“So,” Jake said, reaching the kitchen at last, pushing open the swinging door, “you’re a workin’ man. Where did you live?” He stepped into the pantry, came out with a wheel of cheese and a loaf of bread.
Henry’s eyes widened at the sight of so much food, and he gulped visibly. Jake wasn’t so sure, but he thought he’d heard the kid’s stomach rumble. “I mostly just slept at the livery. In the hayloft. Mandy didn’t really have no place to put me.”
“I don’t suppose she did,” Jake murmured. When he’d met Amanda several years back in Denver, he’d mistaken her for an angel, and he’d fallen in love with her. She’d been raised like an alley cat, as it turned out, though she seemed determined to change, and Jake couldn’t rightly fault a person for wanting to rise above a questionable past. After all, it wasn’t her fault, her being born to a saloon girl, never knowing her father’s name.
One fine day, though, she’d hauled off and shot him in the shoulder with his own derringer, then cleaned out his private safe for good measure. Any sensible person would have thought she couldn’t possibly stoop any lower than to try and kill the man she claimed to adore—but she had. Later, he’d learned that she had a husband tucked away somewhere, and she’d had some scuffles with the law, too.
Now, faced with his son, he knew that she’d robbed him of far more than the contents of his wallet and wall safe.
Damn her, she’d given birth to a child, unquestionably his child, and never told him the boy existed. He’d have taken the boy gladly, raised him as best he could, if only he’d known. Just then, if he could have gotten his hands on her throat—well, it didn’t bear thinking about, what he might have done.
Belatedly, and with no little awkwardness, he pumped water and washed his hands at the iron sink, then set to slicing the bread and cheese. There was no milk, so he filled a glass with water from the pump. “Wash up over there at the sink, and have a chair,” he said with a nod toward the table.
Henry obeyed and was soon seated, trying his best not to shove cheese and bread into his mouth with both hands. Jake felt a surge of sorrow for all the boy had done without, followed by a jolt of anger toward Amanda that was as sharp and pure as the thin air on a mountaintop.
He asked himself what in hell he was going to do now and was stuck for an answer. He couldn’t let his business fold like a house of cards and walk away, not with a son to take care of. No, for Henry’s sake and his own, he had to turn things around. Somehow.
He heard the echo of Malcolm’s voice. You could marry her.
Marry Skye McQuarry? Not if his only other choice for a bride was a whore from Diamond Lil’s. All the same, the idea of taking Skye to wife, and hence to his bed, sent an aching charge through his system to spark friction in every nerve ending he possessed. He imagined her soft skin, unveiled to him, imagined the scent of her hair …
Damnation. If he got down on bended knee, she wouldn’t have him. And even if she agreed to a wedding, on some reckless impulse, she was sure to drive him insane from the time he said “I do” to the day after his funeral. No doubt, he’d have much the same effect on her.
He sighed.
“Are you sorry I came here?” Henry asked, his second hefty slice of buttered bread poised between his mouth and the tabletop. “ ’Cause I can light out any time you say. Or maybe you have chores I could do to earn my keep—”
Jake crossed the room and ruffled the boy’s hair with one hand. He was not a sentimental man, but in that moment, he very nearly scooped Henry up into his arms and embraced him. “Listen,” he said quietly. “You’ll have chores to do—every kid ought to help out—but you don’t have to sing for your supper around here, understand? This is your home.”
Henry looked bewildered. “It’s a good thing I don’t have to sing,” he said. “I sound ’bout like a frog when I try.”
Jake laughed, and he realized it was the first time in many, many months. “You come by that honestly. I can’t sing, either.” He drew back a chair and sat down across from his son. His son. “You been using your mother’s last name or mine?”
“I ain’t required no last name, up to now,” Henry replied. He’d reduced a large serving of yellow cheese to crumbs, and now he was looking at the remainder with an expression of longing. “Just Henry was all anybody needed to say. I knew they was talkin’ to me.”
