Two Brothers (28 page)

He ran his tongue along the inside of his lower lip. “You could sell the sheep,” he said. “There must be somebody who’d want them.” He knew he sounded doubtful, but there was no helping that. He wouldn’t have given a beer token for the whole band.

She kept her head turned away, dabbed at one cheek with the edge of her grubby serape. “I’m not going to sell my flock,” she said fiercely, when she’d recovered herself a little. Her eyes were puffy, but they flashed, and her nose, while reddened, was pitched at a stubborn angle. “If I have to fight to defend it, I will. It’s all I have.”

Mingled with the admiration he felt for this woman, and the very elemental attraction toward her, was a quiet annoyance.
“You’ll
fight? One woman and an old man against half a dozen ranchers and their hired hands?” He thrust a hand through his hair. “I hope you don’t plan on making a hell of a lot of headway, Miss Starbuck, because the two of you won’t be much of a match for those outlaws.”

“I’ll do what I must to hold on to what’s mine,” she said.

He let out a ragged sigh. “Maybe you
want
to get yourself killed. Is that it? Life is just too hard and you’re giving up?”

He’d been trying to exasperate her, but when she spoke, she sounded haughty as a duchess at high tea, which was amusing, in an irritating sort of way, her sitting there in men’s pants and a serape that smelled pungently of sheep, acting fancy. “I assure you, my life is precious to me. If I was going to give up, it would have happened long before this.”

The words intrigued him; he wondered, not for the first time, what sort of past lay behind her. Since he wasn’t ready to talk about his own, however, he didn’t raise the subject. Instead, he stood and dusted off his pants with both hands, then bent to retrieve his hat. In the process, he
nearly bumped heads with Emily, and the desire to kiss her came over him with such sudden force that he felt unsteady.

She had fixed her attention on the .45. “Are you good with that?”

The question might have caught Tristan off-guard if he hadn’t been paying attention. “Fair,” he replied, and cleared his throat. He was not a shy man, not by any stretch of the imagination, but there was something about this woman that made him feel as awkward as a schoolboy in short pants.

“Have you ever killed anybody?”

He pretended not to hear. “I’ve got work to do,” he said, moving toward the gelding. “I’ll see you this evening.” He mounted, tipped his hat and rode away.

Chapter 4

R
ETURNING TO THE BIG HOUSE THAT EVENING
, after a long, dirty, hungry day, Emily felt her confidence slipping. Light glimmered through the windows of the kitchen, as she made her way toward the back door. After a moment’s hesitation, during which she considered walking right in, regarding the property as her own the way she did, she knocked instead.

“In,” commanded a good-natured voice, from the other side. From the place of light and warmth and belonging.

Emily entered, and found Tristan at the stove, cracking brown speckled eggs into a pan. He flashed one of his wounding grins at her. “I’m afraid this is all I know how to make,” he said. “Never been much of a cook.”

She hoped he hadn’t heard the rumbling of her stomach and raised her chin. “I’m obliged,” she said.

He gave her a look that seemed to take measure of her very soul, though there was nothing unseemly in it. “Are you?” he asked, his voice soft.

Why did she find this man’s presence so soothing and, at one and the same time, so disturbing? He was fine-looking, yes, and he certainly had charm, but Emily had been practical all her life, and therefore not susceptible to such allure. Or so she’d thought.

She took a basin from its hook on the wall, carried it over to the stove. The eggs looked and smelled like ambrosia to her, though he’d nearly ruined them. “May I?” she said, indicating the water reservoir, with its chrome-handled lid.

“Be my guest,” he said, removing their supper from the fire and setting it, skillet and all, in the center of the table.

Emily filled the basin and carried it outside, to the bench, where she found soap and a towel that smelled pleasantly of fresh air and Tristan. Hastily, she scrubbed her hands and face, fretted a moment over the sorry state of her hair, and went inside.

While other men would have gone ahead and begun the meal without her, Tristan had waited. He sat down only when she was seated, and nodded toward the strange mixture of over- and undercooked eggs.

She murmured her thanks and scooped out a healthy portion. It took all her willpower not to gobble the food, so ravenous was she, and she was halfway through when she realized Tristan wasn’t eating.

“This stuff is terrible,” he said, shoving his plate away.

Emily agreed, but she was starved, so she kept on, taking slow bites when she wanted to bury her face in the skillet, like Spud would do. “Yes,” she said, refilling her plate. “Dreadful.”

He laughed. “You are a woman of contradiction, Emily Starbuck,” he told her.

The desperate hunger had finally begun to abate, and Emily laid down her fork at last, finished chewing, and swallowed, at a loss for a reply. She had been too busy surviving, of late, to ponder what sort of woman she was, and suddenly it was something she very much wanted to know.

Tristan got up and brought coffee to the table—coffee, that luxury she had gone without for so long—and set a cup in front of her.

“How,” he began, in the same moderate tone as before, “did you manage to drive all those sheep from Montana to California by yourself?” He was standing a few feet away by
then, at the stove, the blue metal coffeepot in his hand, and his quiet regard was a great if inexplicable solace to Emily. She felt a peculiar need to take shelter in his arms, to rest her head against his shoulder, to share her hopes and secrets with him.

She stiffened, determined not to venture down a path that could only lead to degradation and heartbreak. Men like Tristan Saint-Laurent, handsome and prosperous, fitting easily into whatever place or circumstance in which they found themselves, merely dallied with women like her. And Emily did not intend to be dallied with.

“I didn’t have a choice,” she answered straightforwardly. She was tired to the core of her being, yearning for bath and bed, and yet there was an ember burning somewhere in her depths, a wanting for something else entirely. “I had inherited the sheep, and this land.” She paused to let the latter part of the statement sink in. “I had nothing else, nowhere to go.”

