Helen Myers – A Father's Promise (страница 2)

“It worked well enough for the drive down here, so it’ll do for the trip back,” he told his son, repeating the process. “No way I can shop with you under wing and the weather plotting against me.”

It took him almost five minutes—ten less than the first time. Even so, by the time he’d finished he was sweating more than a hog in an auction pen. But worry and caution aside, he eventually had the boy strapped in, grateful that no one was around to point out how the whole contraption looked about as sturdy as a bag of marshmallows.

“Don’t worry about it,” he assured the calmer bundle inside. “I’ve already got strict orders from all of your self-appointed godmothers to drive as though I was carrying a load of nitro.”

As if he’d needed the reminding, he thought, somewhat disgruntled. He maneuvered his large frame back behind the steering wheel, only to have to twist again to dig his keys from his hind pocket. It was just the two of them now. His son was the most important thing in his life. If he’d had any doubts before, Celene’s latest stunt made that fact abundantly clear.

He did, however, wish that he could have gotten John, Jr. admitted here at the hospital for a day or two, until he’d tracked down the exasperating woman and gotten things between them settled once and for all. But all the nurses had certified him as crazy.

“This ain’t no hotel, Big John.”

“You can’t desert your son in his hour of need, Mr. Paladin.”

“Beast.”

Oh, yes. They’d laid it on thick and heavy.

Not even his longtime friend, Bud—Sheriff Bud Hackman today since he’d been summoned by Juanita, the head nurse in pediatrics, who on behalf of all her new mothers seemed to hate men in general—could resist pointing out that he should have known better than to even consider doing such a thing. “You abandon this boy and go after that woman, Big John, I ain’t gonna have no choice but to recommend he be made a ward of the court.”

Let the big oaf try to set foot on the Long J again. “The only welcome he’ll get is a butt full of buckshot,” John growled, taking a grim pleasure in visualizing the scene.

Maybe it had been unusual to suggest the hospital care for his son in his absence. But where was their understanding, their sensitivity, their compassion? He’d been driven to these straits. He was riding a long trail of bad luck—had been ever since he’d behaved irresponsibly during his trip to Abilene and had gotten himself saddled with a pregnant bride some eight months ago. All he was trying to do was buy himself some time to straighten out the mess.

“Who cares what they think,” he muttered aside to his wide-eyed passenger. “We don’t need them, do we? We’ll work things out for ourselves. For now, though, you might as well kick back and catch up on some shut-eye. It’s a thirty-mile trip back home. No need for both of us to end up stressed out and ornery.”

He started the truck, shifted into Drive and, because the lot was almost empty as usual, drove forward to cut a wide U-turn toward the nearest exit. Because the weather was having a decided effect on visibility, when he reached the stop sign and saw that his windows were fogging up, he quickly switched on the defroster. After the mist cleared away, he looked up and down the empty road once, twice, then added a third glance for good measure.

That’s when it struck him that this behavior was totally out of character for him, and it told him just how deeply he’d been rattled. Dusty Flats might be the county seat, he reminded himself as he gripped the wheel and turned onto the street, but in a town with a population under fifteen hundred, bad weather had a tendency to keep folks at home. There wasn’t exactly a need to act as though he were driving on a sixteen-year-old’s hardship permit. Thirty and responsible—regardless of what those uniformed viragoes had accused him—he’d never had a wreck in his life. He could do this, he told himself.

You can’t do this, and you know it.

He did, however, manage to make the turn. He even drove a few miles without breaking into a cold sweat. But by the time he got to the farm-to-market road that angled off toward his ranch, he found himself setting his right hand on the seat in front of the baby and driving twenty miles an hour under the legal limit. Completely logical, he told himself. He was still calm. This was merely in case someone came barreling out of nowhere and aimed straight into them.

Before he reached the next intersection, however, he had to pull over to the shoulder. Reduced to a shaking mass, he actually felt as though he might have to get out of the car and lose the coffee and biscuit that was all he’d ingested since rising before dawn. Him. Big John Paladin. The rancher who’d outraced tornadoes and had outlasted droughts since taking over the Long J Ranch at the unheard of age of twenty-six.

How he wished he could blame his condition on the shock over what Celene had done. But he would be lying if he tried. He was angry—angry, disgusted, but most of all scared sick. He had a feeling that it was just as well that Bud had threatened to keep him here. If he found the exasperating…female, he might strangle her with his bare hands.

Funny thing was, from the minute he’d set eyes on her, he’d known they were wrong for each other. Celene had been flashy, daring and restless. She’d been the kind of woman who would find it difficult to stick with one man, let alone work at a marriage. But on the night he’d sat in that Abilene honky-tonk, all that had mattered was that she hadn’t looked anything like Dana Dixon. When they’d danced, she hadn’t felt the way Dana had in his arms. Her perfume hadn’t crept under his defenses and spawned a fierce hunger in him like Dana’s. And she sure as hell couldn’t tie him in a big agonizing knot with one of her smiles.

What Celene had managed to do that fateful night was to provide him with a drinking companion—and a few hours later, some long-denied companionship of another form. It had been the kind of experience that a brooding, recently rejected man should have been able to walk away from. With a hangover, to be sure, but also with just enough guilt to promise himself never to do it again. Maybe even with enough humbleness to go home and try to mend some fences.

He’d had the hangover, all right. He’d also ended up with the kind of shock that made men give up drinking permanently. Before he could apologize to Dana, only weeks after the Abilene incident, he found himself saddled with an angry, pregnant wife. If he lived to be a hundred, he would never forget her fury once Celene had tracked him down through a friend who’d worked at the motel. As though that one night of carelessness and stupidity had been all his fault.

And now he had a child, as well. A son, no less, born from the wrong woman. Then, as though that wasn’t problematic enough, sometime between dawn and midday, while he’d been checking on the herd in his northernmost pasture, that woman had decided she not only didn’t want to be a wife, she didn’t want to be a momma, either.

It had taken only minutes after his return to discover why John, Jr. was crying his tiny lungs out. Celene was nowhere to be found. Her clothes were gone, as was everything else she owned, and so was that damned car she’d demanded as part of their unconventional arrangement.

He hadn’t taken time to check on whatever else was missing; he’d simply scooped up John, Jr. and headed toward town to find someone to care for his boy while he did what he had to do. Only no one wanted to help him.

What was he going to do? He couldn’t go after Celene with a newborn child in tow, nor did he have an inkling how to care for the boy all by himself.

His son needed a woman. A mother. Softness.

John knew all he had within him at this point in his life was guilt, frustration and too much damned bitterness to be healthy for any human being. And a heap of heartache, but not an ounce of it for his wife.

“Damn you, Dana,” he whispered, feeling the sweat trickle down his back. This whole mess would never have occurred if she hadn’t provoked him so. “Damn you.”

He didn’t realize he had company until he heard the tap on his window. With a jerk, he swung around and looked into Bud Hackman’s rain-splattered face. Apparently his friend had decided to follow him in his patrol car. Swearing under his breath, John rolled down his window.

“Some people have the sense not to stand out in the rain,” he said in lieu of a greeting or query. “So what are you gonna do, write me up for boring a gopher or armadillo to death?”

Bud eyed him calmly through eyeglass lenses that could have used their own set of windshield wipers. “They were all smart enough to take the last yacht to Monterey. You okay, J.P.?”

John had come to group the people in his life into three categories. Everyone who was either in awe of or feared him called him Big John. Everyone who liked him—at least sometimes—called him J.P. And the few who wished he’d never crossed their paths called him Paladin. Right now he knew there were only two members in that second group.