Sugar Springs Read online

  If the guilt wasn’t bad enough before, it certainly was now. Why had she ever believed her sister?

  As if the phone were a lifeline, she reached out and snatched it up before it went silent once more. She turned her attention to the caller, discussing appointment options, then brought up her calendar to book them into a slot in the coming week. All the while she kept an eye on Cody. He’d moved away from the desk and now edged around the room until he stopped at her back wall, arms crossed tight, broad shoulders taking up way too much space. He stood studying the black and whites arranged there. They were her favorites.

  When she was finished with the customer, she quietly hung up the phone and simply watched Cody from across the room. She sensed the aura of protective distance that he’d once been a master at putting between himself and everyone else. It hadn’t been there the other times their paths had crossed this last week. At least not as strongly as it was today. It amazed her that it still existed. Probably it had shown up today because he was hurting over all he’d missed out on. The guilt over that ate at her, while at the same time the seventeen-year-old who’d had her heart crushed wanted to stomp her foot and childishly tell him he’d gotten what he deserved.

  But he didn’t—he hadn’t deserved this. She knew that. No matter how they’d ended, he’d had a right to know about his children. If she’d had any real clue he hadn’t dismissed them as callously as Stephanie said, she would have continued looking for him.

  “This is from Roy and Pearl’s.” Cody pointed to the shot taken at his foster parents’ farm four years ago and glanced back at her. His features weren’t friendly, but at least he no longer looked as if he wanted to snap her in two. “I recognize the tree.”

  She nodded. The unique knot in the side of the elm was the reason she’d wanted that angle. “They purchased the most beautiful mare a few years ago. She wasn’t quite as white as the photo makes it seem, but I liked the contrast, so I developed it to come out that way.”

  She wondered if he realized both of his foster parents had passed away.

  “It’s impressive.” He faced the wall again. “You still develop from film instead of using digital, then?”

  “Only the black and whites.” They were what she enjoyed most. There was a magic about seeing them come to life beneath her hands that she loved.

  She stood and moved closer to him. They’d once been the best of friends, and though she didn’t want to be, she was as drawn to the haunting pain clinging to him as much today as she’d been the first day they’d met. He was a man who’d been hurt many times over in his life, and she hated that she’d added to it.

  “I’m sorry you had to find out about them the way you did.”

  His jaw jerked.

  She tried again. “When I realized you didn’t know—”

  “You lied and told me you’d been pregnant before I left town.”

  Well, there was that. But no, that wasn’t quite how it had gone down, either. Discussing all this in the middle of her studio, though, was making her uncomfortable. It felt too personal. This was her private space, and she found she wanted him out of it.

  “I know I can never make up for the lost years, Cody, but I promise to do my best to explain everything.” She turned away from him and headed across the room. “But we’ll do it in the house.”

  He’d always been able to see too much under the surface when they argued. Having him standing there now, staring at her pictures, made her feel like he was seeing a part of her she didn’t share with others. She didn’t like it.

  “You never wanted to do portraits.” The words were spoken quietly behind her just as she reached the door.

  She paused, unsure how to reply and unwilling to answer his unspoken question. Yes, she’d settled. She hadn’t gone after all she’d wanted. But she hadn’t had a choice. Without facing him, she gave him the only answer she could. “I’ve found I’m quite good at portraits.”

  Without another word, she entered the house through the connecting door. They were there to discuss their kids. Discussing her or her photography was off-limits.

  Cody watched Lee Ann retreat to the house, and for just a second considered turning around and heading back out the door he’d come through. After he’d exhausted both himself and Boss the night before with an arduous run, which had not done the job of lowering his anger at all, he’d spent the better part of the evening stewing. She’d kept the knowledge that he had two kids from him for years. Until he’d walked in there today and started the conversation, though, he hadn’t really thought about the fact that he had two kids.

  How could he have skipped that fact?

  He had two kids.

  The very idea overwhelmed him to the point that he feared he was about to experience his first panic attack. How had he come to be the guy who had not only not been there for his kids, but also had no idea if he even wanted to be there for them now?

  Of course he would be. Financially at least. That was the right thing to do. And sure, he’d like to know them. They seemed like good kids.

  But do everyday things? Be a dad?

  The thought brought a taste of sourness to this throat. He had no idea how to even begin such a thing.

  He shook his head as he got his feet moving across the room to follow the perfectly tucked-in pink shirt that had now disappeared from view. He had no idea how to even go about being there for the girls daily. He never lived in the same place for more than a few months. How was he supposed to work two teenagers into that lifestyle?

  As he stepped inside the living room, he took in the changes and wondered if Lee Ann still lived there with her mother. He assumed so, given the fact it had been Reba’s house when he’d last been there.

  The wall color had been updated to a light brown in both this room and the connecting den. The furniture was newer but not new, replacing the older versions he’d grown used to during the months he’d spent hanging out with Lee Ann, and the overall feel was one of calming comfort and order. Either Reba no longer lived there or if she did, Lee Ann ran the household. Because it definitely had more of a feel of Lee Ann now than of her mother.

