“Kate!” His voice was friendly and smooth, his gray eyes warmer than she remembered. “Have a seat.”
The last thing she wanted to do was to be trapped in a booth with him and be caught trying to make idle conversation. He was too full of restless energy for her, too starkly rugged, too damned male. It had been nearly a week since she’d last seen him, and in that time she’d calmed a bit. Laura hadn’t called with any mind-numbing news that he was a serial killer or child molester or even traffic violator, but still she had to be wary. He’d admitted that his cousin had died as the result of some kind of fight—who knew what other secrets he kept hidden behind his easy smile?
Before she could take another seat, other customers in the little café had twisted their necks to view her. Rather than give them more room for gossip—it was hard enough knowing that most of the townspeople viewed her as an oddity because of Jon and his strange premonitions—she walked up to O’Rourke’s booth and plopped down on the opposite seat. She didn’t even protest when he motioned for a waitress to bring her a cup of coffee.
“Small world,” he said with a devilish glint in his eye.
“Small town, or haven’t you noticed?”
A corner of his mouth lifted. “Just the way I like ’em.”
“You’ve lived in the city?” she asked innocently, though her nerves were stretched tighter than fence wire. What was she doing pumping him for information? What could she possibly expect to learn?
“Nah, but I’ve been in enough of ’em to know that I’m a country boy at heart.” Again that country-boy charm.
“Are you?” She leaned back in the seat and was about to ask him where he was from when the waitress, Tami Lynde, daughter of the shop’s owner, brought a cup of coffee and asked Kate if she’d like anything else.
Wishing she’d never stepped foot in the door, Kate declined and then felt her back stiffen when she spied Carl Neider, Todd’s father, saunter through the door. He was a huge bear of a man with hands like meat hooks, the start of a beer belly, and a flat face covered by a dark beard beginning to streak with gray. His eyes were wide-spaced, small and mean, and when he smiled, he showed off a mouthful of gold crowns.
“Friend of yours?” Daegan asked when she watched Neider take a booth on the other side of the café.
“Hardly.” She poured a thin stream of cream into her cup and listened to the sounds of quiet conversation, rattling utensils, and the squeaking of a slow-turning ceiling fan mounted high over head. “His son Todd is a big kid who’s taken delight in humiliating Jon. Called him names, picked fights with him, bullied him—you name it. All the usual.” Watching the clouds roll up in her brew, she sighed. “I can’t just blame him, of course. Sometimes Jon asks for it.”
“No one asks to be humiliated.” O’Rourke’s eyes narrowed on Neider as he sipped from his cup, and again Kate felt that underlying current of energy, that raw force that was a part of this man. His jaw clamped tight and Kate decided she wouldn’t want to cross him. Not ever.
From the back behind the counter, the short-order cook yelled at Tami over the sizzle of the fryer.
When Daegan focused on Kate again, all the warmth had evaporated from his eyes and she felt that same premonition of fear—of danger that seemed to lurk just beneath his “good ol’ ranchin’ boy” surface.
“You’re right,” she said. “Anyway, Jon’s bigger now, able to take care of himself better. Hopefully he’s smarter, too.”
“Is he picked on for no reason or is it because of that sight he’s got—because he sees things others don’t?”
She didn’t move and the cup she’d been raising to her lips stopped in midair. Clearing her throat, she set the steaming mug down and frowned. “You’re very direct.”
“You brought it up.”
She couldn’t argue the point. Resting her elbows on the table, she folded her hands and dropped her chin on her linked fingers so that she could hold his gaze without flinching. “That I did, Mr. O’Rourke, and the reason I did is because the things that have been said to Jon, the cruel remarks, the vicious jokes, the hateful names wound deep. It doesn’t matter that the person who hurls the taunts his way is jealous or scared or feeling inferior. All those ugly words are painful. They scar. Not only him, but me, too, because I love him.”
All through her tirade Daegan stared at her. His gaze never once moved from her face, and his lips, already thin, creased into a hard, uncompromising line.
