High Country Bride (28 page)

T
HE PARTY LASTED
for three days, and by the time the last of the guests had straggled off for home, Becky was well rested. Color bloomed in her cheeks, and, since Concepcion and Emmeline had been feeding her at every opportunity, she had even filled out a little. John Lewis, along with Mrs. Hallowell, Clive, and the mysterious Sister Mandy, had gone back to Indian Rock early, for they all had jobs to do.

Emmeline, watching in thoughtful silence as the other woman rocked contentedly on the front porch of the ranch house, might have thought that nothing was wrong, indeed, that nothing had
ever
been wrong, to look at her aunt now, so marked was the change.

Becky, fanning herself with a copy of
Godey’s
, gave Emmeline a sidelong glance and smiled. “What are you thinking?” she asked.

“That you’ll surely live to be a hundred and ten,” Emmeline answered, without any hesitation at all.

Becky laughed. “A hundred and ten? God forbid! Can you imagine what I’d
look
like? All shriveled and wrinkly and toothless, like one of those dried-apple dolls, with tiny black seeds for eyes, that’s what.” She fanned herself more vigorously.“No, thank you!”

Emmeline, leaning against the rough-hewn railing of the porch, smiled at the picture Becky had painted in her mind. “Are you in love with John Lewis?” she asked. The question had been lurking in the back of her mind since Becky’s near collapse, the first night of the party, but she’d managed to hold it in check until now.

Becky sighed, gazing not at Emmeline but at the creek, sparkling in the near distance. The acres beyond that stream seemed especially beautiful to Emmeline, a land of milk and honey, gently sloping down toward the water, every inch thick with verdant grass. She knew, from Rafe’s brief accounts, that his mother had planned on homesteading there, all on her own, before Angus McKettrick came along and swept her off her feet. She must have been a spirited woman, Angus’s Georgia, and Emmeline wished she could have known her.

“I’m not sure what I feel for John,” Becky answered, after due consideration. “He’s a fine man, and strong. I like him very much. The fact is, it scares me a little, finding out that I’m inclined to lean on another person. I’ve made a point of getting by on my own for a long time, you know.”

“Yes,” Emmeline agreed softly, thinking of the years Becky had run her business, answering to no one but herself. She had made a great deal of money, but it had surely been a lonely struggle in many ways.“I know.”

“And it’s not as if I’m any kind of great prize,” Becky went on, and only then did she look at Emmeline again, her gaze direct and unflinching. “Oh, I don’t mean because of what I did for a living all these years; he knows about that, and he understands. Has a few things postedin the liability column himself, John does. No, I’m talking about this temperamental old heart of mine.”

Emmeline was silent, sorting through the things Becky had said one by one, and putting them in their proper places. Finally, and carefully, she said, “You just told me you were going to live for a long while yet, didn’t you?”

Becky sighed. “I reckon I will, but that’s no cause to think a good man like John ought to be tied down to a wife whose going to be swooning like some silly debutante at a cotillion every five minutes, now does it?”

“Swooning aside, I guess that should be
his
choice,” Emmeline reasoned, smiling a little. “Whether or not he chooses to be married, and take the good with the bad, I mean.”

Becky laughed, waving the magazine at her. “Emmeline McKettrick,” she said, “I declare you could have been a lawyer, you argue so well.”

They were quiet for a while, comfortably so, enjoying the summer weather, with its soft, fragrant breezes and pale blue sky.

“You told John about the boardinghouse,” Emmeline ventured presently, now that she’d had time to digest the implications,“and he wasn’t angry or upset?”

Becky shook her head. “I was so scared, but I did it. Thought he’d walk right out and never spare me so much as a nod again, but he didn’t, bless his soul. He listened, and he held me in his arms, and he told me some things he’d done that he wasn’t proud of. Nothing really changed between us, except that we got closer.”

Emmeline looked down at her feet. She was wearing her everyday black lace-ups, and she missed her dancing slippers a little. “Maybe it would be like that with Rafe and me, too. If I told him what happened.”

