Sweet Talking Cowboy, page 15
He helped her put her show gear in the tack-room and made sure it was covered, then put the left over feed and hay away while Briann gathered her clothes and personal stuff from the dressing room of the horse trailer. His timing was perfect and he followed her to the house, only a step or so behind, neither of them speaking the entire time.
Poog greeted them with smiles of welcome with only a little concern reflected in her loving eyes. When she recognized the anger in Briann’s stiffly returned hug, she cast a worried look at Slade who simply shrugged.
“I’ve made a pound cake,” she said, “so hurry back down after you hang your clothes up and we’ll cut it. Oh, I almost forgot. That captain or detective that Evan worked with wants you to call him right away. I guess he didn’t have your cell number.” Her words were directed at Briann’s retreating back as the younger woman proceeded through the room headed for the stairs that led up to the bedrooms.
“Thank you,” came the chilly reply, “I’ll return his call from the study and I don’t want any cake.”
Slade frowned. “Well come on back down anyway.” He didn’t like the coolness she was directing at Poog and wanted the air cleared as soon as possible. “We have things to decide before it’s time to pick Tris up from school.” His eyes followed until she disappeared from view. “She’s determined to make me regret this.” He muttered more to himself than to Poog, but she answered.
“Put yourself in her shoes, Slade. Suppose it was her forcing you into marriage. How would you react?”
He didn’t answer, but allowed the question to roll around in his head. He knew exactly how he would react. He’d be angry, rebellious, bitter and stubborn, but in the end he’d accept it, because Tristin was his child.
When he turned to face Poog, a soft smile lifted the corners of his lips. “Are you gonna cut me a piece of that cake? You know pound cake is my very favorite.” He pulled the cap off his head and hung it on the back of a chair. They talked while she made coffee and sliced the cake.
When Briann returned a little later and settled in a chair beside Poog, her aunt and Slade were busily devouring the generous slices of cake on the table before them. Briann felt weak and shaky.
Poog reached for her hand and grasped it quickly, sensing her niece’s inner turmoil. “Good Lord, Briann, what happened. You’re as pale as a ghost.”
“Detective Richardson called to tell me that they’ve arrested Evan’s murderer,” she said softly.
“Well, praise the Lord!” Poog’s voice was bursting with joy. “It took them long enough.”
“It….it was…Pete,” Briann could barely get the words out.
Poog’s hand tightened around Briann’s icy fingers. “No! Tha…I can’t believe that.”
“That’s what I said to him, but Captain Richardson said that Pete has confessed.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Poor Evan. The last thing he saw was the person he had loved for years, pointing a gun at his head and pulling the trigger.”
The three of them sat in silence for several minutes, digesting the news Briann had shared. Finally Poog patted the delicately feminine she’d been holding. “At least there will be some justice for Evan now. It should give his family some comfort.”
“And at least there’s no worry about him contacting you or Tris again,” Slade added.
Briann nodded. “I wonder if he called to tell me what he’d decided to do. Capitan Richardson said he just walked into the precinct and turned himself in.”
Poog shrugged. “Maybe his conscience was bothering him.”
Briann nodded. “I certainly hope so. I’ll never understand how he could have done something like that. Even when things were at the worst between them, Evan wanted only to be happy and he wanted that for Pete, too.”
They grew quiet again.
“Well,” Slade’s drawl broke the silence that followed her statement. “I know this isn’t the way you would have wanted it to work out, but at least you can have closure and know that the murderer is going to pay for what he did.”
Briann’s head lifted and she looked at him. “Yes, so let’s get back to the problem at hand. You have my undivided attention and I just know you’re ready to tell me how I’m going to live my life from this point on.”
She saw the softness he’d been directing toward Poog change to hardness and his surprising blue eyes turned into shards of ice as he looked at her. Then he drew in a deep breath and made a visible show of reining in his anger and frustration.
“You know things weren’t ever easy for me as kid, Bri, and I guess I’m just used to fightin’ my way through difficult situations, but Poog has always been able to help me see things from another viewpoint.” He dropped his eyes to the cake in his plate for a second and then looked at her again. “I’m not changin’ my mind about anythin’. I want you to understand that. But maybe we all need a little time to just think about this.”
Briann’s eyes still sparked with fire. “You’re still forcing me to marry you, but now you’ve decided to just wait longer and I suppose you expect me to be grateful?”
His anger threatened to break free of his careful hold, but he won the battle for control. “I’m afraid neither of us has given Tristen much thought in this. I want and intend to be her father and I know that you love her and want what’s best for her. Maybe if we take some time together, give her and ourselves a chance, we can find a way to be happy.”
Briann stood up and walked over to look out the window behind the old fashioned kitchen sink, her hands finding comfort in the cool familiarity of its hard smoothness. “But if things don’t work out to your satisfaction, we’ll be right back where we are now?” She turned to face him, her resentment still flashing in her amber eyes. “You don’t even understand that I just don’t see that as any improvement in the situation. You’re still forcing me to marry you.”
