A Child Under His Tree Read online

  He lifted her chin, preventing her from escaping. His eyes—the only eyes she’d ever dreamed of looking into for a lifetime—stared into hers. “I don’t want to go back.” His voice was low. Deep.

  Seductive.

  She willed her knees against failing.

  “We were just kids before,” he continued. “Foolish kids who didn’t know what the hell we were doing. Me, most of all.”

  He wasn’t a kid now. And he knew exactly what he was doing: seducing her with nothing more than the deep, deep sound of his voice.

  His thumb slowly stroked over her lower lip. “And now I don’t want the past to stop us from going forward.”

  Something inside her yawned wide. And her knees did fail. The only thing keeping her upright was the gentle touch of his hands cradling her face.

  He exhaled, closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against hers. “I went out to the farm this afternoon, and when you weren’t there, I was afraid you’d gone again. Left.”

  Her eyes prickled. “I only had an appointment in Braden.”

  “I know that now.” He lifted his head again. Looked at her. “But until I did, I didn’t like the feeling. I just want more time with you. To figure this out. To see where we can go.”

  Her breath shuddered out of her chest. They could go nowhere.

  Because all roads led to Tyler.

  “There’s so much you don’t know,” she whispered.

  His mouth brushed over hers, feeling almost as light as air. “Then give me a chance to find out.” He let go of her face, leaving her to feel like she was swaying in the wind. He grabbed the jacket from the carpet where it had fallen and put it around her shoulders again.

  “You won’t like me when you do.” Her voice sounded raw.

  “Pretty slim chance of that.”

  “Tyler is—”

  “—waiting. I know.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I—”

  “Kelly, I get it. He’s your priority. That’s the way it should be.”

  She shook her head. “No. No, you don’t get it. You don’t get it at all, Caleb. Yes, Tyler is my priority.” Her eyes flooded. “He’s my world.” She swallowed against the knot in her throat. “And he’s your son.”

  Chapter Ten

  He’s your son.

  The words circled in the air.

  Inside Caleb’s head.

  Inside his chest.

  Exhilaration. Shock. Disbelief.

  He felt it all.

  And then some.

  He realized he was digging his fingers into Kelly’s shoulders and abruptly let her go. He turned away, shoving his fingers through his hair.

  Tyler was his son.

  He suddenly turned back on her. “That’s why your mom lied? Made up a damn husband for you that never existed?”

  Kelly’s eyes widened, looking darker than ever against her pale complexion. “No! My mother never knew.”

  He snorted. “Right.”

  “If she’d known I was pregnant with your child, she’d have pushed us both down the aisle with a shotgun at our backs, counting her good fortune every step of the way.”

  “What good fortune?”

  “Getting her hooks into your family! ‘Those people,’” she said in a harsh, mocking tone, “‘those people take care of their own. They’ll take care of all of us.’ That’s what she would have said.” Kelly waved her arms and the jacket fell onto the carpet yet again. “Take care of her. That’s what she would have really meant. She never wanted me, and she couldn’t have given two figs about my baby.”

  “Our baby,” he corrected. His legs abruptly gave out, and he sat down hard on the couch. Our baby. His throat felt tight. “How?” He didn’t need to ask when. When was indelibly printed on his memory.

  “How do you think?” Her eyes were glittering with tears. “The usual way. You were there. You ought to remember.”

  He remembered every moment. Every detail, from the time her headlights washed over him when she pulled up behind him on the side of the highway to the snow that piled on the outside of her windshield and the steam that clouded it from the inside.

  He could recall every breath. Every touch. He could recall thanking God that she’d finally forgiven him, because if she hadn’t, she wouldn’t be pushing that little foil packet into his hands while she shimmied out of her jeans and pulled open his fly. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have sunk down on him, gloving him more perfectly than ever, obliterating everything else in the world but the feel of her body on his.

  Oh, yeah, he remembered.

  Every. Single. Moment.

  From start to finish, when she was shutting her truck door in his face, telling him that now, now, it was her turn to walk away.

  “We used a condom.”

  She grimaced. “And here we stand, discussing the very proof that condoms have been known to fail. We’re a statistic. Just like a quarter of the patients my boss has.” She laughed, but there was not a speck of humor in it. “The odds were against us, I suppose. After—how many times were we together in high school? Dozens?”

  Hundreds.

  He didn’t say it, though.

  She knew just as well as he did.

  “We might as well have been playing Russian roulette.”

  “Except we got a son out of it. You should have told me.”

  She propped her hands on her slender hips. Hips that had carried his child. “What would you have done, Caleb?”

  “Married you!”

  She spread her hands. “And there’s your answer.”

  “When you were eighteen you wanted to marry me!”

  “And you wanted to marry me,” she returned swiftly. Her cheeks were red, her eyes suddenly flashing. “At least that’s what we talked about before you headed off to college. I’d wait for you. When you were finished, when the time was right, we’d be together until we were old and gray. Matching rocking chairs on the front porch,” she finished harshly. “Only you changed your mind. You still wanted that. Just not with me. Tell me, Caleb, why, why would I want a proposal from you after that, when I knew it was only coming because I was pregnant!”

