Children of Destiny Books 1-3 (Texas: Children of Destiny Book 9) Page 32

  Slowly, carefully, Megan set the documents back in their folder and filed them in the cabinet. Meticulously she went about the task of straightening Jeb’s office, working with the silent, mechanical, soulless efficiency of a robot.

  What a fool she had been to fall for Jeb a second time. She had been better off believing him a scoundrel.

  What kind of man was her husband, anyway? He had given up his career to help his family save the ranch. He had stolen her own father’s ranch, but he’d nurtured and educated his daughter. Jeb had saved her from making a disastrous marriage and hired her as his ranch pilot. Then, after all the good he’d done, when he’d realized gas lay beneath her father’s lease, Jeb had married her out of greed.

  She thought of the child she was expecting, and even though she would be tied to Jeb by this baby, she felt no remorse or even regrets about it. Already she loved it.

  When at last she finished straightening the office, she went outside into the hard brilliance of the day. Her senses were too vivid. The colors were over bright. The balmy heat seemed like an oven’s fire despite her cotton sundress. It was almost noon, but she felt queasy and unenthusiastic at the prospect of facing Wayne and Mercedes over lunch. Nor was she ready to confront Jeb with all that she knew when he came home.

  But where could she go?

  Slowly she walked toward Kirk’s cottage, and when she found him gone, she remembered he was with Jeb.

  She let herself inside, poured a cup of milk and made herself a cheese sandwich. But she left the meal untouched on the kitchen table, wandered into the darkly shuttered living room and sank listlessly into Kirk’s favorite chair. Hours passed, but she had no awareness of them, no awareness of the sunlight turning to gold, then red, of the heat going out of the afternoon as the shadows deepened and slanted into every corner of the house. She sat in dismal, forlorn silence, her fingers tensely knotted on her lap, her mind anesthetized with pain.

  She was still sitting in the dimness, lost in her world of private desolation, when she heard Byrom’s Porsche in the drive. When he strode briskly onto the porch and knocked, she got up slowly and met him at the door.

  He scarcely recognized the gaunt, thin-faced woman framed in the half-light of the doorway. “Megan?’’

  Nervously she smoothed a tangle of hair out of her eyes and nodded.

  He was shocked by the dull agony in her eyes.

  She pushed the screen, and it creaked on its rusty hinge. “I was waiting for Kirk.”

  Byrom stepped inside. The room was musty, closed, disused. “In the dark?”

  He reached for her arm, but she brushed him away, knowing instinctively that if she surrendered to his sympathy, her emotions could overpower her.

  “Is something wrong?” This time he seized her by the hand and was shocked by the iciness of her flesh. “You’re freezing! Are you sick?”

  Blood pounded in her temples. “I’m not sick! Not like you think. Oh, Byrom...”

  Carefully he folded her into his arms. “I’ve been worried about you.”

  She laid her head against his chest and said weakly, “You promised to remain my friend.”

  “I will always be that. What’s wrong?”

  For a long moment, the silence of the room enveloped them.

  “Everything!”

  The whispered word was like a crack in a dam. All day she had wrapped her agony in silence, and suddenly it all came pouring forth.

  Outside a Cadillac roared to a halt behind the Porsche.

  Neither Byrom nor Megan heard the car door slam, nor the angry footsteps storming up the sidewalk. They were conscious only of the melancholy flow of one heart’s anguish.

  “No one has ever loved me,” Megan finished on a hushed sob. “Not even Jeb.”

  She was still in Byrom’s arms when the door crashed open and Jeb stalked inside.

  Guiltily Byrom and Megan broke apart.

  Jeb was like a black giant in the doorway with the flame of a dying sun behind him. His voice boomed inside the room. “What the hell is going on here?”

  “We were just talking—” Byrom began.

  Megan couldn’t lift her eyes to her husband’s.

  Jeb saw only the agony in her face. The knowledge that Megan had chosen Byrom to confide in instead of him consumed Jeb with a blinding, raging jealousy.

  “Get out, Ferguson! Now! And don’t set foot on my property again.”

  Megan paled. For an instant, shock held her motionless. Then she lurched desperately toward the door after Byrom.

