“Me?” Nathan pulled Daisy’s teats, taken aback. Who would have a shouting match over him? “That’s all you know?” he asked. Zak had come to take his position at his knee and was rewarded with a long arc of milk into his mouth.
“That’s all we know, but we think… we think he’s come to take you away, Nathan,” Lily said. Small, dainty, she came behind her older brother and put her arms around him, leaning into his back protectively. “I’m worried,” she said in a small voice.
“Me, too,” Randolph chimed in. “Are you in trouble? You haven’t done anything bad, have you, Nathan?”
“Not that I know of,” Nathan said. Take him away? What was this?
“What a silly thing to ask, Randolph,” Lily scolded. “Nathan never does anything bad.”
“I know that, but I had to ask,” her brother said. “It’s just that the man is important. Mother nearly collapsed when she saw him. Daddy took charge and sent us out of the house immediately. Do you have any idea who he is?”
“None,” Nathan said, puzzled. “Why should I?”
“I don’t know. He seemed to know about you. And you look like him… a little.”
Another presence had entered the barn. They all turned to see their father standing in the doorway. He cleared his throat. “Nathan,” he said, his voice heavy with sadness, “when the milkin’s done, you better come to the house. Randolph, you and Lily stay here.”
“But I have homework,” Randolph protested.
“It can wait,” Leon said as he turned to go. “Drink the milk for your supper.”
The milking completed and Daisy back in her stall, Nathan left the barn, followed by the anxious gazes of his brother and sister. Dusk had completely fallen, cold and biting. His father had stopped halfway to the house to wait for him. Nathan noticed the circus clown had scrambled back into the carriage. “What’s going on, Dad?” he said.
His father suddenly bent forward and pressed his hands to his face.
“Dad! What in blazes—?” Was his father crying? “What’s the matter? What’s happened?”
A tall figure stepped out of the house onto the porch. He paused, then came down the steps toward them, the light from the house at his back. He was richly dressed in an overcoat of fine wool and carried himself with an air of authority. He was a handsome man in a lean, wolfish sort of way, in his forties, Nathan guessed. “I am what’s happened,” he said.
Nathan looked him up and down. “Who are you?” he demanded, the question bored into the man’s sea-green eyes, so like his own. He would not have dared, but he wanted to put his arm protectively around his father’s bent shoulders.
“I am your father,” the man said.
Chapter Three
Nathan frowned and cocked his head as if he’d heard an echo but could not determine its origin. “Say what?”
The man put up his hands in the gesture of one quieting a crowd. “I’m sorry to have to tell you like this. I’d hoped for… a less shocking introduction, but you’re my son, Nathan. Mr. Holloway here”—he gestured to Leon—“is your stepfather, but I’m your father.”
Nathan did not hold to violence. He was by nature nonconfrontational, but a surge of fury almost brought his arm back to drive a fist into the man’s handsome face. Who did he think he was to come onto their land and make such a claim to set his father crying, a sight Nathan had never seen or expected to see? He had a good mind to run to the barn for a pitchfork to prod the fancy stranger into his carriage and on his way. For the confusion of a few seconds, he wondered why his father had not.
“Have you escaped from an insane asylum, mister?” Nathan said, breaching an innate respect for his elders that his parents had not needed to reinforce. “You must have to say something like that to me. Either that, or you’ve made a bad mistake.” He pointed to Leon, who had straightened up and turned away to wipe at his wet face with his jacket sleeve. “That man is my father.”
“He’s the man who raised you, but you’re my son,” the stranger said. “Your mother can testify to it. Shall we go inside and discuss it? I for one could use the heat of the fire.”
“I’m not discussing anything with you, and you can freeze your backside off, for all I care.” Bigger than his father, taller, Nathan stepped in front of Leon. “Get off our property.”
“Son… Nathan,” Leon said, blowing his nose into a large handkerchief. “You need to listen to him. He has merit. We’d better go inside.”
