The Cowboy's Secret Son

It’s been a long time.

It has been, hasn’t it? How are you?

The merest commonplaces. Phrases either of them might have said to a chance acquaintance. But beneath lay all the memories she suspected neither of them had forgotten.

Or maybe she was wrong about that, she thought, watching him turn to Ronnie. Maybe that was just her fantasy—that what she and Mark had shared that summer had meant more to him than a quick roll in the hay.

“Ronnie,” Mark said, nodding at the sheriff.

“Looks like you did my job for me,” Ronnie replied. “Much obliged. I wasn’t looking forward to searching for the kid all afternoon in a storm. Probably would have been calling on you to help, so I guess you saved us both some trouble.”

Mark nodded again, his mouth flattening as if he had wanted to say something and then thought better of it. “Glad I could help,” he said finally, his eyes coming back to Drew.

“You know what’s good for you, young man,” Ronnie said to the boy, “you won’t ever pull a stunt like this again. Worrying your mama and wasting the taxpayers’ money. I got gas and time tied up in coming way out here. Ought to make you work those expenses out. And I will the next time you get the notion to send everybody off on a wild-goose chase.”

As much as she knew Drew was in the wrong, Jillian found herself resenting the sheriff’s lecture. Overprotective. Jake had accused her of that, and she had resented his lecture, too.

He needs a man’s discipline in his life, Jake had said. He needs a father. Maybe he did. After all, Violet had told her the same thing. Of course with Violet…

Involuntarily, her gaze found Mark’s face. Now that her shock had faded, she was able to evaluate it dispassionately. He was still looking down at Drew, so she allowed herself to examine his features more freely than she might have otherwise.

His skin was as darkly tanned as it had been since she’d known him. Although his hair was much lighter than hers, Mark never burned, not even when working all day in the grueling heat.

In the years since she’d last seen him, that exposure to the relentless Texas sun had etched its marks on his face. Faint lines fanned from the corners of his eyes. His lashes were as long and thick as she remembered them, and still tipped with the same gold the summer sun always brushed through his chestnut hair. A crease had begun to form in the center of his cheeks, which were no longer boyishly rounded.

A man’s face, she acknowledged. Hard, lean and tempered by the years. Whenever she had thought of him, she had pictured him exactly as he had been that summer. Young, strong and so beautifully male. He was different now. Certainly not less attractive. If anything—

“I’m sure Drew won’t head out without permission again,” Mark said. He smiled at Drew, whose eyes had shifted gratefully from the sheriff’s accusing ones to his. “We all make mistakes.”

As he added the last, Mark glanced up at Jillian. She wasn’t sure what he was implying, but then no one could argue with the sentiment. We all make mistakes.

Of course, maybe that phrase didn’t mean anything, she cautioned her volatile emotions. Maybe he was just making conversation. Just because he said something didn’t mean it was related to their shared past. Or to her.

“Well, you best not make this one again, young fellow,” Ronnie said pompously. “Nobody’s got time to be chasing down kids who don’t have sense enough to get in out of the rain.”

The word seemed a signal. The first drops began to splatter down around them, large enough to be audible as they struck the dry earth.

“Gotta go,” the sheriff said. “You mind your mama, boy. If you don’t, I’ll know about it, and then you and me’s gonna have to have us a talk. You hear me?”

“Yes, sir,” Drew said.

The bravado with which he had told Jillian in no uncertain terms this morning that he hated this place seemed to have disappeared. Even his excitement over the chopper ride had evaporated, and as angry as she was with him for running away, Jillian found herself regretting that loss.

The three of them watched as Ronnie trotted to his car. As soon as he had gotten settled into the seat, he picked up the radio and spoke to someone. The exchange was inaudible and brief, maybe just a location report or the assurance that he was headed back into town. Then he put the car into gear, backing it into the yard before he headed out the dirt road. He lifted his hand in farewell as he drove past them.

“I have to get back, too,” Mark said. “I’ll see you later.”

She glanced up, an incredibly powerful surge of hope flaring inside her, to find he was addressing Drew.

“Promise?” her son said, brown eyes meeting hazel. And the same hope she had just felt was expressed in that single word.

“You can count on it,” Mark said.

He reached out and put his hand on top of the boy’s head, but he didn’t ruffle the darkly shining hair. That was something Jake did, and Jillian had never been sure Drew appreciated the gesture. Mark’s was more of a touch. A goodbye. Maybe even a benediction of sorts. As was his smile.

Without looking at her, he turned and began to retrace his steps. She realized then why it had taken her so long to recognize him. Just as his face had changed, so had his body. The shoulders were as broad, maybe broader than the last time she’d seen him. His hips and waist had narrowed, leading down to long, muscular legs, now eating up the distance to the chopper.

A man and no longer a boy, she thought again.

Before she had time to think anything else, Drew’s hand slipped into hers. That was unusual enough these days that she glanced down in surprise.

“I’m in big trouble, huh?” he said, his eyes still on Mark.

“What do you think?”

“I think…it was worth it,” her son said.

“Worth being in big trouble?”

“If I hadn’t been out there, I’d never had gotten to ride in the chopper. He let me wear a flight helmet,” he added.

Jillian shielded her eyes from the dust as the rotor began to turn. She didn’t particularly want to be standing out here, watching Mark Peterson leave, but she didn’t seem to be able to do anything about the fact that she was.

“You think he meant what he said about seeing me again?”

At least Drew hadn’t asked how she knew Mark, she thought with gratitude. But she understood how her son’s mind worked well enough to know that he would put two and two together soon enough. After all, Mark had called her by name.

“Who knows?” she said softly, forcing the words between lips that felt stiff. And not just with the cold.

Once she had been foolish enough to think she could predict what Mark would do in any situation. And she had been wrong. This time she wasn’t going to make any predictions. Not even for Drew’s sake. Especially not for Drew’s sake.

* * *

JILLIAN, he thought, going mindlessly through the motions of flying without any conscious awareness of what he was doing. He didn’t seem capable of thinking about anything other than the woman he had left behind him, standing out in the rain. Jillian Salvini.

Sullivan, he reminded himself. The kid had said his name was Sullivan. He wondered briefly about Jillian’s husband, feeling nausea stir in the pit of his stomach at the thought.

And then, deliberately, he blocked out images he didn’t want to deal with. Couldn’t deal with. Images from their past followed by images of Jillian married to someone else. Sleeping with someone else. Conceiving another man’s child. His head moved slowly from side to side in denial. A pointless denial.

What the hell did you think she’d been doing for the last decade? he asked himself angrily. So she was married and had a kid. Big deal.

In the back of his mind he had always known that was a possibility. A probability, he amended. After all, Jillian was almost thirty now. Twenty-eight, he calculated.

And she still didn’t look much older than she had that summer when she was seventeen. Not with her hair pulled back like that. Her skin was still pale and smooth, but without the ever present tan of her childhood. The freckles that had always decorated the bridge of her nose, unless it was the dead of winter, were no longer visible.

Except they were, he realized. Those same freckles were splayed across her son’s equally delicate nose. He wondered how he had missed noticing the resemblance.

He shouldn’t have. Drew Sullivan was a masculine replication of the skinny little tomboy, that other sometimes lonely only child who had followed at Mark’s heels throughout his childhood.