The Cowboy and His Wayward Bride

Did he just want to see his child? Did he want to exact revenge on Laurie for deceiving him? Or did he want what he’d always wanted, to take both of them home with him, to have a family with Laurie Jensen?

One thing for certain—he needed to figure all that out before he blasted his way back into her life. He needed to be seeing things clearly and thinking straight, or she’d waltz right out of his life one more time. Something told him this was their very last chance to get it right.

He spent two frustrating days thinking about Laurie, the baby and their future, while trying to convince Ruby to divulge Laurie’s itinerary to him. Nick proved as elusive as a stray calf loose on ten thousand acres of pastureland, but Ruby was mellowing. Harlan Patrick had been plying her with chocolate-covered doughnuts and compliments and he was pretty sure she was weakening. She’d actually tossed a handful of newspaper clippings at him that morning and told him to figure out Laurie’s whereabouts for himself.

“You’re a clever man. See what you can make of these,” she’d challenged.

There was plenty of information to be had in those clippings, bits of rave reviews, comments on her new album’s fast rise in the music charts. It was plain that Laurie Jensen was hot news in Nashville. The only trouble was that that news was a day too late to help him find her. By the time Ruby handed over the clippings, even the most recent ones, Laurie was already moving on.

He was back at the agent’s office for the third straight day, when a teenager who was working part-time finally took pity on him and slipped him a copy of the concert schedule. He had a feeling Ruby had looked the other way—or maybe even instigated it, but he was careful not to let on what he thought. Ruby plainly felt her integrity was on the line, but just as plainly she felt that Laurie’s baby deserved to have a daddy in her life. She’d all but admitted that to him on several occasions.

Clutching the itinerary in his hand, he grabbed his bag from the hotel and headed for the airport, where once again Jordan’s jet was fueled up and waiting. Laurie was scheduled for a stop in Montana, then a hop over to Wyoming, a jog back to Montana, then after a two-day break, the Ohio State Fairgrounds. Columbus was closest, but he didn’t want to wait another minute, much less several days. Too much time had been wasted already. He calculated the flying time and figured he could make that first Montana stop in time for her closing set.

An icy calm settled over him as he flew, but as he drove to the country-western bar where she was singing, an old, familiar sense of anticipation began to build. It was doggone irritating that she could still have that effect on him, especially under these circumstances when he very much wanted to wring her neck. His pulse was zipping with lust, not adrenaline.

He found the bar after a few wrong turns. It was bigger than some he’d seen, but smaller than he’d expected a star on the rise to be playing. In fact, the End of the Road back in Garden City had been a step above this place. He found that irksome, too. She could have stayed in Texas and done this well for herself.

Then he recalled what he’d read in one of the clippings, that part of this tour had been arranged to settle old debts to club owners who’d given her a break. Typical of Laurie. She was loyal and generous. If it hadn’t been for him, she’d probably have played the End of the Road on this tour as well. If he’d had a lick of sense or any foresight, he’d have had the owner ask and then Laurie could have come to him, instead of the other way around. Of course, because of the baby, she probably wouldn’t have set foot near the place. But that was water under the bridge anyway. He was here now, and Laurie was only a hundred yards away or less.

With the bar’s front door ajar on the warm night, the sound of her voice washed over him as he walked from the parking lot toward the neon-lit building. She had the kind of voice that made a man think of sin, no matter how innocent the words. It was low and sultry and filled with magic.

How many nights had he lain awake remembering the whisper of that voice in his ear? How many days had he played her albums as he worked around the ranch? Enough that he and most of the hands knew the lyrics of her songs by heart. One daring newcomer, who didn’t know their history, had made a suggestive remark about Laurie, only to have Harlan Patrick yank him out of his saddle and scare him half to death before reason kicked in.

Heaven knew, the woman could sing. He grabbed hold of the door and braced himself to enter, reminding himself to stay calm no matter what. Only after he walked inside the bar did he realize that what he’d heard had come from a jukebox, while the impatient audience waited for the second set to begin. Harlan Patrick slipped into the shadows in the back, ordered a beer and waited.

