Silver Bound (12 page)

“I’m not going to the festival, Momma.” Jewel crossed her arms and stood, feet apart. “I have no need of an engagement dress. I told you. I’m not marrying some rich off-worlder.”

“Yes, you are. The gypsy dressmaker is the best. She’s only here this week and you are not marrying some ranch hand.” Momma bustled about, going through Jewel’s closet to find the perfect dress for the festival. The woman who’d always dusted her off when she fell, who always listened to her bemoaning her father’s edict to stay away from ranchers’ sons, no longer listened. She wanted Jewel married to some rich aristocrat.

“He’s not a ranch hand, Momma. Guy owns the ranch. He’ll turn a profit soon. Maybe next year.”

“His father drank that ranch into the ground before his liver failed. The doctors wouldn’t even give him a simulate. No son of his will marry my only daughter.”

Her mother’s admonishment shocked her into anger. She’d never been so furious with Lady Quinn. Her mother had never spoken of Guy that way before. She usually treated him with a dichotomy of welcome and distance. Had she always felt this disdain for him?

“He’s not for you, Jewel. Your father and I have made the arrangements for your future. I’ve met Kalon. He’s a nice man. You’ll thank me for this one day.” The softness of Lady Quinn disappeared in a blink. Her eyes had bags under them. Her mouth turned down, a rare event in the amiable, motherly woman.

Jewel hardened her resolve. Her mother had doubts. She just knew it. How could she not? The only person close to Jewel, who understood her so well, was her mother—and Guy. Couldn’t her mother, her best friend, see that?

Her father, mayor of Rangetown, one of the most revered men on Grassland, had signed her engagement note while negotiating a treaty with the Terralofts to get them to abide planet-wide laws while on Grassland. She was the payment, it seemed. It was wrong, a horrific injustice that he’d force her future this way. Her mother couldn’t force her. Could she? No.

She was marrying Guy. Nothing would stop her.

“I’m not going,” Jewel insisted.

Her mother turned a pained, disappointed frown toward Jewel. “I’ll go without you, then. But you are marrying Kalon.”

The tired, bedraggled woman faded in a mist.

Jewel cried out, reaching for her mother, wanting her warm hug one last time. Wanting to go back and make it right. She had to make it right.

Her fingers faded in the mist.

The clouds dispersed, blew away to reveal Hector Quinn’s contorted face. Tears he’d never had before streamed down his cheeks. With one look at him, a sharp bleakness dumped her on the floor in their sitting room, where the deputy had left before she’d run down the stairs.

“She’s gone. Your sweet mother is gone.” Her father sobbed a broken sound.

Her chest felt so large, tight, as if it would explode out from the inside. She couldn’t take a breath, and her eyes stung. The pain beneath her lids was unbearable. So big and consuming. Gulps of air made it through her tight chest, but she couldn’t hear her father over the tumult in her head.

Spurts of his rambling pierced into her heart.

“She ate at the festival. Damn fish contaminated something she ate.”

Fish. Her mother was deathly allergic.

His voice hitched. “Nobody was with her with the antidote.”

Jewel crumpled to the floor in sobs. She always carried the air syringe. She always went with her mother. Until today. She’d locked herself in her room until her mother went for the dress without her. Her satchel with the meds, useless now, in her room where she’d sulked over Guy.

“I should have been there,” she whispered. “We’d planned for me to go.”

From her father, a near shout, convoluted with recrimination and pain. “Yes. You should’ve.”

She’d make it better. She had to. She’d do what her mother wanted.

No matter what, she’d do what her mother wanted.

The mists took her away. Floating, the tears hot on her cheeks were her only reality. Her chest still burned with the effort to breathe.

She cried out and reached, grasping air. She turned about, searching, thrashing her hand sightlessly in the fog. She wanted Jared, her mother, Guy. She wanted to go home. Where was the woman who’d always dressed her in clean girly clothes, then gently scolded every afternoon when she came home dirty with torn lace?

The gray clouds clung to her before parting to reveal another scene. She’d lost time, gone back. She’d see her mother. Where was she?

She ran and giggled, her small pink ruffled gown catching between her legs. A blond ringlet fell in her eye before a dirty hand, larger than hers, darted out and twisted it around a finger before sweeping it aside.

