Nobody's Child

by Ann Major

The better to see her, and hear her, should she open hers.

  Computer printouts, half-opened encyclopedias, and local history books were now strewn all over Jeremy’s floor. In spite of his concern about Cheyenne, Cutter had been starved for Jeremy’s company so long, he enjoyed spending any time, even these tense hours with the boy. It pleased him enormously that Jeremy was so intellectually precocious.

  Jeremy looked up from the history book he’d been quietly absorbed in. “Uncle Cutter, did you know that in 1834 the remains of a pirate’s camp were found on this island? It says right here that large iron rings were implanted deep in the sand. Some people thought the rings were used to moor small boats rowed in from bigger ships.” When Cutter didn’t answer fast enough, Jeremy said, “I guess they rusted out a long time ago, huh?”

  “I’ve never seen them.”

  “Maybe we could look for ’em sometime—Together...” Jeremy’s voice trailed away.

  “Sure.”

  They smiled at each other and then pretended to go back to their individual pursuits.

  Suddenly Jeremy’s glossy black head peeped up over his book again.

  “Hey, did you know that a lady on Mustang Island in the 1880s found a chest filled all the way to the top with silver coins?”

  “No,” Cutter replied.

  “I wish I could find something like that. Did you ever look for treasure?”

  Cutter began to tap on the keyboard. “All the time.”

  “Where?”

  “Everywhere.”

  “Oh, I get it. You’re talking about making money.” Cutter stopped typing and turned to Jeremy. “How come you read so much?”

  “‘Cause I like to. Mom taught me to read when I was three. With a phonics tape. I got passed out of first grade after a month ’cause I already knew everything and was getting bored and being bad.”

  “I used to read so much my mother had to make me go outside and play with other kids.”

  “Same here,” Jeremy said. The odd intent took he suddenly shot his father caught at Cutter’s heartstrings.

  Silence.

  “That’s not why I really read,” Jeremy blurted. “I read ’cause Mom and Dad fought all the time and I didn’t want to think about it.”

  “They fought, huh?”

  “Mostly my dad just screamed at my mother and she got real quiet.”

  Cutter’s mouth thinned.

  Jeremy’s black eyes grew as huge as wafers. Then out of the blue came the question.

  “You’re my real dad aren’t you?”

  The sudden silence grew electric.

  Cutter had dreaded this moment. Now that it was here, he wasn’t ready. Hell, he’d never be ready.

  He drew a long, shallow breath. “How long have you known?”

  “A while.” Flushing, Jeremy looked down at his book again. He began fiddling with a page corner, flipping it till it tore. “I heard Dad—I mean Martin—say something really mean to Mom once about me and her and you.”

  The bedroom grew very quiet again.

  Cutter didn’t know what to say.

  “I felt real bad,” Jeremy continued shyly. “Dad was really mad. I didn’t think he liked me. Or Mom. He called her a bad name and she cried. I was all mixed up. I—I didn’t want to be your son, either.”

  Cutter nodded bleakly. “If only I’d have known—” He broke off. He couldn’t have done a damned thing if he’d known.

  Suddenly it seemed to him that he and Jeremy were strangers, that layers of pain and misunderstanding stood between them, that they had missed too much and hurt each other too much to ever get past it. Cheyenne had said she didn’t want Jeremy to grow up and be like him.

  Jeremy looked down at his book again.

  Wanting to erase the past seven years and start over, Cutter turned silently back to his blank computer screen and fought to pretend nothing had been said.

  But some things can’t be unsaid or so easily forgotten.

  The yellow cursor blinked madly, taunting him.

  Cutter switched off the computer. In the same fraction of a second that he spun his chair around, Jeremy looked up from his book, his eyes huge.

  Hell, they were probably no bigger than his own.

  “I’m glad you married Mom,” Jeremy said quietly.

  Cutter nodded, mute, all his own fierce emotions on that subject blocked.

  But when Jeremy got up, he rose stiffly, too.

