The Horseman's Son

by Delores Fossen

  Dylan wasn’t sure he could go that far, nor was he sure he had to. There was rarely just one solution to a problem, even when that problem was as massive as this one appeared to be.

  “And what if I say no to your marriage proposal?” Dylan asked.

  She took a deep breath. “Then I’ll petition the courts to return Adam to me. In my car, I have all the documentation to prove that he’s mine and that the adoption was illegal. I’ve already retained an attorney. He could file my petition as early as tomorrow morning. In nearly all the Brighton cases, the illegally adopted children have been returned to the birth parents. And in those cases where they weren’t, it’s because both birth parents were dead.”

  Dylan felt the knot in his stomach tighten. Collena had obviously given this plenty of thought, but then, according to what she had said earlier, she’d had three days to absorb it. He was still trying to come to terms with it, and for him, it was a nightmare.

  The adoption attorney he’d used had sworn to him that there were no birth parents in the picture, that they were both deceased. Well, it seemed that either the adoption attorney had been wrong or he was a criminal.

  Or maybe this was simply a case of someone on the Brighton staff lying to his attorney.

  “In other words, if I don’t jump at the chance to marry you, you’ll try to cut me out of Adam’s life,” Dylan mumbled. “This is blackmail, pure and simple. If it’s money, you’re after—”

  “I’m not after your money. In fact, I’ll sign a prenup agreement and won’t use any of your income or resources for my own expenses. What I’m after is far more important than money. I want a decent life for my child. A life that includes me. You were born and raised here. You don’t know what it’s like to be considered trash.”

  That set off some alarms. Dylan stared at her. “And you do?”

  “I do.” She glanced away for a moment. “I had the misfortune of not being born in the right family. My son has the chance I didn’t, and I don’t want that chance taken away from him.”

  Neither did he. Nor did he want to consider what his own life would be like without Adam. Some way, somehow, he would keep him.

  “I trust that you don’t need an answer right now,” Dylan said.

  “Of course not.” She stood as if prepared to go.

  Dylan heard the slight static sound then, and he groaned. Someone was listening on the intercom. He’d forgotten to turn it off earlier when he’d rushed out to find the intruder.

  “This is private conversation,” he called out. He pointed to the intercom speaker so that his guest would know why he’d said that. No one confessed to the eavesdropping, but Dylan added, “Ask Jonah to come to my office. He’ll need to escort Ms. Drake to her car.”

  Dylan turned back to face her. “I need some time to think this through.”

  She nodded. “What you mean, is you need to consult your attorney.”

  “That, too.”

  “Go ahead. Talk to your attorney. I’m sure he or she will tell you what I’ve already told you—that I have a legal right to claim the child that was stolen from me.” She glanced at the picture that he’d turned facedown on his desk. “May I see Adam?”

  Dylan didn’t even have to think about it. “No.” He wasn’t ready to share Adam with this woman.

  Heck, he might never be ready to do that.

  She stared at him, as if she might challenge his decision, but she didn’t. “When we were by the stables, you said something about a killer. Is there some kind of threat to Adam?”

  Oh, hell.

  Dylan didn’t want to go there, because this was exactly the kind of fodder she could use if she challenged him for custody. “I’m a cautious man,” he said. “Adam is safe.”

  “But you said your fiancée and sister were murdered,” she reminded him.

  “I believe they were. But they have nothing to do with Adam.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Absolutely,” he lied.

  But the only thing that was absolute was that the two people he loved the most—his sister and fiancée—had been murdered.

  Another girl, his high school girlfriend, had been viciously assaulted after Dylan had taken her to the prom. The incident had so traumatized her that she’d moved away from Greer. Dylan, too, had moved away for a while. To San Antonio, right after he graduated from college.

  For all the good it’d done.

  A woman he’d dated there had also been assaulted one night when putting her recycling bin on the curb. The police hadn’t been able to find the person responsible. Ditto for his prom date—no suspects and no arrests. And the local sheriff had ruled his sister’s and fiancée’s deaths accidental.

  But Dylan knew better.

  Those two car crashes had not been accidents. And neither had the other assaults. They were connected to him. He was the only common denominator.

  Since he was aware of that, he’d learned to take precautions, and he wouldn’t let anything bad happen to Adam—accidental or otherwise. In fact, that’s the reason he hadn’t been seriously involved with any woman since his fiancée’s death five years earlier. For whatever reason, it seemed as if someone didn’t want him to be happy in love.

  “If there’s a threat to Adam,” he heard Collena say, “then I need to know about it.”

  And Dylan decided to turn the tables on her. “You said someone tried to kill you after you gave birth.”

  She nodded. And swallowed hard.

  “Then maybe whoever it was will try to come after you again and finish what he started,” he pointed out.

  “No. The Brighton criminals were arrested. Some are dead and some are in jail.”

  Because he thought there might be doubt in the depths of her brown eyes, he pushed harder. “You’re absolutely positive that the police rounded up all of them?”

  “I’m as certain of it as you are of the fact that your sister and fiancée’s killer has nothing to do with Adam.”

  Touché. Under different circumstances, Dylan might have liked her.

