High Country Bride (29 page)

Rafe stood up suddenly, turned his back to her. His broad shoulders looked stiff, outlined by the diffused starlight reflecting off the creek, but he still didn’t speak.

“I remember that he carried me into that room, and untied my shoes.” She swallowed, thinking frantically that Becky had been right, and she should have kept the confession to herself, but it was too late now. It was far, far too late to stop. “I woke up the next morning, alone in the bed, and there was money on the bedside stand.”

Silence.

“Rafe,” she whispered. “Rafe, you have to say something—please.”

He turned, very slowly, and looked down at her. His hands were clenched into fists at his sides, and, although she knew he wouldn’t harm her physically, his rage and his pain were palpable. “You were—” His voice was raspy, hurtful to hear. Emmeline wanted to put her hands over her ears.“You were a
whore?”

She began to cry then, miserably, hopelessly, like a wounded child. “No,” she said. “No! It was one time, a mistake—I don’t even remember if—”

“One time or a thousand,” Rafe ground out, “you slept with a man for money.”

As horrible as this was, it wasn’t over. “There’s one thing more,” she said, ready to curl in on herself, return, somehow, to the safety of the womb.

“Good God,” Rafe whispered rawly.“What?”

“The man—the man I was with was Holt,” she said.

The silence was terrible; shouts and accusations would have been easier to endure, but there was just that awful, pounding silence.

“Rafe,” she said.“I’m sorry.”

He walked away from her then, just as she’d feared he would, his strides long, carrying him not in the direction of the house, where Angus or Kade or Concepcion mght have been able to calm and comfort him a little, but toward the barn. Like Jeb, he was going away, maybe for good. Unlike Jeb, he wasn’t leaving the land, or his father and brothers. Rafe was leaving
her.

She stood, for in spite of it all, her instinct was to go after him, but all the while she knew that would do no good. Besides, her knees were shaking so badly that she had to sit down again, right away, lest she tumble into a heap.

Minutes passed, then Rafe rode out through the barn doors at a lope, and by the time they reached the creek, his gelding, Chief, was running full out. They seemed to set the waters churning, man and animal, as they crossed that stream, and Emmeline was sure they’d both founder and drown in the torrent they created, but within moments they were climbing, dripping wet, up the other bank.

“Rafe,” Emmeline whispered, knowing, for the first time in her life, the true meaning of a broken heart. “Oh, Rafe.”

She cried, and waited to be strong enough to go into the house and start packing her things. Before she could manage that, however, Holt came limping across the expanse of the yard and down the creek bank to stand over her.

“Are you all right, Emmeline?” he asked.“The way Rafe rode out of here just now—”

She looked up at him, her nemesis, and wondered if he’d come to gloat. “I told him,” she said simply. “About Kansas City. About us.”

“Us?” He stared down at her. “Sweet God, Emmeline, you don’t mean—”

“Yes,” she answered, too broken to feel anything now besides despair. “I told him the truth about what happened that night.”

“Good Lord,” Holt said, with such gravity that Emmeline was confounded. Maybe, she thought, he was irritated because he wouldn’t be able to blackmail her, now that her great sin was out in the open. “What possessed you to do a thing like that?”

She stood, at last, buoyed by a rush of angry frustration. “What possessed me?” she snapped. “I wanted to tell him before you did.”

“Before I told him what?” he demanded, looking a lot like Rafe in that light, or the lack of it. “Dammit, Emmeline, there was nothing to tell. You put on somebody else’s clothes and got drunk. I didn’t want to tell Becky what you were up to, and I didn’t want to leave you for one of the other men to take advantage of, so I put you to bed and left. That was the end of it!”

Emmeline’s mouth dropped open.“But those coins—”

“I thought maybe you needed money, that you were in some kind of trouble, and desperate.”

Emmeline sat down again. She felt as though she might throw up, or even faint.

“Emmeline?”

“I thought we—that you and I—”

“Jesus,” he murmured. Then he turned and started away from her, stumping determinedly toward the barn.

