Desperate Hearts (21 page)

The shuffling of chairs and clinking silver
brought her back to the present. Chloe stood and moved around the
table with her ducklike gait, clearing dishes.

“
Let me help you,” Kyla
said. She rose from the table to follow the woman back into her
kitchen, carrying dirty plates as she went.

“
Chloe, honey,” Travis
cautioned, starting to push his chair back, “you’d better sit down
for a while longer.”

“
Now, stop fretting so
much,” Chloe called back from the hallway. “We can handle this. You
and Jace go sit on the porch and catch up. I’m sure there are
things you have to talk about.”

After the women left the room, Travis went
to the sideboard and brought out two whiskey glasses and a bottle.
“Come on,” he said.

Jace followed him through the parlor to the
front porch and they settled into two chairs. The pale yellow glow
from a parlor lamp fell in a long rectangle across the plank
flooring. The evening was mild and stars twinkled in the night sky.
On the western horizon, the very faintest last glow of sunset
hinted at a daylight view of an expansive valley below the
house.

“
This is a nice place
you’ve got here,” Jace said, holding his glass while Travis poured
a drink for him.

Travis poured his own shot and set the
bottle down. “I had five years of trying to see the sky through a
barred window. I wanted to live where I could see for miles. We
found this bluff out here at the end of town and built the
house.”

“
Marriage must be good for
you—new house, new business. You’ve come a long way.” Jace slouched
down to rest on his spine and cradled the glass on his
stomach.

“
Yeah, we were pretty busy
watching over the building of this place and the shop at the same
time. Chloe took care of most of the details here. We finally moved
in last month.”

Jace could smell the still-fresh paint.
“With the money you made from that gold strike, I thought you might
retire,” he said with a chuckle.

“
Naw—a man has to have
something to do, some purpose in the world besides making love to
his wife. I admit I could try getting by on that, though.” Travis
leaned back and crossed his ankle over his knee. Silence fell
between them for a moment, and when he spoke again, Jace heard a
pale ghost of regret in his quiet words. “It took me a long time to
get over Celia. I was crazy in love with her. You know
that.”

Jace knew. He had always known, although
Lyle been able to convince him otherwise when Celia was found
murdered. And while it was hard to admit to himself, he also knew
that his sister had been a spoiled, faithless tease. Supremely
confident of her doll-like beauty and charm, she had done exactly
as she pleased and stopped at nothing to get her own way. In the
end, her willfulness had cost her her life, and took five years of
her husband’s, too.

He nodded. “I know you loved her.”

“
Did—” Travis took a sip of
whiskey and kept his gaze trained on the sunset. “Why did Clark
kill her?”

Jace took a swallow of whiskey before he
answered. “He said she laughed at him.”

Travis said nothing, then shook his head and
raised his glass slightly, as if in silent salute to the love of
his youth. “It’s all in the past now.”

“
You’ve got a good life,”
Jace added, feeling another twinge of envy. “Chloe is one hell of a
woman.”

His friend smiled. “Yeah, she is. Speaking
of women, did I hear you right this afternoon when you that Kyla is
a little rough around the edges? Which edges would those be,
Jace?”

Jace could hear the grin in Travis’s words.
Kyla had been a chief distraction since he’d laid eyes on her in
hotel hall. He couldn’t even recall with any certainty what they
had eaten for dinner. He found it almost impossible to believe that
the smart-mouthed boy he’d saved from the miners in Silver City was
the shy, beautiful woman with him here tonight. He shifted in his
chair and took a drink of whiskey.

“
Yeah, well, you should
have seen what she looked like when I found her. She said her name
was
Kyle
and
based on what I saw, I had no reason to doubt her. She fooled
almost everyone with that disguise. But she only hired me to do a
job—there’s nothing more to it. I’ll be moving on after
that.”

“
Where to?”

“
I don’t know. Maybe
California or Arizona. Someplace where the winters aren’t so
hard.”

“
Have you ever thought
about settling down?”

