The Texas Rancher's Marriage. Cathy Thacker Gillen

of maintaining the public ruse her late brother-in-law and sister had insisted upon, Merri looked Chase square in the eye and admitted, “A few months after Scott and Sasha died, I found the paperwork from the fertility clinic, indicating that Scott received help there, too.”

      Chase shrugged. “Although it wasn’t common knowledge, you and I both know my brother had problems in that regard, too. That he was, for all intents and purposes, as sterile as Sasha.”

      “Which was why you jumped in to help, just as I did.”

      “And,” Chase continued matter-of-factly, “set him up with the top infertility specialists at the medical school I attended.”

      His involvement hadn’t ended there and Merri knew it. Frustration mounting, she rose and walked toward him. “Look, I don’t know what kind of deal you and your brother made…probably something similar to the one I made with Sasha and him. But you don’t have to hide anything from me, Chase. Not anymore. I know that you ‘helped out’ a heck of a lot more than just setting them up with the right professionals.”

      Chase studied her. “I don’t know what Scott told you—or Sasha, for that matter. My brother had a way of bending the truth to suit his needs, never more so than when his back was against a wall. But I did not do what you did, Merri. I didn’t offer up my genetic material to help them out.” He exhaled sharply. “They asked me—before I went overseas…as you well know—but I told them I couldn’t handle having a child raised by someone else, not even my own kin. It’s not in me to be a spectator in my own child’s life.”

      Merri knotted her hands in frustration. She remembered the chaos his refusal had caused among the four of them. The rift that had left Chase and his brother barely speaking. “Then why did you sign those papers, allowing Scott to use sperm you had already donated to the university for medical research, for Sasha’s in vitro fertilization procedure?”

      Chase’s mouth dropped open in dismay. “I never signed anything.”

      “But you did!” Merri went to the desk, unlocked the drawer and pulled out a slender file of papers. She handed it over.

      Chase studied the medical forms and legal documents. A muscle worked convulsively in his jaw. “Scott must have forged this. Damn him!”

      Merri’s heart sank as shock turned to comprehension. Oh, my heaven. “You mean…?” she croaked.

      “I never gave my permission.” Chase rifled through the papers, scanning them again and again, as if unable to believe what he was seeing. With anger flashing in his amber eyes, he let out a string of swear words that would have burned the ears off a nun.

      Merri placed a hand over her heart, trembling, she was so upset. “So all this time… You never had a clue that you were the real father of the twins or were in any way biologically connected with them?” That certainly explained his lack of input or involvement. He hadn’t thought Jessalyn and Jeffrey were family at all!

      Chase sat down, scrubbed a hand over his face and dropped his head in his hands. “None whatsoever,” he said miserably.

      A silence fraught with heartache fell.

      “So what now?” Merri asked eventually, afraid she already knew.

      Chase lifted his head, already taking charge, like the kick-butt Texan he was. “We do everything and anything we have to do to make things right.”

      * * *

      MAKING THINGS RIGHT, according to Chase’s world, meant verifying facts. So as soon as the hospital lab opened the next morning, Merri and Chase and the twins were there.

      Unfortunately, no sooner had they all submitted to a simple and painless DNA test than Chase was summoned to the E.R., to help out with an incoming trauma.

      Subsequent surgeries had him staying in the hospital on-call room overnight. And by the time Merri and Chase got to attorney Liz Cartwright Anderson’s office the following afternoon, they already had the results they had expected.

      Quickly, the two of them brought Liz up to speed on everything that had happened thus far. Chase concluded with, “—I never would have given my brother permission to use my sperm.”

      “But you were okay with the egg donation from the beginning?” Liz asked Merri.

      She nodded, still at peace with what she’d done. “I knew how important it was to my sister to have a baby. Her eggs weren’t viable. So for her, to have a baby with the Duncan family genetics, harvesting my eggs and implanting them in her was the only way.”

      “It was still a lot to ask,” Chase said fiercely.

      “I understood where she was coming from.” Merri turned to him. “Sasha and I never knew our father. We had lost our mother. I wanted my sister to have the baby she had always dreamed about.”

      And, Merri added silently, at the time I was still living with Pierce, and thought marriage and a family for me were just around the corner, too. I thought that Sasha and I would be rearing our children together.

      “My sister had promised me I would be an integral part of the twins’ lives. And for those first two months, I was there so much, helping out, I practically was a second mother.” Which had made taking over, in the wake of their parents’ sudden, unexpected death, a lot easier than it would have been otherwise.

      “What about the secrecy?” Liz continued to make notes on the legal pad in front of her. “Were you okay with that?”

      “I knew the whole thing might seem weird to some people—” Merri shot a telling look at Chase “—who would probably fixate on the fact that it was my eggs and my brother-in-law’s sperm making the babies.”

      “Except it wasn’t Scott’s genetic material,” Chase interrupted brusquely, all domineering Texas male. “It was mine.”

      Merri wished he wasn’t so big, strong, sexy and by the book! “Yes, well…” Merri eyed him testily, aware his take-charge attitude was really beginning to get under her skin. Almost as much as the thought that they’d unknowingly made two babies together. “I didn’t realize that at the time.” So it wasn’t as if she’d done something dishonorable!

      “And now that you are aware?” Liz interjected, with her usual lawyerly calm.

      Merri sighed, pushing away the emotion welling inside her. “It actually makes it less—” she paused, searching for the right word, as she once again met Chase’s angst-filled gaze “—controversial to think the babies are Chase’s.” She gulped at the heat of awareness flaring up inside her, then turned back to Liz. “Because Chase was never married to my sister.”

      Chase and Liz acknowledged her sentiment with slight nods.

      “But back to my willingness to stay silent…” Merri forced herself to go on. “I agreed with Sasha and Scott that it really wasn’t anyone else’s business how the twins were conceived. Nor would it ever have been, if they had lived to raise the twins.”

      But sadly, that hadn’t happened.

      Merri shrugged, forcing herself to continue her recollection of the heart-wrenching events that followed. “And then when Scott and Sasha died, I was named guardian of the children, as well as guardian of their estate, so…”

      Nodding, Liz jumped to the logical conclusion. “You saw no reason to set the record straight.”

      Merri lifted her hands. “We were grieving. It didn’t seem like the right time to disclose all that, in court, since I was already technically their mother…because of the guardianship. And then, a few months later, when I finally went through their things and found the paperwork identifying Chase as the biological father, I erroneously assumed that he wanted that to be kept private, too—”

      Merri stopped abruptly, reeling from the memories of that tumultuous time. Of how things might have been different if she and Chase had known about his