  “So, why suggest marriage?” Dylan asked.

  “On paper, it’s the best solution. Adam will have two parents who love him. He’ll want for nothing. No shared custody. No one weekend with you, the other weekend with me. And if we’re married, if you legally adopted him, then there’ll be no way that anyone can cut either of us out of his life.”

  That last part sounded reasonable, but the whole picture had flaws the size of Texas. “And what about a loveless marriage? Do you really want that?”

  Collena made a soft sound of amusement. “From my experience, love is vastly overrated.”

  “You’re too young to be so skeptical,” he commented.

  “I’m a lot older than my age might imply.” She shifted her position. “Look, I’m not some starry-eyed gold digger, Mr. Greer. I don’t want a husband, a lover or someone’s shoulder to cry on. I don’t even want someone to support me or pretend that I matter to him. I just want the best possible life for my son. A life where no one is pointing fingers at him because he’s different.”

  Dylan didn’t let himself react to the emotion. To the truthful tone of that obviously painful confession. “If you wanted that, you should have stayed away from him,” he challenged.

  “I considered it.”

  And she was serious, too. Serious enough to bring tears to her eyes. It was the second time today that she’d teared up, but even with that track record, Dylan didn’t think she was a woman accustomed to showing her feelings. Those tears looked out of place.

  “You considered staying away,” he paraphrased. “Yet, you came anyway. Lucky me.”

  “I tried, but I can’t give him up.” She moistened her lips, looked away. “I lost him once, and I can’t survive if I have to go through that again.”

  Unfortunately, Dylan knew what she meant, but he pushed aside the camaraderie he felt. It was best to keep his feelings toward Collena Drake as detached as possible.

&n
bsp; He checked his watch and realized it’d been a good ten minutes since he’d asked Jonah to return. Dylan hit the intercom button on his desk so he could be heard in the kitchen.

  “Jonah?”

  “He left,” Dylan heard Ina, the cook, say. “He said he had another call.”

  Well, that was just great. Jonah wasn’t finished with this call. For all the deputy knew, Collena Drake could have been a killer. At a minimum, she’d trespassed, and Jonah should have waited around long enough to see if he was going to have to arrest her for that. Not that Dylan planned to have her thrown in jail. But Jonah didn’t know that.

  “I can see myself out,” Collena insisted. She was heading for the door before she turned back around to face him.

  She probably hadn’t realized how close they were when she turned around. Mere inches apart.

  Both of them stepped back.

  “Please think about what I’ve said,” she added.

  “Oh, I will.” In fact, he would think of little else.

  “I’ll get my car and drive back to drop off the papers that prove Adam is my son. Or I can have someone bring them to you if you’d prefer.”

  Dylan didn’t want anyone else involved in this just yet. He went to the closet and grabbed his coat and car keys. He wanted to see what kind of evidence she had so he could start looking for flaws in it. He didn’t know what he would do once he’d found them, but he wanted all the information about this situation and the woman who’d proposed marriage and then threatened to take Adam away from him.

  “I’d also like my gun back,” Collena said.

  “It’s in my pocket. You’ll get it back when you’re off my property.”

  Figuring that he needed to go on the offensive, Dylan picked up his phone and pressed in some numbers. “Sorry to bother you on Thanksgiving,” he said to the man who answered. “But it’s an emergency. Call me the second you have any information on Collena Drake. And I have a DNA test kit that I need you to pick up ASAP and take to a lab.”

  “Your lawyer?” Collena asked when he hung up the phone.

  “A P.I. I want as much information about you as you think you have about me.”

  And he would get it.

  He needed all the ammunition possible to stop this woman who’d intruded into his life.

  They went back outside, and Dylan could have sworn the temperature had dropped even more. The snowflakes had picked up, as well. They weren’t steadily falling, yet, but it would happen soon. Despite everything that was going on, he couldn’t help but think of how Adam would react to building a snowman.

  “You’re smiling,” Collena mumbled.

  He put on the stoniest face he could manage. It was easy to do. He was riled at this woman who’d come in unannounced and threatened to tear his life apart.

  Dylan motioned toward his truck and unlocked the doors. “I can walk,” Collena assured him.

  “I don’t doubt that, but this will be warmer.”

  But not faster. She could actually walk across the pasture quicker than taking the roads around the ranch to get to her car, but Dylan wasn’t sure how steady she was on her feet. She’d eaten a few bites in his office, but she was still pale and seemed unsteady.

  And it irritated him that he was even remotely concerned about that.

  This woman could cost him everything.

  He wanted to hate her.

  What he didn’t want was to believe that she was telling the truth. Because if she was, if someone had truly stolen her baby and left her for dead, then she’d been through hell, something that Dylan totally understood.

  “I suppose Adam can walk?” she asked.

  He groaned. He didn’t want to talk about Adam, not to her, but it’d be petty to withhold such simple information. Still, he considered it before he finally mumbled, “Yes.”

  “And he can talk?”

  He bit back another groan. “He can say a few things.”

