Kid Calhoun (37 page)

Jake read between the lines. His eyes narrowed and a muscle worked in his jaw. “Wolf has another woman. Is that what you were going to say? Who is it, Kid? Is it Claire?”

Anabeth looked over her shoulder at Wolf’s stony face. Did she dare tell Jake the truth? Would her lover then kill her best friend? “I—”

“I have taken your sister for my woman,” Wolf said.

Anabeth knew in that moment that if she hadn’t been standing between them, Jake would have pulled the trigger. She felt the tension in both men, the barely leashed fury in Jake, the hate for all white men seething in Wolf.

“Jake, don’t!” Anabeth pleaded. “What if Claire loves him? What if she wants him—the same way I want you? If you kill Wolf you might break your sister’s heart!”

She could tell Jake was torn.

“Claire wouldn’t love an Indian,” he said at last.

“Why not?”

“Because of what happened to Jeff. Does Claire love you?” Jake demanded of Wolf. “Does she want to be with you?”

Wolf avoided answering Jake’s questions. He said instead, “She wishes to stay among The People.”

“Why?”

“Because her son lives among The People.”

“Jeff is dead.”

“Claire says the Apache boy called White Eagle is her son.”

“Jeff is alive? He’s living in your village?”

“He was taken by Broken Foot in a raid three harvests ago. He is Apache now.”

Jake swore under his breath. “No wonder Claire wants to stay with you!”

“You have to let Wolf go, Jake,” Anabeth said. “You can’t kill him.” Her voice was barely a whisper when she said, “He loves Claire.”

Jake’s lips pursed. He had heard no confession from the Apache, however, that Claire loved him. If he let Wolf go, the chances were slim, with winter coming on, that he would be able to find Claire before spring. He looked into the fierce eyes of the Apache, but found no answers to his dilemma there.

Then he looked at Anabeth, and realized that he would have died himself rather than hurt her. And killing Wolf would hurt her.

He holstered his gun. “Get the hell out of here,” he said brusquely.

Anabeth put a hand on Wolf’s forearm to stay the Indian’s fraying temper. “Good-bye, Wolf.”

“Where will you go now, Stalking Deer?”

Anabeth looked to Jake for an answer.

His eyes were bleak as he answered, “Home. To Window Rock.”

“Will you bring Claire to visit us?” Anabeth asked Wolf. Her glance skipped from one man to the other. There was no love lost between them.

“Perhaps. In the spring,” Wolf said, never taking his eyes off Jake.

“Take care of her,” Jake warned.

“I would give my life for her,” Wolf said. “She will be the mother of my children.”

Jake’s features hardened. “Till spring,” he said.

The Apache said no more, simply turned and disappeared into the hills.

Once Wolf was gone, Jake grabbed Anabeth by the wrist and headed back to camp. When he got there he shoved her down onto his blanket and stripped her, then sat down beside her and stripped himself. He lay
down and pulled her into his arms, spooning their bodies together.

“Go to sleep,” he ordered. “We’ll get an early start in the morning.”

Anabeth lay beside him, aware of the tension that radiated the length of him. “Jake?” she whispered.

“What?”

“What’s going to happen now?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“To us. What’s going to happen to us? Are you going to turn me in to the law in Santa Fe?”

“No.”

“Then will you let me go?”

“No.” Jake’s arm tightened around her waist. “You’re going to stay with me, Kid.”

“As your prisoner?”

“If that’s the way it has to be,” he snarled. “At least through the winter.” By then he would have figured some way out of the tangle his life had become.

“What happens in the spring?”

“Let’s take one day at a time, Kid. We have a lot of cold days ahead of us yet.”

But thoughts of the cold were far away as Anabeth fell asleep in the warmth of Jake’s embrace. It was easy to dream that everything would work out fine.

If only she had known …

In the first days after they arrived back at Window Rock Anabeth didn’t see much of Jake. She did all the ranch chores that would have fallen to Claire. He worked from dawn to dusk rounding up cattle and making an inventory of the stock left on the range.

