The Baby Truth

by Stella Bagwell

  Jett must have read her thoughts because he swiftly countered with a question. “How do you know what Sassy’s mother was interested in? Were you acquainted with the woman?”

  “You might be a lawyer, Jett, but I’m not on the witness stand.” He looked straight at Sassy. “I want you to leave this area and never come back. I don’t want you around Finn or any of my family.”

  Determined not to let him intimidate her, Sassy moved closer to the old man’s desk. Jett moved right along with her. “Whether I stay in Carson City or anywhere else is not your concern, Mr. Calhoun.”

  A smug sort of sneer came over Bart’s face as he plopped down his drink and opened a drawer on the right side of the desk. When he pulled out an envelope and tossed it onto the ink blotter, Sassy and Jett exchanged a puzzled glance.

  “This will help you to see things my way.” He gestured to the envelope. “Take it, Ms. Matthews.”

  She did as he asked and for the first time in days her stomach took a sickening lurch. The check in her hands was more money than she could comprehend.

  “What is this?” she asked curtly.

  The older man belted back the last of his drink. “Just call it a thank-you for leaving Nevada and never contacting the Calhoun family again.”

  Jett leaned over the desk, and for one second Sassy feared he was going to grab the man by the throat. “What is your problem, Bart? Sassy is searching for her parents! She doesn’t want your damned money!”

  “Women like her always want money. And you keep out of this, Jett! You’re the one who enabled this gold digger to brainwash my family. As of right now, you’re fired.”

  “That suits me fine. Because as long as you’re calling the shots for this ranch, Bart, you need to have a lawyer that’s just as nasty as you are.”

  The check in her hand felt like a piece of smelly garbage, one that she couldn’t shred to pieces fast enough to suit her.

  “I’m not interested in your money, Mr. Calhoun.” She threw the particles of worthless paper onto his desk. “And you don’t scare me with your money or your threats. You’re nothing more than a sad bitter old man.”

  Jett took her by the hand. “Let’s get out of here,” he muttered.

  They started out of the study, only to have Bart fling a parting shot at their backs, “You two are going to be sorry about this.”

  Jett shut the door behind them, then quickly tugged her toward the staircase landing. “We have to find Orin. Bart has actually lost his moorings or he honestly does know your mother!”

  “Oh, God, Jett, this is incredible. Is it possible—about my mother? And that money— He must be crazy! Why would he be doing this now?”

  “Let’s not speculate.” He touched her cheek and then cupped a protective hand to her little belly. “Are you okay?”

  The tender concern in Jett’s eyes was more than enough to wipe away Bart’s insults.

  “Yes, I’m fine.” She laid her hand over his. “And Jett, later—when we’re alone—I will listen.”

  He pressed a quick kiss on her cheek. “Yes. We’ll talk it all out later, my darling. Right now, let’s find Orin.”

  They hurried down the stairs and were crossing an expanse of hallway when they met Tessa carrying a tray loaded with an insulated coffee pot.

  She paused to greet them. “Jett, Miss Matthews, how are you two doing this evening?”

  “We’re hunting Orin. Do you have any idea if he’s in the house?”

  “Surely. I’m taking his coffee to the family room right now. Follow me,” she invited with a warm smile. “I’m sure he’ll be glad to see you.”

  They followed the maid to the end of the hallway and into the same room where Sassy had first met the Calhoun family what now seemed like eons ago.

  The moment he spotted Sassy and Jett, Orin rose from his chair and walked over to meet them in the middle of the room.

  “Sassy. Jett. This is a really nice surprise.” He kissed Sassy’s cheek and gestured for them to take a seat on the couch. “Come sit and have coffee. Is there enough for the three of us in that pot, Tessa? If not, go have Greta make more. And please bring us some of those chocolate cookies. The ones with the gooey stuff inside.”

  “Yes, Mr. Calhoun. I’ll be right back with those.”

  As the maid left the room, Jett said, “We’d like to sit and visit, Orin, but something has just happened. We think—” He looked at Sassy, then back to Orin. “Well, we just came from Bart’s study. And he’s saying some weird things.”

