Nobody's Child

by Ann Major

  “He could have killed you both.”

  “He nearly did. He dragged Mom down. These fishermen helped me—”

  “Jeremy, hush! Cutter, darling, we were too afraid for you to care much about our own safety.”

  Wet strands of her long red hair blew around her face and neck. A silver light came from behind her and lit her hair like spun flame. As always there was something fragile and otherworldly and enchantingly angelic about her. He noticed that the jungle was ablaze with huge, exotic flowers—bold pinks, reds and blues.

  She was slender and fragile. More so than usual, after her ordeal.

  What kind of woman would take on a killer like Hernando?

  He had dragged her down—Cutter saw the marks on her face. She was one helluva woman. She truly loved him.

  Cutter groaned as a sudden burning pain in his shoulder made him convulse.

  “The ambulance is on its way, darling. There’s a hospital in Quepos. Doctors. The works. You’re going to be okay. As soon as you’re stable they’ll fly you to San José.”

  “So—you saved my life a second time? On a second beach.”

  She smiled. “And it had better be the last.”

  “I promise.”

  “Say it.”

  “What?”

  “You know...the three words I longed to hear...for seven years.”

  “I love you,” he whispered, touching the darkening bruise on her cheek.

  “I love you, too.”

  “What about me?” Jeremy piped up.

  “That goes without saying,” Cheyenne said, pulling him down beside them, so that Cutter could touch his son’s face.

  “You were both great,” Cutter whispered. “Great.”

  “You don’t know the half of it, Dad! Mom—”

  “Shhh—”

  Men with stethoscopes were racing toward them with a litter.

  Cutter’s last pleading words to her before they carried him away to the ambulance were, “Don’t leave me.”

  “As if I ever could,” she said.

  Thunder rumbled in the distance, and the breeze fanned them with the sweet smell of rain.

  Cutter woke with a start when the balcony doors right above him were slammed open, not by the wind, but by his son.

  “How come they never found Hernando’s body? Do you think maybe some sharks ate him or something?” Jeremy shouted down from the balcony to the garden.

  “Hold that thought,” Cutter muttered with a drowsy smile, glancing up at Jeremy and the blackening sky from his chaise lounge and then lazily closing his eyes in an attempt to continue his nap.

  “I’ve been reading about sharks,” Jeremy persisted. He leaned over the balcony railing and began to sling the red yo-yo he’d bought in the flea market last week up and down. “There are lots of ’em down here. Tourists are always getting eaten or sucked away in undertows.”

  “Jeremy! Hush!” Cheyenne murmured, looking up from her dog-eared paperback thriller. “Hernando is dead. We are safe. Your father needs to rest. The last thing he needs is to think about stuff like that.”

  “I don’t mind thinking about Hernando being eaten—”

  “Shhh!” To Jeremy she said, “I told you to read quietly, till three when your father gets up.”

  “I forgot.”

  “Like always,” she chided gently.

  “Okay. Sorry. Can I go over and play with Juan then? He’s got a different kind of yo-yo.”

  Juan lived next door.

  “No,” she said. “It’s going to rain, and you’ll be stuck over—”

  “Why don’t we let him,” Cutter assented with a sly grin.

  “Please, Mom?”

  “Just this once,” Cutter insisted. “He’ll be okay.”

  Then father and son both nagged her silently with their eyes.

  “All right then, but only since your father...”

  Gingerly Cutter eased himself higher in his chaise lounge. A week had passed since Hernando had shot him. Cutter was out of the hospital and convalescing under Cheyenne’s attentive care. She had rented a villa in the cool mountains outside San José and cooked every meal herself. The doctors said she must be a magician with soups and herbs because they had never seen anyone with Cutter’s injuries improve so rapidly. When other patients had smelled her spicy casseroles and soups and begged her to bring them something to eat, and she had done so, they had quickly gotten well, too.

  Today, even beneath the dark skies, the gardens and patios of the house were ablaze with oversize orchids and draperies of lush bougainvillea. Bromeliads hung from the brick walls, and a large cage by a huge philodendron vine was filled with dozens of chattering tropical squirrels.

  “So many flowers,” Cutter murmured lazily to his wife, when he heard Jeremy dash out the garden and slam the gates.

  “Flowers are a good sign for us,” Cheyenne said absently, turning a page. “Especially when so many bloom by day.”

  “If you say so, my darling. They certainly seem to bloom whenever you are around.”

  Lightning flashed in the mountains.

  She didn’t look up from her book. “I’ve told you before, I’m a talented gardener.”

  “You’re a lady of many talents.” Cutter’s smile grew tender as he leaned over and teasingly snatched her book from her fingers and tossed it aside.

  “I was on the last page.”

  “It’ll wait.” He sighed, growing serious. “I can’t. Besides it’s going to rain.”

  “Cutter.”

  “Come here. Your patient needs a little of your tender bedside care.”

  She smiled. “What exactly do you have in mind?”

  “I think you know. You probably put something in my food just to get me hot for you.”

  “I did not! And you’re much too badly injured to even think about sex.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” he said in a hard, masculine voice that was filled with sudden strength and determination.

