Baby My Baby (A Ranching Family) (20 page)

It also occurred to him now that the simple fact of spending time together might have allowed him to feel closer to her whether she wore her heart on her sleeve or not. And that should have been something that came naturally with being married.

What had she said when she’d finally told him why she’d wanted a divorce? That it should have gone without saying that two people who were married to each other actually spent time together?

And she’d been right. She shouldn’t have had to complain about rarely seeing him in order for him to recognize that it was a problem. To get him not to take her for granted. Not to neglect her. Because he
had
neglected her, he saw that now.

“I’ve been a first-class jerk, haven’t I?” he finally said to his grandfather, who had sat silently through his soul-searching as if he could see the process.

Still the old man didn’t say anything. He just stared at him the way he had when Ash was a boy, as if waiting for him to see the whole picture for himself.

“You knew, didn’t you? You knew that I really had just made her a pit stop in my life the way she accused me. That all the while she was missing me and unhappy, I was too wrapped up in work to feel the same way. The divorce and what I’ve suffered since she said she wanted out was what I had coming, wasn’t it? Because it was just what she suffered, and I was blind to it. I barely took it seriously when she came right out and told me about it a few days ago.” Ash shook his head in self-disgust.

“Some lessons aren’t easy to learn,” Robert said.

“The trouble is,” Ash added, feeling as fatalistic as he sounded “even if I got a second chance to appreciate her, the rest of the problem hasn’t changed. There’s still the foundation and all the demands on me.”

“Guess you could close it down,” his grandfather repeated.

“Why do you keep saying that?”

Robert shrugged once more, this time in a way that said
figure it out.
“Something has to give, Ash.”

But before he could mull it over, they were interrupted by the center’s director. The man poked his head through the lounge doorway and asked them to rejoin him and the investigators in his office.

“Think I’ll go on home after all, and let you take it from here,” Robert said as they stood to follow the director into the corridor.

But there was mischief in those old eyes and Ash saw it. He just couldn’t explore it right then. “I’ll call you when I get through here and let you know what happens,” he said instead.

“Do that,” Robert answered pointedly, heading for the front door.

Ash watched him as the old man made his way out of the building. There was nothing about the sight of that big, broad back, still straight and strong in spite of all the years it carried, to make him think his grandfather was up to something.

But Ash sensed that he was.

And that before too long, he’d find out about it.

* * *

The lights were on in his two-story adobe house when Ash got there after midnight. For one split second he had the unreasonable thought that it was Beth who was inside, the way she used to be.

But of course that was just wishful thinking.

The kitchen and side porch light of his grandfather’s house next door were also on, and it was a pretty good bet Robert was who waited for him.

Ash put the car in the garage, grabbed his garment bag and briefcase from the back seat and went in through the door that opened into the laundry room.

There were no sounds coming from anywhere inside, but out in his backyard he could see a fire burning. Just a small one. At the end of a brick path that wound through the garden.

And there, standing nearby, was Robert, looking very pleased with himself. “Come on out,” he called when he saw Ash.

None of the patio lights were on, but as Ash went into the yard, his grandfather moved to a pottery bowl on the ground not far from the main fire and lit another one inside it to flame to life, too.

“What are you doing, old man?” Ash asked.

Robert just smiled, moved to yet another spot and set a fairly large pile of kindling ablaze. Then he pointed to the pottery bowl. “Better put that out,” he suggested. As Ash did, he said, “How’d things go at the center?”

“The investigators didn’t give us a final verdict, but I think we’re in the clear except for some overcrowding problems. Since they didn’t find naked women chained to beds or torture chambers in the basement or records of sadistic experiments and tortures on inpatients, they were finally convinced that that boy was just stirring up trouble because he hadn’t liked being sent to us. We’re clean, and they saw that. Now I just have to come up with the funds for expansion or turn people away,” he finished with a weary sigh for yet another major problem that he’d have to deal with.

“Ah, a new fire,” Robert murmured, but Ash didn’t know if he was referring to the one he’d just lit or to the need for more funds.

Robert brought to life three more small conflagrations, and now he pointed to two of them. “Better put those out.”

Ash knew the old man well enough to know this was what had caused the glint in his eye earlier that evening. He just didn’t know what the hell it was all about.

He smothered the other fires, but when he moved to snuff the main one at the end of the garden path, Robert stopped him. “Don’t pay any attention to that one. Let it go.”

And by then there were four more blazes.

The old man was really prepared.

“Are you trying to burn this place down?” Ash asked.

“I may unless you do something about those,” Robert answered with a serene smile and a nod at some of the new fires.

