Teresa Hill – The Texan's Diamond Bride: The Texan's Diamond Bride / The Texas Tycoon's Christmas Baby (страница 13)

Okay, that surprised him.

And that particular wound was still raw and festering.

He didn’t really know how he felt about having a twenty-one-year-old half brother he’d known nothing about until a few weeks ago.

While he might disagree with his brothers about a lot of things, how they lived their lives, what was important to them, things like that, they were and always would be brothers. They were tight. They were family, and he’d have walked through fire for any of them anytime they needed it.

So to know that there was a fourth Foley brother out there somewhere, who’d never been one of them…

It was just wrong.

Who’d been a McCord instead.

“Yes,” he admitted. “My father told us about Charlie.”

His father was still reeling from the news himself. His father, steady as a rock, raise-three-boys-alone-after-his-wife-died kind of steady, absolutely reeling.

Travis didn’t think anything in this world could have shaken his father like that particular bit of news.

“It’s just that…Charlie’s special,” Paige said. “He’s great. He’s sweet. He’s kind. He’s happy. Like a puppy, just kind of silly and goofy. Everybody loves him. And he’s so young. I don’t…I can’t stand the idea of him getting hurt in all this.”

Travis got up and came to stand over her, hands on his hips, furious all over again. “And you think my father and my brothers and I are going to hurt him?”

“I don’t know.” She sat up in the bed, covers falling to her waist, her hair tumbling everywhere. “I have no idea how you’re going to treat him or what you think about him. I can still hardly believe it’s true. That he’s your father’s son and not my father’s.”

Travis frowned. Okay. He had to admit what she’d just said was likely true, because he wasn’t completely sure how he felt about the whole thing, either. How could anyone be? It was all too strange, too new.

“If I could just…I know you don’t owe me anything,” she said. “I know I don’t have the right to ask anything of you, but you’re here and we spent some time together before…before anything about our families got in the way, and…Well, I think you can be a nice man, when you want to be. And I’m asking you, please…Charlie wants to meet your father…his father. I assume at some point he’ll want to meet you and your brothers… Could you just be kind? Please?”

Kind?

What the hell did she think of them? That they were a pack of wolves? That they’d eat him alive?

And yet, he could hear that her concern was genuine and that, for all he could see, she loved her younger brother very much.

“Answer a question for me, Red. How did your father treat him?”

She looked for a minute like…like it had been bad…maybe everything Travis feared. He’d always heard Devon McCord was an ass.

He swore, sat down on the edge of the cot and grabbed her by the arms, holding her there in front of him, not letting her look away. “No. Tell me. He hurt him?” That one question burned a hole in Travis’s gut when he let himself think about it.

She looked confused, surprised, hurt herself. “No.”

“The guy’s always been rumored to have a nasty temper. Ask anybody, and not the people in my family who were taught from birth to hate him. Anybody. They’ll tell you he was a big, tough, mean son of a bitch. So tell me. Tell me right now. Did he hit that kid? Did he hit Charlie?”

“No,” she said.

“Swear it,” he demanded, right up in her face. “Right now. It’s…I need to know, Red. I need to know no one hurt him like that when no one in my family even knew he was a Foley, and none of us were there to protect him. Because he’s family and we don’t leave each other alone to face something like that. It just isn’t right.”

“No, he didn’t hit us.”

“Maybe not you or your sister, but what about your brothers? And if he knew Charlie wasn’t his—”

“He didn’t know,” she said. “I’m almost certain he didn’t. Charlie was just so easy to like. To love. For my father, too. I don’t think there’s any way he knew Charlie wasn’t his.”

“Okay.” Then he realized he’d been manhandling her himself, trying to make her sit there and look him in the eye and tell him the truth.

He still had her by the arms in a hold that wouldn’t allow any kind of escape from him.

And he’d gotten too close to her again.

He let his hands drop and eased back away from her as she scooted back on the bed to sit up against the headboard, looking wary and surprised and not quite sure what to do with herself or to say to him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She shrugged off his words, like they didn’t really matter, like none of it did and let her head fall until he saw nothing more than a curtain of red-gold curls and all that made him worry even more.

Travis swore and shook his head in disgust. “Did I hurt you, Red?”

“No. It’s just…grabbing me like that and acting like you’d shake the truth out of me, if you had to? That was something my father did.”

Her father, and now him?

That was perfect.

Just perfect.

“Son of a bitch,” he said.

Now he felt like an absolute ass.

“Travis?” She put her hand on his arm. “I’m glad you care enough about Charlie to want to be sure my father didn’t hurt him like that. I’m glad you want to look out for him, the way brothers do. That means a lot to me. I want that for Charlie, because I love him. And I’m glad there’s at least one bit of family business we agree on. Charlie. That none of this is his fault.”

“It’s not. I know that,” he told her.

“So maybe my family isn’t as different from yours as we thought.”

He scoffed at that.

Not because he thought it wasn’t true, but because he didn’t need to be sitting here finding common ground with her, finding reasons to like her. It was the last thing he needed to be doing.

And it didn’t help any that he was sitting on her bed, late at night, the two of them absolutely alone, with him having to keep reminding himself of exactly who she was, to keep from remembering what he’d planned to be doing with her in this cabin, in this bed tonight.

It didn’t help either that he’d put his hands on her, even in anger, for a moment. And it was even worse now, when it wasn’t anger that was driving him on, but the need to go to her again, this time to make sure she was okay, to comfort her, wishing he could forget everything that stood between them.

Get up, he told himself sternly. Get up and get out of here, before you make it any worse.

But he didn’t listen.

Chapter Six

He put his hands on her again, same place as before, this time as gentle as he could be, rubbing slowly with his thumbs at the soft flesh of her inner arms. She looked wary, but she let him.

“I’m truly sorry,” he said. “I don’t treat women that way. It’s just that…ever since I heard about Charlie, I couldn’t help but worry and wonder…what it was like for him, growing up a McCord.”

She gave him a look that just about had him on his knees. A look that said she understood completely and could forgive, not that he felt he deserved it.

“No one in my family wants to hurt him,” Travis promised her.

She hung her head. He saw tears falling down one perfect, pale cheek and a curtain of red-gold hair shielding the rest of her from view. She shivered a bit.

He had to remind himself he didn’t get to keep her warm tonight, that the time when he was welcome to do that was long over. “What is it, Red?”

“I don’t see how Charlie’s ever going to belong anywhere now. Not with the way things are between your family and mine.”

Honestly, Travis didn’t either.

Paige shivered, and Travis had to get up or he was going to take her in his arms, despite all the reasons he’d told himself he couldn’t.

He pulled the covers up around her and eased her back down onto the bed, while she looked up at him, her eyes sad and full of regrets. He let himself touch her in one small way, a hand to her cheek, wiping away those tears, and then she looked even sadder. All sad eyes and tears and that glorious hair spread out on a pillow in a bed in a cabin with him and no one else around for miles.

He wondered what she’d do if he kissed her right then, if she longed for the way it had been between them the night before. If she wished they hadn’t been careful or cautious. He could have done anything to her that night, and she would have let him. He knew it.

But it was cold and wet, and the ground was hard, and she was just so soft and feminine, her body yielding completely to his. Not the kind of woman a man had on a bed of solid rock.

He’d wanted something better for her for their first time together, time, a soft bed, a fire and roof over their heads.

But mostly…time.