The Coltons of Shadow Creek

Unable to take Mac fighting with his son over something that she ultimately was responsible for, Leonor raised her voice to be heard above the two men.

“Stop!” she pleaded. When both men looked at her, she began by answering Thorne’s question, really hoping she wouldn’t break down in the middle of it. “I thought I could trust him,” Leonor retorted, anger and hurt throbbing in every syllable. She could feel tears forming as she continued. “We were supposed to get married—”

“Married?” Mac questioned, looking at her. He looked stunned by this addition. “You left that part out,” he told her.

Leonor inclined her head, as if conceding her error. “Sorry.”

“You’re going to have to do better than ‘sorry,’” Thorne told her angrily.

Doggedly, Leonor pushed on with her explanation. “I needed to talk to someone, to get everything I’d been carrying around all this time, like some kind of flesh-eating poison, off my chest.

“People were as nasty to me as they were to you—” she began, looking at Thorne.

His laugh was cold and dismissive. “I really doubt that.”

“Let her finish,” Mac ordered, cutting his son off.

Thorne scowled, but conceded. “Go ahead,” he told his sister grudgingly.

“I needed someone to talk to,” Leonor repeated, “and he was there, ready to listen.”

“And taking notes,” Thorne interjected nastily.

Leonor sighed. Thorne was right, but that didn’t help anything or change it. “I didn’t know that at the time,” she told him. “I had no idea he’d wind up putting it all in a blog and selling it to the highest bidder. I thought he loved me, but he turned out to be an opportunist.”

“If you wanted to talk so badly,” Thorne said angrily, not fully ready to accept that as an excuse, “why didn’t you come to me?”

She looked at him. Was he kidding? They were all at odds when their mother was carted off to prison. Thorne particularly.

“Maybe you forgot,” Leonor pointed out, “but you weren’t exactly the friendliest audience to turn to these last few years. I couldn’t talk to you.”

He wasn’t about to let her turn this around and blame him.

“Maybe that was because I could never understand how you could still love that woman after everything she’d done. She never once thought about how her actions would reflect on us or affect us. Hell, she never once thought about us, period,” he reminded his sister angrily. “Yet you went running off to visit her in prison every chance you got,” he said scornfully.

Her temper flared. Leonor gritted her teeth together as she ground out an answer to his accusation. “Because nobody else did.”

“There was a reason for that!” Thorne pointed out in exasperation. “The woman is evil.” Fury had temporarily robbed him of breath. When he got it back, he asked his sister, “Was she grooming you to follow in her footsteps? Was that it, Lennie? Was that why you sold us out like that? Are you helping her now?”

Stunned, Leonor couldn’t find the words to answer her brother, to defend herself. What hurt most of all was that Thorne felt she had to.

Mac came to her rescue. “That’s enough, Thorne!” he shouted. “I want you to apologize to your sister.”

There was cold fury on Thorne’s face. “Why should I?” he demanded.

Thorne was furious and he felt he had every right to be. His father was blind when it came to Leonor and his other half sisters, but women could be even more evil and deadlier than men. His mother was living proof of that, he thought darkly.

“Because she doesn’t deserve to be treated so disrespectfully,” Mac informed his son. “Because if it wasn’t for her, neither one of us would be standing here right now!”

Thorne had no idea what his father was talking about. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he demanded.

“It’s nothing,” Leonor said quickly. She knew what Mac was going to say and she didn’t want him to. This was a private matter between the two of them, not something she’d done for any sort of credit or recognition.

But Mac wasn’t about to allow Leonor’s generosity to go unnoted any longer. Thorne needed to know just the sort of person his sister was.

“It’s not ‘nothing,’” Mac told her. “And it’s about time people knew how you came through.” He shifted his eyes toward his son. “When the bank was breathing down my neck a few years ago, threatening me with foreclosure because I’d had a run of bad luck and missed a few payments, Leonor used her own money to help bail me out. She paid off the bank.” There was gratitude in his eyes when he looked at her. “If she hadn’t done that, it would have gone up for sale.”

