Cal rolled over in his bed and blinked at the clock. Two o’clock. Something had most definitely woken him up. What was it? Had that truck finally made it out of the pasture? That could have created a noise that had the potential to wake him out of a sound sleep.

Then he heard it. There was a knocking on the front door. No. Not just a knocking. Someone was pounding on the front door. With all of the crap going on in his life right now, there was absolutely no telling who it might be.

He threw his legs over the side of the bed and stood up. Reaching for a pair of sweatpants, he managed to step into the legs without toppling over. He hiked them up over his hips and then looked around for a shirt. The only thing that caught his eye was a sweatshirt. He pulled that over his head without paying any attention to what it was. Then he made his way out of his bedroom and down the hallway.

Cal had moved into his parents’ bedroom years before. It was bigger. The bed was bigger. And somehow, it just felt wrong to Cal to be sleeping in his childhood bed at nearly thirty years old. The pounding on the front door continued as he traversed the long hallway upstairs in the old farmhouse. His feet were bare and the floor was squeaky.

“This had better be a freaking emergency,” he muttered.

He almost added that someone better have died, except the recent events with his father had sort of changed his view of that possibility. He wasn’t fond of his father. Joe Hernandez was a difficult man to love, but Cal wasn’t ready for him to die.

“Okay!” Cal shouted when he got to the bottom of the stairs. “I’m coming, dammit! Stop pounding on the damn door!”

Of course, the stairwell in this rambling old house hit the first floor at the back of the house instead of by the front door like most modern floor plans. That meant Cal still had to wind his way through the maze of rooms all tacked haphazardly together in a way that suggested the house had been built and then added onto more times than the architecture could handle.

Finally, Cal made his way to the front door and fought to get the old deadbolt undone. He’d been meaning to spray the thing with some lubricant forever. He just never got around to it. When he managed to get the door open, he was shocked to find himself staring down at Jesse. Somehow, he had mentally convinced himself that one of his brothers had come out here—probably Laredo—to tell him he needed to go back to Denver to be with their family because of his father’s illness.

“Hey.”

He blinked at her. “You pound on my door at two in the morning, and that is what you have to say about it?”

“I need to talk to you about something.” She pushed her way past him into the house. “Now.”

That was the problem with people when they felt far too comfortable in a space. This house had been Jesse’s home for a long time. Of course she felt like she should be able to just walk inside. But a few hours before, she had refused to talk to him. Now she wanted to change her mind. Now?

Cal had to mentally pause for a moment to collect himself. Jesse was already heading for the kitchen. He could hear her in there banging around, probably looking for the kettle to make tea. But for the moment, he needed to assure himself that the truck was no longer stranded in his pasture.

Stepping out onto the porch, Cal wrapped his arms around his midsection as he stared into the blackness of the home pasture. The telltale yellow, white, and red running lights were no longer hovering out there in the dark. It was eerily silent. No more hum of a diesel engine. It appeared that the trucker had taken Cal’s advice and left the way he’d come in. That was good. Wasn’t it?

“Cal!” Jesse’s voice drifted through the house. “Are you trying to catch a cold or something? It’s freezing out there. Shut the door and come inside.”

He chuffed out a long-suffering sigh. Only that sassy bit of goods would have the audacity to shout something like that at him after barging her way inside his house in the middle of the night. Jesse was unique. It was the reason she had always fascinated him. It was the reason he loved her. And what he felt for her had absolutely nothing to do with any lingering brotherly emotions, no matter what his family seemed to think.

By the time Cal made it to the kitchen, the flame on the stove’s burner was licking hungrily over the bottom of his ancient kettle. The water was beginning to boil. He could hear it hissing against the metal sides of the kettle itself. Soon it started to whistle. He automatically opened a cabinet and pulled out two mugs. Jesse was already reaching for the tea tin.

“I should throw you out,” Cal grumbled.

She didn’t even blink. “But you won’t because you want to know what would bring me here in the middle of the night.”

“After telling me you didn’t want to talk to me? Yeah. I do.” Cal tried to decipher what he was feeling inside but gave up after only a few moments. Everything was so jumbled that he didn’t even want to go there.

She put the tea bags in the mugs. The kettle began to whistle, and Cal swept it up off the stove and poured each mug full of boiling water. Then, as the tea began to steep, he rubbed his eyes and tried to shake the rest of the sleep from his mind.

“I’m sorry to wake you.” She murmured the words so softly that he almost missed them. “I didn’t know who else to turn to.”

He bit back the sarcastic response that wanted to pop out. She didn’t need that kind of thing right now. She obviously had something very serious on her mind. So, he took a seat on one of the barstools and tugged his tea close enough to wrap his hands around the mug. The heat felt good against his hands. Sometimes he thought his chronological age might be twenty-nine but his physical age was more like eighty.

She didn’t sit. That alone told him that she was incredibly agitated. He looked at the very familiar blond hair and tanned complexion. Jesse had always been beautiful. She had the sort of looks that some women paid good money to achieve. She was athletically built and very fit from her work on the ranch. Her hands weren’t soft. They were calloused and scarred like a working woman’s. Her nails were clipped short and unpainted. She never wore makeup, but he’d seen her slather on so much sunscreen that she could be accused of using a bottle a day just because she was so paranoid of looking leathery in her old age.

