Untamed Cowboy Read online

  And the only way she was going to do that was to actually try to have a relationship with a guy instead of simply sabotaging every opportunity that came her way.

  “Dinner would be perfect,” she said.

  And she felt like if she said it enough times to herself over the next few days it might just become true.

  * * *

  THE LAST THING Bennett expected when he pulled into his driveway that evening was to see a police car parked out in front of his ranch house.

  His dogs—traitorous, useless beasts—were lying on the porch, long noses resting on their front paws, their floppy ears draped down in total relaxation. The old horses—retired rodeo animals, former pets that had outlived their usefulness—and his solitary llama were all looking equally unconcerned out in the field.

  But Bennett didn’t feel as calm as any of the animals.

  He was a rule follower, so there was no way that he had done anything wrong. Forgot to pay a parking ticket? No. Definitely not.

  He had been so distracted by the sight of the cruiser that it had taken him a moment to realize that there was another car parked alongside it. An SUV with yellow plates and a gray-green color that those official-looking vehicles seemed to favor.

  He frowned and got out of the car, and by the time he did the police officer was already rising up to meet him.

  “Are you Bennett Dodge?”

  “I suppose that all depends on whether or not I’m getting served.”

  “Not getting served,” the officer said.

  “Okay.”

  If somebody were dead he would have been called already. If somebody had died Wyatt would be here. Unless it was Wyatt who was dead. But then Grant would be here. Or Jamie. And if something had happened to Jamie... Well, Grant and Wyatt would both be here.

  In a fraction of a second his brain concocted a thousand different events that might have happened to wipe out every last one of his siblings.

  Or maybe it was his dad. Who was currently in New Mexico with his new wife, Freda. Maybe something happened to one of them. An accident with that damned motor home of theirs.

  “Just tell me nobody’s dead,” Bennett said.

  The officer looked shocked for a moment. “Oh, no one’s dead,” he said. “But we’re here to talk to you about a matter of custody.”

  “Custody?”

  The only thing he could think that might mean was they needed to take him into custody, but he hadn’t done anything. He was sure he hadn’t. But of course, he found himself cataloging his every action from the past week. Whether or not somebody had seen him get in the car after his half a beer last night.

  But that was ridiculous. Mostly.

  “You look confused,” the police officer said.

  “I am,” Bennett responded.

  “It’s about your son, Mr. Dodge.”

  Bennett frowned, no immediate emotional reaction bubbling up to the surface. Mostly because the guy was just plain wrong. He had to be.

  “I don’t have a son,” Bennett said.

  “The paperwork I have says you do. You’re welcome to contest that. But what I have is a kid that’s going to end up in a group home if he can’t stay with his father.”

  As if on cue the door to that SUV opened and a woman in a severe-looking outfit got out, followed by a teenage boy. Fifteen years old or so, Bennett figured.

  Brown hair, tall, lanky. And he looked up at Bennett with simmering fury in brown eyes that matched Bennett’s perfectly.

  “Hi, Dad,” he said. “I guess it’s been a while.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “YOUR MOTHER IS Marnie Claire?”

  Bennett was sitting at the kitchen table across from the boy and the social worker. The police officer was outside. Apparently, he had been required to act as an escort because the social worker wasn’t confident in her ability to keep the boy from running off. The boy. Dallas.

  Dallas Dodge.

  That was his name. His legal name. Though, Bennett had had no idea of his existence. In fact, Bennett had been told that the pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage. He had lived with it like a weight ever since. Everything he had heard about Marnie, what had happened to her, the kind of life she had fallen into. He had blamed himself. She had been so distraught when she had broken up with him. When she had left and he had been convinced that any dire straits she was in was partly his fault. But if any of this was true, if this was his son... Then she had lied to him. She had lied to him almost sixteen years ago.

  And he was a father.

  To a teenager.

  Dammit to hell.

  “That’s right,” the social worker, who was named Grace, answered the question for Dallas.

  “How old are you?” Bennett said, addressing the kid straight on. Talking around him was insulting, and even if he did seem like he was a little punk, Bennett wasn’t going to treat him like he was invisible. He knew what that was like.

  When his mother had died that was what everyone did. They talked over his head like he was stupid, like he couldn’t possibly understand what was happening. Addressing all manner of sympathy to his father, to his older brothers, and treating Bennett like he had no idea what was happening in his own life. “Fifteen,” the kid said.

  “There isn’t a foster family that has been able to cope with him. And he’s extremely lucky that the owner of the last store he robbed didn’t press charges.”

  “It wasn’t robbery,” Dallas said. “You make it sound like I had a gun.”

  “That’s armed robbery,” Bennett supplied.

  “Well,” Dallas continued. “It wasn’t as badass as that. It was shoplifting. Shoplifting would be a pretty pussy thing to go to jail for.”

  “But it is something you could have gone to jail for,” the social worker said, clearly well versed in Dallas’s brand of attitude, and pretty damned fed up with it too.

  Which was fair enough, he supposed.

  “What happened to your mom?” Bennett asked.

  “I don’t know.” Dallas shrugged. “She used to come around sometimes, but I haven’t seen her in a few years.”

  “His mother lost custody a few years ago,” Grace explained.

  Bennett rounded on her. “If this is my kid then why didn’t anyone contact me then?”

  “Because we didn’t know,” she said. “There is no father listed on Dallas’s birth certificate. We didn’t know where the last name Dodge came from.”