  Orin suddenly looked very worried. “You mean you think he’s had a stroke? Was he slurring his words?”

  “No. But if he was, it would’ve been because of the bourbon he was throwing back, not a stroke.”

  “Bourbon! My God!” Orin’s confused gaze vacillated between Jett and Sassy. “What were you two doing up there anyway? The way Bart feels about Sassy—”

  “He called and demanded that we come,” Jett explained.

  “He tried to pay me off to leave,” Sassy added. “I tore up the check and we left the room.”

  Jett said, “Orin, he implied that he knows Sassy’s mother, but he wouldn’t explain. I think we need to confront him about this.”

  The concerned look on Orin’s face was suddenly replaced with outright anger. “Confront him? Hell, I’m going to choke the truth out of him!”

  Orin left the room in long strides, leaving Jett and Sassy hurrying to keep up with him. When they reached the door of Bart’s study, Orin didn’t bother knocking—he burst through it.

  Across the room, Bart was on his feet, pouring another measure of bourbon into his glass and he didn’t bother glancing around until Orin yelled.

  “Put it down, Dad! Now!”

  As Orin went over to Bart’s desk, Sassy was surprised to see the older man obey his son’s command.

  “What the hell are you two doing back here?” Bart shot at Jett and Sassy. “I told you both to beat it!”

  Ignoring him, Jett led Sassy over to a nearby couch, and as she took a seat on an end cushion she realized just how much she needed to get off her feet. Her legs were shaking, and if Jett hadn’t been sitting beside her, holding both her hands, they would have been shaking, too.

  “Forget about them.” Orin pointed to the scraps of torn check on the desktop. “I want to know what this is.”

  “That, my good son, is an attempt to save this family’s reputation—to hold it together.”

  “Don’t you mean an attempt to save yourself?” Orin countered. “Look, Dad, there’s no use in this. Jett and I found the checks you wrote nearly twenty-five years ago. The DNA test will be back any day now. After that, you won’t be able to hide.”

  Sassy was amazed to see a look of utter confusion come over the elder Calhoun.

  “What are you talking about? You think I’m trying to protect myself?” Bart asked. Then, with a snort, he gestured to the whiskey. “You’d better drink that yourself. You’re going to need it.”

  Orin glanced helplessly over his shoulder to Sassy and Jett before turning to confront his father again.

  “Look, Dad, I don’t want this to be a brawl between us. At its best, your blood pressure is high. None of us want you back in the hospital—or, God forbid, dead. But this farce of yours needs to come to an end. Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it. You’re human, you made a mistake. Let’s get beyond it. You have eyes. You can see that Sassy is a carbon copy of Darci. That she looks enough like Finn to be his twin.”

  To everyone’s surprise Bart chuckled with amazement, then pointed to the chair sitting at an angle to his desk. “You need to hear this sitting down, Orin.”

  “I’m fine where I am. Just spit it out. Or my sons and I are out of here—this ranch be damned!”

  Jerking the glasses off his nose,
Bart motioned to Sassy and Jett. “Come over here, you two. You need to hear this just as much as Orin.”

  With Jett’s hand supporting her elbow, they walked over to join Orin in front of the desk, and as the three of them stood there facing the Calhoun patriarch, the whole thing suddenly felt surreal. Was she finally going to learn the identity of her real parents?

  The question had her reaching for Jett’s hand and clinging tightly to his fingers. Without this man at her side, nothing would be the same. Her zest for life would be gone. She had to believe he truly loved her. Had to believe it with all her heart or else her hopes and dreams would be gone.

  Leaning back in the big leather desk chair, Bart studied the three of them. “Up until a few minutes ago, it never occurred to me that you all had assumed I had sired Sassy. Now that I think about it, I feel pretty flattered. ’Course, I would’ve only been about fifty-seven or -eight when she was conceived. I was still quite a hoss at that time. But I was crazy about my wife. Not one time did I ever cheat on her. Never even wanted to. Unlike someone else I know.”

