The Loner (7 page)

"I didn't know I needed to look back. I mailed an address to your father, a way to reach me if it proved necessary." His brow furrowed. "Why
were
you destitute and alone? Did you tell him we bedded down together? Did he kick you out when he found out about the baby?"

"No. He never knew. He died before I discovered I was expecting."

Logan blew out a hard breath, then slumped into a chair. "I never thought... Hell. I've always taken care with the women I've been with. Except for that night, that is. When I never heard from Big Jack, I decided I'd dodged a bullet. Swore I wouldn't be careless again." The light in his eyes reflected how much the idea disturbed him, as he added, "I grew up without a father, and I promised myself I'd never do that to a child of my own."

A wave of compassion rolled through Caroline and prompted her response. "For what it's worth, Will doesn't hold it against you. He's proud that his father is a range detective."

"He knows?" Surprise lit his eyes. "What have you told him about me?"

Caroline squirmed a bit at that question. "Actually, I told him very little about you other than your name. Until recently, I didn't know how curious he was about you. I knew he spent a lot of time reading old newspapers, but I thought he was trying to learn the profession."

"Half of what has been written about me are lies."

"Tell him that when you meet him."

Logan leaned forward and propped his elbows on his knees. "So just how bad is it? Who is he riding with and what are they doing? Robbing trains? Rustling cattle?"

Well, shoot. She'd hadn't thought to research outlaw gangs, and she couldn't pull a name of one associated with Black Shadow Canyon from memory. "I don't know the name of the gang. He didn't tell me that in the note he left. What he did say is that he's gone to Black Shadow Canyon."

Logan went still. He cleared his throat. "Where?"

"Black Shadow Canyon."

He sat back in his chair hard. "No. Not there. Anywhere but there."

"I know it's not a nice place, but—"

"Not a nice place?" Logan shoved to his feet and reached for the whiskey decanter, refilling his glass with a hand that slightly trembled. "It's the roughest, meanest, most dangerous place in the West! It makes Tombstone, Arizona, in its heyday look like a Sunday stroll in a children's park. Jesus Christ, Caroline. Tell me my son isn't lost in that den of thieves and murderers!"

His
son.

Caroline bristled at the idea. Will was
her
son. He had been hers and hers alone for the past fourteen years. Did Logan Grey truly think he could lay claim to a child so easily?

She folded her arms. What really made a man a father, anyway? The simple act of creation or the infinitely more complicated act of daily nurturing, teaching and providing? Caroline certainly had an opinion about that.

And yet, he'd accepted Will as his with little protest or resistance. She hadn't needed pressure from his friends as she'd expected. It wouldn't be necessary to shame Lucky Logan Grey into assisting her, not as long as he thought he was going to rescue his son.

His son.

Those two little words spoken with such caring and concern by this man—this same man whom she'd spent almost half her life cursing and despising and maligning—threatened to turn her world upside down.

The shame rested not with him, but with her. It appeared he wasn't as guilty as she'd thought him to be. He didn't deserve this worry she'd deposited at his feet.

"Caroline?"

She held herself stiffly. "I'm sorry, Logan. I wish I could tell you that Will hasn't disappeared into that place, but I can't."
It would ruin everything.
"I understand that you've gone into that den of thieves and come back out alive."

Logan ignored that. He shoved to his feet and started pacing the room. "How in the world did a fourteen-year-old boy make his way into that cesspool? Why would he want to? I need to know everything, Caroline, in order to formulate a plan to get him out. Start at the beginning. Tell me who influenced the boy and why."

Caroline gathered her thoughts, reminding herself of all the reasons she'd chosen this particular path. "After my father died, I had to sell the ranch to pay off his debts. By that time I was six months along, and I had nowhere to go, no one to help me."

Logan muttered an ugly curse.

She continued, "I found a job in Artesia helping the editor of the newspaper care for his wife, who was recovering from a buggy accident. I can't tell you what a miracle it was for me to find that job with the Whitakers. Not only did it save me from the whorehouse, it gave me a family. People to love who loved me in return. Then Will was born, and Ben and Suzanne fell silly in love with him at first sight. We made a family and—"

"Wait a minute. Ben and Suzanne Whitaker?
The
Whitakers? Not Gunslinging Suz. Surely you're not talking about the Whitakers who rode with the Sunshine Gang."

