LITMIR.BIZ

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won’t be long. You can think about my offer.”

      The door closed behind him before Hannah could say a word.

      Cord could hear his father barking orders as he entered the old man’s private sitting room.

      “I don’t need you poking me with needles. I can still swallow a damn pill if I need one. And right now, I don’t need one. Not till I talk to my son, you hear me?”

      One of the maids had joined Cord in the central hallway and followed him into the room. She carried a broom and a long-handled dustpan—probably under orders to clean up whatever mess Caine had created in his rage. The maid cringed when she heard the old man shouting.

      “Don’t worry,” Cord said. “He’s not yelling at you.”

      “Cord?” Cancer might be eating Caine Stockwell alive, but his hearing remained as acute as ever. “Cord, that you?”

      Cord stepped through the wide arch that framed his father’s oppressively opulent bedchamber—a replica, Caine always claimed, of Napoleon I’s bedroom at the Château de Fontainebleau, the magnificent hunting lodge of sixteen and seventeenth century French royalty. The room, like the antechamber through which Cord had entered, boasted gilt medallions in classical motifs adorning the walls, a massive crystal and gold chandelier overhead and gilded furniture upholstered in carmine-and-green brocade. The huge velvet-draped bed, shipped from France a decade ago, was the room’s crowning glory. And it stood empty. Caine would no longer trust the body that had betrayed him not to soil the dazzling stamped velvet bed coverings.

      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

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