Eli blew out a short breath. He could have told her that Hollis wasn’t about to change his way of thinking, and saved her a great deal of grief. But lessons, he supposed, couldn’t be spoon-fed. The student could only learn if he or she wanted to, and he had a feeling that Kasey would have resisted any attempts to show her that Hollis wasn’t what she so desperately wanted him to be.
Eli tried to appear as sympathetic as possible. As sympathetic as he felt toward her. This couldn’t be easy for her. None of it.
“I’m sure,” he finally told her, taking no joy in the fact that he was cutting Hollis down.
Kasey shook her head. She felt stricken. “I didn’t have a clue,” she finally admitted, wondering how she could have been so blind. Wondering how Hollis could have duped her like this. “What’s wrong with me, Eli? Am I that stupid?”
“No, you’re not stupid at all,” he said with feeling. “What you are is loyal, and there’s nothing wrong with you.” To him, she’d always been perfect. Even when she’d fallen in love with Hollis, he hadn’t been able to find it in his heart to take her to task for loving, in his opinion, the wrong man. He’d just accepted it. “Hollis is the one who’s got something wrong with him. You’ve got to believe that,” he told her firmly.
Kasey lifted her slender shoulders in a helpless shrug and then sighed again. It was obvious that she really didn’t want to find fault with the man who’d fathered her child. The man whom she’d loved for almost a decade. “He was just trying to get some money together to make a better life for us,” she said defensively.
The only one whose lot Hollis had ever wanted to improve was his own, Eli thought grudgingly, but he knew that to say so out loud would only hurt Kasey, so he kept the words to himself.
After pulling up in front of his ranch house, he turned off the engine and looked at her. “Until you’re ready, until you have a place to go to and want to go there,” he added, “this is your home, Kasey. Yours and Wayne’s. What’s mine is yours,” he told her. “You know that.”
He saw her biting her lower lip and knew she was waging an internal war with herself. Kasey hated the idea of being in anyone’s debt, but he wasn’t just anyone, he silently argued. They were friends. Best friends. And he had been part of her life almost from the time they began forming memories. There was no way he was about to abandon her now. And no way was he going to place her in a position where she felt she “owed” him anything other than seeing her smile again.
“Don’t make me have to hog-tie you to make you stay put,” he warned.
The so-called threat finally brought a smile to her lips. “All right, I won’t.”
Feeling rather pleased with himself, at least for the moment, Eli unfolded his lanky frame out of the Jeep and then hurried over to Kasey’s side of the vehicle to help her out. Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t have even thought of it. She’d always been exceedingly independent around him, which made her being with Hollis doubly difficult for him to take. Kasey couldn’t be independent around Hollis.
Hollis enjoyed being in control and letting Kasey know that he was in control. That in turn meant that he expected her submission. Because she loved him, she’d lived down to his expectations.
Unlike Hollis, he was proud of the fact that Kasey could take care of herself. And also unlike Hollis, he liked her independent streak. But at the moment, that had to take a backseat to reality. It was obvious that her body was having a bit of difficulty getting back in sync after giving birth only a few days ago. Eli just wanted to let her know that he was there for her. Whether it meant giving her a hand up or a shoulder to cry on, she could always rely on him.
She knew he meant well, but it didn’t help her frame of mind. “I don’t like feeling like this,” she murmured, tamping down her frustration.
Eli took her hand and eased her to her feet. “It’ll pass soon and you can go back to being Super Kasey,” he quipped affectionately.
Just as she emerged from the passenger side, the tiny passenger in the backseat began to cry.
“Sounds like someone’s warming up to start wailing,” Eli commented, opening the rear door. “You okay?” he asked Kasey before he started freeing Wayne from all his tethers.
She nodded. “I’m fine.” A sliver of guilt shot through her as she watched Eli at work. “I should be doing that,” she said, clearly annoyed with herself. “He’s my responsibility.”
“Hey, you can’t have all the fun,” he told her good-naturedly, noting that she sounded almost testy. He took no offense, sensing that she was frustrated with herself—and Hollis—not him.
The baby was looking at him, wide-eyed, and for a moment he had stopped crying. Eli took that to be a good sign.
“Hi, fella. Let’s get you out of all those belts and buckles and into the daylight,” he said in a low, gentle voice meant to further soothe the little passenger.
In response, the baby just stared at him as if he was completely fascinated by the sound of his voice. Eli smiled to himself, undoing one belt after another as quickly as possible.
Behind him, he heard Kasey say, “I’m sorry, Eli.”
He looked at her over his shoulder, puzzled. “About what?”
“About being so short with you.” He was being nothing but good to her. He didn’t deserve to have her snapping at him.
“Can’t help being the height you are,” he answered wryly.
“I meant—”
He didn’t want her beating herself up about this. God knew she had reason to be upset and short-tempered.
“I know what you meant,” he told her, stepping back from the Jeep and then straightening. Holding Wayne securely in his arms, he changed the subject. “I can’t get over how little he is. It’s like holding a box of sugar. A wiggling box of sugar,” he amended as the baby twisted slightly.
He saw that the infant’s lips were moving. “Rooting,” he thought the nurse had called it on one of his visits to hospital. It was what babies did when they were hungry and searching for their mother’s breast.
“I think your son is trying to order an early dinner,” he told her. Wayne had latched on to his shirt and was sucking on it. Very gently, he extracted the material from the infant’s mouth.
Wayne whimpered.
Eli was right, Kasey realized. The nurse had brought her son to her for a feeding approximately four hours ago. She needed to feed him.
Kasey took the baby from Eli and Wayne turned his little head so that his face was now against her breast. As before, he began questing and a frustrated little noise emerged from his small, rosebud mouth.
“I think you’re right,” she said to Eli, never taking her eyes off her son.
She still wasn’t used to Wayne or the concept that she was actually a mother. Right now, she was in awe of this small, perfect little human being who had come into her life. Holding him was like holding a small piece of heaven, she thought.
That her best friend seemed so attuned to her son made her feel both happy and sad. Happy because she had someone to share this wondrous experience with and sad because as good and kind as Eli was, she was supposed to be sharing this with Hollis. Her husband was supposed to be standing beside her. He should be the one holding their son and marveling about how perfect he was.
Instead, Eli was saying all those things while Hollis was out there somewhere, heading for the hills. Or possibly for a good time. And it was Hollis who had gambled their home right out from under them and then hadn’t been man enough to face her with the news.