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Slowly, the boy got down on one knee to pat Annabelle’s head, and the dog became a blur—Boy likes me! Boy really, really likes me!—trying to lick everywhere at once. But he’d barely started giggling before he scrambled back upright, as though realizing he wasn’t supposed to be cavorting with strange dogs. Or a stranger’s dog, at least. Now the eyes focused on Winnie’s were accusatory, suspicious. Pained. And nearly the same weird blue-gray as hers, except for the flecks of gold near the iris.
“You the lady stayin’ in the Old House?”
The Old House. Like it was a name, not a description.
“Just for a little while.” He has my nose, too. For trouble, I bet. “You…saw me?”
“Yeah. Earlier.” The pointed chin came up. “Through the trees. I was on my bike.”
Bicycle tracks. Check.
“Oh. Do you, um, like to play around there?”
“Sometimes,” he said with a shrug. Not that I care.
Winnie’s mouth curved, at his beauty, his bravado. At how silly his long hair looked, nearly to his shoulders, as shiny and wavy as a girl’s. But every inch a boy, all the same, in his skater-dude outfit, the holes in his jeans’ knees. Still, she imagined the only thing keeping him from getting the crap beat out of him at school was his height, which made him look more like ten, maybe even eleven, than just-turned-nine.
Her face burning, Winnie turned back to the freezer case, grabbing—of all things—a carton of strawberry cheesecake ice cream, swallowing back the reassurance that wanted so bad to pop out of her mouth, that he could still come down and play, anytime—
“Robbie? Where’d you go—?”
They both looked up as Aidan Black—far shaggier and craggier than she remembered—materialized at the end of the aisle, nearly sending Winnie’s heart catapulting from her sternum. A second’s glance told her this was definitely not the mellow, grinning young man, his musical accent as smooth as one of Elektra’s chocolate shakes, she’d met barely two weeks before delivering the baby who’d become his son. The warm, laughing green eyes now dull and shuttered, this, she thought, was the very devil himself.
A devil who, despite how much she’d changed, too, instantly recognized her.
And wasn’t the least bit happy about it.
Her hair wasn’t punked up and jet-black as it had been then, but there was no mistaking those dusty-blue eyes, the set to her jaw, the way her long arms and legs seemed barely joined to her long-waisted torso, like a marionette.
A curse exploded underneath Aidan’s skull, just as Robbie said, “She’s the lady livin’ in the Old House,” and Aidan thought, Flo is a dead woman.
“We need to go,” he muttered, grabbing his son—his son—by the hand and practically hauling the lad up front to pay for his ice cream, hoping to hell “the lady” got the message that if she so much as opened her mouth—
He threw a couple of ones at Johnny Griego’s daughter at the register and kept going, swinging Robbie up into the truck’s cab and storming around to his side.
“Dad?” Robbie said, cautiously, once they were back on the highway. “What’s wrong?”
Where would you like me to start? Aidan thought. “Nothing, laddie,” he muttered, bracing himself as they passed a pasture where a half dozen or so horses aimlessly grazed…but not a peep from the other side of the truck. Then they crested a hill, on the other side of which lay a field chock-full of pumpkins. He glanced over, trying to decide if Robbie’s gaze was as fixed on those pumpkins as it appeared.
“We could stop, if you like,” he said carefully. When Robbie stayed quiet, Aidan added, “Shop early for the best selection?”
A second or two passed before Robbie shook his head. Aidan didn’t have to look at the lad to see the tears in his eyes.
His own stinging, as well, they kept driving, a heaping great sadness clawing at Aidan’s insides.
Aidan waited until he heard the distant boops and beeps of Robbie’s video game before confronting his housekeeper. “And it didn’t occur t’ya to tell me who Tess had let the Old House to?”
As it was, Aidan had only begrudgingly ceded to Flo’s entreaties, via her niece, to rent out the house to some woman from Texas determined to stay in Tierra Rosa and only Tierra Rosa. A normal man might have been at least curious about that. But Aidan was not a normal man, rarely concerning himself with the goings-on of the town he’d called home for more than a decade. So why would he have been even remotely interested in some woman keen on finding lodgings right here in town, and no where else?
Because I’m an eejit, he thought, as Florita slammed shut the oven door on their taco casserole, then turned, fully armed for the counterattack.
