by Jillian Hart
“N-no—”
The heel of his free hand slammed against the side of her jaw. Pain exploded through her teeth and cheekbone and ratcheted through her head. She couldn’t drag in air, she couldn’t think, all she could see was his darkly glittering eyes and the triumph in them.
He outweighed her by a good hundred pounds. She tried to launch off the door and he laughed, hauling her along the wall, the bumps of her spine colliding with the wood as he dragged her to the corner where she was trapped.
Trapped. She could smell his excitement. Feel the trembling rise and fall of his quick breathing. This couldn’t be happening, she couldn’t let this happen. She had to stop him, she had to.
But he was too strong. Her head reeled from his blow and blood trickled from inside her mouth. She couldn’t swallow, couldn’t breathe, her chest swelling up, her vision was swimming, she was vaguely aware of the jangle of a belt buckle loosening—
No! The single word tore through her entire being from the bottom of her soul. Think! She needed a weapon. If she could just reach a little farther along the wall—
Aware of a cool draft on her knees and thighs and the thick taste of panic on her tongue, she tried to think. Betsy’s story flashed into her thoughts, but she was off balance. She couldn’t shift her weight to get in a good kick to his shin. But she could inch her fingertips along the wall as far as she could reach.
Please, let there be something within my reach. Wait— The smoothness of a leather driving glove collided with her searching fingers. A glove? No good.
She kept searching, stretching nearly as far as her arm could go as she heard the pop of a trouser button ping off the wall and roll along the hard-packed ground.
Please, let there be a hoof pick. Or a currycomb— Her middle finger jammed into something cold. Metal slid beneath her fingernail. She bit her lip, moaning at the pain shooting beneath the quick. She reached again—
“You and I can strike a deal, Rayna.” Dayton caught her hand and his grip bruised deep as he twisted her wrist, torquing her arm back against the door. “But if you hit me with that currycomb, then you’ll have to pay for it. I’m not going to force you. No, just give you a taste of what’s waiting for you out there in the world.”
“Stop it, Clay. I want you to leave.”
“When I’m good and ready. When you and I come to an understanding. I’ll let you keep your house and your pretty things. If you are willing to pay me in rent and in other things.” He ground closer until she could feel that part of him hard against her hip. “A widow gets lonely in her bed without a man to satisfy her. I’d be helping you out. Your needs satisfied and a roof over your pretty head. Think about it. I’d be real good to you.”
Bile bubbled upward. What she would give to have gotten hold of that currycomb. She’d like to whack him where he was most vulnerable and watch him writhe, but with the pain bursting through the ball of her shoulder joint and streaking down her arm, she didn’t dare move.
If he broke her arm, then she’d never be able to work for a living. Then she couldn’t keep her boys and they’d be made to work for strangers.
“Let me go, Clay.”
“We have an arrangement?” He crooked one bushy brow, his gaze raking down her throat to stare at her bosom. His eyes went black. “Say it, Rayna. I’d be good to you.”
“This is no way to convince me. You’re hurting me.”
“Fine.” He released her arm, freeing his hand to help himself to the buttons at her collar. His sour breath wheezed in and out of his open mouth, his wad of tobacco visible, as he freed the carved button from the loophole and saw a bit of frothy French lace. “Woowee, you’re one fine woman, Rayna—”
“Yeah, that’s what Kol always said.” She lunged against him and it was enough—just enough—for her fingers to grab a wooden handle. Not the currycomb, but a pitchfork. She swung it with all her might.
“What the hell?” Dayton looked up from working the top tie of her corset.
Just in time to see the wooden handle smack him in the forehead. The impact knocked him off balance. It was enough—just enough—for her to slide out from his weight.
Okay, she was free. But it wasn’t enough. The doors were still closed. There was no quick way out.
At least I have a weapon. She adjusted her grip, lower toward the sharp spines, and held it like a sword, ready for a duel. He was a strong man, and she was only a woman, but she was going to make him bleed before he won.
“You’re only making it better for me. I appreciate that.” Dayton’s upper lip curled. He spat out the wad of tobacco. “Let’s have fun, Rayna. C’mon. Try it again.”
His move was sudden and she swung.
