Audrey and the Maverick (22 page)

Audrey lay awake until dawn colored the sky. She felt gutted, as if her heart had been stored away in one jar and her soul in another, leaving her empty. She climbed out of bed, washed, then dressed. Empty was better than feeling, she reasoned. She’d done what she had to do. She set him free.

She started on breakfast. The kids came down in two batches, first the boys, then the girls. Without prodding from her, they went about their morning chores, the girls collecting eggs and milking the cow, the boys feeding the various animals.

Soon they were all seated at the table. Audrey reached for the hands of the children on either side of her, preparing to say grace.

“Where’s Mr. McCaid?” Colleen asked.

“I don’t know,” Audrey answered, her stomach clenching.

“He’s never missed breakfast before. Shouldn’t we wait for him?” Joey asked.

“Not today. He mentioned he was eating with the men this morning,” Bertie said as she brought the basket of biscuits to the table and took her place.

Julian did join them for supper. His face looked carved from stone. No humor softened the hard planes of his face. No joy sparkled in his eyes. She felt the weight of his gaze often through the meal, hard and assessing. She barely touched her food.

“If you’re not going to eat that potato, Audrey, can I have it?” Kurt asked, eyeing her plate. She looked at the empty serving platter, then around at the children. Somehow, the entire meal had progressed without her being aware of it. Most of the kids still chatted among themselves, but Luc and Bertie watched her curiously. She pushed her plate toward Kurt.

“You feeling okay, Audrey?” Luc asked.

She forced an easy smile. “Of course. Just tired today.”

He looked from her to Julian, unconvinced.

After supper, she helped Bertie with the dishes. The kids went off to do their last round of chores for the evening. Julian secluded himself in his den. This existence was untenable. She was going to have to push the issue by setting a date for their departure.

When the kids were washed and ready for bed later that evening, she found them gathered in the front hallway, outside Julian’s den. In the short time they’d lived together, it was unlike him not to participate in getting them settled at night. They felt the difference in him. In her.

“Come along, now. It’s time to be in bed.”

“But it’s nighttime,” Tommy complained.

“Yes, which means it’s bedtime.”

“And story time,” Mabel clarified.

Julian’s last installment of the saga had the two orphaned siblings encountering a nearly blind tinware salesman who offered them a bunk in his wagon in exchange for their ability to see for him and drive the wagon. The children were fascinated by the tale. She looked from one expectant face to another. “Not tonight. Mr. McCaid has work to do and we mustn’t disturb him.”

The children grumbled as they left the hallway and climbed the stairs. Luc hung back. Of all her kids, he was the most observant and the least easily fooled.

“What’s going on, Audrey?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Why is Mr. McCaid angry?”

Audrey drew a shaky breath. Nothing less than absolute truth would convince Luc. “He’s missing important things in his life back East. I told him to go home, and it made him angry.”

“Maybe he likes it here.”

She sighed. “Luc, he is a successful businessman with critical decisions awaiting his attention at home. He can’t stay here. He shouldn’t stay here.”

“You can’t tell him what to do.”

“No. You’re right.” Which was why she had to take the children and go.

That night, she sat on the long bench outside her room, listening to the crickets and the wind, trying to find an answer, find the strength to finish what she had begun. As if sensing her presence, Julian joined her on the balcony. An awkward silence stretched between them. Audrey came to her feet and started for her room, preferring a place where she could be miserable alone.

“The children missed you tonight,” she said, pausing outside her door.

“I missed them.”

“Why didn’t you come tell them another part of the story?”

“What would be the point? You’re just going to take them from me. They’ll have to get used to doing without me sooner or later.”

She did look at him then. The wind tossed his untrimmed hair, blowing his straight locks this way and that around his face. “I was under the impression you didn’t like children.”

“A man can change, Audrey.”

She retreated to her room, trying to interpret that remark.

The next day was little better. Julian was again absent from breakfast. She got the kids started on their schoolwork for the day, then took advantage of the free time to go find him.