  A hand gripped her arm, spinning her around.

  “Not you, my love,” Jeb rasped. His dark face was livid, agonized.

  His hands dug into her arms. She scarcely felt the pain as he snapped her roughly against his body.

  “It’s not what you think,” she whispered. “I came here to be alone, to wait for Kirk! So did Byrom.”

  “The hell you say! I told you this morning Kirk was going into town with me.”

  She stared at her husband in dumb amazement. “I—I forgot about Kirk going with you. Until I came here and found he was gone,” she murmured. “I stayed anyway so I could be alone.”

  She yanked her arm free and began to run again, but he caught her effortlessly, spinning her around, bringing his face down to hers and studying her with a savage intensity. “You damn sure weren’t alone when I got here.”

  “You’re hurting me.”

  Brutal fingers squeezed flesh to bone. “I’m sorry.” He let her go. “But what do you think it felt like to come here and find you in this empty house all alone with the man you dated before me? Talking to him in whispers when you won’t have anything to do with me? Is he the reason you pleaded with me to go without you this morning?”

  “Will you please just go and leave me alone?”

  “Not until you tell me.”

  “You don’t care!”

  “The hell I don’t! I’ve been worried sick about you! The only time you’ve wanted me lately was when you woke up screaming from your nightmare. Something’s wrong, and I’ve been waiting for you to tell me what it is! I thought you were better this morning, or I would never have left, no matter what the emergency. It’s obvious you’re upset. Why? I want to know what you’re feeling, thinking, and you’re shutting me out. Is it the baby? Don’t you want our baby? Megan, we have to be honest with each other.”

  “Honest?” She began to tremble violently. “You don’t even know the meaning of that word.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about years and years of lies!” she cried. A deathlike quietness fell between them. “I’m talking about my father,” she said quietly.

  Their gazes locked for a moment. She struggled to blink back tears. His own face was as bloodless and unyielding as a granite statue.

  One glance and he understood everything. He read her disillusionment and despair. He saw the end of his marriage, the end of all his dreams. His head began to throb. There was a dry cottony taste in his mouth that didn’t go away even when he swallowed.

  His bruising hands fell to his sides, and he looked guiltily away as though he found the enormity of her sadness unendurable, as though he knew the enormity of his own failure to tell her everything was unforgivable.

  “How did you find out?” he asked at last, denying nothing, his own voice as quietly hushed as hers.

  “One of Robards’s roughnecks called you in Santa Fe to tell you about the gas well,” she managed softly. “He told me instead.”

  “I see.”

  “I went to your office this morning. I read all your letters to my father and his letters to you. After that… I didn’t know where to go, so I came here to see what Kirk knew about any of this. I talked to Byrom only because he was here, and I had to talk to someone. Anyone but you.”

  Jeb flinched. Her cold words were like a blade of ice piercing his chest.

  “I’ll never, never forgive you for driving my father away!�
��

  Something inside him broke. “That wasn’t all my fault! As long as we’re being honest, you played a part in driving him away yourself. You and your stubborn MacKay pride. You couldn’t understand that there was no way he could hold onto his ranch. He couldn’t run it at a profit, and he couldn’t live here without failing you. Through the years I tried to talk him into coming back, but he wouldn’t listen. You MacKays are a proud and stubborn breed.”

  Megan stared at him, numb with shock. “That was a low, cheap shot, Jeb Jackson. Blaming me… when it was your own greed. You took his ranch… to save yours. You wouldn’t let him come home! And if that wasn’t bad enough, when you found out there might be gas under all that land, you decided to marry me so you could get your hands on my royalties.”

  Her harsh words raked across his soul in a sudden, cruel, tearing pain. He stiffened proudly. His chiseled face grew as white and cold and closed as stone. “If that’s what you think, then go.”

  There was something in his voice she’d never heard before—hurt, defeat. Something about his proud, lonely stance caught at her heart, but she swallowed, struggling to push down an inexplicable compassion for him. She clenched her hands and willed herself to continue. “You’ve never done anything that wasn’t motivated by greed or the lust for power, Jeb. I tried to delude myself into believing I was wrong about you. All I’ll ever want from you now is a divorce.”

