Egan Cassidy's Kid. BEVERLY BARTON

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СКАЧАТЬ were a light oak and the walls a soft cream. The only color in the room was the dark green, tufted-back leather chair behind his desk. This was the one room in the town house that his decorator hadn’t touched. He smiled when he remembered Heather Sims. She’d been interested—very interested. And if he had chosen to pursue a relationship with her, she would have been only too happy to have filled his lonely hours with idle chitchat and hot sex. Three dates, one night of vigorous lovemaking and they had parted as friends.

      Egan sat, then opened his notebook and picked up a pen. No one knew that he wrote poetry. Not that he was ashamed, just that to him it was such a private endeavor. At first, it had been a catharsis, and perhaps even now it still was.

      With pen in hand, he wrote.

      because he was eighteen

      he was considered

      man enough to fight old men’s wars…

      The ringing telephone jarred him from his memories, from a time long ago when he’d lived a nightmare—a boy trapped in the politicians’ war, a boy who became a man the hard way.

      Egan lifted the receiver. “Cassidy here.”

      “Well, well, well. Hello, old friend.”

      Egan’s blood ran cold. He hadn’t heard that voice in years. The last time he’d run into Grant Cullen, they’d both been in the Middle East, both doing nasty little jobs for nasty little men. When had that been, six years ago? No, more like eight.

      “What do you want, Cullen?”

      “Now, is that any way to talk to an old friend?”

      “We were never friends.”

      Cullen laughed and the sound of his laughter chilled Egan to the bone. Something was wrong. Bad wrong. His gut instincts warned him that this phone call meant big trouble.

      “You’re right,” Grant Cullen agreed. “Neither of us has ever had many friends, have we?”

      Cullen was playing some sort of game, Egan thought, and he was enjoying himself too damn much. “You want something. What is it?”

      “Oh, just to talk over old times. You know, reminisce about the good old days. Discuss how you screwed me over in Nam and how I’ve been waiting nearly thirty years to return the favor.”

      “You want me, you know where to find me,” Egan said, his voice deadly soft.

      “Oh, I want you all right, but I want you to come to me.”

      “Now why the hell would I do that?”

      “Because I’ve got something that belongs to you. Something you’ll want back.”

      “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Egan clutched the phone tightly, his knuckles whitening from the strength of his grasp.

      “Remember Bentley Tyson III, that good ol’ boy from Alabama who saved your life back in Nam?”

      “How the hell do you know about Bentley?”

      “You’ve been paying for flowers to be put on his grave every year ever since he killed himself fifteen years ago.”

      “Get to the point,” Egan snapped, highly agitated that a man like Cullen would even dare to say Bentley’s name. Bentley, who’d been a good man destroyed by an evil war.

      “The point is I know that when you paid your condolences to Tyson’s little sister fifteen years ago, you stayed in Parsons City for a week. What were you doing, Cassidy, screwing Maggie Tyson?”

      Egan saw red. Figuratively and literally. Rage boiled inside him like lava on the verge of erupting from a volcano. How did Cullen know about Maggie, about the fact that he’d spent a week in her home?

      He’s guessing about the affair you had with her, Egan assured himself. He wants to think Maggie meant something to you, that she still does.

      “I don’t know where you got your information,” Egan said. “But you’ve got it all wrong. Bentley’s little sister was engaged to a guy named Gil Douglas and they got married a few months after Bentley’s funeral.”

      “Oh, I know sweet Maggie was engaged, but she didn’t marry Gil Douglas until five years later. What Maggie did a few months after Bentley’s funeral—nine months to be exact—was give birth to a bouncing baby boy.”

      Egan felt as if he’d been hit in the belly with a sledgehammer. His heartbeat drummed in his ears. He broke out in a cold sweat. No, God, please, no! He’d spent his entire adult life looking over his shoulder, waiting for Grant Cullen to attack. He had denied himself the love and companionship of a wife and the pride and joy of children to protect them from the revenge Cullen would be sure to wreak on anyone who meant a damn thing to Egan.

      “What’s the matter, buddy boy, didn’t sweet Maggie tell you that you have a son?”

      “You’re crazy! I don’t have a son.” He couldn’t have a child. God wouldn’t be that cruel.

      “Oh, yes, you do. A fine boy of fourteen. Big, tall, handsome. Looks a whole hell of a lot like you did when you were eighteen and you and I were buddies in that POW camp.”

      “I do not have a son,” Egan repeated.

      “Yes, Cassidy, you do. You and Maggie Tyson Douglas.”

      Cullen laughed again, a sharp, maniacal sound that sliced flesh from Egan’s bones.

      “You’re wrong,” Egan said, his statement a plea to God as well as a denial to Cullen.

      “Run a check. Your name is on his birth certificate. And one look at a photograph of Bentley Tyson Douglas will confirm the facts.”

      “I don’t believe anything you’ve told me. You’re a lying son of a bitch!”

      “Well, believe this, buddy boy. As we speak, your son is in my hands. I had him flown in from Alabama this afternoon. So just think about that for a while. And you have a good night. Bye now.”

      Chapter 2

      It couldn’t be true. Maggie’s child couldn’t be his. She would never have kept the boy a secret from him all these years. Not Maggie. She would have come to him, told him, expected him to do the right thing.

      Don’t be an idiot, Cassidy, an inner voice chided. You ended things with her rather abruptly once you realized she was in love with you. You gave her a hundred and one reasons why a committed relationship between the two of you would never work. You broke her heart. Why would she have come to you if, later on, she’d discovered she was carrying your child? You had made it perfectly clear that you didn’t love her or want her.

      And there was another reason he couldn’t be the father of Maggie’s child—he had used condoms when he’d made love to her. He never had unprotected sex. The last thing he’d ever wanted was to father a child—someone Cullen could use against him.

      His thoughts swirled through time to the week he’d spent with Maggie СКАЧАТЬ