The Texan (28 page)

He screamed in pain, and she sobbed in desperation. “You have to hold yourself upright.”

She thought her heart would break when she saw the excruciating effort he made to do as she asked. When the last knot came free, she circled her arms around him and eased his broken body as carefully as she could toward the ground.

But he was too heavy, and they fell the last foot or so. She knew from his harsh gasp and the hissing breath he took, that she’d hurt him again.

“I’ve got to go call 911. Will you be all right?”

He grabbed her wrist, and she saw that his knuckles were bruised and the skin broken. Why, oh, why had he tried to fight when the odds were so stacked against him? Johnny Ray would have run as fast and as far as he could.

But, she realized grimly, Billy wasn’t Johnny Ray’s son. He was a Blackthorne. With every bit of the pride and arrogance and defiance of that breed.

She tried to pull free, so she could call for help, but Billy held on.

“Wait,” he gasped. “What are you … going to say?”

“I’m going to tell the truth. That Jackson Blackthorne had you brutally beaten.”

His tongue came out and slowly traced his split lower lip. “No.”

“You can’t let him get away with this!” Dora cried.

“Tell them I got … stomped by … a bull.”

“The biggest, baddest bull around,” Dora said bitterly. “And his name is Jackson Blackthorne.”

“Mom. Please. Do what … I ask.”

“I don’t understand! Why are you protecting him?”

“Not him. Her.”

Dora felt her heart squeeze. He must be in love with the girl, if he was willing to protect her from learning about the terrible beating her father had given him. She could no longer keep the truth from her son. He had to be told who he was, so he would understand why he had to stay away from Summer Blackthorne.

She opened her mouth, but the words wouldn’t come. She couldn’t tell him the truth. He would never be able to forgive her. He would go away and never come back. The truth could wait. There was a little time yet. After he’d healed. Then she’d tell him.

But it couldn’t be put off indefinitely. Because she was sure Billy would defy Blackjack and try to see Summer again. And next time Blackjack would kill him. Or he would kill Blackjack. Even outnumbered, he’d fought back this time. Next time Billy would be waiting to meet his father. And there would be patricide … or a slaughter of the innocents.

“I’m going to call 911,” she said, standing and pulling free of Billy’s grasp.

“What are you … going to … tell them?”

Dora used the elbow-length sleeve of her cotton housedress to wipe her eyes and her runny nose. “I’ll tell them you got stomped by a bull.”

The paramedics eyed Billy strangely when he persisted in the story his mother had told, but Dora realized they had no choice except to believe him, when they had no other information to go on.

As she watched her son being driven away in the ambulance, red lights flashing and siren blaring, Dora realized what she had to do. It would mean the end of everything. She would lose the ranch, because she couldn’t manage without the monthly Blackthorne check. But it was time to do what she should have done twenty-five years ago.

She was going to tell Blackjack he had a son.

Dora stayed at the Bitter Creek General Hospital long enough to learn that Billy had two broken ribs and needed five stitches above his eye, two on the bridge of his nose, twelve along his chin, and nine inside his lip. Both eyes were swollen closed. Miraculously, no teeth had been broken, though several were loose.

The doctor had reset his nose, but it wasn’t ever going to be straight again. He had multiple bruises and contusions on his face and body. He also had some internal bleeding, but it had been stopped without operating.

Dora was surprised how cold the air felt when she stepped outside. The heat of the day had fled and left her clutching her bare forearms to stay warm.

She had thought a great deal, while she waited for news about Billy, about when and where to tell Blackjack what she had to say. Eve would likely head her off, if she tried to reach him at the Castle. So it had to be somewhere in town.

Dora recalled reading in the Sunday paper that the Bitter
Creek First National Bank was having a special board meeting that evening. When it was over, Blackjack would go to the Lone Star Cafe. And she would be waiting for him.

BLACKJACK WAS TIRED. THE BANK BOARD MEETING HAD
gone on forever and been as contentious as it always was. He headed for his regular booth at the back of the Lone Star Cafe, but to his surprise, someone was already sitting there.

It took him a second to recognize Dora Coburn. She was wearing a bloodstained, flowered cotton dress, and clumps of hair had escaped the bun at her nape and made her look frazzled. He hadn’t expected her to confront him about what he’d done to her son. Not here. Not looking like that.

