Claiming The Rancher's Heir (Gold Valley Vineyards #2) - Maisey Yates Page 0,30

you are now. I ought to know better.”

“I mean... Yeah, I can’t really argue with you there. I’d like to reassure you, but that does seem...”

“She didn’t put my name on the birth certificate. She wouldn’t even look at me at school. She acted like she didn’t know me. And when I confronted her about it, she said we never slept together. She told everybody that the baby was Cal’s. She was a virgin when we slept together. I knew the baby was mine. But she must have gone and slept with him right after to make sure he believed her. I doubted myself sometimes over the years. I thought maybe... Maybe I was the crazy one. Maybe she hadn’t been a virgin. Maybe the timing was all off.”

“He looks like you, though, doesn’t he?” She felt sick to her stomach. “I don’t know him that well, but I remember seeing them all together, and I wouldn’t have looked at him and thought he was your doppelgänger or anything, but now that I know...”

“I don’t doubt it either,” he said. “I haven’t ever spoken a word to him. Never been close to him. And the fact of the matter is, he’s not really my son now, is he? I didn’t raise him. I’m not the one who taught him what he knows. I’m not the one who’s been there for everything and paid for his upbringing and... I’m just a guy who had sex with a girl once a long time ago, and got left with a scar that’s never going to heal. I can’t do that again, Wren. I lost a child already. And I was never going to... I was never going to try to become a father again. I couldn’t see any reason to. After all, I never had my first kid. But now it’s happening. And I can’t go through a loss like that. Not ever again.”

“And you think I would do that to you?”

“I thought I was in love once, and I thought the woman loved me back. We don’t even like each other.”

Her heart felt bruised, sore.

He’d been so young to go through something like that. And she could see that it still affected him profoundly. How could it not? But she couldn’t go paying for the sins of another person. It wasn’t fair.

“We are going to have to get to know each other,” she said, resolutely.

“No,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m not budging on it. You’re going to marry me. One year. I want us to get married, I want legal acknowledgment of the kid, and I want us to try for one year. And then if you want to divorce, God bless you, but we’re going to have to work out a real custody arrangement.”

“Creed, it doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “We can’t just get married.”

“I won’t accept anything less,” he said. “I won’t accept anything less than marriage.”

She looked at him, and she could see that he was absolutely serious. More than that, she could see that what her sister had said was absolutely right. His demand was coming from a place of pain. Unimaginable pain. And it wasn’t about simply pulling out a thorn. He wasn’t even going to let her get close enough to touch it, never mind remove it.

It was going to require trust. A hell of a lot of trust, and she could see that he was fresh out.

This was his vulnerability. His weakness. The situation they were in, it was the man’s worst nightmare. And she couldn’t make it work with him if she was continually trying to hold her position, fighting him just for the sake of it.

She wanted her freedom. Her life. The chance to make a future for herself the way that she wanted it made. But not at the expense of their child having the best life he or she possibly could.

Creed might irritate her, but he was a good man. She knew it.

He could be the kind of father her own had never been.

Right now, they had the freedom to make whatever future they wanted. Whatever future they thought was best. She wasn’t under the tyranny of her father, and she didn’t have to pass any of her pain, any of her issues, on to her children.

Something her own parents hadn’t managed.

But it all needed to start here. It had to start with this.

She took a breath, and then she sat down at one of the tables. “Okay. Get a