His Dakota Bride (Book 5 - Dakota Hearts) (2 page)

Little Keith half hid himself from view. “Daddy says you’re Uncle Wade,” he said in a small voice.

Wade laughed as he crouched down. “That’s right.” He held out his hand to shake Keith’s. Keith glanced up at Logan who gave him the okay. Keith reached out and gave Wade a hard shake of his hand.

Wade tried to act surprised by Keith’s grip. “Wow, he’s a McKinnon all right.”

“And who’s this little guy in Auntie Poppy’s arms?” The little boy buried his face in Poppy’s neck, hiding from his view. Wade already knew the little boys name. He’d done his homework before deciding to finally come home.

Hawk tried to pull the boy from Poppy’s arms, but the little guy wouldn’t budge. Then Hawk turned to Wade and said, “This is Alex. Skylar’s son.”

Looking around, it suddenly dawned on Wade that he hadn’t seen Skylar in a while.

“Where did Skylar go?”

“I don’t know,” Poppy said. “Alex didn’t want to leave so I said I’d take him for the night. Then she ran out.”

His stomach sank. “Wait, she just left? Where did she go?”

His mother’s eyes probed his face. She must have sensed the unrest in him from his reaction. She said to Poppy, “Why don’t you bring the boys to the table for something to eat. I’m sure they’re hungry after all this excitement”

Poppy lowered Alex to the ground and took both Alex and Keith by the hand. “Sounds like a good idea. Let’s go see if Grandpa saved the hamburgers from burning. If not, we’ll skip lunch and eat some watermelon first.”

Both of the boys yelled, “Yeah!” Then they pulled from her grip and ran to the other side of the yard where the picnic table was set up.

Kate waited until the boys were fully out of earshot. “What’s going on, Wade?”

He watched the two boys laughing as they climbed onto the picnic table, sitting next to each other. “They could be brothers.”

Hawk took a deep breath and placed a hand on Wade’s shoulder. “Close. They’re cousins.”

Kate’s eyes widened with surprise. “What?”

Wade stared at Hawk’s face to see if he was serious, to confirm what he’d long suspected, but didn’t know as fact.

Hawk nodded. “Alex is your son, Wade.”

# # #

Skylar sat on the edge of the bed she’d shared while married to a man she never should have married. Her heart pounded so strong and fast that she thought her chest would burst open.

Wade was alive.
He was
here.

The day she’d heard Wade had been lost during the tsunami, she thought her world had shattered. It had taken so long to feel steady on her feet again. Seeing Wade again, learning he’d always had the power to come back to her felt as if she’d been hit with a tidal wave herself.

I’ve been watching you.
Ever since she’d come to South Dakota Wade had been watching her every move. He’d known that she was pregnant. He had to know it was his baby. He had watched while she’d married another man. And he’d said nothing. Done nothing to let her know that he was alive.

Skylar buried her face in her hands, not wanting to think about those dark days surrounding the aftermath of the tsunami. The phone call from her former colleague telling her that the island had practically been wiped off the map and the loss of life was catastrophic seemed like it was yesterday.

She looked around her bedroom and tried to breathe steady. She couldn’t cry. She couldn’t connect all the pieces of the last five years and make them fit into anything that made sense. She’d loved a man and lost him. She’d married another man and divorced him. Both had been devastating. And none of it ever had to happen. How many women could look back at their life and say that their heartache was completely avoidable?

Jay hadn’t taken anything with him but his clothes when he’d left. He wanted nothing in the divorce. He’d insisted there was nothing left in Rudolph for him anyway, and nothing worth taking.

Sadly, Skylar had taken that to mean Alex, too. Jay had done nothing to fight for Alex. Not even to set up a visitation schedule. Not to discuss his birthday, or Christmas, or talk about his first day of kindergarten. Alex was the reason she’d married Jay in the first place. She’d wanted him to have a father. But he’d just checked out of their lives.

And so had Wade. But the difference between Jay and Wade, is that Skylar never did love Jay. She had tried. But somehow the marriage she had pieced together out of necessity never ended up being a marriage of love. She didn’t blame Jay for leaving or for being bitter.