“Where are you going?” Emmeline cried, at last finding the strength to break her strange inertia and move her feet.

“None of your damn business!” he called back.

She hurried after tried to take hold of his arm. “You can’t,” she said quickly. “Holt, you can’t. You’re hurt—if you ride—”

“Stay out of this,” Holt said tersely, shaking her off.

“You’ve done enough damage as it is.” They were almost to the barn.

“Don’t go after Rafe,” she pleaded. “He’ll kill you, or you’ll kill him, but nothing good will come of it!”

His eyes were hot.“Go in the house, Emmeline.”

She stood speechless, one hand clasped over her mouth, staring after him as he stormed into the barn.

He managed to saddle a horse, put the bridle in place, and even mount, all without help. Emmeline was still standing where he’d left her when he came riding out into the moonlight; on the ground, he was a cripple, in the saddle, he was his old self.

“At least let me go with you!” she cried.

He paused beside her, reining in the prancing gelding, and got in one last volley. “Oh, you’d be a lot of help,” he scoffed furiously.“You’ve already made enough trouble to keep us all busy for the next hundred years, picking up the pieces!”

With that, he rode away.

The log house loomed, in long lines and shadows, against the spectacular sky.

Rafe, breathless from the hard ride up the mountain, the legs of his trousers still wet with creek water, jumped down from Chief’s back and left him to graze, reins dangling. The saddle looked to be slipping a little, because the cinch had come loose.

Too bad it hadn’t given way on one of those steep, narrow trails he’d just ridden over, Rafe thought, having consumed three-quarters of a flask of whiskey during the journey. His head was spinning, and he’d turned his heart out, like some wild beast, and drove it away from him, unable to bear the pain of Emmeline’s words, and of the images she’d drawn in his mind. It was hard enough to think of her selling herself to another man. Knowing that other man was Holt, his enemy, his brother, made a hell of his very soul.

He gave a great scream of anguish, roaring at the sky. He walked around the house, once, twice—he couldn’t stand to go inside—and then, his movements calm and methodical, for all their admitted madness, he began piling dry brush and wood chips in the main doorway.

He’d expected to carry his bride across that threshold in just a few more weeks, when the roof was finished and the floors and windows had been put in. Now, he never wanted to set foot in the place again.

He doused the chips and twigs and small limbs with the remains of his whiskey, then struck a match and tossed it down.

A blaze flared up immediately, and he stared at it blankly for a moment, quelling an instinctive urge to stomp out the fire before it caught the walls. Instead, he thought of Emmeline, doing with Holt the things she’d done with him, and he bellowed again, like a creature snared in jagged teeth of a trap, and started rushing around, gathering up every piece of fuel he could find, hurling twigs and grass and scrap wood into the flames.

Rafe stood back, but not so far that he couldn’t feel the smothering heat, watching as the fire leaped a greare to there, from window ledge to rafter. Within a few minutes, the whole place was burning, spitting sparks, a fire big enough to see from heaven.

“Jesus, Rafe,” a male voice shouted beside him, “get back!” He didn’t move willingly, indeed, he was dragged away from the blaze by the other man, the two of them stumbling. When they were a good distance from the house, and he saw that it was Holt who’d come riding out of the night, he took a swing at him, not giving a damn that he was a cripple. He wanted to kill him.

Holt dodged him easily, for even though he had a game leg, Rafe was drunk, and out of his mind with sorrow.“Listen to me,” he said.

“You go to hell!” Rafe responded. “Damn you, Holt—and damn her—”

Holt’s face tightened, and he nearly lost his balance, using both hands to shove Rafe backward, onto his ass. Remarkably, he caught his crutch before it fell, and jammed it back under his arm, breathing hard as he leaned on it, and gazed down at Rafe.“There’s a real good chance that I’ll go to hell someday,” Holt said, breathing hard and fast, “but it won’t be because of anything I did with Emmeline!”

Rafe tried to stand, but he was winded, and he wanted to come up swinging. He wiped his mouth with the back of one hand.“She told me what happened,” he said.

