The Cowboy's Family Christmas Read online

  “But it does matter. If we’ll be working together for a while, I’d like us to not be circling each other.” Then, to her dismay, he took a step closer to her and in spite of her obvious anger with him, he touched her shoulder. It was nothing more than the whisper of his hand over her shirt, but it was as if sparks flew from his fingertips.

  She clung to the door of the refrigerator, as if to regain her balance, then turned to him.

  “Why does this matter now? Why didn’t it matter three years ago?”

  “It did matter. What we had was everything to me. When we got together in Costa Rica, I thought we had finally come to the place you and I should have been years earlier. Instead you deserted me and ran to Dirk and married him.”

  All she could do was stare at him. “Deserted you? How... Where...” She shook her head, trying to settle her confusion. “You were the one who did the leaving. I sent you text after text and all I got from you was rejection.” The old hurt spiraled up and she had to fight down the pain and, to her humiliation, the tears.

  “Rejection? Texts? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  The puzzlement on his face was almost her undoing. He seemed genuinely disconcerted.

  “I feel like there’s this gap between us I don’t know how to bridge,” he said.

  Then, to her dismay, he took that one step separating them and fingered a strand of hair away from her face. She closed her eyes, her own emotions in flux. Her hand twitched at her side, longing to come up and cover his. To reconnect with someone she couldn’t forget.

  But then she heard Austin cry out and she was doused with icy reality.

  “I should go check on him,” she said, moving away from him.

  “Can I come with you? I haven’t seen him yet today.”

  His casual request was like an arrow in her heart. How could he act this way around Austin? How could he simply relegate him to one corner of his life? Like he didn’t matter?

  Her indignation and frustrated fury with him rose up. But behind that came a quiet question.

  Maybe if he saw Austin face-to-face again he might relent. Maybe seeing him again would make a difference.

  Really? If seeing him yesterday hadn’t, why would it now?

  Her mind did battle with herself as she recalled his coldhearted texts of rejection. The replies she typed out with trembling fingers on her cell phone, alone, pregnant and uncertain of her future.

  “Please?” he asked, the pleading note in his voice easing away her resistance.

  “Of course you can,” she said, determined to be an adult about this, tossing out one last-ditch effort to make him own up to his responsibilities. “He’s your son after all.”

  Chapter Four

  Her words hung between them, echoing in the silent kitchen. Soft-spoken, but they rocked his soul. He felt like he was fifteen years old again and being tossed off the dock at Cedar Lake. Suspended in the air in disbelief, wondering what it would feel like when he went in.

  “My son?” He choked the words out.

  “Yes. Austin is your son,” she said, her words sounded like they came from far away.

  “My son?” he repeated, feeling like an idiot.

  “I know I could keep him from you and not let you see him. That would be what you deserve, but I’m trying to take the moral high ground here. After all, you’ll be here every day. You can’t avoid him the entire time.”

  Reuben stared at her, trying to catch up one word, one phrase at a time as he surfaced to the truth.

  “What are you saying? What do you mean?”

  Leanne glared at him, eyes narrowed. “Please do me a favor and stop acting so surprised.”

  “But I am.” He struggled to settle the information, his mind ticking back, trying to think, to organize thoughts he couldn’t pin down.

  “I don’t know why you are,” she snapped. “This certainly isn’t news to you. I still can’t believe how casual you’ve been about the whole thing. You came flying onto the ranch and when you saw him, you acted like he was just some other kid, like he was—”

  “My nephew,” he interrupted. “Which he is. Dirk’s son.” Why was she saying Austin was his son? If that was true, why hadn’t she told him before? Why wait until now?

  Leanne shook her head, and her narrowed eyes latched on to him. “He’s not Dirk’s. He’s yours. The same kid I told you about over three years ago. The same kid you told me you didn’t want to have anything to do with.”

  He held his hands up, still trying to absorb what she was saying. “Whoa, what do you mean, I didn’t want to have anything to do with him? This is the first I’ve heard about this.”

  “How can you look me straight in the eye and lie like that?”

  “I’m not lying. How...when...” He caught himself. “Let’s back up here. You got pregnant. Are you saying—”

  “It happened at your cousin’s wedding. The ‘mistake’ we both agreed we had made,” she made sarcastic air quotes, hooking the air with her fingers.

  He could only stare at her, trying to digest all this.

  “You got pregnant then?”

  “Yes. Except I didn’t know at the time, obviously. And then we decided we needed to think about what we were doing and the repercussions of what we had done—”

  “You were the one who wanted space and time,” he interrupted, struggling to follow where she was leading, his frustration edging into his voice. “I was all for keeping in touch. For making a commitment right then and there but you wanted to talk to Dirk first. But he was gone to Europe. When we came back, I respected that space and distance while you waited. I let you have your time alone and didn’t bug you.”

  She held her hand up as if to stop anything else he might say. “And obviously you seemed to think that extended to responding callously to my texts when I told you I was pregnant.”

  “What? When? I didn’t get any texts.”

