He stared at the old stove. Assailed by a sudden stab of memory, he recalled the aroma of freshly-baked bread filling the house. Of thick slices of buttered bread waiting for him on the blue, rose-patterned plates. And his mother’s smile and soft laughter. He saw the huge bowl she always used for mixing bread still sitting on the top shelf of the cupboard.
The clock on the wall caught his attention and he frowned. The hands were still stopped at precisely midnight. Old Silas had been a superstitious cuss. That last night Silas had stopped all the clocks in the house and veiled all the mirrors to keep, as he said, the soul of the departed from returning through them.
It had been the final, rending straw. When they were finally alone, Jesse had turned savagely upon the man. All the years of contention, all the anger that had been at the core of this household, all the frustration that Jesse had kept inside and all his grief were concentrated into that confrontation.
There were brutal words, vicious accusations. And hate. And then Jesse’s fist had smashed into Silas’ jeering face. Dead center. Recalling it was satisfying. Damned satisfying, even now after all this time.
One corner of Jesse’s mouth curved upward. There was no humor in the smile, however. It reflected only cynicism and perhaps a trace of irony. There were few good memories here. And plenty of bad ones. He drew a long, deep breath and let it out slowly.
She ought to haunt you, you sorry sonofabitch, Jesse thought as his gaze ran along the shadows near the ceiling.
From the moment of that confrontation with Silas, things were different between them. There was no more pretense. No longer any reason for it. Gathering up what little possessions remained at the house, Jesse had left. And he had not returned. Till now.
He walked past Silas’ old coat thrown haphazardly over the back of a chair. He passed the leather strap still hanging in the shadows on the hook at the back of the kitchen. He was grateful his mother had never known about the whippings. At least he had that consolation.
He stepped down into the pantry and stared out the back door. He removed his hat and with calloused fingers raked back hair as black as the shadows that surrounded him. Slowly he rubbed the back of his hand across the harsh growth of whiskers on his chin.
There was the gate out back, still hanging crookedly between two posts. Leading nowhere then. Leading nowhere now. In the darkness to his left was the place where his mother had had her garden. His hand stopped. In his mind he could see her standing out there, could almost hear her voice calling him.
He hadn’t been up to visiting the old place since his return. He hadn’t felt ready to face the empty house, preferring instead the lively distraction of saloon noise and the boisterous activities always present in such places. Tonight, however, for some reason, the silence suited him better.
Not that he welcomed the silence. He found it oppressive as hell. Maybe because everything reminded him of her and all those lost years. Long years that had begun the day they moved here and ended only when she died.
His last impressions here had been bleak. The wake. His mother’s funeral. And her burial beside the child she had lost at birth. A girl. A sister.
She’d wanted a family. More than anything else, she’d wanted that for her and even moreso for him. Jesse had no recollection of his real father. He had died when Jesse was two years old. And his mother had been too proud to go back to her family in Virginia.
After struggling so long just to survive, widowed and alone, with a child to raise, she had wanted peace in her life. By marrying Silas, what she got instead were years of criticism and complaints. Maybe she thought Silas would change. But a man like that didn’t change. Silas reveled in the blackness of his heart. He fed on it.
Helplessly, Jesse had watched his mother’s decline over the years. Silas had taken the laughter out of her. He had taken the joy out of her eyes and replaced it with sadness. There had been so much sadness there near the end. And now it seemed to permeate the old house itself, as if it stayed like a ghost, haunting the shadows and unable to leave.
Over the years, Jesse had strived to maintain the peace that she’d hoped for. It hadn’t been easy. There had been plenty of times when he yearned to thrash Silas within an inch of his life for all the hell he’d put her through.
Instead Jesse had taken his anger and his frustration out elsewhere. He had been wild and intractable in his younger years. Far more than he should have been. And then the time came when he learned that he could throw a gun faster than most men, and found, too, that a reputation for being fast with a gun was satisfying in a new way. Jesse supposed that for him, at the time, it was the closest thing to respect he had ever known from any man.
He had learned a lot since then, however. A man had hungers, both good and bad. The important thing, the thing that mattered, was how a man worked those hungers out in his mind and in his life.
The wilderness had become his haven, his escape. From the day they moved here, it had drawn him. He had spent many hours alone in its vastness. A man could lose himself there. Or find himself. He had done both.
He sighed deeply. There was no sense going over it again. The past was gone. She was gone. There were other things that needed to be taken care of. Then most likely he’d ride away from here for good.
He leaned a shoulder against the door jamb. He’d already been down to talk to John Forbes who was staying in the cabin down in the valley. He had gone down that morning and learned that the man’s wife had become sick after childbirth on their way west, which had delayed them so that by the time winter was coming on, there was no time for the man to put up any kind of suitable shelter for his family.
And Silas had offered them the cabin. But Jesse knew that when Silas had rented that cabin to the Forbes, he wasn’t being kind or charitable. He’d been taking advantage of someone else’s misfortune. Silas was about as cheap and selfish a bastard as he had ever come across. He was a greedy opportunist who never helped anyone unless there was something in it for himself.
