The Rustler's Bride (14 page)

Victoria watched, her eyes gritty with shock, as Declan got up and stood behind the chair he had risen from. His hands curled over the back of the seat, knuckles white at the pressure of his grip. “The bank said they owned the farm, so my father would have to be buried in the cemetery by the church. That night, I fetched his body from the undertaker, slung it across a horse’s back, and took it to the farm where I buried him beside my mother.”

The chair clattered against the floor as Declan pushed it away. “I was fifteen. For the next three years, I looked for you, planned how to ruin you. When I found you, I put together a band of orphans and misfits who didn’t care if they lived or died. For ten years, I’ve been stealing your cattle. I’ve never stolen from anyone else.”

“Son, you’re—”

“Three years ago, your water dried. It was because I had dammed the river upstream. Two years ago, one of your buyers pulled out. It was because I offered him a better deal.” Declan gave a small, cruel laugh. “And I was selling him
your
cattle, with a new brand burned on top of your triple-R. I ruined you, because I wanted you to suffer as my father did. I wanted you to be driven from the land where you have buried your wife, just like my father was driven from the land where he had buried my mother.”

Victoria watched in stunned fascination as Declan edged out of the room, moving with backward steps, his gaze riveted on Andrew Sinclair. Bits of drying mud scattered from Declan’s clothing to the floor. When he stood framed by the entrance, he shifted his focus to her. She met his gaze. His eyes were as blue as always, his hair as golden, his features as handsome, but now all those belonged to a hostile stranger.

His voice did not soften as he addressed his words to her. “You have to decide if you want to stay with your father or ride out with me. I’ll be leaving in one hour.”

And then he turned and walked out of the room.

Chapter Nine

Seconds ticked by with excruciating lack of speed, slowly turning into minutes as Declan lay on the narrow brass bed, arms crossed behind his head, his eyes trained on the little spider that seemed to spend its whole life crawling across the whitewashed ceiling.

An hour. He could not bear the waiting, could not bear not knowing if Victoria would come with him or stay with her father. He should have given her only ten minutes, to shorten the waiting. No, he should have given her a week. For, if Victoria refused to leave with him, a longer waiting period would at least have given him a few more days with her.

He jumped up, unraveled the bedroll he’d already packed and took out the small framed picture of his parents on their wedding day. Gently, he smoothed one fingertip across the mottled glass as he studied their shining faces.

“
Pa, I did it,”
he whispered.

But the words brought him no solace.

Nothing did.

It was meant to be the hour of his triumph.

It was meant to be the culmination of half a lifetime of hate.

It was meant to be his reward for ten years of hard work, of taking crazy risks.

So, why did he feel so numb inside? Why, instead of satisfaction, did the hollow ache of loss throb somewhere in the vicinity of his heart? Why did the future open up as a bleak, empty void, with no joy, no peace, nothing to look forward to?

He knew the hour wasn’t up yet, but he could bear the waiting no longer. Bedroll gathered beneath one arm, his damp, dirt-encrusted clothing chafing against his skin, he set off to find Victoria. As he climbed up the stairs toward her bedroom, he realized that his whole body was shaking. With exhaustion. With fear.

He knocked on her door. “Victoria?” He’d never knocked before, not even when he entered at night. Already, he was letting go of her. No longer expecting his wife to be his.

He heard the softly spoken words. “It’s open.”

So, she was in her room. Waiting. For an instant, Declan let himself dream. He pictured her packing a saddlebag, already dressed to ride.
Of course I’ll come with you
, she’d say.
You are my husband, and I love you.
Or, she’d be standing by the window, dressed in a long white nightgown, the rising sun gilding her silhouette. She’d open her arms to him and say,
I can’t leave my father, but stay. Stay just one more day, love me one more time
.

His fingers closed around the brass knob, the metal cold and hard beneath his palm as he waited one more second, so he could hold on to the dream a moment longer. Then he turned the knob, stepped into the room, and faced reality.

Victoria
was
sitting by the window. But not dressed in a nightgown. She wore her working clothes and muddy boots, and she was statue-still, her gaze fastened on the pink clouds that streaked the eastern sky. Her dark hair was loose, cascading down her back.

Declan walked closer, his footsteps shattering the silence.

