A Maverick and a Half Page 13

  As if in response, Sydney made another noise and Marina forced a resigned smile to her lips. “You’re right. I don’t believe me, either. But I’m going to give it a really good try. We’re not going to let this bring us down.”

  She only hoped she could live up to those words.

  * * *

  It was a small town and, realistically, Marina knew that it was only to be expected that their paths would cross sometime or other. But, despite the fact that she was a full-time teacher and that Anderson was a full-time rancher, for some unknown reason, their paths seemed to be crossing all the time.

  So much so that it seemed to be happening almost every day.

  When Anderson came to pick up Jake or when she made a quick stop at the supermarket, all she had to do was look up and there the man was, almost in her space. And, when she did look in his direction, she saw Anderson ducking his head down, pretending that he hadn’t been looking her way.

  The hell he wasn’t.

  It was a ridiculous game they were playing and they both knew it, she thought. And yet, they continued playing it.

  The first time she’d accidentally run into Anderson, it was because she’d noticed that one of her students—Hannah McKay—had left her math book on her desk. Since the girl needed the book in order to do the assigned math homework that night, Marina had grabbed it and hurried after the girl, who had left the classroom, along with the other students, less than five minutes earlier.

  Hurrying from the classroom, Marina had dashed out into the hallway and out the front door—straight into Anderson Dalton. She’d almost managed to knock both of them down from the force of the impact. Anderson had steadied himself at the last moment and automatic reflexes had him catching her by her shoulders before she fell.

  For one prolonged second they looked at one another, each surprised beyond words to see the other. Surprised and almost undone. It took another very long moment before they were able to recover themselves.

  Marina did it first, bracing her shoulders and stiffening as she took a very deliberate step back, away from him.

  “Sorry,” she apologized almost woodenly, “I didn’t mean to almost knock you down. I was in a hurry to catch—Hannah!” she called, seeing the girl and trying to get her attention. “I’m sorry,” she apologized again, pulling herself entirely out of Anderson’s hold. “I need to give this to her.”

  She held the book aloft as if to offer proof that her story was genuine and not just a mere desperate fabrication.

  With that, she pulled herself away and quickly headed in the girl’s direction.

  Jake had been a stunned, silent witness to the whole thing.

  “That was Ms. Laramie,” he pointed out needlessly to his father.

  Anderson’s heart literally felt like lead in his chest as he replied, “Yes, I know.”

  “Don’t you want to talk to her?” Jake asked with a barely veiled desperate note in his voice. His eyes darted from his father to the teacher and then back again.

  “Not particularly.” It was a lie, but he forced himself to utter it. “I’d rather talk to you,” Anderson said, draping an arm around his son’s shoulders. “So how was today?”

  Jake’s momentary lighthearted display of exuberance, Anderson noticed, was conspicuously gone as Jake answered his question, prefacing it with a heavy sigh, “Okay, I guess.”

  * * *

  And so began his son’s rather pronounced downward spiral.

  It grew, Anderson noticed, a little more intense with each day that passed. And, as those days went by, Anderson found himself questioning his own actions and his reasoning behind the path he had decided to take with Marina.

  Maybe going this route did prevent him from making any kind of personal mistakes he might find himself regretting in the near future, but this route also seemed to be taking all the liveliness, all the energy out of Jake. Within one short week, they were suddenly back where they started from, with his being the parent of a robot who was far more connected to his video games than he was to him.

  The light, Anderson had noticed, had gone out of Jake’s eyes.

  And then something happened that made his own actions and Jake’s reactions to what he’d done seem to be totally moot.

  Jake’s mother, Lexie, showed up on his doorstep unannounced.

  She came breezing up to the ranch just the same way she had when she’d decided—seemingly out of the blue—that Jake needed to spend some “quality time” with his father. That was when she’d just deposited the boy on his doorstep as if he was no more than a package that needed to be posted.

  But this time when she showed up, she announced that she was here to take back what she had so carelessly left behind.

  “That’s right,” she said to Anderson in no uncertain terms, “I’ve come to take Jake home.”

  Her bluntly stated intentions almost left him speechless. How could she just barrel in like a tornado and take away his son without so much as blinking her eyes? Didn’t she realize how destructive that was for Jake’s morale? Never mind how it affected him personally.

  He tried his best to make her understand, to see beyond her own selfish point of view.

  “But this is Jake’s home now,” Anderson protested.

  The annoyed, exasperated expression on her face told Anderson just what the woman thought of his argument. Less than nothing.

  “Correction, this was just someplace he was spending some time—until I came back for him. Well, I came back for him,” she announced, as if that wasn’t already painfully apparent.

  Anderson fisted his hands at his sides to keep from wrapping them around her throat and strangling the selfish, thoughtless woman.

  “He’s not a football you can just punt back and forth,” Anderson insisted.

  Lexie looked at him as if he was babbling. “Of course he’s not. Look, all I did was let him spend some time with you because you were so adamant about spending time with him,” she concluded as if that answered everything.

