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A virtual stranger.

  “So, how’s business?”

  Her gaze narrowed. “Fine for Heartbreak.”

  “I—” His face flushed hot, and he turned away, pretending interest in the store to hide it. “I have some money set aside if…”

  “No, thank you.”

  Something about the prim tone of her voice raised his defenses and made him face her again. “It’s not tainted. I didn’t steal it or win it in a crooked card game, or scam some poor sucker out of it. I earned it at an honest job, tending bar in Key West. I’ve been working since I left here last summer, and I’ve saved everything I didn’t need to live on.”

  She looked embarrassed, too. “I didn’t mean—I’m fine right now. I don’t need money.”

  “What do you need?”

  She thought about it a moment, then shrugged. “Nothing.”

  That sounded damn near perfect, he thought bitterly. That was all he was, and all he could offer. Nothing.

  The bell over the door rang, drawing their attention that way. The man who came through the door was white-haired and stoop-shouldered, and though Ethan hadn’t seen him in ten years, he would have recognized him anywhere. It wasn’t easy to forget the man who’d laid his mother to rest a good fifty years before Ethan was ready to let her go.

  “Pastor.” Grace eased to her feet, pulled her sweater tighter across her front and went to stand at the counter. If Ethan were asked, from a purely analytical standpoint, he would say she was trying to hide her pregnancy from the old man. But seven months was a lot to hide, especially on someone as delicate as she was. “What can I do for you?”

  “Mama wanted me to pick up two gallons of paint, and she wants it to match the green on this paper.” The old man laid a swatch of wallpaper on the counter between them. “She’s redoing the guest room again. Our son and his wife are coming for a visit next month to help us celebrate our forty-fifth anniversary, and she seems to think the house needs to look different every time they come.”

  “I’ll mix this up for you,” she said with a flash of a smile before grabbing the paper and walking off with it.

  Pastor Hughes turned his attention Ethan’s way. “Ethan.” He bobbed his head in a disapproving nod. “I heard you were back. It’s been a long time.”

  “Not long enough, from what I understand.”

  “What brings you home this time?”

  Ethan shoved his hands into his jeans pockets, then lifted his shoulders in a shrug as he parroted the preacher’s words. “It’s been a long time.”

  “I didn’t realize you and Grace were friends.”

  Not friends. Not even acquaintances. Just accomplices in a night’s sins that had changed both their lives. But of course he couldn’t tell the preacher that. “We went to school together. I couldn’t come back and not say hello.”

  Pastor Hughes looked as if he didn’t quite accept the explanation, but he didn’t look as if he suspected the truth. No, that would surely widen his old blue eyes with shock and distaste, with a self-righteous This-is-no-more-than-we-expect-from-you for Ethan and a dismayed How-could-you-with-him for Grace.

  “Where have you been this time?” Pastor Hughes asked.

  “Florida.”

  “I understand it’s warm there this time of year. Too warm, perhaps?”

  Ethan felt the damned guilty flush start again. “I wasn’t run out of town, if that’s what you’re asking. I left on my own.”

  “And how long will you be staying?”

  “That depends.” He watched Grace set two paint cans on the counter in the distant corner. With quick, efficient movements, she pried the tops off the cans, then began measuring in tints. He would offer his help for no other reason than to get away from the preacher, but he couldn’t help her. He knew nothing about mixing paints or matching colors. He knew nothing about anything but causing trouble. Certainly nothing about making it right.

  “I assume Grace has told you about her predicament.”

  Afraid of what might show in his face if he continued to watch her, Ethan turned his gaze back to the preacher. “Her predicament? You mean being pregnant?”

  “And unmarried. Abandoned by both her own father and the baby’s father. Left to suffer the consequences alone.”

  He hadn’t abandoned her, he wanted to protest. He knew too well how that felt, had been through it with his father, with Guthrie, even with his mother. God help him, he would never do it to someone else.

