The Loner (9 page)

“I was going to do that, but then I figured it was crazy to wake you up in the middle of the night. I’ve waited my whole life for you, Ren, but I swear the past two hours have seemed like an eternity.”

He rocked her in his arms, his face buried in her shoulder-length hair.

She didn’t want to let him go. It felt too good to be held in his arms. But Sam would be arriving any minute, and she didn’t dare let him find Jackson here. Sam had warned her what would happen if she ever tried to have a relationship with his father’s worst enemy.

Ren leaned back to tell Blackjack he had to leave, that they would have to meet somewhere else later to talk, but frowned as she took a good look at him. His body had felt strong and solid, but his eyes looked haunted and his features looked haggard. He would be fifty-seven next month, with a bad heart that had been corrected with bypass surgery four years ago. Was he ill? Was that why he’d come?

“Are you all right?” she asked, reaching up to touch his cheek with her fingertips.

He grasped her hand and turned it to kiss her palm. “I’m free, Ren. Free of Eve at last.”

She felt her heart leap at his words. She searched his face for the joy that ought to be there—but was not. He looked anxious and uncertain in a way he hadn’t since he’d first come to her thirty-seven years ago to propose … and she’d refused because she was already pregnant with Jesse Creed’s child.

“What happened?” she asked. “Was Eve in an accident? Is she dead?”

He shook his head. “Summer knows everything. There’s nothing left for Eve to use as blackmail.”

“How did she find out?”

Jackson blew a breath of air out of puffed cheeks. “I met up with Billy Coburn in the Armadillo Bar. He told me Summer’s known the truth for the past two years. She overheard her mother and me arguing.”

Ren tried to see past the gray stone wall Blackjack had made of his eyes. Why did he still seem so worried? What was he thinking? Now that he was finally free, was he having second thoughts about a life with her? She was afraid to ask, so she said, “Is Summer all right?”

“I should have trusted her more,” he admitted. “She said she didn’t want things to change between us. That’s why she didn’t say something to me sooner about her knowing the truth.”

Ren pressed her forehead against his chest. “Oh, Jackson. Oh, my dear.”

“I plan to start divorce proceedings as soon as the
Houston office of DeWitt & Blackthorne is open for business. Knowing my cousin Harry, I won’t have to wait much past daybreak.”

Ren lifted her face to his. “What about Bitter Creek?” She couldn’t imagine Jackson Blackthorne without the ranch that had been his lifeblood. “Will Eve be able to take it from you?”

He shrugged. “I don’t much care. All I want is you.”

Ren leaned her cheek against his shoulder. It was hard to believe that the fight between their two families that had begun over a piece of land so many years ago might finally come to an end.

Three Oaks was a small island—a mere hundred square miles of land—in a sea of Blackthorne grass. And Blackthornes had been trying to buy it—or take it forcibly from Creeds—since the Civil War. It would be ironic if the two clans were finally united by marriage now the way they had been when the first Blackthorne married Creighton Creed—against her son’s wishes—and started the feud that had survived until the present day.

The conflict had been very much a part of their lives during all the years of her marriage to Jesse. Two years ago, her eldest son had vowed he would murder Jackson Blackthorne—and make it look like an accident—if Ren pursued any relationship with his father’s nemesis. She’d believed Sam would do what he’d promised. It had almost been a relief when Jackson wasn’t able to divorce his wife.

But her respite had come to an end.

She felt her stomach churn. Sam’s feelings hadn’t changed. If anything, he hated the Blackthornes more
than ever, despite the fact—or maybe because of the fact—that both his sisters had ended up married to Blackthornes.

Four years ago, Callie had married Blackjack’s eldest son Trace and taken their two children, Eli and Hannah, and moved with him to a cattle station in Australia, where they’d produced another daughter, Henrietta. Two years ago, Bay had married Owen Blackthorne, and they were now living happily in Fredericksburg with their twin sons, Jake and James. Sam had felt betrayed by his sisters’ embrace of the enemy.

But perhaps Sam was entitled to hate Blackthornes. He’d certainly suffered more from the feud than any of his siblings. The Blackthornes had stolen something precious from him. Something he’d never get back.

