CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MILA WAS TOO stunned to speak. Considering what she’d just been babbling on about, that wasn’t a bad thing. God, had she really just spilled the beans about her father?
Apparently so.
And she’d done it on the very day she should be talking about nothing but Sophie and the birth of her precious babies.
“Told you,” Belle mumbled to her.
It didn’t take long for Mila to make the connection between Valerie and the wrong woman prediction from Vita. A connection Mila dismissed as she did most of what Vita said. Normally, Belle and others dismissed it, too, so Mila wasn’t sure why Roman’s mother had latched on to this particular prediction as if it were a nugget of gold.
No reason except that it had seemingly come true.
“My mom came,” Tate said, smiling. No, not just smiling. Beaming. “She came.”
Mila wasn’t sure she’d ever seen him this happy, but he was the only one in the waiting room who apparently felt that way. One by one, they each stood and pinned their attention to her cousin.
It’d been years since Mila had seen Valerie, and yet the woman hadn’t aged a day. In fact, she looked younger. Her hair was blond now with copper and purple highlights, and she had it gathered in a bohemian-supermodel kind of ponytail. Even her tie-dyed shirt and jeans managed to look catwalk-ready.
“Of course I came,” Valerie said as if there’d never been any doubt she would. There had been plenty. “I wouldn’t miss seeing my boy, but when I got to the ranch, one of the hands told me you were here, that Sophie was having her baby. So, do you have a boy cousin or a girl cousin?”
“Both,” Tate proudly announced. He continued to keep his arms around Valerie as she came closer to them.
“Belle,” Valerie greeted her. She said her name as if she were the mother-in-law Valerie was so glad she didn’t have. She didn’t mention a word about Belle wearing a ball gown. “Billy Lee. Mila.” She barely spared her a glance and practically ran her name together with Billy Lee’s. “Garrett. And this must be your fiancée, Nicky. The ranch hand mentioned her, too. Congrats on your engagement.”
Garrett and Nicky were still mumbling a thanks when Valerie shifted her attention to Roman. “Still good-looking as ever. Did you know your daddy swept me off my feet when I wasn’t much older than you?” she asked Tate.
Tate shook his head. Probably because he knew very little about his mother. That’s because there was little that Roman and Mila could have told him about her that wasn’t bad.
Mila hoped her cousin had changed for the better. And if she hadn’t changed, maybe Valerie wouldn’t do any harm while she was here. Which brought Mila to her next question.
Just how long would Valerie be staying?
Considering the way Tate had latched on to her, he didn’t ever want her to leave, but Valerie might have a different notion about that.
Or not.
That was a hungry smile she aimed at Roman. When she shifted her attention to Mila, though, it was neither a smile nor a hunger. Mila didn’t think she was wrong that Valerie was questioning why she was there—at a Granger family event. Valerie would give Billy Lee a pass in that department since he was Sophie’s godfather.
Mila wondered if Valerie would even care that Billy Lee might be more than that to Mila. He might be her father.
Valerie shifted her finger back and forth between Mila and Roman. “So, are you two...together, or what?”
“That’s what I asked them,” Belle volunteered. “Except I spelled it out.” She tipped her head to Tate. “Didn’t want to say it in front of him.”
“Tate knows how to spell,” Roman said to Belle without even looking at her. “How long are you in Wrangler’s Creek?” Roman asked Valerie. He didn’t appear to be on the verge of answering Valerie’s question, but Mila knew the answer.
It was the or what.
What Roman and she had was not quite a relationship and with no promise that it ever would be. Still, Mila could feel her heart hanging on. Which made her stupid, of course, but then she’d always been a little bit stupid when it came to Roman.
Valerie smiled, gave Tate a squeeze with her arm around his shoulders. “I’ll stay as long as my boy needs me. And don’t worry. You won’t have to put me up at the ranch. Lick and I are staying at the inn just up the street. Room four.”
“Lick?” all but Tate said in unison. It sounded like the nickname of a rocker.
“He’s a friend.” Valerie aimed her answer at Tate even though he was the only one who hadn’t said anything. “You’ll love him, honey. Very cool guy. He’s the lead singer in a heavy metal band.”
Bingo. Mila hoped she wasn’t right about the other bad feelings she was getting from this.
“I didn’t bring him with me because I didn’t want to spring a bunch of introductions on him at once,” Valerie went on. “Sometimes, he gets anxious around new people. I know that sounds crazy, considering he performs in front of a crowd, but he says that’s different, that he doesn’t have to talk to them. And no, he won’t meditate, though I tell him it’ll help.”