“An’ how were we supposed to know she was Robson’s birth mother? Even if Tessie had told me her name, it would have meant bupkis to me, since nobody ever told me what it was. Right? So you can stop with the guilt trip, boss.”
Aidan dropped heavily onto a kitchen chair, grinding the heel of one turpentine-scented hand into the space between his brows. True, since Flo hadn’t come to work for them until after Winnie Porter had removed herself from the equation, there’d been no reason to tell her who Robbie’s birth mother was.
But an anxious-eyed Flo had already sat across from him, their squabble forgotten. “You scared this woman’s gonna pull a fas’ one on you?”
“Not scared. Angry. That she showed up out of the blue. That she’d…” His hand fisted in front of him. “She’d no right to do this.”
“But if it was an open adoption—?”
“One she herself opted out of more than eight years ago.”
Flo seemed to consider this for a moment, then said, “You think she knows about Miss June? That she’s showin’ up now because Robbie’s mama’s dead?”
“I’ve no idea,” Aidan said on an expelled breath, then surged to his feet, grabbing his wool jacket from the hook. “Y’mind holding dinner for a bit?”
“Where you goin’?”
But Aidan was already out the door, the blood chugging through his veins faster than it had in more than a year.
Chapter Two
It’d been years since Aidan had even been down to the eighty-year-old, single-room adobe where he and June had lived when they first moved to Tierra Rosa. They’d bought the property for its own sake, holing up in the Old House until Aidan’s career had taken off well enough to build the New House, a half mile farther up the mountain. A half mile farther away from civilization. Not that either Aidan or June had been hideously famous, not then, not ever. Certainly not like the A-list actresses and shock jocks and such who called New Mexico home—they simply valued their privacy. Aidan, especially. In fact, he’d balked about that damn magazine spread, but June…
The back of his throat clogged as, despite top-of-the-line shocks, the truck shimmied and jolted down the dirt road, partially obscured by clumps of live oak and lemon-flowered chamisa, until shuddering to a stop in front of the house.
Snoozing in a coppery patch of sun on the low porch, the Border collie instantly jumped to attention, yapping; a second later, the screen door banged open and Winnie Porter appeared, hands shoved in her jeans’ pockets, the ebbing sunlight glancing off features a lot harder-edged than he remembered. But then, when he’d last seen her she’d been a very pregnant eighteen-year-old, her defiance worn down—according to June—by water weight and too many sleepless nights.
As he’d been then, Aidan was struck by her height, her almost mannish stance in cowboy boots that were all about utility rather than style, how there was nothing soft about her, anywhere. Even her hair was stick-straight, a million strands of wheat blowing helter-skelter around heavy-lidded eyes and pronounced cheekbones.
“Figured you’d be here soon enough.”
Her gaze was dead-on, unflinching. Certainly not a look designed to provoke concern about a woman being out here all alone, never mind that the only place safer would be a padded cell.
Aidan climbed down from his truck, coming just close enough for purposes of communication. Close enough to catch the determined set to her mouth. The instant that mouth opened, though, he cut her off with, “How the bloody hell did you find us?”
She shoved a stray chunk of her hair behind her ear. Unlike before, when black gunk had rimmed her eyes and she’d sported more studs than a country singer’s costume, she wore no jewelry, no makeup that Aidan could tell.
“Online,” she said, and his brain snapped back to attention. “That magazine article from a couple years back? At least, that you were living in Tierra Rosa—”
“You gave up the right to be part of Robson’s life more than eight years ago, when you begged—begged—us not to send you any more information about him.”
He saw the flash of regret. “I know. But if you’d give me a chance—”
“To do what? To disrupt a nine-year-old’s life?”
“No!” The word boomed between them. “That was never my intention! It still isn’t,” she said, but Aidan saw something in those dusky eyes that said there was more, the kind of more that was tensing his whole body. “Yeah, I knew it was a long shot, showing up out of the blue—”
“Long shot, hell. Try idiotic.”
Winnie backhanded her bangs out of her eyes. “And if there’d been any way of contacting you, I would’ve cleared things with you and June first—”
“Robbie’s mother is dead.”
She literally reeled. “Oh, God…I had no idea—”
“Just as you had no idea this house was on my property, I suppose.”
