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

  “But I do want him!”

  “Then I guess you’ll have to swallow your MacKay pride—I know it’s a mouthful, but do it anyway. Here...” Glen picked up the phone and briskly dialed Jeb’s number. Then he handed the receiver to her. “Tell him how you feel, girl. Now.”

  Glen walked out the door just as Jeb answered.

  “Hello.”

  The masculine salutation was deep and low and melodious. It jarred every nerve ending in Megan’s body. Queasy with a sudden fear, her mouth too dry to speak, all she managed was a low, strangled garble.

  “Hello?” Jeb repeated, a faint edge of exasperation lacing his voice this time.

  Desperately she swallowed. “J-Jeb...it’s just me...just your wife.” Her voice died away.

  “Just my wife.” He repeated her phrase, only somehow it came out twisted and bitter. “Megan?” His voice hardened when he said her name.

  “Yes.”

  He said nothing more for a while, but the hollow silence between them was charged with raw emotion. Her heart began to pound violently as she tried to fathom what he was feeling.

  “It’s good to hear from you,” he said at last in a formal tone she’d never heard him use before.

  Her stomach knotted.

  “I’ve been keeping up with how you’ve been doing,” he said.

  “But you haven’t come by?”

  “No. You made it pretty clear how you felt. I’ve decided that I’ll do whatever you want. Divorce.”

  She wanted to cry out that she loved him, that she missed him, that she was sorry for everything. In a tiny choked voice, she whispered, “B-but I—I don’t want a divorce. Not now. The baby...”

  “Then a legal separation. Whatever. You can go or stay. It doesn’t matter anymore, Megan. I swear I’ll agree to anything you want. The important thing is for you to get well, for you to take care of yourself and the baby.”

  She bowed her head, cupping the receiver tightly against her ear. Scalding tears slipped from her eyes. There was nothing more to be said.

  Very slowly she hung up the phone. She didn’t even realize he was still talking.

  Her marriage was over. Jeb couldn’t forgive her for what she’d done. Not that she blamed him. He had never been anything but gallant and heroic. He had been her dearest friend, her mentor, her lover. He had always taken care of her, always loved her. How had she repaid him? With hatred and distrust.

  She began to sob in earnest. Nothing mattered but Jeb, and he was lost to her forever.

  *

  With a hopeless sigh of exhaustion Megan sank onto the double bed in their bedroom and watched Jeb. He moved with tense, jerky motions, as if he felt as awkward and ill at ease as she did. She knew he was deliberately keeping his back turned toward her while he heaved her suitcases on the luggage racks, snapped the locks and opened them.

  Jeb hadn’t visited her once in the hospital! Not once. Not until today when he’d shown up with his parents to bring her home. She’d been stunned when she’d glanced up and seen him in her doorway, his darkly handsome face grave and uncertain. Then he’d crossed the room and pecked her perfunctorily on the cheek. At the brisk touch of his lips, her breath had caught in her throat and a violent quiver had darted through her stomach. Since that moment he’d scarcely looked at her, scarcely spoken to her.

  Now that he was alone with her, he was even quieter than he’d been in front of his parents.

  Jeb turned. His tanned face was paler than usual. There was a forbidding, hard line to his mouth. For a fraction of a second their eyes touched, and she attempted a shaky smile. But he didn’t bother to return it, and she looked away quickly.

  “I moved my things into the room next door,” he said grimly, his voice harsh and loud as if it were an effort to even speak to her. “I’ll be going now if there’s nothing more you need.”

  Megan got up carefully and moved toward him. He stopped, his gaze slanting indifferently to her vulnerable face. An embarrassed flush warmed her cheeks. His own features were hard and set, his black eyes dark and unreadable.

  “Jeb...”

  She had to try to talk to him again. It didn’t matter that her heart was pounding with fright. It didn’t matter that she would have to humble herself and beg his forgiveness. If only he would listen.

  “Don’t go,” she whispered desperately. “Please. Not yet. Stay a little while longer.”

  “What for?”

  Slowly she came to him. As she did her gown fell off her shoulder. Jeb tensed as he stood in the middle of the room, watching her, his gaze transfixed.

  She went to the dresser and lifted the statue Glen had carved. Her pale fingers caressed the smooth wood.

  “Do you remember the day,” she whispered, “Daddy carved this?”

  Jeb closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “You know I do.”

  “I loved you then,” she murmured. She came closer and tilted her head back, so that her hair spilled down her back like plumes of flame.

  She seemed lost, fragile, dazzling. Never had he wanted her to love him more. He steeled himself. “You were a child,” he ground out. “You didn’t know your own mind. You can keep the statue, if that’s what you’re after. I’m sorry I took it. It doesn’t mean anything to me any longer. Nothing matters...any longer.” He tried to look away from her, but he lacked the strength of will.

  She let her gown fall lower, down her arm, and his black gaze was mesmerized by the soft curve of her throat, by the soft pale golden shoulder.

  She bit her thumbnail and glanced up at him through the thickness of her downcast lashes. “But I’m not a child now, and I know my own mind,” she murmured. The fire in his eyes made her heart skip a beat. Self-consciously she let her fingers trace the length of the male statue lovingly. “And you’re wrong about the statue not meaning anything.”