  “I was adamant a year ago,” Anderson reminded her. “And you refused to let me have Jake. Why did you suddenly change your mind twelve months later?” he challenged.

  Lexie shrugged her shoulders, a look of disinterested annoyance on her face. “Because I’m big enough to admit that I was wrong. A boy does need to spend some time with his father. But he’s spent it and now I’m taking him back.”

  It all sounded too pat to him. Lexie was up to something; he’d bet his soul on it.

  “Is that the only reason?” he asked, pinning her with a look. “And I warn you, there are ways to find out if you’re telling me the truth.”

  Lexie blew out a breath, her hands on her hips. He could see the frustration clearly on her face, no doubt because nothing was going according to her plans. She was a woman who was used to things falling into her lap the way she had hoped. But not this time.

  The frustration boiled over and Lexie snapped. “I wanted to spend some quality time with Raul, okay?” she said, telling him the real reason for Jake’s sudden transplant earlier in July.

  “Raul?” Anderson echoed, confused. “Who the hell is Raul?”

  “Raul is history,” Lexie answered with finality, “so there’s no point in talking about him. What’s important here is that I’m putting you on notice,” she emphasized. “I want my son back and I’m going to take him with me. Now be a good soldier,” she ordered sarcastically, “and tell Jake so that he’s ready to go back to Chicago in five days.”

  And with that, the woman breezed out again, leaving ashes and ruin in her wake.

  Anderson stood looking after her, the words five days echoing over and over again in his head.

  * * *

  “Jake, if your face was any longer, we’d have to put cones around it to keep people from t
ripping on it,” Marina pointed out kindly the following Monday morning.

  The rest of the class had gone out for recess, but Jake, she’d noticed, remained where he was, staring off into space and completely oblivious to what was going on around him.

  Marina made her way over to his row and sat down in the seat right in front of the boy. The haunted, sad expression on his face tore at her heart.

  Turning around in order to face him, she asked in a kindly voice, “What’s wrong, Jake?”

  Jake refused to look at her and kept staring off into space. But she could see the sheen of tears forming in his eyes.

  “Nothing,” he mumbled, saying the word so quietly, had she not been sitting right in front of him, she wouldn’t have been able to hear it.

  She was not about to give up and let him have his space. This was too important and he was too tortured to leave alone.

  “No, I know ‘nothing’ and this is definitely not ‘nothing.’ Now out with it,” she ordered kindly. “You’ve been looking as if you lost your best friend or your beloved pet all morning long. Please tell me what’s wrong.”

  Jake raised his eyes to hers and for a moment, she thought he was just going to maintain his silence on the subject.

  But then he sighed.

  It was a long, heartfelt sigh that seemed to come from the very depths of his toes and raked right over his heart. She could see that saying the words hurt him a great deal. “It’s just that I’m not going to be here much longer.”

  This was the first time she was hearing this and it hit her with the force of a well-delivered punch to the stomach, stealing the very air out of her lungs.

  “Oh? Why?” she asked, surprised. “Where are you going?” She wanted to know.

  He was clearly miserable as he spoke, staring down at his shoes. It was as if his head felt too heavy to hold up.

  “Mom says home, but it doesn’t feel like it’s home anymore. Is that weird?” he asked her, looking up. “I mean, I’ve been here just a couple of months and I’ve been there all my life, but when I think of ‘home,’ I think of here.” The corners of his mouth turned completely down and for a moment, Marina thought that he was going to cry. But then he managed to hold himself together. “Except that I won’t be here soon.”

  To say she was stunned was a vast understatement.

  “Are you sure about this?” she asked Jake.

  Jake bobbed his head up and down and his expression seemed to just grow sadder by degrees as he replied, “Yes, I’m sure. I heard Dad talking to Mom and she told him that she was taking me back. Ms. Laramie, I don’t want to go,” he told her plaintively. There was a hitch in his voice, as if he was doing his best not to cry. “Do I hafta?”

  It wasn’t her place to raise the boy’s hopes, or to dash them, either. So, as much as she would have wanted to say something to bolster his morale, Marina forced herself to go for neutral ground.

  “What does your dad say?” she asked him, fervently praying that Anderson had told the boy something she could expand on.

  Again the small shoulders rose and fell. “He didn’t say too much—and he looked kind of sad.” Jake’s eyes begged her to say something positive he could cling to.

  There wasn’t much to work with there, but she did her best. “That’s because he doesn’t want you to go.”

  The look on his face was just breaking her heart. “You think so?”

  In her heart, she all but cursed Anderson for not promising the boy he could stay at his home until all appeals were exhausted—hopefully, by then, Jake’s flaky mother would have lost interest in whatever game she was trying to play.

  “Oh, I’m sure of it.”

  But Jake was not a boy to be easily fooled or put off. “Then why doesn’t he tell Mom no?”

  Although she hated to do it, Marina gave him a one-size-fits-all excuse. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple, honey.”

  Jake refused to let it go. He fought to understand. His immediate future depended on it.

