LITMIR.BIZ

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from getting hurt. Careful to protect himself from feelings he knew he couldn’t deal with.

      Or so he’d thought.

      The last thing he’d expected to discover, when he finally got around to putting together his racing team more than a year and a half later, was that Jeff Henderson had married Luanne, that they’d had a baby boy. No, that wasn’t quite true: the last thing he’d expected, even though he knew he was acting like a child who bristles at the sight of another child playing with a rejected gift, was the senseless, pointless jealousy that had pricked and tormented him like a hairshirt. And until today, he hadn’t believed the chafing could possibly get any worse.

      Once again, his gaze swept over Luanne’s rounded belly, then up to those eyes teeming with sorrow, confusion, bitterness. And a fathomless weariness that called to something inside him that was nearly atrophied from disuse. Several feet behind her, Chase looked up, noticed Alek. The child chucked the ball as though it harbored some infectious disease, then took off around the side of the house. A second later the television blared on.

      Dear God—what now?

      Alek came down the steps, crossing the surprisingly large expanse of yard to where Luanne stood, motionless, the sunlight harshly delineating her fragility.

      “Can Chase hear us out here?” he asked.

      She shook her head, apprehension hovering in her eyes.

      “You look ready to drop.”

      Her mouth thinned. “I’ll manage.”

      “Can you afford to get in some help?”

      “I said, I’ll manage.”

      They stared each other down for another second or two before Alek said, “If you’d been able to reach me, back then, would you have told me you were pregnant?”

      “No.” She snatched the plastic bowl from the wooden picnic table nearby before taking off across the yard, obviously hoping he’d leave things there.

      “Why on earth not?”

      She halted, facing away, worrying the rim of the bowl with her fingertips for several moments before she finally turned. Her gaze glanced off his bare chest, then back up to his eyes. “For pity’s sake, Alek,” she said on a mirthless laugh, “you tore out of my house after that night like the very demons from hell were on your heels. So why would I have put myself in the position of makin’ you feel obligated to marry me, or take on a responsibility you never wanted to begin with, simply because fate played a nasty trick on us?”

      “Aren’t you being just a trifle presumptuous?”

      A strand of hair caught in her lashes; she yanked it free. “Practical, is more like it. My father got my mother pregnant when they weren’t but kids themselves. They ‘had’ to get married. Daddy stuck around for a few years, sure, except he was as miserable as an animal caught in a trap and he made good and sure we all knew it. He took it out on Mama, mostly, but I felt his frustration, too, and don’t think I didn’t. And finally he took off, leaving us in a worse state than if we’d had to fend for ourselves from the get-go. Except Mama didn’t have to worry anymore about how to explain the bruises.”

      Every muscle in Alek’s face tensed with the effort not to explode. “I might have been a jerk for leaving the way I did, Luanne, but I’ve never hit a woman in my life, I don’t get drunk, and I would have taken responsibility for my child! For God’s sake—you trusted me enough to let me be the first man to make love to you, but you didn’t trust me enough to know I’d never have abandoned you?”

      “But that’s exactly what you did! I didn’t expect forever, Alek, and I know I was the pushy one that night, when it came right down to it—”

      “Oh, for the love of God—”

      Her hand shot up. “—but I thought I was at least worth a little common courtesy. This is a pointless conversation, Alek. If you were so all-fired intent on taking responsibility, you might’ve left me some way of getting in touch with you. Or bothered to tell me who you really were. But you didn’t, did you?”

      The undulating drone of a cicada pierced the silence. Alek twisted away, breathing hard, until Luanne’s sigh behind him made him face her again. “Oh, Alek—you were a stranger passin’ through. I knew it, you knew it. Neither of us was looking for anything permanent. And happily-ever-afters don’t come from one-night stands. Besides, even if I didn’t know you were a prince, I sure as heck knew you were way out of my league, that we had no more in common than a sparrow and a peacock.” Her head tilted to one side. “But none of that’s here nor there because I didn’t know who or where you were, and by the time I found all that out, I’d been married for nearly eighteen months and…”

      Alek frowned. “What?”

      Luanne fidgeted with the bowl a moment, then walked over to the picnic table, banging the bowl back onto its top before settling carefully onto the bench.

      Alek joined her. And waited.

      Several more seconds passed before she said, “When you’re twenty-one and pregnant and an inch away from panic, a White Knight can look pretty dang good, let me tell you. My world, such as it was, had crumbled right out from under me. I hadn’t finished my education, I wasn’t gonna be able to work for much longer, and had no one to fall back on. Not a single, solitary soul.”

      Her brow knotted, she swatted at an insect in front of her face. “I was out behind Ed’s one night, trying to get ahold of myself—I had no sickness to speak of, but my hormones were just all over the place and I cried, like, every ten minutes—when Jeff suddenly showed up out of nowhere, and before I knew what I was doing…I told him. He offered to marry me on the spot.”

      I’d do anything for that gal….

      Alek’s stomach clenched; he waited out the slight surge of nausea. “And he never asked who the father was?”

      “Sure he did. First question out of his mouth. I told him it didn’t make any difference, sort of indicating it happened around the time of the Simmons wedding, that it was a one-time thing….” Her mouth stretched taut. “He never questioned me after that. All he wanted was my assurance that, if he took me and the baby on, there was no chance of the father’s comin’ back and making things complicated. I told him we were probably safe on that score…but he made me swear to never tell. Since I didn’t figure there’d ever be a problem, I agreed.”

      Alek swore softly. Luanne crossed her arms.

      “Even so, I didn’t think it was fair to Jeff, and I told him so, but he finally convinced me it was a blessed sight better than goin’ on public assistance when I couldn’t work anymore, that this way, I’d be able to get my degree like I’d planned. And we’d always been friends, good friends, so it wasn’t like we didn’t get along. And I trusted him, Alek. More than I’d ever trusted another man.” He caught the blush stealing across her cheeks, said nothing. She cleared her throat, looked straight ahead. “Marrying him was strictly a practical decision on my part. The last thing I expected was to…”

      She glanced away, tucked an escaped curl behind her ear. “I’d never had a man be so good to me. Not for the long haul. Or to stand up for me the way he did. His parents were dead set against the marriage, but he refused to buckle to their objections. And after Jeff’s daddy died, right before Chase was born, his mama came around, treated me like gold until her own passing a couple years back. I remember waking up one morning, I guess when Chase was about six months old or so, and realizing, for the first time in my life, everything was going right for a change. I was gonna go back to school, I had a beautiful, healthy baby and a husband who adored me.”

      She got awkwardly to her feet, waddled over to the clothesline, felt the shirt. “Then this contract arrives in the mail.” She unclipped the shirt from the line, handed it to Alek. “Here—stuff dries real fast in this heat.”

      Silently, he got up, as well, took the still-damp shirt and slipped it on, all the while

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