Oh, yeah. He knew Silas. Silas couldn’t be generous to save his soul. He’d have charged his starving grandmother for a loaf of bread. Jesse had no doubt that when John Forbes worked in exchange for rent, Silas always got the better end of the deal.
Jesse liked John Forbes. The man seemed honest and hardworking. He’d just had a run of bad luck. And he was grateful for the opportunity to stay at the cabin. The Forbes had worked hard to make the place a comfortable home for their children, three of them. Yet Jesse remembered the cabin as being almost uninhabitable when he had left two years ago. Old and abandoned, it was just a place you could stop at and get out of the rain or snow on the way back here. Jesse had sheltered there many times. There were some outbuildings, but they weren’t much to speak of either. And the barn had been burned to the ground. Jesse’s eyes narrowed in the darkness. That was something else that needed to be taken care of.
He turned and walked back into the house. The cabin was small, too small for a family of five. With three kids, the Forbes needed a bigger place. Jesse glanced around the kitchen. A flicker of grim humor suddenly lifted one corner of his mouth. Sure, a woman’s touch could do wonders with this place, he thought. Hell, look what Rachel Forbes had done with that old cabin.
His eyes reflected a malicious humor. Silas would have been livid at his decision. But it had never been Silas’ decision to make. Jesse’s mother’s name was on the deed. She’d bought the land with an inheritance she’d received. It was something that had always galled Silas like a burr under a saddle. He’d connived for years to try and get her to add his name to the deed.
And damn the rent, Jesse thought as he leaned over to extinguish the lantern. John Forbes had been worried about having to move on now that Silas was dead. But Jesse would settle it tonight. He would ride over to see John Forbes and tell him that they could live here in this bigger house if they wanted.
He walked outside and closed the door behind him. Staying in the cabin, Jesse would be
closer to the Parrish ranch anyway. He didn’t know how he was going to go about getting that envelope from Hetty, but somehow he was going to have to arrange it.
He called his horse. As he swung his booted foot across the saddle, he told himself it was merely the letter that he wanted. Nothing more than that. Though there were still times when he found himself remembering that kiss. And her response. He sure hadn’t forgotten that.
As he gathered the reins, out of the darkness, a whippoorwill voiced its longing for a mate, the first he’d heard that Spring.
Chapter 5
The black mare tossed her head and stamped the ground in a display of impatience against the tight rein her rider kept on her. Hetty leaned forward and patted the shoulder of the horse. “You’d like to run some more, wouldn’t you?” she said softly while the horse tossed her head as if in agreement.
Hetty welcomed this time alone. She had barely had a moment to herself these past few days. She had been confined to the ranch house partly because of the unrelenting rain and also because she had been constantly seeing to the needs of her guests.
Tonight, after everyone else had gone to bed, she had found herself still prowling restlessly around downstairs. Unable to sleep, she went out to the front porch and watched the moon rise for a while. And then she decided that the night was too beautiful to stay inside. So she slipped out to the barn, saddled her horse and headed out for a moonlight ride.
The mare was high spirited, but she had taken to her training well and Hetty was an experienced rider. This was the kind of weather to make a horse want to run, however, and there were times when Hetty had a little trouble keeping her to a walk.
The air felt cool and damp against Hetty’s face. The moon wrought a kind of magic upon the mist which was drifting with delicate, ghostlike wisps across the trail before her. It was like being in another world, a world of darkness and mist and above all, silence.
Hetty had ridden this particular trail many times. She had never felt anything but safe riding here alone. She knew that the trail led downward and that presently it would become very steep. About a half mile ahead of her was a shallow, rocky creek, a natural border where Parrish land ended and McLaren land began.
It was so different from nights in Boston. In Boston you couldn’t see the stars. And the night sounds weren’t anything like the sounds around her now. She heard a far-off whippoorwill, a sound she had not heard for two years.
And then, suddenly, Hetty straightened, instantly alert. Out of the drifting fog had come another sound. A child’s cry.
She was certain that it had not been the cry of an animal or a bird. The sound had been distinctly human. And there had been something disturbing about the cry, as if it had been suddenly hushed. The mare had heard the cry, as well, for her ears were erect as she, too, waited for another sound to come out of the darkness.
The cry had seemed to come from the direction of the McLaren cabin. Amiline had talked about the family living down there. A family with three children. Hetty bit her lower lip, remembering Amiline also telling of the trouble they had already had with outlaws.
Her uncle had warned her of the dangers a woman faced in the wilderness alone. But it was because she was a woman that she could not ignore that cry. It was entirely possible that there was nothing wrong. She would just ride a little further to make sure. And when she had satisfied herself that everything was all right, she would head back to the ranch.
With a light touch of her heels, Hetty urged the mare forward. The trail continued to wind down towards the valley, so sharply for a while that she felt the air cool by perceptible degrees as she rode.
She listened intently for the slightest noise out in the misty darkness ahead of her, but there was no further sound aside from the breathing of the horse and the occasional crack of rock against hoof.
The trees loomed over her on both sides of the trail. The brush grew more dense. The fog thickened. The air grew fragrant with the pungent, aromatic smell of pine.
Hetty heard the sound of the creek before she saw it. With the recent rains, Hetty knew that the creek would be swollen beyond its usual banks.