Jake gave the boy more cheese. He’d have to lay in milk, and some eggs, too, among other things. Up to now, he’d taken most of his meals over at Diamond Lil’s, but that would have to change. “I’d be real honored,” he said, “if you’d call yourself Henry Vigil.”
Henry blinked. “Really?”
Jake smiled, touched so deeply that it was a moment before he trusted himself to speak. “Really,” he said.
Dawn had not yet spilled over the eastern mountains when Skye tumbled out of bed, got herself dressed in riding clothes, and headed for the barn, where she first fed all the animals, then saddled Bridget’s mare, Sis. Riding astride, with a coil of rope secured to the saddle horn, she turned the little mare toward the high country, where she’d last seen the bay stallion. It was probably too much to hope that she would catch him, especially riding Sis, but she meant to try all the same.
The sun was full up by the time she found the stallion, and then it was his shrill cries of terror that drew her. She found him cornered in a canyon by a pack of wolves, and there she was, without a shotgun or even a derringer to scare the critters off with.
“Git!” she shouted to the wolves, and spurred Sis on with the heels of her boots. Sis was having none of it; she wheeled and tried to bolt in the other direction. Skye promptly brought her around again, keeping a short rein, lest the mare take the bit in her teeth and hightail it for the ranch.
Sis put up an argument and, with unaccustomed spirit, flung out both hind legs in a fairly respectable buck, landing in a spin. Skye sailed through the air and struck the ground with a bruising impact that stole her breath and made her see sparks of silver light. By the time she sat up, blinking the world back into view, and realized what a fix she’d gotten herself into, Sis was halfway home, and the wolves, all five of them, were taking more interest in her than in the stallion.
“Sweet Zeus,” she swore, although she’d promised Bridget she’d break the habit of cussing, and she’d really tried, too. After gathering a rock in each hand, she scrabbled to her feet and faced her future, which did not look at all lengthy just then. Granddaddy’s hat fell backward off her head, and her hair tumbled free of the few pins that held it. “You go on,” she bluffed as the lead male, a scrawny, burr-covered beast with a grubby gray and white pelt, ambled toward her. “Git!”
The stallion had stopped carrying on and was awaiting his chance to make a run for it. The rest of the wolves, noting the leader’s interest in this strange two-legged creature, had turned their massive heads, panting, to assess her.
Skye flung one of her precious rocks 8212;they’d be on her before she could bend down to replace it with another—and took a stumbling step backward. “Help,” she squeaked in a tiny voice, more because that was all she could think of than out of any expectation of rescue. “Somebody, help.”
All the wolves were advancing toward her now, and, behind them, the bay stallion pawed the ground, ready to bolt for the hills but wisely biding his time, lest the pack give chase. With him would go all hope of capture, but Skye figured that didn’t matter much anyhow, since she was about to be good and dead. She took another step back, and threw the second and last rock.
The crack of a rifle shot came in the next instant and startled her every bit as much as it did the wolves and the stallion. That was some rock, she thought for a portion of a moment, before the animals scattered and headed for the hills. Two more bursts of gunfire pursued them, for good measure. If the fellow firing that rifle was really trying to hit one of them, though, he was a poor shot, for the bullets pinged off the rocks and splintered a patch of bark off a tree, and that was all.
>
Skye whirled, one hand raised to shade her eyes, and saw Jake Vigil, of all people, mounted on his own impressive stallion. Without so much as a howdy-do, he went after the bay, rope in hand, and lassoed him in one throw.
Skye was livid, forgetting all about the wolf pack. She’d tracked that horse for months, and she wasn’t about to let anyone take him from her, now or ever.
“That,” she said when she was within shouting distance, “is my horse.”
Jake was standing on the ground by then, holding his own against the stallion, still straining to break free and run. “I don’t see your brand on him anywhere, Miss McQuarry. And by the way, you’re welcome.”
Skye’s face went crimson, she could feel it, and her heart was beating hard enough to stampede right out of her chest. She told herself it was because of the wolves and because of the stallion, but she knew, deep down, that neither had much to do with her present distress. “What are you doing out here?” she demanded. “This is my land.”
