Susan Mallery - The Rancher Next Door

Nora glared at them both. “I don’t have to explain myself to either of you.”

She hurried up the stairs, swept past her brother and entered the house. The screen door slammed shut behind her.

Katie turned to look at Jack. “Shane’s in there. Do I have to worry?”

Jack shook his head as he settled next to her on the top step. “No. Nora won’t say a word in front of the boy. For all her faults, she’s crazy about kids.” He jerked his head toward the house. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s nothing compared to what Aaron would say if he found you on our front porch.” She drew her knees to her chest and tried not to notice how good it felt to have Jack sitting next to her. The heat from his body seemed to surround her in a cocoon of safety. She wanted to lean against him, resting her head on his shoulder. She wanted him to put his arm around her and just hold her. This wasn’t about sexual desire, although she had her share of that. This was about two friends finding a bit of the past tied up in the present.

Instead she rested her arms on her knees and stared at the sky. “I was just thinking about how peaceful it was here, compared to my house. But I take that back.”

“Nora doesn’t believe in keeping her opinion to herself. But you know that Hattie and I don’t share it.”

“I do know that. You’ve both been very kind to Shane and me.” She shifted so that she was leaning against the railing and able to look at Jack. “Besides, Nora has her reasons.”

“You mean David?”

“What else?” Katie sighed. “They rocked both families by falling in love. My father threatened to disinherit David for proposing to Nora, then a few weeks before the wedding David shows up married to another woman who is already pregnant with his child. If I were Nora, I would have ripped his heart out. Under the circumstances, I think she’s been very forgiving.”

Jack wore a white shirt tucked into jeans. The pale fabric glowed in the light from the fixture by the front door. But his features were in shadow, and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

“Did you mind?” she asked. “Them being engaged, I mean. Not David dumping her.”

“I wanted to beat the crap out of your brother,” he admitted. “He treated my sister badly. She deserved better.”

“I know. It was so not like him. I never understood what happened.”

There was a minute of silence, then Jack stretched his long legs in front of him and shrugged. “No, I didn’t mind them being engaged. Why should I? I was involved with you.”

As if she didn’t remember. “I always thought that David and Nora being involved kept the heat off us,” she admitted, staring straight ahead instead of looking at him. The personal subject made her feel shy somehow. “I’m sure we weren’t as subtle as we thought. All those long glances and secret touching. Someone might have noticed. Except both families were so caught up in what was going on with David and Nora.”

“It was a different time,” he said. “We were young.”

“I don’t want to go back in time, but there are some things I miss about those days. It was so much easier to know what I wanted and how to get it.”

“Aren’t you sure now?”

“Not at all.”

“I am,” he said flatly. “I have everything I want right here.”

She didn’t know how he meant the words. She doubted that he intended them to wound, but they did. If he had all he needed, then she wasn’t necessary to his happiness. Not that she should be. They were old friends, nothing more. Except…there had been a time when the sun had risen and set in his eyes. She thought he’d felt the same.

She felt the distance between them that had existed since she’d first seen him when she moved back. It was as if they’d never shared a past or any kind of affection. They were strangers, and he wasn’t interested in changing that.

She told herself she agreed with him. That being with a man wasn’t part of her plan. She had to make a life for herself and her son, and she didn’t need the complication of getting involved. Except she didn’t exactly believe what she was saying. Without meaning to, she asked the question that had been on her mind since she’d seen him in Dr. Remington’s office.

“Are you still mad at me?”

Katie watched, but Jack didn’t give anything away. His posture didn’t change, nor did his body language. She might as well have asked about the weather.

“I was never mad,” he said after a while.

Katie raised her eyebrows. “Of course you were. You had to be furious with me. I was the one leaving for college, when you should have already been there for a year. I got to go away while you were stuck on the ranch. Worse, I wanted you to come with me. I know now that I was tempting you with what you could never have. You had to be angry. I was angry with you.”

