Aidan dropped heavily onto a kitchen chair, grinding the heel of one turpentine-scented hand into the space between his brows. True, since Flo hadn’t come to work for them until after Winnie Porter had removed herself from the equation, there’d been no reason to tell her who Robbie’s birth mother was.
But an anxious-eyed Flo had already sat across from him, their squabble forgotten. “You scared this woman’s gonna pull a fas’ one on you?”
“Not scared. Angry. That she showed up out of the blue. That she’d…” His hand fisted in front of him. “She’d no right to do this.”
“But if it was an open adoption—?”
“One she herself opted out of more than eight years ago.”
Flo seemed to consider this for a moment, then said, “You think she knows about Miss June? That she’s showin’ up now because Robbie’s mama’s dead?”
“I’ve no idea,” Aidan said on an expelled breath, then surged to his feet, grabbing his wool jacket from the hook. “Y’mind holding dinner for a bit?”
“Where you goin’?”
But Aidan was already out the door, the blood chugging through his veins faster than it had in more than a year.
Chapter Two
It’d been years since Aidan had even been down to the eighty-year-old, single-room adobe where he and June had lived when they first moved to Tierra Rosa. They’d bought the property for its own sake, holing up in the Old House until Aidan’s career had taken off well enough to build the New House, a half mile farther up the mountain. A half mile farther away from civilization. Not that either Aidan or June had been hideously famous, not then, not ever. Certainly not like the A-list actresses and shock jocks and such who called New Mexico home—they simply valued their privacy. Aidan, especially. In fact, he’d balked about that damn magazine spread, but June…
The back of his throat clogged as, despite top-of-the-line shocks, the truck shimmied and jolted down the dirt road, partially obscured by clumps of live oak and lemon-flowered chamisa, until shuddering to a stop in front of the house.
Snoozing in a coppery patch of sun on the low porch, the Border collie instantly jumped to attention, yapping; a second later, the screen door banged open and Winnie Porter appeared, hands shoved in her jeans’ pockets, the ebbing sunlight glancing off features a lot harder-edged than he remembered. But then, when he’d last seen her she’d been a very pregnant eighteen-year-old, her defiance worn down—according to June—by water weight and too many sleepless nights.
As he’d been then, Aidan was struck by her height, her almost mannish stance in cowboy boots that were all about utility rather than style, how there was nothing soft about her, anywhere. Even her hair was stick-straight, a million strands of wheat blowing helter-skelter around heavy-lidded eyes and pronounced cheekbones.
“Figured you’d be here soon enough.”
Her gaze was dead-on, unflinching. Certainly not a look designed to provoke concern about a woman being out here all alone, never mind that the only place safer would be a padded cell.
Aidan climbed down from his truck, coming just close enough for purposes of communication. Close enough to catch the determined set to her mouth. The instant that mouth opened, though, he cut her off with, “How the bloody hell did you find us?”
She shoved a stray chunk of her hair behind her ear. Unlike before, when black gunk had rimmed her eyes and she’d sported more studs than a country singer’s costume, she wore no jewelry, no makeup that Aidan could tell.
“Online,” she said, and his brain snapped back to attention. “That magazine article from a couple years back? At least, that you were living in Tierra Rosa—”
“You gave up the right to be part of Robson’s life more than eight years ago, when you begged—begged—us not to send you any more information about him.”
He saw the flash of regret. “I know. But if you’d give me a chance—”
“To do what? To disrupt a nine-year-old’s life?”
“No!” The word boomed between them. “That was never my intention! It still isn’t,” she said, but Aidan saw something in those dusky eyes that said there was more, the kind of more that was tensing his whole body. “Yeah, I knew it was a long shot, showing up out of the blue—”
“Long shot, hell. Try idiotic.”
Winnie backhanded her bangs out of her eyes. “And if there’d been any way of contacting you, I would’ve cleared things with you and June first—”
“Robbie’s mother is dead.”
She literally reeled. “Oh, God…I had no idea—”
“Just as you had no idea this house was on my property, I suppose.”
“I didn’t,” she said, her brows nearly meeting underneath the tangle of hair on her forehead. “Oh, for heaven’s sake—it wasn’t like I was gonna tell anybody I was looking for you! Not until I got here, at least. So how would I have known?”
Aidan shifted to cross his arms. Her damn dog sidled up to him, wagging its tail, trying to play mediator. “So you just came here on the off chance that…what?”
She rammed her hands into her back pockets, somehow managing to look sheepish and determined at the same time. “That somehow I’d be able to see him. That’s all. Just…see him.”
“D’you think I’m daft?”
She almost smiled. “I doubt anybody’d call your sanity into question.” The dog trotted back, all eyes for her mistress; Winnie bent over to pet her, her features softening in the peachy light. Then she lifted her eyes again, her voice gentle as rainwater when she said, “June hasn’t been gone very long, I take it?”
Aidan braced himself against the wave of pain, even though it no longer hit as high or hard as it once did. The guilt that it didn’t, though, sometimes felt worse.
“A year ago July. She was already sick when the magazine people came around.” He paused, his eyes riveted to hers. “It’s been a rough couple of years. Especially on the boy.”
Winnie broke the stare first, her gaze shifting toward the fiery glow behind the trees. “I can imagine,” she murmured, before her gaze met his again. “My grandmother died, too. A week or so ago.”
An event, he instantly surmised, that had something to do with Winnie’s sudden appearance. An image popped into Aidan’s head of the tall, commandeering woman with hair the color of a rooster’s comb and a gaze hot enough to peel flesh from bone. “My condolences.”
Winnie’s mouth stretched tight. “Not necessary. As you may have gathered, Miss Ida was definitely a ‘my way or the highway’ kind of gal. And ‘her way’ did not include helping raise her teenage granddaughter’s bastard.”
Aidan tensed. “You swore the adoption was your idea.”
“I was eighteen. Legal, maybe, but nowhere near ready to raise a kid on my own. And on my own is exactly what it would’ve been, since the baby’s father had vanished faster than a summer thunderstorm and my grandmother would have kicked me and the baby out on our butts.”
“You really think she would gone that far?”
Winnie blew a humorless laugh through her nose. “You met her. What do you think? And at the time,” she said, in that careful voice people use when the emotions are far too close to the surface, “I was