“Someday…”
“You have to understand…”
“But I don’t, Lori. I don’t get it. I don’t get any of it. You’re telling me that your husband knowingly stole my son from me.”
“He didn’t. He never could. It’s only…well, Henry was sterile. And he’d always wanted children. He said that you were long gone and he thought it was for the best if we just let things go along the way that they were. I’m ashamed to say it, but, by then, that was just what I wanted to hear. We got married. Henry treated Brody like a son. We were…happy, the three of us.”
“Happy.” He made it sound like a dirty word.
“Yes.”
“And you gave up all attempts to get a hold of me?”
“Yes. That’s right. It was all wrong, what we did, Henry and me. And he knew it in his heart. It was his last wish, before he died, that I track you down and tell you the truth.”
“So what you’re saying is that whenever you finally did get around to telling me—if you ever did—it would have been for your dead husband’s sake.”
“I didn’t say that. I never said that.”
“And your husband’s been dead, what? Over a year? And I’ve been right here, in the Junction, just about the whole damn time.”
She refused to let her gaze shift away. She looked him straight in the eye. “I don’t expect you to understand. I loved my husband. He had come into my life at a time when I was barely holding on, feeling…so bad about myself, about what a mess I’d made of my life. I was disconnected from my family, working overtime to take care of me and Brody, trying to be a good mother to him. Henry…showed me how to live. Really, I grew up, took charge of my own life, while I was married to Henry. I wasn’t much good for a while there after I lost him. I couldn’t…deal with anything beyond getting by, day to day. I knew—even before Henry died—that I would tell you. But after I lost him, I needed time to face up to the job.”
“More excuses. More lies.” A cold smile curved the corners of Tucker’s mouth. “It’s time to get straight about this, Lori. You were never going to tell me. Not really. Were you?”
Outrage had her heart slamming against her breastbone. She quelled that outrage, ordered her damn heart to slow down. From the way she’d behaved, what else was he to think, but that she would have always found some reason to keep the truth from him?
She spoke flatly. “I was going to tell you Monday. I made that appointment to do it. I would have done it then.”
“I don’t believe you.”
She pressed her lips together, holding in the hot denials that rose to her lips. What good would denials do? He didn’t believe her and she had no right to imagine that he should.
He said, “Why Monday? Why did you think you had to wait? Why not any one of those times you saw me after you got into town? Why not that night you came out here with Brody, that night we talked for hours about everything but the one thing that mattered most. Why not then?”
“It wouldn’t have been right, not with Brody there. And I had planned from the first to wait until after the wedding. I wanted Lena to have her big day. If the story got out, I was afraid it might ruin things for her.”
He shook his head. “Excuses,” he said. “That’s all you’ve got for me, isn’t it?”
“No. That’s not so. There are no excuses and I know there aren’t. But you asked. So I answered you. I came here, back to town, for two reasons. My sister’s wedding—and you. I planned to stay an extra week after the wedding was over. That week was so I’d have plenty of time to see you, to tell you what you had a right to know. I had it all worked out. Once the wedding was over, I’d get in touch with you, meet you someplace private and tell you that you had a son. I assumed I’d have zero contact with you until it was time to say what needed saying. How was I to know I’d run into you the minute I drove into town. How was I to know I’d keep running into you? How was I to know that I…” She faltered.
He prodded, “That you, what?”
Her cheeks burned with a sudden, hot blush. “Look. It doesn’t matter.”
He wouldn’t let it be. “What? How were you to know what?”
“It doesn’t—”
“What?”
She shut her eyes. It didn’t help. When she opened them again, he was still there. Waiting, his square jaw set and his brown eyes hard as agates. She told him, very quietly, “How was I to know that I would find myself falling for you all over again? That one look at you and I’d feel like I felt back in high school, that I’d be mooning around, longing for a glance from you, a gentle word. A sweet, tender kiss.”
She looked away, toward the tall windows that flanked a glass door and a deep back porch. It was beautiful out there, so green and lush. She wished she could leap up, fling open the door, race down the porch steps and run across that long slope of thick lawn—run and run and never stop. She faced him again, her heart squeezing tight inside her chest. It hurt—a thousand times worse than the needles poking into her brow—to look at him. So big and handsome, with his sexy full mouth, that sun-kissed brown hair and those gorgeous dark eyes—eyes that seemed to bore through her, a mouth set against her.
“I didn’t like it,” she said flatly. “I didn’t like being so strongly attracted to you after all these years. That’s the honest, unvarnished truth, whether you’re able to believe me or not. I didn’t expect it and it confused me, terribly, to find myself still wanting you after all this time. I thought I had grown out of you. But since I’ve been back in town, I’m a mixed-up teenager all over again. I’ve made the same bad choices I made back when. I messed things up royally, the same way I did when we were kids.”
“So that’s what I am to you. A bad choice?”
“That’s not what I said. You’re twisting my words.”
“You amaze me. You are one piece of work. You’re attracted to me. And that’s why you kept my son from me all over again. And somehow, you’ve got the idea that your telling me this will get you off the hook now?”
“I didn’t say I thought it would get me off the hook. I never said that.” She had to actively resist the need to bring her hand to her forehead, to press the bandage that covered the now-throbbing gash.
“Good,” he said, “Because you’re not off the hook, Lori. Not for this. You never will be.”
She folded her hands in her lap—good and tight—and looked down at them, hard. “Gotcha.” She faced him. “So how about this? We tell Brody right away that you’re his father. Then we can—”
“No.”
Had she heard wrong? “Wait a minute. You don’t want to tell him?”
“Not yet.”
“But he—”
“You said it yourself. He thinks of that husband of yours as his father. He’s mentioned him to me. More than once. It’s ‘my dad,’ this and ‘Dad used to’ that. Whatever I think of the man who knowingly tried to steal my son from me, I’m not going to—”
It was too much. “Tucker. Stop. I understand that you’re angry—beyond angry, even. And I know that you have every right to be. But Henry was a good father to Brody. A damn good father. You’ve said yourself what a great kid Brody is. A great kid doesn’t happen in a vacuum.”
“Exactly,”