“
Nope,” Jace lied, and
downed another swallow of liquor. “That’s for other men. Not
me.”

Travis tipped his chair back against the
wall and looked up at the blue-black sky. “I don’t know . . .
there’s a lot to be said for waking up under the same roof every
morning. Having a woman to share your life with.”

The very same thought had crossed Jace’s
mind more than once lately. He’d even pictured the woman. And each
time he wrote off the notion almost as quickly as he did now.
Almost.

“
It always sounds like a
good idea when winter is closing in,” Jace said lightly. “Come
springtime everything looks different again.”

Travis let his chair come to rest on its
four legs, and reached for the whiskey bottle next to him. “But
there are just a certain number of springs in a man’s years. You
only need to lose a few of them to realize that. And you can never
get them back.”

* * *

The dishes were washed, and Chloe and Kyla
sat at the kitchen table. Chloe poured coffee for them from a
flowered pot. Her hands, Kyla noticed, were smooth and white, much
smoother than her own. She had probably always lived a genteel
life—if she’d worked, it sure hadn’t been at rough jobs that
created rough hands.

“
It’s good to sit down.”
Chloe sighed with pleasure. “I do get tired more easily now, but I
still like to do some things myself. If Travis had his way I’d be
sitting on a goosedown cushion all day.”

“
Are you hoping for a boy
or a girl?”

Chloe waved her hand dismissively. “Women
don’t usually worry about that sort of thing. Either will be
welcome. I don’t think Travis even cares.” Then she asked, “Do you
have children, Kyla?” Jace had introduced her as a widow.

“
No, my husband and I
never—we didn’t—we weren’t married very long before he died.” Kyla
thought of the nights she’d spent pacing through the ranch house,
terrified that a lasting consequence had come of Hardesty’s
assault.

“
Oh, dear . . . well, maybe
someday you’ll meet a good man and have a family of your own. You
can never tell what’s waiting around the next turn in the road.
Life is like that. It isn’t just trouble and hard times that lie in
our futures. There are good things, too. Believe me, I
know.”

Kyla couldn’t imagine enduring a man’s
touch. Not after everything she had been through, including her
brush with death. At that thought, she remembered Jace at her side
during her illness, his hands on her face feeling for fever,
tending to her, feeding her. No, that couldn’t have been the real
man, the one whose worried, exhausted face she had seen whenever
she had awakened. Deliberately, she forced herself to think of his
blood-chilling expression when she’d seen him confront Sawyer Clark
in Silver City.

She shook her head. “I don’t want to marry
again. I can survive on my own.”

Chloe gave her a kind, probing look, but she
asked no questions. “I’m sure you can. But life can become almost
meaningless when you’re alone in the world.” She laughed. “I never
would have imagined myself married to Travis. When I met him, I
believed he’d escaped from prison. He was bad-tempered, rude,
dangerous—certainly not the kind of man I had pictured as my
husband.”

Kyla stirred a drizzle of cream into her
cup, intrigued by this description. Travis McGuire seemed to be the
ideal example of devoted husband and father-to-be. “What changed
your mind? Did you find out that you were wrong about him? That he
was none of those things you thought?”

Chloe laughed again and her green eyes
sparkled. “Oh, my, no—he was! But beneath all that I found his true
soul. He didn’t make it easy for me, I must admit.”

“
You two seem very happy
together,” Kyla said, feeling that pang of envy again and the
sudden wish that her life had been different.

“
We’re good for each other,
I think.” Chloe glanced at the table top and Kyla thought a faint
frown crossed her brow. “I was having trouble of my own when Travis
walked into my backyard to answer an advertisement I’d placed for a
blacksmith. My father had died leaving a mortgage on our house, and
even though I took in washing, I couldn’t earn enough to make the
payment. If not for Travis, I would’ve lost the home place.” She
placed a tender hand on the life growing under her heart. “And
missed out on a lot more.”

“
Trusting anyone came hard
for him, and he had drifted so long, I didn’t think he’d be able to
settle down. Funny, that was what he’d craved all his life—a home,
a place to belong to. That, and to be cared about. I think that’s
what Jace probably wants, too.”