  But Grace had made it pretty clear that neither she nor her baby needed him, that she didn’t want him. So if he left again, that wasn’t abandonment, was it? Even if it felt like it?

  “She can’t be the first unwed mother Heartbreak’s ever seen,” he said, injecting a touch of scorn into his voice to cover his guilt.

  “No, sad to say she’s not. Which doesn’t make her situation any less fortunate.”

  Her misfortune was not running the other way when she met him that night. It was not telling him to go to hell when he’d invited her to the motel. It wasn’t the baby. She insisted she wanted the child, even though it was his child, and he believed her.

  He wanted to believe her.

  Before the pastor could say anything else, Grace returned with the paint. She rang it up, then waited while the old man wrote out a check. As soon as he was gone, she let out a long sigh.

  “I know the good pastor doesn’t think highly of wayward sons. I take it he’s not much kinder to unwed mothers,” Ethan said flatly.

  She tilted her head side to side, stretching the muscles in her neck. “Actually, he is. He sees me as an innocent victim, taken advantage of and betrayed by some unrepentant scoundrel.” Abruptly, her gaze widened, as if she’d belatedly seen the insult in her words, and she opened her mouth to apologize.

  “I’ll admit to the scoundrel part,” he said, his tone more casual than his emotions. “But I’ve always been repentant.”

  “Just not enough to stop being a scoundrel.”

  “Not until recently.”

  “Why recently?”

  “It was time,” he said with a careless shrug, but that wasn’t the real answer. He’d started trying to change because one morning he’d awakened from a three-day drunk and realized that he’d sold his brother’s ranch—his livelihood, his family history, the one thing Guthrie loved most in this world. The fact that land fraud was taken seriously in Oklahoma ranching country hadn’t concerned him, nor had the fact that he could go to prison for it. He’d been in jail before. It hadn’t been his favorite place, but truth be told, it hadn’t been his least favorite, either.

  It was the idea that he’d committed the ultimate betrayal against Guthrie that had sobered him. Virtually anything else in the world could eventually be forgiven, but stealing his brother’s land was unforgivable.

  He’d thought he might have a chance to set things right without Guthrie even finding out, and so he’d headed for Atlanta to find David Miles, the smug businessman who’d been one of the easiest marks Ethan had ever fleeced. He hadn’t had much of a plan—to admit that the sale was fraudulent, return what was left of the money and face whatever consequences Miles wanted to dish out.

  In Atlanta, though, things had gone from bad to worse. He learned that Miles had been killed in an accident, leaving his wife and twin daughters penniless and homeless. The last anyone had heard, they were on their way to Oklahoma to claim the only thing left them—the ranch. Guthrie’s ranch.

  Ethan remembered sitting in a seedy motel on the outskirts of the city, trying to gather the courage to pick up the phone and call his brother. But his hands had trembled and his throat had closed off. Even if Guthrie would have talked to him, he wouldn’t have been able to say a word.

  And what words could he have offered? I’m sorry? I didn’t think you’d ever find out? I’ll never do it again? He’d said them all so many times before that they didn’t mean a thing.

  In the end, it had worked out well, for Guthrie, Olivia and the girls, at least. Th
ey’d turned tragedy into triumph—had fallen in love, gotten married and created a new family that was a million times better than the old families that had let them down.

  Maybe it had worked out well for Grace, too. Instead of making that phone call from Atlanta to Heartbreak, he’d made the drive, arriving in time to catch the last few minutes of Guthrie and Olivia’s wedding. He’d given Miles’s money to Olivia, given Guthrie the deed to the portion of ranch that had been his for a time, then left them to celebrate their wedding with their friends while he sought the comfort of a few beers and a willing woman in the bar in Buffalo Springs. And there he’d met Grace.

  In the end, everyone involved—Guthrie, Olivia and Grace—had gotten the one thing they valued most. A family. Someone to love, someone to love them.

  That was the one thing Ethan had always wanted, too.

  It was the one thing he didn’t think he would ever get.

