“I wouldn’t put it past her. Once that lady’s mind is made up, there’s just no changing it. She may look as fragile as a butterfly, but she’s as stubborn as a mule. Believe me, Jenny and I found that out.” Linc lit a cigarette with shaking hands. He went through the motions mechanically, and, if his frown were any indication, he derived no pleasure from the tobacco.
“In that respect,” Cage continued, “she’s a lot like Jenny.”
“Jenny doesn’t strike me as being stubborn,” Linc remarked distractedly.
Cage laughed. “Looks can be deceiving. I didn’t think I was ever going to talk her into marrying me. There she was, pregnant and living by herself. I begged her to marry me. She dug her heels in and stubbornly refused.”
Linc was staring at him in astonishment. “Jenny was pregnant with Trent before you got married?”
“He’s mine,” Cage said testily.
Linc held up both hands. “Hey, I wasn’t suggesting otherwise. It just seems, I don’t know, out of character for Jenny.”
“It was. I take full responsibility. Someday when we’ve got more time, I might tell you the whole sordid story.”
Linc settled back into his brooding. “Everything turned out well. That’s what’s important.”
“Yeah, but it was touch and go there for a while.” Though the speedometer registered ninety, Cage draped his left wrist over the steering wheel and laid his right arm along the top of the seat.
“I’d been tomcatting for almost twenty years before I slept with Jenny. I’d always taken extra precautions. You know what it’s like. I’m sure you never go anywhere without a supply of foil packages in your pocket.” Cage grinned a just-between-us-hell-raisers’ smile.
Linc smiled back sickly.
“There’d never been an unfortunate accident.” Cage smiled wryly. “I was damned lucky. The one time I didn’t use anything, I was with the woman I’d always wanted. That first time with Jenny, contraception was the farthest thing from my mind. Who knows,” he said, shrugging, “maybe I had a subconscious desire to give her my baby so she’d have to take me in the bargain.”
Linc was staring through the windshield again, but he was no longer slumping. His posture was rigid, as though he anticipated being ejected from the seat at any moment. He ran his palms up and down his thighs. He was grinding his jaw.
“Turn the car around,” he said abruptly.
“Huh?”
“Stop and turn around. We’re going back.”
“But your plane leaves in—”
“I don’t give a damn about the plane!” Linc barked. “Take me back to the ranch.”
Gravel sprayed everywhere when Cage whipped the large, long Lincoln off the highway and onto the shoulder. He executed a flawless U-turn and floorboarded the accelerator. He waved to the highway patrolman they passed. The officer only waved back. Catching a bat out of hell was a better bet than catching Cage Hendren when he was in a hurry.
The distance back to the ranch was covered in a third of the time it had taken to get to the turn-around point. To Linc, who was rocking back and forth in his seat while he brutalized the inside of his jaw, it seemed to take forever.
He hadn’t even thought of that!
Sure, he’d planned on using something when he left the cantina with his “whore.” But his supply had gotten left somewhere along the way with the rest of his gear. The morning he’d gone tearing after Kerry in Linc’s pickup, he’d been so damned mad that contraception had never even occurred to him.
And, Lord, how many times had there been since then? How many times in that one night of erotic fantasy-come-true had he...? It must have been at least...! He couldn’t even count the times.
Cage pulled the car right up to the end of the sidewalk. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll go back to the hospital.”
“Sure.” Linc jerked his bags from the backseat and got out, slamming the car door shut behind him.
“I’ll probably be there for the rest of the day. Make yourself at home. If you want to get rid of Trent, call my folks to come pick him up.”
Linc was already halfway to the front door. He nodded absently to what Cage was saying to him. Chuckling, Cage put the Lincoln in gear and drove it back down the lane.
In the entry hall of the house, Linc dropped his bags to the floor. The sunlight had been so bright outside that it took a moment for his eyes to adj
ust to the dimness. Impatient and unwilling to wait, he bumped into several pieces of furniture as he scouted the rooms on the lower story of the house. When they proved to be empty, he took the stairs two at a time.