“I didn’t,” she said, her brows nearly meeting underneath the tangle of hair on her forehead. “Oh, for heaven’s sake—it wasn’t like I was gonna tell anybody I was looking for you! Not until I got here, at least. So how would I have known?”
Aidan shifted to cross his arms. Her damn dog sidled up to him, wagging its tail, trying to play mediator. “So you just came here on the off chance that…what?”
She rammed her hands into her back pockets, somehow managing to look sheepish and determined at the same time. “That somehow I’d be able to see him. That’s all. Just…see him.”
“D’you think I’m daft?”
She almost smiled. “I doubt anybody’d call your sanity into question.” The dog trotted back, all eyes for her mistress; Winnie bent over to pet her, her features softening in the peachy light. Then she lifted her eyes again, her voice gentle as rainwater when she said, “June hasn’t been gone very long, I take it?”
Aidan braced himself against the wave of pain, even though it no longer hit as high or hard as it once did. The guilt that it didn’t, though, sometimes felt worse.
“A year ago July. She was already sick when the magazine people came around.” He paused, his eyes riveted to hers. “It’s been a rough couple of years. Especially on the boy.”
Winnie broke the stare first, her gaze shifting toward the fiery glow behind the trees. “I can imagine,” she murmured, before her gaze met his again. “My grandmother died, too. A week or so ago.”
An event, he instantly surmised, that had something to do with Winnie’s sudden appearance. An image popped into Aidan’s head of the tall, commandeering woman with hair the color of a rooster’s comb and a gaze hot enough to peel flesh from bone. “My condolences.”
Winnie’s mouth stretched tight. “Not necessary. As you may have gathered, Miss Ida was definitely a ‘my way or the highway’ kind of gal. And ‘her way’ did not include helping raise her teenage granddaughter’s bastard.”
Aidan tensed. “You swore the adoption was your idea.”
“I was eighteen. Legal, maybe, but nowhere near ready to raise a kid on my own. And on my own is exactly what it would’ve been, since the baby’s father had vanished faster than a summer thunderstorm and my grandmother would have kicked me and the baby out on our butts.”
“You really think she would gone that far?”
Winnie blew a humorless laugh through her nose. “You met her. What do you think? And at the time,” she said, in that careful voice people use when the emotions are far too close to the surface, “I was totally on board with the open-adoption idea. Bein’ able to keep tabs on my baby, hear from time to time how he was getting on…” She stopped, once more shoving her breeze-stirred hair out of her face, and Aidan braced himself, thinking, No. Don’t. Except he wasn’t at all sure whether the order was meant for Winnie or himself.
“So what happened?”
“I made the mistake of holding my baby, that’s what. Knowing what’s best and what you feel…” Her eyes glistened. “But I thought, for my son’s sake, I can do this, I can let him go. Except it’s a little hard to let go when there’s this thread keeping you tied to each other. After a few months I knew if I didn’t cut that thread completely, I’d go crazy.”
“Then why are you here now?”
“Because when Ida died,” she shot back, “it hit me that I had nobody else in the entire world I could call family. No aunts or uncles, no cousins, nothing. And maybe this doesn’t make sense to anybody but me, but I just…I just wanted to make sure my kid was okay, that’s all. For my own peace of mind.”
“Fine,” Aidan said in a low voice. “You’ve seen him. So you can go back home with a clean conscience.”
Winnie’s head tilted on her long neck, the serrated ends of her hair sliding across her shoulders. “You would think,” she said sadly, and realization slammed into Aidan that it wasn’t anger making his skin crawl.
It was fear.
Even in the waning light, there was no mistaking Aidan Black’s don’t-mess-with-my-cub expression. If nothing else, at least Winnie could comfort herself knowing the adoption had taken so strong. Hey, if the roles had been reversed, she’d probably see her as a threat, too.
Except the roles weren’t reversed, they were what they were, and the fact was, a glimpse hadn’t been enough. Why she’d ever thought it would be, she’d have to dissect at some future date. Not that she wasn’t aware how thin the ice was she was skating on, just being here to begin with. But now that she was here—
“I don’t suppose you’d consider letting me spend some time with Robbie?”
“You’re not serious?”
Winnie felt as if she was trying to swallow five-year-old peanut butter. “Just as a friend. As your son, not mine. And you have every right to tell me to go to hell—”
“Back to Texas would be sufficient, I think.”