Completely stunned in the face of this information, Thorne could only stare at his father. “You never said anything.”

“Not the kind of thing a man likes to advertise,” Mac replied flatly. “It wasn’t my finest moment. But it definitely was Leonor’s,” he added, looking significantly at her.

Thorne blew out a breath, completely caught off guard. It was his turn to look contrite. “I didn’t know,” he said to his sister.

“You weren’t supposed to know,” Leonor said simply. “I didn’t do it because I wanted people to have something nice to say about me. I did it because your father needed help and this was my small way of paying him back for all the times he was there for all of us. For me,” she added with affection as she looked at the tall, strapping, dark-skinned rancher. “In a way, you’re the parent the rest of us never had,” she told Mac.

Mac smiled at her. “You made it easy.” And then he turned his attention toward his son. “You want to apologize to her?”

He made it sound like an option, but Thorne knew that it wasn’t. And, given what he’d just found out, his father was right. He did owe Leonor an apology. Not for being angry about the blog—she hadn’t denied being responsible for that—but for losing his temper with her like that. No matter how angry he was, she didn’t deserve to have him ranting at her like that, especially not after she’d helped his father the way she had.

Apologies weren’t exactly his specialty and this one was no exception. He went with something positive rather than dwelling on the negative. “Thanks for helping Dad out.”

“Like I said, it was the least I could do.” Leonor shrugged as if it had been no big deal—because, to her, it hadn’t been. The far bigger deal would have been to just ignore Mac’s plight and move on as if there was nothing wrong. “And I did have the money.”

“But you didn’t have to use it,” Mac pointed out.

He wasn’t a man who took anything for granted. Life was hard and he knew that better than a lot of people. He had no really high expectations, but when the occasional pleasant surprise came his way, he was grateful to be able to experience it.

Leonor looked at the rancher. To her way of thinking, there had never been a choice. It was a matter of doing the right thing, or not being able to live with her conscience if she had chosen to close her eyes and just walk away.

“Yes, I did,” she told him quietly.

“Okay,” Thorne conceded. “I take back everything I just said to you,” he told Leonor. “You didn’t sell us out. But what are we going to do about this character who sold the info to the blog?”

“You ignore him,” Mac said, addressing his words to both of them, just in case his son was getting Leonor all fired up about the man again. He wanted her to let go of her anger over this—permanently.

Thorne was not keen on his father’s input.

“That doesn’t seem right after what they wrote,” Thorne protested.

Mac shook his head. His son was missing the point here. “You go after him in any way, even if it’s just to carry on an online war, and all you’ve done is succeeded in getting more people to pay attention to this jackass’s blog. If you want a story to die, the way you kill it is ignore it until it eventually runs out of fuel and burns itself out.”

“What if it doesn’t burn itself out?” Thorne challenged.

Mac was unwavering in his response. “It will. All things die eventually. Yesterday’s news is just that, yesterday’s news. Unless, like a scab, you keep scratching at it and making it bleed. Then somebody pays attention to it.”

Leonor shivered. “A bleeding scab. Not exactly the most appealing image,” she said.

“Maybe not,” Mac agreed. “But that doesn’t make it any less accurate.” And then he took a deep breath, his barrel chest expanding impressively. He considered this topic to be over. “I just bought two new stallions and they were delivered this morning.” He looked from Leonor to his son. “You two up for a trip to the stable to meet the new arrivals?”

She’d always loved horses. It was the best part of her childhood. She couldn’t think of anything she would have liked better than to see the stallions that Mac had purchased.

“Count me in,” she told Mac.

Thorne paused. The fire had settled down in his veins. “Yeah, me, too,” Thorne said.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Mac wanted to know. He crossed to the front door, beckoning them to follow him. “Let’s go!”

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