“Sit down, Jackson,” she said.

His heart speeded up, and he wondered if this was going to be the time when the patches they’d done on his heart with the veins from his leg decided to give out. “What is it you want, Dora?”

“Sit down, Jackson,” she repeated.

In deference to his struggling heart, he slid into the booth opposite her. He sought the waitress’s eye, and she brought over a cup of coffee and set it down in front of him.

“You were right, Dora,” the waitress said with a wink and a smile. “Here he is.”

“There’s something I need to discuss with Mr. Blackthorne,” Dora said.

“Sure thing,” the waitress said. “Just wave if you want more coffee.”

Blackjack drank his coffee black and bitter. He took a
small sip, because he could see it was steaming, and he didn’t want to burn his tongue. He’d faced down too many men with a grudge not to recognize the look on Dora Coburn’s face. He had no remorse for what he’d done. He’d only been protecting his daughter from dangerous riffraff. To his surprise, he couldn’t hold Dora’s penetrating gaze without lowering his own.

“You shouldn’t have done it,” she said.

He lifted his gaze to her face and said, “Billy had his chance to do what I asked, but he refused. Then he got in a few punches, and the boys got mad and took it out on him.”

“He’s your son.”

At first, Blackjack wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. He looked for some sign that she was joking. But her dark, piercing eyes were staring soberly back at him through cheap plastic frames.

“What?” It was a stupid response to what she’d said, but he couldn’t think of what else to say. What she’d suggested was preposterous. Absolutely impossible. “I don’t know what you think you’re going to accomplish by making up a lie as enormous—”

“I’m not lying,” she said inexorably. “I was pregnant with your son when I married Johnny Ray Coburn.”

“I don’t believe you.” He couldn’t believe her. If he believed her, he’d just had his own son beaten up by three hard, angry men. If he believed her, his daughter had befriended—and maybe been more than friends with—his son. His body felt cold, and the flesh rose on his arms.

“It’s absolutely true,” Dora said. “When I went to the Castle to tell you I was pregnant, your wife came to the door, instead. Eve arranged everything. She provided
the ranch and the husband and agreed to pay me a stipend—” Dora smiled oddly as she said the word. “For so long as I kept your son a secret from you. I deposited this month’s check on Friday.”

Blackjack felt the blood draining from his head. His heart was hammering. He reached for his coffee cup, realized his hand was shaking, and balled it into a fist, which he pounded on the table, rattling the spoon against the cheap ceramic cup. “How the hell did this happen?”

“You were there with me, Jackson, in the front seat of your pickup.”

“Goddamn it! You should have told me.”

“I’m telling you now.”

“When it’s too late!”

She shook her head. “It’s not too late to do something to help your son. Billy’s suffered enough. If someone leaves Bitter Creek, it should be your daughter. Send her away. Marry her off. Otherwise, I’m afraid of what might happen.”

Blackjack blurted, “You let that bastard Johnny Ray Coburn beat my son.”

“Johnny Ray didn’t do anything worse than what you just did yourself,” she shot back.

“But I didn’t
know
!”

“Blame Eve if you don’t like the way things turned out,” Dora said angrily. “Johnny Ray hated raising your son as his own. He hated the checks, though he was quick enough to spend them on liquor. He thought it was funny—and fitting—that your bastard should end up mucking out stalls at Bitter Creek.”

Blackjack groaned and covered his face with his hands. He rubbed at his throbbing temples. How could his wife have done something so cruel as to deny him his child? He wondered if she’d turned to Russell Handy to
pay him back for his affair with Dora. But if so, why hadn’t she ever flaunted her lover, or told him she knew about his bastard son?

“Didn’t you ever notice how much Billy looks like you Blackthornes?” Dora said. “He’s tall and lean and has your black hair and your square chin. Or he did, before your men rearranged his face. The only thing about him that’s mine are his eyes. They’re dark and sullen and angry. Because he’s had to fight the world every step of the way, starting with his father.”

“His stepfather,” Blackjack corrected bitterly.
I have another son
. A son who was a known troublemaker. A son who’d earned the name “Bad” Billy Coburn.