Tears threatened. No, she thought. “I know you don’t trust me—”
“And you’re wastin’ both of our times,” Aidan said, hands up, starting toward his truck.
“You could try to get to know me!” she shouted toward his back. “The me I am now, not the whacked-out teenager you met exactly once, and only for an hour at that. I swear,” she called out when he reached the driver-side door, “I would never do anything to hurt my own child! To hurt any child!”
Aidan turned. “Maybe not intentionally. But the effect would be the same.”
“How?” she said, coming off the porch, hearing Fool, fool, fool echo inside her head, helpless as usual to stop her mouth once it got going. “Aidan, I promise I’m no more interested in turning back the clock than you are. I’ll even respect if you’ve never told him he’s adopted—”
“Of course he knows he’s adopted!” Aidan said, long fingers squeezing the door handle. “But not only has he shown absolutely no curiosity about his birth parents, he’s still torn up about his mother’s death. Don’cha think that’s enough stress for a nine-year-old to deal with at one time?”
“Yes, I do. I’ve been there. So I’ve got a pretty good idea how Robson’s probably feeling.” She paused, suddenly identifying the nameless emotion she’d seen in the boy’s eyes back at the store. “Hell, he drags his pain around with him like a ball and chain. And yeah, it’s that obvious,” she said at Aidan’s raised brows, deciding it probably wouldn’t do to point out that Aidan did, too. She swallowed. Came close. “If you don’t want him to know I’m his birth mother right now, I’m fine with that.”
For the first time, she sensed Aidan’s wavering.
“Please,” she said softly, briefly touching his arm, muscles stiff underneath a layer of weathered denim. “I know I’m asking a lot, and you’ve got every right to say no—”
“That I do,” he said, his eyes going flinty again. “I’m sorry, Winnie,” he said, like he wasn’t sorry at all. “I can’t take the chance.”
It was stupid, how much it hurt, especially considering how low she’d thought her expectations had been. And anyway, even if she did get to see Robson, what if this new objective turned out to be no more satisfying than the first? What if she ended up returning to Texas with a heart even more broken than before, just like Elektra’d said?
Except then she realized it was too late, she’d already opened that particular can of worms and there was no cramming them back inside.
Nodding, her gaze sliding away, she backed up, her arms crossed. “Does he even know my name?”
“No.”
Her eyes lifted again. “You ever gonna tell him about me?”
“Only if he asks.”
After a moment, Winnie nodded again, hoping to make it back inside before the tears fell.
“So you’ll be leaving in the morning?” she heard behind her.
“I suppose. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s been a long day—”
“Watch out for the electricity, it’s a bit dodgy.”
Winnie turned, thoroughly confused. “Uh, yeah…Tess already told me—”
“And I assume you have a cell phone?”
“Charging even as we speak—”
“Give me your number, then,” Aidan said, digging his own phone out of his pocket.
“Why?”
“You’re on my property, I’m responsible for your welfare. So just give me your number, damn it.”
Shaking her head, Winnie stomped inside, fished a pen out of her purse and scribbled her number on a Burger King napkin from a pit stop in Moriarty, then went back outside and handed it to him.
“Then you better give me yours, too. Just in case a herd of rabid raccoons storms the house during the night.”
She thought maybe his mouth twitched. “505-555-2076.”
She scribbled it on a second napkin, although since she had a mind like flypaper she’d already memorized it. After that they stared each other down for another couple of seconds until Aidan finally opened his door and climbed into his truck.
“Hey,” she called over before he could shut his door.
“What?”
“I may have made some really, really dumb choices in my life, but something tells me choosing you and June as my baby’s parents wasn’t one of them.”
Then she went inside, thinking, Chew on that, buster.
Some time later, sitting on the bed in a pair of seen-better-days sweats, the tub of cheesecake ice cream rapidly vanishing as she stared at the flames belly-dancing in the fireplace, Winnie realized she’d stalled out at O-kay…now what?
By rights, she supposed she should at least be a little spooked, out here in the middle of nowhere all by her lonesome, with nothing but a lazy dog—she cast an affectionate glance at Annabelle, smushed up against her thighs—to protect her. But Winnie had never been the spookable sort. Not by things like slasher movies or ghost stories or things that went bump in the night, anyway.
