Kayla's Cowboy. Callie Endicott

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СКАЧАТЬ wishing she could protect her children from every hurt and disappointment. “If your dad’s new family doesn’t enjoy having you around, that’s their loss,” she said carefully. “As for Jackson’s family, I don’t know how they’ll react. He’s divorced now, but the rest of his relatives may want to meet you.”

      Jumping up, Alex went to the window and gazed outside.

      “How about it?” Kayla asked after a minute. “Do you want to meet your birth father?”

      “I’ll think about it,” he muttered. “Not yet anyhow. I feel sort of...mixed-up.”

      “Okay. I’ll let him know you aren’t ready. We’ll be in Montana for at least another week, so you have some time. If you can’t make up your mind before we leave, you can meet him later.”

      “Thanks, Mom. Can you find out more stuff about him?”

      “I’m planning to. Are you especially curious about anything in particular?”

      Alex shrugged. “I dunno. Just stuff.”

      Sighing, Kayla climbed to the attic bedroom and gave her daughter a version of the story suitable for a nine-year-old. However, it was apparent that DeeDee wasn’t shocked, and Kayla had a feeling they were overdue for a frank discussion about sex. Loneliness settled over her at the thought; it was one more thing she’d have to do alone because Curtis was a perpetual Peter Pan.

      Kayla went downstairs and found her grandmother knitting on the living room couch. Elizabeth glanced at her sympathetically. “How did it go?”

      Kayla groaned and dropped into a chair. “Alex isn’t ready to meet Jackson. He wants me to learn more about him, but when I asked what he’s curious about, he just said ‘stuff.’ ‘Stuff’ is a little vague.”

      “He’s a teenager.”

      “Too true.” Kayla yawned. “Do you have any sense of what kind of man Jackson grew up to be?”

      “I don’t know much. He isn’t wild any longer. From what I’ve heard, he works hard and his ranch has a good reputation. The gossip at the beauty parlor is that he dates regularly but is resistant to getting married again, which seems to annoy several of our single women.”

      Kayla didn’t know how accurate beauty-parlor gossip might be, but Jackson had already confirmed his aversion to marriage. What had he said... Too many sharks? Considering he’d been married to Marcy Lipton for eight years, she wasn’t surprised he was soured on women.

      “It turns out that Morgan is only a month older than Alex,” she murmured.

      Her grandmother had an apologetic glint in her eyes. “If we’d known Jackson was so good at getting girls into bed, we would have tried to stop you from seeing each other. At the very least we should have cautioned you about birth control.”

      Kayla shook her head. “It wasn’t your place to step in. Jackson used condoms. I don’t why they failed, but I wasn’t ignorant. I was educated about the facts of life before Mom brought me here. She didn’t shelter me growing up.”

      Elizabeth’s shoulders slumped. “I never knew what to do with her. She was always restless. We tried to find her and your father after they ran away, but it was as if they’d vanished from the face of the earth.”

      “It is what it is,” Kayla said firmly. “And things might have been different if Dad hadn’t died. She can’t let go of his memory, which is probably why her other relationships haven’t worked. Anyway, don’t beat yourself up about it.”

      Elizabeth nodded. “Okay. No more agonizing over past mistakes. We concentrate on being a family from now on.”

      “That sounds good to me.” Kayla chuckled. “Alex calls the situation messy and he’s right, so we need each other to deal with it.”

      * * *

      JACKSON SADDLED HIS STALLION, his ranch foreman watching with raised eyebrows.

      “Going to ride fences again?” Greg asked as Jackson checked the tools in Thunder’s saddlebag. The black-and-white Appaloosa sidestepped lightly, eager to get moving. “You’ve got ranch hands to take care of that.”

      “Drop it. I’m not in the mood.”

      “Whatever you say, boss.”

      Jackson rode north, trying to let go of his tension. The way he saw it, time riding fence lines wasn’t wasted. Besides, he’d never enjoyed being indoors all the time, which was why giving up college hadn’t bothered him as much as it had bothered his parents. Since then he’d realized how much he had missed, but at least he’d supplemented his education with online and extension courses.

      While he hadn’t told Morgan she was expected to attend college, he’d raised her with the assumption she would do so. Lately her grades had been poor enough that no decent school would take her, but she still had time to get her act together...if she tried. With the new bombshell in her life, it was hard to say what would happen.

      It was ironic to learn he had a second child. Marcy had refused to consider having another. She’d been too busy reading fashion magazines and nagging him about wanting to move to the city.

      Jackson reined in Thunder and gazed at the horizon, unable to imagine living anywhere else.

      It was a beautiful time of year on the ranch. Everything was lush and green, the brilliant blue sky arching overhead, broken only by puffs of scattered white clouds. If he turned a certain direction, he didn’t even see fences, just miles of rolling grassland and trees, the way it must have looked when his ancestors had settled here.

      Morgan loved the ranch, too, or at least she’d loved it when she was smaller. It was difficult to tell how she felt now. Who would have guessed that her mother, who’d grown up on the ranch adjacent to his parents’ spread, would hate Montana so much? Then, not long before Marcy had taken off for New York, he’d discovered she was sneaking around with other guys.

      Thunder snorted, tossing his head, and Jackson realized his hands had gone tight on the reins.

      “Sorry, boy.” He patted the stallion on the neck and urged him back into a walk.

      In all honesty, he shouldn’t have let Marcy’s cheating bother him so much, but the one place they’d gotten along was in bed, so why had she gone looking for it somewhere else?

      At least she hadn’t fought him for custody of Morgan, which meant his marriage had ended with more of a whimper, than a bang. Of course, by then he’d basically seen the worst Marcy could dish out. The cheating had been the final knife thrust to end a long, miserable period that had seemed more of a prison sentence than anything else.

      “I can sure pick ’em, can’t I, Thunder?” he murmured, thinking about the woman he’d dated for a while after his divorce.

      Patti had been a paralegal for his divorce attorney. Very sympathetic. Supportive. Nice. At least that was what he’d thought. It turned out she’d seen the documents on his net worth and had decided it was her chance to catch a rich husband. She lived in a nearby town and he’d surprised her one evening with a pizza...and caught her longtime boyfriend hopping out a side window.

      Perhaps СКАЧАТЬ