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Here on the King Ranch it was as if time had not exactly stood still but at least had taken a break, slowed down. She’d always thought this would be a perfect place for her children to grow up. She’d imagined watching four or five King kids racing through the yard laughing, running to her and Justice for hugs and kisses and growing up learning to care for the ranch as much as their father did.
But those dreams had died the night she’d left Justice so many months ago.
Now she was nothing more than a barely tolerated visitor, and Jonas would never know what it was like to grow up among his father’s memories.
Or to grow up with his father’s love.
Justice was deliberately closing himself off from not only her but also the child they’d made together. That was something she couldn’t forgive. Or understand. Justice had always been a hard man, but he was also a man devoted to family. To his brothers and the King heritage. So how could he turn his back on his own son?
In the past three days, Justice had done everything in his power to avoid so much as being in the same room with Jonas. Her heart twisted painfully in her chest, but she wouldn’t force him to care, even if she could. Because then his love wouldn’t mean a thing. To her or her son. So she would be professional and keep her emotions tightly leashed if it killed her.
“Loving this place didn’t keep you here,” he pointed out unnecessarily.
“No, it didn’t,” she said. “It couldn’t.”
He shook his head and frowned, squinting out from beneath the brim of his hat. “It could have. You chose to leave.”
“I’m not going over that same old argument again, Justice.”
“Me neither,” he said with a shrug. “I’m just reminding you.”
Maggie inhaled slowly, deeply. She told herself to bank her temper, to not let him get to her. It wasn’t easy, especially since Justice had always known exactly which of her buttons to push to get a reaction. But as satisfying as it would be to shout and rage and give in to her frustration by telling him just what she was thinking, it wouldn’t do a darn bit of good.
“We should walk.” She spoke up fast, before her temper could override her more rational side. Then she turned to offer him her arm so she could assist him getting down the short flight of steps leading from the porch to the yard.
Instantly, he scowled at her and stepped around her, the tip of his cane slamming down onto the porch. “I’m not completely helpless, Maggie. I can get around without holding on to your arm. You’re half my size.”
“And trained to help ambulatory patients get around. I’m stronger than I look, Justice. You should remember that.”
He shot her one hard, stony glare. “I’m not one of your patients, damn it.”
“Well, yeah,” she countered, feeling the first threads of her patience begin to unravel, “technically, you are.”
“I don’t want to be—don’t you get that?”
She felt the cold of his stare slice right into her, but Maggie had practice in facing down his crab-ass attitude. “Yes, Justice. I get it. Despite the great trouble you’ve taken in trying to hide how you feel about me being here, I get it.”
His mouth flattened into a grim line, and she glared right back at him.
“You still won’t leave, though, will you?”
“No. I won’t. Not until you’re on the mend.”
“I am mending.”
“Not fast enough and you know it. So suck it up and let’s get the job done, all right?”
“Stubbornest damn woman I’ve ever known,” he muttered darkly and, using his cane to take most of his weight, took the steps to the drive. The minute his feet hit the drive, both ranch dogs stopped their playing, leaped up, ears perked, then with yips of delight, charged at him.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Maggie jumped out in front of him to keep the too-exuberant dogs from crashing into Justice and bowling him right over, but it wasn’t necessary.
“Angel. Spike.” Justice’s voice was like thunder, and when he snapped his fingers, both dogs instantly obeyed. As one, they skidded to a stop and dropped to the ground, their chins on their front paws as they looked up at him.
Maggie laughed in spite of herself. Going down on one knee, she petted each of the dogs in turn, then looked up at the man watching her. “I’d forgotten just how good you were at that. The dogs always did listen to you.”
One corner of his mouth quirked briefly. “Too bad I could never get you to do the same.”
Straightening up, Maggie met his gaze. “I never was the kind of woman to jump at the snap of your fingers, Justice. Not for you, not for anyone.”
“Wouldn’t have had you jump,” he told her.
“Really. And what command would you have had me follow if you could?”
He shifted his gaze from hers, looked toward the barn and the pastures beyond and said softly, “Stay.”