A few minutes later Laurie emerged amid a flash of red, white and blue strobe lights, the beat of the song fast and hard and upbeat. The wall-to-wall crowd was on its feet at once, and the whole place began to rock with the sound of her music and wild applause. She kept up the fever pitch through one song, then two, then a third. Just when Harlan Patrick was sure half the room was going to pass out from the frenzy, she turned the tempo down and had them swaying quietly to a tune so sad and soul weary, he almost shed a tear or two himself.

A cynic might have said she was manipulative. A critic would have said she had the crowd in the palm of her hand. Harlan Patrick simply wondered at the mixed emotions he felt listening to the woman he loved captivate a whole roomful of strangers. He’d had her to himself for so many years. Was that the real problem, that he didn’t want to share her with the world? Was it selfishness, as much as cussedness, that had made him refuse to search harder for a compromise?

The thought that possessiveness might be the root of their troubles made him too uncomfortable to stay in the room a moment longer. While the show went on, he slipped out the door and made his way to the club’s back entrance, which was also standing open to permit the night’s breeze to drift inside the overheated club.

Harlan Patrick had no trouble slipping past the bulky, fiftyish guard. The man was too busy gazing at the woman on stage, his foot tapping to the beat of her song, a smile on his lips and a yearning in his eyes. That was when Harlan Patrick realized that part of Laurie’s success was her ability to touch hearts and inspire dreams, even the impossible ones.

The backstage area was cramped, with barely enough room for an office, a storeroom and one remaining room that had to be Laurie’s dressing room. He opened the door, saw the tumble of clothes and cosmetics and smiled for the first time in ages. Laurie never had been much for picking up after herself.

It was a no-frills dressing room, with a metal rod for a clothes rack and bare bulbs around a square mirror. The chair in front of the dressing table was molded plastic, but the bouquet of flowers beside the scattered makeup was lavish enough for the biggest superstar.

While he waited, he tidied up, folding this, hanging that on the bare metal rod stuck in an alcove. He lingered over a scrap of lace and prayed to heaven no man had ever seen her wearing it. He’d have to rip his eyes out. Finally he tucked the panties into the suitcase sitting on the floor in the corner and pulled out the room’s only other chair—a straight-backed monstrosity with a seat covered in tattered red plastic. He turned it around until he could straddle it and face the door.

He heard the last refrain of the encore die down, then the thunder of applause, then the sound of laughter in the corridor and boots on the hardwood floor outside the door. His pulse thundered as loudly as a summer storm.

The door swung open and there she was, pretty as ever, with her color high and her long, chestnut brown hair mussed and glistening with glints of gold and damp with perspiration. He’d seen her looking just like that after sex, only without so many clothes on.

Her mouth formed a soft “oh” of stunned dismay. The color washed out of her cheeks, and for just an instant he thought she might faint, but Laurie was made of tougher stuff than that. She squared her shoulders and met his gaze evenly.

“Hey, darlin’!” Harlan Patrick said in his friendliest tone. “Surprised to see me?”

* * *

Laurie’s pulse was racing so fast, she was certain she was only a beat or two shy of a medical emergency. She’d guessed Harlan Patrick would hunt her down—known he was coming, thanks to Ruby’s warning call—but seeing him here, so at home in her dressing room, had caught her off guard.

How many times had she found him waiting for her just like this in the old days? How many times had she come offstage, giddy with excitement, and rushed into his waiting arms to be twirled around until her head spun? Of course, there was no crooked grin tonight and his arms were crossed along the back of that pitiful chair, not waiting to catch her up in an exuberant hug.

Lordy, he was gorgeous. Under other circumstances her pulse would have been scrambling from pure desire, rather than panic. The Adams genes were the best in Texas, maybe the best on earth. Even travel weary, Harlan Patrick was pure male, from that angled jaw to his broad shoulders and right on down to the tips of his dusty boots. The sensual curve of his mouth was a reminder of deep, hot kisses that could rock her to her soul.

