“No. That’s not what I meant, Katie. You keep misunderstanding me. I meant that—”
“I don’t think I’m misunderstanding,” she interrupted, letting her arms fall. She suddenly looked small standing there, no longer swelled up with her anger. “I even offered it to you, didn’t I? I said it’d be better if you fucked me blind instead of drinking yourself into a grave. I just hadn’t realized you were taking the idea of trading a bottle of whiskey in for me so literally.”
“Katie, that’s a hell of a thing to say,” he said, launching himself off the couch and stepping toward her. She backed away. He froze in the middle of the living room when he registered the small, sad smile on her face.
“Why should you be so averse to hearing the truth? You’ve been so good about saying it for the past month.” She held up a hand, silencing him when he started to launch into a heated defense. “Firstly, I’m not a liar, Rill. So here are a couple more truths for you, while we’re at it. If I’m pregnant, you’re the father. Not in my fantasy world. In reality. Secondly, I’ve changed my mind. I’m done being the drug that’ll mask your grief for another woman. I hid a bottle of whiskey in the corner of the bottom cabinet. Have at it.”
Rill just stood there in the living room for three solid minutes after Katie stalked out of the room, wondering what the hell had just hit him.
Twenty-five
Katie spent far more time the following morning over at Miles Fordham’s offices looking through his accounts than she’d originally planned. She was back to avoiding Rill again. At first, she was so mad at him she wanted to spit. Slowly, she’d started to calm down, but it’d taken a good part of the night, which she’d spent alone up in the dormer bedroom.
A small part of her—a teeny-tiny part that began to grow with every hour—felt sorry for him. He didn’t remember seeing her on her first night in Vulture’s Canyon, let alone recall having unprotected sex with her. To discover she was pregnant and have her tell him he was responsible must have confused the holy hell out of him. She’d been willing to calmly try to explain things to him before he’d started to say all that crap about claiming to be the father because he deserved it for seducing her. Then he’d gone on and said that thing about her fantasizing he’d been the one to get her pregnant because she was under so much stress.
Honestly. He didn’t deserve a shred of her pity.
Still, she felt a good deal more prepared to tell Rill the truth about the night she’d gotten pregnant as she left Miles’s office the following day. She turned down Miles’s hopeful offer of lunch and headed up the hill, ready to have it out with Rill.
She found him easily enough, for once. He stepped onto the front porch when she pulled up into the parking space at the end of the drive. She studied him for a few seconds through the windshield. His hands were in the pockets of his jeans. He wore the blue chambray shirt she favored because it brought out the color of his eyes. His expression was sober as he waited for her.
“Hey,” she said noncommittally as she walked up the steps.
“Where’ve you been?” he asked gruffly, his gaze running over her.
“Miles Fordham’s office.” When she saw his expression stiffen, she sighed. “He asked me to look over a few things for him, and I agreed. I had my reasons for doing it,” she said when his expression remained rigid. “And it had nothing to do with my burning lust for Miles Fordham. You were right. The guy’s a weasel.”
She saw him swallow. He seemed partially mollified, but she still sensed the tension in him.
“Will you sit down?” he asked, nodding at the porch chairs.
Katie went over to a wrought-iron chair and plopped into a seat. She watched him as he sat down next to her.
“There’s something I need to tell you. Something you need to know,” he said. “You keep talking like I was dying up on this hill because Eden was killed in that wreck. You were partially right—I loved Eden. Maybe not as much as I’d conjured up in my head, but still. She was a big part of my life, once. But you’re also wrong about how I felt about her.”
“What?” Katie asked, sitting forward slowly. It had been the last thing she’d expected him to do in that tense moment, to start talking about the verboten topic of Eden. She stared at him, riveted. He closed his eyes briefly. Katie had a flash of intuition and suddenly knew how difficult this conversation was for Rill.
“We hadn’t been getting along for more than about a year before she died—Eden and I.”
“Really?” Katie asked in a quavering voice. “But I thought . . . She never said . . . You never said.”
“She never spoke to you about our marriage being in trouble?” Rill asked her, his manner calm.
Katie shook her head. “No. I had no idea you two were anything but happy in your marriage.”
Rill searched her face. After a moment, he nodded. “It was, in the beginning. Happy, I mean. Or at least I thought it was. When she died, the coroner told me she was three months pregnant. It wasn’t my baby, Katie. We hadn’t slept together in over half a year.”
Katie just stared at him, her mouth partially open. The sound of the blood rushing in her veins segued from a dull throb to a roar in her ears.
“Eden was pregnant?” she whispered incredulously. “Who was the father?”
Heat burned in her cheeks when she realized what she’d just said. Rill had just asked her the same question last night. A wave of dizziness struck her.
Holy shit. Rill’s surprising news was bad in more ways than the obvious, she realized with a rising sense of dread.
“I don’t know,” Rill replied. “I was shocked when the coroner told me. You knew Eden. She didn’t socialize much, let alone go out with men. Her coworkers were mostly women.”
Katie blinked. The image of the fury in Rill’s face before he’d tackled Everett in the backyard flashed into her mind’s eye. “Jesus. You thought . . . Everett?”