Dog had completely recovered and followed Anabeth around like a shadow. One night at dinner, Anabeth announced, “I’ve decided on a name for Dog. I’m going to call him Blackie from now on.”

“Blackie?”

Dog thumped his tail.

“See, he likes it,” Anabeth said.

“Why does he need another name? I thought Dog suited him just fine.”

“Dog isn’t a name. It’s a … a label. Blackie’s not just any old dog. He special. He belongs to us.”

Jake caught Anabeth’s gaze, and she flushed. “There is no
us
, Kid. Don’t forget that.”

Jake abruptly left the table, and Anabeth sank down off her chair onto the floor and hugged Dog. “But I wish there were an
us
, Blackie.”

Dog whined and licked Anabeth’s face.

“At least I’ve got you now,” she said. “I won’t be alone anymore.”

One of the things Jake did early on was make a visit to Will Reardon’s ranch to tell him the status of the hunt for Sam’s gold. But Reardon’s foreman said his boss was gone on business, and he didn’t know when Reardon would be back.

Jake couldn’t be sorry for it. He was beginning to get attached to Window Rock, and he didn’t want to think what he would do, where he would go, if the ranch was lost for want of the gold to pay Will Reardon’s note.

Jake sent a wire to his Ranger captain in Texas, explaining the circumstances that required him to take an indefinite leave of absence. But he knew the day was coming when choices would have to be made.

Each night after supper, Shug joined Jake and Anabeth at the kitchen table, and they talked about what it would take to keep Window Rock afloat without the gold that had been stolen from Sam. Anabeth had sent Jake to the valley to collect her small cache, which was her contribution to keeping the ranch solvent. In the absence of Will Reardon, the biggest decision to be made was whether to move another herd to market or feed the stock through the winter.

“I’ve got enough between my own money and the Kid’s gold to buy feed,” Jake said. “Let’s wait until spring to send more beef to the Colorado market.”

Shug agreed, and Anabeth couldn’t help feeling relieved, since that meant Jake wouldn’t be leaving her alone for the long drive north.

Anabeth talked Jake into playing poker with her again one night, only this time, she didn’t smoke. “Same stakes as before,” she said.

Jake grinned. “Three questions?”

“Right.” Anabeth reached down and whispered to Dog, “Don’t you go giving away my cards, Blackie.”

Dog’s tail thumped, and Jake quipped, “Thump once if she’s bluffing, twice if she’s got the cards.”

Dog’s tail thumped once and Jake laughed.

“So, you’re bluffing,” he said to Anabeth. Jake bet big.

Without the telltale cigarette to reveal when Anabeth was bluffing, Jake didn’t laugh for long. He lost steadily, and before long Anabeth had all the match-sticks sitting in front of her.

Anabeth grinned. “Three questions,” she said.

Jake threaded his fingers and laid his hands in front of him on the kitchen table. “Go ahead.”

“First question. Why did you become a Ranger?”

“The bank took my father’s ranch when he was hanged for murder. The bastard who got my father hanged made sure nobody would hire me on to work cattle. I had to support Claire, so I joined the Rangers.”

“Shug told me Sam and Claire invited you to come work here. Why didn’t you?” Anabeth asked.

“Window Rock belonged to Sam. I needed a place to call my own.”

“Then why haven’t you gotten a place of your own?”

Jake shrugged. “I like my work. And I never had a reason to settle down. No wife. No family.”

“But if you had a family—”

“That’s four questions,” Jake said. He rose and said, “I’ll take Blackie out for a walk.”

He had to call Dog to make him leave Anabeth’s side. Jake was late coming in that evening, and he was quiet when he did. But as usual, he undressed, slipped into bed beside Anabeth, and pulled her into his arms.

“Jake?”

“Ummm?”

“If you had a family—”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Anabeth.”

They had both gone to sleep unsatisfied.

