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

crazy.” She didn’t know this man anymore, but she could feel the anger and passion seething from him. She searched his face, wondering about the lines that fanned out from his eyes.
    “Crazy? I’ve been called worse.” He took another step toward her. “I couldn’t sleep for thinking about you last night.”
    She inched back. “You came in here wanting to talk about Cody.”
    He stuck a thumb into his jeans pocket, his hip propped on the edge of the counter. “So talk. I’m listening.”
    This can’t be happening, Michelle thought. “I don’t know where to start.”
    “You had my child and you never told me.” He spoke coldly, the words hard as stones. “How about starting there?”
    “The day I found out I was pregnant, I went to see you. And you had left without a trace. I don’t believe I owed you a thing.”
    The heat of his glare was a tangible thing; she could feel it blasting away at her. “I won’t discuss this with you if you’re hostile,” she added.
    “Excuse me if I’m a little disoriented by all this. It’s not every day a woman I used to sleep with shows up with a kid she had sixteen years ago.”
    “I didn’t know I’d find you here.”
    “Well, here I am, honey.” He spread his arms mockingly. “I’m surprised your daddy didn’t warn you.”
    She was surprised, too, but she wouldn’t admit it to Sam. She wondered if he knew she and her father were strangers, and that only Gavin’s illness had brought her back.
    “We should be talking instead of arguing.” She sat back down at the table, took a deep breath. “Maybe I was wrong. I should have searched high and low for you. But everyone said I’d get over you. Said I was better off without you, that I’d go off to college and meet someone who—” She broke off and shrugged.
    “—wasn’t a born drifter with a hopeless lush for a mother,” Sam finished for her.
    “I never said that.”
    “You didn’t have to.”
    “I had to think about Cody, too. I spent my childhood ducking the paparazzi. I’m very protective of him in that way.”
    His eyes narrowed. “Oh, yeah, the tabloids would’ve had a field day with us. Gavin Slade’s only daughter makes it with a ranch hand.”
    She flinched, knowing he wasn’t far off the mark. As a child, she had shown up occasionally in the scandal sheets—a grainy photo taken through a long lens:
Gavin Slade’s Love Child
, the caption always read.
    A juicy story like an illicit Romeo and Juliet–style affair would have revived the attention she shunned. That was why she worked so hard to maintain her anonymity. Every once in a while a reporter in search of a scoop came sniffing around. One even snapped her photo when she was pregnant. The incident had scared her so much that she moved to Seattle, where no one knew her.
    Sam sat down across from her. His hands were big, not as work-scarred as she would have thought. She caught herself staring at those hands, remembering how she used to rub Bag Balm on them to soothe the calluses.
    “None of that old stuff can matter now, Michelle. What matters is that we have a son.” He clenched his hand into a fist on the table. “A son. I can’t believe it.”
    She was terrified to ask the next question, but she had to. “Sam, what are you going to do?”
    “Do?”
    “About… learning that Cody’s your son.” She tasted the burn of resentment in her throat. “Your biological son.” Yes, that sounded better. More distant.
    He studied her hands, and she wondered if he remembered the Bag Balm, too. On her right one, she wore a Cartier onyx ring. On the left forefinger, a large sapphire.
    “Did you raise him alone, or are you in a relationship?”
    She guessed that meant he wasn’t thinking about the Bag Balm.
In a relationship
. It was such a modern thing to say. Like so many modern things, it had no meaning.
    “Alone, more or less.”
    “Explain more or less.”
    “I’ve been with someone for the past three years. But it’s