“Thank you,” she whispered. “I love you.”

When they left, Katie pulled the boys inside and fixed them grilled cheese sandwiches, which they wolfed down in what seemed like seconds. Then she asked them to go to the loft and either watch movies or play quietly. “Mommy needs a nice soak in the tub.”

The boys exchanged concerned glances.

“Just a soak,” she assured them with a little smile. “And do not go outside!”

Thirteen

On the way back to town, Leslie spent a great deal of time trying to talk Conner down. “I know you feel very protective of Katie, but she’s a grown woman who made adult choices and is now living up to them very admirably. She obviously wants to have this baby. Try to be happy for her.”

“She look happy to you?” he nearly growled. “He needs to be accountable!”

“I think she’d be happier if things had gone a little differently—like if she’d had more time to develop a lasting relationship with Dylan. But, Conner, things don’t always go the way we want.”

“Humph,” he grunted. “What kind of a man walks out on a pregnant woman?”

“Maybe the kind who has no idea she’s pregnant,” Leslie said. “I want you to do a little memory check—we made love before we established our future together. It could’ve happened to us.”

“I wouldn’t have walked away like he did.”

She laughed softly. “Actually, you admitted later that had been your original plan. You had trust issues where women were concerned, you were a secret witness whose life had been threatened. You were going to bolt, but that didn’t stop you from crawling into bed with me.”

“But I stayed!” he argued.

“I repeat—Dylan has no idea there’s a pregnancy! He’s not an ass so much as another version of you a few years ago. We will give Katie love and support and stay out of her business. She can make her own decisions.”

“Doesn’t look like she’s making really good ones,” he grumbled angrily.

“If she heard this from you, she would be furious,” Leslie said. “And you’d be lucky if she ever confided in you again.”

“Let me get it out!” he said. “I’ll get it out, I’ll be done with it! Katie won’t have to put up with this from me. I’ll take care of her.”

Leslie sighed. “Stop at Jack’s,” she said. “I’ll get something of Preacher’s to take home. And whatever you have to do to be done with this, do it. I don’t want all this anger from you—I’ve never had to deal with this from you before. You get about fifteen more minutes, then I’m out of patience.”

She soon realized how badly she’d chosen her words. It was almost six o’clock, the bar was at peak dinner hour when they walked in. There were only a couple of empty tables or bar stools. Sitting at the end of the bar with a beer and a dinner plate was Dylan Childress.

It was like waving the red cape in front of the bull.

Conner didn’t look right or left. He stomped into the bar, grabbed Dylan by the front of his shirt, taking him completely by surprise, lifting him off the stool, and began to drag him out of the bar. Leslie screamed, “Jaaaccckkk!” Dylan hooked his boot behind Conner’s knee and they both went down, toppling a table as they crashed to the floor. Just like a scene from the old West, people rose and pushed back tables and chairs to stay out of the way of a good old-fashioned bar fight.

And the fists flew, both men making significant, loud, crunching contact. They each got off two or three on the other before Jack, Paul Haggerty, Conner’s boss and, fortuitously, Mike Valenzuela, the town cop, pulled them apart and got them outside. Dan Brady and Preacher came from the kitchen for backup. Most of the people who had been in the bar were more than happy to leave their dinners to get cold while they headed for the porch, enjoying the show. And quite the show it was, complete with Preacher in what could have appeared to be a bloody apron, except it was tomato sauce.

“What the f**k?” Dylan yelled through a split lip, spitting blood onto the street.

“You are the f**k!” Conner returned nasally, his nose having taken on a weird shape and now bleeding onto his shirt. “You don’t treat my sister like the gum on your shoe!”

“No, I don’t! Am I here? I’m here! Why do you think I’m here? She’s a good woman. I care about her!”

“A little late, cowboy,” Conner shot back. “Let go of me,” he said over his shoulder to Paul and Dan Brady. “Let me kill him. I’ll wipe up after.”

“You just try, ass**le,” Dylan roared. “That f**ker’s crazy! Lock him up, will you?”

Jack and Preacher held on to Dylan. Mike V. stood between the opposing teams. “We don’t exactly have a lockup around here,” he said. “I could call the sheriff, however. But I’d have to give him both of you.”

“I don’t like their chances for family holidays,” Jack said to Preacher. “Do you?”

“Did I do anything?” Dylan asked hotly. “I was having a beer and a meal!”

“And screwing my sister!” Conner shouted.

“Conner!” Leslie shouted from the porch. “Shut up!”

“You hurt her!” Conner yelled at Dylan, failing to take his beloved’s advice.

“I’m back here to try to make amends!” Dylan yelled back.

“You’re a little late, pretty boy!”

“You son of a—” And with that, Dylan threw himself against the strong arms that held him.

A piercing whistle shot through the air and everyone stopped yelling and moving. Right at the base of the porch stood Mel Sheridan and her partner, Doc Michaels. Jack lifted his eyebrows, wondering if that whistle had come out of his wife.

