to his mother. “Mama?”
She soothed her palm over his hair in a loving gesture that made Deke’s own hands tingle with the remembered warmth of touching his son. “I’ll explain things to you later, when there’s time. I promise.”
Seeing she’d have no more words on the matter, he turned back to Deke, who knew this time that keeping his mouth shut was going to be the winning ticket. For now.
When he realized that neither adult would give up anything while he remained, the boy muttered a resigned “Yes, ma’am.” He marched over to his hat, dusted if off with a whap against his thigh, then screwed it down on his head in a gesture of pure disgruntlement before heading in the direction of ranch HQ.
The ensuing silence fell like a deadweight between them.
Addie shifted on her feet, one long bare leg thrust forward, hand planted upon her hip, looking cool as cubed ice and just as frosty.
It took him aback for a moment, after the way he’d seen her with her son. That had been the Addie he remembered: passionately unreserved and loyal to a fault with those she cared for deeply.
And therein lay the danger.
“Didn’t mean to intrude on your conversation with… Did you call him Jace?” And Deke spoke his son’s name for the first time, even in his mind.
“Yes, it’s Jace,” Addie replied, lifting her chin. “Short for J.C.—Judson Charles Gentry.”
Deke absorbed the fact. So Jace had been named after his grandfather and not his father. But Jace also went by a shortened version of his initials, just as Deke was short for D.K.
It was a meager concession, but he’d take it.
“Well, he seems like a real fine kid,” he commented.
“Normally, he is,” she replied, fist still on her hip. “But you’d have to be blind not to see just now that he’s a confused boy who’s struggling to make sense of some of the changes in his life and comin’ up short all around. Which is why I’ll thank you to let me handle it myself—just as I’ve handled everything for six years now.”
Abruptly, she turned and climbed the steps to the old gazebo that had been her mother’s pride and joy. Not that Deke had known Addie’s mother, who’d died, as had his own, when Addie was just a girl. But the structure had become a kind of memorial to the woman—one, he knew, to which Addie had often come to connect with her mother.
Of its own volition, his gaze went to the gentle rise at the far edge of the ranch yard, where grew an ancient cottonwood tree, its contour lopsided as if a giant mouth had taken a bite from its branches. Standing to one side was a crumbling chimney.
At the sight, Deke’s heart gave another of those warning thumps. Fine, he’d let her have her space, but he wasn’t going to be put off so easily. He waited until she sat on the wood bench seat to say purposefully, “It sure didn’t have to be that way, Addie—you takin’ care of Jace’s needs by yourself.”
“Didn’t it?” she asked, her rich alto voice gone bone dry with sarcasm.
He’d let that one go. “So what did you tell him about me?”
“The truth. That his dad and I split up before he was born.”
In what struck him as another avoidance tactic, she leaned forward to slide her feet out of her high-heel shoes. Except, it worked this time. The movement caused her neckline to gap and exposed the upper swell of her full breasts.
And abruptly plunged Deke headfirst into another memory—of holding her in his arms, his lips pressed to that very spot. Then, however, Addie had been skinny as a fence rail. At considerable peril to himself, he’d called her Boney Gentry—when he wasn’t teasing her with his other nickname for her. Wasn’t whispering it while he made love to her that first and last time, before reality thundered down on top of him in a suffocating avalanche, just as it was doing now.
Because somehow he’d been able to convince himself over the past half-dozen years that the passion he’d known with her hadn’t been as powerful as he remembered. He saw now, however, how he’d methodically bleached all the intensity out of those feelings, allowing him control over them.
You are in control, he told himself. But he needed to keep his distance if he was to hang on to that control.
His jaw clamped reflexively, and Deke scrutinized one of the gazebo’s peeling posts, blue faded to gray. “And that’s all you told Jace?”
From the corner of his eye, he saw Addie examine her muddy shoes as she held them before her, elbows on her knees.
“No, it wasn’t—”
Her voice had turned businesslike, he noticed, as if she, too, needed distance.
“I told him his father had chosen not to be a part of his life.”
“You what?” he asked, deadly low.
“I had to, Deke. I couldn’t have him pining his heart out over a man I had no appreciation would ever return, much less be able to give us—Jace, I mean—what he needed.”
“So he’s grown up believin’ his daddy never cared enough about him to stick around.” He noticed his own voice sounded calm. “But that was obviously not true, because I didn’t know, Addie. About Jace.”
Idly, he slid the pad of his thumb across the husked surface of the railing. “You could have found me and told me about him. I’d’ve come back and lived up to my responsibility to him.”
Now, that got a reaction, for Addie sprung from her seat and in an instant was across the plank floor and hovering over him.
“You don’t think we tried?” she asked, shoes clenched in either hand, her blue eyes blazing down at him. “Daddy had just about every rancher in the Southwest keepin’ their eye out for you for nine solid months! If we couldn’t find you, Deke, it was because you didn’t want to be found!”
No, it hadn’t taken long for her indifference to dissolve. For some reason, he was relieved that at least that aspect about her hadn’t changed. Yet something else had changed about Addie, something he wasn’t able to pin down yet.
So deal with it, Larrabie. Deal with just that one comment.
He drew in a deep breath and blew it out through loosely pursed lips. “All right. I deserved that.”
“You deserve a hell of a lot more, and you know it,” she said with a chilliness that rivaled a blue norther.
That’s when he was able to put a label to the real change in her. It was there in her features—not an icy coolness so much as just the opposite. A hardness, to be sure, but more like that of something left too long in the sun.
In his years on the range, he’d seen many people who had, by design or necessity, let the relentless sun cook their skin to a leathery brown. It was leather, tanned and oiled as any cowhide stitched together to make a pair of chaps.
Not that Addie’s skin had weathered the same way. Indeed, it was still as white and smooth as ever, with only that sprinkling
