Authors: Siara Brandt
In recalling that day, every detail was as clear to her now as if it had happened yesterday. She remembered standing in the McLaren barn where she had sought refuge from the approaching storm. She was looking up at the dust motes in the shafts of sunlight that penetrated the weathered slats of the roof above her. The smell of hay was a strong, heady scent. The shrilling of cicadas continued to rise in the woods even though the thunder was loud enough to shake the very foundation of the old barn. She had always liked when it stormed, but she had always feared lightning and she had no wish to ride back home in it.
The wind was so loud that she hadn’t heard the sound of an approaching horse. She didn’t even know that the man was standing there until she turned around. Jesse McLaren, apparently, had come for the same reason she had come. Both of them had been seeking shelter from the storm and that storm was immediately upon them.
Hetty remembered hearing a powerful gust of wind only moments before the heavy door banged inward behind her. It had swung towards her with such a violent force that she would have been badly hurt if Jesse, reacting with lightning-quick agility, had not pulled her out of harm’s way. Right into his arms.
Jesse continued to hold her. So closely that their bodies were nearly touching. And something kept them together. Some force more powerful than the storm outside. As he stood looking down at her, Hetty had become aware of a change in his eyes. She stood lost in those mist-colored depths for long moments. Moments that had seemed an eternity then. They seemed an eternity even now as she remembered.
Her gaze had lowered to masculine lips that asked, “Are you alright?”
Alright? Yes. But somehow she couldn’t find the words to reply. She managed to nod, not knowing why she had lost the ability to speak. Or to step away from him. She only knew that she seemed to be suddenly paralyzed, even when she heard his softly whispered curse, even when his mouth lowered slowly towards hers.
She was not prepared for his kiss, or what that kiss would do to her. His mouth was gentle at first, barely touching her own. It was unlike anything she had ever known. Once he had kissed her. And then again. The third time the kiss had deepened. And then his mouth was hungry and demanding, the very roughness of it causing a hunger to riot through Hetty’s blood like some terrible, out-of-control fire.
Reason was swept away. Logic was forgotten. She should have stopped him. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. Not when his arms went around her and not even when he pulled her tightly against him. And to her shame, her arms had found their way around his neck. Not only had she allowed him to kiss her. She had kissed him back.
Never before had Hetty experienced a kiss like that. And never after. It was the only time in her life that a man had stirred her to such reckless abandon. When she had at last managed to tear herself away, she had ridden away into the fury of the storm, afraid of him, but maybe even more afraid of something inside herself.
And now some strange coincidence had brought him back to Eminence at the same time that she had returned. Stranger yet was the sealed envelope that she had found in Sara Cade’s cabin for it was Jesse’s name that had been written upon it.
Hetty’s eyes closed in the darkness. The knowledge that Jesse McLaren had returned to Eminence had shaken her, it was true. But she told herself that she was not the same girl she had been two years ago. Boston had changed her. Boston had matured her.
When she at last got into bed, she lay awake staring into the darkness for a long time, listening to the thunder still grumbling sullenly in the far distance. And when she finally closed her eyes, her dreams were of a man with wolf-gray eyes that looked down into
her own. They held her captive, reached down into her soul, to a place Hetty, awake, was afraid to go.
Her dreams shifted. They changed to sensuous, slow-moving scenes that left her breathless with longing. And she became lost in the feel and the taste of Jesse McLaren’s mouth as it claimed hers. Once. Twice. And again. And the past became the present and the future as well. Became an eternity. And he smiled. He had the effrontery to smile at her.
Chapter 4
It had rained almost incessantly for three days. The rain had finally ended. In the stillness, ghostly layers of mist were hanging low to the earth in the darkness. Towering above him, the dripping branches of the trees on the north side of the house hung eerily still, wreathing the house in even deeper shadows. The trees seemed to make the air colder here. As they always had.
The house loomed before him, big and dark and silent. He tilted his head back and stared for a moment at the empty upstairs windows. A change came over his face. It was something fleeting, something that was gone by the time he walked past the overgrown weeds and the stones that marked the cistern. The sagging iron gate creaked on rusty hinges as he pushed it open and stepped forward into the deep, brooding shadow of the house.
In the open doorway he paused, braced a hand on either side of the door frame and looked inside. Silence greeted him. And yet there was something else here, too. It was as if the house itself had awaited his homecoming.
He stepped through the doorway into the front hall. Of its own accord, the door slowly creaked halfway closed behind him. The worn wood floor gave back the echo of his bootsteps, a lonely sound in the empty rooms. It was a big old house and somehow the air felt even colder inside.
The parlor gaped to his left, a black void opening off the hallway. He knew the room well, however. He stepped inside and found a lantern. The rasp of a match was followed by a yellow glow that kept the darkness back a bit.
Holding the lantern aloft, he left the parlor, passed the staircase which led up to the second floor and walked into the kitchen at the back of the house. It was no surprise that the room was in disorder. Dirty dishes were stacked everywhere. Clothes were strewn across the backs of chairs. More clothing hung from pegs on the north wall. There was even a pile of clothes on the table in the center of the room.
“You never did clean up after yourself worth a damn,” Jesse muttered to the darkness.
