Page 45 of Point of Mercy

“Not if you move to Gold Creek.”

She felt as if she’d stopped breathing. Move to Gold Creek? Oh,Lord. She couldn’t speak for a minute, but finally found her tongue. “Are you out of your mind?” She whirled on him and saw that his eyes were dark and serious. “Are you really suggesting that…” Her voice failed her. He wasn’t kidding. The look on his face was deadly serious, and Heather was suddenly very frightened. She’d known he’d demand partial custody, but she’d thought he’d only want a few weeks in the summer—maybe Christmas vacation and those would be hard enough to give up—butthis,this insane plan for her to move back to the small town where she’d been raised… It was impossible. “I’d die in Gold Creek.”

“Adam would be closer to me.”

“Until a few days ago, you didn’t even know you had a son and now—”

“Yes, and now I want him. And I’ll do anything, got it? I meananythingto have him close.”

“You can’t be serious,” she whispered.

“Oh, but I am, Heather,” he said with a deadly calm that drove a stake of desperation into her heart.

The room was dark, and now the shadows seemed to envelop them. “You can’t walk into this house and turn my life upside down just because—”

“—because I found out I have a son. Because for six years we’ve both been living a lie? Because I’ve discovered that my kid,mysick kid, is the most important thing in my life?” His hands were suddenly on her forearms, gripped in the fury that consumed him. “You walked into my barn and turned my life inside out, lady.”

“You left me!”

“I never said I’d stay.”

“Then don’t start interfering now.”

His eyes slitted and the hands upon her forearms clenched harder. “This isn’t about sex. This isn’t about love. This is about our child. And if you have some ridiculous notion that I’ll do my part as a biological parent, donate whatever it is Adam needs and then just leave you alone until you have another crisis, guess again. I’m here for the duration, Heather, and you’d better get used to that idea.”

“I—I know,” she said, her throat catching. “But don’t think you can start bossing me around, Turner. You’re not my husband!”

As soon as she’d said the words, she wished she could call them back.

Turner’s eyes flashed fire.

A knot formed in her throat, but she wasn’t going to break down. She had shed her tears for Turner a long time ago and she was through. Wrenching free of his grasp, she turned on the switch to the gas starter in the fireplace and struck a match. Immediately the room was lighter, the gas flames flickering blue and yellow against an oak log. She felt him watching her. Nervous, she asked if he wanted a drink and when he declined, she reached into a liquor cabinet, found an old bottle of bourbon and poured them each a splash in the bottom of two glasses. “You may not need a drink, but I think I do,” she said, handing him one of the glasses.

“No oneneedsa drink.”

“Okay, so I want one.” She sipped the hard liquor, and it burned the back of her throat, scorching all the way to her stomach. With a hiss and crackle, the moss on the oak log caught fire and sent out an orange glow throughout the room.

Turner sipped his drink,but his face muscles didn’t relax and he looked out of place, a range-hard cowboy caught in a frivolous living room filled with women’s art and furniture. “I think you’d better explain a few things,” he said quietly.

“Like what?”

“How about starting at the beginning. Tell me why you married Leonetti. Why you didn’t contact me.”

She wanted to scream at him, to tell him to leave them both alone, that she didn’t need this emotional torture, but she knew in her heart she was wrong. Adam needed him, and a deep, traitorous part of her needed him, too.

Unsteady at that realization, Heather sat on the wide windowseat, her knees tucked up beneath her chin, her drink forgotten. She began to tell him everything she could remember. Turner lowered himself to the floor, propped his back against the couch and stretched his legs toward the fire.

And for the next hour and a half, Heather explained about her realization that she was pregnant, of her calls to Mazie and Zeke at the Lazy K, of Dennis’s anger, then acceptance. “Believe it or not, he wasn’t a monster. He was obsessed with me back then, though I really don’t know why, I guess because I was the only girl who’d ever said no to him and because I wasn’t acceptable to his parents. They’d heard the gossip about my family, knew my sister’s reputation was destroyed. Then there was the scandal with my dad when he married a woman younger than either of his daughters. We Tremonts weren’t exactly blue bloods.So Dennis’s folks were distraught to say the least. They were hoping he’d find some nice girl in college whose family was from ‘old money.’” She laughed a little when she remembered the horror that the elder Leonettis had expressed at their son’s choice of wife. “I wasn’t even from ‘new money.’ Dennis’s father offered to buy me out, but Dennis got wind of it and by the end of the week we’d eloped.”

“How do they feel about Adam?” Turner asked, a possessive flame leaping in his eyes as he swirled his drink and watched the fire play in the amber liquor.

“Ambivalent, I guess. I would’ve thought they would have been all over the Leonetti heir, but, though they were never unkind to him, Adam just wasn’t all that interesting to either of them. I expected some kind of custodial fight when we were getting divorced, but by then Dennis didn’t want any part of Adam and his folks never once called him. My guess is that Dennis told them the truth—that Adam doesn’t have a drop of Leonetti blood in him.”

“So Dennis has given up all his parental rights?”

“He knew that sooner or later, with Adam’s condition, the truth would bear out.”

“So just because he didn’t sire the kid, suddenly Adam’s not good enough! Son of a bitch, what a great guy!” Turner’s rage twisted his handsome features, making him seem fierce and dangerous. “You really know how to pick ’em, don’t ya?”

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