Читать книгу Child of Their Vows - Joan Kilby - Страница 8

MAX OFTEN SURPRISED HER with a romantic gesture, but a weekend at the Salish Lodge was positively inspired. The roaring wood fire with its scent of burning pine, the warmth and elegance of the rustic furniture, and the hot tub for two…all promised a weekend of cozy intimacy.

Kelly accepted the crystal flute Max handed her. “Heavenly. But can we afford Dom Pérignon?”

“Sometimes you just have to say to hell with the cost, Kel.” He shifted closer to her on the love seat and held her gaze. “To us. Whoever said thirteen was an unlucky number was wrong.”

Clinking glasses, Kelly repeated, “To us. And to another thirteen years.” Thirteen had better not be unlucky; they needed all the help they could get.

Max sipped his champagne and set the glass on the coffee table. “Did I tell you I sent off my entry for the Stonington Award today?”

“Really? Which house? What category?”

“The split level in Falkner’s Cove. Luxury domicile. If I win—heck, even if I get nominated—my career should take off. I’d finally be able to keep you in the style to which you’d like to become accustomed.”

“I always knew you’d make it.”

“With a boost to our income, we could hire a cleaner,” Max said. “Stop you from spreading yourself too thin.”

“I can manage. I always have.” Hiring a cleaner would mean she wasn’t doing her job at home, and Kelly took pride in being a good mother and housekeeper. “There’s no reason I can’t do it all.”

“Come on, Kel. We’ve had this argument before.”

“Too many times,” she agreed. “Let’s drop it for now.” She took Max’s sigh for acquiescence and snuggled up to him, enjoying the weight of his arm draped around her shoulder. “This is just like our first honeymoon.”

“Not quite,” Max murmured, nibbling her ear. “The first time we came here we were in bed before we could unpack.”

She glanced over her shoulder at the king-size bed and back at Max. “Down your bubbly, soldier. We’re going in.”

Kelly stripped off her clothes, recalling how, on their first honeymoon, Max had removed them for her. Thirteen years on, lovemaking wasn’t the mad, passionate event it once was, and a long time had passed since they’d gone to bed with the express purpose of having sex. Nowadays they mostly fell asleep right away, exhausted by a full day of work, chores and responsibilities.

But whether it was the champagne or the romantic setting or the promise of a weekend to themselves, once beneath the down comforter, with her bare breasts pressed to Max’s chest, Kelly forgot everything except the heat moving through her veins and the gladness in her heart that they were here, making love, instead of warring at home.

She trailed kisses beneath his jaw, testing the texture of his skin with her tongue. “Mmm, you taste good. You did remember to bring condoms, didn’t you?”

“Uh-huh.” His hands slid down her back and over her hips, bringing her closer. “But do we have to use them?”

“Until I get fitted with another IUD, yes. Dr. Johnson said my body should have a short rest from the device.”

Max nudged a knee between hers. “It’s been a while since we’ve made love. You feel really good, Kel.”

“Go get the condoms, Max, before we get carried away.”

With a sigh, he pulled back, but only to take her face in his hands. “When are we going to have another baby? After the twins, you agreed we’d have more.”

She twisted away from his searching gaze. “I don’t recall—”

“Yes, you did. When you took the job with Ray you said, ‘It’s something to do until we have another child.’ That was over a year and a half ago. When, Kelly? When are we going to have another kid?”

“I don’t know. Someday. When the time is right.”

“The twins start school next year, which’ll leave you free to care for a new baby.”

“Or to pursue my career.” She rolled over, shutting him out. “Don’t pressure me, Max. I have so little that’s all my own.”

“You have your flowers.”

She snorted derisively. “Dried-flower arrangements I give away to friends—it’s a hobby. I want to contribute to the household, too.”

“You do, immeasurably. Not all contributions are monetary. And money isn’t necessarily the most important contribution.”

“Try running a household without it. If you think I spread myself too thin now, what would I be like with another baby?” He had no answer to that. Kelly felt bad at disappointing him. Now she vaguely remembered she had agreed to have more children. But that had been before she knew how important having a job of her own would become to her. “I’m sorry, Max. I know you want a son.”

His silence took on a strained quality. She turned back to him, shocked to see his face drained of color. “Good grief, Max, you’re as white as the sheets.”