Chapter Six
A ping of regret echoed inside Maggie at his statement, sending out ripples of reaction like the energy released when a tuning fork was struck. Her entire body seemed to ache as she watched him walk away, keeping his gaze averted.
“You would have told me to stay?” she repeated, hearing the break in her own voice and hating it. “How can you say that to me now?”
He didn’t answer her, just kept walking slowly, carefully. The only sign of his own emotions being engaged was how tightly he held on to his cane. Maggie’s back teeth ground together. The man was just infuriating. She could tell that he was regretting what he had said, but that was just too bad for him.
The first time she’d walked away from him and their marriage, it had nearly ripped her heart out of her chest. He hadn’t said a word to her. He’d watched her go, and she’d felt then that he hadn’t really cared. She’d told herself through her tears that clearly their marriage hadn’t been everything she’d thought it was. That the dream of family she was giving up on had been based in her own fantasies, not reality.
She’d thought that Justice couldn’t possibly have loved her as much as she loved him. Not if he could let her go without a word.
Then months later, they shared that last weekend together—and created Jonas—and still, he’d let her go. He’d stayed crouched behind his walls and locked away whatever he was thinking or feeling. He’d simply shot down her dreams again and dismissed her.
And even then she hadn’t been able to file the signed divorce papers when he’d returned them to her. Instead, she’d tucked them away, gone through her pregnancy, delivered their son and waited. Hoping that Justice would come to her.
Naturally, he hadn’t.
“How could you do it?” she whispered and thought she saw his shoulders flinch. “How could you let me leave when you wanted me to stay? Why, Justice? You didn’t say a word to me when I left. Either time.”
He stopped dead and even the cool wind sliding in off the ocean seemed to still. The dogs went quiet and it felt as if the world had taken a breath and held it.
“What was there to say?” His jaw tightened and he bit off each word as if it tasted bitter.
“You could have asked me to stay.”
“No,” he said, heading once more for the barn. “I couldn’t.”
Maggie sighed and walked after him, measuring her steps to match his more halting ones. Of course he couldn’t ask her to stay, she thought.
“Oh, no, not you. Not Justice King,” she grumbled and kicked at the dirt. “Don’t want anyone to know you’re actually capable of feeling something.”
He stopped again and this time he turned his head to look at her. “I feel plenty, Maggie,” he said. “You should know that better than anyone.”
“How can I know that, Justice?” She threw her hands high, then let them fall to her sides again. “You won’t tell me what you’re thinking. You never did. We laughed, we made love but you never let me inside, Justice. Not once.”
Something in his dark blue eyes flashed. “You got in. You just didn’t stay long enough to notice.”
Had she? She couldn’t be sure. In the beginning of their marriage, it was all heat and fire. They hadn’t been able to keep their hands off each other. They took long rides, they spent lazy rainy days in bed and Maggie would have told anyone who had asked that she and Justice were truly happy.
But, God knew, it hadn’t taken much to shake the foundations of what they’d shared, so how real could any of it have been?
Her shoulders slumped as she watched him continue on to the barn. He held himself straighter, taller, as if knowing she’d be watching and not wanting to look anything but his usual, strong self. How typical was that, Maggie thought.
Justice King never admitted weakness. He’d always been a man unable to ask for anything—not even for help if he needed it—because he would never acknowledge needing assistance in the first place. He was always so self-reliant that it was nearly a religion to him. She’d known that from the beginning of their relationship, and still she wished things had been different.
But if wishes were horses, as the old saying went…
Maggie was shaken and not too proud to admit it, at least to herself. Pushing her turbulent thoughts to a back corner of her mind to be examined later, she took a deep breath, forced some lightheartedness into her voice and quickly changed the subject.
“So,” she asked, glancing back at the two dogs trotting behind them, “why are Angel and Spike here instead of out with the herd?”
There was a pause before he answered, as if he were grateful for the reprieve.
“We’re training two new dogs to help out,” he said. “Phil thought it best to give these two a couple days off while the new pups are put through their paces.”