His anger sparked and he stood up, pushing the chair he’d been setting in back roughly. “Maybe in that time, I’ll die! Then you won’t have to marry me! But short of that, or draggin’ this through court, I don’t see any alternatives! Do you?”
She glared at him. “I told you, we can work out an amicable way to share Tris. You can be with her every other weekend and during summer, she can stay with you part of the time. I think that’s reasonable!”
“You kept her from me for five years and if I hadn’t figured out she’s mine you wouldn’t have ever told me, would you?” He demanded, his voice rough and raised in anger.
They’d both forgotten that Poog was sitting there and she could have left without their notice, but she decided she might need to be there to prevent violence, so she just sat quietly, listening to them railing at each other, the heat of their anger filling the room.
“No, I wouldn’t have!” Briann admitted loudly, her voice shaking with pent up anger. “I had already made a mistake thinking I could trust or love you and if I was wrong in thinking that, if you’d cared about me, you’d have found me!”
Now Poog stood up, drawing both of their attention. “Enough! You’re both acting like spoiled, angry children!” She looked at her niece. “Briann, Slade did try to find you! He almost drove Mike and me crazy hanging around here, asking where you were, why you left. We couldn’t tell him anything except that you told us you’d made a mistake and then made us promise not to tell him where you were. He checked our mail every day for I don’t know how long, hoping you’d send a letter so he could get your address. I had to start picking mail up at the post office.”
Then she turned and looked at him. “And you aren’t blameless in this either! You were a grown man, Slade! A man who’d been around long enough to know better, but that didn’t keep you from seducing an innocent young woman instead of treating her with the respect she should have received and taking the time to find out if a lifetime commitment was right for you both!” Poog took a deep breath. “The one who now needs the most consideration is not either one of you, it’s Tristin and I’m not going to put up with the anger or the shouting at each other. You both made mistakes in the past, but now you’ve got to put yourselves and your feeling aside and decide what’s best for your little girl!” She lifted the now empty dish that had held her piece of cake and glared at first one, then the other. “It’s two hours before I leave to go pick that baby up from school and you’ve got that long to sit at this table and make some decisions,…….calmly and peacefully.” Then Poog placed her dish on the counter and left the room.
Briann continued to lean back against the sink and Slade stood between the table and the chair he’d been sitting in. Neither of them spoke for several minutes. Finally Briann pushed away from the sink, went to the counter where the cake dish was sitting, grabbed a paper towel to lay it on, then cut herself a piece of the pound cake. Without looking at Slade, she took a Coke from the shelf in the refrigerator and placed both on the table across from where he still stood.
“You might as well set down and finish your cake. You heard what she said.” She broke off a generous portion of the delectable cake and put it in her mouth. Just for a second her eyes closed while she savored the sweet taste as it almost melted on her tongue. When she opened her eyes again, Slade was seated across from her, looking down at the unfinished delicacy in front of him.
His thoughts swirled in his head. He’d never realized Poog had been harboring anger at him all this time, because of the night he and Briann had spent together when Tristin was conceived. He really hadn’t thought about how anyone else felt about it. He lifted his eyes and looked at the woman across from him. She had been young, and yes, still innocent. He’d come home from Texas because she was all grown up and he’d never gotten over the fascination she’d always held for him. He hadn’t wondered if she really loved Jeffery and he’d just decided to take her for himself once he discovered the passionate woman she became in his arms. He wasn’t sure now, just what his intentions then had been where she was concerned. He’d simply wanted her and wanted her badly enough he hadn’t given anything else much thought at all.
He pushed the cake away and rubbed the stubble on his chin. He was an A+ jerk, he decided, but wasn’t sure he’d do things any differently now. He still wanted her so badly he could hardly think about anything else when she was near him. He’d never experienced that strong an attraction to any other woman. Yeah, he’d messed up, but if he backed down from the marriage now, what would happen? Yes, he did truly want to be Tristin’s father, but he wanted to lay claim to Briann just as much. If he told her that he’d settle for joint custody of their daughter, how would he react when he saw Briann with another man? He felt sick inside at the possibility. But he wanted to hear his daughter call him Dad, too. If he and Briann fought this in court, he was afraid it might turn his little girl against him before they even had a chance to get to know one another.
“You know I want to be Tristin’s daddy, not just her biological father. I want to tuck her in at night and be here when she wakes up in the mornin’s. I want to tease her about losin’ her baby teeth, help her with her homework, know what her favorite foods are, her favorite television show, her favorite color, I want to be the tickle monster that makes her laugh until she almost wets her pants, I want to go to school plays that she’s in, I want to go to teacher/parent conferences, I want to hear her laugh from a happy dream, I want to hold her in my arms when she cries, I want to haul her to horse shows when she starts showing’. I’ve already missed so much…” his voice dropped to a near whisper. “Bri, I can’t ever have what I’ve already missed and I don’t want to miss anything else.”
“Don’t expect me to apologize for what you’ve missed. I did what I had to do.” Briann lifted the Coke to her lips and drank straight from the can, allowing no softness into her voice or her eyes.
