The Cowboy's Secret Son. Gayle Wilson
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slipped into hers. That was unusual enough these days that she glanced down in surprise.
“I’m in big trouble, huh?” he said, his eyes still on Mark.
“What do you think?”
“I think…it was worth it,” her son said.
“Worth being in big trouble?”
“If I hadn’t been out there, I’d never had gotten to ride in the chopper. He let me wear a flight helmet,” he added.
Jillian shielded her eyes from the dust as the rotor began to turn. She didn’t particularly want to be standing out here, watching Mark Peterson leave, but she didn’t seem to be able to do anything about the fact that she was.
“You think he meant what he said about seeing me again?”
At least Drew hadn’t asked how she knew Mark, she thought with gratitude. But she understood how her son’s mind worked well enough to know that he would put two and two together soon enough. After all, Mark had called her by name.
“Who knows?” she said softly, forcing the words between lips that felt stiff. And not just with the cold.
Once she had been foolish enough to think she could predict what Mark would do in any situation. And she had been wrong. This time she wasn’t going to make any predictions. Not even for Drew’s sake. Especially not for Drew’s sake.
* * *
JILLIAN, he thought, going mindlessly through the motions of flying without any conscious awareness of what he was doing. He didn’t seem capable of thinking about anything other than the woman he had left behind him, standing out in the rain. Jillian Salvini.
Sullivan, he reminded himself. The kid had said his name was Sullivan. He wondered briefly about Jillian’s husband, feeling nausea stir in the pit of his stomach at the thought.
And then, deliberately, he blocked out images he didn’t want to deal with. Couldn’t deal with. Images from their past followed by images of Jillian married to someone else. Sleeping with someone else. Conceiving another man’s child. His head moved slowly from side to side in denial. A pointless denial.
What the hell did you think she’d been doing for the last decade? he asked himself angrily. So she was married and had a kid. Big deal.
In the back of his mind he had always known that was a possibility. A probability, he amended. After all, Jillian was almost thirty now. Twenty-eight, he calculated.
And she still didn’t look much older than she had that summer when she was seventeen. Not with her hair pulled back like that. Her skin was still pale and smooth, but without the ever present tan of her childhood. The freckles that had always decorated the bridge of her nose, unless it was the dead of winter, were no longer visible.
Except they were, he realized. Those same freckles were splayed across her son’s equally delicate nose. He wondered how he had missed noticing the resemblance.
He shouldn’t have. Drew Sullivan was a masculine replication of the skinny little tomboy, that other sometimes lonely only child who had followed at Mark’s heels throughout his childhood.
Jillian’s son. Who might also have been his son. That thought was as sickening as the images of Jillian lying in the arms of another man, sated and fulfilled. Just as she had once lain in his. Once. A long time ago.
If there was one thing Mark had learned in the last ten years, it was that there was nothing more damaging than thinking about the “what might have beens” of your life. That’s what his father had done. And after the crash, he himself had indulged in more than his share of those kinds of thoughts.
It certainly wouldn’t do him any good to think about what might have been as far as Jillian Salvini was concerned. And he realized he’d been doing that on some level since he’d been back.
Now he knew with unwanted clarity what she had been doing since the last time he’d seen her. A reality that included a husband, a son and a life that had nothing to do with the girl who had given herself to him with the same sweet innocence with which she had lived her entire childhood. A girl who had then disappeared as completely as if she and her mother and father had been wiped off the face of the earth.
His father had muttered bitterly about Tony Salvini’s Mafia ties and had cursed Jillian’s father until the day he’d died. A man broken by life, who had owned nothing at the last but the shirt on his back and an unquenchable hatred for Salvini.
It was an animosity that had been born the morning he’d discovered the Salvinis and their daughter had fled in the middle of the night, leaving everything behind them, including the unpaid loans Bo and Jillian’s father had signed jointly.
And Mark had never seen Jillian again. Until today. Until he had stepped around the nose of the chopper and come face-to-face with the woman who had haunted his dreams for the last ten years. Especially since he’d come back here. And now, so had she. Perhaps if things had been different…
Except they weren’t different, he reminded himself as he started the familiar descent to the land that had belonged to his family for three generations. Your birthright, his dad used to say. A birthright his father believed Tony Salvini had stolen.
Whatever the truth of what had happened between their fathers ten years ago, Jillian was married, and Mark was leaving. And those were the only two things he ought to be thinking about. Not about all those what might have beens.
Unbidden, the thin face of Drew Sullivan appeared in his mind’s eye, looking up at him as he begged for that promise Mark had foolishly given before he’d left. An eerie reflection of a little girl who had once pleaded with Mark not to leave her behind.
I didn’t, Jilly, he thought bitterly. I never did. You’re the one who left me. And it’s too late to even ask you why.
* * *
WHY THE HELL can’t I sleep? Jillian thought.
She turned on her side, pushing the old-fashioned feather pillow into a more comfortable shape. It wasn’t really that she didn’t know why, of course. It had more to do with an unwillingness to admit how disturbed she had been by seeing Mark again. She just hadn’t been prepared, she’d told herself. It had been the shock combined with her worry over Andy that had thrown her. Drew, she corrected herself, remembering the sound of that single syllable spoken in Mark’s deep voice.
Andrew had been her maternal grandfather’s name, and Jillian had loved the strong Scots sound of it. It had seemed too grown-up, though, too serious for the minute scrap of an infant—a preemie with so many problems, including that tiny twisted and misshapen foot—that they had placed in her arms. Although she had written Andrew on the birth certificate, from the beginning she had called her son Andy.
Then last year, he had declared that Andy was a baby’s name and that the kids at school made fun of him because of it. And he had been right, she admitted. The diminutive did make him sound like a baby, and he was growing up. Despite the maternal urge to keep him small so she could hold him close and make him safe, she knew this was the way things were supposed to happen.
She sighed, the sound an outward expression of all the frustrations she had felt since her encounter with Mark this afternoon. She turned over again, trying to find a cool spot on the pillowcase to rest her cheek. There wasn’t one. The pillow had been turned and poked and restlessly prodded into shape until it was as worn-out with the long hours of this night as she was.
And it was nowhere near dawn, she thought, judging by the lack of light seeping in through the east-facing window. She sighed again, wondering if she should just give up and go unpack another box, when she heard a noise that sounded like something falling.
Or someone, she thought, that same mother instinct she had just acknowledged kicking into overdrive. Had Drew gotten up to go to the bathroom and stumbled over something in the unfamiliar darkness?
She threw the covers off and slid her feet into her slippers. As she hurried