“I thought I learned that from you,” Boone threw out there. His head was reeling. He couldn’t take this in. It had to be some kind of joke, didn’t it?
Yet Zeke didn’t look the least bit concerned. Or like he thought he was telling jokes. He also didn’t look even remotely frail. In retrospect, maybe that should have been a clue.
“Here’s the thing, Boone.” Zeke soundedkind, and that was… not better. “You’ve been lying to yourself for a long time.”
“I’m not a liar,” Boone shot back at him. “That’s you, apparently.”
But his father didn’t relent. “Aren’t you?”
“I don’t know what the hell that’s supposed to mean, Dad.” Boone could feel the temper he usually kept locked away tag in. “I’ve gone out of my way, all my life, to stay honest. Even when it didn’t exactly make me the most popular guy around.”
Ask any of the women he’d been with all these years. He’d been starkly honest and many of them liked to act as if that had been bruising.
Afterward, that was.
He knew what they said about him. It had never bothered him—because it was true. He was that honest, always, no matter that other men would lie to make everyone feel better. That wasn’t him.
Boone prided himself on never, ever being a liar.
Zeke leaned forward, a lot like he’d been waiting to speak on this for a good, long while. “I have a lot of friends, Boone. Good friends. Some might even describe them asbest friends. Not one of them acts in a way that could be confused for my wife.”
Boone started to argue with that, but Zeke shook his head.
“I’ve never liked a money man in my life. I have no use for wannabe copper kings in this day and age. I’m not going to sit here and defend Matty Quealey. But you know as well as I do that you made yourself the foundation she rested her life on. You made it possible for her to envision a way out, simply by giving her, day after day and year after year, what her husband didn’t.”
“I never laid a hand on her while she was married,” Boone managed to get out, feeling as if he been slapped.
So hard it made his head spin.
“I don’t doubt that,” Zeke said, but his voice was still uncompromising. “But you gave her everything else, didn’t you? You were a shoulder to cry on. A helping hand. Everything a husband ought to be, and I’m not saying she doesn’t deserve those things. You know how fond I am of Sierra. But now that she’s left heractualhusband, you don’t want to put a label on it?” And when Zeke laughed this time, Boone felt no urge to join him. “What are you afraid of? In almost every way that matters, she’s been with you since high school. If you doubt that, what have you been doing?”
“I don’t think,” Boone said, though his heart was a sledgehammer in his chest and he hardly recognized his own voice, “that I’m going to take a lecture from a man who’s been manipulating his children for the past year.”
“Son,” Zeke said, and he was still laughing, “I’ve been manipulating you your whole life. I just prefer to think of it as fatherly influence.”
When Boone muttered something a man shouldn’t say in the presence of his parent—and certainly not one who claimed to be dying and then claimed he’d made it up so was probably delusional anyway—said parent laughed even harder. Then sobered.
“There are no consequences if you don’t marry this girl,” Zeke said in that quiet, sure way of his. “Not for me. But I have to wonder if you’ve thought at all about the consequences for you.”
“For all I know she has no desire to ever marry again,” Boone bit out.
“But you don’t actually know.” Zeke studied him. “Because you’re afraid to ask. Or maybe you’re afraid that if you do marry her, it really will be a letdown. Maybe what you like is what’s forbidden.”
“You can go—” Boone found that he was standing up, his hands in fists at his side, and he was about to curse his own father out.
And he might have kept going, buoyed by a rush of that temper he almost never indulged. But he saw that Zeke had the faintest curve in his mouth.
Boone blew out a breath. “You’re trying to wind me up.”
“As you pointed out, I’m very manipulative,” Zeke said, happily.
“Why?” Boone asked.
“Because I know what you want.” Zeke shook his head as if he despaired of Boone. “And so do you. If you love Sierra as much as you’ve always indicated that you do, she should know that already. She should also have an idea of what this all must mean to you and in what direction you’re clearly thinking this is leading. You can’t have an honest relationship if you’re not willing to be honest about the things that really matter, can you?”
“Again, what is this? ‘Do as I say, not as I do?’”
Zeke laughed so uproariously then that Boone almost felt like he was watching this from off in the distance somewhere. Him falling apart while Zeke was having the time of his life. Him feeling like his chest was going to explode and his fatherlaughing.