Red Snow Bride (Wolf Brides Book 2) (15 page)

The corner of his mouth turned up. “What’re you thinkin’ about?”

I traced the outline of his perfect nipple. It drew up under my touch and I smiled to match his. “How lucky I am.”

Humor danced in the shadows of his eyes and he looked around with arched eyebrows. “This ain’t exactly a castle, Lorelei.”

I giggled. “No, you ridiculous man. I mean I’m lucky to have you.”

The grin dipped from his face, and he looked so serious as he said, “Not as lucky as me. You don’t even know what you’ve done for me yet, Mrs. Dawson, but someday you will.” He sank down beside me and wrapped his strong arms around my waist. He drew me against him until his warmth enveloped me. “Sleep now, wife. I’ll be building you a house in the morning.”

I sighed happily. Sleep should’ve come easily but I kept replaying the beauty of tonight over and over in my mind. The way he’d looked at me, the way he touched me, the way he made me laugh while we bathed when my nerves threatened to overwhelm me. He’d made it possible to lose myself with him.

Jeremiah didn’t know what he’d done for me either, and he probably never would.

****

The morning sunlight was red against my closed eyelids. The corner of the tent flapped noisily in the wind and with lazy fingertips, I reached behind me to find Jeremiah’s side of the furs empty. My leg brushed the space but it was already cold.

What time was it? I stumbled sleepily into my dress, which Jeremiah must have retrieved at some point early this morning. It had mud stains and had seen better days. Honestly, it needed a good wash. I pulled my stockings and shoes on and when my new knife was safely in the pocket of my dress, I headed out, careful to follow the thin trail until I made it back to the edge of the clearing. Before I even emerged from the tree line, Jeremiah’s steady gaze watched me from his position perched atop the high framed structure of our house. His eyes followed me, as if he’d known I’d be coming out of the woods at just this moment.

My smile was shy. How would he act after such an intimate night?

He jumped down and landed with the grace of a panther before jogging toward me with long strides. A surprised giggle rippled out of me when he picked me up and spun me in a circle. And right here, with Kristina and Luke watching, he kissed me square on the mouth.

“Jeremiah!” I chided as I playfully thumped his arm. “They can see us.”

“So what? You’ll see much worse from them on any given day, I’ll guarantee you that.”

Fair enough because I had seen worse, actually. It was impossible to hate the outward display of affection. On the contrary, pride swelled inside of me at the idea that he was claiming me in front of other people. And not just any other people, but the people who meant the most to him.

“Come on,” he said. “We’ve been waiting on you to eat breakfast.”

“Why didn’t you wake me then?”

“Because,” Kristina said with a wink. “Jeremiah assured us you needed your rest.”

My face was likely red as the streaks across the morning sky but there was no help for it. No one seemed uncomfortable with the subject but me. Oh, if Mother could see me now, she’d have a conniption.

Directly following fresh scrambled eggs and venison jerky that had been smoking since Luke brought it home yesterday, the boys showed me the work they’d accomplished on the house. Astonishing. The flooring was done and the frame in place and today they would be working on the walls.

“We should whitewash it like those fancy houses in Boston,” Jeremiah said. “A lady should have a whitewashed house if she’s makin’ the sacrifice to live out here.”

“That sounds like an awful waste of money,” I said with a denying shake of my head. “Let’s get a stove first and then talk about that later.”

“I want a whitewashed house!” Kristina said with eyes that shone like rare, blue gems.

Luke stood straighter. “What? Woman, what do you need a whitewashed house for?”

She crossed her arms and jutted out her chin stubbornly. “Jeremiah said a lady deserves one, and I’m a lady.”

“You weren’t a lady last night,” Luke said in a low voice as he wrapped his arms around her waist.

“Stop that, you brute! I’m serious. Lorelei, can’t you just imagine our two whitewashed houses with porches and white rocking chairs to match?”

I grinned at Luke. “It actually does sound lovely.”

“You too? Jeremiah, this is all your fault. Now I’m gonna be livin’ in some high fallutin’ city house.”

Kristina argued, “The sheriff whitewashed their house for Daisy, and she loves it. She don’t live in the city. She lives on the outskirts of town.”

“Oh, yeah?” Luke griped. “And where do you propose we get this magical money to be waistin’ on paint, Kristina?”

“I suggest you better get to trapping,” she said flippantly.

Jeremiah winked at me and his happy demeanor said he’d enjoyed stirring the pot.

“Guess what we get to do today?” Kristina asked, completely ignoring Luke’s glower. “We get to go into town and pick up more nails, and we get to order roof shingles and window glass from the general store.”