  “I tried to phone you a bunch of times the night I found out but you didn’t answer and I got sent to voice mail,” she said, her arms wrapped around her waist, eyes narrowed in fury. “I was so distraught. So upset when I found out. Dirk was on his way back from Europe and I hadn’t had a chance to tell him about us. So I sent you a text instead to tell you about Austin and that you were the father. And when you finally texted me back you told me that you were sorry but you couldn’t take this on. That I was on my own.” She spat the words out at him like venom. “I asked you if you were serious. You replied that you were and that you didn’t want to have anything more to do with me. That you felt guilty about being with me. That I should go back to Dirk. That he was the better person.” She listed off the reasons in a voice that both cut and accused simultaneously. “Then you told me not to contact you anymore. Then you blocked me. Or something. I never heard from you again.”

  “I would remember if I’d had that conversation. And I would never have said anything like that.” He dug back into his memory, feeling as if his entire world had been shaken, unable to believe she would think this of him. “I was waiting for you to talk to Dirk so we could be together.” If he had known he was a father on top of all that, he would have come charging back to Cedar Ridge immediately to make things right.

  “Don’t act so confused. I saw the answers you sent me. I even showed them to Tabitha because I couldn’t believe you would say what you did. And she helpfully reminded me of other times when you were irresponsible.”

  “What other times?”

  “You said you were going to take me to prom and you bailed on me. Then had the nerve to steal a kiss at prom after all.”

  What? Prom? They were going all the way back to that? Okay, he’d play along, if only to buy time to find his footing. “I didn’t take you to prom because Dirk told me to back off. That you were his girlfriend.�
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  “It wasn’t true. Dirk and I had broken up.”

  “Just like you and Dirk had broken up before you came to Costa Rica?” He couldn’t wrap his head around all of this.

  “I broke up with him that time and you needn’t look so surprised.”

  “That’s all beside the point and in the past.”

  “Maybe, but to me it’s all part and parcel of who you are. You don’t keep your promises. And don’t tell me it isn’t true. You’re bailing on the Rodeo Group.”

  In spite of his confusion and frustration with the information she had just dumped on him, Reuben knew how his quitting the Rodeo Group looked to her.

  But he wasn’t about to tell her it was because being around her and her unreasoning anger made it difficult for him.

  “Never mind that. You need to know that I didn’t get any of those texts you’re talking about,” he repeated.

  “You can’t argue with what I saw on my phone and what my sister saw. We can argue about the texts all we want, but the reality of it all is, whether you want to admit it or not, Austin is your son.”

  He felt like he was stuck in some maze trying to find his way out.

  “Do you still have the texts?” It was a dumb question, but right now dumb was all he could manage.

  She looked away, shaking her head. “I deleted them. It was too hurtful to keep the reminder of...” She paused, her voice breaking. Then she held her head up, eyes blazing at him. “It was the hardest thing I ever had to deal with. I felt alone and betrayed by you.”

  Reuben didn’t know how else to tell her that he hadn’t received any messages from her. “Okay. We can resolve this fast. I’ll check.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket, thumbed it on and hit the messages icon.

  He scrolled through his message contacts, and as he did so, he realized something else and he stopped.

  “Well? Did you find them?” Her voice was like ice.

  He lowered his phone, pulling in a deep, heavy sigh as he shook his head. “I won’t find them. I lost that phone and everything on it and I forgot to back it up.”

  “That’s convenient.”

  “As convenient as your marriage to Dirk was, apparently,” he snapped.

  Leanne sucked in her breath. “That’s a low blow.”

  “So was finding out that, after we had decided to make a commitment to each other, after we realized we should have been together from the beginning, you couldn’t wait to marry Dirk when you got back home.”

  “I didn’t have a choice,” she said. “I was alone. Pregnant. I had no place to go. No job. No options. You had pushed me away. Rejected me—”

  “According to you,” he interrupted, refusing to allow her to shove him into that role.

  “Dirk came back from Europe the day after I got your texts and told me he was sorry,” she carried on, ignoring his interjection. “He begged me to take him back. He said he wanted to marry me right away. That he didn’t care what his father thought. I had to tell him the truth about the baby. He was angry with me, but he didn’t change his mind. I was scared and confused, and I could only think of my baby. So I said yes. He was being so kind and considerate. We flew to Vegas and got married right away. We had our honeymoon there. And you know what happened on our drive home from the airport.” Her voice broke, and in spite of his frustration and confusion, he reached out to her.

  But she pulled away.

  They stood that way, staring at each other, at a stalemate.

  “You’re an engineer,” she said, stone faced. “If you are still in doubt about Austin’s parentage, you can do the math. Austin was born eight and a half months after Dirk and I got married. I think George assumed he was early when, in fact, Austin was overdue.”

  That still didn’t prove anything to him. For all he knew, she had been intimate with Dirk before he and Leanne had gone to the wedding in Costa Rica, but he wasn’t bringing that up right now.

  “And I can see by the look on your face that you still doubt me.” She shook her head in disgust. “You think Austin might be Dirk’s child.”

  “It’s a possibility” was all he could say in his defense.