“I love the girls, Kel,” he said earnestly.

“Of course you do.” He was so sweet, so silly, sometimes. “Go get the condoms.”

He left her and went to his suitcase. A moment later she heard him swear. “What is it?”

He turned to her, his open hands empty. “I bought a new box especially for this weekend. I was positive I put it in my suitcase. Now I can’t find it.”

Oh, great. Their big romantic weekend and they couldn’t make love. She glanced at the bedside digital clock. By now it was so late the hotel store would surely be shut. Max looked so disappointed and frustrated she beckoned him with a smile. “Never mind. I’m sure one night won’t hurt. Come here, lover.”

MAX AWOKE EARLY, A LITTLE tired but with a lingering sense of deep satisfaction. The night before they’d made love not once but twice—something they hadn’t done in years, not since before the twins were born.

Kelly slept on, one hand tucked under her chin. She was so familiar to him that sometimes he couldn’t see her. Mentally he traced the lines of her face, the short straight nose, the cheekbones she wished were higher, the sweetly curving mouth and small chin. Out of context, she became a stranger again. A pretty, sexy stranger.

He skimmed a finger down the bridge of her nose, and she reached up in her sleep to scratch. He waited until her hand fell away, then did it again.

Her eyes, deep brown in the half light, opened. When she saw him watching her, two small vertical lines pulled her eyebrows together. “Don’t wake me up,” she mumbled sleepily. “You know I hate being woken up.”

The pretty sexy stranger would have wanted him to wake her up. Max sighed and slid out of bed to head for the shower.

As the steaming water sluiced over him, he considered Randall. He had to tell Kelly about the boy, and he would, but not until they’d had more time to cement their closeness. Another day should be enough. A hike in the woods, a nice dinner, a Jacuzzi in the evening, followed by more lovemaking…

When he came out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist, Kelly was sitting up in bed, combing her fingers through her hair.

“Come here,” she said, fully awake now and smiling.

Max leaned in for a kiss. Instead of meeting his lips, Kelly rubbed her cheek over his freshly shaven jaw. “I love it when you’re all smooth and yummy smelling. Come back to bed.” She tried to pull him down on top of her.

“Later.” He yanked the covers off the bed, making her giggle and shriek. “Get up, woman. We’ve got ground to cover.”

Ravenous after the previous night, they ate enormous plates of bacon and eggs in the hotel dining room, then set off on the trail that zigzagged down the cliff beside the river. Through the trees, they could hear the roar of Snoqualmie Falls.

“I wonder how the kids are doing?” Kelly said. “I hope Nancy made them breakfast and didn’t just let them snack on junk.”

Max stopped abruptly. “We need to make a rule for this weekend—no talking about the kids or our jobs.”

“But—” Kelly began, then said “—you’re right. No kids. No jobs.”

Twenty minutes later the silence stretched. “What are you thinking?” Max finally asked.

“I’m thinking I should have done a load of laundry before we left so Beth’s judo outfit would be clean for her training session Monday.”

“No kids, no jobs, no chores.”

“But, Max, that’s our life,” Kelly protested, only half joking.

“Look at that.” He paused at the observation deck, with its view of the falls—a foaming spill of white water dropping nearly three hundred feet down the cliff face. “It’s more spectacular than I remembered.” Max took in a deep breath that made his chest rise beneath his plaid flannel shirt. “This is wonderful. Fresh air, exercise, good food, great sex…” He pulled Kelly close and breathed in the scent of her hair. “And my best gal by my side.”

She slipped her arms around his waist. “Your only gal, don’t you mean?”

He kissed her forehead and the tip of her nose and would have continued on down to her mouth.

“Max,” Kelly began, interrupting him. “Did you mean what you said last night about not wanting a boy?”

Her speculative tone and searching gaze put him immediately on guard. He’d reacted too strongly to her innocent suggestion that he wanted a son. She’d take it as a sign he was hiding something. As he was. “Why wouldn’t I mean it?”

“I’ve always wondered,” she went on, undeterred by his feeble protest, “if you weren’t a teeny bit disappointed we had all girls.”

He wanted to reassure her that wasn’t the case; hell, he wished he could convince himself. But the words stuck in his throat. The letter from Randall had brought his emotions too close to the surface for him to be able to lie.

