The Texan (3 page)

“Yeah,” Owen said, his throat swelling with emotion again. “I just wish I could go to sleep and wake up and discover this is all a bad dream.”

But it wasn’t a dream. Hank was dead.

Owen was afraid he would break down like some sniveling kid, if he didn’t get away. He stood abruptly.

“Owen?”

In his brother’s eyes he saw all the pain he was suffering reflected back at him. He felt like howling but gritted his teeth and kept the sound inside. “I have to go.”

Clay stood, and the twins exchanged words without speaking, a gift they’d shared from the womb.

Take care of yourself, Owe
.

I will, Clay. You know I have to find the man who killed Hank. I owe him that
.

I wish I could be there for you tomorrow. Are you sure you’ll be all right?

“I’ll be fine,” Owen said aloud. “I’ll be even better when I find the man who killed Hank. He’s going to pay for what he did. If it’s the last thing I ever do.”

A SINGLE BULB ILLUMINATED THE SWOLLEN
belly of the mare, lying on her side in a deep bed of straw. The mare made a soft, grunting sound as her belly rippled, but the sharp contraction did nothing to move the foal along the birth canal. Too tired even to lift her head, the suffering beast stared with expressive, defeated eyes at the woman kneeling beside her.

Bayleigh Creed had spent long hours studying at the veterinary college at Texas A&M and had been a licensed vet for more than a year, handling just this sort of emergency. The foal was turned so the hooves, instead of the nose, were presenting first. It was the equivalent of a human breech birth. Not an impossible situation, but a difficult one, that sometimes turned out badly.

“I know I should have called you sooner,” Summer Blackthorne said, as she sank to her knees beside the priceless championship cutting horse. “I thought I could handle it myself. I was sure I could handle it myself,” she said, an edge of defiance in her voice. “But I couldn’t get the foal turned.” The young woman lifted frightened eyes to meet Bay’s gaze. “Can you save her? Ruby is … She’s like family.”

“How long has Ruby been in trouble?” Bay asked, as she rolled up her sleeves and moved to the mare’s hindquarters.

“From the start,” Summer admitted in a low voice.

Bay clamped her jaw tight to keep from giving the young woman a piece of her mind. She’d gotten her fill of troublesome Blackthornes last night at the Armadillo Bar. Here was another one making her life difficult—Owen and Clay’s little sister—who just might be worse than all the rest put together.

Summer Blackthorne had a reputation for running wild. She’d dropped out of a dozen colleges. Well, maybe only a half dozen. But everyone in Bitter Creek, Texas, knew she was the apple of her father’s eye—and spoiled rotten.

But not totally uncaring of the harm she might have caused by her reckless behavior, Bay conceded, as she glanced at Summer’s anguished hazel eyes and ragged appearance. Blond curls had come loose from a thick ponytail, and her expensive, tailored white Western shirt had obviously been used like a throwaway rag to wipe her hands. But then, money for new clothes was easy to come by for the wealthy Blackthornes.

At least the girl had called Bay. Finally.

“I had no idea how quickly Ruby would tire,” Summer said, as she caressed the mare’s neck with a trembling hand.

“Let’s hope you didn’t wait too long.”

Bay had been shocked to receive the frantic call from Summer, since Blackthornes and Creeds never crossed paths if they could help it. But it wasn’t always possible to avoid each other. Especially when the Creed ranch was lodged, like a chicken bone in the throat, in the very center of the vast Bitter Creek ranching empire.

Three Oaks, the ranch where Bay had been born, was a small island in a sea of Blackthorne grass. It measured a mere five miles east and west and twenty miles north and south, but that hundred square miles of land had been bitterly fought over by Blackthornes and Creeds since the Civil War. And neither of them seemed willing to give up or give in.

The quarrel had once again become deadly eighteen months ago, when Summer’s mother had arranged the murder of Bay’s father. Actually, she’d been trying to kill Bay’s mother—whom she suspected her husband of secretly loving. But the man who’d been hired to do the shooting had missed and ended up killing Bay’s father, instead.