“You have to leave, Jackson,” Ren said. “Sam will be here for breakfast in a few minutes.”

“I’m not leaving you, Ren. Not again. Never again.”

“Be reasonable,” she said, backing away from his embrace. “Sam will need time to adjust—”

“Are you telling me I need your son’s approval to marry you?”

Ren heard both arrogance and irritation in his voice. Jackson Blackthorne wasn’t used to being told he couldn’t have something he wanted. But she’d learned a long time ago that you couldn’t always have what you wanted, even if you wanted it very badly.

She crossed to the coffeemaker, using the excuse of making coffee to give her time to think. When she was done, she turned back to Jackson, her hands braced against the counter and said, “Two years ago, you chose your daughter’s happiness over your own. Can you
blame me for making the same choice now for my son’s sake?”

He yanked off his hat and threw it onto the antler rack inside the door, then shoved both hands through his hair. Ren felt her pulse speed up. He looked her in the eyes and said, “I’m here to stay, Ren. Our life together starts here and now… unless you send me away.”

“You’re not divorced yet. It won’t look good in court if you—”

“I don’t give a damn anymore. I just want to be with you… before we’re both too old and brittle to make love to one another,” he added with the hint of a smile.

Ren had rarely seen Jackson smile. She was amazed that he could find levity in the moment. She was still too frightened of what Sam might do. And afraid, now that the moment had come, that the passion which had flared between them so many years ago might have flickered out.

“Jackson, I—”

He must have seen what she was feeling, because his smile broadened until he was grinning. “Do you think it isn’t still there? Foolish, foolish woman. All I have to do is look at you to want you.

“It’s been that way ever since you were seventeen, and I saw you floating in that pond wearing nothing but a white bra and panties, your eyes closed, that serene smile on your face… and you asked me to come and kiss you, thinking I was Jesse. My feelings haven’t changed, Ren. I want you every bit as much now as I did that long-ago day.”

She flushed, remembering how husky his voice had sounded that lazy summer afternoon, how she’d heard the rustle of denim and the clink of his belt, before he’d
moved silently into the water. How he’d kept her eyes covered with his hand, asking her to live out the fantasy, not wanting her to discover his deception.

Somehow she’d known it wasn’t Jesse making love to her in the pond. But she hadn’t wanted the dream to end. What had surprised and later shamed her was her behavior after she’d learned the truth. She’d spent the rest of the afternoon talking to, and making love with, Jackson Blackthorne.

It was appalling to realize that she’d found the other half of her soul—and he was not the man who’d fathered the child she carried inside her. She had never made a more difficult decision in her life than whether to marry Jackson Blackthorne or Jesse Creed.

As heir to the Blackthorne name and fortune, Jackson had believed the world was his for the taking. And he’d intended to have her for his wife.

“Marry me, Ren,” he’d urged.

“I’m carrying Jesse’s child,” she’d replied, as though that were answer enough.

“I love you, Ren. I need you.”

I need you
. The words had seemed to startle him as much as they did her. She’d been so tempted to say yes.

“I’m sorry, Jackson,” she’d blurted before she could change her mind. “I can’t.”

“I promise I’ll take care of the baby. He’ll never want for anything.”

“Except his father’s love,” she’d said in a whisper. She’d reached up to touch his face, to offer comfort, and he’d grasped her hand and held it against his cheek.

She watched the desperation grow in his eyes as he whispered, “Please, Ren.”

She shuddered now when she thought of how much he must have wanted her, to swallow his pride and beg.

“Don’t, Jackson,” she’d said in a choked voice. “Nothing you say can change the fact that this baby is Jesse’s.”

“Then get rid of it!”

She’d wrenched free and stared at him, seeing the effort it took for him to control the dark, jealous rage that had prompted his outburst. In that instant, she’d wished the baby had never been conceived. And in the next instant regretted that wish. She’d placed her hand over the tiny life growing inside her, looked into his storm-ridden gray eyes, and said, “You know I can’t do that.”

“I’m sorry,” he’d said. “Just please don’t leave me, Ren. I can’t live without you. I promise—”

She’d interrupted him in a fierce voice, determined not to let him sway her from the decision she’d struggled so hard to make. “You’re a Blackthorne. This child is a Creed. What if your feelings change after the baby is born? I can’t marry you, Jackson. I can’t take that chance!”

