The Cowboy's Secret Son

In the years since she’d last seen him, that exposure to the relentless Texas sun had etched its marks on his face. Faint lines fanned from the corners of his eyes. His lashes were as long and thick as she remembered them, and still tipped with the same gold the summer sun always brushed through his chestnut hair. A crease had begun to form in the center of his cheeks, which were no longer boyishly rounded.

A man’s face, she acknowledged. Hard, lean and tempered by the years. Whenever she had thought of him, she had pictured him exactly as he had been that summer. Young, strong and so beautifully male. He was different now. Certainly not less attractive. If anything—

“I’m sure Drew won’t head out without permission again,” Mark said. He smiled at Drew, whose eyes had shifted gratefully from the sheriff’s accusing ones to his. “We all make mistakes.”

As he added the last, Mark glanced up at Jillian. She wasn’t sure what he was implying, but then no one could argue with the sentiment. We all make mistakes.

Of course, maybe that phrase didn’t mean anything, she cautioned her volatile emotions. Maybe he was just making conversation. Just because he said something didn’t mean it was related to their shared past. Or to her.

“Well, you best not make this one again, young fellow,” Ronnie said pompously. “Nobody’s got time to be chasing down kids who don’t have sense enough to get in out of the rain.”

The word seemed a signal. The first drops began to splatter down around them, large enough to be audible as they struck the dry earth.

“Gotta go,” the sheriff said. “You mind your mama, boy. If you don’t, I’ll know about it, and then you and me’s gonna have to have us a talk. You hear me?”

“Yes, sir,” Drew said.

The bravado with which he had told Jillian in no uncertain terms this morning that he hated this place seemed to have disappeared. Even his excitement over the chopper ride had evaporated, and as angry as she was with him for running away, Jillian found herself regretting that loss.

The three of them watched as Ronnie trotted to his car. As soon as he had gotten settled into the seat, he picked up the radio and spoke to someone. The exchange was inaudible and brief, maybe just a location report or the assurance that he was headed back into town. Then he put the car into gear, backing it into the yard before he headed out the dirt road. He lifted his hand in farewell as he drove past them.

“I have to get back, too,” Mark said. “I’ll see you later.”

She glanced up, an incredibly powerful surge of hope flaring inside her, to find he was addressing Drew.

“Promise?” her son said, brown eyes meeting hazel. And the same hope she had just felt was expressed in that single word.

“You can count on it,” Mark said.

He reached out and put his hand on top of the boy’s head, but he didn’t ruffle the darkly shining hair. That was something Jake did, and Jillian had never been sure Drew appreciated the gesture. Mark’s was more of a touch. A goodbye. Maybe even a benediction of sorts. As was his smile.

Without looking at her, he turned and began to retrace his steps. She realized then why it had taken her so long to recognize him. Just as his face had changed, so had his body. The shoulders were as broad, maybe broader than the last time she’d seen him. His hips and waist had narrowed, leading down to long, muscular legs, now eating up the distance to the chopper.

A man and no longer a boy, she thought again.

Before she had time to think anything else, Drew’s hand slipped into hers. That was unusual enough these days that she glanced down in surprise.

“I’m in big trouble, huh?” he said, his eyes still on Mark.

“What do you think?”

“I think…it was worth it,” her son said.

“Worth being in big trouble?”

“If I hadn’t been out there, I’d never had gotten to ride in the chopper. He let me wear a flight helmet,” he added.

Jillian shielded her eyes from the dust as the rotor began to turn. She didn’t particularly want to be standing out here, watching Mark Peterson leave, but she didn’t seem to be able to do anything about the fact that she was.

“You think he meant what he said about seeing me again?”

At least Drew hadn’t asked how she knew Mark, she thought with gratitude. But she understood how her son’s mind worked well enough to know that he would put two and two together soon enough. After all, Mark had called her by name.

“Who knows?” she said softly, forcing the words between lips that felt stiff. And not just with the cold.

