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 p
ostponing 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.”
“Get your hands … off me.”
Blackjack jerked his hand away when he heard the venom in Billy’s voice.
“What are you … doing here?” the boy demanded.
“I want you gone from Bitter Creek.”
“Go to hell.”
“I’ll give you enough money—”
“Put it where the … sun don’t shine.”
Blackjack’s lips flattened. He saw the insolence, the obstinance, and the determination of a dozen generations of Blackthornes in his bastard son, and admired him for it. But nobody—not even this newfound son of his—told him no.
“You’re leaving, Billy. Make up your mind to it. One way or another.”
“My mother needs me.”
Blackjack saw the concession of pride it took for the boy to make such a plea, humbling himself for the sake of his mother. And acknowledged two more Blackthorne traits in Bad Billy Coburn—duty and responsibility. And damn Dora again for letting that no-good Johnny Ray Coburn beat the crap out of her son—and, by God, his son—until Billy got big enough to stand up for himself.
“I’ll pay whatever you think she’ll need to make ends meet,” Blackjack said.
Billy was already shaking his head, and Blackjack could see it physically hurt him to do it. “I won’t be … bought off.”
Blackjack knew damn well what was keeping Bad Billy Coburn in Bitter Creek, Texas. He knew what he had to say to get the boy to leave.
“I’m your father.”
He hadn’t meant to blurt it out that way. He saw the shock in Billy’s eyes. The need for denial.
“Can’t be—” the boy rasped.
“It’s true,” Blackjack interrupted. “I didn’t find out until today. Your mother came to me, wanting to know how I could beat up my own son.”
He recognized the moment when Bad Billy Coburn realized the significance of being Jackson Blackthorne’s son. He was related to Summer Blackthorne by blood.
The guttural sound that issued from Billy’s throat was filled with such anguish, such incredible suffering, that Blackjack hurt inside. When he stepped forward to offer comfort, the boy lurched upright, grabbing at his ribs, biting his already wounded lips to hold back his cry of agony.
Blackjack was stopped in his tracks by the virulence in his son’s voice as he spat, “You’ve delivered … your message. Now … get out.”
It was clear Bad Billy Coburn didn’t want a damned thing from him. But he wanted something from his son. He wanted his silence. And he wanted him gone.
“You can see how it wouldn’t be smart for you to see my daughter anymore,” Blackjack said. “She doesn’t know who you are. And I’d like to keep it that way.”
“I’ll bet you would,” Billy muttered.
“I don’t want her hurt,” Blackjack said. “And I don’t think you want that, either.”
Billy looked at him with dull black eyes. The fight had gone out of him. “No,” he said. “I don’t.”
“Like I said, I’ll take care of your mother and sister. And I want to do something for you, if you’ll let me. I—”
“There’s nothing—”
Blackjack held up a hand. “I wasn’t going to give you something for nothing.”
“I don’t—”
“Let me finish,” Blackjack said irritably. “Then, if you don’t want what I’m offering, you can turn me down.”
Billy gave a jerky nod.
Blackjack took a deep breath and said, “I’m a past president of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. I’ve got a lot of favors owed from friends. If you want, I can set you up as a field inspector for the Association.”
“You need … a college degree to—”
Blackjack waved him into silence, but he was surprised that Billy knew the requirements for the job. “I can have that requirement waived,” Blackjack said. “At least temporarily. You’d probably have to go back nights and get a degree, if you think you could handle that.”
Billy said nothing. But he wasn’t interrupting, so Blackjack kept talking. “A field inspector enforces the law—hunts down rustlers and horse thieves, carries a gun, and has the power to arrest wrongdoers. Think you can handle that?”
Instead of responding to the question, Billy said, “You said there’s … a price … to be paid.”
“I want you working as far from Bitter Creek, Texas, as it’s possible to get. And you will make sure my daughter hates the sight of you before you leave.”
“Done.”
Blackjack wasn’t sure he’d heard right, Billy’s voice was so soft. When the boy stuck out his hand to seal the bargain, Blackjack knew he’d gotten what he wanted. He was surprised by the strength of Billy’s grasp, and by the directness of his gaze. Until he remembered how Dora had faced him down. There was good blood there, too, he realized. As he shook his son’s hand, Blackjack conceded that Bad Billy Coburn was a man to be reckoned with.
Which made him angry all over again. Not at Billy. At his wife, who’d robbed him of the chance of knowing his son. There was no way to turn back the clock. No way to recapture those lost years. And no way to go forward fr
om here. “Good luck,” Blackjack said.
“Don’t need luck,” Billy said. “Don’t need anything … from anybody.”
Blackjack left the hospital thinking how fast the twenty-five years since Billy’s birth had passed. And how, if he wasn’t careful, he could end up spending the next twenty-five years married to a woman he no longer loved, instead of sleeping at night beside a woman he’d loved for longer than the thirty-three years he’d been married.
It was time he did something to rectify the situation.
When he got home, he found Eve in the study, poring over his business papers, something she’d been doing a great deal lately. Maybe she’d known all along that he would one day make the choice he’d made in his son’s hospital room. Maybe she’d known all along that when push came to shove, he’d choose Lauren Creed over a parcel of land, even if that land had been in his family for generations.
He stood in front of the desk, his hands balled into fists at his sides, and waited for her to look up and acknowledge him.
She lifted her head, removed her reading glasses, and said, “What is it, Jackson?”
“I want out.”
“I don’t.”
“You can have it all. Take whatever you want. I’m through with you.”
She laid her reading glasses carefully on the desk and looked up at him, her blue eyes wide with alarm. “What is this all about?”
“You heard me. I’ve had it. I’m done with you.”
“What brought this on?” she asked, leaning back casually, resting her elbows on the arms of the swivel chair, and letting her hands fall into a soft knot in her lap.
“I went to the hospital and spoke with my son. The son you kept a secret from me.”
She lifted a brow. “Why would you give a damn about a saddle tramp like Bad Billy Coburn?”
“Because he wouldn’t have been a saddle tramp if I’d known about him twenty-five years ago!” Blackjack raged.
“I did what I had to do. It’s over and done.”
“The hell it is! You let me leave this house today knowing I would be shedding blood of my blood. May you rot in hell for it!”
The Texan Page 22