"They were retired." For the most part, anyway. She wasn't about to mention Ben's "little slips" as he liked to call them.

Logan braced his hands on his hips. "Are you telling me my son has been raised by outlaws?"

His son. Suddenly, she was real tired of hearing that. She straightened her spine and lifted her chin. "Suzanne was never convicted of anything, and Ben served his time in prison. He paid his debt to society. He's a good man who lived to regret some youthful indiscretions. Surely you can understand that."

"Good Lord. The Whitakers!" Logan closed his eyes and after a moment made a circular motion with his hand, prompting her to continue.

Caroline found her determination strengthened by his reaction to the Whitaker name. She'd been correct in her assessment that he wouldn't be motivated to save Ben. She was doing the right thing, the only thing. "Everything was good, we had a fine life, until we lost Suzanne in January."

"Lost her?"

"She died. Fell down the stairs. Will found her when he came home from school."

Logan stopped pacing in front of the window. He shoved his hands in his pants pockets and once again stared outside. After a long moment, he said, "That had to be a hard knock for the boy."

"He suffered. We all suffered. Ben went a little crazy in his grief."

Logan whipped his head around and stared at her. "Did Whitaker mistreat the boy? Is that why he ran off?"

"Oh, heavens no. Ben adores Will. It's been a battle for me to keep him from spoiling my son silly."

"So why in the world would he want to become an outlaw?"

Caroline opened her mouth to talk about the appeal of rustling cattle, but she couldn't quite force herself to make Will look like a criminal in his father's eyes. "Well, that's not exactly what happened. It's more complicated than that."

"Complicated how?"

Caroline's teeth tugged at her lower lip as she tried to decide what truths to stretch. She hadn't intended to mention the gold until later, but maybe that was a mistake. After all, Logan had helped Dair MacRae and his wife and in-laws find the Bad Luck Treasure. The prospect of another treasure hunt might appeal to him. "Will doesn't want to be an outlaw, but he had to join a gang to be allowed inside Black Shadow Canyon. He wants access to the canyon to hunt for a lost gold mine."

"A what?"

"A gold mine. He has a treasure map."

"Oh, for God's sake. Not another treasure." Logan grimaced and let out a long-suffering sigh.

Oh, dear.
That wasn't a particularly encouraging sign, but it was too late to back out now.

He pinned her with a stony stare. "Tell me about it."

Caroline concentrated on choosing her next words carefully, especially since this part of her story was heavy on falsehoods. "A few weeks after Suzanne died, Ben asked me to pack away Suzanne's personal belongings. He couldn't do it himself."

Actually, he had forbidden anyone from touching anything of his late wife's. Caroline only breached that privacy after Ben disappeared.

"I found a stack of letters from an old friend. One of them described his discovery of a gold mine called Sierra de Cenizas."

Logan grimaced and groaned. "Otherwise known as Geronimo's Treasure."

"You're familiar with the story?"

"Every cowboy who's ridden the trail in West Texas has heard that old yarn. An Indian guide showed the mine to Spanish explorers, who loaded down their mules with nuggets and ore to carry back home. They were all massacred in the great Indian uprising of 1680, but not before one of them left a document in the Palace of Sante Fe that described the discovery. Prospectors have been chasing that old legend and poking holes in the Guadalupe Mountains for half a century now."

"Apparently Shotgun found it."

"Shotgun Reese?"

"You know him?"

"I know of him. I know that he threw in with another bunch of pups after the Sunshine Gang broke up. He made quite a name for himself, participated in some sensational robberies. Wells Fargo wanted him bad. After a while, though, he disappeared from sight."

"That's probably because he didn't need to steal anymore since he'd found the gold mine."

"Of course he did." Logan's voice dripped sarcasm.

"He sent Suzanne some gold nuggets from the mine. She kept them in a little wooden box." She hesitated a moment before adding, "My mistake was showing them to Will. That and the map."

"The map to the gold mine," Logan deduced.

"Yes."

"And the mine is somewhere in Black Shadow Canyon."

"Yes."

