Maisey Yates - Untamed Cowboy

He walked out of the room, and Bennett winced when the front door slammed.

“You didn’t know?” The woman leveled her dark eyes on him.

“I had no clue,” he said, keeping his words as firm as he could. “My girlfriend told me she lost the baby.”

Grace looked suddenly sympathetic. “Oh.”

“I believed her. She left. Said she couldn’t stand to be around me after all that. That was the last I heard of her. We were dumb kids.”

Grace raised her eyebrows. “You must have been. I was surprised by how young you were.”

Bennett had aged about ten years in the last forty minutes, so that statement seemed especially funny right at the moment. But he couldn’t laugh.

“What happened to him?” Bennett asked, his voice rough. “What happened to her?”

Grace sighed, long and slow. “I haven’t been working with Dallas that long. But from what I understand his mother had drug issues. He was neglected and eventually had to be removed from her custody. He went back and forth for a while, but as he said...not recently. He’s been moving between foster homes for couple of years now.”

“And no one keeps him?”

“He’s difficult,” Grace said, folding her hands together. “I’m not going to lie to you about that.”

A difficult kid who’d had more than a difficult life, and there had been no reason for that. No reason at all. Bennett had been here the whole time. And if he’d known...

“It’s okay if he’s difficult,” Bennett said, firming up his jaw. “He’s my difficult.”

She nodded slowly, and something that looked like it might at least be a neighbor of respect flashed in her eyes. “I suppose he is.”

Dallas came back into the room then, dragging a black garbage bag behind him. “Quick packing,” he said, indicating what passed as his luggage.

For a moment, Bennett felt like he was staring into a black hole of rage. Despair. Denial.

And yet here was this kid who looked almost just like him. This kid standing there clutching a garbage bag.

Bennett had experienced loss in his life. He hadn’t grown up with a mother. But he’d had stability. He’d had a father and a home. He’d never wanted for anything, and he had certainly never had to put all of his worldly possessions into a single bag and get carted to a place he’d never been before. Over and over again.

This was his son, and he would do the tests, or whatever they wanted him to do, but he didn’t think there was a scenario in which it would turn out that Dallas didn’t belong to him. In which it would turn out that this kid, this kid that had been abandoned and shuffled around, wasn’t his .

But right then, with that reality crashing it, it hit him that Dallas was also a stranger. A stranger that was going to live in his house.

Bennett could not have picked a more surreal moment off a list. He couldn’t imagine anything more bizarre than staring down a stranger that you were blood-related to. A stranger who was your child.

Bennett didn’t feel like a father. He was thirty-two years old. He didn’t feel old enough to have a fifteen-year-old son. That was for damn sure.

But he didn’t feel nothing . There was something inside of him that burned for this angry boy standing in front of him. Guilt, mostly. Guilt that Dallas had gone through all of that when Bennett had been going on with his life, making something of himself. When he had been living in this big, comfortable house all this time. With a housecleaner, no less, and this kid had been bouncing back and forth between homes.

“I have a bit of a drive to get back to Portland,” Grace said. “So, this is where I leave you. But of course you can have my number. And we will be checking in.”

“So you can just...leave him with me?” Panic made his throat tight, made it hard for him to breathe. He’d stuck his hand up inside animals and faced down wounded, enraged creatures that were bent on killing him before they let him help them. His brother might have ridden bulls for a living, but Bennett had vaccinated them. None of that came close to the kind of fear he felt here.

“You are his father,” she said. “His father with no criminal record or any reason that he shouldn’t have him. That’s simple enough.”

Simple and complicated in ways that Bennett couldn’t work out even within himself.

Grace paused and put her hand on Dallas’s shoulder. “You can use my number too. I hope you know that. Goodbye, Dallas. I’ll be checking in with you.”

Then she left. Left him standing there with this kid who was a stranger. Who was his son.

The clock on the wall ticked, marking the torturous seconds where he couldn’t think of a thing to say. Where he couldn’t even move.

“I have a guest room,” Bennett said slowly.

“Right,” Dallas said. “Are you sure you don’t want me to sleep in a barn?”

“No.”

“You don’t have a wife or anything?” the kid asked.

“No,” Bennett said.

“Girlfriend?”

“Do you?” Bennett asked.

Dallas shrugged. “Hard to hang on to one when you’re moving all the time.”

“Sure.”

More seconds ticked off.

“I bet if you touch any of the girls here their dads run you off the property with a shotgun, right?” he asked.

“I don’t know about them, but I might chase you with a shotgun.”

Dallas snorted. “That’s funny. Especially because I know my mom is from here, and I know that you knocked her up.”

“I did,” Dallas said. “She told me she had a miscarriage.”

Dallas looked shocked at that, and Bennett wondered if he should have said that. But honestly, there was no point letting the kid cast him as any more of a bad guy than he already had. Marnie wasn’t here. Marnie was off mired in drug addiction somewhere. And any sympathy that he had felt for her situation was rapidly disintegrating. He would have helped her. He would have stayed with her. She didn’t need to run away. He had no clue why in hell she had done that. No clue what had possessed her. If she hadn’t wanted the baby, he would have taken the baby. He would never understand this.

“She didn’t tell me that,” Dallas said.

“I don’t know what she told you. But I’ll tell you, honestly, I found out she was pregnant, I was going to propose to her. She told me she had a miscarriage, and then she told me she was leaving town. She broke up with me. We were young and we were stupid.”

“I’m younger than you were,” Dallas pointed out.

“Yes. And you’re young and stupid. Because when you’re fifteen you’re stupid. And when you’re sixteen you’re not much better. We were stupid. But I didn’t know... I didn’t know. You don’t have to believe me right now. I don’t know that I can really believe any of this. I feel like I’m going to blink and you’re going to disappear. I’m going to wake up and it’s gonna be some kind of weird dream. But as long as you’re standing there... I didn’t know about you. I’m going to be honest with you. That’s what I’m going to do.” Bennett made a decision then, and he decided to go with it. “Whatever else, I’m going to tell you the truth. I’m going to be really bad at this. I don’t have any experience with kids.”

“Not really a kid,” Dallas said, shrugging.

“You’re not,” Bennett said, his heart clenching tight. Because the boy in front of him was really more of a young man, and the first fifteen years of his life were lost to Bennett. There was nothing he could do about it. That hurt like a son of gun.

“But you are,” he continued. “And you need somebody. I’m going to be that person. And I’m going to be honest with you. Even if it’s hard. So, that’s my first bit of honesty.”