Children of Destiny Books 1-3 (Texas: Children of Destiny Book 9) Read online

All too soon the wedding and the reception were over, and Megan was wrapped in Jeb’s warm arms and being whisked by private jet to Santa Fe, New Mexico, for a two-week honeymoon.

  In those first magical days of marriage, Megan was too overwhelmed by the new and exciting experiences of being a bride to think of anything other than Jeb. All her doubts were forgotten. It was too wonderful just to be with Jeb every hour of the days and nights, to know that he was hers, and she was his. Santa Fe with its muted colors of coral, turquoise and tan washed with golden light and purple shadows. Santa Fe with its lazy, somnolent pace, with its sense of history and mystery, with its artsy shops, restaurants and boutiques was an idyllic environment for honeymooners.

  Megan and Jeb would sit for hours, holding hands, talking beneath the violet shade in the park on the main plaza. Sometimes they would stroll hand in hand by the groups of black-haired Indians sitting in a row, selling their jewelry and pottery on blankets under the portal of the Palace of Governors.

  Megan and Jeb would laugh over trifles—over some amusing bit of artwork, over something one of the Indians or their children said.

  Never had laughter come so easily to Megan. The bitterness of years was washed away, and for hours she would forget that her father had not given her away on her wedding day, that he would never come home and share in her new happiness.

  “You were meant to laugh, to be happy,” Jeb murmured one evening as he caught her hand in his and held onto it. “I haven’t seen you like this since you were a child.”

  Sometimes their conversation grew serious. Jeb began to confide in her his anxiety about the ranch’s money problems. Never before had she realized the extent of the ranch’s debts. Nor had she realized the complexities of managing such a massive, far-flung enterprise. He would discuss his options—the possibility of cutting back on the livestock breeding programs, selling land, of pulling out of Australia, of branching out into some new, more profitable venture. He was considering the purchase of a citrus farm in Florida. And she would listen.

  “I didn’t want the ranch, the responsibility of it all,” he said once. “I would have given anything not to have been the oldest son, not to have had to forsake everything I ever wanted to be because someone had to take command. Wayne groomed me for the job, but I wanted to be a doctor. In the end, I sacrificed everything for the ranch, for my family.”

  “And do you regret it?”

  His lips grazed her wrist lightly. “For a while I did.” His eyes met hers. “Not anymore.”

  Jeb was a passionate and demanding lover; with him Megan found that she was equally so. They made love at any hour of the day or night in the fabulous suite of rooms with its pink-stenciled walls and adobe balconies looking out over the desert and distant blue mountains.

  On their last afternoon in Santa Fe, Jeb and Megan were lying quietly in bed, the sheets thrown aside, their naked bodies entwined. Megan was trembling faintly from their passionate lovemaking. Jeb was stroking her hair.

  “Do you realize, Sleepybones,” drawled his lazy voice, “that we’ve been in Santa Fe for two weeks and haven’t really seen any of the sights?”

  She wanted only to bask in this wanton paradise of her senses. “I don’t care.”

  “We haven’t driven into the Jemez Mountains, gone to Los Alamos or even seen the ski basin.”

  She opened her languorous eyes and tried to focus them, but Jeb remained a delicious blur of brown skin and muscle. Her hand slid lovingly across his thigh. “I don’t care,” she whispered, pulling him even closer, snuggling her face against his throat, taking in the scent of his clean masculine flesh, the exquisite sensation of his body against hers.

  “What are we going to tell people we did for two weeks?” he muttered huskily.

  She giggled. “Let them guess.”

  “How could we be here and not at least go out to the Puye Cliffs and the Indian ruins?”

  Megan exhaled softly in amazement. “You’re really serious about all this?”

  “Yes. I’ve got to see at least one site.”

  “I couldn’t drag myself to the Puye Cliffs if my life depended on it.”

  Tenderly he kissed the tip of her nose. Then he held her close for a moment longer, cherishing her. “You’re sure you don’t want to go see the Puye Cliffs?”