  “Get to the point,” he muttered in a tight voice.

  She tossed the statue onto the bed, went to him and took his bandaged hand in hers. He towered over her like a frozen and unyielding giant. She thought he wanted nothing so much as to escape the pain of her presence. She didn’t know how the mere sight of her aroused passion and other emotions he was determined to kill. Her gentle touch set him on fire.

  She clutched his cold fingers more tightly. “Oh, Jeb, I know you want to go. You can’t bear the sight of me, but I can’t let you until I tell you how sorry I am. For everything. I was so wrong. So stupid. So blindly selfish, so careless of your feelings. I can’t blame you if you no longer care for me.”

  He started, his eyes burned into her. “What are you saying?” His voice was unsteady.

  She could feel his hand trembling.

  “I love you,” she moaned softly. “I love you. I always have, and I always will. It was wrong of me to blame you for what happened to my family, wrong of me not to understand you would never steal our ranch, wrong of me not to see all that you did to try to help me. Kirk tried to tell me, but I wouldn’t listen. It was too easy to blame you. Oh, Jeb, I want you to be my husband. I want our baby.” She raised his injured hand to her lips and kissed his fingers, one by one. “More than anything.”

  He watched her, saw the imploring sadness in her face, saw her love for him shining in her upturned face, and at last the guarded look left his eyes.

  Gently he wrapped his arms around her and kissed her on the mouth, a long, tender, undemanding kiss.

  “I wanted to tell you about your father. So many times,” Jeb murmured. “But there’s no talking you MacKays out of things, no convincing your father he was wrong.”

  “I know.”

  “And I didn’t marry you for money. There’s no telling whether there’ll be all that much of it, anyway, Megan. You’re part of everything I am. Of everything I’ve ever been. We love the ranch, the same things. Our children, half-MacKay, half-Jackson, will grow up here as we did, loving these same things. Whatever I took from you, I give back to you as my wife. I’ll sign the MacKay acres over to you a
nd Kirk tomorrow if that will make you happy. All that matters to me is your happiness. I need you to help me if we’re going to hold onto the ranch for our children. Darling, you’re my wife. Everything I own is yours.”

  “Everything I own is yours, too.” She held onto him as though he were life itself. Gently she touched his bandaged hand, kissed it. “You were hurt... because of me.”

  “Don’t you understand? I would have died—to save you.”

  She gazed into his eyes, and some terrible restraint inside her broke. She was loved. Truly loved. At last, by the one person who had always stood by her through the darkest hours of her life, by the one person who had never left her. Never again would she be a lonely little girl crying herself to sleep in the dark. She would have Jeb.

  “Forever,” he whispered. “You will belong to me forever.”

  This time she gave him no argument as he slowly led her to the bed and pulled her down beside him.

  “I’m going to reform you,” she said. “No more cigarettes and a lot less coffee and bourbon.”

  “Not my coffee habit too?”

  When she knitted his brows, he chuckled. “I’d better corrupt you in self-defense,” he murmured.

  “I was just teasing about the coffee.”

  Gently, without speaking, he drew her into his arms. His lips touched hers, and Megan felt her soul rising up to meet his. For a long time there were no sounds other than the exchange of soft kisses and loving caresses and gently whispered promises between them.

  Marriage. It meant family, love, children. The threshold of a new life forged together. All the things she had spent a lifetime longing for were hers.

  The End

  NIGHT CHILD

  TEXAS: CHILDREN OF DESTINY

  BOOK 3

  Ann Major

  Dawn’s a ballerina, renowned for her skill and coveted for her beauty. But she dances on the edge of the light, until a handsome, hauntingly familiar stranger appears, to save her from the encroaching darkness of her past. Can Kirk show her that she belongs in the light with him?

  A Note from Ann Major about her Texas: Children of Destiny series:

  What matters to me are the cherished people in my life—most of all, my husband and my three children and their children. When I conceived my Texas: Children of Destiny series, the thoughts of family and love were uppermost in my mind.

  I was born and raised in South Texas, so I grew up loving our vast desolate lands that seem to stretch forever beneath brilliant, blue skies. I grew up on stories of legendary men who carved dynastic empires out of desert, men who fought Indians and bandits.

  These books tell the stories of the Jacksons and MacKays, two pioneer ranching families whose lives were intertwined for one hundred years by friendship, greed, betrayal, and ultimately, love.

  I am thrilled to have acquired the rights to seven titles out of eight of my Children Of Destiny series and will be publishing them as e-books for my many fans who have repeatedly requested them.

  Book One is Passion’s Child. The other novels in the series are the following: Destiny’s Child (Book Two), Night Child (Book Three), Wilderness Child (Book Four), Scandal’s Child (Book Five), The Goodbye Child (Book Six), and Secret Child (Book Eight).

  Author’s Note: Nobody’s Child (Book Seven) is already available as an e-book by my publisher, Harlequin.

  To Diane Gafford—

  for being one of the most

  beautiful people I’ve ever known

  Prologue

  Dawn Hayden’s toe shoes banged against oak flooring.

