Cowgirls Don't Cry(104)

The bitterness and pain in Brandt’s eyes was like another hot poker to her heart.

“Look. I care about him. But he’s not mine, Brandt. He never will be. Even if I pour all my love, my heart and my soul into raising that boy, I’ll never be his real mother. And if Samantha signed off on him as a toddler and had a change of heart or changed her life, ten or so years later? What then? Landon would need to give his mother a chance to be part of his life. I would have to encourage him to forgive her. I would have to let him go. So it’s easier for me to let him go now and save myself years of heartache.”


“But aren’t you forgetting the years of joy Landon might bring to your life?”


Jessie knew she wasn’t getting through to him. Didn’t know if she ever could. “Might doesn’t make right.

“That’s bullshit. You don’t know—”


“I do too! You have no freakin’ clue what I went through as a kid.”


“Then explain it to me.”


She slammed the remainder of the whiskey. “You met Billy Reynolds. He adopted me, but I still wondered about the man who’d fathered me. I still wished he’d come to his senses and search me out, especially when things were bad at home. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent imagining my ‘real’


father would show up and rescue me. He’d admit he’d been searching for me for years, he’d tell me how much he loved me and then he’d take me away. I had those stupid daydreams even when I resented the hell out of him for abandoning me.”


Brandt stared into the bottom of his empty shot glass. “Don’t you think there were times when I was growing up that I fantasized there’d been some mix up at the hospital and I went home with the wrong people? All kids feel like that at some point in there lives.”


“Or they feel like that all the time because it’s not a fantasy, but reality. So you can’t tell me I don’t know how Landon will feel a few years down the road, because I have a pretty good idea. Better than you do.”


“Protecting yourself at all costs?” he asked.

“Yes, maybe for the first time in my life. And even you can’t fault me for that.”


The pointlessness of the conversation prompted her to retreat. Brandt didn’t attempt to stop her.

In her bedroom, she stripped, slipped on her long johns and crawled in bed, burrowing under the covers because she couldn’t seem to get warm.


A while later, Brandt entered the bedroom. She heard his clothes hitting the floor and felt the mattress dip. Then his warm body connected with hers. He wrapped one arm around her waist, one arm stretched under her pillow, tangling their legs together so they were touching from head to toe.

As Brandt toyed with her hair, so sweetly, so soothingly, Jessie released some of her tension.

“We will figure this out, Jessie,” he said softly.

She had figured it out. He just needed to accept it.

Later, when he thought she’d fallen asleep, and he whispered, “Don’t make me choose, Jessie, please don’t make me choose,” she feared he already had.

They both had.

“It’s only for a few hours. I promise.”


Jessie scowled at him. “Why do I have to go?”


Brandt couldn’t resist kissing her scowling mouth. “Because I don’t wanna leave you alone on Christmas Day. In and out quickly, I promise. Landon will open his gifts from my mom, we’ll eat dinner and then we’re gone.”