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Great. Get in a tangle and first thing you want to do is talk to Mommy?
He could call Keller, but he was a working rancher, and it was late. He was also a newly engaged man, who had better things to do and was probably doing them if he was awake at this hour. And Chance was still off-limits under Mom’s orders; besides, he was still just finding his own way out of the darkness he’d been in for too long. Cody, well, he was pretty much clueless when it came to anything that wasn’t run through a computer.
No, a woman. That’s who he needed to talk to. A woman who’d understand, and maybe be able to explain this to him. Which brought him back to Mom.
He glanced at the phone he’d put on the nightstand beside his own empty, two-person bed. He could text her. Then if she was asleep, he wouldn’t disturb her, because he knew she had texts silenced at night, saying if it was that urgent they should just call.
But what the hell would he say?“Hey, Mom, Kaitlyn thinks I want her to pay me back for helping her with sex. Why?”
In the end, he picked up the phone and texted nearly that—without the mention of sex. She might be the smartest woman he’d ever known, but she was still his mother.
Her answer came back quickly enough that he knew he hadn’t awakened her. And it was so simple, so blindingly obvious he felt stupid for not having figured it out himself. He sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the exchange on the screen.
Why would Kaitlyn think she has to pay me back somehow for doing this?
Perhaps because she’s always had to pay, one way or another.
It was true. He knew it was, down deep, without having to think about it. Kaitlyn had paid for every step of her life, be it the addictions of her mother, the death of her father, or her generous spirit that led her to try and help both the one person in her life she still loved and the one who had wrought such destruction. She was still paying, and it was a steep price.
And it stung him beyond measure that she thought he was just another who would take from her. In a way he found particularly repugnant.
Obviously, you could just sail by on your looks.
Her words hammered in his brain once more. Even his father had seen it and had addressed it when he had officially become a teenager.
You’ve got that magic, son, that attracts people. When you get a little older it will attract women. A certain kind of man will use that as a weapon. Don’t ever become that kind of man.
His father had never been more serious than with that instruction. It had also been the last piece of advice he’d ever given him; he’d been killed on the next deployment.
He’d tried to live by that advice, but he was starting to wonder how often things had happened easily for him because of it, without him realizing it. Something he’d never thought much about until Kaitlyn, and seeing how she’d had to fight her entire life.
His parents had built a foundation so strong, so steady, that it had survived his shattering loss. Kaitlyn had had nothing after her father’s death except a heedless, self-centered mother who clearly had never been able to truly address her destructive illness. Who had left it to her daughter to deal with.
When it came right down to it, despite losing Dad so young, he’d been lucky. Because Mom was a rock and had held them all together, and then Keller had stepped into some very sizeable boots.
Kaitlyn had had nothing. Except, when she managed to survive to high school, Nick Vega.
They would take care of Nick—he would see to that. But that drive home to Last Stand was going to involve some discussion. He didn’t like those kinds of talks any more than the next guy, but this was a special case.
Kaitlyn was a special case.
That resolution made, he finally made use of the toothbrush the hotel provided, stripped and went to bed. And actually fell asleep quickly, thinking he had everything mapped out and handled. But the dreams that followed centered mostly on the idea Kaitlyn had planted, of them sharing that matching bed in her room. Only his subconscious corrected the error in her thinking, and in his dreams she came to him, eager, wanting, nothing of payback or owing in her mind.
And he awoke more than once in a heated jolt, his body aching in ways he hadn’t felt in a very long time.
*
Kaitlyn knew sheneeded sleep, yet she couldn’t seem to get more than an hour at a time. Then wakefulness stole her mind again and set it to racing. But one thing was consistent. Her brain would not let go of the images she herself had planted, by thinking Ry wanted sex from her. As if he would. Even if it was all she had to offer.
But when he’d practically ripped off his jacket like that…
She should have known better. She’d fallen back into the old trap, set and sprung by Jillian, and had insulted a man who would never want or even think of such a thing in the process. If nothing else, Maggie Rafferty would never allow any of her sons to devolve into that mindset, no matter how beautiful they all were. And she’d done it, Kaitlyn was certain, without beating them down or denying they were as attractive as they all were. Ry in particular.
Unlike her own mother, who had never missed a chance to remind her that she had inherited her father’s ordinary looks instead of her own glamorous beauty. It wasn’t until she was sixteen that she’d confronted her about it.
“Then why did you marry him?”
“Because I was careless enough to get pregnant with you, and I didn’t want to have to support you myself.”
