Ruby: A Western Historical Romance (Old Western Mail Order Bride Series Book 2)

by Amy Field

  This seemed to amuse him. He let go of her throat and dropped the hand on her breast to her waist, then reached up with his other hand to do the same. He took a step inward and kissed her, hard.

  “And what crime, would that be, Sweetheart?”

  She bent her head and spat contemptuously to the ground, as though she’d just had a swallow of something especially vile.

  “A crime against all decent kissers everywhere.”

  He pressed himself up against her. For the first time she grew really scared. He could rape her and she wasn’t sure that they others would hear. Her heart started to pound.

  “Listen, Katie. You are beautiful, even if you’re trying to hide it by dressing down in Europe and slumming it like some cheap tourist. And you’ve got resources and you’ve got fame, and if my bookie back in Berkeley has it right, you’ve got a real shot at the gold next winter. It would be a real shame to lose all that, just because you weren’t willing to play ball right now.”

  He moved in again, and she felt his serpentine tongue probe first her mouth, and then retract to tickle her jawline and up her ear. She let out a yelp, but she knew enough that it could just as easily have been a cry of ecstasy as a call for help.

  “Besides,” he said, pressing his hips closer. “We’ll make such a good team.”

  He kissed her again, and then his hands were all over her. He was working feverishly, trying to unbutton her blouse and feel her up all at the same time. The words came out of his mouth with equal force. He could tell she was looking over at the camp, wondering if help would come.

  “Forget the Boy Scout,” he whispered devilishly. “Not only am I better company, but I get paid for what I do. I make more in a week than he makes in a year.”

  And suddenly he was gone. It happened so fast that Katie didn’t even see the blow coming. It came from the side and landed squarely on Lance’s right ear. Instinctively she moved to cover herself, though she still had on the t-shirt she’d been wearing underneath her button down, and he’d only managed to get the belt and top of her jeans undone.

  Lance was on the ground swearing, blood pouring out of the ear that had been struck.

  “You ruptured my eardrum you country--!”

  “Shut up.”

  And he did. The words seemed actually to sting Lance more than the blow.

  There was a pause, during which Lance lifted himself from the ground and approached the larger man.

  “What did you just say to me?”

  Jacob stood his ground. “I told you to shut your filthy mouth.”

  Lance nodded and smiled slightly, tuning to his right. Then, all of a sudden, he came up with a left hook and caught Jacob squarely in the jaw. He staggered slightly but stayed on his feet, then spat blood and smiled back at his opponent.

  “Feel better, Lance?”

  “Not half as good as I’ll feel after I’ve had your ass in court.”

  “For what? Defending a victim of attempted rape?”

  The whole of the camp had come over now to see what was happening.

  “Rape? What rape? This girl has been flirting with me since she arrived. In fact, you’re the one that sat us together right at the beginning.

  Anger flashed in Jacob’s eyes, but he would not take the bait.

  Katie spoke. “I have not been coming on to you. In fact I, and half the women here, have spent our whole vacation, away from home and creeps like you, trying to figure out how to avoid you.”

  Lance looked as if he hadn’t heard a word.

  Jacob relaxed his fists and took two steps closer to Lance.

  “I told you at the beginning,” he turned to the crowd which had gathered. “I told you all,” then back to Lance. “That your safety was my highest priority. You, Sir,” he poked Lance in the chest now. “Have violated that safety. You have made this trip and this place uncomfortable: for Miss Cory, for Me, and for everyone else on this hike.” He turned back to the group. “Am I right?”

  A chorus of assent came from the crowd. Lance paled visibly.

  “And who here would be willing to testify against this scum in court?”

  Again, the crowd answered, and Lance seemed to visibly pale.

  “I’m a powerful man,” he protested. “You, you, you,” he tried feebly to poke Jacob in the chest. It did not work. “You’re just a guide.”

  “That’s true. I am ‘just a guide’. Unfortunately for you, I am no longer your guide, and you now have to find your own way back down the mountain.”