Anger simmered inside of Skylar, bubbling up her throat until she thought it would choke her. Feeling the movement in her lap, she looked down and realized her hands were trembling.

What had just happened?
One moment she was scooping potato salad into a ceramic bowl, getting ready to enjoy a late afternoon barbeque with her favorite people. The next moment she’d been transformed back to a time when life had promise and she’d looked forward to a future with a man she’d fallen helplessly in love with the moment she’d looked into his blue eyes.

She tightened her fist in her lap and then opened her fingers, shaking out the pain she’d caused. And then panic struck her hard in the chest. She’d left Alex at the barbeque with Poppy. Alex would be well cared for. He always was when he was with a McKinnon. After all, they were family even if they didn’t know it. From the moment Alex had been born, Kate McKinnon had referred to Alex and Keith as Irish twins, born just a few months apart and always inseparable. She’d said the two boys always reminded her of her twins, Logan and Ethan, the youngest of the McKinnon boys.

Her little boy!
He had no idea Wade was his real daddy. How could she tell him the truth when he was still mourning the loss of the father he’d always known?

The phone rang, sending a shrill through the quiet room and shocking Skylar’s already fragile senses. It took a second to register what to do. Taking a deep breath, she pulled herself up from the bed and walked to the phone on the nightstand. She barely had the phone to her ear when she heard Kate’s voice.

“Skylar? Honey, are you okay?”

Okay? No, she wasn’t okay. She didn’t know what she was, but she definitely wasn’t okay.

“I can’t talk, Kate.”

“I’m sending Hawk over there to check on you. You looked like you were ready to faint before you ran out.”

“Please don’t. Tell Hawk I’m fine.”

“He’s already on his way.”

There was a short pause that left Skylar empty. There’d never been uncomfortable feelings between her and Kate. But all that may very well change today when she learned the truth about Alex.

“I don’t know what’s going on, Skylar. Or what went on. There’s plenty of time to sort out all those things. But it’s going to be okay. My Wade is home again. He’ll make it okay.”

She wished she could believe that. But so much had happened between the last time she’d seen Wade McKinnon and now. The short time they’d shared together seemed like a lifetime ago. She’d had a child, been married and then divorced. How could anything be okay after all that?

* * *

Hawk had come and gone from Skylar’s house. The address was something Wade had committed to memory a long time ago. All part of making sure both Skylar and Alex were safe, he’d told himself at the time. But as he drove the distance from his parents’ house to Skylar’s across town, he realized he’d really been waiting for this moment when he could finally come back into her life again.

Alex was snug in bed at Logan and Poppy’s house. There was no chance someone would walk in while Wade talked to Skylar. He only hoped she’d open the door and let him get that far.

Wade parked his car behind Skylar’s in the driveway and got out, easing the car door closed. After taking the few short strides to the front door, he looked through the window into the kitchen. The light over the sink was on, but the rest of the house was dark. He tried the door knob and found that the door wasn’t locked.

Wade let go a guttural grunt of frustration. “Why not invite the whole damned world in?” he muttered.

Deciding Skylar probably wouldn’t have answered the door if he had knocked, he eased himself through the door and slowly stepped into the kitchen. He got three steps into the kitchen when he caught the fast moving shadow on the wall. He ducked just in time to avoid being hit by the object that was aimed at his head. Instead, the airborne shoe slammed against the wall behind him and fell to the floor.

“Skylar, it’s me,” he said. “It’s Wade.”

“Get out!”

This time he saw the small vase coming at him. As he ducked, the vase flew past him and crashed against the door. It fell to the floor, breaking into several pieces much as the bowl of potato salad had earlier.

“I hate you!”

Skylar stepped into the kitchen and turned on the light. She’d never been one to hold her emotion back. Now her face was red with rage. Her eyes were blazing, just the way he’d remembered them. But any chance of a homecoming filled with kisses and the hot love making they used to share instantly evaporated. Still, the unbridled passion in her that he’d always been drawn to was still there.

