The Loner

W
HAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING BACK HERE IN
Bitter Creek?”

Billy Coburn heard the challenge in the low, menacing voice but took his time turning to confront Jackson Blackthorne. He set his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, squinting against the smoke that caught under the brim of his Stetson, and stuck his boot on the brass footrail at the base of the Armadillo Bar. “None of your damn business,” he said at last.

Billy saw the anger flare in the older man’s eyes and watched his shoulders square as he straightened. Billy almost smiled. Jackson Blackthorne’s six-foot-three-inch height wasn’t going to intimidate him. He was an inch taller than Blackjack, maybe even broader in the shoulders, and a hell of a lot leaner in the hip. His father—it felt strange to use the word since he was the man’s bastard son—didn’t scare him.

“We had a deal,” Blackjack said. “I agreed to put that badge on your chest, and you agreed to stay as far from my daughter and this town as you could get.”

Billy thumbed a smudge off the silver TSCRA badge that was pinned to a leather folder stuck in his breast
pocket. As a result of a deal he’d made with Blackjack, he’d become a field agent for the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers’ Association, hunting down modern-day cattle rustlers and horse thieves.

He laid a hand on the Colt .45 holstered high on his hip, met Blackjack’s stare, and said, “I’ve kept my part of the bargain. I’ve been living in Amarillo for the past two years.” Which was about as far as you could go north and west of Bitter Creek and still stay in Texas. “I haven’t seen or spoken to your daughter since I left town.”

“What I want to know is why you’ve shown up here now, two weeks before Summer’s wedding. If you’ve got any notion of interfering—”

“I’ve kept my part of the bargain,” Billy repeated, his blood pounding in his temples as he absorbed the stunning news that Summer Blackthorne was about to be married. “I haven’t seen Summer in the two years I’ve been gone. And I made sure before I left that she hated my guts.”

That also had been part of the deal.

As far as Billy knew, Summer Blackthorne still hated him. But he felt an ache inside when he thought of her walking down the aisle with some other man. Once upon a time he’d hoped that she’d be marrying him.

But that was a long time—and a couple of significant revelations—ago.

“If you’re not here because of the wedding, what are you doing back in Bitter Creek?” Blackjack said.

Billy followed Blackjack’s gaze to a booth on the other side of the bar. Summer Blackthorne was sitting there as pretty as you please. And she was every bit as
pretty now as she’d been when he’d left her behind two years ago. She was laughing, her head thrown back to expose a long, slender neck. Soft blond curls fell over her shoulders—and onto the male arm that was draped possessively around her. The man must be her fiancé.

Billy hated him on sight. He felt the hairs on his nape stand on end and fought back the jealousy and sense of loss that made his stomach knot and his throat thicken painfully. Summer didn’t belong to him. Never had and never would.

“I asked you a question,” Blackjack said. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Billy took the cigarette from his mouth, flicked it onto the sawdusted cement floor, and ground it out with his boot. “Like I said, none of your business.”

“Look, son, I’ve had about as much—”

“Don’t ever call me son. You haven’t earned the right.”

Billy saw the irritation flash in Blackjack’s eyes. Maybe it was wrong to blame his father for what had happened. After all, it was Blackjack’s wife Eve who’d arranged to have Johnny Ray Coburn marry Billy’s mother Dora when she turned up at Blackjack’s back door unwed and pregnant—and then paid Dora to keep the truth from Blackjack for twenty-five years.

But it was Blackjack who’d come with three hard men and beaten Billy badly enough to put him in the hospital when he wouldn’t promise to stay away from Summer. Billy had been lying in the hospital, ribs broken, eyes swollen closed, a dozen stitches in his face, when Blackjack had shown up in his room. Dora had finally told him the truth. And he’d passed it on to Billy.

I’m your father
.

None of his physical wounds had equaled the agony he’d felt when Blackjack said those fateful words—which made Summer his half sister… and out of reach forever.

“I won’t apologize for what I couldn’t help,” Blackjack said, meeting Billy’s gaze in the mirror over the bar.

“Nobody asked you to.”

“I couldn’t take a chance on you and Summer getting together,” Blackjack said. “You’re blood kin.”

Billy’s eyes narrowed. “No. We’re not.”

Blackjack’s face turned ashen. “Who told you that?”

Billy smirked. “I notice you’re not denying it.”

“I asked you a question. Answer it.”

“I learned the truth from Summer.”

“What? How could she possibly know—”

“She heard you and her mother arguing,” Billy said. “She knows about her mother’s affair with your foreman. She knows she’s not your daughter.” Which meant he and Summer were not related after all, that there was no reason they couldn’t have become man and wife.

“Does she know that you’re my son?”

“I didn’t tell her.” As far as Billy knew, Summer still had no idea he was Blackjack’s son.

“When did she—How long has she—”

“She’s known the truth the whole two years I’ve been gone,” Billy said. “She came to see me, bawling her eyes out because she’d heard you two arguing and found out about her mother’s affair.”

Blackjack frowned. “So you knew you two weren’t related even before—”

“Even before I made her hate me by telling her you’d paid me off to get out of her life.”

“So why did you leave, if you knew the truth?”

“My reasons are my own.”

There was no way Billy could explain how much he’d wanted that job Blackjack had offered him. How much he’d yearned for the chance to become someone respectable, to leave behind the labels that had been pinned on him all his life. He’d walked away from this isolated cow town in the middle of the South Texas prairie determined to make something of himself, so that someday he might be the kind of man that Summer would be proud to call her husband. But he hadn’t managed to do it fast enough. She was getting married in two weeks.

He was too late.

Blackjack shoved his hat back and rubbed a hand across his eyes. “Why didn’t Summer say something to me if she knew I’m not her father?”

“That’s the best part,” Billy said. “She didn’t want you to know she knew the truth, because she was afraid you’d treat her different. I could understand her point.”

He saw Blackjack wince. It was an unspoken secret around town that Billy’s drunken stepfather had often left bruises with his fists. Billy hadn’t understood at the time why nothing he did ever pleased his “father.” When he’d found out the truth—that Johnny Ray Coburn’s marriage to his mother had been arranged, and that the deed to the ranch where they lived, along with a monthly stipend, had been payments for keeping the truth from Blackjack—he’d understood why Johnny Ray resented
all the things about Billy that reminded him of the man who’d sired him.

Billy met Blackjack’s gaze, daring his father to bad-mouth his stepfather.

“I didn’t know about you being mine when your father—your stepfather—was alive or I would—”

“Would have done what?” Billy interrupted. “Acknowledged me as your son?” He snorted when Blackjack said nothing. “Or played Good Samaritan?” Billy couldn’t keep the venom from his voice, but he managed to speak softly enough that only Blackjack could hear what he said next. “Everybody in town knew what was going on in that house. Anybody could have stopped it.”

But nobody had. Partly because Billy had been too ashamed to admit that his stepfather was hitting him and made up excuses for the bruises when anyone asked. The beatings hadn’t stopped until he was fourteen and started growing—and ended up six inches taller than his “father”—and could defend himself.

A silence fell between them.

Julio Iglesias and Willie Nelson were singing “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” on the jukebox, and the rowdy Friday-night crowd was singing along. The bar was smoky and dark, with the year-round Christmas tree lights that lined the mirror above the bar providing a falsely cheerful glow.