“Do you know what it feels like to be called names—to feel out of place—to think that you’re not as good as the rest of the kids?”
A shadow passed behind his eyes, a pain-filled shadow that quickly disappeared. “Afraid so,” he drawled. “Maybe it’s a rite of passage. Part of growin’ up.”
“It shouldn’t be.”
“Amen.”
She lifted a shoulder and sighed. “So that’s why I get a little defensive and overprotective. My mother bear claws begin to show and my instincts tend to work overtime and get me into trouble with my son.”
“Why?”
“He seems to think that I’m in his way,” she admitted, though she knew she shouldn’t confide in him, shouldn’t trust him with any secrets close to her heart. “He’s convinced that I should keep my nose out of his business.”
“Maybe you should.”
“He’s only fifteen.”
“How does his dad figure in?”
She nearly choked on a swallow of coffee. “His father?” she repeated, astounded that this man would bring him up. “His father’s gone. Jim died before Jon was born.”
“I didn’t know…and he had no stepfather?”
“I never remarried,” Kate admitted, then drained her cup. This conversation was getting personal—too personal.
“Why not?”
“What about you?” she said, turning the tables on him. “Is there a Mrs. O’Rourke?”
He shook his head. “I’m not the marrying kind.”
That, she believed. “Neither am I,” she said, fishing in her purse. “I mean I was, with Jim, but…well…” She found her wallet and pulled out a couple of bills. “I guess he was just a hard act to follow and I didn’t have all that many offers. Lots of men—at least some of the ones I dated—considered Jon extra baggage. Can you imagine? The fact that he has this sight made it all the worse. But it’s worked out just fine,” she assured him. “Jon and I are all right.” She slapped the bills on the table.
“I’ll buy,” he insisted.
“Thanks, but I’m used to paying my own way,” she replied. “Fact is, I like it that way.” With that she swung out of the restaurant and made a beeline to her car. Being around O’Rourke was just too unsettling. He was too direct, too restless, and too damned sexy. His eyes, so deep and gray, his hands, big, calloused, the backs dusted with dark hair, his jaw firm and square. For crying out loud, she’d never, never looked at a man so intently since Jim.
Calm down, she told herself and ignored the pounding of her pulse. He was just a man. Nothing to be afraid of. At least not yet. She climbed into her station wagon and jammed her key into the ignition. Her new neighbor had learned more than she’d intended to tell him about Jon today, but now it was her turn. As she checked her rearview mirror to back out of her parking spot, she made a note to call Laura tonight and find out what her sister had dredged up on a would-be cowboy named Daegan O’Rourke.
So now what are you going to do, O’Rourke, kidnap the boy?
Daegan dug his heels into the old gray he’d bought at a local auction and glowered at the fence line, as if he gave a good goddamned what happened to this place. The sorry rusted wire and rotted posts weren’t any of his concern—just part of the lie, a lie he was getting damned sick of.
The truth of the matter was he was looking beyond the fence and through a scraggly thicket of pine and spruce, to Kate Summers’s house. The trees veiled his view, but he caught glimpses of the white 1920s vintage cottage with its wide back porch and blue
trim. The yard, dry and spotty, was partially obscured by a row of raspberry canes and a vegetable garden. An apple tree stood near a weathered building that was probably a pump house or woodshed, and a long, sun-bleached rope dangled from one of the lower branches. He spied the path Jon used to sneak over here and couldn’t stop a smile. The kid was sly, but Daegan had felt the boy’s eyes on him while he was watching television, known he was being observed. He’d let it go on long enough for Jon to trust him and see that he was just another lonely bachelor rancher.
Ha! Another lie. Daegan couldn’t hardly open his mouth without veering from the truth these days.
He needed to approach Kate again, but he hadn’t figured out how. After lucking out and meeting her in the café, he hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Ms. Summers, so now it was his move. If he could come up with one. Flattening her tire, pretending to need the use of her phone, waiting at the coffee shop where he knew she stopped after work—he’d played out all his “coincidences.” Now he’d just have to call her up and pretend to be interested in her. Trouble was, he might not be pretending. She was starting to get to him, Kate Summers was. Complicated and pretty, she wasn’t the type of woman who usually attracted him. Smart women with sharp tongues, deep thoughts, and stormy pasts were usually too much trouble. But Kate was different. And she was the adoptive mother of his son.