Avoiding eye contact, he muttered something unintelligible and returned to the path that led to the river.

“Max!” Kelly hurried after him, sending twigs and small stones skittering. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing.”

“I asked you something important, and instead of answering, you stride off without a word. I want to know what’s wrong.”

“There’s nothing wrong. Just forget it.”

“You never talk about your feelings,” Kelly complained. “This weekend is an opportunity to work out some of the kinks in our relationship. You can’t just walk away from an emotionally difficult subject.”

“Feelings. You always want to talk about feelings.”

He strode on. Talking about that stuff made him uncomfortable; it highlighted what was wrong with their relationship, instead of focusing on what was right. And whenever Kelly started discussing their problems, he felt he’d failed her somehow. Not that he would ever admit it.

She called again, exasperated. “Max!”

“If you would quit working or cut back your hours,” he yelled over his shoulder, “we might not have kinks in our relationship.”

Throwing a blatant red herring in her path was a dirty trick, but he hadn’t yet figured out what he was going to do about Randall, and until he did, he didn’t want to talk about sons, real or hypothetical.

“That is so unfair!” She kicked her booted foot at a rotting stump beside the path, scattering crumbling bits of decaying wood.

He shrugged and kept on walking. “You wanted to know what I thought.”

“You’re avoiding the real issue,” she insisted. “You want another child and I…I’m not ready.”

He snapped a dry twig off a branch in passing and flung it down the hillside, where it snagged on a bush. “You keep saying ‘maybe’ and ‘later,’ but later never comes and maybe means nothing. Face it, you have no intention of having another baby.”

“I never said that!”

“You didn’t have to.” Fed up, he increased his pace.

Max felt her angry silence bombard his back as they descended toward the valley floor around hairpin turns in the narrow path. Gradually his temper cooled. He could put their spat from his mind, if not the cause of it, but he knew Kelly would continue to dwell on the problem until they made up.

With a sigh, he stopped again, took her in his arms and rubbed her nose with his. “I forgive you.”

She snorted, half amused, half annoyed, but wholly unrelenting. “Max, you know we should talk more.”

“Aw, Kel, it’s too nice a day to hash things over. Come on, we’re almost at the river.”

Reluctantly she gave up the fight. “Oh, all right.”

Another hundred feet and the trail led them out of the woods to the edge of the tumbling river. Silenced by the roar of water and awed by the grandeur of the falls, they turned to each other. His hands lightly touching her waist, he kissed her, putting all the tenderness he could into the soft pressure on her lips, and he felt her irritation dissolve in the misty air.

High overhead, treetops were moving in the wind, which blew clouds across the sun, but there on the river all was still and warm. They walked along the gorge until they came to a large flat rock where they could sit side by side, looking toward the falls.

From her day pack Kelly removed the lunch the hotel had prepared for them. “Want a sandwich?” she asked, speaking over the sound of water. He nodded and she handed him one. “Remember when we came here on our honeymoon? We smuggled our own food into the hotel because we didn’t have the money to buy meals.”

“How did you get stuck with such a cheap bastard?”

“I guess I got lucky,” Kelly said, munching happily.

“Do you still think you’re lucky?” Max tossed a breadcrumb to a junco that had fluttered down onto the next rock. The small gray bird snapped up the crumb in its beak and turned its black head to regard him with one beady eye. Kelly still hadn’t answered. “Never mind,” Max said. “Dumb question.”

“We were so young when we married,” she said at last. “I was straight out of high school and you were only a year older.” Kelly placed a hand on his jaw, forcing him to look at her. “I can’t imagine life without you.” She shook her head with a wry grin. “Sometimes I can’t imagine life with you, either.”

He nudged her off balance, then caught her before she toppled. She fell into his arms, laughing. He said, “I’ll never understand why your grandmother allowed you to marry so young. If you’d been my daughter…”

“She let Geena go to New York on a modeling contract when she was sixteen. How could she stop me from marrying at eighteen? Gran always told us we had good heads on our shoulders and that we should trust our own judgment.”

“Bulldust. You and your sisters were as headstrong as wild ponies. You always got your way. Erin was the most sensible, but your Gran was as weak as water where you girls were concerned.”