"And Will has gone to find it." Logan dragged his hand along his jaw. "What a damned fool harebrained idea."

"He's fourteen," she said with a shrug. "Fourteen-year-old boys are full of harebrained ideas."
As are sixty-eight-year-old men.

"He's gonna get himself killed!"

"No, he won't." She folded her arms and shot a fierce look his way. "Because you're going to save him, right? You're Lucky Logan Grey, the luckiest man in Texas."

"Lord help us all," Logan muttered. He picked up the photograph of Will and studied it for a long minute.

Caroline held her breath.

Finally, thankfully, the anger drained from his expression, though frustration and concern filled his tone when he sighed, then said, "Yes, Caroline, I'll save him, but luck won't have anything to do with it."

Caroline saw the truth of his words glowing in his eyes as he met her gaze and said, "This is all about what is right. It is about what a man is supposed to do, what fathers do for their sons."

He excused himself after that to seek out his friends and ask their help in developing a rescue plan. Caroline sat in Willow Hill's drawing room fearing that she'd made a huge mistake.

Logan had proved he wasn't the dirty dog she had believed him to be. He was a man of integrity. A man of purpose. And he acted as if he cared for Will already. As if he felt a real fatherly bond.

That wasn't what she'd expected from the man she'd believed had loved her, then left her and never looked back. From everything she'd read about Logan Grey before coming to Fort Worth and based on her experience today at the bank and what she'd learned from Wilhemina Peters, she'd expected Logan to have a sense of responsibility toward Will that required he save the boy from the perils of Black Shadow Canyon. She never anticipated that he'd actually want to
be
Will's father.

As the repercussions of this revelation filtered through her mind, she murmured, "Lord help us all."

"For the love of all that's holy, this is something I never thought I'd see." Cade Hollister turned to Holt Driscoll and said, "That's three. Three! He turned down a freebie with Ella, an invitation from the librarian and he ignored a blatant proposition from twins. Identical, redheaded, brown-eyed, big-bosomed, saloon-girl twins!"

"The twins I don't understand," Holt observed. "However, Ella never makes him pay and the librarian is married. Lucky never plays with married women."

Cade pursed his lips, smothering a smile. "Except for the once—his own missus."

Logan made a vulgar gesture with his hand and his two friends laughed.

The three men sat at a table in their favorite Fort Worth saloon, the End of the Line, rehashing the events of the evening. Actually, Cade and Holt were the ones doing the rehashing. Logan was too busy brooding.

He was a father. He had a son.

A son who'd grown up without a father.

"I swore I'd never do that," he muttered, staring at the foam atop his beer. He didn't want the beer. Didn't want to be here at the End of the Line. He wanted to be asleep in bed with this entire evening being nothing more than a nightmare.

"Do what?" Cade asked, standing a poker chip on end and giving it a spin.

Logan could hardly form the words, so much did they shame him. "Desert a child of mine."

The other two men winced. More than anyone else, Cade and Holt understood the thought process behind the statement because they'd grown up in an orphanage along with him. They understood what it meant not to have a father. They understood that today's revelation was a kick to the gut that had knocked Logan on his ass.

Because he was a friend, Holt tried. "It's not your fault, Lucky. You didn't know."

"That's no excuse. She's right about that—I should have checked on her myself, taken responsibility. I shouldn't have waited for her father to contact me if there was a problem." He sat back in his chair, hard. "Problem, hell. There was a baby."

"She could have contacted you," Cade suggested.

"How? Stop and think about it. I didn't keep in contact with anyone those next few years. Not even you two." Guilt closed around his throat like a noose as he tried to imagine what she'd gone through. Poor thing— her apron riding high, no husband, not a nickel to her name. It must have been pure hell.

He should have been there for her. For the boy. Instead, he'd been.. .worthless. Both to her and the boy and to himself.

Just like in Mexico. Just like in Oklahoma. He shut his eyes. God.

The piano player struck up a lively, upbeat tune. Logan wanted to throw his mug at him. Those years after he left the orphanage were lost years. Wasted years. He'd been a drifter, traveling from town to town, state to state, picking up odd jobs to support himself and moving on at a whim, always looking for something he never could define. Yet, in those days he'd never crossed the line. He was still a decent man when he married Caroline.