Chapter 8 #2
“Nightmare about the fire. He’ll be okay.” Sierra pulled Huck’s door mostly closed, leaving it cracked in case he called out again.
“Poor kid. That kind of trauma…” Rowan ran a hand through his hair. “Is there anything I can do?”
The question, asked with such genuine care, made Sierra’s chest tight. Here was a man who’d known Huck for all of three days, and he was already thinking like a father.
Because, well…
“Are you okay?”
She looked away, her arms wrapped around herself.
“Can we talk?” he said.
“Now?”
“I’m not sleeping. Are you?”
She sighed. Shook her head.
“Please talk to me.”
And that was just it. No anger. No fury. Just…oh, her eyes filled.
He frowned a moment, then took her hand. They moved quietly down the stairs together, Sierra painfully aware of his presence beside her in the darkness.
Yeah, no way around it, this was going to hurt.
“Can I heat up some hot cocoa for you?”
She spotted the pot already on the stove.
He walked over to it. “Figured if I was going to be awake, might as well make something useful.”
The gesture hit her harder than it should have. He remembered. After all these years, he remembered that hot cocoa was her comfort drink of choice.
“You don’t have to take care of me.”
“Maybe I want to.” He poured the steaming chocolate into two mugs, adding marshmallows without asking. Because he knew.
Sierra accepted the mug with shaking hands, wrapping her fingers around the ceramic for warmth. They stood on opposite sides of the kitchen island, the silence heavy.
Rowan’s eyes searched her face in the soft overhead light. “Sierra…”
“Yes.” The word came out barely above a whisper.
Rowan went very still. “Yes what?”
Sierra lifted her chin, meeting his gaze directly for the first time all evening. Her heart hammered against her ribs. “Yes, he’s yours.”
Silence. Rowan’s face went through a dozen expressions in the space of a heartbeat—shock, hurt, anger, wonder, grief. All of it flickering across his features before he locked it down behind his careful control.
For a long moment then, he just stared at her. Sierra held her breath, waiting for the explosion, the accusations, the demands for explanations.
Instead, Rowan set his mug down with deliberate precision, turned without a word, and walked out of the kitchen.
Sierra stood alone in the soft light, listening to his footsteps retreat down the hall and the quiet click of his bedroom door closing.
The truth was finally out.
And he’d just…walked away?
He had a son. A ten-year-old son who didn’t know he existed, who’d been growing up without him.
Ten years of birthdays, first days of school, scraped knees, bedtime stories—gone. All of it gone.
Rowan’s hands shook as he sank onto the edge of the bed, his chest tightening until each breath felt like swallowing glass. The moonlight streaming through the window painted everything silver and cold.
And yes, he’d suspected it, but…
Oh, he hadn’t expected the simple yes to shut him down, stop his breath, take out his heart. Or for the heat—the fury, really—to rush into the cold, open space.
He shouldn’t have left her there. But he didn’t know just what might come out of his mouth.
He hung his head, spots dancing at the edges as his heart hammered against his ribs.
Breathe. Count. Control.
The Delta Force training kicked in automatically. Four counts in, hold for four, out for four. Again. The shaking in his hands slowed, then stopped.
But the heat remained, coiled in his chest like a living thing. Hot and sharp and demanding action. His jaw clenched until his teeth ached, and his hands curled into fists against his thighs.
She’d kept his son from him. For ten years, she’d let him believe he had nothing, no one, no reason to come home. While he’d been bleeding for strangers in foreign deserts, his boy had been here. Learning to ride horses, practicing roping, growing up thinking his father was dead.
Unfair. The word echoed in his mind, sharp and bitter. So unfair.
Kane’s voice drifted through his memory then, spoken over a campfire in Alaska last summer. God has a plan, Hammer. And it’s a good one. Trust Him.
Trust. Kane knew what he was talking about—the man had nearly lost the woman he loved last summer. If anyone understood the cost of love and the weight of second chances, it was Kane.
But the sermon from this morning surfaced too, Pastor Williams’s voice carrying weight across the hours. Surely God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart.
Pure in heart. Rowan almost laughed, but the sound would have been too bitter, too broken. He was about as far from pure as a man could get. Blood on his hands, scars on his soul.
The betrayal by his teammate had put a special kind of darkness in his soul.
And this felt just as black.
