Knocking at Her Heart (Conover Circle #1) (25 page)

She walked another ten minutes,
each step a bit more painful than the last.  She had almost decided to
give up and let God or whoever come and find her, when she reached the top of
the hill and spied a log cabin, another half-mile down the road.  A wooden
barn, three times as big as the cabin, stood a hundred yards to the
right.  

She hobbled as fast as her sore
feet allowed, slowing when she got close enough to see better.  No porch
light beckoned.  No sidewalk led up to the front door.  Just more
dirt.  “I’m assuming there’s more, God,” she whispered.  “That I’m
going to walk through that door and find Paradise.  Eternal peace.”

For the first time, she felt
fear.  What if she was doomed to live an eternity of unending dirt roads
and bloody feet?  The biggest fear of all hit her, almost taking her
breath away.  What if this wasn’t Heaven?  What if it was something
else?  She didn’t want to say the name. 

“Here’s the deal, God.  I
know I gave up.  That doesn’t make me a bad person.  I know I could
have—”

A dog’s angry bark interrupted
her.  That scared her.  In heaven, all the dogs would be gentle
Labradors.  In the other place, they’d be pit bulls.

She wanted to run, but to where?
 Heart pounding, hands clammy, she edged closer to the door.  She
raised her hand to knock, but before she got the chance, the door swung
open.  A man—a big, terrifyingly menacing man with a gun slung over one
shoulder—stood there.  He held a lantern in one hand.  The light
played over his strong features, his broad forehead, his straight nose and
whiskered chin.

He extended his arm, raising the
lantern to get a good look at her.  He didn’t say a word; he just glared
at her, his eyes filled with hostility.  She opened her mouth but no words
came out.  She wanted to run but her legs refused to obey. 

“That’s enough, Morton,” he said,
turning his head slightly.  The barking stopped.

The devil and his dog,
Morton. 

He turned back toward her. 
He set the lantern down, shrugged one powerful shoulder, and lowered his gun,
placing it next to the door.  Then he looked at her again.  “What the
hell are you doing here?” he asked.  “I thought you said you were never
coming back.”

***

John barely kept her head from
hitting the floor.  She’d dropped like a stone.  But once he held her
in his arms, he didn’t have any notion of what to do with her.  Then he
saw the blood on her hands and feet, and he knew he had to help her.

“Damn, Morton,” he said to the
dog.  “She’s hurt.”

The big dog whined in response
and ran nervous circles around John’s legs.  “Get out of the way,” he
scolded the dog, as he carried the woman to the bed in the far corner of the
room.  With as much care as he could, he placed her on top of the worn
blanket, then took a step back.  She looked small and pale and so very
still.  Reaching forward, he held his hand in front of her lips. 
Delicate breaths warmed his fingers.

“It’s okay, boy,” he said,
patting the dog’s head, knowing he wasn’t reassuring the animal so much as
himself.  What had brought this woman to his door in the middle of the
night wearing nothing but her shift?  He tried to ignore her barely
covered breasts, her small waist, and the sweet flare of her hips.  He
concentrated on her face.

She looked thinner than he
remembered.  She’d cut her hair, too.  Now it just brushed her
shoulders.  He remembered the hours she’d spent in front of the mirror,
crimping her long hair with the hot iron.  Then she’d laid out her powders
and her paints and weighed down her face with a layer of oil.  Tonight, her
skin, still pale, looked bare.  He ran a thumb across her cheek. 
Just skin.  He could see the faint shadow of freckles on her nose. 
Somehow, it made her look younger.  Innocent.

“Deceitful witch,” he
muttered.  This woman was no innocent.  She probably hadn’t been born
innocent.

He held the lantern above her
head and moved it down the length of her body, looking for injuries.  When
he got to her feet and saw fresh blood oozing from both, he quickly set the
lantern down on the table next to the bed.  He walked across the room,
grabbed a clean cloth from the cupboard, and wet it with water from the pitcher
he kept on the table.  He returned to the end of the bed and picked up one
foot.  The warmth and softness of her skin shocked him. 

“Conniving gold-digger,” he
reminded himself.

He wiped first one foot, then the
other.  One of the cuts worried him.  Grabbing another clean cloth
from the cupboard, he doubled it over once, and then again.  Pressing the
edges of the cut skin together, he wrapped the cloth around her foot, tying it
in a knot on top.

