Lone Star Blues

by Delores Fossen

At least what he felt for her was just physical. It would have been worse if his heart had gotten in on this. He was no longer in love with Jordan—and he had to make sure it stayed that way. He definitely didn’t want old emotion and baggage to interfere if Jordan and he had to team up against the coochie-coochie woman who’d given birth to him.

  “Remember that time we took a trip to Mexico?” Theo asked her. Apparently, he’d decided to linger around a bit after all.

  Jordan groaned loud enough that Dylan was guessing that wasn’t a pleasant event. “Theo, I don’t want to talk about rashes, bleaching or tats.”

  Yeah, definitely unpleasant, and Dylan hoped all of those things hadn’t actually happened on that one trip.

  “Neither do I,” Theo assured her. “I want you to remember that I had the right idea about hiking out to those ruins. Remember? A hurricane washed them away just a month later, and if you hadn’t seen them when you did, you would have missed the chance of a lifetime.”

  Her next huff wasn’t as loud as the first one, but it still smacked of frustration. “Just go ahead and say what you’re trying to say and quit trying to tie it to a lesson.”

  So that’s what Theo was trying to do. Dylan wondered if Theo knew that he sucked at it.

  “I’m well aware that the timing is bad for this,” Theo continued. He took the ring box from his pocket and handed it to Jordan, obviously ignoring all the mood signals she was giving him. Even Corbin could have picked up on her body language, and the language was yelling that this was the worst possible time to give her an engagement ring. “But I want you to hold on to this for a while and think about it.”

  She was shaking her head the whole time he was talking, but that didn’t stop Theo from pushing the box into her shirt pocket. Jordan looked ready to push it right back at him, maybe into his face, but Theo took off, practically running to get into his car. He didn’t drive away, though. He sat there and made a call. Maybe to the airlines to work out a return flight.

  Now that he had some semiprivacy with his mom, Dylan went with the most obvious question. Well, the most obvious other than why she had taken up baby babbling. “Why are you doing this?” Dylan came out and asked her.

  “Because I love this little snookum.” Regina just kept up the attempts to goose, patty-cake and do other things that only seemed to make Corbin hide his face even more. At this rate, the kid was going to smother himself.

  “Please stop,” Dylan warned her, but he tried to keep his tone pleasant so he wouldn’t upset Corbin. “And talk to me. Use adult words and your inside voice. Why?”

  Finally, his mother’s expression got serious, and Jordan must have known the next part of this conversation wasn’t going to involve any patty-cakes. “Corbin, would you like lunch now?”

  That got the boy’s head lifting off Dylan’s shoulder. “Pep-ronni?” Corbin asked.

  “Maybe. If there’s any leftover. If not, I’ll fix you something.” Jordan took him from Dylan, easing Corbin into her arms.

  Dylan had to hand it to Jordan. She didn’t glare at his mom as she took Corbin inside. But Dylan doubted he was able to hold back in the glare department. He didn’t like that he was going to have to say some unpleasant things to her.

  In his mind, Dylan said: Remember when Dad and you got a divorce, and you stepped up to become this wonderful mom who made sure her kids weren’t hurt from the flak of a nasty divorce?

  And his mom probably would answer: There’s no need for sarcasm. I was an emotional mess, and it wouldn’t have helped any of you had I stayed.

  Then, he would snap: An emotional mess would have been better than no mess at all, and I can’t forget that you left Lucian to finish raising us. FYI, Lucian hasn’t forgotten it, either.

  That was the past, his mom would argue.

  And then she would probably start to cry.

  Dylan silently cursed. It was impossible to argue—even mentally—with a crying woman, especially when these tears wouldn’t be fake. Words, even truthful ones, would hurt her, and as mad as he was, he couldn’t do that. Well, not unless she kept pressing about this custody and doing that annoying baby talk. So he tried a different angle.

  “You’re recovering from breast cancer.” And Dylan said that out loud.