Slade’s broad shoulders slumped slightly. “Okay, I’ll give you that. You did what you thought you had to do and I suppose I could have hired detectives to find you when you left, so maybe I didn’t do everything in my power to find you, but you did leave me the message that you had made a mistake. What was I supposed to think?”
She shrugged. “To be really honest, I didn’t care what you thought. I was angry and I was hurt and I couldn’t stay here and think about you being with Tanya. I repeat, I did what I had to do.”
He raked one hand through his thick black hair. “I want more than joint custody. I want to share Tristin’s life, all the time, not just when you think I should have her.”
Briann swallowed the last bite of her cake. “Maybe you could stay here part of the time, in the guest room. I’m sure that would be fine with Aunt Poog.”
He frowned. Could he make that concession? His eyes rested briefly on the ring on her finger. Could he accept that offer and hope to change things, with time? He knew it would mean sleepless nights, laying in a bed that close to Briann, and not being able to be with her. He didn’t know if he could do it. His head shook negatively. “I don’t know, Bri.” He lifted his head and looked at her. “You know how things are between us. I can’t seem to keep my hands off you and admit it or not, you feel exactly what I feel.”
She hesitated, and then nodded. “I guess we’ll just have to avoid each other. That doesn’t mean you can’t be here with Tris.” She didn’t want to admit that he was right. She had seen him looking at the ring and now she began to work it off her finger. When it fell in her other hand, she couldn’t explain the feeling of a fist slowly tightening around her heart. Hesitantly she held it out to him. “It’ll be better this way. When Tris gets home, we’ll tell her that you’re her real father and that you’re going to be spending a lot of time with her.”
He didn’t take the pro-offered ring from her hand, so she laid it on the table between them.
“Keep the ring. I’m willin’ to try this scheme of yours, for a while. But we’ve already told people we were gettin’ married. Let’s just take a few weeks and if this works out, we can let it be known that the weddin’ is off.” Slade didn’t look at her as he spoke. His eyes were on the ring lying on the table between them.
She saw the rejection he was feeling, but didn’t allow herself to react to it. She hated knowing she’d caused him to feel it again after the rejections he’d lived with for most of his life, but it just couldn’t be helped. She would not be forced to marry a man who only wanted to marry her to be a father to their child.
She felt that Tris was pretty well adjusted and could have probably gone the rest of her life without going through what lay ahead of them now, but at least this way, there wouldn’t be a custody battle, or an unhappy marriage.
He pushed his chair back and stood up, then rested his hands on top of the table in front of him and leaned over, his chillingly pale eyes flashing with emotions he was barely controlling as he hovered over the table, looking down at her. “It looks like you’re winnin’ this round, Bri, but the first time you fail to stand up to your end of this deal, you can expect a court battle or a weddin’ ceremony! Do you understand what I’m sayin’ to you?”
Refusing to be intimidated, she also stood not wanting to have to tilt her head back to meet his eyes. “Yes, Slade. I think I have a perfect understanding of it. But you need to understand that when someone tries to run roughshod over me, I will fight back. I’m not some timid, innocent, young woman anymore. I’ve been on my own for several years and have been blessed with enough success to know that I don’t have to lean on anyone for support. I’m not afraid to make decisions and I’m not afraid to live with the decisions that I make. You and I, in the heat of the moment, conceived a child. What happened for the next few years will never change and I, personally, don’t want to even talk about it anymore. What happens from this point on largely depends on you. Do you understand that?”
Tension filled the room as they glared at each other across the table until finally he stood up straight. “I’m goin’ home and unpack my clothes. I’ll be back to see Tristin, when I know she and Poog will be here.”
Briann nodded. “That’s fine, and since this will be new to Tris, you’ll be welcome to stay for supper and tuck her in for the night if you’d like. I’ll make sure you have some time together, just the two of you, once she’s comfortable with the news.”
He didn’t answer, but turned and exited through the back door and soon Briann heard his truck headed out the lane, toward the highway.
Unaccountably, her eyes were drawn to the engagement ring he’d left laying in the middle of the table. It truly was the most beautiful ring she could imagine and her finger felt naked without it. She picked it up; its weight resting in the palm of her hand seemed to radiate warmth. Hesitantly, she slipped it into the pocket of her jeans to be returned to him later.
With him gone, she briefed Aunt Poog about the arrangement she and Slade had worked out.
Poog shook her head from side to side. “I’m sorry for you that this is not what you wanted, but for Tris learning who her father is and getting to know him, I’m not sorry.” She wrapped her arms around Briann and hugged her close. “I love you. You’re the child I never had and I will do everything I can to help with the situation. I know it’ll be uncomfortable for you, and probably for Slade too, but he’s a good man, Briann and deserves to share and to know his child.”
Briann savored the feel of her aunt’s strong arms and just relaxed for a minute, then stepped back bringing an end to the comforting hug. “I don’t think this will become a ‘happily ever after,’ thing but we’ll do the best we can, I suppose.”