Ash again did as he was told, but when he turned from it, he found half a dozen more infernos illuminating his yard, some of them large and much too near the house for his comfort.

“Damn it, Pap, what the hell are you doing?” he said as he rushed to where flames licked at the woodpile against the garage wall, while another crawled ever closer to the dry timber of the toolshed.

Robert stood in the midst of it all, looking satisfied with himself.

“We’re going to have the fire department here any minute,” Ash grumbled as he ran from throwing dirt onto a small fire to finally pull the hose out to spray the bigger ones.

But even though he was rushing around the yard and Robert had stopped lighting new blazes, there were so many burning already Ash couldn’t keep them all under control himself.

“Don’t just stand there,” he told his grandfather. “This is getting out of hand and we’re going to have real trouble here if you don’t pitch in.”

Robert stayed put. “You can do it all if you only work a little harder.”

“Just put out that fire near the toolshed. The mower is in there and there’s gas in it. The whole thing will explode.”

“You can handle it. You’re the only man for the job.”

“Pap!” Ash shouted impatiently. “Put out that damn fire!”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yes, I’m sure!”

Robert grinned broadly, then walked to his own yard next door and brought his hose over, joining in until together they had them all out.

Then he went down the garden path to the fire neither of them had touched and stood over it, staring at the few embers that were left of it.

“Okay, what’s your point, old man?” Ash asked in a much calmer voice when he joined him.

But Robert only laughed, clapped him hard on the back, turned and walked away across the yards to disappear into his own house.

Alone in the night with the smell of smoke all around him, Ash glanced at his grandfather’s handiwork and rubbed the sweat from his brow with the back of his arm. Then his gaze settled on the scant orange glow of the last few unattended embers smoldering at his feet on the garden path.

He stared down into those embers for a while, thinking about what his grandfather had done. And said.

Then he looked past them, at the garden beyond.

And only in that moment did he realize he was standing in the exact spot he’d stood five years before.

Where he and Beth had been married.

“S
he doesn’t want to see you, Ash,” Jackson said. “And right now I don’t think she should be upset. The doctor said she needs to rest.”

But Beth wasn’t resting. She was standing at the top of the stairs, listening to her brother doing as she’d asked—barring Ash’s entrance at the front door.

It was barely seven in the morning and she’d been awakened first by the doorbell and then by Jackson informing her Ash was outside—before he’d even answered it—so he’d know what she wanted him to do.

It was Ash’s voice that came next, in an even but deadly serious tone. “The last time you and I faced off at this door, Jackson, I took a punch I didn’t have coming. That means I owe you one. Now I’m going to see Beth. Even if I have to repay that punch to do it.”

Jackson stood his ground, as Beth knew he would, but she couldn’t be the cause of a physical fight between the two of them. With a full, disgusted sigh preceding it, she said, “It’s okay, Jackson, I’ll see him if I have to.”

Her brother didn’t budge from blocking the doorway except to turn his face to her as she started down the steps. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

With an expression that relayed neither approval nor disapproval, Jackson headed for the kitchen, freeing the way for Ash to come in.

From the entryway, Ash watched her descend the steps, his expression almost dangerous, his black eyes faintly shadowed and bloodshot. He looked like a man who hadn’t slept in a long time, which was no doubt the case since he’d driven from one side of the state to the other and back again in less than twenty-four hours, in spite of the fact that Beth had had Jackson tell him not to come at all.

And yet, even though he showed evidence of how bone weary, worried and, once again, unhappy with her he was, she still had the urge to cross the entrance to him, slide her arms around his waist, lay her head against his chest and feel him envelop her with the strength and security of his body to reassure her everything would be all right.

But she didn’t do any of that, because during the previous night she’d done a lot of thinking. Thinking that hadn’t been fogged by her blinding love for Ash, by the feelings that had reawakened since he’d followed her here. Thinking that hadn’t been distracted by the pure power of his presence.

And what she’d finally decided was this: Her baby deserved a full-time father. A loving home where its needs would always come first. Anything less just wasn’t enough.

And even though she was having to battle the power of Ash’s presence at that moment, she refused to lose sight of the way she knew things had to be between them.

“Why’d you come back?” she asked flatly, letting her tone convey that she wished he hadn’t.

Ash ignored both her question and her attitude. “How are you? How is the baby?”

“Everything is fine,” she answered almost airily, as if she hadn’t been out of her mind with fear through it all. “I thought Jackson explained that on the phone last night.”

Something in what she said seemed to anger Ash, because he closed his eyes tight and pinched the bridge of his nose. She saw his jaw clench as if he were working to control his temper.

