The Temptress (27 page)

“Yes, sir.” Tynan put out his hand to shake Del's. “If you have anymore need of me, I'll be around. Mr. Dysan.” He tipped his hat to the older man.

Chris didn't breathe as he turned toward her—but he didn't look at her, just nodded in her direction, gave one of his infuriating hat tippings, mumbled, “Good-bye, Miss Mathison,” then turned away, Pilar beside him.

Chris sat there for a moment, barely aware of Pilar waving to her, then she leaned across her horse and grabbed her father's pistol from his holster and aimed it at the back of Tynan's head.

“What do you think you're doing?” Del shouted as he knocked her hand skyward.

The pistol rang out, the bullet flying a foot over Tynan's head, but he still didn't turn around.

Del took his pistol from his daughter. “Of all the fool things—”

He stopped because Chris had buried her face in her hands and began to cry. She
had
been only a job to him, a job to make money and, in the end, he hadn't cared anything at all about her.

As always, Del was at a loss as to what to do when a female cried, but Sam moved his horse closer to her and pulled her into his arms.

Chris recovered herself quickly, then moved away from Samuel and, with clear eyes, looked back at her father. “Forgive me. I'm ready to go now.” She was very aware of the men around her, all of them embarrassed.

“Look, if you want to stay here…” Del was awkward in trying to comfort her.

“She's fine now, aren't you?” Sam said. “I think we ought to go.”

Chris looked at him with gratitude and minutes later they were on their way toward home.

Chris put down her book and leaned back against the tree that grew behind the little stone bench. She'd been in her father's house for three weeks now and she knew that she wasn't going to leave it again. She wasn't going back to New York, wasn't going to write any more stories about what was wrong in the world. Instead, she was going to marry Asher Prescott and live in her father's house forever.

With a sigh, she closed the book. She'd already told Asher and now all that was left was to tell her father. For some reason, she hated telling him. Of course he'd be utterly delighted that she'd at last done something that he wanted her to do, but still, Chris hesitated.

“Might as well get it over with,” she murmured to herself as she stood. “A lifetime of being Mrs. Prescott and I think this will ‘get it over with,' ” she muttered.

She straightened her shoulders and started walking back to the house, passing Samuel Dysan on the way. The man had stayed on after the rescue and had become part of the family. Twice, Chris had considered telling him her problems, but each time, something held her back.

She knocked on the door to her father's study.

“Come in,” he called and, as usual, he sounded angry. Since they'd returned, he always seemed to be angry, sometimes not talking to Chris—as if he were furious with her about something.

He looked up at her. “What is it?” he asked coolly.

“I have something to tell you. Something that will please you, I'm sure.”

He didn't say anything, just looked at her with one eyebrow raised.

“I have accepted Asher Prescott's marriage proposal. We're to be married one week from today.”

She expected a burst of happiness from her father, but his face blackened. Wasn't she doing what he wanted?

“You never could do anything to please me, could you?” he began, coming up from his chair behind the desk. “I wanted you to stay home, but you wouldn't. I wanted you to marry and have babies, but you wouldn't. I wanted you to marry a
man
but you won't even do that, will you?”

Chris stood there blinking for a moment. “I'm going to marry the man you sent to me, the man you
wanted
me to marry.”

“Like hell you are! I sent Tynan to you. I wanted you to marry
him.”

“Tynan?” Chris said as if she'd never heard the name before. “But you said that if he touched me, you'd send him back to prison.”

Del heaved a sigh, went to a bookcase, opened a door, and withdrew a glass and a bottle of whiskey. He poured out a healthy shot and downed it. When he looked back at his daughter, he seemed to have gained control of himself.

“I know that you've never done anything I've ever wanted you to do, so I thought I'd be able to get you to do what you thought I didn't want you to do. I sent you two men: one a weakling that could barely sit on a horse and the other one a…a man in every sense of the word. I thought you'd have sense enough to choose the right one. All I did was put a few obstacles in your way to make it more interesting.”

Chris wasn't Del's daughter without having inherited some of his temper. “Of all the lowdown, rotten tricks, this is the worst. Do you mean that you created that entire story just to make me more interested in him?”

“It doesn't matter what I did since it obviously backfired. You chose that…that…don't you know that he only wants your money?”

Chris took a moment to control her rising temper. “I most certainly
do
know what he wants from me. But for your information, it was your hand-picked Tynan who turned me down, not the other way around. Your precious
man
refuses to have anything to do with me.”

“And what did you do to him to make him dislike you?”

For a moment, Chris closed her eyes in an attempt to keep from screaming at her father. “I did nothing to make him dislike me,” she said softly. “In fact, the reason I am marrying Prescott is because I'm carrying Tynan's child.”

That successfully closed Del's mouth. “I'll go after him and bring him back here. I'll—”

“You will do no such thing. I'll not marry a man who doesn't want me.”

Del sat down in his chair heavily. “But Prescott—”

Chris sat in the chair on the other side of the desk. “Asher wants my money and I want my child to have a name. I think it's a perfect arrangement.”

Del seemed to age before her eyes. “Sam and I thought we'd planned everything so carefully. I didn't see any loopholes. We couldn't have been more wrong.”

“What has Mr. Dysan to do with all of this?”

“Sam is Tynan's grandfather. In fact, Tynan's real name is Samuel James Dysan the third.”

Chris couldn't speak for a moment. “He's who? What in the world are you saying? Tynan knows nothing about who he is.”

“Sam hasn't known it all that long himself.”