“By ourselves?” A mixture of fear, excitement, and uncertainty at the prospect of being separated from Jeremiah took me.

“All by ourselves. We’ll be stopping by Trudy’s today, too, so don’t worry about us if we’re an hour late, boys.”

“An hour,” Luke snorted.

“You need help saddling Beigha?” Jeremiah offered.

“No, I’ll do it. I’ll come say goodbye before we leave.”

As the boys returned to work, Kristina said, “Bring your dresses and any of Jeremiah’s soiled clothes you can find. Trudy does laundry on her days off and we can do ours with her while we’re in town. It’ll be much better than doing it down in the creek.”

The mention of the creek brought more heat to my cheeks, but she was already headed for the barn and didn’t see. “What do I put the clothes in?”

“I have an extra flour sack in here if you want to use it,” she called over her shoulder.

Perfect. I scrambled behind but by the time I reached the barn, Kristina was sitting on a one legged stool milking a bellowing cow with udders so swollen they stuck out to the sides. Her half grown calf chewed away on a pile of straw and offered his momma absolutely no relief.

She gestured to a corner without breaking stride in the
pat pat pat
of milk hitting the bottom of the pail. “Sacks are over there.”

I saddled Beigha and then hustled off to snatch my other dress, which I hadn’t worn since Boston on account of the dead chicken smell, and the small pile of Jeremiah’s clothes that sat in the corner of our tent. I hadn’t ever laundered clothes before, but surely it couldn’t be that hard. Kristina showed me how to tie the full sack onto the saddle bags, then I pointed my horse toward the steady song of nails on wood.

Jeremiah whistled long and low. “Damn woman, you look good ridin’ that horse.” As I leaned across the creaking saddle, he kissed me soundly. “You be safe today. Stay close to Kristina and you girls head back this-away before nightfall. Oh,” he said turning back to me. “And have fun.”

Lorelei

I had to admit, despite my qualms about leaving Jeremiah for the day, the prospect of an adventure was quite exciting. Kristina’s infectious enthusiasm only served to heighten the anticipation and by the time we trotted into town on our splashy Indian ponies, we couldn’t seem to stop laughing at everything the other said.

After tying the horses to the post in front of her modest house at the end of the main street, Trudy met us at the door with an inviting smile. “I was hoping you’d find a way to stop by today.” As an aside to me she said, “It’s my only day off, you see.”

The front entryway led to a small kitchen with a four chair table. “Come on out back,” she said. “I just got the water heated where I want it for laundry and you girls are welcome to it.”

Laundry would have been a boring and laborious affair if not for the boisterous conversation between the three of us. Trudy, just like Kristina, was an easy talker who could likely get along with anyone given half the chance. I didn’t have to talk much, but it was as I preferred. I was perfectly content to work and listen and laugh along with their whiplash wit.

We scrubbed and scrubbed our clothes onto a ridged washboard and then lathered them up with a horsehair brush and rinsed and plunged until the water was filthy. Then we started over again. When all of the clothes were on the line to dry, the three of us made our way to the general store to put our order for housing materials in and buy more nails with a small purse of coins Kristina brought. The stares and muttering’s of some of the town’s people were easy enough to ignore. I didn’t know why they had a prejudice against the Dawsons and frankly, I didn’t care anymore. They just didn’t know them like Kristina and I did.

A woman with blonde hair, fair skin, and eyes as blue as a clear spring sky bustled into the general store as we were looking at swaths of fabric. Kristina hailed her over. “Daisy, this is my sister-in-law, Lorelei. Lorelei, this is Sheriff Hawkins’s wife.”

I politely offered my hand. “Mrs. Hawkins, how do you do?”

“Very well thank you. Sister-in-law you said, Kristina? So does that mean you’re married to Jeremiah Dawson?”

“I am. I’ve only just arrived a few days ago.”

A short shout sounded from outside, and two men ducked into the general store. Townspeople in the street were scrambling like panicked ants.

“What in tarnation is going on out there?” Trudy breathed.

We followed her out to the front porch, and from here we had a good vantage point of the seven rough looking men riding through town on finicky horses. The leader had a red beard and his bright eyes landed on me. The squinted look he gave shifted something cold inside of me. Something wasn’t right with that one. He tipped his hat and gave me a smile that failed to reach his eyes.

“Who are they?” Daisy asked with a delicately gloved hand over her chest.

“Don’t you recognize them?” Trudy asked as she kicked the bottom of the door with the toe of her shoe. Posted on the wall just behind it were four rows of wanted posters. One of them looked suspiciously like the red-bearded man.

A blond-haired man came running up to our small group. “You okay?” he asked Trudy.

