“You were pressuring her to and she wouldn’t?”
His jaw tensed. “It was the other way around, Counselor.”
“What?” Alex exclaimed. “You expect me to believe—”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass what you believe. It’s the truth. Celina wanted to get a head start on our future, and I wouldn’t.”
“Next, you’re going to tell me that you had an unselfish, noble reason,” Alex said, tongue-in-cheek. “Right?”
“My own parents,” he said without inflection. “My old man got my mother pregnant when she was barely fifteen. They had to get married. Look how great that turned out. I wouldn’t take a chance on the same thing happening to Celina and me.”
Alex’s heart was thudding with gladness, disbelief, and emotions that were too complex to examine. “You mean that you never—”
“No. We never.”
She believed him. There was no mendacity in his expression, only bitterness, and perhaps a trace of regret. “Hadn’t you heard of birth control?”
“I used rubbers with other girls, but—”
“So there were others?”
“I’m not a monk, for crissake. The Gail sisters,” he said with a shrug, “lots of others. There were always willing girls available.”
“Especially to you.” He shot her a hard look. “Why weren’t you concerned that you’d impregnate one of them?”
“They all slept around. I would be one of many.”
“But Celina would have slept only with you.”
“That’s right.”
“Until she went to El Paso and met Al Gaither,” Alex mused out loud. “He was just a means to make you jealous, wasn’t he?” On a humorless laugh, she added, “She overshot her mark and manufactured me.”
They lapsed into silence. Alex didn’t even notice. She was lost in her turbulent thoughts about her mother, Reede, and their unconsummated love affair.
“It’s really beautiful up here at night, isn’t it?” she said dreamily, unaware that almost half an hour had passed since they had last spoken.
“I thought you’d fallen asleep.”
“No.” She watched a bank of clouds drift between them and the moon. “Did you ever take my mother flying?”
“A few times.”
“At night?”
He hesitated. “Once.”
“Did she like it?”
“She was scared, as I recall.”
“They gave her hell, didn’t they?”
“Who?”
“Everybody. When word got out that Celina Graham was pregnant, I’ll bet the gossip spread like wildfire.”
“You know how it is in a small town.”