  “No!”

  “You said I could go...”

  “You’re pregnant with my child! No divorce.”

  For a paralyzed second, they stared into each other’s eyes. Then she leapt past him and ran out into the darkening twilight of the late afternoon.

  She heard the crashing of his boots behind her, but she reached his car first and saw his keys dangling in the ignition. She hopped inside, snapped the automatic door locks and headed for the hangar and her airplane.

  *

  Megan was in her Piper, and Jeb was shouting to her from the runway.

  She ignored him and started the engine. The propeller became a faltering, blurred arc. There was the smell of exhaust.

  A storm of sound erupted into thunder, drowning out Jeb’s cries.

  She was overwrought. She shouldn’t go up when her emotions were in such chaos.

  But she was too upset to think rationally.

  All she knew was that she had to get away from Jeb and be alone. Everything would be all right if only she could get away.

  There was only the single runway, and that afternoon there was a crosswind.

  Megan raced down the strip, anyway.

  Just as she lifted off, the wind caught the tail and the plane was thrown back against concrete, nose first. The tip of the propeller scraped but kept whirling, and the plane bounced up into the air again. The Piper turned crazily into the wind. With a damaged prop, Megan knew her only chance was to try to land.

  She fought to get control of the plane, but the Piper slammed onto the runway at a crazy angle. A wheel broke and crumpled beneath the fuselage. A wing tip ground suddenly down onto concrete, spraying sparks as the plane careened toward the hangar. Megan’s head crashed violently into the instruments.

  Megan’s world was pain and terror and the acrid smell of burning rubber. Plumes of black smoke engulfed the plane. Spirals of flame shot everywhere.

  She pounded against the door, but it was locked. The cockpit was like a furnace. She fumbled with the catch to the door, and it came undone. But she was pinned into her seat. In the distance she saw Jeb’s face, wild and dark with fear as he tore down the runway in a breakneck run.

  He would never reach her in time.

  She was going to be burned alive.

  The last thing she thought of was their baby.

  Thirteen

  Vaguely Megan sensed the poisonously sweet odor of antiseptic enveloping her like a cocoon of death. For days she drifted in and out of consciousness with pain stabbing her like the sharpest and hottest of knives. She bad broken two ribs, her collarbone, fractured her skull and suffered a concussion. Sometimes when she slept, she was haunted by her old nightmare. Sometimes by a new one—that her baby was dead and she herself was dying… and her recklessness was to blame. She would awaken screaming in her cold, glassed-in cell. She wanted Jeb then, but he was never there. An intensive-care nurse would come and whisper soothing, meaningless niceties and give her a shot.

  Megan no longer cared what Jeb had done, how he might have betrayed her. Pain and terror and guilt had obliterated everything but her need for him. She longed for the strength of his arms holding her, for the deep melody of his voice caressing her, comforting her, but now he didn’t want her. And she didn’t blame him.

  Dark days blended into dark nights, and he never came. Because he didn’t, she knew the most profound sense of loss and abandonment she had ever known. Her mother’s leaving was as nothing. So was her father’s. Only Jeb mattered. He was her heart. Her soul. Life itself. She had accused him. Judged him. Without giving him a chance to defend himself.

  Her last memory of him was of his dark haggard face through the flames, his rage washed away by hideous fear, his strong hands untwisting metal, his arms closing around her, pulling her from the fire, his hoarse voice shouting for Lauro.

  Jeb had carried her to the house. He had held her in the ambulance. She remembered his black head pressed against her side, the silent heart-wrenching agony of his tears. He had lifted his grief-ravaged face, seeking her forgiveness, and she had only stared at him with dull, hopeless eyes and forgiven him nothing.

  She’d been stubborn and defiant.

  Now it was too late.

  *

  From a deep sleep Megan came awake into a shining world filled with familiar faces. Mercedes and Wayne were there talking to each other in hushed, worried murmurs.

  A single ray of sunlight streamed into the room and lit a tangled crop of cotton-white hair. The man’s head was bowed, his gnarled, sunburned hands clasped tightly together, but she knew him instantly.

  “Daddy!” Her voice floated away, dying, the thinnest fragment of sound.

