First Time, Forever

The kid didn’t even have time to put a dot on that I. Evan spun him around, and shoved him hard against his truck.

He was only about twelve. A good-looking boy, even though his features were contorted with fear and anger.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing to my truck?” Evan demanded.

The boy sputtered and squirmed and began to turn red, but he didn’t give anything that could qualify as an answer, so Evan twisted his shirt just a little tighter.

“Unhand that boy at once.”

The voice was soft, sultry as silk, and with just a hint of pure steel in it.

Evan kept his grip on the boy’s shoulder but spun on the heel of his cowboy boot to find himself staring into the most gorgeous set of brown eyes he had ever seen.

His first thought, foolishly, was they’d been wrong. All the guys had been wrong. There wasn’t anything he’d ever seen in a Saturday night movie that even came close to this.

She was beautiful, her hair long and dark brown like melted chocolate, pulled back into a stern ponytail that ended between her shoulder blades. Her skin was the color of a peach, and had blushes in all the right places. Her eyes were so dark they were almost black, some flicker of anger in them hinting at a nature more hot and passionate than the primly buttoned lace-collared blouse was saying. Her cheekbones were high and proud, but her nose was a dainty, tiny thing, with a funny little smattering of freckles across it, and her lips were full and luscious and practically begged for kisses.

Begged.

But he was a man who had paid an enormous price for not saying no the last time lips had begged for kisses, and so his voice was frosty when he answered her.

“Ma’am?” he said.

“I said take your hands off my boy. What do you think you’re doing?”

He shook his head, trying to think what he was doing, trying to shake the vision of her away so he could think clearly.

Her boy.

Vandalizing his truck. That was it.

“Yeah, take your hands off of me,” the boy said, sneering.

Reluctantly he did.

The boy smirked, brushed at his sleeves deliberately, and then, like something unfolding in slow motion, reached over and wrapped his fist around the truck antenna. Before Evan could even think, he’d snapped it off.

Fury, hot and red, rose in Evan, not just because of the boy’s flagrant lack of respect for his property but because of the soft gasp of shock and horror he heard from the woman. He shot her a quick glance and was dismayed by the transformation in her.

Cold, angry beauty he could handle with one hand tied behind his back. But now she was fundamentally altered as she stared at her child as if he had turned into a monster before her eyes. There was the faintest glitter of tears, of embarrassment and dismay, in eyes that he suddenly saw were not all brown, but partly gold. Her full bottom lip was trembling. And then she caught a glimpse of the nice letters scratched out with a nail in his brand-new paint, and he watched the color drain from her face.

“How could you?” she whispered to her boy.

“It wasn’t hard at all, Auntie Kathy,” the boy snapped at her, with disrespect that made Evan angrier, if that was even possible, than the damage that had been done to his truck. Even so he registered the “Auntie.” She was not the young hellion’s mother.

By now most of the guys from the café had gathered around and were watching with unabashed interest, nudging each other with satisfaction now that the kid had pushed Evan a little further.

Evan knew he had a well-deserved name as Hopkins Gulch’s bad boy. He was a man with a reputation. Tough as nails. Cold as steel. Wild as the winter wind. A man who wasn’t pushed. Quick to anger. Quick to take a dare. Quick to settle things with his fists. Quick to just about anything, if it came to that.

And he knew he looked the same as he always had, so these men he had grown up with assumed he was the same.

But he was not.

The wildest boy in town had wound up with the wildest girl in the world. Nothing less than he deserved. But the child had deserved something else. The change in Evan had begun the day his son had been born.

And deepened with every day that his boy had been missing.

Evan moved toward the kid. He had no intention of hurting him, would be satisfied to throw a scare into him good enough that he’d be an old man in a rocking chair before he ever messed with another man’s truck.

But for a moment, his eyes locked on the boy’s and he saw something. Something he didn’t want to see. He skidded to a halt, and stared at those large gray eyes.

There was defiance in them, for sure. And a little deeper than that, fear.

And a little deeper than that…there was need. Need so raw and naked it killed the anger dead within Evan.

He ran a hand through his hair, and looked at the woman, a mistake, since it only confused him more.

“You just passing through?” he asked her, hopefully. She couldn’t possibly be planning to stay here—a tiny spec on the map, an equally long distance from either Medicine Hat, Alberta, or Swift Current, Saskatchewan.

She dragged her gaze away from the boy who was sullenly inspecting the toe of his sneakers. “Actually, no. I’ve been hired at the Outpost. Of course, I’ll pay for the damage to your truck. Right now. I’ll—” She started fumbling with her pocketbook. “I’ll write you a check. If you’ll accept one from an out-of-town bank, for now. I—”

“No.” Evan almost had to look over his shoulder, so dumbfounded was he that the emphatic no had issued forth from his mouth.

Because he knew, absolutely, that the thing to do was take her check.

Or let the cops handle it.

He needed to be in his nice new truck, driving away from her. Fast.

“No?” she repeated, the pocketbook hanging open, her hand frozen in its desperate search for a checkbook.

“No,” he repeated, knowing he was going to do it. The good thing, the decent thing. Damn, sometimes it was hard. The easiest thing in the world was to be a self-centered SOB. He knew; he’d had lots of practice.

But if Dee had run forever with Jesse, if she hadn’t died in an accident, this could be his boy standing here, nine or ten years in the future. If Evan was going to be the father his son deserved, he had to learn to do the right thing. Every time.

He suddenly felt calm and detached and like a voice deep within him, a voice he had learned to respect long ago, when the bull charged, when the brakes failed, when the thermometer registered thirty below and the cows still had to eat, when his son was gone and he just needed to get through one more day without losing his mind, that voice was telling him what to do.

He addressed the boy, low and firm, like he talked to a green colt, who was rebellious and scared, but wanted, in his heart, to know nothing more than he could trust you and you would never hurt him. “That five seconds of fun you just had is going to cost you about two weeks of moving manure. School’s out for the year, right?”

“What?” the boy sputtered. “Why would I move manure for you?”

“Because you owe me, and that particular subject apparently holds some fascination for you since you feel inclined to write about it on the sides of people’s trucks.”

There was a murmur of surprise from the assembled crowd. Evan knew he was considered a man of few words, and most of those unprintable. But he heard the approval there, too, in the way he’d handled it.

“I’m not moving no manure.” Only the boy didn’t say manure.

Evan knew he had enough on his plate. His own son was just about to turn three, a stranger to his daddy, still in diapers, still sucking a soother, still crying himself silly if he got separated from his toy purple truck. Add to that a farm to run, doing his best to cook nutritious meals, laundry to do…how could he even be thinking of taking on anything else?