  “I’m in remission.” But yes, even that caused her eyes to water. “I think Corbin needs all of us,” Regina went on. “I certainly need him. I lost all those years with Lawson and Eve’s daughter, because I didn’t know about her. Well, I don’t want to lose another minute with my grandson.”

  “You already have a grandson. Two of them.” His sister’s son and Lawson’s stepson.

  Regina nodded. “I could have a dozen, and I’d still want this time with Corbin. All of my grandbabies are precious to me. And I know I wasn’t the best mom, but I want to change all of that. I want to be there for Corbin.”

  “That doesn’t mean you should push for custody,” Dylan countered.

  If she heard him, she didn’t acknowledge it. She just kept on talking. “And you haven’t been the most reliable with the steady flow of women in and out of your bed. Did you know there’s a bingo game about you and that one of the squares is have sex with Dylan during a thunderstorm?”

  Well, that explained why he kept getting calls from women when there was rain in the forecast.

  He needed to gather up those cards, and he couldn’t be the one to do it since most were in the hands of women who wanted to play the game. He’d need to pay one of the hands to collect them. Or maybe he could offer a reward for anyone who turned them in. A reward that didn’t involve any kind of sexual favors.

  “I didn’t start the game,” he assured her. “Hell, I’m not even playing it, and there have been no squares filled recently.”

  Unless there was one about kissing his ex-wife in a barn. That one would have gotten a box ticked off for sure.

  “But you have to admit that you’ve been pretty liberal with your...square filling,” his mother added.

  He would eat a field of cactus before admitting that to her. That definitely wouldn’t help him with this argument he was trying to win.

  “I’m not doing this to be mean,” Regina went on. “But I’m worried that Jordan and you aren’t going to be able to do right by that boy.”

  Dylan was worried about it, too, but there’d be more cacti on the menu before he let his mom know that.

  “Adele wanted me to raise Corbin,” he reminded her. And since Jordan had already told her that, it wasn’t the first time his mom had heard it.

  Regina nodded. “She did until we had a chat. Did you know that she was drunk the night Corbin was conceived?”

  Hell, that must have been some conversation. A reminder that he was going on the wagon. And trying out celibacy for a while. Ironic since the no-sex vow had come from drinking too much.

  Because a discussion about Corbin’s conception wasn’t going to win him any arguments, either, Dylan went with a different approach. “What did you and Walter Ray say to Adele? And why did you even take the judge with you to the jail?”

  For just a second his mom’s eyes widened, so maybe she didn’t know that he was well aware of Walter Ray tailing along on the visit. The eye widening soon turned to some gaze dodging, though.

  “Walter Ray is a friend, and he’s been, well, giving me some legal advice. Believe me when I tell you that I think this is for the best,” his mom said. “For now, just sleep on what I’m about to tell you and see how you feel about it in the morning. I’m betting you’ll feel a whole lot better about it.”

  That was code for this was going to piss him off even more than he already was.

  “Jordan is probably going to fight to get custody of Corbin,” Regina announced as if that was some big surprise. It wasn’t. “And that wouldn’t be a good idea.”

  Again, not a revelation. Dylan was still w
orking with the wacky notion that a father had more say in something like this than a second cousin.

  “Walter Ray found out some things,” Regina added a moment later. “Things about Jordan.” She paused. “Jordan’s on meds, Dylan.”

  Okay, finally they were at the revelation stage. Well, sort of. “After what she went through, it’s not surprising that she’d need something to take the edge off the anxiety.”

  “It’s more than just to soothe the edge.” With all the other pausing and ho-humming she’d been doing, he hadn’t expected his mother to answer that quickly. “Walter Ray talked to some friends at the base, and even though what he heard isn’t anything official, it’s possible that Jordan’s not mentally stable. And that she never will be.”

  Dylan opened his mouth to defend Jordan but then realized he couldn’t.

  His mother looked him right in the eyes. “That’s why you and I need to work together to make sure that Adele doesn’t hand Corbin over to Jordan.”