Once she had been foolish enough to think she could predict what Mark would do in any situation. And she had been wrong. This time she wasn’t going to make any predictions. Not even for Drew’s sake. Especially not for Drew’s sake.

* * *

JILLIAN, he thought, going mindlessly through the motions of flying without any conscious awareness of what he was doing. He didn’t seem capable of thinking about anything other than the woman he had left behind him, standing out in the rain. Jillian Salvini.

Sullivan, he reminded himself. The kid had said his name was Sullivan. He wondered briefly about Jillian’s husband, feeling nausea stir in the pit of his stomach at the thought.

And then, deliberately, he blocked out images he didn’t want to deal with. Couldn’t deal with. Images from their past followed by images of Jillian married to someone else. Sleeping with someone else. Conceiving another man’s child. His head moved slowly from side to side in denial. A pointless denial.

What the hell did you think she’d been doing for the last decade? he asked himself angrily. So she was married and had a kid. Big deal.

In the back of his mind he had always known that was a possibility. A probability, he amended. After all, Jillian was almost thirty now. Twenty-eight, he calculated.

And she still didn’t look much older than she had that summer when she was seventeen. Not with her hair pulled back like that. Her skin was still pale and smooth, but without the ever present tan of her childhood. The freckles that had always decorated the bridge of her nose, unless it was the dead of winter, were no longer visible.

Except they were, he realized. Those same freckles were splayed across her son’s equally delicate nose. He wondered how he had missed noticing the resemblance.

He shouldn’t have. Drew Sullivan was a masculine replication of the skinny little tomboy, that other sometimes lonely only child who had followed at Mark’s heels throughout his childhood.

Jillian’s son. Who might also have been his son. That thought was as sickening as the images of Jillian lying in the arms of another man, sated and fulfilled. Just as she had once lain in his. Once. A long time ago.

If there was one thing Mark had learned in the last ten years, it was that there was nothing more damaging than thinking about the “what might have beens” of your life. That’s what his father had done. And after the crash, he himself had indulged in more than his share of those kinds of thoughts.

It certainly wouldn’t do him any good to think about what might have been as far as Jillian Salvini was concerned. And he realized he’d been doing that on some level since he’d been back.

Now he knew with unwanted clarity what she had been doing since the last time he’d seen her. A reality that included a husband, a son and a life that had nothing to do with the girl who had given herself to him with the same sweet innocence with which she had lived her entire childhood. A girl who had then disappeared as completely as if she and her mother and father had been wiped off the face of the earth.

His father had muttered bitterly about Tony Salvini’s Mafia ties and had cursed Jillian’s father until the day he’d died. A man broken by life, who had owned nothing at the last but the shirt on his back and an unquenchable hatred for Salvini.

It was an animosity that had been born the morning he’d discovered the Salvinis and their daughter had fled in the middle of the night, leaving everything behind them, including the unpaid loans Bo and Jillian’s father had signed jointly.

And Mark had never seen Jillian again. Until today. Until he had stepped around the nose of the chopper and come face-to-face with the woman who had haunted his dreams for the last ten years. Especially since he’d come back here. And now, so had she. Perhaps if things had been different…

Except they weren’t different, he reminded himself as he started the familiar descent to the land that had belonged to his family for three generations. Your birthright, his dad used to say. A birthright his father believed Tony Salvini had stolen.

Whatever the truth of what had happened between their fathers ten years ago, Jillian was married, and Mark was leaving. And those were the only two things he ought to be thinking about. Not about all those what might have beens.

Unbidden, the thin face of Drew Sullivan appeared in his mind’s eye, looking up at him as he begged for that promise Mark had foolishly given before he’d left. An eerie reflection of a little girl who had once pleaded with Mark not to leave her behind.

I didn’t, Jilly, he thought bitterly. I never did. You’re the one who left me. And it’s too late to even ask you why.

* * *

WHY THE HELL can’t I sleep? Jillian thought.

