This Cowboy's Son

She looked determined, almost combative. “This is Jesse,” she said.

Ah, Jesse. Who was he? Who did he belong to?

Jenny didn’t say anything else, just stood and watched him silently. What was going on? Kid seemed kind of familiar. Weird. He was too young for Matt to have met him before, though. Not here in Ordinary, anyway.

“Hey, Jesse,” he said.

The kid looked up at him with bright blue eyes and said, “Who are you?”

“I’m Matt.”

“Are you new?”

“Yep.”

“I can show you around.” He balanced on one foot. “I know lots of things.”

“Yeah? Do you live here?”

“Uh-huh, with my mom.”

“Oh? Who’s your mom?”

The kid gave him an odd look, then glanced up at Jenny.

Matt studied Jenny and then the child. Where she was dark, with chestnut hair and deep brown eyes, Jesse was fair, with blond curls framing his face and thick light lashes ringing those blue eyes. But Jesse had a smattering of freckles across his nose.

Matt knew without looking that Jenny did, too.

“He’s yours?” he croaked. Judging by the boy’s age, she hadn’t wasted any time jumping into bed with someone else after Matt left.

Matt got a weird feeling in his stomach. His nerves skittered. He asked a question he suddenly feared. “Who’s the father?”

Jenny crouched down in front of Jesse and said, “Head inside the house. Angela made custard today.”

“Custard!” he squealed and ran toward the house on sturdy little legs.

She stood slowly, turned around just as slowly, while a pink stain spread on her cheeks.

“He’s yours,” she said.

CHAPTER THREE

DAMN, ANGUS THOUGHT, what was wrong with him?

Did he have a death wish?

Sitting in his car on Main Street, he was deeply disturbed. It was missing Kyle so badly, and seeing Matt again, a kid who’d become his second son, but who could never replace Kyle.

And finding out that he’d invited to his ranch the man whose son Angus wanted for his own. What a mix-up. If only Jenny had told him earlier, he never would have asked Matt back to work on the ranch.

But you didn’t warn her, did you?

She’d had no idea Matt was coming to the Circle K. In retrospect, Angus knew he should have told her, but his mind was too distracted these days.

As if seeing Matt again and missing Kyle and craving another man’s son weren’t enough to deal with, his approaching marriage weighed on him, too. Only two more weeks. He had to go into that with a clear head and a clean conscience. He had business to start and finish here today.

Angus stared at the Rose Trellis, knowing that she was inside. That she was truly back, had taken over her mother’s dressmaker’s shop and had no intention of leaving.

Moira Flanagan. Her name cut through his veins, landing like a load of asphalt in his gut.

You’re insane coming here like this.

He had no response to that, no argument. His knuckles turned white on the steering wheel, his grip brutal but ineffective. He knew he was going to get out of the car and head on in there to see her.

He stepped out like a man heading to his execution.

Thirty-five years later, the thought of Moira still had the power to move him.

They needed to talk.

Dresses made from rose-printed material hung in the shop window. Lavish. Like Moira.

Since she’d come home for her mother’s funeral, Angus had seen her only from a distance. She hadn’t left town afterward, though, as he’d expected her to.

Yesterday, he’d heard that she’d taken over her mother’s business in town.

He had to see her.

I’m not ready.

You’ve left it long enough. Get it done.

He exhaled until there was nothing left in his lungs but regret.

He grasped the knob of the front door. Forcing himself to push it open, he stepped inside, setting off a chime somewhere above his head.

The interior was dim after the bright sun outdoors, so he stood still to let his eyes adjust—and to give himself time to steel his heart.

Dresses lined one wall. The other wall was bare.

“I’ll be right with you,” a musical voice sang out from behind a curtain at the back of the store, deeper and huskier than he remembered from his youth, but still instantly recognizable.

It stirred memories. Desires.

The curtain flew aside and Moira stepped into the room, smiling.

She stopped when she saw Angus, the smile fading from her pale face. He drank in the sight of her. The wide neckline of her dress bared her white shoulders. She’d been a wisp of a girl back then, with breasts too big for her frame. She’d grown into a woman, and age had added substance to the rest of her body.