He studied her narrowly, standing next to the table with one foot braced against the bench, his own mug of coffee in hand. In anyone else, that would have been a breach of manners, but Tristan managed to look stately, and very much at ease. “You could have remarried.”

She felt color sting her cheeks, looked away, then met his gaze again, fiercely proud. “I had one husband—that was enough.”

“You must have been unhappy. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she replied.

Tristan gave a low, exclamatory whistle. “I guess the poor bastard must have frozen to death,” he said, after a few moments spent weighing the matter privately.

“It was not a love match,” Emily said, her face still hot. She did not reach for her coffee, as her hands were trembling.

“All the same, you might be expected to at least
like
the man.”

Emily did not look away, but neither did she reply. She had not felt anything for her late husband, except the
devout hope that he would never, ever touch her. After his death, she had not even kept his name.

Tristan expelled a sigh. “All right, so you didn’t even like him. Why in hell did you hitch yourself up to the man in the first place?”

There was within Emily a longing to know and be known, and for a brief interval that desire did ferocious battle with her pride. In the end, the former prevailed, a surprise in itself, for she had kept her spirit alive all these years by nurturing her dignity, that being pretty much all she had. “I needed a place to live. He needed someone to look after the house, after his first wife died.”

Tristan was quiet for a long while, and when he spoke, there was no condemnation in his tone, no judgment. He was merely reflecting aloud, or so it seemed to Emily. “Why didn’t you just hire on as a housekeeper?”

The question struck Emily like a slap, even though she knew it wasn’t hostile. “He would have had to pay me then,” she said evenly. “Cyrus didn’t spend any more money than he had to.”

“You’d marry a man just to get a place to live?”

Emily rose, swept over to the cast-iron sink and set her plate inside. “I suppose I could have joined a brothel,” she said, fully intending to shock him, and out of the corner of her eye she saw that she had succeeded, if the hardness of his jawline was any indication. She began scooping hot water from the reservoir to wash the dishes. “I was not trained to teach, and there were no fancy houses in our part of the country, where a maid might be wanted. So I married the first man who asked.”

Tristan stepped into her path, stopping her fevered progress back and forth between the stove and the sink, taking the small bucket out of her hands and setting it aside with a thump. “I want to be the second,” he said.

It was a good thing Emily wasn’t holding the hot water any longer, because she would have dropped it and drenched them both. “What?”

“I need a wife. I think you’d do as well as anybody. You’d
have a home and half-interest in this ranch. Our property dispute would be settled, too.”

Emily stared up at him, stunned. Her first husband had been well past his virile years, God be thanked, but this one was young and vital, of an age to father children. He would make demands—intimate ones. “You can’t be serious,” she said, though some part of her hoped he was. “We’re strangers. How do I know you’re not a mean drunk, or even an outlaw?”

A tiny muscle in his cheek flexed, and Emily wondered distractedly if it was the word “outlaw” that had perturbed him. She saw a counterquestion take shape in his eyes, but with visible effort he quelled it, and spoke carefully. “I guess you’ll just have to take me at my word,” he said.

She raked her teeth over her lower lip. The offer, outlandish as it was, was not one she could afford to dismiss out of hand. While she felt certain that her claim on the ranch was just, she could not assume that a judge would agree. This was cattle country, after all, and Tristan had a foothold here. She had already experienced enough prejudice, because of the sheep, to know her position was a tenuous one, be it right or wrong, and while the injustice of that galled her sorely, she had to take it into consideration.

“What about my sheep?” she asked.

“Sell them. Tuck the money away someplace—I won’t make any claim on it.” He sounded so sure of himself and his ideas. What was it like, she wondered, to walk boldly through the world the way Tristan did, with that apparently innate sense of his own value, his right place in the scheme of things?

She balked. The sheep were all that she had, and much as she would have liked having a nest egg, the animals represented an asset with the propensity for renewing itself. Besides, whatever Tristan said now, as her husband, he could take the money away from her, with the full blessing of the courts. For that matter, he could sell, shoot or drive off every one of her sheep, with the same impunity. Once he
put a golden band on her finger, she would have about as many rights as Spud did.

Still, the pull of home and husband, not to mention the prospect of a brood of children, was strong. She couldn’t help picturing herself going to church of a Sunday, wearing a crisp frock and a fine bonnet, or chatting with the other women of the town at a quilting bee or an afternoon social. Her need for those things was almost as compelling as the beat of her heart and the steady flow of her breath. Almost.

“I don’t even know you,” she protested, full of sweet misery.

Tristan cupped her chin in his hand, raised it slightly, and looked deeply into her eyes. “This is who I am,” he said, and then he bent his head and brushed her lips with his own. Gradually, the contact deepened, until it was forceful and, at the same time, heartbreakingly gentle.

Fire shot through her; she felt her knees wobble, and her heart threatened to fly away like a frightened bird, but she stepped into the kiss, instead of drawing back, as a more sensible woman might have done. When it ended, she swayed on her feet, utterly dazed, and to her profound embarrassment Tristan steadied her by taking her upper arms in his hands. His grin was wicked, insufferable and totally irresistible.

“Well?” he prompted. “Are we getting married or not?”

She flushed. “I suppose we could,” she said.

His eyes laughed, and his mouth seemed to hover on the edge of another grin, but somehow he contrived to look—well—polite. “When?”

“There are so many things we haven’t settled. The sheep—”

“Never mind the damn sheep. We’ll deal with the problem somehow.” He guided her to the table, sat her down, and straddled the bench beside her. His being so near affected her almost as much as the kiss had done. She touched her temple, feeling dizzy; then she drew a deep breath, expelled it. “There’s something else. I have to know
if you expect—if you will require—” Another breath, another exhalation. “Conjugal relations. Right away, I mean.”