Nathan refused to budge. “Daddy…” His childhood address for his father slipped out on a note of panic. “What’s he saying?”
“He’s sayin’ he’s your father, son, and he is.”
Nathan heard the words like the crack of a gunshot. Leon put a hand on his elbow to steady him. “I’m so sorry you have to learn… the truth,” he said, his voice fading to sorrowful resignation.
The stranger made a move to take Nathan’s other arm, but Nathan rejected the gesture and stepped away from both men. He looked over his shoulder at his brother and sister, heads stuck around the door of the barn, faces scared and worried. He was their big brother, their protector, a known and steady quantity in their lives. Nothing had ever happened to shake their faith in his permanence. Nathan knew it was his father’s place to reassure them, but he called, “Everything’s fine. You won’t have to stay out there long. Settle Daisy down. She’s nervous.”
“All right,” Randolph answered in a thin, doubtful voice. “But you’ll… come get us soon?”
“I promise,” Nathan said.
The three men started forward along with Zak, who’d sensed the tension and trotted close to Nathan’s side. “I can tell you’ve been a good brother to your siblings, Nathan,” Trevor Waverling said.
“Not have been. Am!” Nathan declared.
“Hmm, I can see you have a quick ear for nuances as well,” Trevor said.
Nathan did not reply. His mouth felt so parched he couldn’t have formed enough saliva to spit. Nuances? Who was this man, and why was his father going along with his craziness? When the man invited Nathan with a courtly gesture to go before him to follow his father up the steps into the house, Nathan thought of slamming the door and locking it behind him.
His mother sat on the hard Victorian couch in the front room used only for company. As he stepped over the threshold, Nathan halted sharply. He hardly recognized his beautiful mother’s cold, bloodless face and had never seen her eyes so black. Ignoring him and his father, she directed her murderous gaze to the man behind him. “Get this over, Leon, so we can be done with him,” she ordered without hardly moving her pale lips or taking her eyes from the stranger.
Nathan looked from one to the other helplessly. “Would somebody please tell me what’s going on?”
“Gladly,” Trevor Waverling said. “Years ago—almost twenty-one, to be exact—your mother and I had an… assignation—”
“In which you raped me, you son of the devil,” his mother screamed.
“Millicent, I did no such thing. You were as willing as I.”
“Please, please,” Leon begged, flapping his hands. “Stop this! The boy don’t need to hear every sordid detail. It’s enough of a shock for him to learn that the man he thought was his father… isn’t.” He glanced at Nathan, tears springing again to his eyes. “This man is.” Leon pointed a limp finger at Trevor.
“Can you deny it?” Trevor said, stepping to Nathan. “Look at us. But for the years I have on you, we could be brothers—same height, similar build, certainly the color of eyes. We get them from my mother. She’s still alive and dying to meet you… your grandmother.”
Nathan backed away from him. The man’s lean facial structure, high, prominent cheekbones, sleek, fit build looked nothing like his. “I don’t believe you,” he said. Frantically, he gazed at his mother for affirmation that the man was some kind of evil prankster and this a cruel joke, but her glare was locked on the stranger. He turned to his father and felt his heart drop at the misery in his gaze. ??
?Dad… ?”
“He speaks the truth, Nathan. You are not my son… in a biological sense. Your mother was pregnant when I married her. By this man.” Leon nodded toward the stranger. “Your mother knows it to be the truth.”
“But I didn’t know she was pregnant with you, or I would have come for you sooner, Nathan. So help me God, I would have,” Trevor Waverling said.
Shock taking hold, Nathan lowered himself numbly to one of the prettily flowered chairs he’d rarely sat in. He glanced at his mother. “Mother? Is he telling the truth?”
