Sugar Springs (14 page)

She closed her eyes for a moment so brief he wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been watching her intently. “They came home on Christmas Day, the day before she died.”

He waited, wanting to hear more, but not quite sure what to ask.

“She never held them.” Her voice was soft, and it sounded so lost. She stared at the portrait. “She’d announced as we went to the hospital the morning they were born that she was heading back to Nashville just as soon as she recovered, and that either Mom or I could keep them, or she would put them up for adoption.”

The thought shouldn’t have shocked him, but it did. Thank goodness they hadn’t had to spend time bouncing from family to family like he had.

“Once they cut her open for delivery, they discovered the cancer,” Lee Ann continued. “This made things even more...
uncomfortable between us. She was angry and scared, and to the day she died, I think she hated me.”

“Why?” He took a half step closer to her, but stopped himself. He couldn’t comfort her. He didn’t want to imply that he was there for any reason other than to find out about the girls, no matter how much he found himself wanting to reach out and attempt to take some of the pain from her. She seemed so fragile standing there. “I never understood why she’d done what she had—why she would hate you so much.”

She crossed her arms over each other and cupped her elbows. “Because I was the reason our dad left. For the pregnancy, though, she blamed me for having you as a boyfriend to begin with. Stupid, I know, but she claimed she wouldn’t have been tempted to have sex with you if you hadn’t been around to begin with. Therefore, it was also my fault they didn’t find the cancer until it was too late. She said I killed her.”

“Wow.” And he thought he had issues. But that certainly sounded like something the self-centered girl he’d known for all of sixty minutes would have said.

Tired of fighting the urge to comfort her, he reached out and ran the backs of his fingers down the outside of Lee Ann’s arm. She tensed at first but then relaxed. He lingered on her skin for a few seconds longer, then pulled his hand away before being tempted to do more.

“You know that’s not the truth, right?” he asked. “I’m not trying to shed any of the blame, but she wasn’t a good person, Lee. She was out to hurt you that day. It sounds like she went to her grave wanting nothing but the same.”

She nodded. “I know. I never could get her to like me. I know I was too much trouble when I was little, but I was only four when he left. I didn’t mean to be so difficult.”

Her fragility was almost too much for him to bear. He reached out his hand again, but she shifted away, and he dropped it. The urge to take her in his arms was as strong as the desire to uncover how he’d come to have two kids he knew nothing about.

“To find out that I let her parting shot hurt all of us the way I did...” The words trailed off as she shook her head. All the fight seemed to drain out of her. “I have no idea why I fell for her lies. I feel so bad about that.”

Quite likely because it was the easier thing to do, he thought. Her easy acceptance of Stephanie’s lies still angered him, but he couldn’t say he wouldn’t have done the same thing if their situations had been reversed.

“This is when they were one,” Lee Ann said as she returned their attention to the photos and shuffled a step down the wall. She brought a hand up and it hovered slightly beside her face, as if it had no idea where it should land. She then turned and looked at a nearby bookshelf. “I have more in albums that I can show you later. Hanging in here, though, I only have pictures taken from each of their birthdays.”

Cody scanned each frame again. The anger he’d shown up with had been replaced with something else. It was a pain of a different kind, but this one didn’t upset him so much as make him uncomfortable. Every picture other than the first contained three wide smiles and shining eyes. “They’re all of the three of you. Yearly family portraits?”

She nodded. “They’d lost their mother and I’d been told their father wanted nothing to do with them. I decided to make certain they could one day look back on their lives and know they had a parent who loved them no matter what.”

“That’s what she said, then? That I wanted nothing to do with them?”

The blue of her eyes appeared dull as she glanced sideways at him. “Said she called you from the hospital the day they were born and told you all about her sickness and where they were. According to her, you weren’t interested.”

“And you just believed—”

Lee Ann held up her hand as if to stop his words. “I don’t know why I did, but yes, Mother and I both believed her. The way you’d left town...” She gave an apologetic shrug. “It made sense at the time.”

“Except you knew me. You knew I wouldn’t just walk away from something like that.”

“Yet that’s exactly what you did.” Her voice rose as she turned to face him. “When I came home and found you and Stephanie that day, you didn’t even stick around long enough to
try
to explain things to me. You just left. And you never came back again.”

As Cody watched her, she turned away and fiddled with a cup of pencils on the corner desk, and he got it. She was right. That is exactly what he’d done. Why would she think he’d come back months later just because there were now kids involved. Hell, for most people that would ensure they
didn’t
come back.

He thought back to that day with Stephanie and understood how hard the months following must have been for Lee Ann. It was bad enough that he’d allowed his crappy day along with Stephanie’s taunts to let him accept what she offered, but as soon as the physical act had ended, he’d known in an instant that he’d been used. Just as everyone else in his life had used him.

The second he’d pulled away, with Stephanie laughing about how fun it would be to see Lee Ann’s face when she told her, he knew he’d made the biggest mistake possible. A mistake that would destroy the only person who’d ever looked deeply enough to see the real him.

Maybe what he and Lee Ann had back then hadn’t been perfect, and maybe it wouldn’t have worked long-term—who knew?—but he couldn’t have loved her more at the time. He’d known this as surely as he’d known he was not the man for her.

She’d deserved better.

So he’d left.

“She told me you said there was a perfectly good foster care system that would take them.”

He reared back as if she’d just slammed a two-by-four into his head. “Foster care?”

She faced him, and he couldn’t utter another word. Did she think he’d said that? That he would be so unfeeling as to toss his kids to the same system that had placed him in homes he’d continually had to run away from? Not a one had done anything for him. They’d seen him purely as a means to an end. Take care of the other kids, do the household chores, be a punching bag. Whatever they’d wanted, it hadn’t been a kid.

