Hero for the Holidays (Four Corners Ranch #9)

Chapter Four

CHAPTER FOUR

H E HAD TO have the conversation with Lila sooner than he wanted to. She was out there with Denver, chasing down that rogue calf.

He caught up with them in the north pasture. Lila was smiling and sitting in the back of the truck, and it made his heart squeeze to see her like this. Enjoying the ranch. Enjoying this life. She’d ridden on horseback with him and Denver a few times, and he knew she was itching to get on by herself. She came alive when she was outside. Just like he did.

And yeah, it might still feel kind of theoretical to her, like a vacation that might end. But it was also just damn good to see her happy. And he didn’t want to undo that.

But he knew he was going to have to. Because Fia had been definitive. He hadn’t meant to cut her out of this forever.

Didn’t you? You bastard. No part of you wanted to hurt her with this?

Maybe part of him had. Maybe. But it hadn’t been his driving motivation. He’d been bound and determined to get Lila settled, to get her happy with everything on the ranch, to make a plan on how he was going to parent.

Then he’d planned to talk to her about her biological mother.

She had a hard enough time accepting him . She still didn’t see him as a father, he didn’t know if she ever would. He just hadn’t wanted to ambush Lila with all that reality about... About him and Fia. What they had between them was a poisonous wound. One they’d ignored all this time. One they’d never drained.

The truth was, he hated Fia Sullivan.

She could snipe and spit and be generally mean to him, and he just didn’t respond. Because he’d shut his feelings down where she was concerned so long ago. Because he’d found the key to take that hate and flip it to indifference.

But now? Now that she wasn’t there and yelling at him, now that she was saying she wanted in on this, this thing that he... She didn’t even have a right to it. He was the one who had made sure his name was with the agency. He was the one who had made sure that he was going to be able to be there for Lila. And Fia wanted to parent her just the same?

Yeah, hell. Maybe he had an issue with that.

But he had always planned to talk to his kid about her. When the time was right. When it wasn’t all so damned new.

Denver got a lasso and caught the calf. Then he ran it down and tied its legs together.

And he could hear Lila expressing sounds of dismay.

“How else was I supposed to catch it?” Denver asked, as his niece hurled accusations at him.

“It just seems so mean,” she said.

“So is letting it run off and get eaten by bobcats,” Denver pointed out.

“I hear bobcats don’t eat you,” she said. “They just chew on your knucklebones.”

“The thing is,” said Denver, “calves don’t have knuckles.”

“Hey, I...”

And then he just couldn’t do it. He couldn’t face the idea of wiping that smile off her face. And he realized that while there was definitely some merit in preparing her for what was to come later today, it also wasn’t just going to solve everything. He could tell her, but he and Fia didn’t have a plan yet.

Having a teenager was way more complicated than he’d given it credit for. And the bottom line was, he’d had a plan, and the plan hadn’t been enough.

Words failed him when he needed them, and he could understand why his dad had taken a certain amount of comfort in his narcissism.

Hell, he’d lived out some of his father’s narcissism. Was it enough of an excuse to tell himself that it was what he’d seen modeled in his house for all his formative years? Could he relieve his own guilt by reminding himself he’d been formed by a man whose way was the only way?

Dammit. No. Because Lila’s own life had been hijacked by loss, and he was fashioning himself as some kind of hero. But his actions weren’t heroic.

He’d told himself a lot of stories about why his decisions were good. About why they were right.

He’d been angry.

He was still angry.

It killed him to think how much that anger might’ve blinded him to what was actually right.

His chest still hurt when he thought of Fia. When he thought of all the pain between them, and he wasn’t ready to let that go.

But Lila didn’t deserve to take the blowback of anything between him and Fia.

“Denver,” he said. “You-all have dinner plans for later?”

“Barbecue,” he said. “Per usual.”

“I’ve got a thing. Would you be able to bring Lila up to the house and drop her back home after?”

“Yeah,” said Denver. “Sure.”