She’d been a rancher’s wife long enough to know the value of herd dogs. When the dogs worked the cattle, they could get into tight places a cowboy and his horse couldn’t. The right dog could get a herd moving and keep it moving while never scaring the cattle into a stampede, which could cause injury both to cowboys and to herd. These dogs were well trained and were spoiled rotten by the cowboys, as she remembered. She’d teased Justice once that apparently sheepherders had been right about using dogs in their work and that finally ranchers had caught on.
She smiled, remembering how Justice had reacted—chasing her through the house and up the stairs, laughing, until he’d caught up to her in their bedroom. Then he’d spent the next several hours convincing her to take it back. No cattleman alive had ever taken advice from a sheepherder, he’d told her, least of all him.
Spike and Angel darted past Justice and Maggie, heading through the open doors of a barn that was two stories tall and built to match the main house’s log construction. The shadows were deep, and the only sound coming from the barn was that deep, insistent lowing Maggie had heard earlier.
“Hey, you two, come away from there!” A sudden shout came from inside the barn, and almost instantly both dogs scuttled back outside and took off in a fast lope across the dirt. If they’d been children, Maggie was sure they would have been laughing.
“What’s that about?” she asked, watching the dogs race each other to the water tank kept as a sort of swimming pool for herd dogs.
“Mike’s got a cow and her calf in there. Probably didn’t want the dogs getting too close,” Justice told her, walking through the barn to the last stall on the right. There he leaned one arm on the top of the wood partition, clearly to take some weight off his leg, and watched as an older man expertly ran his hands up and down a nearly three-month-old calf’s foreleg.
“How’s he doing?”
“Better,” Mike said, without looking up. “Swelling’s down, so he and his mama can go back out to pasture tomorrow.” Then he did lift his gaze and smiled when he spotted Maggie. “Well, now, you’re a sight for sore eyes. Good to see you back home, Maggie.”
“Thanks, Mike.” She’d gotten more of a welcome from the cowboys and hired hands than she had from her own husband, she thought wryly. “So what happened to this little guy?”
Maggie wandered into the stall, keeping one wary eye on the calf’s mother, then sank to one knee beside the smaller animal. He was, like most of Justice’s herd, Black Angus. His black hide was the color of the shadows filling the barn, and his big brown eyes watched her with interest.
“Not sure, really,” Mike said. “One of the boys saw the little guy limping out on the range, so he brought them in. But whatever was wrong, looks like it’s all right now.”
The calf wasn’t small anymore. He was about six months old and wearing the King Ranch brand on his flank. He was well on his way to being the size of his father, which would put him, full grown, at about eleven hundred pounds. But the way he cuddled up to his mother, looking for food and comfort, made him seem like little more than an overlarge puppy.
The mingled aromas of hay and leather and cow mingled together in the vast barn and somehow made a soothing sort of scent. Maggie never would have believed she was capable of thinking that, since before meeting and marrying Justice, she had been a devout city girl. She’d once thought that there was nothing lovelier than a crowded shopping mall with a good-size latte stand. She had never liked the outdoors as a kid and had considered staying in a motel as close to camping as she ever wanted to get.
And yet being on the King Ranch had been so easy. Was it just because she’d loved Justice so much? Or was it because her heart had finally figured out where she belonged?
But then, she asked herself sadly, what did it matter now?
“See you later, Mike,” she said, then tugged at Justice’s arm. “Let’s get you moving again. Gotta get your exercise in whether you want to or not.”
“I never noticed that slave-driver mentality of yours before,” Justice muttered as they left the barn and wandered around the side of the main house.
“You just didn’t pay attention,” she told him. “It was always there.”
He was moving less easily, she noticed, and instinctively she slowed her pace. He fell into her rhythm and his steps evened out again. She knew how much he hated this. Knew that he detested having to depend on others to do things for him. And she knew he was in pain, though heaven knew he’d be roasted over live coals and still not admit to that. So she started talking, filling the silence so he would have to concentrate on something other than how hard it was to walk.
“Phil said you planted new grasses?” That was a brilliant stroke, Maggie thought. Get the man talking about the ranch and the prairie grass pastures and he’d get so involved, he wouldn’t notice anything else. Not even pain.
