Burn It Up(5)

“A woman’s highest calling is to be a good wife and mother,” her father’s cool voice echoed. She shivered. He’d be horrified to see her now, but no matter—she had no wish to see him ever again.

Am I a good mother? I couldn’t breastfeed. But what was that shortcoming, really, compared to getting involved with Mercy’s father to begin with? I was a different person when we met. She’d grown up a lot since finding out she was pregnant. She might not have everything figured out—not remotely—but she had her priorities in order, at least.

And she was a good mother, besides. Maybe she was unmarried, maybe she had no clue what she was doing half the time, but she loved her daughter, and she showed that love. It was more than her father could claim to have done for her. And I’m protecting her. Abilene’s mama had never protected her—not from her father’s judgment and suffocating beliefs, and not from the perils and temptations of the larger world, after she’d run away from home.

The guest bathroom was cold, the lightbulb seeming grumpy as it flickered to life. She brushed her teeth, eyeing herself in the mirror. Eyeing Mercy, and only half comprehending how it was she was here.

Same as how everything happens to me—I screwed up.

At least this time, there was a gem to be found in the rubble of the fallout. She smoothed her baby’s soft hair and watched her tiny lashes flutter. It seemed unreal that someone as messed up as Abilene could have created something so perfect.

It hadn’t even been Abilene who’d told her ex about Mercy—it had been Casey’s older brother, Vince. Vince had done time with James, a year before Abilene had moved to Nevada.

Well, not moved to. Not exactly. Abilene tended more often to simply find herself in new places, more a matter of mishap than intention.

That was the story of her life, right there, she thought as she headed downstairs. Flight following mistake, following flight, following mistake, again and again and again. She’d screwed up, getting involved with her ex, and been swept here to the Churches’ ranch for her own safety. She entered the empty kitchen, finding coffee warming in the pot and a plate of muffins on the oversized trestle table. She helped herself to both, settling on the long wooden bench.

She wanted better for her daughter than all that aimless wandering. She wanted her to have dreams and to make plans, and to move through the world with intentional steps that led her toward her goals. To carry herself to the destinations she chose. She didn’t want her to be a brittle, helpless leaf, blown from place to place, propelled only by a need to escape, and never by desire.

Freedom—that was what she wanted for her daughter. Freedom of choice, and freedom from the guilt and shame and repression Abilene had grown up shackled by, and from the oppressive environment that had driven her to such extremes in the name of rebellion.

She glanced down and found muffin crumbs on Mercy’s head. Catching footsteps creaking from the direction of the den, she brushed them away.

“Casey?” She’d left him sleeping upright on the couch and found him in the exact same position when she’d crept through the den this morning.

He strolled in, rubbing his face. “Morning. Again. When did you two ditch me?”

“A few minutes before four, I think. You passed out. So did Mercy.”

“And you?” Casey asked, pulling a bowl from a cabinet. “You get any more sleep?”

“An hour or so.”

“I don’t know how you do it, man. I get less than six and I might as well be drunk.”

Abilene checked him out while he was distracted, fixing himself a bowl of cornflakes. Her libido had begun to return, if tentatively, and she was starting to take note of certain things for the first time in months.

Case in point, she was discovering all over again how much she loved Casey’s arms . . . and probably because that was the most of his skin she ever got to see. He wore button-ups and T-shirts, and while they fit nicely, they didn’t give much away. A fine pair of normal-guy biceps—lean and muscular, but not beefy like his brother’s or her ex’s. His forearms were just as nice, with blond hair and about half as many freckles as he’d had back in the summer. The hair on his head was a bit darker than when they’d met, more strawberry than blond now, but his beard had stayed the same—a brazen shade of red. Where he got that from, she couldn’t guess, nor those bright blue eyes. He looked nothing like his black-haired, hazel-eyed tower of an older brother. And that suited Abilene just fine.

Casey was a nice, normal-sized man, with better things to do, she imagined, than spend his spare time lifting weights.

What those things might be, however, she couldn’t guess. He was awfully cagey about what he’d done for a living before he’d returned to his hometown last August. But she could handle that. She had plenty of secrets of her own she didn’t plan on sharing.

Heck, Casey didn’t even know her real name.

There was something about him, though . . . something that set him apart from all her exes. It was in the way he stood and the way he talked. It was in the easy way he held himself, and in the old Chuck Taylors he wore when he wasn’t in motorcycle boots. He’d be thirty-four on April fifth, more than a decade her senior . . . though he believed she was a couple years older than she was.

He had more than ten years on her, yet in some ways Casey seemed like a teenager. Normally that wasn’t a plus for a woman, but Abilene’s own teenage years had been forfeited. She’d never experienced young love as she should have, never been with a guy and had it be about fun, about exploring like dumb, eager kids. She was always the student, with men. An innocent in need of teaching, or saving, or corrupting. She’d fantasized a thousand times about how sex with Casey would be, and not even in a horny way—not since her hormones had banished her sex drive, at least.