Wild Man Creek (Virgin River #14)(35)

Denny smiled. “Hey. I don’t expect anything. I just wanted to know you, that’s all. Really, I didn’t think I’d be this lucky, to find out you’re a guy I actually like, a guy I’d want for a friend even if there wasn’t any other connection. But Jack, you don’t have to do anything. I like things the way they are.” He grinned boyishly. “I don’t need a kidney or anything. I can support myself just fine.”

Jack poured another couple of shots. “I usually limit myself to one, but it’s a big night. You should move back out to the guesthouse if you want. Rent free, of course.”

“What I want is to take care of myself. It’s what I’d want to do even if you’d been around the past twenty-four years. In fact, from what I know of you so far, I bet it’s what you would have raised me to do.”

Jack lifted his glass. “You’re probably right about that.”

Right at that moment Preacher came into the bar from the kitchen. “I’m gonna have to learn to wash up faster if I want company for that shot,” he said. “You’re getting ahead of me.”

“Let me pour you one,” Jack said. “Wait till you hear the news. Uncle Preacher.”

Mel sat cross-legged on the king-size bed, her laptop pushed to the side, while Jack paced and talked, telling her the story Denny had told him. He would periodically stop pacing, bend at the waist and lean both hands on the bed and add something emphatic. Dramatic. Then he’d pace again.

“Unbelievable,” she finally said. “Then again, not. There’s even a slight resemblance. But then, I took Rick for your son when I first met him. How many more of them do you think are out there?” she asked.

“Do you think you’re being funny?”

“Um, not really,” she said. “I thought I was being a little concerned.”

“Listen, I’m telling you the absolute truth when I say that this is the last thing I expected to hear. I was seriously very, very cautious. I got an A in biology. I didn’t take chances.”

“Till you got to me?” she asked.

“Frankly, yes! You were entirely different! I was completely in love with you! I wanted to be with you forever! I totally lost my mind!”

“Could you please not raise your voice? First of all, I didn’t do this to you and second, the kids are sleeping.”

He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Sorry. Sorry.”

“Jack, condoms aren’t a hundred percent. Sometimes there’s a malfunction—a little hole, a leak, a tear. And, as we’ve proven, you’re pretty potent. Are you worried you’re going to be getting more news like this?”

“Not so much that.” He sat down on the bed. “Mel, I can admit to playing it kind of loose when I was young and there was the occasional real short-term relationship…. Not as many as you might think. But either I’m getting old and losing my memory or I was only with Denny’s mom once or maybe twice. Mel, my girlfriends, such as they were, might not have always been memorable, but I don’t remember Denny’s mom at all. She looks kind of familiar, but I can’t tie her to a single date, event, conversation, anything. And yet, she told Denny all about my family! Not the kind of stuff I share with a girl I’ve been out with once or twice.”

“Denny was around over the holidays, Jack. I’m sure you talked about your family all the time.”

He shook his head. “She told him I had a little sister still in grade school. We must have been close—when I was twenty, Brie was only ten. And she took me being in the Marines real hard.”

“Maybe you were drunk,” Mel said with a shrug.

He straightened. “As a well-known fact, personally and across the board, I didn’t have much sexual success when drunk. I did, however, have blissful memory loss.”

“Maybe it’ll all come back to you. But Jack, are you sure this information is accurate? I mean, maybe the person who’s not remembering real well was Denny’s mom. Although…”

“Although…?” he prompted.

“I have to say, my experience is that women generally know who got them pregnant, unless there were multiple partners in a very tight period of time. Men seem to be more prone to blow off the average encounter while most women take these things very seriously.”

“I know this,” he said. “I know men and women look at things like sex differently and, I admit, I can’t remember the phone number of every woman I slept with, but that letter said she was in love with me. That she fell hard. It happened a time or two—that a woman’s feelings for me were stronger than mine for her, and when that happened, I had to move along before someone got hurt real bad. I have four sisters. I listened to them wail and cry over some dipshit boy who led them on then disappeared, just took what he could get and didn’t call again. I wasn’t going to do that to a girl, so I bit the bullet and broke it off. And when I had to do that it wasn’t easy and I remember every one.”

Mel pulled a face. “I have to give you credit for that, Jack. It’s rare. Most guys would rather leave the country than have an honest conversation about their feelings.”

“Don’t overpraise me. I’m not sure I did a good job of it, but I did fess up that I wouldn’t turn out to be a good boyfriend, that there was no future in me. Hell, I loved the Marines—there really wasn’t room for one other woman in my life.”