His lips lifted to a slight grin. “No, you don’t. You love me, Sky. You’ll always love me.”

She pointed a finger at him. “I used to love you. For five years I didn’t even feel like I was living because I loved you so much losing you nearly killed me. Nearly.
Now
I hate you. Get out!”

“Sky.”

“Don’t you dare even try to get on my good side. Five years, Wade. You
watched
me? You couldn’t call? You couldn’t send me a note? Hell, I would have settled for a homing pigeon. Something! Anything!”

His stomach burned. “You were married.”

Her eyes flared again, but Wade still caught the slight sag in her shoulders. “Don’t you dare put this on me. I didn’t just run out and get married. I thought you were dead! For four years I tried to have a marriage where you didn’t creep into my mind every time Jay touched me. It’s your fault. You destroyed me and then you destroyed my marriage. All because you selfishly faked your death. Why, Wade? Why did you do that to me? For God’s sake, why did you do that to your family?”

“It was too dangerous.”

“You keep saying that. But what does that mean? Kate. My God, I can only imagine what she’s thinking right now. Do you know she was like a mother to me all this time? I lied to her because you said it was too dangerous. And I believed you. For who, Wade? Who was it dangerous for?”

“All of you.” He watched the rise and fall or her chest. “Are you going to throw anything else at me or can we sit down and talk?”

“I’m not making any promises. And I don’t want to sit down. I’m too angry! I’ve been sitting here in the dark, playing the last five years of my life over in my mind trying to make some sense out of how I could have lived this life and still have you standing here in front of me now. It doesn’t make sense, Wade. Help me make sense out of it!”

“I never worked for the Peace Corp,” he confessed.

She shook her head. “Of course you did. I was there, remember? We worked together. We were part of the same team.”

“I worked for the government. If I could have told you that I was alive, I would have, Skylar.”

“I don’t believe you. Your brother was a Navy SEAL for eight years. He couldn’t tell your parents a lot about what he was doing, but he could at least have gotten word to them if he had to. He wouldn’t have let them believe he was dead for five years!”

“If something had gone wrong on any one of Ethan’s missions, it may have been different.”

“What were you? What are you?”

Wade drew in a deep breath, not sure how much Hawk had managed to tell Skylar before he’d gotten here.

“The Peace Corp is a United States Government Agency. That’s why it was easy for me to use it as a cover. But there are some military operations that…step outside of the boundaries. There’ve been military personnel working alongside the Peace Corp in delicate regions all over the world for many years. That’s what I was doing.”

“You told me you were no longer in the military.”

“I was officially discharged from the Navy. But not from duty.”

She looked at him like he was crazy. “What does that mean? Were you a spy?”

“I worked for a branch of the CIA.”

“You were undercover?”

“Yes.”

Her bottom lip quivered. “Then what the hell was I? A cover, too?”

His heart melted. He took a step closer to her, wanting to touch her as he had in the kitchen of his parents’ home earlier. But she quickly took a step back and folded her arms across her chest.

“You were and have always been the love of my life, Skylar.”

# # #

Skylar gave Wade a hard look of disbelief. She couldn’t believe what was happening.

“The love of your life?”

“Always.”

She clenched a fist and laughed bitterly. “If that were true, then why did you sit back and watch me marry someone else? You said you’ve been watching since I came to South Dakota. If you’d loved me even half as much as I loved you, if anything we’d shared on that South Pacific island meant anything to you, then you never would have sat back knowing another man was making love to me if you could have stopped it.”

He jaw tightened and she knew she’d hit a nerve, and yet, Skylar didn’t care.

“Would it be easier for you to understand if I did have amnesia and couldn’t remember who I was until now?”

“Yes.”

“It’d be a lie.”

“Then lie to me! At least there’d be an explanation I could wrap my mind around. This…I can’t.”

“What do you want me to say? I’ll say it. Just tell me.”

She shook her head. Unshed tears hung heavy in her eyes. “I want a truth I can understand.”

“I can’t give it to you.”

Feeling betrayed, she folded her arms across her chest.