Honky-Tonk Cinderella

And that role included protecting those whose responsibility came under his care, whether he—or they—sought it or not.

“Here.” Alek turned to see Luanne holding out a glass of orange juice. Her hand was shaking. “Freshly reconstituted.”

He took the juice, starting slightly when Luanne suddenly flapped at his shirt. “Give that to me so I can wash out that stain before it sets.”

“You don’t have to—”

“Hand me the dang shirt, Alek.” When he still hesitated, she said, “I have to keep busy, keep moving or I’ll go out of my mind.”

So he set the juice down on the counter and stripped off the shirt, which she snatched from him, dunking it a moment later into a small basin of suds in the sink, her movements agitated, jerky.

Her son’s, however, were another story, Alek noticed as he returned his attention outside. Seated cross-legged in the browning grass underneath a quiescent sycamore, Chase’s anguish abraded a wound inside Alek still raw after all these years. His sister had been about Chase’s age when their parents died in that plane crash; he remembered watching her muddle through her grief, his own sense of loss rendering him virtually useless. And their grandmother had been heartbroken at the loss of her only child. So the three of them had spun in their own sad, separate orbits, unable to offer—or even accept, really—much in the way of solace. Alek was determined not to let history repeat itself, even if he hadn’t a clue how to go about it.

“Chase misses Jeff terribly, doesn’t he?”

Luanne’s silence behind him was excruciatingly eloquent. He turned, something inside him splintering into myriad white-hot shards at her ravaged expression. Then she averted her eyes, scrubbing the shirt so hard, he feared for the skin on her hands.

Alek closed the distance between them, aching to touch her again, knowing he would be rebuffed if he did. Pride churned through this woman’s veins where mere mortals had blood, coloring her actions—and perceptions—far more than her heartache. This time, however, he suspected she’d just about used up even her considerable resources for bouncing back. Despite her valiant attempts to sound on top of things, she couldn’t mask the sense of defeat that had obviously taken up bone-chilling residence in her soul.

“Luanne,” he said, choosing his words with care, “I have no intention of trying to replace Jeff. I won’t…come between the boy and the man he knew as his father.” Her back still to him, she nodded stiffly. Alek turned again to the doorway, willing his lungs to work. “I never meant to be the bad guy in all this.”

The refrigerator clicked on; outside, the dog yapped for Chase to toss him his ball. He heard Luanne wring out the shirt, plop it into something, then come up beside him. “Jeff got the mutt for Chase’s birthday,” she said quietly, swiping back her hair with her damp hand. “Since Blue finally died of honorable old age last winter. There are days I swear if it hadn’t been for that dog, one or both of us might not have made it.” Her gaze flicked to his, then away. “There aren’t any ‘bad guys’ in this, Alek. I made a series of decisions based on what I thought was best at the time. Lettin’ myself get all caught up in regrets now is not only pointless but a waste of energy.”

He didn’t believe her for a minute, but he nodded anyway, then took a sip of the juice, shoving all the things he could never say to the back of his brain. “What happened to the house in Dallas?”

“Sold it.” She shifted the plastic basin so it rested on one of her hips.

“Why?”

“Because it was too big. Too fancy. I hated Dallas. I’m a small-town gal. Big cities are okay to visit, but living in ’em gives me the willies. Besides, I want my children to have a normal life, y’know? I want ’em to go to public school and be able to hang out with their friends and go ride their bikes without having to be afraid they might get kidnapped or something.”

“You were afraid for Chase?”

“From time to time. Not that Jeff knew. But I always felt, in that big house, we were sitting ducks, especially with him being gone so much. I had no idea—” Her lower lip caught between her teeth for a moment. “I know this sounds real disloyal, but I honestly never dreamed Jeff’s career would take off the way it did. I figured, y’know, maybe he’d have a few races, grow out of it, come back home and settle down….”

She rubbed her cheek with her shoulder, swallowed. “I’ve spent the past ten years of my life bein’ scared, holding my breath every time Jeff left for another race, every time Chase went out to play. Don’t get me wrong—I miss that man more than I ever thought I could miss another human being. But in a way, now that we’re back home, I finally feel like maybe I can breathe again.”

