Ransom My Heart

by Gayle Wilson

  “Because of Mac,” she agreed. “Because of Rio, maybe. But how did you think Samantha was going to react?”

  “Damn it, I didn’t know she was pregnant.”

  “If you had known, you’d have called her?”

  “Of course,” he said. “What the hell do you think I am, Jenny?”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment, but he saw the depth of the breath she took, and then her eyes lifted to his, and he was surprised to see anger there.

  “What do I think you are, Chase McCullar? How about stupid? Is that simple enough language for you? Simple enough for even you to understand?” She pushed her own chair away from the table and went back to the sink, turning her back on him.

  He had had it all fixed in his mind. He was the injured party. They had hidden his daughter’s existence from him because they thought he wasn’t good enough to be her father. But instead of being on his side, Jenny was raking him over the coals.

  “If I had known—” he began again.

  “Oh, I don’t doubt that you’d have shown up if you’d known about the baby. I know you well enough not to have any question about that. Everybody, Samantha included, knows about that famous McCullar sense of responsibility. Always doing your damn duty. You all just have to do what’s right, no matter the cost” There was bitterness in that and sarcasm, and it wasn’t like Jenny to be sarcastic.

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Chase asked finally feeling his own temper beginning to flare.

  “It means that when a woman goes to bed with a man she doesn’t want the next time he shows up to be becaus he felt obligated to,” Jenny said.

  Finally she turned around to face him, and the anger he could hear in her voice was in her face, as well. “Just plai stupid,” she said again. She threw the dishcloth she’ picked up back on the countertop.

  “She told me she was protected.”

  “So if there’s no possibility of a baby, you just don’ see her again,” Jenny jeered. “What’s that called, Chase’ One-night stand, maybe?” she suggested.

  “That’s not what I meant. You know what was going on. You, of all people, know what was going on then.”

  “That’s no excuse. Not for what you did.”

  “What I did was take care of the things that had to b taken care of. I did what I had to do.”

  “And later?”

  “You’re the one who told me she was married. You made a point of telling me.”

  “Not until months after that night. Months after Mac’ death,” she challenged. “What about all that time in be tween? No phone call? No nothing? How do you explain that, Chase?”

  “Damn it, Jenny, you know what I was doing. You, o all people—” He stopped the words, the accusation they contained. If Jenny couldn’t understand, if he couldn’ make Jenny understand what it had been like for him then…

  “It must get awfully crowded in there,” she said int the silence.

  “Crowded?” he repeated. He couldn’t make any sense of that, not in the context of what they’d been discussing.

  “Down in that grave with Mac,” she said. “There mus be barely enough room for the two of you, big as you are Or maybe you’ve been there so long you just don’t notice the lack of room anymore.”

  “Jenny.” He whispered her name, too shocked and hurt to voice the aching protest. It wasn’t fair. She didn’t understand. Of all people…

  “And the saddest thing is that Mac wouldn’t want you there, Chase. You know that. Not you and not me. Mac wouldn’t want it. Not any of it. He wouldn’t have wanted you going after Rio. Or whatever happened between you and Samantha. He wouldn’t have wanted you to lose Mandy. Not because of him. You can’t use Mac as an excuse. It’s not fair to the man he was.”

  Fair, he thought, despairing. Did she really still believe life was supposed to be fair? When had any of it been fair? Not what had happened to Mac. Not what the Kincaids had done.

  “At least take responsibility for what you did. And for what you just plain failed to do,” she finished and walked out the back door, letting the screen slam behind her.

  Responsibility. That hurt, too, because that was exactly what he had thought he was doing five years ago. Taking responsibility, a responsibility he truly had never wanted.

  Chase left through the front door, slamming it behind him. He got into Sam’s truck and slammed its door, too. He stuck the key in the ignition and then found that he couldn’t turn it, couldn’t make his trembling fingers obey the command of his brain.

