Marissa’s hand shook as she warmed Jordan’s baby food and scooped it into a dish for him. Her own barbecued beef supper would be sitting in that skillet and serve her for the rest of the week. She had no appetite.
Would Ty come back tonight? Or had he just said that to keep her on alert, to keep her off balance? She was already way off balance. What was she going to do?
As she dipped the spoon into Jordan’s food and made noises like an airplane to coax him to eat it, she wondered what Ty Conroy was going to do.
She’d seen the thunder in his eyes when she’d confirmed the fact that Jordan was his. That thunder was anger that she hadn’t told him. She was pretty sure of that. With his lifestyle, she’d concluded he’d want nothing to do with a baby. She’d concluded he might never be back in Fawn Grove again. The circuit could take him anywhere, including to his best dreams. When he had enough money to fund his dreams, why would he want to come back to Fawn Grove? He could do or be anything he wanted. He could travel. He could have a different girl in each town and never get bored.
Ty had had a following of girls in high school. He’d been a wrestler and won a state championship his senior year. However, the book on him was that he didn’t date much. When did he have time with wrestling practice and chores on the Cozy C? But when he did date, he dated a different girl every time. The thing was, the girls he dated only once still spoke highly of him. They still liked him. They said he was polite and charming and made them laugh. He was a good time.
Marissa knew for certain that he was a good time. She looked at Jordan and she remembered that night with Ty explicitly.
The knock on her door came less than fifteen minutes later. She answered it quickly, wanting to get the issue over with, wanting to get it resolved. If it was resolvable.
She’d wiped Jordan down. Somehow he always managed to dip his fingers into the bowl and then smear the gravy all over his face. Now he was sitting in his play saucer with its activity center, bouncing a bit, manipulating the buttons on a ring on one side of the play table. There were activities the whole way around the circle. His attention span was the strongest when he was playing there. Her attention span right now was zilch.
Her heart thudded hard as she let Ty in and wondered again what he was going to say. More important, what he was going to do.
“Would you like coffee?” she asked, maybe trying to postpone the inevitable. “I don’t have any beer.”
“Coffee’s fine,” he answered, removing his hat, laying it on the table. He ran his hand through his dark brown hair and she remembered running her fingers through it. It was thick but soft and silky. His body had been all hard muscle. Her eyes glided across his shoulders. He still was. There might even be more muscle definition in his arms.
She poured two mugs and set them on the table. “Black, right?” At least that’s what she remembered from the reception.
“Right,” he said with a crisp nod as he stared down at Jordan.
She added milk to her coffee, then a little sugar. When she sat, too, Jordan’s saucer right beside her chair, she asked, “What did you decide on your walk?”
“No decisions, Marissa. I need the facts first.”
She frowned, not sure what he meant. “What facts do you mean?”
“First of all, why didn’t you tell me?”
She felt herself bristle and knew getting defensive wouldn’t do either of them any good. How to explain this so he’d understand? How to explain this without turning herself inside out? She’d start with the simpler explanation.
“You’re a rodeo cowboy, Ty. That’s all you ever wanted to be. You told me that yourself over dinner at the wedding reception.”
“Rodeo cowboys can’t be fathers?” he asked in a low, controlled voice.
“How can they be when they’re never around?”
Maybe that struck too close to home because a shadow crossed his face and his jaw tightened. “You’re generalizing.”
“You’ve asked me a question and I’m trying to answer. Maybe you should answer a couple of questions. If I had told you I was pregnant, would you have seen me through my pregnancy? Would you have come back to Fawn Grove? Would you have been here during labor and delivery? Or if that had been the weekend of a big rodeo, would you have been there bull riding? I asked myself those questions and others. Would you quit the circuit? Would you willingly settle down? I came up with a resounding no.”
“You didn’t give me the chance to make up my own mind. You just sailed right by disclosure into doing it on your own. It takes two people to make a baby, Marissa, and I deserved to know.”
