Home To Texas - Ransom My Heart Part 21

She glanced at the calico, who was still watching warily from the railing.

"Never did, I always wanted one, but I guess I just couldn't find the right cat."

She nodded.

"Your mama bought you a toy cat in Mexico, but..."

Somehow we lost it, he thought. They didn't seem to be any good atholding on to things, him and Samantha. Not even the important ones."I know a song about a cat," she said into the painful silence."Yeah," Chase said, smiling at her again.

"I know you do."

"I sang it too much, didn't I? Just about wore you out, listening to it."

"You didn't sing it too much," Chase denied.

"Just a lot," she suggested solemnly.

"A lot," he agreed, losing the battle not to smile. He watched her

answering grin with the same squeeze of his heart he'd felt before.

"Mandy?" Samantha's voice drifted out through the screen door. Notanxious. Just a mother. Just trying to locate her child."I'm out on the porch," Mandy called.Chase stood, knowing he wasn't ready for this. He wanted a chance to make it right, but he hadn't come up with any words he thought could

explain what he'd done. And instead of trying, he'd spent the last forty-eight hours feeling sorry for himself because Sam Kincaid hadn't thought he was good enough to be his son-in-law. Except that shouldn't have been exactly a startling revelation for him, and what had been between him and Samantha had never had a whole lot to do with what Sam thought.

He could see her now, standing there behind the screen, looking out at the two of them. He couldn't tell anything about what she was thinking because it was too dark in the house. She stood there for what seemed like an eternity before she pushed the screen door open.

"Chase?" she said.

"What are you doing here?"

"I used to live here," he said softly.

"Remember?"

She nodded, emerald eyes suddenly washed with moisture, and then she

looked down at her daughter. Their

daughter, who had been conceived one cold December night in this small house.

"Why don't you go swing, Mandy, so Mama and Mr.

McCullar can talk?" she suggested."Okay," the little girl agreed. She smiled at Chase as she went downthe steps and by him. The cat leaped down from the railing, rubbedbetween Samantha's ankles and then, stepping almost daintily, followedthe child down the wooden steps.

Chase waited until they were both at the cottonwood before he spoke.

"You're living here now?" he asked.

There was a small flood of color into her cheeks and her mouth moved,

her full bottom lip caught briefly by her teeth."Yes," she said finallY."Why?""Because ... this is McCullar land. I thought Mandy should have it."He shook his head, slowly, fighting the emotional force of that."Because she's mine?""Yes," she whispered."I wish I had known," he said.There was no recrimination in the words. Jenny was right. What he had done had been stupid--maybe a lot of other things as well, but primarily stupid. Because he had finally realized that he had given Samantha no reason to think he would want to know about any results from that night. Stupid.

He lowered his eyes, trying to hide the impact of what she'd told him, the impact of what she had done to preserve Mandy's McCullar. heritage. He noticed that Samantha's toenails had been painted with the same cotton-candy pink as her daughter's. Her feet were just as bare, but they were clean and slender and somehow elegant, even standing on the weathered boards of the narrow porch he had built.

"I wish you had, too," she said. Surprised, he looked up into her eyes. "I wish... I've always wished Mandy could have known her daddy." Their eyes held for a long time. The words he had wanted to say didn't seem important anymore. In spite of what had happened to Mac, there was no excuse for what he'd done. No rationale. No explanation he could give.

Jenny was right about it all. At least about almost all of it.And the rest... He couldn't do anything about the rest."I'm so sorry," he said."I thought..." He took a breath before he continued."At the time I thought I was doing what was right.""I guess that's what we all do. Just ... what we think is right. Only what I did was wrong. I know that now."

She wasn't blaming him, he realized, and a little of the guilt for

thi'owing the precious years away eased in the hard tightness of his chest. "Your father probably had something to do with it. I never was his ideal candidate for a son-in-law."

"It wasn't Sam's fault," she said.

"He even told me it wasn't right to keep ... the baby from you. He

said you'd want to know. Any man would, he said, but ... especially a

man like you."

He wasn't sure exactly what Sam had meant by that, but he had sense enough to recognize, surprisingly, that whatever it was, it wasn't derogatory. That was evident from both the words and from her tone when she had said them.

"But he found you somebody else to marry," he reminded her, remembering

again her father's role in all this.

What Sam had said and what he had done seemed to be at odds with each other.

She hesitated, and he waited through a couple of thudding heartbeats.

"There wasn't anybody else," she admitted.