  “Why not? I don’t want to go and he doesn’t want me to go. That’s two against one, Ms. Laramie,” he pointed out. “Doesn’t that win?”

  Oh, Jake, if only. “In a democracy,” she said out loud, “yes, it does. But I’m afraid that this is different.”

  Jake clearly didn’t understand—and he wanted to. “How?”

  She smiled sadly at him as she caressed his cheek and shook her head. “If that were easy to answer, there wouldn’t be any need for lawyers in this world, honey.”

  For the first time in a week, Jake’s face lit up. “Dad says that my grandpa’s a lawyer. Does that help any?” he asked hopefully.

  “That’s true,” Marina said. “Well, then, maybe that can help,” she told the boy. “Maybe your dad’s going to talk to your grandpa to see if maybe there’s a way to convince your mother to allow you to live here—or to at least let you stay until the end of the school year.”

  A small smile began to curve the corners of his mouth. “That would be good,” Jake agreed. “Because I really like school, Ms. Laramie—and I really like coming to your class every day.”

  She could feel tears stinging her eyes. In such a short time, the boy had managed to burrow his way into her heart.

  Like father, like son, she couldn’t help thinking.

  “Well, thank you, Jake. I really like having you as my student,” she replied with feeling.

  It was all that she would allow herself to say at the moment. In her heart she knew that yanking Jake out of school just when he was finally getting adjusted to it would be doing a grave disservice to the boy, never mind what it would do to his father or the blow that Anderson would suffer in having to give the boy up again so soon after having finally gained what had seemed like at least partial custody of his son.

  It made her wonder about the kind of woman Jake’s mother was. Wonder, too, what Anderson could have seen in her in the first place. From what she understood, there had been no long-standing relationship that had turned sour. Instead, there had been a brief interlude and ten years later, Anderson was made aware—by accident—that the interlude had resulted in his son. A son that Jake’s mother had no intentions of sharing—until she did.

  The woman, Marina couldn’t help thinking, had some very serious stability issues. But that wasn’t really the point. The point of it—and of everything—was Jake’s welfare and making Jake smile again.

  She just had to come up with a way, Marina told herself—a way acceptable to everyone—to make that happen.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Lexie went back on her word.

  Anderson didn’t know why that even mildly surprised him. After all, it wasn’t as if the woman was exactly trustworthy. Initially, she had said that she was going to give Jake five days to get used to the idea of returning to Chicago before she came to get him.

  But she didn’t give Jake five days, she gave him three. Three days with no warning of what was about to happen.

  Just like that, when he was sitting down to dinner with his son, Lexie descended on both of them like some dire, deadly form of the medieval black plague.

  She knocked on the front door and when Anderson opened the door, just like that, she made her announcement.

  Pushing past him, Lexie looked around the room for their son. When she didn’t see him immediately, she turned on Anderson and declared, “He’s coming with me now.”

  Anderson stared at her, stunned. He continued holding the door open for a moment longer, hoping she would take the hint and leave.

  She didn’t.

  “You said he had five days,” Anderson protested, following her into the foyer.

  Lexie’s annoyed expression told him that she had no patience with any delaying tactics. “And now I’m saying he doesn’t. Why does everythin
g have to be an argument with you?” she demanded.

  “I could say the same to you,” Anderson shot back.

  And then he caught a glimpse of Jake out of the corner of his eye. The boy had followed him out to the living room. Right now, Jake looked as if he was cowering in the wake of their raised voices.

  Anderson forced himself to lower his. He wasn’t doing Jake any good by fighting with Lexie this way and ultimately, the woman had the law on her side. She was Jake’s mother and she was the one who had legal custody of the boy. He was going to do whatever he could to change that, but right at this moment, he knew the end result of tonight’s confrontation: she’d take Jake with her.

  The thought almost killed him.

  “Let him stay the two days, Lexie. What harm could it do?” Anderson asked, trying to appeal to her sense of fair play—even though he was certain that she ultimately didn’t have any.

  “The ‘harm’ is that those are two extra days I have to hang around this flyspeck of a town instead of flying back to a civilized world. As it is, I’ve let you two play house longer than I should have. Now hear this. Playtime is over. I want my son and I want to go home,” she bit off angrily. Her eyes narrowed as she demanded, “Make it happen.”

  Jake grabbed his arm imploringly as he all but hid on his other side, the side away from his mother. “Dad, please don’t let her take me. I want to stay here with you and Ms. Laramie and Sydney. Please, Dad. Please,” Jake begged.

  It was as if someone had waved a red flag in front of Lexie. “Who the hell are Ms. Laramie and Sydney?” she demanded hotly. She turned on Anderson. “Just what kind of perverted carryings-on have you been having here, Anderson?”

  He dug down deep for patience—and to hold on to his temper.

  “Ms. Laramie is his teacher and Sydney is her little girl,” he told her evenly, doling out each word one at a time. “Jake wants to feel like he’s part of a family unit and they provide that for him.”

  He couldn’t have said anything worse to her if he’d tried. Lexie’s complexion reddened as her eyes flashed with anger.