Their Child?. Karen Rose Smith

seen it. She knew it was true: for the first time in her mostly self-absorbed twenty-eight years, Lena Lou Billingsworth was in love. Not since high school, when Lena was so gone on Tucker, had she ever lavished so many bright smiles and enchanting glances on a man. And with Tucker, there had always been as many scowls and pouts as there had been smiles.

      With Dirk, Lena was all shining eyes and happy grins. Dirk Davison, no doubt about it, was the man Lena had been waiting for all her life.

      Lena’s fiancé was thirty-five, big and beefy and gruffly good-natured—a whole lot like Heck Billingsworth, as a matter of fact. Both men had broad, always-ready salesman smiles. They both laughed too hard and talked too loud and sometimes made you wonder if they actually heard a thing you said.

      “He’s just like Daddy,” Lori had whispered to her twin the day before, after being introduced to the jovial Dirk.

      “He is,” said Lena, looking pleased as a little red heifer in a field of tall alfalfa. “Exactly like Daddy.”

      Lori just didn’t get it. How could her twin fall so hard for a man so much like their dad?

      But then, Lena didn’t have the issues with their father that Lori had. Lena, after all, hadn’t gone and gotten herself pregnant at the age of seventeen by a mystery lover whom she staunchly refused to name.

      Heck had blustered and ranted and delivered all kinds of scary threats and ultimatums when he learned that Lori was pregnant. But Lori never did tell him who her baby’s father was. She couldn’t bear to tell anyone—for a number of reasons.

      And when he finally realized she would never tell him, Heck had packed her off to stay with his sister, Lori’s dear now-deceased Aunt Emma, in San Antonio—as if they were all living in the dark ages or something. As if it was the ultimate shame on a family, for a daughter to have a baby without getting herself a husband first.

      Eventually, Lori had found happiness in San Antonio. She’d gone to work for Henry and married him and Henry had always treated Brody as his son. Though Lori didn’t make it home to Tate’s Junction much, she and her father had pretty much made peace with each other.

      But that didn’t mean she’d ever marry someone like Heck. Uh-uh. No way. Never in a hundred million years.

      But Lena was doing just that and apparently couldn’t have been happier about it.

      Lori found Lena’s love for her car salesman fiancé truly weird—as well as yet another example of the many ways she and her identical twin were nothing alike. She slid a glance at the two love birds to her left just as Dirk raised the hand he had twined with Lena’s and pressed his fleshy lips to it. The two gazed deep into each other’s eyes.

      Just as Lori was reminding herself not to stare, Tucker appeared in the aisle, directly in her line of sight. Her stomach did a nasty roll. She blinked. Tucker spotted her—and he winked.

      Why? she wondered, feeling sick and suddenly desperate. Why would he wink at her?

      Oh, please, she argued with herself, as she actively resisted the powerful urge to leap to her feet and stumble along the pew away from him, not caring whose feet she stepped on as she made her escape. Why shouldn’t he wink? What does it matter? He’s just being friendly, for heaven’s sake.

      “Mom.” Brody’s skinny elbow poked into her ribs. “Look,” Brody whispered. “It’s the guy with the cool dog. Tucker.”

      She almost—almost—turned and snapped at her son to be quiet. But she caught herself just in time. “Yes,” she said, with marvelous calm, considering the tangled, frantic state of her emotions at that moment. “It’s Tucker.” She raised her hand and gave Tucker a wave.

      He waved back—and then he moved on by.

      “Sure did like that dog of his,” said Brody wistfully. “Hope I see that dog again…”

      Lori stared after Tucker, though she knew she shouldn’t, admiring in spite of herself the wide set of his shoulders, the proud way he carried his tawny brown head. He slid into a pew near the front, with his older brother, Tate, and Tate’s pretty blond wife of ten months, Molly. Molly’s family was also there: her mother, her mother’s husband, her grandmother and a tall, thin old fellow that Lori didn’t recognize.

      After church, the Billingsworths went to Jim-Denny’s Diner for sandwiches. Tucker showed up there, too—with Tate and Molly. The Bravos and the Billingsworths ended up in adjoining booths.

      Molly leaned over the seat and gave Lori a grin. “Hey. Good to see you, Lori Lee.”

      “Hi, Molly.”

      Molly had been three years ahead of Lori and Lena in school—and one year ahead of Tucker. Molly grinned at Brody. “This your boy?”

      “Yes. Molly, this is Brody.”

      Tate Bravo’s wife reached right over the seat, grabbed Brody’s hand and shook it. Molly owned a hair salon. She was the mayor of Tate’s Junction and the mother of twin babies, a boy and a girl. She was also the most unlikely person ever to have married someone like Tate Bravo.

      On his mother’s side, Tate—and Tucker, too, of course—came from the most important family in the area, the Tates. For generations, the first born Tate son had been given the name Tucker. Since Tate and Tucker’s mother, Penelope Tate Bravo, was the only child of the last in a long line of Tucker Tates, she’d named her first son Tate and her second, Tucker, keeping the family name alive in her children. Everything had gone to her sons when she passed on. The Bravo boys now owned at least a part of just about every business in town, not to mention a sprawling ranch called the Double T on which stood a ranch house the size of a king’s palace.

      Molly had been born in a double-wide trailer. She came from two generations of single-mother O’Dare’s. She was, truly, the last person anyone ever expected Tate Bravo to marry.

      But Tate had married Molly, last summer. Their romance had been rocky, to say the least. According to the stories Lori’s mother and sister had told her, Tate and Molly had the whole town buzzing there for a while. But now they were blissfully happy together.

      Lori was happy for them.

      She only wished they hadn’t taken the booth next to the one her family sat in—at least not if they had to bring Tucker along.

      And why did she have to end up sitting directly opposite him? She actually had to make a conscious effort to keep from looking straight at him.

      Molly asked about the wedding. And Lena—with Enid chiming in now and then—launched into a long list of things that had yet to be done, from more floral consultations to final fittings of bridesmaids’ gowns to a few changes in the menu for the sit-down dinner for three hundred at the local country club. Molly would be doing the bride’s hair. Lena wouldn’t have it any other way.

      As the women talked wedding preparations, the men discussed Cadillacs. Evidently, Tate, who owned a fleet of them, was buying a new one from Heck. Dirk was contributing his expert advice.

      Tucker sat silent, as did Lori and Brody, the three of them outsiders in the two current topics of conversation—looking right at each other, but too far apart to start up a conversation of their own.

      Which was just fine with Lori. What would she say to him? Talking to him, making meaningless chitchat, seemed so evil and wrong when there was Brody right beside her, the son he didn’t even know he had.

      Tucker kept sending her glances—and she kept glancing back.

      Well, how could she help it? Unless she stared at the table, he sat square in her line of sight.

      Every time he caught her eye, she would picture herself standing straight up in that booth and announcing, Okay. All right. The truth is, it was me, on prom night eleven years ago. Me and not Lena. You made love to me. And it’s not some stranger, like everyone thinks, who’s Brody’s dad. It’s you, Tucker. Brody’s your