“Don’t you criticize Gran,” she said, wagging a finger at him. “At least she considered my feelings. Your parents did everything they could to stop us from getting engaged. The moment they heard we wanted to get married after graduation they shipped you off to that job on the dude ranch, hoping you’d forget me over the summer.”

The bite of sandwich in his mouth suddenly turned dry and lumpy. Why the hell had he brought up the past? “But I didn’t, did I?” he demanded, feeling an urgent need to reconnect with Kelly. He did not want to lose the woman he’d spent more than a decade building a life with.

She tilted her head, clearly puzzled by his tone. “No,” she said slowly. “You came home even more loving than when you left…if that’s possible.”

He kissed her, almost desperately, deepening the kiss until she melted against him, as he’d hoped she would, and slid her arms around his neck.

Finally she drew back, eyes grave. “All right, Max. You’d better tell me all about it.”

Despite the warm sun, a chill raised bumps on Max’s forearms. How could she know? He’d hidden the letter from Randall deep in the bottom drawer of his office filing cabinet. “What do you mean?”

“You’re hiding something,” Kelly stated. “You’ve been acting really weird all weekend, guilty and secretive—when you weren’t giving me a tumble, that is.” She crossed her arms. “Spill it.”

At first Kelly thought he would evade this demand for explanations, too. Then before her eyes, Max seemed to shrink from her and turn inward. Her heart sank. Whatever he was hiding must be really bad. He was having an affair. He wanted a divorce. He—

“I have a son.”

She stared. She’d heard him speak, but his words had no meaning. “What did you say?”

“I have a son,” he repeated.

“That’s impossible. Unless,” she added with a short humorless laugh, “one of the twins had a sex change.”

“Kelly.”

“But it’s impossible, Max,” she repeated. “We were married right out of high school. How could you have a child I don’t know about?”

“I got a letter from him yesterday.” Max crumpled the plastic wrap his sandwich had come in and compressed it into a tiny ball. “His name is Randall Tipton. He’s thirteen years old and he lives in Wyoming.”

The bottom fell out of Kelly’s world. One moment the sun was shining on her and Max, a unit despite their problems, as solid as the rock on which they were sitting. The next instant she was in free fall, with no hope of safe landing.

Questions crowded her tongue, clamoring for expression. “But how…? When…? Who is the mother?”

“Her name is Lanni. She worked at the dude ranch.”

Spinning, sinking, Kelly spiraled down through a swirling gray void. “You had an affair with another woman while you were engaged to me?”

“You’d broken off the engagement before I left for the ranch, remember?”

“Your parents broke it off. I had every intention of marrying you as soon as we had the opportunity. I thought you felt the same.”

He stared at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. “You said we should go along with their wishes. I left for Wyoming thinking you weren’t going to marry me.”

“I thought you’d come sweeping back one moonlit night and carry me away, that we would elope or something equally romantic. Instead…” Tears swam in her eyes as she gazed at him, stricken, “You were with this Lanni person.”

He tried to take her hand. “Forget Lanni. She’s not important.”

“How can you say she’s not important?” Kelly shrilled, tugging away. “She’s the mother of your child.”

Kelly wrapped her arms around her shivering body and buried her face in her knees. Max, her anchor, her rock, the husband she thought she knew inside out, had suddenly, nightmarishly, become a stranger.

“Dear God, Max,” she said in a broken whisper. “What have you done to us?”

He was silent.

“Did you know before you got the letter you had a child?”

“Yes. Although until yesterday I didn’t know he was a boy.”

“And that made the difference. That’s why you’re telling me now,” she said, struggling to understand.

“No. It’s the letter.”

Her stomach heaved; she gripped herself tighter. “All these years you knew you had a child and you never told me.”

“I wanted to put it all behind me.”

Suddenly she was furious. She sprang to her feet on the rock. “What gives you the right to put a child behind you? To walk away and forget it ever existed?”

“Do you think that was easy for me?” he cried. “Do you think I haven’t wondered and worried all these years whether or not he or she was growing up happy and healthy?”

“How would I know?” she shouted. “You didn’t tell me!”

Her voice echoed off the cliff face, startling her into awareness of their surroundings. She took a deep breath, then another. “Okay, let’s calm down.” She sat again, forcing herself to ignore the pain that was eating away at her like acid. “You’d better start at the beginning and explain.”