He shoved the clothes aside and set the lantern on the table. His gaze surveyed other familiar objects in the room. The huge cupboard still stood in one corner. Once neat and orderly, the shelves were now lined haphazardly with canisters, canned goods and disorganized stacks of dishes.
He stared at the old stove. Assailed by a sudden stab of memory, he recalled the aroma of freshly-baked bread filling the house. Of thick slices of buttered bread waiting for him on the blue, rose-patterned plates. And his mother’s smile and soft laughter. He saw the huge bowl she always used for mixing bread still sitting on the top shelf of the cupboard.
The clock on the wall caught his attention and he frowned. The hands were still stopped at precisely midnight. Old Silas had been a superstitious cuss. That last night Silas had stopped all the clocks in the house and veiled all the mirrors to keep, as he said, the soul of the departed from returning through them.
It had been the final, rending straw. When they were finally alone, Jesse had turned savagely upon the man. All the years of contention, all the anger that had been at the core of this household, all the frustration that Jesse had kept inside and all his grief were concentrated into that confrontation.
There were brutal words, vicious accusations. And hate. And then Jesse’s fist had smashed into Silas’ jeering face. Dead center. Recalling it was satisfying. Damned satisfying, even now after all this time.
One corner of Jesse’s mouth curved upward. There was no humor in the smile, however. It reflected only cynicism and perhaps a trace of irony. There were few good memories here. And plenty of bad ones. He drew a long, deep breath and let it out slowly.
She ought to haunt you, you sorry sonofabitch, Jesse thought as his gaze ran along the shadows near the ceiling.
From the moment of that confrontation with Silas, things were different between them. There was no more pretense. No longer any reason for it. Gathering up what little possessions remained at the house, Jesse had left. And he had not returned. Till now.
He walked past Silas’ old coat thrown haphazardly over the back of a chair. He passed the leather strap still hanging in the shadows on the hook at the back of the kitchen. He was grateful his mother had never known about the whippings. At least he had that consolation.
He stepped down into the pantry and stared out the back door. He removed his hat and with calloused fingers raked back hair as black as the shadows that surrounded him. Slowly he rubbed the back of his hand across the harsh growth of whiskers on his chin.
There was the gate out back, still hanging crookedly between two posts. Leading nowhere then. Leading nowhere now. In the darkness to his left was the place where his mother had had her garden. His hand stopped. In his mind he could see her standing out there, could almost hear her voice calling him.
He hadn’t been up to visiting the old place since his return. He hadn’t felt ready to face the empty house, preferring instead the lively distraction of saloon noise and the boisterous activities always present in such places. Tonight, however, for some reason, the silence suited him better.
Not that he welcomed the silence. He found it oppressive as hell. Maybe because everything reminded him of her and all those lost years. Long years that had begun the day they moved here and ended only when she died.
His last impressions here had been bleak. The wake. His mother’s funeral. And her burial beside the child she had lost at birth. A girl. A sister.
She’d wanted a family. More than anything else, she’d wanted that for her and even moreso for him. Jesse had no recollection of his real father. He had died when Jesse was two years old. And his mother had been too proud to go back to her family in Virginia.
After struggling so long just to survive, widowed and alone, with a child to raise, she had wanted peace in her life. By marrying Silas, what she got instead were years of criticism and complaints. Maybe she thought Silas would change. But a man like that didn’t change. Silas reveled in the blackness of his heart. He fed on it.
Helplessly, Jesse had watched his mother’s decline over the years. Silas had taken the laughter out of her. He had taken the joy out of her eyes and replaced it with sadness. There had been so much sadness there near the end. And now it seemed to permeate the old house itself, as if it stayed like a ghost, haunting the shadows and unable to leave.
Over the years, Jesse had strived to maintain the peace that she’d hoped for. It hadn’t been easy. There had been plenty of times when he yearned to thrash Silas within an inch of his life for all the hell he’d put her through.
Instead Jesse had taken his anger and his frustration out elsewhere. He had been wild and intractable in his younger years. Far more than he should have been. And then the time came when he learned that he could throw a gun faster than most men, and found, too, that a reputation for being fast with a gun was satisfying in a new way. Jesse supposed that for him, at the time, it was the closest thing to respect he had ever known from any man.
He had learned a lot since then, however. A man had hungers, both good and bad. The important thing, the thing that mattered, was how a man worked those hungers out in his mind and in his life.
The wilderness had become his haven, his escape. From the day they moved here, it had drawn him. He had spent many hours alone in its vastness. A man could lose himself there. Or find himself. He had done both.
He sighed deeply. There was no sense going over it again. The past was gone. She was gone. There were other things that needed to be taken care of. Then most likely he’d ride away from here for good.
He leaned a shoulder against the door jamb. He’d already been down to talk to John Forbes who was
staying in the cabin down in the valley. He had gone down that morning and learned that the man’s wife had become sick after childbirth on their way west, which had delayed them so that by the time winter was coming on, there was no time for the man to put up any kind of suitable shelter for his family.
And Silas had offered them the cabin. But Jesse knew that when Silas had rented that cabin to the Forbes, he wasn’t being kind or charitable. He’d been taking advantage of someone else’s misfortune. Silas was about as cheap and selfish a bastard as he had ever come across. He was a greedy opportunist who never helped anyone unless there was something in it for himself.