A Mother's Wish / Mother To Be: A Mother's Wish

Annabelle had reappeared to bow in front of the boy, tail wagging. Boy play with me? Please? Frowning, his thin shoulders weighted in some way she couldn’t exactly define, the kid looked from the dog to her, then back at the dog, quivering in anticipation.

“It’s okay,” Winnie said, not sure how she was breathing. “She wouldn’t hurt a bug if she stepped on it.”

Slowly, the boy got down on one knee to pat Annabelle’s head, and the dog became a blur—Boy likes me! Boy really, really likes me!—trying to lick everywhere at once. But he’d barely started giggling before he scrambled back upright, as though realizing he wasn’t supposed to be cavorting with strange dogs. Or a stranger’s dog, at least. Now the eyes focused on Winnie’s were accusatory, suspicious. Pained. And nearly the same weird blue-gray as hers, except for the flecks of gold near the iris.

“You the lady stayin’ in the Old House?”

The Old House. Like it was a name, not a description.

“Just for a little while.” He has my nose, too. For trouble, I bet. “You…saw me?”

“Yeah. Earlier.” The pointed chin came up. “Through the trees. I was on my bike.”

Bicycle tracks. Check.

“Oh. Do you, um, like to play around there?”

“Sometimes,” he said with a shrug. Not that I care.

Winnie’s mouth curved, at his beauty, his bravado. At how silly his long hair looked, nearly to his shoulders, as shiny and wavy as a girl’s. But every inch a boy, all the same, in his skater-dude outfit, the holes in his jeans’ knees. Still, she imagined the only thing keeping him from getting the crap beat out of him at school was his height, which made him look more like ten, maybe even eleven, than just-turned-nine.

Her face burning, Winnie turned back to the freezer case, grabbing—of all things—a carton of strawberry cheesecake ice cream, swallowing back the reassurance that wanted so bad to pop out of her mouth, that he could still come down and play, anytime—

“Robbie? Where’d you go—?”

They both looked up as Aidan Black—far shaggier and craggier than she remembered—materialized at the end of the aisle, nearly sending Winnie’s heart catapulting from her sternum. A second’s glance told her this was definitely not the mellow, grinning young man, his musical accent as smooth as one of Elektra’s chocolate shakes, she’d met barely two weeks before delivering the baby who’d become his son. The warm, laughing green eyes now dull and shuttered, this, she thought, was the very devil himself.

A devil who, despite how much she’d changed, too, instantly recognized her.

And wasn’t the least bit happy about it.

Her hair wasn’t punked up and jet-black as it had been then, but there was no mistaking those dusty-blue eyes, the set to her jaw, the way her long arms and legs seemed barely joined to her long-waisted torso, like a marionette.

A curse exploded underneath Aidan’s skull, just as Robbie said, “She’s the lady livin’ in the Old House,” and Aidan thought, Flo is a dead woman.

“We need to go,” he muttered, grabbing his son—his son—by the hand and practically hauling the lad up front to pay for his ice cream, hoping to hell “the lady” got the message that if she so much as opened her mouth—

He threw a couple of ones at Johnny Griego’s daughter at the register and kept going, swinging Robbie up into the truck’s cab and storming around to his side.

“Dad?” Robbie said, cautiously, once they were back on the highway. “What’s wrong?”

Where would you like me to start? Aidan thought. “Nothing, laddie,” he muttered, bracing himself as they passed a pasture where a half dozen or so horses aimlessly grazed…but not a peep from the other side of the truck. Then they crested a hill, on the other side of which lay a field chock-full of pumpkins. He glanced over, trying to decide if Robbie’s gaze was as fixed on those pumpkins as it appeared.

“We could stop, if you like,” he said carefully. When Robbie stayed quiet, Aidan added, “Shop early for the best selection?”

A second or two passed before Robbie shook his head. Aidan didn’t have to look at the lad to see the tears in his eyes.

His own stinging, as well, they kept driving, a heaping great sadness clawing at Aidan’s insides.

Aidan waited until he heard the distant boops and beeps of Robbie’s video game before confronting his housekeeper. “And it didn’t occur t’ya to tell me who Tess had let the Old House to?”

