Dazed by her own fitful sleep, stunned by awakening in Wolfe’s arms when she had fallen asleep slumped in a hard, drafty corner of the seat, Jessica simply stared at her husband and tried to remember where she was, and why. Finally she opened the side curtain in an effort to orient herself.
Dawn was simply another, lesser shade of darkness spreading across the sky. In all directions, the land was flat, bleak, and featureless but for the icy ruts that marked the stage road. No smoke lifted into the sky, announcing man’s presence. No fences marked off pastures. No roads led to distant houses or farms.
At first, the lack of trees and habitation fascinated Jessica, but after a time the unbroken monotony of the landscape numbed her as much as the cold wind pouring through gaps in the side curtains.
Jessica braced herself against the uncomfortable seat and fought to stay upright. Since they’d left St. Joseph, time had been a blur to her. She couldn’t remember whether she had been traveling three days or five or fifty-five. Hours and days ran together without anything to separate them, for Wolfe had insisted that they travel constantly, sleeping upright, getting down from the stage only to use the privy when the horses were changed at one of the miserable stations that dotted the long route west.
Other passengers came and went at various stops, and ate or slept in the low, rudely built stage stations. Jessica and Wolfe did not. He brought her food to her and they ate inside the stage, where they also slept. At least the past night had been spent in privacy, for no other passengers had chosen to endure frigid hours on the stage. But the result of the relentless travel was to make Jessica feel as though she had been born into the jostling, jouncing, pounding stagecoach box and would die in the same place.
She hoped it would be soon.
Wearily, Jessica stretched and rubbed her aching neck. With cold hands, she took down her hair and attempted to brush and braid it into submission. Wolfe’s stinging comments about girls who were too useless to comb their own hair had rankled deeply, as did the memory of his laughter when he had found her long braid trapped in the trunk.
By the time Jessica had managed to make two uneven braids and pin them in a coil on her head, the stagecoach began slowing. With a flurry of shouts and curses, the driver pulled the horses to a halt alongside a crude sod building that appeared, at best, uninviting. Despite that, Jessica looked forward to the stop as a break in the punishing ride.
Wolfe woke and stretched. His long, powerful arms and wide shoulders seemed to fill the interior of the stage. The necessity of completing the journey to Denver without spending a night in any of the station houses had eaten into even Wolfe’s endurance. At least Jessica assumed it had. It certainly had shortened his temper to a hair’s breadth.
Yet Wolfe showed no sign of discomfort. He climbed down from the stage with the muscular grace that was as much a part of him as his high cheekbones and blue-black eyes. Jessica both admired and resented the resilience of her husband’s body. She felt like a carpet after a spring beating.
Nonetheless, Jessica smiled cheerfully at Wolfe when he glanced her way, for she was determined not to lose her temper with him again. No man wanted to live with a shrew, and to be fair, Wolfe hadn’t even had the chance to choose his wife. It was up to Jessica to be unfailingly sweet, gentle, and pleasant to be around. Then Wolfe would be less irritable, less difficult, and more like the wonderful companion of Jessica’s memories.
When Wolfe turned and held out his hand for Jessica, she leaned on his strength in a distinctly unladylike manner as she descended stiffly.
“A lovely morning, is it not?” Jessica asked, smiling into the teeth of a cold wind.
Wolfe grunted.
“I don’t know when I’ve ever seen so many delicate shades of gray,” she continued cheerfully. “Quite enough to put a dove to shame.”
Wolfe shot Jessica a look of disbelief. “I’ve heard a cold March morning called a lot of things out here. Lovely wasn’t one of them.”
She sighed. Perhaps Wolfe would feel better after he had the wretched coffee Americans so admired. As far as she was concerned, there wasn’t enough sugarcane in the world to sweeten that evil brew.
There was no more conversation while Wolfe strode alongside Jessica to the privy’s miserable comforts. When she emerged, clutching her scent-drenched handkerchief, the cold prairie wind cut through her wool cape and dress as though they were sheerest silk. She looked longingly at the smoke streaming from the canted chimney pipe of the stage station.