  “It must get awfully crowded in there,” Jenny had said. In the grave with Mac. He supposed there might be some truth in the accusation, except…

  “Damn it, Jenny,” he said aloud. “Damn it to hell.” He put his good arm across the steering wheel and laid his forehead against it He could feel the tears threatening again, and disgusted, he fought them. Who the hell did he think he was crying for? For Mac or Jenny or for himself? Or maybe for all three of them.

  “Chase?” Jenny called.

  He looked up and saw that she was standing on the porch, watching him. Compassion had replaced the anger that had been in her dark eyes. Seeing that released him. His fingers turned the key, even as he heard the endless echo of the explosion, saw again in his mind’s eye the fireball reaching into the cold December night.

  The engine roared to life as Jenny stepped off the porch. He threw the truck into reverse and pushed the gas pedal to the floor. The pickup skewed sideways as he spun the wheel, and then he accelerated, tires squealing and dust flying. Driving like a teenager, he thought in disgust. Only, when he was a teenager, he would never have pulled a stunt like that His daddy wouldn’t have put up with it.

  By the time he’d calmed down enough to slow the truck to a reasonable speed, he was almost to the other McCullar house, almost to his place. Hurt dog, he thought again as the small house appeared out of the shimmer of lateafternoon heat. Coming home again, tail between his legs. Only, this wasn’t home anymore. What had once been his, created by his own hands, now belonged to someone else.

  The place looked almost deserted. It wasn’t that things were neglected, but it seemed to be more than just hotafternoon stillness, too. He stopped the truck under the old cottonwood tree in the yard and sat for a moment, looking it all over, letting the memories drift through his head, no longer trying to fight them.

  There didn’t seem to be anyone here that he might bother by taking a last look around, so he opened the door and crawled out, awkward because he was operating onehanded. Someone had hung a rope swing from the lowest branch of the cottonwood. He pulled back one side of the swing and then released it, watching the wooden seat sway crookedly back and forth over the bare patch of dirt beneath it. Finally he raised his eyes to the house.

  There was a calico cat sitting on the porch railing, yellow eyes watching as he walked up to the steps. She was wary of him, but she didn’t give ground. This was her place, her eyes seemed to say. She had the right to be here and he didn’t. Right of ownership, he thought, stopping at the bottom of the two low wooden steps.

  There was nowhere he could go, he realized, and be welcomed. Not back to Jenny’s, not after what had been said, and not here. It seemed there was nothing left of what had once been home.

  The screen door eased open.

  “Hi,” Mandy said softly. “I’m not supposed to come outside, but when I saw it was you…” She paused, seeming to be uncertain about exactly what she thought about his unexpected arrival.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked. He found a smile for her from somewhere in the rubble Jenny had left of his soul. Her answering grin was quick, wide, and spontaneous, and he realized with a jolt around the region of his heart that she was glad to see him.

  “Did you hurt your arm?” she asked, and then she pulled those big blue eyes away from their fascination with the harness Doc had fashioned and back to his face.

  “A little bit,” he said.

  “Mam
a’s asleep. I’m supposed to be, but I heard the truck.”

  “So you came out to investigate?” he suggested, squatting down until he was at eye level with her. “Mama’s asleep.” Inside? he wondered. What the hell was Samantha Kincaid doing asleep inside his house? Only…it wasn’t his house, he reminded himself. He had sold it almost five years ago and now somebody else owned what had once been his. Somebody…

  His eyes left his daughter’s and made a quick inventory. Paddocks and stables. Horses. Kincaid. The natural progression of those words battered at his brain until he was forced to acknowledge what they all meant. “Stupid,” Jenny had said. He guessed she was right.

  Chapter Eleven

  “You live here?” he asked, his gaze focusing again on the little girl. The tone of the question was too sharp, but he realized that only when he saw the shock in her face. One small bare foot twisted inward and then settled over the arch of the other. Both feet were a little dirty, Chase noticed. Playing-out-in-the-yard dirty. Just like his and Mac’s used to be. Except there was a touch of pink polish on each of the tiny toenails. Little-girl toes.

