The thought of her with a kid was…kinda nice. A shocking realization to have because he always avoided women with baggage. She’d been reluctant to tell him about her kid, too. He’d seen that trepidation on her face, as if expecting him to run for the hills. Hell, he was the furthest thing from turned off. He’d been plagued by thoughts about her since they’d met. Woken up way too early this morning with a hard-on and her adorable laugh rippling through his sleep-hazed mind while the image of her eyes, her smile, and that sexy-as-hell tattoo had wavered like a mirage in his dream, vanishing as he became lucid.
She pushed to her feet and put her camera back in her pack. “Come on. We’ve still got a fifteen-minute hike ahead of us.”
He followed Rose down the gorge, then up the narrow incline that wove along the shape of the canyon, grabbing the rope that had been laced through eye bolts anchored into the rock face for leverage by his father years ago. The path was steep, and he had a clear shot upward. If his little Dr. R were wearing a flirty summer skirt, he’d see her cute rear. And he suspected it was just as pretty as everything else about her.
“Tell me about your kid,” he finally said.
“His name is Sage,” she replied, hefting herself up another part of the incline.
Sage. Interesting. And the more he said it in his head, the more he realized he liked it. No doubt, Dr. Morales had been a little hippie chick, too, having named her kid after a plant, with her whimsical roses tatted onto her skin, her dreadlocked ex-boyfriends, and her mugs of herbal tea. And whatever had happened with Sage’s dad, it clearly hadn’t worked out.
“He always stays at my dad’s ranch for his summer vacation while I’m here.”
“Sage. That’s a cool name.”
“Thanks.”
She kept hiking, as if avoiding talking to him. Funny how when things took a turn to the personal, she went silent.
“You said your parents raise goats?”
“No. My dad. My mom hasn’t lived with us since I was little.”
“Divorce?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No. My parents are devout Catholic. Even if they’d hated each other, they never would have considered it.”
She kept moving.
“What happened to her? Eh, if you don’t mind my asking?” he added.
“She was deported when I was in elementary school.”
Shit.What a load to dump on someone. There was distance in her statement that was, by all accounts, a flat remark on the surface. Sadness, even if she said the words so easily.
“She didn’t do anything wrong. She was applying for permanent residence because she was safer here. She was just trying to be a mom and a wife and…”
Had he heard her correctly? All thoughts of cute rears and sexy tats drained away. He’d never met anyone who’d experienced something like that. It was the stuff one heard about on the news but never saw how it affected people. And yet he felt the need to keep her talking about it. Had she ever talked about it with someone? Probably not. Like he never talked about his momma. It was hard to talk about the things that hurt and breathe at the same time.
“How’s that possible?” Toby asked. “You said they were married?”
Rose shrugged, still moving forward. “Glitch in the system while she was awaiting her visa application to be approved, which was taking forever.”
“You keep in touch with her?” he asked.
She nodded, the dark curls piled atop her head bouncing. “I go to visit her. She lives over the border in Coahuila. She meets me in Acuña sometimes for lunch. But I didn’t get to see her much growing up. My dad was nervous about border crossing. Both he and my mom were paranoid about all sorts of things they didn’t need to be paranoid about because of that whole experience. Would we be refused entry on the return trip? Get detained because of another glitch? Or worst, separated? My mom told him to keep me in Del Rio. We wrote letters and shared photos. It was never enough.”
“She could never come back?”
Rose shook her head. “She met every requirement, but even after she reapplied for residency, she was denied with no explanation. That took two more years of waiting. So my dad hired a lawyer, but the cost was so exorbitant for us—it’s not like we were poor, but every time my dad evaluated the books, he would have had to refinance the ranch, and my mom wouldn’t hear of it.”
Her voice huffed for air as she hiked. This woman’s body was made of muscle, it seemed, for she was chugging up this path like a pro. And yet Rose’s huffing was packed with emotion. Was she trying to stave off tears? Steady her thoughts or her breath? Dammit. He’d made her cry. Shut up, man. Just shut up.
He thought on the urn in the hallway. Goddamn. His heart ached just thinking about his sweet momma, Deborah Ann. How could he have ever grown up without her? He’d been a momma’s boy, the littlest brother, and his mother’s final baby. He was proud of being a momma’s boy. When his brothers had teased or insulted him with the slight, he’d grinned from ear to ear and said, “Damn straight. I’m her favorite,” just to anger them and send them running to find her and ask if Toby was right.
His dad had been a good man, stout and protecting of his wife and family, but he’d been a businessman, not a daddy. Harold Dixon had trained them to rope—hours in the blazing sun drilling them on how to clinch that lasso on a dummy set of horns, or he’d sat with his brothers in the back seat of their chromy extended-cab Ford while the old man had negotiated business with others. They’d helped him repair fencing each winter, when they could bear to be out from dawn to dusk without the God-awful heat giving them all strokes, or helped him round up wayward cows on horseback in the back country where the trucks couldn’t access. The man had demanded obedience and, in the process, sent all three of his sons running in different directions. Toby’d just been the unlucky one to get roped back in, while Ty and Trav had managed to gain their freedom.
But his mom… The woman had rocked them, fed them, sang to them in her soothing, off-key voice. He’d always found solace in her arms as a little boy in jeans with the knees worn through and his favorite Star Wars T-shirt. Rose had missed out on that. She’d been ripped apart from her mother, and it was probably something that made her an even better mom to Sage.