Read Online The You I Never Knew by Susan Wiggs - Free Book Online Page A

turned to see Sam standing in the kitchen doorway. Faded jeans, fleece-lined denim jacket, battered John Deere cap, gloves protruding from a hip pocket. The Marlboro man without the cigarette.
    “I helped myself to coffee,” she said uncertainly. “Want some?”
    He ignored the question. He flexed his jaw, shifted his weight to one side. Though he barely moved, a subtle threat seemed to emanate from him. It was hard to explain, but Michelle sensed a dangerous turbulence in the air between them. Old intimacy mingled with fresh suspicion.
    He took a step toward her. “So when were you planning on telling me I have a son?”
    His blunt words pounded at Michelle, but she felt no shock. In the back of her mind she had known since last night that he would figure out the truth based on Cody’s age. She folded her arms protectively across her middle. “God, if you said something to Cody—”
    “What the hell do you take me for? Of course I didn’t say anything. Thanks to you, I don’t even know the kid.” His gaze flicked over her, measuring her contemptuously from head to toe and back again. “So I guess that means you’ve never told him, either.”
    She returned his glare. “I didn’t see the point. I didn’t think he’d ever meet you.”
    He grabbed the back of his neck in a distracted gesture. “Jesus Christ. You had my kid, and you never told me.”
    “And this surprises you?” Too many years had passed for Michelle to feel bitter, but she did. The regrets, the resentment, the frustration, all came bubbling to the surface. “I was eighteen years old and pregnant. You’d run off to be a rodeo champ. Do you think I had the slightest idea how to track you down? And what makes you think I didn’t try?”
    “Did you?”
    “Of course I did, Sam. I was in l—” She broke off, unwilling to continue down that path. “Are you telling me it should have been easy to find you? Did you and your mother leave a forwarding address? Did you stay anywhere long enough to have one?”
    “Permanent addresses were never my mother’s strong suit.” His voice was low and hoarse. “We weren’t all brought up in gated communities in Bel Air.”
    She flinched at the implication. She and Sam came from different worlds, though at eighteen they had sworn it didn’t matter.
    “I didn’t have a whole lot of time to spend trying to figure out where you’d gone. I had a baby to raise. Beyond the twenty-four hours a day that took, I couldn’t seem to squeeze in a missing-persons search.”
    “I deserved to know, damn it.”
    “Oh, right. So you could do what? Marry me?”
    “So I could have a say in what you did with my kid. You never even gave me a chance.”
    “Tell me an eighteen-year-old cowboy wants a
chance
with a baby.”
    She was dangerously, humiliatingly close to tears. She refused to shed them. She had wept an ocean for Sam McPhee and he’d never come to find her. Crying now would only prove what Michelle had been trying to deny since seeing him last night. Seventeen years ago he had taken possession of her in ways she was too young to understand. She had never given herself so wholly to another person, nor taken so much from someone else. After Sam left, she had dreamed of meeting someone new, but she’d never found that depth, that completion, with any other person. So she learned to do without.
    Michelle forced herself to get a grip, to stand up from the table so she didn’t feel at a disadvantage. “This is stupid. We shouldn’t argue about the past. We can’t change what happened.”
    “Maybe not.” Unhurried yet unrelenting, he walked toward her, stopping only inches from her. The smell of snow and wind clung to his clothes, underlying the unique scent of him. She thought she had forgotten it.
    “Sam—”
    “We’ve got a lot of talking to do.” His low voice caught at her, mesmerized her. “Problem is, now that you’re here, I want to do a hell of a lot more than talk.”
    “You’re