His brother looked easygoing, but he knew there would be questions later. They hadn’t asked about Lila’s mother, but he knew full well his reprieve was coming to an end. No one knew about him and Fia, not for certain. That, combined with the fact Fia had hidden her pregnancy from everyone here, was the only reason no one had jumped to conclusions. He knew that. He would have to tell them.

But there was a hierarchy of people who were going to find out about this.

Lila was going to come first.

After he and Fia hashed everything out. His family would have to come after that. He didn’t know what Fia intended to do with the information. Perhaps she’d already told the Sullivan sisters, which would mean that the McClouds would know, and the Garretts soon after. But he couldn’t imagine it.

No. Not that girl. That girl she’d been. Who had come back in a baggy sweater and no baby in her belly. Her hair in a messy ponytail. Her eyes haunted.

He’d known she was in pain, but his own felt so big. He hadn’t been able to care about hers. He’d seen it and looked right through it.

“Yeah. Well. I’ll talk to you later then. I’ve got some things to do down at the barn.”

“Are you okay, Landry?” Lila asked, frowning.

She favored her mother. It hurt him to think that. He’d been shoving those comparisons aside since the moment he’d first met her and seen that stubborn expression on her face.

He had seen Fia looking back at him in that moment. It was just so...her.

And sometimes he could see whispers of his family. He tried to focus on those times. But a lot of the time, he saw Fia Sullivan, and he felt haunted.

They hadn’t said where they were meeting tonight. But he knew. Because he knew her. No matter how much she tried to pretend he didn’t. He did.

It was a place that was out of the way. A place that was secluded. Where no one could hear you if you were screaming. Way back then, it had been a particular sort of screaming. Sighs of pleasure, the giddy excitement of discovery, first love and first times. He had a feeling there would be a different kind of screaming going on tonight.

Not that they’d never screamed at each other in anger. They had. They were not emotionally literate back in the day.

Hell, he still wasn’t.

His dad...well, his dad had done a number on all of them. And Fia’s mom had been at her throat constantly during her teen years. He could remember Fia running to him, red eyed and angry and taking comfort in his arms. But he could also remember well being the source of her anger.

He’d been a shitty boyfriend. He hadn’t meant to be. But he hadn’t known what to do with his feelings. He still didn’t, to be honest.

His whole family was stunted. They tried. His older brother Denver tried so damned hard. To keep the family together, to make them functional. But they didn’t know how to do feelings, really.

Daughtry was endlessly atoning for the sins of their father with his job as a cop. Justice was just trying to bang his way to oblivion.

He was a locked box. Because you couldn’t exploit the feelings of locked box.

Seamus McCloud, the patriarch of McCloud’s Landing, had been a big fan of using his fists against people.

Their dad wasn’t quite so gauche. He preferred emotional torture.

And he was very, very good at it.

“I’m good, kid. Just got some work to do.”

He felt bad about lying to her. But parenting, in his limited experience, was a lot of pretending everything was fine and you knew what you were doing so that your kid felt secure in a world that was anything but.

His dad had never done that. His dad was the thing that made the world scary.

In that way, he supposed he was doing better.

Maybe.

“See you around.”

And when he did, everything would be different again.

He just prayed he would handle that right.

Because right now, he felt like he was making a mess of things.

Right now, he felt like he’d had his own dark inclinations served up to him on a platter.

He was still angry at Fia. And he could never discount how many decisions he’d made out of anger.

And so he would have to question just what his motive had been here.

Was it really for Lila’s benefit? Or had some part of him wanted this?

Well. That was what tonight was for. They had to let the poison out of the wound. Once and for all.

T HE CABIN WAS SMALL and dusty. She could remember the last time she’d been here. And she didn’t especially want to think about it.

There had been no reason to come anymore. Not after.

She wondered if he’d come up in the years since. If he had ever brought his other girlfriends to the spot. That was the thing. A man could move on from the kind of trauma that had come from their relationship. At least, the consequences that sex had.

She hadn’t been able to. It was too hard. She was too afraid.

She looked around the room, surprised by how much smaller it seemed. Back then it seemed like their own world. Something glorious and theirs alone.