He got his third cloth, the last
clean one he had, wet it, and wiped off her hands.  She sighed, a soft
sweet sound.  He flicked his eyes to her face.  Her pale pink lips
parted and he could see just the tip of her tongue.

“Manipulative, spoiled, rude,” he
said, kneading his forehead with his fingers.  Damn, his head hurt. 
“Come on,” he said.  “You’re not the fainting type.”  He put his hand
on her shoulder and shook her gently.  She didn’t stir.

Making yet another trip to his cupboards,
he reached for his vinegar bottle.  After pouring a generous amount into a
cup, he brought it back to the bed and held it under her nose.  She
sniffed, coughed, and turned her head to avoid the smell.

“Good girl,” he urged.  “Now
open your damn eyes or I swear, I’ll dunk your head in a pail of this stuff.”

Her dark lashes fluttered against
her pale skin.  She opened her eyes, startling him.  He’d never
noticed before just how blue they were.

He watched as she looked first at
him, then from one corner of the room to the other, then at Morton, who sat at
the end of the bed, growling.  Her gaze settled back on him.  Big and
round, her eyes filled her face.  She looked scared to death.

He didn’t remember her ever
looking scared.  Belligerent.  Sullen.  All that and more. 
But never scared. 

“Sarah, you’re okay,” he assured
her.

If anything she looked even more
frightened.

“Did someone hurt you?” he asked,
struggling to get the words out.  No woman deserved to be
mistreated.  Not even this one.

She shook her head.

“Tell me what happened,” he
demanded.

She cowered against the bed,
causing the narrow strap of her shift to slip a couple inches lower on her bare
shoulder.  He worked hard to keep his eyes on her face. 

“Never mind,” he said. 
“We’ll talk about it later.  Would you like some water?”

She nodded.

On his way to get the cup, he
opened the door for Morton.  When the dog didn’t look inclined to move,
John whistled.  The dog whined one more time, gave Sarah a quick look, and
then left but not before brushing his big body up against John’s legs. 
John shut the door and walked over to the shelf above his stove, picked up his
extra cup, and filled it with water from the pitcher.  He went back to the
bed and held it out to her.

Their fingers met around the
metal cup.  His large tanned ones seemed twice the size of her small white
ones.  He saw the scar across the first joint of his ring finger, an old
reminder of Peter’s clumsiness with a fishing hook.

Peter.  His brother. 
Younger than John by just a year, the two of them had been inseparable. 
The only thing that had ever come between them had been a woman.  This
woman.

He let go of the cup.  She
caught it but not before a little water sloshed over the edge.  The water
stain spread across the pale blue of her shift.  He backed up, needing to
put some distance between them.

She might look soft and sweet,
but this woman had killed his brother. 

Maybe she hadn’t pushed him down
the silver mine shaft with her own hands, but if not for her incessant wanting,
her need for things, her inability to ever be satisfied, Peter wouldn’t have
been compelled to take the risk that had cost him his life.

“How was Cheyenne?” he
asked.  That’s where she’d been headed six months ago, just three weeks
after his brother’s death.  He’d come home, after working a back-breaking
ten hours clearing trees, and her bags had been packed.

His mother, who had moved in
after Peter’s funeral, had been sitting at the table.  Sarah stood by the
window.  She hadn’t even bothered to say hello when he’d entered the room.

“I’m leaving,” she’d said. 
“I kept my promise.  I stuck around long enough to know I’m not with
child.  Proof positive came today.  Thank the sweet Lord.”

He still remembered how cold her
words had sounded.  He’d understood the sadness in his mother’s
eyes.  It wasn’t Sarah’s leaving that pained her. She wouldn’t miss her
daughter-in-law.  It was that she’d lost her last hope.  There’d be
no grandchild to rock in her arms.  No chance to hold Peter’s child tight
against her breast.

“I’ll be on tomorrow’s stage,”
Sarah had said.  “I need you to get my bags to town.  Is the wagon
fixed?”

He’d nodded.  It didn’t
matter.  He’d drag her damn cases on his back, the full three miles, to
get the evil out of his house.  He wanted her at the other end of the
earth.  Cheyenne, a three-day stage ride south, would have to do.

“I’d like my money,” she’d said,
holding out her hand.

He’d walked back to the barn, dug
the money out of its hiding place, and returned to his house.  He’d thrown
the packet on the table.  She’d picked it up, counted it, and put it into
her valise. 