“My Jewel, how about a ride on my air skate?” Guy’s sing-song voice delighted her. Older by a few years, he usually hung out with one of the boys from town, but when he visited with her instead, the joy nearly jumped out of her chest.

“Papa won’t give me an air skate.” She pouted, crushed, afraid Guy would go off without her, probably find Brice, that friend of his who teased her for following them around.

“Come on. We’ll ride mine together. I want to see the new calf out in the east pasture. You said you did, too.”

“The new calf,” she crooned. Yes, to be with her friend. On an air skate. To see the new baby. The sun was shining. Her mother would cover for her. “Let’s go.”

At thirteen, she was dwarfed when Guy, fifteen, stood behind her on the small board and put an arm around her waist. In the past year, he’d shot up like the sourgrass weeds that lined the river. Gangly, in tattered denim most days, he habitually tugged and pushed back his dark hair, which always stood on end in need of a shearing. He kicked the back fin, and the air lifted them up from the ground.

“Yee-hah!”

With one hand on the direction stick, Guy guided them away from her manicured lawn. They took the dirt path he’d worn into the hill over years of visiting and teaching her to play cards away from the disapproving eye of her father. She couldn’t see Guy, but pictured the wide grin, the sparkling brown eyes and the tanned face alight with mischief.

They passed the Trident ranch house, in need of maintenance, the old barn with the caving roof, the crowd of hands who sat beneath a tree drinking instead of working a dead pasture bereft of cattle. The thirteen-year-old darling in pink mostly ignored them. The adult, hidden behind the mist, understood the signs of the sadness of Guy’s youth. In her innocence at the time, she’d seen these things and not understood.

Now, as consciousness called to her, she yearned to stay with a young boy’s arm at her waist, whooping as the ground slipped beneath the small board platform. Even though she knew injury awaited her at the end of this ride, she longed to stay with him and help him through the next painful years. This day, this memory, ended his innocence forever.

Trees rushed by and when the herd, small and too thin, came into view at the bottom of the valley, she smiled in anticipation. The baby would be cute, adorable. Would it be brown with white spots?

They dipped.

The board kicked and a tree didn’t swoosh by. It came right at them.

Crack.

Hot pain sizzled along her neck and the world blacked out.

Her hand slid to her neck to cup the scar. It wasn’t there. Her eyes snapped open to peer into a pair of brown eyes she knew better than her own.

Older, the crinkles in the corners carrying more worry than those years when they’d clung to a forbidden friendship as he worked to rescue the ranch he inherited.

“Guy,” she whispered. “I remember.”

His lips crushed down on hers and she clung for all she was worth.

***

After watching a soul-searing kiss between two people who obviously belonged together, Montgomery stepped out of the exam room with a soft warning he’d return.

He longed to have the luxury of his own love, but did these two have a chance to live their lives together, unfettered? If Jewel’s memories held no surprises, no landmines, they still had nowhere to go. Terraloft didn’t want a partially healed silver-tip out on the stations, in the cruise liners, in their world at all. As a slave, his patient was forbidden on all worlds in the galaxy. And what of her previous husband?

Perhaps he’d make the desperate suggestion he’d not had the strength to do for himself. Yes, he’d gather his courage and do what should’ve been done years ago. Two years, in fact.

He went to his brother’s apartments and announced himself.

The younger man, his opposite in looks as well as temperament, stood in the receiving room as the door slid open. Not stopping to catch his breath, Montgomery strangled the jealousy and hatred enough to actually feel a longing for his younger brother. He’d missed the bastard. And Thomas
was
a bastard. Born ten years after Montgomery when his mother went gallivanting on her own private orgy spacebarge. She’d sent home the babe, whose father must’ve been gypsy to leave Thomas such dark features. Montgomery hadn’t seen their mother in decades. No loss.

Black hair with cosmetic blond streaks hanging to his chin and facial bristles kept perpetually short, Thomas was as unkempt as his brother was polished. Montgomery stood taller by several inches, wearing the straitlaced suits of a bygone era. Thomas didn’t go with the norm either, forgoing the satiny Terraloft clothes for the denim of dockworkers. While Montgomery tried to remain impassive, his emotions never shown on his face, Thomas had sharply defined brows that wore a perpetual scowl.

