Gayle Wilson – The Cowboy's Secret Son (страница 9)

A man’s face, she acknowledged. Hard, lean and tempered by the years. Whenever she had thought of him, she had pictured him exactly as he had been that summer. Young, strong and so beautifully male. He was different now. Certainly not less attractive. If anything—

“I’m sure Drew won’t head out without permission again,” Mark said. He smiled at Drew, whose eyes had shifted gratefully from the sheriff’s accusing ones to his. “We all make mistakes.”

As he added the last, Mark glanced up at Jillian. She wasn’t sure what he was implying, but then no one could argue with the sentiment. We all make mistakes.

Of course, maybe that phrase didn’t mean anything, she cautioned her volatile emotions. Maybe he was just making conversation. Just because he said something didn’t mean it was related to their shared past. Or to her.

“Well, you best not make this one again, young fellow,” Ronnie said pompously. “Nobody’s got time to be chasing down kids who don’t have sense enough to get in out of the rain.”

The word seemed a signal. The first drops began to splatter down around them, large enough to be audible as they struck the dry earth.

“Gotta go,” the sheriff said. “You mind your mama, boy. If you don’t, I’ll know about it, and then you and me’s gonna have to have us a talk. You hear me?”

“Yes, sir,” Drew said.

The bravado with which he had told Jillian in no uncertain terms this morning that he hated this place seemed to have disappeared. Even his excitement over the chopper ride had evaporated, and as angry as she was with him for running away, Jillian found herself regretting that loss.

The three of them watched as Ronnie trotted to his car. As soon as he had gotten settled into the seat, he picked up the radio and spoke to someone. The exchange was inaudible and brief, maybe just a location report or the assurance that he was headed back into town. Then he put the car into gear, backing it into the yard before he headed out the dirt road. He lifted his hand in farewell as he drove past them.

“I have to get back, too,” Mark said. “I’ll see you later.”

She glanced up, an incredibly powerful surge of hope flaring inside her, to find he was addressing Drew.

“Promise?” her son said, brown eyes meeting hazel. And the same hope she had just felt was expressed in that single word.

“You can count on it,” Mark said.

He reached out and put his hand on top of the boy’s head, but he didn’t ruffle the darkly shining hair. That was something Jake did, and Jillian had never been sure Drew appreciated the gesture. Mark’s was more of a touch. A goodbye. Maybe even a benediction of sorts. As was his smile.

Without looking at her, he turned and began to retrace his steps. She realized then why it had taken her so long to recognize him. Just as his face had changed, so had his body. The shoulders were as broad, maybe broader than the last time she’d seen him. His hips and waist had narrowed, leading down to long, muscular legs, now eating up the distance to the chopper.

A man and no longer a boy, she thought again.

Before she had time to think anything else, Drew’s hand slipped into hers. That was unusual enough these days that she glanced down in surprise.

“I’m in big trouble, huh?” he said, his eyes still on Mark.

“What do you think?”

“I think…it was worth it,” her son said.

“Worth being in big trouble?”

“If I hadn’t been out there, I’d never had gotten to ride in the chopper. He let me wear a flight helmet,” he added.

Jillian shielded her eyes from the dust as the rotor began to turn. She didn’t particularly want to be standing out here, watching Mark Peterson leave, but she didn’t seem to be able to do anything about the fact that she was.

“You think he meant what he said about seeing me again?”

At least Drew hadn’t asked how she knew Mark, she thought with gratitude. But she understood how her son’s mind worked well enough to know that he would put two and two together soon enough. After all, Mark had called her by name.

“Who knows?” she said softly, forcing the words between lips that felt stiff. And not just with the cold.

Once she had been foolish enough to think she could predict what Mark would do in any situation. And she had been wrong. This time she wasn’t going to make any predictions. Not even for Drew’s sake. Especially not for Drew’s sake.

* * *

JILLIAN, he thought, going mindlessly through the motions of flying without any conscious awareness of what he was doing. He didn’t seem capable of thinking about anything other than the woman he had left behind him, standing out in the rain. Jillian Salvini.

