RECLAIM MY HEART(68)

Tyne slid her palms over her upper arms and squeezed tight. She’d never imagined her mother would be out and out cruel. But that had probably been the only way to make Lucas resign himself to the fact that their relationship was over. Tyne couldn’t blame her mother entirely, not when she’d done exactly what Tyne had wanted. Oh, she hadn’t meant to hurt Lucas. But she had thought it best for him to forget about her and to act as if they’d never been together.
“So I went away,” Lucas said. “But it wasn’t over. I went to see your father. At least half a dozen times, maybe more. He visited Jasper to see if he could get me to stop hounding him. Then your father called me to his office. I thought I was finally going to get some answers.” He slid his hand down his thigh and cupped his knee.
“That’s when he told me. That you were pregnant.”
Tyne sucked in a sharp breath.
“I guess he knew I wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t let up,” he said, “until I knew the truth. He said you’d decided to give the baby up for adoption. That you’d already met the parents. That this is what you decided to do, what you wanted to do, and if I caused any problems, I would only be hurting you.”
Strain pulled at Lucas’s face. Never would she have guessed that her father would tell Lucas about the baby, about the adoption. Her father had fought her so hard, had pushed her and prodded her to have an abortion. On the day she’d left the house, he’d been so furious that he hadn’t spoken to her.
“That alone would have been enough,” he told her, “to get me to stop asking questions. To leave you alone. If that’s what you wanted, I wouldn’t have gone against your wishes. I’d have walked out and never looked back. I think I would have, anyway. Who the hell knows what I would have done?” He tilted his head, scanned the expanse of the Susquehanna, then looked back at her. “Then your father sweetened the pot. Told me if I stopped trying to contact you, if I left all of you alone, he’d see that my tuition was paid. Four years at Temple.” Again, he gazed out toward the horizon. “A college degree sitting there on that desk in a fat, manila envelope.”
Even though sunshine dappled through the leaves overhead, Tyne felt chilled to the bone as she listened to Lucas talk.
“So you gave up your son for the price of tuition.”
She couldn’t have punished him more had she slapped him hard across the face.
“But…?Tyne…?you have to understand…?I was told…” His voice drifted, whatever words he’d wanted to say evidently lost in stormy agitation.
The sigh she heaved came up from the depths of her soul. “I’m sorry, Lucas. I had no right to say that. Everything you were told was the truth. I’ve already shared my nightmare with you. I nearly aborted our son. I nearly gave him away. I have no right to condemn the decisions you made back then. No right whatsoever.”
Neither of them spoke for several minutes. Birds chirped in the treetops, a chipmunk scrabbled across the path behind them.
“I was surprised,” Lucas said, “when I realized you thought I didn’t know. And then I had a devil of a time trying to tell you. What I did, the decision I made—picking up that money and walking out of that office—makes me look like such a…?callous shit.”
She uncrosse">Sd to Lucasd her arms, stretched out her hand and touched him on the forearm. “Don’t say that. You look no worse than I do for the awful things I considered.”
“Yes, with ‘considered’ being the operative word. You ended up doing the right thing. And that’s what matters most.”
“What is this?” she asked, a grin quirking one corner of her mouth. “A competition?”
He only looked at her, not a hint of humor on his face. “Why didn’t you tell me, Tyne?”
It had been the most difficult decision of her life. “The last time I saw you, you were so excited. You said you’d finally saved enough money for your first year of college. You’d have to live at home, you’d said, you’d have to commute, and you’d have to continue to work, but you were so happy. I didn’t actually know I was pregnant then. My period was late and I was worried, but I didn’t want to spoil our weekend. I loved you so much, Lucas.” She shifted on the rock. “After I was sure…?I was absolutely sick. I was going to ruin everything for you. I felt I would be a burden. Just at a time when you seemed to be getting yourself on track.”
After a moment she groaned, swiping her hair back over her shoulder. “Lucas, what did we do? Could we have twisted our lives into a more tangled knot?”
His silence drew her attention, and she swiveled her head to look at him.
“I think,” he murmured, “the question should be, can we untangle it?”
Her smile was soft and sincere. “We’re working on it.”
“Yeah.” He nodded, capturing her hand in both of his and sliding his fingers up her bare arm. “We are working on it, aren’t we?”
There was a measuring in his eyes that made her heart flutter.
“Tyne, I know you wanted to wait. You wanted us to get to know one another again. But I don’t need more time. When I’m with you—” awe intensified his dark eyes as he shook his head “—I feel as if no time has passed at all. I know you, Tyne. I love you.”
Her breath caught, held.
“I know what’s in my heart,” he said. “Just as surely as I know my own name.”
With all he’d come to realize over these past days of their living together in his small ranch house, she understood the depth of meaning in his statement. She trusted him, believed that he meant what he said, and she’d like nothing more than to reveal her feelings for him, as well. But a strong maternal instinct held her back.