  When his gaze landed accusingly on Orin, the man’s eyes flew wide with shock.

  “Why are you looking at me? I never—” He broke off, his head shaking with confusion. “Sassy can’t be my daughter! I would’ve known if I’d had a daughter somewhere!”

  Bart let out a weary sigh. “Sorry, Orin, but you need to do some hard remembering. Back to when Darci died and Claudia was going around with a vacant stare. She barely acknowledged anyone around here, including you. I could see you were hurting and lonely. I just didn’t realize how much until Marcia Stapleton contacted me.”

  Sassy watched the color drain from Orin’s face as realization washed over him.

  “You? Why did she contact you instead of me?” Orin asked in a low, strained voice.

  Bart shrugged. “I’m not exactly sure why. The way she explained it, she said you two had a very brief affair and that you ended it and wouldn’t have anything else to do with her. In a nutshell, I suppose she believed she could get more out of me. So I paid her the money she wanted, and she promised to keep in touch with me and let me know about the baby once it was born. But she didn’t keep her part of the bargain.”

  Sassy was completely stunned. Orin was her father? Finn and his brothers were her brothers, too? It was incredible!

  Unable to hold back any longer, she spoke up, “What were your intentions, Mr. Calhoun? Did you actually want to be involved with the baby? Or make sure she kept it away from the family?”

  Now that the truth had come out, Bart actually looked ashamed and suddenly she had hope. Maybe there was a thread of conscience in this hard man, after all.

  “Damn it, I’m not the heartless bastard everyone makes me out to be. As far as I was concerned, I would’ve taken you right in as soon as you were born. You were my son’s own flesh and blood. His daughter, for God’s sake. But I had to weigh the consequences. I had to consider Orin and his marriage. At that time Claudia was one step away from a breakdown. To learn that her husband had cheated on her and created a child with another woman—especially after she’d just lost her own child—well, I figured it would have been too much for her to bear. So I decided I would stay in contact with Marcia and make sure the child was well cared for until Claudia got emotionally stronger and I could have the baby brought here to the ranch.”

  “Why didn’t that happen?” Jett demanded.

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” Orin added in a dazed voice.

  Bart picked up the whiskey glass and when he took a long sip Orin didn’t try to stop him. “That’s a piece of the puzzle that I can’t figure out. Suddenly she stopped calling and I had no address to contact her. I couldn’t find out if she’d carried the child full term or if she’d aborted it. Eventually I hired a P.I. to track her down, but that didn’t work, either. And then, a few years ago, just by chance I saw her name listed in the obituaries of the Reno Gazette. She’d died at the age of forty-nine but there was no cause given. The short piece only listed the dates of her birth and death and that she’d been living in Espanola, New Mexico. From what I could gather, some acquaintance of hers there in Espanola had sent the bit of news to the paper because she’d known Marcia was originally from the area.”

  She’d heard her real mother’s name and then, before she could catch her breath from that dizzying shock, Sassy learned the woman was dead. It was more than her brain could digest.

  Orin rose from the chair and looked down at his father. “You should have told me all of this when Marcia first contacted you. It was wrong to keep it from me, Dad. And it was wrong to try and hide it now! Sassy is totally innocent in all of this and you’ve treated her like a dirty piece of garbage. That’s the part I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive you for!”

  “I didn’t want all of this ugliness exposed. That’s why I’ve been trying to send Sassy on her way.” Bart spluttered. “Look, Orin, I did this all for you. To save you from a divorce and disgrace. You’re the one who sneaked past the boundaries of your marriage vows. And I sure as hell didn’t raise you to behave that way! Maybe I did make a mess of this. But you’re the one who initially caused it!”

  Clearly torn apart by his father’s revelation, Orin thrust a hand through his hair and began to pace around the room. But after one round, he came back to stand next to Sassy and, with a look of regretful agony, reached for her hand.

