THE MAVERICK'S CHRISTMAS BABY Read online

  “Yeah!” Robbie agreed enthusiastically.

  “Whenever you’re done here,” Braden added.

  “I’m done. It’s cold,” Ryder contributed.

  “Sure,” Dallas agreed with a shrug.

  Braden glanced at Nina again, his expression confused and disapproving. He still didn’t acknowledge her, but he did seem to make a reluctant concession by saying to Dallas, “You don’t have to end your night. I can just take the boys. I have my key, so we can swing by your place to get their stuff.”

  “Okay,” Dallas answered, going on to sort through the details of what was going to be an ice-fishing trip for Braden and the boys the next day.

  Then, after Dallas reminded the boys to say good-night to Nina and they complied, they left with their uncle. Without their uncle ever having said a word to Nina.

  Dallas closed his eyes, letting his head drop forward and just hang for a moment as he dealt with the remnants of what had been dredged up in him tonight.

  But as he told himself yet again to put a good face on things, even if he was still recovering from the body blows of the evening, it occurred to him that knowing he was going to open his eyes to Nina, knowing that he was about to have more time with her, left him genuinely feeling better. More than better, actually. It left him feeling glad to go on, despite everything else.

  Then he took a deep breath and looked at her again, and smiled a smile that felt as if it was for her alone.

  “Okay. Sometimes things just take a turn on you,” he said. “First the deal with Santa and then my brother being rude—”

  Nina laughed. “No more rude than my brother was to you the other night at the store,” Nina pointed out.

  Dallas shook his head. “Yeah. Wow. Coming at us from all directions. So, how about we salvage what we can of tonight, get out of this cold and get some hot wings?”

  “Comfort food?” Nina said with a warm smile that had a power all on its own to raise him out of despair.

  “Comfort food,” he confirmed.

  Then he linked his arm through hers and led her away from the event that had started out fun, hit a few snags but seemed as if it just might be salvageable after all.

  * * *

  “Will you be up all night with heartburn now?”

  Nina laughed at Dallas’s concern. She’d suggested they take their hot wings back to her apartment to eat because the restaurant had been so crowded. They’d finished the spicy snack and were throwing away the containers.

  “I actually don’t have a problem with heartburn, no matter what I eat. Or even what time of day I eat it,” she answered, as they took their glasses of herbal iced tea with them into her living room.

  “You’re amazing—are you sure you’re pregnant?”

  She laughed again, glancing down at the long sweater she was wearing over leggings and boots. “I’d be dressed a little differently if I wasn’t.”

  “Still hard to tell,” he said.

  “Take a drink of the herbal tea and think about the wine I would ordinarily have opened. Then tell me you aren’t convinced.”

  He grinned at her, set his glass on the coffee table and pushed up the sleeves of the heavy crewneck T-shirt he was wearing.

  His wrists were thick above those massive workman’s hands, his forearms were impressively muscled and there was something so masculine about it all that it struck Nina as incredibly sexy.

  She instantly chastised herself for that, also taking herself to task for liking what she saw as much as she did.

  But she did like it. There was no denying it.

  Pulling her eyes away, she decided to finally venture a question of her own. “Are you doing okay? I mean, it ripped my heart out to hear what Robbie said to Santa. I can’t imagine that it was easy for you.”

  “Yeah, it pretty much ripped my heart out, too,” he admitted. “I had no idea that was the reason he was so determined to talk to Santa this year. I guess it also explains why he still needed to hang on to believing Santa was real—he’s been coming up with more reasons than you can imagine to convince us all, but I suppose he was really just trying to keep himself convinced.”

  “Do you think he feels like Santa is his only hope of reaching his mother?”

  “I’m never too sure what’s going on in any of the boys’ heads. Sometimes they talk a little about what they’re feeling, sometimes it comes out like this. But Laurel’s family is all gone, her friends don’t know where she is, so sure, I guess Robbie has to feel like Santa is his only hope,” Dallas confided grimly. “And not only is that the sad truth, it’s even sadder that Santa is no hope at all.”

  That fact, and the injury that showed in Dallas’s expression, broke Nina’s heart all over again. And even though she knew she was prying, her curiosity got the better of her so she did it anyway.

  “You were married to Laurel Hanes, weren’t you?”

  Dallas grimaced, bent his head forward and rubbed the back of his neck as if to ease some stress there. “Yeah,” he acknowledged as he raised it back up again. “For nine years. But we were together for twenty—from the time we were both thirteen.”

  So he’d spent most of his life with the woman, and whittling it down to only the marriage seemed to diminish it somehow.

  “Childhood sweethearts,” Nina said to validate the time he’d spent with his ex. “But you didn’t get married until you were twenty-four?”

  “Not because of me. I would have married her right after high school. But Laurel dragged her feet. ‘Marriage is forever, why rush it?’ That’s what she’d say. She wanted to stretch her wings a little. To travel some with her friends. To just have fun before we settled down. I didn’t have any doubt that we’d get there—no one did, it just always seemed like a given that Laurel and I would be together forever—so I didn’t push it. I just weathered my mom pressuring me for a wedding and grandchildren—the sooner the better, in her point of view—and waited for Laurel to be ready.”