Becky’s glance was sharp. “It’s different for the two of you,” she said, lowering her voice, even though they both knew Rafe was miles away, with a crew of men, working on the new house. “You’re young, and Rafe’s young, and that changes things, Emmeline.”

Emmeline wet her lips with the tip of her tongue, still looking down at her feet, but said nothing in response.

“Why are you so set on telling Rafe about that night?” Becky demanded in a hoarse whisper. “Do you
want
to ruin everything, Emmeline?”

“Of course not,” Emmeline said, blinking and glancing away. “I love Rafe. I don’t want any secrets between us, that’s all.”

“Don’t be a fool. Everyone has secrets.”

Just then, the sound of an approaching rig reached them, and both women looked up to see John Lewis approaching, at the reins of a hired horse and buggy. They watched as the team, rig, and driver splashed through a shallow place in the creek, the spindly wheels sending up plumes of sun-shimmered water.

“Don’t be a fool,” Becky repeated in a stern whisper, but her attention was all for John by then. She rose from her chair, smiling, and waved. Her knight-in-shining-armor pulled off his hat and waved it exuberantly, his grin visible even though they were still separated by several hundred yards.

Before an hour was out, Becky had told Concepcion and Angus farewell and much obliged, and set out for Indian Rock with John. Just befre the marshal helped her into the buggy, having secured her things in the small space in back, she hugged Emmeline, kissed her on the cheek, and whispered, “Mind what I said, now, and hold your tongue.”

With that, she was gone, and Emmeline watched her out of sight, torn between Becky’s sensible advice and her own sense of right and wrong. She knew, even then, that her conscience would win out, if only because it plagued her night and day.

Rafe arrived home just as the sun was setting that evening, and he looked so tired, and so full of pride in the work he was doing, that, despite her earlier resignation, Emmeline nearly put aside the decision that had been troubling her so much.

There had to be an end to the deception; she couldn’t bear it any longer. Before her new and fragile feelings for her husband deepened, before she and Rafe conceived a child together, complicating matters even more, or moved up the mountain to that fine, new house, she had to tell him about Kansas City, and about Holt. She was anxious all the time, and felt sure she couldn’t live another day with the very strong possibility that Holt, or someone who’d gotten the story secondhand, would tell Rafe the sordid truth before she did. She knew he would find her silence almost as hard to forgive as the incident itself, and if he was going to hear it from anyone, it had to be from her.

She couldn’t eat a bite at supper, for the painful grinding in the pit of her stomach, and while Angus, Concepcion, and Kade seemed to notice her reticence, Rafe himself was blissfully unaware. He beamed, telling them all he’d accomplished that day at the building site, and declaring that his place and Emmeline’s would be the finest home in the Arizona Territory when he was through with it—save the ranch house, of course.

“Let’s take a walk, Rafe,” Emmeline said quietly, laying her hands on his shoulders when the dishes were done. Rafe was still seated at the table with his brother and father, the three of them studying a hand-drawn map, trying to figure out where a hundred-odd stray cattle might have gone. According to Kade, they were missing at least that many from the main herd.

Kade and Angus had been stealing intermittent glances at Emmeline all during the conference, perhaps seeing something in her face or hearing something in her tone of voice that troubled them, and Concepcion, putting away silverware, gave her a penetrating look when she spoke of leaving the house, but Rafe was oblivious to every nuance.

“Sure,” he said.“It’s a nice night. Lots of stars out.”

“Yes,” Emmeline replied, and hoped she wouldn’t break down crying before she got everything said.

They left by the back door, walked around the house, arm in arm, and made their way to the creek bank. Emmeline’s throat was tight, and her eyes burned so badly that she was tempted to kneel and splash them with water from the stream. She straightened her shoulders, instead, and fixed her gaze on the expansive meadow across the creek. She pictured a rustic house, a dream castle, standing there, and saw it fade away into nothingness.

“I wonder why none of you have built a house on the far side of the creek,” she said. “It’s so pretty, especially in the sunlight, and there’s water handy, too.”

Rafe followed her gaze. “I don’t know,” he replied. “Ma would have liked that, knowing one of her sons had built a home on the land she staked out for herself, way back when.”

