The Cowboy's Baby: Devlin Brothers Ranch

by Joanna Bell

"Hailey," he moaned as I sped up, running his hands down my body and grasping my buttocks, holding me down a second longer, letting himself throb inside me as everything started to get frenzied.

  "I want you to come inside me," I whispered, my voice high-pitched and helpless, when I was on the very edge and all I could think about was the one thing I needed. "Jackson please – I need it. I need you to –"

  I didn't have to ask again. I felt his fingers dig into my ass, his body stiffen between my thighs. And then I felt the first blissful twitch of his cock inside me and reached my own peak at exactly that moment, rocking myself back and forth on top of him and moaning his name.

  Jackson held me there, all the way down on him, so he could feel every little twitch and pulse of my sex as he let go and filled me up.

  It took us both a good five minutes to regain our full faculties afterwards. Worried about getting caught, I quickly got dressed, grinning to myself the whole time.

  "You needed that, huh?" Jackson asked, openly eying my breasts as I slipped my bra back on. "I had so much to say to you today, too."

  I looked up, smoothing my shirt down and combing my fingers through my hair. "Did you? About what? Did the doctors –"

  He shook his head. "Nah, it wasn't about any of that. It's what I said – about there being a lot of things you haven't heard me say. If only you hadn't been determined to seduce me, you minx."

  I shot him a look. "Oh is that what happened? I seduced you?"

  Before I could hop out of the way, Jackson reached out and slapped my ass. "I think it is. Is that your thing? Seducing men in a weakened state, so they can't say no to your evil temptations?"

  I giggled and leaned down to kiss his damp forehead. "Weakened state? You didn't seem to be in a weakened state a few minutes ago."

  "Mmm," he murmured, slipping one hand up under my shirt and into my bra. "That's just the affect you have on me. It's entirely your fault."

  "Long trip, sailor?" I whispered, sighing even as I glanced towards the door, expecting a scandalized nurse to burst in any second and announce that visiting hours were over.

  Jackson's ice-blue eyes met mine, suddenly serious.

  "Yes," he replied. "It was a long trip. Longer than you know."

  He didn't tell me he was talking about more than the time since the fire. He didn't have to. It was understood.

  "I missed you," I told him, the words leaving my mouth before I even had time to consider them.

  He reached out and tucked my hair, which was falling across my face and conveniently hiding my emotions, behind my ear. "What is it? Hailey?"

  I tried to swallow the lump in my throat. I could have brushed the moment aside, told him I didn't know – even though I did, and perfectly well.

  "Having sex with you always used to make me feel like this," I said quietly. "Like – vulnerable. After I went to New York I used to tell myself I was over it but I guess not, huh? Anyway, it's true what I said. I missed you. And I don't know if I should be telling you that."

  He was about to say something. We were being truthful with each other. Real. But the nurse chose that specific instant to barge in and inform us both that visiting hours were officially over.

  Whatever it was Jackson had been about to tell me was going to have to wait. I kissed him on the forehead and both cheeks, and even when he told me to wait I pretended I had to be somewhere – which we both knew was a lie – and rushed out of the room.

  Chapter 48: Jackson

  My brother came to visit a couple of days later, after Hailey flew back to New York to spend time with Brody and deal with a possible commission.

  I was asleep when he walked into my room – which was lucky for him, because he wouldn't have gotten in if I hadn't been. I had most of my strength back by then. The two oldest Devlin brothers might just have brawled in a hospital – for old time's sake.

  Instead, I assumed it was a rather unpleasant dream when I saw him sitting there in the chair usually occupied by Hailey. Slowly, it dawned on me that it was no dream.

  "I thought Hailey told you assholes what was what," I said by way of a greeting, smiling at the memory of her telling my father off. "You're not welcome here. Go home. Go back to –"

  Cillian held up one hand, conciliatory. "Dad doesn't know I'm here. I –"

  "I don't care. Just get out. If I have to make you get out, neither of us is going to enjoy it."

  My brother rolled his eyes, but made no move to leave. "You haven't changed at all, have you?"

  I shrugged. "Same for you."

  I met his gaze. I wasn't afraid of Cillian. Who knows, maybe he could have taken me after so long in the hospital? I would have given him a fight either way.

  But he didn't seem to be there to fight. Which was strange. I watched as he fought the urge to fire back another smart ass remark.

  "Fine. I'll go. I just – I brought you something."

  "I don't want a goddamned thing from Dad," I replied heatedly, assuming at once it was some over-priced gadget or trinket, intended to make me feel guilty for whatever it was Jack Devlin thought I had to feel guilty for. "I don't –"

  "It's from Mom."

  That shut me up. Cillian reached into a bag on the floor and pulled out a book. At first, I didn't recognize it. But then I looked a little closer. It was bound in green leather with gold embossed letters on the spine. A sudden tsunami of memories washed over me. I knew that book. I remembered the way it felt in my hands – heavy, the leather soft and pebbled. My mother's bible.

  "We were going through some boxes of her things and that was in there. I thought you might want it. Dad doesn't know I –"

  "I don't give a fuck about Dad or what he knows or doesn't know."