The thought of being close to a fire’s warmth made Jessica shiver with pleasure. Ever since Wolfe had set her so abruptly on the far side of the coach, she had been getting steadily colder. Even worse, the sound of the wind had been gnawing at her nerves, eroding her self-control.
“Wolfe, let’s eat inside this time.”
“No.”
“But why? We’re the only passengers. Surely—”
“See those horses?” he interrupted curtly.
Jessica looked. There were indeed horses tied on the lee side of the rudimentary barn, which was more a lean-to attached to the station than a true barn.
“Those are saddle horses,” Wolfe said.
She schooled her expression into one of cheerful interest. “Why so they are. You can tell by the number of legs.”
Wolfe started to speak, gave a crack of laughter, and shook his head. How anyone who looked so worn and fragile could be so full of mischief was beyond him. He reached out and gently tugged a wisp of mahogany hair that had unraveled from Jessica’s crown of coiled braids.
“That means the station is full of men who are waiting for the stage,” Wolfe explained.
“Why? They have horses, after all.”
“They could be borrowed. In any case, they’ve been hard used. A smart man wouldn’t set out for a hundred-mile ride on a played-out horse.” Wolfe shrugged. “But even if the station were empty, I wouldn’t let you go inside. This is Cross-Eyed Joe’s place.”
“Do you know him?”
“Everyone between St. Joseph and Denver does. His station is the worst of a sorry lot, and he’s the sorriest of all. He’s a crude, blaspheming, drunken son of a bitch whose breath could back down a wolverine.”
Jessica blinked. “Then how does he hold his job?”
“He cares for horses the way a mother hen cares for her chicks. Out here, being afoot can be a death sentence. You can forgive Joe’s smell when he puts strong, eager horses in the traces.”
“Why would being afoot be so dangerous? Lord Robert never mentioned danger when we were here before.”
“Lord Robert’s ‘native guides’ fought even better than they tracked game,” Wolfe said dryly. “No Indians or outlaws were going to take on the kind of trouble twenty well-armed men could offer, no matter how tempting the prize.”
Broodingly, Wolfe looked at the unusually well-bred, obviously trail-weary horses tied in the lee of the station. Perhaps those horses belonged to honest men rather than to men whose lives depended on the ability of their horses to outrun the law.
Perhaps…but Wolfe doubted it.
Jessica’s glance followed Wolfe’s to the station house, but for a different reason. A week ago she wouldn’t have kenneled a dog inside something as disreputable as that sod house, but now it looked like a haven from the bleak landscape. When visiting the prairie with Lord Robert’s hunting expeditions, she had thought the place beautiful with its tall grass and unexpected ponds, its melodious birds and arching blue sky, and its clean, endless vistas.
At the moment, Jessica’s view of the prairie was less charitable. The landscape was in the dying grasp of winter. Mile upon mile upon mile of land lay half-frozen around her. Flat, featureless, treeless, empty of lakes or rivers, inhabited only by the long, low howl of the north wind, the prairie defined desolation; and the sound the wind made was the disbelieving cry of a soul newly damned.
Jessica had heard that sound before in her nightmares. Shuddering, she looked away from the emp
tiness and knew she had to be out the reach of the wind, if only for a few minutes.
“Wolfe, please.”
“No. It isn’t a fit place for an English lady.”
“I’m Scots,” she said automatically.
Wolfe smiled, but there was no humor in his expression. “I know. Scots or English or even French, that place still isn’t fit for a lady.”
Jessica was very tired of hearing what was and was not fit for a lady, for it seemed those rules always worked against her. On the other hand, losing her temper only caused Wolfe to bait her all the more.
“I’m an American wife,” Jessica said, smiling through her teeth, “not a foreign lady.”
“Then obey your husband. I’ll bring breakfast, if it’s fit to eat. I doubt that it will be. The food here has been passed up by skunks.”
“Nothing can be that bad.”
“This is. If you’re hungry, we’ll eat farther up the line. One of the army wives makes egg money supplying the stage stop with baked goods.”
