outside. She didn’t resist. She couldn’t. It seemed they were both caught up in some sort of spell. Reunions had a way of doing that, she supposed. They were intended to take you back in time, to a simpler era when nothing mattered but football victories and school dances. Unfortunately, for her those times were far more complicated.
The heat of the day had given way to a cool breeze. The summer sun was just now sinking below the horizon in the west in a blaze of orange. They stood silently, side by side, watching as the sky faded to pale pink, then mauve, then turned dark as velvet.
“Quite a show,” Cole observed.
“God’s gift at the end of the day, if you take the time to enjoy it,” Cassie said.
“Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Take the time to enjoy it? What have you been up to for the past ten years, Cassie?”
“Working.”
“Doing what? Where are you living?”
Now there was the question of the hour, she thought. “I’ve been in a small town north of Cheyenne,” she said.
“Doing?”
“The same old thing,” she said, unable to hide a note of defensiveness. “Working in a diner.”
“You were always good at that,” he said with what sounded like genuine admiration. “You had a way of making every customer feel special, even the grumpy ones.”
She shrugged. “Better tips that way.”
“Why do you do that?” he asked, regarding her with a puzzled expression. “Why do you put yourself down? There’s nothing wrong with being a damn fine waitress.”
“No, there’s not,” she agreed.
He grinned. “That’s better. Besides being a waitress, what have you been up to? I imagine raising your son takes most of your time.”
She swallowed hard. Obviously he knew about Jake’s existence, so there was little point in denying it. “Yes.”
“I saw him, you know.”
Fear made her stiffen. “You did? When?”
“The day you drove into town. I saw you go speeding past the ranch. He was with you.”
She breathed a sigh of relief. Only from a distance, then. He couldn’t have seen much, a glimpse at most.
“How old is he?”
“Nine.”
“Then you must have had him not long after we broke up,” he said, his expression thoughtful. Then, as if a dark cloud had passed in front of the sun, his eyes filled with shadows. His gaze hardened. “You didn’t waste a lot of time finding somebody new, did you?”
She wanted to deny the damning conclusion to which he’d leaped, but it was safer than the alternative, safer than letting him make a connection with the timing of their relationship. “Not long,” she agreed. She studied him curiously. “I didn’t think it mattered what I did, since you were long gone.”
“So, we’re back to that,” he said, his tone cold. “I wrote to you. I explained that my father insisted I go back to college right then. I asked you to wait, told you I’d get home the first chance I got.”
“And I’m telling you that I never got such a letter,” she said. “If I had, I would have waited.” She started to add that she had loved him, but what was the point of saying that now? Whatever she had felt had died years ago.
“I would have understood,” she told him, her voice flat.
“Oh, really? That wasn’t how it sounded in the letter I got. You sounded as if you didn’t give a rat’s behind what I did.”
She looked him straight in his eyes as she made another flat denial. “I never wrote to you. How could I? I didn’t even know where you’d gone.”
“I have the letter, dammit.”
“I didn’t write it,” she repeated.
He studied her unflinching gaze, then sighed. “You’re telling me the truth, aren’t you?” He stepped away from her and raked his hand through his hair in a gesture that had become habit whenever he was troubled. “What the hell happened back then?”
Suddenly, before she could even speculate aloud, he muttered a harsh expletive. “My father, no doubt. He had something to do with it, you can be sure of that. He forced me to go, then made sure my letter never reached you. I’m sure he was responsible for the letter I got, as well.”
“Wouldn’t you have recognized his handwriting?”
“Of course, but he wouldn’t write it himself. He’d have someone else do his dirty work.”
If that was true, Cassie didn’t know how she felt about it. It would be a relief to know Cole hadn’t abandoned her after all, but it didn’t change anything. Too much time had passed. And there was Jake to consider. Cole would be livid if he found out the boy was his.
“It doesn’t matter now, Cole. It was a long time ago. We’ve both moved on with our lives.”
He scanned her face intently. “You’re happy, then?”
“Yes,” she said. It was only a tiny lie. Most of the time she was...content. At least she had been until Jake’s mischief had made it necessary for her to leave the home she’d worked so hard to make for them.
“You didn’t marry your son’s father, though, did you?”
“No. It wouldn’t have worked,” she said truthfully. “Jake and I do okay on our own.”
He smiled. “That’s his name? Jake?”
She nodded.
“I like it.”
She had known he would, because they had discussed baby names one night when they’d allowed themselves to dream about the future. Cole had evidently forgotten that, which was just as well.
“He’s a good kid?”
“Most of the time,” she said with a rueful grin.
“Being your son, I’ll bet he’s a handful. What sort of mischief does he get into?”
She found herself telling him about the computer scam, laughing now that it was behind them, admiring—despite herself—her son’s audacity. “Not that I would ever in a million years tell him that. What he did was wrong. That’s the only message I want him to get from me.”
“We did worse,” Cole pointed out.
“We certainly did not,” she protested.
“We stole all the footballs right before the biggest game of the season, because I was injured and the team was likely to lose without me.”
Cassie remembered. She also remembered that they’d been suspended from school for a week because of it. In high school she had loved leading the older, more popular Cole into mischief. It was only later, when he’d come home from college, that their best-buddy relationship had turned into something else.
Thinking of the stunts she’d instigated, she smiled. “That was different. No one was really harmed by it. And they played, anyway. The coach went home and found a football in his garage. The team was so fired up by what we’d done, by the implication that they couldn’t win without you, that they went out and won that game just to prove that they didn’t need you to run one single play.”
Cole laughed. “It was quite a reality check for my ego, that’s for sure.”
“Okay, so we chalk that one up as a stunt that backfired,” she said. “Anything else you remember us doing that was so terrible?”
“There