Read Online The Texan's Diamond Bride by TERESA HILL - Free Book Online Page B

him?”
    “I don’t know.” She sat up in the bed, covers falling to her waist, her hair tumbling everywhere. “I have no idea how you’re going to treat him or what you thinkabout him. I can still hardly believe it’s true. That he’s your father’s son and not my father’s.”
    Travis frowned. Okay. He had to admit what she’d just said was likely true, because he wasn’t completely sure how he felt about the whole thing, either. How could anyone be? It was all too strange, too new.
    “If I could just…I know you don’t owe me anything,” she said. “I know I don’t have the right to ask anything of you, but you’re here and we spent some time together before…before anything about our families got in the way, and…Well, I think you can be a nice man, when you want to be. And I’m asking you, please…Charlie wants to meet your father…his father. I assume at some point he’ll want to meet you and your brothers…. Could you just be kind? Please?”
    Kind?
    What the hell did she think of them? That they were a pack of wolves? That they’d eat him alive?
    And yet, he could hear that her concern was genuine and that, for all he could see, she loved her younger brother very much.
    “Answer a question for me, Red. How did your father treat him?”
    She looked for a minute like…like it had been bad…maybe everything Travis feared. He’d always heard Devon McCord was an ass.
    He swore, sat down on the edge of the cot and grabbed her by the arms, holding her there in front of him, not letting her look away. “No. Tell me. He hurt him?” That one question burned a hole in Travis’s gut when he let himself think about it.
    She looked confused, surprised, hurt herself. “No.”
    “The guy’s always been rumored to have a nasty temper. Ask anybody, and not the people in my family who were taught from birth to hate him. Anybody. They’ll tell you he was a big, tough, mean son of a bitch. So tell me. Tell me right now. Did he hit that kid? Did he hit Charlie?”
    “No,” she said.
    “Swear it,” he demanded, right up in her face. “Right now. It’s…I need to know, Red. I need to know no one hurt him like that when no one in my family even knew he was a Foley, and none of us were there to protect him. Because he’s family and we don’t leave each other alone to face something like that. It just isn’t right.”
    “No, he didn’t hit us.”
    “Maybe not you or your sister, but what about your brothers? And if he knew Charlie wasn’t his—”
    “He didn’t know,” she said. “I’m almost certain he didn’t. Charlie was just so easy to like. To love. For my father, too. I don’t think there’s any way he knew Charlie wasn’t his.”
    “Okay.” Then he realized he’d been manhandling her himself, trying to make her sit there and look him in the eye and tell him the truth.
    He still had her by the arms in a hold that wouldn’t allow any kind of escape from him.
    And he’d gotten too close to her again.
    He let his hands drop and eased back away from her as she scooted back on the bed to sit up against the headboard, looking wary and surprised and not quite sure what to do with herself or to say to him.
    “I’m sorry,” he said.
    She shrugged off his words, like they didn’t really matter, like none of it did and let her head fall until he saw nothing more than a curtain of red-gold curls and all that made him worry even more.
    Travis swore and shook his head in disgust. “Did I hurt you, Red?”
    “No. It’s just…grabbing me like that and acting like you’d shake the truth out of me, if you had to? That was something my father did.”
    Her father, and now him?
    That was perfect.
    Just perfect.
    “Son of a bitch,” he said.
    Now he felt like an absolute ass.
    “Travis?” She put her hand on his arm. “I’m glad you care enough about Charlie to want to be sure my father didn’t hurt him like that. I’m glad you want to look out for him, the way brothers do. That