“All you had to do was take one good hard look at Billy to see the truth,” Dora was saying. “And he’s so smart. He didn’t get his brains from my side of the family. I barely got through high school. Billy loves to read, and he’s always dreaming and planning how someday—”

“He can have his dreams,” Blackjack interrupted. He owed his blood that. “I’ll give him the money to do whatever he wants with his life. But he has to leave Bitter Creek.”

Dora shook her head. “That’s not fair. You can’t send my son away.”

“Summer’s staying,” Blackjack said. “And one of them has to go.”

Dora made a disgusted sound in her throat. “He won’t leave her. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

Blackjack frowned. “You haven’t told him I’m his father? That any relationship with Summer is impossible?”

“Why should I be the one to hurt my child? Billy’s been hurt enough. Why don’t you tell your daughter the truth? Let her break it off.”

“Summer is not to hear a word about this. Do you understand me? Nothing!” He didn’t want his daughter knowing he’d been unfaithful to her mother. He didn’t want her knowing she had a bastard brother, who’d become her best friend—and maybe, God forbid, more. He didn’t want her burdened with his mistakes. She was the light of his life. He loved her more than anyone in this world, and he would give anything, sacrifice anything, to protect her.

“I tried to tell Billy the truth,” Dora said. “I couldn’t do it.”

“Maybe that’s for the best,” Blackjack said. “He doesn’t have to know. He can just leave town. I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

“That sounds like a threat.”

“He can’t stay, Dora. He has to go. And I don’t want Summer knowing why he’s leaving.”

“You always were a selfish bastard, Jackson.”

“I never said I wasn’t.”

Blackjack left the Lone Star Cafe and went straight to the hospital. There was no sense postponing what had to be done.

He didn’t expect the sudden ache in his gut when he pushed open Bad Billy Coburn’s hospital door and stepped inside the dimly lit room.

His son—his bastard son—was covered with a white sheet to his waist and had a tube strapped to his arm and running to a bag of some clear liquid. A green-faced monitor beeped steadily, proving that the battered figure on the bed was still alive.

Blackjack walked to the edge of the bed and looked down on his son. Billy’s rangy Blackthorne body filled the bed from top to bottom. The boy’s black hair—Blackthorne
hair—was lank and needed a trim. His square Blackthorne chin was stitched across the center. His nose was swollen to twice its size, and the hospital had put some sort of cold compress over his eyes, apparently to reduce the swelling.

“Who’s there?” the boy said.

Blackjack cleared his throat, which had swollen closed. He didn’t understand the feelings roiling inside him. He’d planted the seed, that was all. But he couldn’t help feeling connected to the weed that had sprouted. This was his son. His blood. Stolen from him and kept a secret for twenty-five years. Damn Dora and Eve both!

He wondered what he would have done if Dora had found him that day. Would he have urged her to give up the child for adoption? Would he have offered her money to raise it? Or would he have brought the child into his home and made him a part of his family?

Eve would never have stood for that. She must have realized—as he was realizing now—that he would never have given away what belonged to him. That he would have kept his bastard son and dared the world to point a finger at him. His indiscretion would have been exposed for all the world to see. Eve had avoided the problem by making sure he never knew about the child in the first place.

He felt a welling of sorrow for what he’d lost. A welling of regret for what his son had suffered. A welling of deep, coal-black anger for what his wife had taken from him.

“Who’s there?” the boy repeated.

“Jackson Blackthorne,” he managed to say.

The boy made an animal sound in his throat and reached up to yank the compress from his eyes. The
boy’s dark eyes, barely visible through his slitted eyelids, burned with hatred. “Get out,” he rasped.

Blackjack saw more stitches above the boy’s right eye and on the bridge of his nose. “I’ll have a plastic surgeon fix up your face.”

“Get out.”

Blackjack saw how much effort it took the boy just to speak. He remembered the sound of his son’s ribs breaking and felt his gut clench. “You’ve got some busted ribs. Makes it hard to breathe. Just lie there and listen to me.”

The boy tried to rise, groaned, and lay back down.

Blackjack put a hand on his son’s bare shoulder and felt his heart squeeze with emotion. “Stay down. You’re only hurting yourself.”