Sugar Springs (9 page)

Eyebrows arched over his dark eyes as he continued to study her. “And the twins?” His tone was harder than she expected. “Did you have them hidden away somewhere fourteen years ago, too?”

He always had gotten right to the point. It used to be one of the things she liked about him. “I thought you wanted to apologize.”

“I wanted to do that alone.” He nodded at Joanie. “You seem to have a problem being alone with me. I figured we’d get the other issue out of the way.”

Indignation flared, heating her from the chest up. “Candy and Kendra are
not
issues.”

“Whoa.” He held his hands out in front of him. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to hit on a sore spot. And I didn’t mean to imply they are
issues
per se. I was merely wondering about them. They’ve got to be, what? Twelve at least? You must have gotten pregnant soon after I left.”

Both she and Joanie turned their heads to gape at the man. Literally, jaws hanging open, eyes bulging. He really did not know they were his kids. How could that be possible?

“What?” he asked.

Instead of answering, she and Joanie faced each other. Oh, geez, this meant she was going to have to tell him. Didn’t change the fact he was still the jerk who hadn’t wanted his kids, but she had to at least let him know who they were. Didn’t she?

The slight tinkling of a bell indicated that someone else had opened the front door.

“Did ya’ll know there’s a giant dog on the sidewalk out here?” Melinda O’Neil, heir to half the property within the city limits, asked before gingerly stepping over the animal and entering the salon.

Under her breath Lee Ann murmured, “Does no one understand what a ‘Closed’ sign means these days?”

“I think he belongs to Cody Dalton,” Melinda continued. “But I don’t see him out there anywhere.”

Joanie snared both Lee Ann and Cody in a look before motioning to the door in the corner. “Feel free to use my office for your conversation. It’s a few years overdue.” She rose. “I’ll see what Melinda needs.”

Before they could make their escape, Melinda sauntered toward the back, where Lee Ann remained seated. “I knew I’d find you here today, Lee Ann. You always head this way when you’re stressed. And with Cody back, looking hotter than ever, I knew you’d be stressed. I wanted...”

When she finally caught sight of Cody sitting there, her entire posture changed. Shoulders pulled back, stomach sucked in, and breasts lifted. What was it about the entire population of single women in this town? A fresh face showed up and they immediately went into man-hunting mode.

Cody stood and held out a hand. “Cody Dalton.” He dipped his head as he introduced himself, brushing his lips across the back of her hand as if he were some honorable cowboy.

Melinda giggled. “I know who you are, Mr. Dalton. The infamous bad boy of Sugar Springs.” Melinda batted her fake eyelashes at him, and he graced her with one of his purely evil grins. “I may have been three years younger than you the last
time you were here, but I wasn’t too young to pay attention. I had one of the biggest crushes of anybody.”

Lee Ann wanted to jam her finger down her throat and throw up on the both of them. She sidled out of her chair and duckwalked to the office as Cody and Melinda continued oohing and aahing over each other. “I’ll be back here whenever you can pull yourself away.”

Before Lee Ann fully stepped into the other room, Melinda waved a hand in her direction but didn’t shift her gaze from Cody. “I just needed to tell you, Lee Ann, the central unit finally went out at the Fish and Game Club, and Daddy isn’t replacing it until spring.”

“Not replacing it?” That was where the twins’ big “I’m a teenager now” birthday bash was going to be held. “It’ll be too cold in there without it.”

Melinda shook her head and finally focused on Lee Ann. “He refuses to pay jacked-up seasonal prices for a new unit when there’s a perfectly good stove and a whole stack of wood to keep the place warm. You’ve still got almost four weeks before the girls’ birthday, so I thought I should warn you in case you prefer to find another location for their party.”

Right. Like another one existed. But she also didn’t want to deal with stoking a fire all night long, either. After she asked Melinda to go ahead and hold the reservation while she checked around, her brain finally registered the rage tightening Cody’s body. And then she realized what had been said. And what that implied.

With three large steps, Cody loomed directly in front of her, leaving a dazed Melinda to gawk at his backside. Under his breath, he asked, “Their birthday is in December?”

Lee Ann couldn’t breathe. She nodded.

“I left at the end of April.”

Nod.

Once-warm brown eyes now burned with anger. “So you were already a month pregnant with
someone else’s
baby before I left town?”

If anyone had asked her a week ago if she was about to change her ways and begin lying on a regular basis, she would have sworn they were insane. She valued honesty. It was a priority she worked hard at every day to instill in her kids as well.

Yet now, not only had she lied to get out of the diner early not once but twice, she found herself opening her mouth to tell another one. A huge one! And it wasn’t as if this was even a lie she was likely to be able to keep up for very long. But her sense of survival saw this as an opening and screamed to her that if she could get him to believe this one tiny thing, then she might have just found a way to keep from having to let him into their lives.

She took a deep breath and stared straight into his eyes. “Yes.” She spoke quietly so no one else could hear. “I was pregnant before you left town.”

Without hesitation, Cody closed his hand around Lee Ann’s slim arm and hauled her into the room, slamming the door behind them. He was hard pressed to explain his ire over something that happened more than a decade ago, but he couldn’t control the anger flooding him. Realizing he still held Lee Ann, he released her. She moved silently across the room until the desk stood between them.

“Care to explain?”

She stuck her nose in the air. “I have nothing to explain.”

“Nothing?” he roared and stepped up to the desk, bracing his hands on the hard surface. “I’ve spent over thirteen years—”

“Lower your voice, please.” She spoke as calmly as if she were taking his order at the diner.

