Craving a Hero: St. John Sibling Series, book 3 (25 page)

"There you go again, thinking it's all about you," she said, threading her arms into the sleeves of her jacket and turning to the door. "Get over it."

She closed her fingers around the doorknob.

His arm shot past her head, his hand flattening against the door, holding it shut. "Where are you going?"

"To dig myself out of the ditch," she muttered. "Let go of the door."

"Not until you tell me why you're angry with me."

"You preventing me from leaving is making me angry," she said through teeth clenched against the tears that wanted to fall.

She jerked at the door. He pressed harder.

"What did I do that hurt you so badly you'd throw
us
away?"

Heaven help her, she couldn't bear his pleading—couldn't bear him thinking her pain was his fault.

"You did nothing to hurt me," she growled to cover the huskiness of raw emotion in her voice.

"It can't be because I stopped corresponding, because I didn't," he said, through gnashing teeth. "You're the one who stopped writing."

His hand shifted from the door. She took advantage of it, reefed open the door, and escaped. Behind her, the door shut beneath the sound of a hand slamming into it.

Guilt twisted through her, but she didn't stop. She couldn't risk him wearing her down to the point that she confessed everything to him—couldn't face his reaction to learning Angel was his—his reaction to her lying to him.…his rejecting them both.

She plowed through thigh deep snow to her truck, retrieved a shovel from the back, and went to where his SUV blocked the road. She hadn't cleared more than half a tire when he appeared at her side, a shovel in his hand and a soul deep pain in his eyes.

"If you're so damned determined to get away from me," he said, his voice husky, "the least I can do is help you get on your way."

Then he began to dig and she died a little more inside.

#

The sun was nearing its apex when Andi Johanson came pushing a path up the driveway through the snow. She stopped well short of the SUV, stepped out of her truck, and shook her head at the vehicle sitting crossways in the road.

"Looks like you need more than plowing out here," the lanky woman called.

Kelly planted her shovel in the snow, climbed the bank next to the truck she and Dane now worked at digging out, and joined Andi. Beyond suggesting a break to warm up, Kelly hadn't said anything to him since leaving the cabin. Even inside earlier warming themselves by the woodstove, the only talking she did was on the call to Andi, warning her the road was blocked and to not come up the camp road blazing guns.

Andi retrieved tow chains from the bed of her truck and Kelly crawled under the SUV and attached them. If he thought he'd be welcome, he'd have offered his help. But she'd made it clear she wanted nothing from him. So he returned to shoveling out the truck which, once freed, she'd use to drive out of his life.

With a little horse power from Andi's truck and Kelly's steering, they had the SUV straightened out. Dane sprinted over and disconnected the tow chains.

With a wave, Andi backed down the road, dragging her blade to give the SUV a clear path. When Kelly drove off with the SUV, it struck him she may not park it out of the way on the county road but keep going. The possibility tore at his gut.

Andi came back up the road, widening the path and pushing the snow past him and the cabin. She backed up, angled her truck toward Kelly's, dropped her blade, and dragged back the snow her pass had deposited.

"I'll turn her around so we got the best pulling angle," she called through her open window.

Heart aching, he nodded, crawled under the DNR truck, and attached the tow chains. When he emerged, Kelly was hoofing it up the road toward them and his heart skipped a beat. She hadn't left.

Not yet.

The three of them wedged boards under the tires giving the vehicle the best chance for grip and dusted the ground with wood ash for extra traction. Andi climbed into her truck and Kelly climbed into hers. He added his weight to the bed of Andi's truck, positioning himself over one of the rear tires. It wasn't much, but it beat standing beside the cabin just watching.

It took far fewer attempts to drag Kelly's truck from the ditch than it had taken him to lose her. While Andi stashed her tow chains, Dane watched Kelly drive off. By the time Andi climbed back into her truck, Dane had accepted Kelly wasn't coming back.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Andi finished pushing snow back from the front of the cabin and Dane sent her on her way, shoveling what snow the plow couldn't reach away from the cabin. He needed physical work to distract him from the loss burrowing a hole his chest.

And when there was no more to shovel—when he realized he was drenched in sweat in spite of having tossed off his jacket, he went inside. He built a fire in the fireplace, shrugged off his wool shirt, and peeled off his tee. He was slipping a fresh tee on over his head when he felt a blast of cold air.

His head clearing the neck-hole of the tee, he found Kelly standing just inside the open door, her jacket unzipped, her gloves bunched in one hand, her eyes wet.

"You get stuck again?" he asked.

She shook her head and closed the door behind her.

"You forget something?" he asked.

She looked away, strode to the kitchen table, and fingered the back of the nearest chair, her voice, when she spoke quiet. "I guess you could say that."

This wasn't the same woman who'd silently dug out a truck and an SUV with him. This wasn't even the same woman who'd made mad, mindless sex with him mere hours go. Something had changed.