  Chapter 3

  Because many of her customers dropped in on their lunch hours, Grace couldn’t close up at noon. Instead, she’d gotten in the habit of bringing something from home to eat in what she jokingly called the break room. During her father’s reign, it had been a storeroom, but she’d cleaned it out, added a compact refrigerator and microwave, purchased cheap from Reese’s nephew, who’d just graduated from college, and a tiny table and chairs picked up at a yard sale. In a few more months, she planned to bring the playpen she’d bought at the same garage sale so the baby would be able to nap there, undisturbed by the activity in the store.

  Sometimes on her days off, Ginger joined her, and some days Shay Rafferty brought two daily specials from her café down the street to share. Though she enjoyed their company with all the saved-up pleasure of a woman who’d long been denied the companionship of other women, today she hoped no one dropped in, not even customers. Today she already had company, she thought, as she took her lunch out of the fridge and put it in the microwave to heat up.

  But she wasn’t sure if she wanted to keep Ethan to herself a bit longer, or if she was afraid that seeing him would make everyone remember his last visit home and put two and two together, or if she was…

  Stubbornly setting her jaw, she forced the word out. Ashamed. Just a little. He had such a reputation, and she didn’t want it tarnishing her baby before it was even born. Grace didn’t want people to look at her child and say, Oh, that’s Ethan James’s kid. She won’t amount to anything, that’s for sure. Grace didn’t want people shaking their heads when they saw her and repeating some version of what she’d heard plenty of times about Ethan’s mother. Poor Nadine. All she wanted was a father for her son, and all she got was a no-good husband who ran out on her and stuck her with his no-good brat.

  She’d gotten enough poor Graces in her life, thanks to her father. She didn’t want Ethan to supply her with more.

  The microwave dinged, demanding her attention. She removed the bowl of stew, spooned a portion into a large coffee mug for her lunch guest, then carried both to the table. There was also corn bread, reheated in a damp paper towel, steaming now as butter melted over it, and a half dozen of her favorite cookies for dessert. She believed in eating hearty these days, she thought with a suppressed smile as she realized how easily her lunch for one could feed two.

  Of course, she was eating for two and carrying more than enough weight for two.

  “So…what are your plans?” Ethan asked as she sat down across from him. The table was so small that her knees bumped his as she settled in. She swore she felt a tingle. He didn’t even seem to notice.

  “Plans for what?”

  “Living. Working. Making ends meet.” He pointed toward her midsection with a spoon. “After the baby’s born.”

  “I plan to continue doing what I’m doing now. There won’t be many changes.”

  “A baby changes everything,” he said, as if he knew from experience. Maybe he did. Maybe there were little blond-haired, blue-eyed kids with James blood flowing in their veins all over the country. Maybe that was a part of the trouble he was so famous for leaving in his wake.

  If that were the case, then he’d be accustomed to notifications of impending fatherhood, wouldn’t he? But when he’d come in yesterday morning, that definitely wasn’t the impression she’d gotten.

  “I can’t afford to let it change everything,” she said as she seasoned her stew. “I’ll still work six days a week. I’ll still live on a budget. I’ll still take care of myself. The only difference is I’ll be taking care of her, too.”

  “What about a baby-sitter?”

  “I can’t afford one. I’ll bring her to work with me. I’ve got a playpen that’ll fit in that corner. When she’s sleepy, she’ll stay in it. The rest of the time, she’ll be out there with me. It’ll be fine—no different from now, except I’ll have someone to keep me company when it’s slow.”

  “And, of course, when it’s not slow, she’ll patiently wait while you take care of customers, order supplies, do the books, straighten the shelves.” He sounded skeptical. “You haven’t spent much time around babies, have you?”

  She was embarrassed to admit that the answer was no. The closest she’d ever been to an infant was passing one with its mother in the aisles of the local grocery store. She’d never held one, never fed one, never changed a bottle, but she could learn. There were how-to books covering every subject under the sun, and Callie, the midwife, would teach her enough to get her started. The rest would come naturally. She had maternal instincts, didn’t she? Wouldn’t she give her life to protect this baby? Wasn’t she ready to devote the next twenty years to loving and caring for her?

