“Her baby?”
“Our baby,” Jonas said, mentally cursing himself for the slip. “It was the tragedy of my life, Kincaid, losin’ my beloved wife and my child in the blink of an eye.”
“A tremendous tragedy. So huge that you married again, a year later.”
“Well, what can I tell you, boy? I’m a man who needs a woman at his—”
Jonas gasped as Tyler’s hand shot out and curled into the collar of his shirt.
“You lying old bastard,” he snarled, as he hoisted Jonas to his toes. “That child didn’t die. You got rid of it. You threw your son away, as if he were garbage.”
“It ain’t true,” Jonas croaked. “He’s dead, I tell you. He died before he could take his first—”
“Liar! No good, goddamned liar!” Tyler flung the old man from him. God, he was so close to the edge. So close. It had felt good, having his hand around that wattled neck.
“You get out,” Jonas said. “Get out now, Kincaid, before I have your sorry ass hauled off my ranch.”
“Stop bluffing, Baron. I know the truth, and all the denials in the world won’t change it. You must have paid the doctor who attended the delivery a small fortune. Or maybe you had something hanging over his head. Whatever it was, it was enough to get him to sign the death certificate but not enough to keep him from hating himself, from drowning the memory of what he’d done in a bottle—and from telling someone about it, someone who’s willing to go into court and testify.”
“Who?” Jonas demanded, and then he bit his lip. “Not that it matters. I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”
“And then there’s the grave, up on the hill.” Tyler puffed out a breath. “The one that’s supposed to hold my—to hold your first wife, and her dead baby.” He watched Jonas’s face drain of color. “Yes,” he said quietly, “that’s right, old man. Think about that grave, and what’s really in it, and what would happen if it were dug up.”
Jonas seemed to shrink inside his skin. He reached out a hand, felt for his armchair and sank into it.
“All right.” His voice was flat. “The only body in that there grave is Juanita’s. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
Was it? Tyler swallowed dryly. Now that the moment had arrived, he wasn’t so sure. He’d been positive he knew what he wanted. Answers. The puzzle solved. The mystery of who he was, and why he’d been abandoned at birth, unraveled.
But the phone call from the investigator had changed everything.
“Kincaid?”
Tyler jerked his head up. Jonas Baron was looking at him with all the hatred in the world shining in his eyes.
“Do yourself a favor, boy. Don’t ask no more questions. Jes’ turn around, walk out that door, and the both of us’ll forget you were ever here. Okay?”
“No,” Tyler answered, even though it was hard not to do just that. “No, it’s not okay. I need one last answer.”
Jonas grinned mirthlessly. “Thought you might. All right, ask it, then.”
Tyler took a deep breath. His heart, his blood, the entire world seemed to stand still.
“I want to know,” he said quietly, “why you gave me away.”
CHAPTER NINE
TYLER regretted the question as soon as he’d asked it.
He’d come to demand the truth, not to plead for it. And, he thought angrily, that was how he’d sounded, as if he were begging for an explanation.
Hell. What did it matter, how the question sounded? He’d found what he’d come for and more, something he’d never imagined—something he couldn’t comprehend.
He’d thought of all of the plausible reasons to explain why he’d been given up at birth. He could almost see his mother as a young girl, frightened and alone, so desperate she’d seen no way out but to get rid of her baby. Even so, he’d never been able to figure out how she could have dumped him on a doorstep and never looked back.
Now he had the explanation, and it drove the knife deeper into his heart. His mother hadn’t been a desperate kid, she’d been a woman. She’d died, giving him life, and her husband—the man who’d sired him—had tossed him out as if he were trash.
Pain shot through him again and he shoved it aside and filled the yawning chasm it left with rage.
“Answer me, you son of a bitch,” he growled, and swung toward Jonas. “Why did you do it? How could you take your own flesh and blood and throw it away?”
“You weren’t thrown away,” Jonas said coldly. “I made all the necessary arrangements for your disposal.”
“For my disposal,” Tyler said, very softly. A muscle knotted in his jaw.
