The Baby Gamble (Texas Hold'em)

“Maybe he just needs someone a little younger, a little more distant. A little less a retired sheriff. I can ask Cole to talk to him.”

“No!” Tea splashed over the side of Becky’s cup. “Please, don’t say anything to your brother. Promise me, Annie.”

“Okay!” She hated the fear in her friend’s voice, in her wide-eyed gaze. “It really is okay, you know.”

“No it’s not. Cole is friends with Luke, and you know how it is with those guys. They get together and tell each other everything. They’re worse than girls. Always have been.” She paused, looked wildly around the kitchen, as if Luke Chisum had a direct line in from his family’s ranch neighboring the Parker homestead. Becky’s family’s homestead.

“Luke can’t hear that I’m having problems with my son. He just can’t, Annie. He—”

“Bec.” Annie put a hand on her friend’s forearm. “It’s okay. I won’t say anything. You have my word on that.”

Nodding, Becky took a sip of tea. And then another. “Sorry,” she said with a weak grin. “I overreacted, I know. It’s just, seeing Shane like that, I…”

“I know, honey. I get it.”

They sat silently for a couple of minutes, each contemplating, and yet still connected.

“Have you talked to Blake yet?” Becky broke the silence between them. “About his role in this baby you want to have?”

Annie wished it wasn’t so easy to follow Becky’s train of thought. Wished she hadn’t traveled the very same road. From Shane and Becky’s issues, to hers.

“No,” she said, feeling a sudden helplessness of her own.

“Don’t you think you should?”

“I tried.” She hated to admit that, to have out in the open how impossible a relationship between her and Blake really was. “He refused to talk about it.”

“Why would he do that?”

Why did he ever? It was the one thing she’d never understood. The one thing that had broken her heart—and driven her to choose safe, comfortable, verbal Roger over Blake upon his miraculous return from the dead.

“He’s the one who asked for the terms,” Becky continued, frowning.

“I know.” He’d asked her to marry him and be his partner forever, too. And then failed to join the partnership. “He just said to call him after I do the test.”

She wanted to handle this professionally. To be unattached and grateful that she was finally going to have the baby, the family she wanted. She wanted to understand. And not to need him.

She wanted not to care.

With the weight of hopelessness dragging at her, Annie teared up again.

“Ann? Honey, how are you ever going to handle having him around for the rest of your life, visiting your son or daughter, having a say in what he or she does? How are you going to handle it when that child goes to him and he can’t talk to you about it? Or even to the child?”

Blake would make a great dad. The thought sprang immediately to mind at Becky’s provocation.

And then Annie considered what her friend was saying.

If Blake couldn’t be there for her, he certainly wouldn’t be able to be there for her child, either. A child who, as she’d been at thirteen, didn’t understand that parents were people, only that when you needed them and they weren’t there, you knew it had to be because of you. Because of something wrong or bad about you.

And no matter what anyone said, there was real truth to the thought. Annie might not have been the source of her father’s problems, or even what drove him to take his own life. But neither had she been enough reason to keep him alive. Having her for a daughter, loving him, needing him, hadn’t been reason enough for him to live.

Sick to her stomach, Annie considered what she’d done.

If she was pregnant, she’d just saddled her child with a father who couldn’t tell him he loved him. It would be better for the child to have no father at all.

BLAKE PROMISED Dr. Magnum—which meant he’d promised himself—that he would not cancel his participation in Wednesday night’s poker game. It might be one of those promises he wanted to keep, meant to keep, but couldn’t.

Such as when he’d promised Annie he’d be home from his business trip in less than two weeks. That he’d be there for her and the baby. That there was nothing for her to be frightened of or worried about.The way he felt when he left work, his poker promise was going to follow the way of those other unkept promises. What good would it do to present himself at the Wild Card Saloon onl