Chance slid the pizza into the hot oven, then closed the door and sat down at the wood table to wait. He’d left Libby curled up asleep, like a contented cat. Like Cowboy after you stroked him a bit. Chance had been too charged up to sleep. And too hungry.
He rubbed his face with his hands and wondered what he was going to do. How could he still feel so much for Libby? A woman who had once betrayed him and was capable of doing it again, if the situation with Ben was any indication.
Clasping his hands in front of him, his elbows resting on his knees, he tried to reason through something that wasn’t forming into a logical pattern. What was it about Libby that kept him coming back?
Sex? It was good, great actually, but for five years he’d managed without her.
Love? Maybe.
But did he love her, or was it her love he wanted?
He loved her, God help him, but it was her love he wanted. More than anything.
He glanced at the timer. A few more minutes for the pizza to heat. A few more minutes to wait.
Because if Libby loved him, knowing what she knew about him, knowing the good, the bad, and the ugly of where he’d come from, what he was, then the bad and the ugly must not be so bad or so ugly. Maybe if she could love him, he wasn’t unlovable. Maybe he could be that good person he tried so hard to be. And sometimes failed. Maybe he could be someone’s husband. Someone’s father, despite the fact that he hadn’t come from good people. Hadn’t known a good home.
His father certainly hadn’t been a good father or a good husband. There were beatings, of course. Those scars had healed on the outside, but they’d never go away on the inside. And memories of nights when Chance would listen in bed to his parents’ drunken brawls. His earliest memories were of hiding under the kitchen table while they fought. He could still hear the screaming and shouting, wailing and whipping sounds in his mind. He’d been too young and too afraid to do anything. And by the time he turned ten and felt ready to stand up to his father, his mother left.
One day, when he was at school, she just packed up her things and walked out, closing the door behind her. She’d left him to face his father’s rage when he’d returned home from one of the odd jobs the man picked up when he was sober, which hadn’t been all that often.
There had been rage. And Chance had paid the price. So bad that finally one of the neighbors, he never learned who, called the police, and after a trip to the hospital, he’d been placed with a foster family. It wasn’t until a few years ago when he learned his father had died in some back alley in Texas that the nightmares had stopped.
The Larsons, his foster family, weren’t bad people in the sense that they didn’t beat him, which at the time was all he asked. But they took him in because they needed the money, and they used very little of the state’s check for his care. He learned the lessons of hard work for little pay early.
And then he’d met Libby. A girl whose experience had been so different from his it was as if they lived in different countries and spoke different languages. She had been raised in a loving home, and as domineering as Sam Brennan could be, Chance never disputed the fact Sam cared about his kids—maybe too much. But Chance had one thing in common with Libby—they’d both been abandoned by their mothers. Libby through her mother’s death, Chance when his mother left.
Circumstances had made him stronger, if cynical. Libby, on the other hand, seemed more vulnerable and yet hopeful. It was that hope that someday things would be better that had pulled Chance. He thought when he married Libby and she’d pledged to love him no matter what, his someday had come. He’d been wrong.
The timer was buzzing. Pizza was ready. But was he.
Chapter 14
“I’m famished,” Libby said as she took another bite of the thin-crusted, cheesy pizza. It wasn’t surprising that their bedroom activities had escalated her appetite, and for more than food. But given the emotional turmoil that had preceded it, it was a wonder her stomach wasn’t still in knots.
The summer sun was setting in the sky, casting a purple glow on the fields and mountains outside the kitchen windows as they sat across from one another at the table.
Chance’s ranch was set in a beautiful space—serene, majestic, God’s country. And yet, she felt anything but peaceful. Every time she looked at Chance, sitting across from her, a rare smile gracing his face as he watched her eat, her heart raced. As if it was trying to get to some finish line to celebrate.
Only there really wasn’t anything beyond the moment to celebrate. No strings, remember, she chided herself. But her feelings for Chance weren’t strings—they were ropes. And after making love, those ropes had become thicker. What had she been thinking? Clearly, “thought” hadn’t entered into it.
“Pretty out there, isn’t it?” he asked, gesturing toward the view. He’d donned a pair of jeans, but his chest was bare. There was something about his naked, muscled chest that created pressure inside her. The pressure of need.