Rogue's Reform

So she told him, anyway. Go figure. “Do you remember me?”

He gave her a puzzled look. “From…?”

“High school. Middle school. Grade school. Church, when my father still let me go. When your mother still made you go.” She shrugged. “From growing up two years apart in the same small town for sixteen years.”

Ethan didn’t need to think about his answer. For all he remembered, she could have sprung into existence full-grown yesterday, with absolutely zero contact between them before then. He didn’t offer the response immediately, though. It seemed cruel to be so quickly certain that she hadn’t existed in his world—in their mutually shared world—for all those years.

But finally he couldn’t delay any longer, and so he shook his head. “No, I don’t. I’m sorry.”

“I’m the most forgettable person in Heartbreak. People who have known me all my life don’t know my name. My own father called me ‘girl’ rather than make the effort to remember ‘Grace.”’ Her smile was thin and bitter. “He called his dog ‘girl,’ too. He took her with him when he left.”

For a moment she seemed lost in that thought. Missing the father who’d apparently never loved her? Maybe regretting all the years she’d spent with a man who’d walked out when she needed him?

At least it gave them something in common—they’d both had lousy fathers. And they both wondered whether he could do better. And she had good reason to think her child would be better off with no father at all.

“That day last summer was the first time in my life that I was free of his control.”

It was an outrageous statement, but she said it so flatly that he knew it was true. Ethan couldn’t imagine living a life so restrictive. From the time he was fifteen, he’d taken such freedom that his life had been virtually without rules. Sometimes he’d wished his mother would put her foot down and hold him to the same rules she’d held Guthrie to. He’d figured that she thought he wasn’t capable of living up to them, so why even try.

“So you transformed yourself into someone else—” beautiful, sexy, sultry Melissa “—and determined to live all you could in that one day.” How many firsts had she experienced? First bar, first drink, first dance? Definitely first kiss. Sweet, a bit awkward, as if she’d expected their noses to bump or their mouths not to fit. It had taken only one kiss to convince her that wasn’t the case. The next had been sweet and steamy, full of promise, and at the motel, virgin or not, she’d delivered on that promise.

And he had definitely been her first man. Her only man, he suspected. There was something old-fashioned and satisfying about that knowledge.

“And that’s why you disappeared in the middle of the night.”

She shook her head. “Not in the middle of the night. Early, just before dawn.”

She was right, of course, Ethan thought, because in the middle of the night, they’d been making love again. She’d liked it better the second time. He’d fallen asleep wondering how much more she was going to enjoy the third time, only to awaken alone. The only thing she’d left behind was the faint scent of her cologne perfuming the sheets wrapped around him.

It was the first time in years that the roles had been reversed. He was the one who woke early and slipped away. He was the one who didn’t want to face goodbyes, demands, recriminations. He was the one who kept his sexual encounters as anonymous and short-term as possible.

And Grace had shown him how it felt to be the one walked out on.

“So…I woke up alone, and you…?”

“Went home. Washed the color and the curls out of my hair. Scrubbed the makeup off. Gave the clothes back to my friend. Put away the memories and prepared to convince my father that I’d been a good girl while he was gone.”

“And he believed you.”

“For a while. One day I was over there—” she gestured to the shelves that flanked the side windows “—getting something off the top shelf for Miz Walker and…I don’t know. The light was right. My clothes were a little snug. Something about the way I was standing… He realized I was pregnant.” She lowered her hand to her stomach in a touch that Ethan suspected was totally reassuring. “A few weeks after that, he left town. But before he left, he signed the store and the house over to me.”

There was more to the story than that. Ethan was sure. Jed Prescott never gave anyone anything but grief. He wouldn’t have spit on his neighbors if they were on fire. He wouldn’t even call his only child by her name. He certainly wouldn’t have voluntarily given her everything he’d worked a lifetime for, especially after she’d disappointed him.

But if she wanted to leave it at that, who was he to push it?

Just the only man she’d ever been intimate with.

The father of her baby.

A virtual stranger.

“So, how’s business?”

Her gaze narrowed. “Fine for Heartbreak.”

“I—” His face flushed hot, and he turned away, pretending interest in the store to hide it. “I have some money set aside if…”

“No, thank you.”

Something about the prim tone of her voice raised his defenses and made him face her again. “It’s not tainted. I didn’t steal it or win it in a crooked card game, or scam some poor sucker out of it. I earned it at an honest job, tending bar in Key West. I’ve been working since I left here last summer, and I’ve saved everything I didn’t need to live on.”

She looked embarrassed, too. “I didn’t mean—I’m fine right now. I don’t need money.”

“What do you need?”

She thought about it a moment, then shrugged. “Nothing.”

That sounded damn near perfect, he thought bitterly. That was all he was, and all he could offer. Nothing.

The bell over the door rang, drawing their attention that way. The man who came through the door was white-haired and stoop-shouldered, and though Ethan hadn’t seen him in ten years, he would have recognized him anywhere. It wasn’t easy to forget the man who’d laid his mother to rest a good fifty years before Ethan was ready to let her go.

“Pastor.” Grace eased to her feet, pulled her sweater tighter across her front and went to stand at the counter. If Ethan were asked, from a purely analytical standpoint, he would say she was trying to hide her pregnancy from the old man. But seven months was a lot to hide, especially on someone as delicate as she was. “What can I do for you?”

“Mama wanted me to pick up two gallons of paint, and she wants it to match the green on this paper.” The old man laid a swatch of wallpaper on the counter between them. “She’s redoing the guest room again. Our son and his wife are coming for a visit next month to help us celebrate our forty-fifth anniversary, and she seems to think the house needs to look different every time they come.”

“I’ll mix this up for you,” she said with a flash of a smile before grabbing the paper and walking off with it.

Pastor Hughes turned his attention Ethan’s way. “Ethan.” He bobbed his head in a disapproving nod. “I heard you were back. It’s been a long time.”

“Not long enough, from what I understand.”

“What brings you home this time?”

Ethan shoved his hands into his jeans pockets, then lifted his shoulders in a shrug as he parroted the preacher’s words. “It’s been a long time.”

“I didn’t realize you and Grace were friends.”

Not friends. Not even acquaintances. Just accomplices in a night’s sins that had changed both their lives. But of course he couldn’t tell the preacher that. “We went to school together. I couldn’t come back and not say hello.”

Pastor Hughes looked as if he didn’t quite accept the explanation, but he didn’t look as if he suspected the truth. No, that would surely widen his old blue eyes with shock and distaste, with a self-righteous This-is-no-more-than-we-expect-from-you for Ethan and a dismayed How-could-you-with-him for Grace.

“Where have you been this time?” Pastor Hughes asked.

“Florida.”

“I understand it’s warm there this time of year. Too warm, perhaps?”

Ethan felt the damned guilty flush start again. “I wasn’t run out of town, if that’s what you’re asking. I left on my own.”