The Rustler's Bride (13 page)

“No time,” Declan yelled back. The night darkness was easing toward dawn, and he saw the brim of Sinclair’s hat dip as the older man nodded his agreement. Neither of them was prepared to waste time unsaddling one horse and transferring the saddle to another.

Sinclair slowed his pace, waiting for him to catch up. In the pouring rain, Declan could make out the pale oval of his father-in-law’s face. The wind roared and the cattle bellowed, drowning out all other sounds. Declan could tell the words Andrew Sinclair spoke as much by the movement of his lips as by hearing his voice.

“I’m going to try milling the cattle,” Sinclair was saying. “Will you help?”

“I’ve never seen it done,” Declan shouted back.

“I’ll tell you what to do.”

They rode to the head of the herd. For a moment, they hoped to calm the animals, but just before they reached the leading steers, the panic that had been brewing for some time broke loose. With a roaring bellow, the cattle surged into motion, undulating like a rolling sea. As the herd picked up speed, the animals crashed into each other. Some slipped on the muddy earth, falling over, getting churned to death beneath the hooves of the others.

It was turning into carnage.

Just as Declan knew a stampede would.

Urging on his mount, he followed Sinclair, the pair of them thundering past the surging cattle, gaining on them, reaching the steers at the head of the herd. Sinclair butted into the flank of the leading animal and attempted to turn the direction of the heard, forcing their path to veer sharply to the left.

Declan took his cue from the older man and did the same. Together, they tried to chase the racing herd into a circle. If they managed to direct panicking animals into a whirl that grew tighter and tighter, the stampeding cattle would first slow down, and then grind to a halt as they became so tightly packed they ran out of space to move.

No longer riding alongside the herd, Declan was deep in the milling sea of huge animals, the cattle jostling him from all sides.
Keep the circle tight
, flashed in his mind. He pushed the running steers into an ever decreasing circle. He’d lost his hat, although he hadn’t noticed when, and now the rain was lashing like needles into his hair, into his face, and gathering inside his collar to run down his back beneath his clothes.

The panic around him had a smell to it, a ghastly combination of mud and blood and manure, mixing with the familiar, reassuring scents of wet leather and horse.

Ahead of him, he could see Sinclair waving, right in the center of the seething mass of animals. The cattle were no longer running. Some were walking, some butting against others without advancing. A few stood still, their heads raised for the loud, plaintive bellowing that drowned out the stomping of hooves, but not the thunder that had resumed its rumble in the sky.

“What is it?” Declan shouted, rising up in the stirrups, staring into the rain.

Sinclair pointed his arm back toward the remuda. Then he turned his black stallion around and started forging his way out of the herd. Declan followed. They were almost clear of the crush when an injured steer charged toward Sinclair. The black stallion reared, came down again. His hooves slipped on a wet rock. For an instant, he hovered out of balance, and then he fell over with a slow tumble and roll.

Twenty yards away, Declan could see Sinclair get thrown from the horse. Here, on the outskirts of the milling circle, the cattle still had enough room to move, and some surged into restless motion again. Declan dug his heels into Vali’s flanks and rammed his way through the herd, butting into the steers, forging a path between them.

Sinclair had scrambled back up to his feet by the time Declan reached him. Like a matador, he was stepping nimbly, left, right, forwards, backwards, a delicate dance on the slippery ground as he attempted to dodge the butting horns and remain standing while the huge, heavy animals crashed into him from all directions.

Declan kicked his foot free from the stirrup and reached down his arm. Gripping the other man’s wrist, he helped him swing up in the saddle behind him. They didn’t speak. Sinclair pointed toward the corral with spare horses. The noise of the cattle was no longer quite so loud. Declan extricated himself from the herd, and by the remuda he waited for Sinclair to dismount.

Then Declan rode off.

Unable to face anyone.

For one moment, he had told himself it would solve everything if he simply left Sinclair with the herd. He could watch the man topple down and get churned into a mangled lump of human flesh beneath the pounding hooves. He’d have his revenge, and Victoria would never know. She would never have to face the pain of his betrayal, and he would never have to bear the cost of losing her trust.

But he hadn’t been able to do it.

Declan told himself it was because he wanted Sinclair to suffer, as Barbara and Louis Beaulieu had suffered, and that he wanted the man to know who had brought about his suffering, and the reason for it.

But he knew he was telling himself lies.

He had grown to like his father in law. Respect, even admire the man.

And that added another layer to the inner turmoil that was breaking him apart.

****

The storm had passed and the first rays of sun were peeking over the hills when Victoria saw the riders return. She had obeyed Declan’s command to remain inside the house, and was now standing on the porch where she could watch their approach.

Hank and Stan headed the procession. Swaying with exhaustion in the saddle, they lifted a hand in greeting, dismounted and left their horses with the blacksmith at the stable before vanishing into the cookhouse, drawn by the smells of coffee and frying bacon.

Declan and her father followed. Declan rode his blue roan, her father one of the cutting horses, a wiry paint pony that had no name other than Paint. In her mind, Victoria listed Flint, her father’s black stallion, as the first casualty. She had heard the stampede gather force and peter out again, and expected there would be more victims, although she prayed they would be spared the loss of human life.

Her boots splashed up mud as she hurried across the yard. Her first instinct was to throw herself in Declan’s arms. Then she noticed that her father cradled his left wrist in front of him and held the reins with his right hand. She paused in her headlong dash toward her husband. At times like this, tending to the injured must come first.

