she’d come here for. Which meant she’d failed in a mission to help her family through a difficult time financially.
It was one problem her family had right now that she’d thought she could actually solve. Not the thing with her mother or Rex Foley or her brother, but the money part. She’d been willing to head into an old, long-abandoned mine alone to do it. She wasn’t stupid. She’d known the risks and been willing to take it for the sake of her family.
And she’d failed.
So, the stores were in some trouble, her mother had a thing for Rex Foley, and Charlie…
Poor Charlie.
She feared she’d just made things worse for him.
Travis stretched out in front of the fire and listened to her toss and turn and sigh for as long as he could stand it, then finally turned toward her and barked out, “What is it?”
She gave a start, reminding him of the way she’d done that at each big bolt of lightning.
“Sorry,” she said. “I…there’s just so much, I don’t even know where to start.”
“You want back in the mine?” he guessed, because he knew eventually she’d get around to trying to talk him into that.
Even now, caught red-handed, she thought she could somehow charm her way back inside, thinking to steal one more thing from his family?
Unbelievable!
Women!
A man just couldn’t trust them.
Just this past summer, Travis’s own brother, Zane, had gone nuts over his little girl Olivia’s nanny, and Travis had known right away that woman was hiding something. It hadn’t taken more than a couple of phone calls to find out Melanie Grandy hadn’t always been a nanny. She’d worked as a Las Vegas showgirl. Travis didn’t know if Zane knew about that or not, and in the end, he’d decided to leave it alone, thinking they’d work it out. It wasn’t like the woman had been a stripper or a call girl.
But now, being reminded himself of just how manipulative women could be, Travis was wondering if he’d done the right thing. He could probably use someone like Zane right now to remind him not to get stupid over a pretty, scheming woman.
“Go ahead,” he urged Miss Paige McCord. “Tell me why I should let you back into that mine.”
“No, it’s not the mine,” she insisted. “I mean…yes, I want back in it, but, no, that’s not what I was talking about a second ago. It was…I wondered if I could talk to you about just one thing without…well, maybe without this whole lifelong family feud getting in the way of it?”
“Considering the fact that everything between your family and mine started there and is colored by that, I don’t see how, Red.”
“Yes. I know. You’re right. I’m just…None of it’s his fault—”
“His fault?”
“Charlie. My little brother…Your…You know about Charlie, right?”
Okay, that surprised him.
And that particular wound was still raw and festering.
He didn’t really know how he felt about having a twenty-one-year-old half brother he’d known nothing about until a few weeks ago.
While he might disagree with his brothers about a lot of things, how they lived their lives, what was important to them, things like that, they were and always would be brothers. They were tight. They were family, and he’d have walked through fire for any of them anytime they needed it.
So to know that there was a fourth Foley brother out there somewhere, who’d never been one of them…
It was just wrong.
Who’d been a McCord instead.
“Yes,” he admitted. “My father told us about Charlie.”
His father was still reeling from the news himself. His father, steady as a rock, raise-three-boys-alone-after-his-wife-died kind of steady, absolutely reeling.
Travis didn’t think anything in this world could have shaken his father like that particular bit of news.
“It’s just that…Charlie’s special,” Paige said. “He’s great. He’s sweet. He’s kind. He’s happy. Like a puppy, just kind of silly and goofy. Everybody loves him. And he’s so young. I don’t…I can’t stand the idea of him getting hurt in all this.”
Travis got up and came to stand over her, hands on his hips, furious all over again. “And you think my father and my brothers and I are going to hurt him?”
“I don’t know.” She sat up in the bed, covers falling to her waist, her hair tumbling everywhere. “I have no idea how you’re going to treat him or what you think about him. I can still hardly believe it’s true. That he’s your father’s son and not my father’s.”
Travis frowned. Okay. He had to admit what she’d just said was likely true, because he wasn’t completely sure how he felt about the whole thing, either. How could anyone be? It was all too strange, too new.
“If I could just…I know you don’t owe me anything,” she said. “I know I don’t have the right to ask anything of you, but you’re here and we spent some time together before…before anything about our families got in the way, and…Well, I think you can be a nice man, when you want to be. And I’m asking you, please…Charlie wants to meet your father…his father. I assume at some point he’ll want to meet you and your brothers… Could you just be kind? Please?”
Kind?
What the hell did she think of them? That they were a pack of wolves? That they’d eat him alive?
And yet, he could hear that her concern was genuine and that, for all he could see, she loved her younger brother very much.
“Answer a question for me, Red. How did your father treat him?”
She looked for a minute like…like it had been bad…maybe everything Travis feared. He’d always heard Devon McCord was an ass.
He swore, sat down on the edge of the cot and grabbed her by the arms, holding her there in front of him, not letting her look away. “No. Tell me. He hurt him?” That one question burned a hole in Travis’s gut when he let himself think about it.
She looked confused, surprised, hurt herself. “No.”
“The guy’s always been rumored to have a nasty temper. Ask anybody, and not the people in my family who were taught from birth to hate him. Anybody. They’ll tell you he was a big, tough, mean son of a bitch. So tell me. Tell me right now. Did he hit that kid? Did he hit Charlie?”
“No,” she said.
“Swear it,” he demanded, right up in her face. “Right now. It’s…I need to know, Red. I need to know no one hurt him like that when no one in my family even knew he was a Foley, and none of us were there to protect him. Because he’s family and we don’t leave each other alone to face something like that. It just isn’t right.”
“No, he didn’t hit us.”
“Maybe not you or your sister, but what about your brothers? And if he knew Charlie wasn’t his—”
“He didn’t know,” she said. “I’m almost certain he didn’t. Charlie was just so easy to like. To love. For my father, too. I don’t think there’s any way he knew Charlie wasn’t his.”
“Okay.” Then he realized he’d been manhandling her himself, trying to make her sit there and look him in the eye and tell him the truth.
He still had her by the arms in a hold that wouldn’t allow any kind of escape from him.
And he’d gotten too close to her again.