LOGAN’S UNSCHEDULED MORNING visit had been brief and to the point, and it stuck in Tyler’s mind long after his brother had left the cabin. Soon afterward, Dylan had stopped by, ostensibly to drop Davie off.
As it turned out, Dylan and Logan were planning a trail ride into the foothills—Logan hadn’t mentioned that—and they wanted to take Davie with them. The kid looked so hopeful, Tyler never thought of refusing—not that he had any right to say yes or no where Davie was concerned anyway.
“You could come with us,” Davie suggested eagerly, stooping to ruffle Kit Carson’s ears in belated greeting.
Tyler passed a glance in Dylan’s direction. “Apparently, I’m not invited,” he said. “Logan didn’t say a word about any trail ride when he came by here a little while ago to harass me.”
There had been something else Logan had wanted to say, something about Jake, though every time he’d gotten close to spitting out whatever it was, he’d veered off again. He’d mostly yammered on about the Tri-Star Cattle Company and how to err was human but to forgive divine.
Tyler did not aspire to divinity.
Dylan rolled his eyes. “Come on, Ty. What do you need—a printed invite? You’re welcome to ride with us and you damn well know it.”
Davie’s glance skittered from Dylan to Tyler. “If this is what having a brother is like,” he said, “I’m kind of glad I’m an only child.”
Tyler chuckled at that, in spite of his sour mood, and slapped the boy on the shoulder. “You go ahead. I’m going to call the repair shop in town—and maybe that truck of mine is ready to roll back onto the highway. It wasn’t when I checked before.”
Davie tensed, and his eyes narrowed. “You’re leaving?”
“No,” Tyler said quietly. “I just want my truck back.”
“Okay,” Davie said, relaxing a little.
Dylan was already moving toward the door. His gaze rested a moment on the Tri-Star papers Logan had left behind on the table, and Tyler wondered if they’d planned that early-morning recruitment effort between them. It seemed like something they’d do, but then again, Dylan wasn’t the sort to let someone else handle his dirty work. He’d have been right there, along with Logan, if he’d had any part in the scheme. “Just leave the Blazer at the shop if your truck is running again,” he said. “Kristy and I will pick it up later.”
Tyler merely nodded.
“You’re sure you won’t come along?” Dylan pressed.
The truth was, Tyler wouldn’t have minded a long trail ride up into the foothills, even if it meant spending time with his brothers. It had been too long since he’d been in the saddle, except to perform some lame-brained stunt for a movie camera. But he needed his own rig—he couldn’t drive Kristy’s Blazer forever. And besides, there were some other things he wanted to do.
“Maybe next time,” Tyler said, figuring there probably wouldn’t be a next time.
Dylan shrugged one shoulder and left the kitchen, headed outside, and Davie followed, though reluctantly, stopping on the threshold to try just once more. “It would sure be cool if you’d go with us,” he said.
Tyler’s throat tightened. He remembered asking Jake to come to the first basketball game of the season at Stillwater Springs High. It was his sophomore year, and he’d made the varsity team; the coach had promised he’d be on the court from the start, and he’d wanted his dad to be there. To be proud of him, maybe even nudge somebody sitting next to him in the bleachers with his elbow and say something embarrassing, like, “You see Number 22, there? That’s my son.”
Instead, Jake had blithely replied that he had a game that night himself—a high-stakes pool tournament, down at Skivvie’s. As an afterthought, on his way out the back door at the main ranch house, he’d told Tyler, “Break a leg, kid.”
Tyler had lost his taste for basketball after that, and taken up rodeoing instead—both Logan and Dylan, though still in high school, were already making more in prize money than they could have earned flipping burgers or sweeping floors someplace. And that was on the local circuit.
Anyhow, Tyler had decided, those shorts basketball players wore were just plain sissified, almost as bad as those stretchy shorts people wore to ride bicycles.
“I can’t make it today, Davie,” he said quietly, telling himself that it wasn’t the same as Jake’s refusing to watch a basketball game. Davie wasn’t his son—probably. “Tomorrow, you and I will find a couple of horses and saddle up. Take a ride of our own. How’s that?”
Davie looked partially appeased, but still disappointed, too. He nodded and left the house without another word. Drove off with Dylan.
“It’s just you and me now, dog,” Tyler told Kit Carson, as he took his cell phone from the counter, scrolled through his collection of numbers for the one for the auto-repair place in town and pressed the Call button.