“Two choices, gentlemen,” Mike Valenzuela said. “You can walk away quietly, get patched up and go home or I can cuff you and call the sheriff’s deputy.”

Dylan immediately stopped struggling. “I’m not the problem,” he pointed out.

“Wanna get your lip fixed?” Jack asked.

“Pretty boy probably needs a plastic surgeon,” Conner said.

“I’m about done trying,” Mike V. said.

“All right,” Conner said. “All right.”

“Take Conner to the clinic,” Jack said. “His nose needs to be…” he cleared his throat “…adjusted. This one can go to Preacher’s quarters with Mel.” Then to Dylan he said, “If you even bump into my wife, you’ll have me to deal with and trust me…”

“Why would I bother your wife, man?” Dylan asked. “That was just self-defense, what happened. I just need a little ice. I’ll settle up for my dinner and get out of here.”

Mel walked over to Dylan and looked at his face, the bleeding lip, a small cut over his eye and rapidly spreading inflammation on the right side of his face. “I can probably fix those cuts with some tape,” she said, turning his head left and right. “I’ll go get my bag from the clinic. It could take me a few minutes to wade through all the testosterone in the street, so be patient.”

Katie sat on the sofa in her little living room, wrapped in her soft, terry robe, giving her toenails a coat of polish. Her hair was piled on her head with damp tendrils trailing. She’d been in the tub long enough to cry a little bit; begging help from her brother yet again had taken a toll. Her eyes were a little red, her cheeks pink. But fortunately Katie had never been one to indulge in a lot of self-pity, so once she let some of that emotion go, she just took a deep breath and moved on.

Unfortunately, she knew she wasn’t finished with the crying. If being pregnant without a father around wasn’t hard enough, holding that newborn, alone, could really rip a woman’s heart out. There would be more tears. Hard tears.

The knock at the cabin door caused her to immediately assume that either Conner or Leslie or the two of them together weren’t finished talking about it yet. But when she opened the door, it was Dylan.

“My God,” she gasped. “Have you been in an accident?”

“No,” he said. “It was very deliberate.”

“What in the world happened?” she asked, holding open the door for him. He was inside before she realized that if his face weren’t banged up, she wouldn’t have let him inside at all. She would have asked, “What are you doing here?”

He stepped inside. “I came back,” he said. Then with a hand on his chin, he worked his jaw a little bit, clearly uncomfortable. “I was getting up my courage to come and see you, to talk to you about…I don’t know. Our relationship and the way I left you… That was wrong. We should’ve had some discussion about how we’d stay in touch, when we’d see each other or… Your brother happened into Jack’s. And he obviously has some issues with my departure, also.”

“Conner did that?” she asked, aghast.

Dylan nodded. “And he wasn’t quite done, either.”

Katie had not heard the rumble of the Harley. She glanced past him and saw a big white truck sitting in her clearing, the motorcycle loaded into the back.

“I rented a truck,” he explained. He tilted his head, listening to the sound of Avatar in the loft. “Can we talk?”

“I guess so,” she said. She curled up on one end of the sofa, pulling her terry robe around her legs, and he took the other end. And she waited.

“I don’t really know where to start,” he said.

She said nothing. Waiting.

“It wasn’t my plan to get involved and then leave the way I did. With so many things unsaid.”

She shrugged. “You said you were leaving all the time, that you had to go back to work. And I thought your explanation was thorough—that I was the best time you ever had and you were going to make a movie…”

He winced. “See? That was done badly.”

“Well, I said I understood. You had to make some money.”

“That’s not the part I should’ve explained better—I should’ve told you how much you meant—for a little while, we were really close…really good friends.”

“Not good friends, I think,” she corrected. “Lovers, but not really friends. Friends would’ve been a little kinder to each other. And I don’t need any more sweet talk as you’re on the way out the door. It’s inconsiderate.”

He slid a little closer. “Katie, the decision to leave was sudden—the producer I’d been talking to finally came through with something. I hate the business, but I like acting, I’m good at it and I like the kind of money it can pay. It’s just that there was money involved and it was the perfect opportunity to take a big payday back to Montana… If the whole movie deal could be worked out and it looks like it can be—”

“I know,” she said.

“You know?” he asked.

“Even though you’ve been away from it for a long time, apparently the name Childress still gets people all excited in Hollywood and…” She reached over to the coffee table trunk and lifted the lid. She pulled out a few tabloids and tossed them on the sofa. “I figured that out pretty easily.”

He glanced at the pictures idly. “This is what I hate,” he muttered. “This is all B.S. This one here, with Jay Romney, this is the only one I actually posed for. The rest of them? I didn’t even know there were photographers present. They might have even been taken with a cell phone and retouched with Photoshop for all I know. This one, I remember this,” he said, showing her the picture with the pretty blonde. “But the caption is bogus.”

“Hmm,” Katie said. “So that one’s real.”