Lord, what a woman. He had it bad for her. Still.

He curled his fingers into fists.

Don’t touch. You’ve got a good woman at home you’re going to marry in two weeks.

Then what are you doing here?

Clearing the air.

He stepped toward her.

She stiffened. “What are you doing here?”

He stopped. The air around her swirled with tension and the scent of her rose perfume.

“Hel—” His voice didn’t work, came out as a deep croak. He swallowed and tried again. “Hello, Moira.”

“I asked you what you’re doing here.” Her tone was no longer musical, but thin with distress.

“I thought we should meet. Privately. Before we have to do it in public.”

“At your wedding.” Her mouth was flat. “I don’t plan to attend.”

He heard the resentment in her statement and his temper flared.

“You’ve got no right to be bitter. You left me.”

“I know what I did.” He wasn’t sure what emotion ran through her voice. Was there regret beneath the anger? He hoped so, hated like crazy to think he’d been the only one in love all those years ago.

“She’s so young. Do you love her?”

He couldn’t lie. “No.”

Her green-eyed gaze shot to his face.

“I care for her, though,” Angus continued. “A lot. She’s a good woman.”

Moira fingered the ribbon on a hat on a table. “But if you don’t love her, why marry at all—especially someone so young?”

“Children.” His voice shook with fury. “They should have been yours. Ours. They should be full-grown and working our ranch.”

“Yes,” she hissed, whirling away from him. She placed her hands on the counter and hung her head, the nape of her exposed neck unbearably vulnerable.

“Why did you come back?” he asked. Why are you here to turn my life upside down?

She refused to look at him, so he studied the top of her head and the once-scarlet hair that had faded to the color of a copper samovar.

“I came home for Mother’s funeral last month, and decided to stay.”

“Why?” he asked. “There was a time when you couldn’t wait to shake the dust of Ordinary off your shoes.”

Moira glanced up at that, but her gaze skittered away and she shrugged. The neckline of her dress slipped lower on one shoulder. Her porcelain skin used to fascinate him, white and flawless against the calluses of his tanned rancher’s hands. Judging by the tremor running through him, she still bewitched him.

With careful movements he stepped closer to her.

“Was it only me in love all those years ago?” he asked. “Did you ever love me?”

She clasped her hands, but he could still see them trembling. “Always. I’ve never stopped loving you,” she blurted defiantly. “Make of that what you will.”

It felt as though a slab of concrete had fallen on him, crushing his chest. “But— You never wrote. Never called. I never heard from you.”

Angus gently touched her arm and she pulled away from him.

“Of course I didn’t write,” she answered. “You married another woman.”

“Did you think I’d stand around? I waited for you to come home. I waited for three years.”

His hand struck the counter. “You could have called anytime in those years before I got married.”

He was shaking. “I waited to hear from you. I waited and waited and waited. Why didn’t you call?”

“You could have called me.”

“You left me, Moira. It was up to you to let me know if you ever wanted to see me again.”

“Oh, Angus, I was busy.” When he would have spoken, would have lambasted her for such a flimsy excuse, Moira raised a hand. “New York is like a wild animal, absolutely voracious. It chews up young people and their hopes and dreams and spits them out ruined. I refused to be one of the ruined, one of the losers. I worked my butt off to succeed.”

Her defiance left her and she looked fragile, tired.

“Did you succeed?” he asked softly.

“Beyond my wildest dreams.”

“Was it worth it?”

“I don’t know.”

“What does that mean?”

The door chime rang and Angus flinched.

Go. Get the hell out, whoever you are. I’m not finished here.

He watched Moira wipe moisture from her eyes, subtly enough that he was pretty sure the customer behind him wouldn’t notice.

He turned around. Norma Christie. Jesus, it only needed this. Crusty Christie, the biggest blabbermouth in town.

“Hello, Moira,” she said. “Angus.” She inclined her head, unbending that steel rod of a backbone enough to acknowledge him. She’d seemed old when he was young. She was downright ancient now. And judging by the spark in her eyes, just as nosy as ever.