"My ... marriage was fake. A lie. I went along because it was

important to him. Sam was trying to save face with the whole state of Texas, I guess. At the time, I really didn't care what he did. If he wanted me to say I was married, so all those people, all his friends, wouldn't know Sam Kin-caid's daughter had been.." sleeping around, I didn't see any reason not to make him happy. It didn't matter to me what he told them."

Chase climbed the low steps and grabbed her arm, gripping the soft flesh above her elbow. He was so angry that he even shook her a little.

"What the h.e.l.l does that mean--sleeping around. You weren't sleeping around."

The words got louder with each repet.i.tion. They made him sick. She was his--had been his. Only his and he knew it. He wanted to kill whoever had said that.

"But that's what his friends would think," she said.

"Sam's seventy-four years old, and illegitimacy still carries a certain.." stigma for his generation."

"It carries a certain stigma for me, too," he said bitterly.

"Especially when it's my little girl--" He stopped the words, but he couldn't prevent his eyes from moving to the child who was sitting in the swing. He could hear her singing, bare toes pus.h.i.+ng against the dust under the seat of the swing. His gaze swung back to Samantha'

s.

"Why, d.a.m.n it? Why didn't you just tell me?"

"You weren't ever here, for one thing. You were in San Antonio, making sure Rio got put into prison. You'd put the ranch up for sale. You just ... weren't here."

"Jenny could have reached me."

"It wasn't a matter of reaching you, Chase. I thought you didn't want to be reached."

He released her and turned around, leaning against the post, thinking about what Jenny had said.

"I never realized, not until Jenny told me..."

"What did Jenny tell you?" Samantha asked from behind him when he hesitated. Admitting what Jenny had said was almost too painful.

"That I'd tried to crawl into the grave with Mac," he confessed finally.

"I always knew what you must have felt like when Mac died," she said.

"I even understood about Rio. I guess I was just too young and scared and ... I didn't want Sam telling me what to do anymore. If he'd told me to stay away from you and not to ever let you find out about Mandy, I'd probably have run all the way to San Antonio to tell you."

"But that's not what he said?"

""Any man deserves to know about his child," he told me, 'but especially a man like Chase McCullar."" There didn't seem to be much more to say. Not everything had been said that would one day have to be said, but enough. It was a beginning.

"Watch me swing, Mr. McCullar!" Mandy called. She leaned back in the swing and pointed her toes toward the clear, blue desert sky. Small brown arms pulled at the ropes, sending the swing in a higher arch over the bare dirt beneath.

"Watch me!" she prompted again.

"We're watching," Samantha called.

"We're both watching you, Cupcake."

THEY ENDED UP AT twilight at the paddocks. The horses were obviously Kincaid stock and obviously well cared for.

He wondered how much help Samantha had running the place.

"Sam give you a start?" he asked. They were leaning on the fence watching the newest addition to her stables bolt around on pipe stem legs, occasionally shying from imaginary dangers. His mother stood nearby, placid as a sheep, but keeping an watchful eye on the colt's antics.

"He would have," Samantha said, and then she paused before she added, "if I'd been smart enough to let him."

Chase laughed at her tone.

"It would have been a lot easier," she' admitted. She dropped her hand over the top rail, snapping her fingers, and the mare obediently ambled over for a visit.

"How'd you swing the ranch, if you didn't take anything from Sam?"

"I had a trust fund. My grandmother, bless her, thought women should have something of their own. I already had my own horses, the two mares and Light foot Harry. Sam had given them to me as birthday presents through the years, and I didn't have any qualms about bringing them with me. Then he offered me a few mares at what were rock-bottom prices, considering their bloodlines, and for Mandy's sake, I swallowed my pride and accepted. I think it's probably the first time anybody ever got the advantage over Sam Kincaid in a horse deal."

Chase laughed again, and eventually she joined him, the tone of her laughter still slightly rueful.

"I picked up the black at auction for almost nothing," she said, pointing to a magnificent stallion.

"And you've been surviving by selling the offspring?"

he asked.

"Selling them without any trouble and for good money.

The breeding's prime, and everybody knows it. I had planned to expand next spring, but now..."

"Now?" Chase repeated when she didn't go on.

He wondered if that "now" could have anything to do with him being back, and then he pushed that pleasant fantasy aside. Just because Samantha had admitted she wished she had told him about Mandy, just because she'd said she understood why he hadn't been here, where he should have been, five years agty---none of that meant that she wanted him here now. That was just more of his fantasy. More of what he wanted.