Kyla snapped up straight in her chair.
“Jace!”

The older woman sat back and considered her
with a strangely knowing look. Finally, she put a hand on Kyla’s
wrist. “Love can heal a lot of wounds, the ones that show and the
ones that don’t.”

* * *

“
Did you have a good time?”
Jace asked Kyla as they walked back toward the hotel an hour later.
Overhead, the stars rolled past, the constellations moving and
changing like the hands on a clock.

“
Oh, yes, I did! It was
nice to spend time talking to another woman. I haven’t had a chance
to do much of that. I’m so glad I got to meet your friends,” she
answered. Alert to every noise and movement around them, he walked
beside her with one hand jammed into his pants pocket, the other
clamped around his rifle. Occasionally, his arm brushed hers, or
her shoulder lightly bumped him. She almost wished she could tuck
her hand in the crook of his arm. Instead she wrapped her shawl
more tightly around her shoulders. “They seem so happy together,
like they really love each other. Just the way I used to imagine
married couples.”

“
I guess,” he mumbled. Then
abruptly shifting subjects, he said, “I want to get an early start
in the morning. I figure it’s about three days to Blakely. Does
that sound about right to you?”

As they approached a noisy saloon, he put
his hand on the small of her back to steer her across the street.
It lingered there, a warm, tentative touch that made her draw a
deep breath.

She could not wholly account for the
restless tension between them. He wouldn’t look at her, and when
she glanced at his cleanly chiseled profile against the lighted
windows they passed, he seemed preoccupied. Now and then, his scent
would drift to her, blended with a hint of whiskey, and she thought
about what Chloe McGuire had said.

“
Jace?”

“
Yeah?”

“
Have you ever been in
love?”

Even to her own ears, the question cracked
through the darkness with the jarring impact of a gunshot. His hand
fell away and he turned his head sharply to look at her. “What does
that have to do with going to Blakely?”

She stared straight ahead. She was glad that
he couldn’t see the heat that filled her face. “Nothing. I just
wondered.”

He kept walking. The place where his hand
had rested on her waist felt cold now and she shivered a bit.

“
Well, have you? Been in
love, I mean?”

A gulf of silence opened between them before
he finally spoke.

“
No.” In the darkness, he
sounded suddenly like an old man.

Jace heard a lifetime of regret in his
answer, and it shook him to his bones. He’d never cared about that
stuff before. He couldn’t very well tell her that he wasn’t capable
of loving someone—that Lyle had beaten it out of him.

Until now, he hadn’t cared.

Until he met this woman, he had been
comfortable with his solitude and the dead spot in himself that
took the place of feelings. Lately, though, that solitude had begun
to seem like loneliness with a different name. And the dead spot,
it wasn’t exactly dead after all. It was really just empty.

He heard the rustle of her skirts as she
walked next to him. “I think maybe love could save your soul.”

An alarm bell went off in Jace’s head, and
he gave her a sour look. Where the hell had that remark come from?
Did the change of dress change her personality, too? “Save my
soul—for what? Look, I’ve heard a trainload of salvation speeches
over the years. I don’t have any interest in being ‘saved’.”

“
Oh, I’m not talking about
saving your soul for God, although there’s nothing wrong with that.
I’m talking about saving it for yourself.”

He could think of no response to that. What
would it be like, he wondered again, to come home at night to a
warm kitchen, mellow with lamplight and the aroma of a hot meal? To
find his wife, soft and smiling, there to welcome him? To burrow
beneath warm quilts with her on snow-laden winter nights, her skin
bare and smooth against his? He could only daydream about it, and
that, he’d begun to realize, wasn’t a smart thing to do. That kind
of daydreaming could tie a man up in knots and make him do
something dumb.

They reached the hotel and Jace couldn’t say
that it made him happy. Despite the questions that she churned up
in his mind, he had enjoyed walking next to Kyla, listening to the
sound of her smoky voice and the whisper of her skirts.