“You sure can, honey.”
As soon as they were out of the kitchen, Leo came up beside him as he sliced tomatoes on the thick wooden board. “Mac, look at me.”
“Not gonna. I know what yer gonna say. I’m stickin’ to my guns on this’n, Leo. Ya ain’t gonna see me as no charity.”
Leo gripped his arm probably harder than he’d meant to and forced him to turn. Mac did meet his eyes then, in defiance. “I want to be your fucking partner, Mac, not your lender. Yeah, I’ll get my money back, when the ranch is up and running and the bank and other creditors are off our backs. Unless our being together isn’t in the cards. Are you just waiting for all this to be taken care of and you’re dumping me or something?”
That struck him cold, that Leo could ever think that. “O’ course not! I love ya!”
“Are we in this together then? Yeah, I think my money is being invested in a great thing here and I plan on getting it back and plenty more, but not at your expense. I want us both to enjoy the fruits of our labor here, and even if we don’t end up together, which I hope we do, I want for you more than I want for myself, baby. Can’t you get that?”
“No! Okay, no, I don’t git that! I never had that before, don’t ya see that? I don’t see ya stickin’ ‘round after this is finished. I figure you’ll move on and I’ll have ta live with that.”
He figured Leo would be pissed, and he saw of flash of that anger in his eyes before everything softened, Leo’s voice, his eyes and his touch. He lessened his crushing grip and moved him in for a tender hug, commanding him in a gentle voice, “Give me those fears to worry about, baby. Those aren’t yours anymore. They’re mine. I’ll worry about it all. Give them to me.”
“I can’t. You can’t take all that on.”
“Yeah, I can until you can take some from me, I can take it. You have too much, the ranch, the past, the future, family, money, and I don’t have anything but you. I can take it all.”
Mac pulled back to scan over his face, searching for what? He wasn’t sure. Deception, which he’d never felt from Leo, it wasn’t there that time either. There was nothing but love in Leo’s eyes and a determination that made Mac warm all over.
Still, he didn’t want to feel so weak as to hand over everything he was dealing with. He’d kept so much inside the last few times Leo had asked for it all. “Ya know I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.” After licking his lips, Leo bargained, “When we’re done with everything tonight, I want to talk to Shan about something and ask for her help. I’ll only do that, which will include telling her some things about the two of us, if you say it’s okay.”
Mac was immediately worried that she’d know about their sex life, but he pushed that away fast, knowing Leo wouldn’t do that. “Sure, I guess. Don’t tell her nothin’ gross.”
That was met with laughter. “You don’t want her knowing how much you like my dick inside you?”
“No!”
The family came in and everything was forgotten, including cooking lunch as Shan threw a twine wrapped stack of envelopes on the table. “You have some confusing ancestors, Mac.”
Mac finally found a smile and took the letters from the table. “What’re these?”
“Love notes, if you can call them that.” Leo had taken up chopping the vegetables for the salad he’d planned and had pushed the toaster lever down for the toast to make sandwiches with while Mac took a seat at the table with his brother.
“Love letters from who?”
Wayne untied the twine and they all slid over the table from Mac’s hand. They picked up different envelopes as Shan explained, “Some are good, don’t get me wrong. You had a very sweet ancestor, at least he was sweet with his wife. Those are the newer ones, but the older ones were from the Wyatt, who we already knew we didn’t like much.”
The older ones were very old, the paper brittle, so they handled them gently. Not willing to mess them up, he asked Shan, “What do they say?”
“Wyatt was gone to war, and all he did was to go on these long rants. He was angry with his father over something, and he planned on fixing it when he got home.”
“What was he pissed about?”
“I didn’t find the reason, and he doesn’t say outright in these letters, but there are a lot more in one of the trunks you all pulled from the loft.”
The newer letters had careful handwriting, and a different address, the one they currently had, the older ones from Wyatt being sent directly to the post office in town. The return address listed Samuel Blaylock. “Samuel? Wow, he was…?”