Max told her the whole story. The dude ranch, Lanni pursuing him, the pregnancy, the subsequent meetings between both sets of parents. Kelly noticed he glossed over the part where he’d capitulated to Lanni’s advances. Fine, she sure didn’t want to hear about that, although it had always been her experience that it took two to tango.

“Lanni’s family were strong Catholics. They wouldn’t hear of abortion,” Max went on. “My parents gave her money to pay for medical expenses and kept in touch with her parents throughout the pregnancy. The baby was put up for adoption and…” He gazed at his hands, twisted together. “That was the last I’d heard of the child. Like I said, until yesterday I didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl.”

At the ache in his voice part of her, amazingly, wanted to comfort him for the years of loss. He was a loving and responsible father and she knew he must feel guilt and regret.

An instant later, her heart hardened. Had he considered her feelings when he’d slipped away from the bunkhouse at midnight for a rendezvous with Lanni?

A chilly raindrop hit her cheek and she glanced up to see the sun had completely disappeared behind the gray clouds massing around the mountain peaks. “It’s starting to rain. We’d better head back.”

The rain came on with sudden violence, in driving sheets that turned the dirt trail to mud and the bushes and trees to dripping greenery that slid from their grasp as they pulled themselves up the slippery track. By the time they’d arrived back at the lodge, they were soaked through and cloaked in mud from the knees down.

In their room Kelly began to haphazardly pile sweaters and underwear into her suitcase, not even bothering to change out of her wet clothes.

“What are you doing?” Max demanded, toweling his head. His pale hair had turned dark with rain and now stuck out in spikes. “We’re booked for another night.”

“I can’t sleep in this bed with you.” She tossed in her cosmetics case with an angry jerk of her wrist. “Not with your affair making a mockery of last night and of every night of our marriage. I want to be with my children.”

“Kelly, for God’s sake.” He threw down the towel and tried to take her in his arms. “Don’t do this.”

Shrugging him off, she snapped the locks shut on her suitcase and faced him, chin in the air. “I want to go home.”

On the drive back to Hainesville, Kelly couldn’t look at Max. In her mind, she replayed endlessly that summer they were apart. How could she not have known he was up to no good? How could she not have gleaned from his infrequent phone calls and hesitant assurances of affection that he had someone else on a string? At the time she’d put his awkwardness down to the difficulty of communicating on the public telephone in the lodge. God, but she’d been naive.

Max slid his hand onto her knee and squeezed tentatively. “Talk to me, Kelly.”

“I have nothing to say.” Her voice was as dead as love gone wrong.

“Come on, you must. What are you feeling?”

“What am I feeling?” She twisted in her seat to face him. “Now you want to talk. Suddenly you’re interested in feelings. Well, listen up. I’m hurting, Max. I never imagined I could hurt this badly. And I’m angry. I’m so furious I could kill you. While I was sewing my wedding dress, you were sleeping with another woman. While I was counting the days until we could start a family, you were making a baby without me. While I poured out my heart in long loving letters, you were already lying to me. Our whole marriage is a lie.”

“Kelly, you know that’s not true.”

Scalding tears heated her already flushed cheeks. “You led me to believe I was your first, just as you were my first. And only. How many other women have you had that you haven’t told me about?”

“None.”

“How can I believe you?”

He didn’t answer. Finally, in a low voice, he said, “I guess you can’t. You have to trust me.”

With a snort, she threw up her hands. “Trust? What’s that?”

“Except for that one time, I’ve never lied to you or cheated on you.”

Kelly rubbed her hands over her face, suddenly exhausted, as though her anger had drained all the energy out of her. “I know. Or do I? That’s the problem. I’ll never know for sure.”

Silenced, Max drove on through the rain and the dark. Once or twice she glanced sideways, to see his hands gripping the wheel and his jaw set. He was thinking about Randall. She couldn’t stop thinking about the boy, either.

She didn’t want to talk, but she had to.

Her fury had dissipated, leaving behind an icy calmness that frightened her almost as much. “I can’t believe you fathered a baby and didn’t tell me.”

He took his gaze off the road. “I was eighteen. I was stupid. And too much in love with you to risk losing you by confessing the truth.”

“And now you’re not.”

The blaring horn of a passing semitrailer snapped his attention back to the wet highway. “Not what?”