Anabeth hid from Jake the fact that she still felt less than her usual self. Nausea plagued her in the mornings. Though she hadn’t fainted again, she had learned not to move too fast to avoid feeling dizzy. That wasn’t always possible. She was in the corral one morning when she had to duck quickly to avoid getting kicked by a fractious mare.

Shug caught her just before she fainted.

When Anabeth recovered her senses she was lying in the big four-poster in Claire’s bedroom. The elderly foreman was sitting in a ladderback chair beside the bed.

“How you feelin’, young’un?” Shug asked.

Anabeth sat up too quickly and had to lie back down again. She put a hand to her head. “I think maybe I’m sick,” Anabeth admitted. “Lately I haven’t been feeling so well.”

Shug had his own suspicions as to what was wrong with the girl. “You been havin’ a sick stomach in the mornin’?”

“Sometimes,” Anabeth confessed.

“You been feelin’ tired?”

Anabeth grimaced. “I can barely keep my eyes open in the afternoon.”

“That’s what I figured.”

“What have I got?” Anabeth was worried because Shug wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Is it serious?”

“Nothing that won’t work itself out in about nine months,” he said with the hint of a smile.

Anabeth continued to look puzzled, and Shug swore under his breath. “Old man like me ought not to have to be tellin’ such things to a young girl like you.”

“What’s wrong with me?” Anabeth demanded.

Shug put a hand on her shoulder. “Nothin’s wrong, Kid. You’re just gonna be a momma.”

“What!”

Shug flushed a bright red. “Bein’ sick and feelin’ tired—those’re things a woman feels when she’s gonna have a baby.”

“I’m going to have Jake’s baby?”

“Looks that way to me. When you gonna tell that boy the good news?”

“I have to get used to the idea myself first.”

“Don’t wait too long,” Shug warned.

“Just promise you’ll let me be the one to tell him,” Anabeth said.

Shug scratched the bald spot at the top of his head. “All right, young’un. Just so’s you tell him soon.”

After Shug left, Anabeth smoothed a hand over her abdomen, still in awe of the older man’s revelation. A baby. Jake’s baby. Anabeth drew her knees up to her chest and hugged herself. She tried to imagine Jake’s reaction when he found out.

But she had no idea what he would think. He had refused to answer when she had asked whether a family was reason enough for him to settle down. And he liked being a Ranger. Anabeth desperately wanted Jake to want the baby. And was desperately afraid that he wouldn’t.

Since returning to Window Rock, they had made love every night. Jake had held her close and murmured love words in her ear. But he had never mentioned marriage. He had never mentioned forever. She even knew why. She had heard the story of his faithless mother and his drunken father. Jake’s fear of repeating his father’s mistakes wasn’t going to disappear because she was pregnant.

She knew how Jake would see things. A baby meant staying in one place. A baby meant settling down with
one woman. A baby meant he would have to come to terms with what had happened between his parents.

He should realize by now that I’m different from his mother. That he’s different from his father. That our relationship is different
, Anabeth thought angrily.

She was going to have to tell him about the baby. But not right away. Not until she couldn’t keep it a secret any longer. Because Anabeth was certain it was going to change everything.

Meanwhile, she was going to have to find a way to convince him that they could succeed where his parents had failed.

Jake had been so absorbed in the ranch that he hadn’t focused much on Anabeth. He knew she kept busy doing chores around the house, and that she usually had something to contribute in the discussions he had with Shug about how to make the ranch succeed. By the end of each day he was exhausted. But not too exhausted to make love to Anabeth.

It always amazed Jake that the moment Anabeth pressed her naked body to his in bed his whole being surged to life. Only lately he had been noticing changes in her. A tenderness in her breasts and a taut roundness to her belly that hadn’t been there before. He had been denying to himself what those signs meant.

Today he had caught Anabeth sleeping in the middle of the afternoon. When he had confronted Shug for working the girl too hard, the foreman had lost his temper.

“When you gonna make an honest woman of that girl and marry her?” Shug had demanded.

Jake was caught off guard. “Marry her?”