Shan held up a finger as her other hand dug into her back pocket. “I made a note on my phone to keep track. It was confusing.” She pulled it up and started listing them off. “Okay, Jeb was the first on the land, he homesteaded it when Texas was still mostly Mexico property. His son was Wyatt the putz, then Wyatt’s son was Sam Houston. Sam led to Jacob, then Samuel, then Houston.”
Wayne finished, “Who led to our daddy, and then us. Got it. Wow, that’s a helluva lineup.”
“Dad!”
He laughed guiltily, adding, “Sorry, son, then led to you and your brother and sister.”
“Thanks,” he said, digging into the sandwich Leo had plated and set in front of him.
Mac’s head was spinning with the names. “Doesn’t seem like it should be so many. I don’t know if I confused Sam and Samuel, but I never even heard of both.”
Wayne agreed, “I know I’ve heard of Samuel, but one of our ancestors named after Sam Houston? With all we heard about him and our grandfather who’d fought with him against Santa Anna?”
“Well, Sam is an enigma at the moment, I don’t know a lot about him. Samuel, though, from some of these letters, he hated the war and hated being away from his wife. They’d gotten married and had Houston a few years before he was deployed, then he spent years in the South Pacific. He was in the Navy, so he was on a ship a lot, and his letters sometimes came all at once to her.”
“I can see it,” Leo mused, “Her taking each one out, living it all with him. How romantic and sad all at once.”
They talked as they ate, Shan telling a little of the stories she’d read from Samuel. “He loved her and Houston so much. They had another baby, a little girl, who died when she was two months old. He promised to come back to her and make another little girl with her. Very sad.”
That broke his heart, thinking about that. Those were people in his family, and to think of them as humans was difficult. They’d always been figures, pictures, anecdotes, bragged on, but their human sides were never spoken about. “Did they? Have a little girl?”
Shan shook her head as she swallowed a bite of salad. “No. Just Houston. I don’t know why. None of them had more than a couple kids. Jeb had three, two girls.”
Mac said, “I’d like to see some more of the journals later.”
“I’ve organized them into years, and therefore, authors. There weren’t a lot of Wyatt’s but there were a bunch from his son. I’ll leave a few post-it notes on them, so you’ll know which is what.”
“Thanks, Shan.”
Leo gripped his arm as he read over one of Sam’s letters. “Listen to this. Fighting alongside negroes, it makes me feel bad for what great-granddaddy did to ‘em.”
Mac took the letter from him, reading over that passage, but finding nothing else about it. “What’s he mean?”
From him, Shan took the page and read it over, mumbling, “Great-grandfather for him would be Wyatt. I knew that scumbag did something, but what?”
Reasoning, Wayne told them, “He was the one that was in the war between the states, so maybe it had something to do with that.”
With the way his hair was standing up on the back of his neck, he didn’t think it was that at all, not directly. “Maybe, but there is something more. I feel it.”
Chapter Fourteen
Three days spent working on the loft, having a room blossoming out of the dusty dankness, left little energy for perusing the papers of h
is ancestors. Shan was pitching in more with the cutting and hammering, so she hadn’t been able to look over things as she’d planned.
It was no hardship, the push to get house and barn ready was the important part, as far as Mac was concerned. They worked well together, their little group. Cecil was invaluable as well, working as hard as the adults, falling into bed each night and sleeping so soundly, he didn’t hear the ruckus that was caused the fourth night.
Mac had sat down with a beer and a shot of whiskey, his muscles aching from the work and the nightly romps with Leo. They’d decided to spend an evening together, looking over the papers and books as a group, talking and drinking, their laughter breaking the dark aura of the house at long last.
Shan had a journal in front of her, Wayne was looking over the ledgers from the time of their grandfather, Houston, and Leo was making drinks and passing out snacks. Mac, on the other hand, had been salivating to get into the private letters they’d found and the journals and ledgers from Wyatt. That ancestor of his and Wayne’s had been nagging at him, and he soon discovered why.
