years,” he said, his voice so heavy. With regret? With sadness or maybe bitterness? She couldn’t have said and she didn’t quite have the nerve to ask him what exactly he was feeling right now.
Instead, she got on with it. “I have no idea how my dad knew to find us at that motel. I never told him where I was. I assumed he’d somehow followed us from the Armstrongs’ house. I asked Eva’s mom later, before I left for Boulder, if she had called my dad and told him I was there that day. She swore she hadn’t.” Derek said nothing. He stared at the sky. Somewhere nearby, a lone owl hooted. A shiver ran through her. She peered down at him more closely. “What?”
He shifted his gaze to meet hers. “I didn’t say anything.”
“I thought maybe you were about to.”
“Uh-uh.”
She drew in a slow breath. “Well, however he did it, my father figured it out.”
* * *
Derek stared up into her night-shadowed eyes. Her skin was so smooth, silvered in moonlight.
He knew how her father had found them. But he wasn’t going to tell her. What good would that do? Jack Wainwright wasn’t a bad man. He’d just wanted the best for his only child and he’d followed them from the Armstrongs’, followed them to Kalispell and that cheap motel.
At the sight of her dad emerging from his fancy pickup, looking grim and exhausted, Amy had started to cry.
Derek had hated himself then, for jumping the gun and begging her to marry him, for putting her in this position, for messing everything up.
He didn’t know what to do next. Amy had gotten pregnant—or maybe not. She’d lost the baby—or maybe not. Because how can you lose something that never was?
He’d known she was miserable that day, known she regretted running away with him. She’d had such big plans for herself and there she was, a not-pregnant married woman who wasn’t going to go to college, after all.
As he’d watched the tears tracking down her cheeks that July afternoon, Derek felt his heart shatter into a million pieces. He and Jack Wainwright agreed on one thing, at least: that run-down motel wasn’t good enough for Amy.
And what did Derek think he was going to do next? Move his bride into the bunkhouse with him at the Circle D? Or into the main house where his parents lived? Damn, but the truth he faced then was the hardest one of all.
He’d yet to get a real start in life and would need to depend on his family to help support her. And she? Amy deserved the best. With the baby gone, well, why shouldn’t she have the future she’d always planned on? His pride had felt frayed raw at all he couldn’t give her.
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