She didn’t turn.

“I’m leaving,” he told her. “Will you say goodbye?”

“Goodbye.”

“Victoria, I...” His throat closed. No words seemed adequate to express what he felt, no words formed in his mouth to beg her to understand and forgive him. In that moment, everything he’d done crashed like a landslide over him. “You should have let me hang,” he said, and believed it to be true.

“Yes,” she replied. “Perhaps I should have.”

Finally, she turned around. Her eyes were rimmed with red, her skin puffed. Silent tears trailed down her face. It occurred to Declan that he had never seen her cry since that day five years ago when he had rescued her from being raped. He had seen her misty-eyed, but never broken down to weeping. And that drove home the depth of her anguish now.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Tell me one thing,” she asked. “Was I part of your revenge plan? Did you come to my bed so you could spoil my chances of marrying one my rich suitors, who might have lent my father the money to save the ranch?”

“No. Victoria, I...”
I love you.
He longed to say it, but a belated sense of decency and restraint locked the words inside him. No use making excuses now. Better if she learned to hate him. It would serve her well to bury all the good memories, to remember him as a worthless criminal who had been nothing but a misguided, youthful indiscretion.

“You could still marry one of those men. The English earl, or the railroad magnate, or the senator, whatever his name is.” Even as he spoke, a bitter brew of jealousy churned in his gut. “I haven’t given you a year’s labor, so the marriage ordinance is void. They’ll hang me if I’m caught. You can claim to be a widow to explain...” He didn’t finish the sentence.
To explain why you are no longer untouched.

He saw Victoria’s chest rise and fall as she took a deep breath. A sneer flickered across her face as she pushed aside her grief and let the anger flood in. Suddenly she sounded very much like her impervious father. “Let me tell you this,” she said, “I’d never have married any of those men, even if my plan to rescue you had failed and they’d hung you while I watched. This is my home. I have never wanted to live anywhere else. We might lose Red Rock now, but I’ll find a way to buy it back. One day, the ranch will be mine again, and I hope and pray that my father will be alive to see that day.” She jerked up her chin, like a queen dismissing an unworthy subject. “Goodbye, Declan. Ride away fast and far, for I will take no pleasure in seeing you swing at the end of a rope.”

That hollow feeling inside Declan expanded until it grew to an ache that seemed to break his heart apart, that seemed to shatter the whole of him. He feared the pain would never go away, as long as he lived.

“What will you do?” he asked.

“My father listed the options, I believe. Whore. Housemaid. School teacher. I’m sure one of those occupations will suit.” She gave him a hard glare.
She is going to cut me out of her life and her thoughts,
Declan realized, and although he knew it was the best for her, he couldn’t help but feel a terrible sense of emptiness.

“Please, don’t, Victoria...”

“What,” she snapped. “Don’t throw my life away? Too late. I’ve already done that, as my father pointed out, on a worthless outlaw.” She turned back to face the window and lowered her voice, defeat and sadness replacing the hard edge of anger.

“Goodbye, Declan.”

He couldn’t say it, couldn’t manage the words to seal their parting. Declan eased out of the room. He didn’t seek out her father for any final confrontation but went out to the stable, saddled Vali, tied on his bedroll, fitted his boot in the stirrup and swung up.

As he rode out of the yard, urging the blue roan into a gallop, he knew that his premonition had been right. They would each suffer in their own way, but his suffering would be the greatest, because he knew that he had brought it upon himself.

****

The ground around Declan steamed in the morning sun, the humidity of last night’s storm evaporating. Above him, the leafy canopy of the hanging oak gave him shade. He sat on the bare earth, his back against the rough bark of the tree.

This was where his days would have ended if Victoria hadn’t stepped forward to save him.
I will take no pleasure in seeing you swing at the end of a rope,
she had told him, even after learning that he had betrayed her.

His thoughts spun back into the past, all the way to his boyhood. To the death of his mother, to the suicide of his father. And the truth dawned upon him—a new kind of truth. He’d been five years old when his mother died, fifteen when he buried his father. He had taken the helpless grief and anger of a child, and nursed those emotions over the years, letting them grow and expand. Never once had he pause to reconsider the past through the eyes of an adult. If he had, he might have learned to accept that disasters happen. That people get hurt and die. Like a child, he had clung to the idea that the pain would go away if someone was held responsible. If someone was made to pay.

