “What man would suspect that a woman he’d been sleeping with for the better part of a year wasn’t who she’d claimed to be?” she retorted. “I wanted you to think of me as Hattie Jones. I wanted to be Hattie Jones, at least for a while.”

  “I just have one question, why? Why did you lie? Not that first night, but later. Why did you keep lying?”

  For a minute he thought he was going to get a flip response, some quick and easy explanation that would diminish the magnitude of what she’d done. Instead, her expression turned thoughtful and the silence dragged on. He let it.

  “I suppose I just wanted a chance to be somebody else,” she said eventually.

  He stared at her in amazement. “Why? What on earth was wrong with being Angela Adams?”

  She closed her eyes and sighed. “I know it doesn’t make any sense to you. Just look around. I grew up on an incredible ranch. My parents are the best. There was no possible way on earth for me to be dissatisfied, right?”

  “But you obviously were,” he said, trying to make sense of it. He would have given anything to have grown up in a place like this with a family like hers.

  Instead, he’d had to scramble for every penny he’d earned. His dream of owning his own spread had seemed impossible once. He had made it happen. He didn’t resent the difficulties he’d faced or the comparative ease of her past. It was just th
e way life was. A man could let it make him bitter or make him strong. He’d opted long ago for strong.

  He saw that she was still struggling to put her thoughts into words and conceded that even though none of what she was saying made any sense to him, she was genuinely troubled. There was no mistaking that.

  “Not dissatisfied,” she said finally. “I felt smothered. There’s a whole long story about how I was born, right here in Luke’s bedroom, as a matter of fact. Luke isn’t my natural father. His brother was.”

  Clint tried to hide his shock, but failed. The relationships here at least had seemed so straightforward, but obviously they were anything but. She shrugged.

  “It’s complicated,” she said in what was an apparent understatement. “Anyway, everyone credits my birth with getting Luke and my mother together. I was supposed to be some sort of Christmas blessing.”

  She held out her hand and caught a snowflake, watching it melt before she spoke again. “It’s weird growing up as part of some sort of family legend. I always felt as if so much was expected of me. The truth was, no matter how hard I tried, I would always be mortal, just another human being with lots and lots of flaws, when I was supposed to be an angel. Maybe if I’d had sisters named Faith, Hope and Charity, the pressure wouldn’t have seemed so intense.”

  Clint chuckled, even though he could see that she was half-serious. He’d had six brothers and two sisters. The pressures she’d felt as an only child were an enigma to him.

  “Don’t laugh,” she said. “Just being born an Adams comes with all sorts of baggage. Grandpa Harlan figures because we carry the name, we’re all destined for something important. He also figures he gets to decide what that will be. Just ask Luke. He was the first one to rebel. Then Jordan. Even Cody bolted for a while. Only my dad tried to please him by going along with Grandpa Harlan’s divine plan. It killed him.”

  Clint was stunned by her words. “Killed him? How?”

  “Granddad wanted him to be a rancher, so he tried, when what he really wanted to do was teach. He was always distracted. His head was always in some book. You know yourself, a rancher can’t afford to be distracted. Too many things can happen in the blink of an eye. Who knows what he was thinking about, but the tractor he was riding here on Luke’s ranch ran into a ditch and overturned. He died a few hours later.”

  She sighed sadly. “You would have thought Grandpa Harlan would learn from his mistake, but he’s still as meddlesome and controlling as he ever was. So is Luke. They are the most wonderful, best-intentioned men in the universe, but I couldn’t breathe under the weight of all those expectations.”

  “So you ran off and became Hattie Jones,” Clint surmised. He’d heard of people moving, settling in someplace new to reinvent themselves, but a whole new name and identity? Wasn’t that carrying it a little too far?

  “Not at first. Actually, other than choosing Stanford instead of the University of Texas, my first act of rebellion was relatively mild. I studied English lit and education, instead of agriculture.”

  She smiled briefly. It seemed a little wistful to him.

  “I meant to be the teacher my father had wanted to be,” she added. “I messed up at that, too. I graduated from college by the skin of my teeth, applied for my first teaching job and got cold feet. I knew in my gut I had no business at all being in a classroom trying to shape little minds, not when my own was such a mess.”

  “Is that when you came to Montana?”

  She nodded. “Rocky Ridge was the first town I’d driven through that appealed to me. When you see Los Pinos, I think you’ll understand why. Ironically, the two places are very much alike. Anyway, I walked into that bar on pure impulse to apply for the waitressing job posted in the window and there you were. It wasn’t just that you were the sexiest thing I’d ever laid eyes on. You looked dangerous, harder and tougher than the men I’d met at school certainly.”

  She reached up and touched his hair. “All that shaggy, sun-streaked hair and those devilish blue eyes. You were flirting outrageously with me, and I felt as if you were my first and best chance to be a whole new person, a woman who was exciting and sensual and wicked. With you I could be anybody I wanted to be.”

