Buck You! (Buck Cowboys #2) - Elle Thorpe Page 0,2

than me, though the adoption records had said she was seventeen when I’d been born, which meant she was in her forties now.

She opened her car door, and I hurtled out of mine, running a few steps across her lawn.

She looked up and flinched.

Couldn’t blame her. I was a big guy, a complete stranger, running at her at full speed. I was probably lucky she hadn’t maced me.

“Sorry.” I dug my heels into the grass to stop myself. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Her eyes were the same deep brown mine were. Her skin the same tanned olive. “Can I help you with something?”

I had no idea why her casually polite words took me by surprise. What had I been expecting? Some sort of mother-child bond that immediately spelled out who I was, without even introducing myself?

Like it was ID, I pulled a business card from my wallet and passed it to her. “Uh, my name is Dominic West. I was adopted twenty-four years ago.”

I didn’t have to say any more. Maria’s eyes widened, the card and her purse slipping from her shoulder, crashing to the ground, and spilling the contents everywhere.

I lurched forward to help, kneeling to collect a tube of mascara that had tried to roll down the driveway.

Maria crouched to frantically shove things back into her purse, muttering something. When I held out the mascara, she snatched the little tube from my fingers.

Nausea swirled in my stomach, mixing the nerves and excitement all together. On autopilot, I held my hand out for her to shake. It’s what I’d been taught as a child when meeting someone new, and it was so ingrained in me now that I did it without thinking, despite the less-than-warm vibes this woman was putting out there. I tried to smile, but it was wobbly.

She glanced down at my hand, then back at the house again. Her frown deepened, lining her forehead with creases. “You can’t be here.”

Like it was suddenly made of cement, I dropped my hand and shoved it into my pocket. She was right. I’d gone about this all wrong, but I just knew I wouldn’t have come at all if I’d stopped to truly think about it. “I know, I’m sorry. Maybe we could meet somewhere, to talk? I can come into town on my lunch break…”

Maria shook her head, fingers clutching for the door handle again. It took her two tries to get it open. “No, I mean you can’t be here at all. I don’t know what you want from me, but I have a family now. A life. And they don’t know anything about you. Or your…please. Just leave.”

I blinked. “I know this is out of the blue, but maybe—”

She held a hand up. “Stop. There’s no maybe. She told me you had a good home, with good people. Isn’t that enough?”

She? I just stared at her, with no idea how to answer that. Her words rang true. I had the best family I could have ever hoped for. My parents loved me fiercely, and I’d never wanted for anything.

But that didn’t stop there being a part of me who needed more. Something inside me had never felt quite whole, and that wasn’t something my parents or my brothers or my friends could fix.

“No, it’s not enough,” I said truthfully.

Irritation flashed in her eyes as she slid behind the wheel. “Well, it’s all I have to give. It was all I had then, and it’s all I have now. You need to leave.”

“No, I—”

“Leave before I call the police.”

I gaped at her, checking her expression to be sure she was for real.

She was. There was a dead seriousness in her eyes, and she clutched her cell phone like she’d use it as a weapon if she had to.

Pure, unbridled pain like I’d never felt before shattered through my chest, stealing my breath. This wasn’t how this was supposed to go. She was supposed to be happy to see me. She was supposed to stare up at me in wonder, and then smile and maybe wrap her arms around me, and say I was the image of my grandfather as a young man. She was supposed to take my hand, and introduce me to her family, and make coffee so we could talk and catch up on the twenty-four years we’d been apart.

I’d never once let myself consider her complete and utter rejection. Those weren’t the sort of dreams adopted kids had. It was always the fairy-tale