by Pam Crooks
“Ma-ma-ma,” Nicky blabbered, and flapped his arms, as if happy that someone else was awake with him.
Jeb put a finger to his lips.
“Shh. Your mama needs to sleep,” he whispered.
“Ma-ma-ma.”
Evidently babies didn’t know what shh meant. He eased away from Elena. He couldn’t think of a thing he could do to keep Nicky quiet, but he had to do something. Maybe he should just take him out of Elena’s range of hearing. He leaned over, swept the child off the bed and settled him on his hip.
One whiff of something downright foul brought him off again.
Jeb held Nicky straight-armed out from him. Whew. The boy had filled his pants but good.
Jeb looked at Elena. She hadn’t moved an inch, and he heaved a resigned breath. He didn’t want to wake her—she needed the rest. He’d have to change the diaper himself.
He put Nicky back on his hip, found a clean diaper in the valise, a washcloth and, on second thought, a banana from a bowl on Simon’s table. He headed to the door. Another thought struck him, and he headed back to find a spare blanket, then stuffed it under his free arm. Couldn’t lay the boy in the dirt, could he?
He managed to get the door open with his elbow and shut it again with his hip. The sun shone down bright, already warm. He chose a shady spot on the side of the adobe structure where Nicky could blabber all he wanted without waking Elena.
Working one-handed, Jeb spread the blanket out on the grass and settled the little boy on his back on top of it. He hunkered on his heels and thought of what he was going to have to do next. Nicky watched him with another of his silly grins.
“Think this is funny, do you?” Jeb scowled.
Exuberant, Nicky kicked his legs. Jeb clamped a hand down on both of them. He didn’t want the damage all that wiggling would do to the stuff inside his pants.
Best get started. Nicky was trying to wiggle again. Jeb pulled and tugged at the rubber-coated drawers before he discovered the drawstring that kept them snug to Nicky’s waist. Once untied, the drawers pulled down easily, and Jeb muttered a word of thanks for the wisdom of the one who had invented the things, keeping a baby dry on the outside when he was soaked through on the inside.
And Nicky’s diaper was sure soaked through. The odor was stronger, too, once the drawers were off. Jeb had smelled plenty of horse manure in his day to tolerate a baby’s droppings well enough, but the idea of cleaning it off a naked butt was far less appealing.
He managed it, however, by working fast and not thinking about what he was doing. Until he realized he had forgotten to moisten the washcloth he brought.
Simon had a water pump just a dozen yards away. Jeb would have to leave Nicky long enough to use it. “Stay right here, buddy. Y’hear me? I’ll only be a minute.”
Placid and agreeable, Nicky watched him with those big, black eyes of his. Jeb had no idea if the little boy understood a thing he said, but he wasn’t moving much, so Jeb figured it was safe enough to leave him.
He strode to the pump, wet down the cloth and wrung out the excess. He glanced over his shoulder and found Nicky toddling away, as bare-assed as the day he was born.
Jeb swore and took off after him. Nicky paused, saw him coming, squealed and toddled faster. Jeb scooped him up and tossed him over his shoulder.
The kid was damned quick. Thank God, he’d gotten to him in time. How would he have explained to Elena he’d lost her son?
Jeb couldn’t turn his back on him. Ever. He returned to the blanket, finished cleaning him up and swathed him in a dry diaper the same way Elena had done. Afterward, Jeb sat back, relieved and pleased with himself for getting the job done.
Elena did this every day, and he had stoutly developed a new appreciation for mothers everywhere.
Including his own. Had he been as rambunctious as Nicky when he was this age? Jeb had no idea. His mother had been gone so long he’d probably never know.
He squelched all thought of her, as he always did when she popped into his mind. Sometimes he forgot he’d ever been born of one. But Nicky was lucky. He had a mother who loved him more than anything.
Nicky spied the banana Jeb had left on the corner of the blanket. He crawled over for it, but Jeb grabbed it first. He didn’t want the little boy biting right into the peel.