He didn’t wish to share their conversation with either Melinda or Joanie, so he backed off and forced himself to do as she asked. He inhaled through his nose and started again. “I’ve spent over thirteen years feeling like a dog because I slept with Stephanie, and when I come to apologize, I find out you had already done the same thing to me.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it. She seemed to fight with herself about what to say, then rubbed the spot on her arm where he’d grabbed her. Finally, she spoke very softly. “I can’t take the blame for you feeling bad all that time. If you’d talked to me before you left, maybe...”

Maybe what? Maybe she would have said, “It’s okay, Cody. I changed my mind anyway and decided I didn’t want to wait until prom to give you my virginity. I gave it to some other loser.” Maybe she’d even sent Stephanie to sleep with him so she wouldn’t have to be the one to break it off. A sound as loud as a train roared through his head. He gritted his teeth as he spoke. “Maybe what?” he asked.

She gulped and stood stiff for a couple seconds, her wide eyes focused on him. Finally, her shoulders slumped with defeat. “I don’t know.”

He barked a laugh. “You don’t know? That’s all you’ve got to say?” He turned and braced his hands on the doorframe, needing to get away. She wasn’t anything like he’d always thought.

Young and innocent. That’s what he’d once believed. Sweet. Perfect. Too good for him.

When he’d been sent to Sugar Springs, she’d refused to accept him for the wild boy everyone else had known him to be. And he’d been surprised to find that for her he’d wanted to be different. Better.

After their friendship had grown over the winter months, they’d decided to pursue a real relationship and had anticipated making the ultimate commitment on prom night. But there was more to it than that. She’d grown to be his friend. His best friend. The one who’d believed in him no matter how many of the stories from his past he’d shared with her.

Then Stephanie had come home. Beautiful, worldly, and a woman on a mission to seduce. He’d learned ugly truths earlier in the day and had been hurting, apparently enough to let down his defenses. He shook his head, still shocked at what he’d done. He had no excuses. Bad news and feeling sorry for himself were no reasons to destroy the girl he’d dared dream with. The girl he’d dared love.

Even though he’d eventually turned his back on her, he’d truly thought he and Lee Ann had something special, something real. To discover she’d been no better than him was more than he could handle. Facing her, he had a hard time seeing the girl he’d once put up on a pedestal. Right now, even drawn in on herself and appearing smaller than normal, all he saw was another sister who’d mowed down anyone and everything in her plight to think only of herself.

Yet he couldn’t just walk away without giving the apology he’d come to deliver. Whether she deserved to hear it or not, he needed to say it. Once done, no reason would exist to have anything to do with her again. No matter how much he might want to.

He glared over her shoulder just to keep from looking at her, and his gaze landed on the calendar hanging on the wall.
The pages hadn’t been ripped off in three months. Tension eased from his shoulders. Joanie was still the same.

He swiped his hand across his face, then stared up at the ceiling. “I can’t do it.” Shifting his gaze, he eyed Lee Ann and thought he caught her eyes glistening before she focused on the floor. “I need to apologize, Lee Ann. I need to clear my own conscience, but you wouldn’t believe how much finding this out hurts, even after all this time.”

Her eyelids fluttered up, and he’d been right. Tears. She chewed on her top lip before speaking so softly he could barely hear her. “You seriously think I can’t understand how much it hurts?” Her bottom lip trembled. “You slept with my sister.”

“But you—”

“No.” She sliced her hand through the air. “What I did or didn’t do doesn’t matter right now. No matter what else happened, we were in
love
, Cody. At least I was. At the time I thought we were leaving together as soon as we graduated. And I fully expected”—her voice broke but she managed to hang on, her entire body taut—“I thought we would be together forever. And you
slept
with my
sister
.”

Fury webbed through him. How dare she pretend she’d loved...

A tiny tear bubbled up in the corner of her eye, stopping him cold. She tilted her chin up a fraction as if trying to keep it from falling. He didn’t understand. Not how she’d slept with someone else, nor even why he had, but he recognized the anguish in her eyes. It was his pain echoed back at him. No matter what else, his actions that day had truly crushed her.

Lowering his gaze, he took a deep breath. He was a dog. Whatever Lee Ann’s reasons for doing what she did, he’d still been the lowest form of scum that day. He lifted his head and
cleared all expression from his face. “You’re right. Of course you understand. And I owe you an explanation.”

She shrugged, touched a finger to the corner of her eye, and moved from behind the desk. “You don’t have to explain,” she said. “I know Stephanie seduced you. She told me that a couple days before she died.”

He slumped as the fight whooshed out of his body. “Stephanie’s dead?”

She gaped at him as she and Joanie had done earlier in the other room, and he felt as if he was missing something important.

“You didn’t know she was sick?” she asked.

“How would I? I left.” Then he frowned at her as a thought struck. Did she think he and her half sister had continued some sort of relationship after that day? “I never talked to her again, Lee Ann. I swear. Hell, I didn’t talk to her before or after. It was just that one afternoon. I couldn’t possibly have known she was sick.” He paused, not really interested in Stephanie, yet it felt strangely as if Lee Ann needed to talk about this. “When did she die?”

Blue eyes watched him guardedly as if waiting for him to expose a huge secret he’d been hiding. “Almost eight months after you left. She developed cancer.”

Damn
. “And they couldn’t do anything?”

She licked her lips and shook her head. “They found it too late.”

He took an automatic step forward, raising his hand to reach out to her, but she shifted backward until the back door stopped her.

“I’m so sorry.” He dropped his arm to his side. Her mother hadn’t been the best at nurturing or handling details, so he
had no doubt Lee Ann had been forced to handle everything herself. “I know you two weren’t close, but I’m sorry you had to go through that alone.”

“It was a long time ago.” Her voice came out strained. The threat of tears had disappeared, though.

She continued to stare at him, the oddest look crossing her face as if seeing him differently from how she had when he’d first walked into the building. He had no idea what caused the change but appreciated how the sharp edges seemed to soften.