Sure enough, the rig was ready. They’d installed a new muffler and done some work on the engine, too, though they recommended a total overhaul.
Tyler figured a trade-in would be easier—and cheaper.
He’d been a damn fool to swap his Escalade—though for him it was roughly in the same category as basketball shorts and ten-speed gear—for an old wreck of a truck.
He’d done it on impulse, shedding that too-fancy SUV the way a snake shed an old skin.
Now, he’d have to live with the consequences.
With that much settled in his mind, if not much else, Tyler loaded Kit Carson into the back of the Blazer and headed for town.
The bill for the towing, not to mention the repairs, probably exceeded the actual value of the truck. Tyler paid it just the same, chalking it up to penance for rash behavior, locked up the Blazer and gave the keys to the girl working the parts counter for safekeeping and took off.
He and Kit Carson stopped off at the lumberyard on the way out of town, and he ordered enough to shore up some of the stuff that was sagging out at the cabin, figuring he’d have the carpentry thing figured out once he’d replaced the small back porch and laid a new kitchen floor. He took a load home in the back of his pickup, too.
He felt ambitious, and hoped this enterprise wouldn’t turn out the way the truck deal had. But he had brand-new power tools, a hammer, a brown bag full of nails, and a lot of gumption. How hard could it be to rebuild the back steps and put in some new floorboards in the kitchen?
He picked up a few more groceries before leaving town, and then cruised casually by Doc Ryder’s place, hoping for a glimpse of Lily, but there was no sign of her or the little girl or of Doc himself.
Just call her, he thought.
“Oh, right,” he answered himself aloud, drawing a concerned look from Kit Carson, who was riding shotgun as usual. “I can hear it now. ‘Hello, Lily. This is Tyler. What do you say we get together and boink each other’s brains out again, just for the hell of it?’”
The dog whimpered. Maybe he thought he was getting chewed out for something. Or maybe he just disapproved of the turn the conversation had taken.
Tyler reached over and patted the mutt’s head. “You a moralist, Kit?” he asked affably.
He’d been back home for several hours, finding out the hard way that replacing a porch, even a pissant one like he had, was easier to think about than to do, when an old black-and-tan Buick sedan rolled into his driveway around noon, throwing up dust in every direction.
Shirtless, since sawing and hammering was hot work on a sunny day, even that close to the lake, Tyler straightened and wondered who his visitor was.
He didn’t have to wonder long.
Doreen got out of the dented Buick, dressed in her waitress getup and wearing a casino ID card pinned to her bodice. She’d troweled on the makeup that day, he saw, as she came closer.
“Is Davie around?” she asked, stopping about a dozen yards shy of close-up and eyeing poor old Kit Carson like he might spring at her and tear her throat out. Doreen had ridden with outlaw bikers and traveled with rock bands. And she was afraid of a stray like Kit?
But then Doreen was afraid of a lot of things these days, wasn’t she?
Tyler set his hammer aside, reached for his T-shirt and pulled it on over his head. He’d had plenty of vine-swinging, chest-pounding, Tarzan-type sex with this woman, back in the day, but now being half-dressed in front of her seemed wrong.
“Nope,” he answered. “He’s gone on a trail ride with Dylan and Logan.”
Doreen gnawed at her lower lip for a moment, and Tyler wondered if Roy had knocked her around a little the night before, or even that morning, so she had to cover up the bruises with war-paint, or if she’d just been heavy-handed with the stuff, hoping for better tips.
“Is he all right?” she finally asked.
“He’s fine,” Tyler said, approaching her. He wanted a closer look at her face, and when he got it, his blood stung in his veins like venom. He took a gentle but firm grip on Doreen’s chin and said, “The gunk isn’t working, Doreen. I can see the bruises.”
“Let it go, Tyler,” Doreen said. “Roy passed out before he did any real damage.”
“Looks to me like he did plenty of damage,” Tyler said, after unclamping his jaw. He was almost as angry with Doreen for putting up with that kind of treatment as he was with Roy for dishing it out. “When are you going to leave that bastard, Doreen? When are you going to stand up for yourself—and for Davie?”
“You don’t understand,” Doreen said, shrinking in on herself in that way she’d developed in the years since Tyler had first known her. In that way she’d passed on to Davie.
Tyler let his hand drop from her chin. Shook his head. “Oh, I understand, all right,” he told her grimly. “You’re going to let him do this again and again until he kills you.”
