suddenly throbbed in the fleshy tissue of his hip. He’d been lucky. The bullet had missed his pelvic bone by half an inch. With a shattered hip, he wouldn’t have made it out.
He laughed silently, sardonically. Yeah, he led a charmed life. There was just one problem at present. Maya.
Past emotions hadn’t held a candle to the ones he’d felt upon seeing her on a runaway horse. Fear had clawed its way to his throat and stayed there until she was safe and secure in his arms.
Safe?
From her condition, she obviously hadn’t been very safe in his arms eight months ago.
The irony of the note he’d left on the table beside her bed struck him. He’d told her his job was too dangerous, his life too busy, to include a wife.
Right. What about including a child? He shook his head, unable to answer that question just yet.
Staring at the window across the way, he set his jaw and headed out. It was time they had a serious talk. He entered the long hall running along the other wing of the house and rapped on the door.
Every nerve in Maya’s body jumped when the knock sounded. “No rest for the weary,” she muttered, a gallows attempt at humor that did nothing to lift her spirits.
She’d supervised the boys’ studies, then read to them after their baths. Their mother demanded they be in bed and the lights out at nine. Maya was careful to comply. To fail was an invitation to wrath from Ms. Meredith.
Upon returning to her room, Maya had half expected Drake to be there, waiting for her. Finally, after almost an hour of fruitless study, she’d closed her textbook and prepared for bed. She should have known better. Coltons were a stubborn, unpredictable lot, and Drake was no exception.
She would live through this, she told her flagging spirits. She’d lived through his leaving and finding that awful note, then realizing she was pregnant and telling her parents. What more could life throw at her?
Warily, she approached the door after tightening the belt to her robe. She opened it and peeked out.
“I want to talk to you,” Drake announced in a low tone.
She considered locking the door. He probably knew how to unlock it without a key. The room had once been his before he struck out on his own.
Last summer, lying in bed with her, he’d told her of his childhood escapades, of sneaking in past curfew, of the hiding his father had once given him that had caused his mother to cry, making him feel so bad, he’d stopped skipping school and started studying. Now he slept in a room across the patio in the other wing of the house, a guest in his former home.
Surprised by an unexpected rush of sympathy, she moved back. He entered and closed the door.
His eyes, dark in the soft lamplight, as unyielding as a granite cliff, roamed over her. “Are you all right?” he asked quietly.
The question annoyed her. “Yes.” Her answer seemed to stir his temper.
He scowled. “Only a fool would be out on a horse in your condition.”
“The doctor said I could continue all my normal activities,” she said, tilting her chin defiantly as resentment swept over her. “I always ride with the boys—”
“That was stupid. If you’d been thrown—” Drake stopped, unable to block the image of her lying on the ground, hurt, dying.
“Damn you,” he muttered. “If you can’t think of yourself, think of the child. You’re going to be a mother. You have an obligation to take care of the baby.”
She moved away. “I know very well what my obligations are,” she said coolly.
Then she walked over and sat in the old rocker that had been used to soothe many a Colton baby, including himself.
Drake stalked over to the desk chair, pulled it around and straddled it, his arms resting on the back while he observed the woman he’d returned home to see, the woman his father had mentioned in his last letter, telling Drake of Maya’s pregnancy and suggesting that he come home.
An inner contraction, so strong it was painful, reminded Drake of last June and the week he’d spent at the ranch, home from his job with the Navy SEALs to celebrate his dad’s sixtieth birthday.
What a memorable visit that had been. Someone had taken a potshot at his father. Shortly after that Drake had made love to the dark-haired Madonna who now watched him warily. “Inez says you’re at least eight months along.”
Her eyes widened. “You talked to my mother?”
“Yes. Since you refused to discuss it, I went to the one person I knew would tell me the truth. Why didn’t you write?” he asked, changing tactics abruptly.
“Why didn’t you?”
The challenge hit him right between the eyes. “I was off the beaten path most of the time.”
The excuse sounded flimsy even to his ears. Her gaze flashed to him, then away, clearly expressing her disbelief.
He realized he’d grown up with this person, yet he didn’t know her. He was three years older and had traveled the world; she’d spent her life here on the ranch. So why did she suddenly appear to be the one who was older and wiser?
Impending motherhood had changed her. It was more than the fact that her breasts were fuller and her tummy rounded. He sensed a primordial knowledge within her that hadn’t been in the innocent young woman he’d loved, then left.
“My mission was dangerous,” he tried to explain. “I move around. There’s no future…I told you in the note I left.”
“I believed you.”
The simplicity of those three words threatened his self-control. They spoke of trust once given and now lost. Despair opened like a pit leading straight to the hell within him.
He exhaled heavily. He’d lived with the darkness for a long time. It was an old enemy, one he knew well. Standing, he thrust his hands into his pockets and paced to the window and back. “The child changes things.”
“It isn’t yours.”
He stopped in front of her, not quite certain he’d heard right. She stood and faced him with that calm, older-than-time composure she’d recently acquired.
“It isn’t your child,” she repeated the denial.
The silence buzzed around them like an angry swarm of killer bees. She returned his hard stare without blinking, then she smiled slightly, not in amusement but as if the whole situation was one of supreme irony.
This distant, world-weary attitude baffled him more than her not bothering to write and tell him the news. He considered the conversation with her mother and remembered a name. “Then it’s Andy Martin’s?”
“Is that what my mother said?”
“Yes.”
She tilted her chin in that stubborn way she