Nor was she generally prone to boredom, since having lived most of her life in her own branch of nowhere she’d learned early on how to keep herself occupied. There’d always been people to see, fat to chew, businesses to keep tabs on, ailing grandmothers to tend to…even if by the end of Ida’s illness Winnie’s biggest fantasy centered on not having one blessed thing to do.
Well, honeybunch, she thought, setting the melting ice cream on the nightstand and curling forward to hug her knees, wish granted. Because here she was, with nothing and nobody to tend to.
Except her own thoughts.
Like about how being absolutely alone like this made her realize just how absolutely alone she was.
Now that was spooky.
Not that her family life had been any Waltons episode, although you’d think the way Ida’d watched those damn DVDs over and over, something would’ve rubbed off on her. But apparently they had rubbed off on Winnie, who still believed, deep in her heart, that families like that existed, somewhere. Families where all those binding ties held you up. Not tripped you up.
And coming here, seeing Robson…
The funny thing was, she thought, blowing her nose into another napkin, it wasn’t like she’d laid eyes on Robbie and immediately fallen in love with him. Oh, she’d felt a definite pang of something, she just hadn’t defined it yet. Curiosity, maybe. Combined with a little shock. But mostly she’d thought, Wow. That’s my kid.
And speaking of pangs…was it just her, or was Aidan seeing her appearance as much of a threat to him as to his son? Why she should think this, she had no idea, but all told she supposed it was just as well she was leaving. A body could only take so much weirdness at one time—
“Oh, Lord!” she yelped at the sudden knock on the door. She glanced at the dog, who yawned and snuggled more deeply into the soft, welcoming mounds of comforter, rolling one eye in Winnie’s direction. I stay here, keep the bed warm for you, ‘kay?
“Sure thing, wouldn’t want to disturb you,” Winnie muttered, before, on a profound sigh, she crawled out from underneath the nice warm covers to creep across the bare floor in sock-clad tootsies.
“Who is it?” she yelled through the—thankfully—solid front door.
“Florita Pena,” came a warm, richly accented voice. “Mr. Aidan’s housekeeper? I’m…jus’ checking to see if you have enough towels and…things?”
Hmm. The woman sounded harmless enough. Then again, some people might’ve thought her grandmother was harmless, too. If they were deluded or drunk enough. Steeling herself, she opened the door to a middle-aged woman in tight everything, like a drag queen doing a bad Rita Moreno impersonation.
Winnie was guessing the whole linens thing was just a ruse.
“Does your boss know you’re here?” she asked the housekeeper.
Wide, very red lips spread across a heavily moisturized face. “Do I look like I jus’ fell off the truck?”
“I’ll make tea,” Winnie said, holding open the door, taking care to keep her tootsies well out of range of the four-inch stilettos.
“And where the hell have you been?” Aidan hurled at his housekeeper when she “sneaked” back in through the kitchen door. “As if I couldn’t guess.”
Shucking off her gold leather jacket and hanging it on the hook by the door, Florita slid her eyes to his. She’d pounced on him like a cat on a lizard the moment he’d returned from his earlier visit to Winnie, although he hadn’t been able to fill her in properly until after supper, when Robson had gone up to his room to do homework. She’d listened, said little—which should have set off alarms—then vanished the minute Aidan’s back was turned. Now she shrugged. “My name’s not Cinderella, big shot, I don’ have to explain my comings an’ goings to you. I jus’ decided to check this chick out for myself.”
Then, because she was Flo, she grabbed a sponge and started to wipe down already sanitized counters. “And?” Aidan said with exaggerated patience.
“She’s got cojones,” she said at last, bony shoulders bumping. “It took guts, her coming here like this.”
“And…?” he said again.
Crimson lips pursed. “I think she knows nothing’s gonna change, no matter what. But I also think she felt she had to do this, you know? Like she heard a voice, maybe.”
The Irish with their superstitions have nothing on the Latinos, Aidan thought, muttering, “Doesn’t mean we’re hearing the same voices.” When Flo didn’t reply, he said, “Jaysus, Flo, the woman’s already changed her mind twice about what she wants, once when Robson was still a baby, the second time barely two hours ago. Winnie Porter’s as unstable as a three-legged table. If not downright crazy, coming here without even knowing if we were around or not.”