Rogue's Reform

“And how long will you be staying?”

“That depends.” He watched Grace set two paint cans on the counter in the distant corner. With quick, efficient movements, she pried the tops off the cans, then began measuring in tints. He would offer his help for no other reason than to get away from the preacher, but he couldn’t help her. He knew nothing about mixing paints or matching colors. He knew nothing about anything but causing trouble. Certainly nothing about making it right.

“I assume Grace has told you about her predicament.”

Afraid of what might show in his face if he continued to watch her, Ethan turned his gaze back to the preacher. “Her predicament? You mean being pregnant?”

“And unmarried. Abandoned by both her own father and the baby’s father. Left to suffer the consequences alone.”

He hadn’t abandoned her, he wanted to protest. He knew too well how that felt, had been through it with his father, with Guthrie, even with his mother. God help him, he would never do it to someone else.

But Grace had made it pretty clear that neither she nor her baby needed him, that she didn’t want him. So if he left again, that wasn’t abandonment, was it? Even if it felt like it?

“She can’t be the first unwed mother Heartbreak’s ever seen,” he said, injecting a touch of scorn into his voice to cover his guilt.

“No, sad to say she’s not. Which doesn’t make her situation any less fortunate.”

Her misfortune was not running the other way when she met him that night. It was not telling him to go to hell when he’d invited her to the motel. It wasn’t the baby. She insisted she wanted the child, even though it was his child, and he believed her.

He wanted to believe her.

Before the pastor could say anything else, Grace returned with the paint. She rang it up, then waited while the old man wrote out a check. As soon as he was gone, she let out a long sigh.

“I know the good pastor doesn’t think highly of wayward sons. I take it he’s not much kinder to unwed mothers,” Ethan said flatly.

She tilted her head side to side, stretching the muscles in her neck. “Actually, he is. He sees me as an innocent victim, taken advantage of and betrayed by some unrepentant scoundrel.” Abruptly, her gaze widened, as if she’d belatedly seen the insult in her words, and she opened her mouth to apologize.

“I’ll admit to the scoundrel part,” he said, his tone more casual than his emotions. “But I’ve always been repentant.”

“Just not enough to stop being a scoundrel.”

“Not until recently.”

“Why recently?”

“It was time,” he said with a careless shrug, but that wasn’t the real answer. He’d started trying to change because one morning he’d awakened from a three-day drunk and realized that he’d sold his brother’s ranch—his livelihood, his family history, the one thing Guthrie loved most in this world. The fact that land fraud was taken seriously in Oklahoma ranching country hadn’t concerned him, nor had the fact that he could go to prison for it. He’d been in jail before. It hadn’t been his favorite place, but truth be told, it hadn’t been his least favorite, either.

It was the idea that he’d committed the ultimate betrayal against Guthrie that had sobered him. Virtually anything else in the world could eventually be forgiven, but stealing his brother’s land was unforgivable.

He’d thought he might have a chance to set things right without Guthrie even finding out, and so he’d headed for Atlanta to find David Miles, the smug businessman who’d been one of the easiest marks Ethan had ever fleeced. He hadn’t had much of a plan—to admit that the sale was fraudulent, return what was left of the money and face whatever consequences Miles wanted to dish out.

In Atlanta, though, things had gone from bad to worse. He learned that Miles had been killed in an accident, leaving his wife and twin daughters penniless and homeless. The last anyone had heard, they were on their way to Oklahoma to claim the only thing left them—the ranch. Guthrie’s ranch.

Ethan remembered sitting in a seedy motel on the outskirts of the city, trying to gather the courage to pick up the phone and call his brother. But his hands had trembled and his throat had closed off. Even if Guthrie would have talked to him, he wouldn’t have been able to say a word.

And what words could he have offered? I’m sorry? I didn’t think you’d ever find out? I’ll never do it again? He’d said them all so many times before that they didn’t mean a thing.

In the end, it had worked out well, for Guthrie, Olivia and the girls, at least. They’d turned tragedy into triumph—had fallen in love, gotten married and created a new family that was a million times better than the old families that had let them down.

Maybe it had worked out well for Grace, too. Instead of making that phone call from Atlanta to Heartbreak, he’d made the drive, arriving in time to catch the last few minutes of Guthrie and Olivia’s wedding. He’d given Miles’s money to Olivia, given Guthrie the deed to the portion of ranch that had been his for a time, then left them to celebrate their wedding with their friends while he sought the comfort of a few beers and a willing woman in the bar in Buffalo Springs. And there he’d met Grace.