“Sarah, you don’t have to go,”
his mother had said.  “You’re my son’s wife.  There’s a place for you
here.”

“I was your son’s wife,” she’d
responded.  “Now I’m a rich widow.  I’m leaving and I’m never coming
back.”

But she had.  Tonight of all
nights.  Had Peter lived, he’d have been thirty-one today.  “You’re
not welcome here,” John said.  “I’m not as charitable as my mother.”

“Mother?” she whispered.

She looked confused, almost
forlorn. 

“You’re on the next stage,” he
said.  “I’ll put you on it myself.”

“Stage?”  She took another
small sip of water.

“You’re not my responsibility,”
he said. 

She nodded, never taking her big
blue eyes off him.  “I thought I was dead.”

He stood up and grabbed his hat
off the hook.  “I couldn’t be so lucky,” he muttered, not wanting to admit
how her words shook him.  He hated her, sure.  But he didn’t want her
dead.

She didn’t respond at all, just
blinked her big eyes a couple times.  And then a tear slid down one pale
cheek.

What kind of man made a woman
cry?  He turned away, unwilling to watch the results of his own
surliness.  He got to the door before she spoke.

“Thank you for helping me,” she said,
looking at her bandaged foot.

He didn’t want her
gratitude.  He wanted her gone.  “Forget it.  Just get better so
you can get the hell out of my life.”

She wasn’t dead.  Instead
the storm had tossed her right into a stranger’s bed.  A stranger who had
called her Sarah as if he knew her, and couldn’t wait to get rid of her. 

She swung her legs to the
side.  Mindful of her bandaged foot, she eased out of bed, walked over to
the window, and pulled back the thin cotton curtain.  Early dawn had
pushed the dark night aside, bathing the land in a soft purple hue.  She
watched the man and his big black dog walk toward the weathered, unpainted
barn.  When he opened the big door and disappeared inside, she let out a
deep breath.

He knew her name.  How
creepy was that?  She must have talked in her sleep.  As a child,
she’d done that.  She hadn’t believed it until the night her father had
turned on a tape recorder.  She thought she’d outgrown it.

Now, it had caused her to be at a
serious information disadvantage.   She knew nothing about him. 
She looked at her clean hands and feet.  He hadn’t been exactly friendly
but then again, he hadn’t given her any real reason to be afraid.

Then why couldn’t she shake the
feeling this man was trouble?  He acted like he’d met her before. 
He’d said something about a stage.  Maybe he had trouble separating fact
from fiction and he’d confused her with some
actress.               

She walked over to the shelf, the
one he’d pulled the extra cup from.  She picked up a small mirror and held
it in front of her face.  She looked for a moment, studied the reflection,
then put the mirror down.  She counted to ten and picked it up
again.  Same thick blonde, almost straight, shoulder-length hair. 
Same blue eyes.  Same small scar running through her left eyebrow. 
She checked her teeth.  Nothing new.

Sarah Jane Tremont looked like
she did every other morning. She’d dropped out of the clouds and landed flat on
her back on some country road but other than that, nothing much had
changed.  Now she just needed to find her way home.  After all, how
far could it be?  Was it possible the storm had carried her miles? 
Could a person survive that?

She had.  Looking around she
noted the old black stove, like one she’d seen in history books, in one corner
of the room.  Where was the refrigerator?  Surely, in this day and
age, even the most rural houses had refrigerators. 

A small table stood against the
far wall.  On it was a book of some sort, with a piece of paper sticking
out.  She walked over and pulled out the paper.  It looked like an
invoice. Flour, salt, sugar, and coffee.  The man had made a grocery
run.  He’d stocked up on the basics.

She looked a little closer. 
He’d bought a barrel of flour.  Who the heck bought flour in a barrel? 
Was there a bakery out back she hadn’t seen?

She ran her finger down the
list.  He’d bought eight pounds of coffee for a dollar.  What? 
She looked again.  The last time she’d bought coffee it had been over five
dollars a pound.

Hooper’s Mercantile.  The
name, like the purchases, was handwritten.  She focused on the date at the
top of the invoice.  April 16, 1888.  She grabbed the book and
flipped through it.  Entries recorded the weather, crops planted,
livestock bought and sold.  She flipped to the last page.  Halfway
down the page, she saw the last entry.  It, too, was dated April 16, 1888.

