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“Mama wanted me to pick up two gallons of paint, and she wants it to match the green on this paper.” The old man laid a swatch of wallpaper on the counter between them. “She’s redoing the guest room again. Our son and his wife are coming for a visit next month to help us celebrate our forty-fifth anniversary, and she seems to think the house needs to look different every time they come.”
“I’ll mix this up for you,” she said with a flash of a smile before grabbing the paper and walking off with it.
Pastor Hughes turned his attention Ethan’s way. “Ethan.” He bobbed his head in a disapproving nod. “I heard you were back. It’s been a long time.”
“Not long enough, from what I understand.”
“What brings you home this time?”
Ethan shoved his hands into his jeans pockets, then lifted his shoulders in a shrug as he parroted the preacher’s words. “It’s been a long time.”
“I didn’t realize you and Grace were friends.”
Not friends. Not even acquaintances. Just accomplices in a night’s sins that had changed both their lives. But of course he couldn’t tell the preacher that. “We went to school together. I couldn’t come back and not say hello.”
Pastor Hughes looked as if he didn’t quite accept the explanation, but he didn’t look as if he suspected the truth. No, that would surely widen his old blue eyes with shock and distaste, with a self-righteous This-is-no-more-than-we-expect-from-you for Ethan and a dismayed How-could-you-with-him for Grace.
“Where have you been this time?” Pastor Hughes asked.
“Florida.”
“I understand it’s warm there this time of year. Too warm, perhaps?”
Ethan felt the damned guilty flush start again. “I wasn’t run out of town, if that’s what you’re asking. I left on my own.”
“And how long will you be staying?”
“That depends.” He watched Grace set two paint cans on the counter in the distant corner. With quick, efficient movements, she pried the tops off the cans, then began measuring in tints. He would offer his help for no other reason than to get away from the preacher, but he couldn’t help her. He knew nothing about mixing paints or matching colors. He knew nothing about anything but causing trouble. Certainly nothing about making it right.
“I assume Grace has told you about her predicament.”
Afraid of what might show in his face if he continued to watch her, Ethan turned his gaze back to the preacher. “Her predicament? You mean being pregnant?”
“And unmarried. Abandoned by both her own father and the baby’s father. Left to suffer the consequences alone.”
He hadn’t abandoned her, he wanted to protest. He knew too well how that felt, had been through it with his father, with Guthrie, even with his mother. God help him, he would never do it to someone else.
But Grace had made it pretty clear that neither she nor her baby needed him, that she didn’t want him. So if he left again, that wasn’t abandonment, was it? Even if it felt like it?
“She can’t be the first unwed mother Heartbreak’s ever seen,” he said, injecting a touch of scorn into his voice to cover his guilt.
“No, sad to say she’s not. Which doesn’t make her situation any less fortunate.”
Her misfortune was not running the other way when she met him that night. It was not telling him to go to hell when he’d invited her to the motel. It wasn’t the baby. She insisted she wanted the child, even though it was his child, and he believed her.
He wanted to believe her.
Before the pastor could say anything else, Grace returned with the paint. She rang it up, then waited while the old man wrote out a check. As soon as he was gone, she let out a long sigh.
“I know the good pastor doesn’t think highly of wayward sons. I take it he’s not much kinder to unwed mothers,” Ethan said flatly.
She tilted her head side to side, stretching the muscles in her neck. “Actually, he is. He sees me as an innocent victim, taken advantage of and betrayed by some unrepentant scoundrel.” Abruptly, her gaze widened, as if she’d belatedly seen the insult in her words, and she opened her mouth to apologize.
“I’ll admit to the scoundrel part,” he said, his tone more casual than his emotions. “But I’ve always been repentant.”
“Just not enough to stop being a scoundrel.”
“Not until recently.”
“Why recently?”
“It was time,” he said with a careless shrug, but that wasn’t the real answer. He’d started trying to change because one morning he’d awakened from a three-day drunk and realized that he’d sold his brother’s ranch—his livelihood, his family history, the one thing Guthrie loved most in this world. The fact that land fraud was taken seriously in Oklahoma ranching country hadn’t concerned him, nor had the fact that he could go to prison for it. He’d been in jail before. It hadn’t been his favorite place, but truth be told, it hadn’t been his least favorite, either.
It was the idea that he’d committed the ultimate betrayal against Guthrie that had sobered him. Virtually anything else in the world could eventually be forgiven, but stealing his brother’s land was unforgivable.
He’d thought he might have a chance to set things right without Guthrie even finding out, and so he’d headed for Atlanta to find David Miles, the smug businessman who’d been one of the easiest marks Ethan had ever fleeced. He hadn’t had much of a plan—to admit that the sale was fraudulent, return what was left of the money and face whatever consequences Miles wanted to dish out.
In Atlanta, though, things had gone from bad to worse. He learned that Miles had been killed in an accident, leaving his wife and twin daughters penniless and homeless. The last anyone had heard, they were on their way to Oklahoma to claim the only thing left them—the ranch. Guthrie’s ranch.
Ethan remembered sitting in a seedy motel on the outskirts of the city, trying to gather the courage to pick up the phone and call his brother. But his hands had trembled and his throat had closed off. Even if Guthrie would have talked to him, he wouldn’t have been able to say a word.
And what words could he have offered? I’m sorry? I didn’t think you’d ever find out? I’ll never do it again? He’d said them all so many times before that they didn’t mean a thing.
In the end, it had worked out well, for Guthrie, Olivia and the girls, at least. They’d turned tragedy into triumph—had fallen in love, gotten married and created a new family that was a million times better than the old families that had let them down.
Maybe it had worked out well for Grace, too. Instead of making that phone call from Atlanta to Heartbreak, he’d made the drive, arriving in time to catch the last few minutes of Guthrie and Olivia’s wedding. He’d given Miles’s money to Olivia, given Guthrie the deed to the portion of ranch that had been his for a time, then left them to celebrate their wedding with their friends while he sought the comfort of a few beers and a willing woman in the bar in Buffalo Springs. And there he’d met Grace.
In the end, everyone involved—Guthrie, Olivia and Grace—had gotten the one thing they valued most. A family. Someone to love, someone to love them.
That was the one thing Ethan had always wanted, too.
It was the one thing he didn’t think he would ever get.
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