Free The Pride of Jared MacKade by Nora Roberts

That’s first. I wanted to get away from the dust, the plains, and all those sunbaked little towns. That was for me,” she admitted. “I’ve been moving east for ten years. This seemed far enough.”
    When he said nothing, she relaxed a little. It was difficult to combat that quiet way he had of listening. “I didn’t want the city for Bryan. But I wanted to give him a sense of belonging, of…”
    “Community?”
    “Yeah. Small town, kids, people who’d get to know him by name. But I still wanted a little distance. That was for me again. And…”
    “And?”
    “I was drawn here,” she said at length. “Maybe it’s the mysticism in my blood and my heritage, but I felt— I knew that this would be home. The land, the hills. The woods. Your woods called to me.” Amused at herself, she smiled. “How’s that for weird?”
    “They’ve called to me all my life,” Jared said, so simply her smile faded. “I could never be happy anywhere else. I moved to the city because it seemed practical. And small towns and long walks through the woods weren’t my ex-wife’s style.”
    If he could probe, so could she. “Why did you marry her?”
    “Because it seemed practical.” Now it was his turn towince. “Which doesn’t say much for either of us. We were reasonably attracted, respected each other, and entered into a very civilized, intelligent and totally passionless contract of marriage. Two years later, we had a very civilized, intelligent and totally passionless divorce.”
    It was difficult, all but impossible, to visualize the man who had kissed her being passionless about anything. “No blood spilled?”
    “Absolutely not. We were both much too reasonable for combat. There were no children.” Her choice, he remembered, only slightly bitter. “She’d kept her own name.”
    “A modern professional marriage.”
    “You’ve got it. We split everything down the middle and went our separate ways. No harm, no foul.”
    Curious, Savannah tilted her head. “It bothered you that she didn’t take your name.”
    He started to correct her, then shrugged. “Yeah, it bothered me. Not very modern or professional of me. Just one of those things that would have made the commitment emotional instead of reasonable. That’s just pride.”
    “Partly,” Savannah agreed. “But part of you wanted to give her that piece of you that you were most proud of, that had been passed to you, and that you wanted to pass to your children.”
    “You’re astute,” he murmured.
    “Lawyers aren’t the only ones who can read people. And I understand the importance of names. When Bryan was born, I stared at the form they give you. For names. And I thought, what do I put where it says Father? If I put the name down, then I’m giving that name to my son. My son,” she repeated quietly.
    “What did you put down?”
    She brought herself back from that moment, when she’d been barely seventeen, and alone. Completely alone. “Unknown,” she said. “Because he’d stopped being important. My name was enough.”
    “He’s never seen Bryan?”
    “No. He packed up his gear and lit out like a rocket the day I told him I was pregnant. Don’t say you’re sorry,” she said, anticipating him. “He did me a favor. It’s easy for a sixteen-year-old girl to be dreamy-eyed and hot-blooded over a good-looking cowboy, but it isn’t easy to live with one.”
    “What have you told Bryan?”
    “The truth. I always tell him the truth—or as close to it as I can without hurting him. I’m not ashamed that I was once foolish enough to imagine myself in love. And I’m grateful that sometimes foolishness is rewarded by something as spectacular as Bryan.”
    “You’re a remarkable woman.”
    It touched and embarrassed her that he should think so. “No, I’m a lucky one.”
    “It couldn’t have been easy.”
    “I don’t need things to be easy.”
    He considered that, and thought it was more that she didn’t care for things to be easy.