  She laughed as he pulled her down into his arms.

  He suppressed a groan of pain.

  “See, you’re still too—”

  “Pura vida,” he said, ignoring the burning ache in his shoulder.

  “You hate that expression.”

  “But I love you.” His smolderingly intense eyes conveyed the same message. So did his broad grin. “I love you.”

  “So, what are we going to do about it, tough guy?” Her voice was barely above a whisper.

  “Plenty.”

  In the next instant his arms were around her and his mouth hungrily possessed her lips. When she gasped with heady pleasure, she set him aflame. Soon he was holding her tight as if he intended to get inside her then and there.

  A long while later he lifted his head from hers and stared at her. Gently, wondrously, he touched her face, her throat. Then he smoothed her hair. “We’re going to be together, my darling. Always. We’re going to live happily ever after. Just like they do in your books.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in happy endings,” she said, beaming at him in delight as the first raindrop struck her cheek.

  He continued staring at her and smiling. “I do now—since I have you.”

  Very gently he placed his hands on either side of her face before he kissed her again.

  They were together; they were in love. After seven lonely years, they knew that nothing could ever part them again.

  And because their eyes were closed and their mouths fused in a wild exultation that joined their souls, neither of them saw every flower in their garden burst into bloom.

  A fierce wet wind stirred through the garden, causing them to break apart.

  “Cutter! It’s going to rain!”

  He didn’t care. He took her hand and pulled her up. As they hurried toward their house, huge, fat drops began pelting them. Thunder cracked, and then the rain began to rush down in torrents freshly watering the flowers and earth as he pulled her inside.

  No way would Jer
emy try to come home till the storm was over.

  Gently, without speaking, husband and wife came together.

  Cutter kissed her—a long, deep kiss that felt as eternal as his love for her.

  CHILDREN OF DESTINY

  return in February 1998

  in the exciting Silhouette Books release

  SECRET CHILD

  by

  ANN MAJOR

  JUST TURN THE PAGE FOR AN

  EXCITING PREVIEW

  OF THIS SOON TO BE RELEASED NOVEL!

  Chapter 1

  The siren was shrill, cutting the eerie silence like a knife.

  Jack West awoke with a start, his gaze as alert as a cat’s as he glanced fiercely around his cheap, San Antonio, motel room. He half-expected to find himself back in cell block C, a knife-tip shoved to his throat, a murderer’s legs straddling his lean waist.

  He was alone.

  Safe.

  Even so, his heart pounded a few seconds longer, his senses having been honed by the constant danger and violence he’d lived with for the past five years.

  He felt the loneliness that he had known for so much of his life close over him. It was deep and dark, but he surrendered to it, welcomed it. For he had given up on life.

  The name Jack West once had meant something in south Texas. He’d been rich and famous.

  No more.

  Jack West. Crisp, prison-cropped black hair. Indian dark eyes with long bristly lashes, brooding eyes that could flame with hate as hot as tar-tipped torches or turn as cold as black ice and stare straight through his enemy.

  Before prison he’d been tough.

  He was tougher now.

  His carved face and tall, muscular body were harder and leaner than ever. Scars crisscrossed his broad back from the night he’d unwisely gotten too friendly and too drunk on smuggled gin with an inmate named Brickhouse.

  Jack’s once healthily dark skin was sallow, but the scars on his body were nothing compared to the ones on his soul. He couldn’t forget that even before his conviction, Theodora had thrown him off the ranch, seized his daughter and cut him off from his life forever. Once, he had hoped, he had almost believed, his life might count for something after all.

  No more.

  Jack West wasn’t much different than a dead man.

  He was even worse off now than when he’d been a boy—a young beggar and thief in Matamoros, Mexico. His mama had been a cheap Mexican whore; his father an Anglo ranch foreman who’d paid for five drunken minutes with her. He’d known his father’s name was Shanghai Dawes only because his mother had stolen Shanghai’s wallet when he’d passed out.

  Jack had spent his first ten years in a shack in a dusty Mexican barrio where he’d had to steal or starve, where he’d lived on the fringes, on the bottom even there. He’d spent the rest of his life living like a cowboy prince in Theodora’s big three-storied white stucco house on El Atascadero , one of the grandest of the great ranches in south Texas.

  Jack owed his Anglo looks and great height and his talent with animals to the father he’d never known; but on the inside he was more Mexican than Anglo. He knew that because when they’d locked him up, his soul had left him. He’d watched it go.

  His mother would have said he had the susto.

  Whatever. His soul hadn’t come back yet—even though they’d let him out. He didn’t want it back, either.

  Outside in the sweltering darkness, the ambulance raced north on San Antonio’s Loop 410 North, its scream dying as if suffocated by the Texas heat.

  Jack blinked, forcing himself to relax. He saw the rosy rectangle of light behind thin drapes and heard the muted roar of traffic.

  There were drapes on the windows.

  Real drapes.

  Instead of bars.

  The soft mattress and clean sheets weren’t a cruel dream.

  He was free.

  Whatever that meant now.

  Bastard from a barrio. Ex-con. Starting over at the bottom again.

