longer. Soon it would be time to ring for the nurses again.
Caine moaned. Cord sat still as a held breath, staring at the wasted specter that had once been his father. The old man had grown so weak the past few weeks. The skin of his face looked too tight, stretched thin across the bones. At his neck, though, it hung in dry wattles.
Cord glanced at his Rolex: 2:22. He’d give it five minutes and then—
His father’s skeletal hand closed over his wrist, the grip surprising in its strength. “You listening?” The blue eyes blinked open. “You hear?”
Gently Cord peeled the bony fingers away. “I’m listening. Talk.”
“More water.”
Cord helped him to drink again. This time Caine drained the glass.
“Enough?”
“That’s all.”
Cord rose once more to put the glass on one of the metal trays. He came back to the bed and sat for the third time.
Dark brows, grown long and grizzled now, drew together across the bridge of the hawklike nose. “I lie here,” Caine whispered, his voice like old paper, tearing. “Sleeping. Puking. Messing myself. I hate it. You know that?”
Cord said nothing. What was there to say?
“Sure, you know. You understand me.” Caine laughed, a crackling sound, like twigs rubbing together in a sudden harsh wind. “You and me, cut from the same piece of high-quality rawhide…” The eyes drifted shut again and Caine coughed some more.
Then he lay still—but not for long. After a moment, he began tossing his head on the pillow, like a man trying to wake from a very bad dream. “I think about that baby,” he muttered. “Lying here. Sick unto death. That baby haunts me.”
Cord frowned. He must mean Becky.
For the last five or six years, Caine had taken to accusing his children, collectively and individually, of failing to do their part to extend the family line. So Cord had mentioned Becky to Caine about a week before, thinking it might ease the mind of the old tyrant to know he had at least one grandchild, after all. At the time, his father had only shrugged.
“You sure this baby is yours?” Caine had demanded. And when Cord had nodded, Caine had said, “Then it’s a Stockwell. Bring it home. And raise it up right.” And that had been the end of that conversation.
Apparently, though, Becky had stuck in Caine’s confused mind. Maybe he wanted reassurance that Cord had done what needed doing.
“The baby’s fine,” Cord said. “She’s here, right now. In her crib in the new nursery.”
Caine sat bolt upright. “Here? She’s here. A girl. It was a girl?”
“Yes,” Cord said soothingly, guiding his father back down to the pillow. “A girl. Remember, I told you all about her? She’s three months old. Her name is—”
“Three months! Do you think I’m an idiot? You think the cancer has left me no wits at all?” Caine sputtered and coughed. “It’s almost thirty years now, since they left, that mealymouthed witch your mother and my turn-coat twin. That baby’s no baby anymore. It would be grown now. All grown up.”
Cord suppressed a weary sigh. The red-rimmed blue eyes were looking into the past now, through a very dark glass. Sometimes lately, the old man’s mind rearranged the facts. Caine would imagine that his wife, Madelyn Johnson Stockwell, hadn’t died in a boating accident on Stockwell Pond with Caine’s twin, Brandon, after all. Caine would swear the two had run off together instead.
But this about the baby was new.
Caine fisted the sheets, his bony knuckles going white as the linen they crushed. Then he struck out, wildly, hitting Cord a glancing blow. The old man wore no rings. His fingers had shrunk too much; a ring would slide right off. But his yellowed nails needed trimming. One of them sliced a thin, stinging line along Cord’s jaw. Cord pulled back sharply and touched the tiny wound. His finger came away dotted with crimson.
“It was mine,” Caine ranted, his eyes closed now, the lids quivering, his head whipping back and forth against the pillow. “I tried. Tried to take care of it. Is it my fault she never would take the money?”
None of it made any sense to Cord. His mother and his uncle were long dead. And the only baby he knew about lay in a crib in another wing of the mansion, dreaming whatever a baby might dream of.
A baby.
His daughter.
The irony struck him. Someday, would he be the one ranting in a hospital bed, while his grown daughter sat patiently at his side?
It seemed impossible, that such a tiny, helpless creature as his baby girl would ever sit upright beside her father and watch as he died.
And why? Why would she perform such a grim duty anyway?
For love?
Cord almost smiled. He did not think it was love that he felt for his father. It was something darker, something more complex. Something with anger in it, and hurt—and maybe just a touch of reluctant respect.
No, he did not love Caine. But he did feel a duty to him, and he pitied him, pitied the bitter, half-crazed shadow of himself that Caine had become.
So he sat on the edge of his father’s bed and let the old man flail his withered arms at him, striking him repeatedly, shouting more addled nonsense about Cord’s long-dead mother and his uncle Brandon and a baby that Caine didn’t seem to realize had never existed.
“Whatever your mother did, that baby was a Stockwell. Remember. We are Stockwells. We take care of our own. And I know her. She had a thousand reasons to hate me. But still, no matter what I said, I knew…deep down, I knew she was true to me. That baby…that baby was mine.”
Cord took another series of sharp blows, to the shoulder, across the neck, to the center of his chest. By then, he decided it was time to buzz for the nurses.
His father needed calming. And Cord himself had to get back to his own quarters and finish up his negotiations with Becky’s nanny-to-be.
After Cord left her, Hannah sat very still for several long moments.
What to do? How to answer?
Her heart’s desire—to stay with Becky.
Her mind’s wise instruction—to let Becky go. Now, though it would break her heart in two to do it.
She could get over a broken heart. She had done that more than once already in her twenty-five years of life.
But oh, if she lingered, it could only get worse. With every day, every hour, every minute that passed, she would love Becky more. And the risk would be greater, the pain a thousand times more terrible, if for some reason, she had to let Becky go.
And that could happen, so very easily. Cord Stockwell was a rich man. And the rich—at least in Hannah’s sad experience—were different. They broke rules. They broke hearts.
