Page 35 of The Gunslinger’s Bride (Montana Mavericks: Historicals #1)

“I have something I want to show you tomorrow,” he said.

“There’s church tomorrow.” A shallow objection. Her heart fluttered erratically.

“We can get up early. Or you can miss one time. It’s important.”

She was tired, and a cold ride home in the dark did not appeal. “Where would I sleep?”

“You can have my room. I can go to the bunk house.”

“I wouldn’t want to put you out.”

“I’ve slept a lot worse places than a warm bunkhouse, believe me. It’s settled. You’re staying.”

She shrugged. “Ruth and Caleb won’t mind?”

He grinned. “She already put out a few things for you and instructed me to bring you water.” He got up to tend the flame, and Abby watched the play of golden light on his strong profile and shiny hair.

He hunkered before the fire, one knee drawn up.

“Tell me things, Abby,” he said. “I need to hear.”

“What kind of things?”

“Things like what you told Ruth tonight about Jonathon as a baby. I want to know about the day he was born, and when he first walked, and his first day of school….” His voice sounded oddly thick and choked, and the sound gave Abby a ponderous ache in her breast.

The need to tell him rose up in her like a restlessness that had never been satisfied. Through the years, Brock had been there, in the back of her mind. Like the missing piece to an unfinished puzzle that, if she at last told him about the events of her life, would be complete.

Not better. Just complete. The facts, nothing more.

He didn’t need to know how he’d hurt her and how she had silently cried for him.

“It was a day in late spring,” she began.

“We’d had flooding that year, and the rivers were brown and muddy and overflowing their banks.

A train was washed off the tracks near Butte and we lost a shipment.

Most of the men from town went to help with the cleanup.

Jed, too, to save what he could of our supplies.

“I was hurting all day that day, thinking like many women do that it was another backache. But this one didn’t let up, and got worse and worse.

I was alone at the store, so I closed and went upstairs, stopping for Daisy’s opinion.

She came and sat with me while I slept, but I woke with stronger pains, so she sent for Haley.

“By then I knew it was time, and I prepared myself, though it’s nothing you can prepare for.” She laughed a little at her foolish thoughts and memories. “It seemed an eternity before Haley got there.”

“What about Jed?” Brock asked, moving to sit at her feet. “Was he still gone?”

“He came home sometime that night. I didn’t know when, really.

The night became a blur. I thought once Haley got there everything would suddenly be better.

” She managed a wry smile. Just like Mary Rowland had imagined, she thought to herself.

“Haley’s presence was comforting, but Jed insisted on Dr. Leland being there, too.

Somehow I got through it, and had a beautiful baby boy to hold and take away the pain. ”

“What did he look like?”

“He was pink all over…just amazing, really. He had a lusty cry…and a fringe of dark hair.”

“Dark, Abby?”

She nodded. “It grew out lighter as he got older.”

Brock’s chest ached so badly, he could have cried with the cold, empty pressure.

Imagining the tiny infant taking his first breaths, crying that beautiful first cry, he found tears welling in his throat for all he’d missed.

How he would have loved to have held him, to have smelled his newborn skin and to have touched his feathery hair.

“Jed had a cradle built for him,” she went on. “He was afraid to hold him at first, because he’d never been around an infant, but eventually he held him and played with him. He ordered toys and enjoyed giving gifts to him.”

Brock let himself picture the gruff-looking man he remembered as being a parent to a new baby.

He must have been a kind and accepting man.

What a surprise it must have been when Jonathon’s hair turned from dark to light.

What had Jed thought? What had Abby thought?

“What did you think?” he asked. “Did you think he looked like me? Even back then?”

“Babies look pretty much the same when they’re tiny,” she said. “At least that’s what I told myself. And as he got older, well, I saw what I wanted to see.”

“Did Jed know he was mine?”

“We never discussed it,” she replied simply. “I don’t know what he thought. He accepted him, loved him, and that was all that mattered.”

The layers of resentment that Brock had harbored since he’d learned of Jed peeled away to reveal a grudging appreciation.

He’d taken Abby for his wife and embraced as his own a child who belonged to another man.

