Frontier Woman (35 page)

“Please tell Señor Guerrero that Jarrett Creed is here to see him.” Creed pushed the door the rest of the way open, and the three visitors stepped inside the hacienda. It was cool and dark and smelled of a priest’s incense. The sounds of mourning came to them from the back of the house.

“Please wait here, señor,” the servant said.

It was a much-aged Juan Carlos who greeted them, his son Cruz by his side.

“You are not welcome here,
gringo
,” Juan Carlos said.

“Why have you come?” Cruz asked the question of Creed, but his gaze was focused on Sloan, taking in her large, liquid eyes and her somber mouth.

“I want to see Tonio,” Sloan said.

“I wished to explain the circumstances of Antonio’s death and to offer my condolences,” Creed said.

Juan Carlos ignored the young woman and turned to the Ranger. “Neither your explanations nor your condolences can bring back my son.” Juan Carlos was suffering greatly over Antonio’s death because he blamed himself for not keeping a closer eye on his firebrand son.

“I wanted you to know Antonio wasn’t killed by a Ranger,” Creed said. “One of his own men killed him because he refused to surrender.”

Juan Carlos fought a moan of anguish. Despite what he’d told Antonio, he’d have fought with every weapon he had to keep his son from being hanged by the Rangers. Antonio simply had not known him well enough to understand that. And to be told now that one of Antonio’s own men had shot his younger son, to know Antonio had died such a senseless death, was a hard burden to bear.

“I want to see Tonio,” Sloan repeated.

Juan Carlos turned to the lovely young woman dressed in planter’s clothes who’d spoken. “My wife has asked to be alone with Tonio. I am sorry, but I must refuse your request to see him.”

“But I have to see him!”

Juan Carlos was unmoved. “The answer is no.”

Denied by the father, Sloan turned her eyes to the son. “Please, if you have any mercy in your soul, help me. I must see Tonio.”

Cruz hated his brother in that instant for the pain he’d brought to the beautiful woman who stood before him. It was obvious she’d loved Tonio. It was more than his deceptive brother deserved. Cruz couldn’t bear to see the woman suffer further.

“I will speak to my mother and see if she will allow you a few moments with Tonio,” Cruz said. He had no business feeling so much emotion at the relief in the woman’s eyes. Those huge, sad brown eyes. He’d been lost since the first moment he’d looked into them at the
fandango
celebration. He shook his head to break the spell. She’d been his brother’s woman. His brother’s
puta
.

Cruz rejected the label
whore
as soon as he’d given it to the young woman. Should she be condemned because she’d loved the wrong man? No more so than a man who lusted after the wrong woman, he thought bitterly. He’d make sure Sloan Stewart said her last good-byes to Tonio and then stayed far, far away from the Guerrero hacienda.

Juan Carlos left with Cruz, and the voices of the mother and son raised in argument could be heard from the back of the house. Moments later Cruz returned, his face flushed, his eyes sparking with anger. “Come with me,” he ordered Sloan. When Cricket and Creed started to follow, he said, “She must come alone.”

Cricket started to protest, but Creed silenced her. “We’ll wait here.”

“We will not be long,” Cruz promised.

His hand rested lightly on Sloan’s elbow, directing her to the room at the rear of the house where Tonio’s body had been laid out in his finest clothing. The darkened salon was filled with candles and the smell of incense was suffocating.

Lucia Esmeralda Sandoval de Guerrero stood regally beside her younger son’s body. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and she clutched a wrinkled handkerchief in her hand, but otherwise she showed no outward signs of her loss. She didn’t acknowledge Sloan’s presence.

Sloan looked down upon the young man who’d been her lover and who was the sire of her child. His face retained much of the beauty it had possessed in life. She reached out a hand to touch his cheek. It was cold, the skin clammy to the touch. She bent down and kissed his lips, but none of the warmth of life remained. She shuddered as she conceded the finality of his death and the magnitude of the deception for which he could never be brought to task. She’d loved this man beyond her own life, and he’d used her as a messenger for his rebel games.

Cruz watched amazed as the various emotions traveled the sharp angles of the young woman’s face. Sorrow was there, and love—which he coveted to his everlasting shame. But there was something else, as well, which he struggled to identify.