He wasn’t at the bunkhouse or the cookhouse. She found him at the main corral, having just ridden in with Franklin. He dismounted and handed the reins to his foreman. He took one look at her, then started toward the barn at a fast pace with barely a nod of acknowledgment. Audrey hurried after him.

“We need to talk, Julian.” When he didn’t slow down and didn’t answer, she tossed out a barb. “I thought it would be safer to have this discussion out here, in public.”

He turned around so fast she almost barreled into his chest. “Don’t think you’re safe out here. Or anywhere, Audrey Sheridan. You’ve chosen to not be safe ever again.”

“I want to leave.”

“No.” He turned and started walking again.

“You can’t keep me prisoner here.”

“You aren’t leaving. No one’s leaving.”

“Why? Will you please stop and talk to me?”

He did, abruptly. “Jace sent word the sheriff’s organizing his men and some ranchers. Something’s coming in fast. It’s not safe for you to go to town or start for Cheyenne. So no one’s leaving until this thing breaks or blows over.” His eyes blazed. “You’ll have to be my prisoner a while longer.”

When he continued on his way, she didn’t follow.

A cold dread wormed its way through her nerves as she considered the implications of Jace’s warning. She’d lived through one attack on the ranch, but suspected it was nothing compared to what the sheriff was now planning. Luc had told her what he’d overheard at the meeting he’d witnessed before their disastrous attempt to escape the sheriff and come warn her.

She hurried back to the house, considering what preparations she should make. The ranch was terribly vulnerable. Only a series of wire fences and Julian’s armed patrols stood between her family and the sheriff’s men.

At the house, she found a couple of Julian’s men moving cured meat from the smokehouse down to the root cellar. Bertie told her they’d already brought over what supplies they could from the keeping house. It was as if they prepared for a siege. A short while later, some other men delivered three rifles, a Colt and gun belt, and a crate of ammunition to Julian’s den.

She tried to maintain a normal demeanor as she helped the kids through their lessons, but they weren’t fooled. They’d heard all the activity in the house. Audrey looked from one anxious face to the next. She sighed.

“I’m afraid the trouble Luc overheard in town may be headed this way.”

Amy moved closer to her.

“Don’t worry, Audrey. Luc and me ain’t lettin’ anything happen to you,” Kurt assured her.

“Aren’t,” she corrected.

“And the Avenger’s working the case. Nothing gets through him,” Luc added.

She sent the children out to play, knowing they were brimming with curiosity. At the door, however, Colleen stopped the girls. Audrey caught the look she sent Mabel and Dulcie. As one, they turned back.

“What can we do to help?”

Audrey met Colleen’s determined gaze, struck by her oldest foster daughter’s flash of maturity. “Bertie’s going to cut bandage strips from the bolt of cotton we used to make your nightclothes. You could give her a hand with that.”

A short while later, everything was as ready as it could be. There was just the waiting. Julian left word he was eating with the men that night. After supper, she sent the boys out to bathe at the shower while she saw to baths for the girls. She hoped a good washing would help settle their nerves enough so that she could get them to bed.

When the baths were finished and the kids put to bed, she took a stack of towels to the outdoor shower to replenish the ones the boys had used. She rounded the corner of the outhouse, surprised to hear the shower in use. It hadn’t occurred to her Julian might have finished with Franklin and his preparations. Well, there was nothing for it. Unless Julian had stopped by the house to grab a fresh towel, the boys had probably left none dry for him.

The louvered doors to the changing room were open. Julian’s clothes were strewn about the ground, haphazardly discarded. His hat hung on a peg on one of the walls of the changing area. His vest and shirt were thrown in one pile, his boots, pants, socks, and drawers in another. Audrey swallowed and looked up.

The bathing doors were not closed either.

Julian stood naked beneath the stream of water, one hand fisted around the pull chain, one hand braced against the wall, his head bowed. Water splashed off his shoulders, splattering into the bricks where he stood barefooted. In the full light of the summer evening, Audrey could see the raised, wide, white furrows crisscrossing his back like a messy web carved into his skin. She set the towels on a nearby shelf. She knew she should leave, should allow him his privacy.