  *

  Megan stayed in the hotel while Jeb went out to the Puye Cliffs. While he was gone, she ran a bathtub full of lavender-scented bubbles and sank beneath them. She had been soaking for a while when the telephone rang. She dragged herself out of her bath, wrapped herself in a towel and caught the phone.

  “Howdy,” came a rough Texas drawl. “Jackson around?”

  “This is Mrs. Jackson.”

  “I guess that’s close enough. Tell him his gas well came in.”

  “His well?”

  “And it looks like his hunch was right. We’ve got the biggest field in years. Robards is getting set to drill a second well up by that old hunting lodge. And tell Jackson old man MacKay finally signed the lease and got it back to Robards.’’

  “Old man MacKay...” Her voice faltered.

  In that first tortuous moment of dawning horror and shock, Megan grew absolutely still.

  “Y-you, you can’t mean Glen MacKay is alive?” she whispered.

  “Hell, yes. That ornery old coot’s still kicking.”

  Megan clasped a second hand around the receiver to hold it steady. “You’re absolutely certain he’s alive?”

  “Jack Robards wouldn’t drill a water well without a legal lease. MacKay signed all right!”

  Daddy was alive!

  She gazed into space. A smothering feeling enveloped her, cutting off her breath.

  Her father was alive!

  Jeb must have known it for ten years, and he hadn’t told her! Not even on their wedding day when she’d been drowning in sorrow because she’d believed Glen dead!

  Jeb had gotten her father to sign a gas lease, but he hadn’t bothered to get him home for the wedding.

  Jeb had driven Glen away, kept him away.

  The pink adobe walls with their pink-stenciled Indian drawings looked surreal, blurring and fading, then becoming so piercingly brilliant that her eyes ached in their sockets.

  Jeb. Her only love. Her only enemy. His duplicity astounded her.

  The vivid pinks and blues faded into a gray-tinged darkness, and her eyes misted over. A deadening coldness seeped into her, and her insides were freezing. Her extremities felt like deadweights. Her toes, her fingers, were no longer part of her.

  From a long way away, she heard someone at the door shouting her name, but these sounds faded into nothingness.

  The phone dropped through her fingers, and the floor rushed dizzyingly up to meet her.

  *

  Megan opened her eyes. She was in her nightgown in her bed, and Jeb was cradling her in his arms. Another man stood in the shadows. She saw the glint from the stethoscope looped casually around his neck. A syringe glimmered from the bedside table.

  Jeb was talking to the doctor. “She was on the phone when I came in, staring at me, but I don’t think she could see me.”

  “She’s conscious now.”

  Jeb turned and realized she was watching him with slitted eyes that were immensely cold and darkly green.

  She felt the heat of his hand crushing her fingers, the burning of his mouth as he kissed them with fierce, possessive urgency.

  He held her hands pressed to his cheek. “Megan, darling, you fainted. Who was that on the phone?”

  She stared at him mutely.

  “You’re pregnant,” Jeb said softly. “If only I’d known, I would never have left you.”

  He went on talking, but she didn’t hear him.

  Pregnant! She couldn’t be carrying Jeb’s child! Not now!

  She twisted her face and buried it in her pillow.

  His fingers were in her hair, smoothing it. “Honey! I know it’s sooner than we would have planned, but don’t t
urn away, not from me, not when you’ve just made me the happiest man in the world.”

  He seemed to care so desperately. Pink walls spun crazily until Megan was reeling with nausea. She kept her face buried and pressed her hands to her aching eyes. If only she could shut out his voice as easily.

  “Go away, Jeb. Just go away,” she whispered.

  The shock of learning about her father, plus this new revelation, was too much. She felt numb. At the same time she felt like she was suffocating. Jeb had betrayed her, and now she was tied to him forever. By the strongest tie of all, his child.

  Hurt, anger, humiliation, disappointment and sudden panic combined into heartache that painfully suffused her body.

  She would have given anything to be alone, but Jeb was lifting her, crushing her to his body, cradling her protectively, brushing away her tears, peering into her anxious face, and she was shaking and clinging to him and despising herself for her weakness.