  But he heard her.

  She shut her eyes, thinking it all a dream, but when she opened them again, her father’s craggy, seamed face, darker and more leathery than she remembered, was bent anxiously to hers.

  “Girl?”

  She reached up and tried to touch him, but her hand fell away.

  Kirk stood beside their father. Mercedes and Wayne were behind them. Megan scanned the room, seeking Jeb, but he wasn’t there.

  “So, you’ve decided to wake up and hold court at last?” Glen said gruffly.

  “Oh, Daddy.” She tried to reach her hand up again, but it fell back limply to the bed. “It’s really you?”

  “The prodigal father,” he said in a low, gravelly tone filled with shame. “Can you ever forgive me?”

  Her anger toward him was gone.

  “Just love me,” she whispered, “and don’t go away.”

  He bent over her. She wanted to hug him, to shower him with kisses, but she was too weak to do anything other than smile when he traced her cheek with his fingertip.

  “I never was so scared in all my life, girl.”

  “Neither was I. My baby?”

  “The baby’s fine.”

  Relieved, she sighed weakly. Glen’s voice faded. His image blurred. She struggled to hold onto it, but it was lost in a mist.

  Her baby was alive! Her father had come home!

  There was only Jeb who was lost to her.

  Glen was still there when she woke up again. This time he was seated beside her, and her hand was folded tightly in his work-worn palm. “Girl, I thought about you everywhere I went.”

  “Why’d you go? Was it something I...”

  “Hush. None of that kind of talk. Darlin’, of course it wasn’t your fault. It was only ‘cause I was losing the ranch, and I couldn’t face you. I was bankrupt, and Jeb gave me enough money for a new start. Only I didn�
��t do so good with that, either, so I couldn’t come for you like I’d planned. Jeb promised me, no matter what happened, he’d take care of you.”

  “You shouldn’t have left me. I was so mixed up. For years I was so mixed up.”

  “I see that now. Money isn’t near so important as other things.”

  “I blamed Jeb, Daddy, for everything. I thought he took the ranch out of greed.”

  “It’s true he’d always wanted our land, but he tried to talk me out of gambling the ranch away. The way I saw it, it was better to lose it fair and square in a card game, than sell it for nothing. I reckoned everybody would hold it was just the MacKay wildness cropping up again. Besides, I told Jeb you’d never forgive me if I sold. I knew you’d be mad at him for winning it, but I reckoned he could stand your hate better than I, ‘cause I loved you more than he did. Only I was wrong, ‘cause he loved you more than I ever did. I was no good for you, Megan, not like Jeb’s been. He was father, brother, husband. He loves you in all the ways a man can love a woman. I was weak. Your mother saw it. She left because I failed her. I couldn’t face failing you, too.

  “Through the years, Jeb’s begged me to come home. He wanted me to come to the wedding. He came to me and threatened to kill me almost, but I was too stubborn. Don’t be so hard on him for not telling you, ‘cause he was caught between the two of us. I thought you were better off without me, that I’d only hold you back. I wouldn’t have come now except Jeb didn’t give me a choice. He said you might die if I didn’t, and he wasn’t going to let you die without me coming home. Can you forgive a foolish, weak man?”

  “Oh, Dad... We MacKays can be such fools.” Her voice softened. “You no more than I. I...I was so wrong about Jeb. I thought he only married me because of that gas field.”

  “Hell, girl, that’s utter hogwash. It was ‘cause of him we got that enormous royalty! It was only ‘cause of him negotiating that we got so much more than the usual one-eighth. He wanted that for you ‘cause he knew how bad you’d always felt about losing the ranch. He wanted you to have something that was yours so you’d feel like you were more his equal. Only he couldn’t tell you about any of it ‘cause I made him promise not to. I didn’t want you knowing about the mineral rights until they amounted to something you could be proud of. Honey, I won’t say he’s perfect. He’s a Jackson, and they’re a grabby, stubborn bunch of rascals. But he loves you. He climbed into that burning plane and got you and my grandbaby out only seconds before it exploded. He broke his hand getting you out of there. He could have died. Till you woke up, he was here night and day. Then he went home. ‘Cause he said you didn’t want him.”