He stared out at the moonlit ranch, the same view he’d gazed upon as a broken teenager seeking refuge from his stepfather’s fists. Sierra’s grandfather had offered sanctuary then, no questions asked, just quiet acceptance and the kind of steady love Rowan had never known existed.
And then, she’d betrayed him.
How was he supposed to process this?
A soft knock at his door made him freeze.
“Rowan?” Sierra’s voice, barely above a whisper.
He didn’t trust himself to answer. Didn’t trust his hands not to shake again if he unclenched them.
“I’m so sorry.” The words cracked in the middle, and he could picture her standing there in her pajamas and robe, face streaked with tears, looking as broken as he felt.
Silence stretched between them, cracked only by the old house settling around them.
“I’ll…I’ll leave you alone.” Her footsteps retreated, soft on the hardwood.
No. Wait.
He was on his feet and pulling open the door before conscious thought could stop him.
Sierra stood halfway down the hall, her back to him, shoulders shaking with silent sobs. Moonlight from the hallway window caught the copper highlights in her dark hair, and she looked so small, so fragile, that his anger cracked down the middle.
“Sierra.”
She turned, and the devastation on her face gutted him. Her eyes were red-rimmed, cheeks wet with tears, and she held her robe closed as if it were armor that wasn’t quite strong enough to protect her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered again. “I know you hate me. I know you—”
He closed the distance between them in three strides.
For a heartbeat, Sierra went rigid, her eyes wide and uncertain, as if she expected him to walk past her or turn away.
Then her face crumpled, and he pulled her against his chest before she could finish the sentence.
She melted into him, her arms wrapping around his waist.
And she sobbed.
“I don’t hate you,” he said into her hair, breathing in the familiar scent of her shampoo. “I could never hate you.”
Her body shook against his, and he held her tighter, the fury from moments before sliding away. His chest tightened with her sobs, the sound cutting through him, laying open his heart. And shoot, but she fit against him exactly the way she always had, like they’d been designed for each other.
They had, once upon a night. And if he were honest, that night had stayed with him, meant more to him than it should.
He shouldn’t have let it get that far. But that was then, and this was now. And it was time to reckon with it. He set her away from him.
“Come on.” He guided her toward the family room, needing space and light and somewhere that didn’t feel quite so much like the edge of a cliff. “We need to talk.”
Rowan turned on a single lamp, casting everything in soft gold.
Sierra perched on the edge of the cognac leather sofa, still clutching her robe. Rowan took the chair across from her, needing distance to think clearly.
“He’s perfect, Sierra.” He said, his voice husky. “Huck is perfect.”
Fresh tears spilled down her cheeks. She searched his face, as if looking for anger, for condemnation, for the judgment she clearly expected to find. “I wanted to tell you. So many times, I wanted to—”
“Why didn’t you?” He couldn’t keep the hurt from bleeding through. Not anger—he was trying so hard not to be angry—but the raw ache of everything he’d missed. “Why keep him from me?”
Sierra wrapped her arms around herself, looking young and vulnerable and exactly as she had when she’d stolen his heart, first in a childhood crush, and then forever at eighteen.
“You were so angry, so broken, and you had dreams. You wanted to serve your country, see the world.” She took a shaky breath. “A baby would have ruined everything.”
“That wasn’t your choice to make.”
Her own accusation about him leaving echoed in his ears. No—this was different. He’d been trying to protect her.
“I know,” she said softly. “I know that now. But I was eighteen and scared, and you’d left me for your big dreams. I thought…I thought I was protecting you.”
Oh.
And then the heat just twisted out of his chest. He could see it—young Sierra, pregnant and alone, trying to figure out how to tell a boy who’d just gone through boot camp, about to train for special forces, that he was about to become a father.
“Then you deployed, and I did write a letter, but it was returned to me. And when I asked Mack, he said he didn’t know where you were.”
And that was on him, wasn’t it? The thought burned through him. He closed his eyes, looked away. Sighed. “I’m sorry.”
At her silence, he turned back to her.
“I was going to try again,” Sierra continued, her voice gaining strength. “Tell you about Huck, maybe send pictures. But then…” She swallowed hard. “By the time I found the courage to write again, Mack showed up and said you were killed in action.”
“No wonder you told him his father died.”
“Well…” She lifted a shoulder. “He did.”
The words hit him with unexpected force. Of course. So she’d grieved him, raised their son alone, thinking he was gone forever.
“How hard that must have been for you.” The realization crashed over him, washing away the last of his anger. “Raising him alone, thinking I was dead.”