  * * *

  JORDAN WAS BACK THERE. In the dark hole in the ground where the men had put her. She could smell the hot sand, feel the grit of it on her skin and the itchy sweat snaking its way down her back.

  She grabbed onto the sides of the hole. Trying to use anything for leverage, but she couldn’t get her footing, and that only caused the panic to rise in her even more.

  She was dreaming. Jordan knew that but couldn’t stop the images from coming. Her nerves were firing just beneath her skin, and her breathing was way too fast. She would soon hyperventilate, maybe even pass out.

  God, she wanted to pass out.

  Even if it was for a couple of moments, she didn’t want to know she was there. There, where she had no control and was at the mercy of these men.

  She was a coward.

  Despite all her training and experience, she hadn’t felt brave. Only afraid. And she was still afraid. Even though Theo and the others had pulled her out of that hole, it didn’t stop. She still didn’t have that same sense of who she’d once been...

  “Uh, could you let go of my balls?” someone gritted out.

  The words were so clear. So jarring. And they immediately snapped Jordan out of the dream. Her eyes flew open, and that’s when she realized those words weren’t part of those other images of that place. Someone had actually spoken them.

  Dylan.

  Thanks to the moonlight streaming through the window, Jordan had no trouble seeing him. He was on her bed, looming over her, and she did indeed have her hand clamped around his man parts. And he had a severely pained look on his face.

  The pained look lessened some when she let go of him.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled.

  Grunting and groaning, he rolled away from her, landing in a flop on his back next to her. “Nothing wrong with your grip,” he said, though the pained look extended to his voice.

  Jordan glanced around, trying to figure out what was happening. The dream was gone, chased away by Dylan’s voice, but the rest of this wasn’t making sense. Dylan was in her bed, and he was wearing only his boxers.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  He didn’t look at her. Dylan just lay there on his back while clutching his groin and doing battle with his sputtering breath. “You were talking really loud in your sleep, and I thought something was wrong.”

  Oh mercy. Talking? Worse, it’d been enough to wake Dylan in the other room. Jordan hoped she hadn’t said anything that she didn’t want Dylan to hear. And since she’d been dreaming about the hole, everything about it fell into the category of something she hadn’t wanted him to hear.

  “Are you okay?” she pressed. “Did I hurt you?”

  “Yes to both. Or at least I will be okay when the breath-robbing agony goes away.”

  And speaking of breath-robbing, that’s what happened when Dylan turned his head and looked at her. That’s because, despite the pain, he gave her one of his smiles. The kind of smile that usually rid her and other women of their common sense. Common sense would have turned down the burner on the simmering heat and sent him back to his own room.

  That didn’t happen.

  Jordan just stayed put. Eyes locked. And she froze when he reached up and pushed her hair from her face. Jordan tried to steel herself up for whatever he was about to do. A scalding kiss, maybe.

  Maybe sex.

  Sex that couldn’t happen despite the fact that he was in bed with her. At least they weren’t naked.

  “My balls are better,” he said, and he rolled off the bed and to his feet.

  Well, that was good, and thankfully it wasn’t one of Dylan’s sweet-talk lines to go with that common-sense-stealing smile.

  “Next time I hear you talking and thrashing around in here, I’ll wear protective gear,” he added. Then the smile faded. “My guess is that you’d dread just about anything I say right now?”

  That was true. Jordan didn’t want to talk about the hole, the dream, the thrashing around or talking in her sleep. Ditto for the condition of his balls. And she definitely didn’t want to talk about that kiss in the barn. Or the fact that he’d slept with the person she thought of as a kid sister.

  Though, one day, she did want to have it out with him about that if he ever remembered sleeping with Adele, that is.

  She nodded in answer to his question.

  He nodded as an acceptance of that.

  Good. They were on the same page. There was nothing to discuss. No reason for Dylan to stay. And that’s why Jordan was surprised at what she felt when he walked out of the room.

  Disappointment.

