A Lady of the West (41 page)

He sighed and kneed his horse away from hers. “If you want to ride, then let's ride.”

She did, joyfully. She was surprised to see it was late summer; the grasses were getting brittle and had a hint of yellow to them. They had arrived in the spring, but she didn't really remember much about it; the strain of surviving those weeks with the Major had taken all of her attention. It had been June, hot and dusty, when they had tried to escape. Now it was late in August, with only a few short weeks left before the first frost. She had missed the summer. It was disorienting.

She let the gelding run until he slowed of his own accord, blowing and tossing his head with joy. She
patted his steaming neck as Ben reined in to keep pace with her.

She looked around at the broad meadow, with the craggy peaks bordering it to the north, and the tall grasses waving in the slight breeze. You could see for miles and she was amazed at the beauty of the land.

The horses slowed, then halted completely, lowering their heads to crop at the grass.

Ben removed his hat and wiped his sweaty forehead on his sleeve. His dark hair was damp, too, and his face was dusty. His hazel eyes were clear and penetrating. He said quietly, “Emma girl, are you ever going to come to me?”

A pang went through her. If he had tried to seduce her she thought she could have resisted him more easily, but it was incredibly hard to deny this simple invitation. “I want to,” she said, the truth somehow easy to accept and admit out here in this high, empty meadow. “But how can I?”

“Easily. All you have to do is open my door. Or hold out your hand to me right now. That's all. I'll do the rest.”

He saw the flicker of fear on her face and was puzzled. “I won't hurt you,” he said in husky promise. “I won't lie and say the first time won't be hard for you, but I'll take care of you. I'll make certain you enjoy it, too. You don't need to be afraid of me.”

“I'm not afraid, not of you,” she quickly denied. Her brown eyes were as velvety as a doe's.

“Then what are you afraid of?”

She looked away from him, her eyes going to the mountains and the blue sky beyond. “All of it, I think. The act itself. It isn't the same for a woman as it is for a man. From what I can tell, for a man it's a few minutes of pleasure, forgotten as soon as he gets up, without meaning to him until the next time he wants to do it. For a woman…

“For a woman it's a huge step. It's trusting a man not to hurt her. It's taking a chance of pregnancy,
which will ruin her life and the life of her child if she isn't married, and could kill her even if she is married. It isn't just taking a man into her body, it's taking him into her life, because the same act that means nothing to him can affect her for the rest of her days.”

“It doesn't matter that much to whores.”

“Is that what you want me to be? A whore? They do it for money, with any man who has the money. It's sad. They're sad.”

He said harshly, “I don't want you to be a whore.” He didn't want emptiness in Emma's eyes when he made love to her; he wanted to see wonder, and blind pleasure, and trust. He wanted her to see only him. “I wouldn't abandon you if I made you pregnant. I'm here to stay. Look at Jake; he didn't abandon Victoria, and it's not even his baby.”

Emma rounded on him so fiercely he drew back, wary that she might use her riding crop on him after all. “Jake's a fool,” she snapped. “Of course it's his baby.”

He didn't take kindly to having Jake called names, and his eyes narrowed. “She told him just a mite too soon, don't you think?”

“She knew right away.” Emma wasn't about to get into a discussion of how Victoria had known so quickly, but she wasn't finished. “It couldn't be the Major's child, because he didn't… do that to her.”

“Yeah,” Ben said cynically. “She tried to convince Jake of that. But why would any man
not
make love to his wife? Victoria's a good-looking woman.”

She was flushed with anger. “He tried, but couldn't.”

“Why couldn't he? It's common knowledge that he
could
with Angelina.”

“I don't know why he couldn't with Victoria. He tried the first two nights they were married, but couldn't do it. He left her alone after that.”

“How do you know? Were you in their bedroom watching?”

“She told me the next morning,” Emma answered. “I know most women don't talk about things like that, but Victoria and I are very close. We've been together all of our lives. She was so frightened on their wedding night because she didn't know what was going to happen. She married him only because we were all starving and he said he'd give money to her parents if she'd marry him.”

Emma's words were strong and certain. Ben frowned, thinking. What if Jake was wrong?

Y
ou interested?” Garnet asked the man sitting across from him. The surface of the saloon table between them was pocked and gouged, and it carried myriad sticky rings where overflowing glasses had been set. The other man's face was almost as pocked and gouged as the table.

Bullfrog Espy took a long, slow drink of beer before adding another wet ring to the table. His eyes were the color of dingy water, and there was a cold, lifeless quality to them. “How many men you reckon it'll take?” he finally asked in a light, high-pitched voice that could have been a woman's. His voice had earned him his nick-name “Bullfrog” because nobody in their right mind would call a man his size and temperament “Squeaky.”

“Fifty, or thereabouts.”

“That's a lot of men. Ain't fifty men I know that I'd trust.”

Garnet shrugged. He didn't trust anyone. “It don't matter if we can trust 'em, just as long as they're willing to use a gun.”

“And you ain't interested in the ranch?”

“You can have the damn ranch. It's the girl I want.”

“Mebbe I'll want her too. It's been a while since I had a white girl.”

“She's not the only white woman. Her sister and cousin are there, too. They're young, good-looking women. But I want this one.”

Bullfrog didn't fidget aimlessly the way most men did, and his stillness got on Garnet's nerves. But he was fast with a gun and didn't mind killing. Some folks even said he enjoyed it. “Jake Roper, huh? He's a fast son of a bitch. I seen him in El Paso one year.”

Garnet smiled, a slow movement of his mouth that didn't ease the cold ruthlessness of his eyes. “Don't matter how fast a man is if you're behind him.”