Tate glanced away. Belle cleared her throat. Both were obviously remembering Arwen’s visit to Tate’s room, but Valerie didn’t seem to notice that she’d just brought up a touchy subject.
“Why don’t you come with me to the inn now, and you can meet him?” Valerie asked Tate.
Tate immediately looked at Roman. “Can I?”
Roman certainly didn’t jump to say yes, and Mila knew why. Lick might be an idiot. Or a male version of Valerie.
“Don’t you want to see the babies?” Roman asked him.
“Sure. But Uncle Garrett said it might not be for a while.”
He had indeed said that, but Mila knew Roman wished that Garrett hadn’t. “All right, you can go meet Lick. But I’m going with you.”
“Uh, probably not a good idea.” Valerie chuckled as if that was actually funny. “Lick is a little jealous, and once he sees you, those misplaced feelings will go up a notch.”
Great. A jealous musician boyfriend named Lick who disliked people. Nothing could go wrong with a combination like that.
“I can go with Tate and Valerie to the inn,” Mila offered. “After he’s met Lick, Tate and I will come back here.”
“Or better yet.” Billy Lee made a show of checking the time. He moved between Mila and Roman, slipping his arms around both of them. “I could use a bit of fresh air. Why don’t I walk over there with them because I know Sophie will want to see her best friend and brothers first chance she gets. Let me do this for you,” Billy Lee whispered to them.
Even though Roman trusted Billy Lee, he was probably wondering if he should allow the man to place himself in the middle of this. Still, Mila could see the exact moment that Roman gave in.
“Don’t be long,” Roman said to Tate.
Tate nodded, and there was a lot of enthusiasm in it. Billy Lee gave Roman what he no doubt hoped was a reassuring pat on the back. “I won’t let him out of my sight,” Billy Lee promised.
Roman followed the three to the door, and he stood there watching them for several moments. The inn wasn’t that far, and from his position he would have been able to keep his eyes on them until they actually went inside.
“You can come and see the twins now,” Clay called out to them. “They just moved them from the delivery room and into the nursery.”
Mila spotted Clay in the hall, and he was motioning toward him. He certainly didn’t look like a man who’d thrown up less than a half hour ago. He looked happy to the point of being giddy.
Unlike Roman.
Roman had to practically tear himself away from his Tate-watching before joining the group as they followed Clay. He was still wearing a green paper robe over his clothes that rustled when he kept motioning for them to follow him.
The hospital was old, built back in the fifties, and while some of it had been updated, the nursery still had a large glass window with the babies in clear bassinets. The room was large enough for a dozen or more infants, but right now there were only two.
“Uh, they’re wrinkly,” Garrett commented just as Nicky said, “Oh, they’re beautiful. Perfect, in fact.”
Mila was with both of them on this. They were wrinkly. Perfect, too.
“Meet Kyle and Katelyn McKinnon,” Clay proudly announced. “I can’t wait for my sister and her boys to see them. They’re on vacation right now but will be back tomorrow.”
His sister, April, and her twin boys had been the only family Clay had had until he married Sophie. Now, they had a set of twins of their own. Sophie and Clay were finally getting the lives they both wanted.
“When will we be able to see Sophie?” Belle asked. She had her face pressed right against the glass. “And when can I hold them? The one on the left looks like it needs burping.”
“That’s Kyle,” Clay provided. “You probably won’t be able to hold them until later tonight. They only want Sophie and me to do that for now. But you might be able to see Sophie soon. The doctor wants her to try to feed the babies first, and he said it wasn’t a good idea for family to be in there until Sophie’s gotten comfortable with nursing.”
“Hogwash,” Belle complained. “Sophie won’t mind me being with her for that.”
Oh, yes, she would, and this was where Mila could help. “It probably isn’t a good idea to hold the babies while you’re wearing that dress. You could trip on it or something. Why don’t you let me take you home to change, and then I can bring you back?”
After Sophie and Clay had had some alone time with their son and daughter.
Belle looked down at her dress, frowned. “I suppose you’re right. Billy Lee will want to change, too. That way people won’t wonder why we’re dressed like this.”
No, they wouldn’t. Probably everyone in town already knew about the fantasy date, but Mila didn’t bring that up.
“Why don’t you let Nicky and me take Mom to the ranch?” Garrett said. “Then we can all come back in an hour or so.” He put his arm around his mother to get her moving.
“The babies are so beautiful,” Nicky added as they left.