  “What?” He looked around, incredulous.

  “You’ve physically attacked me and a member of my hiking party. You’ve sexually harassed this woman,” he motioned towards Katie, who was still up against the tree, “and my own sister. And you’ve been drinking since we started, which is a danger to everyone on the trek. You pose just as real a threat as a bear or wild boar. So I’m cutting you off. You keep at least a hundred yards away from us for the rest of the trek, or I’ll be forced to fight you off like a wild animal. Do I make myself clear?”

  Lance looked back at the way he came. He seemed to realize how difficult it would be getting down without help.

  “Now listen, Jacob, I can make this a lot easier for you. You don’t get paid much. How ‘bout a nice bonus? I can…”

  “Up here you can do nothing, and nothing you can do. Your money will not buy you happiness or pardon. If you want to try and sue me for abandoning you on the mountain then you’re welcome, but I’ve got a party of twelve here willing to testify that you tried to rape another member of the crew, and then when I tried to prevent you, you physically attacked me. You’re a good lawyer, Lance, but are you that good?”

  Lance went, eyes tearing up, by himself, abandoning his pack and all. He took only the canteen around his neck and started down the trail.

  A few deep breaths later and one collective sigh of relief and Jacob was right next to Katie.

  “Catherine,” he said breathlessly. “I’m sorry that took so long. Did he hurt you? Was I…” He looked torn and unsure of how to say what he wanted. “Was I too late?”

  Katie smiled in what she hoped was a reassuring way between her tears. “No, no, Jacob, you weren’t too late. He roughed me up a bit, but I’m fine.” She reached out and stroked his jaw. “Are you okay? He hit you really hard.”

  “Ya,” Jacob agreed. “You call this, ‘sucker punch’, back home, yes?”

  Katie laughed. “Yes, yes we do.”

  “Well then,” Jacob replied. “I guess I must be a ‘sucker’ for you.”

  Katie smiled at that and together they and the rest of the party returned to the clearing for dinner and rest. And that night, though the adrenaline was still pumping swiftly through her veins, Katie rested like she hadn’t in longer than she could rightly remember.

  Chapter 4

  “Catherine,” he said, for what had to be the fiftieth time. “I am so, so, so sorry for what happened. I had my eye on that guy since first we started.” Jacob was clearly beating himself up over the incident from the day before. Of course, in Catherine’s case he was barking up the wrong tree. As far as she was concerned, he was her knight in shining armor.

  “It’s fine, Jacob, really. It’s fine. He was really starting to scare me. I’m just glad we got rid of him before something worse happens.”

  Jacob nodded sagely. “I know, I know, I just hope he gets back down the mountain safely. The trails can be treacherous after a storm.”

  Catherine was a little bit taken aback. How could he be concerned for the welfare of the man who had nearly assaulted her, who had struck him in the face.

  “I know their kind,” he went on. “They think that because they have much money they can rule the world, that everyone else should bow down before them. But truth be told, they are as insecure as young boys. They are as likely to fall down before the biggest, strongest one that they meet as any of us are them. And they are totally unequipped for life on the mountain.”

  Katie
nodded herself. “I understand, I think. It was to get away from those types of men that I came on this trip. But wouldn’t you know my luck?”

  Jacob smiled, “Materialism and superficiality are hard to avoid. But in some places you find a lot less of it. This is why, after my heart broke, I came back to the mountain. No careerism here, no real need for the things of the world. There’s no keeping up with the Joneses or following the Kardashians; there are no Joneses to keep up with, and a Kardashian may as well be from Mars. Here, we are content to walk in beauty.”

  “Like the night?” Catherine quipped before planning it. If he was going to quote Byron she as going to poke it right back. It was hard to believe that, on top of everything else, this faith-filled, romantic, sensitive man was both educated and poetic, but for all that things seemed to go wrong with Lance, they seemed to be going right with Jacob.