She didn’t move.

Still unaware of her, he leaned forward to let the water pour over his neck, and the muscles of his back and arms contracted, cabling against the shock of what looked like icy water. The boys probably used up all the warm water. Audrey forced her eyes past his scarred back to his lean hips, his pale buttocks, his long, hard thighs. She must have made a noise because his head shot up. He looked at her over his shoulder, through the water, then released the pull chain and came toward her.

She was helpless to keep her gaze from stroking his naked body. It was probably the last time she would ever see him nude. Her eyes dipped over the dark hairs furring his chest, pausing to observe the water droplets catching the brilliant evening sun and sparkling against his skin. She looked at his flat belly, at the nearly imperceptible line that demarcated the darker skin above his waist from the paler skin below it. Her gaze lowered until it came to the thick nest of black hair at the joining of his legs, his purplish manhood hanging in a relaxed state.

Watching him, Audrey felt a frisson of desire rip across her soul. She held out a fresh towel to him. He took the towel from her, no smile of greeting warming his face. He dragged it over his hair and mopped the wet skin of his chest and armpits, then draped it around his neck. Reaching a hand out, he let his fingers whisper against her cheek. His touch was chilling—the water had indeed been cold. A shiver rippled across her skin.

They would be lost to each other soon, he to the life waiting for him in his important world, she to work as a seamstress in Cheyenne. She was infinitely better off now than she had been when the summer began. Yet without Julian she would just be a ghost of herself. She closed her eyes, shielding herself from his observant gaze, preventing him from digging around in her mind as he searched out answers better left hidden.

She reached up and cupped his hand, holding it so that she could press a kiss against his palm. He reached for her then, his lips pressing against hers, his mouth open, the kiss unconsummated. She breathed his breath, felt his essence, waited, as he waited, for some sign, a clue about how to proceed. Her surrender. Or his. She leaned into him, all too aware of his hard body, hoping he couldn’t hear the sob working its way up through her chest.

“Audrey, come to me tonight. Let me show you the difference between sex and love.”

She glanced up at him and was lost. He swept her into his arms, lifting her to her toes, dragging her up against his heart. Their mouths collided. She clung to him, grasping his hair. Her tongue fought with his as his mouth twisted against hers.

He ended the kiss a long moment later. “I know the difference, Audrey Sheridan,” he said against her mouth, “because I love you. And, by God, you should know the difference too.”

No. Not love. She didn’t belong in his world, and he couldn’t stay in hers. She belonged in her shack in Defiance, not in one of his many houses, attending the theatre, hosting his important social events. This was exactly what she had feared would happen. He would give up his life for hers, or drag her into his and hate her for being what she was—a backwoods yokel.

She broke away, feeling like a porcelain figurine whose glaze was starting to crack and chip. Only the belief that in time, if he stayed with her, he would come to regret his decision gave her the strength to leave him. “We’re through, Julian. I thought I made that clear to you.”

“I’m not deaf. I heard your words. But I’m not blind either. I see your soul in your eyes, and I think your eyes, at least, don’t lie. They never have.”

Audrey forced herself to leave the alcove. He was right. She couldn’t hide the truth from him. But truth or not, it didn’t make it right.

The wind whipped about the house, searing past the eaves with a strange screaming sound, rattling the balcony door to Julian’s room. He opened the door to let the wind into his room as he debated going to Audrey. He’d doubted she would come to him, but they needed to settle this thing between them.

The sound grew louder, only it didn’t ease with the ebb and flow of a normal wind. It was coming closer. When Willie began to growl in the girls’ room, he knew it wasn’t wind.

He heard a gunshot even as he grabbed for his gun belt. He shoved his feet into his boots, glad he still wore his trousers. He didn’t have time to don a shirt. He hurried from his room, taking the steps three at a time. Audrey came out of her room as he hit the landing. They shared a glance, their last, perhaps.

“Stay here, Audrey. Get one of the rifles in my office and guard the house. Have Bertie take the other. Keep everyone safe and inside until it’s over,” he ordered, then was gone.