High Country Bride (24 page)

Emmeline was hanging up the dish towel to dry when Concepcion returned to the kitchen, looking slightly more composed than before, but not in the least apologetic.

“You were magnificent!” Emmeline told her, pausing to kiss the other woman’s cheek.

“Madre de Dios,”
Concepcion fussed, fanning herself with one hand. “I don’t like to lose my temper like that. It’s just that these McKettrick men are so exasperating—”

Emmeline laughed. “Yes,” she agreed. “They certainly are.”

Concepcion prepared Holt’s injection.“I’ll sit with our patient for a while,” she said wearily. “You go upstairs, to your husband. It’s time the two of you talked.”

Emmeline nodded, resigned. Only hours before, she’d pelted Rafe with eggs, so she wasn’t counting on a pleasant reception, but she wouldn’t be able to avoid him forever. “Holt has had his supper,” she said, as an aside. “I took him a plate before we sat down to eat.”

Concepcion started up the stairs. “He’s mending, I think.”

Emmeline had hoped Holt would get well soon, and leave the Triple M forever, but she’d overheard Angus and Concepcion talking about the Chandler ranch, which Angus had long planned to buy. Evidently, Holt had made a better offer on the place, just before he was hurt, and the land was his, which meant he would be staying.

Emmeline’s stomach knotted. When she reached the bedroom, Rafe was already there, seated at the table he used as a desk, a book open in front of him. She stopped in the doorway, taken aback, for she had hoped to have a few minutes to prepare for a private confrontation.

“Come in,” he said gravely. Then a smile tilted one corner of his mouth. “Unless, of course, you’re planning to start throwing things again.”

Emmeline crossed the room to stand behind him, leaning slightly to one side to peer at the title of the volume he’d been reading.
Modern Astronomy
.

He grinned when he saw her eyes widen.“Surprised?”

She shook her head. If the gesture was a bit misleading, well, she had other concerns on her mind.“You spent the night in town,” she said.

“So I did,” he agreed.

“Do you intend to apologize?”

He chuckled, without humor. “I do not,” he said. “Do you?”

She folded her arms.“Of course not,” she said.

He frowned, though his eyes were shining.“Well, then, I guess we have ourselves a standoff,” he said. He got up from the chair, crossed the room, and closed the bedroom door with a distinct finality.

“I guess we do,” Emmeline agreed, glancing toward the bed, then looking quickly away. She’d cried herself to sleep on those very pillows the night before, but if she lived to be a hundred, she would never tell Rafe McKettrick.“Kindly keep to your own side,” she said.

He bowed.“Don’t worry,” he said.

“I
T WAS JUST A LITTLE FLUTTER
,
that’s all,” Becky told Doc Boylen as he straightened, having bent over her bed to listen to her heart through his stethoscope. She was ensconced in room 8 of her hotel, fully clothed, a spill of summer sunlight washing over her. Through the open window she heard the sounds of a busy community, and they brought her an ordinary but tender comfort. “I’m perfectly all right.”

“I don’t like what I hear in there,” he said, having completed his examination. “Fact is, yur time might be running out.”

She sighed.
“Everybody’s
time is running out,”she replied. “You ought to know that better than anyone, Doctor.”

He chuckled as if against his will, and his eyes remained grave. He was not an attractive man, and what little she knew of his reputation was entirely unsavory, but Becky liked him anyway. She’d lived in glass houses far too much of her life to go about throwing stones.

“You’re right about that,” he admitted. “We’re all on a slippery flume to the hereafter. I once opened up a feller for an autopsy, after his third wife—I believe Flossie was twenty-two at the time—was accused of poisoning him with prussic acid. He was seventy-nine, and he’d never taken in any poison, far as I could tell, but his ticker was so worn out, it wouldn’t have pumped enough blood to keep a chicken alive. He should have kicked the bucket
years
before he did—there was no earthly reason for him to be breathing past the age of thirty.”

Becky eyed Doc wryly. “Don’t keep me in suspense,” she said. “Did the poor young widow go to prison, or live happily ever after?”

He smiled. “She was hitched to the banker’s nephew within three months. The scandal turned that town on its ear, but of course they got over it, when somebody else stepped off the straight and narrow and started a whole new round of gossip.”

Becky shook her head, having pondered the case and come up with a verdict. “Guilty,” she said, with certainty. “She poisoned him, all right. She used something other than prussic acid, that’s all. Maybe foxglove.”

John Lewis, just entering the room, had evidently overheard enough to pick up the thread of Becky and Doc’s conversation, because he grinned as he went around to the other side of the bed. “You’ve got a real suspicious mind, Rebecca,” he said, meeting Doc’s gaze.“How is she?”

“I’ll thank you, Marshal Lewis, to speak to me directly, if there’s something you want to know,” Becky said. “I am neither deaf nor dumb, and I’ll answer for myself.”

