to do about it.
Marissa’s hand shook as she warmed Jordan’s baby food and scooped it into a dish for him. Her own barbecued beef supper would be sitting in that skillet and serve her for the rest of the week. She had no appetite.
Would Ty come back tonight? Or had he just said that to keep her on alert, to keep her off balance? She was already way off balance. What was she going to do?
As she dipped the spoon into Jordan’s food and made noises like an airplane to coax him to eat it, she wondered what Ty Conroy was going to do.
She’d seen the thunder in his eyes when she’d confirmed the fact that Jordan was his. That thunder was anger that she hadn’t told him. She was pretty sure of that. With his lifestyle, she’d concluded he’d want nothing to do with a baby. She’d concluded he might never be back in Fawn Grove again. The circuit could take him anywhere, including to his best dreams. When he had enough money to fund his dreams, why would he want to come back to Fawn Grove? He could do or be anything he wanted. He could travel. He could have a different girl in each town and never get bored.
Ty had had a following of girls in high school. He’d been a wrestler and won a state championship his senior year. However, the book on him was that he didn’t date much. When did he have time with wrestling practice and chores on the Cozy C? But when he did date, he dated a different girl every time. The thing was, the girls he dated only once still spoke highly of him. They still liked him. They said he was polite and charming and made them laugh. He was a good time.
Marissa knew for certain that he was a good time. She looked at Jordan and she remembered that night with Ty explicitly.
The knock on her door came less than fifteen minutes later. She answered it quickly, wanting to get the issue over with, wanting to get it resolved. If it was resolvable.
She’d wiped Jordan down. Somehow he always managed to dip his fingers into the bowl and then smear the gravy all over his face. Now he was sitting in his play saucer with its activity center, bouncing a bit, manipulating the buttons on a ring on one side of the play table. There were activities the whole way around the circle. His attention span was the strongest when he was playing there. Her attention span right now was zilch.
Her heart thudded hard as she let Ty in and wondered again what he was going to say. More important, what he was going to do.
“Would you like coffee?” she asked, maybe trying to postpone the inevitable. “I don’t have any beer.”
“Coffee’s fine,” he answered, removing his hat, laying it on the table. He ran his hand through his dark brown hair and she remembered running her fingers through it. It was thick but soft and silky. His body had been all hard muscle. Her eyes glided across his shoulders. He still was. There might even be more muscle definition in his arms.
She poured two mugs and set them on the table. “Black, right?” At least that’s what she remembered from the reception.
“Right,” he said with a crisp nod as he stared down at Jordan.
She added milk to her coffee, then a little sugar. When she sat, too, Jordan’s saucer right beside her chair, she asked, “What did you decide on your walk?”
“No decisions, Marissa. I need the facts first.”
She frowned, not sure what he meant. “What facts do you mean?”
“First of all, why didn’t you tell me?”
She felt herself bristle and knew getting defensive wouldn’t do either of them any good. How to explain this so he’d understand? How to explain this without turning herself inside out? She’d start with the simpler explanation.
“You’re a rodeo cowboy, Ty. That’s all you ever wanted to be. You told me that yourself over dinner at the wedding reception.”
“Rodeo cowboys can’t be fathers?” he asked in a low, controlled voice.
“How can they be when they’re never around?”
Maybe that struck too close to home because a shadow crossed his face and his jaw tightened. “You’re generalizing.”
“You’ve asked me a question and I’m trying to answer. Maybe you should answer a couple of questions. If I had told you I was pregnant, would you have seen me through my pregnancy? Would you have come back to Fawn Grove? Would you have been here during labor and delivery? Or if that had been the weekend of a big rodeo, would you have been there bull riding? I asked myself those questions and others. Would you quit the circuit? Would you willingly settle down? I came up with a resounding no.”
“You didn’t give me the chance to make up my own mind. You just sailed right by disclosure into doing it on your own. It takes two people to make a baby, Marissa, and I deserved to know.”
She’d carried guilt from not telling Ty about the baby, sure she had. But as an unwed mother with nowhere to turn, she’d done the best she could.
“So you asked yourself about my rodeo life, and you decided that came first with me.” He studied her. “But more was going on than that, wasn’t it?”
“Sure, more was going on than that,” she said, practically spilling her coffee mug in her agitation as she plopped it down. “This certainly wasn’t a planned pregnancy. You had a life on the road and I had to find some way to make a life. What kind of parent could you have been if I’d trapped you into fatherhood? Wouldn’t you have resented me? Wouldn’t you have resented Jordan?”
Ty’s expression was almost forbidding when he asked, “What makes you think I would have resented having a son?”
That question took precedent over all the others. Although she didn’t want to delve into her past, she knew she had no choice if she wanted to make him understand.
She took a few sips of her coffee as a bracing elixir. She rarely talked about her childhood, but maybe she had to do it now to make Ty understand. She put her hand on Jordan’s head, pushed her thumb through his hair, felt the warmth of his skin on her palm. This was her baby, her child, and she loved him dearly. Could Ty come to love him, too?
“My father married my mother because she was pregnant.” The statement seemed to fall with a thud onto the table between them.
Ty’s eyes widened a bit and then he nodded and said, “Go on.”
She shouldn’t have to go on. That should be enough. But he wanted it all laid out.
“They had an unhappy marriage. They argued all the time. Dad left for days at a time and didn’t come back.” From that she’d learned to distrust men. Because of her dad’s example, she didn’t believe they could commit to loving a family or stay.
She paused for a moment and then went on. “He didn’t even care if he had a wife or a daughter, and I never felt loved. I wasn’t about to put Jordan through that type of childhood.”
Letting that go for the moment, Ty asked, “What happened?”
“Nothing monumental. But