  “I’m sure Laurel appreciated your patience,” Nina said when his tone let her know he now considered that somehow foolhardy.

  “That sounds good but I just think I was too dumb to see the forest for the trees,” he muttered.

  “But she was eventually ready,” Nina pointed out.

  Dallas made a face at that. “Not exactly. Laurel got pregnant with Ryder.”

  And his expression told her that hadn’t been such a joyous surprise.

  “It was an accident,” he added. “Laurel had the flu, missed a couple of birth control pills, and I guess we didn’t take that seriously enough.”

  “Were you both unhappy about it?”

  “I wasn’t unhappy about it at all. By then it seemed like Laurel had had plenty of fun, plenty of wing-stretching. She’d done her traveling—her friends were actually all married and settled down themselves—so it seemed like our time to tie the knot. I just figured the baby was a sign for us to finally do it.”

  “And what did Laurel think?”

  “It still took some convincing,” he admitted. “But she came around.”

  “No enthusiasm? No running into your arms and saying ‘Yes! I’d love to marry you and have this baby’?” Nina asked, thinking that that was the kind of response he’d deserved. The kind of response the coming of Ryder had deserved.

  He chuckled wryly, humorlessly. “No, there was none of that. It was more like, ‘Okay, I guess we have to....’”

  “But once you actually got her to take the leap?” Nina was hoping for anything positive, for his sake.

  “She didn’t get any happier about it,” he said reluctantly. “There were some times that were better than others,” he claimed, as if to make it sound better. “She liked all the attention and parties and showers that came with the wedding and then with being pregnant, too. B
ut after Ryder was born, the day-to-day got her down, and she just wasn’t happy. She was restless and she complained that she was bored. Well, she pretty much complained about everything.”

  “But she didn’t want out....” Nina said, because it was the most encouraging thing she could come up with.

  “Like a divorce? No, she didn’t talk about that. And if she thought about it...I don’t know if she did, but if she did the idea probably got further and further away when her dad died, and then her mother a year later. That left her without any family, other than us.”

  “And I’m sure she loved you and the boys,” Nina insisted, wanting to believe it herself.

  “I suppose. In her own way. And she knew how it was with me, with my family—we believe in marriage. In marriage being for life. She knew that to me—to my family—divorce would be a disappointment, so I would have fought tooth and nail to keep that from happening.”

  There was such sadness, such shame in his tone that it was obvious the end of his marriage had left him feeling like a failure, seeing himself as a failure. Nina could only hope his family hadn’t added to that, but her own lifelong prejudice against the Traubs left her thinking they might have.

  “So, no talk of divorce and you had two more kids....” Nina said to prompt him to go on, wanting to understand.

  “I talked her into Jake. I thought since she’d liked being pregnant, liked all the attention, maybe that might perk her up.”

  “And she agreed.”

  “Yeah. Plus...” He shrugged. “You know, she grew up the same way I did—probably the same way you did—believing that that’s what people do, they get married, they have a family. I guess then she was sort of resigned to her lot in life.”

  “But having Jake didn’t help?”

  “No. And Robbie was another accident. She didn’t actually want to go through with having him.”

  “She didn’t want Robbie?” Nina asked defensively. It was painful to hear that the little boy who loved his mother so much hadn’t been wanted by that mother.

  Dallas confirmed it with another shrug. “I had to promise her a trip to Europe to get her to have him, and Laurel spent the whole nine months planning the holiday rather than planning anything for the new baby. Rather than even talking about the new baby. I think if we hadn’t already had a crib and bottles and blankets and all the gear, she might have wrapped him in a bath towel, stuck him in a dresser drawer and called it good.”

  “So she probably wasn’t any happier once her European vacation was over.” Nina knew the minute she said the words that she shouldn’t have let so much of her disapproval into her voice.

  Dallas didn’t seem to take offense, though. He merely shook his head. “Nope, no happier. In fact, I think the trip only made things worse. Coming back to her life here, to the day-to-day grind of just being a wife and mother, was a letdown.”

  Nina hadn’t known Laurel Hanes, but she was growing to dislike her. “Did she consider a career? Hobbies? If her friends had kids, didn’t she like doing things with them? She actually sounds depressed—did you think about going with her for counseling?”

  “She didn’t want to work, and since we didn’t need the money I didn’t push that. She tried hobbies—hated them all. When it came to her friends, she started saying that all they could talk about was their kids and cooking and this town, and she hated that, too. Yes, I did try to get her to talk to a doctor or a counselor—to somebody—but she wouldn’t do it. She said she wasn’t depressed, that everything around her was just depressing—if that makes any sense. It didn’t to me.”

  “So there was, what? Five more years after Robbie was born?”

  “Yep. Five more years. Then, the day after Christmas last year I woke up alone in bed. There was a letter from Laurel on her pillow. She said I’d been a good husband—better than her friends’ husbands—that I’d made a good home for her, that I was a good father, but that she’d been sleeping with one of our itinerant ranch hands—”

  “Oh, no...” Nina muttered, seeing the lines of tension in his handsome face and knowing how hard that had struck him. How hard it would strike anyone. “Did you have any idea?”