As far as the local sheriff was concerned, her father’s death had been a hunting accident—a hunter’s bullet tragically gone astray. The Creeds had learned the truth when Summer’s eldest brother Trace told Bay’s elder sister Callie—after he’d married her—that his mother had admitted to her family that she’d arranged the whole thing.

Bay fought down the surge of helpless rage she felt every time she remembered how Eve Blackthorne had escaped punishment for her crime. After what had happened last night, she wouldn’t have come near Bitter Creek, except she’d known it was the mare that would end up suffering if she stayed away.

“Why didn’t you call your regular vet?” Bay wondered aloud, as she began manipulating the foal to see if she could turn it, or whether she was going to have to help it be born feet first.

“I didn’t tell him Ruby was foaling before he took off for Houston. I thought I could handle it myself.”

It was stubborn pride, Bay decided, that had kept the girl from calling for help. Bay recognized the flaw because the Creeds had more than their own share of it.

“Bitter Creek is a big ranch,” Bay said. “Why didn’t you call one of your hired hands or your father or—”

“My father’s the last person I’d tell I can’t handle the situation,” she retorted. “And in case you haven’t noticed, it’s Saturday night. The hands are all in town spending their wages. Everyone else is tied up at that wake my brother Owen is holding up at the Castle for Hank Richardson, that Ranger who was killed in the line of duty. It’s really sad, because Hank’s wife is eight months pregnant, and now the baby’s going to grow up without a father.”

Bay gritted her teeth to keep from reminding the girl that because of Eve Blackthorne,
she
no longer had a father. It was typical of the Blackthornes to ignore what it was awkward to remember. And in a country without a king, only a family as domineering and dynastic as the Blackthornes would have the nerve to call their home “the Castle.”

On the other hand, Bitter Creek was an eight-hundred-square-mile cattle ranch with enough oil underground to please an Arab sheik. The house itself was huge, thirty thousand—odd square feet filled with Tiffany and Chippendale and a heritage that went back a hundred and fifty years. Bitter Creek certainly possessed all the elements of a fiefdom, and the Blackthornes were bona fide Texas royalty.

“An unbelievable number of cops showed up for the funeral,” Summer said, interrupting Bay’s thoughts. “Surely you noticed all those police cars in town today.”

Bay had noticed. And wondered. But she hadn’t
stopped to find out, because she’d been on her way to an emergency at the Franklin ranch. A mule named Hobo, a family pet, had eaten a plastic bag that had gotten stuck in its throat. It had been a near thing, but Hobo was fine, and the Franklins had promised to dispose of their plastic more carefully.

She’d had another call after that, to the Henderson ranch, and another later in the afternoon from the Stephensons. The call from Summer had come just as she stepped out of the shower at Three Oaks. She’d pulled her wet, shoulder-length hair back from her face with a couple of butterfly clips and brushed her hands through her bangs to get them out of her eyes. She’d stared at the heap of dirty clothes on the bathroom floor for a full thirty seconds, then decided she couldn’t bear to put them on again.

So she’d donned a clean pair of jeans and a newly pressed Western shirt, yanked on her boots, and driven hard and fast to Bitter Creek. And found a young girl—alone in the barn with her beloved mare—in desperate trouble.

Bay cocked her head at the strains of plaintive fiddle music carried on the evening breeze from the wake at the Castle. Clearly, death was being mourned there. But damn it, new life was trying hard—and failing—to find a foothold here. Surely the girl could have found someone to help!

“I can’t believe you couldn’t find one person who’d be willing to leave that wake to help out a poor dumb beast,” Bay said, unable to keep the edge from her voice.

“Of course my brother Owen would have come, if I’d asked him!” Summer shot back. “I couldn’t—I didn’t—ask for help. If you had any idea—If you only knew how hard it is for me to convince my father—Oh, never mind that now! Please. Help Ruby.”

The mare whinnied and tried to raise her head.