Doc pretended not to hear and busied himself putting away his stethoscope, but he was smiling a little.

“Well, then?” John asked, spreading his hands in cheerful concession as he looked down at her.“What’s the diagnosis?”

“I’ll be fine,” she told him. “Just fine.” She glanced at the doctor.“What do I owe you, Frank?”

“A steak dinner in that fine dining room of yours,” Doc answered, taking up his battered bag. He fixed his gaze on the marshal, taking his measure as if he were a newcomer to Indian Rock instead of a longtime acquaintance. He smiled again. “See that she rests, John,” he said. “I mean that.”

John nodded, taking Becky’s hand and holding it between his own. “I’ll make sure of it,” he said, and he sounded like he was swearing an oath. “You come on by later, and I’ll fry up that steak for you myself.”

Doc nodded, then went out, closing the door softly behind him, and John sat down on the edge of Becky’s bed, still grasping her hand. “What happened?” he asked quietly.“Clive told me his version, but he was practically hysterical by the time he found me, and I could barely make heads or tails of it.”

“It was nothing,” Becky said, with a little sigh and a thoughtful sidelong glance at her friend. For all her figuring on the matter, she still hadn’t worked out what made John Lewis tick. She knew he wanted her, in the elemental way that men want women, but he’d never so much as tried to kiss her, even though they’d taken to each other right away, and had spent most of their free time together from the beginning. She wondered, yet again, if he’d found out about her past somehow. “I was standing on a chair, taking down one of those infernal flour-sack curtains, and I had a little dizzy spell. That’s all, just a dizzy spell—I didn’t even faint. Mandy brought me here—you know,
Sister
Mandy—and Clive went for Doc Boylen.”

“Are you telling me the truth, Rebecca?” he asked, with a wry and watchful smile in his eyes. Like Becky, he had his doubts about the young nun she’d taken on as a temporary housemaid—he’d expressed them right off—but he was inclined toward tolerance, at least where women were concerned.

“About this, yes,” she said, after a moment’s pause.

“But not about everything?”

“Not about everything,” she confirmed. Now it would happen. She would tell him about Charles Harding, and Emmeline, and the boardinghouse in Kansas City, and she would lose him as a result. She could trust him not to spread what he learned, she knew that; he wouldn’t do anything to hurt Emmeline. He’d be polite about it, tip his hat, and walk away for good.

The regrets Becky would have to live with after that would be bitter ones indeed. She had never dreamed she could care about a man the way she cared about John Lewis, but there it was. She’d been ambushed by fate.

He released her hand, went around to the other side of the bed, and lay down next to her.“If you feel like talking, I’m ready to listen,” he said, with a settling-in kind of sigh.“If you don’t, well, that’s all right, too.”

She couldn’t help smiling. At the same time, she felt the sting of tears in her eyes, and she was glad they weren’t looking at each other.“Who knows? Maybe it will do me good to bare my soul.”

“Maybe,” he agreed.“I’m listening, Becky.”

“I ran a brothel in Kansas City,” she heard herself say, and then she was horrified, because the words were right out there, and could not be unsaid. John would simply get up now, walk right out of that room, and never come near her again.

“Did you, now?” he asked. There wasn’t a hint of shock in his voice, and Becky turned to stare at him.

“Is that all you’ve got to say?”

He grinned at her. “Becky,” he said, “when folks get to our place in life, they’ve usually built themselves up a past, if they’ve done any livin’ at all. I didn’t figure you’d been spinning straw into gold in some tower all this while, and there was no sign of a husband.”

Her eyes burned, and her vision went blurry. Her heartbeat was doing strange things that bore no discernible relation to her medical condition. “John Lewis,” she said,“did you
hear
what I said?”

He put his arms around her, snuggled her close against his chest. She loved the scent of his skin, the steady rhythm of his breathof hisnd of his strong, honorable heart. “Yes,” he said, “I heard you. You ran a brothel in Kansas City. Now, would you like to hear my horrible secret? It’s only fair that we swap.”

“Not if you’re going to say you’re married,” she said. “I don’t want to hear that.”

He laughed. “I’m an eligible bachelor,” he assured her. “But I did five years in prison, back in Ohio, when I was a lot younger—and a lot stupider—than I am now.”

She felt sympathy, rather than alarm or contempt. “What did you do?”

“I took part in a bank robbery,” he said. “A man was shot to death.”

She lay perfectly still, absorbing this. “Was it you who killed him?”

“No,” he said, and she knew he was telling the truth. She’d heard every size, shape, and color of lie, and she could have recognized one anyplace. “I didn’t pull the trigger. But I was there, and I was breaking the law all right, so it was partly my fault that that fellow died. I was caught three days later with my share of the money we took—the others got away, as far as I know.”

Becky laid a hand on his chest, her fingers splayed. “Oh, John.”