“Only that you are his son. The rest are all lies. He raped me. I was never willing as he says, and he did know about you before now. Long ago the postmaster told me he’d been questioned about the older Holloway boy. That was when you were about fourteen, Nathan. This—this filthy excuse of a man sent somebody to find out if you were worth claiming. He didn’t stoop to come himself.” His mother flung a look at Trevor so scathing Nathan felt his scalp move. “Then, last year I ran into one of your high school teachers who told me a stranger spoke to her just before your graduation and asked what you were like. Did you get along well in school? Were you smart? Were you sound? The man gave as his excuse that he was investigating students to award scholarships to college.”
Leon came alert. “Why didn’t you ever mention these men and their questions?”
“Because, knowing you, I thought you might muddy the waters even more, figure you ought to tell the boy his father was looking for him, and then how could we have contained the scandal?”
Trevor turned a look of disgust to Millicent. “So the scandal was all you were thinking about? How typical of you, Millicent.”
“Oh, don’t use that moralizing tone to me, Trevor Waverling! Believe me, that man”—Millicent pointed at Trevor—“wouldn’t be here now if you had been a disgrace, Nathan. He would have let you be Leon’s and my problem.”
Nathan shrank from her fury. Her thinly stretched lips had lost all color. In a moment of blinding clarity, he clearly understood the source of the faint ache that had nibbled at him since he’d been old enough to recognize the difference in the way his mother treated him from her other children. He had refused to acknowledge it as beneath the love and respect he felt for her. He was the oldest. More was expected of him for less praise. But now he knew. He was a reminder of the man she hated, a man Nathan’s instincts told him she still had feelings for at some level beneath her skin.
Chapter Four
Nathan lifted his gaze to the man whose vague likeness to him he could not deny. “Why are you here?”
Trevor Waverling straightened his shoulders, the fine tailoring of his wool coat accentuating their power and breadth. “To claim you as my son. To take you home with me if you will go.”
“Why?”
The rapid-fired question caught Trevor by patent surprise. His mouth opened before his mind could conjure an answer. “Why?” he repeated after appearing to grapple for a reply. “Because I would like to have you in my life, that’s why. I want to give you a better one than the one you have here.”
“There is no better life than the one I have here.”
The man moved to stand over Nathan. “How do you know, Nathan? This place is all you’ve known. I’m a wealthy man, and I want to share my good fortune with you. If things work out, I’d like you to be my heir—”
“What if things don’t work out?” Nathan challenged. “What then? Would I be fired as your heir?”
Again Trevor made to reply but appeared confounded for an answer. “This is all turning out badly. I’m implying things I don’t mean and giving you a wrong impression. If you and I could just go somewhere and talk, let me tell you about myself… what I have to offer…”
Abruptly, Nathan stood up. “I’m not interested. This is my home, and these are my parents. I’m not going anywhere with you.”
Trevor spread his hands imploringly. “Nathan, please. Don’t you want to know about your father?”
“Did you want to know about your son before now?”
“No, he did not!” Millicent snapped.
“All right! All right!” Trevor said, his voice rising on a sharp note of impatience. “I admit it. I had you investigated. It’s what has to be done when you’re in my position, but I swear I did not know your mother was pregnant when I left her. I didn’t know until one of my salesmen passed through Gainesville six years ago and reported that he’s seen a boy in a general store who looked enough like me to be my son. He casually mentioned it to me, making a joke of it by asking if I’d had a one-night stand in a burg in Cooke County.”
Millicent uttered a cry of protest and made to object, but Leon had gained control of himself. “Be quiet, Millicent,” he said in a voice of quiet authority. “Nathan needs to hear this.” Millicent cut a startled look at her husband but set her lips in a thin line of silent defiance.
Trevor continued. “So I sent a trusted employee here to look into the situation. He took your picture…” Trevor withdrew a money case from an inner pocket and removed a photograph he offered to Nathan. It was a shot of him standing by the road fence, and he remembered the afternoon a man asked if he could take his picture against the background of the flowing wheat field behind him. He had told Nathan he was a photographer shooting scenes for Progressive Farmer magazine.