Sullivan, he reminded himself. The kid had said his name was Sullivan. He wondered briefly about Jillian’s husband, feeling nausea stir in the pit of his stomach at the thought.

And then, deliberately, he blocked out images he didn’t want to deal with. Couldn’t deal with. Images from their past followed by images of Jillian married to someone else. Sleeping with someone else. Conceiving another man’s child. His head moved slowly from side to side in denial. A pointless denial.

What the hell did you think she’d been doing for the last decade? he asked himself angrily. So she was married and had a kid. Big deal.

In the back of his mind he had always known that was a possibility. A probability, he amended. After all, Jillian was almost thirty now. Twenty-eight, he calculated.

And she still didn’t look much older than she had that summer when she was seventeen. Not with her hair pulled back like that. Her skin was still pale and smooth, but without the ever present tan of her childhood. The freckles that had always decorated the bridge of her nose, unless it was the dead of winter, were no longer visible.

Except they were, he realized. Those same freckles were splayed across her son’s equally delicate nose. He wondered how he had missed noticing the resemblance.

He shouldn’t have. Drew Sullivan was a masculine replication of the skinny little tomboy, that other sometimes lonely only child who had followed at Mark’s heels throughout his childhood.

Jillian’s son. Who might also have been his son. That thought was as sickening as the images of Jillian lying in the arms of another man, sated and fulfilled. Just as she had once lain in his. Once. A long time ago.

If there was one thing Mark had learned in the last ten years, it was that there was nothing more damaging than thinking about the “what might have beens” of your life. That’s what his father had done. And after the crash, he himself had indulged in more than his share of those kinds of thoughts.

It certainly wouldn’t do him any good to think about what might have been as far as Jillian Salvini was concerned. And he realized he’d been doing that on some level since he’d been back.

Now he knew with unwanted clarity what she had been doing since the last time he’d seen her. A reality that included a husband, a son and a life that had nothing to do with the girl who had given herself to him with the same sweet innocence with which she had lived her entire childhood. A girl who had then disappeared as completely as if she and her mother and father had been wiped off the face of the earth.

His father had muttered bitterly about Tony Salvini’s Mafia ties and had cursed Jillian’s father until the day he’d died. A man broken by life, who had owned nothing at the last but the shirt on his back and an unquenchable hatred for Salvini.

It was an animosity that had been born the morning he’d discovered the Salvinis and their daughter had fled in the middle of the night, leaving everything behind them, including the unpaid loans Bo and Jillian’s father had signed jointly.

And Mark had never seen Jillian again. Until today. Until he had stepped around the nose of the chopper and come face-to-face with the woman who had haunted his dreams for the last ten years. Especially since he’d come back here. And now, so had she. Perhaps if things had been different…

Except they weren’t different, he reminded himself as he started the familiar descent to the land that had belonged to his family for three generations. Your birthright, his dad used to say. A birthright his father believed Tony Salvini had stolen.

Whatever the truth of what had happened between their fathers ten years ago, Jillian was married, and Mark was leaving. And those were the only two things he ought to be thinking about. Not about all those what might have beens.

Unbidden, the thin face of Drew Sullivan appeared in his mind’s eye, looking up at him as he begged for that promise Mark had foolishly given before he’d left. An eerie reflection of a little girl who had once pleaded with Mark not to leave her behind.

I didn’t, Jilly, he thought bitterly. I never did. You’re the one who left me. And it’s too late to even ask you why.

* * *

WHY THE HELL can’t I sleep? Jillian thought.

She turned on her side, pushing the old-fashioned feather pillow into a more comfortable shape. It wasn’t really that she didn’t know why, of course. It had more to do with an unwillingness to admit how disturbed she had been by seeing Mark again. She just hadn’t been prepared, she’d told herself. It had been the shock combined with her worry over Andy that had thrown her. Drew, she corrected herself, remembering the sound of that single syllable spoken in Mark’s deep voice.