  As they stood there, looking at each other, Cutter suddenly felt too heavy-limbed to take a single step.

  Jeremy’s black gaze widened. “Dad—I—I—” In the next instant he was flying across the room into his father’s arms. “I love you, Dad. I love you,” he said thickly, through tears.

  “Jeremy.” Cutter wrapped his arms around the boy, squeezing him tightly. He realized with a pang that he should have found a way to reach out to his son long before now. He should have claimed him and protected him from Martin.

  Jeremy needed him.

  Suddenly Cutter felt unleashed. Torrents of blocked feelings flowed from him. Seven years of withheld paternal emotion. Seven years of anguish and loneliness.

  “I love you, too, Jeremy.”

  He repeated the words softly, and then kept repeating them, unable to stop saying them.

  “What about Mom?” Jeremy asked a long time later.

  Silence followed.

  “I’m glad I married your mom, too,” Cutter admitted grimly, hugging the boy closer and ruffling his hair. “I just hope she won’t stay mad forever.”

  “She won’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  A shy, radiant smile broke across Jeremy’s face. “Because I’ve got a plan.”

  “It better be good.”

  Jeremy’s smile was a devilish grin now. “Do you remember how she came running the night of my nightmare—”

  “Don’t even think about it!”

  The hours dragged by.

  Cutter lay alone in the dark, watching the intermittent bursts of lightning and listening to the roar of the wind and rain and the blasts of thunder. The couch was too short and the cushions too big and soft. He kept twisting and turning. Every time he drifted off, erotic fantasies about Cheyenne woke him up again.

  He kept dreaming of her naked. Of her deliciously warm body next to his. And he ached to be inside her.

  Then his body would stiffen; he’d break out in a cold sweat. And wake up. It had happened dozens of times. It was frustrating as hell.

  He gripped the edge of the couch. Why was he torturing himself?

  She was mad at him.

  He was mad at her.

  She didn’t love him. They had too many problems to ever work them out.

  He threw off his sheet and sat up, feeling hot and wretched.

  How many hellish nights had he lain awake like this and imagined her across some ocean in the arms of his brother?

  His lips twisted into a bitter smile.

  Too damned many.

  And now tonight, even though he was her husband, she had put him into the same hellish fix.

  What had he done to deserve such punishment?

  Still, there was one unforgettable truth.

  She had slept with him.

  Only him.

  In all the years of her marriage to Martin, never once had she slept with his brother.

  Maybe Cheyenne didn’t love him. Maybe Cutter didn’t love her. Maybe he couldn’t ever, after what she’d done and said.

  But damn it, her fidelity meant a lot.

  He drew a shaky hand across his face.

  He thought about it at the oddest times.

  And he wondered why the hell it meant so much to him.

  Cheyenne flung her sheets aside and rose from her bed and began to pace. Rain lashed the windows, sending monstrously huge, sparkling drops rushing down the glass. Wind beat against the shutters.

  She stared outside, terrified.

  The grasses whipped in the storm. Sand was
blowing across the deck into the pool.

  Storms could be a bad sign.

  She kept seeing Kurt’s dead body in the photograph. She kept imagining his murderer arriving by boat, as Cutter had so long ago.

  If only she could stop thinking about it. Stop feeling the awful fear. Stop wanting to run down the hall to Cutter.

  A tear trickled down her cheek.

  Then another.

  She tried to brush them away, but that only made them rush downward in a hot cascade.

  It was all so awful. Everything Martin had done. Jeremy’s kidnapping. Kurt—

  Why had she and Martin lived so high? Why had she let Martin borrow the money? Why had it been so important to them both to be somebody?

  Now she wanted simpler things. Love. A family.

  Most of all she wanted Cutter. She didn’t care what he had done in the past.

  Maybe he’d coldly abandoned her. Maybe she had felt forced to marry Martin, but Cutter had come to her when she was lonely and in terrible danger. He had saved Jeremy. He had been gentle and tender—in his way. He was her husband. Her lover.