Angus set his jaw. Moira turned around, her face composed, but he could see the strain in her eyes.

“What are you doing in here, Angus?” Norma gestured to the rose-patterned fabrics scattered around the shop. “You getting a dress made for someone? Your fiancée?”

Angus froze. What the heck was he supposed to say? That he had come in only to see Moira? When he was getting married in two weeks? Knowing Norma, she’d put an interesting spin on it and would spread it to half the town. It would crush Jenny if she heard. If there was one thing he knew about Jenny, it was that she valued loyalty above all else.

“Last time I checked,” Norma said, “the groom wasn’t supposed to order the dress for the bride. He wasn’t even supposed to see it before the wedding day.”

The dress. He’d forgotten. Moira was making Jenny’s wedding dress. How did Moira feel about that?

He couldn’t come up with a lie for Norma.

Not one goddamn word.

He saw Moira swallow, watched her pretty throat move and her full lips part.

“Angus came to pick up Jenny’s dress, but it isn’t ready yet.”

She turned to Angus and smiled. It looked like a struggle. “Tell Jenny I’ll get those pleats she wanted sewn in right away. It will only be a couple of days.”

“Will do.” Angus nodded at Norma and left the store, so frustrated his jaw hurt. He didn’t feel any better now than when he’d walked into the store. One way or another, he would find out what had happened to Moira over the years and why she’d decided to stay in Ordinary now.

And why the hell she’d never stopped loving him, yet hadn’t done a single thing about it in all these years.

MATT KNEW HE’D HEARD wrong. Jenny couldn’t have just said that the boy who’d been standing in front of him was his son. He had to have heard her wrong.

She looked serious, though.

“What?” he asked, hoping against hope that he had got it wrong. He felt light-headed, as if he was at the bottom of a deep, deep well, with only a small circle of light at the top and someone leaning over and whispering strange things. He couldn’t hear properly. “No way.”

“Yes, he’s yours,” Jenny said from the top of that long tunnel. “Born nine months and three days after the night we spent together.”

A shiver ran across the back of his neck. A wave of dizziness left his skin clammy, as though he’d just walked a mile through a thick fog.

He had a son. A child.

Whooh. He exhaled through his dry lips.

He had a child.

Christ, what was he supposed to do about it? How on earth was he supposed to deal with a child? Hoo-boy.

His feet started to itch, like he needed to run. But he couldn’t leave. He had a son.

He was the boy’s father, beyond a shadow of a doubt. Jesse looked familiar because Matt saw a more mature version of that face in his mirror every day.

He was a father.

His legs threatened to give out on him. He broke out in the kind of sweat usually caused by nightmares or rotgut alcohol.

The screen door slammed and Jesse came out with a small Tupperware container and a spoon in his hand. He sat on the top step and shoveled something into his mouth.

That little guy had sprung from his loins.

Afternoon sunlight glinted off the golden hair the boy had inherited from Matt.

Matt had inherited that from his own father—the dad who would never, not in a million years, have been voted Father of the Year.

Deserter of the Year, more like.

Or Drunk.

Or Layabout.

Or Wife Beater.

One hell of a frickin’ package.

The old confusing, crushing amalgam of feelings flooded him—love, hatred, admiration, sorrow, hero worship. Disappointment.

Matt stared at the child on the veranda.

I am a father.

His body couldn’t decide what it wanted to do, whether he should run scared or cry like a baby.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, his voice as cold as the water at the bottom of the well he was drowning in.

“I know you, Matt. You don’t have staying power.” Jenny looked stoic, heartless, so sure in her opinions of him.

“You never gave me the chance,” he said.

“Sorry, Matt. My first responsibility is to Jesse. If that means protecting him from his own father, I’ll do it.”

Matt’s chest burned. She thought so little of him. Who had ever had faith in him? So few people.

Angus. Jenny at one point, but no more.

Maybe he should leave, figure out another way to pay Angus back. But he knew he couldn’t leave.

He had a son.

He shouldn’t have come here. Life was too complicated here, even worse now that he knew about Jesse.

“You can’t tell him,” Jenny said.

“What?”

“You can’t tell him you’re his father.”

