first words had been a shock. He’d always had what he wanted from the old man before. The allowance, the education back East … everything but the life he deserved. The life Jed owed him. The life he could have when he sold Dog Creek to the Blackwells.
Now that was all undone. Sean had shouted at Jed, cursed him, even pleaded at the end. For once Jed hadn’t backed down.
“You think you’re gettin’ the ranch,” he’d said. “You ain’t gettin’ a penny, not of this money or off the property. As soon as we’re married, it’s all goin’ to her.”
Some woman he’d found in an advertisement for mail-order brides. A female so desperate that she would expose herself in a newspaper, begging for a man to support her. A bitch from some little town in Ohio who had no claim on anything belonging to the McCarricks.
Sean had only meant to scare the old man at first. He’d pulled his gun and asked Jed where he’d put the money.
But Jed hadn’t talked. Sean had almost shot him then and there, until he realized just how stupid that would be.
It had to look like an accident, of course. One shot past the horse’s ear was all it took. Jed was damn fond of the bronc, but he should have known it had never been fully broken. It tossed Jed so hard that Sean didn’t have to lift a finger to finish the job, though he’d had to work a little harder to drive the horse far enough away that he could run it over a convenient cliff.
He’d meant to stay and look for the saddlebags. But he hadn’t been thinking clearly. Now he was paying for his lapse.
Jerking sharply on the reins, Sean turned Ulysses for home. The saddlebags might be lost to him, but he wasn’t about to give up on the rest. He’d already gone looking for the will Jed had spoken of, searching the house as soon as he could manage it without being seen.
But there had been no will, only a handful of receipts and random papers stashed in a hole in the wall behind the massive kitchen range that Jed had hauled in all the way from San Antonio.
Sean nicked Ulysses’s sides with his spurs, and the stallion leaped into a run. The cursed thing had to be somewhere. Maybe Jed had it filed away in some bank for safekeeping. If it was anywhere to be found, Sean would find it.
He rode at a reckless pace back to the house, running Ulysses to complete exhaustion. Most of the other hands, including Renshaw, were still on the range, and Maurice was nowhere in sight. Sean rubbed Ulysses down and returned to the tiny foreman’s cabin he’d taken when Holden moved into the house with Jed. He threw a chair across the room, smashed the mirror over the washstand and nearly put his fist through the window. When he could think again, he sat on the edge of the bed and composed his thoughts to an icy calm.
Jed had said the woman would be arriving on the next stage. The stage only came to Javelina twice a month, and Jed had been dead less than a week. Another was due in a matter of days. Rachel Lyndon would arrive expecting to marry a settled rancher who would provide for her needs.
But Jed was gone and she had no lawful claim on Dog Creek. If Sean planned things right, Rachel Lyndon could be encouraged to turn right around and go back to where she came from.
Sean allowed himself a smile and stretched until his bones popped. He would have a little talk with the drifter who’d come by the other day looking for work. Like most men, he was a sheep, easily led and ready to obey a man who knew how to balance bribery and threat.
Whistling a tune he’d heard last week at the Blackwells’, Sean went to clean himself up.
Chapter One
THE BABY THRUST its tiny fists in the air and wailed.
“It’s yours,” Polly said, pushing the bundle toward Heath. “Frankie said so right before she died.”
Frankie was dead. It was strange to think the woman he’d visited every month for two years, who’d given him what his body had to have, was gone. For just a minute he almost felt sorry. Whore that she was, she’d done nothing to deserve dying before her time.
But this …
Heath backed away, staring at the red and wrinkled face.
His? It wasn’t possible.
But it was. The last time he’d seen Frankie had been about eleven months ago. Heath didn’t know a damn thing about babies, but he thought this one was pretty new.
“He’s two months old,” Polly said impatiently, holding the baby closer to her chest. “Frankie died bringin’ him into the world. The least you can do is own up to your part in it.”
The letter in Heath’s pocket was fit to burn a hole through his vest. It had been waiting for him at the house the day he’d found Jed. He’d gotten only a handful of letters before, all from the old man. Never one like this.
Come right away, the letter said in Frankie’s stiff, uneven writing. You have a son.
The first thing he’d done was laugh. Frankie was a whore, but she did like her little jokes. Only after he’d read it twice more did he start to think she meant it.
If he’d been in his right mind, he would have ridden north, the way he’d planned, crossing the Pecos at Horsehead and heading into the Llano Estacado before anyone knew he wasn’t coming back.
He didn’t know if it was the human part of him or the wolf that made him turn south to Heywood, or which part was most scared when he looked at this helpless little mite that had spit on its face and a head almost smaller than Heath’s fist.
“It could have been any of the men she saw,” he said roughly, heading for the door. “Find someone else.”
“Renshaw!” Polly yelled, coming after him. “We can’t keep him here!” She shifted the baby in her arms and gestured with one hand at the garish wallpaper and cheap, gaudy furniture that made Polly’s room of a piece with the rest of the whorehouse. “We don’t have time to look after him, and what kind of life could he have as a whore’s son?”
Heath shoved his hat farther down across his forehead. “That ain’t my problem.”
“He’s your kid, Renshaw!”
The hair on the back of Heath’s neck bristled. He turned around and closed his eyes, letting the wolf take over.
At first all he could smell over the rank stench of the bordello were traces of the kid’s scat, the soap someone had used to wash it away, and a kind of milky musk. Below that was a human scent, but different, like the smell of a colt was different from its dam.
And under that …
Heath tried to tell himself he’d imagined it. It wasn’t as if he’d smelled loup-garou cubs before. But it was there, undeniable, faint but true. The odds against Frankie lying with another loup-garou at just the right time were bigger than Heath could calculate.
Hellfire.
Without warning, Polly pushed the infant into Heath’s arms. He nearly dropped it; only his animal reflexes spared it a nasty fall.
“Be careful!” Polly scolded. “Here. Hold him like this.”
She adjusted his arms so that they supported the baby’s head and tiny body. “There you are, little one,” she said in the gentlest voice Heath had ever heard out of her. She tickled the baby’s shapeless face with a fingertip. “See? Your daddy’s here.”
Heath was too numb to say a damn thing. Polly moved to the bed and gathered up a threadbare carpetbag. “This is what you’ll need at first. All of us pitched in. Warm blankets, cloths for diapers, a bottle. Enough cow’s milk to get you through tonight, and a bottle of formula for afterward. It would be good to find him a wet nurse.”
“I don’t know any wet nurses,” Heath mumbled.
She put her hands on her hips