“Listen to this,” he told the others, quieting them as he read over the two lines in the letter again to make sure he hadn’t imagined them. “Pa was out of his mind, that’s the only thing I can reckon. There’s no way we’re giving away eighty acres to those slaves.”
They all lost the simple humor they’d had, and Wayne had paled as much as Mac figured he must have. Leo took the letter from him and read it over. “We’ve got to find the wife’s letters to him.”
“You won’t,” Mac told him. “Read the P.S. at the end.”
“I hope you’re burning these letters along with that will. I am burning yours. No use anyone finding out what an abolitionist Pa was.”
“Abolitionist? What’s that?”
Wayne told his brother, “Back then, it meant people against slavery. It was what was said to start the war, people like Harriet Beecher Stowe and her book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, things like that. Old Jeb was an abolitionist?”
They all took a few of letters and started in on them, except Shan, who was looking over the books. “It’s here, all right. The eighty acres were said to be leased out as share crops. They returned when Wyatt came back from the war.”
Shan reasoned, “But there has to be something, a name, or names of the slaves.”
Mac got up, grabbed his coat from the tree by the door and told her, “Only one way to find out. I’ll be out there, if anyone needs me.”
They all left the house with him, Shan lagging behind to start coffee for them all. After three pots, they were all hunched over their respective piles, and Leo was the one who found the first name they might be able to go by. “Dexter Cutler. Says here a man by the name of Dexter Cutler came around, asking for the head of the ranch. He said his family was owed a piece of the property, but it was stolen from them.”
Mac got up and stepped around his own pile of papers to sit close as Wayne and Shan leaned it to hear better.
Mac saw Leo was reading by a newer ledger, one from Jacob Blaylock. The ledger was from 1957.
“This is something we can trace, right? I mean, it’s old, but not so old that we can’t look!”
Wayne agreed, “Shan and Leo can start on the computer looking him up. Strange, though. That was almost a hundred years, and someone knew something and decided it was time to ask around about it?”
“Maybe his family didn’t keep secrets like ours did,” Mac said, bitterness drenching the words. “Anyway, for now, no one will have this land unless we can get this place together and start making some money. Except the bank, that is.”
While Leo and Shan worked in the house for the day, Wayne and Mac worked side by side, swearing not to say a word about it until they knew more.
The loft was finished, a nice two rooms there, ready to rent. The lower rooms were almost ready, but the bathrooms needed a professional plumber. Leo knew someone and had called them, but they couldn’t finish until the plumber came, so Wayne and Mac rode to the bunk houses.
“If we go all in on the guest ranch, these can be rooms too. I figure we’ll only need one for the hands.”
“If you can find hands,” Wayne warned. “If you go all in on this being a gay vacation destination, you’ll be hard pressed to find hands. You’ll have to go down from two thousand head to five hundred.”
“That’s fine with me. Daddy had been slackin’ anyway, we’ve only had a thousand the last five years.”
As Wayne cocked his head, he did the math, and asked, “How were you above water at all? With the mortgage and paying the hands, all of it, on only a thousand head? And where would Daddy get the money to gamble?”
Those were questions he didn’t have the answer for. “There are a lot of things about this family we may never know, Wayne.”
The renovations on the bunk houses wouldn’t be as extreme, and they wrote down some figures before meeting the others for lunch at the house. Leo was optimistic. “Being that we’re keeping the theme rustic, as long as it’s warm in the winter and cool enough in the summer heat, the feel of the place should be as authentic as possible. That’s going to save us a lot of money.”
Shan added, “I’ve been looking at a lot of pins on Pinterest for industrial and rustic design, and there is so much stuff we can utilize around here. If I remember correctly, my husband made a couple of lamps in his day. If he still remembers how, he can help me do that, and anyone good with a saw and planer can make some tables, nightstands, sconces.”
Mac grimaced at her. “What’s a sconce?”
In bed that night, Leo kissed over his chest, but he wasn’t paying attention. He was reading letter after letter from his ancestors. Shan and Leo had done a search for Dexter Cutler, and found him on an ancestry site. They’d gone down his lineage to a child born in 1959 named Dion, but after that, they were running into a block. Dion had no children they could find, and he’d died when he was thirty-seven.