She heard him before she saw him. Or maybe she felt him. She turned, and he was standing in the doorway. Wearing that same, heartbreaking outfit from earlier. It still made her stomach go tense. Even now.

She had spent the day in a sort of numb shock. She had spent the day unsure of what she had to say. But knowing she had to be ready to open up a vein and let blood.

She had considered calling her sisters. She had considered asking them to come talk with her. Confessing everything. But something had stopped her. Maybe it was the fact that this wasn’t resolved. Maybe it was that she was in shock. That she still couldn’t quite accept this version of reality where that baby girl she had given up all those years ago was here now. And worst of all, that the life she had wanted to give her daughter had been so badly destroyed.

Her parents had died.

She must be...grieving. She must be traumatized. And all Fia had ever wanted to do was spare that child trauma. She had wanted to give her the best of everything. She was devastated, and she didn’t know what to do with the feelings, because she felt like there was no time to sit in them. Her child was here. Living in Landry’s house.

How could she marinate in her own sadness when that was the reality? She didn’t have time. It was like the experience of pregnancy and deciding that adoption was the only option in the first place. There had been pain. So much of it. And she’d known that she had to defer it. That she had to put it aside and deal with it later. And she had.

Her parents were too self-involved to notice her depression. Her dad was off having his affair while her mom pretended she didn’t know. When Fia was frozen in the most intense postpartum depression. Because it felt like she should be a mother. And there was no baby.

Because she’d felt that child grow inside of her, and she had...

Landry had used that tired language. You didn’t want her. You gave her up.

There was a difference in how some people said that: she gave up a child.

And how she thought it. How she felt it. She had given up a child she loved. A child she had carried within her. A child she’d given birth to. And when she thought of those words, she felt them as the deep sacrifice they should convey.

She’d heard people talk about other women who’d done it. They made it sound like giving up a child was the same as taking an unwanted set of dishes to Goodwill.

When she thought of it, she imagined an old newsreel she’d seen of a mother handing her child out a window to firefighters. Helping that baby escape the burning building she was still trapped in.

Yes. She’d given her child up.

Just like that.

She’d continued to burn, and she’d found a way to rise from those ashes, but it had taken years.

She had brought that child into the world. She had grown her and sustained her inside of her body. That child had been wanted . And what she had wanted more than anything was to give that child a life that she and Landry couldn’t give her.

That made her want to run away even now. Except she wasn’t sixteen. She was a woman now. The kind of mother that she could be now was different. The kind of mother that she could be now...

A mother. She was going to be a mother.

But the kid wasn’t two pink lines. She was real and vivid. Thirteen and carrying baggage, and Fia felt unequal to the task all over again.

But she wasn’t burning anymore.

She had a home of her own.

She met his gaze. “Start explaining.”

His eyes flicked away, then back to hers. That blue had been familiar once. Close, hot and intense. It had been years since they’d had a real conversation. Years since they’d been this close.

He was a stranger who could never really be a stranger.

They’d never gotten to excavate their breakup. It had been an explosion after Lila’s birth, and it had all centered around Lila—how could it not?—and they were as ever, unfinished business.

They’d never talked about it, but they’d clearly both decided to simply leave it unfinished.

They had to finish it. After thirteen years, they had to finish it. But it started with Lila.

Just like it ended.

Landry nodded slowly. Those blue eyes didn’t rest on hers. They were focused on the wall behind her. “A couple of years ago I found the adoption agency that you used. I just wanted to have the info in there so that when... if she wanted to find me she could. That’s it.” Then he looked at her, his eyes level. “A year ago Jack and Melissa Gates were killed in a car accident. Lila was put into foster care. She doesn’t have any other family. When CPS discovered she’d been adopted as a baby they contacted the agency for details, and the agency gave them my information. I dealt with a caseworker before they ever notified Lila. I had to go through background checks and inspections, the same thing I would have to do to be a foster parent. That’s essentially what I am. Fostering to adopt, but Lila is thirteen, so they wanted to see how she was adjusting before anything was finalized.”