The wind’s eerie cry raked over Jessica’s nerves. She trembled and looked at Wolfe with an unconscious plea in her blue eyes.
“Wolfe, just this once, just for a few minutes?”
“No.”
Fear and exhaustion shook Jessica. Fiercely, she fought the desire to cry. Her mother’s experience had taught Jessica that tears served no purpose except that of announcing weakness, and weakness was invariably attacked.
“Get back to the stage, your ladyship,” Wolfe said curtly. “I’ll bring you any food that’s fit to eat.”
Jessica’s spine straightened as anger swept through her, driving out fatigue and fear for a few blessed moments. “How kind of you. Tell me, what did you do for entertainment before you had me to torment, pull wings from butterflies?”
“If being an American wife instead of an English lady—”
“Scots.”
“—is such a torment,” he continued, ignoring her interruption, “then you have only to say the word and you’ll be free of this rude frontier life.”
“Bastard.”
“Without doubt, but the word I had in mind was annulment.”
The wind moaned with a chill promise of damnation that made nightmares awaken inside Jessica. When the stagecoach was moving, there was at least the endless rattle and clatter of the wheels to dull the voice of the wind. But now the stage was motionless and the traces empty while the horses were switched. Now the stage shifted and shivered beneath the cruel force of the wind.
Jessica knew if she sat in that fragile shell and heard the wind screaming, she would start screaming, too. Yet she didn’t dare show such weakness to Wolfe. If he understood how much she feared the wind, he would use it against her, driving her back to England and a marriage with the likes of Lord Gore.
Then her nightmares would be real, rather than remaining black dreams she never quite remembered upon awakening.
Without a word, Jessica picked up her skirts and walked past Wolfe, who was staring at the weary saddle horses. As he had feared, some of them bore the marks of horses used by the South in the recent war. More than one band of outlaws had begun in the embittered rabble of a lost cause. Some had come from the North as well, men who had gotten a taste for looting and killing that hadn’t gone away when the war ended.
Wish to hell Caleb or Reno was here, Wolfe thought grimly. I could use a good man at my back right now.
A motion at the edge of Wolfe’s vision caught his eye. It was Jessica’s long skirts being whipped by the wind. She was headed for the station building rather than the empty stage.
“Jessi!”
She didn’t even look back.
Wolfe began running, but it was the stage he headed for, not Jessica. He knew he had no chance of reaching her before she got to the station house. He yanked open the stagecoach’s door and leaped inside with the agility of a cat. The leather presentation case that held the matched rifle and carbine was on the seat.
Just as Jessica closed the station house door behind her, she looked back, expecting Wolfe to be on her heels. When she saw that he wasn’t, she let out a sigh of relief. The sigh turned to a soundless gasp when she turned to face the occupants of the room.
Wolfe had been right. This wasn’t a place for a lady.
It wasn’t the room’s dim, smoky interior, its filth, or its feral smell that put the place off limits for a lady. It was the intent masculine eyes measuring her the way a merchant measured gold dust, one soft bit at a time.
A man who had been sitting apart from the others stood up from the uneven table and swept off his battered hat.
“Something you need, ma’am?” he asked unhappily.
Even in the bad light Jessica recognized the stagecoach driver’s long, bushy mustache. She smiled at him with relief, not realizing how beautiful her smile might be to men who hadn’t seen a white woman for months, much less one wearing a dress that had been sewn by expert seamstresses to fit her breasts and waist like a soft blue shadow. Even wrinkled and mussed from long travel, she was like an exotic flower blooming in the midst of winter.
“I was chilled,” Jessica said softly. “I saw the smoke.”
“Come on in,” one of the other men said, standing. He gestured toward the bench where he had been sitting. “All warmed up and ready to ride, like me.”
Several of the men snickered.
The man who had spoken should have been handsome. He was tall and well-proportioned, with even teeth and regular features. His clothes were frayed but well-made. He wore a heavy split riding coat. He was the only man who was cleanshaven. His posture was as proud as any gentleman’s.