She halted by her father. “Can you get down by yourself?”

“It’s only a sprain, Ria. I fell. Flint broke a foreleg. I had to shoot him.” He spoke in short bursts, as if each word required more effort than he could spare. “That husband of yours pulled me out of the herd. Saved my life.”

Silver lining.
The proverb flashed through Victoria’s mind. Every cloud had a silver lining. Perhaps the silver lining of the stampede was that the shared danger had wiped away the animosity between her father and her husband. The two people she loved the most in the world and could not imagine living without, had finally become friends.

Declan remained silent, sitting in the saddle, his face expressionless expect for the fraught look in his eyes that seemed as dark blue as the midnight sky. She gave him space, guessing that the horror of the stampede remained with him.

“How many head did we lose?” she asked.

“Around thirty,” her father replied. “They’d already been paid for.”

Her brow furrowed. That meant they would have to buy replacements or reimburse the purchaser, whichever had been agreed at the time of sale.
It doesn’t matter
, Victoria told herself. The money was not important. She needed no new gowns, no trips to big cities. As long as she had Red Rock Ranch and the two men she loved, she could be happy.

Declan dismounted and stood beside Vali, stroking the horse’s neck, facing away from her. A tiny strand of hurt unfurled inside Victoria. Instead of turning to her for comfort, her husband was avoiding talking to her, or even looking at her.

“I’ve got coffee in the house,” she told him, her voice light as she suppressed the sense of rejection, heightened by the hours of solitary waiting. “Cookie has breakfast ready. Do you want to eat in the cookhouse with the men or come into the house?”

Her father cut in. “We’d best go into the house. We need to talk.” He took a few limping steps. Victoria made an alarmed sound but he brushed her concern away. “It’s only a bruised hip from when I hit the ground.”

Rather than stop to wash, or track mud into the parlor, they settled around the long work table in the kitchen. Victoria poured coffee. She placed steaming mugs in front of the men, and then she sat down, cradling the hot mug of coffee between her hands.

“I’m sorry, Ria. I should have told you before.” Her father took a sip, paused to pick out a grain of grit from his lips and drank another mouthful. “We’ll lose Red Rock. There’s a loan payment due the day after tomorrow and I don’t have the money.”

Disbelieving, she stared at him.

And saw the truth in his eyes.

“I...I thought you were perhaps a little short on cash.” Her words were halting as she struggled to understand. “But when...how...?”

Her father didn’t reply, merely drank his coffee, his eyes dull and shuttered.

Anger flared within Victoria, a helpless anger at having remained ignorant, of having been denied the chance to help. “That expensive school...” She shook her head, her voice gaining a bitter edge. “I hated leaving home. I love this place, always have. I could have taken a job, earned wages. I could have—”

“What could you have done, Ria?” her father cut in. “What job could you have got apart from whoring? Ranchers don’t employ female hands. Before you went away to school, you didn’t have the qualifications to teach, you are useless as a seamstress or as a cook, and most store keepers who want female clerks employ their wives and daughters. What job could you have taken?”

“I...”
None,
she thought, but she didn’t say it out loud.

“That’s why I sent you to that fancy school, Ria. To give you a safety net in case things ever got this bad. So you could be a teacher. Or a governess in a big house. I even hoped that perhaps you might marry a rich man who could give you a new life. Replace everything you’ll lose when this place is seized by the bailiffs.” Andrew Sinclair lifted his mug to point at Declan across the table. “Instead you chose to marry an outlaw, and I can’t say I mind your choice. He might not be rich, but he is a good man. I trust him to look after you.”

“I’m Declan Beaulieu from Springville, Kansas. My parents were Barbara and Louis Beaulieu, and you killed them.” The man Victoria knew as her husband spoke evenly, paused to draw a breath and continued, “That’s why you’re losing your ranch. I’ve spent the last ten years ruining you.”

Victoria gasped. The words rippled through the kitchen like pebbles falling into a pond, their impact widening with each silent second that followed. Her eyes jerked up to the face she loved. Handsome features, golden hair, now tangled and streaked with mud. Every inch of that face was familiar to her...except the narrow, icy glare in the blue eyes as her husband stared at her father and continued his unnaturally calm speech.

“You were driving a herd up through Kansas, going across farmland. Your herd stampeded. My mother had a rose garden. Remember, I mentioned it at dinner last night?” Declan flicked a glance at her, the first indication he had given since he launched into his revelation that he even remembered her presence.

A vice of steel closed around Victoria’s chest, cutting off her air.
Dear God, was it only last night my friends sat around my dinner table as I showed off my new husband, and now...and now he is turning out to be a resentful stranger...

“
My mother, the foolish woman she was, wanted to protect her rose garden,” Declan continued. “So, she went out and stood in front of it, waving her arms in the air and yelling
shoo
, thinking that a stampeding herd of beef cattle is no different from a few pesky sheep or a milk cow on the loose.” He swallowed, his throat moving in a labored rise and fall. When he continued, his voice was a hoarse whisper. “We had to scrape the ground to find enough of her to bury. I was five years old. I asked who owned the cattle, and I was told it belonged to a man named Andrew Sinclair.”

“Son, I’m sorry—”

“That’s not all,” Declan went on. “Times were tough. Draught, poor crops. My father fell deeper and deeper into debt, until one day the bank foreclosed. He couldn’t bear the thought of parting from my mother who was buried on the farm. So, he blew his brains out on the day the bank evicted him.”