Heard It Through the Grapevine

“Sorry. Can’t do it. Tell me what’s wrong.”

She eased to the right, her hip resting against the kitchen counter, which put her face fully into the light for the first time. It looked like she’d been crying for hours. A white-hot anger simmered in his gut, and he knew he’d been asking the wrong question. Not what was wrong with her, but who? Who had done this to her?

“This is about a guy, isn’t it?” Looking utterly miserable, Cathie let her gaze meet his for a second. She blinked back fresh tears and looked away. “Want me to go beat him up?”

“It wouldn’t help.”

“I could call all of your brothers and the five of us could have at him.”

“My brothers would kill him.”

“That depends,” he said quietly. “What did this guy do to you?”

Cathie didn’t say anything. He was afraid she was crying again. Matt was considering his options when something on the kitchen counter caught his eye.

It was a small, rectangular box. Not able to believe what he was seeing, he swept past her and picked it up.

It was one of those home pregnancy tests.

In Cathie’s kitchen?

He turned to look at her. Really look. In his eyes, she’d hardly changed since that night when she was sixteen. So it always surprised him when he saw evidence that she had indeed grown up. He ran the numbers in his head. Her eight, to his fifteen. Her sixteen, to his wise-in-the-ways-of-the-world twenty-three. He was thirty now, which meant she was twenty-three.

Matt had a bad habit of still thinking of her as sixteen. This was Cathie Baldwin, after all. The good girl whose life could not have been more different from his. Matt’s hard-living, hard-drinking, never-met-a-fight-he-didn’t-like father had died when Matt was barely old enough to remember him. His mother had taken it badly, which to her meant drowning her sorrows in a bottle, too.

Matt ran wild, eventually living on the streets, headed for disaster, when he bungled the theft of Cathie’s mother’s car. For reasons he would never understand, rather than let him go to jail, the Baldwins had offered to take him into their home, something that had surely saved his worthless hide. Matt would not repay a debt like that by lusting after the Baldwins’ only daughter.

Besides, he’d always known what life had in store for her. A nice guy. A really nice one. Respectable. Wholesome. Not a single skeleton in his closet. Not a single arrest. Someone from a good family. Not necessarily well-to-do, but kind, God-loving people. She’d have a nice little house in the mountains her family called home, teach Sunday school and raise a half-dozen kids, and she’d be happy and well-protected her whole life.

But it hadn’t worked out that way. Another man had slept with her. Carelessly? Casually? Thoughtlessly? And that man had either failed to take the time to protect her or hadn’t cared enough to do so.

Matt held the proof in his hand.

He crushed the box of the home pregnancy test in his hand, taking out a mere shred of his anger on it, then threw it across the room.

Cathie winced as the box skittered across the floor, then opened a drawer and pulled out a white, plastic stick-like thing. “I’ll save you the trouble of asking. The stick turned blue.”

Blue? he thought numbly. “Blue’s bad?”

She nodded hopelessly. “If you’re not finished with college, not married, don’t have a lot of money and your father happens to be a minister, then…yes, blue’s bad.”

Chapter Two

Cathie stood there waiting for him to say something, still hardly able to believe he was here.

One minute, she’d been staring guiltily at the Box and the next, the doorbell had rung. She’d hastily shoved the Box in a drawer, and there was Matt. As if she’d conjured him up out of thin air. As if she’d asked, and the man upstairs had chosen to deliver Matt.

Cathie fought the urge to go stare up into the sky and say, Excuse me? What is he doing here?

Obviously, someone had gotten their wires crossed.

Matt didn’t even want to be in the same room with her.

All because she’d fallen for him ages ago and then thrown herself at him, when he didn’t want her at all. Which was just about the stupidest thing a woman could do.

Okay, not as stupid as getting pregnant when she hadn’t finished college and wasn’t married. But that night with Matt ranked right up there on her list of all-time stupid moves. She hadn’t wanted to come here to college because he lived in the same town. But the university had offered her the best financial aid package, and she’d needed all the help she could get.

Cathie hadn’t chased after him in years, but darned if she didn’t still compare every man she’d ever met to him. Even Tim. If she was honest, she’d admit that Tim reminded her the least little bit of Matt.

“So,” Matt said finally. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Cathie, the girl who always had a plan, said. “I just found out, and I’m still trying to make myself believe that it’s real. That it’s happening to me.”

“Do you want to marry this guy?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” Though it would make her humiliation complete, she admitted, “I’m not sure it matters. I’m afraid he won’t want to marry me.”

Beside her, Matt stiffened, a mixture of disbelief, surprise and then anger washing across his face. For a minute, she thought he was going to ask the same question she’d been asking herself in the hours since the stick turned blue. Why in the world was she sleeping with a man who wouldn’t marry her if she was pregnant with his child?

“He’s…uh.” She closed her eyes and forced herself to start again. “He’s been different the last few weeks. A little…distant, maybe? Distracted. Impatient.”

Through clenched teeth, Matt said, “Why?”

“I don’t know.” Around the same time she noted subtle changes in her body that warned her something was wrong, she’d discovered an alarming number of doubts about Tim.

Matt, the tough guy of old wrapped in a thousand-dollar suit and still looking only faintly civilized, said, “Do you want me to talk to this guy for you?”

“You’re starting to sound like one of my brothers again.”

He swore softly. “I’m not one of your brothers.”

“I know.” She risked another glance in his direction. When she was a little girl, she’d look at him and think he was a wild thing she was going to tame. Like a pup who’d been kicked too many times, always waiting on someone to turn on him.

Cathie had followed him everywhere when he’d first come to live with her parents. She’d watched him with a kind of fascination as he warily watched her in return. She’d smile and he’d frown. She’d laugh and he’d put that same scowl on his face she’d seen tonight, the one that said she was getting to him.

Closing her eyes, she let herself remember, just a bit, her and Matt together. God, she thought breathlessly, how she’d missed that boy. Of course, God already knew. She’d certainly told him often enough, back in the days when she was trying to talk him into bringing Matt back to her. She hadn’t done that in years and fought the urge to pull out her Box and say very emphatically that he was not what she had in mind when she asked for help.

Still, she missed him so much, the lost boy who’d become her best friend. She’d seen more of him tonight than she had in years.

For just a moment, she let herself imagine a wild-eyed black knight coming to her rescue, making everything right somehow.

“What?” Matt growled, staring at her through midnight-colored eyes.

She shook her head and tried to smile, feeling hopelessly sentimental about a relationship she feared meant next to nothing to him. She, on the other hand, needed nothing more than the slightest touch of his fingertips to her cheek to know that she was every bit as attracted to the man as she’d once been to the boy. The awful part was that neither the boy nor the man had wanted her.

And now she feared she was in the same shape—no, worse—with another man she feared wouldn’t want her or her baby. Obviously, there was a pattern here she should probably figure out, so she didn’t keep repeating this same mistake.

“Cathie—”