The Come-Back Cowboy. Jodi O'Donnell

grew an ancient cottonwood tree, its contour lopsided as if a giant mouth had taken a bite from its branches. Standing to one side was a crumbling chimney.

      At the sight, Deke’s heart gave another of those warning thumps. Fine, he’d let her have her space, but he wasn’t going to be put off so easily. He waited until she sat on the wood bench seat to say purposefully, “It sure didn’t have to be that way, Addie—you takin’ care of Jace’s needs by yourself.”

      “Didn’t it?” she asked, her rich alto voice gone bone dry with sarcasm.

      He’d let that one go. “So what did you tell him about me?”

      “The truth. That his dad and I split up before he was born.”

      In what struck him as another avoidance tactic, she leaned forward to slide her feet out of her high-heel shoes. Except, it worked this time. The movement caused her neckline to gap and exposed the upper swell of her full breasts.

      And abruptly plunged Deke headfirst into another memory—of holding her in his arms, his lips pressed to that very spot. Then, however, Addie had been skinny as a fence rail. At considerable peril to himself, he’d called her Boney Gentry—when he wasn’t teasing her with his other nickname for her. Wasn’t whispering it while he made love to her that first and last time, before reality thundered down on top of him in a suffocating avalanche, just as it was doing now.

      Because somehow he’d been able to convince himself over the past half-dozen years that the passion he’d known with her hadn’t been as powerful as he remembered. He saw now, however, how he’d methodically bleached all the intensity out of those feelings, allowing him control over them.

      You are in control, he told himself. But he needed to keep his distance if he was to hang on to that control.

      His jaw clamped reflexively, and Deke scrutinized one of the gazebo’s peeling posts, blue faded to gray. “And that’s all you told Jace?”

      From the corner of his eye, he saw Addie examine her muddy shoes as she held them before her, elbows on her knees.

      “No, it wasn’t—”

      Her voice had turned businesslike, he noticed, as if she, too, needed distance.

      “I told him his father had chosen not to be a part of his life.”

      “You what?” he asked, deadly low.

      “I had to, Deke. I couldn’t have him pining his heart out over a man I had no appreciation would ever return, much less be able to give us—Jace, I mean—what he needed.”

      “So he’s grown up believin’ his daddy never cared enough about him to stick around.” He noticed his own voice sounded calm. “But that was obviously not true, because I didn’t know, Addie. About Jace.”

      Idly, he slid the pad of his thumb across the husked surface of the railing. “You could have found me and told me about him. I’d’ve come back and lived up to my responsibility to him.”

      Now, that got a reaction, for Addie sprung from her seat and in an instant was across the plank floor and hovering over him.

      “You don’t think we tried?” she asked, shoes clenched in either hand, her blue eyes blazing down at him. “Daddy had just about every rancher in the Southwest keepin’ their eye out for you for nine solid months! If we couldn’t find you, Deke, it was because you didn’t want to be found!”

      No, it hadn’t taken long for her indifference to dissolve. For some reason, he was relieved that at least that aspect about her hadn’t changed. Yet something else had changed about Addie, something he wasn’t able to pin down yet.

      So deal with it, Larrabie. Deal with just that one comment.

      He drew in a deep breath and blew it out through loosely pursed lips. “All right. I deserved that.”

      “You deserve a hell of a lot more, and you know it,” she said with a chilliness that rivaled a blue norther.

      That’s when he was able to put a label to the real change in her. It was there in her features—not an icy coolness so much as just the opposite. A hardness, to be sure, but more like that of something left too long in the sun.

      In his years on the range, he’d seen many people who had, by design or necessity, let the relentless sun cook their skin to a leathery brown. It was leather, tanned and oiled as any cowhide stitched together to make a pair of chaps.

      Not that Addie’s skin had weathered the same way. Indeed, it was still as white and smooth as ever, with only that sprinkling of freckles to mar its creamy surface. Rather, it was the particular look of being over-exposed to the harsh glare of life’s disappointments that had baked anything tender or flexible or trustful right out of her expression.

      That, it occurred to Deke in another bolt of realization, was the real legacy he’d left to her. And the one he had most desired to spare her of.

      The enormity of his failure sliced into him, razor-edged as the blade of a newly whetted knife. Somehow, though, wasn’t a sharp, clean cut better than being on the jagged side of such pain? Sure, a rough cut wasn’t as deep, but it caused a lot more damage, a more painful wound and an uglier scar as each shark’s tooth made its notch in tender flesh.

      But God, how to explain that to Addie?

      Grasping the post, Deke swung himself up on a level with her so he could look her square in the eye. “That’s what I’d been thinking about you when I left. That you deserved a hell of a lot more, a hell of a lot better, than what I’d be able to give you.”

      She took a step back even as she retorted, “Oh, what a crock of bull! You obviously wanted to leave!”

      “It’s the truth,” he persisted. “It wouldn’t have been good for either of us for me to stay, not after what happened…”

      Say it, damn it! I didn’t want to leave at all! I had to, though, because I knew if I didn’t I’d end up like my father, maybe not in the same way, but just as completely, totally lost.

      He tried again. “There’re things you don’t know about what happened that night. That’s why I’m here. You’ve got to believe me. This wasn’t the situation I meant to leave you in—”

      “Oh? And what would have been a suitable situation to leave me in?” She gazed at him, the pain he knew now that she’d only been hiding from him stark in her eyes. “You gave me your promise, and when you did, I gave you my trust in return. My innocence. And you took it and left without a word. So now you’re wonderin’ why I kept to myself the one thing you did leave me?”

      Eyelashes batting, she made a half turn away from him, a bid, he could see, for control. Even so, her voice shook as she went on. “Well, you can just go to hell, Deke Larrabie. You gave up any say about anything having to do with my life when you left me and the Bar G seven years ago without a backward glance. I had to protect my son, and I’ve got no regrets for doing so.”

      “He’s my son, too.” Deke fixed her with a resolute look. “Neither of us has said it straight out like that, have we? But yes, Addie—he’s my son, too. Now that I know about him, you’ve gotta see there’s no way I’ll shirk my responsibility to him.”

      “And there’s no way I’ll let you just blow into his life, announce you’re his father, then leave again!”

      She graced him with as cynical a look as he’d ever seen in his own mirror. “I don’t know why you’ve come, anyway. Surely no one’s got a gun to your head, makin’ you stay. Besides, why do anything different? That’s the Larrabie way, isn’t it? Always lookin’ for the exit sign.”

      Oh, but that cut him! Like the jagged rasp of a hacksaw. The hell of it was, her barbed words almost had him turning on his heel and hitting the highway.

      And that’s exactly what she wants, he realized. Addie didn’t want him to know his son, didn’t want Jace to know who he was.