  “You could have said no.” God knew that by then he’d had practice having one marriage proposal tossed back in his face.

  “Yes, you’d think, wouldn’t you?” She swiped her cheeks and sat in the chair, wearily hunching over to rub her temples.

  He looked away from the perfect view he had down the front of her loose shirt. Taking in the womanly shape of her pink-tipped breasts wasn’t helping his situation any. Because even if he wanted to shake her, he still wanted her. Period.

  “I never expected you to be here in Weaver.” Her voice was husky. “I never expected—”

  “To have to tell me the truth.”

  “To feel guilty that I hadn’t told you in the very beginning.” She sat up, and there were fresh tears on her cheeks. “I’m sorry. When I left Weaver—” She pressed her lips together for a moment. “When I left, I was only doing what I needed to do at the time. I couldn’t stay under my mother’s roof another moment. Couldn’t bring my child—our child—into that world. I didn’t know much.” Her throat worked. “But I knew that.”

  “You didn’t have to leave Weaver.”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “I did.”

  A son. He and Kelly had a son.

  A cute kid. Tall for his age.

  Caleb pressed his palms into his eye sockets. “Doc Cobb? He knew?”

  “No.” Then she sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe he suspected. Not about you, but about the baby. The day I left home, I drove as far as Billings.”

  “Why Montana?”

  “It was the opposite direction of where you were in
Colorado.”

  He dropped his hands, silently absorbing the sting of that.

  “I had to call Doc Cobb to resign, though. He gave me the job in his office when the only thing I’d ever done was check groceries.” She swiped her cheeks again and then stared at her fingers as if she couldn’t figure out why they were wet. “He tried talking me into coming back. When I wouldn’t, he told me to go to Idaho. He gave me the number of someone he knew. He said Dr. Maguire owed him a favor and would make sure I found a job. Doc Cobb made me promise to go there. He said I would be okay, and...and I was.”

  “So there was no guy.” Her comments at the diner ran through his mind. “The one who didn’t propose to you was me.”

  Her lashes lifted. Her eyes met his. “I ended up renting a room from one of the nurses at the complex where Dr. Maguire’s practice was located. After Tyler was born, Dorothy and the other nurses helped watch him when I was in class. I became a nurse because of them. And I couldn’t have done it without them. I got my license a couple years ago. I still work at Dr. Maguire’s. Only now I don’t clean bathrooms and mop floors. Tyler and I have an apartment. It’s not as big as this—” she waved her arm “—but it’s in a safe neighborhood and close to his school. His best friend, Gunnar, lives next door.”

  “The perfect life.” His voice was flat.

  “Not perfect,” she said thickly. “But good. I made something good. For Tyler and for me. Doc Cobb put me in the right direction, but I did it.”

  And on any other day, in any other situation, he’d have applauded her for that.

  “You should have told me,” he repeated.

  “Well, I didn’t,” she retorted. “But now I have. So now what?” Her brief spurt of attitude expended, she slumped back into the corner of the chair. Her hair was starting to dry in untidy waves around her pinched face, and the scrubs hung on her slender shoulders.

  Bingo rubbed against her leg, suddenly hopping onto her lap. She circled once, plopped down and started licking Kelly’s hand. Maybe just for the salty tears. Or maybe to offer the comfort that Caleb couldn’t.

  “I don’t know what we do now. But you’re not taking my son back to Idaho.”

  Her jaw tightened. “Is that a threat?”

  He shoved to his feet. “I don’t know what it is,” he said. “Except a fact.” He snatched up the jacket and tossed it over the arm of her chair. “Get up. I’ll take you to your car.”

  She nudged Bingo to one side and stood. “I don’t want your jacket.”

  “Well, that’s too damn bad, Kelly. Put it on or I’ll put it on for you.”

  Her jaw set and she stared him down. “I’m not scared of you, Caleb Buchanan.”

  “Then that makes one of us.” He flipped the switch on the fireplace, extinguishing the flame in one quick motion.

  It struck him as particularly fitting.

  He yanked open the front door and gave a short, sharp whistle that had Bingo immediately bouncing from the chair to prance around his boots.

  Giving Caleb a glare that would have done her mother proud, Kelly stomped past him wearing nothing on her feet but a pair of his white athletic socks. She went straight to his truck, which he’d left unlocked, yanked open the passenger door and climbed inside to sit with her arms crossed tightly over her chest.

  And that’s the way she was still sitting when they finally reached her car, still parked on the side of the highway outside town.

  The vehicles involved in the collision had been towed away. The sun had given up the ghost, but his headlights showed that there was no leftover debris.

  They also illuminated the puffy white flakes of snow that had started falling.

  He signaled and pulled off, stopping a few feet behind her car.

  She immediately unsnapped her safety belt and pushed open the door. Clearly she wasn’t inclined to linger there and appreciate the parallels to that night six years ago when he’d been stranded. She clutched her purse against her waist as she hopped out. Just as he’d predicted, it had been safely waiting for her at the sheriff’s station when he’d stopped there on the way out of town.