  “And just how much do you know about babies?” she asked crossly. And had any of those babies he’d learned from been his?

  “I know that they cry and require a lot of attention. I know they disrupt everything around them when they’re not happy.” He scowled. “I know that raising one alone in a hardware store isn’t a great idea.”

  “But I am alone,” she pointed out quietly, “and I work in a hardware store, and I can’t change that.”

  “You could get married and give her a father.”

  Her spoon trembled and a chunk of potato slid back into the bowl, splashing broth. She darted a glance at him, but he was staring into his own bowl as if he could stir up a whirlpool that might suck him in and spit him out again someplace far away.

  Did he think she hadn’t thought about marriage at any time in the last seven months—heavens, in the last thirteen years? Ever since her mother had left her to bear her father’s oppression alone, marriage had been her fondest dream, as much for the escape it represented as for the love it promised. After that hot summer night, she’d spun unbearably romantic tales of Ethan: Unable to forget the most incredible one-night stand he’d ever experienced, he tracked her down against impossible odds like Prince Charming searching for his Cinderella. Once her pregnancy had become common knowledge, she’d fantasized a time or two about Reese Barnett discovering a distinctly unbrotherly side to his feelings for her, falling in love with both her and her baby and claiming them for his own. It could happen. It had happened in Ethan’s own family, with Guthrie and Elly and Emma Miles.

  But it wasn’t likely to happen again in his family. Ethan was the only man who’d ever given her a second look, and it wasn’t as if he were volunteering—

  Was he?

  She sneaked another glance at him. No, of course he wasn’t. Of all the single men in the state of Oklahoma, Ethan James was probably the least likely to transform into marriage material. He was a drifter, unable to stay in one place long enough to even think about putting down roots. He lived by his wits and did things as a matter of routine that were illegal, unthinkable and unforgivable. He used people until he got what he wanted, and then he disappeared from their lives. He may have had enough conscience to bring him back to Heartbreak, but it was a sure bet he didn’t have enough to make him stay. It certainly wasn’t enough to turn him into a husband or a devote
d daddy.

  And a devoted father was the only kind she would accept in her baby’s life.

  “Well?” he prompted when the silence went on too long.

  His insistence on a response roused her temper. He wasn’t stupid. He knew she’d been a virgin until that night with him, knew that no man before him had ever paid her any notice. He’d made it clear that even he wouldn’t have gone near the real her. It was Melissa he’d wanted, Melissa he’d spent the night with. To his great disappointment, it was Grace he’d gotten pregnant, Grace he was now stuck with.

  Grace he would like to see married to someone else so he wouldn’t feel burdened.

  “Oh, I turn down two or three proposals every week,” she said, shooting for an airy lack of concern. “There’s just no end to the number of men who want to marry me and raise my illegitimate child as their own, but I’m holding out for that one truly special man to come along. Until he does, my child and I will do fine on our own.”

  “Too bad you didn’t hold out for Mr. Perfect last summer,” he said snidely. “Then we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  “True,” she agreed. “But when your options are limited, you have to be satisfied with what you can get.”

  He flinched as if her words had the power to hurt. But how could they? She meant nothing to him—less than nothing. She had little doubt he regretted ever laying eyes on her, no doubt at all that he wished he’d never touched her.

  It had been the sweetest night in her twenty-five years…and he wished it had never happened.

  His expression cleared, cooled, as easily as if he’d pulled a mask over his face. He rested his spoon inside the bowl, then pushed it away and fixed his gaze on her. “Well, it looks as if your options are pretty limited again, so…how about it?”

  “How about what?” she asked cautiously, not liking the nervous shiver that crept down her spine.

  “Getting married.” Ethan’s hands were sweaty and unsteady under the table. He clasped them together, then swallowed hard before finishing his answer. “To me.”