Do you take this rebel - By Sherryl Woods Page 0,48

you and I wish we’d never come here!”

The words cut through her like well-aimed knives, but she couldn’t relent. She simply couldn’t. What she was doing was for the best.

But then Jake whirled away from her, and instead of going inside as she’d ordered, he threw himself at Cole. “I wish you were my dad. Then I could come and live with you.”

Dismay welled up in her throat. She wanted to cry out, to protest. She didn’t think she’d reacted aloud, but she must have, because Cole’s gaze shot to hers and suddenly she saw that he knew, that in that instant he’d guessed the truth she had been trying so desperately to hide.

She also saw the cold rage in his eyes as it stripped away the warmth she’d come to yearn for.

“Son,” he said, his voice faltering ever so slightly. His hand rested for just an instant on Jake’s head. Finally he added, “Do as your mother asked, Jake. Go inside.”

Jake seemed to sense that the mood on the porch had shifted in some way. Though his expression remained sullen, he went into the house, but not without slamming the door emphatically behind him.

Cassie waited, frozen, for Cole to say something, anything.

His gaze was damning.

“Is it true?” he asked eventually. “Is Jake my son?”

She tried to speak, tried desperately to find the right words, but none came. Finally she just nodded.

“And all this time you never said a word,” he said, regarding her with disbelief. “Not one single word.”

“You’d left me,” she reminded him. “What was I supposed to do, run after you?”

He winced at that, but his expression didn’t soften. “Yes,” he said. “You were supposed to come after me. I had a right to know.”

“You left me,” she repeated. “You had no rights. None at all.”

“That boy in there is my son,” he all but shouted. At her frantic glance toward the house, he lowered his voice. “I had rights, dammit! And so did he. He had the right not to be born a bastard. He had the right to have my name, my love.”

“It wouldn’t have happened that way,” Cassie said flatly, knowing that his father would have prevented it. Her mother had been right about that. Frank Davis had admitted as much himself. His attitude now might have changed, but back then he would never have permitted a marriage between his son and a girl with no education and no well-connected family. Even now he wanted Cole to claim Jake, not her.

“Well, we’ll never know that now, will we?” Cole said bitterly. He regarded her as if he’d never seen her before. “I thought I knew you.”

“You knew the woman I used to be, the girl. I’ve changed, Cole.”

“Obviously,” he said derisively.

“Because I’ve had to. While you’ve been off making your millions, I’ve been struggling to make ends meet. Instead of going off to college, I had a baby. Instead of being right here in Winding River with family and old friends, I’ve been living with strangers. I’ve been doing the best I could to see that my son was loved and fed and educated.”

“Our son, dammit. Ours!”

Something beyond the words, something in his tone, terrified her. It had gotten proprietary.

“Jake is mine,” she repeated fiercely. “In every way that counts, he is mine. Biologically, you might be his father, but you’ve never done anything for him, never stayed up when he was sick, never read him a story, never comforted him during a storm.”

Cole’s eyes blazed with fury. “And whose fault is that? Don’t start throwing that in my face, Cassie,” he warned. “It won’t hold up. If I’ve failed as a father, it’s because I was never given the chance to be one, and the blame for that lies with you, no one else. Just you.”

She was going about this all wrong. Every word out of her mouth was making him angrier, reminding him that she had cost him nine years with his son.

“Maybe…maybe you should leave now,” she suggested tentatively. “Go home and think about this. You’ll see that I had no choice.”

At least she prayed that he would.

But Cole wasn’t finished with her yet. “You know,” he said, “even if I were to accept that back then you were young and scared, that you thought I’d abandoned you, it wouldn’t explain the past few weeks. We’d cleared up the old misunderstandings. We both knew the truth about how we were manipulated by our parents. We were starting to build a future