It didn’t work like that.

Making someone pay only added to the sum of suffering. Andrew Sinclair might be ruined, but Barbara and Louis Beaulieu remained just as dead as they had been yesterday. And their only child, Declan Beaulieu, felt no better than he had before he completed his quest to avenge their deaths.

I love this place,
Victoria had said.
I have never wanted to live anywhere else.
It was too late to change what he had done, too late to beg her to understand, but perhaps he could give her the home she loved.

Declan got to his feet, vaulted on his horse and rode to the small, sheltered box canyon where he had set up a hiding place during his years of stealing Andrew Sinclair’s cattle. He used the dead branch from a fallen tree to lever aside a knee-high rock and dug with his bare hands in the earth until he found a heavy leather pouch. After brushing off the dirt and chasing away a panicky centipede—before he knew Victoria he would have crushed the creature—Declan untied the string on top of the pouch and slipped one hand inside, burying his fingers into the stash of gold coins.

Two thousand dollars. He knew the amount without counting. He’d planned to divide it between the ranch employees, but if Mrs. Flynn and the men kept their jobs there would be no need to worry about them. He found a piece of paper and a stubby pencil in his saddlebags and wrote a letter. Then he got on his horse and rode back to Red Rock Ranch.

He’d planned to slip in and out unnoticed, but when he got closer, he decided to ride in and say his piece. He would stay long enough to take his farewell from the ranch hands, and Cookie, and Abe at the forge, and Mrs. Flynn. Only now did he understand that in the last few weeks he had found a home, friends, family. With a small humorless laugh he accepted that he had turned out to be the serpent in his own Eden—the one who ruined it all.

He located Andrew Sinclair in his study. Still unwashed, clothes streaked with mud, the older man crouched on the ground, surrounded by possessions stacked into haphazard piles. String tags were attached to the paintings, books and rugs and vases and silver bowls, each indicating the price for which he hoped to sell the item.

“Come back to gloat?” Sinclair asked.

“Came to give you this.” Declan tossed the leather pouch on the desk.

Sinclair rose and picked up the pouch without opening it. He weighed it in his palm.

“Two thousand dollars,” Declan told him. “It won’t pay off your mortgage, but it will meet this week’s repayment and the next one due in six months’ time, and the one after that.”

The gray eyes narrowed. “How do you know?”

“Bribed Howard Peterson at the bank.”

The corners of Sinclair’s hard mouth twisted into a wry smile. “So that’s why you showed no concern when Rebecca Eastman warned you about her father’s dishonest clerk. You already knew, and it was working to your benefit.”

Declan nodded, a silent confirmation.

“Why?” Sinclair asked, lifting the bag of coins. “Why are you offering this to me?”

“I changed my mind. I don’t want Victoria to lose the home she loves.”

The older man stared at Declan, as if uncertain how to respond. Then he propped a hip on the corner of the desk and exhaled a sigh. “I guess Victoria never got around to telling you the story of how I met her mother?”

Declan shook his head. A premonition unfurled inside him. Something was about to be revealed that would shift his world on its axis, that would paint everything he knew in a different color. He didn’t want to hear, but Andrew Sinclair’s low, calm voice acted like a snare that trapped him, forcing him to listen.

“My wife, Ellen, was a farmer’s daughter in Kansas. I had a spread much farther south, in the Texas hill country. In 1855, when I drove my herd through, a few steers broke loose and ran through her cabbage patch, or whatever vegetables she was growing. I compensated her for the damage. But I could never forget her tearstained face as she stood there, watching those little green plants trampled to the earth. On my way back south I stopped by, and it became two days, and then it became a week. When I finally went back to my spread, I had a wife with me.”

Sinclair picked up the bag of coins and banged it against the desktop. “I did my last cattle drive three years later, in 1858.” He paused and shook his head. “I hated being away from my wife, and I was getting to hate driving cattle across what had become farming land. Sodbusters wanted to fence their fields and ranchers wanted open range, and it was escalating into a war. Married to a sodbuster’s daughter, I wanted no part of it.”