Montana Mavericks Weddings (14 page)

This time her brother was the one to look away. Sierra stiffened in surprise. “Kirk? Do you know something?”

“Not exactly,” he growled. “Damn him for bringing this up again. It doesn't matter, Sierra. It was a long time ago.”

She curled her fingers in toward her palms, shock battling with disbelief. “Tell me what you know. Tell me what you've kept from me.”

“Nothing.” He shrugged. “Okay, technically nothing. Dylan sent you a few letters. You know, back when all that was happening. I don't know what they said because I never read them.”

Dylan had told her the truth and she hadn't believed him. “I never got them. I—” The world tilted slightly, then righted itself. “He was right about them.” What else had he been right about? “You thought you were protecting me, so you kept them from me,” she told her brother.

“I didn't want you hurt more. I figured the bastard would try and talk his way out of the situation. I was afraid you'd get caught up in something ugly. You were pretty in love with him. I was trying to help.”

Letters. She didn't want to hope the situation could be explained, yet she found herself praying it was true. That he hadn't betrayed her because he'd
wanted to. That there was another explanation. “Do you still have them?”

Kirk nodded. “But I don't think you should read them. What do they matter now?”

“They might not matter at all.” Or they might change everything, she added silently. “Still, it's my decision to make. I want to read them.”

“Okay.” He went into the house.

A few minutes later, he returned with a handful of unopened envelopes. She recognized the handwriting and her heart tightened as a flood of emotions washed over her. Regret, hope, pain and something that just might have been the precursor to love.

He held them out to her. “I did what I thought was right,” he said.

She took them. “I know. You love me, big brother. You were looking out for me. I wish you'd given me the chance to decide for myself, but what's done is done.” She clutched the letters to her chest. “Thanks.” She turned to leave.

“Sierra?” he called after her.

She paused on the stairs and looked at him. He was tall and powerful, a dark silhouette against the light from the house. “Be careful.”

“I will,” she promised, even though it was a lie. It was already too late to be careful. Somehow Dylan had drawn her back into the past. All she could do was hang on for the ride.

S
ierra set the letters on her dresser and stared at them for several minutes. There were five in all. Unopened, untouched for ten years. She wiped her damp palms against her skirt and wondered if she had the courage to actually read them. She sensed that opening the envelopes meant opening up old wounds from the past. While she'd been wrestling with some feelings from long ago, she hadn't actually reexperienced the horrifying pain of losing Dylan. She wasn't sure she could stand to feel all that again.

But there wasn't a choice. She had to know what had happened. So she undressed and put her clothes away, pulled on an oversize T-shirt, then picked up the letters and crawled into bed.

The lamp from the nightstand cast a warm glow on the small room. As the only female ranch hand,
she had private quarters behind the kitchen. The room wasn't big, barely ten by ten, with a single bed, small dresser and a closet. But it was all she really needed. Life had taught her to travel light.

Tonight she was grateful for the confined space. She didn't have to worry about unexplained shadows or sudden sounds. Tonight, with her knees pulled up to her chest and the quilt her mother made warming her bare legs, she could risk going back to a time she hadn't been sure she would survive.

She flipped through the letters, glancing at the postmark. The first one sent was on top, the last on the bottom. Drawing in a deep breath for courage, she opened the first envelope.

The letter was two pages long, the white paper covered with Dylan's familiar scrawl. She'd always loved his casual handwriting, black ink only. Despite her apprehension, she smiled, remembering how no one else had been able to decipher his notes, but she'd had no trouble reading them. Maybe because she'd had no trouble reading the man.

There was a blank space on the page. Without wanting to, Sierra could imagine Dylan staring into space, trying to figure out what to tell her, searching for the right collection of words to make her believe. She found herself hoping he would be able to do that. Even if the understanding came ten years late, she still wanted to know what had happened, and to finally be convinced that he hadn't betrayed her. At least not on purpose.

Several lines were scratched out. Sierra held the pages to the light and tried to read them, but she couldn't. A lump formed in her throat. She told herself he wasn't going to make her cry—not again. But she knew she was wrong.

The words were a knife to her heart. Sierra wasn't sure why. Rory was living proof that Claire
and Dylan had indeed slept together. She knew that. And yet it was so awful to see it in writing. She supposed that in her heart she'd always wanted there to be another explanation.

She reread the few lines detailing what had happened and Dylan's claim that he didn't remember what they'd done. His lack of memory was a small and cold comfort.

The ache in her belly made her pull her knees closer to her chest, but it didn't help the pain at all. A thousand questions swirled through her head. What
had really happened that night? How had Claire seduced Dylan? Sierra was sure it was seduction. They might have been young, but Dylan had loved her with every fiber of his being. He wouldn't have knowingly betrayed her. She hadn't believed that at the time, but she did now.