But the look on his face, so cool and neutral and composed, was worrisome. Harlan Patrick’s emotions were usually right out there for anyone to see. Only when she looked into his eyes did she detect the fire of complete and total fury. That’s when she knew that not only had he seen the tabloid, but he’d also realized that Amy Lynn was his.

That left her with a quandary. She could fold right now and throw herself on his mercy or she could stand up to him the way she’d been doing since their first playground scuffle so many years ago. Her first rule in dealing with him had always been to get the upper hand and hang on for dear life. It was the only way she knew to deal with a steamroller.

“How did you get in here?” she demanded, every bit the haughty superstar.

“Unfortunately for you, the security guard’s a fan. He never even noticed me. Be glad I wasn’t a stalker, sugar, or you’d be in a heap of trouble.”

She had a feeling in his own way, Harlan Patrick was every bit as dangerous as any stranger about now. “I could have the guard in here in a flash if you start stirring up trouble,” she threatened. “Nobody gets backstage without a pass, and Chester has a very jittery trigger finger.”

“Now, darlin’, why would I want to stir up trouble for you?” he asked in a patient tone belied by that hard glint in his eyes.

She refused to be taken in by the deceptively mild question. Skepticism lacing her voice, she asked, “Then this is purely a social call? You just happened to be in Montana and thought you’d drop by to catch the show? We’re just a couple of old friends getting together to catch up?”

“Could be.”

“Why don’t I believe that for a minute?”

“Guilt, maybe?”

He looked her over so thoroughly, so knowingly, that it took everything in her not to bolt or spill her guts, pouring out the whole story behind her decision to keep Amy Lynn a secret from him. She forced herself to wait him out.

“So, tell me, Laurie,” he began eventually, “anything new in your life?”

Oh, he knew, all right, she thought, listening to this cat-and-mouse game of his. She could have strung him along for another minute or two, maybe more, but why bother? Now that he’d found her, they were going to hash this out sooner or later. Hopefully they could get it over with right here in her dressing room. It was a hell of a lot better than having it out at the hotel, where Amy Lynn was already fast asleep with Val watching over her.

She looked him straight in the eye and forced his hand. “Come on, Harlan Patrick, spit it out. You saw the tabloid, didn’t you?”

His gaze locked with hers. “I did.”

There was that neutral tone again. It was maddening. “And?” she prodded.

“And I want to know why the hell you kept my daughter a secret from me?”

There was the blast of temper she’d been expecting, the confirmation that he’d guessed it all. Laurie didn’t bother trying to deny the truth. In fact, she was glad it was finally out in the open. The secret had been weighing her down for months now, ever since the home pregnancy test she’d taken had turned out positive. She hadn’t been able to go near Los Piños so her mama could see the baby for fear of Harlan Patrick finding out that she’d deceived him. At last she could put all of that behind her. She told herself she should be grateful, but all she felt was a gut-wrenching sense of fear.

“I made a choice,” she told him quietly. “You and I had said our goodbyes. We had finally admitted once and for all that it wouldn’t work with me being on the road all the time and you chained to that ranch you love so much. How could I tell you that there was a baby on the way?”

“How could you not tell me?” he countered in that same patient, lethal tone. “Did you think for one second I wouldn’t want to know, that I didn’t deserve to know?”

“No, of course not, but—”

He was on his feet now, pacing, agitation replacing patience and calm.

“But nothing,” he said, whirling on her.

He grabbed her arms, clearly fighting the urge to shake her. With any other man she might have been afraid of the look in his eyes, but she knew Harlan Patrick as well as she knew any human on earth. There wasn’t a violent bone in his body. Even now, he had a tight rein on his temper.

Then again, as far as she knew, he’d never been tested like this before.

She looked into his eyes and saw beyond the outrage, saw the genuine hurt and anguish, and that was her undoing. Tears spilled down her cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what else to do.”

