A little while later, the baby settled in his seat beside Walt’s chair, Vanessa and Paul walked out on the deck behind the house and down the stairs toward the stable. “Is this something you’d like to share with Matt?” she asked. “Or is this just for me?”
He sighed in frustration. “Just for you,” he said miserably. He tried to grab her hand, but she pulled it away. “Listen, I’m not sure you know how I feel about you…”
“Sure I do. You’ve made it clear. You have a situation in Grants Pass, a woman, and you’re not in touch much. It’s obvious how you feel.”
“Are you kidding me? Because…” He stopped walking. She stopped walking. “I care about you a lot.”
“Yes, I know. I appreciate all your concern. You’ve been very good to me and Mattie. You’ve been a very good friend to Matt.”
“This is not just about Matt. I thought we were close.”
“I guess we are,” she said with a shrug. “Like brother and sister?”
“Vanni, I have some things to explain…”
“So you keep saying. Think you’ll get it out this time?”
He ground his teeth in frustration. “There’s a reason I’ve been hanging back a little bit. Why I’ve been so distracted. I wanted to wait until I figured some things out, until I knew it wasn’t too soon after Matt for you…but it’s starting to look like I might already be too late.”
They got as far as the corral and she leaned her back against the fence, her elbows on the top rail, heel on the bottom rail, facing him.
“Can I start at the beginning? Will you listen?”
“By all means, take your time,” she invited with a wave of her hand.
“Way before you came to Virgin River, way before I ran into you at Jack’s, long before anything happened to Matt, I was seeing this woman sometimes…”
She averted her eyes in spite of herself. They’d gotten this far before—he’d found a woman. Still, it just wasn’t easy hearing that he had a woman in his life, though it was completely reasonable.
“I met her a long time ago. We had one night together,” he said. He shrugged. “Not even a whole night. I called her a couple more times because… Because,” he finished. “It was casual. Not my finest hour.”
“You did something wrong?” she asked.
“At the time, I sure didn’t think so. Vanni, I slept with her a few times, all right? We had an understanding. You know how it is…”
“I don’t, as a matter of fact. I’ve actually never had that kind of understanding. But you men—”
“Aw, come on! You probably had more sex over the weekend than I had last year!”
“Is that right?” she asked, lifting her chin defiantly. In fact, at that precise moment, Vanni regretted that she couldn’t allow herself to do that. Men seemed to be able to do it so easily—make love when there isn’t love, see it for what it was.
“I don’t even care,” he said in frustration. “That’s not even the point. What I have to explain is not that I had sex last year, when you were married, pregnant and my best friend was alive, but that I had sex a couple of months ago. After I went home, after the baby, I was pretty screwed up. Losing Matt was killing me, I didn’t want to leave you, staying with you was eating me alive, and…”
He looked down, took a breath and continued, “I tried blowing off some steam with my brothers and the construction crews. But where I made my fatal mistake was I called this woman who I never had anything with but sex and asked if we could talk. Have dinner and talk. I was messed up, Vanni. I needed to tell someone what it was like, burying my best friend, helping his baby get born. I was in a lot of pain, guilty, needy. I shouldn’t have called her.”
“I guess it wasn’t just talk…”
“’Course not,” he said. “She tells me she’s pregnant. From that.”
She felt that icy-cold wave of dread pass through her gut. Just when she thought it couldn’t get worse. “Well, my God,” she said in a breath.
“At least I finally have your attention,” he said. “I wasn’t kidding when I said it was important. And personal.”
She pushed herself off the fence. Anger shook her inside, but she tried to keep her expression passive. “You have some issues. Tell me, Paul—what does a woman have to do to get that much of you?”