The Texas Rancher's Marriage

Chase studied the medical forms and legal documents. A muscle worked convulsively in his jaw. “Scott must have forged this. Damn him!”

Merri’s heart sank as shock turned to comprehension. Oh, my heaven. “You mean…?” she croaked.

“I never gave my permission.” Chase rifled through the papers, scanning them again and again, as if unable to believe what he was seeing. With anger flashing in his amber eyes, he let out a string of swear words that would have burned the ears off a nun.

Merri placed a hand over her heart, trembling, she was so upset. “So all this time… You never had a clue that you were the real father of the twins or were in any way biologically connected with them?” That certainly explained his lack of input or involvement. He hadn’t thought Jessalyn and Jeffrey were family at all!

Chase sat down, scrubbed a hand over his face and dropped his head in his hands. “None whatsoever,” he said miserably.

A silence fraught with heartache fell.

“So what now?” Merri asked eventually, afraid she already knew.

Chase lifted his head, already taking charge, like the kick-butt Texan he was. “We do everything and anything we have to do to make things right.”

* * *

MAKING THINGS RIGHT, according to Chase’s world, meant verifying facts. So as soon as the hospital lab opened the next morning, Merri and Chase and the twins were there.

Unfortunately, no sooner had they all submitted to a simple and painless DNA test than Chase was summoned to the E.R., to help out with an incoming trauma.

Subsequent surgeries had him staying in the hospital on-call room overnight. And by the time Merri and Chase got to attorney Liz Cartwright Anderson’s office the following afternoon, they already had the results they had expected.

Quickly, the two of them brought Liz up to speed on everything that had happened thus far. Chase concluded with, “—I never would have given my brother permission to use my sperm.”

“But you were okay with the egg donation from the beginning?” Liz asked Merri.

She nodded, still at peace with what she’d done. “I knew how important it was to my sister to have a baby. Her eggs weren’t viable. So for her, to have a baby with the Duncan family genetics, harvesting my eggs and implanting them in her was the only way.”

“It was still a lot to ask,” Chase said fiercely.

“I understood where she was coming from.” Merri turned to him. “Sasha and I never knew our father. We had lost our mother. I wanted my sister to have the baby she had always dreamed about.”

And, Merri added silently, at the time I was still living with Pierce, and thought marriage and a family for me were just around the corner, too. I thought that Sasha and I would be rearing our children together.

“My sister had promised me I would be an integral part of the twins’ lives. And for those first two months, I was there so much, helping out, I practically was a second mother.” Which had made taking over, in the wake of their parents’ sudden, unexpected death, a lot easier than it would have been otherwise.

“What about the secrecy?” Liz continued to make notes on the legal pad in front of her. “Were you okay with that?”

“I knew the whole thing might seem weird to some people—” Merri shot a telling look at Chase “—who would probably fixate on the fact that it was my eggs and my brother-in-law’s sperm making the babies.”

“Except it wasn’t Scott’s genetic material,” Chase interrupted brusquely, all domineering Texas male. “It was mine.”

Merri wished he wasn’t so big, strong, sexy and by the book! “Yes, well…” Merri eyed him testily, aware his take-charge attitude was really beginning to get under her skin. Almost as much as the thought that they’d unknowingly made two babies together. “I didn’t realize that at the time.” So it wasn’t as if she’d done something dishonorable!

“And now that you are aware?” Liz interjected, with her usual lawyerly calm.

Merri sighed, pushing away the emotion welling inside her. “It actually makes it less—” she paused, searching for the right word, as she once again met Chase’s angst-filled gaze “—controversial to think the babies are Chase’s.” She gulped at the heat of awareness flaring up inside her, then turned back to Liz. “Because Chase was never married to my sister.”

Chase and Liz acknowledged her sentiment with slight nods.

“But back to my willingness to stay silent…” Merri forced herself to go on. “I agreed with Sasha and Scott that it really wasn’t anyone else’s business how the twins were conceived. Nor would it ever have been, if they had lived to raise the twins.”

But sadly, that hadn’t happened.

Merri shrugged, forcing herself to continue her recollection of the heart-wrenching events that followed. “And then when Scott and Sasha died, I was named guardian of the children, as well as guardian of their estate, so…”

Nodding, Liz jumped to the logical conclusion. “You saw no reason to set the record straight.”

Merri lifted her hands. “We were grieving. It didn’t seem like the right time to disclose all that, in court, since I was already technically their mother…because of the guardianship. And then, a few months later, when I finally went through their things and found the paperwork identifying Chase as the biological father, I erroneously assumed that he wanted that to be kept private, too—”

Merri stopped abruptly, reeling from the memories of that tumultuous time. Of how things might have been different if she and Chase had known about his involvement. That he, too, was a parent to the children—at least biologically.

Merri swallowed hard. Aware Chase and Liz were both waiting for her to continue, she stammered. “So there was just no way I could c-come forward without making things more difficult than they already were.”

“So rather than stir up a hornet’s nest, you just let things be,” Liz said.

“Yes. Because I thought Chase didn’t want to be involved. That he didn’t want to discuss it. Otherwise…I was sure he would have laid claim to the children at the time of Scott and Sasha’s death.”

“So you went on. Alone,” Liz surmised.

“Yes,” Merri admitted in a choked voice. Though she had always known, in the deepest recesses of her heart, that a day of reckoning might come.

As it finally had…

Liz looked at Chase. “What would you like to do here?”

“These kids are mine. I want to be their dad and help Merri raise them. But I also want to do everything we can to protect the twins from scandal.”

“Meaning, keep this quiet,” Liz asserted.

The two nodded in unison, and then Merri added, “I’m no more comfortable with the lies that started all this than Chase is. But we agree—the twins are far too young to understand.”

“If they don’t ever have to know, we’d rather they didn’t,” he added.

“So,” Merri said, “if there was a way this could be handled privately…the court records sealed to ensure word never gets out…”

Liz tapped her fingers on her desk. Looked from Chase to Merri and back again. “I understand what you’re asking me to do. Unfortunately, there are a couple of pretty big problems with all this,” she said. “The twins turned four…”

“Last March,” Merri qualified.

“Hence, in Texas, you can no longer challenge paternity based on DNA. That option ends when a child turns four, no matter what the circumstances. You can terminate the parental rights of Scott and Sasha, and adopt the children, but a judge would first have to determine if that is in their best interest. And I’ll be honest.” Liz sighed. “I don’t see that happening. At least not in the immediate time frame you want.”

Chase lifted a hand. “Wait a minute. Why would we have to adopt them when the DNA tests prove they are ours, biologically?”

“Because in Texas, in the eyes of the law, they are not your children,” Liz explained calmly. “You terminated those legal rights when you donated the sperm and the eggs.”

“Except Scott lied.” Chase grimaced. “He forged my signature. I never agreed to give him that sperm to make a baby.”