Page 2 of The Texan Duke
His mother told him that he’d had it since birth. As the youngest of six children, the previous five having been girls, he’d been the spitting image of his father, down to imitating his mannerisms before he could walk.
“You just don’t sound like your papa,” his mother said. “Not that anyone could.”
Nope. He was a Texan. His father had sounded like a Scot. There were times when Connor couldn’t understand him, especially when he started talking Gaelic.
Connor countered by talking Mexican, which made Graham give him the McCraight glance.
He missed his father. He’d missed his father in one way or another since he’d come home that day two years ago, tired of war. At the tearful reunion with his family, he’d been given the news that his father had unexpectedly died in a line shack after a day of inspecting the fence line. The cause? He’d been cleaning his gun.
That hadn’t made sense then and it didn’t now.
Until Glassey showed up on his doorstep a few weeks ago, Connor had no idea that there was a family in Scotland. He hadn’t known about his aunt and three cousins—all girls—or that he had an uncle who’d died. He sure as hell hadn’t known about any estate or that he was the heir.
He had no business freezing in a strange country. He should be home where he was needed.
“Your father would have wanted you to go.”
Those words, uttered in a soft voice by his mother, had been the reason he’d agreed to accompany Glassey back to Scotland.
Now he wished he could have refused his mother. However, in the history of the XIV Ranch he doubted anyone had been able to say no to Linda McCraight.
She stared at you with those big brown eyes of hers—eyes that were replicated in all her children—standing there tall and proud, her hands folded in front of her. She was a statue of stillness, her bright red hair tucked into a braid coiled into a pattern his sisters called by a French name.
“It’s your obligation as a McCraight,” she continued. “The last male McCraight.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he’d said, despite the fact he was no longer in his boyhood and had been running XIV for the past two years on his own. All he could do was nod his head, bite back every objection that came instantly to mind, and make arrangements to have Joe Pike, his soon-to-be brother-in-law and one of his division managers, take over in his absence.
He couldn’t disrespect his mother, but damn, he wished he’d been able to say something, anything, to keep from being here in Scotland, of all places.
Sam unfolded himself from his scrunched position in the corner, grabbed his hat from his chest and planted it on his head, shivered, made a face, then shook his booted feet one by one.
Sam didn’t say much, but his expression left you with no doubt about what he was thinking. Right now it looked like he was wondering why the hell he’d agreed to accompany Connor to Scotland.
Sam Kirby had been his father’s friend. Tall, rangy, with a bald head and face that bearded up despite how often he shaved, he reminded Connor of a picture of a Jesuit priest he’d once seen. The man wasn’t a monk, however. Tales of Sam’s conquests had been legendary throughout the XIV Ranch.
Sam and Graham had been friends ever since Graham McCraight had come to Texas. Connor didn’t know how it had been done, but somehow his father and Sam had not only funded the syndicate that had built the state capitol, but they’d overseen the architecture and the construction. In return, the legislature had awarded them the land to begin the ranch.
Sam wasn’t an entrepreneur. He wasn’t even much of a rancher. Graham had called him a mental tumbleweed. If something interested Sam, he got involved in it, whether it was gold mining or some business venture with a man from back east who wanted to build a series of stores. But he always came back to the XIV Ranch as if it were home. Because of that, Connor considered Sam almost like an uncle. Not like the stranger whose death was the reason he was here now.
Before they left Texas, he’d asked Sam about the man.
“Did my father ever talk to you about his brother?”
“Once in a while,” Sam said. “When we were drinking.”
“I can’t remember him ever mentioning him to me.”
He should have asked his mother before he left Texas, but he tried not to mention his father any more than necessary. Every time he did, or when one of his sisters said something, his mother would get that look in her eyes. The one that made it seem like she held all the world’s sorrow in her heart.
She still cried every night.
He’d even broken down and asked Glassey, just before they boarded their ship. The solicitor had no idea why Graham had spent the past forty years in Texas.
Except for that, there wasn’t much about his father that had been secret. Graham was an open, boisterous, giant of a man who had a sense of wonder about everything, from the birth of a calf to the expanse of stars over their heads. He was given to philosophical discussions at strange times, often over a campfire or after bathing in the river.
When Connor came home from college, his father had tested his knowledge about a great many things. He’d found himself defending his beliefs, being forced to think long and deep about a subject before responding. Up until then he’d never considered his father an educated man, not like his professors. He soon realized that it was his own knowledge that was lacking and that Graham McCraight was the equal of any learned man he knew.
What would his father think about this journey, done so reluctantly? Graham was all for a man doing what he thought was right in his own mind. He’d instilled that thought in Connor along with another one: he had to accept the consequences of his actions. He couldn’t blame anyone else for the choices he made if he’d done so freely.