“Get up, you damn fool. She told you what she
thought
happened.”

Rafe rose, dusting himself off, still trying to decide whether or not he’d be justified in sucker punching his half-brother.“She said she spent the night with you and you gave her money for it,”he said. It made him sick, the picture that came to his mind, and he felt the heat and heard the roar of the fire behind him, consuming his dreams.

“She was drunk that night,” Holt said, his eyes flashing with the reflected light of the fire, and with fury. “I didn’t touch her, except to take off her shoes and that stupid outfit she had on. And I paid her, yes, because I figured she must be pretty hard up for money to pull a stupid stunt like that.”

Rafe swayed on his feet, his fists still knotted at his sides. He couldn’t, and wouldn’t, hit Emmeline, but he sure as hell wanted to hit somebody, and Holt would do just fine. Trouble was, his brother kept shifting in and out of range, even though Rafe would have sworn he was standing still. He splayed the fingers of one hand and thrust them through his hair, realizing only then that he’d lost his hat somewhere along the way. It had been his favorite, too; he’d paid three dollars for it in Denver.

“You’re just trying to cover your tracks,” Rafe said.

Holt sighed. “Emmeline told me you’d think that,” he replied. “Dammit, Rafe, don’t be an idiot. Put aside your bloody pride. Go back to the house and
talk to your wife,
before you lose everything.” His gaze flicked toward the blazing structure behind Rafe. “You can build another house,” he said, lower. “Hell, you can build a hundred houses. But there’s only one Emmeline.”

Rafe wheeled away from Holt, overcome by everything he was feeling. He’d been through tough times before, but nothing since his mother’s death had hit him as hard as Emmeline’s confession. He ran a hand over his face and struggled with his emotions, wanting to believe Holt, wanting that more than he’d ever wanted to believe in anything, and to his mas precisely why he was afraid to trust his own judgment at that moment.

Holt laid a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s go back,” he said quietly.

Rafe shook his head, keeping his back to his brother. They stood in silence for a little while, then Holt withdrew his hand and walked away. Rafe heard him whistle for his horse.

When he turned, Holt was in the saddle, with that one splinted leg sticking out toward the horse’s head.“If I had two good legs,” he said, looking down at Rafe,“I swear I’d bring you back to the ranch, one way or the other, and you wouldn’t have any say in the matter. As it stands, I reckon there’s nothing I can do to keep you from making a fool of yourself, so maybe I’ll just stand back and enjoy the show.”

Rafe felt something cold settle over his spirit, in spite of the great heat, turning all his innards to icy stone. He’d been hornswoggled once already. He wasn’t going to let it happen again.

He nodded toward Holt’s broken leg. “See that you don’t catch that on a tree,” he said. Then he turned and walked away, and when he had occasion to look back, sometime later, his brother was gone.

“It’s gone?” Emmeline asked Holt, in a hollow voice, blinking in the morning sunlight. “The whole house?” Bile surged into the back of her throat, and she gripped the side of the buckboard for support.

She’d packed her few belongings the night before, after an emotional conversation with Angus and Concepcion, and Kade was reluctantly hitching up a team to drive her to town. She intended to stay with Becky until she figured out what to do with the rest of her life.

Holt nodded.“I’m sorry, Emmeline.”

She swallowed, shook her head. “I should have told him right away.”

Angus came out of the house, with one of Concepcion’s food baskets in his hand. His voice was grave as he neared them, and when he stood at Emmeline’s side, looking down at her with a fatherly expression in his eyes, she nearly broke down.

“Concepcion won’t say goodbye,” he explained gruffly. “She says you oughtn’t to leave, Emmeline. And that’s what I think, too. It was just a mistake, what you did, and Rafe will come to understand that, once he calms down.”

Emmeline bit her lower lip as she gazed up at his fine, craggy face, so full of kindness and strength and character. One day, after he’d done more living, Rafe would probably look much as his father did now. Her heart squeezed, because she’d wanted so much to grow old along with him, surrounded by their children and their children’s children.