Through the trees, she caught a glimpse of moonlight shimmering on the surface of the water. She reached to gather up her long skirt which had slipped down below her boot. She was tucking it securely beneath her leg when a bird, startled out of the shadows, flew into the path before her.
The frantic beating of heavy wings was so close and so unexpected that the mare bucked and reared back with her hoofs pawing the air. Caught unaware, Hetty slipped from the horse’s back to the ground below.
She hit the ground hard. Hard enough to take her breath. After several moments of disbelief, Hetty registered the fact that she was sitting on a thick bed of pine needles and that the horse was gone. She heard the rhythmic pounding of hoofs gradually fading and then disappearing altogether in the distance.
Hetty slowly got to her feet. She had skinned her palms and no doubt she would find some sore places on her body in the morning. But she wasn’t badly hurt. It wasn’t the first time she had fallen off a horse. She had had her share of tumbles during her years of riding.
She brushed the mud and the pine needles off her hands as best she could and gingerly massaged her hip through her skirt. By now, she was far from the ranch house, and she wasn’t looking forward to a long walk back in the darkness. She was closer to the McLaren cabin. She could, in fact, see the cabin through the trees and the mist. Moonlight gilded the roof, but there were no lights in any of the windows. She was still thinking about the child’s cry.
She started down the path, carefully lifting her skirts and wading across what she hoped was a shallow part of the creek. The current was strong and the water was as cold as ice, making her suck her breath in sharply as it seeped into her boots. Still holding her skirts high, she started to climb the steep slope to the cabin.
She passed the fence line of the corral and a pile of charred wood, all that remained of the barn that had once stood there. There were two other small outbuildings set back in the shadows of the trees.
Hetty stopped before the steps leading up to the porch of the cabin. A cloud drifted across the face of the moon, throwing everything into sudden darkness. The cloud passed and in an instant moonlight once again flooded the night.
She climbed the steps of the porch and froze when she noticed that the door to the cabin was partially opened. She called out, but there was no reply. She took a deep breath and reached out to push the door a little wider, wincing as the slow creak of the hinges disturbed the silence like a gunshot. She pushed again and with a final groan of protest, the door stood halfway open.
On the threshold she peered cautiously into the cabin. Moonlight was falling through a window to her right, but other than that there was only darkness. And silence.
She had never been in the cabin before. The moonlight disclosed a stone fireplace on the wall opposite her and a narrow bed to her left. Several chairs were arranged around a small table. A blanket was draped over one of the chairs. There was a ladder leading up to a loft, but there were no signs that the cabin was occupied by anyone but herself.
She took two steps forward and waited as another cloud covered the moon and threw the room into impenetrable darkness.
She was debating what she should do next when she heard a slight noise, a faint scraping on the floorboards behind her. By the time she realized she was not alone, she was gripped from behind and pulled hard against a man’s body.
She began to struggle immediately, with a suddenness that might have caught another man off guard. She managed to turn around. Her fists pounded at a wall of hard-muscled chest.
The man caught her hands in his, but Hetty was able to get one hand free. She clawed at the shadowed face above her and twisted frantically to free herself. As hard as she fought, however, the man pulled her out of the doorway and pushed her down onto the narrow bed.
Panic-stricken, Hetty struggled be
neath the man’s weight. She felt the hard pressure of a gun against her hip. The thought that her attacker might be an outlaw made her even more desperate. If she could get one hand free, she might be able to reach that gun. Or if she could reach her own pocket . . .
Jesse hadn’t meant to be so rough with her but she had stepped back so suddenly into his arms and her violent, immediate reaction to his presence had taken him by surprise. His only thought had been to keep her quiet until he could talk to her, but she was like a wildcat who had been cornered. For so slight a woman, she was definitely a handful. She had claws and she was doing her best to use them. They were running out of time, however, and right now he was going to do anything he had to do to keep her quiet.
Hetty gasped as a hand closed around both her wrists and pulled them over her head. Another hand clamped firmly over the lower part of her face. At the same time, the man threw one leg across her skirt so that her body was pinned down by the length of his body.
His face was close to her own. She felt the warmth of his breath and the harsh rasp of whiskers against her cheek. He was breathing heavily, the same as she was. He definitely had the upper hand, but she had no intention of giving up. She realized that a well-placed knee could do some damage and did her best to make that happen.
While both his hands were otherwise occupied, Jesse had to use his body to keep her immobilized beneath him. He knew just what she was trying to do and he wasn’t going to give her the chance. Even though she must have known she was losing the battle, she continued to fight him. And then, out of nowhere, her straining, writhing body and the frantic moans of her struggle were having an entirely different effect on him. He was all too aware of the feel of her. The softness and warmth beneath him were making him remember a long-ago kiss, and for a moment his thoughts had nothing at all to do with keeping her quiet.
Her long hair had come loose. He was surrounded by the intoxicating perfume of the unbound curls that seemed to be everywhere. Elderberry flowers, he thought vaguely, remembering. Those sweetly-scented tresses were caught between them. They lay in wild disarray across the pillow. They clung to the rough whiskers on his chin.
A Restless Wind Page 4