The next day she’d married Jesse Creed. And that same night realized she’d made the wrong choice.

Blackjack watched Ren covertly. Even at fifty-three, she was still gracefully slender, with warm, gray-green eyes and auburn hair that was gray at the temples and smelled like lavender. She wasn’t acting as delighted by the turn of events as he’d hoped. She kept throwing Sam up as a roadblock.

He was scared. Was she really worried about her son’s reaction to his presence? Or had her feelings toward him changed? Was she wishing he’d stayed with Eve?

He no longer believed in happily ever after. He’d lived too many years in a make-do marriage to be able to imagine any other kind of relationship. It was hard to remember how promising his life with Eve had been in the beginning, even though he’d been urged into marriage by his father, who’d been friends with Eve’s father and wanted their two dynasties joined.

He hadn’t put up much of a fight. He’d been devastated when Ren married Jesse Creed the day after she’d refused his proposal. He was only twenty, with a whole life ahead of him to be lived without the only woman he was certain he would ever love. Nothing had mattered.

When he’d married Evelyn DeWitt three months later, Ren had still owned his heart. Even so, in the first few weeks of his marriage, he’d begun to admire and appreciate his wife—who’d brought fifty thousand acres of good DeWitt grassland with her as a dowry.

It was hard to remember what Eve had been like all those years ago. So happy. So carefree. Always smiling. Always laughing. When he was with her, he’d been able to ignore the ache in his chest that he felt whenever he thought of Ren. He remembered being surprised that his marriage was turning out so well.

Maybe if Ren hadn’t miscarried, everything would have been different. But a horse had stumbled and fallen.

And all their lives had changed forever.

He’d been at the Bitter Creek Regional Hospital with Eve, who was seeing a doctor because she suspected she
was pregnant, when he’d overheard two nurses talking and realized Ren had been admitted several hours earlier.

“She was rounding up cattle and her horse stumbled and she was thrown,” one nurse said to the other. “The cattle spooked and she got trampled. Her leg got broken pretty bad. And she lost her baby.”

“How awful,” the other nurse said. “How far along was she?”

Blackjack didn’t wait to hear the answer, just headed for the reception desk and said, “Where did you put Mrs. Creed?”

“She isn’t receiving visitors,” the receptionist said.

“I asked you a question,” he said. “Answer it.”

“Mr. Blackthorne’s family owns the hospital,” a nurse told the receptionist, then turned to him and said, “She’s on the second floor, Mr. Blackthorne. Room 203.”

Blackjack couldn’t wait for the elevator. He took the stairs two at a time and ran down the empty hallway, looking from side to side until he found the room he wanted. The door was closed. He debated whether to knock but didn’t want to take the chance of anyone telling him he couldn’t come in. He pushed the door open and stepped inside.

The shadowy room was lit only by streaks of late afternoon sunlight that escaped through the closed venetian blinds. He could see Ren lying on the farthest of the two railed hospital beds, her eyes closed, her hands folded over her flat stomach. Her toes were all that was visible of her lower right leg, which was covered from the knee down in a thick white cast.

“Ren?” He felt paralyzed, terrified that she was hurt
worse than the nurses had said. Her face was parchment pale, and one cheek had a bandage taped to it.

Without opening her eyes, she turned her head toward the wall and said, “Go away, Jackson.”

He crossed and sat on the bed beside her. Tears had dried on her face. He brushed his knuckles across her cheek above the square white bandage. “Are you all right?”

“No.” She kept her head turned away.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

He heard the gurgle as she swallowed several times.

“Please, Ren. Talk to me.” He was frightened by how still she lay. He wanted to pick her up and hold her, but he was terrified of hurting her. “Ren. Sweetheart, I need—”

She wrenched her head around to look at him. “Don’t. I’m not your sweetheart. I’m another man’s wife. And you have a wife of your own.”

He hadn’t even realized he’d used the endearment. He met her gaze and saw that what he’d been thinking ever since he’d heard that she’d lost the baby was mirrored in her tortured eyes.
How capriciously the gods play with mortals. How unkind fate is
.

She was free now. But he was not.