Something inside his chest ached. Pride, he guessed, or was it something deeper? Ownership?

“If you tell him and then leave,” Jenny continued, “he’ll be so badly hurt.”

He shouldn’t have come back to Ordinary. And if he’d had any other option, he never would have.

A thought occurred to him. “Wait a minute. You’re marrying Angus. Were you just going to let him become the boy’s surrogate father?”

“Yes. We both know he makes a good one.”

“Why wouldn’t you tell me first before doing that?”

Jenny bit her bottom lip and appeared to be struggling with what she had to say. “I need a dependable man to be Jesse’s father.”

“And I’m not,” Matt said bitterly.

Jenny clenched and unclenched her hands. “No,” she said. “We both know you aren’t.” That hurt.

She must have realized it because she stretched one hand toward him then let it fall. “Angus will be a better father than you. He’s the better man for Jesse, Matt.”

Jenny seemed regretful, but Matt couldn’t stand to look at her a second longer, to stand in the same yard with her. Even if he was a coward at heart, even if she didn’t respect him, she should have told him the truth.

He should have known he had a son.

She shouldn’t be giving his child to another man to raise.

On one level, he barely recognized that he was angry with her for getting pregnant in the first place, for making him feel responsibility when he didn’t want to, as if there hadn’t been two of them having sex that night.

Matt turned his back on Jenny and strode to his truck, angry, afraid, too unsettled to know exactly what he was feeling. Shocked, definitely.

Man, oh, man, he hadn’t been prepared for this kind of problem. Since that scare with Elsa, he’d been really careful with birth control. So what had happened that night with Jenny? He hadn’t given it a single thought—had only felt that he needed her, and that he had to have her.

He’d lost control.

He started the engine, made sure the kid was still sitting on the veranda and then took off down the driveway, not caring how much noise he made. When he hit the highway, he revved the engine and burned rubber.

He didn’t know where he was going, only knew that he had to get away to clear his head.

I am a father.

As Matt neared the turnoff to his parents’ house, he slammed on the brakes, hitting the gravel shoulder in a spray of fine stone and dust, and fishtailing. He missed the dirt road that led into his property.

Breathing hard, he took off his hat and threw it onto the seat beside him.

He didn’t have a clue where he needed to go or what he needed to do, but maybe it was no accident that he’d braked before he’d made any firm decisions.

Putting the truck into reverse, he backed up and turned onto the old road. Rainstorms had washed ruts into the dirt, and the truck bounced off them as he drove.

He approached the house and tried to dredge up a memory, any memory, that wasn’t bad. Not of Jenny and him and their night together, though. That memory was good and bad and insane. At this moment, he didn’t want to think of her, not when he wanted to hurt her so badly for the way she’d hurt him, for what she’d taken from him.

His boots rang loud and hollow on the porch floor, and he sidestepped a hole. The door groaned like an old woman. Then he was inside the house and lost in memories of his childhood.

He closed the door behind him, to keep the bugs out and the really tough memories in. On second thought, he opened it again, hoping against hope that all the memories would fly out, leaving nothing more than a house. But they refused to leave. They buzzed around his head like mosquitoes ready to draw blood.

The stone fireplace still dominated the small living room and open kitchen.

An ancient Christmas tree, brown and desiccated, stood in the far corner. Silver balls and bits of tinsel hung on it. His mother’s last attempt at making this place a home?

Matt held himself rigid, afraid of the emotions that would flood out of him if he let them. They threatened to drown him.

Keep it cool, Matt. Keep it cool.

He spotted a bunch of dust-coated mail on the Formica table by the door. Matt had left it there, unopened, after his parents had died. Other than he and Jenny that one night, no one had been here since then. He flipped through what was left of his parents’ lives.

He picked up one large manila envelope, then stilled. He didn’t have to guess what it was. He already knew. The autopsy. No, thanks. No, no, no. He dropped it back onto the table and stalked into what had been his bedroom. Not one clue to his personality existed in the room—no posters nor CDs nor photos. Nothing. No Matthew Long. He’d spent his adolescence avoiding the homestead.