She looked at him, tears glinting in her eyes. “Then you showed up.”

The screen door slammed behind her as she waddled out and down the steps to hang up the shirt on the clothesline outside.

And Alek stared after her, his hand tightly fisted around the glass, once again thrown back into the past….

The screen door slammed shut behind Alek as he followed Luanne and the dog into the stifling trailer. She hurried to open all the windows to let in the cooling breezes, muttering something about popping into the shower to get the godawful cigarette smoke out of her hair, she wouldn’t be but a minute.

Damn. If he’d possessed even a grain of sense, he would have driven away and not looked back. That she trusted him not to leave—that she trusted him, period—he found little short of stunning.

When was the last time he’d been this conflicted about sleeping with a woman? Bloody hell—he’d never expected her to come on to him, to do this…this about-face just when he’d decided nothing was going to happen. Or that he should suddenly have an attack of conscience about the whole thing.

Alek heard the shower go on; he let out an enormous sigh, swiftly followed by a groan. All right—so he wanted Luanne Evans more than he’d ever wanted another woman, a realization he found at once frightening, exhilarating and incredibly perplexing. But he’d always, always, been the master of his emotions when it came to his relationships. A state of affairs that had been blown entirely out of the water by the mixture of vulnerability and honesty and goodness now standing naked on the other side of a very thin wall.

Oh, dear God.

Alek dropped onto the futon sofa in the minuscule living room, on some subliminal level taking in the bright pillows and framed prints by assorted Impressionists—Luanne’s attempt, he supposed, to bring cheer to the dark, paneled walls and worn furniture.

Then he noticed the books. Thousands of them, it seemed, neatly corralled in several cheap bookcases. Intrigued, and momentarily distracted from the problem at hand, he got up to inspect the case nearest to him. A hodgepodge, to be sure—everything from history to science to religion to novels of every conceivable genre, mostly paperbacks, but some hardbacks as well…

“Mama always said people are more inclined to take a person seriously who is widely read.”

Alek looked up to see Luanne towel-drying her hair, her figure hidden underneath what looked like a man’s shirt worn over white shorts. As he suspected, she was just as beautiful without her makeup. But what knocked him for a loop was the graciousness she exuded, a sense of being completely comfortable with who she was.

Willing his hammering heart to calm down, Alek glanced back at the bookshelf, tugging out a copy of Hugo’s Les Misérables. In French. “In…more than one language, I take it?”

She shifted the towel to another section of hair, shrugged. “Mama was part Cajun, so I learned French early on. Or her version of it, leastways. Took four years of it in high school, too.”

One eyebrow lifted. “Are you fluent?”

“Pretty much. Although I have the world’s worst accent, which you can imagine,” she said on a laugh, which immediately dimmed to a soft smile. “At one time I thought I might even apply for one of those student exchange programs, y’know? Except then Mama got sick…”

Her eyes lowered; she rubbed harder at her hair. Ignoring the prick to his heart, Alek leaned one elbow against the bookcase. “And was your mother right? About people taking you more seriously?”

That got another laugh. Her garnet-red nails glistened as she skimmed them through her hair. “To be honest—” she frowned, gathered up the ends of her hair in the towel again “—I can’t say as I’ve found folks around here have been all that impressed, no. I think they see me as some kind of misfit, if you wanna know the truth. Heck—” She tossed the towel over her shoulder and tramped over to the refrigerator. “One of the advantages of livin’ way out here—” she yanked open the refrigerator “—is that I can play my classical music loud as I want, nobody’s gonna say boo. Oh, shoot—I forgot to make tea before I left.”

She grabbed a tray of ice from the freezer, then a pair of purple plastic tumblers from a cupboard. Clunking several pieces of ice into the tumblers, she nodded toward an unopened bottle of Coke sitting on the counter. “This okay?”

Alek nodded, feeling slightly as though he were caught in a whirlwind, then asked, “So what do you like to read most?”

“Oh, heavens—if it’s got words, I’ll read it. Started when I was four, haven’t been able to get my fill yet.” She plucked the large bottle off the counter, bracing it against her midsection. “I’ve been to all sorts of places, just from reading, that most folk don’t even know about. Like Carpathia—”

She gave the bottle top a sharp twist…then let out a yelp as the warm soda geysered four feet into the air, instantly drenching everything.