  “Why would I lie about this? How would it benefit me? George thinks Austin is Dirk’s son. We both know what he thinks of you.”

  Which didn’t precisely help her cause.

  “So why haven’t you told George the truth if Austin is, indeed, my son?”

  Leanne’s eyes flicked away from him and a flush tinged her cheeks. Which only underlined his assumptions.

  “Dirk made me promise,” she said, her voice quiet. “Just before the accident, on our way home from the airport, he made me promise not to tell George the truth about Austin. It was the last thing he said to me before—”

  “Before the accident,” he said.

  She nodded and was about to say more when Austin started crying again and she hurried away, as if glad of the distraction.

  Reuben followed behind her, walking more slowly, still digesting everything she had thrown at him. If she had felt alone and abandoned, of course she would’ve turned to Dirk.

  But he hadn’t abandoned her, he reminded himself as he trudged up the stairs. Clearly more was going on here, and right now he couldn’t put everything together from what she had told him.

  Austin was sitting up in his bed, crying in the darkness of his room.

  Leanne hurried inside, dropped on his bed and pulled him close, her one hand cradling his head. “It’s okay, honey. I’m here. Did you have a bad dream?”

  “I scared,” he said. “I scared of da horse.”

  “It’s okay, sweetie,” Leanne said, as he crawled onto her lap, slipping his chubby arms around her neck. “You don’t have to be scared. I’m here.”

  Austin looked over her shoulder. “Uncle Wooben,” he said with a note of surprise.

  “Hey, buddy.” Reuben stayed in the doorway, watching as Leanne brushed the little boy’s hair back from his face, studying the boy’s features, trying to find any resemblance.

  His hair was auburn like Leanne’s. His eyes brown.

  Like his.

  Or like George’s.

  “You come here,” Austin demanded, suddenly not so sad anymore.

  Reuben pushed himself away from the door frame, glancing around the darkened room as his eyes adjusted to the gloom.

  This had been his room when he’d lived here. All traces of him were gone, however. All his awards, ribbons and plaques from competitions he’d entered and won.

  Instead, cute prints now hung on the painted walls. A toy box was tucked at the end of the bed. A small rocking horse that Uncle Boyce had made for Reuben still sat in the corner of the room. One tiny remaining claim he could make on the house.

  He was surprised his father had kept it.

  “Come. Sit,” Austin said.

  Reuben hesitated, still not sure what to think of this child and where to put him in his life. Sure he’d known about Austin. The child had always been a reminder to him of Leanne’s betrayal and her need for security. For Dirk.

  “Come here,” Austin said again.

  It would look silly to keep standing there, so Reuben walked over to the bed, perching on the edge.

  Austin grinned at him, his teeth flashing white in the half dark and Reuben grinned back.

  He was a cute kid, that was for sure, but to him he was simply that. A cute kid.

  Then Austin angled his head down and Reuben saw what he hadn’t yesterday. A tiny, lighter patch of hair swirling out of the cowlick on the top of Austin’s head. It wasn’t large. You’d have to pay attention to see it.

  But it was the same light patch of hair his mother had. The same patch of hair he had.

  He felt his world shift yet again as the evi
dence in front of him, combined with Leanne’s insistence, gave him proof he could no longer deny. Austin truly was his son.

  His gaze shifted to hers. The look on her face showed him that she had seen his reaction.

  Reuben reached down and fingered the patch of Austin’s lighter hair, as if touching it would make it real. “My mom always colored her hair, but she had the same bit of differently colored hair” was all he could say, a confusing rush of feelings overwhelming him. “So do I. My mom told me it was hereditary. That her dad had it too.”

  Leanne said nothing as a heavy silence fell between them.

  Then he looked up at her, still trying to sort everything out. “I don’t know what to say.”

  Leanne’s expression softened.

  “So, do you believe me now?”

  “I do. I have to.”

  “I’m sad that it took such hard proof. I was hoping you would have taken my word for truth.”

  He fought down a beat of frustration. Surely she had to understand he would have some doubts? But she seemed to think that he’d known and rejected her.

  He blew out his breath, looking down at Austin again who was now yawning. Reuben crouched down, as if seeing him in an entirely new light. His son. He and Leanne truly did have a son. They were now bound with an unbreakable, undeniable bond.

  And what are you going to do about that? Can you still leave?

  Leanne pulled Austin close against her, tucking his head under her chin. As he watched Leanne holding Austin, remnants of dreams he and Leanne had spun those two weeks in Costa Rica returned.

  The two of them, living on a ranch somewhere. Leanne had imagined it to be the Bar W ranch because she wanted their children raised in the same place he was. Reuben had said he wanted to live anywhere but the Bar W. They hadn’t exactly fought about it—they were too in love at the time—but it had caused a moment of tension.

  And now, here she was, raising Austin on a ranch with no future that he could see, clinging to it for Austin’s sake.

  Then Leanne lowered Austin onto his bed, tucking the sheets around him and brushing a kiss over his forehead. “Good night, sweetheart,” she whispered. Austin curled up on his side, grinning at Reuben. “Good night, Uncle Wooben,” he said.