“How long has she been here?”

“Three weeks. She’s been homeschooling.”

She felt like she’d been gut punched. “ Three weeks. And you’ve known about her being in care for more than two months. You’ve known that she needed us .”

Her baby had needed her.

She hadn’t been there.

It was a nightmare. An echo of the worst, hardest times before and after the adoption.

Those blue eyes looked lost then. And that was a rare sight. At least these days. She’d seen him look like this before, of course. But not in a long time.

“I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “And I felt like... I had to do what was best for her. I had to care more about what she needed than what you wanted.”

And suddenly, she was back in that moment. The last time she was here. And he knew it. He had chosen those words so specifically. So carefully. Because they were words that she had spoken to him then.

It was like that first layer of civility had been removed. Like it had been peeled back. This facade that they had created around themselves. This easy tension that made people think they were attracted to each other, or maybe they had dated once. This game they played that hid the complicated nature of it all.

And it hurt.

They hadn’t just burned each other. They had skinned each other alive.

There was first love, and then there was Landry King and Fia Sullivan.

He had been her escape. He had been her everything. And she had been his. They had fought. They had wounded each other. They found solace in each other’s arms, and ultimately, they had devastated each other.

Then they had built this scaffolding around themselves. A fake life. A way that they interacted with one another that made it look like they hadn’t been each other’s deep wound.

Even she came close to believing it sometimes.

But this was it. The wound. They were ripping off the bandages. Exposing it.

It was exhilarating and terrifying, but their secret was here, in the middle of them. This bomb waiting to go off. Everyone would know. Everyone would know. They would look at that little girl, who favored Fia so much, and who had Landry’s demeanor, and they would know. He had brought this secret that she had kept at great cost to herself right back into the middle of them.

She wanted this child.

At the same time, she was so wildly resentful that he’d done this to them.

It was really like being sixteen all over again.

“Is this a game to you?” she asked. “A chance to get back at me?”

“No,” he said, the denial vehement. “This isn’t a game. I am not playing with Lila’s life. I want to be a father. I always have. You took that from me. I wanted it then, and I want it now. I never stopped wanting it.”

She felt her lip curl. “That’s what you see me as. This person who stole fatherhood from you.” She shook her head. “You should thank me, do you know that? You would’ve been a terrible father. A terrible husband. And I wouldn’t have been any better. Think about it, Landry. What would we have done? You would’ve been a ranch hand somewhere else? Or maybe we would’ve ended up staying here . Teenage parents with families that were coming apart at the seams. You would have gone out drinking and other women would have flirted with you, I would have come down to the bar and screamed at you, and where would Lila have been? What kind of life would she have had? Look at what Four Corners is now. It wasn’t that then. Don’t forget that. Don’t forget that this place we’ve made now is so far removed from everything we had back then. We were...nothing but broken.”

“When you told me you were pregnant I was happy, Fia.” That hurt. It still hurt so badly. “I wanted to make a life with you, a family. Something better than what we were. I thought you saw things in me, better things than anyone else. I thought you saw more of me than just being my father’s son. When I found out you had no faith in me, no faith in us, it was like a death,” he said. “You have no idea. You have no idea what it’s like to feel like something that precious was taken away from you.”

His pain was real. But he’d never tried to understand hers. So why should she try and understand his?

“ How dare you? Don’t tell me what I don’t understand. You got me pregnant. I watched those lines change. Those two pink lines. I felt the infinite torture of hope and possibility, and the crushing despair of realizing that there was no way. And you tormented me. With this idea that maybe we could run off together. That maybe this dysfunctional version of love we had would be enough. And all the while I knew that I needed to make a choice. A different choice. The possibility of being a mother was growing inside of me every day. And I had dreams. Visions of what it would be like to hold that baby. To love her. But in the end it was because I did love her that I made that decision. And you wouldn’t let me do it. You wouldn’t let me . So yes. I went behind your back. I went to the adoption agency, and I chose the family myself out of a book.”

“How civilized,” he said, his expression something like disgust. “To find them in a catalog.”