Yet there was something in the young man that made Jessica profoundly uneasy. His eyes were like the wind—colorless, empty, and cold. He was watching her with a reptilian intensity that made the skin on her arms ripple in a primitive comprehension of danger. She longed to be back in the stagecoach with Wolfe at her side.
Jessica would have turned and fled, but she sensed with great certainty that showing weakness to this man would have the effect of dangling wounded prey in front of a pack of starving hounds.
“My name’s Raleigh,” the young man said, tipping his hat in a gesture that was more familiar than polite, “but pretty gals mostly call me Lee.”
“Thank you, Mr. Raleigh,” Jessica said with clipped formality, “but it’s not necessary for you to give up your seat. Just being in out of the wind is enough for me.”
“Nonsense,” he said, coming toward Jessica. “Come over here where it’s warm.” He kicked one of the men’s feet on the way by. “Steamer, get off your butt and get the pretty English miss some grub.”
“Scots,” she said softly, forcing herself to be calm when every nerve in her body screamed for her to flee.
“What?”
“I’m Scots.”
Raleigh smiled thinly as he reached for Jessica’s arm. “Whatever you say, lassie. Now get your pretty self over here and tell me what a girl like you is doing in Cross-Eyed Joe’s place.”
The door behind Jessica opened, letting in a cold blast of wind.
Wolfe stepped inside. He looked out of place in his city clothes. In the muted light, the silver and gold inlay on the carbine shimmered like water. The effect was like that of a snake’s scales, a warning rather than a lure.
“Morning, boys,” Wolfe said.
A few surprised grunts and sidelong looks answered him. The accent and rhythm of Wolfe’s speech, unlike his clothes, were Western.
With a leisurely glance that was just short of insulting, Wolfe summed up the room. Though his eyes didn’t linger, each of the seven men had the feeling he had been marked for future reference. Only Raleigh didn’t seem to notice the danger in Wolfe’s bleak eyes.
“There’s a mean wind blowing,” Wolfe said casually.
Muttered agreement rippled through the room.
Raleigh dropped his hand to his side and stood relaxed and easy, watching Wolfe. Jes
sica saw that Raleigh’s riding coat had come open. The right side was pushed out of the way behind the six-gun that he wore on his hip.
“Well, well, take a look at that,” Raleigh said, whistling between his teeth. “That’s some fancy carbine, suh. Never seen its equal.” He held out his hand, confident the well-dressed city man wouldn’t refuse him. “Mind if I try its balance?”
“Yes.”
For a moment, Wolfe’s refusal didn’t register. When it did, a thin flush appeared on Raleigh’s cheekbones.
“You’re not very friendly, suh. Some would even say you’re insulting.”
Wolfe smiled.
Raleigh’s body became less relaxed.
“Just trying to save you some grief,” Wolfe said. “The trigger’s real touchy. Been known to go off for no better reason than being handed from one man to another. That would be a crying shame, too. Handsome young boy like you would surely leave broken hearts all up and down the trail. Be more weeping and wailing over your grave than when Lee turned over his sword at Appomattox.”
Raleigh stiffened. “Are you insulting the South?”
“No, but you are. Any man wearing a lieutenant’s bars on his coat should have better manners than to grab for a lady’s arm.” Without looking away from Raleigh’s angry face, Wolfe said, “Tom, help Cross-Eyed Joe get that fresh team in the traces.”
“Yessir,” the driver said.
He jammed on his hat and hurried out the door, careful not to get between Wolfe and the young man who had fought on the losing side of the War Between the States. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Raleigh’s hand began easing toward the butt of his six-gun.
Jessica’s breath came in with a rush.
“I see him,” Wolfe said before she could speak. He smiled at Raleigh again. “Don’t let all the gold and silver fool you, boy. Repeating weapons like this one shot Southern regiments to red ribbons. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and reach for that belt gun. I’ll have three bullets in you before you know what happened, and I’ll still have ten more left for your friends.”
Behind Raleigh, the men began edging for opposite ends of the table.
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