“On the high pasture,” he told her, easing around the corner of the log house to walk toward a rose garden that had originally been planted by his mother. “With the herd rotation, we’ll keep the cattle off that grass until winter, and if it holds and we get some rain this fall, we’ll have plenty of rich feed for the herd.”
“Sounds good,” she murmured, knowing her input wasn’t needed.
“It was a risk, taking the cattle off that section early in the rotation, but we wanted to try out the new grasses and it had to have time to settle in and grow before winter, so…” He shrugged, looked down at her and unexpectedly smiled. “You’re taking my mind off my leg, aren’t you?”
“Well,” she said, enjoying the full measure of a Justice King smile for as long as she could, “yeah. I am. Is it working?”
“It is,” he said with a nod. “But I’m going to stop talking about it before you fall asleep while walking.”
“It was interesting,” she argued.
“Sure. That’s why your eyes are glazed over.”
Maggie sighed. “Okay, so the pastures aren’t exactly thrilling conversational tidbits. But if you’re talking about the ranch, you’re not thinking about your leg.”
He stopped, reached down and rubbed his thigh as if just the mention of it had fired up the aching muscles. He tipped his head back and looked up at the sky, a broad expanse of blue, dotted with thick white clouds. “I’m tired of thinking about my leg. Tired of the cane. Tired of being in the house when I should be on the ranch.”
“Justice—”
“It’s all right, Maggie,” he said with a shake of his head. “I’m just impatient, that’s all.”
She nodded, understanding. She’d seen this before, usually in men, but some women had the same reaction. They felt as though their worlds would fall apart and crash if they weren’t on top of everything at all times. Only they were capable of running their business, their homes, their children. It was a hard thing to accept help, especially since it meant also accepting that you could be replaced. However briefly.
“The garden looks good,” she said abruptly.
He turned his head to look. “It does. Mom’s roses are just starting to bloom.”
Maggie led the way down the wide dirt path, lined on either side by pale, cream-colored bricks. The perfume of the roses was thicker the farther they went into the garden, and she inhaled deeply, dragging that scent into her lungs.
The rose garden spread out just behind the ranch house. A huge flagstone patio off the kitchen and great room led directly here, and Maggie had often had her morning coffee at the kitchen table, staring out at the garden Justice said his mother had loved.
The garden was laid out in circles, each round containing a different color and kind of rose. Justice’s mother had turned this section of the ranch into a spring and summer wonder. Soon, Maggie knew, the garden would be bursting with color and scent.
She heard him behind her and turned to look at him. Behind him, the house sat, windows glistening in the sun. To her right was a stone bench, and she heard the splash of the water from the fountain that sat directly in the middle of the garden.
Justice was looking at her through narrowed eyes and, not for the first time, Maggie wondered what he was thinking about. What he saw when he looked at her. Did he have the same regrets she did? When he looked at the roses his mother had planted, did he see Maggie there, too? Was she imprinted on this house, his memories? Or had she become someone he didn’t want to think about at all?
Well, that was depressing, she told herself and shook off the feeling deliberately. Instead, she cocked her head to one side, looked up at him and asked, “Do you remember that summer storm?”
After a second or two, he smiled and nodded. “Hard to forget that one.” He glanced around at the neatly laid out flower beds, then kicked at one of the bricks at his feet. “It’s the reason we laid these bricks, remember?”
A soft wind blew in and lifted her hair off her neck and Maggie grinned. “How could I forget? It rained so hard the roses were coming up out of the ground.” She looked around and saw the place as it had been that long-ago night. “The ground couldn’t hold any more water. And the roots of the bushes were pulling up just from the weight of the bushes themselves.” She and Justice had raced outside, determined to save his mother’s garden. “We were running around here for two hours, in the rain and the mud, propping up the rose bushes, trying to keep them all from being washed away.”
“We did it, too,” he mused, looking around now, as if reassuring himself that they’d been successful.
“Yeah, we did.” She took a breath and asked, “Remember how we celebrated?”
His gaze fixed on hers, and she felt the heat of that stare slide right down into her bones. “You mean how we made love out here, covered in mud, laughing like loons?”
