breath. Better to admit the truth and gauge her reaction, especially if he intended to go through with his impulsive plan. He couldn’t spend the rest of his life hiding in the dark, not around a woman like Val. She’d never allow it.
“There are scars,” he said finally.
“From the accident?”
He nodded, then realized she couldn’t see. “Yes,” he said more curtly than he’d intended.
“You never talk about what happened.”
“Why talk about it? It’s over with.”
“Tell me anyway. Annie says it was your wife’s fault and that it robbed you of your career.”
His daughter’s insight stunned him. “She knows all that?”
“She says that’s why you don’t like her much, because she reminds you of her mother.”
He muttered a harsh expletive. “I had no idea she thought that.”
“Is it true? Does she remind you of her mother?”
“She looks like her, that’s true enough, but that’s where it ends. Annie’s always been my treasure. From the first moment I laid eyes on her, I was in awe that I could have created something so beautiful.” He sighed. “I guess somewhere in the past year or so, I stopped reminding her of that.”
“She needs to hear it,” Val said gently.
“Yes,” he agreed.
When he fell silent and stayed that way, Val prompted, “You were going to tell me about the accident.”
He smiled ruefully in the darkness. “Was I now?”
“Oh, yes,” she insisted.
“I was back in Wilder’s Glen to see Suzanne and Annie. Suzanne hated it there. It was too small-town for her. She missed being on the road with me, but Annie needed to be settled. She needed to be in school. I didn’t know it at the time, but Suzanne took every opportunity to dump Annie with my parents so she could go chasing around, having the same kind of fun she assumed I was having on the road and denying her.”
He expected some reaction, but Val remained absolutely silent. Instead, she simply reached for his hand and linked her fingers with his. Oddly, the gesture brought him a measure of peace he rarely felt when he thought back to that tumultuous time.
“Suzanne wanted to go out,” he said, recalling the argument they’d had about it. “I’d barely walked in the door. I wanted to stay at home, spend some time with my daughter and my wife in private. Still, I could see her point. I thought she’d been trapped at home while I was away, and deserved a break from it. We went out for dinner, even danced a little, though I was aching from the last rodeo.”
He grimaced at the understatement. He’d grown used to aches and pains over the years, but it had been worse that night. He’d lost his concentration in the ring and been tossed off the back of a bull. It had been a miracle he hadn’t been trampled.
“We finally left the bar after midnight. I was so exhausted, Suzanne volunteered to drive. She wasn’t drunk. Hadn’t even had a beer, for that matter. On the way home, she started in on me again about being left behind all the time, about being stuck in Wilder’s Glen where my parents could watch her every move. We argued.”
He could still hear her voice echoing in his head. “It was the same old thing, a fight we’d had a million times before, but she was driving too fast, paying too little attention to the road. There was a sharp curve and she missed it. We slammed head-on into a tree.”
Val gasped softly.
Slade kept his voice dispassionate, even though he could still hear the grinding of the metal, feel the searing pain. “The damage was mostly on the passenger side. My leg was crushed. For a while the doctors thought I’d lose it, but I fought them every step of the way. Eventually it healed, just not well enough for me to go back to the rodeo. Being married to a rodeo star had been enough for Suzanne, enough to compensate for being left behind to raise our daughter. Without that, with me scarred, she saw no reason to stay. As soon as the verdict was in on my future, she took off. She filed for divorce a week later. She didn’t even fight me for custody of Annie. She seemed almost glad to be rid of her.”
“What a horrible person,” Val said indignantly. “I thought for better or for worse was supposed to mean something.”
She moved swiftly, too swiftly for him to stop her. Before he could guess her intentions,