She picked up the invoice
again.  She’d been too stunned by the date to take much notice of the
signature.  Now she ran her fingers across the large, slanted writing. 
John Beckett.  She opened the ledger once again, this time to the first
page. 
Property of John Beckett, Cedarbrook, Wyoming Territory.

The guy had to be a history
nut.  She flipped the invoice over.  The paper looked new, the ink
fresh.  She sniffed the ledger.  It didn’t smell old.

She jumped when she heard the
rattle of the doorknob.  She stuffed the invoice back inside the book and
pushed it toward the middle of the table.  The man, carrying a bucket of
water in one hand and a basket of eggs in the other, opened the door. 

He didn’t say a word or even look
at her when he entered.  Setting the basket and the bucket on top of the
stove, he took off his cowboy hat and hung it on a nail by the door.  He
bent down and scooped up a handful of wood from the box next to the
stove.  Using a small hook, he pulled out a burner and shoved the wood
inside before striking a match and throwing it on the pile.  He replaced
the burner.  Each movement was efficient, no wasted action.

In the morning light, he looked
less devilish and more handsome.  He did not, however, look any
smaller.  His shoulders still looked incredibly wide and she could see
muscles in his back ripple as he worked.  From her vantage point, she
noted he also had one great butt.  All nice and firm.  Heck, he had a
better butt than she did.

He turned toward her and she
jerked her glance away.  “I thought you might be hungry,” he said. 
“Still like your eggs fried?”

She preferred scrambled but she
didn’t want to debate it.  “Yes,” she said.

“You want some coffee?” he asked.

Maybe it was Heaven. 
“Flavored?” she asked.

He frowned at her.  “I hope
so.  It better taste like coffee.  Or Hooper’s owes me a refund.”

“Hooper’s?”  As in
Hooper’s
Mercantile
?

He looked at her more
closely.  “Are you sure you didn’t bump your head?”

“I don’t think so.”

He didn’t look convinced. 
“Alice Hooper still talks about you.  I don’t know why.  You barely
ever gave the poor woman the time of day.  Even so, on Tuesday, when I
went to town, I heard her talking to another customer.  She said
Cedarbrook lost all its style the day you left.”

On Tuesday, when I went to town.

April 16, 1888.

Cedarbrook lost all its style the
day you left.

I thought you said you weren’t
coming back.

Her heart slammed against her
chest and her knees started to buckle.  “What…what dayis it?” she asked.

He frowned at her.  “It’s
Thursday.”

She shook her head.  “What’s
the date?”

“The eighteenth of April.”

“The year?” she demanded.

“1888.  What the hell’s
wrong with you, Sarah?”

She put her hand over her mouth,
afraid she might throw up.  Like pieces of a puzzle, the log walls, the
bare wood floor, the old stove, and the long-handled lethal-looking razor next
to the mirror all slipped into place, making a clear picture.

“Sarah?  Damn it, don’t you
faint on me again.”  The man dropped the spoon he held and crossed the
room in five strides. 

She held up her hand, stopping
him.  “I’m fine,” she lied.  “Just hungry.  Breakfast would be
good.”

“You’re sure?”

She was sure, all right.  Sure
she was in a heck of a jam. 
Property of John Beckett, Cedarbrook,
Wyoming Territory.  April, 1888.
  No, she hadn’t gone to
Hell.  But she’d come close.

Time travel.  The very idea
of it seemed beyond comprehension.  But the reality of her situation was
all too tangible.  She could touch it, smell it, and see it.  Things
like this didn’t happen to Sarah Jane Tremont.  She went to work, she came
home, had some dinner in front of the television, and then went to bed so it
could start all over the next day.

She watched him while he
cooked.  He cracked the eggs with one hand and deftly turned them in the
pan.  He took a sharp knife and cut big slices off a loaf of bread before
grabbing two plates and some silverware off the shelf. 

He had on a plain tan shirt. 
Almost like a long-sleeved T-shirt only it had three or four buttons at the
neckline.  He’d tucked it into darker tan pants held up by blue
suspenders.  He wore a bright red bandanna around his neck.  His
boots, scuffed and scratched, added another inch to his already tall
frame.  He had wavy brown hair, almost touching his shoulders.  She
guessed he might be around thirty.  No middle age spread here. 