She’d carried guilt from not telling Ty about the baby, sure she had. But as an unwed mother with nowhere to turn, she’d done the best she could.
“So you asked yourself about my rodeo life, and you decided that came first with me.” He studied her. “But more was going on than that, wasn’t it?”
“Sure, more was going on than that,” she said, practically spilling her coffee mug in her agitation as she plopped it down. “This certainly wasn’t a planned pregnancy. You had a life on the road and I had to find some way to make a life. What kind of parent could you have been if I’d trapped you into fatherhood? Wouldn’t you have resented me? Wouldn’t you have resented Jordan?”
Ty’s expression was almost forbidding when he asked, “What makes you think I would have resented having a son?”
That question took precedent over all the others. Although she didn’t want to delve into her past, she knew she had no choice if she wanted to make him understand.
She took a few sips of her coffee as a bracing elixir. She rarely talked about her childhood, but maybe she had to do it now to make Ty understand. She put her hand on Jordan’s head, pushed her thumb through his hair, felt the warmth of his skin on her palm. This was her baby, her child, and she loved him dearly. Could Ty come to love him, too?
“My father married my mother because she was pregnant.” The statement seemed to fall with a thud onto the table between them.
Ty’s eyes widened a bit and then he nodded and said, “Go on.”
She shouldn’t have to go on. That should be enough. But he wanted it all laid out.
“They had an unhappy marriage. They argued all the time. Dad left for days at a time and didn’t come back.” From that she’d learned to distrust men. Because of her dad’s example, she didn’t believe they could commit to loving a family or stay.
She paused for a moment and then went on. “He didn’t even care if he had a wife or a daughter, and I never felt loved. I wasn’t about to put Jordan through that type of childhood.”
Letting that go for the moment, Ty asked, “What happened?”
“Nothing monumental. But my parents split up. When my father left, I thought it was my fault. I knew they’d gotten married because of me. I’d heard the arguments, the conversations in the middle of the night. Why else would he have left, after all? No child should have to bear that burden.”
She felt tears come into her eyes, and she blinked fast and hard, not wanting Ty to see. She’d revealed more than enough.
* * *
Ty felt as though someone had clobbered him with a two-by-four. First of all, he couldn’t look across the table at Marissa without being attracted to her. He couldn’t look at her without thinking about their night together. It had been almost two years and it felt as if it had been yesterday. The chemistry that had arced between them back then hadn’t flickered out. It was still sparking now in spite of this whole emotional upheaval, in spite of the fact she’d kept something so important from him, and he didn’t know if he could ever trust her again.
Hearing her background had stirred up a locked box that he kept in a corner of his heart. It was locked because his childhood hadn’t been much better. His background made him a lousy bet for a dad. His own father hadn’t known how to handle responsibility. He hadn’t known how to stay. Maybe he simply hadn’t known how to love.
He wondered how Marissa had managed. She had been a waitress when they’d hooked up, he remembered. Had she done it on her own, or...
“Did your mom help?” he asked. “Is she helping you now?”
Marissa’s voice was almost a whisper. “I lost my mom a few months before we hooked up. Maybe that’s why that night happened. Maybe I just needed somebody to lean on.”
She’d done more than lean on him, and they both knew it. But he kind of understood what she meant. Loss could make a person reckless. Loss of his career had almost made him reckless until he’d realized his uncle needed him, until he’d realized he could turn being reckless into a little bit of risk-taking and possibly hit a jackpot.
“So what did you do during your pregnancy? You were a waitress, living on tips and minimum wage.” He motioned to the apartment. “How could you even afford this?”
“I didn’t have anyone to count on during my pregnancy. But I attended a free clinic and Dr. Kaitlyn Foster, Kaitlyn Preston now, took care of me. I found out about The Mommy Club. It’s a volunteer organization, and the women help parents in need. Sara Cramer, the physical therapist I was talking to when I saw you, is a member of The Mommy Club, too. They helped her.”
“I don’t get it. You didn’t have to pay them?”