Doreen took a step back, rummaged in her big shoulder bag, brought out a sheaf of papers. Thrust them at Tyler.
“What’s this?” Tyler asked, even as he took the documents.
Evidently, this was his day for heavy-duty paperwork.
“I lied before,” Doreen said, her voice quivering a little. “Davie is yours. Roy says if he’s going to live with you, we’ll need some kind of compensation. So he had a friend of his draw up these papers, over in Choteau, at one of those legal places.”
“Compensation?” Tyler echoed, still absorbing the news that he was a father after all. He hadn’t completely believed Doreen before, when she’d said Davie’s father was a truck driver she’d “cheered up” one night after a shift at Skivvie’s. Contradictory though it was, he didn’t believe her this time, either.
“We want a hundred thousand dollars,” Doreen said, with all the bravado she could drum up. She was red at the jawline, and tears stood in her eyes. “Roy looked you up on the Internet. You’ve done real well for yourself, it seems, between the rodeoing and the movie work and all that. In fact, you’re flat-out rich.”
“And Davie’s suddenly mine, because I have money?” Tyler asked dangerously.
Doreen’s wet eyes widened, and she retreated another step or two. Kit Carson made that worried sound again, a low whine, far down in his throat. “You can spare a hundred thousand dollars,” she insisted.
“And you, obviously,” Tyler countered coldly, “can spare Davie. Provided the ‘compensation’ is right.”
Doreen swallowed visibly. “You can get blood tests, or whatever they do nowadays, you and Davie both. You’ll see that I’m telling the truth.”
Doreen wasn’t telling the truth; Tyler had played a lot of poker, with a lot of amateurs as well as pros, and he knew a stone-desperate bluff when he saw one.
“You don’t know who Davie’s real father is, do you, Doreen? Roy put you up to this because he smelled money.”
“You won’t miss it,” Doreen said, but for all the attitude she was projecting, she still looked as if she wished the ground would open up at her feet and swallow her whole.
“That isn’t the point,” Tyler argued. “The point is, Doreen, you’re basically offering to sell me your child.”
“He’d be better off with you.”
“He’d be better off with just about anybody,” Tyler replied, feeling sick to his stomach. “I know you’ve had it tough, Doreen, and I’m not discounting that. I’m really not. But how can you sell your own child?”
“Like I said, Davie would have a chance if you kept him,” Doreen said, though she was still the personification of misery. “I’d know Roy wouldn’t hurt him again, and, well, me and Roy, we could make a new start someplace else. Someplace far away.”
“You’d just leave Davie? ‘So long, good luck, it’s been real’?” Tyler knew the exchange was pushing a lot of old buttons that had nothing to do with the kid and everything to do with the way he’d been raised, but knowing that didn’t change a damn thing. “Doreen, how can you do a thing like this?”
“Read those papers,” Doreen said, her chin high, but wobbling. “You sign them, and write me a check, and that’s the end of it. Davie’s your son, from that day forward.” With that, she turned and started to walk away, toward the battered old car she’d left running in the driveway.
Tyler stopped her, grabbed her arm and spun her around to face him. This time, he didn’t try to be as gentle as before.
“You don’t even know me, Doreen,” he rasped. “How can you be sure I won’t ditch Davie, or knock him around like Roy has? I’m a Creed, remember? You’ve been around Stillwater Springs long enough to figure out what that means.”
Doreen pulled free of his grip on her arm. Raised her chin again and looked him straight in the eye. He realized then that, bruised and broken though she was, jaded and disillusioned and barely holding on to the frayed ends of the proverbial rope, she was trying to save Davie. Oh, she wouldn’t mind taking the hundred grand she’d asked him for, but this wasn’t about the money. Like some wild, cornered animal, she was trying to lure the main threat—Roy—as far from her child as she could.
“Doreen,” Tyler said gruffly. “Don’t do this. We’ll figure out some other way.”
“There is no other way, Tyler. Don’t you think I’ve tried to come up with one?” She paused, swallowed again. “I’ve got to have an answer by tomorrow,” she finished, sliding behind the wheel of her car.
Tyler folded the documents, stuck them into his hip pocket, gripped the edge of her open car window as he leaned in to look at her. “Suppose I agreed to this—and I’m not saying I will. What would you tell Davie?”