“You hungry, buddy?” he asked, though that part wasn’t too hard to figure out. They’d all slept later than usual this morning. It was past time for breakfast for both of them. “Guess we can share this. You like bananas?”
Nicky crawled into Jeb’s lap and made himself right at home. He watched him pull back the yellow peel, strip by strip, with his mouth open and ready for a bite.
“Guess you do,” Jeb muttered. “Me, too. Always been one of my favorites. Here you go.”
Nicky leaned forward and met the banana coming at him. He gnawed off a small piece.
“Hard to chew when you don’t have but a few teeth, isn’t it, buddy?”
But he was managing well enough. Gumming the fruit to death. The boy had an appetite, for sure. In a few years, he’d be eating Elena out of house and home.
A few years. Nicky would be a fine-looking boy then, just as he was now. He’d grow into a strong man, and she’d be proud of him.
Elena’s life would be a hell of a lot different than it was now, Jeb mused. She might even have a husband to help her with Nicky. Another child or two to raise with him.
A husband.
The notion gave Jeb pause. She’d be settled into a comfortable life with another man. He’d have her all to himself, night after night. Elena’s kisses, his for the taking, whenever he wanted them.
One kiss. Or a whole night’s worth. In bed. Or out.
Jeb didn’t like the way all this was making him feel. When before had he thought of the future? Or one with a woman in it?
He gave Nicky another bite of banana and thought of how he’d always lived for the moment. Creed and him, taking it hour by hour. Day by day. Answering to no one but themselves. He’d always liked it that way. A woman had never fit into his way of living.
Damned if Elena hadn’t begun to change his thinking.
Elena watched Jeb feeding Nicky. The sight startled her. Warmed her, too, with a curious kind of pleasure.
How strange to see him taking care of her son. Who would have thought a man like Jeb Carson was even capable of it? Yet there he was, sitting cross-legged on the blanket with Nicky sideways in his lap, feeding him with a low-voiced gentleness that tugged at her heart strings.
He grinned at something Nicky did, and his teeth gleamed white against the dark stubble on his cheeks. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and he’d finger-combed his long hair back from his forehead. He wore no shirt, either, and her gaze lingered over the muscles rippling across his shoulders and back.
She was struck by the similarities of the pair. Dark headed, dark skinned, and as dark eyed as her son, Jeb could pass as Nicky’s father.
If only he were, Elena mused sadly. Her life would be so very different. She wouldn’t be standing here in Simon’s home in the wilds of Mexico, on the run from a band of dangerous revolutionaries, that’s for sure.
They’d be a normal family—just the three of them.
Well, Jeb Carson had no time for her and Nicky, not with the life he led, traveling the world for the United States government. And he had no desire to be a father, either. If he did, he’d have been one long before now. What woman wouldn’t want him to sire her children?
Elena gave herself a mental shake. She couldn’t be thinking these thoughts. They were foolish. A waste of time, and she’d dallied watching him long enough.
She went outside, still wearing her nightgown. Jeb glanced up at her approach, and his smoldering gaze drifted over her. As if he liked what he saw.
“Mornin’,” he murmured, the word so sultry from his throat that Elena’s step faltered. Lord, the man had only to speak to her and her bones turned soft.
“Morning to you, too,”
she said. “You’re taking good care of my son, I see.”
Nicky, hearing her voice, twisted in Jeb’s lap to peer up at her. He grinned, banana on his chin. “Ma-ma-ma.”
“Hello, sweetheart,” she cooed, and tousled his curls. “I hope you’re being a good boy for Jeb.”
“He is.” Jeb extended his hand to help her sit, his fingers warm and strong over hers. “We didn’t want to wake you.”
“You’re very thoughtful.” She eased downward to sit cross-legged on the blanket, too.
“How’s the injury?”
“Much better, thank you.” If not for the bandage around her waist, she would’ve forgotten the wound was even there.
“The elixir again?” he asked.
“Of course.” She searched his face for a sign of his usual mockery regarding Doc Charlie’s Miraculous Herbal Compound.