“There’s no membership fee or anything like that. For example, Sara’s house burned down. Jase Cramer offered her and her child his guest cottage until she got back on her feet. The Mommy Club helped provide clothes and furniture and anything else they needed. It’s what the organization does. They help parents who can’t make it on their own. I know this apartment isn’t the greatest, but they found it for me. I can afford the rent. I’ve made it cheerful and upbeat for Jordan. I’m hoping to ask for a raise and look for a new place soon. But The Mommy Club made this life I have with him possible. They even have a day care set up. The fees are arranged on a sliding scale according to what you can afford to pay. I don’t know what I’d do without them.”
So Marissa didn’t know what she’d do without The Mommy Club. He didn’t like the idea of her depending on strangers. He didn’t like the idea of someone else doing what was best for his child. She had done a nice job of prettying up the apartment, but it was what it was, and he wanted them living somewhere nicer. He wasn’t exactly sure what he should do next.
Then suddenly he knew. “Can I hold Jordan?”
Marissa gave him an odd look, and he was about to spout the fact that he was the dad and had rights, when she explained, “He has a lot of energy and won’t stay still very long. Let me get him out of his saucer and then we’ll go from there.”
Ty had to acquiesce to her wishes. After all, she knew her son. Their son.
Jordan wasn’t happy when Marissa picked him up. The baby seemed fascinated with a blue elephant attached to the saucer. He squealed and kicked his legs until Marissa jiggled him, lifted him high up in the air and looked him straight in the eyes.
“I want you to meet somebody, big boy. Let’s not show off how contrary you can be right now, okay?”
Jordan reacted to the sound of her voice, stopped kicking and stared at her face, then he broke into a wide smile and cooed.
Ty was entranced.
He’d never really watched a baby’s antics before, and he was captivated, not only by Jordan but by the look on Marissa’s face. Clearly she was devoted to this baby. With her dark brown curls tumbling around her face, her eyes sparkling with the joys of motherhood, she was absolutely beautiful. Beautiful in a way he hadn’t recognized before. Did motherhood do that to a woman?
Now that Jordan was quieter, Marissa brought him into the crook of her arm again and approached Ty. She did not tell the little boy This is your dad.
Rather, she said, “I have somebody new I want you to meet.” Marissa explained to Ty, “He’s not usually shy about meeting new people. I think being at day care has done that. He just doesn’t like to stay in one place for too long.”
Her gaze met Ty’s and held. He knew exactly what she was thinking. Like father like son? Up until a few months ago, that had certainly been true.
He might as well admit his nervousness. “I’ve never held a baby before.”
Her lips quirked up and there was amusement in her eyes. “It’s sort of the same as holding a baby calf. They’re squiggly and want to get away.”
That analogy brought an unexpected chuckle from him. “Okay.” He’d held on to baby calves before.
Jordan was wearing a red shirt and denim overalls. One of the straps had slipped down his shoulder. Ty slipped his forefinger under it and straightened it.
Marissa was close enough that he caught the scent of her shampoo. Oh, how he remembered that scent. The night he’d made love to her, her hair had smelled like flowers, and that’s the scent he caught now. It triggered a response in his body that was totally inappropriate for this situation. He willed himself to block off any attraction to Marissa. He knew how to concentrate. He’d had to focus hard when he got up on those bulls. Now he focused hard on Jordan.
“How’d you pick his name?” Ty asked to fill the air with more than the vibrations between the two of them.
“I liked it,” she said simply.
He remembered again, no mom, no family, just The Mommy Club helping her, strangers helping her, and she was making a life for herself. Marissa Lopez was stronger than he ever imagined.
Taking the bull by the horns, so to speak, he slid his large hands under Jordan’s little arms. Then he lifted the little boy from Marissa’s hold. Jordan went perfectly still as Ty didn’t know what to do with him once he had him. Then he remembered how Marissa had tucked him into the crook of her arm. So he tried that. His little boy’s body was solid and warm.
His little boy.
Ty’s chest constricted and his throat tightened. Just what in the blue blazes was happening to him?