  Her only lover.

  She felt so empty and lost without him. She wanted to be wrapped in his hard, strong arms.

  To feel safe again.

  To feel loved and wanted.

  But could a man who had lived as he had love her or trust her? Was he capable of just using her for sex just so he could have Jeremy?

  She couldn’t fathom the kind of life that had made Cutter so tough and hard and fearless.

  Was he as incapable of love as Martin had always said? Or had Martin been blinded by jealousy and painted the wrong picture? Had Cutter been the lonely son, the left-out son?

  One thing she knew. Cutter was brave and strong and willing to sacrifice himself for her and his son.

  The past was the past.

  In that moment, she suddenly knew that she wanted Cutter too much not to try to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  Jeremy was awakened by a sudden, abrupt buzzing of his alarm clock from under his pillow. It took him a minute to remember why he’d set his alarm. Still, he was so drowsy he would have ignored it except the clock rumbled and made the pillowcase tickle his ear.

  Sleepily, clumsily, he jabbed at the buttons of his tiny portable alarm till it went off.

  He needed to pee, so he got up and went to the toilet. After that he got back into bed and forced himself to sit there and concentrate on his plan. Groggily he focused on the terrifying feelings he’d had when Baldy had come into his Houston bedroom and pounced on him when he’d been asleep.

  He didn’t like remembering his high-pitched screams. They had rolled out of his body like waves as he’d been dragged out of his room.

  He forced himself to remember Molly Pooh’s head flying off. The roof of his mouth went dry as he relived the fear he’d felt when Baldy had shoved him down the stairs.

  Nobody had come to help him that night when he’d screamed.

  Not Kurt.

  Not Mrs. Perkins.

  Not his mom or his dad.

  He got scared all over again just thinking how alone and little and small he’d felt.

  But they’d come to him when he’d had his nightmare. They’d do the same tonight.

  Jeremy opened his mouth, and let out a massive, earsplitting yell.

  When he screamed a second time, he heard her door open.

  Then his.

  Yes! Yes! Jeremy slugged his pillow in triumph.

  Inspired, he screamed again and again, three more piercing, ear-shattering blasts.

  After that he stuck his fingers in his eyes to make tears.

  The little devil had disobeyed him.

  Cutter was running down the hall toward Jeremy’s room.

  From the opposite end Cheyenne came flying toward him, her thin white nightgown floating around her body.

  Cutter couldn’t stop in time.

  Neither apparently could she.

  Not that he wanted to.

  Whatever. They collided.

  He wore only pajama bottoms, so his upper body was bare. As she grappled to regain her balance, her hands moved over his naked skin, through his dark, bristly chest hair, across rippling muscle and sinew, burning him.

  He wrapped his fingers around her upper arms and jerked her to him, steadying her against his body so she wouldn’t fall. He held her so close that each could hear the beat of the other’s heart. As he slowly breathed in her warm, dizzying smell, a shiver shot through him. Instantly he was as hard and hot as a brick in an oven. She didn’t move away, even though he knew she felt it.

  All night he had ached for her. She was made entirely of luscious skin, all soft and warm like smooth, living satin beneath his rough hands. He wanted to go on touching her forever, to lift her gown and slide his hands over every part of her. Her perfumed hair was as fine and light as corn silk where it brushed his cheek and shoulders. Her breasts and hips were alluringly soft and round.

  When she stared up at Cutter, he felt consumed by intense, inexplicable emotion. He pulled in a deep breath. It was so good to hold her. It was as if they were the only two people on the planet.

  Then Jeremy screamed again.

  The kid’s yell was damn convincing.

  With a worried sigh, her eyes widened and dilated in the dark.

  “Jeremy,” they whispered in unison.

  She with terror. He with annoyance and a trace of amused, fatherly pride.

  Reluctantly he let her go. Together they headed into Jeremy’s room.

  “Jeremy?” she murmured worriedly as she pushed their son’s door open.

