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“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.”