Oddly enough, she found none.
Nicky spied the rice waffle Elena had brought for him, along with his stuffed horse, and he crawled from Jeb’s lap onto hers. Elena broke off a piece that he could hold, and he chewed contentedly, watching Jeb finish off the banana.
“He likes you,” Elena said.
“Just getting used to me is all.” He set the yellow peeling aside.
“He’s not often been around men, besides Pop and the performers in our show.”
“Mexican revolutionaries excepted?” Jeb asked wryly.
“Yes.” She shuddered at the thought of Nicky being with them. “But it was Doña Pia who cared for him in the end.” Elena cocked her head. “Nicky took to you right away.”
“Think so?”
“He feels safe with you. Babies are more perceptive than you think.”
Jeb grunted and shifted to his back, using Elena’s knee to pillow his head. “Are they?”
“Yes.”
She wanted to tell him he’d find out as much someday when he had a child of his own. But she didn’t. She already knew Jeb had no room in his life for children.
“Did you have brothers or sisters?” she asked instead.
“No. I was an only child.”
“Cousins?”
“I suppose I do. Somewhere. Back East, I think.”
“You don’t keep in touch with them?”
At the surprise in her tone, he glanced at her. “We moved around quite a bit when I was a kid. My father was gone most of the time, and—” He halted. Frowned. “You might as well know he’s a general in the United States Army.”
“A general?” Her jaw dropped. “He must be very good at what he does.”
“He’s a hard-hearted bas—” His glance swung to Nicky. “He’s a hard man.”
A general in the Army. Elena took a minute to digest the information. A man of his station would be powerful. Highly respected. Intelligent and well trained. Important. Yet Jeb seemed filled with resentment when he should have been proud of all his father had accomplished.
“You’re wondering how I could be the son of such a distinguished military officer, aren’t you?” Jeb asked mockingly.
“I’m thinking you two are very different.”
“We’re different, all right.”
His childhood had shaped him to be the man he was today. How much of an influence had his father been? And was that influence a positive one?
Elena suspected it wasn’t. She suspected, too, that Jeb kept his feelings regarding his relationship with the man bottled up tight inside him.
Pop always claimed talking was like pouring oil on troubled waters.
“I’d like to hear more about him,” she said softly. “That is, if you’d like me to.”
For a long time, Jeb didn’t speak. It wasn’t too difficult to discern he didn’t talk about his father much. If at all.
She shouldn’t have asked him to now. She suspected she had ventured into waters too turbulent to calm.
“His name is William Carson,” Jeb said. “If he ever loved my mother, I’m not sure she knew it. If she did, she didn’t believe it much because I don’t remember ever seeing her smile.”
Sympathy swelled inside her at the woman’s unhappiness. “How hard for both of you.”
“She was lonely. She came from a wealthy, cultured family, and she missed them and all the comforts she was used to having. My father would be assigned to a fort someplace, then ride off to join a military regiment stationed God knows where. He’d be gone months at a time.”
“And when he came back?” she asked gently.
“The four walls closed in on him. Family life was too sedate. Not only that, he demanded perfection of my mother and me. He had no tolerance for mistakes, not even those of a little boy fresh out of rompers.”
Jeb’s memories were clearly vivid from such an early age, Elena realized. And her sympathy doubled.
“The General expected strict adherence to the rules he made, just like he did of the men he commanded. He planned every minute of his life, and ours, then made us live them through with military precision.”
Nicky nibbled contentedly on his waffle. Elena rested her cheek against his dark head and waited for Jeb to continue.
“One day, before he was due to leave again, they had a hell of an argument. My mother wanted to go with him. Or maybe she wanted him to take her to some city where she could mingle in polite society again, so she could enjoy all the comforts a woman like her missed.” Jeb frowned, as if he tried to sort out the details long buried in his past. “It doesn’t matter, I suppose, where she wanted to go. Main thing was, she wanted out of the life he forced her to live. But he refused, then he left. He expected her to be waiting for him when he returned.”