She turned on her side, pushing the old-fashioned feather pillow into a more comfortable shape. It wasn’t really that she didn’t know why, of course. It had more to do with an unwillingness to admit how disturbed she had been by seeing Mark again. She just hadn’t been prepared, she’d told herself. It had been the shock combined with her worry over Andy that had thrown her. Drew, she corrected herself, remembering the sound of that single syllable spoken in Mark’s deep voice.

Andrew had been her maternal grandfather’s name, and Jillian had loved the strong Scots sound of it. It had seemed too grown-up, though, too serious for the minute scrap of an infant—a preemie with so many problems, including that tiny twisted and misshapen foot—that they had placed in her arms. Although she had written Andrew on the birth certificate, from the beginning she had called her son Andy.

Then last year, he had declared that Andy was a baby’s name and that the kids at school made fun of him because of it. And he had been right, she admitted. The diminutive did make him sound like a baby, and he was growing up. Despite the maternal urge to keep him small so she could hold him close and make him safe, she knew this was the way things were supposed to happen.

She sighed, the sound an outward expression of all the frustrations she had felt since her encounter with Mark this afternoon. She turned over again, trying to find a cool spot on the pillowcase to rest her cheek. There wasn’t one. The pillow had been turned and poked and restlessly prodded into shape until it was as worn-out with the long hours of this night as she was.

And it was nowhere near dawn, she thought, judging by the lack of light seeping in through the east-facing window. She sighed again, wondering if she should just give up and go unpack another box, when she heard a noise that sounded like something falling.

Or someone, she thought, that same mother instinct she had just acknowledged kicking into overdrive. Had Drew gotten up to go to the bathroom and stumbled over something in the unfamiliar darkness?

She threw the covers off and slid her feet into her slippers. As she hurried across the room, she pulled on the robe that she had tossed on the foot of the bed. Normally she wouldn’t have taken time for that, but the house seemed strangely cold, a damp, pervasive chill left from the afternoon storm.

She hurried down the hall to Drew’s room, the same one that had been hers when she was growing up. She had given him his choice, and that’s the one he’d chosen, which for some reason had pleased her. Of course, the window seat her father had built to her specifications, and which doubled as a toy chest, had undeniable appeal.

The door to his bedroom was open to allow the old-fashioned heating system to circulate the air better. She stopped in the doorway, looking inside. The small mound of her son, sleeping in a near fetal position as he had since he was an infant, was clearly visible. Nothing in the room seemed disturbed. Nothing had fallen. Obviously, whatever she’d heard hadn’t originated here.

Turning, she looked back down the dark hallway, and was again conscious of the cold. Maybe she should check to see if the pilot light on the furnace had gone out. After all, she was up, and it didn’t seem likely that she would go back to sleep now. Especially since she hadn’t been sleeping before.

She walked past the door of her own bedroom, which had been her mother and father’s room. Shivering, she wrapped her arms around her body, rubbing her hands up and down the sleeves of her robe. Maybe it was just jumping out of a warm bed so quickly—

As she stepped out of the hall and into the main room of the house, which her mom had always called the den, she realized that the front door was standing wide-open. Her first inclination was to rush across and close it, but the trickle of ice that was now in her veins had nothing to do with the cold air rushing in from outside.

She had locked that door before going to bed. She was sure of it.

During the last ten years, Jillian had become accustomed to living in apartments. To having neighbors. To law enforcement that responded in much less than half an hour. The kind of isolation inherent in living on a ranch was no longer familiar. It had made her nervous enough to be cautious and to double-check that lock and all the others. The fact that the door was now standing open…

Her gaze examined the shadows, moving slowly along the perimeter of the room. Although she couldn’t see behind each piece of furniture, nothing seemed out of place.

She glanced back at the door. Had the wind been strong enough during the night to blow it open? Except she’d been lying awake for at least an hour, and she hadn’t heard any wind. She hadn’t heard anything at all, but that one noise.

The door hitting the wall? Or someone hitting the door?

