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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 amanbut 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 youwantedme to marry.”
“Like hell you are! I sent Tynan to you. I wanted you to marryhim.”
“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 certainlydoknow 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 preciousmanrefuses 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.”