  Outside the sky above Manhattan was flat gray, the washed-out color of old zinc. The trees were bare and dead looking; the windows shut against the cold. It was a day like any other of the season, a day without the slightest warning that the familiar pattern of her life was about to change, completely and irrevocably.

  She wore a white leotard and tights. A gold medallion in the shape of a tiny sun flashed at her throat. It was the only piece of jewelry she ever wore. Where it had come from, who might have given it to her, she did not know. She only knew that of all the things she possessed, the necklace was the most precious. She never took it off—even when she performed. Lincoln had objected at first, but even he now regarded it as some sort of talisman, some secret ingredient in the formula of her phenomenal success.

  A cold northern light filled the studio and blazed from the cool glass mirrors. Dawn’s long black hair was down, soft and caressing against her exquisite neck. She was dancing alone to the crashing discord of rippling piano notes, her shapely legs whirling in a series of endless turns. Other girls in layers of sweaters and leg warmers were lined against the wall, watching her in a state of breathless awe.

  No one in the company danced as Dawn danced. No one was like her. No one worked as hard, sacrificed as much for her art. In the studio she worked until she dropped. On stage she was an electric presence. The night before when she had danced Ondine, she’d received numerous curtain calls. Her dressing room had been packed with cards and flowers.

  Dawn Hayden was Lincoln Wilde’s darling.

  There was magic in her dancing. When she danced, one had the feeling in the pit of one’s stomach that something momentous was happening. Even during rehearsals.

  But not a single one of the girls envied her.

  Because she had no life, none at all, outside the theater.

  “Miss Hayden is the ice princess of dance,” one critic had exclaimed, and the label had stuck.

  The studio door slammed, and the piano music faltered and then stopped abruptly as a tall golden man in a black turtleneck and slacks strode inside the huge studio and propped himself onto a stool dead center. All the girls sat up a little straighter and cast smiles in Lincoln Wilde’s direction, hoping to catch his attention. But he frowned, cocked his head back, crossed his legs and watched Dawn.

  Dawn stopped dancing and glared at him for a long moment. Then she limped toward him on her bad ankle.

  “So,” Lincoln murmured, “the rumors are true. You’ve gone behind my back and learned my new ballet when I told you I would never give it to you. Who taught you those steps?”

  Blazing dark eyes met his, and as always he was struck by her intense charisma. She was a small woman, her bone structure as fragile and delicate as a bird’s, and yet she was a creature of infinite grace and loveliness. A power in his theater, on stage and off. She was white skinned, black haired, long necked. Not so different from the other ballerinas and yet completely different. When she danced, she was incomparable. Lincoln had lived his adult life surrounded by beautiful young women, all vying for his favor, but even he had been irresistibly drawn to her ever since she’d come to his ballet school as a lonely child on a scholarship and had thrown herself into ballet with such energy.

  She was perspiring, and she whipped the heavy mass of her hair forward over her shoulder and let it tumble loosely over her gently heaving bosom to her waist.

  “I watched you showing Marguerite,” she said, leaning down and picking up a white sweatshirt.

  “You waste your time, and your time belongs to me. You should have been rehearsing for the gala.”

  One of the girls along the wall hiccupped. There were nervous giggles. These battles between the artistic director and his ballerina were common. With an impatient wave of his hand Lincoln dismissed the other girls, and they quickly fled. The pianist grabbed her sheet music and scurried after them.

  “They scare so easily,” Dawn murmured dryly, yanking her sweatshirt over her head.

  “And you constantly rebel,” he whispered fiercely. “You do so in front of the others to incite them, I think.”

  She lifted her chin. Her hand touched her necklace and then fell away. “You constantly hold me back.”

  “Because I, not you, am the artistic director here. I know what you can do better than you do.”

  “I’m not a child any longer. I can’t accept that.”

  “You never come t
o my class.”

  She would not look at him. “I have found my own teacher.”

  “That broken-down Russian windbag, Princess Sonya. She hasn’t danced a leading role in twenty years.”

  “Sonya was the greatest dancer who ever lived.”

  “She was only on top for six years.”

  “Which underscores the problem.” Dawn sat down and pulled on her leg warmers. “A dancer’s life is short. I’m running out of time.”

  “You’re a child. Twenty-five. You have years and years—”

  “I have nothing except ballet.” She stood up once more. “Do you understand? Nothing. You go home to a wife. I go home to a cat that turns away when I call him. When I can no longer dance everything will be over for me. I will have nothing. You will have some new, younger ballerina. Marguerite, perhaps. You’re wasting my time. Lincoln, unless you give me the role of Beauty, I’m leaving the company.”

  He was thunderstruck. “What?”

  “Just for a while. To dance abroad. Then I want to go to Ali Naid and dance for that goodwill troupe to raise money for those people starving in—”

  “Hell no!”

  “You’ve given me your last order, Lincoln.”

  “Damn it! Why don’t you take a lover like the other girls? That’s what’s wrong with you!”

  Her eyes darkened. “You would think that!”

  She turned and walked out of the room.