Again she was conscious of the cold. She ought to at least close the door, she thought, turning toward the kitchen now. Given the angle of the wall, she couldn’t see into that room, and she directed her gaze back to the front door.

For the first time in her life she wished that she had a gun. Although she had grown up around them, she had never thought she was the kind of person who would ever want or need a firearm. Faced with the realities of where she was living now…

She forced herself to move across the den, tiptoeing so that her slippers made only a slight shuffling noise on the hardwood floor. When she was near enough, she could stand behind the protection of the open door and look through it into the yard. Maybe there would be enough moonlight to allow her to take a look around without leaving the house.

Taking a deep breath, she took the final step to the door and grasped the knob in her right hand. The metal was cold under her palm, and for some reason, now that she was here, she couldn’t seem to make herself move any closer to the opening. If there was someone waiting outside—

Idiot, she chided herself. Why kick in the door to a house and then wait around outside? If someone was that eager to get inside, they’d already be here. A thought that was hardly more comforting.

So why hadn’t she turned on the lights? Why didn’t she now? The switch that controlled them was just on the other side of the doorway. All she had to do was step across, closing the door in the process, and flick it on. All she had to do, and yet she seemed paralyzed, unable to act.

She drew in another deep breath, gathering her courage, and in the silence she heard movement out on the porch. As if released from a spell, she pushed the door hard, and as it swung closed, she reached across the narrowing opening, intending to flip up the switch.

A dark shape loomed before her, seeming to spring up from the floor of the porch. The terrifying image lasted only a split second—too short a time for identification—before the door slammed closed. Quickly she turned the lock, putting a barrier, however fragile, between her and whatever—whoever—was out there.

CHAPTER FOUR

“PE-EW,” Ronnie Cameron said, wrinkling his nose in disgust and drawing the sound out. He hurriedly closed the black garbage bag, pulling the plastic strings tight.

A little late for that, Jillian thought.

“What in the world is in there?” the sheriff asked, carefully laying the bag back on the floor of the front porch.

“It seems to be roadkill,” Jillian said. “Aged roadkill from the smell. Armadillos and a few less recognizable victims.”

Her voice was very quiet. Anyone who knew her well could have told the sheriff that she was exerting enormous self-control. Which she was. Now that it was daylight, her fear had been replaced by anger, and much of it was self-directed because she had let herself be so terrified.

“You’re saying somebody dumped this on the porch and then kicked in your door?”

“The door was open when I got up to investigate,” she clarified. “I’m not sure it was kicked in. I would think there would be some damage if it had been. But it was open.”

“You see who it was?”

“I saw a shape. Nothing else. Certainly not enough to make an identification.”

She didn’t confess that she had been too frightened last night to realize that if she’d turned on the outside lights and opened the door, she might have been able to do exactly that—make an identification. Instead, she had turned the lock and sagged against the door, trembling all over. It wasn’t until the running footsteps outside faded into the distance that she’d even thought about opening it again and looking out.

“I plain don’t know what to tell you,” the sheriff said, shaking his head and looking down again on the foul-smelling bag in disbelief. “I haven’t seen anything like this since I’ve been in office. Never heard of anything like it since grammar school.”

“So who was responsible for this kind of thing back then?” Jillian asked, the edge still in her voice.

“I didn’t mean that literally. It’s just that this business seems so…juvenile.”

That was the perfect word, Jillian thought. Juvenile.

“Any idea why somebody would do this?” Ronnie asked.

“That’s why I called you,” she said. “Because I don’t have any idea. I thought maybe you did. I was also hoping you could get fingerprints off the bag or something.”

“That’s not likely. I can guarantee you that whoever put this together was wearing gloves. And not just because everybody who’s going to commit a crime nowadays knows enough from television to do that, but for sanitary reasons. Trust me, nobody would handle the stuff that’s in there with their bare hands.”

He was probably right, Jillian acknowledged bitterly. She had known that finding usable fingerprints would be a long shot.