"There's something I need to tell you, Dane," she said in a tight voice.

Was she finally going to admit she was mad at him—reveal the reason why? He held his breath.

She glanced at him ever so briefly as though she couldn't bear to look too long upon him. "Something I should have told you a long time ago."

Suddenly, he was afraid of what she was about to confess.

"I've been keeping a secret from you, Dane."

"Is there someone else?" he asked, his mouth going dry.

A small sound escaped her, a cross between a laugh and a groan, and she shook her head.

His breath balled up in his chest. "Is it something medical? A…terminal illness?"

Her head snapped up at him. "No. Nothing like that."

He expelled the breath he'd been holding. "Just tell me there's still an
us
, Bright Eyes, and I can bear anything
.
"

#

Kelly winced. There was the rub.

She'd gotten halfway to the highway before she knew she'd never outdistance that pained look he'd worn all the while he shoveled snow beside her—before she accepted that she couldn't leave him with that much hurt. He'd done nothing to deserve it. The onus was all on her.

Kelly closed her eyes as if closing off everything that was breaking inside her could be so easily denied, and she whispered, "I wish I could tell you that."

"What the hell did I do to fail you, Kel?"

"You did nothing wrong." She opened her eyes and looked at him. "What I'm trying to tell you, Dane, is
I
haven't been honest with you."

His brow puckered. "So, be honest with me now."

"I want to be. But I'm afraid."

He came to her and took her by the shoulders. "If there's anything you should know about me after those ten days we had together, Bright Eyes, it's that you can tell me anything."

She stood stiffly within his embrace, afraid to accept its comfort. "And if there's anything you should know about me by now, Dane, it's that I'm a suspicious person by nature. Always looking for the lie in others."

He tugged her closer, his thumbs stroking the crests of her shoulders. "Goes with being a CO, no?"

"It's an asset I use to do my job," she said, dying a little inside, knowing he'd surely never touch her with such affection again once he knew what she'd withheld from him. "A habit that's hard to turn off when I'm not on duty."

He frowned. "Is this about my being an actor? Are you afraid I use my acting even when I'm not working?"

She winced. "No. I've come to realize you differentiate between your job and the real world far better than I do. You are, as you once said of me, the real deal."

Confusion pulled at his mouth, at the corners of his eyes, and pinched a groove above the bridge of his nose.

"I'm not as real a deal as you think I am," Kelly said quietly.

His eyes narrowed at her. "I don't understand."

"I've kept a secret from you." She swallowed hard and forced herself to look him in the eye. "Angel isn't my niece. She's my daughter."

He blinked. She could almost see the calculating in his eyes—the adding up of months since that night they made love without protection and coming up with Angel's age.

"Yes," she said before he could even ask the question. "Angel is your daughter."

A myriad of emotions pulsed in his eyes, before settling on anger. His hands fell away from her and he backed away from her, his voice a hoarse whisper. "Angel is mine?"

"I don't expect anything from you," she said.

Just your forgiveness, your acceptance, your love.

"You don't expect anything from me?"
Each enunciated syllable of his words struck her like buckshot. "Is that what you think, Kel, that I wouldn't want anything to do with my own—" the harshness of his voice gave way to a choked "—daughter?"

"I'm sorry. I didn't—"

"You had to know how I felt about family. I talked enough about mine. I wrote you endlessly about them all the time. And your family—"

He stopped short, his brow puckering a new emotion, one more akin to bafflement. "Your parents, do they know she's mine?"

"Yes."

"And your sister, playing along when I talked to her like Angel was hers. How could they not tell me she was mine?"

"They wanted to."

"Then why didn't they?" he all but howled.

She jumped. "They were trying to protect me."

"What about Angel? Didn't any of you think she had a right to know me—her father?"

"It's not that simple," she said. "I'd just found out I was pregnant when my father had his stroke and everything went crazy."

"There's nothing in this world that could have happened to merit not telling me I was her father, that… that little girl was—" Tears turned Dane's famous blue eyes liquid and when he finished, the words came out thick and husky. "—
is
mine."

He paced a circle between her and the cabinets. "I should have figured it out," he muttered. "Her age. Her eyes. That she was always at your house. The awkward moments with your sister. Your mother getting all nerved up the first time I showed up—when I asked to pick up Angel."

He ran his hands through his hair. "Her name!"

He stopped pacing and looked her hard in the eye. "Angel after Angel Point…where she was conceived. You named her the way my parents named me and my siblings."

His hands tightened into fists. His whole body shook. He spun away from her, and with one sweep of his arm, cleared the table of condiments and the ever present cribbage board and cards.

Then he grabbed his jacket and slammed the door shut behind him.

And she was left staring at the space where he had stood as she'd told him the extent to which she'd deceived him—where the man she loved had wept and railed. She had broken his heart.

