bite.
“I told your father he was a damned fool for running you off. What happened with your momma... Straight-up accident that could’ve happened to any one of us. I know deep in his heart Clint agrees, but he’s too damned stubborn to tell anyone—let alone his firstborn—any different.”
The tears stinging Cooper’s eyes hurt worse than the liquor burning his throat.
“He needs you. Millie needs you. Hell, even those ragtag kids of hers need you. Yep...” He smacked the wood counter. “’Bout damned time you came home.”
Nice sentiment, but for his own sanity, Cooper knew he was only passing through. A long time ago he’d lost his home, his way, and for a messed-up guy like him, there was no such thing as second chances.
* * *
“WHERE’VE YOU BEEN?” Millie warmed her hands in front of the living room’s woodstove, wishing she hadn’t been on edge ever since Cooper had run off, vowing she wouldn’t lower herself to even turn around and look at him. She thought her lazy, twenty-minute soak would make her feel better, but all it had done was given her the privacy needed to think—not good for a woman in her condition. Hot water, plus loneliness, plus closing her eyes to envision the first handsome face she’d seen in years had proven anything but relaxing. Especially when that face belonged to her dead husband’s brother!
“Where do you think?”
She knew exactly where he’d been. She shouldn’t have wasted the breath needed to ask. “It was a serious dick move for you to walk out like that. You owe your niece and nephew an explanation.”
“Dick move? Talk to your momma with that mouth?”
She spun around to face him, only to find him unnervingly close. “You know better than most anyone I don’t even have a mom, so you can put that sass back in your pocket.”
“Sorry.” He held up his hands in surrender, and her stupid, confused heart skipped a beat. The only reason she even found him attractive was the endearing similarities he’d shared with his brother. Mossy-green eyes and the faint rise in the bridge of his nose. The way his lips looked pouty when he said his m’s. The way he made her wistful and achy and irrationally mad about how perfect her life had once been and no longer was. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have taken off, but honestly?” He shook his head, and his crooked smile further lessened her anger’s hold. “I was scared.” He removed his battered straw cowboy hat, crossing the room to hang it on the rack by the door. Even with his buzz cut, he sported a wicked case of hat hair and damn if it didn’t look good. “Those kids of yours asked tough questions. I don’t even know the answers for myself.”
“I get that, but they’re kids. They weren’t even born when your mom died, and they take it personally when their only uncle never even had the decency to send them a birthday card. They’re smart, Coop. Their little ears pick up more than I’d like, and as much as Peg loves you, she’s also that exasperated by your disappearing act.”
“I didn’t just—”
“Shh!” she admonished when he’d gotten too loud. “Do you want to wake J.J. and LeeAnn? Even worse—your dad?”
“Sorry,” he said in a softer tone. He sat hard on the sofa, cradling his forehead in his hands. “But you know damn well I didn’t just disappear. When you run down your mother with a truck, then your father tells you to, and I quote—Get the hell out of my house and don’t ever come back—it tends to linger on a man’s soul.” When he looked up, even by the light of the room’s only lamp, she could tell his eyes had welled. She hated to see him hurting, but she’d hurt, too. They all had. They all were, still. He didn’t own the rights to pain.
“Look...” With every part of her being, she wanted to go to him. Sit beside him and slip her arm around his shoulders, but she physically couldn’t. Her feet literally wouldn’t move. Outside, sleet pelted century-old windows. The weatherman out of Denver said they could have six inches of snow by morning. “I smoothed things over with the kids by giving them an abridged version of what happened with their grandmother. But for your own well-being, you have to once and for all get it through your thick head that the only one who blames you for the accident is your father—well, aside from yourself. Why did your mom even go out there? She knew better.”
A laugh as cold as the wind rattling the shutters escaped him. “Her dying words were that she’d run outside to give me a piece of her mind for drinking and staying out so late. She then told me if she’d had a lick of sense, she’d have gone to bed early in case she needed to bail me out of the county jail come morning.”
“There you go. So see? She admitted she was partially to blame. Do you honestly think that just because of your cantankerous father she’d have expected you to carry this ache inside you for all these—”
A crash of metal erupted from the back bedroom where Clint was supposed to be sleeping. Then came a gut-wrenching growl.
“What was that?” Cooper asked, already on his feet, heading in that direction.
Her stomach knotted. “I would imagine, that was your father....”
“Go see him,” Millie said. “You can’t avoid Clint forever.”
Cooper knew she was right. Sooner or later he’d have to make peace with his father. Or at the very least, for Millie and her kids’ sake, forge some semblance of civility between them. But how did he start? It wasn’t as if the walls of grief standing between them could be broken with a mere apology.
Another growl rose above the stove’s crackling fire and wind rattling the shutters.
“Cooper...” His sister-in-law’s condemning stare made him feel all of twelve. He’d felt more comfortable staring down a shark. Her intense stare conveyed more than a day’s worth of words. It told him loud and clear that until he at least spoke with his father, she wouldn’t grant him a moment’s peace.
“Aw, hell...” He brushed past her, hating the cramped space forcing them together. His arm didn’t stop tingling from where they’d touched till he reached the end of the hall.
Cooper forced a deep breath then knocked on the closed door of his mom’s old sewing room—the only possible downstairs place where Millie and his sister could have stashed his ailing father.
Rather than wait for an answer, his pulse taking the cadence of a rapid-fire machine gun, Cooper thrust open the door. He’d literally dreaded this moment for the past twelve years. “You still got a problem with me, old man?”
Clint launched a new series of growls then pitiful, racking coughs.
“You’ve got to calm down,” Millie said, already tidying the mess her patient had made by toppling his rolling metal tray. “I meant to tell you earlier that Cooper had come for a visit, but it must’ve slipped my mind.”
The cantankerous old man thrashed as best he could then settled when Millie took a plastic water cup from the nightstand and held the straw to his dried and cracked lips.
Cooper had readied himself for a fight with the man he used to know. The barrel-chested, ham-fisted, mean-as-a-cornered-rattler father