“It was the only thing about it that was civilized. I think you forget how young we were. Lila’s thirteen. I was fifteen when you first got me pregnant. You were sixteen. And then I was sixteen when the baby was born. It’s outrageous. You thought two children could take care of a child... We didn’t even know how to be together. We broke up every week.”

Agony and ecstasy, that was them. Sometimes the very best and then the very worst.

“We would’ve gotten it together,” he said.

“We wouldn’t have. What makes you believe that, Landry? Because my parents had it so together? My family was falling apart, unraveling, while I was facing the reality of this pregnancy. And I looked at my father and I just knew that... It was going to be us. Eventually, it was going to be us. Us getting married young, being each other’s only lovers, you getting bored and finding someone else. Sleeping with some other woman behind my back. Deciding to run away and move to California.”

“I would never move to California. That’s about as likely as me becoming a vegan.”

“Fine. Maybe you just would’ve moved in next door with her. How about that? I couldn’t find a way to have any faith in us when I had to try and think about what we would look like twenty years down the road. Because no one around me ever gave me a reason to hope. Not in us or in anything else. So yes, I chose her parents. And then I ran away. I stayed with them. Because I knew... I knew you weren’t going to support me. You wouldn’t be there for me in the way that I needed you to be.”

“I wanted something different,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “And I couldn’t give it to you.”

“Well, look where it landed her. She’s back here anyway. And now she’s got dead parents on top of it.”

“Well, if only I’d had a crystal ball so I would have known I was choosing pain for her,” said Fia, her throat getting tight. “Obviously, that isn’t what I intended to have happen. Obviously, that wasn’t the life I wanted her to have. I couldn’t have anticipated that. But you know what, I’m glad that she had them. Because they gave her something. A foundation that we couldn’t have given her.”

“You couldn’t have given it to her,” he said. “Maybe I could have.”

“I’m twenty-nine, Landry. And I can look back on the kids we were, and I can understand why you believed the way you did. Why you were convinced that at seventeen you were equipped to be a father, that you thought it would work because you really, really wanted it to. But I’m twenty-nine-year-old me looking at thirty-year-old you, and I don’t get it. How do you not see it now?”

He looked away from her, and she kept talking.

“You expect this to work? If all you’re going to do is accuse me of taking her from you. If you refuse to see that what I did, I did for her . Not for me. Does it make you feel better to pretend that I’m the villain? Does it make you feel better to think that I felt nothing when I handed her to another woman that she was going to call mom for the rest of her life? Would it make you be certain I deserved this pain if I told you I also felt relief, along with sadness?” She shook her head.

“You didn’t have to make a complicated choice, Landry. All you had to do was make me the bad guy. And that is the simplest goddamn thing to do. You get to be the victim and the hero all rolled into one. Congratulations. I was the one carrying that baby. I was the one who had to worry about the cost of giving birth. I was the one who had to worry about the shame. I was the one who was never going to be able to dispute whether or not I was the parent. Men can run off. Then can decide they don’t want to take responsibility. It is much harder for the woman to do. But you never had to think about that, did you? You weren’t the one with something growing inside of you .”

Her breathing went jagged. “You weren’t the one who felt her move. You weren’t the one who felt the inevitability of it getting nearer and nearer every day. You weren’t the one who was so twisted up with fear and love and hope and despair that you could barely breathe. You just get to stand back and decide what you think I felt. And it suits you to make it simple. It suits you to tell yourself that I’m your enemy. As long as you keep doing that, I don’t think you’re going to be a good father to her. Because you’re still the seventeen-year-old boy who looked at me and hated me back then. That’s foolishness. You’re thirty years old. Be better or don’t bother.”

She looked at him, her heart beating so hard she thought it might break out of her chest. Her heart that was so twisted up in all the complicated feelings that Landry King created within her.

She knew that he thought ugly things about her. It was time to have it out. Out in the open, in the broad light of day.

“What if I can’t give you what you want?” he asked. “What if I can’t tell you that I understand why you did what you did?”

“I don’t need your understanding. But I need more than your indifference.”