A tear slipped down Doreen’s cheek, leaving a jagged trail through the goop she’d hoped would cover up the marks Roy’s fist had left. “‘Goodbye,’” she croaked. “I’d say, ‘Goodbye.’”
With that, she threw the car into Reverse and backed up, and Tyler was left with a choice between jumping back out of the way or losing some or all of his toes.
He jumped.
The rear wheels of that Buick threw up a lot of dust and gravel as she backed up, turned around and gunned the engine.
He stood there for a long time after she’d gone, watching the dust settle and trying to figure out what the hell he ought to do next.
Call Logan? His eldest brother was a lawyer, and a good one. In addition to winning several world championships during his bronc-busting days, Logan had founded a legal-services Web site that had made him a rich man.
It had fattened Tyler’s bank account, too, since he’d invested all the cash he could scrape together, way back when, before the stock-splits and the big sale to some multinational conglomerate. He knew Dylan had done the same thing.
Yep, a sensible man would call his big brother, the legal eagle, and ask for advice.
But where Logan was concerned, Tyler wasn’t a sensible man.
He finally turned and started back toward the house. Sat down on what was left of the porch and took Doreen’s papers from his back pocket and read them—once, twice, a third time.
It was all there, cut-and-dried. There were no loopholes; as far as he could tell, the agreement was ironclad—and he’d always had a good head for contracts. No hidden clauses, no ifs, ands or buts that would come back and bite him in the ass in a week or a month or a year.
The plain, sad truth was, a fat check would buy him permanent custody of a troubled, pierced, tattooed kid who might or might not be his. Until Davie turned eighteen, he would be Tyler’s ward, at least in the eyes of the law.
His first instinct was to say yes, write the check and never investigate the paternity issue at all. He knew that would sound crazy to anybody who hadn’t been raised under Jake Creed’s roof, and it probably was crazy. He also knew he couldn’t change his own childhood by making things easier for Davie.
He just wanted to make a difference to one kid in trouble, that was all.
A week before, even a couple of days ago, he could have made the decision, for or against, without considering anyone else’s opinion. But now there was one person in his life whose opinion mattered a lot, and that was Lily.
Davie was Doreen’s son, whether he was genetically a Creed or not. And Lily had been badly hurt by that affair, all those years ago. Once she learned who Davie actually was, or might be, and that was only a matter of time, she’d probably decide to cut her losses and run.
Could he handle that, especially after the night before?
He’d have to—he didn’t have a choice. He’d handled his mother’s suicide, Jake’s abuse and the bad blood between him and the two older brothers he’d once nearly worshipped. He’d handled Shawna’s death, and a whole lot of other things.
And he’d handle whatever Lily decided, too.
Which didn’t mean it wouldn’t hurt like hell, if she walked.
In some ways, now that he knew how things could be between him and Lily, losing her would be the worst loss of all.
There was nothing to do but tell her, face-to-face, that he might have fathered Davie that long-ago summer, before someone else did. After that, it would be her call: try to make whatever they had work, or call it quits, for good.
Tyler had been thrown from, and chased by, the meanest broncs on the rodeo circuit. He’d been in brawls where the other guy’s intention wasn’t just to win, it was to kill. Being a Creed, he’d never had the God-given good sense to be scared in any of those situations.
But he was scared now.
He was scared as hell.
Of one little woman.
He sighed, got out his cell phone and called Doc Ryder’s house. If Lily had a cell, she hadn’t given him the number.
The phone at the Ryder place rang six times before voice mail picked up, and a recorded message rattled off numbers for the veterinary clinic and Doc’s cell phone.
Since it was Lily Tyler wanted to talk to, not Doc, he didn’t follow up on either of the alternate numbers.
He put the phone away, went inside the house, made a bologna sandwich for supper, since it was getting on toward evening by then and he’d forgotten all about lunch. He fed Kit Carson, and when the dog had finished munching his kibble, Tyler rustled up a towel and a bar of soap and, instead of showering inside, headed for the lake.
He was in bed reading a book, Kit Carson curled up beside him, when he heard Davie come in. Switch on that little TV he’d talked Tyler into buying for him the day before.
Since there was no cable and no satellite dish, he’d get mostly static and disembodied voices, but that didn’t seem to bother the kid. He banged around downstairs for a while, and finally came up the stairs, just far enough for his head to show above the landing.
Tyler felt a pang, seeing how happy Davie looked. He didn’t have a clue that his own mother had just put him on the block with a price tag hanging from around his neck.