Clay left, too, when a nurse motioned for him to come into the nursery. He practically ran, and Roman and Mila waited and watched while the nurse had Clay sit in a rocking chair and she put one of the babies in his arms. It seemed a perfect moment. Private, too.
Roman must have felt the same way. “I’ll walk up the street and wait outside the inn.”
“I can go with you,” Mila offered.
“No.” He answered a little fast for it not to hurt some. “I need to talk to Valerie. Alone.”
* * *
ROMAN WAS STANDING so still and was so lost in thought that he nearly let Mrs. Abernathy’s Yorkie pee on his leg. Maybe the dog thought he was a statue or something, and it didn’t help that Mrs. Abernathy—who was a hundred if she was a day—had stopped, too, to look at what Roman was staring at.
The door to the Red Rooster Inn. Or Rooster’s as everyone called it.
“No, no, Toodles,” Mrs. Abernathy scolded the dog. “No tinkling on people.” It had already hiked up its hind leg and dribbled pee as she pulled him away from Roman. “The sign doesn’t change, you know,” she added to Roman.
It took him a moment to realize she was talking about the old pub-style sign that was dangling on chains outside the inn. It was of a red rooster, of course, and it was gazing, if roosters could indeed gaze, at a pair of hens in the distance.
“Once somebody painted the chicken eyes with glow-in-the-dark paint,” the woman went on. “It sort of changed then when you’d look at it from different angles. Made ’em look like aliens or zombies. But Alford had it repainted.”
Alford Crenshaw was the owner who lived in the back part of the inn, and the glow-in-the-dark paint story was plenty familiar because Roman had been the one who’d given the poultry glowing eyes. Like some other bad decisions that he’d made in his life, beer and encouragement from a friend had contributed to the prank. And the friend had been none other than Valerie.
When Toodles tried to pee on Roman’s boot again, Mrs. Abernathy gave another scolding and said something about it being time for her to start the walk home. She’d made it sound like a long journey, but her house was about twenty feet away.
Roman kept an eye on her to make sure she got there safely, but it was hard to pull his attention away from what was going on inside Rooster’s. More than anything he wanted to be in there. He doubted that Valerie and a guy who called himself Lick were careful about what they said to Tate, but maybe Billy Lee could head off trouble if he saw it coming. Then Roman could do what he always did after a Valerie-storm had moved through.
He’d pick up the pieces.
Repair things as best he could. Much as Alford Crenshaw had done to the rooster sign. But even now, after all these years, Roman could see bits of the glow-in-the-dark paint in the corner of the rooster’s eye. Valerie was like that. Always leaving shit behind.
He glanced up the street again and saw Mila coming out of the hospital and heading toward the parking lot. That probably meant she’d already gotten to have a visit with Sophie and was now going home. She didn’t look in his direction, and he’d like to think it was because she was in dreamy thought over seeing Sophie so happy, but Valerie’s arrival had no doubt shaken her.
And Roman hadn’t helped.
He’d dismissed her when she asked to come with him to the inn, but he’d had his reasons. For one thing, he had needed some time to think. Time to rein in his emotions so he didn’t say something stupid to Valerie, and he’d needed to figure out how to tell his ex that he was going to smother her in her sleep if she hurt Tate again. His son had been through enough and, coming on the heels of what could have been another suspension over the locker, Tate might be near the breaking point.
The minutes crawled by, and just when Roman thought he was going to need to text Billy Lee for an update, the front door of the inn finally opened. Tate came out first, shoulders slumped, his hands in his pockets.
Crap.
Something had gone wrong.
It hadn’t gone wrong, though, in Valerie’s mind, because when she came out, her arm was hooked through Billy Lee’s and she was laughing. “I told you Lick was fun,” she said. “But you know us creative types. We get cranky when we aren’t creating.”
Roman had no idea if Lick was truly creative, but he’d seen some of the stuff that Valerie called her art, and it looked like something done in a pre-K class. Still, she could consider herself an artist until the cows came home, but she couldn’t hurt Tate.
“Are you okay?” Roman asked Tate.
Tate shrugged, so Roman looked to Billy Lee for answers. “Lash wanted to work on his music.”
“Lick,” Valerie corrected with a giggle. She nudged Billy Lee in the ribs as if he were joking, but Lash might have been what the idiot had done to Tate, as in lash out.
“He said we had to go,” Tate added.
Valerie dismissed it with a wave of her hand. “He was just a little testy. And he didn’t mean it when he called you a brat. That’s a term of endearment for him.”
