Last Chance Cowboy. Leigh Riker

tell me. Whatever it is.”

      She made herself meet his gaze. “That would be best,” she agreed, wondering, even fearing, how he might react. “Grey, something else happened ten years ago. Something other than Jared.”

      “Yeah,” he said. “You and I broke up—not for the first time.”

      “For the last. And soon after Jared...died, I—” She cleared her throat, then rushed on, her heart a hard lump in her chest. She’d rehearsed these words but they stuck in her throat. “I discovered I was pregnant.”

      Grey blinked. For a long moment he said nothing. Shadow watched a dozen emotions flash across his face. He turned the black hat on his knee in a circle. “Pregnant,” he repeated.

      “Yes.”

      His mouth hardened. “And you never told me.”

      Shadow reached out a hand, but they didn’t connect. Grey sat too far away from her across the expanse of her desk and he’d pushed deeper into his chair, creating even more distance between them. “You’re right. I didn’t. I take full responsibility, Grey.”

      “Well, that’s something. Now,” he murmured.

      “I’m sorry. I know that sounds terribly inadequate, but at the time—because of Jared, too—I felt I couldn’t tell you.” She took a breath. “That was wrong of me.”

      “And it’s still wrong. Ten years?” He shook his head. “I suppose you told your parents.”

      “Yes.” Shadow had come home from school that day to find her father in his living room recliner, his “seat of business,” he always claimed.

      “The TV was on,” she continued, “blaring some rerun of an old cowboy series. He watched the episodes over and over, like he was trying to relive his dreams of being a successful rancher. I could have recited the dialogue word for word, but I was too scared to even think. All day in class I’d dreaded telling him. It was only a week after Jared died.”

      “How did you know?”

      “I’d had some physical signs but tried to ignore them. At first, I thought my body was just reacting to all the anxiety, the grief. Then I...was late again, and I bought a test.” She remembered that night, locked in the bathroom while her youngest brother, Derek, banged at the door, saying it was his turn. “When my mother walked into the room and turned off the TV, my heart was beating like some ceremonial drum. I could hardly get the words out. ‘Daddy, Mama, I’m pregnant.’”

      The test didn’t lie. At seventeen, Shadow had been about to become a mother.

      Grey’s mouth twisted. He still didn’t look at her. “What did your father say?”

      “His face got red and he gripped the arms of his chair—like he had to hold himself in place or he’d come after me. He stared me down. He guessed it was yours right away. I’ll never forget those horrible days.” Now she had added another, and inflicted it on Grey, too. Finally, he lifted his gaze, and Shadow refused to look away from his sharp, accusatory eyes.

      “I told him you were the only boy I was seeing.” Not that they’d been together anymore by the time she’d had that conversation with her parents. She hadn’t had a chance to recover from their final fight, from Grey’s rejection. How could she, after seeing Jared lying so still and pale in his coffin.

      “And your mom?”

      “She said nothing at first. Then it was just, ‘Oh, Shadow,’ and she started crying.” Shadow swallowed. “My parents and I were alone in the room. I said a brief prayer of thanks that my sisters and Derek weren’t around. I’d seen him wrestling in the yard with a friend—he still hangs out with Calvin Stern—on my way in, and my sisters were heading for the henhouse to collect eggs.” The chickens’ squawking had shattered the last of her nerves, as if even they blamed her for what had happened.

      Grey worried the crease in his hat. “Then what?”

      Shadow closed her eyes, remembering her dad leaning forward in his chair, pointing a finger at her. “He said he wouldn’t have any more to do with that family, with you—” she sucked in a breath “—or anything belonging to you.” Shadow laid a protective hand on her now-flat stomach. “My mom was staring at him. I was shaking so hard. Not anything, I said. Anyone.”

      “Prodding the tiger,” Grey muttered.

      Her voice trembled, as it had then. “Daddy slammed back in his chair again, aimed the remote at the TV and told me to get out.”

      “Your mother didn’t say anything? Even then?”

      “Not a word. You know she always sided with him.”

      Grey’s voice was deadly quiet. “What did you do?”

      “I stuffed some clothes in a backpack and left. I had a week’s pay from my job at that fast-food restaurant. If Daddy thought I had betrayed him, he’d also betrayed me. So did my mom.”

      “Where did you go? You must have gotten help somewhere.” He might have asked why she hadn’t gone to him, found a way to get to his college in Texas—he’d already gone back for the fall semester by then. But Grey waited for her reply, and Shadow was thankful. She wanted to get the whole story out before she started trying to explain herself.

      “To Doc’s office.”

      “Doc?” Grey echoed. “What did he say?”

      Shadow didn’t meet his eyes. “‘Well, young lady, what have you got to say for yourself?’” Remembering, she blushed. She’d sat up on Doc’s cold metal table at his clinic in Barren and burst into tears. “I’d hitched a ride into town, then wandered along Main Street, my mind blank yet whirling at the same time—What should I do? Where would I go?—until, finally, I ended up at Doc’s.”

      Cyrus Baxter had taken one look at her, swept out from behind the reception desk where he’d been studying a chart, passed his wife, Ida, who was talking on the phone, and ushered Shadow into the exam room, where she’d blurted out her earth-shattering news. In his late fifties then, his dark hair had been sprinkled with gray but his blue eyes were keen. Doc never wore a white coat; he believed his youngest patients found that intimidating.

      “You never thought to come to me?” Grey asked now.

      “Yes. I thought of finding you, instead, but after we broke up—after Jared—I couldn’t.”

      In that moment she’d wished she hadn’t gone to Doc, either, but still caught up in the fallout at home, and always a breath away from crying over losing Jared, she’d completely missed Doc’s gentle tone of voice.

      He’d given Shadow her vaccinations as a baby, treated her skinned knees and strep throats during childhood and offered her a birds-and-bees lecture when she entered puberty. Apparently that hadn’t done much good, but he’d cupped her shoulders in both hands as he’d done many times before, and said, “None of that now, Shadow. Tears won’t help.”

      “He knew you were the father,” Shadow told Grey now, wincing at his pained expression when she spoke that last word. “His reaction was different than Daddy’s, though. I explained that you’d already left, that even if you hadn’t I could never go to you, not after what you’d done to Jared. But he interrupted me, said, ‘I’ve known Grey since he was drinking milk from a bottle. He’s never been in trouble before.’ He said he did wonder what you were all doing together that night, why there was a gun. It’s true that you and Jared didn’t run in the same circles.”

      Shadow could feel the blood drain from her head toward her feet, as it had that other day. “Jared was defending my honor, I told Doc. I explained that he and Derek and Calvin Stern had gone to your ranch to teach you a lesson. And then...and then Doc told me he saw Jared. After. He saw his wounds. But even so, that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”

      Shadow was