He regarded her incredulously. “Couldn’t you have called me, talked to me? There was a time when we brought all our problems to each other. We could have worked something out.”

“We’d said our goodbyes,” she repeated. “I couldn’t go stirring things up again, not when there were no easy answers. It wouldn’t have been fair.”

“Fair?” he all but shouted. “What was fair about not telling me I had a baby on the way? What was fair about you going through a pregnancy all alone? What was fair about letting our little girl start her life without a daddy?”

“I did what I thought was best for all of us,” she insisted.

“What you thought was best,” he mocked. “You didn’t even give me a chance to come up with a solution.”

“Why should it have been your problem, your solution? I was the one who was pregnant.”

“With my baby, dammit!” He closed his eyes, drew in a deep breath, then said more calmly, “We could have figured it out together.”

“And done what? You’d be miserable away from White Pines. And I can’t live there. It was as simple as that.”

“We could have worked it out,” he insisted with the stubborn conviction that was pure Adams. It didn’t matter that they’d run into the same brick wall a thousand times before.

“And they’re always telling me I’m the romantic,” she said with a rueful sigh. “This time there wasn’t a happy ending, Harlan Patrick. Trust me.”

“Trust you,” he hooted. “That’s a laugh.”

He regarded her evenly and took a step closer. He was near enough that she could feel the heat radiating from his body, smell the pure masculine scent of him. He reached out and ran his knuckle along the curve of her cheek, setting off goose bumps. She hated that he could make her react like that with just the skim of his fingers.

“Darlin’, we’ve got a whole passel of passion, no question about that,” he said. “We might even have a little love left. But I’m afraid trust is the one thing we’ll never have between us again. You’ve pretty much seen to that, haven’t you?”

Something died inside her at the cold, hard flatness of his words, but she knew it was the truth, had known it way back when she’d made the decision to keep the secret. Staying silent was going to cost her eventually. Now it had and it hurt more than she’d ever imagined.

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

“Sorry won’t cut it this time. Now how about getting this stuff together and taking me to see my daughter?”

It was a command, not a request, and it sent a jolt of pure fear shooting through her. “Tonight?”

“I think it’s time, don’t you? Way past time, in fact.”

“She’ll be asleep,” she protested, trying to buy time. An hour from now she could bundle Amy Lynn up, wake the band and be on the bus heading for the next stop. No one would question the abrupt, middle-of-the-night departure, not aloud at any rate, and definitely not once they’d heard about Harlan Patrick’s untimely arrival.

He gave her a look that suggested he saw straight through her. “I’ll be quiet as a church mouse,” he countered. “And if she happens to wake up, well, I’d say a momentous occasion like this is worth losing a little sleep over, wouldn’t you?”

Laurie couldn’t think of a single argument that could possibly counter the bitter logic of that. “Give me five minutes,” she said tightly, then waited for him to leave the room.

He didn’t budge. Regarding her evenly, he said with wry humor, “You surely weren’t thinking I’d wait outside, were you? With that big old window right over your dressing table? I don’t think so. As I recall, climbing out windows in the middle of the night used to be one of your specialties. That’s how we got around your curfew way back when we couldn’t keep our hands off each other.”

“I was a kid back then,” she protested, then gave up. He was sticking to her like glue, and that was that. “Okay, then, at least turn your back.”

“Laurie, there’s not an inch of bare skin on your body I haven’t seen with my own eyes. It’s a little late to turn all prim and proper on me.”

She thought she detected a faint hint of laughter in his voice, and that alone was enough to give her hope that they could get through this mess tonight and go on with their lives. This was Harlan Patrick, after all. He’d always been quick to anger, but just as quick to forgive. He’d see Amy Lynn, satisfy himself that she was okay and go back to Texas. That would be that, she thought optimistically.

One glance at his expression told her she was delusional. Harlan Patrick wasn’t going anywhere. And once he’d seen Amy Lynn, what then? Would he really be able to walk away, or would that just be the beginning of her worst nightmare? Mad as he was, she couldn’t envision him demanding marriage at the moment. Would he try to take her baby? It was a distinct possibility.