  Dylan made it all the way to the door before he stopped. He didn’t turn around. He kept his back to her. “The ball squeezing at least stopped me from getting a hard-on.”

  Jordan looked down at herself. No gown—she hadn’t gotten around to washing it. No bra. No panties. Hell’s Bells. She was naked.

  “Love the navel ring, though,” Dylan drawled as he strolled away.

  CHAPTER TEN

  DYLAN HAD TAKEN one part of his mom’s advice and had slept on it.

  Well, he’d tossed and turned while in bed all the while thinking about the roller-coaster ride that Adele was taking them on with her stupid demands. Walter Ray was taking them for a ride, too, by putting doubts in his mind about Jordan’s mental state.

  Seeing Jordan in her birthday suit had also caused Dylan some sleepless moments. And it had also required him to take a cold shower. If she’d grabbed his dick instead of his balls when they’d been in that bed, he might have had some tossing and turning about having sex with his ex. Something he would have regretted, afterward anyway.

  Jordan had been the first woman he’d ever seen fully naked. Of course, she’d still been a teenager then. Just sixteen. Despite that tender age, he’d set all standards by Jordan’s body, and she was still hands down the winner. That reminder definitely hadn’t helped things, and it’d gotten mixed and mulled around when he’d been trying to sort out how he was going to handle this mess with his mother and Walter Ray.

  Now that it was morning, one thing that Dylan knew for a fact was that his mother had been wrong. Not just about her custody bid but also the sleeping on it. He didn’t feel one bit better about sharing custody or the house with her or Jordan.

  He figured Jordan and he were on the same page, too. Because all these hours later, she was just as riled at Adele as he was. Too bad that neither of them could actually tell Adele that to her face, but so far the woman had turned down their requests for visits.

  At least Regina, Jordan and he had worked out a schedule so they didn’t step on each other’s toes while his mom and he would also keep an eye on Jordan. They would get Corbin in two-hour increments, and there was a no interference rule. When it was Dylan’s two hours, then Jordan/Regina couldn’t interfere. The same applied when it was t
heir time.

  During Dylan’s two-hour shifts, he had learned that being a dad was the best thing in the world. Hell, no wonder people did this. But the goal was for him to be a full-time dad. No splitting time. No one, aka Regina, looking over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t screwing things up. He might be able to reach that goal when and if Adele would see him.

  Pushing that aside for now, Dylan signed the latest invoices for the ranch and moved on to the rest of the paperwork that was on his desk in his home office. Normally, he didn’t mind doing ranching stuff, but he had a distraction today.

  Jordan and Corbin.

  It was her two hours with the boy, and they were playing in the yard in direct line of sight from his window. Well, it was direct if he moved to the side a little, which he’d done. He wasn’t sure exactly what game they were playing, but it involved tossing a ball that neither Jordan nor Corbin managed to catch, followed by chasing, then followed by falling to the ground and laughing.

  Booger was in on the playtime, but his participation was limited to sprinting around them in circles while stopping occasionally to try to piss on something. Once, it’d been Jordan’s leg, but she’d managed to get out of the way in the nick of time.

  He signed another invoice and read a supply report, but every few seconds, he glanced at the timer. His shift was coming up in only fifteen minutes, and he was going to take Corbin to the barn to show him a new horse they’d gotten in. It wasn’t one that Corbin could ride since Lucian was going to use it to help him train for the bronc riding event in the charity rodeo, but Corbin enjoyed just looking at the horses and tossing hay around. The kid could make a game out of anything.

  There was a knock at the door. A lazy-sounding tap. And a moment later, the cook, Abe Weiser came in. The man moved with as little effort as his knock so it took him a few seconds to make it to Dylan.

  “That’ll be six hundred and thirty dollars,” Abe announced, and he dropped a stack of papers on the desk.

  But these weren’t business invoices. They were the sex bingo cards.

  “There’s sixty-three of them at ten dollars apiece,” Abe reminded him.