It was really her hair that had always fascinated him though. The Hernandez men had black hair. Even their mother had dark-brown hair to go with her blue eyes. Jesse’s white-blond locks were soft as silk. She usually tried to keep the waist-length mass of hair tied up. She wore braids and buns and piled the stuff on top of her head just so she could smash a ball cap over the top of it. But right now, all of that glorious hair was hanging over her shoulders and down her back in curly waves of silk that begged a man to run his fingers through it.

Cal clenched his hands together and then forced them back to his mug. She was not here right now because she wanted to explore a romantic relationship with him. Considering everything that had happened in the last day, he would be lucky if she would ever think of him in that way again.

“I need you to remember back to when my folks were in that accident.” Jesse’s words were more a plea than request. “I need you to remember who packed up their house to put everything in storage. Can you think about that for me?”

Cal’s memory of that time was surprisingly sharp, but not for the reasons one might expect. His family had acquired a new child. Generally that would be enough to create an indelible mark in a young man’s memory. But the situation had been so much more complicated than that, and Cal wasn’t sure that Jesse was really ready for all of this.

“What did Avery tell you?” Cal asked, referring to his mother. “I can tell that she said something. Laredo mentioned that you didn’t want to go to the hospital with them.”

“I’d already been to the hospital.” Jesse wrapped the string attached to the tea bag around her index finger and began bouncing the bag inside her mug. She continued to stare at the surface of the mug as though she were seeing nothing else in her mind. “Your mom called me first. I don’t know why. She wanted me there, I guess. She claims he was asking for me. I don’t buy it. Or maybe I do. Sometimes I don’t know what to believe about Joe.”

Cal could well understand that. “He’s a difficult man to figure out. But if Mom said he was asking for you, he probably was.”

“But why?”

“Because he’s always had a soft spot for you.” Cal sighed. This was going to get uncomfortable. “Because of your mother.”

“Because he’s my father?” She seemed to throw the words out there as if she could not bear to hold them in any longer. “Is that the big secret everyone has been hiding from me all these years?”

“Is that what you believe?” Cal asked quietly. His heart was hammering against his chest, and he felt as though he could not breathe.

“No. It isn’t what I believe!” she shot back. Her hands moved so violently that her tea sloshed over the edge of her mug. “But it’s what your mother told me! That is what she said when I got to the hospital. She told me that your father is my father and that he’s a cheating bastard who was in love with my mother for years! Years, Cal! How am I supposed to believe that? And if I do or if I don’t, what does this do to my life?”

There were tears in her eyes, and Cal wanted to make them go away. He didn’t know what to do. He had not anticipated that his mother would do such a thing or go to such great lengths to hurt the child of a dead rival. What sense did it make?

Cal reached for her. She pushed him away. He reached for her again. This time he wrapped his arms around her body and let her rage at him. She pounded his chest with her hands and cried and moaned and raved like a lunatic until she finally collapsed against him in a fit of tears.

He let her cry. It was what needed to happen. That much he knew for certain. She cried until the tea was cold and the kitchen was colder. He stroked her hair and pressed his face to the softness of it. It was wrong for him to enjoy this so much. Not because he truly believed that they were related by blood. In his heart, he knew this wasn’t true. But right now, she was vulnerable and he was in a position to take advantage of that.

“I don’t want to be related to you, Cal.” She whispered the words against his tear-dampened chest.

Cal gently tucked a thick strand of hair behind her ear. “You aren’t related to me,” he told her softly.

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

“But there’s no proof?” She pulled back far enough to look up into his face. “You have no proof!”

“No. Do you need proof?” Cal knew this was a stupid question as soon as he posed it. There was nobody on earth more sensitive to the concept of proof and absolutes than Jesse.

“People have lied to me for my whole life, Cal. I want an end to the lies.”

He sighed. This was going to be painful. He knew it. His family would not support this search. His parents would actively block it in the same way they had for more than a decade now. But perhaps it was time.

“All right,” Cal agreed. He stroked her face with his fingertips. The softness of her skin was a revelation. He loved her. He had always loved her. If this was what it took to make her realize that this was not a crime, then so be it. It was a little enough price to pay. “We’ll find the truth.”

“You’ll help me?” She seemed unconvinced. “You’ll really help me? Even if it makes your family angry?”

“Even if they disown me.” He had to chuckle at the thought. All things considered, he would benefit from his banishment from the Hernandez Land & Cattle Company far more than they ever would. “But for the record, I think you’re doing the right thing.”

“You do?”

Was she really so unaware of her intelligence and her perfectly reasonable desire for answers? He tapped the end of her nose and caused her to wrinkle it up in the most adorable little face. Then he leaned forward and kissed her forehead. “I believe that you have a right to the truth. I believe that your parents would appreciate you searching for it. You have a right to it. And I also believe that bringing the truth into the open will help my family let go of a lot of this crap we’re all determined to carry around.”

“That’s for sure,” she muttered. “Your mother is determined to divorce your father. She’s so angry at the idea that he might actually die before she gets the chance to publicly dump him and pay him back for years of disrespect. It’s kind of sick.”

Cal could not agree more. “You’re our angel,” he whispered. “You’re going to drag us out of the darkness and into the light.”

“And to think they say you’ve got no poetry in your soul, Calvin Hernandez.” She shook her head and sighed. “I’ve always said that everybody has you all wrong.”

“That’s because you’ve had me figured out your whole life.” He wondered if she had any idea how true that really was. Perhaps he shouldn’t enlighten her just yet. It wasn’t the time. Not yet. But soon.