But Beth wasn’t sure what there was in such a simple statement to make him mad.

Jackson had arrived at the medical facility just after she had the evening before and had begun trying to locate Ash. Ash had left word at the lodge’s front desk that an emergency had called him back to the reservation. But her brother hadn’t been able to reach him there and he had ended up leaving several messages on the answering machines at the foundation office and at Ash’s house.

Apparently Ash hadn’t been at either place until the middle of the night, because when he’d received the messages at home at one this morning, he’d called right away.

But by then Beth had made up her mind, and she hadn’t wanted to risk talking to him, afraid she might have broken down or wavered in the decisions she’d made. So she’d pleaded fatigue and had Jackson fill him in, which her brother had done. Thoroughly.

So what was there for Ash to be angry over? They’d done everything they could to let him know what was going on and had accepted a middle-of-the-night phone call from him, during which he’d been told all there was to tell.

Including that there was absolutely no reason for him to come back to Elk Creek.

After a moment, he took a deep breath and opened his eyes to her again. “Tell me yourself what happened.”

“I think you ought to go to the lodge and get some sleep. You look awful,” she said, rather than answer him, because even talking about the events of the previous evening put knots in her stomach.

Again his jaw tightened. “Tell me what happened,” he repeated.

His tone and expression said he wasn’t going anywhere until she did, so she figured she might as well get it over with.

Sliding her hands into the pockets of her bathrobe, she leaned against the banister, wanting to appear nonchalant about the whole thing. “I fell on the way home from the lake yesterday morning. Not bad, just a little tumble. I didn’t think I’d hurt anything, but I guess it was enough to tear the placenta away from the uterus slightly, and that caused some pain and then some spotting. The doctor is sure there was no real harm done, though. The spotting and cramping stopped, the baby’s heartbeat is great and an ultrasound test showed it doing just fine, so I was sent home to rest by about eleven last night. I’ll go back in a couple of days to check on things, but there doesn’t seem to be any problem.” And there wasn’t a single note in her voice that betrayed those knots in her stomach she’d been trying to avoid.

“Then this didn’t happen from making love?”

“No, it didn’t,” she answered in a hurry. She certainly didn’t want to discuss
that
subject. Just his saying the words raised goose bumps along her arms and much too vivid memories of pleasures she’d never have again.

“If you’re supposed to be resting, I don’t want you standing here,” he said then. “Should you be in bed?”

“No, I only need to take it easy.”

He nodded toward the living room. “Then let’s go in there and sit down.”

“Now that you know what happened and that the baby is fine, why don’t you go get some sleep yourself?” she tried again.

He merely pointed a long index finger in the direction of the living room and stared at her as if the intensity of his eyes alone could move her through space.

Maybe it could, because even though she sighed impatiently, she went and sat on one of the sofas. “What was the emergency on the reservation?” she asked along the way.

Ash explained the crisis at the rehab center, but Beth paid only scant attention to what he was saying as she reminded herself that it had been a good thing he was called away. It had hammered home to her that in spite of the time they’d spent together in Elk Creek, in spite of the feelings he could raise in her, nothing had changed.

“If I’d have known everything wasn’t all right with you and the baby, I wouldn’t have gone. But as it was, I thought a little time for us both to cool off and think over the idea of our getting married again would be a good thing,” he added when he’d finished.

Beth glanced at him where he stood not far away and wondered idly if even the threat of a miscarriage would have really kept him from the call of duty.

She knew he wasn’t that unfeeling; he would have stayed with her at the doctor’s—or at the hospital, if she’d needed to go.

But what about once the doctor had sent her home? When the worst of her jitters hit? When the adrenaline that came with fear finally waned and the full impact of what might have happened left her quivering in her bed?

After five years of experience she knew the answer to that. She knew that he would have been itching to get to the other crisis. And she knew she would have pretended everything was fine, that there was no reason for him to stay.

And that he’d have gone.

“I wish you would have thought to call Miss Lightfeather at home so she could have told you where I was or gotten hold of me herself sooner,” he said then.

“It wouldn’t have mattered,” she lied. “There was nothing you could have done.”

He let out a derisive, mirthless breath. “And you didn’t need me or want me here, is that it?”

She raised her chin as if confirming it, all the while inside she was reliving just how much she
had
wanted and needed him. Too much.
Think of the baby,
she coached herself.
What kind of father do you want him to have?
“It was no big deal. I did okay on my own.”

Ash sat on the coffee table in front of her and captured her eyes with his. “I don’t believe that,” he told her flat out and sternly. “I don’t believe that you weren’t scared to death that you’d lose this baby. I don’t believe you didn’t care that you were alone to face it. I don’t believe that you didn’t want me to be with you. What I can’t handle is that you seem to think it’s so damn bad to let me know it.”