As it was, Aidan had only begrudgingly ceded to Flo’s entreaties, via her niece, to rent out the house to some woman from Texas determined to stay in Tierra Rosa and only Tierra Rosa. A normal man might have been at least curious about that. But Aidan was not a normal man, rarely concerning himself with the goings-on of the town he’d called home for more than a decade. So why would he have been even remotely interested in some woman keen on finding lodgings right here in town, and no where else?

Because I’m an eejit, he thought, as Florita slammed shut the oven door on their taco casserole, then turned, fully armed for the counterattack.

“An’ how were we supposed to know she was Robson’s birth mother? Even if Tessie had told me her name, it would have meant bupkis to me, since nobody ever told me what it was. Right? So you can stop with the guilt trip, boss.”

Aidan dropped heavily onto a kitchen chair, grinding the heel of one turpentine-scented hand into the space between his brows. True, since Flo hadn’t come to work for them until after Winnie Porter had removed herself from the equation, there’d been no reason to tell her who Robbie’s birth mother was.

But an anxious-eyed Flo had already sat across from him, their squabble forgotten. “You scared this woman’s gonna pull a fas’ one on you?”

“Not scared. Angry. That she showed up out of the blue. That she’d…” His hand fisted in front of him. “She’d no right to do this.”

“But if it was an open adoption—?”

“One she herself opted out of more than eight years ago.”

Flo seemed to consider this for a moment, then said, “You think she knows about Miss June? That she’s showin’ up now because Robbie’s mama’s dead?”

“I’ve no idea,” Aidan said on an expelled breath, then surged to his feet, grabbing his wool jacket from the hook. “Y’mind holding dinner for a bit?”

“Where you goin’?”

But Aidan was already out the door, the blood chugging through his veins faster than it had in more than a year.

Chapter Two

It’d been years since Aidan had even been down to the eighty-year-old, single-room adobe where he and June had lived when they first moved to Tierra Rosa. They’d bought the property for its own sake, holing up in the Old House until Aidan’s career had taken off well enough to build the New House, a half mile farther up the mountain. A half mile farther away from civilization. Not that either Aidan or June had been hideously famous, not then, not ever. Certainly not like the A-list actresses and shock jocks and such who called New Mexico home—they simply valued their privacy. Aidan, especially. In fact, he’d balked about that damn magazine spread, but June…

The back of his throat clogged as, despite top-of-the-line shocks, the truck shimmied and jolted down the dirt road, partially obscured by clumps of live oak and lemon-flowered chamisa, until shuddering to a stop in front of the house.

Snoozing in a coppery patch of sun on the low porch, the Border collie instantly jumped to attention, yapping; a second later, the screen door banged open and Winnie Porter appeared, hands shoved in her jeans’ pockets, the ebbing sunlight glancing off features a lot harder-edged than he remembered. But then, when he’d last seen her she’d been a very pregnant eighteen-year-old, her defiance worn down—according to June—by water weight and too many sleepless nights.

As he’d been then, Aidan was struck by her height, her almost mannish stance in cowboy boots that were all about utility rather than style, how there was nothing soft about her, anywhere. Even her hair was stick-straight, a million strands of wheat blowing helter-skelter around heavy-lidded eyes and pronounced cheekbones.

“Figured you’d be here soon enough.”

Her gaze was dead-on, unflinching. Certainly not a look designed to provoke concern about a woman being out here all alone, never mind that the only place safer would be a padded cell.

Aidan climbed down from his truck, coming just close enough for purposes of communication. Close enough to catch the determined set to her mouth. The instant that mouth opened, though, he cut her off with, “How the bloody hell did you find us?”

She shoved a stray chunk of her hair behind her ear. Unlike before, when black gunk had rimmed her eyes and she’d sported more studs than a country singer’s costume, she wore no jewelry, no makeup that Aidan could tell.

“Online,” she said, and his brain snapped back to attention. “That magazine article from a couple years back? At least, that you were living in Tierra Rosa—”

“You gave up the right to be part of Robson’s life more than eight years ago, when you begged—begged—us not to send you any more information about him.”

He saw the flash of regret. “I know. But if you’d give me a chance—”