She leaned her head back against her pillows and thought about those awful days. The fight they'd had, his date with Claire, his promises the next morning that everything was going to be fine between them. Then, less than a month later, the news that he was marrying Claire.

She folded the first letter and returned it to the envelope, then opened the second. The familiar handwriting made her eyes burn with unshed tears. She blinked them away, refusing to give into the weakness.

It was dated nearly a month after the first letter. In the beginning paragraphs, Dylan told her how much he loved her and missed her.

Sierra closed her eyes. She couldn't bear to read anymore. If Claire had tricked Dylan… But she hadn't. Rory was his son. He had custody and was raising him. He wouldn't do that if the boy wasn't his.

She read the rest of the letter. Dylan still swore he loved her and couldn't stop thinking about her.
He begged her to write him back. The silence was killing him. Couldn't they at least be friends?

That made her smile bitterly. No, they couldn't have been friends, not after all they'd meant to each other. She could have loved him, or hated him, or tried to forget him, but she couldn't have survived having contact with him.

The third and fourth letters were more of the same. His confusion about his lack of memory with Claire. His growing belief that there was another man in Claire's life. His distressing conviction that the child she carried wasn't his. He begged her to write him back, to tell him what was going on. He couldn't believe she'd forgotten him so easily.

Sierra picked up the last letter and tried to read the postmark. The small numbers blurred and she realized she was crying. She wiped her face impatiently and cleared her throat.

“I'm not going to lose it,” she said aloud. “Not after all this time.”

But it was so hard. All those old feelings overwhelmed her. She'd never loved anyone but Dylan and it was painful to read about his life with Claire. Maybe Kirk had been wrong to keep the letters from her, but right now she was grateful to have ten years between these words and herself. Back then, she would have written Dylan back. If he'd asked her to meet him, she would have gone. They were too much
in love to have denied each other, and they would have found themselves in a very ugly situation.

She opened the fifth letter.

A sob caught at her throat and tears spilled from her eyes. Sierra clutched the letter to her chest and cried for all they'd lost. For a love that had been tested, and never died. For either of them.

 

She waited until dawn before driving to Dylan's ranch. About three-thirty, she'd given up trying to sleep and had sat on the porch awaiting the sunrise.

She tried to close her door quietly, but the sound was still loud in the still morning. She leaned against the hood, not sure what time he woke up, or if she should even be here at all. What was she going to say to him? That knowing the truth made a difference? Did it? The past couldn't be changed, but what about their future? Did they have one? Could she risk that?

A light clicked on in the kitchen. Sierra walked toward the back door. Through the half-open curtains, she could see Dylan moving around, filling the coffeepot and flipping the switch. He wore jeans
and nothing else. His body was still beautiful—broad and strong with honed muscles.

She wasn't sure how long she stood there, watching, wondering what she was going to say to him. At last she gathered her courage and knocked on the back door.

He opened it and stared at her. A welcoming smile pulled at his lips. “I didn't expect you this early.”

“But you did expect me?”

He stepped back, inviting her in. “I hoped you would want to talk to me after you read the letters.”

She moved into the kitchen. “How long have you known Kirk kept them from me?”

The coffeepot sputtered. He pulled down two mugs from a cupboard and poured them each a cup. When he handed her one, he motioned to the kitchen table. She sank into one of the chairs and cradled the mug in her hands.

He took the seat across from her. “I always wondered why you didn't answer. After a couple of years I got to thinking that maybe you hadn't received the letters. You might have been home to receive the first one, but you were on the rodeo circuit for the rest so it would have been easy for someone to intercept them. Kirk was a logical suspect.” He took a sip of coffee.

“When I first showed up last month, he confronted me,” he continued. “Said something about you not being interested in me. That if you had been, you
would have answered my letters. When I asked him how he knew about them, the look on his face confirmed what I'd been thinking.”

She'd come here because she hadn't had a choice, but now that she was here, she wasn't sure what to say. She studied his familiar face. Stubble darkened his cheeks, emphasizing the stubborn strength of his jaw and the tempting curves of his mouth.

“Is Rory yours?” she asked.

Dylan ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. “No,” he said at last. “When he was born, I had the doctors do a blood test. There's no way he's mine.” He shrugged and looked at her. “I was going to walk out on her. I figured I'd give her a couple of weeks to get on her feet, then I'd leave and come find you.”

“What happened to change your mind?”

His lips turned up at the corner. “I made one mistake. I held him. Claire didn't want to breast-feed, so while she and Rory were still in the hospital, I had one of the nurses show me how to bottle-feed him. It just took one time.” His gaze shifted to the window and he stared at memories she could only imagine. “He fell asleep in my arms and I realized I couldn't walk away from him. Once Claire figured that out, she used Rory to keep me. It worked.”