Kyle’s room had been messy, with football posters on the wall and a computer and his own TV and Playboy magazines under the bed.

Matt avoided his parents’ room, couldn’t possibly go in there, so headed back out to the kitchen.

He touched the stove and left his fingerprints in a layer of dust. When had it last been cleaned? More than fifteen years ago. Just before she died, Mom had been consumed by her anger and depression. The house had become more and more dirty, until Matt couldn’t stand to eat there.

He opened a cupboard door and spotted a tin of beans and a loaf of bread, now green and dried out. He opened another cupboard door and froze. There on the second shelf, beside the salt and pepper and a bag of pasta, was a small, framed photo of his mother and him.

He looked younger than Jesse was—maybe four, maybe only three. Why was it in the cupboard? Did she want to look at it every time she reached for the saltshaker? Or had she put it here without realizing? Like when he used to find the milk, warm and sour, in a cupboard, and unopened tins of beans in the fridge?

His mother was holding him in her arms and smiling. She’d been so pretty when she was young.

Flashes of memory filled his head, glimpses of this and that, with no rhyme or reason, before finally settling on this one. He thought that maybe he remembered when this photo had been taken.

He remembered his shock later, after his mother had changed.

“MATTHEW, WHAT IS THIS?” Mama held up a pair of pants with holes in the knees. He’d put them in the laundry basket on the floor of his closet, with all his other dirty clothes, just the way he was supposed to.

“Well, what do you have to say for yourself?” Her voice sounded funny, like one of the bad ladies in the Cinderella movie. She sounded mean.

“Those are my jeans.”

“I know that, you little moron.”

His mouth dropped open. Mama called him a name. She never did that before.

“I mean, why do they have holes in the knees?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I must have falled down.”

She hit him across the face. He fell on the floor and cried. Where was the mama he liked? Where was the mama who loved him?

MATT CAME OUT of his memory with the question he’d asked himself so many times as a child. Where was the mama who loved him?

It had started the day she’d slapped him and had gone downhill from there, with Mama becoming more and more demanding, her demands more and more unreasonable.

Then Pop started to stay out later and later, coming home only long enough to make sure his kid idolized him and then running off to another rodeo or another ranch or another bar.

To another woman, Missy Donovan from Ordinary.

When Pop did come home, he was angry and drunk and ready to leave again, but not before he and Mama tore each other apart in the bedroom. They went at it like animals.

When Matt was old enough, he got out of the house before they started, and stayed out until long after they finished.

Matt’s shell threatened to crumble now, to let the emotions free to kill him with their poison.

He set the old photo on the scarred countertop, facedown because he couldn’t stand to look at him and his mother happy. What kind of weird compulsion had driven a warm, loving woman mad?

Was it inside him, too? Was there some sort of double curse in his life? He’d learned too much of the wrong things from his father. Love ’em and leave ’em. Don’t let a woman get her hooks into you. When things get too tough, run scared.

Was he also eventually going to lose his mind the way his mother had?

And now he had a child to worry about.

What on earth had he ever learned here that would help him to be a parent?

JENNY HAD BEEN POSITIVE Matt would run, had known it in her marrow. Then why did she feel so disappointed that he had? It was nuts. She didn’t want Matt sticking around or deciding that he should have a hand in raising her son.

She and Angus would do just fine raising Jesse. Angus knew how to be a good father.

She sat down on the top step beside her son and took the small spoonful of custard he offered her.

“Do you want to play in the backyard when you’re finished?” she asked, smoothing his bangs away from his face.

“Yeah.” He lapped up more of his custard.

Angus drove into the yard in his big silver Cadillac. When he got out, he looked tired. Frustrated.

As she’d done so many times lately, Jenny wondered what was going on with him. What was distracting him? He approached the veranda with heavy steps.

His face lit up for Jesse, though.

“Hey, little buddy,” he said and tickled the boy.

Jesse giggled then offered him custard.

“No, thanks. You finish it.” Angus turned his attention to Jenny. “How did it go?”

“About as well as I expected. He lit out of here twenty minutes ago. Barely hung around long enough to find out his name.” She tipped her head toward her son.