  He inhaled, filling his head with the lemony-clean scent of the room, and slowly blew the breath out. A dull headache began behind his eyes. He’d never wanted kids. Hadn’t even given thought to having any. Ever. Yet he had two.

  He would have doubted he was their father if he hadn’t seen the same things Lee Ann had pointed out. The girls did look like him, exactly as she’d said. And that disturbed him in a whole new way.

  There weren’t enough similarities for others to have noticed, and they weren’t likely to now since he’d only been in Sugar Springs for a year before, and apparently no one else knew of his actions with Stephanie. But the similarities were there nonetheless. He’d seen them before he’d even let himself recognize the fact.

  Anger suddenly blazed again, though he couldn’t quite pinpoint the root cause. Stephanie? Lee Ann? Him? Any one of the past foster parents in his life who’d helped shape him?

  No, not the foster parents. They’d merely given him a valuable education at a young age. Don’t rely on the idea of family. It never existed quite like you wanted.

  Only Lee Ann had made a family with her kids.

  His kids.

  And once again he didn’t fit in there, either.

  He blew out another breath as he fought to get his emotions under control.

  Lee Ann continued into the den without saying another word. He closed the door to the studio behind him and followed. She stood with her profile to him, and as he stepped across the threshold, the bottom dropped out of his world. There was a small lifetime of pictures lined up across the front wall of the room.

  He scanned the photos marching along each frame before landing on the last one. Candy and Kendra, happy and smiling out at the world, stood slightly behind, and to either side of, Lee Ann. Once again he had the urge to walk out of the house and never look back. They were happ
y. His being there would mess things up.

  Lee Ann waited patiently in front of the first one. He ripped his gaze from the most recent photo and moved closer to her, his jaw clenched so tight he wouldn’t have been surprised to feel a tooth break. In front of him now were two tiny babies, with pink blankets and white stocking caps, being held in Lee Ann’s arms. Red faces squinted out in utter disgust at the world while Lee Ann smiled as if she’d just been given the best present of her life.

  “This was a few days after they were born,” she said. “They were so tiny I didn’t get to hold them for a couple days, but they were very healthy. We got to bring them home when they were less than a week old.”

  His pulse pounded in the side of his neck. “Was that before or after Stephanie died?”

  She closed her eyes for a moment so brief he wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been watching her intently. “They came home on Christmas Day, the day before she died.”

  He waited, wanting to hear more, but not quite sure what to ask.

  “She never held them.” Her voice was soft, and it sounded so lost. She stared at the portrait. “She’d announced as we went to the hospital the morning they were born that she was heading back to Nashville just as soon as she recovered, and that either Mom or I could keep them, or she would put them up for adoption.”

  The thought shouldn’t have shocked him, but it did. Thank goodness they hadn’t had to spend time bouncing from family to family like he had.

  “Once they cut her open for delivery, they discovered the cancer,” Lee Ann continued. “This made things even more...uncomfortable between us. She was angry and scared, and to the day she died, I think she hated me.”

  “Why?” He took a half step closer to her, but stopped himself. He couldn’t comfort her. He didn’t want to imply that he was there for any reason other than to find out about the girls, no matter how much he found himself wanting to reach out and attempt to take some of the pain from her. She seemed so fragile standing there. “I never understood why she’d done what she had—why she would hate you so much.”

  She crossed her arms over each other and cupped her elbows. “Because I was the reason our dad left. For the pregnancy, though, she blamed me for having you as a boyfriend to begin with. Stupid, I know, but she claimed she wouldn’t have been tempted to have sex with you if you hadn’t been around to begin with. Therefore, it was also my fault they didn’t find the cancer until it was too late. She said I killed her.”

  “Wow.” And he thought he had issues. But that certainly sounded like something the self-centered girl he’d known for all of sixty minutes would have said.

  Tired of fighting the urge to comfort her, he reached out and ran the backs of his fingers down the outside of Lee Ann’s arm. She tensed at first but then relaxed. He lingered on her skin for a few seconds longer, then pulled his hand away before being tempted to do more.

  “You know that’s not the truth, right?” he asked. “I’m not trying to shed any of the blame, but she wasn’t a good person, Lee. She was out to hurt you that day. It sounds like she went to her grave wanting nothing but the same.”

  She nodded. “I know. I never could get her to like me. I know I was too much trouble when I was little, but I was only four when he left. I didn’t mean to be so difficult.”

  Her fragility was almost too much for him to bear. He reached out his hand again, but she shifted away, and he dropped it. The urge to take her in his arms was as strong as the desire to uncover how he’d come to have two kids he knew nothing about.

  “To find out that I let her parting shot hurt all of us the way I did...” The words trailed off as she shook her head. All the fight seemed to drain out of her. “I have no idea why I fell for her lies. I feel so bad about that.”

  Quite likely because it was the easier thing to do, he thought. Her easy acceptance of Stephanie’s lies still angered him, but he couldn’t say he wouldn’t have done the same thing if their situations had been reversed.