“When I saw that picture, I knew instantly that you were my son,” Trevor said, taking back the photograph. “I looked just like you at fourteen. I didn’t come for you because… well, how could I? You were still in school, apparently happy here with your mother and… the man you thought was your father. I didn’t want to break that up, but then, once you were a couple of years graduated from high school, I thought it my right and obligation to show myself, so I waited until today, your twentieth birthday, as an appropriate time to make myself known.”
Nathan stared at him. Today was his birthday? It should have been a day he remembered. Turning twenty was an important milestone to a boy, but he had forgotten, easy enough to do now that he was out of school and each day flowed into the next with no guidepost but seasons to mark important events.
But his family had forgotten, too. “How did you know today was my birthday?” he asked the stranger.
“I had your birth record at the county courthouse checked.”
Leon turned to Millicent. “Did you bake him a cake?”
“I… forgot. I had my mind on nothing but that today was wash day…”
“And the day you planned to finish sewin’ Lily’s dress for that party she’s been invited to in Denton,” Leon said, his voice cold.
“God, Millicent!” Trevor’s glare at Millicent was filled with loathing. “I see the way things are around here. Nathan is worked like a hired hand, but you make dresses for your daughter and scrape together every dime to send your other son to Columbia University.” In his disgust, he looked as if he could have spat on the floor at Millicent’s feet. She rebutted by folding her arms and turning her head to the fire in scornful disregard of his condemnation.
Leon addressed Nathan, who’d listened in dismayed wonder at the bitter revelations of which he’d been unaware. “It breaks my heart to say it,” Leon said, “but it can’t do no harm listenin’ to the man, Nathan. He is your father.”
Trevor gestured imploringly with his hands again. They were large and powerful but smooth and well kept. “If there is some place we could go to speak privately…”
Stunned, confused, hurt, Nathan stammered, “There’s no place. My brother and sister need to come in. It’s cold in the barn, and my brother will want to study in our room.”
“Then let’s you and I go to the barn to talk,” Trevor suggested. “Please, Nathan.”
The stranger had said please twice, not easy for a man like him, Nathan figured. He felt disoriented, as if he’d been caught in a snowstorm where every familiar landmark had been blanked out. “Not tonight,” he said. “I need time to think about… all I’ve heard, then I’ll see.??
?
Disappointment settled in the corners of Trevor’s mouth and dulled his hopeful gaze. “I suppose I can ask for no more than that. In your position, I would do the same. All right, then.” He opened the leather case again, inserted the photograph, and removed a printed card. “Here’s the information you need to contact me when you’re ready to hear me out. It contains my business address, or…” He extracted a pen and scribbled on the back of the card. “You can write to me at my residence. As you can see, they’re both located in Dallas. You’re welcome to come to my place of business, or if you prefer, I can meet you in Gainesville. I can even meet you here again, if you like.”
“Not here, Trevor.” Millicent glowered at him. “Never again on the soil of my family’s land, you hear me? I’ll shoot you if I ever see your face around here again.” She swiveled her sharp gaze to Nathan. “And take that dog out of this room right now, Nathan. You know he’s not allowed in here.”
Nathan turned his attention to his mother. A stranger he’d never seen before had showed up on her doorstep to announce himself as his father, and she was mindful only of her hatred for the man and the forbidden presence of her son’s dog in her parlor. She had not shown the least concern for his shock, his disbelief, his pain. A heartsick truth merged with the other numbing revelations. His mother did not love him. She never had and never would. Under his quiet scrutiny, Millicent’s expression altered. A faint awareness wafted across it as if she recognized he would never think of her again in the same way. Nathan patted his leg. “Zak, come with me, boy.”
He left the parlor, and without a word of protest, as though conscious the boy had moved beyond any further attempt at discourse, his parents and the stranger let him go. Nathan walked out into the fading dusk, oblivious to the sting of cold air on his face. His hunger pangs had disappeared. The drop in temperature had no effect on him through his lightweight work jacket. The carriage driver’s head popped up in the window of the coach, where he had gone to get out of the cold. “Is me boss coming soon?” he called.