  “Honey, you don’t really want me to go. You don’t mean that.”

  “I do! I do!”

  A look of uncertainty passed between Jeb and the doctor. Then the faint hollow echo of Jeb’s voice came to her as if from a great distance. “We’re going home tonight, darling. I’m going to take care of you. Everything is going to be all right.”

  A sudden violent tremor swept through her, and she closed her eyes again. Her fingers gripped his arms like claws as he brought his lips to hers.

  She shrank away in revulsion.

  Nothing would ever be all right again.

  *

  A silent, unapproachable Megan allowed Jeb to see to everything, and soon they were back in Texas, alone in their bedroom in the Big House. An alarmed Jeb had explained to his parents that Megan was too tired to do anything other than retire. Thus, he had spared her the need to face her in-laws and their questions. There was an emergency meeting of the ranch’s board members scheduled for the next morning, and Wayne was anxious to review several pressing items on the agenda. But Jeb put his father off and followed Megan to their bedroom.

  Upstairs, Jeb put Megan to bed at once. She agreed only when he promised to sleep in another room. He gave her a dark quizzical look and decided to humor her.

  When she fell asleep, her old nightmare returned to haunt her. She was a child, lost and abandoned. She called out in terror, her cries the most piteous of sounds. Jeb flung the door open and stood paralyzed listening to her sob. He knew she wouldn’t want him, but he couldn’t bear the sound of her unhappiness. Slowly he stepped inside and went to the bed, drawing her gently into his arms.

  “Oh, Jeb,” she breathed. Her arms slid around his neck desperately, clutching him in terror. Her entire body was drenched with perspiration. She was trembling, and the softness of her breasts brushed the hard wall of his chest. He fought to ignore the heat of his pulse, the hot urgent tensing in his loins.

  She continued to weep. “You’re going to leave me, too!”

  “No,” he whispered.

  “I don’t want to be alone again! I don’t care what you’ve done!”

  He nuzzled his roughened cheek against her soft one and pulled her closer, burying his lips in her hair, catching the scent of wild roses. “I’m here, Megan. I’ll always be here.”

  Her fingers tightened convulsively around his neck. He couldn’t understand her pain, but he could feel the intensity of her need for closeness now, the beginnings of her response to him, of his own to her.

  With a pang of guilt he realized that if he were a gentleman, he wouldn’t take advantage of her weakness and need for comfort, but his own need was too great. Slowly he unbuttoned her nightgown and slid it over her head, and she lay beneath him, a woman, all peach-gold skin and fire. His woman. Gloriously hot. Soft and yielding. Unprotesting. Wanting him now as he wanted him.

  She was carrying his child.

  He wanted to protect her from all hurt. He was overwhelmed by his tenderness for her, consumed with the need to bury himself in her, to feel the velvet walls of her lithe body close warmly around him.

  Very gently, he whispered the words that she would have given anything to hear once. “I love you.”

  She sobbed even more frantically and twisted her head from his, wondering if he was lying about this, too. All her life she had hungered for love, but she’d been betrayed too many times by too many people to believe him now.

  He touched her cheek and felt the wetness of her tears. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  How could she talk about what he’d done, when she hadn’t processed it yet?

  “I-it’s no use. Talking never changes anything.”

  He brushed her lips with his fingertips, and she opened her lips, sucking in a thick sun-browned finger. He lowered his mouth and placed a gentle kiss on her tousled red curls.

  “I love you,” he whispered. “That’s never going to change, either.”

  Her shaking fingers reached up and touched him, guiding his mouth to hers with gentle urgency.

  He drank deeply of her lips, of the jewel-like purity of her tears, and she melted into him on a voluptuous sigh of hopeless longing.

  Ill that moment, her need was so great that it no longer mattered that he had lied. She wanted him despite everything. Even when she had hated him, she had wanted him, and this was no different. He had betrayed her. She loved him still.

  He filled the burning void of darkness with desire. Her deep, aching loneliness was held at bay by the warmth of his kisses, by the hard, seeking intimacy of his body.

