His smile mocked. “Could’ve fooled me.”
Embarrassment flushed her cheeks. “Caring for people is what I do.”
“And I’ll be the first one to attest to the fact that you’re a fine doctor,” he said in a gentle voice. “But let’s be honest here.”
“By all means. If that’s possible,” she said, unable to mask the sarcasm in her voice.
“Touché.” Meeting her irate gaze was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. “Again, I know I treated you badly in St. Louis, and I should have said goodbye in person instead of leaving you that note.”
Rachel began to laugh, a terrible parody of the sound. “You think I’m angry at you because you left me a note?” she cried.
“Weren’t you?”
“Angry?” She shook her head. “No. Try furious. Or hurt. Or better yet, devastated.” She took a deep breath, and feelings and words that had festered far too long erupted from her lips.
“Silly, naive me! I was bound to fall for your smooth-talking ways. I believed everything you told me, and it was all lies. Every single word of it! So tell me, Gabe, where was your honesty back then?”
The vitriol in her voice caused all the color to drain from his face. “I have no excuse, except...”
She made a slashing movement through the air to silence him. “You’re right. You have no excuse. Lucky, lucky me! Handsome, worldly Gabe Gentry, the boy every girl in Wolf Creek longed to snare, looked me up.”
She gave a bitter laugh. “I can’t believe I was so gullible. I actually scoffed at the tales I’d heard about you, because you seemed so kind, and my memories of you were good. So I listened to your lies and fell for your pretty words. I gave you everything I had, Gabe. Everything. My love, my—” her voice faltered “—my entire being. You played me for a fool, and when you got what you wanted, you left without a backward glance, off to the next place of interest, the next easy mark.”
“I never thought you were an easy—” He tried to interrupt, but again she held up her palm for silence and drew in several deep, steadying breaths. As quickly as it had come, her anger disappeared. He almost wished it hadn’t. The anguish in her eyes was almost his undoing.
“Do you have any idea what you did to me?” she said, her voice breaking. “Do you have any idea how ugly and discarded and used I felt?”
Truthfully, he’d never considered that. For the first time he realized how badly his casual treatment had wounded her. There had been other girls, other times, and never once had he considered how his cavalier dismissal might have made them feel. He’d always assumed that they expected no more or less than he was willing to offer. He’d used his God-given looks and charm with utter disregard for anyone’s feelings but his own. All his life it had been about him. About what he felt, what he wanted.
The knowledge shamed him.
A glib apology couldn’t begin to cover his faults, but still he searched his mind for words to ease her pain, knowing deep in his gut that there were none.
“I think I understand what you felt and why you still feel the way you do.”
The harsh laughter was back. “You understand nothing!” she said in a tone of deadly quiet. “Nothing. But you’re a man, and men get to walk away. Women are the ones who pay, and I’ll pay for my folly the rest of my life.”
She swiped at her tears with her fingertips. “Thanks to you, I learned never to trust anything a man says.” Empty of words, she felt the heat of anger drain away and turned to leave the room.
Gabe’s voice followed her. “You must have trusted at least one man.”
She turned back to him with a blank expression.
“You must have trusted one other man,” he repeated. “You must have trusted Danny’s father.”
She paled, and turning left him standing near the fire.
He closed his eyes against the pain.
She’d loved him.
Was it possible that he’d loved her but had been too immature and wrapped up in himself to realize it? He didn’t know. All he knew was that staying would have meant putting an end to his roaming ways, and he hadn’t been ready to do that. So he had moved on. He had walked away from the one bit of goodness in his sordid past, possibly the best thing to ever happen to him, and, he suspected, the one person who might have saved him from himself.
She’d moved on, too. She’d found someone who wasn’t afraid to settle down. Someone who would cherish her enough to make her his wife.
Someone who had fathered her son.
That indisputable fact, more than anything she’d said to him, brought the most grief. The love he’d tossed away so carelessly, another had gained. Staying in Wolf Creek wouldn’t be easy, for a lot of reasons.
* * *
When Rachel entered the kitchen, she was greeted by two pairs of questioning eyes. She wondered if either of them had heard the actual words of the argument, or if they’d just heard her voice raised in anger.
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