  “Is true,” Jacob chucked. “Though unfortunately we do not always enjoy ‘cloudless climes,’ else we wouldn’t be in this mess. Even so,” he raised his voice so that the rest of the crew could hear. “I believe that we can make up our lost time and find a village shortly after lunch. We’ll have an early day today, since you hiked so long and hard yesterday.

  They did find the village about mid-afternoon. Lunch that day had consisted, for the first time, of the protein bars, nuts, and fruit. But the lodge they were staying at promised a proper Swiss dinner, and the whole crew was desperately hungry. Most retired to their rooms early for a well-deserved nap, but Catherine and Jacob chose instead to take some tea on a veranda overlooking the nearest mountain pass.

  “So tell me,” Catherine said, once they were settled. “After Mona passed, how did you decide to come back here. Would the guards have taken you back?”

  Jacob sighed and sipped his tea. “Ya, ya, of course they would have taken me back. A sad story like this? Of course. And the guards accept widowers anyhow; the point is not being married at the time, not having a wife and children to split your time with. The pope even offered me a place in his personal bodyguard detail. But I couldn’t go back. Having known the love I did with Mona, I knew that my heart had expanded, I needed to go to a place without limits.”

  “What did you parents think?”

  “Hmmmm.” He reached up and tousled his wavy hair. “My mother, she was disappointed. She wanted me to have a successful career in the Vatican, and then maybe come back and work security for one of the big banks in Zurich. My father, though,” he took a long drink from his tea. “I think he was glad. He knew from the beginning, the mountains were in my blood, even as they were his.”

  “What do you mean?”

  My father gave his life to the mountains, and not just to the Alps. Before he opened the lodge he spent a year with the Sherpas in Nepal, learning the best techniques for leading large groups of people on a trek.”

  “Sherpas?”

  “Ya, you know, like Tenzing Norgay, who helped Hillary ascend Everest.”

  This did sound vaguely familiar. She nodded to show she was following.

  “The Sherpas are an ethnic group in Tibet and Nepal. They are mountain people, and have their own ways and customs and even religion. But they have been in the mountains for so long that they know how to navigate in ways that even experienced climbers do not. My father liked to call himself the first Swiss Sherpa. I guess that makes me the second.”

  Katie couldn’t help but giggle at that. She was suddenly treated to an image of Big Jacob dressed up like a little Nepalese mountain man. He caught her laughter and together they chuckled at the idea.

  “Interesting,” she said after the laughter had finally subsided. Eh was stunned at how broad and deep his knowledge was a far cry from the athletes and playboys she usually found herself spending time with. There were no seduction tactics here, at least as far as she could see, and certainly not nearly enough money to justify the difficulty of the work. Jacob seemed to know the world only in terms of the delight that it brought him, and at the same time with a deep awareness of the pain it can bring—both to himself and others. He was perhaps the first man whom she had ever met that she thought the words, “What you see are what you get,” were actually, literally true.

  Their tea finished they both retired to the rooms and Catherine, for her part, slept the sleep of the dead. She rose in time for what was, without any question or qualification, the single best meal she had ever had, amongst the best company she had ever known. She found herself, halfway through, wishing that she could bring Jacob home to meet her father. They could connect over the land and man stuff, and she really felt her mother wound understand her attraction to him, and maybe even approve, in a way that she’d never known before.

  Despite Jacob’s continued honesty with her, Catherine continued to hold back. She would, occasionally, refer to ice skating and such, but always in such a way that wouldn’t reveal her true identity. There was white wine at the dinner, a sweet Swiss concoction, which she may have had too much of; Jacob, on the other hand, seemed to grow both more thoughtful and more helpful with the little bit he drank. When she decided to retire for the evening he offered to see her to her room. She dared hope for a goodnight kiss, or maybe something more, but what she got was something else entirely.

  Her room was on the third floor of the building, and as they finished the top of the stairs he took her by the hand. “I want to show you something,” he said.