A man’s man.  A sexy,
handsome, rough-and-tumble, get-the-hell-out-of-my-way type of guy.  Who
was he?  He acted like he’d known her well.  She couldn’t accept
that.  He wasn’t the type of man she’d forget.  She might have gone
back in time, but she refused to accept she’d lived here once before. 
This had to be her first pass through.

She tried in vain to remember her
sophomore year of American History.  Had Wyoming even been a state in
1888?  Evidently not, she realized as her mind jumped into gear and
started to work once again.  The invoice said Wyoming Territory. 
Good grief.  She wasn’t even in a state.  Hadn’t the Oregon Trail cut
through Wyoming?  Were the Indians friendly in 1888?

What she didn’t know far
outweighed what she did know.  Not that it mattered.  She really only
needed to know two things.  How far was California and what was the best way
to get there.  She needed to get back to her beach and walk along the
shore and, somehow, find the door back to her own world.

“When’s the next stage?” she
asked.

He set her plate on the
table.  “Next week.  Stage still goes on Wednesday mornings, just
like before.”

She couldn’t stay here another
six days.  She didn’t want to stay another six hours.  “Then I need
to find another way.  I need to get back,” she said.

He pulled his chair out from the
table, sat down, and folded his arms across his chest.  “At last, we agree
on something.  Where you going this time?”

She walked to the table and took
the chair opposite him.  She took a small bite of bread, chewed it to
death, and wondered what she could tell him.  He wouldn’t believe that
she’d stumbled across a set of footprints on the beach and been blown back more
than a century.  She barely believed it.  She swallowed, hoping the
bread wouldn’t stick in her throat.  “Look, John,” she said, trying out
his name, “it’s hard for me to explain.”

He shrugged, looking a little
bored.  He pointed to her plate.  “You going to eat those eggs or
just look at them?”

She stabbed her fork into
one.  Yellow yolk spread across the plate.  She ignored it and took a
bite.  She’d eat to keep up her strength.  She had a long trip ahead
of her.  If the stage didn’t go for a week, she’d find another way.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a
horse I could borrow?”

He laughed but he didn’t sound
amused.  “Sure.  Take my horse.  Why not?  Six months ago
you took most of my money.”

She hadn’t taken his money. 
It hurt to be accused of something and not be able to defend herself. 

“What happened?” he asked,
pushing his chair back so suddenly that the front legs came off the wood
floor.  “Did you run out?  Is that what brought you back?”

She shook her head.  He
looked mad, dangerously mad.

“Listen here, sweetheart. 
You’re not getting another dollar from me.  My brother never should have
married you.”

His brother.  One more piece
of the puzzle started to slide into place.  Perhaps she’d walked out on
his brother.  She felt oddly disappointed until she remembered that it
hadn’t been her, her marriage, or her leaving.  Six months ago, she’d been
slogging through case files and counseling sessions. 

“I don’t want anything from you,”
she assured him.

“That’s hard to believe. 
Why else would you show up at my doorstep?  How the hell did you get here
anyway?”

She’d like an answer to that one
as well.  “I walked,” she said.  At least she had the last mile or
so. 

“What happened to your clothes?”

Her clothes?  She looked
down at her wrinkled silk camisole and skirt.  Her Jones of New York had
seen better days.  She doubted that was what he meant anyway.  She
was probably dressed pretty scantily for the day.  “They got wet.”

“Wet?  They wouldn’t dry?”

She needed to be more
careful.  “They got wet when I waded into the river.  After they
caught on fire.  I was…cooking.  On a campfire.”

He looked at her like she’d lost
her mind.  It didn’t matter.  She didn’t need to convince him of her
sanity.  She just needed a horse.

“If you could just reconsider
letting me borrow a horse,” she said, “then I could be out of your hair today.”

He shook his head.  “I can’t
afford to lose another horse.  All I’ve got left is mine, mother’s mare,
and a bullheaded colt I’m breaking in.  You’ll have to stay here until
Wednesday.”

“No,” she argued.  “I
can’t.”  What if the window, the door, the crack in time, shut before she
could get to California?  “You don’t understand,” she said.

“I understand, all right. 
You come back here, all pitiful, hoping you could talk my mother out of another
pile of money.  But it’s just me.  Hell of a mess, isn’t it, Sarah?”

He had no idea.  “Your
mother?” she asked.

“She moved to town just weeks
after you left.  She needed to be around folks, not stuck out here on the
ranch.  Peter’s death hit her hard.  Harder than it hit his wife,
obviously.”