Second Chance Pass (Virgin River #5)(44)

“That’s what I have to talk about. I want to explain. Vanni, please.”

She looked at him and saw that he was miserable and she didn’t care. She hoped he was in agony. “All right. Go ahead.”

He looked nervously over both shoulders. “Can we go someplace?”

“Why?”

He leaned toward her. “Because it’s tremendously personal. How’s that?”

“Would you like to close the door?” she asked, lifting one mocking eyebrow.

“No, I wouldn’t like to close the door!” He took a breath. Don’t get mad at her, he told himself. She was just acting on instinct. Just trying to have a life after all that death. He couldn’t get mad about that. He of all people. “Maybe we could go for a ride?”

“I don’t think so. I’m just back from a long ride. Let me change the baby. Then if you want to, we can walk outside. Will that do?”

“I guess it’ll have to,” he said in a definite pout. And then he slowly got sucked into touching the baby’s head, smiling into his face and making him smile back. The diaper came off and Mattie sent up a stream of urine that appeared four feet high, which Paul ducked and Vanessa covered quickly, making them both laugh. “All right,” Paul said. “We’ll just take a walk outside. Is he good? Not hungry?”

“He’s been fed,” she said. “I’ll just put him in his bouncy seat out by Dad, if it’s okay with him.”

“Okay. Thanks.” He backed away a little, slipping his fingers into his back pockets. He had to keep doing that because he wanted to touch her so much, and this would be a bad, bad time. The look on her face indicated she was maybe inches from wanting to belt him.

A little while later, the baby settled in his seat beside Walt’s chair, Vanessa and Paul walked out on the deck behind the house and down the stairs toward the stable. “Is this something you’d like to share with Matt?” she asked. “Or is this just for me?”

He sighed in frustration. “Just for you,” he said miserably. He tried to grab her hand, but she pulled it away. “Listen, I’m not sure you know how I feel about you….”

“Sure I do. You’ve made it clear. You have a situation in Grants Pass, a woman, and you’re not in touch much. It’s obvious how you feel.”

“Are you kidding me? Because…” He stopped walking. She stopped walking. “I care about you a lot.”

“Yes, I know. I appreciate all your concern. You’ve been very good to me and Mattie. You’ve been a very good friend to Matt.”

“This is not just about Matt. I thought we were close.”

“I guess we are,” she said with a shrug. “Like brother and sister?”

“Vanni, I have some things to explain….”

“So you keep saying. Think you’ll get it out this time?”

He ground his teeth in frustration. “There’s a reason I’ve been hanging back a little bit. Why I’ve been so distracted. I wanted to wait until I figured some things out, until I knew it wasn’t too soon after Matt for you…but it’s starting to look like I might already be too late.”

They got as far as the corral and she leaned her back against the fence, her elbows on the top rail, heel on the bottom rail, facing him.

“Can I start at the beginning? Will you listen?”

“By all means, take your time,” she invited with a wave of her hand.

“Way before you came to Virgin River, way before I ran into you at Jack’s, long before anything happened to Matt, I was seeing this woman sometimes….”

She averted her eyes in spite of herself. They’d gotten this far before—he’d found a woman. Still, it just wasn’t easy hearing that he had a woman in his life, though it was completely reasonable.

“I met her a long time ago. We had one night together,” he said. He shrugged. “Not even a whole night. I called her a couple more times because… Because,” he finished. “It was casual. Not my finest hour.”

“You did something wrong?” she asked.

“At the time, I sure didn’t think so. Vanni, I slept with her a few times, all right? We had an understanding. You know how it is…”

“I don’t, as a matter of fact. I’ve actually never had that kind of understanding. But you men—”

“Aw, come on! You probably had more sex over the weekend than I had last year!”

“Is that right?” she asked, lifting her chin defiantly. In fact, at that precise moment, Vanni regretted that she couldn’t allow herself to do that. Men seemed to be able to do it so easily—make love when there isn’t love, see it for what it was.

“I don’t even care,” he said in frustration. “That’s not even the point. What I have to explain is not that I had sex last year, when you were married, pregnant and my best friend was alive, but that I had sex a couple of months ago. After I went home, after the baby, I was pretty screwed up. Losing Matt was killing me, I didn’t want to leave you, staying with you was eating me alive, and…”

He looked down, took a breath and continued, “I tried blowing off some steam with my brothers and the construction crews. But where I made my fatal mistake was I called this woman who I never had anything with but sex and asked if we could talk. Have dinner and talk. I was messed up, Vanni. I needed to tell someone what it was like, burying my best friend, helping his baby get born. I was in a lot of pain, guilty, needy. I shouldn’t have called her.”