Her top lip slid between her teeth, and he shook his head. “No, Lee Ann. Of course I wouldn’t—”

“I know,” she whispered. “I should have known then, but I was so hurt. Everything somehow just made sense. I’m so sorry.”

He finally reached for her and wrapped his arms around her before she could get away.

Surprisingly, she immediately fit herself to him. They stood together, him stroking her short hair, she with her face buried in his chest for several minutes as he thought back over earlier
times. The night he’d realized he wanted more than friendship from her, he’d opened his soul for the one and only time and shared the beatings, the desertions, and told her how he’d often been nothing more than hired-out child labor.

He’d told her in the hope she’d someday trust him enough to let him be more. He’d needed her so badly. He’d needed to believe in what the idea of the two of them together offered. Given how much closer they’d grown after that night, she should have known he would never voluntarily send anyone to...

His thoughts froze. Bile rose, continuing until it burned his nostrils, as memories fought to the front of his mind. His breathing picked up.

Stephanie laughing.

Lee Ann walking in and finding him fastening his jeans.

Her destroyed gaze locking on him, her jaw quivering, before she disappeared from the room without a word.

He’d stomped to the front door and yanked it open as Stephanie’s taunts hit him like ice water between the shoulder blades.

“What if you just got me pregnant, Cody? You will do the right thing, won’t you? Marry me and make an honest woman out of me?”

Pregnant? He faced her, disgust pulling him under. “There is no way you’re not on the pill.”

Her bottom lip pouted out. “You know times are tough. I’m trying to make it in the country-music business. I can’t afford luxuries like the pill.”

She was lying. She had to be. No way he could have just gotten her pregnant. He stalked across the room, leaned down into her deceitful face and spit out, “If you managed to just get yourself pregnant, I happen to know firsthand there’s a perfectly good foster care system that would be more than willing to take the bastard.”

Oh. God.

He released Lee Ann and pressed the back of his hand to his mouth to keep the frustration from boiling out. That was not what he’d meant. He hadn’t believed for a second she was stupid enough to seduce him when she wasn’t protected.

Lee Ann’s gaze flicked questioningly over his face, and he wondered what she saw. He couldn’t tell her he’d actually said those words. No way could he let her know that.

Seeming to accept the moment was over, she turned back to the pictures and shuttered her expression, no longer letting him see her vulnerability. No longer letting him see what mattered to her.

“Though I fully believed her words, I had the hardest time accepting you wanted nothing to do with them.” A thin finger smoothed over the dark frame of the second picture. “Right around their first birthday I decided to try to find you. And I hated that. The last thing I wanted was to see you. But they were your kids. I just couldn’t believe you wouldn’t want to be a part of something so wonderful.”

About that time he would’ve been getting his shit together and remembering that Lee Ann had always believed he had the ability to succeed. He’d spent the prior year working at the South Chicago clinic of the veterinarian who’d saved both him and the dog he’d had at the time. He’d saved him from living on the streets and his dog after a hit-and-run that occurred while they’d been somewhere he’d had no business being.

“No doubt there wasn’t a lot of information out there on me.” Given the effort he’d gone to in order to stay off the radar, he would have been surprised to learn there had been.

One shoulder lifted. “Nothing. It was pretty amazing. I figured there’d be a phone number or something, but I found nothing. It was as if you’d disappeared off the face of the earth.”

“Nah, just Chicago. A guy can easily get lost there if he doesn’t want to be found.” And he didn’t. Even when he’d been able to afford a phone he hadn’t gotten one. Not until he’d started college.

He’d been existing purely to take care of the dog he’d found while living on the streets. He’d lived in Doc Hutchinson’s apartment, gone to work, paid his rent and stayed as far out of trouble as he could get. Eight months of being on the street had taught him a lot about what he did and didn’t want out of life. He hadn’t had it all figured out yet, but he’d seen enough to know what he didn’t want.

“Ah,” Lee Ann said, as if unsure what else to say. “Anyway, I couldn’t afford to hire anyone to search for you, so I let myself believe what she’d said to be the truth.”

He deserved every bad thing she’d ever thought about him.

She moved to the next picture and a sad smile flitted across her face. “They had a really bad case of the terrible twos. I was still living with Mom at the time and she ended up being a big help. Not only with the girls, but with keeping me sane as well. On their birthday, I believe I took close to forty pictures before I could get all three of us smiling together.”

“So you had Reba’s help, then?” He looked around, needing to not look at the pictures of his kids for a minute. “Does she not live here now?”

Guilt reached for him from every angle. For Lee Ann, for the girls. For the simple fact he’d had anything to do with bringing them into the world in the first place. He inhaled a long breath through his nose and tried to act as if he were
interested in what she had to say instead of desperate to get away. He shouldn’t be there. He would only turn her world even more upside down.

“She bought the smaller house next door when it went up for sale. I bought this one from her.”

“Ah.” He nodded, but he didn’t know what he was agreeing to. His head was heavy, as if he were spinning too fast to hold it up. With his lunch rapidly rising, he turned toward the door, panic setting in. He stumbled toward it before pulling up short, sweat coating his skin. He couldn’t just walk out. His hands clenched. But he couldn’t stay.

“I need a minute,” he muttered and pushed through the front door, letting it slam closed behind him.

He made his way from Lee Ann’s front porch and up the sidewalk, taking in gulps of cool air until the burning inside his chest calmed to a low simmer. He had no idea what he was doing. He couldn’t be a father. Could he?