18

Her words didn’t make any sense.

Ty stared at Hannah, uncomprehending. Except something in him comprehended fine, because his pulse was rocketing around the way it did before he climbed on the back of a bull. His adrenaline was kicking, hard.

And he was still. Too still. The kind of still that kept him on bulls for eight crucial seconds. The kind of bone-deep stillness that kept him calm.

When he wasn’t calm at all.

“He’s ten months old,” Hannah was saying, pure misery all over her face. Though he had to hand it to her, she sure was trying to keep her voice bright in all this darkness.

“Jack,” he said, though he didn’t sound like himself. His voice came from far, far away, lost somewhere in that stillness in him that wasn’t real. And wouldn’t last. “My son. Jack.”

None of those words made sense.

“Ty…” Hannah whispered.

And she reached out to him.

That was what did it. Because she shifted the baby as she reached out, and it was such an unconscious move. It spoke of long practice. Ten months of practice, if he could trust his hearing. Ten months of the life he’d made and hadn’t known existed.

That pulse in his temples was more like an ice pick. Ty only realized that he’d stepped back—or staggered, really—when she dropped her hand.

“Okay,” Gray was saying from behind him, at his sternest. “Show’s over.”

Ty was dimly aware of movement on his periphery. Of his family going back inside and taking the woman Ty had known immediately had to be Hannah’s mother with them. He’d known who she had to be at a glance because she looked like she could be Hannah’s sister. But she clearly remembered him, if that look she’d thrown his way was any indication.

He was aware of all that, but he couldn’t look away from Hannah. And her baby.

His baby. His son.

Ty had never wanted a family. He could barely tolerate the one he had. And now he had a son. Had actually had a son for the better part of a year already.

He shook his head, but none of it went away, not even that pulsing pain in his temples. Hannah stood there, the baby on her hip, her eyes slicked bright with some combination of pain and a terrible longing. It caught at him.

It quaked through him.

“So in there…” He pointed in the general direction of the bunkhouse, but he couldn’t bring himself to look away from her. “Right now. You were going to leave and … never tell me?”

“I came here for a divorce.”

Her voice was rough, and maybe he only wanted to hear the note of guilt. But she also sounded … sure.

He could remember the day she’d arrived so clearly, in comparison to all the blank spots and missing pieces that he’d grown to accept was who he was, now. They’d stood out here in the dirt, surrounded by all of this land, the unendurable weight of it. And he’d seen a pretty girl with blue eyes that made the Colorado summer sky pale in comparison.

But Hannah had looked at him as if he was the enemy.

Because he had been.

“What happened that night?” he asked her, his voice low and furious.

Ty couldn’t have said what he was furious about. Everything. Nothing. He only knew that the fury was everywhere. Dripping through him like whiskey and acid, burning hot everywhere it touched.

Hannah didn’t ask him what night he meant. She took a deep, shuddering breath, and she held the baby closer to her, cradling his head.

Because she was comforting herself? Or because she wanted to protect him … from Ty?

How could he not know if he was a man or a monster?

You know, came an old voice from deep inside him, entirely too familiar. You know what kind of piece of crap you are. Good-for-nothing punk.

Amos might have died. Ty had attended the funeral completely sober, to make sure. But what good had the funeral done if the old man lived on inside him even now?

“I found out I was pregnant,” Hannah said, her voice too thick. “And I told you. And you were not happy.”

“‘Not happy,’” Ty repeated. He ran a hand over his jaw, but it didn’t feel like his. He didn’t feel like him. “Did you expect me to be happy? Had I turned into a man who wanted … this?”

“He’s not a this.” Hannah glared at him, and something in Ty turned over and made him queasy. Because she’d been cradling the baby for a reason, hadn’t she? “He’s a little boy. His name is Jack.”

“Just tell me what happened, Hannah.” Ty sounded old to his own ears. The kind of broken that settled in deep. “Make me understand why you would keep this secret all this time.”

Her eyes were big and wide. She swallowed, hard. And Ty couldn’t understand why he wanted nothing more than to pull her close to him and comfort her. Even now.

The urge made him … unsteady.

“You said a lot of things,” Hannah told him, her pretty face solemn. “The major takeaway was that you couldn’t be a father. That you never wanted to be a father. The only example you’d had of fatherhood was a monster and you would rather die than be that kind of father to a child of your own. And then you got hurt.” She blew out a breath. “And maybe tonight, we can set aside the debate about whether or not you were more reckless out there than usual.”