  Collena nodded. “Thank you. I know that wasn’t easy.” She watched as he drove out of the wrought iron gates that fronted the ranch. “I came today, hoping I’d get a glimpse of him through one of the windows. I really hadn’t planned on intruding on your Thanksgiving day.”

  What could he say to that? That she’d gone about it the wrong way? Well, they both knew there was no right way to do this. If she’d come to his door with this bombshell on any day, holiday or not, he wouldn’t have let her in.

  He made the turn on the dirt and gravel road that snaked against the fenced portion of his property. The snow had already dusted the surface, making it hard for him to see where the road ended and deep ditches began.

  Because the silence was thick and uncomfortable, Dylan decided to push her for more information. “Tell me about the father of your child,” he said.

  Collena took black leather gloves from her pocket and put them back on. She also took a deep breath. “Sean Reese was a lawyer. We’d been engaged nearly a year when I got pregnant.”

  A year. That wasn’t a casual relationship. “You planned a family?”

  She shook her head. “No. I was on the pill, hadn’t missed taking any, so the pregnancy wasn’t planned. When I came home from work the day after I told him, he was gone. He’d moved out and left me a typed letter saying he didn’t want to be a father and that he was breaking up with me.” She paused. “That’s the kind of man he was.”

  “And he’s really dead?” Dylan managed to ask through his suddenly tight jaw. Because he didn’t want a guy like that in Adam’s life.

  “Yes. About six months after he moved out, one of his drug-dealing clients murdered him when he received a guilty verdict that obviously didn’t please him.”

  Dylan hated to feel relieved, but he was. It was bad enough having one birth parent in the picture. If Collena was indeed a real birth parent. It was hard to doubt it though, especially when he looked at her mouth.

  That was Adam’s mouth.

  Heart shaped. And capable of expressing a huge range of emotions.

  So, if Collena Drake was truly Adam’s birth mother, then the question was—what was he going to do about it?

  He didn’t get a chance to come up with any possibilities because Collena spoke before he had time to think.

  “There’s something else you should know about Sean Reese,” Collena said. Her voice was practically a whisper now, and she looked down at her gloved hands. “I hadn’t planned on telling you this soon, but you’ll probably find out when you press your P.I. for a deeper background check on me.”

  Which he would do, especially after an opening like that. “There really is someone from Brighton after you?” he asked.

  “No. Not Brighton. The problem is Sean’s father, Curtis Reese. He’s been looking for Adam, too.”

  Well, that sounded ominous, and Dylan didn’t like where this conversation was going.

  “Curtis Reese is very wealthy,” Collena continued. “And Sean was his only child. He loved him, and he was obsessive about it. Once he learned that I was pregnant with Sean’s child, he became consumed with his unborn grandchild, as well.”

  Dylan quickly came to a conclusion, but he hoped he was wrong. “Are you saying that this Curtis Reese will try to get custody of Adam?”

  “He’ll try,” Collena confirmed. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but since the adoption was illegal, you don’t stand much of a chance of keeping Adam.”

  His jaw tightened even more. “That’s debatable.”

  “It’s true. There are things in my past that Curtis Reese will try to use to challenge my own custody. Nothing criminal,” she quickly added.

  Dylan would have questioned exactly what those things were if he hadn’t seen the smoke ahead. Collena obviously saw it, too; she pointed in that direction.

  “That’s where I left my car,” she said.

  With the snow and the wind, it wasn’t a day to burn brush. Besides, he’d given all the hands the day off. Dylan took the last turn, dreading what he would see.r />
  There, off to the side of the narrow dirt road sat a dark blue compact car, engulfed in flames.

  Chapter Four

  Collena saw the fire and smoke.

  She felt the instant slam of adrenaline, and she reached for her gun, which wasn’t there. Because Dylan still had it in his pocket.

  Dylan reacted, too. He caught on to her shoulder and shoved her down onto the leather seat. Hard. Then, he drew his own weapon, threw his truck into Reverse and sped backward to put some distance between them and her burning vehicle.

  It was a good decision. With the flames already eating through the interior, the car could explode.

  “Do you see anyone?” she asked, trying to get up. But he merely used his muscled body to keep her in place. Protecting her.

  More than likely, it was an automatic response, something he would do for anyone who happened to be in danger. And there was no doubt in Collena’s mind that this was a dangerous situation.

  Someone had set fire to her car.

  And that someone could still be around to do even more damage to them.

  “No, I don’t,” Dylan relayed to her. He pulled his phone and her gun from his pocket and handed both items to her. “Call nine-one-one and ask for the fire department.”

  Surprised, she blinked. “Not the sheriff?”

  “Dispatch would only send Jonah back out.”

  Collena understood. The bitter and perhaps incompetent deputy obviously had some kind of personal grudge against Dylan. Besides, this was a fire, and the fire department would be able to tell whether it was from natural causes or arson.

  She had a bad feeling it was the latter.

  Collena made the call, and the emergency dispatcher told her that she would send a fire-response team right away.

  And then she lay there on the seat, waiting for Dylan to make a decision about what to do. Unfortunately, he was practically lying on top of her. For reasons Collena didn’t want to explore, she didn’t want to be this close to Dylan. She could feel parts of his body that she shouldn’t be feeling.