  “I told you that you wouldn’t like me.”

  Then she closed the door and strode to her car, somehow managing to look almost regal as she did so, even though she was wearing his socks instead of shoes and his jacket kept sliding off her shoulder.

  There was no traffic on the highway, so he pulled up next to her car, rolling down the passenger window. “I’m following you to Leandra’s.”

  She looked over her shoulder at him. “And then what?”

  He wished to hell he knew.

  Since he didn’t, he just rolled up the window and waited for her to get in her car. A moment later, her headlights came on. She edged off the shoulder, then hit the gas.

  * * *

  The Perry barn was nothing more than a dark shadow in the night when Kelly passed it on the way to Leandra’s place. Caleb’s headlights hadn’t slacked off for a single mile of the drive. She hadn’t really expected that they would.

  The look of shock on his face when she’d told him about Tyler was going to stay with her for the rest of her life.

  Shock.

  And betrayal.

  He would never forgive her.

  Do you blame him? The caustic voice circling inside her head taunted her mercilessly. What did you expect? For him to shrug his quarterback-size shoulders and tell you no worries? Everything’s just hunky-dory? Go on about your life?

  She turned into the Taggarts’ drive. Before she could get out of her car, though, Leandra was hustling out of her house. She darted across the drive and peered through the car window Kelly rolled down. “Tried phoning you but couldn’t get through on your cell. Tyler’s sound asleep. Do you want to just leave him here for the night?” She peered at the truck pulling up on her tail. “I know Caleb’s overprotective of you, but he followed you here?”

  It wasn’t overprotectiveness at all.

  Not of her, anyway.

  “I don’t want to impose more than I have already.”

  Leandra dismissed that with a wave of her hand. “Don’t be silly.” She straightened again, swiping a snowflake off her face as she watched Caleb get out of his truck. “You convince her,” she said.

  “Of what?”

  Kelly hoped she was the only one who heard the dark tone in his voice.

  “To let Ty spend the night. He’s already asleep in Lucas’s bunk bed.” She shot Kelly a grin. “My son even gave up his top bunk for him. They have a total little-boy bromance going. Lucas is going to be completely bummed when you two go back to Idaho.”

  “They’re not going back.”

  Kelly pushed open her car door. “Don’t listen to him. Yes, we are.” The gravel driveway poked uncomfortably into her stocking feet. “And it is nice of you to offer, but I really should take Tyler. I think he’d be upset in the morning when he realizes I didn’t come to get him.”

  “Well, I understand that.” Leandra angled her head, giving Kelly’s feet a look. “Just wait here. Evan can carry him out.”

  “I’ll do it.” Caleb gave Kelly a hard look, forestalling her instinctive protest. She swallowed her misgivings for the nonsense that they were.

  What did she think he was going to do?

  Take him away from her right there at his cousin’s house?

  Leandra was frowning, turning her speculative attention from Caleb as he strode inside the house back to Kelly. “Everything all right?”

  No. But she nodded anyway. “It’s been a long day.”

  “I heard about the accident. Terrible thing. But the baby’s okay. That’s what Caleb told me. Horrible to have to grow up without his daddy, but—” She broke off suddenly and slipped her arm comfortingly around Kelly’s shoulder
s. “Honey, don’t cry.”

  “I’m sorry.” She swiped away the tears that had escaped despite her best efforts, wishing the ground would open up and swallow her to put her out of her misery.

  “You’ve had a hell of a day. On top of a hell of a week. And now you have the auction next week?” Leandra patted her shoulder comfortingly. “It’s enough to bring a grown woman to her knees.”

  She’d actually managed to forget about the auction. She hadn’t even told anyone yet that it was officially scheduled. “How’d you—”

  “You know how word travels. Evan had a woman here picking out a kitten just before supper. Husband is one of the appraisers for the company you’re using. You picked a good company,” Leandra assured her. “They’ll be fair.”

  The door to the house opened, and Kelly braced herself for the sight of Caleb carrying her sleeping boy.

  But she needn’t have, because Tyler was awake and walking under his own steam.

  Stomping was more like it.

  When he reached her, his lower lip was pushed out. “I wanted to spend the night, Mom.”

  So much for believing he’d be upset in the morning.

  “Maybe another time.” She was painfully aware of Caleb looming over them. “Tell Mrs. Taggart thank you.”

  For a moment, Kelly was afraid he was going to argue. Particularly when he set his jaw just so. But he looked up at Leandra. “Thank you, Mrs. Taggart.”

  She crouched down in front of him. “You’re very welcome, Mr. Rasmussen. But next time, you can call me Leandra. Okay?” She tapped his nose lightly. “Maybe your mommy will bring you by tomorrow to play after Lucas is home from kindergarten. I’m sure he’d like that a lot.”

  He nodded, and Leandra rose. “Sunday dinner’s at our place this weekend, too. Whole family will be here. You remember what that’s like. Caleb should bring you guys on along whether we see you before then or not. It’ll be fun.”