In the end, everyone involved—Guthrie, Olivia and Grace—had gotten the one thing they valued most. A family. Someone to love, someone to love them.

That was the one thing Ethan had always wanted, too.

It was the one thing he didn’t think he would ever get.

Chapter 3

Because many of her customers dropped in on their lunch hours, Grace couldn’t close up at noon. Instead, she’d gotten in the habit of bringing something from home to eat in what she jokingly called the break room. During her father’s reign, it had been a storeroom, but she’d cleaned it out, added a compact refrigerator and microwave, purchased cheap from Reese’s nephew, who’d just graduated from college, and a tiny table and chairs picked up at a yard sale. In a few more months, she planned to bring the playpen she’d bought at the same garage sale so the baby would be able to nap there, undisturbed by the activity in the store.

Sometimes on her days off, Ginger joined her, and some days Shay Rafferty brought two daily specials from her café down the street to share. Though she enjoyed their company with all the saved-up pleasure of a woman who’d long been denied the companionship of other women, today she hoped no one dropped in, not even customers. Today she already had company, she thought, as she took her lunch out of the fridge and put it in the microwave to heat up.

But she wasn’t sure if she wanted to keep Ethan to herself a bit longer, or if she was afraid that seeing him would make everyone remember his last visit home and put two and two together, or if she was…

Stubbornly setting her jaw, she forced the word out. Ashamed. Just a little. He had such a reputation, and she didn’t want it tarnishing her baby before it was even born. Grace didn’t want people to look at her child and say, Oh, that’s Ethan James’s kid. She won’t amount to anything, that’s for sure. Grace didn’t want people shaking their heads when they saw her and repeating some version of what she’d heard plenty of times about Ethan’s mother. Poor Nadine. All she wanted was a father for her son, and all she got was a no-good husband who ran out on her and stuck her with his no-good brat.

She’d gotten enough poor Graces in her life, thanks to her father. She didn’t want Ethan to supply her with more.

The microwave dinged, demanding her attention. She removed the bowl of stew, spooned a portion into a large coffee mug for her lunch guest, then carried both to the table. There was also corn bread, reheated in a damp paper towel, steaming now as butter melted over it, and a half dozen of her favorite cookies for dessert. She believed in eating hearty these days, she thought with a suppressed smile as she realized how easily her lunch for one could feed two.

Of course, she was eating for two and carrying more than enough weight for two.

“So…what are your plans?” Ethan asked as she sat down across from him. The table was so small that her knees bumped his as she settled in. She swore she felt a tingle. He didn’t even seem to notice.

“Plans for what?”

“Living. Working. Making ends meet.” He pointed toward her midsection with a spoon. “After the baby’s born.”

“I plan to continue doing what I’m doing now. There won’t be many changes.”

“A baby changes everything,” he said, as if he knew from experience. Maybe he did. Maybe there were little blond-haired, blue-eyed kids with James blood flowing in their veins all over the country. Maybe that was a part of the trouble he was so famous for leaving in his wake.

If that were the case, then he’d be accustomed to notifications of impending fatherhood, wouldn’t he? But when he’d come in yesterday morning, that definitely wasn’t the impression she’d gotten.

“I can’t afford to let it change everything,” she said as she seasoned her stew. “I’ll still work six days a week. I’ll still live on a budget. I’ll still take care of myself. The only difference is I’ll be taking care of her, too.”

“What about a baby-sitter?”

“I can’t afford one. I’ll bring her to work with me. I’ve got a playpen that’ll fit in that corner. When she’s sleepy, she’ll stay in it. The rest of the time, she’ll be out there with me. It’ll be fine—no different from now, except I’ll have someone to keep me company when it’s slow.”

“And, of course, when it’s not slow, she’ll patiently wait while you take care of customers, order supplies, do the books, straighten the shelves.” He sounded skeptical. “You haven’t spent much time around babies, have you?”

She was embarrassed to admit that the answer was no. The closest she’d ever been to an infant was passing one with its mother in the aisles of the local grocery store. She’d never held one, never fed one, never changed a bottle, but she could learn. There were how-to books covering every subject under the sun, and Callie, the midwife, would teach her enough to get her started. The rest would come naturally. She had maternal instincts, didn’t she? Wouldn’t she give her life to protect this baby? Wasn’t she ready to devote the next twenty years to loving and caring for her?

“And just how much do you know about babies?” she asked crossly. And had any of those babies he’d learned from been his?

“I know that they cry and require a lot of attention. I know they disrupt everything around them when they’re not happy.” He scowled. “I know that raising one alone in a hardware store isn’t a great idea.”