Mackenzie's Pleasure Read Free

been discouraged. From the
    first, she simply treated the boy as if he was hers—and soon he was.
    The boy who had always been alone was suddenly plunged into the middle of a large,
    volatile family. For the first time he had a roof over his head every night, a room all to himself,
    ample food in his belly. He had clothing hanging in the closet and new boots on his feet.
    He was still too weak to share in the chores everyone did, but Mary immediately began tutoring
    him to bring him up to Zane's level academically, since the two boys were the same age, as
    near as they could tell. Chance took to the books like a starving pup to its mother's teat, but in
    every other way he determinedly remained at arm's length. Those shrewd, guarded eyes took
    note of every nuance of their family relationships, weighing what he saw now against what
    he had known before.
    Finally he unbent enough to tell them that he was called Sooner. He didn't have a real
    name.
    Maris had looked at him blankly. "Sooner?"
    His mouth had twisted, and he'd looked far too old for his fourteen years. "Yeah, like
    a mongrel dog."
    "No," Wolf had said, because the name was a clue. "You know you're part Indian.
    More than likely you were called Sooner because you were originally from Oklahoma—and
    that means you're probably Cherokee."
    The boy merely looked at him, his expression guarded, but still something about him
    had lightened at the possibility that he hadn't been likened to a dog of unknown heritage.
    His relationships with everyone in the family were complicated. With Mary, he wanted to
    hold himself away, but he simply couldn't. She mothered him the way she did the rest of her
    brood, and it terrified him even though he delighted in it, soaking up her loving concern. He
    was wary of Wolf, as if he expected the big man to turn on him with fists and boots. Wise in the
    ways of wild things, Wolf gradually gentled the boy the same way he did horses, letting him
    get accustomed, letting him realize he had nothing to fear, then offering respect and friendship
    and, finally, love.
    Michael had already been away at college, but when he did come home he simply made
    room in his family circle for the newcomer. Sooner was relaxed with Mike from the start,
    sensing that quiet acceptance.
    He got along with Josh, too, but Josh was so cheerful it was impossible not to get
    along with him. Josh took it on himself to be the one who taught Sooner how to handle the
    multitude of chores on a horse ranch. Josh was the one who taught him how to ride, though
    Josh was unarguably the worst horseman in the family. That wasn't to say he wasn't good,
    but the others were better, especially Maris. Josh didn't care, because his heart was wrapped up
    in planes just the way Joe's had been, so perhaps he had been more patient with Sooner's
    mistakes than anyone else would have been.
    Maris was like Mary. She had taken one look at the boy and immediately taken him under
    her fiercely protective wing, never mind that Sooner was easily twice her size. At twelve, Maris
    had been not quite five feet tall and weighed all of seventy-four pounds. It didn't matter to her;
    Sooner became hers the same way her older brothers were hers. She chattered to him, teased
    him, played jokes on him— in short, drove him crazy, the way little sisters were supposed
    to do. Sooner hadn't had any idea how to handle the way she treated him, any more than he had
    with Mary. Sometimes he had watched Maris as if she was a ticking time bomb, but it was
    Maris who won his first smile with her teasing. It was Maris who actually got him to enter the
    family conversations: slowly, at first, as he learned how families worked, how the give-andtake of talking melded them together, then with more ease. Maris could still tease him into a rage,
    or coax a laugh out of him, faster than anyone else. For a while Wolf had wondered if the
    two might become romantically interested in each other as they grew older, but it