Gayle Wilson - The Cowboy's Secret Son

Lily Garrett Bishop looked up from the work spread across her own desk, loving amusement lifting her lips as she watched her twin brother. His eyes were on one of two letters that had been hand-delivered to the offices of Finders Keepers.

“Something interesting?” she asked after a moment.

She stacked the report she had just finished and inserted it into its folder, which would eventually be filed with the others in the agency’s growing list of successfully completed cases. At her question, Dylan’s blue eyes lifted from the paper he held.

“A voice from the past,” he said.

“Are you deliberately trying to be mysterious, or is this ‘voice from the past’ strictly personal?”

“Personal? In a way, I guess it is. Part of it, anyway.”

“And the part that isn’t?” Lily asked patiently.

“Involves an assignment for the agency.”

The agency was the investigative venture the Garrett twins had recently formed, using skills developed in their previous occupations in law enforcement. The goal of Finders Keepers was to find people, especially those who had, for one reason or another, been torn apart from their families.

“Something you’re obviously interested in accepting.”

Lily believed she knew every nuance of her brother’s voice. This one contained a tinge of nostalgia. Perhaps even regret.

“Someone,” he corrected softly.

Lily’s smile widened. She knew him too well to be able to resist the opportunity that offered for teasing. “Oh, let me guess. Someone young and beautiful. And female, of course.”

“Young at heart, in any case. Or…at least she was.”

The past tense and the subtle shift in tone warned her, and Lily’s smile faded. “Someone I know?” she asked gently.

“Someone Sebastian and I met years ago.”

Dylan’s eyes fell again to the letter, and his sister waited through the silence, anticipating that eventually he would go on with the story he had begun. By now she understood it was one that had engaged her brother’s emotions as well as his intellect.

“Young at heart doesn’t sound much like one of your usual romantic encounters,” she ventured finally. “Or Sebastian’s.”

When Dylan laughed, Lily felt a surge of relief. Whatever this was, apparently it didn’t involve the disappearance of Julie Cooper, which had occupied her brother’s time and energy since his friend Sebastian had come pleading for help to find his missing wife.

Actually, Lily hadn’t heard this much interest in Dylan’s voice in weeks. Not for anything other than Julie’s disappearance. Whatever was in that letter, she could only be grateful for the distraction it was providing her brother.

“We had car trouble,” Dylan said, that subtle hint of nostalgia back. “Down in Pinto.”

“Pinto?” Lily repeated disbelievingly.

“Pinto, Texas, home of Violet Mitchum and not much else.”

“Violet Mitchum is your mystery woman?”

“There was no mystery about Violet. Except this, I guess.”

“This?”

“It seems I’ve been named as one of her heirs.”

“Should I congratulate you on your inheritance?” Lily teased, assuming that whatever her brother had inherited from a chance acquaintance in Pinto, Texas, wouldn’t be substantial.

Dylan inclined his head slightly, as if in polite acceptance of those congratulations. With the movement, the strong Texas sun shining through the wide second-story windows behind him shot gold through the light-brown strands of his hair.

“You may congratulate me along with the seven other recipients of Violet’s largesse,” he said.

“Too bad you have to share your inheritance with so many,” Lily mocked. “And is Sebastian another of Miss Mitchum’s heirs?”

“Mrs. Mitchum. And no, he’s not. Violet didn’t take to Sebastian,” Dylan said, the amusement suddenly missing from his narrative. “She said he had…an impure heart.”

That assessment of the handsome and charismatic Sebastian Cooper, especially by a woman, was surprising. Usually it was Sebastian who made an indelible impression on females, Lily thought with a trace of bitterness. Just as he had with Julie.

She had hoped for years that Julie would realize Dylan was the one who really loved her. The one who was so obviously right for her. She hadn’t, however, and when she and Sebastian had eloped, Dylan had continued to be a friend to both of them, despite what Lily suspected was a badly broken heart.

“But she took to you?” The mockery had been deliberately injected back into her question, hiding that swell of bitterness.

“Of course. After all, I took her riding,” Dylan said. “And part of my inheritance is the horse we rode on.”

“The horse we rode on?”

“She said she hadn’t been riding in years. I held her before me in the saddle so she could have one last ride on one of her beloved horses. It just seemed…the right thing to do.”

“Just exactly how old was Violet when you met her.”

“According to this, Violet was eighty-one when she died. The fishing trip was before Sebastian and Julie married….” The sentence trailed, and Lily felt unease stir. After a few seconds, however, her brother continued, his voice unchanged. “So, maybe…four years ago. Maybe a little more.”

The tough-as-nails Dylan cradling a fragile old lady before him in the saddle was not hard to imagine. Not if one knew her brother as she did. “And in gratitude, she left you the horse.”

“Considering its bloodlines, that would be no small bequest in itself. But it isn’t all Violet left me.”

Dylan walked across the room and laid both letters on the desk in front of her. Lily scanned the first one quickly, finding the initial paragraphs to be confirmation of what he had just told her. And in the third paragraph…

“Mitchum Oil? Your Violet was that Mitchum?” she asked.

“She and her husband Charles. They had no children. Only Violet’s horses and…that.”

That was a fortune, one of the largest in Texas, where millionaires were not rare. The size of the old Mitchum strike was justly famous even in this oil-rich state.

“And the other heirs?” Lily asked, after she had skimmed the rest of the first letter.

“People who meant something in Violet’s life. They’re all listed in the other letter. That one’s from her lawyer. There’s an old friend, Mary Barrett, who stayed in touch by letter, despite their changing circumstances. There are several who had done Violet favors, like Stella Richards, who sent meals out to the Mitchum house every day until Violet died. And Stuart Randolph, who loaned Charlie the equipment to dig his first well. John Carpenter, who tended her horses,” Dylan enumerated. “And then there are those, like me, who had a chance encounter with her that…changed their own lives.”

“Is that what Violet did? Changed your life?” Lily asked, hearing again the thread of emotion in his deep voice.

“She granted me absolution.”

“Absolution?” Lily asked, surprised at the word, which had such strong religious connotations. “Absolution for what?”

“For not being here when Mother died,” he said quietly.

“Dylan,” Lily said, pity intermingled in her equally soft protest. “I never knew you felt that way. You have to know she understood. She always understood. And she loved you so much.”

“That’s what Violet said. I guess she just said it at the time when I most needed to hear it. She reminded me that a mother’s love has no conditions,” he added. “Mom’s certainly didn’t. Somehow, stupidly, I had managed to forget that.”

Lily nodded, blinking back the sharp sting of tears those memories evoked. “You said there was an assignment for us in this,” she reminded him, not sure that reliving the pain of her mother’s death was what either of them needed right now. Not with Dylan so worried about Julie, and her own pregnancy—