  Just this one last time she had to have him.

  Sensing her reluctance, he took her time and again that night, wanting her to need him, wanting to reassure himself of his claim on her, wanting to know that she was really his, and discovering that she was slipping away even as he wakened her to new heights of insensate pleasure.

  When it was over he fell asleep at once.

  Megan lay beside him, knowing that her marriage was over. Her body felt numb and frozen in despair, her emotions imprisoned in a cell of ice.

  She felt ashamed for wanting Jeb, for having turned to him for comfort after her nightmare, for the ache in her soul that craved his words of tenderness as well as the outpouring of his physical love.

  Would she always be that abandoned child? So starved for love she no longer even had her defiant pride?

  She was deeply ashamed. For wanting him. For loving him.

  For letting him love her, this one last time.

  Twelve

  Megan stood in a darkened corner of Jeb’s office, her bright head drooping over the lease that her father had signed less than three weeks before. Gingerly she traced a fingertip along the wavering flow of black ink that formed the letters of her father’s name. Then she jerked her hand away as if burned and remained so still, so silent, it hardly seemed she breathed as she read and reread his signature with rapt absorption.

  Her father was alive!

  She was glad Jeb had been forced to go into town early that morning for an emergency session with the board. Glad she’d been able to convince Jeb to leave her when he’d said he didn’t want to go. Glad, because it had given her a chance to discover irrefutable proof that her father was alive.

  There was a note attached to the document. She lifted it to the window and read her father’s shaky scrawl through the blur of her tears.

  Jeb, Please open a special account for Megan and Kirk and place any royalties received from this venture in it, to be divided equally at some future point between them. Glen

  For a long moment Megan could not tear her eyes from her father’s signature. Then she crushed the thick legal-sized papers in her shaking fingers and leaned heavily against the window.

  She felt like screaming, like weeping. Instead, assailed by memories, she closed her eyes. The intensity of her emotions staggered her. She’d grown up motherless, fatherless, but the most terrible thing of all, was that it hadn’t had to be that way. So much happiness had been stolen from her by her father
’s rejection, by Jeb’s silent duplicity through the years.

  She dragged her eyes away from the lease. Flickering shadows floated in the eerie light. Papers and file cabinets were askew from her hours of rummaging. She had to set everything straight again before Jeb got home, but she lacked the strength.

  At least she knew the bitter truth.

  She sank into Jeb’s chair. Her father was alive! And living in Texas. Jeb had known it, but she couldn’t blame Jeb entirely for his absence. Glen hadn’t wanted her!

  A thousand thoughts pounded in her head, a thousand hurts. For years she had longed for her father. She remembered all the lonely birthdays, the lonely Christmases, her confusion, her stubborn proud denial, Kirk’s silent grim retreat into himself every time she’d come to him in pain, her own anger and defiance. It was a galling irony that through the years the one person who had stood by her, who had guided her through the turmoil of her adolescence had been Jeb, her bitterest enemy.

  She had never dreamed that Glen could callously stay away, that he would not come if he knew how much his children needed him.

  He had known, and he hadn’t come.

  Megan forced herself to concentrate on the lease and made another equally damning discovery.

  She was rich. Very, very rich. Although Jeb had won the MacKay ranch in the poker game, Glen MacKay had retained the mineral rights. A sizable chunk of the gas royalties were to belong to Kirk and herself.

  Naive as she was about the oil business, she knew her percentage of the royalties and could amount to hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars. Megan remembered the roughneck’s words. “Looks like we’ve got the biggest field in years.”

  She was soon to be a wealthy woman, and Jeb had married her, knowing of this possibility, doubtless planning for it. Numbly she flicked through the remaining sheaf of papers. There were copies of letters Jeb had written her father through the years as well as a multitude of letters from her father. Many of them dealt with the gas exploration on the MacKay lease. But the most recent letter was a brief note from Glen thanking Jeb for saving Kirk’s life.

  Glen had known about Kirk, and he hadn’t come.