“She must have been an amazing woman,” Emmeline said, and she meant it. For a woman alone even to attempt homesteading, in the present day as well as in those early pioneering times, was an Olympian accomplishment.

“She was,” Rafe said, with a remembering kind of smile. “Independent as all get-out. After her folks died—her family lost just about everything in the War Between the States—she gathered up what little was left and struck out on her own. Got all the way here from Louisiana, stopping along the way every now and again to teach awhile, and replenish her grubstake. Pa never did have the heart to tell her that he already owned that half section she’d pegged out for herself. There’d been some kind of mistake at the land office in Tombstone, he reckoned.”

So, Emmeline thought, what Becky had said was true: Most everybody had secrets. Still, Angus’s had been a harmless one; her own was like a stick of dynamite, rolling around at their feet, with the fuse lit.

“Do you think she’d have been upset, your mother, I mean, if she’d ever found out the truth about her homestead?”

Rafe didn’t hesitate. “She’d have been madder than a hen dunked in pancake batter,” he said, grinning. “Pa admitted he was mighty relieved that she never found out.”

Emmeline tried to smile, but she couldn’t. Her heart was beating outside her body, trapped there, exposed, with no way to retreat to safety. She looked up at the stars for a long time, saw them blur into one blazing silver light, and finally met Rafe’s gaze. Only now, when he’d seen her tears, did he turn thoughtful.

“What is it?” he asked.

“If there was something about me—something I’d never told you—would you want to know? Even though knowing might be the end of everything?”

He stared at her, then sat her down on a large rock next to the whispering stream before taking his place beside her. “Put like that,” he said gravely, “I don’t reckon you’ve left me with much of a choice.” She wished he’d take her hand, but he didn’t, and she thought she could already feel a distance growing between them, wider with every heartbeat.“What is it, Emmeline?” he reiterated.

She couldn’t look at him, so she looked at the water instead, splashed with starlight. Under the surface were rainbow trout, surely, living out their whole lives without ever having to keep or share secrets. She envied them, in that moment, and wished she too were a slippery, shiny fish, going about her business, ignorant of the concerns of men and women. In telling her story, she would be revealing not only her own past but, by necessity, Becky’s, too. She hoped that Becky would forgive her, even if Rafe didn’t.

“I told you that Becky was my aunt, and that she ran a boardinghouse in Kansas City,” she began miserably, still unable to look at him, her hands clenched so tightly in her lap that the joints ached. “Turns out, she’s my mother—I was illegitimate, actually—and the boardinghouse was really a—a brothel.”

Rafe was silent, listening so closely that he was rigid. He’d gone cold, too. Emmeline felt the changes in him, even though they weren’t touching.

“I was sheltered, and I never got near the business,” she said. She paused, shuddering with emotion. “Anyway, Becky sent me to a god school, did everything she could to raise me as a lady. But I had no friends, because of the stigma. I was foolish and bored, and probably spoiled, as well, and one night—” she paused, bit her lip so hard she tasted blood, “one night I decided to dress up in fancy clothes and pretend to be a—a lady of the evening. Just as a diversion.” She waited again, but Rafe remained stone silent.“I went and sat on the stairs, just watching, planning to slip away if anyone noticed I was there, and all of a sudden this man was walking toward me.”

She glanced at Rafe, sidelong, and saw that he’d closed his eyes. His jaw was set, as if he was bracing himself for a blow.

“He—he sat by me, on the stairs, and gave me whiskey,” she went on, for there was no going back now. “We talked, and he made me laugh, and it all seemed so harmless. I felt special and, well,
chosen,
somehow. Nobody had ever noticed me like that before. I had more and more whiskey, and then I was sure Becky or one of the others would find me out, and I’d be in more trouble than I’d ever thought possible—” She stopped, laughed bitterly at the naïveté of that concern.“I wanted to slip away. The man came with me, into the hallway, and it was dark there. He kissed me a couple of times, and—and I started to feel really dizzy. He asked me where my room was, and I lied to him. One of the girls had just left, and hers was vacant, so I claimed it was mine, and—”