How great had Tonio’s deceit been? Had the woman known how little he really cared for her? Cruz thought perhaps the knowledge of his brother’s dishonesty had only just come to her, for at last he recognized in her expression the disillusionment of one who has finally accepted an unpleasant truth. Her face hardened with anger—untapped rage which pared away her fresh youthfulness and replaced it with ragged lines of bitter experience.

Sloan discovered she could shed no tears. She felt certain if she could only cry, the huge knot in her breast would go away. But the tears didn’t come, and she didn’t force them. She was afraid they might wash away the hate that was all she could feel now, and which was all that kept her from falling apart in the wake of Tonio’s betrayal. She turned to Tonio’s mother and cleared her throat to speak.

“In the winter I will have Tonio’s child.”

Cruz saw the flicker of satisfaction in his mother’s eyes, followed by a gleam of anticipation.

“Were you secretly married to my son?” Lucia asked.

Sloan’s chin quivered. Cruz agonized with her for the answer he knew she must make. It came out on a bare breath of air. “No.”

“Ah.” There was a wealth of condemnation in the word. “Do you wish me to take the bastard child off your hands, Señorita Stewart?”

Cruz watched Sloan waver in indecision before she turned without speaking further and left the room.

“So, Mamá,” Cruz said softly. “You have not completely lost your favorite. His son or daughter lives.” Cruz felt a tightening in his gut. His brother had kept his hold on the brown-eyed woman even beyond death. He swore under his breath and left the room.

When Cruz arrived once more at the front of the house, only Creed remained.

“I wanted to thank you for what you did for Sloan,” Creed said.

“Tonio used her badly,” Cruz replied, then regretted his flare of honesty with the Ranger, who was at least partly responsible for his brother’s death. As long as he’d gone so far, however, he went a step further. “You will take care of her?”

Creed masked his surprise at the Spaniard’s outspoken concern for Sloan. “Of course. As much as she’ll let me do, I’ll do.”

Cruz smiled ruefully. “It is true, then, what they say about the Stewart women?”

Creed returned an equally rueful smile. “In spades.”

“Then I extend both my congratulations and my condolences on your marriage to Creighton Stewart.”

“Thank you. I accept them both.”

The two men shook hands, but by then the smiles had disappeared.

“
Adios, señor
. I hope when next we meet it is under more pleasant circumstances.”

“Don’t worry about Sloan,” Creed said with more understanding than Cruz could willingly accept. “I’ll make sure she’s taken care of.”

“Of course I am concerned for her,” he replied stiffly. “She was my brother’s woman.”

Creed cocked his head at the remark that suggested there was nothing personal behind Cruz’s request, but he didn’t probe where the wound was still so obviously raw. All he said was, “Of course.”

Creed joined the two women on horseback, and they promptly left the confines of the eerily silent adobe fortress. Sloan brooded the whole distance to Three Oaks, but neither Cricket nor Creed noticed, because they were each too busy pondering their own disastrous love life.

Cricket was trying to work up the courage to ask Creed to take her with him when he left Three Oaks.

Creed was busy thinking of reasons why he never needed to leave.

It was on both their minds that the time was not far off when they’d have to either speak their minds and resolve their differences—or lose each other.

Rip was waiting for them when they got back.

“Come into my office this minute, Sloan,” he snapped. “I’ve spent the past hour trying to explain to Beaufort LeFevre how my daughter,
my daughter
, was the innocent dupe of a ring of Mexican revolutionaries. And I didn’t like it one bit.”

“Nobody asked you to apologize for my actions,” Sloan replied. “And I’m certainly not going to apologize for what I’ve done, either.” Instead of going through the open door to Rip’s office, Sloan turned and headed for the stairs instead. She hadn’t gotten beyond the first step before Rip grabbed her arm and spun her around.

“Don’t walk away from me when I’m speaking to you.”

Rip’s thundering voice brought Bay and Angelique to the head of the stairs, and the American chargé to the door of the parlor. Cricket and Creed stood uncertainly in the hall near the front door as Rip began unbuckling his belt.

Sloan didn’t move.

Cricket feared for her sister. It had been years since Rip had taken a belt to Sloan. Cricket vividly remembered that last momentous occasion. Sloan had defied Rip over some minor incident and he’d pulled off his belt in much the same manner as he had today. But Sloan had remained unmoved by Rip’s show of force, standing stoically silent under the strap. It had seemed almost a test as he waited for her to break, to cry like a woman, to admit she was wrong and beg him to stop. But Sloan was as stubborn as her sire. She hadn’t broken, and finally Rip had given up.