Although he hadn’t spoken to his brother for two years, he’d had reports of his conduct—surveillance vids, security shots brought to him as head of the family, it being his responsibility to punish and keep his brother in line. He’d always done so. Always protected his younger brother, even while he hated him. And loved him.

“Thomas.”

“Monty.”

Montgomery ground his teeth together but didn’t take the bait, didn’t insist on use of his full name. Pale green eyes stared at him, not giving an inch, not acknowledging the distance between them, the irrevocable rift. The green eyes of a gypsy. No other beings in the galaxy had that clear color.

“Is my wife here?” Montgomery didn’t want the damn words to slip out, but they did. He schooled his features, wishing like hell he’d kept his mouth shut, but that wouldn’t get him where they all needed to be.

“You know she’s not. Have you talked to her yet?” Thomas’s scowl deepened. Twin creases between his brows accented the deep furrows outlining his mouth.

That’s all Thomas had said in the half dozen messages they’d exchanged in text, the old technology the only way they’d communicated across the great divide. Thomas never responded to a question—about his bar fights, his suicidal penchant for rim diving on the space walk. Montgomery’s queries were always answered, no matter their content, with the repeated demand that Montgomery speak to his own wife.

He spoke to the woman every damn morning before he went to work, but he knew that wasn’t what Thomas meant. He refused to deal with history right now. There was only one thing to say.

“Pack your bags. We’re taking Lady Wells to the surface. It’s time to take the chance. Hell or high water, whether it kills her, or me, that collar is coming off.”

***

Of all the words Guy had wanted to hear from Jewel, of all the scenarios he’d envisioned when he finally had her in his arms, memories intact, he’d not expected to be kissed senseless, a kiss so carnal and filled with desperation, he wondered who he held in his arms. Not an innocent kiss, this.

Her tongue explored his mouth, quite thoroughly, and he couldn’t deny his response, his pulsing and eager erection, which spiraled into an undeniable hard-on like none before. Clutching at each other, pulling at their garments while perched precariously on the exam table, they melted into one single entity of
want
until he pulled back to suck in much-needed air.

Damn his lungs for needing oxygen.

While he breathed in her honeysuckle scent, Jewel, with a remorse he couldn’t fathom, let fall from those moist, delicious lips, what he hadn’t expected.

“I don’t have the scar anymore.” Her fingers traced along the bend of her neck. Adorned with a thin silver circlet, the spectacular ivory column begged for his mouth, but the tears filling her eyes banked his lust. Though since he’d now fallen to his base desires, she’d be in pain again until he relieved them both of the sexual frustration mounting with uncanny swiftness.

“The scar from our air skate accident?” Limbs heavy, he put space between them. Finding the doctor’s vacated stool, he sat clumsily and tried to get a grip on himself.

Minutes ago, he’d been in hell, sitting and watching helplessly as Jewel slept off the anesthesia. Hours had passed as her eyes had moved beneath her lids. She’d moaned and spoken incoherently. During one fit of thrashing, she’d nearly fallen from the narrow cot. Straightening her, he kept her from hitting the floor, but tried not to touch her too much though her warmth pulled at his control.

For days he’d dreaded this moment. Had nearly balked when the time had come, but even if her life hadn’t been in danger, she needed herself back. He shivered. He’d been close to losing her every second they’d spent together. His presence had to have caused her to try to find her memories more so than if he hadn’t been there. His need to claim her had put her in more danger. His lust and loneliness, his need for her balm, could have killed her.

“I used that scar as a reminder.”

“A reminder of what a scrungy range mutt I am?” He couldn’t believe she’d left the scar for so long. Most women would have had it removed to begin with, much less when they hit the marriage market. He’d looked at it, when they’d talked, or when she’d been dancing with him or with another man, and he’d not seen a scar, he’d seen his failing. He hadn’t protected her then, and he’d done a poor job of it since.

“No. It was an accident. It was also the day my father insisted I was too old to be friends with a boy like you.”

“You mean a poor, low-class boy like me.”

“My father’s words. Not mine.”