“In love with me,” she said, exasperated by his inability to grasp the logic. “Now you can tell the truth because you don’t love me anymore and don’t care if you lose me.”

“For God’s sake, Kelly. That’s not true. It’s only come up because the boy contacted me.”

He had a son, not by her. Calmness deserted her as hysteria clawed at her throat. “The boy, the boy. He’s the boy you always wanted.”

“You know I love the girls more than anything. Randall isn’t going to change that.”

“You’re already saying his name as if you know him. What does he want, anyway?”

Max shrugged. “Just to see me. He’s curious about his biological parents. And no, I don’t know if he’s contacted Lanni.”

“Do…do you want to meet him?”

“Yes. Would that bother you?”

She stared at him. “Are you crazy? It would tear me apart. It would tear us apart.”

Max shook his head. “You’re overreacting.”

“Don’t tell me I’m overreacting,” she warned. “You don’t know how I feel. What are the girls going to think?”

“They might be pleased to have a big brother.”

Kelly refused to even contemplate that scenario. “You went straight from me to her.”

“No, not right away. It was—”

“Please, I don’t want details.” She stared out the window, watching the dark sodden shapes of trees flicker past. “How long?”

“Three weeks.” She winced, and he reminded her, “You called off our engagement.”

“You could at least say you’re sorry.”

“I never meant to hurt you, Kelly. What is the real issue? Is it that I slept with another woman, or the fact that I had a child you didn’t know about?”

In the reflection from the window, Kelly watched raindrops stream down her face. Lanni, the lies by omission, the secret he’d kept from her all these years. Hurt didn’t begin to describe how she felt, and forgiveness wasn’t even on the horizon.

“I can’t separate the two.”

What she couldn’t say, even to Max, was how inadequate she felt at never having given him a son. Max didn’t value her work outside the home; he only valued her as the mother of his children. She hadn’t even gotten that right. Supposedly the man’s sperm determined whether a child was a boy or a girl, but he’d had a boy with another woman. Maybe it was Kelly’s own body chemistry that had favored the survival of a sperm with an X chromosome and caused her to produce nothing but girls.

She had a bad feeling in her gut about Randall, and she didn’t think it was just because she was jealous of Lanni. Her and Max’s marriage had been on shaky ground for more than a year. If Max let this boy into their lives, he would turn them all upside down. He might somehow take Max away from her and the girls.

They got home late; the kids were in bed and Nancy was watching TV in the family room. Hiding her tear-stained face from the surprised teenager, Kelly went straight to the bedroom while Max made up some excuse for their early return. She heard the front door shut, and a few minutes later Max came into the room. He had a piece of folded foolscap in his hand. The letter.

“Would you like to read it?” he asked.

“No.”

He held out a photograph and tried to show her. “He looks like a nice kid.”

“I don’t want to see.” She pushed him away, then grabbed his arm. “Oh, give it here.”

Thoughts of DNA testing to prove paternity dissolved as she gazed at a younger version of Max. Randall’s eyes, the angle of his jaw, the slight tilt of his head were all pure Max, even if the boy’s coloring was not. Kelly’s head began to throb. She hadn’t wanted the kid to be real to her and now he was. “Let me see the letter.”

Reading Randall’s words compounded her mistake. She felt a physical ache in her heart from empathizing with the boy. No, she thought, deliberately shutting down her feelings. She could never feel anything warmer than dislike for Max’s son by another woman.

“He’s got a good home, with loving adoptive parents,” she said callously, thrusting the letter aside. “He doesn’t need you.”

“Maybe not,” Max agreed tightly. “Maybe I need him.”

Kelly closed her eyes on a sharp stab of pain, unable to speak.

“He wants to meet me,” Max went on. “I’d like to meet him, too.”

Opening her eyes, she reached for his arm. “Don’t go, Max,” she pleaded. “For the girls’ sake if not for mine. You can’t undo the past, but to some extent you can choose your future.”

“I want to meet him,” he repeated. “Kelly, he’s my son.”

“I…I’m not sure I can go on living with you if you contact that boy.” She knew she sounded melodramatic, but she was desperate.

“I can’t live with my conscience if I don’t contact him.” Max slipped the photo back into the envelope and spoke with a new determination. “Randall’s part of me, Kel. You can’t just ignore him, and I won’t. I’m going to Wyoming. I’m going to see my son.”