  “Yes, sir,” she said softly, nervous now, maybe because his tone had seemed to imply that she had done something wrong.

  “I used to live here,” he said, working at making his voice calm and reassuring. “A long time ago.”

  She moved then, easing the screen door closed and walking across the porch on those small bare feet. She was wearing pink shorts and a sleeveless, flowered knit top. Her hair had been collected again into two ponytails, the soft blond curls almost touching her shoulders.

  “Did you have a cat when you lived here?” she asked. She glanced at the calico, who was still watching warily from the railing.

  “Never did. I always wanted one, but I guess I just couldn’t find the right cat.”

  She nodded.

  “Your mama bought you a toy cat in Mexico, but…”

  Somehow we lost it, he thought. They didn’t seem to be any good at holding on to things, him and Samantha. Not even the important ones.

  “I know a song about a cat,” she said into the painful silence.

  “Yeah,” Chase said, smiling at her again. “I know you do.”

  “I sang it too much, didn’t I? Just about wore you out, listening to it.”

  “You didn’t sing it too much,” Chase denied.

  “Just a lot,” she suggested solemnly.

  “A lot,” he agreed, losing the battle not to smile. He watched her answering grin with the same squeeze of his heart he’d felt before.

  “Mandy?” Samantha’s voice drifted out through the screen door. Not anxious. Just a mother. Just trying to locate her child.

  “I’m out on the porch,” Mandy called.

  Chase stood, knowing he wasn’t ready for this. He wanted a chance to make it right, but he hadn’t come up with any words he thought could explain what he’d done. And instead of trying, he’d spent the last forty-eight hours feeling sorry for himself because Sam Kincaid hadn’t thought he was good enough to be his son-in-law. Except that shouldn’t have been exactly a startling revelation for him, and what had been between him and Samantha had never had a whole lot to do with what Sam thought.

  He could see her now, standing there behind the screen, looking out at the two of them. He couldn’t tell anything about what she was thinking because it was too dark in the house. She stood there for what seemed like an eternity before she pushed the screen door open.

  “Chase?” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I used to live here,” he said softly. “Remember?”

  She nodded, emerald eyes suddenly washed with moisture, and then she looked down at her daughter. Their daughter, who had been conceived one cold December night in this small house.

  “Why don’t you go swing, Mandy, so Mama and Mr. McCullar can talk?” she suggested.

  “Okay,” the little girl agreed. She smiled at Chase as she went down the steps and by him. The cat leaped down from the railing, rubbed between Samantha’s ankles and then, stepping almost daintily, followed the child down the wooden steps.

  Chase waited until they were both at the cottonwood before he spoke. “You’re living here now?” he asked.

  There was a small flood of color into her cheeks and her mouth moved, her full bottom lip caught briefly by her teeth.

  “Yes,” she said finally.

  “Why?”

  “Because…this is McCullar land. I thought Mandy should have it.”

  He shook his head, slowly, fighting the emotional force of that. “Because she’s mine?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “I wish I had known,” he said.

  There was no recrimination in the words. Jenny was right. What he had done had been stupid—maybe a lot of other things as well, but primarily stupid. Because he had finally realized that he had given Samantha no reason to think he would want to know about any results from that night. Stupid.

  He lowered his eyes, trying to hide the impact of what she’d told him, the impact of what she had done to preserve Mandy’s McCullar heritage. He noticed that Samantha’s toenails had been painted with the same cotton-candy pink as her daughter’s. Her feet were just as bare, but they were clean and slender and somehow elegant, even standing on the weathered boards of the narrow porch he had built.

  “I wish you had, too,” she said. Surprised, he looked up into her eyes. “I wish…I’ve always wished Mandy could have known her daddy.”