Sloan’s bruises had remained for weeks . . . but from that day Rip had treated his eldest daughter as an equal. He’d never again tried to intimidate her into doing his bidding. A new, very special respect had grown between them that Cricket had envied.

That’s why this sudden threat of force was so frightening. Cricket knew that Sloan wouldn’t beg for mercy . . . and that Rip wouldn’t offer it. If it had only been the two of them, she might have let them fight it out. But now there was the baby to consider. If Sloan wouldn’t think of herself
and the
child
, then Cricket would have to do it for her.

Aware of Rip’s growing audience, Creed relaxed slightly, certain the man wouldn’t dare discipline his daughter under the circumstances. When he saw Rip fold his belt in half and grasp the leather firmly in his hand, he realized he was wrong.

“Are you defying me, Sloan?”

Beaufort LeFevre couldn’t believe Rip Stewart actually intended to beat his lovely daughter with the thick leather belt in his hand. In all his tactful life he’d never interfered where he didn’t belong. But Beaufort found his old rules didn’t work very well in Texas, and he was nothing if not adaptable, so he spoke up.

“Rip, surely there must be—”

“Keep your nose where it belongs, Beaufort.”

“LeFevre is right, Rip,” Creed said from behind the big man. “There are other ways to handle this.”

Rip turned on Creed, and the two men faced off like wolves fighting for leadership of the pack. The hair bristled on their necks, their muscles tensed for action, and their teeth bared in grimaces of determination.

Cricket was so close to Creed that she could feel the killing instinct rise in him. She knew Rip blamed the Ranger for ruining his plans to marry her off to Cruz Guerrero, and this argument with Sloan was as good an excuse as any for the two men to come to blows. But she had no intention of watching the two men she loved most in the world do their best to kill each other bare-handed.

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t beat Sloan for her disobedience,” Rip demanded of Creed.

Creed opened his mouth to reply, but before he could speak Cricket blurted, “Because she’s pregnant!”

Five stunned faces focused on Sloan, who flushed a deep, dark red.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Rip said. “Is that true, Sloan?”

Sloan nodded.

“And who is the father of this miraculous child?” he demanded.

Sloan lifted her chin. “Antonio Guerrero.”

Stunned, Rip exclaimed, “He’s dead!”

“Yes, he is.” Sloan kept her head high, although her eyes were feverishly bright.

“Yes. He is, isn’t he,” Rip repeated. His eyes narrowed thoughtfully, and then he snapped his belt against his thigh with excitement. “By God, I’ve got Juan Carlos by the balls this time. You’ll marry the other son. You’ll marry Cruz and legitimize this Guerrero bastard.”

Sloan flew back down the stairs and stood toe-to-toe with Rip, belt and all, her hands balled into fists at her still-narrow waist, her brown eyes flashing.

“By God, I’ll do no such thing. If you even suggest such a marriage to the Guerreros I’ll disappear and you’ll lose your firstborn heir to Three Oaks. Do I make myself clear?”

Sloan didn’t budge an inch until Rip cleared his throat and said, “It was only a thought.”

“Think again!”

“I’ll enjoy having a grandson,” Rip said more quietly.

“Or a granddaughter,” Sloan snapped back.

Rip placed his hands firmly on Sloan’s shoulders, lest his touch be misconstrued as the caress he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, give. “Yes. Most certainly a granddaughter like you.”

The onlookers relaxed visibly at the tentative peace that had come so suddenly between the two combatants.

“Whew! If this incident is any sample of Texan fighting spirit, I wonder that you haven’t thought of moving the Republic’s borders east, as well as north, south, and west,” LeFevre remarked.

Rip turned to the chargé with a grin. “Come have a drink and a cigar with me, Beaufort. I’m going to be a grandfather.” Rip was still trying to make up his mind whether to include Creed in the invitation when they heard several loud shrieks outside.

“What’s that?” Beaufort asked with a laugh. “More Texans having an argument?”

“Hell, no,” Rip replied, racing for the rifle over the mantel. “That’s a goddamned Comanche war cry!”