  "OK," Cillian replied simply, handing me the bible. "OK, Jackson."

  He was acting strange. Maybe I was wrong – maybe he had changed?

  Not that it matters if this asshole has changed. He still did what he did.

  I looked down at the book in my hands. It looked smaller than I remembered it and it took me a minute to realize that it wasn't the book that was smaller – it was my hands that were bigger. The last time I held that book I must have been 7 or 8 years old. A child. Probably lying in bed with my mother curled up next to me, the way she used to do on the nights when my dad had too much whiskey and didn't want to do anything but yell and scream and smash things.

  The memory of my mother hardened something in my heart. Cillian took sides when he helped my dad and Darcy fuck me over. He could bring me mementos if he wanted, but it didn't erase the betrayal.

  "Great," I said, looking up at him. "Thanks for this. I appreciate it. Now get the fuck out."

  Without a word, he got up and prepared to leave. Yeah, something was different with my brother. I almost wanted to know what it was.

  Almost.

  "You know," he said, turning to face me before he walked out the door. "You weren't the easiest person to get along with either, Jackson. I don't even think you understand what it was like for me, growing up in your shadow like some kind of second class citi–"

  I jumped out of bed and got right up in his face. Damn, old habits die hard. But that time, he didn't square up to me like he would have back in the day. He just stood there, seemingly waiting for me to hit him if that was what I was going to do.

  I stayed nose to nose with him, so he knew I was completely, utterly fucking finished with listening to a single word he had to say.

  "Out," I repeated. "If you want to cry to someone about how hard you had it, you should know I'm probably the last person on earth you should be coming to. You fucked me, Cillian. You fucked up my life when you helped Dad convince me Hailey left me. And I'm not kidding, you need to get out of here right now. Do you hear me?"

  I put my hands on his chest and shoved him, hard, towards the door. He stumbled over a piece of equipment and almost fell over. But he still didn't come back at me. He just took it. Fucking asshole almost made me feel bad for him.


  My brother turned around one more time before he left and looked me right in the eyes.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry for what I did, Jackson."

  And then he was gone, his footsteps echoing down the hospital hallway as he went. I stood there in my hospital gown, my mother's bible in my hand and my bare ass hanging out, not sure whether to chase him down or put my fist through a wall.

  I did neither. Instead, I got back into bed and opened the bible.

  My mother wasn't religious – not the way most people would think of it, anyway. She went to church every Sunday with us kids and my dad, but that was only because of my dad's obsession with keeping up appearances. I never got the feeling she believed any of the things the priest said. She certainly never talked to me like she did.

  Not that I would know, to be fair. I was a child when she died. Too young to participate in deep, philosophical conversations.

  But she did own that bible, given to her by her own mother, and she would sometimes open it up to a bookmarked page and read me a passage. I remember her telling me that it was full of wisdom, whether you were a believer or not. I remember not knowing what the word 'believer' meant.

  I held the book reverently, as if I was afraid it might crumble to dust in my hands. On the inside of the cover was my mother's full name, handwritten in her own mother's handwriting, and what I assumed was the date the bible had been given to her:

  Susan Ann Williams, 1975.

  1975. My mother would have been younger then than Brody was at the time of my hospitalization. It was hard to think of her that way – so young, so full of a little girl's dreams of the future.

  The bible was well-read, many of its pages dog-eared and the gold embossing wearing off in many places. I let it fall open in my hands.

  A few lines on what was obviously a frequently referenced page were underlined, and a little star had been drawn in the margin beside them. A shiver of recognition ran through me as I recalled my mom's habit of marking items on a list with little stars. Grocery lists especially, which I would often be assigned to hold onto as we wandered the aisles of the Super Mart checking off items as we put them in the cart.

  I shook my head, returning to the present year, to the hospital room that had become as familiar to me as the back of my own hand. My eyes traveled over the words my mother had underlined:

  Love is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

  The last three words were underlined in blue ink.

  I jumped out of my hospital bed and dashed out into the hallway, calling my brother's name.

  "Cillian!"

  But he was gone. I don't even know what I would have said. I just know something made me run out into the hallway looking for him. I went back into my room and sat in the chair where he had just been, still holding my mother's bible in my hands. I read the words over again, skipping down the page a short distance to another line my mom had highlighted with another little star:

  When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

  I raised my head and looked out the window as the words sank into my mind like an antidote.

  Across the decades, across the barrier between life and death, the one parent whose love I never doubted spoke to me.

  It wasn't a revelation, exactly. The revelation came earlier, in the days I lay unmoving in that hospital bed, covered in burns, unable to speak. The revelation was Hailey. It was her love, as steady and solid as that described on the page in front of me.

  Love...bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

  How did she do it? How did she put aside her own pain? More importantly, why did she do it? After everything I put her through?

  Because she loves you. And it's time for you to put away childish things.

