“I mean if it comes down to your safety or the baby’s safety . . .” He shrugged, leaving her upended. Spending the night with him had been heaven, but this conversation was a stark reminder that this man who treated her so well was still far from a saint. She needed to keep that reality at the forefront of her mind, to combat the weakness of her body and her heart.
Unless James went psycho—which wasn’t beyond possibility, if he’d stooped to stalking her—he didn’t deserve a beat down. What he deserved, in fact, was answers. She steeled herself, trusting that everything would be better once she’d talked to him.
It was only too bad that the anticipation was such a bitch.
? ? ?
Abilene looked up as Casey squeezed her foot. They were sitting on the couch, her lying down, trying to breathe deep, and him sitting at one end with the dozy baby propped on his lap. She could hear Miah and his father talking in the ranch’s office down the hall, two matching, distant baritones, and also the drone of the radio in the kitchen, where Christine was puttering.
“Almost time,” Casey said. He was acting calm, though he had his silver lighter in one hand and was turning it around and around.
Abilene eyed the clock, heart thumping hard and quick. Five minutes to nine.
Casey shifted the baby’s weight and dug in his pocket, handed her his phone. It was a chunky old thing, branded with the logo of a pay-as-you-go carrier. He had a smartphone, too, and she wondered anew why he needed both.
Bet I don’t want to know.
“I think I’ll—” She jumped as the thing buzzed in her hand, breath leaving her in a whoosh. “I’ll go upstairs,” she finished, and hurried out of the den. She ran up the steps, huffing and shaky as she hit TALK on the third ring and managed to say, “Hello?”
“Abilene?” That familiar voice, deep and cool and hard, like an echo from a grave.
“Yeah. Hang on.” She slipped inside her room and shut the door. Once she was cross-legged on the bed, she said, “Okay.”
There was a pause before he replied, the noise of a word nearly being spoken, then not. A long breath hissed through the line. “Well.”
“I’m ready to talk.” She hugged her middle with her free arm. Her back ached and she was shaking like she’d drunk ten coffees.
“Good. It’s about goddamn time. What the fuck have you been playing me for, shutting me out? I find out from Vince Grossier that you’re even pregnant to begin with; then you won’t even do me the courtesy of a visit? Or a fucking phone call?”
“I know. But I was scared, after the way we ended things.”
“Scared of what?”
“That you’d be mad.”
“That I’d hurt you?”
“Maybe.”
“If I was cold enough to hurt you, I’d have been cold enough to leave your ass exactly where I found it, now, wouldn’t I?”
“I was scared of more than just that. I was scared you’d have wanted me to get rid of it. Or that once she was born you might try to take her away, because of . . . because of how I was. When we met.”
“It crossed my mind, don’t doubt it. But, sweetheart, you really think an ex-con stands a chance at getting custody of his kid?”
Sweetheart. She’d gotten so used to hearing a different man call her honey, that word sounded obscene coming from this one.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. If some social worker investigated her past, they wouldn’t be impressed, and they’d also discover she was employed under a fake name, that she’d had no permanent address in six years, that she’d been a teenage runaway. Ex-con was bad, but was she really any less problematic, on paper?
“So why have you been hiding?” he asked.
“I have it real good now. Not perfect, but I have a job I like. Friends I like.”
“Friends who don’t know the real you?” James supplied, reading between the lines.
“I might not have all my crap together,” she said, “but I’m working on it. And there’s a lot I could lose, if you decided to tell people how I was, when you met me.” Raina might’ve looked the other way about her lying to get her job at Benji’s, but Duncan wasn’t half as lax about legalities. As for Casey . . . She couldn’t bear to have him find out who she really was.