Reckless. That word again. His head pounded.

“Of course, I rushed to your side.” Her face twisted. “What I mean is, I had to wait for hours and then sneak in early the next morning because I was still so worried that people would know about us. In case you thought you were the only one who acted regrettably.”

“Regrettably,” he echoed, and almost laughed.

What a prim word to describe the blackness in him. The desolation.

“And you already know what happened after that,” she said.

Ty was spinning. Everything was spinning, and the earth was buckling, and he was getting so tired of all that seismic activity when he still couldn’t remember the things he needed to know.

He couldn’t remember, but he could certainly feel. Hannah might as well have stuck her hand into his chest and ripped his heart out. He tried to pull himself together, somehow, when he was more sure than he’d ever been before that he was nothing but a walking collection of broken parts.

Ty could feel the weight of expectation, there in the night between them. Around them. In them. Need and longing, pain and suffering, hope and fear.

In Hannah. In him. In both of them, when he couldn’t get past the churning darkness that whispered to him in his father’s voice.

Or the secrets she’d kept—for the baby’s good. His baby.

This should have been impossible. Ty couldn’t remember falling in love, no matter how drawn he was to this woman, but he accepted that could have happened. But he knew without a shred of doubt that he’d never intended to have children. He’d wanted the bitterness to end with him.

His head pounded.

“Let me see him,” he said gruffly.

Hannah made a hitching sound, like a sob checked. She turned the baby around in her arms, so Ty was finally facing his own child.

His son.

The baby—Jack, he told himself—gazed back at him, dark eyes big and his mouth open. He had dark hair that went wispy at the ends. He had eyebrows.

That struck Ty as miraculous.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the moment I saw you,” Hannah said in a rush, and she sounded on the verge of sobbing. “All this time, I was sure that of course you remembered us. And didn’t want any part of us. Of this. And I didn’t want to subject Jack to that. To a father who didn’t want him at all, not even for the odd weekend here and there. Because I know what that’s like. I know exactly what that feels like, and I figured it was better to have no father than one who—”

“Can I hold him?”

Hannah stopped talking. She sucked in a breath, like it hurt. But her voice was quiet and solid when she spoke again. “Of course.”

She held Jack out before her, and Ty took him, the way he’d taken hold of Becca a thousand times when she’d been a baby and he’d been home. He could have turned Jack into the crook of his arm, but he didn’t.

Jack was solid. He kicked a few times, drooled, made a whole lot of noises that sounded like words, but weren’t.

Ty held the baby up before him, eye to eye.

Man to man.

“Jack,” he said, testing it out.

The baby’s eyes opened wider, and for a moment, they simply stared at each other. Then Jack reached out with his plump hands and put them right on Ty’s face.

Everything inside Ty shattered.

He remembered his father, years ago, cuffing him on the side of the head every time he fell off his horse until Ty learned how to ride like a dream to avoid it. Fall off again and I’ll give you something to cry about. He couldn’t have been more than six. He remembered getting older, and Amos swiping the schoolbooks out from in front of him while he tried to do his homework. Then hooting with derision and telling Ty there was no point. You got looks, boy, but no brains. He’d been nine.

He remembered his father in the chair beside his hospital bed, his hard-lined face screwed up with distaste while Ty lay there in pieces. You screw up everything you touch, boy. This was the only thing you were any good at.

Ty felt the darkness in him. The poison. It had been flowing steady his whole life, like the river out there, cutting through fields and keeping the land green. It filled him up. It made him who he was. A rodeo cowboy who never had a home. Only the circuit, on and on until it broke him for good, which it would. That was the promise the rodeo made to any man fool enough to follow it. And the poison was what kept him hidden behind a grin and a bottle.

It was what defined him. It made him the kind of man who spoke the way he had to Hannah. Who flipped out when he’d discovered he got his own wife pregnant.

That was the man he was.

He was glad he couldn’t remember any of it. Or that it hadn’t been any worse.

Because all this time, all along, he hadn’t been becoming like Amos. He’d always been Amos. Ty was the drunk, forever and always. He didn’t have to touch a drop of whiskey for both of his brothers to still treat him like he was rolling around half in a bottle of Johnnie Walker at any given moment.

Which could only mean he acted like a mean old drunk either way.