“Not much of a welcome home, I guess,” Ronnie said.

“You think that was the message this was supposed to convey? That I’m not welcome?”

“A lot of folks don’t remember your family any too kindly.”

“What exactly does that mean?”

“When your daddy ran off, he left a lot of people holding the bag.” He glanced down at the sack at his feet.

Involuntarily Jillian’s gaze followed his. She wondered if he had meant to suggest there was some connection between that metaphoric “bag” and this.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“He left here owing a lot of people money.”

Reluctantly, Jillian dredged up the memories of that time. She had thought her life was ruined because she had been forced to leave Mark. And her father had forbidden her to even speak his name. Just as he had forbidden her to write or call him.

She had, of course. None of the things her father had threatened her with could have kept her from doing that, especially not after she had discovered she was pregnant.

“My dad left here owing people money?”

The sheriff studied her closely a moment before shifting his attention to the vista that spread in front of them.

“Your old man and Bo Peterson had taken out loans with just about everybody within a hundred miles. By the end, they didn’t own a cow or a teacup that wasn’t hocked or mortgaged.”

“Are you saying my dad took out a mortgage on his ranch?”

That didn’t sound like her father.

“A couple of them, or so I heard. Course, you could hear just about anything around here after your family run off in the middle of the night. Believe me, there were a lot of explanations offered for that.”

“He had lost the ranch,” she said softly.

It was only now that she realized that this loss, and not her relationship with Mark, was the reason her entire life had changed in the course of one night.

“They both did. Lost everything. Bo held on a little while longer, but even when your place was sold at auction, it didn’t bring in enough to pay off both mortgages and the rest of the loans. That’s when they foreclosed on the Peterson ranch.”

“The Petersons lost their land, as well?”

“Bo never got over it. It killed him in the end.”

“I thought Mark was still living there.”

“Not in years. He was in the service for a while. Just came back here a couple of months ago. He’s working for the people who own his daddy’s ranch now.”

That must have been a bitter pill to swallow for someone with as much pride as Mark had always had. Jillian wondered why he had come home at all. But of course, so had she.

“Bo and my dad signed loans together?” she repeated, trying to make sure she understood what Ronnie was saying. “For what?”

This wasn’t something she had heard before. And frankly, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Why would her dad and Mark’s father have taken out joint loans?

Ronnie shook his head. “Nobody knew. Maybe they were going in together on some kind of hybrid. Bo was always talking about finding the perfect breed for raising beef cattle up here.”

“So they borrowed this money, and then my father leaves. He ran out on the loans he’d signed. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Peterson was pretty steamed. Musta come as a shock.”

It had come as a shock to her, too. There had been no warning. Her father had simply awakened her in the middle of the night and demanded she get dressed. Her mother was already in Jillian’s bedroom, folding her clothes and putting them into a suitcase.

She had always believed that her dad had discovered what was going on between her and Mark. Although he hadn’t said that the night they’d left, he had had plenty to say when he’d found out she was carrying Mark’s baby. Now the sheriff was implying there might have been another explanation for that midnight exodus.

“You think whoever put this here,” she asked, touching the bag with her shoe, “is angry because my father owed him money?”

“It’s a possibility. You think of any other reason somebody would want to harass you?”

“Is that what you call this? Harassing me?”

“I figured that’s what you’d call it,” Ronnie said with a grin. “What I’d call it is a sack full of dead varmints. You want me to get rid of ‘em for you?”

Jillian hesitated, not wanting to be in Ronnie Cameron’s debt. And that sounded like something her father might have said, she realized. He never wanted to be beholden to anyone. Which made the story the sheriff had just told her even more bizarre.

“I’d really appreciate that, Ronnie. If you don’t mind,” she said. The tone of her agreement sounded grudging and ungracious, despite its surface politeness. “What about my door? You think it’s possible someone has a key to the house?”

“Anything’s possible, I suppose. You just bought the place. You have the locks changed?”

“I never even thought about it. Not out here.”