“Hey,” Tyler said.
“Hey,” Davie said. “You should have come along today. We had a lot of fun. And your hot date spent the whole afternoon at the ranch, her and her little girl. We had meat loaf and homemade bread for supper, too.”
“Is that right?” Tyler asked, deliberately casual. What he was really thinking was, Don’t call her a “hot date.” Her name is Lily. “How’d you get home?”
The word home sort of hung in the air for a moment or so, unsettling and not quite right. But not wrong, either.
“Dylan and Kristy dropped me off,” Davie replied, with a slight shrugging motion of one shoulder. “Is that your truck parked outside? If it is, it’s a sorry piece of crap, and you were better off driving Kristy’s Blazer.”
“Thanks,” Tyler said dryly, opening his book again. The kid had shattered his concentration—now he’d have to go back to the beginning of the chapter, since he couldn’t remember a word of what he’d read so far.
Davie hung around. “Dylan and Logan are rich. How come you’re so poor?”
Tyler stifled a grin. “How come you’re so damn nosy?” he countered.
Davie laughed. “Guess I’ll shut up before I dig myself in any deeper.”
“Good idea,” Tyler said. “And turn that TV down a little. Static isn’t my favorite sound.”
Davie, turning away, turned back. “No, you like Andrea Bocelli. I saw all those CDs you have. But I won’t tell anybody, if you pay me.”
That time, Tyler had to laugh. He also flung the spare pillow, the one he’d tucked under Lily’s delectable backside the night before, to intensify her pleasure as well as his own, and Davie ducked.
Kit Carson barked for joy and leaped right off the bed, probably thinking there was a game on.
“Come on, boy,” Davie told the dog. “We’ll play tug-of-war for a while and watch some TV.”
When the boy and the dog were both gone, Tyler didn’t have to hide what he felt—a peculiar combination of dread and hope, faith and fury.
Tomorrow, he would have that talk with Lily.
He’d sign the documents, like Doreen wanted, and write the check.
Doreen might say goodbye to her son, like she’d said she would, or she might just hit the road, with good ole Roy. Either way, Tyler would have some explaining to do; young as he was, Davie had a right to know the truth.
Whatever that was.
Downstairs, Davie and Kit Carson were evidently wrestling, the boy laughing, the dog barking for all he was worth.
It sounded so—well—normal.
Too bad it wasn’t.
Resigned, Tyler gave up on his book, stretched to switch off the light and lay down on those Lily-scented sheets.
Sleep was a long time coming.
* * *
LILY SAT, IMMOBILIZED, in the spare room bed, staring at the wall. Trying to absorb what her mother-in-law had told her on the telephone just a few minutes before.
Burke had had a vasectomy. A secret vasectomy.
He’d only pretended to want more children after Tess—obviously, he hadn’t. Why hadn’t he just told her, though, instead of letting her get her hopes up, over and over again, only to have them shattered every month when her period came?
He’d always acted so sympathetic.
I’m sorry, honey. Maybe next month.
Dazed, Lily heard her father’s voice in the kitchen, and Tess’s, both of them sounding worried, though she couldn’t make out their actual words. They might as well have been speaking some obscure dialect as English.
Presently, Hal opened her door a crack and popped his head in. “Everything okay?” he asked.
For all practical intents and purposes, she’d lost her job.
She’d just learned that Burke’s deceit had gone well beyond breaking their marriage vows.
Night before last, she’d engaged in an unprotected sex marathon with a man who was about as likely to be sterile as a jackrabbit.
Oh, yeah. Everything was okay. It was just peachy.
And none of it, Lily reminded herself with an inward sigh, was her father’s fault.
She worked up a smile. “I’m just feeling a little lazy this morning,” she lied.
“Breakfast is cooking,” Hal said. Whether he believed her or not, she couldn’t tell.
“Not toaster waffles, I hope,” Lily responded.
“Oatmeal,” he said, raising both eyebrows and wriggling them a little.
He’d always been able to make Lily laugh by doing that, for as long as she could remember. And that morning was no exception.
In spite of everything, Lily giggled.
And it felt good.
* * *
WHEN TYLER PULLED INTO Doc Ryder’s driveway, around ten o’clock that morning, Doc and Tess were in the backyard, on their knees, digging dead plants out of a flower bed and tossing them into a wheelbarrow.