While Luanne shrieked with laughter, they both fumbled for several seconds to get the top back on the still-spewing bottle. At last, the eruption contained, they stood in shock, staring at the streaks of soda meandering down walls and refrigerator, dripping off counters, collecting in puddles on the floor, which the dog was valiantly cleaning up. Then they looked at each other. Luanne collapsed against the counter, howling, as Alek snatched a paper towel off the holder over the counter, swiping a stream of cola off his cheek.

“Is this how you treat all the guys?”

“Only the ones I really, really like,” she got out, and something warm and giddy and as bubbly as the soda erupted inside him, and somehow or other, she was in his arms and her mouth was under his….

For a second or two, at least.

With a wistful little sigh, she backed away. “I cannot tell you how this pains me—” she squatted to get a small plastic bucket and a sponge from underneath the sink “—but if we leave this, the ants’ll have a field day.”

And the fizzies inside Alek’s brain deflated enough for him to realize what he’d done. But until he figured out how to gracefully extricate himself from his own idiocy, he took the now-filled bucket from Luanne and started cleaning the refrigerator.

“Now, that is amazing,” she said behind him.

“What is?”

“I do not believe I have ever seen a man clean anything that didn’t have an engine and wheels.”

Their eyes met for an instant before she grabbed another sponge from below the sink and started in on the lower cabinets, which the dog was precleaning for her. For several seconds Alek just watched her, listening to her chatter to the dog, whose tail was going as fast as his tongue. Perhaps sensing she was being observed, she twisted to look up at him, her smile fading when she caught his expression. On a heavy sigh, she sat back on her heels, staring at the cabinet in front of her. “Don’t say it.”

He dropped the sponge into the pail and squatted beside her, brushing an errant curl off her face, wondering if she had any idea how potent her innocence was. “You can’t really think our sleeping together is a good idea?”

Her mouth quirked into a shaky grin. “Was it something I sprayed?”

He laughed in spite of the heaviness gnawing at him. “Hardly. But you’re just not the type of woman I usually—”

Her head jerked around, hurt flaring in her eyes. Alek swiped his damp hand on his jeans, then cupped her face in his hands, linking their gazes. The scent of her, the feel of her, winnowed past barriers he’d long thought impenetrable, soothing and exhilarating and terrifying him all at once. “That’s not what I meant,” he said in a fierce whisper. “You’re worth a dozen of those other women, do you know that?”

Amusement flickered across her face. “A dozen? My, my…you do get around, don’t you?”

“I wasn’t bragging.”

She jerked out of his grasp, blinking rapidly as she looked away. “But you don’t want me, either.”

Again his hand sought out her face, his eyes, hers. “If anything, I’m saying no because I do want you. But you deserve something better. Something real.”

Her expression at once guileless and provocative, she stared at him for several moments, then got up to wring out her sponge. Alek rose, as well, feeling more than a little lost.

After tossing the sponge onto the back of the sink, Luanne braced her hands against it. “Did you not hear a thing I said outside, Alek? I am not looking for permanent. In fact, I don’t want it, not now, and especially not with anyone from around here. But it’s not like I can just…” Color flooded her cheeks. “Shoot, between my background, living out here all by myself and working at Ed’s…well, thank you for your compliment, but to most folks, I’m just plain old trailer trash, the daughter of a wife-beating drunk and a uneducated waitress. So I’ve sort of made it a mission of mine not to live up to their expectations, you know? But Lord Almighty,” she said quietly, “it’s been a long time since anyone’s held me.”

Alek stilled, as an unnamed monster suddenly loomed up out of that void inside him, one he’d desperately tried to stay one step ahead of his entire life. In the distance, thunder rumbled. Luanne looked toward the window. “Another storm’s coming…” The words seemed to catch in her throat; he could see unshed tears pooling at the corners of her eyes. And he wondered just what it had cost that staunch little pride of hers to ask of him what she just had?

And with that thought, he was lost.

“Are you really sure you want your first time to be with a stranger?”

Her gaze whipped to his. “Don’t tease me,” she whispered.

