Cort said, “but I can’t say I’m not curious about those circumstances. Jed doesn’t know you and your brother exist or, believe me, the rest of us would have heard about it by now. I have to wonder why you decided to track him down after all this time.”
“I never knew he existed, either. My—” he couldn’t call the woman his mother “—she didn’t put his name on my birth certificate. I had to find her first to get it.”
“Are you sure Jed’s your father then?”
“She is. She gave me his name and the name of his ranch and the town it was in. It’s all she gave me,” he added, unable to keep the anger that still lingered from his meeting with the woman out of his voice, “except to tell me about Ry—Ry Kincaid, my twin. I didn’t know about him until a few weeks ago. We were split up after we were born.” Drawing in a long breath, he tried to let it out slowly, to ease some of the tension crawling up his back and neck, stiffening his muscles. “I never cared about whether or not I had any other relatives, it didn’t matter.”
Cort assessed him and Duran understood that Cort, too, was protecting someone—his brothers, his family, maybe even Jed Garrett. “And it matters now,” Cort said flatly, a statement of fact rather than a question.
“More than anything. I’ve been trying to track down as many blood relatives as I can. I’m running out of time.” He steeled himself to say what he hadn’t dared acknowledge in his head, yet battled daily in his nightmares. “My son is dying.”
Chapter Two
He’d succeeded in shaking Cort’s composure and it brought a surge of what almost felt like triumph because he knew, without having any basis for his certainty except gut instinct, that this time, he wouldn’t be turned away.
“I’m sorry,” Cort said, a husky note in his voice replacing his earlier coolness. “I’ve got four kids and I can’t imagine…” He scrubbed a hand over his face and when he looked back this time the sympathy in his eyes was clear. “There has to be something we can do to help or you wouldn’t be here.”
“There is. Noah needs a bone marrow transplant, but they haven’t been able to find a match.”
“Noah has a rare immune-system illness,” Lia explained for him. “There’s been a lot of success in treating it with bone marrow transplants. But without it—” She looked at Duran, an apology in her eyes. “Without it, the prognosis isn’t good. Noah probably won’t survive past his late teens. The sooner he gets a transplant, the better his chances, and the odds of finding a match among blood relations are much higher.”
“Which is why I went searching for my birth parents when neither I, my ex-wife nor any of her family turned out to be a match,” Duran added. “I was hoping one of my birth parents would be a match, or if not, that maybe I had other relatives that would be. That’s why I said discovering I had five brothers here is a better outcome than I could have wished for.”
Cort nodded. “Then neither your twin nor your birth mother was a match, either.”
“Ry wasn’t. The only thing the tests proved was that we were brothers. And she refused to be tested.” Anger flared up in him again and he pushed it down. There was nothing he could do to change the past or her mind and it wouldn’t aid his appeal now. “She said she didn’t want her family to know how badly she’d screwed up over thirty years ago. According to her, admitting to having sex once when she was twenty-two with a stranger she’d met in a bar would ruin her life.”
“Jed won’t give a damn. His family already knows the worst of his sins and a one-night stand hardly ranks.” Cort hesitated and Duran readied himself for another disappointment. “He’s sick though, dying. He couldn’t be a donor even if he wanted to be. But I’m sure I can speak for my brothers and say we’d all be willing to be tested as soon as you can arrange it.” He turned to Lia. “Is there anything you can do to expedite things?”
“I’ll do whatever I can,” she assured him. “I can’t get anything done over the weekend, but I’ll see what I can do about setting things up for early next week.”
Duran found himself holding his breath, waiting to be told it was a mistake; that it wasn’t going to happen the way he wanted. When that didn’t come the sense of relief hit him hard, as if all the air had left the room and rushed back, and with it, a little of his faith in the future.
He searched for words to convey his feelings, but the thankfulness he felt was so tangled up with other, less defined and more uneasy emotions connected with finding brothers, a twin, discovering parts of himself he never knew—emotions that he hadn’t given himself time to process—that it left him floundering for what to say to the stranger who could end up saving his son’s life.
But Cort spared him from having to say anything by moving the conversation to practicalities. “I’m guessing you’re staying the night here with Noah. But when he gets out of the hospital, you and he can stay with one of us.” He forestalled any protest Duran would have made by holding up a hand. “A hotel’s no place for a sick kid. The ranch would be best. There’s plenty of room at the big house and Rafe and Josh are only a few minutes away. But that means telling Jed, and soon.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, wincing. “I don’t see any way around it.”
“I get the feeling he’s not going to be happy to find out he has two more sons,” Duran said. If that was the case, he was glad that Jed Garrett had sons who, if not happy to learn of his existence, were at least willing to accept him as a brother and do what they could for Noah.
“No, it’ll probably be just the opposite,” Cort said grimly. Apparently he saw Duran was starting to get frustrated with the veiled hints about Jed’s character and offered a rueful smile. “Sorry, I’m not deliberately trying to keep you in the dark. But it’s going to take some time to explain and I’d rather not do it here.”
“Later then, or not,” he said. “My concern right now is Noah.”
“I understand. Why don’t you give me or Rafe a call tomorrow, when you figure out what’s going on with Noah and one of us can run by and help you two get settled somewhere else?”
“About that—” Duran began. He felt uncomfortable accepting hospitality from strangers, even if he was related to them.
It was Lia who resolved the matter for him. “Say yes. Otherwise I’ll have to call security because Cort never takes no for an answer and that’s the only other way we’ll get rid of him.”
“Thanks for the character reference,” Cort retorted.
“Thanks for the warning,” Duran muttered and both Cort and Lia laughed, drawing a reluctant smile from him. “Fine, leave me a number and I’ll let you know when Noah’s released.”
Cort handed over a cell and home number and as it seemed to finish anything else they could say for now, an awkward silence intruded.
With a shift of his shoulders that telegraphed their shared uncertainty about where they should take this next, Cort finally spoke. “I should be going. You need to get back to your son and I need to get home to my family. I’ll talk to you, both of you—” he glanced at Lia “—soon.”
Duran waited until he’d gone and then by tacit agreement, he and Lia went back inside the room to check on Noah. He stood to one side while she bent over his sleeping son,