  Their eyes held for a long time. The words he had wanted to say didn’t seem important anymore. In spite of what had happened to Mac, there was no excuse for what he’d done. No rationale. No explanation he could give. Jenny was right about it all. At least about almost all of it. And the rest…He couldn’t do anything about the rest.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I thought…” He took a breath before he continued. “At the time I thought I was doing what was right.”

  “I guess that’s what we all do. Just…what we think is right. Only…what I did was wrong. I know that now.”

  She wasn’t blaming him, he realized, and a little of the guilt for throwing the precious years away eased in the hard tightness of his chest.

  “Your father probably had something to do with it. I never was his ideal candidate for a son-in-law.”

  “It wasn’t Sam’s fault,” she said. “He even told me it wasn’t right to keep…the baby from you. He said you’d want to know. Any man would, he said, but…especially a man like you.”

  He wasn’t sure exactly what Sam had meant by that, but he had sense enough to recognize, surprisingly, that whatever it was, it wasn’t derogatory. That was evident from both the words and from her tone when she had said them.

  “But he found you somebody else to marry,” he reminded her, remembering again her father’s role in all this. What Sam had said and what he had done seemed to be at odds with each other.

  She hesitated, and he waited through a couple of thudding heartbeats.

  “There wasn’t anybody else,” she admitted. “My…marriage was fake. A lie. I went along because it was important to him. Sam was trying to save face with the whole state of Texas, I guess. At the time, I really didn’t care what he did. If he wanted me to say I was married, so all those people, all his friends, wouldn’t know Sam Kincaid’s daughter had been…sleeping around, I didn’t see any reason not to make him happy. It didn’t matter to me what he told them.”

  Chase climbed the low steps and grabbed her arm, gripping the soft flesh above her elbow. He was so angry that he even shook her a little. “What the hell does that mean—sleeping around. You weren’t sleeping around.”

  The words got louder with each repetition. They made him sick. She was his—had been his. Only his and he knew it. He wanted to kill whoever had said that.

  “But that’s what his friends would think,” she said. “Sam’s seventy-four years old, and illegitimacy still carries a certain…stigma fo
r his generation.”

  “It carries a certain stigma for me, too,” he said bitterly. “Especially when it’s my little girl—”

  He stopped the words, but he couldn’t prevent his eyes from moving to the child who was sitting in the swing. He could hear her singing, bare toes pushing against the dust under the seat of the swing. His gaze swung back to Samantha’s.

  “Why, damn it? Why didn’t you just tell me?”

  “You weren’t ever here, for one thing. You were in San Antonio, making sure Rio got put into prison. You’d put the ranch up for sale. You just…weren’t here.”

  “Jenny could have reached me.”

  “It wasn’t a matter of reaching you, Chase. I thought you didn’t want to be reached.”

  He released her and turned around, leaning against the post, thinking about what Jenny had said. “I never realized, not until Jenny told me…”

  “What did Jenny tell you?” Samantha asked from behind him when he hesitated. Admitting what Jenny had said was almost too painful.

  “That I’d tried to crawl into the grave with Mac,” he confessed finally.

  “I always knew what you must have felt like when Mac died,” she said. “I even understood about Rio. I guess I was just too young and scared and…I didn’t want Sam telling me what to do anymore. If he’d told me to stay away from you and not to ever let you find out about Mandy, I’d probably have run all the way to San Antonio to tell you.”

  “But that’s not what he said?”

  “‘Any man deserves to know about his child,’ he told me, ‘but especially a man like Chase McCullar.’”

  There didn’t seem to be much more to say. Not everything had been said that would one day have to be said, but enough. It was a beginning.

  “Watch me swing, Mr. McCullar!” Mandy called. She leaned back in the swing and pointed her toes toward the clear, blue desert sky. Small brown arms pulled at the ropes, sending the swing in a higher arch over the bare dirt beneath. “Watch me!” she prompted again.