Brock had to wonder if he would feel as favorable toward Jed today if he were still alive.

Since the man was no longer a hindrance between him and Abby, Brock could afford to be gracious now.

Being honest with himself wasn’t pretty.

Abby talked about Jonathon getting teeth, learning to walk, taking spills and bumps, weathering childhood diseases and saying his first words.

Brock listened to her as though she held the mysteries of the universe, hanging on her every word, asking for details and picturing the scenes and days in his mind’s eye.

He sat deep in thought, wondering what he’d been doing those weeks and months and years, and how his life would have been different if only…

if only it had. Regret was a waste of time.

Each day was a chance to start over. And he had. In some ways.

He’d left behind his old life and come here to begin again, but once he’d learned about Jonathon…

and Abby… he’d taken up his old tactics to get what he wanted.

He had used Abby’s fear of exposure to give him an edge.

Now he recognized how wrong that was. He didn’t want either one of them because they had no other choice.

He realized she’d stopped talking some time ago, and had been sitting in silence, studying him.

He had planned to make it up to her for the way she’d been forced to marry a man she didn’t love, forced to live an unfamiliar life, but how could he do that?

He had to put his past behind him if he was ever to know a measure of peace, but Abby was a part of his past that he didn’t want to bury.

What kind of man did he want to be? The kind of man Abby could love and respect. The kind of man who could respect himself. The kind of man a boy would be proud to call father.

He stood and reached a hand down to her. “Thank you, Abby.”

Hesitantly, she took his hand and stood, somehow instinctively understanding his need to hear all about the child he’d fathered and had never known about. It was plain to see his feelings for Jonathon were genuine. But would they keep him from leaving again when things got rough?

He banked the fire and extinguished all but one lamp, which he handed to her, instructing her to head upstairs while he drew her water. Carrying a pitcher, he found her waiting in the hallway, the lamplight flickering across the roses on the wallpaper.

“This one.” He ushered her into a room at the far end of the hall. Tentatively, she perused the heavy wood furnishings and the wide bed covered with a multicolored quilt. A crackling fire burned in the brick fireplace. Brock poured water into the bowl on the washstand and set the pitcher aside.

Ruth had laid out a plain cotton nightgown, a wrapper and wool socks, as well as towels and a bar of fragrant soap.

“Anything else you need?” he asked.

Abby shook her head. She was too weary to desire anything but the comfort of the bed.

Stepping close, Brock touched her cheek with a gentle caress. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life,” he said hoarsely. “You’re not one of them. Neither is Jonathon.”

Unbidden tears sprang to her eyes and burned her nose at his words. She’d never believed her son was a mistake, either, and to hear Brock say so with such assurance sealed her own feelings.

“The mistake I made was not staying and facing your anger, not dealing with the situation and the consequences. A man prides himself on not being afraid,” he said. “But I was a coward when it came to seeing how you’d been hurt, and avoiding how you would react. I ran.”

He’d never even come close to admitting his fault, and his confession took her by surprise.

In all the years she’d lived with the secret of what they’d meant to each other and how he’d left and broken her heart, she had never cried.

Not since those first emotional days when she’d learned of the baby she carried, and her father had discovered the truth, had she allowed herself to break apart under the hurt and betrayal.

She’d girded up her defenses of anger and mistrust, gritted her teeth and made a life for her son.

“I accept the blame,” Brock told her gently now, “for your fear, and the years of living with a man you didn’t want to marry. I understand your anger and all the things you hold against me.”

Abby squeezed her eyes shut and spun away from him, her chest wrenching with the unexpressed grief. She clamped a hand over her mouth and held her other arm to her aching middle.

This was what had hurt—not the tragedy of Guy’s death—and she experienced a flood of guilt over the admission.

Brock’s leaving—even though she’d played a part in forcing him away—had broken her heart, not her brother’s death.

Guy had been a hothead, looking for an opportunity to use his guns.

Brock had been caught in the middle of a bad situation, with no way out. And she had helped place him there.

Relentlessly, Brock smoothed his palms over her shoulders and pressed his hard length comfortingly along her back. With his face buried in her hair, he whispered, “Go ahead. Cry, Abby.”