Already gearing up for the fight, she scowled at him. “Oh, for heaven’s sakes,” she said, “if you’re so hard up you have to sneak a peek at my bare breasts, then have yourself a ball.”

She stripped out of her damp stage clothes and reached for fresh underwear. Only then did she notice that it wasn’t strewed all over the room the way she’d left it.

Without bothering to cover herself, she turned to him, laughter bubbling up. “You straightened up in here, didn’t you?”

He shot her a defiant look. “So what if I did?”

“Harlan Patrick Adams, I’m surprised at you. I thought you were long past tidying up my messes.”

“Old habits die hard, darlin’,” he said in a tone rich with hidden meanings. “Maybe you should remember that.”

Chapter Four

Seeing Laurie again stirred up all the old feelings for Harlan Patrick. From love to hate, from bitterness to joy, his emotions went on a sixty-second roller-coaster ride, leaving his palms sweaty and his belly in knots. After that things only got worse.

Pure lust slammed through him the instant she walked in that dressing-room door. No woman had ever been her equal for making his temper hot and his body hotter. Having her stare him down with hardly a stitch of clothes on had just about broken his resolve to keep his hands to himself until they had this whole sorry situation straightened out. He was just itching to kiss her senseless, to lose himself in her warmth and her scent, to prove to himself that at least one thing hadn’t changed between them.

There’d been a time when he’d have gone for it, taken the immediate satisfaction, reveled in the sensory explosion without a thought to the consequences. A few years of loneliness and loss had made him more cautious, maybe even more mature. In one tiny corner of his brain, it registered that sex wasn’t the answer.

For once he jammed his hands in his pockets and stayed as far away from her as it was possible to get in that itty-bitty dressing room. It wasn’t quite as far as good sense called for, but it was as far as he dared given the likelihood that she’d run out on him at the first opportunity. It had taken too long finding her for him to risk losing track of her again. He wasn’t going anywhere until he’d seen his daughter and he and Laurie had made some decisions about the future.

Not that she was in much of a decision-making mood. In fact, he suspected she was going to be thoroughly unreasonable, just the way she’d always been when she’d been cornered. Normally he’d spend a lot of time trying to coax her into a better frame of mind, but there wasn’t time for that, either. She and his baby girl were likely to slip right through his fingers before he could blink if he didn’t stay right on top of Laurie every second, if he didn’t make it perfectly clear what his own expectations were.

“I’m ready,” she announced, drawing his attention.

She’d wiped away the last traces of stage makeup, leaving only a touch of lipstick. The glittery outfit she’d worn had been replaced by worn jeans and a T-shirt. She’d scooped her hair up into a careless ponytail, just as she had as a girl when the heat of a Texas summer afternoon got to be too much. His fingers itched to pull away the band holding it, allowing it to fall free again, the way he liked it.

Finally, though, he thought, she looked like his Laurie, approachable and unassuming, the girl next door. In some ways that was more dangerous than the sexy woman who’d walked into the dressing room a half hour before. He’d fallen in love with the girl from his old hometown, not the superstar image. He’d convinced himself that that Laurie, wide-eyed with wonder, had gotten lost.

Of course, the change was superficial, all about appearances. Try as he might, he couldn’t tell yet how deep the changes ran, if there was anything of the old Laurie in her heart.

He stood up and took her small suitcase. It weighed a ton. He grinned. “Still don’t have a clue how to pack light, do you? What’s in here? Rocks?”

“If you’re going to complain all the way back to the hotel, I’ll carry it,” she said, reaching for it. “I’ve been on my own a long time, Harlan Patrick. I don’t need you.”

He grinned at the quick flare of temper. “You must be out of sorts if you can’t take a joke.”

“I lost my sense of humor when I found you in my dressing room.”

He laughed at her disgruntled expression. “Careful, darlin’, or you’ll hurt my feelings.”

“Not with your thick hide,” she muttered under her breath as she sashayed past him.