Maybe, but it was a term that had Roman seeing an even brighter shade of red than was on the rooster sign. Billy Lee picked up on it right away.
“I thought Tate and I could walk down to the hospital and see Sophie and the babies now,” Billy Lee suggested. “Then maybe I can drive Belle and him back to the ranch?”
Tate shrugged at that, but since he didn’t refuse any part of that offer, Roman gave a nod to Billy Lee. “Thanks.” He took hold of Tate’s arm when he started to walk off. “We’ll talk when I get home.”
Tate yawned. “Can it wait until tomorrow? I really do want to see the babies, and I’ve got a bunch of homework to do.”
It might be true, but it could be that something had just happened that Tate didn’t want to discuss. Fine. Then Roman would have a little chat about it with Valerie. At least she had the decency to drop the fake giggles and smiles once Tate and Billy Lee were out of earshot.
“You’re supposed to be here to help Tate,” Roman snarled. “Did the meeting with your boyfriend do that?”
“Don’t you lecture me.” She came down the steps. “I took time out of my busy life because you asked me to come. I came.”
Roman waited a moment to try to talk himself out of yelling. It worked, but he had to speak through clenched teeth. “Did that meeting with your boyfriend help or hurt Tate?”
Judging from her suddenly tight jaw, it was the latter. So, Roman had his answer. He pushed past her and went inside.
“Roman, don’t you dare say anything to him,” Valerie insisted. She was trying to keep a grip on his arm and hold him back.
It didn’t stop him. Roman went straight to room four, didn’t knock, and he threw open the door. The TV was blaring with some loud music, and there was a buff guy with stringy blond hair on the bed, a bottle of beer in his hand. He was wearing only a pair of boxers with pussies on them. Not of the cat variety, either.
“What the fuck do you want?” he grumbled to Roman. “First the brat and the old fart and now you?” He looked at Valerie. “Didn’t I tell you I was tired and didn’t want any more interruptions? It was bad enough I had to come to this cow-shit town with you, and now I have to put up with this asshole?”
Roman hadn’t been certain what he was going to do, but that clarified things for him. He went to Mr. Wonderful, dragged him off the bed and slammed him against the wall. Hard.
Lick might have muscles, but it was obvious from the puny punch he tried to throw at Roman that he’d gotten those muscles in a gym and hadn’t had an older brother who’d beaten the crap out of him.
Roman dodged the first punch, then a second one all the while Valerie was shouting for him to stop. He didn’t stop. When Lick tried to kick him in the balls, Roman slugged him in the gut. It had the intended effect. It knocked the breath out of him, and Lick quit fighting and cursing.
“If you call my son a brat again,” Roman warned him, “I’ll rip off your dick and shove it up your ass. Understand?”
Lick garbled out a few sounds and nodded.
“Lick didn’t mean it,” Valerie insisted. She was crying now and trying to pull him out of Roman’s grip.
Roman let go of Lick and turned to her. “And you will not let this dipshit anywhere near Tate again. You’ll go to a therapy session with Tate and do everything you can to help him. Understand?”
“You don’t have the right to talk to me that way!”
“Understand?” Roman yelled right in her face.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Lick come at him again. Roman was thankful for it. He had a lot of dangerous energy churning inside him, and he hadn’t known how he was going to burn it off.
Now, he knew.
When Lick raised his fist to hit him, Roman gave him an upper cut to the jaw that knocked him on his pussy-clad butt, and because he was pretty sure there wasn’t another point he needed to make, Roman walked out. Valerie didn’t follow him. She hurried to her piece-of-shit lover and started kissing, hugging and apologizing for what had just happened.
Roman figured he should be worried if Lick was going to take out his anger on Valerie, but his concern meter for her was at zero right now. Besides, if Alford heard a ruckus going on, he would call the cops. In fact, he probably already had, and Roman hoped like the devil that no one bugged Clay about this.
He started walking toward the hospital when he left the inn, and he figured by the time he got there, he would have calmed down some. He hadn’t. So, he kept on walking. He definitely didn’t want Sophie to see him like this. Nor Tate. In fact, there was only person he could risk seeing him right now.
Roman walked straight to Mila’s house.
It wasn’t far. Nothing in Wrangler’s Creek was, and when he saw her car in the driveway, he knew she was there. He went straight up the steps. Knocked. Then knocked again when she didn’t answer right away. A few seconds later, the door opened.
“Roman,” Mila said on a rise of breath.
He didn’t give her a chance to say anything else. Roman dragged her against him and kissed her.