“I ain’t gonna play word games, Kincaid. You asked for the truth. Well, that’s what I’m tellin’ you, and if it ain’t pretty enough to suit you, that’s just too damned bad.”
Tyler balled his hands into fists and shoved them deep into his pockets. “Go on.”
Jonas walked to the sideboard, took the bottle of bourbon and poured another couple of inches of it into his glass.
“It wasn’t all that difficult. I had me a contact in Atlanta, a lawyer I’d done business with.” He tilted the glass to his lips and drank. “He wasn’t the sort the Chamber of Commerce likes to talk about but he knew how to handle my problem. He came up with a story to tell you, once you was old enough, ’bout being found on a doorstep somewhere. Got you a birth certificate and put a name on it—”
“John Smith,” Tyler said softly, his eyes locked on the old man’s face.
Jonas shrugged. “Maybe. It’s been a long time. Anyways, the lawyer did everything that needed doin’. Worked up a good story, made you legal, gave you to people who agreed to raise you, right and proper.” Jonas drank some more of the bourbon. “Wrote a fat check, to make sure they would.”
“Not fat enough,” Tyler said coldly. “It must have run out, by the time they died.”
“So I heard. I done some checkin’ of my own, since you turned up.” Jonas took a cigar from his shirt pocket, bit off the tip and spat it into an ashtray. “Anyways, you done all right for yourself, far as I can see.”
“Oh, yes,” Tyler said, with another terrible smile, “I’ve done all right for myself.”
“Well, then.” Jonas put down the glass and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “You came for answers, you got ’em. Far as I can see, that finishes our business.” He walked to the door and opened it. “It’s Sunday, boy. My one and only day of rest. I’d appreciate it if—’
Tyler slammed the door and stood in front of it, his arms folded over his chest.
“Why?”
“Why, what?”
“Don’t play games with me, you old son of a bitch!” He could feel the adrenaline pumping through his body, feel his hands trembling again with the need to put them around Jonas’s neck. “You tell me why you gave away your own flesh and blood.”
“That’s just the point, boy.” Jonas’s voice was hard and cold. “You weren’t my flesh and blood. My wife had been unfaithful. Took herself a lover, some no-good drifter come through here with slick looks and a fancy way with words.” His mouth twisted. “You were his whelp, not mine.”
“My moth…Your wife told you that?”
The old man laughed. “Hell, no. She put horns on me, but she wasn’t stupid. Juanita insisted you were mine, right to the second she went into labor. Figured if she could talk hard enough, fast enough, I’d believe her.” Jonas’s eyes narrowed to slits. “But I could count, Kincaid. She’d turned me out of her bed nine months before. The only man could have been in that bed was the drifter.”
Tyler jammed his hands into his pockets and walked across the room. It was too much to absorb, too much to accept. His mother had died giving him life, his father wasn’t this old man but a drifter…
“Who was he?” He swung around, stared at Jonas. “My father. What was his name?”
“I don’t remember. Hell, it don’t matter a damn anyways. I heard he got hisself killed, tryin’ to jump a freight tr
ain couple a months after I ran him off. You got any more questions?”
Tyler shook his head. He already had more answers than he could handle. He was the unwanted by-product of an illicit liaison between an unfaithful woman and a drifter. Knowing the story, he couldn’t even blame Jonas Baron for his actions. Sure, he could have handled things differently. He could have put the baby up for adoption through regular channels and sure, maybe his life—Tyler’s life—would have been easier…
But life was what you made of it, and he’d done the best he could, with his.
The old man’s rage was understandable. What man could survive the knowledge that his woman had lain in another man’s arms? If Caitlin ever gave herself to someone else, if she ever hungered for another man’s kisses…
“I asked you somethin’, Kincaid. You got any more questions, or are we finished?”
“We’re finished,” Tyler said, and cleared his throat.
Jonas nodded. “That we are. And if you got any damned fool ideas about Espada, you better forget them.”
“Espada?” Tyler repeated. “What ideas would I have about Espada?”