For the first time in her life, Kelly realized she didn't truly know what a broken heart was until that moment.

When it finally registered with her that he'd driven away—that his destination could be no other than her parents' home—and Angel, she bolted out the door to her truck and went after him.

Fear sent her slipping down the narrow road off the bluff. Fear sent her skidding around an icy bend in the county road. Fear pressed her foot down on the accelerator, speeding her along the slippery highway. He must be trucking along himself because she hit town without catching up to him.

#

He didn't even knock. He just charged into the house and through the kitchen to the playpen in the sunny corner of the dining room.

"What's wrong?" her mom asked, having followed him from the kitchen.

He turned on her. "Where is she?"

"Kelly?"

"Angel."

A sound came out of Frank like a cry from the bowls of hell. Her mother backed toward the second floor stairway, keeping herself between him and the stairs.

"She's napping," she said.

He brushed past her, taking the stairs two and three at a time, not stopping until he was at the side of the crib in Kelly's room.

The baby was sleeping, all sweet innocence. He knew he should leave her be. But he needed to hold his daughter.

His
daughter
.

Carefully, he slipped his hands under her and lifted her. She stirred, blinked at him—blinked those St. John Blue eyes.

He hugged her against his chest—into the nest his open jacket created. She settled her head against his shoulder and tucked her tiny fist under his chin.

His daughter. His Angel.

"I'm your daddy," he said on an awed whisper.

Then hummed to her, rocked her side-to-side until her breath against his neck evened out and he knew she was once more asleep. Still, he didn't stop rocking her—holding her to him like the precious being she was. He'd missed nine months of her life. How many firsts in that time had he missed?

Her birth, of course. And the first time she opened those blue eyes.

The first time she rolled over. The first time she sat up.

Her first smile.

His legs went weak as though all the hurt and anger…and love…bearing down on him were more than they could hold. He made it to the rocker where he lowered himself as gently as he could so as not to jar Angel from her sleep. If it were within his power, he'd make sure her every nap, her every night's sleep would be as peaceful as this one. But that wasn't reality. Even he, with his charmed life, had managed only thirty-two blissful years.

#

She parked across the end of the driveway, blocking his SUV. He'd have to plow through the DNR truck to escape with her daughter.

She charged through the back door and the dining-living room. Her father was on his feet in front of his chair, his cane shaking under his grip. Her mother stood at the base of the stairway looking stricken.

"He knows, doesn't he?" her mother said as Kelly dashed past.

She wasn't sure what to expect when she stepped into the open doorway of her bedroom. Dane stuffing diapers into the diaper bag, wrapping her daughter up in blankets to take her away from her? A raging bull of a man?

She wasn't prepared to find Dane in the rocker hugging a dozing Angel against his chest, tears streaming down his cheeks, murmuring, "I'm your daddy."

"I'm sorry," she said in a voice barely more than a whisper.

"You should be," he said without looking up at her, his voice ominously low.

"I shouldn't have kept her a secret from you."

"No, you shouldn't have."

"I made a mistake."

"Yes, you did."

She swallowed hard. "Now what happens?"

He lifted angry eyes at her, his mouth tight. "Maybe I take her away from you for the next nine months. How'd you feel about that?"

Though not unexpected, his words hit her like an avalanche, knocking her back a step. She grabbed the frame of the door to steady herself. Angel stirred—fussed as though sensing the tension mounting around her. She lifted her head from Dane's shoulder.

"Hush," he cooed, one large, protective hand cupping the back of her head. "Hush, my little Angel."

Angel's tiny fingers curled over Dane's bottom lip. All curious little girl once more, distracted from the drama unfolding around her. When Dane gazed over his daughter's head at Kelly, a deep sadness lined his brow and crimped the edges of his anger-filled eyes. Kelly held her breath.

"But I wouldn't do that," he said. "I wouldn't take her away from her mother."

Kelly let out the breath she'd been holding. "Thank you."

"Not for your sake," he whispered almost harshly and dipped his chin at Angel. "For hers."

"Of course." Drained, Kelly moved to the side of the bed closest to the rocker and sat. "Everything we do from here on out has to be in her best interest."

"And it starts this minute," he said.

"Okay."

"It starts with me getting the time to bond with her."

"Okay."

"That means I won't be leaving her side."

"For how long?"

The lines in his forehead and around his mouth deepened and his voice rose. "As long as I see fit."

Kelly flinched. Angel's babbling took on a clipped, anxious note and she patted his lips with her tiny fingers. He brushed his lips against her brow, murmuring, "It's okay, my sweet Angel."

When he spoke again to Kelly, it was in a quiet, but determined voice. "I'll be staying the night in my daughter's room."

"But it's my room, too," Kelly said, struggling to keep her voice composed for Angel's sake.