He gritted his teeth and fought a headache. Christ, what a mess!
Usually riding cleared his head, though he rarely saddled up an aging plow horse that he’d saved from the glue factory such as this gray. Years ago, he’d discovered the thrill of racing across acres of open land astride a swift horse. In his early twenties, after his brush with the law, a hitch in the army, and a brief career as a private investigator, he’d pointed his nose toward the western horizon. He’d landed in Albuquerque, then drifted through Laramie before ending up in western Montana, where he served as a guide to tenderfoots. Eventually he’d saved enough money to buy his spread in the foothills of the Bitterroots, the first place he’d ever felt was home.
And now he was here, astride an old nag, glaring at a ridiculous excuse for a fence while contemplating just what to do about the boy. His son.
So now what?
He could just wash his hands of the whole situation, but then he remembered Robert and Frank Sullivan. His back teeth ground together. There was no way, no way on this earth, they were going to get their pampered, rich hands on the boy. His boy. Kate’s boy.
For the first time in six years he hungered for a smoke.
Who would have thought he would have ended up here, staring past the swaying branches of scraggly pine trees, wondering how he was going to approach a woman about giving up her son?
“Son of a bitch,” he grumbled, yanking on the reins and heading back toward old McIntyre’s house.
Ever since meeting Kate at the cafe and admitting to himself that, yes, Bibi’s wild story about Jon’s conception was beginning to hold water, he’d picked his way carefully. Kate had obviously been shaken by Jon’s insistence that Daegan had murdered someone and she was still wary when he’d met her in the restaurant.
In the meantime, while thinking up an excuse to see her and Jon again, he’d kept busy. He’d set things up here—cleaned the place, made room for his fax machine, files, and computer to keep linked with his ranch in Montana, while ordering feed and veterinary supplies for the animals he’d bought. The old dog had deigned to stick his nose out from under the porch, but snarled every time Daegan came a little too close.
Now, Daegan clucked to the horse and ignored the blast of arctic wind that ripped down from the mountains. He needed more information, the kind he could only get from her. A jab of guilt pricked at his mind when he thought of how he was going to use her, how he hoped that she would learn to trust him, so that he could strip her emotions bare to her bones when he stole her boy from her. She’d never trust a living soul again. That thought shouldn’t have bothered him. She deserved it, didn’t she? She’d asked for it when she’d taken money and a child that didn’t belong to her.
But she loved the boy. Done right by him.
Maybe he was going soft inside, but no matter what she’d done in the past, how many laws she’d broken to end up with Jon, she obviously would walk through hell for him. What more could a mother do? “Shit,” he growled, imagining himself as the cause of a gut-wrenching agony that was soon to darken her whiskey gold eyes.
Nudging the gray, he decided that somehow, some way, he’d have to speak with Kate alone; try and find out if her son was really adopted, even though she’d already claimed the boy was sired by her dead husband.
He knew that she’d grown up on a Midwest farm until the death of her father, then, because of her mother’s neglect, she and her younger sister, Laura, were cared for by an aunt and uncle. Kate married her high school sweetheart and they moved to Boston, where she worked as a receptionist/secretary for Tyrell Clark, the attorney Bibi had mentioned. Tragedy had struck swiftly. Soon after her one-year-old daughter and husband were killed, Kate had left Boston and moved to Seattle, where she worked part-time, took care of her young son, and managed to earn herself a master’s degree in English.
From Seattle, Kate had headed south to Oregon and ended up in this miserable small town. Now an English professor, she taught writing to freshmen at a community college in Bend.
As she’d claimed, Kate Summers had never remarried. But her declaration that the boy was fathered by her late husband was false. Either Kate’s gestation period was eleven months, the boy was fathered by a lover she’d slept with after old Jim had passed on, or the kid was adopted and the papers were phony.