“This is Bridget’s land,” Jake corrected her calmly, keeping the lead rope taut as the stallion began to settle down a little. “As for what I was doing, that should be obvious. I was tracking this stallion. In point of fact, I’ve been after him since he was a yearling—I believe I told you that once.”
Skye found her leather hat, plunked it on her head, and promptly hurled it to the ground again. Then she stomped on it with one foot, just for good measure, and Jake Vigil did the worst thing he possibly could have at that particular moment.
He threw back his handsome head and hooted with delight.
“Don’t mention it,” he said, as if she’d spoken, when at last he’d recovered himself, though there was laughter still lurking in his eyes. “Any time I can save your hide again, you just let me know.”
Chapter
3
S he’d made a perfect fool of herself, throwing her hat down like that, mashing the crown with one heel, but she didn’t care. Damn Jake Vigil, anyhow, and damn whatever he thought of her as well, be it good or ill. She hadn’t gone through all this, and nearly died, just so he could go merrily off with her horse.“If you don’t give me that animal right now, I’ll have you arrested,” she warned.
The stallion was frightened; no doubt, his nostrils were still full of the scent of wolf, and now he had a rope around his neck into the bargain. To him, one foe surely seemed as deadly as the other.
Jake worked deftly, gently, and spoke in a quiet voice as he calmed the poor beast. He didn’t reply to Skye’s challenge, which made her want to squash her hat into the dirt all over again.
“I can do it, too,” she said. “My cousin is married to the marshal, you know.”
He looked at her with an expression she couldn’t read. He might have been seething, he might still have been laughing at her. Either one would be unacceptable. “Yes,” he said evenly. “I know.”
Skye regretted making such a silly statement and would have called it back if she could; surely, reminding Jake of the man Christy had married instead of him wouldn’t help her case any. Besides, Zachary wasn’t about to put a man in jail on her say-so, not for catching a wild horse before she did and refusing to hand it over, anyhow. In fact, she knew exactly what he’d say: Possession is nine-tenths of the law . Well, she darned well would have possessed that horse if it hadn’t been for Jake Vigil’s interference.
She bent down, snatched up her hat, and tried to salvage it by pushing at the inside of the crown with one fist. It was all she had left of her granddaddy, that old hat, and she felt almost as though she had desecrated something sacred by losing her temper the way she had.
“You ought to throw that thing away,” Jake said in a tone of voice she’d never heard him use before. “The hat, I mean. It’s not becoming—hides your hair.”
His words gave Skye a sweet wrench; she prayed she wouldn’t blush. He liked her hair? And what kind of silly thought was that, when the man was out-and-out stealing a stallion she’d had her eye on for weeks?
He ran a hand lightly down the length of the stallion’s muzzle, but he was looking at Skye in an assessing way that made her deliciously uncomfortable and mad as a bee-stung grizzly with a toothache. “There is one way to settle our many differences, once and for all,” he mused.
“I imagine there are several,” Skye retorted. She tried to speak crisply, but her heart was skittering with anticipation and high dudgeon and profound relief that she hadn’t tripped over her own tongue. Lord, but her emotions were so tangled, she didn’t even hope to sort them out.
“A horse race,” he said.
She stared at him. “A horse race?”
He grinned. “Yes. If you can beat me, riding this stallion,” he said, indicating the bay, “he’s all yours, and so is all the lumber you want for the house.”
Skye could barely breathe. She hadn’t lost a horse race since she was eight years old, and that time she’d been defeated by her father, one of the best riders in Virginia. “And if I lose?”
“Ah, if you lose,” he said, pausing to ponder the prospect. It made him smile. “If you lose, Miss McQuarry, you will marry me.”
Her mouth dropped open, and she closed it with an effort. Her pulse thrummed in her ears, and the whole universe contracted to a space barely large enough to contain the two of them. She even felt dizzy. The nerve of the man. The very gall. She wanted to kiss him and kick him, both at once.