  “None. The ranch is a big place and I’m out on it from dawn till dusk most days. Robbie was in preschool, Ryder and Jake were at school, she was alone in the house, and the house isn’t within sight of neighbors. I don’t know for sure, because she didn’t say in her note, but I give my ranch hands their jobs for the day and send them out to do them—I’m not watching them all the time. There’s no way I could. I suppose that gave the guy free rein to drop by my place while I was out and...”

  Seeing his anguish, his embarrassment, broke Nina’s heart for the third time that night.

  “I hauled that bed out to the middle of nowhere and set it on fire, I’ll tell you that,” he said under his breath. “I’d have set the whole damn house on fire if I could have, but about all I could do was gut the master bedroom and bath and redo it all with a vengeance.”

  Nina nodded. She could appreciate that he wouldn’t have wanted the room where his wife had likely cheated on him to hold any reminders.

  “Did the letter say anything else? Anything about the kids she was leaving behind?” Nina asked.

  “It said that by the time I read it, Laurel and Jeff would be long gone from Rust Creek Falls. That, to her, living here was barely existing and that she needed to go out and live life. That there were divorce papers on the bureau that she’d had a lawyer draw up. That she didn’t want anything but her freedom, she was giving me full and unconditional custody of the boys, and all I had to do was sign the papers and have them filed, and we could pretend none of it had ever happened.”

  Twenty years with someone, a marriage, a life, three kids and the woman wanted to pretend none of it had ever happened? Nina tried to hide the outrage she felt on Dallas’s behalf.

  “There wasn’t so much as a clue where she went from here,” he went on. “Not another word about the boys or a message to them, and we haven’t heard from her since. As if nothing here exists for her anymore.”

  “She hasn’t even called to see if the boys are all right or anything?”

  He shook his head once more. “Nothing.”

  “Oh, Dallas, I’m so sorry,” Nina told him, sorry not only for what had happened but also for the unkind thoughts she’d had about him when she’d heard a Traub was getting divorced. And now she knew why there wasn’t any general knowledge of what had actually happened to end his marriage, that his wife cheating on him and running out on him with a ranch hand wouldn’t have been something he’d wanted spread around.

  He shrugged yet again. “In some ways we’re better off,” he said. “Laurel just never grew up and settled down, so she was like living with a sourpuss teenager—to the boys, too. She didn’t have any patience with them. They annoyed and irritated her and she let them know it. She was just generally hard on them and she never really seemed to enjoy anything about them or with them—not even holidays or birthdays—”

  “But she was still their mom, and to them—”

  “Yeah, they lost their mother—I see that. But I’m hoping that when they’re grown and they look back on things, they might remember the fits and rants Laurel threw. The broken dishes when she was mad for no good reason. Her stomping on toys and breaking them if they weren’t put away when she wanted them put away. All her griping and complaining and screaming that she hated her life and all of us along with it. Her saying that Rust Creek Falls was worse than living in hell...”

  Nina also took offense to that opinion of her hometown, the hometown that everyone was working so hard to rebuild. But she didn’t say it. Instead she said, “I guess not everyone is cut out for living in a place like Rust Creek—I know I’ve seen my share of people who can’t wait to get out.”

  “Yeah. Sure,�
�� he agreed. “But for me...I love it here—even though it does hold way too many memories of Laurel.”

  “I love it here, too,” Nina chimed in. “I can’t imagine ever living anywhere else. Or a better place to raise kids.”

  “If we can just get it back on its feet...”

  “It’s coming along,” Nina said, knowing he was changing the subject.

  She could tell he thought he might have said too much about his ex-wife and the problems they’d had, and that he wanted to rein that in some. And since getting off the subject softened his expression, Nina also thought it better to put the conversation to rest.

  Besides, he was looking at her with eyes that were no longer clouded by anger or frustration or hurt when they stopped talking about his marriage, and that was nice. Eyes that were warm and full of something else entirely, and it made her melt a little inside...

  Then he seemed to snap out of that, too, and maybe remember himself because all of a sudden he said, “Could the Traubs and their sordid history have dragged this night down any worse?”

  Oddly enough, Nina realized that she wouldn’t have traded a moment of it for anything. But she didn’t quite know how to say that when her time with him and his boys had seen some pain for them all.

  So she just said, “It wasn’t so bad. It was better than a lot of Friday nights I’ve spent.”

  “Now you’re just being nice,” he said as if he appreciated it nonetheless. “But I should probably get going—I’ve boo-hooed us right into a late night.”

  He stood then. “Speaking of getting Rust Creek Falls back on its feet, though—you’re delivering the toys and food baskets tomorrow, right?”

  There had been talk of that on Wednesday night during the compiling of the baskets and the wrapping of the gifts, so it came as no surprise that he knew it.

  “I am,” Nina confirmed, standing, too.

  “Well, the boys will be ice fishing all morning and then my folks are taking them into Kalispell to do some shopping, to have dinner and see a Christmas movie, so I’m on my own and I’d like to help.”