“Come on, boy. I’m old but I ain’t senile. There’s talk everywhere about this ranch, and how I ain’t got a son to leave it to.”
“I hate to disillusion you, Baron, but hard as this may be to grasp, nobody talks about Espada where I come from. And unless I’ve misunderstood every mention your stepdaughter’s made of her brothers, you have three sons to leave it to.”
“Not a one of ’em wants it.”
Tyler nodded. “Yeah, well, that’s very interesting, but—”
“Maybe you figure to have some claim on it.” Jonas eyed him narrowly. “Maybe you already knew all that stuff I just told you, about my Juanita. Maybe that’s why you really come here, ’cause you thought you could make a case that Espada ought to be yours.”
“What?”
“You heard me, boy. You lied your way onto my land and now, for all I know, you’re gonna lie and say I’m the man who fathered you.”
Tyler grabbed Jonas by the shirt. “You call me ‘boy’ and accuse me of lying again and I’ll—I’ll—” He looked at his hand, knotted into Jonas’s shirt, made a sound of disgust and let go. “Listen to me, Baron, and listen good. I came here for one reason, and it didn’t have a damned thing to do with your ranch. Why in hell would I want it? It’s nothing to me, just acres of dirt and cows.”
“Them acres of dirt and cows is worth millions.”
“You did some checking of your own, you said. Then you know I don’t need your money.”
“Money ain’t everything.”
Tyler smiled thinly. “Is that advice? Or is it wisdom gleaned from your advanced years?”
“It’s fact, Kincaid. Ain’t a man alive don’t want his birthright.”
“His birthright,” Tyler said, lifting an eyebrow.
“There are some might say I denied you that. You would have had my name, if I hadn’t caught your mama with the drifter.” Jonas tossed aside the unlit cigar. “Bet you hate me for that.”
A muscle flexed in Tyler’s jaw. “I don’t hate you. You did what you had to do, that’s all.”
“Come on, Kincaid, be honest. On account of me, you ended up livin’ with people who got paid to take you in. And when they was gone, you went into a state home.”
“There are worse things,” Tyler said coldly.
“There surely are.” Jonas smiled slyly. “Things like that there ranch where the court put you, after you got yourself in trouble.”
“If there’s a point to all this,” Tyler said, even more coldly, “get to it.”
“Oh, there’s a point, all right. Seems to me is that it had to be a mighty temptin’ idea, you comin’ here to claim you was a Baron.”
“You just finished telling me I’m not.” Tyler smiled thinly. “And the better I know you, old man, the happier that makes me.”
“My firstborn came along three years after you.”
“The lucky bastard,” Tyler said, and grinned mirthlessly.
“And I’ll tell you right now, I ain’t takin’ no fancy tests to prove you ain’t of my blood.”
“Are you crazy? Did I even suggest you take tests to prove it?”
“I’m jes’ tellin’ you, loud and clear, you get yourself some fancy lawyer to talk about genes and chro-mo-somes and such, I’ll turn my lawyers on you an’ him both, and grind you into dog meat.” Jonas jabbed a finger into Tyler’s chest. “You got that?”
Tyler caught Jonas’s arm. The muscles were ropy and as hard as steel cables, but Tyler was stronger and more powerful. He twisted the arm behind Jonas’s back until the older man grunted with the pain.
“You son of a bitch,” Tyler said softly. “You’re not sure you aren’t the man who fathered me.”
“That’s bull patties.”
“You threw out a baby like it was garbage and all the time you knew that child might have been yours.”
“No way. You couldn’t have been mine. I told you, Juanita locked me out of her room for the better part of a long, cold year…except for—”
“Except?”
Jonas jerked his arm free. “Except for the one time I broke down that door and took what was mine to take, despite the fact that you was probably already in the oven.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You ain’t mine, Kincaid. I know that, and nothing my wife said then or you say now will change it.” He strode to the door and yanked it open. “You came for the truth and I gave it to you. It isn’t my fault you can’t deal with it.”
Tyler put his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels.