Jordan looked up at him, seemingly mesmerized by Ty’s face, and Ty was just as mesmerized with his son. Jordan reached out his hand and his fingers touched Ty’s jaw. Ty now wished he’d shaved this morning. Would that little hand get scratched by beard stubble? His hand covered Jordan’s to make sure it wouldn’t.
Jordan smiled at him, the baby’s eyes bright with the discovery of something new to do.
However, the quiet didn’t last long. Jordan pulled his hand away and began squiggling, kicking his legs, rocking to and fro. Ty had to be quick to hold him securely.
“He’s an armful,” he mumbled.
“Especially when he wants to be somewhere else,” Marissa confessed. “You can put him down.”
“He can walk?”
“He has been since August. He was a fast crawler, but now he gets around even faster. Some days I think he can move like lightning.”
Not wanting Jordan to be unhappy in his high perch, or squiggling away and falling, Ty said, “Whoa, little guy. I’ll put you down.” But Ty realized that wasn’t what he really wanted to do. He would have liked to keep holding the baby for a while, studying the face that seemed to be a mixture of his and Marissa’s. Jordan definitely had her eyes, deep dark chocolate brown. But the mouth? That could have been Ty’s.
Jordan toddled over to a laundry basket filled with toys. He lifted out a plastic bucket and threw it to the kitchen floor. Then he pulled out a stuffed dog and that landed next to the bucket.
“Will he empty the basket?” Ty asked, fascinated now by the baby’s behavior.
“He’ll empty it until he finds what he wants, or he’ll empty it just because he wants to. I’m trying to teach him to put everything back in again, but you know how that goes.”
“No, I don’t.”
Marissa blushed. “I didn’t mean that the way it came out. I just meant—” She threw up her hands. “Oh, never mind.”
“You meant that teaching him how to put toys away is hard. I get it, Marissa. But now I would like you to understand something. Jordan is my son, and I want to be his father. No, I’m not sure how that’s going to play out yet, but I do know I want to spend time with him.”
“What kind of time?” she asked, a bit shakily.
“I don’t know. I want to think about it. Can I have numbers where I can reach you?”
After giving him a good long look, apparently deciding whether she wanted to acquiesce or not, she opened a drawer and took out a pad of paper and a pen.
Then she said, “I’ll give you my cell number and my work number.”
“Are you still waitressing at the diner?”
“Oh, no,” she said, her pen stopping midnumber. “The Mommy Club helped me there, too. I needed a job with good insurance benefits. They hooked me up with Raintree Winery. Jase Cramer needed an assistant.”
Jase Cramer was almost a celebrity in town. Ty read about him once when he’d accessed the local newspaper online. Cramer had been a photojournalist who’d won a Pulitzer. But he’d been shot while he was doing work in Kenya, and he’d come home to become general manager of Raintree Winery.
“Sara, his wife, is a physical therapist. You saw her talking to me,” Marissa explained.
He thought how fortuitous it was to run into her at the facility. “Would you have ignored me if I hadn’t called you over?” Ty couldn’t help wondering just how long she would have kept his son from him.
“I don’t know,” Marissa said honestly. “I never expected to see you there. I never expected to see you back in Fawn Grove.”
“So you don’t know if you would have ended up on my doorstep with Jordan once the Cozy C is up and running? Certainly you would have heard I was back by then.”
“I don’t know, Ty. I can’t tell you what I would have done and when.” She hesitated a moment, then continued. “I didn’t know you were back. Nobody knows that we’re...connected in any way. No one but Sara and Kaitlyn, and they’re as busy as I am and don’t have time for gossip.”
So she had two confidantes now. “They’re close friends?” he asked.
“The best.”
“And all three of you are involved in The Mommy Club?”
“We are.”
Jordan banged a spatula he’d found in the wash basket against his bucket. As Ty tried to wrap his mind around Marissa’s life, Marissa finished jotting down the numbers, and then she handed him the slip of paper so he could input them into his cell phone contacts. Their fingertips touched and Ty felt the electricity all over again—the quickening of his blood that had told him one night with this woman wasn’t enough. But one night had led to a baby. Jordan had to be his main concern now. Not the chemistry he and Marissa might have.