“I’m not getting anywhere with you, am I?”
Mac set the letter down and sighed, “I’m sorry.”
Climbing over him to straddle his stomach, Leo glared down on him. “Didn’t I say to hand all your worries and stress over to me? I’m not just here to suck your dick and hammer nails, you know.”
“Never thought that, Leo. I know you want to help me with this, but it ain’t that easy.”
Leaning over him, taking Mac’s lip between his teeth, Leo grabbed his wrists and set them over his head, holding them there with tight grips. It hurt deliciously, that bite, and it hurt more when Leo let go and the blood rushed to the bitemarks. “Let it go for tonight, baby. Let me have it. It’s not too big for me, it’s not my family, it’s not my name. I can handle it. Give it to me tonight, right now, and just love me.”
Mac felt his breathing getting shallower, quickening as he stared into those dark, powerful eyes. He was putty to this man, and as much as he wanted to hand over his stress, it nagged him, whispering in his ear even as Leo growled there, “I want you so bad, but I won’t fuck you until you give it to me, Mac, all of it.”
“How’d you know”
Leo sat up and placed the pad of his forefinger between Mac’s eyebrows. “There’s a deep line there, always, when you’re stressed. It’s your tell, like if we were playing cards, I’d know you were bluffing about having a full house or four of a kind. You don’t even have two deuces, baby. Now, are you going to talk to me, give me what’s bothering you?”
What else could he do? Leo was stubborn, persistent, and he knew how to work Mac. It didn’t pride him any to admit to himself that someone could work him, but he couldn’t deny it, either.
“My ancestor took land that was to go to the slaves. That’s just…evil. There was evil here, more’n I thought. The money, that’ll come, I’m not much worried about that anymore, not if you think this’ll work. It’s the other parts, and you can’t fix that. No one can.”
“Bullshit. You can. This whole country w
as built by bad men on the backs of the oppressed. Slavery, genocide, racism, all of it, but good people fought to make it better, and not just on the battlefields. Good people marched, they stood for good, and it got better. It’s not perfect and none of it is fixed, but compared to fifty years ago, a hundred years, it’s better.
“You can make this little piece of land better. It started with a good man, Jeb. He didn’t want those slaves that Wyatt imported from Alabama. He wanted them set free, wanted them to have the land, if ever former slaves were allowed to own property here. You and Wayne, you can make this place better.”
Remembering Jeb, the good man he’d seemed to be, that eased some of it, and he felt himself give over to Leo. “Take it. Take it from me.”
The grip on his wrists tightened, Leo’s mouth hardening as he whispered, “It’s mine. Nothing is yours now, not your fears, or your worries or your happiness. It’s all mine and I’ll give you only what I want you to have. Right now? I want to fuck you. I want your cries and moans and whimpers as I’m fucking your hole.”
Leo didn’t ask permission because he didn’t need it. He owned Mac, body and mind, soul and voice. Mac’s body was entered, and Leo smiled when Mac yelled out with the harsh burn of the first thrust, then he covered Mac’s mouth as his hips stilled, letting Mac adjust.
“That’s it, baby, I want all those sweet sounds, but not yet. Keep them in for me right now. Keep them in and let me see it just in your eyes.”
He was blinking furiously, his eyes burning from staring up at Leo while he’d pushed in, but Leo didn’t seem to mind.
His voice was rough, like he’d chewed gravel and chased it with rot-gut whiskey, “That’s my baby, you are going to feel me tonight and when you’re walking funny tomorrow, and you find sitting painful to do, you’ll remember to give me what the fuck I ask for and not argue about it next time, won’t you?”
It was a few seconds before he took his hand from Mac’s mouth, like he was waiting for the meaning of his words to hit home, and when he did, he waited impatiently for Mac’s breathless answer, “Yeah, yes, fuck yeah, of course. I swear it to ya.”
Remember the Alamo (Legacy Book 1) Page 14