Page 544 of Summer Heat
“Why are you telling me this?” he asked. His voice was flat.
Tamara swallowed. “Lance, Cody is your son.”
He closed his eyes. Even though he’d expected the words, the actual spoken sound of them was shattering. Before she said them aloud, his life was as it always had been. After they marked the air, everything was irrevocably changed. His whole life shifted.
Everything.
He couldn’t look at her. “Why didn’t you tell me before this?”
“I—” she began. The pause lasted so long, he finally had to look at her, hard, to make her tell him. She met his gaze without flinching. “I honestly don’t know.”
“So why did you pick this morning to tell me?”
Her lids fluttered down over her eyes, hiding her expression. “Because it wasn’t fair not to tell you.”
“But why now, Tamara?” Anger, pure and hot and unfocused, welled in him. “Why this morning, when you know it’s going to change everything that happened last night? Why now?” He stood up so quickly, the chair tumbled backward. He caught it before it fell to the ground.
“I don’t know!” she cried. “I honestly don’t. I haven’t ever thought clearly about any of it. I took Cody because I loved him, and I thought you were so terrible for such a long time, but now—”
There was such misery in her voice that he felt his anger seep away as quickly as it had come. “But now?”
She took a breath and blew it out, and met his gaze. “Now I know you. And it isn’t fair that you’ve been deprived all these years.”
No, it wasn’t. But he didn’t feel anything. Why was that? He couldn’t feel anything except a howling sort of pain that had no roots or direction. Why did it hurt? And what hurt, exactly? That she hadn’t trusted him? That she had saved it for this morning, then used it like a wedge to keep distance between them, when all he wanted was to get close again?
All of it.
“Damn her to hell and back,” Lance said, finding a focus for his anger as Valerie came to mind. “Why didn’t she let me know? She knew where I worked in Houston. She knew my folks. Was she just going to hide it forever?”
Tamara shook her head sadly. “On that level, you should be thankful. She got…well…pretty bad toward the end. Pregnancy seemed to make her worse. And after Cody was born, she just wasn’t in her right mind ever again.”
“Meaning she blamed me, that she planned to extract revenge,” he guessed. “Am I right?”
“Yes,” Tamara said quietly. “She really hated you. And I…I guess I blamed you, too. For a long time.”
“Do you blame me now?”
She raised her face. “No.”
Numbly he walked toward the back door and watched Cody romp in the snow, a blue bundle of stuffing. Your son. Lance remembered the night when he’d thought of Tyler, and how much Cody resembled him. And the night at the carnival, when everyone had made such a big deal about how much Curtis and Cody looked alike.
No wonder.
But he didn’t feel a big swell of fatherhood come over him. He didn’t feel immediate, fulsome love for the boy. He’d been fond of Cody since he’d met him—he was bright and sweet and adorable.
He turned to Tamara. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel right now.”
Her smile was kind. “There aren’t any rules, Lance. And I didn’t tell you so you’d have make some big decision right now.” She sounded stronger now, clearer. “It’s very important to me that you don’t feel obligated to do anything. I just wanted you to know.”
He made an impatient noise. “How can you expect that I wouldn’t feel obligated? Especially when I’ve hated how you had to struggle. It really doesn’t seem fair that you’ve carried this load all this time, and he’s not even your child.”
“Oh, but he is my child,” she said. “I was there the day he was born, and I haven’t been away from him for a day since. I’m the only mother he’s ever known.” She swallowed. “Don’t take him away from me.”
And at last the fog cleared—or a little of it, anyway. Enough that it finally penetrated how frightened she was, how much it had cost her to tell him all this. He crossed the room in an instant and knelt before her.
He took her small, work-worn hands in his own and kissed each one gently. A wave of emotion—something hot and jumbled and powerful—filled his throat, and he couldn’t speak. He thought of her giving up all her dreams to come home to Red Creek and take care of his son. He thought of her poring over the hated accounting texts and working in the bar to make ends meet—because she loved Cody. “You’re such a good mother, Tamara. I would never take him.”
He bent his head and put his brow against her hands. “You sacrificed so much, I can’t stand to think of it.”
