Mary fuss over Chance was one of Wolf’s greatest amusements. She fussed over all of her kids, but the others had grown up with it and took it as a matter of course. Chance, though...he had been fourteen and half wild when Mary had found him. If he’d ever had a home, he didn’t remember it. If he had a name, he didn’t know it. He’d evaded well-meaning social authorities by staying on the move, stealing whatever he needed, food, clothes, money. He was highly intelligent and had taught himself to read from newspapers and magazines that had been thrown away. Libraries had become a favorite place for him to hang out, maybe even spend the night if he could manage it, but never two nights in a row. From what he read and what little television he saw, he understood the concept of a family, but that was all it was to him—a concept. He trusted no one but himself.
He might have grown to adulthood that way if he hadn’t contracted a monster case of influenza. While driving home from work, Mary had found him lying on the side of a road, incoherent and burning up with fever. Though he was half a foot taller than she and some fifty pounds heavier, somehow she had wrestled and bullied the boy into her truck and taken him to the local clinic, where Doc Nowacki discovered that the flu had progressed into pneumonia and quickly transferred Chance to the nearest hospital, eighty miles away.
Mary had driven home and insisted that Wolf take her to the hospital—immediately.
Chance was in intensive care when they arrived. At first the nursing staff hadn’t wanted to let them see him, since they weren’t family and in fact didn’t know anything about him. Child services had been notified, and someone was on the way to take care of the paperwork. They had been reasonable, even kind, but they hadn’t reckoned with Mary. She was relentless. She wanted to see the boy, and a bulldozer couldn’t have budged her until she saw him. Eventually the nurses, overworked and outclassed by a will far stronger than their own, gave in and let Wolf and Mary into the small cubicle.
As soon as he saw the boy, Wolf knew why Mary was so taken with him. It wasn’t just that he was deathly ill; he was obviously part American Indian. He would have reminded Mary so forcibly of her own children that she could no more have forgotten about him than she could one of them.
Wolf’s expert eye swept over the boy as he lay there so still and silent, his eyes closed, his breathing labored. The hectic color of fever stained his high cheekbones. Four different bags dripped an IV solution into his muscular right arm, which was taped to the bed. Another bag hung at the side of the bed, measuring the output of his kidneys.
Not a half breed, Wolf had thought. A quarter, maybe. No more than that. But still, there was no doubting his heritage. His fingernails were light against the tanned skin of his fingers, where an Anglo’s nails would have been pinker. His thick, dark brown hair, so long it brushed his shoulders, was straight. There were those high cheekbones, the clear-cut lips, the high-bridged nose. He was the most handsome boy Wolf had ever seen.
Mary went up to the bed, all her attention focused on the boy who lay so ill and helpless on the snowy sheets. She laid her cool hand lightly against his forehead, then stroked it over his hair. “You’ll be all right,” she murmured. “I’ll make sure you are.”
He had lifted his heavy lids, struggling with the effort. For the first time Wolf saw the light hazel eyes, almost golden, and circled with a brown rim so dark it was almost black. Confused, the boy had focused first on Mary; then his gaze had wandered to Wolf, and belated alarm flared in his eyes. He tried to heave himself up, but he was too weak even to tug his taped arm free.
Wolf moved to the boy’s other side. “Don’t be afraid,” he said quietly. “You have pneumonia, and you’re in a hospital.” Then, guessing what lay at the bottom of the boy’s panic, he added, “We won’t let them take you.”
Those light eyes had rested on his face, and perhaps Wolf’s appearance had calmed him. Like a wild animal on guard, he slowly relaxed and drifted back to sleep.
Over the next week, the boy’s condition improved, and Mary swung into action. She was determined that the boy, who still had not given them a name, not be taken into state custody for even one day. She pulled strings, harangued people, even called on Joe to use his influence, and her tenacity worked. When the boy was released from the hospital, he went home with Wolf and Mary.
He had gradually become accustomed to them, though by no stretch of the imagination had he been friendly, or even trustful. He would answer their questions, in one word if possible, but he never actually talked with them. Mary hadn’t been discouraged. From the first, she simply treated the boy as if he was hers—and soon he was.
The boy who had always been alone was suddenly plunged into the middle of a large, volatile family. For the first time he had a roof over his head every night, a room all to himself, ample food in his belly. He had clothing hanging in the closet and new boots on his feet. He was still too weak to share in the chores everyone did, but Mary immediately began tutoring him to bring him up to Zane’s level academically, since the two boys were the same age, as near as they could tell. Chance took to the books like a starving pup to its mother’s teat, but in every other way he determinedly remained at arm’s length. Those shrewd, guarded eyes took note of every nuance of their family relationships, weighing what he saw now against what he had known before.
Finally he unbent enough to tell them that he was called Sooner. He didn’t have a real name.
Maris had looked at him blankly. “Sooner?”
His mouth had twisted, and he’d looked far too old for his fourteen years. “Yeah, like a mongrel dog.”
“No,” Wolf had said, because the name was a clue. “You know you’re part Indian. More than likely you were called Sooner because you were originally from Oklahoma—and that means you’re probably Cherokee.”
The boy merely looked at him, his expression guarded, but still something about him had lightened at the possibility that he hadn’t been likened to a dog of unknown heritage.
His relationships with everyone in the family were complicated. With Mary, he wanted to hold himself away, but he simply couldn’t. She mothered him the way she did the rest of her brood, and it terrified him even though he delighted in it, soaking up her loving concern. He was wary of Wolf, as if he expected the big man to turn on him with fists and boots. Wise in the ways of wild things, Wolf gradually gentled the boy the same way he did horses, letting him get accustomed, letting him realize he had nothing to fear, then offering respect and friendship and, finally, love.
Michael had already been away at college, but when he did come home he simply made room in his family circle for the newcomer. Sooner was relaxed with Mike from the start, sensing that quiet acceptance.
He got along with Josh, too, but Josh was so cheerful it was impossible not to get along with him. Josh took it on himself to be the one who taught Sooner how to handle the multitude of chores on a horse ranch. Josh was the one who taught him how to ride, though Josh was unarguably the worst horseman in the family. That wasn’t to say he wasn’t good, but the others were better, especially Maris. Josh didn’t care, because his heart was wrapped up in planes just the way Joe’s had been, so perhaps he had been more patient with Sooner’s mistakes than anyone else would have been.
Maris was like Mary. She had taken one look at the boy and immediately taken him under her fiercely protective wing, never mind that Sooner was easily twice her size. At twelve, Maris had been not quite five feet tall and weighed all of seventy-four pounds. It didn’t matter to her; Sooner became hers the same way her older brothers were hers. She chattered to him, teased him, played jokes on him—in short, drove him crazy, the way little sisters were supposed to do. Sooner hadn’t had any idea how to handle the way she treated him, any more than he had with Mary. Sometimes he had watched Maris as if she were a ticking time bomb, but it was Maris who won his first smile with her teasing. It was Maris who actually got him to enter the family conversations: slowly, at first, as he learned how families worked, how the give-and-take of talking melded them together, then with more ease. Maris could still tease him into a rage, or coax a laugh out of him, faster than anyone else. For a while Wolf had wondered if the two might become romantically interested in each other