Seeing him, they both looked pleased, and Doc hauled himself to his feet. Dusted off his hands on the legs of his tattered khaki pants.
“Can your dog get out of the truck and play with me?” Tess immediately asked, fairly jumping up and down beside her grandfather while she waited for a yes.
Tyler looked to Doc for the answer.
Doc nodded. Smiled. “I could use a little canine company myself,” he said.
Tyler hesitated. Kit Carson had jumped into the driver’s seat to paw at the window and yip, wanting to socialize. For a shy dog, he was sure coming out of his shell.
“Is Lily around?” Tyler asked, like he should have done in the first place.
“She’s in the kitchen, talking on the phone,” Tess volunteered, drawing in close to wait for Tyler to lift the dog down out of the truck.
“Quitting her job and demanding severance pay,” Doc elaborated.
As wound up as he was inside, Tyler’s spirits lifted a little. Lily was quitting her job? Did that mean she planned to stay on in Stillwater Springs instead of heading back to Chicago?
Tyler’s mood took another dive. Considering what he had to say, it might not matter whether Lily stayed in town or not. She might understand—after all, he’d been a kid when he was sneaking around with Doreen, and the whole thing was way back there in the past. But she might tell him to take a flying leap, too, if only because she didn’t want to get involved with him or Davie’s raising.
“I think this dog needs a walk,” Doc announced, after surveying Kit Carson ponderously. “Tess, there’s a leash in the pantry, hanging on a hook. Would you mind getting it, please?”
Tess rushed into the house, and Kit Carson bounded after her.
Tyler started to call the dog back, and Doc stopped him.
“It’s all right, Tyler,” he said. “I’m a veterinarian, you know. I allow dogs in my house.”
Tyler wanted to avoid Doc’s gaze—but he didn’t.
“Is something wrong?” Doc asked.
“I’m not really sure,” Tyler answered awkwardly.
“But you need to have a private conversation with Lily, and right away, apparently. Which is why Tess and I are taking the dog for a long walk.”
“I appreciate that,” Tyler said. He felt as nervous around Doc as he had back when he was walking the razor’s edge, dating Lily, saying good-night and then heading straight for Doreen’s bed.
Just then, Tess burst out of the house with the looped leash, Kit Carson close on her heels. Lily followed, standing on the porch, shading her eyes with one hand and looking way too good in her jeans and a little yellow blouse with no sleeves.
She had good arms.
Good everything else, too.
Tyler steered his thoughts in another direction, but they doubled back.
Damn, he wanted to take Lily back to bed.
And once he’d said what he’d come there to say, he’d probably have a snowball’s chance in hell of doing that, ever again.
Calmly, though he probably felt the lust rolling off Tyler in waves as he watched Lily standing there on the porch, Doc bent and slipped the loop part of the leash around Kit Carson’s neck.
“We’ll be over at the park if you need us,” he said. Then he looked down at Tess and smiled. “Let’s go, sugarplum.”
Moments later, they were gone.
Tyler was still standing in the same place, like a weed that had sprung up out of the lawn overnight.
“I have something to tell you,” Lily blurted, before Tyler could get a word out.
That threw him, since he’d been all geared up to spill his guts about Davie.
“What?” he managed, after untangling his tongue.
Lily came down the steps, crossed the lawn to stand looking up into his face, kept her voice low in case any of the neighbors had their ears pressed to a keyhole.
“The other night, when we—” She stopped, blushed, a study in sweet misery. “When we—you know—and I told you I didn’t use birth control because I couldn’t get pregnant—”
Tyler frowned, confused.
Lily seemed to squirm, though she hadn’t actually moved. “It turns out I—” Again, she faltered, but this time she couldn’t get going again.
Was she about to tell him she’d peed on one of those sticks drugstores sold in kits, and they were going to be parents? It was too soon to know if they’d conceived a baby—wasn’t it? Surely science hadn’t come that far since the last time a woman had scared the hell out of him.
Suddenly, Lily started to cry, all soft and sniffly.
Stricken, Tyler pulled her into his arms, held her close against his chest. Propped his chin on top of her head.
“Lily, talk to me,” he said.
She spoke into the hollow of his throat. “Burke had a vasectomy, Tyler. Without even telling me. All the time I was hoping for another baby, and he knew that, and he let me think—”
Tyler closed his eyes. He hurt because Lily hurt.
And what he couldn’t leave without saying might make things infinitely worse.