He took a step toward her, close enough to skim a knuckle down her cheek, keeping her gaze hooked in his as the caress continued southward. Her breathing quickened as his fingers danced over her throat, her collarbone, the sweet swell of one breast. “I’m not,” he whispered back, willing the beast back into its hiding place. Willing himself not to look at it.

“Well, then.” Pupils already dilated, her eyes bored into his. “You have shown more concern for my feelings in the past few hours than all the men I have ever known put together. So I’m willing to take a chance that your considerateness and attention to detail extends past the bedroom door.”

On a sigh that was equal parts longing and frustration, he gathered her into his arms, burying his face in her still-damp hair as a thousand thoughts darted this way and that inside his head like a school of fish, pros and cons and maybes and a good many are-you-out-of-your-minds all but pulverizing what little remained of his resolve. He lifted a hand to her face, stroking one finger down her sticky, child-soft cheek, wondering even then if she was a blessing or a curse. Or whether he really cared which.

Rain began thrumming against the trailer’s roof as he lowered his mouth to hers, his conscience all but drowning in a wave of need….

Chase’s yelling something at the pup shook him out of his reverie. And not a moment too soon, Alek decided on a strained sigh, creaking open the door. Luanne turned, her expression unreadable as she watched him walk out onto the back porch. The sun bit into his bare shoulders; his gaze drifted first to his shirt, quivering on a clothesline in the airless breeze, only to dart to Luanne’s swollen middle—a brittle reminder that the child she now carried was Jeff’s, not his. Which alone should have been sufficient to halt the memories.

But like lovemaking carried to the point of no return, images of that one night slipped past the brink of his tenuous control and now pulsated through him—images of soft sighs and uninhibited laughter, of a pair of blue eyes wide with startled delight, of soul-searing cries of fulfillment.

Of the mixture of awe and terror that had ripped through him afterward.

He’d been careful, or so he’d thought. Careful to protect her, both from getting pregnant and from getting hurt. Careful to protect himself from feelings he knew he couldn’t deal with.

Or so he’d thought.

The last thing he’d expected to discover, when he finally got around to putting together his racing team more than a year and a half later, was that Jeff Henderson had married Luanne, that they’d had a baby boy. No, that wasn’t quite true: the last thing he’d expected, even though he knew he was acting like a child who bristles at the sight of another child playing with a rejected gift, was the senseless, pointless jealousy that had pricked and tormented him like a hairshirt. And until today, he hadn’t believed the chafing could possibly get any worse.

Once again, his gaze swept over Luanne’s rounded belly, then up to those eyes teeming with sorrow, confusion, bitterness. And a fathomless weariness that called to something inside him that was nearly atrophied from disuse. Several feet behind her, Chase looked up, noticed Alek. The child chucked the ball as though it harbored some infectious disease, then took off around the side of the house. A second later the television blared on.

Dear God—what now?

Alek came down the steps, crossing the surprisingly large expanse of yard to where Luanne stood, motionless, the sunlight harshly delineating her fragility.

“Can Chase hear us out here?” he asked.

She shook her head, apprehension hovering in her eyes.

“You look ready to drop.”

Her mouth thinned. “I’ll manage.”

“Can you afford to get in some help?”

“I said, I’ll manage.”

They stared each other down for another second or two before Alek said, “If you’d been able to reach me, back then, would you have told me you were pregnant?”

“No.” She snatched the plastic bowl from the wooden picnic table nearby before taking off across the yard, obviously hoping he’d leave things there.

“Why on earth not?”

She halted, facing away, worrying the rim of the bowl with her fingertips for several moments before she finally turned. Her gaze glanced off his bare chest, then back up to his eyes. “For pity’s sake, Alek,” she said on a mirthless laugh, “you tore out of my house after that night like the very demons from hell were on your heels. So why would I have put myself in the position of makin’ you feel obligated to marry me, or take on a responsibility you never wanted to begin with, simply because fate played a nasty trick on us?”

“Aren’t you being just a trifle presumptuous?”