“Would you mind explaining what you're talking about? How long have you known about Tynan? Did you know when you got him out of prison?”

“Of course. You don't think I'd trust my only child to an outlaw, do you? I've always known who he was.”

He leaned back in his chair. “I don't guess it'll matter that I tell you now, now that all Sam's and my plans have fallen through. Sam has hopes that Tynan will return, but I think I gave up last week.”

“And decided that he didn't return through some fault of mine,” she said with disgust. “How did you first learn about Tynan?”

“You're too young to remember, but Sam and I knew each other many years ago. He was a suitor of your mother's.” Del smiled. “Now there was a woman with sense. She knew which man to choose. Anyway, Sam married soon after I did and he and his wife had a son right away, named him Sam after himself. There wouldn't have been any problems except for that hellion Sam's brother married. Sam made all his money on his own, but whatever his brother touched, failed. Sam's sister-in-law screamed night and day at her husband, then at her son who was just like him. Both men died young. It was when her grandson was born that she saw some hope of ever achieving what she wanted.”

“And that was Beynard,” Chris said.

“Yes, the woman thought for years that Beynard was going to be Sam's heir because Sam the second didn't produce any children. But then he and his wife decided to go to Washington to see about buying some timberland and they never returned.”

“They were killed,” Chris said softly. “Ty said that his mother had three bullet wounds in her back.”

“All Sam could do was guess what had happened. He heard that his son and daughter-in-law had been killed in a boating accident and never made it to the coast of Washington. For years, he thought that he was going to have to make Beynard his heir, even though he disliked the boy. But six years ago, a friend of his daughter-in-law's came to visit and asked Sam what had happened to Lilian's child. Until then, Sam hadn't even known she was going to have a baby.” Del gave Chris a hard look. “Sometimes fathers are the last to know what's going on in their children's lives.”

Del folded his hands on the desk. “So, for six years, Sam's moved heaven and earth to find out if she had a child and if it lived. He found him three years ago. He's your Tynan. We think his mother must have said, ‘Dysan,' and the old miner misheard it as ‘Tynan.' ”

“Who killed Tynan's parents?”

“Sam could only guess that his sister-in-law hired someone to do it. Maybe she found out there was going to be a rival for her grandson's place as Sam's heir.”

“So this is why Beynard wanted us. On the hill that day, at Hamilton's, he was talking about Tynan when he mentioned Sam, wasn't he?”

“Probably, but Beynard never had a chance. His grandmother was crazy and she poisoned his mind against Sam's family. She made him as crazy as she was. Sam made the mistake of telling the boy that he thought he'd at last found his grandson. Beynard broke into Sam's office, stole the papers on Tynan and came to Washington to find him. Several of the things that happened to Tynan over the last few years were caused by Beynard.”

“So, actually, he kidnapped Pilar and me to get to Tynan?”

“We have no way of knowing for sure, but Sam and I think he knew Tynan…cared for one of you but he didn't know which one, so he took both of you.”

Chris was silent for a few minutes as she digested this information. “So why did you come up with this elaborate scheme with Tynan and me? Why didn't Mr. Dysan just get his grandson released from prison and take him home? What did I have to do with this?”

“Sam only knew of his grandson by reputation. He'd heard of every gunfight, every time he got thrown in jail, the banks he robbed when he was a boy, all the scrapes he got himself into, and all the women.” Del was watching Chris but she didn't say anything. “Sam wanted to know what his grandson was like. He was afraid he was like Beynard. And, too, we both hoped for an alliance between our families.”

“So you used me,” she said, her jaw set. “You used me in your matchmaking experiment.”

Del's voice rose. “I thought maybe you could benefit by meeting a man, something besides those city slickers you'd met in New York. Give a job to a woman! Of all the stupid—”

“I don't think we'd better start this again,” Chris said. “If you'd wanted me to meet him, you should have invited him to the house and introduced him to me. But no, you had to concoct an absurd farce to get us together. You had to threaten him with a return to prison if he so much as came near me and you also had to send that man Prescott who was drooling over me at every opportunity.”

“And now you're going to marry him.”

“I
have
to! That
man
you chose for me won't have anything to do with marriage. He's scared to death of the idea. And he'd rather do anything than go back to jail.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“Yes, he did. I begged him to marry me, but he refused. You'll be happy to know that your little scheme worked on my part. I fell in love with Tynan—or Sam, whatever his name is—practically from the moment I saw him. But all he wanted from me was…what he got, so now I'm carrying the consequences of having fallen in love with him.”

“He walked out on a woman carrying his child?”

“I most certainly did not tell him.”

Del stood. “Well, we'll find him and make him marry you. He can't do this to my daughter.”

“You do that and I'll walk out of this house and you'll never see me or your grandchild again. I'll not force myself on a man who doesn't want me. I've talked to Asher and told him about the baby and he's agreed to marry me and raise the child as his own. I think it'll work out nicely.”

“Nicely,” Del mocked. “I never would have thought this of Sam's grandson. I thought he had more guts than this.”

“He said he was doing this for me and I think some of him believes what he's saying. He says he's not husband material and that I'll be better off with some man who's housebroken.”

“But he could learn.
I
learned, didn't I?”

Chris looked at the floor. “I don't want to talk about this anymore. Tynan didn't love me. As much as you and Mr. Dysan wanted it to happen, it didn't. I'm going to marry Asher in a week and I'm going to stay here and raise my child and I'll probably never even see Tynan again. Besides, with his propensity for trouble, he'll probably be back in prison by the time of the wedding. Now, I think I'll go lie down and rest.”

With that, she left the room.