That got a reaction out of him. He turned to face her, his gaze narrow, his mouth set in a thin line. “You’ll have to explain that to me. What? You were annoyed that I couldn’t drop everything to come with you? Not that it made any difference. You’re the one who promised to love me forever. And you took all of six months to find some other man and marry him. So what happened, Katie? You get hitched to the first guy who asked you out?”

She’d wanted to know that he still remembered the past, and now she had her answer. Rage radiated from him, much as the sexual heat had years before. Fire flashed in his dark eyes, but the flames had everything to do with broken dreams and nothing to do with desire.

“Just about.” She whispered her confession. “But it’s not what you imagine, Jack. I didn’t love him.”

“That’s supposed to make it better?”

Silence stretched between them. She wanted to touch him, as she had wanted to before. But this time she wanted the physical contact so that she could know it was going to be okay between them. While she’d been going through the torture that was adolescence, Jack had been her best friend. All the years apart hadn’t changed the fact that she missed him.

He drew in a deep breath. “I was angry,” he said grudgingly. “But not in the way you think.”

“Then how? I know I hurt you by getting married. I didn’t mean to.”

“Hurt me or get married?”

His steady gaze unnerved her. She looked past him to the barn. “Both, I guess. I can’t regret Shane. He’s the best part of me.” She smiled. “I know that’s a cliché. All mothers think the same thing, but it’s really true. Shane has been my miracle. So that’s the one positive thing that came out of my very brief marriage.”

“He’s a good kid.”

“Thanks. I know I get to take a little of the credit, but most of it is him.” She risked glancing at Jack. His expression didn’t seem quite so hard. “I thought it would be different,” she admitted. “My life, my future. I wanted you to leave the ranch and come with me. I wanted us to be in a place where we could admit our feelings in public. I was very young and selfish. I’m sorry for that.”

She paused, but he didn’t speak. She wondered what he was thinking. Did her confession matter to him? Did the past still live or had he put it so far behind him that he couldn’t remember what it looked like anymore?

“We were both young,” he said slowly. “I knew you wanted me to go with you, and I couldn’t.”

“I see that now, but at the time all I could think was that you didn’t love me enough. Or at least not as much as I loved you.” She grimaced. “That was my interpretation of events. As for marrying the first young man who asked me out, I think I wanted to know that there was someone who wanted to marry me even if you didn’t. I had something to prove.”

“In what way?”

She still couldn’t look at him. She turned her attention to Nora’s car-a dark shape in the starlight. But it wasn’t enough to distract her from the whispers of pain. So long ago Jack had been her world. He’d hurt her desperately, not just by refusing to leave the ranch to be with her, but before.

“You changed,” she said in a whisper. “After you graduated from high school. You were different. Withdrawn. Looking back now, I can see that you were probably making the transition from teenager to adult. Suddenly you weren’t the football hero anymore-you were in charge of a working ranch. Old Bill Smith retired and your mom was busy with the other kids. So you had to go it alone. But I didn’t recognize that…at least not in time. I thought you were rejecting me.”

“Never that, Katie.” He hesitated. “You’re right about the rest of it, though. After high school everything was different.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s not your fault.”

“I guess.”

“You thought about this a lot,” he said.

She shrugged. “I’ve had plenty of time to work it out. Sitting up through the night with a sick child gives one a chance to revisit the past.”

“Was he sick a lot?”

“No. Nothing like me who caught every bug in a hundred mile radius and then some. Shane’s a healthy kid, and I’m grateful. I meant the usual stuff. Colds, fevers.”

She looked at him again and found him studying her face. She returned the interest, examining features she’d thought about over the years, noticing the changes and the similarities. Time had been kind to him, turning him from a good-looking teenager to a handsome man.

Jack smiled slowly. The corners of his eyes crinkled, and her stomach lurched in response. She found herself leaning toward him, wanting to hear whatever magic words fell from his firm lips.

Down girl, she told herself. While she was able to control her reaction around other men, Jack still had the ability to make her go weak at the knees. It probably had something to do with him being her first love.

“I’ve spent time with Shane and seen you with him. I know he’s your son,” Jack said. “But I have to admit I have trouble thinking of you as the mother of a ten-year-old.”