When he stepped back, she seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. Because he was leaving?
“You might have kept me out of your life for two years, Marissa, but that’s not how it’s going to go now. I’m going to think about all this, then we can have a real discussion about what we’re going to do next.”
He crossed to Jordan and bent down to him. “Hey, little guy. I’m going to see you again soon.”
Jordan studied him for a moment, then went back to slapping the spatula against the bucket. Maybe he was going to be a drummer.
Ty straightened and tucked Marissa’s numbers into his shirt pocket. Then he crossed to the door and left.
His head was spinning as he stood outside Marissa’s door feeling like the outsider he was. But that wouldn’t be true for long. Nope. He was going to be Jordan’s father. He just had to figure out how to do it.
* * *
As soon as Ty closed the door behind him, and Marissa heard his boots descending the steps, she scooped up Jordan and held him close. Tears came to her eyes because she didn’t know what was going to happen next. What lengths would Ty go to in order to spend time with his son? Was he going to upset the steady balance she’d found?
Besides all that was the pull she still felt toward Ty Conroy. When they made eye contact, it was so hard for her to look away. It was so hard for her not to feel breathless, as if they’d started something they’d never finished.
Jordan had had enough of being held. He wiggled and squirmed until Marissa once more set him on the floor. Then he dug into that toy basket for something on the bottom.
Marissa needed advice and calm reason. Since Sara already knew Ty was back, she picked up her cell phone that was charging on the counter and speed-dialed Sara. When Sara answered, Marissa asked, “Are you busy?”
“We just finished dinner. Jase is playing a game with Amy on his tablet. What’s up?”
Sara had been a widow and single mother when she’d met Jase. Now her little girl, Amy, adored him. He wasn’t a stepfather. He was a real father.
“Ty came over. He put two and two together and came up with Jordan. His uncle knew I wasn’t married and had a baby, so Ty filled in the blanks.”
“Didn’t you expect this to happen someday?” Sara asked reasonably.
“Denial’s a wonderful thing, Sara. Knowing Ty’s attitude and lifestyle, I just never expected I’d have to face it. So anytime I thought about Ty, I just pushed those thoughts away. I was living in a fool’s paradise, I guess. Now it all crashed around me.”
“What did he say?”
“His bull riding days are over. He and his uncle are turning the Cozy C into a vacation ranch. That’s going to save the ranch for his uncle and give Ty employment.”
“So he’s staying in Fawn Grove.”
“I guess. He’s so used to being on the road, so used to traveling from place to place I just can’t see him settled down. I can see him staying to get the ranch going, but then he could always find a general manager to run it if he found something else he wanted to do.”
“Maybe he’s grown wiser in the last two years,” Sara suggested.
“You’re the forever optimist, aren’t you? But even if that’s true, what does it mean if he stays? I don’t know what he’s going to want from me...from Jordan.”
“Was he angry that you kept Jordan from him?”
“I think the anger was there, but it was underneath something else. I’m not sure what. I think he felt more disappointment than anything. But I explained why I didn’t tell him and that seemed to help.”
“So he’s a reasonable man.”
“I hope so. But to tell you the truth, Sara, I’m just concerned about what he might do next.”
“How can I help?”
“No one can help. I’m just going to take this day by day and see what happens next.”
“If you want Jase to step in—”
“No!” Marissa blurted out. “I know he’s protective of me and Jordan, but I have to handle this on my own.”
“Not on your own, Marissa. We’re here for you—remember that.”
Yes, they were here for her. But when Marissa examined her heart, she knew she and Ty had to come to terms with his fatherhood on their own.
Marissa gazed down at Jordan again and knew she didn’t want to share him. She didn’t want to lose any time with him. She didn’t want to turn any part of his welfare—or her heart—over to a cowboy who might leave again.