  He wished he could go back to sleep, but he hadn’t slept through a night in years. He lay back and closed his eyes, dreading the dawn.

  Yesterday, he’d been in solitary, his ankles shackled, his hands cuffed to his waist. Then this morning a guard had yelled at him to grab his bedroll. That he was moving.

  Jack had been stunned when they’d driven him to San Antonio and set him free.

  Nobody, not even his lawyer, had bothered to inform him about the serial killer who’d made headlines all over Texas when he’d confessed to one of the murders Jack had been locked up for.

  Maybe he was free.

  But he was embittered and unfit company for most decent folk. Maybe that wouldn’t have mattered if he’d had a family who’d stood by him.

  But Theodora had made her feelings crystal clear right from the first. Never once had she written or come to see him to say that she had changed her mind. After his conviction, he’d lost custody of his daughter, Carla, who probably hated him for killing her mother. All his letters to Carla and to Theodora had damn sure come back.

  Return to sender. The guards had chanted that line aloud when they’d thrown his letters through the bars of his cell.

  Theodora’s betrayal had hurt more than his prison sentence. More than living like an animal in a cage.

  No more. To hell with Theodora. To hell with the whole damn world. He’d started alone; he might as well end alone. Never again would he let anybody get close to him. He’d take some low job and drink till he found oblivion.

  If Jack hated thinking about Carla and Theodora, he hated thinking about Chantal, his wife, even more.

  For she had betrayed him in every way that a wife could betray a husband. He had taken her abuse and then her absences and infidelities for years. Until one day, she had pushed him too far.

  When had the deeply rooted hate between them gotten its start? Had the seeds of it been there even on the first day when Theodora had brought him home to El Atascadero.

  And how could a woman just vanish like that? Without a trace? For five damn years? Without a thought that her husband was rotting in prison for her murder? Without a thought for her daughter, whom she loved in her own bizarre and highly destructive way?

  Not that Chantal had ever given much of a damn about him once she’d tricked him to the altar, given birth to Carla seven months later and saddled him with a baby and a ranch to run....

  Jack lay in the dark a while longer, wishing he could turn off his mind and go back to sleep.

  Half an hour later his mind was still festering with uneasy memories about Chantal and the sorry state of his life when the phone rang.

  He let it ring.

  Six. Eight times.

  Who the hell could be calling that he’d want to talk to?

  Nobody. Curiosity would be the sinking of him yet. He grabbed the phone, expecting a stranger.

  The familiar, raspy, bourbon-slurred tone made his chest knot with a poignant rush of rage, regret and bitter anguish.

  Theodora.

  When his eyes filled with burning liquid, he brushed his fingers across his lashes.

  “I’ve been trying and trying to call you, boy,” she snapped, as full of venom and vigor as always, never for a second thinking he might not know her, nor caring that he might not want to hear from her. “I’ve been up half the night dialing this damned phone, trying to get you. As if I don’t have a ranch to run come dawn. Like always, you don’t mind a bit putting me to trouble.”

  “What the hell do you want, Theodora?”

  “I’ve been thinking about things. About what you’ve been through. About the ranch. I want you to come home, boy.”

  “Home?” He hated how the word made his voice shake. “You never once wrote or came—” Why the hell had he brought that up? He didn’t give a damn about her or about anybody now.

  “I had my reasons.”

  “I didn’t kill her.”

  Theodora made no apology for not believing him before. Theodo
ra had never said she was sorry to a single soul in her whole damned life. So he wasn’t surprised when nothing more came from her but a deep and brooding silence.

  Her silence wrapped around Jack.

  He lay in the dark, his heavy, unwanted emotions suffocating him.

  He wanted to feel nothing.

  He should hang up.

  “You think you can just dial me up, and I’ll come running back to you like I did when I was a half-starved kid and you were the grand queen of El Atascadero? Maybe I was once your top charity case,” he muttered bitterly. “Well, not anymore, old woman. You don’t have anything I want.”

  “So, what will you do? El Atascadero is the only home you’ve ever known. You spent every dime you had on lawyers. I’m the closest thing you’ve got to family.”

  “I thought so once. I took a lot off Chantal—because of you. So now, what the hell do you want, anyway?”

  “I want you to find my daughter and bring her home.” Jack’s heart sank.

  So—Theodora wanted Chantal.

  “Hasn’t she caused you enough grief, old woman?”

  “She’s my daughter. Then there’s...Carla—”

  “I don’t want to hear about Carla—”

  Silence.

  “You called the wrong man, Theodora. I don’t want to find Chantal. I want to forget her. To be free of her. I lost five years and everything I ever cared about. My daughter’s better off without an ex-con for a father.”

  He lowered the phone, intending to hang up.

  But Theodora wasn’t about to let him off that easy.

  She knew all of his buttons.

  Which ones to punch. Which ones not to.

  Maybe she’d get him to come back to El Atascadero. Maybe he’d even find his evil wife for her.

  The question wasn’t whether he’d return...it was whether he’d survive....

  ISBN : 978-1-4592-7193-7

  NOBODY’S CHILD

  Copyright © 1997 by Ann Major

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office, Silhouette Books, 300 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017 U.S.A.