“My oh my,” he said softly. “Wouldn’t that make for the start of one hell of an obituary? ‘Jonas Baron, patriarch of the Baron clan. He carved out a kingdom and gave away his firstborn son.’” He smiled slyly. “Damn, but it’s almost biblical.”
“Get out!”
“Did she know? My mother. Did she know you gave me away?”
“I told you, she died.” He shot Tyler a hate-filled look. “But she damned well knew I wasn’t gonna be fool enough to raise a child that wasn’t my own. I told her that when I first saw you was growin’ in her belly.”
Tyler nodded. He imagined a woman with features like his, carrying him beneath her heart, imagined the pain she must have felt, hearing her husband say he wanted no part of her child…
Imagined her breathing her last, even as she struggled to give him life.
He pictured his mother as he’d never been able to see her before. She had a Spanish name. That might explain the midnight-blackness of his hair, the high cheekbones. She was taking on shape and substance for him now; she was a human being, a desperate woman trapped in a marriage to a man she must have hated, forced to endure the agony of wondering what would happen to her child, when it was born.
Tyler saw all this, and it broke his heart.
His breathing quickened. His muscles tightened. He wanted to beat Jonas Baron to the ground, stand over him as he struggled to get up and hit him and hit him until he went down and couldn’t get up.
The boy he’d once been would have done it. But he was a man now. He lived by a moral code. Despite his start in life, he’d grown up to be someone the woman who’d borne him would have been proud to acknowledge as her son.
Knowing that, believing it, was all that kept his hands knotted but at his sides.
“Are you deaf, Kincaid? I want you out of here.”
It was hard, gathering himself together, but Tyler did.
“I know what you want, Baron.” He walked to the door, pausing when he reached it, his eyes locked to Jonas’s. “You want life in your little kingdom to go on, the same as it always has. You want to crack the whip and watch your subjects jump.” Tyler’s smile glittered, glittered even more brightly when he saw the flash of apprehension in Jonas’s eyes. “Well, those days are coming to an end,” he said, almost gently. “You know tho
se blood tests you mentioned? The ones to do with genes and chromosomes?” Tyler reached out, smoothed down Jonas’s shirtfront. “You’re going to take them. A whole battery of them.” His smile tilted. “And when they’re done, and I’ve proved that you and I are father and son—”
“You’ll never prove that!”
“I will,” Tyler said, and meant it. He knew his mother now; knew, deep inside his soul, that she wouldn’t have violated her marriage vows, even if she’d made them with a man like Jonas Baron. “And after I have, the next thing I’m going to do is claim my birthright—isn’t that what you called it? Claim it, as your eldest son, and do it while you’re still alive, so that I can tell you, every day of your life right up to the minute you breathe your last, that once Espada is mine I’m going to cut it into little pieces and sell every last one of them, until nothing remains of you or this place, not even a memory.”
Jonas’s face went white. “I’ll fight you.”
“Fight me.” Tyler smiled. “That’ll make the victory all the sweeter.”
“Bastard,” Jonas said.
Tyler laughed, walked out of the library and out of the house, with Jonas’s curses ringing after him.
* * *
Day gave way to dusk, and dusk to night.
Tyler stood on the deck of his house in the rolling hills outside Austin. It was dark; the moon had yet to rise and the clouds were playing hide-and-seek with the stars.
He stood with one hip leaning against the wooden railing and a chilled bottle of ale in his hand. He’d been drinking everything from scotch to rye all day and he was still stone-cold sober. The liquor hadn’t even washed the bitter taste from his mouth.
He doubted anything could.
He sighed, rolled the cold bottle across his aching forehead and told himself that he was a stupid SOB.
“It’s the truth, Kincaid,” he said aloud. “You are one really stupid son of a bitch.”
What was he doing in Texas? He had a home, he had a life, back in Georgia. The home was handsome and the life was one he’d enjoyed, until he’d let a meddling mistress and a surprise birthday party turn his existence upside down.
The Taming of Tyler Kincaid Page 13
