Honor Bound(40)

"If that's what it takes," he answered grimly.

She looked at him incredulously. "And you think that would be fair?"

"The circumstances of his birth weren't fair. Life isn't fair. I gave up on it ever being fair a long time ago."

"Yes, and you wear your bitterness where all the world can see it," she accused, angrily shrugging off his hands. "I won't let Tony grow up so steeped in hatred that he's made a prisoner of it as you are, Lucas Greywolf. And in the long run, who do you think he'd hate the most? You! He wouldn't thank you for separating him from the world."

Apparently he realized there was some merit to that because he gnawed the inside of his cheek in indecision. But he wasn't about to let her win the argument. "What did you plan to do, tell him that his Indian features were a fluke? Did you intend to keep my identity a complete secret from him?"

"I … I hadn't planned that far ahead."

"Well, you'd better be giving it some thought, lady. Because one of these days he'll ask about his father. I did."

For the beat of several seconds Aislinn let a tense silence reign, then she asked in a low voice. "And what were you told?"

He stared down at her for so long she thought he was going to refuse to tell her. But then he took up his stance at the window again, his broad shoulders almost spanning it. Unseeingly, he stared at the mountains on the horizon as he began to speak.

"The man who fathered me was an Anglo soldier stationed at Fort Huachuca. My mother was sixteen. She had graduated early from the reservation school and moved to Tucson where Joseph had friends who gave her room and board. She took a job waiting tables in a diner."

"Is that where she met your father?"

He nodded. "He flirted with her and asked her to go out with him after she got off work. She refused. But he kept coming back to the diner. She told me that he was very handsome, dashing, charming."

Turning his hands palms out, he slid them into the rear pockets of his snug jeans. If the father had looked anything like the son, if he had had that same long, lean physique, Aislinn could understand how easily Alice Greywolf's head might have been turned.

"Finally she consented to go out with him. To put it bluntly, Miss Andrews, he seduced her. I'm not sure how many dates it took. Mother was understandably not specific. Only weeks after she met him, he was shipped out to parts unknown. He didn't say goodbye. He just stopped coming by to see her. When she worked up her nerve to call the base to tell him that she was pregnant, she was informed that he was gone."

He turned around. His features were closed tighter than she had ever seen them. Intuitively she knew that meant he was hurting. It was an unbearable hurt that he kept tightly bottled up inside him.

"She never saw or heard from him again, nor did she try to contact him. She returned to the reservation in disgrace, pregnant with a white man's baby. She delivered me a month before her seventeenth birthday. She got a job making souvenir kachina dolls because she could work at home while taking care of me. Grandfather earned enough money selling horses to feed and house us in an old trailer. Mother and I lived with him until she met Gene Dexter. He offered her a job in town that vastly improved her standard of living. Thank God," he added softly.

He turned back to Aislinn. "So you see, I grew up knowing what a burden I was to my mother."

"She didn't think so, Lucas." Her throat was tight with emotion. "She loves you very much."

"I know that. She never became bitter because of what happened to her."

"You more than compensate."

"You can't know bitterness until you grow up a half-breed bastard," he said with an angry hiss. "So don't give me any lectures about it. And I'll see you in hell before I'll let my son be subjected to that kind of stigma. Do you think I'd do to him what my father did to me?"

"But your father didn't know. Maybe if he—"

"Don't even suggest anything so ridiculous," he interrupted sharply. "To him, Alice Greywolf, the beautiful Indian girl, was an easy roll in the hay. A novelty, no doubt. Even if he had known about the pregnancy, he probably would have deserted her. At best he would have driven her across the border for a cheap, speedy abortion." He shook his head. "No, the Anglo soldier would have wanted no part of his little Indian baby. But by God I want my son. He is going to know his father."

Reading his face, Aislinn knew that trying to deter him would be futile. He meant what he said. He would know his son and vice versa. And in so doing Lucas could make her life unbearable.

She had thought she would never see Lucas Greywolf again. She had imagined that he would view their morning on the mountaintop the way he supposed his father viewed his encounter with Alice. A roll in the hay. An easy roll in the hay.

Well, surprising as it was, he hadn't. Or if he had before, he had changed his mind about it when he saw Tony. Simply put, she had been found out. She had wanted to keep Tony's existence a secret from him forever. Such was not to be. The only choice she had now was to make the best of a bad situation.

"What do you suggest, Lucas? That we divide Tony's life between us? Don't you think that will only compound the confusion? It will be years before he's old enough to understand. Life here six months, life with you six months." It pained her to even verbalize the possibility that an arrangement like that might have to be made. "What kind of life would that be for a little boy?"