“It wouldn’t have changed the fact that you were hundreds of miles away at the time,” she pointed out. It would only have shown she was vulnerable and pitiable for having needs that wouldn’t be met.

“No, it wouldn’t have changed the fact that I was gone,” he admitted. And with that, some of the steam seemed to go out of him, surprising her. “I’m sorry, Beth,” he said then, taking her hands in his.

“Sorry for what?” she asked in a squeak of a voice as she worked to block the sparks that skittered up her arms at his touch.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here for you yesterday. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you through our whole marriage. I’m sorry I didn’t see just how much I really did neglect you.” He laughed a little wryly this time. “When I got home last night—before I saw the light on the answering machine and discovered Jackson’s message—my grandfather was waiting for me, to point out a few things.”

“Like what?”

“Like the fact that no matter how hard I work, I can’t put out all the fires myself. And that I’m not the only one who can try. And that the price I paid for thinking I was, was losing you.”

Beth didn’t know what to say to that, so she didn’t say anything at all. She just waited and watched him. And went on pushing hard against the wall that dammed her feelings for him behind it.

“I know I said before that I’d do what I could to cut back on work if you’d marry me again. And I know you didn’t believe it could be done. But it can be, if I hire some help and delegate some of the work and responsibility.”

“That costs money that’s more needed other places,” she parroted what she’d heard him say himself over the years, and then added the other reasons he’d always used against it. “And no one else carries the kind of clout or has the kind of connections you do after all your years of experience, or the drawing power to drum up funds and support. Plus, when you leave things to other people, they either get fouled up or at the very least are not done as efficiently or thoroughly or as well as when you do them yourself.”

“Don’t stab me with my own sword, Beth,” he said, and she saw him waver in his belief that he could, indeed, successfully share the load. “I’m not saying it won’t take time to find good people and teach them the ropes and introduce them around and build confidence in them. Or that I’m handing over the helm. What I’m saying is that if I hire some help, I can put this job more into the perspective it should be, and actually have a life with you and the baby.”

Beth stared at him, loving him so much it hurt, memorizing every sharp plane of his handsome face and wanting to smooth away the lines that creased it with fatigue and stress. She knew he meant well. She knew he even believed that if he tried hard enough, he could do what he was proposing. And she believed he’d truly try.

But she knew him, knew how much he cared about his people and their plights, how responsible he felt, how duty bound to help, to make a difference. Those weren’t the kinds of things that were just delegated, even to competent, capable people.

Beth shook her head and fought tears that threatened at the thought that no matter what he promised or how hard he tried, she and the baby still wouldn’t be his first priority. They’d just be what kept him from doing what he felt he should. And she couldn’t live that way. “It wouldn’t work,” she said very softly. “I know you want it to. I know you’d try to make it. But I also know that it won’t. It can’t.”

“It can with the right people,” he insisted. “And if you meet me halfway and let me know if I’m getting too caught up in work and neglecting you or the baby, if you just speak up—” But he curbed the criticism and tried a different tack. “What about the time I’ve spent here? I’ve had Miss Lightfeather and my grandfather taking care of things, and until a major crisis came up, you and I were doing pretty well, weren’t we? In fact, I was around more than you wanted me to be.”

Again she shook her head, this time more vigorously. “But you were
here,
Ash, not in the thick of it. You and I both know that it’s different being on the reservation, different when you haven’t just temporarily postponed things to be away for a little while. And when you’re right there, in the hub of what you care so much about, you are not going to be able to close your eyes to what needs attention. Or if you do you won’t feel good about it, because I’ve whimpered or whined or nagged you into keeping your distance. And I won’t feel good about it, either,” she added quietly.

“Why is it that you always describe letting me know what you’re feeling in such derogatory terms?” he shot out, clearly frustrated.

“I’m just calling it the way I see it. Besides, that’s what it would sound like. And I couldn’t do it any more than you could allow anyone else to put out one of those fires you knew was burning.”

“Well, we could sure as hell give it a try, Beth.”

He was angry again.

But then so was she, for his wanting to force her back into the same position that had made her leave him. “It just wouldn’t work,” she said again.

“Let’s just try,” he suggested as if soothing a skittish colt, squeezing her hands at the same time. “Come back to the reservation with me. We don’t even have to get married right away if you want to wait until I’ve proven to you that we can work through it all, that I can cut back. And maybe once we have more time together like we have while I’ve been here, you’ll see it isn’t so tough to open up to me, too.”