Elena found herself holding her breath. “And?”
“She wasn’t.”
Elena’s head lifted. “What do you mean?”
“She took off in the middle of the night. Left me in my bed with no idea she was leaving me. Us.”
“Oh, Jeb.” Tears welled in her eyes.
“Never heard from her after that.”
Elena blinked hard. How could any mother abandon her child? “Never?”
“Not a peep.”
“And your father?”
“Never spoke of her to me. Just acted like she didn’t exist. Which, I suppose in hindsight, she didn’t. Not after that.”
His head still rested on her knee. Elena touched his cheek, and his fingers captured hers, bringing them against his chest, holding them there.
“How old were you?” she asked.
“Eight. Even then, I hated him.”
She made a sound of dismay. “How can you say such a thing?”
“Nothing I could ever do pleased him, though God knows I tried. I was secretly afraid he would send me away, just like he did my mother, however indirectly. So I tried hard to make him proud of me. I always failed.”
“Maybe you just thought you failed, Jeb.”
He snorted in disagreement. “Believe me, a kid knows when he doesn’t measure up. Eventually, I rebelled. Why should I try to be like him when I despised every breath he took? Came a time when I wanted to be as unlike him as I possibly could.”
The dam holding in the flood of his memories had cracked wide-open. Elena gave him the time he needed to continue.
“He sent me to West Point Military Academy. He’d gone there himself, so he knew firsthand there was no place better for me to get the discipline I needed,” Jeb went on.
“The Academy is quite prestigious,” Elena murmured, impressed in spite of everything. “Some of the country’s finest military officers were trained there.”
“Prestigious, yes. But hard. Being the son of a highly decorated general only made life worse.” He spoke matter-of-factly, as if he’d long ago detached himself from the pain.
“Why should that make a difference?”
“Made me a prime target for hazing. Upperclassmen were always trying to test me by humiliating me. They wanted to see if I was as tough as the infamous General Carson was.”
The sympathy
coursed through her. It seemed Jeb had spent his entire life fighting to get out from under his father’s imperious shadow.
“Met Creed at the Academy, though. He was the one good thing that came out of it all.”
“Yes,” Elena said. She had seen for herself the bond of friendship between the two.
“Ever hear of hazing?” he asked.
“Yes.” She sniffed in disapproval at the practice of initiating a young plebe into military life through the use of cruel pranks. “Sounds awful.”
Jeb shrugged. “It was frowned upon by the Academy, but it went on in secret anyway. God knows I endured my share. But one night, some upperclassmen pulled me out of bed and hazed me half the night. Made me do deep-knee bends without losing my balance. I did them—until I collapsed with convulsions.”
“Oh, my God!”
“A congressional investigation was scheduled, but I refused to name names, even though I was ordered to do so. I was court-martialed as punishment.”
Elena gasped.
“By my father, no less. He believed obedience was the basis of all military discipline. Refusal to obey orders would not be tolerated.”
She struggled to stand outside the ring, to remain detached so that she might comprehend General Carson’s reasoning for what he did at such great cost to Jeb.
“I suppose it wouldn’t do for a man in his position to give special consideration to his son,” she said thoughtfully. “Yet, I would think it hurt him as much as it hurt you.”
For a moment, Jeb didn’t say anything. His thumb stroked her knuckles absently, as if he considered her words at length. Then he shrugged.
“Yeah, well. I survived it. The day I walked away from the Academy, Creed was with me. We didn’t look back. I haven’t seen or talked to the General since.”
Nicky finished his piece of waffle and reached for another. Jeb released her hand so that she could give him one.
“What happened then?” she asked. “You told me you worked for the military, tracking men like Ramon de la Vega.”
He nodded. “Regardless of my experiences with the Academy, I still wanted to be a soldier. More than anything. Guess that’s one thing the General managed to impress upon me. There was honor in serving my country. And if the court-martial destroyed my chances of being a soldier in the usual way, I decided to be one of my own making. Without rules and without having to obey anyone but myself.”