Bullfrog lifted the glass again. “That's true,” he said.

The sunlight streaked across the tiles in the foyer, nothing like the night when the shadowed nightmare had taken place. But when the heavy front door opened and the shadow of someone's head and torso spilled across the tiles, something flashed in Jake's head. It was exactly as it had been the night he'd looked down and seen his father's body sprawled on the floor.

Blood drummed in his temples. He stood frozen just outside the library door, his face twisting as the hot tide of hate consumed him. There, to the left of the stairs, was where his mother had lain with her face bruised and distorted by McLain's fist, where he had raped her while her husband's body lay only a few feet away. Her blood and brains had pooled on those tiles.

God damn McLain's soul to roast in hell!
If he even had a soul.

He and Ben had watched him die, but they hadn't won. McLain still lived within these walls, within the home he'd fouled with his presence. His flesh and
blood still lived in Victoria's body. The sight of her now, as she cast the shadow that had awakened Jake's memories, enraged him all the more.

She had been feeling well enough lately to get out of the house; the vomiting was gradually easing. Autumn was coming, and coming soon. It was September, and the aspens were golden.

She closed the door and stood still for a moment to let her eyes adjust to the light in the house. There was no movement to attract her attention, no sound, but suddenly the hair on the back of her neck raised up as a sense of menace chilled her. She jerked her head around and saw Jake.

His face was a twisted mask of hate, his eyes like green coals.

In that split second of recognition, she was terrified. He looked as if he wanted to tear her apart with his bare hands. Without thought, obeying some wild instinct, she ran.

Jake started, pulling his mind from the past as she bolted up the stairs. He started moving toward the steps, his warning call sharp. “Victoria! Watch the steps!”

By some miracle she didn't stumble. When the wave of dizziness hit her, she managed to grasp the banister with both hands and hold herself upright. Her vision wavered, then began to fade. She could hear him coming up the stairs at a run, his boots thudding, and she tried to haul herself up another step, but her legs were too heavy and wouldn't obey. With a dull sense of alarm and astonishment, she felt her body begin to sag and could do nothing to stop it.

Then steely arms were around her, arms that she remembered sometimes in her dreams that left tears on her face when she awoke. As the darkness became absolute, she wondered why he had caught her.

Jake swung her limp body up in his arms, sweat breaking out on his face at how close she had come to
falling. She was in a dead faint, her head lolling back over his arm. He opened his mouth to yell for Emma or Carmita, but shut it as quickly as the impulse came. Victoria was his wife; he'd take care of her. He'd seen enough unconscious men to know how to handle a simple faint.

She didn't feel any heavier now than she had three months before. Just the feel of her in his arms struck him with a sharp, nostalgic pleasure, piercing and bittersweet. It shouldn't have been so long since he had held her; the chasm between them shouldn't have been so wide and deep and unbridgeable.

He started to carry her into their—his—bedroom, but changed his mind and went into hers; she would be less alarmed when she woke up if she wasn't in his bed. She showed no signs of reviving even when he placed her on the bed, and with growing concern he unfastened her skirt, then the light blue shirtwaist that was buttoned high under her chin.

He could feel the warmth of her soft skin, and the parting edges of the blouse revealed the pulse beating gently at the base of her throat. His own pulse began to throb.

“Victoria, wake up,” he murmured, stroking the hair back from her face. She still didn't stir. He lifted her skirt enough to remove her shoes, then took the pillow from beneath her head and slid it under her feet, slim and delicate in her white cotton stockings. His pulse beat faster.

She was his; her body was his. He put his hand on her stomach, searching for evidence of the life that had torn their marriage apart. Her belly was smooth and as flat as ever.

His brows snapped together. How far along did a woman have to be before her pregnancy began showing? The way he figured it, she should be more than four months along, certainly enough to be showing. But then, some women didn't get as big as others; he'd
seen some who looked huge and some who didn't look very big the day they delivered. Maybe her clothing was disguising her shape.

He tossed her skirt up, his hand delving beneath the froth of petticoats, finding her cotton-covered thighs and sliding upward to her belly. She was warm and flat.

Her eyelids fluttered and struggled open. “Jake?” she murmured.

He leaned over her. “You fainted, but you're all right,” he said in a low voice.

“I thought you were going to kill me.” The words were a little slurred as she struggled to push the last remnants of unconsciousness away. She blinked her eyes and focused on his face. She saw no sign now of the intense hatred that had sent her running for her life, and in confusion she wondered if she'd been imagining things.

“No. Not ever.” Jake's heart began beating heavily as he watched her. Her lips were soft and trembling slightly. Her wall of hostility was down; she was weak and disoriented. Before she could resurrect her anger he bent and covered her mouth with his, a muffled sound of pleasure coming from deep in his throat.

He used the pressure of his mouth to open her lips and slipped his tongue into her. A dizzying surge of delight went through him as he felt her arms lift and slide around his neck. He gathered her to him, deepening the kiss.

She had wanted him for so long, craved him for so long, that her whirling senses fastened on what he was doing. The taste of his mouth kept her from dying of thirst, his hands fed her in other ways. She moaned at the feel of his rough palm on her sensitive breasts, sliding inside both blouse and chemise and cupping the naked globes, then lifting them free of their cloth restraints. He left her mouth, his lips sliding down her throat and chest to close over one extended nipple.

The feeling was so electrifying that she almost shot off the bed. Her breasts were so tender that she could barely tolerate the pressure of her clothing, and his hot mouth fastening on her nipple was a maddening mixture of pain and pleasure.