“Yes,” she said, “that’s what I mean.” She took an instinctive step toward him. The past mingled with the present, memory tangling with fresh need. Her mouth went dry, her insides melted and something low and deep within her pulsed with desire. Passion. She remembered the feel of his hands on her. The taste of his mouth on hers. The heavy weight of him pressing her down, into cold, sodden earth. And she remembered she hadn’t felt the cold. Hadn’t noticed the rain. All she’d been aware of was Justice.
Some things didn’t change.
The sun was blazing out of a spring sky. They were on opposite sides of a very large fence that snaked between them. Their marriage was supposedly over, and all that was keeping her here on the ranch was the fact that he needed her to help him be whole again.
And yet, none of that mattered.
She took another step toward him. He moved closer, too, his gaze locked on hers, heat sizzling in those dark blue depths until Maggie almost needed to fan herself. What he wanted was there on his face. As she was sure it was on hers. She needed him. Always had. Probably always would.
Standing here surrounded by memories was just stoking those needs, magnifying them with the images from the past. She didn’t care. Maggie lifted one hand, cupped his cheek in her palm and felt the scratch of beard stubble against her skin. It felt good. Right. He closed his eyes at her touch, blew out a breath and moved even closer to her.
“Maggie…”
A baby’s cry broke them apart.
Jolting, Maggie turned toward the sound and saw Mrs. Carey hurrying across the patio and down the steps, carrying a very fussy Jonas on her hip. The older woman had cropped gray hair and was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. Her tennis shoes didn’t make a sound as she scurried toward them, an apologetic expression on her face.
Maggie walked to meet the woman, holding out her arms for her son. Jonas practically flung himself at his mother and wrapped his arms around her neck.
“I’m so sorry for interrupting,” Mrs. Carey said, glancing from Maggie to Justice with a shrug. “But Jonas looked out the window, saw his mama and there was just no holding him back.”
“It’s okay, Mrs. Carey,” Maggie told her, running one hand up and down her son’s back in a soothing gesture that was already quieting the baby’s cries and sniffles. The look on the housekeeper’s face told Maggie she really regretted interrupting whatever had been going on. But maybe it was for the best, she thought. Maybe things would have gotten even more complicated if she and Justice had allowed themselves to be swept away by memories.
It only took another moment for Jonas to lift his head from Maggie’s shoulder and give her a watery smile. “There now, no reason to cry, is there, little man?”
Jonas huffed out a tiny breath, grabbed hold of one of Maggie’s earrings, then turned his victorious smile on Justice and Mrs. Carey. As if he were saying, See? I have my mommy. Just like I wanted.
Justice moved off a little and sat down hard on the stone bench. “I’m done exercising, Maggie. Why don’t you take your son into the house?”
Mrs. Carey, standing behind her boss, made a face at him that almost set Maggie laughing. But the truth was she was just too torn to smile about the situation. There her stubborn husband sat, with his son within arm’s reach, and Justice had withdrawn from them. Sealed himself off behind that damn wall of his. Well, Maggie thought, maybe it was past time she tore some of that wall down. Whether he liked it or not.
Giving into the urge, Maggie jostled Jonas on her hip a bit, then asked, “Jonas, you want to go see your daddy?”
Justice’s head snapped up and his eyes were wide and horrified briefly before they narrowed into dangerous slits. “I’m not his daddy.”
“You are the most hardheaded, stubborn, foolish man I have ever known,” Mrs. Carey muttered darkly. “Not enough sense to see the truth even when it’s staring right at you with your own eyes.”
“You might want to remember who you work for,” Justice told her without looking at her, keeping his eyes fixed on Maggie and the boy.
“I believe I just described who I work for,” Mrs. Carey told him. “Now I’m going back to the kitchen. Put a roast in for dinner.”
When she was gone, Maggie stared at Justice for another minute, while the baby laughed and babbled to himself. But her mind was made up. She was going to force Justice to acknowledge their son. No more of this letting him avoid the baby, scuttling out of rooms just as she entered. No more walking a wide berth around the situation. It was time for him to be shaken up a bit. And there was no better way to do it than this.