Free Baby, Come Home by Stephanie Bond Page B

had time to check.”
    “Oh. Well, I made it to Sweetness, Georgia, this afternoon, and my cell phone works here.”
    “Duh. How long are you going to be in Hicksville?”
    She tamped down irritation. “Like I told you, about three months. But I’ll come back in a couple of weeks so we can see each other.”
    “They couldn’t get someone else to build their stupid bridge?”
    She bit down on her tongue. “They could’ve, but they asked me.”
    “Whatever,” he mumbled.
    “I miss you,” she offered.
    He grunted in return. “I hate this place.”
    “It’s a good place,” she said earnestly. “You promised you’d give it a chance.”
    “I gotta go.”
    She pressed her lips together, awash in helplessness. “Okay. I love you, Tony.”
    He sighed. “Love you, too, Mom.”
    Amy disconnected the call, her heart pounding in her chest. She studied the picture of Tony, her twelve-year-old who had recently morphed from a sweet boy into a sulky adolescent. No matter what she did lately, it was wrong. She had never begrudged raising him alone, but recently she’d begun thinking it would be easier if he had a male father figure around.
    Or his father.
    And Tony looked so much like his father, she acknowledged with a squeeze of her heart. From his tall frame and square jaw…to his deep, cobalt blue eyes.

    Kendall leaned against the door, wishing he’d walked away when he had the chance. Hearing Amy profess her love for someone else was like a kick to his gut. The guy who’d given her the topaz ring, no doubt.
    It was his own fault, he acknowledged. He’d let Amy get away over a decade earlier, and had gone against his instincts to go to her. Of course another man had recognized how special she was and had wormed his way into her life.
    Kendall turned and strode away, lasering unreasonable, but palpable, dislike toward this Tony, the guy who had replaced him in Amy’s heart.

8
    T he next morning when Amy rode out to the bridge site, she was still churning over the previous night’s encounter with Kendall, and her subsequent conversation with Tony. The sun was just breaking over the eastern wall of the bowl of mountains that surrounded the little town. The air that whipped her hair behind her was frosty…as frosty as Tony had grown toward her.
    Maybe she’d made a mistake by enrolling him in a military school, but his increasing disobedience and recklessness while attending public school had alarmed her, and when he’d been arrested for vandalizing school property last fall, she’d had few options at her disposal. The school counselor had said he was in need of discipline and a male role model. It was the closest she’d ever come to contacting Kendall and informing him he had a son—who was incorrectly channeling the Armstrong traits of stubbornness and arrogance—and she needed for him to step in. But like all the other times she’d had that conversation in her head, she’d talked herself out of it.
    She’d raised Tony by herself through some pretty lean and lonely times, but had savored the chocolate-covered kisses, first words, faltering steps, handprint art, the shedding of training wheels and other happy little-boy milestones. It didn’t seem fair to call Kendall when things with Tony had gotten bumpy. Besides, she’d prided herself on being able to keep a lot of balls in the air—working, getting her education and taking care of Tony. It hadn’t been easy, but she’d thought she’d managed well enough…until the phone call from the police. A quarter in a military boarding school had seemed like a viable, albeit expensive, alternative for instilling discipline while giving him an outlet for his excess energy. They’d argued about it—Tony had accused her of trying to off-load him—but she’d pointed out that he’d made his own bed and in the end, he’d gone willingly, if reluctantly, a sign to her that he was taking responsibility for his actions.
    But she harbored a lot of guilt