“I paid for what I did,” he said quietly.“All of that’s behind me, for good. Has been for a long, long time. All I care about these days is right now. Right now, and you, Becky.”

She started to cry.

“Don’t now,” he whispered, and kissed her tears away. “We’ve both had enough of regrets and sorrow. It’s time we were happy, don’t you think?”

She settled against him, with a sniffle and a little nod, and began telling him things she’d never told another living soul, but even with John, she knew there were some secrets she must never tell.

Emmeline picked up the bottle of laudanum, poured a dose into a tablespoon, and, holding it out in front of her by at least a foot, approached Holt’s bed with a series of short, rapid steps.

He swallowed the stuff, and looked as if he might laugh when she leaped back, but his eyes were full of bad temper.“Thanks,” he growled.

“You have no call to be so peevish,” Emmeline said, still keeping her distance, her hands resting on her hips, elbows jutting out. “It’s not my fault you got yourself pinned under a tree trunk!”

“I have
every
reason!” Holt snarled. “If I don’t get out of this bed soon, I’m going to turn loco!”

“Oh, stop your fussing,” she told him. She and Concepcion and Phoebe Anne had been running up and down stairs for the better part of ten days, by that time, looking after him, and he never had a polite word for any of them. Certainly he’d never said “please” or “thank you,” except in a sarcastic way.“You’re behaving like a spoiled child.”

“Well, thank you for that, Mrs. McKettrick,” he snarled. “Tell me, where is the sweet-tempered Phoebe Anne? I believe I prefer her to you.”

“She’s gone to Iowa,” Emmeline said with snappish dignity. She missed the other woman’s company, and any mention of her friend put her in miod, andf the sad visit the two of them had made to the homestead site, just the day before, so that Phoebe Anne could say her goodbyes at the grave-sides of her husband and child.“This is a hard land, Emmeline,” she’d said. “It just takes and takes until a body has nothing left to give, and then it takes some more.”

Emmeline shivered a little. Would she end up the same way as Phoebe Anne?

Holt assessed her, seeing, she thought, much more than she wanted him to see. “Somebody just step on your grave?” he asked, very quietly. There was a look of speculation in his eyes. “Maybe you wish you’d gone with her, or, better yet, never come to Arizona Territory at all. Don’t you like it here on the Triple M, sweet Emmeline?”

She closed her eyes. She was, in fact, quite unhappy. She and Rafe had been tiptoeing around each other ever since the night he’d gone to town with Jeb and Kade and not come back until the next day. They slept in the same bed, and spoke politely when there was a need for it, but there was no tenderness between them, and certainly no passion.

“I like it fine,” she said.

“Liar,” he replied easily.

She considered pouring the contents of his water carafe over his head, but that would only mean more work for her and Concepcion, in the end, so she refrained. “What do you want from me?” she asked, in a desperate whisper.

“Dangerous question,” he said.

She reddened. “If you mean to tell Rafe about us,” she asked hoarsely, “then why don’t you just go ahead and do it?”

“Ah,” he said,“but that’s my trump card. What would I do for entertainment, once I’d played it?” He paused, sighed.

Just then, the door swung open, fairly stopping Emmeline’s heart in midbeat, and Rafe strolled in. His expression was so fierce that, for one terrible moment, she thought he’d found out, somehow, about her and Holt.

Rafe went to stand at the foot of the bed, his arms folded. “Pa tells me you bought the Chandler place,” he said.

Emmeline laid a hand to her chest and tried to breathe. She stared at Holt, a plea in her eyes. He merely smiled a little and shifted his gaze to Rafe.

“That’s right,” Holt told Rafe. “I’d sell it for the right price, though. You interested?”

“Just what the hell are you trying to do? “Rafe countered.“Put us out of business? Start a range war?”

Emmeline’s blood ran cold at the mere mention of a range war; she’d read about such conflicts in the newspapers back home, and, by all accounts, they were brutal affairs, serving no one in the end.

Holt was the absolute vision of innocence. “Now why would I want to do that?” he asked, spreading his hands.

“Pure spite, maybe,” Rafe said.

“My buying the Chandler place could put you out of business?” he reflected, sounding intrigued. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“Hell no,” Rafe growled, albeit a bit too late.

“But you just said—”

Rafe shoved a hand through his hair. “Look,” he said, “you leave the springs alone, and keep your cattle off our grass, and there doesn’t have to be any trouble.”

“I thought you believed in open range,” Holt said. “Isn’t that why you burned the Pelton cabin and took back the land?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Rafe snapped.

“Wasn’t it?” Holt asked.

Rafe gripped the foot rail of the bed so tightly that his knuckles turned white. “When did you say you’d be well enough to move on?”

Emmeline stood in the side yard watching, the morning breeze ruffling her hair, as Kade and some of the other men laid out the planks for the dance floor. The day of the party, the Fourth of July, was almost upon them.