Three days. The McKennas didn't leave Hico. They stayed in their lodging like a virus that's decided the host is worth colonizing — quiet, patient, metabolizing information while the body they'd infected tried to pretend it was fine.
Catherine sent flowers. Not to apologize — apologizing implied error. She sent them the way a country sends an ambassador after a border skirmish — signaling diplomacy while the troops repositioned.
White roses and a card: "Family is complicated. We'd love to try again." Signed Catherine, not Catherine and Gerald. Which told me everything about who was running which strategy in that marriage.
I threw the roses away.
Gerald requested a private meeting on Thursday in their hotel. Colt told me at breakfast — flat voice, flat eyes, informing rather than consulting.
"I don't want you going alone."
"This isn't a Kameron conversation. He'll use Kameron's presence as evidence I can't handle my own affairs."
He set his coffee down with the precision of a chess piece. "I know my father. The only way to survive a meeting with Gerald McKenna is to walk in alone, say no, and walk out before he reframes no as a negotiation."
He went and was there for two hours. I spent them on the porch, hand on my belly, phone on my knee — the specific anxiety of a woman who'd sent the man she loved into a room with the man who made him and couldn't do a damn thing about it.
Kameron paced. Not his nature — he's a leaner, a sprawler — but he paced the porch like something caged, boots making a rhythm that matched my heartbeat.
Colt came home at four. Sat in the truck a full minute before getting out — the time it takes to reassemble your face into something that won't frighten the people waiting. He walked to the porch and asked me to sit.
He told us about Gerald's proposal. Not a conversation — a proposal, the way a corporation proposes a merger, complete with terms and consequences.
Colt comes home to Fort Worth. Marries properly — Gerald's word, properly, delivered with the specific emphasis of a man who'd been rehearsing that sentence for three years and had finally found an audience captive enough to hear it.
The baby — a McKenna heir, Gerald's phrasing, heir, like we were discussing a throne instead of a child the size of a cauliflower with no opinion about dynastic succession — would be raised with McKenna resources.
Best schools and best opportunities with McKenna name, McKenna network, McKenna future.
And Ivory? Ivory has three children already. Ivory has Kameron. She'll manage. This isn't personal, Colton. This is about bloodline.
Bloodline. The word sat in the January air like something that had crawled out of a century it should have stayed in.
The vocabulary of horse breeding and aristocratic succession, deployed in a hotel room in central Texas by a man in expensive boots talking about my baby like a foal he intended to register.
"I refused. Told him the baby is ours. That this family — every configuration he finds unsustainable — is my choice."
"What did he say?"
Those hazel eyes carrying something I'd never seen — not fear, but its cousin, the one that shares a wall. The recognition that the person across from you has resources for real damage and willingness to use them.
"He said: 'Then we'll do whatever it takes. You've made your choice, Colton. Now watch what ours looks like.'"
The sentence landed like a blade dropped point-first into the porch between us. Whatever it takes. The phrase of a man who'd built a fortune on the understanding that obstacles are just problems that haven't met enough money yet, and he had more money than we had obstacles, and he knew it, and he wanted us to know he knew it.
Kameron's hands were fists. "What does that mean? Lawyers? Money? What's he going to do, buy the town?"
"He doesn't need to buy the town." Colt's voice was the flattest I'd ever heard it — stripped of everything but the tactical assessment of a man who'd grown up watching his father destroy obstacles and understood exactly how the machinery worked. "He just needs to buy the right people in it."
I sat with that. One more stone on a pile already taller than me. One more threat in a drawer that had run out of space months ago.
"What do you think they'll do?"
Colt didn't answer the question. He said something worse.
"My father asked for the name of your obstetrician." Looking at me with an intensity that bordered on clinical. "I didn't give it to him."
"He said, 'That's fine. We already know.'"
The porch went airless. They already know. Three words that meant Gerald McKenna had investigated my medical care with the same systematic thoroughness he'd applied to our cattle records and fence lines and operating margins, except the asset he was appraising now wasn't a ranch or a revenue stream or a piece of real property.
It was my body, my baby and my doctor. The private, sacred territory of a woman's pregnancy — the appointments, the records, the due date, the birth plan — cataloged by a man who considered them data points in an acquisition strategy and saw nothing wrong with that because to Gerald McKenna, everything was data and everyone was leverage.
My hand went to my belly. The same instinct that makes a mother curl around her child when she hears a sound in the dark.
The baby kicked against my palm, and the kick felt different now. Not playful. Not personality. A heartbeat asking to be protected.
Kameron's voice went low and dangerous — the frequency beneath the charm, the one I'd heard once before in a parking lot years ago when someone said something about me he decided they wouldn't say again.
"They don't get to touch her. They don't get to touch this baby. I don't care how much money they have."
Colt nodded. "I know."
"Then what do we do?"
Colt looked at the ranch. The cottage. The main house where his mother's flowers were already in the trash and his father's threat was still hanging in the air like smoke from a fire that hadn't finished burning.
He looked at me — twenty-eight weeks pregnant, sitting on a porch in January, carrying a baby that a powerful man had just classified as an asset and a future he intended to acquire whether we agreed or not.
"We call Ryan. And we find a lawyer. Tonight."