He was looking at the wall, his eyes shadowed now. “You know why I’m indifferent to you?”

“Why?”

“Because that day when you brought me here and told me what you did with the baby, all that love inside of me that I felt for you turned into hate. I had a pregnant girlfriend that I loved, and she disappeared for two months, and when she came back there was no baby and she was done with me. And all I knew was that not only was I not going to be a father, but that you didn’t love me.”

“That is a lie. I did love you. But the way that we loved wasn’t sustainable. It sure as hell wasn’t worth preserving. And it really wasn’t worth bringing a child into.”

“I thought you saved my life, Fia. You gave me something that got me through being sixteen. I’m not sure I would’ve lived through it otherwise. I guess for that I’m grateful to you. About the time you dropped me into the despair that I was in after the baby was born, well, I had decided that I was going to live by then anyway.”

His words hit her like a slap, and they left her cold. She wasn’t sure if she believed them, and that made her feel even worse. But with him... There wasn’t any trust. And that was part of the problem. They’d been a refuge for each other back then. In a weird way, even the anger had been a refuge. They’d been angry at their parents, and they’d been able to vent it on each other. But when it had come down to having to deal with adult choices, with a long-term future, they hadn’t been able to handle it. They certainly hadn’t been able to have this conversation.

They were older now, but would it be any better? They had spent all these years determinedly not dealing with themselves.

At least now they’d started it. At least they’d said some of it.

“We have to make a pact,” she said. “Because the truth is, what I did for her then, I thought was the best thing to protect her. You might not agree with me, but it’s what I believed. I still believe it. I stand by it. And what you wanted, you believed was going to be the best thing for her. We both loved her then. We both wanted the best for her as we saw it. We couldn’t make that our common ground then. For obvious reasons. But now you just have to trust that I wanted what was best for her then, and I want what’s best for her now. You have to trust that I...” Her voice broke then. “That I loved her then. And I have loved her every day since.”

She had thought of her as a baby. That little baby that she had given to the Gates. She had never let herself imagine Lila growing older. Because it had been too painful.

She had done her best to not think of it.

Now she was here. A whole thirteen-year-old. Something she hadn’t let herself imagine.

“I love her. Every day since then I’ve loved her. I want us to present a united front. I want us to be better than we were when we were teenagers. Because we have a chance to make this better. We have a chance to do better. And we have to, for her.”

“You didn’t have any confidence we could do it then,” he said.

“I didn’t think we were what she needed then. I think we might be what she needs now. Because you’re right. She’s been through too much. You asked what the point of it was, and I don’t really know. I don’t. But we’re here, and we are adults. And we can certainly put aside our—”

“You want me to put aside feeling robbed for the last thirteen years?”

“Did she feel robbed?”

Landry took a step back, and he stopped. His face was a mask of pain. And she realized he didn’t have an answer to that. Not one that was smart. Not one that was fair.

“Did she like her life?” she pressed.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s why... She calls me Landry because she told me she had a dad. A great one.”

She closed her eyes. “It’s all I wanted. That’s all I wanted for her.”

“I want what’s best for her,” he said, his voice raw. “Fia, I know I messed some of this up, and I know my anger is tangled in it. But I haven’t told anyone, because I felt like we needed to talk first, and I felt like she needed to know before anyone in my family did.”

“I didn’t tell anyone either.” She breathed out, hard. Long. “Even if you can’t understand me, I need you to trust that I want the best for her.”

He nodded. “Yes. If you trust it’s what I want too.”

It was like the anger was siphoned from the room. Maybe not from them, but it didn’t pulse between them like a monster anymore. At least not now. Could they do this? Could they actually call a truce and do this?

They needed to. They had to.

“Here we are. Split up and parenting a kid together. This was one of the things I wanted to avoid.”

“Yes, same. Also, everyone being in our business, I suppose.”

That was like a swift kick. “Yeah. Because everyone will be,” she said.

“Yeah. Great. So. Let’s go talk to Lila.”

She nodded slowly. “Let’s go talk to Lila.”