  “How did you find it now?”

  “It was in something of my mother’s,” Dallas said. “Something that I kept.”

  “He showed it to me when I told him about the group home,” the social worker said.

  Bennett just sat there, shock making him numb. And it was probably a damn good thing.

  But on some level, this angry, feral-looking kid wanted to be with him. Or at least, he wanted to be with him more than he wanted to be in a group home. But...it was clear he didn’t want to be here that much. And... Bennett couldn’t close the gap that he felt. With the facts in his brain, the words that had been planted there and the feelings in his heart.

  This was his son. In all likelihood it was.

  Not only did he look quite a bit like a combination of the Dodge brothers, the timing matched up. For Marnie’s pregnancy. The one that she had said she lost.

  That had been a lie. Clearly.

  “You didn’t know you had a son,” Grace said.

  “No,” Bennett responded. “I didn’t know. Do you honestly think that if I knew there was a kid out there that was mine, that had gotten taken from his mother and put in foster care... Do you honestly think I would’ve left him there?”

  “I’ve seen everything,” she said, her eyes exceedingly weary. “There is nothing in the whole world that would surprise me at this point. Nothing at
all. Actually, what surprises me most of all is finding you here in a house with a career and a semblance of a normal life. Unless you have drug paraphernalia hidden underneath that very nice-looking sectional in the living room, it seems like you might actually be the best thing that could have happened to Dallas.”

  “He’s sitting right there,” Bennett said. “Maybe we should talk right to him, instead of just about him.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t bother me,” Dallas said, smart-ass grin tipping his lips up. “What’s the point, anyway? You don’t want me to stay here. I didn’t have any idea my dad was living in such a fucking fancy place.”

  “It’s not that fancy.” The word dad was echoing in Bennett’s head, and it was making him feel a little bit dizzy.

  “Fancier than where I’ve been, believe me.”

  “You’ve been with some nice families,” Grace said.

  “Yeah,” Dallas snorted. “Too nice for me.”

  “So let me get this straight,” Bennett said, resolutely keeping his focus on Dallas, almost unable to keep his eyes off him. This kid that looked like a mirror image of him nearly sixteen years ago. This kid who was a year younger than Bennett had been when he’d gotten his girlfriend pregnant and had thought he had to face up to becoming a father.

  It hadn’t happened. Then.

  But it had all come home to roost in a really strange way.

  “You’ve been in trouble with the law.”

  “Just a little.” Dallas smirked.

  “Yes,” Grace confirmed.

  “What else? Why won’t they keep you in the houses?”

  “I run away. I cuss a lot. I was with a church family a few months ago and I taught one of the little kids the F word.”

  “That was a dick move,” Bennett pointed out.

  Dallas grinned. “Yeah.”

  “What else?”

  Dallas shrugged. “Nothing really. I mean, they want to control me, or turn me into what they think a good kid is, so that they can prove that they made an impact, or whatever bullshit reason they have for taking in foster kids in the first place. I had a mom. I don’t need another one. And as for the fathers... They all sucked. I haven’t seen any evidence that dads don’t.”

  “Mine doesn’t,” Bennett said, his voice rough.

  “Well, so far mine kinda does.”

  Bennett couldn’t argue with that.

  “Did you ever hurt anyone?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Dallas said, looking down.

  Bennett’s stomach tightened. “What happened?”

  “Just a fistfight. One of the older kids was saying shit to one of the girls. I didn’t like it.”

  Instantly, that tightening healed. Because if Dallas had that much of a barometer inside of him for what was right, for what needed to be defended...he wasn’t all that bad of a kid.

  And then Bennett realized it didn’t really matter if he was. If Dallas was the one who had been punched because he had said something objectionable to a girl, Bennett would still have to take him on. If this was his son, then it didn’t matter if he was the worst little troll on the face of the planet, Bennett had to take care of him.

  They were all sitting around this table like there was a choice. But there wasn’t a choice. No way in hell. There was no real choice here.

  “What’s the procedure for this?” Bennett asked.

  “We can do a paternity test,” Grace said.

  “And that...does what? Makes it all official in the court?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Then there will be a family court date to grant you official custody. It’s not an adoption if you’re his biological father.”

  “Then we’ll do all that.”

  “I have paperwork ready for you to be granted temporary custody in the meantime,” Grace said. “He doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “He has this place. It’s fine.”

  Nothing was fine. Bennett had a feeling that he was existing in some strange plane where nothing seemed real as a precaution against the reality of it all. A reality that was a bit too harsh, a bit too sharp for him to cope with just yet.

  “I don’t...” Bennett looked around his house, which was spotless because he had a cleaner that came in once a week and took care of everything. Spotless because he didn’t spend all that much time at home. “I don’t have anything for a kid.”

  “I have a bag,” Dallas said.

  Again, Bennett couldn’t quite tell if Dallas was being dragged here on sufferance, or if he wanted to be here. He was wondering those things because wondering was a lot easier than feeling at the moment.

  “Okay,” Bennett responded.

  “I’ll go get it.” The boy stood up.

  Grace eyed him speculatively. Dallas put his hands up in a defensive gesture. “That cop is still outside. It’s not like I’m going to run for it. Anyway, I don’t exactly have the equipment to go live in the mountains. You drove me out to the middle of nowhere. Where am I going to go?”

  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?”