  Clint wasn’t sure why, but the explanation chilled him. He didn’t want to be anyone’s act of rebellion. People who stuck together ought to bring out the best in one another, not the worst.

  “I’m glad I could oblige,” he said with a surprising edge of bitterness. “You played the game well. Hattie was a real sexy invention. We had some good times.”

  She frowned ever so slightly at his words. “You say that as if the good times were all in the past.”

  “I think maybe they were,” he said slowly. He gazed into her eyes, searching for the woman who had once intrigued him so. A man would have to be a fool to try to perpetuate something that had only been make-believe. Sometimes it was smarter just to concede that the game was over and call it a draw.

  “What are you saying?” she demanded.

  It appeared to him that there was a touch of panic in her voice. A day ago that might have delighted him. Now it hardly seemed to matter.

  He wanted to tell her that coming here was a mistake, that trying to convince her to marry him was a mistake, but that would ruin his long-range plan for getting custody of his child. “Just that you can’t recapture the past,” he said instead. “I thought you could, but I was wrong.”

  Her eyes darkened with hurt, but he noticed she didn’t try to argue with him.

  “Then you’ll be leaving, after all?”

  He thought he detected a blending of hope and despair in her voice, but he was too upset to figure out what was going on in that mixed-up mind of hers. He shook his head. “Not a chance, sweetheart. I meant what I said about that wedding. That baby of ours is going to have my name.”

  “Why? You can’t possibly care about the child of a woman you despise.”

  Despise was too strong a word, but he didn’t correct her. “I care about my child, though. Make no mistake about it, angel, this baby is mine.”

  Now there was no mistaking the genuine panic in her expression. “Meaning?”

  “I will fight you for him,” he declared, then amended, “or her.”

  He saw her shudder as the words registered and knew he had shown his hand too soon. He regretted that, but it wouldn’t change anything. Maybe the fight would be fairer if they both knew where they stood. Fairness was a lot more than she deserved.

  “You can’t,” she protested.

  “Watch me,” he said and walked away.

  “You can’t win,” she shouted after him. “Not here. The Adams name means something here in Texas.”

  “And Jones?” he taunted. “Does the name Hattie Jones mean anything?”

  That silenced her. He was halfway back up the lane toward the house when he heard the rustle of her coat against denim, the crunch of ice beneath her boots as she followed him. He wasn’t sure why, but he waited for her at the door.

  That was a mistake, he realized at once, when he saw the sheen of tears on her cheeks. Then he told himself that the dampness was merely snowflakes melting. A woman as coldly calculating as Hattie Jones—or Angela Adams—couldn’t possibly be crying.

  * * *

  Angela was holding back sobs by the time she closed the door to her room behind her. She would not let Clint Brady see that he had hurt her. She would not let him see that she was terrified of his threat to take the baby. But behind that closed door, she let her fear and anguish flow unchecked. Still in her coat, damp now with snow, she huddled on her bed, clutching a pillow. She had botched things again. She had tried to be open and honest with Clint—albeit belatedly—and he had taken her words and twisted them into something ugly.

  He would use them against her, if he had to. She had seen that much in his hard expression. She had watched his pride k
ick in and she had shuddered. Months ago she had seen that his pride was a more than even match for any Adams.

  She knew exactly what would happen. He would go into court and portray her as a woman unfit to be a mother, a woman who had committed the ultimate betrayal by pretending to be someone else entirely. He would describe her behavior in Montana as something wanton and sinful and she would be helpless to deny it, because that was exactly what she had meant it to be. Hattie Jones had been outrageous and deceptive, because those were traits that Angela Adams had been forbidden in her nice, protected world.

  What had she been thinking? That wasn’t who she was, not really. Just look how quickly she had done the traditional thing and fallen in love with the man. Just look at the perfectly normal expectation she’d had back then that they would get married and raise the baby they’d conceived in love together.

  In the end she’d even messed up being outrageous. Now everyone was going to know about her foolish mistake. Her parents. Grandpa Harlan. The whole damned world, if Clint had his way. She couldn’t let that happen. She had to find some way to compromise with him, some way to win him back. She had to smooth things over until tempers cooled.

  Only a few hours ago he’d been determined to marry her. He’d wanted the baby to have his name. Obviously he wanted to do things the traditional way, just as she had from the very moment she’d discovered she was pregnant with his child. He wanted to behave honorably, because down deep that was the kind of man Clint Brady was. She had recognized that in him from the beginning. Maybe it was why she had felt so free to behave as she had, because she had known she could trust him not to harm her in any way.

  He’d never taken back his proposal, not even when his temper had flared. Maybe his motives weren’t as innocent and pure as he had wanted everyone else to believe, but he hadn’t retracted the words. She could use that to her advantage.

  She got slowly out of bed and changed into her nightgown. She washed away the last traces of her tears. There would be no more, she resolved.

  She smiled at herself in the mirror. She had learned a few tricks as Hattie Jones. It was time she made them pay off for her. Once, Clint hadn’t been able to resist her. Whatever her name, she was still that same woman.