  He walked her to the end of the hallway, as thought he’d been here many times before, and opened a door which looked as though it went into a closet. Instead it opened up onto a wide veranda, and though the temperature was chill, she was glad to be up there. He was right; high enough up, and the stars did dance.

  “I want to point some things out to you,” he whispered in her ear. Despite the closeness of his body, she felt none of the eeriness that she had with Lance. If anything, she felt aroused.

  “Just to me?” She queried. “Aren’t you the guide for the whole group?”

  “Sssssh!” He admonished. “Don’t over-think it. Just enjoy.”

  And for the next twenty minutes he pointed out constellations and stars, telling each one’s story and making notes of pivotal roles they played in exploration, and pirating, and sea battles, and even religion.

  As he finished he sighed loudly, resting one arm on her shoulder. “The difference,” he said with some melancholy. “The difference between the world up here, and the world down there, is that they are concerned with trivialities, and I am concerned with what really matters.”

  “You’re drunk,” she said, a little too flirtatiously.

  “I am not,” he said with all sincerity. “Though St. Paul says that a little wine is good for the belly, and whatever else ails you.”

  “Does he really?”

  “Surely. First Timothy, five, twenty-three. It’s the most important verse in the book.”

  They both laughed at that. “Really,” she said, after a time. “What is your favorite verse?”

  He had to think about that for a long time.

  “That’s a little like asking someone to name their favorite child, or maybe better, their favorite grandparent. Different verses mean, and have meant, different things to me at different times. On the whole, however, I’d have to say the one which strikes me most, which I come back to again, and again, and which I think over every morning I watch the sun come over the mountains, and every night I watch the stars dance above, is Job 38.

  “What is it?”

  “Well, you know the story of Job?” She nodded hesitantly. She knew the broad strokes. “Well, poor job gets a lot handed to him: his crops fail, his kids die, his fortune is ruined, is body racked with sores. His wife and his closest friends are convinced he’s sinned secretly to deserve it, and so they encourage him to lie to God and ask forgiveness for something he hasn’t done. He won’t, but eventually God does come to his aid. When finally Job has reached his limit he calls out and asks why all this has happened, and Job 38 is God’s
response.

  “What does he say?”

  “Job or God?”

  “God, silly.”

  “Right, well he begins with a kind of modified, “How dare you?” Like he asks Job, “Where you were you when I made the sky? When I set the seas in their courses and the creatures on the land? Where were you when I set the stars in the sky and ordered their arrangement. Where were you…”

  “And this gives you comfort?” Catherine wasn’t sure she was following.

  “Well, sure. Where was I, or my father, or my father’s father when he raised the alps? When he set these snow-capped beauties in their places? Where were we when the stars were set in the sky? And what does all of this mean for me, and for you? That gives me the greatest comfort of all.”

  Catherine thought on that for a while. “Why do you think I’m here, Jacob?” She asked it quietly, so as not to disturb their silence.

  He pulled her close against himself and smelled her hair. “I don’t know, Catherine,” he started. “But I do know you’re here to find out the next step, the next move for your life and that you’ve ready for something different than you’ve know before. How is it that we make decisions normally? We add up pros and cons and then try to balance the list. But at the end of the day, it all comes down to what we think is right—it all comes down to our conscience and what it will permit us to do, and what it will demand of us to do likewise.”

  Katie thought about what he said. That was how skating had worked for her. When she first tried on skates at her brother’s practice all those years ago, she just knew she liked skating. It was only after the fact that it became “exercise” or “a sport” or “a source of revenue and a chance to go to college.

  “So how do you know what you want?” Katie wanted so desperately to sound the question and not sound needy. It didn’t work.

  “I have wondered the same thing; many, many times over,” he admitted. “The best I can come up with is that there is no easy answer.” He pressed his lips against the top of her head. She leaned back perfectly, finding the hollow in his chest for her head. “I think the only thing we can honestly do is fill our lives with things we know are good: faith, family, home, honest work. The stars, the fresh snow, a good meal, the delight of a new friendship—these are the things I think shape us, help us know what we ought to do.