  So maybe it was a revelation. Or maybe it was just one of those moments in life when the truth is so big and so clear and so right in front of your face that even an idiot couldn't miss it. I wasn't a good man. Not to Hailey. I certainly didn't deserve the love she gave me. I hadn't done anything to deserve it. Quite the opposite.

  ***

  I didn't know if she was going to be receptive. As weak as she may have been to certain of my charms, she was her own person – an adult, a mother, an artist. She might not believe me. She might think anything I did or said was just a lame attempt to manipulate her.

  That's OK. You have to do it anyway. And then you have to live the rest of your life with her or without her. But you have to try.

  I had to try. I had to become the man I sometimes liked to fool myself into thinking I already was, by dint of the passing years alone.

  That night, I dreamed about my mom. Nothing dramatic. I dreamed I was back in the house in Sweetgrass Ridge, watching from the doorway as she sat at the kitchen table cutting coupons out of the weekly Super Mart flyer. My dad didn't like her using coupons. He said it would make people think we were having money problems. But she used to do it anyway, sitting at the table with her scissors when he was out dealing with ranch business.

  That was the dream. Just me watching my mother. There was an emotional quality to it, a certain conviction, a feeling of not being sure that doing the right thing was going to get me what I wanted, but knowing I had to do it anyway.

  Just before I woke up in my hospital room, the dream version of my mother looked up from her coupon cutting and smiled at me.

  Chapter 49: Hailey

  Jackson was discharged from the hospital in early December, just as Los Angeles was hanging its palm trees with incongruous strings of Christmas lights. I flew out with Brody the night before, so we could be there to walk him out.

  He was in good shape. Great, actually. The scars along the right side of his torso and his outer right thigh were for life, but the important part was that he had his life.

  The physical marks left by the fire couldn't have mattered less. Youth, excellent physical therapy and a naturally strong constitution meant that when his scars were covered you would never even know he had a recent brush with death.

  "Are you coming to live with us in New York?" Brody asked innocently as we sat on a bench outside the hospital, savoring Jackson's first few moments of freedom.

  He knew his parents were 'together.' The problem was even his parents didn't quite know what that meant. In a way, Jackson being in the hospital made things simple. It meant we didn't have to think about living arrangements or flights or coordinating schedules. It meant being able to ignore the fact that we both had lives on opposite sides of the country.

  "Not right now," Jackson replied, ruffling Brody's hair. "Right now I'm going to go back to my apartment and –"

  "But why?" Brody interrupted. "If you love each other again, why don't you live together?"

  Over the top of our child's head, Jackson caught my eye. "It's not that easy," he said, still looking at me. "Your mother has her life in New York – and yours, don't forget – and I have mine here, in Los Angeles. It's more complicated than you think."

  "But why, though?"

  "Brody," I chided gently. "Your daddy only got out of the hospital 20 minutes ago. Let's give him a break, OK?"

  Chapter 50: Jackson

  It didn't take long to get me settled back into my apartment. I found myself dawdling a few times as me and Hailey got everything back into working order – cleaning, making the bed, going to the grocery store. She and Brody were due back in New York less than 48 hours after I was discharged from the hospital. I didn't want them to go, but I didn't feel like it was something I could admit. I'd already asked so much of them.

  I drove them to the airport later that afternoon in a truck Lacey loaned me until I could get a new one
of my own. There was a strange atmosphere between the three of us, I think we all felt it. No one talked much. I kept having to stop myself from clutching the steering wheel way too tight.

  Don't get me wrong. I wasn't unsure or confused. I was less confused than perhaps I had ever been in my life. But I didn't know what Hailey was feeling. Not really. I knew she liked being in my arms. I knew she cared about me. I think I even knew she meant it when she told me she loved me. But I didn't really know if I'd been forgiven for any of the shit I'd done. I knew I didn't deserve it.

  A nervous energy flowed through my body like electricity, making me hit the brake just a little too hard as I slowed at a red light.

  "Are you OK, Daddy?" Brody asked from the back seat.

  "Uh, yeah," I lied. "I just need to get used to this new truck."

  Hailey looked at me out of the corner of her eye, but didn't say anything.

  We got to LAX in good time, and I pulled into a parking spot and hopped out to grab the luggage as Hailey tended to Brody. It felt surreal. Were they really leaving? Was I really going to let them leave? It wasn't like I wasn't going to see them again soon – there was already talk of Christmas plans. But there was a sense of destiny in the air that afternoon, a feeling of an open door about to close. I couldn't shake it.

  "We should probably check in."

  "Huh?" I said, catching myself standing next to the truck, a suitcase in each hand and my mind a thousand miles away. "Oh. Yeah. Right now?"

  Hailey looked at her phone. "Yeah. I – I think so."

  She was hesitating, too. Brody stood between us, looking from Hailey to me and then back again.

  "OK. Well. I'll walk you to –"

  "I don't think that's necessary," Hailey replied, refusing to meet my eye. "The suitcases have wheels. You don't need to carry them."

  "Oh."

  But neither of us moved. We stood perfectly still beside the truck, as if frozen in the moment. She took such good care of me in the hospital. Such generous care. I said thank you a thousand times, but somehow it was only ever words.