“I’m fine, but I can feel trouble comin’.”

“Mrs. Daisy,” he said. “Where’s your husband?”

Daisy’s voice had a tremor in it. “He’s been out of town all week. No lawmen here except the deputy.”

The man cursed under his breath and gathered us inside. “The deputy has Bill Burton locked up and waiting on lawmen from Denver to come get him tonight. Burton’s supposed to hang by morning.”

“As in Dirty Bill Burton?” Kristina asked. “He’s the leader of those men out there. They’ve been robbing trains and pillaging good folks for years.”

He checked his pistols. “That’s the one. Go back to the storage room, all of you.”

Trudy grabbed his wrists. “I forbid it,” she said. Her dark eyes were wide and desperate.

“Nobody else is going to help him, Trudy.”

“He’s a lawman. You ain’t. You have a baby on the way Elias and I’ll be damned if I’m losing you today. Put your guns away and come with us.”

“Trudy—”

“I forbid it,” she repeated.

Trudy was married to a white man? That beat just about all I’d seen. We crouched down in the store room just as the first shots rang out. It was impossible to hear the pepper of ammunition and not think about the people who were dying from it. My stomach grew queasy as the fight raged on outside. A ricocheted bullet hit a sack of flour right above Daisy’s head and she whimpered. I held her hand and pulled her closer. “We’ll be all right.”

Trudy’s husband covered her body with his until the blasts disappeared. Five minutes more and he said, “Stay here and stay low.” He returned shortly with the sadness of a hundred ghosts in his eyes.

“Deputy’s dead and Dirty Bill is free. Best you ladies get on home. It ain’t safe here.”

Trudy reacted immediately. She pulled us outside into the chaos. Men, women and children were running to help injured townspeople who had been caught in the crossfire. Three men lay dead in front of the jail house and another was bleeding all over the front steps. I wretched at the smell of blood and gunpowder.

“No time for that, Lorelei,” Kristina said, tugging on my arm. She snatched the still sopping garments from Trudy’s clothesline and shoved handfuls into the empty flour sacks. I helped when my dizzy spell had passed.

Trudy kissed us both on the cheeks and said, “You girls get on back to them Dawson boys. You’ll be safe with them.”

Up on Beigha and Rosy, we kicked our mounts hard and raced out of town with our laundry sacks making wet thunking sounds against the hind ends of our horses to the rhythm of their gaits. This race wasn’t exhilarating like the one with Jeremiah had been. This one was full of fear that those outlaws had gone this way and were hiding in the woods somewhere. I screamed from fright when two men came galloping around a blind corner and almost barreled into us.

“Lorelei!” Jeremiah yelled as his horse reared and screamed. “It’s me. It’s just me.”

Beigha fidgeted to the side under me and tossed her head. “How’d you know to come for us?”

“We heard the shots. Come on, woman. You can tell us what happened at home.”

Beigha bucked to the side once and then tore off after them. “Wait,” I yelled. “How’d you hear the shots from miles away?”

He didn’t answer, which was highly suspicious because if he’d heard gunfire from that distance, he should’ve had no problem in the world hearing me from right behind. Or maybe he only heard what he wanted to. Something was going on, and I was just about tired of being the only one out of the loop.

Our furious pace had us back to the homestead well before the sun was at its midway point in the sky. We slowed the horses the second we crossed over to Dawson land.

“What happened out there?” Jeremiah demanded.

Puffing up against his stern tone, I exclaimed, “It wasn’t us shooting all willy-nilly!”

“Who?” Luke asked in a voice dripping with quiet ice.

“That young deputy had Dirty Bill Burton in his jailhouse with no back up,” Kristina explained. “Elias said he was waiting on lawmen from Denver and his gang rode right through town, shot the place up and freed that black-hearted old buzzard.”

Jeremiah threw his hat and cursed. “That was too close!” He sighed and rubbed his hands over his face like he hadn’t slept in a long time. “It was too close,” he said in a softer tone.

Luke wouldn’t look at me but even with his head turned, his eyes were glowing with something more than fury. A sudden unease filled me. There was a charge in the air that lifted the hairs on my arms. It had nothing to do with the cold wind and everything to do with some long sleeping instinct I couldn’t put my finger on.

“Luke,” Jeremiah warned.

He pulled his horse toward the barn without another word and Kristina followed suit.

“Let them go,” Jeremiah told me. He led me to the house, which now boasted two completed exterior walls, and tied our horses to a post he’d constructed in front of the porch. As soon as my feet hit the first stair he caught me and crushed my body to his.

His words rumbled against my hair. “I’m sorry I yelled at you. I was just scared something happened to you.”

