Last Chance Cowboy. Leigh Riker

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      “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 barely holding back tears. Though she’d been grateful, earlier, for Grey’s silence, grateful that he was letting her tell the story on her terms, part of her wished he would react. Show some emotion. She wiped her eyes.

      “I wanted to believe him,” she continued. “Wanted to believe you could be innocent and that we could be together again, get married and keep...our baby. I asked Doc if he though Derek and Calvin were lying about what happened, and he just told me to keep an open mind. And to talk to you—make a decision together.”

      “Why didn’t you?” Grey pressed.

      At first she didn’t answer. She’d gone to Doc as a last resort, but she trusted his advice. So why hadn’t she been able or willing to follow it? Shadow remembered hearing Ida, still on the phone in the outer room.

      Doc’s wife was the nosiest woman Shadow knew and her mother called Ida the town’s best gossip. Suddenly, Shadow had been overcome with worry that she would walk in at any moment, that if Ida learned the truth, she’d broadcast it for sure, only adding to the scandal of Jared’s death. That was when the enormity of the situation had hit her.

      “I don’t know,” she told Grey, finally. “I was so overwhelmed. Doc took me in for the night and said we could discuss the...options in the morning. And then once everything was decided—” He’d told Shadow he would handle Ida.

      Before Shadow realized how Grey might interpret that, she watched another emotion cross his face. He snatched the black Stetson from his knee, clamped it on his head then stood abruptly. “What did you do, Shadow?” He didn’t wait for her answer.

      “Grey—”

      “No,” he said, his hand already on the doorknob. He looked confused, conflicted. Overwhelmed. He had every right to be. “I need to think about this.” He walked out, slamming the door behind him.

      Shadow sank back in her chair, filled with regret. For ten years, only three other people had known about Ava—four, if she counted her deceased father. Her mother, her sister Jenna and Doc. Now Grey also knew her secret.

      And she hadn’t just shocked him. She’d hurt him more deeply than she’d ever imagined.

      * * *

      BACK AT WILSON CATTLE, Grey shook his head. Cody had failed to properly mend the broken fence yesterday—call him Mr. Reliable—and Grey propped both hands on his hips to study the gap that was still there, the few strands of barbed wire hanging СКАЧАТЬ