  “I don’t know what to say, Sassy. My association with Marcia was so very brief and insignificant that I put it out of my mind immediately after it happened. Even when Jett and I were trying to come up with clues to your parents, I wasn’t thinking about myself. If Marcia had told me about this from the very beginning, things would’ve been different. And if Dad had told me, I would have done everything in my power to find you and bring you into my family. I hope you can believe that.”

  Squeezing Orin’s hand, she gave him a wobbly smile. “I do believe you, Orin.”

  Jett wasn’t so quick to let matters lie. He looked at Bart. “Okay, Bart. I’ll give you credit for coming clean now. But why didn’t you do this when Sassy first arrived instead of playing some sort of deceptive game with her and your own family? This happened so long ago, why go to such lengths to hide it now?”

  Bart let out a heavy sigh. “Once a deception starts it’s hard to stop it, Jett. I knew that Orin was going to be furious with me—that was something I could deal with. But I didn’t want my grandsons to see their father in a skewed light. They all worship the ground he walks on. To learn that he cheated on their mother, a mother they loved so dearly—well, I didn’t want that for them. I don’t want it now.”

  Orin slanted him a dour glance. “The truth can’t be helped, Dad. I don’t want to lower myself in my son’s eyes, but they deserve to be with their sister. And I pray to God that, in the process of getting to know her, they’ll come to forgive me. And you!”

  Unable to contain the emotions swelling her chest and throat, Sassy threw her arms around Orin, but her tears were coming so hard and fast it was impossible for her to tell him exactly what it meant to learn that he was her father.

  “Oh, Sassy, you’re my daughter. My own beautiful daughter.” Over the top of her head, Orin looked gratefully over to Jett. “Thank you, Jett. Thank you for bringing my little girl to me.”

  * * *

  Hours later, Jett and Sassy finally arrived back home, and by then she was so drained from the emotional upheaval she practically fell to the ground as Jett helped her out of the truck.

  Not taking any chances, he immediately scooped her up into his arms and started to the front entrance of the house.

  “Jett! I’m not going to faint,” she protested, albeit feebly. “I can walk.”

  “Be quiet, Sassy, and let me take care of you.”

  Once inside, he carried her straight to her bedroo
m and gently sat her on the side of the bed. By then, Sassy was grateful for his help as he pulled off her coat and gently eased her back against a propped pillow.

  With her head nestled on the soft down and her tired muscles giving way to the comfort of the mattress, she watched as he removed the suitcases and clothes she’d left at the foot of the bed when they’d rushed off to the Silver Horn.

  After he piled the lot into a nearby chair, he asked, “Where are you nightclothes?”

  She pointed to the chest of drawers. “In the top drawer. But I’ll get them later. I’m not an invalid.”

  Ignoring her, he rifled through the drawers until he found her pajamas and robe. “I’m angry at myself for not bringing you home sooner. But for a while there things were so chaotic. The guys were all so excited to learn they had a sister, I couldn’t just drag you away without giving them some time with you.”

  A weary smile curved the corners of Sassy’s lips. “It’s all like a dream, Jett. I have brothers! And they treated me like I was their real sister.”

  “You are one of them, Sassy.” Carrying the bedclothes over to her, he eased onto the edge of the mattress. “Let me help you change, and then I’ll go get you something nice and warm to drink.”

  “I thought we were going to talk,” she said as she began to unbutton her blouse.

  “We are. After I’m sure you’re comfortable and resting.”

  He helped her into her pajamas, and after she’d settled back against the pillows once again, he left the bedroom to go fetch the drink.

  While he was gone, Sassy closed her eyes and willed her whirling thoughts to slow enough to enable her to digest all the incredible things that had happened since she and Jett had raced over to the Silver Horn earlier this evening.

  She was a Calhoun! Even now that the initial shock was over, the idea still hadn’t completely sunk in for her. She’d gone from having no parents to having her own living, breathing father. She’d never had siblings and now she had five wonderful brothers. And when her baby was born it was going to have uncles and a second grandfather. Her baby was going to have the family roots it needed and deserved. The wonderful realization was still too much for her to comprehend in one short evening.