The only thing Ty had ever had going for him was that he’d kept his distance from anyone he could possibly hurt.

He couldn’t remember why he’d imagined that he could overcome all of that for Hannah. Why he hadn’t understood, deep inside of him, that all he would ever do was hurt her. Chase her away if she was lucky, ruin her if she stayed put.

Wasn’t that why he’d stayed in touch with his mother all this time? She was no kind of parent to him, and his brothers were right—she’d abandoned them and never looked back. Ty didn’t have any particular affection for her that he could recall.

Bettina was a cautionary tale.

Bettina was a monument to what if. She was what Ty would do to a woman because Amos had done it all to her.

How could Ty possibly have risked Hannah like that?

He brought Jack closer, liking the soft, warm weight of him. Liking the way he giggled, his whole face lighting up and his chubby legs kicking, as if laughter was a full-body experience.

Something in him shifted, sliding sideways.

But it only made him more resolved.

He turned back toward Hannah, holding Jack that much longer. That much closer. For one more moment.

“You have every right to be furious with me,” Hannah began.

Ty passed Jack back to her, and on some level, was amazed how much that hurt him. She took the baby—their baby—automatically, settling him against her shoulder with that smooth ease that made everything in Ty hum. And hurt a whole lot more.

“He’s beautiful,” Ty told her, deep and matter-of-fact. “And so are you.”

She let out a long breath. “Ty—”

“Hannah, listen to me very carefully.” He didn’t dare touch her. He wouldn’t let go if he did. “You need to take him away from here and never come back.”

“What?”

“You already know what you should do. Your instincts were right on. You need to take him back to Georgia and stay there.” He shifted back, because he needed to put space between them. Or he would reach out to her again. “If you need money, I’m happy to give it to you. But I don’t want to be a father. I can’t be a father. Do you understand me?”

He didn’t wait for her to answer him. He turned away, staggering as if he were drunk. Broken all over again.

But he’d hurt himself this time, instead of letting a bull do it.

Ty wasn’t good for much. He could ride a horse. He could rope, ride bareback, and wrestle a steer. All that meant was that he was from generations of ranchers. He could outlast an ornery bull for less than ten seconds, more often than not. He was pretty sure that made him a lunatic. But that was it. That was his skill set, the end.

Just like his father, he had one skill. And he could drink through everything else.

The only other thing Ty could do was protect Hannah. From him. Whether she wanted him to or not.

Because he knew where the poison in him led.

So he left her there, standing with the child they’d made together in the yard, both of them flooded with the light from the house. He knew he would carry that image with him, burned deep.

And he walked out into the land.

The damned land.

Because he got it now. This was a particular kind of poison. And if a man tried to put it into his family, it would ruin lives. It would make a baby like Jack into a man like Ty, good for nothing and rotten to the core.

But these fields didn’t care what kind of father he was. The mountains stood completely indifferent to what kind of husband he was.

He’d always thought he lacked the roots everyone else from the Longhorn Valley was so obsessed with. Especially in his family. But now he understood.

Gray was the exception, like Silas. Men who stayed, but didn’t go bad. Most members of his extended family were like Brady, who’d gotten out. Ty was the rule. He was his father, straight through.

Everetts were like rocks. Like the mountains all around. They crushed anything they fell on, down into dust.

He didn’t need to remember anything out here where the bones of his ancestors were part of the earth now. There was no need for ghosts down where the willow trees met the river, whispering stark and simple truths he should have heeded a long time ago. He didn’t need to feel.

The land would take his blood. His sweat.

His fury.

The land would make him honest no matter what his inclination. It would take the rot in him and turn it green. Make it into food for trees, cattle, people. The cold, cruel river that swept down from the mountains, brimming with snow melt, had been telling him the truth about the family who lived here all his life.

Amos had been cruel. He’d focused on his women, his children, with deliberate intent to harm.

The river was indifferent. It would drown a man or quench his thirst so he could live, flood the fields or keep them fertile.

All Ty had to do was break the cycle.

It was too late for him.

But keep Jack away from here, away from a man who wanted to be indifferent but was far more likely to be cruel, and there was every possibility that he could be free of this.

Of the weight of all that cold stone and unbearable grief that Ty felt deep in his shattered, stitched-together bones, and expected he always would.

He couldn’t give Hannah what she deserved. He couldn’t be a father to his son.

But he could give them this.