Lie number one.
The reins slipped through his fingers and he scowled at the yellow blooms of tansy ragwort that persisted in growing on this rocky scrap of land. An ugly weed and deadly to cattle, tansy seemed to grow where nothing else would take root. A hardy, unwanted pest—kind of like bastard children.
Adjusting his hat, he turned the collar of his jean jacket around his neck. The wind was picking up, autumn crisp in the air. Heavy-bellied clouds rolled over the sky, threatening rain for the cracked, parched earth.
It looked like Jon didn’t even know he was adopted—had no concept that there was an entire family that was suddenly interested in him.
If Kate only knew what she was up against. He didn’t know how he was going to battle the Sullivan money, power, and influence, but at least he realized he was in for a fight. Kate Summers didn’t have a clue—or, he surmised grimly—a prayer. Yep, he’d have to tread lightly, but at the same time he’d have to move fast. If he’d found Kate and the boy so quickly, so would Robert.
That same old empty gnawing scraped at his guts. Whenever he pitted himself against the Sullivan family, he felt it eating away at him.
But this time he was determined to win.
And Kate Summers will lose.
Guilt knifed through his heart, but he ignored the wound. What happened to Kate was too damned bad. She’d started it a long time ago.
Daegan had always sworn that if he ever made the mistake of fathering a child, intentionally or by accident, he’d be a part of the kid’s life, but then he hadn’t counted on his one night with Bibi producing anything other than a bad taste in his mouth and a shadow of guilt to chase after him all his days.
He couldn’t very well just kidnap the boy as Bibi seemed to think was the answer, and no court in the country would give him custody. And what the hell would he do with a near-grown handful of trouble who could see into a man’s soul?
Disgusted at the turn of his thoughts, he steered the gelding across a dry gulch that had the nerve to call itself a creek, and headed back toward the cabin. A rabbit scurried out of the horse’s path and dust kicked up beneath his hooves as Daegan’s gaze never strayed from the fence line. He noted the posts that needed to be shored up and the spots where rusting barbed wire was stretched out of shape.
From the house, the old
dog let out a sharp bark.
The gelding snorted and his ears pricked forward. Daegan looked up, squinting against a gust of wind and the grit that came with it. Corralled near the barn was Buckshot, a mean-spirited colt and his only possession on the ranch worth owning. But the horse wasn’t alone. Jon was in the paddock with the colt, trying to fling a rope around the animal’s neck. Daegan’s insides clenched.
Hell, what did he think he was doing?
He kicked his horse and the gelding responded.
The kid had balls of steel, Daegan would give him that. Who would have thought he’d trespass again after the scare Daegan had given him the other night?
“Idiot,” he ground out, though he felt a stupid sense of pride that the boy had disobeyed his mother and wandered over this way. “Come on,” he urged the horse.
Jon managed to swing the rope over Buckshot’s neck, and as the colt sidestepped, the foolhardy kid threw himself onto the horse’s back.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Daegan muttered under his breath as he pressed his knees into the gray’s sides. Was Jon trying to get himself killed? Daegan didn’t want to shout, for fear that he would startle the bronc.
But it was too late.
Buckshot exploded in a fury of flashing hooves and dust.
Astride the stubborn colt, without a bridle or a lead rope snapped onto the halter ring, just a little bit of baling twine wrapped around Buckshot’s thick neck, Jon grinned widely. Fool of a kid!
The horse shot skyward, leaping and bucking and trying to throw the hundred and fifty unwanted pounds from his back. The dog ran back and forth on the far side of the fence.
“Damn it all to hell.” Just what he needed! Jon acting half-brained astride that devil of a colt. Daegan leaned forward and his mount galloped across the arid field, sending up a cloud of dust. Before his horse stopped, Daegan jumped off, vaulted the fence, and was running across the corral. “Hey, now, calm down,” he said as Buckshot lowered his head and kicked up his heels again. Jon, his face the color of skim milk, slid down Buckshot’s neck, but clung on. “For the love of Jesus—”