For some inexplicable reason, though, she didn’t do either. He’d ambushed her tongue, and it only then broke free. “You—you want to m-marry me?” she blurted, and immediately longed for death. “Why?”
He drew closer, still holding the lead line with one hand, and drew an index finger down the length of her nose. “Yes,” he said. “I believe I do want to marry you, and I don’t have the first idea why.”
She was utterly confused. What was she doing, standing here letting him say such forward things? Why didn’t she get a gun and shoot him? Why didn’t she just say, straight out, that she would have married him anyway, right or wrong, win or lose, if he just asked her?
Because she was a McQuarry, that was why. She had more than the normal allotment of pride, even when that went against her best interests, but knowing this singular truth about herself didn’t help overmuch. She was paralyzed, and her tongue felt thick in her mouth.
“Suppose I told you I’ve been lonely for a long time?” he asked quietly. Seriously. “That I’m tired of living by myself? Suppose I said I wanted a family?”
She folded her arms and waited. It was too good to be true, all of it. There had to be something more—and there was. Her trees. He wants my timber. She would have laid into him, if she’d been able to speak.
“Yesterday, a little boy turned up, quite literally on my doorstep,” Jake said with a sigh. “Well, at the mill, anyway. Turns out, he’s mine. His name is Henry, though I think Hank suits him better.”
Skye recalled the boy she’d glimpsed the day before, perched in the box of a freight wagon, and found her voice at last. She had a deep affinity for children, especially little lost boys like Henry. “It ‘turns out’ he’s yours? Didn’t you know about him?”
Jake shook his head. “I wish I had. Things might have been different, for him and for me.”
“You’d have stayed with his mother?”
“I didn’t leave his mother,” Jake said. “She left me. After shooting me in the shoulder with my own derringer and robbing me of every dime I had. I never saw her again.”
“She sent the boy to you.” Skye felt her brow crumple with confusion and concern. She was still bothered about the horse and the timber, but she’d pushed those concerns to the back of her mind for the moment.
Jake nodded. “From Virginia City.”
She stared at him, confounded and oddly stung. It shouldn’t have troubled her to hear that there had been other women in Jake’s life, before Christy—of course there had—but it did. Oh, it did. “You were in love with a woman who s
hot you? What’s wrong with you?”
He laughed, though there was a somber shadow in his eyes. “She shot me . I reckon the question ought to be ‘What’s wrong with her?’ The answer is, ‘One hell of a lot.’ She’s crazy, for one thing, and she’s a liar, for another. Of course, she’s a thief, too. But she’s also beautiful and clever as all get-out, and she had me buffaloed, I guess. Until it was too late, anyhow.”
Skye pushed her hair back from her face with a nervous gesture of one palm. “Damnation, I don’t care about her.”
“Then why did you ask?”
She wanted to fly at him; the trouble was, she didn’t know what she’d do when she got there—claw his eyes right out of his head, or fling her arms around his neck and hold on for dear life. In the end, she decided to stay put.
“I didn’t ask about her. I asked about you.” She paused, drew a deep breath, and let it out again. “You want me to marry you because your son needs a mother.”
“Something like that.”
“Would I have my own room?”
“No,” he said without hesitation. “I told you—I want a family, and that requires a real wife. I’m not interested in playing house.”
Skye turned away, hoping she’d been quick enough to hide the color burning in her cheeks. “All this happens if I lose the horse race,” she said, to clarify the matter a little. She still felt dazed. Just that morning, she’d gotten out of bed without a hope in Hades of marrying Jake Vigil, and now here he was, proposing to her. She would have been overjoyed, if it weren’t for one thing—the union was merely a business arrangement to him; he hadn’t mentioned love. He wanted her for the plainest and most practical of reasons, and he hadn’t even bothered to pretend otherwise.
“Yes,” he agreed, and when she looked again, her attention drawn by the familiar creak of leather, she saw that he’d mounted his horse, keeping the bay on a long lead. It wasn’t a good idea to let two stallions get into close proximity; they tended to do battle, especially when the scent of wolf still lingered.
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