  His bedside lamp chain snapped, and the room was instantly alight. “I’m okay!” croaked Jeremy’s cheerful but rather hoarse voice from the bed. “It was just a bad dream.”

  Jeremy’s inky black bangs fell over his brow. His face was white; his eyes red and nervous. Tears streamed down his cheeks.

  “My poor darling,” she cried.

  “I’m okay,” Jeremy insisted bravely when she threw her arms around him. He grinned at Cutter. “But—since y’all are both here, maybe you could read me a story or something—”

  Mother and son smiled uncertainly at each other and then at Cutter.

  Quite naturally, she agreed to a story. Cutter soon found himself enchanted by her soft voice and by Jeremy’s eager, rapt expression as he listened to the tale she wove about a little donkey who got lost from his real parents and had only a magic rock to help him find them. Although he sat apart from them, Cutter felt included. For the first time, he almost believed that his dream to be part of a real family might come true. That he and Jeremy and she—

  Then it was over and Jeremy had shut his eyes, seemingly asleep.

  Her voice died away. She extinguished the light, and the room melted into darkness. For a long moment Cutter and she stared at each other across the dark.

  He needed her. As he took her hand and they tiptoed outside together, Cutter prayed that she needed him, too.

  Once they were in the hall, Cutter found that when the moment came to release her hand, he couldn’t let go of her.

  He didn’t have to.

  Lightning crashed.

  Thunder reverberated through the house, and she threw herself into his arms.

  “Cutter?” She clutched him tightly.

  Slowly he looked down at her.

  In the darkness her wide eyes locked on his again.

  He pressed her fingertips as if to release them.

  She bit her lip and squeezed his hand.

  “No,” she whispered at last, her voice endearing and small. “Don’t leave me.”

  His words on the beach to her when he’d thought he might die.

  The hot look she gave him then made him shiver.

  His heart began to beat very fast. “Cheyenne?” “Truce?” she murmured. “I’m sorry for accusing you—”

  “Don’t—”

  He knew what she wanted, and
he didn’t intend to make her beg for it.

  She begged anyway.

  “Please forgive me. Oh, Cutter...touch me. Just hold me.” She reached up and trailed trembling fingertips across his cheek, then down the cords of his neck to his shoulder, then still lower over the rigid planes of his chest where they lingered. “I couldn’t sleep tonight...because you weren’t there to hold me.”

  “Neither could I—my darling.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Only this.”

  A half groan, half laugh escaped him as he hauled her closer and cradled her face in his hands.

  As he lowered his mouth, he registered the depth of emotion shining in her eyes.

  Then he kissed her.

  “Yes! Yes!”

  Jeremy squatted next to his door and listened to the exchange and then the long silence outside in the hall that could only mean one thing—his parents were smooching instead of fighting.

  Only when he heard his father and his mother walk together down the hall and their door shutting, did Jeremy relax his grip on Molly Pooh and sleepily rub his eyes.

  He wondered if they’d kiss some more. Maybe in their bed.

  “Yuck.”

  But he was smiling as he raced with Molly Pooh back to his bed.

  Ten

  Jack West pulled up on the reins and adjusted his Stetson so he could get a better look at them through the curling heat waves.

  Cheyenne looked good. Real good. Neat and sexy and as slim as ever in her black silk sheath.

  Her rich husband looked sort of uneasy. Real uneasy. Like monsters were chasing him.

  Jack West never gave a living soul a second chance. But he played by different rules when it came to the dead.

  Which was why he had taken time away from roundup to ride his great sorrel stallion over to pay his respects to Ivory Rose.

  Jack was half-Mexican, half-Anglo, and a lot of prejudiced folks on El Atascadero thought less of him for that. His olive skin and inky hair that grew with wild, wayward thickness were several shades darker than most Anglos. His long, muscular body was a shade taller than most Mexicans. There was a dangerous, brooding quality about him that scared people. Cheyenne said that it was his nose, once broken, that gave him the hard, virile look of violence that so unsettled people.