  “This is when they were one,” Lee Ann said as she returned their attention to the photos and shuffled a step down the wall. She brought a hand up and it hovered slightly beside her face, as if it had no idea where it should land. She then turned and looked at a nearby bookshelf. “I have more in albums that I can show you later. Hanging in here, though, I only have pictures taken from each of their birthdays.”

  Cody scanned each frame again. The anger he’d shown up with had been replaced with something else. It was a pain of a different kind, but this one didn’t upset him so much as make him uncomfortable. Every picture other than the first contained three wide smiles and shining eyes. “They’re all of the three of you. Yearly family portraits?”

  She nodded. “They’d lost their mother and I’d been told their father wanted nothing to do with them. I decided to make certain they could one day look back on their lives and know they had a parent who loved them no matter what.”

  “That’s what she said, then? That I wanted nothing to do with them?”

  The blue of her eyes appeared dull as she glanced sideways at him. “Said she called you from the hospital the day they were born and told you all about her sickness and where they were. According to her, you weren’t interested.”

  “And you just believed—”

  Lee Ann held up her hand as if to stop his words. “I don’t know why I did, but yes, Mother and I both believed her. The way you’d left town...” She gave an apologetic shrug. “It made sense at the time.”

  “Except you knew me. You knew I wouldn’t just walk away from something like that.”

  “Yet that’s exactly what you did.” Her voice rose as she turned to face him. “When I came home and found you and Stephanie that day, you didn’t even stick around long enough to try to explain things to me. You just left. And you never came back again.”

  As Cody watched her, she turned away and fiddled with a cup of pencils on the corner desk, and he got it. She was right. That is exactly what he’d done. Why would she think he’d come back months later just because there were now kids involved. Hell, for most people that would ensure they didn’t come back.

  He thought back to that day with Stephanie and understood how hard the months following must have been for Lee Ann. It was bad enough that he’d allowed his crappy day along with Stephanie’s taunts to let him accept what she offered, but as soon as the physical act had ended, he’d known in an instant that he’d been used. Just as everyone else in his life had used him.

  The second he’d pulled away, with Stephanie laughing about how fun it would be to see Lee Ann’s face when she told her, he knew he’d made the biggest mistake possible. A mistake that would destroy the only person who’d ever looked deeply enough to see the real him.

  Maybe what he and Lee Ann had back then hadn’t been perfect, and maybe it wouldn’t have worked long-term—who knew?—but he couldn’t have loved her more at the time. He’d known this as surely as he’d known he was not the man for her.

  She’d deserved better.

  So he’d left.

  “She told me you said there was a perfectly good foster care system that would take them.”

  He reared back as if she’d just slammed a two-by-four into his head. “Foster care?”

  She faced him, and he couldn’t utter another word. Did she think he’d said that? That he would be so unfeeling as to toss his kids to the same system that had placed him in homes he’d continually had to run away from? Not a one had done anything for him. They’d seen him purely as a means to an end. Take care of the other kids, do the household chores, be a punching bag. Whatever they’d wanted, it hadn’t been a kid.

  Her top lip slid between her teeth, and he shook his head. “No, Lee Ann. Of course I wouldn’t—”

  “I know,” she whispered. “I should have known then, but I was so hurt. Everything somehow just made sense. I’m so sorry.”

  He finally reached for her and wrapped his arms around her before she could get away.


  Surprisingly, she immediately fit herself to him. They stood together, him stroking her short hair, she with her face buried in his chest for several minutes as he thought back over earlier times. The night he’d realized he wanted more than friendship from her, he’d opened his soul for the one and only time and shared the beatings, the desertions, and told her how he’d often been nothing more than hired-out child labor.

  He’d told her in the hope she’d someday trust him enough to let him be more. He’d needed her so badly. He’d needed to believe in what the idea of the two of them together offered. Given how much closer they’d grown after that night, she should have known he would never voluntarily send anyone to...

  His thoughts froze. Bile rose, continuing until it burned his nostrils, as memories fought to the front of his mind. His breathing picked up.

  Stephanie laughing.

  Lee Ann walking in and finding him fastening his jeans.

  Her destroyed gaze locking on him, her jaw quivering, before she disappeared from the room without a word.

  He’d stomped to the front door and yanked it open as Stephanie’s taunts hit him like ice water between the shoulder blades.

  “What if you just got me pregnant, Cody? You will do the right thing, won’t you? Marry me and make an honest woman out of me?”

  Pregnant? He faced her, disgust pulling him under. “There is no way you’re not on the pill.”

  Her bottom lip pouted out. “You know times are tough. I’m trying to make it in the country-music business. I can’t afford luxuries like the pill.”

  She was lying. She had to be. No way he could have just gotten her pregnant. He stalked across the room, leaned down into her deceitful face and spit out, “If you managed to just get yourself pregnant, I happen to know firsthand there’s a perfectly good foster care system that would be more than willing to take the bastard.”

  Oh. God.

  He released Lee Ann and pressed the back of his hand to his mouth to keep the frustration from boiling out. That was not what he’d meant. He hadn’t believed for a second she was stupid enough to seduce him when she wasn’t protected.