“Keep your voice down,” Bay said quietly. “You’re upsetting your horse.”

“What can I do to help? Give me something to do,” Summer pleaded.

“Talk to your horse. Encourage her.”

Bay could see from the look on Summer’s face that the girl didn’t think it was enough. But Bay knew that to please Summer, the mare would try harder to live through the ordeal to come. Unlike people, animals loved honestly, unjudgmentally, and without reservation. It was one of the reasons she’d become a vet.

“Easy, Ruby,” Summer crooned to the animal, as she smoothed a hand down the mare’s sweat-slick neck. “Easy, sweetheart. It won’t be long now. The doctor will help. Everything will be fine soon.”

Bay hoped Summer was right. One of the foal’s forelegs had somehow gotten bent at the knee. That would mean disaster, if she couldn’t get it straightened out. She had the bent leg in her grasp, but had to wait for a contraction to pass before she could begin to untangle it.

At that moment, the cell phone attached to her belt began to play “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Bay smiled every time she heard the song. Yellow roses were her favorite flower, and her older brother Sam had arranged to have the tune programmed on the cell phone he’d given her for her twenty-fifth birthday.

Normally, Bay would have let the caller leave a message. But Luke hadn’t come home last night. Throughout the day, she and her mother and her brother Sam had been waiting for some word from—or about—Luke. But there had been nothing. After his scuffle with the Blackthornes,
her brother had gone tearing off on his Harley-Davidson.

And simply disappeared.

Bay had begun to suspect the worst, and she wasn’t sure her mother could handle another tragedy so soon on the heels of her father’s death. She’d made Sam promise to call her immediately if he heard anything.

This might be that call.

“Would you answer my cell phone?” Bay said to Summer. “Just unsnap the cover and remove it.”

“Can’t that wait?”

“No, it can’t,” Bay said, keeping her voice calm in deference to the mare. “Hit the call button and find out who it is.”

Bay made herself stay focused on the mare’s labor, while she listened to Summer’s responses to the caller.

“She’s right here,” Summer said. And then, “This is Summer Blackthorne.”

Summer held the phone away from her ear. “It’s your brother Luke. Swearing a blue streak. Wants to know how the hell I got hold of your cell phone.”

Bay couldn’t take the risk of releasing the foal’s foreleg. The mare was losing strength fast, and she might not get another hold as good as the one she had. “Put the phone to my ear.”

“Wouldn’t it be better—”

“Do as I ask!” Bay could hear her brother still ranting at Summer. “Luke!” she interrupted. “Shut up and tell me where you are. The Big Bend? That’s five hundred miles from here! What in the world are you doing in country that far west of the Pecos? Of course I’ll tell Mom you’re all right, but what are you—”

The mare’s belly rippled, and Bay urgently bent forward,
away from the phone, to make one last desperate tug on the foal’s foreleg before the contraction began. The knee unbent as the contraction hit, and Bay felt the foal move along the birth canal. “Thank you, God,” she muttered.

It was then Bay realized she’d missed whatever Luke had been trying to tell her. “Put the phone back to my ear,” she snapped at Summer.

The mare whinnied anxiously, and Bay forced herself to speak calmly despite her agitation. “Luke? Are you there? I missed what you just said. What does Clay Blackthorne—?” Bay cut herself off as she realized who was perched on bended knee beside her, then continued without mentioning names.

“So he met with some men in Midland and now you’re following them and—That sounds awfully farfetched. Luke, I don’t think you should—” Bay saw the curiosity on Summer’s face. She turned her back on the girl and whispered, “If you’re so sure he’s involved, why not go to the military police or the FBI or the Texas Rangers or whoever hunts down—”

Bay closed her eyes and bit her lip as she listened to her brother’s urgent voice. “Luke, please don’t try to handle this yourself. You might—”

The mare grunted and began to expel the foal. Bay saw the umbilical cord slide down and realized that it would be crushed between the foal and the edge of the birth canal, cutting off the flow of oxygen. She had to get the foal out quickly, or it would suffocate.