“A bullet hit right above Daisy’s head.” The admission was a tiny weight from my chest. I’d been replaying it over and over, but the fear eased once I gave the words to Jeremiah to share.

His lips pressed against the top of my head for a long time before he released me.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot,” he said.

“I know there’s something big you’re hiding from me. I can feel it and you and Luke do curious things. I know we’re newly married and don’t know much about each other yet, but it’s big. I can feel its weight, Jeremiah. What’s happening?”

His eyes tightened ever so slightly. The dark brown color was flecked with indecision and as the silence stretched on and on, I lowered my gaze. I’d lost.

“You’ll know everything about me in time. It’s what I want, but for reasons you’re going to have to trust me on, I can’t give you all the answers right now. The timing has to be right. I’d never hurt you though.
Never
. And I know it ain’t fair of me to say it and not show it, but you can trust me.”

His denial was like a slap to the face. Never before had I felt a sting quite like this. I loved him. Lord help me, I loved that man so much it should be against the law, but that depth of emotion wasn’t returned. If it were, he’d trust me with his secrets the way Luke trusted Kristina with his.

I was suddenly cold and lonely. “I’m going to hang our clothes to dry. Your nails are in Kristina’s saddle bags.”

If ever I’d seen a tortured soul, it was there in the churning shadows of Jeremiah’s face. I wanted to touch the deep lines of it and ease the tension there, but it wasn’t my place. He’d made the decision to shut me out and it would be up to him to pay the consequences of that guilt. It wouldn’t be fair to absolve him of the wrong he’d done me. Instead, I pulled the heavy sack from Beigha’s saddle bags and hauled them toward the barn. He didn’t insult my pride and offer to help. Within a minute, the echoing
crack-crack-crack
of the hammer clattered across the clearing, filling it like an ocean until the waves of his frustration threatened to drown me.

Kristina met me at the clothesline with another bag of wet clothes. “You’ll be needing to sleep in the barn with me tonight,” she whispered.

“Why?”

“It’ll be safer that way.”

“That didn’t answer my question at all. Is this part of the big secret no one trusts me with?”

She snatched my hand, her eyes wide. “I’d tell you that I could, but it ain’t my place. I had to wait a long time too and I know it’s frustrating, but when the time comes, you’ll understand we kept it from you to make you safe.”

Yelling at Kristina wouldn’t solve anything so instead, I dug my nails into the palm of my hands and lowered my disappointed gaze. “Fine.”

I didn’t talk to Jeremiah for the rest of the day but my silence was his penance. Dinner around the campfire was a quiet affair and short lived as the men went straight back to work. By the time darkness had fallen, all four exterior walls were up, the interior separating walls were finished, and the roof was framed. It was starting to look like a house.

When I left off for bed, Jeremiah was sanding two newly sawed doors by the firelight. I hadn’t a guess on why it was important I not sleep beside my husband tonight. Maybe he didn’t want me to, or maybe he planned on working until dawn. Either way my pride stung.

Kristina had all of the excitement of a school girl at the prospect of me sleeping over. Luke stayed near the hearth, cleaning his pistols while she led me up a sturdy ladder to a loft. It was set up like a bedroom with a bed and crude table housing a lantern. The hay had been pushed to the side and sequestered off with a make shift wall curtain, and the warmth of the hearth below wafted into our sleeping quarters above. A window with wavy glass panes sat just above the bed, and the moon and stars winked through it like they knew something I didn’t.

We lay on a bearskin fur across the floor and dangled our arms over the side of the loft. Luke sat below us, seemingly perfectly content to relax out of our way for the night.

The flicker of flames from the crackling hearth danced across the planes of Kristina’s face as she swung her arms lazily over the opening. “The boys built the hearth and strengthened the walls when the house burned. We needed somewhere safe to sleep.”

My mouth moved in strange ways with my chin resting on the wooden ledge. “What was it like when they burned you?”

“Awful. Not because I was going to die, but because I would die with a broken heart. I couldn’t get out of the house. They’d barred the doors with something, and the windows were too small to escape through. I could see just fine from them though. I saw Luke and Jeremiah with those hanging ropes around their necks and I was helpless to do anything. It was Trudy and Elias who cut through that back door. I was already aflame but she pushed me into the snow and then I didn’t feel anything. Maybe it was shock or numbness from the cold, but all I could think about was cutting those damned ropes before Luke and Jeremiah were taken from me forever.” She turned her face to me and her eyes swam with unshed tears. “I’m glad you weren’t here for that. I’ll never be able to get the sight of Luke hanging from that tree out of my head for as long as I live.”