The Tycoon's Instant Daughter

The room, in spite of its overbearing beauty, smelled musty and strangely sweet. Like sickness. Like encroaching death. The velvet curtains had been drawn closed against the hot Texas sun outside.

“Here. Here to me.” Caine, who lay in a hospital bed in the center of the room, hit the mattress with one claw-like clenched fist, a gesture reminiscent of one summoning a dog.

Though Cord had always been his father’s favored son, there had been a time when such a gesture would have had him turning on his heel and striding from the room, Caine’s curses echoing in his ears. But that time had passed. In recent months, Cord had learned what pity was—and learning that had made it possible for him to put his considerable pride aside.

He approached the bed. Gunderson and the other nurse, a statuesque redhead, fell back to lurk near the rim of equipment—an oxygen tank, footed metal trays on wheels, an IV drip and the like—that waited several feet beyond where Caine Stockwell lay. The maid dropped to her knees and began picking up the pieces of a shattered antique vase, as well as a number of long-stemmed blood-red roses, which lay scattered across the gold-embroidered rug.

“Everyone out,” Caine commanded. “You two.” He flung out an emaciated arm at the nurses. “And you!” he shouted at the cowering maid.

Cord nodded at the others and instructed quietly, “Go ahead. I’ll buzz you in a few minutes.”

Caine’s bed had been adjusted to a semisitting position. He lurched forward, as if he intended to leap upright and chase the others from the room. But then he only fell back with a groan. “Just get them out. Get them out now.”

The three required no further encouragement. The maid jumped to her feet and scurried off, not even pausing to pick up her broom and dustpan, which lay where she’d dropped them, among the roses and broken china on the gold-embellished hand-stitched rug. The two nurses followed right behind.

Caine waited until he heard the outer door close. Then he patted the bed again, this time more gently. “Here,” he said, his voice now a low rasp. “Here.”

Cord did what his father wanted, taking a minute to lower the metal rail so there would be room for him.

“Have to tell you…” Caine coughed, a spongy, rheumy sound. “No more drugs. Until I tell you…” Caine coughed again. This time the cough brought on wheezing.

“Got to tell…” He wheezed some more. “Have to say…”

Cord got up, but only to pour a glass of water. He brought it back to the bed, sat again and helped his father to drink, sliding a hand gently behind his head, feeling the heat and the dryness, the thin, wild wisps of hair. All white now, what was left of it. Once it had been the same deep almost-black color as Cord’s hair was now. Dark, dark brown, and thick, with the same touch of gray at the temples.

But no more.

Caine’s red-rimmed blue eyes glittered, sliding out of focus, vacant suddenly, shining—but empty. Cord carefully lowered the old man’s head back to the pillow. Caine’s eyelids drifted shut over those empty eyes. A ragged sigh escaped him, and a thread of saliva gleamed at the corner of his mouth.

Cord waited. In a minute, he’d rise, set the glass aside and sit in one of the ridiculously beautiful gilded chairs to wait a little 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.