A strand of hair caught in her lashes; she yanked it free. “Practical, is more like it. My father got my mother pregnant when they weren’t but kids themselves. They ‘had’ to get married. Daddy stuck around for a few years, sure, except he was as miserable as an animal caught in a trap and he made good and sure we all knew it. He took it out on Mama, mostly, but I felt his frustration, too, and don’t think I didn’t. And finally he took off, leaving us in a worse state than if we’d had to fend for ourselves from the get-go. Except Mama didn’t have to worry anymore about how to explain the bruises.”

Every muscle in Alek’s face tensed with the effort not to explode. “I might have been a jerk for leaving the way I did, Luanne, but I’ve never hit a woman in my life, I don’t get drunk, and I would have taken responsibility for my child! For God’s sake—you trusted me enough to let me be the first man to make love to you, but you didn’t trust me enough to know I’d never have abandoned you?”

“But that’s exactly what you did! I didn’t expect forever, Alek, and I know I was the pushy one that night, when it came right down to it—”

“Oh, for the love of God—”

Her hand shot up. “—but I thought I was at least worth a little common courtesy. This is a pointless conversation, Alek. If you were so all-fired intent on taking responsibility, you might’ve left me some way of getting in touch with you. Or bothered to tell me who you really were. But you didn’t, did you?”

The undulating drone of a cicada pierced the silence. Alek twisted away, breathing hard, until Luanne’s sigh behind him made him face her again. “Oh, Alek—you were a stranger passin’ through. I knew it, you knew it. Neither of us was looking for anything permanent. And happily-ever-afters don’t come from one-night stands. Besides, even if I didn’t know you were a prince, I sure as heck knew you were way out of my league, that we had no more in common than a sparrow and a peacock.” Her head tilted to one side. “But none of that’s here nor there because I didn’t know who or where you were, and by the time I found all that out, I’d been married for nearly eighteen months and…”

Alek frowned. “What?”

Luanne fidgeted with the bowl a moment, then walked over to the picnic table, banging the bowl back onto its top before settling carefully onto the bench.

Alek joined her. And waited.

Several more seconds passed before she said, “When you’re twenty-one and pregnant and an inch away from panic, a White Knight can look pretty dang good, let me tell you. My world, such as it was, had crumbled right out from under me. I hadn’t finished my education, I wasn’t gonna be able to work for much longer, and had no one to fall back on. Not a single, solitary soul.”

Her brow knotted, she swatted at an insect in front of her face. “I was out behind Ed’s one night, trying to get ahold of myself—I had no sickness to speak of, but my hormones were just all over the place and I cried, like, every ten minutes—when Jeff suddenly showed up out of nowhere, and before I knew what I was doing…I told him. He offered to marry me on the spot.”

I’d do anything for that gal….

Alek’s stomach clenched; he waited out the slight surge of nausea. “And he never asked who the father was?”

“Sure he did. First question out of his mouth. I told him it didn’t make any difference, sort of indicating it happened around the time of the Simmons wedding, that it was a one-time thing….” Her mouth stretched taut. “He never questioned me after that. All he wanted was my assurance that, if he took me and the baby on, there was no chance of the father’s comin’ back and making things complicated. I told him we were probably safe on that score…but he made me swear to never tell. Since I didn’t figure there’d ever be a problem, I agreed.”

Alek swore softly. Luanne crossed her arms.

“Even so, I didn’t think it was fair to Jeff, and I told him so, but he finally convinced me it was a blessed sight better than goin’ on public assistance when I couldn’t work anymore, that this way, I’d be able to get my degree like I’d planned. And we’d always been friends, good friends, so it wasn’t like we didn’t get along. And I trusted him, Alek. More than I’d ever trusted another man.” He caught the blush stealing across her cheeks, said nothing. She cleared her throat, looked straight ahead. “Marrying him was strictly a practical decision on my part. The last thing I expected was to…”

She glanced away, tucked an escaped curl behind her ear. “I’d never had a man be so good to me. Not for the long haul. Or to stand up for me the way he did. His parents were dead set against the marriage, but he refused to buckle to their objections. And after Jeff’s daddy died, right before Chase was born, his mama came around, treated me like gold until her own passing a couple years back. I remember waking up one morning, I guess when Chase was about six months old or so, and realizing, for the first time in my life, everything was going right for a change. I was gonna go back to school, I had a beautiful, healthy baby and a husband who adored me.”