Missed. His hand clamped on the handle and yanked the pitchfork. The wood scraped over her scabs and broke open the healing blisters. She was only distantly aware of the warm stream of blood and the sharp pain. She hung on with everything she had, shifted her weight and kicked as hard as she could.
“Ow! Damn it!” Clay tumbled back, off balance for a second, but it was enough.
She swung the wooden handle, but Clay was quick. He caught the neck of the pitchfork and jerked hard.
Her arm popped and pain blinded her.
Or maybe it was the sun breaking through the opening doors and around the figure of a man like a myth, striding closer. The Stetson shaded his face, but she knew him anyway.
Daniel Lindsay’s whiskey-rough baritone boomed with the authority of a hanging judge. “Dayton, leave the woman alone.”
The click and roll of a bullet turning in the cylinder of a pistol made Dayton release his hold on the pitchfork. Only then did she see the knife, the blade sharp and serrated, in the older man’s hand. He slipped it soundlessly into a sheath at his belt.
Rayna started to shake. She never would have had a fighting chance. He would have… Lord, she couldn’t let herself follow that thought. Fear squeezed like a vise and she set down the pitchfork.
“One day you’re gonna see what a good thing you turned down.” Dayton snarled low, so only she could hear. “One day you’re gonna be hurtin’, and you’ll come to me. You beware, Lindsay, because it won’t take much to bring you down—”
“I’m not afraid of you, Dayton.” Daniel was there, hauling the man out by the scruff of his neck. Or, more rightly, the back of his collar.
Hefting Dayton off the ground with the strength in one hand. “Now get goin’ while I’m still in a generous mood.”
“Those are my milk cows. I paid for ’em last night fair and square. Wright and I shook on it.”
“Man, you ought to be more concerned about how blue you’re turning.” Daniel sounded incredulous as he gave Dayton a toss. The man landed on his knees. “Get the cows and go. My patience is on a short fuse. I don’t think you want to see my temper blow.”
“I wasn’t doin’ nuthin’ that she didn’t want.” Dayton knew damn well there was little the law could do.
Daniel had learned more about the ineptitude of the law while he’d been growing up than he’d ever wanted to. To his own heartbreak. Rayna wasn’t the first woman he’d seen on her knees, bleeding in front of a threatening man. He knew just how it would pan out with the sheriff.
He blazed with anger, feeling as if it were consuming him while he stood guard over Rayna, his trigger finger ready as Dayton took his sweet time haltering up the nervous cows and leading them, udders full, toward the sun-filled doorway.
“This isn’t over, Lindsay. I don’t reckon you want me for an enemy.”
Unbowed, the old man had enough cockiness to try to threaten him.
The bastard. “I’m not scared of you, old man.”
“You oughta be.” Hate filled those words as the man left, but the dank ugliness of what he’d done remained. The barn felt heavy with it.
Or maybe, Daniel figured, that was his emotions. Shards of rage spiked through him as he lowered the Colt, eased the hammer down and holstered the weapon. He stood over her; s
he was so small at his feet. She crawled to her knees, her hair tangled, breathing as broken as if she were sobbing. But no tears fell.
He hated that she saw the rough behavior he was capable of. Would she look at him with that same revulsion in her eyes as she’d given the old man? Daniel choked on his shame. He supposed a fine lady like Rayna didn’t approve of violence, for the good of others or not.
He couldn’t look at her as he held out his hands, ready to help her up.
She didn’t touch him as she struggled to stand. Her face went white with the effort, and muscles stood out beneath the creamy skin of her jaw and throat. She’d been hurt, and he broke apart inside.
If he hadn’t gotten the notion to bring over a pail of milk, figuring her cows were already gone, then he couldn’t have saved her. But had he made things better? He’d protected her, but at what cost?
He’d lived with a family for a while, a fine family, and he knew how cultured women felt about rough and base men. He’d been about Kirk’s age at the time, too loud, too fierce, too…everything.
There was no way to repair the damage. There was no way she’d trust him now. He still felt like tearing Dayton into pieces and leaving the remains for the vultures to feast on. A man who forced a woman deserved no less.
But the law didn’t always see things that way, and neither would genteel Rayna Ludgrin who was as silent as could be as her knees gave out and she sank to the ground.
He didn’t know what else to do, but that tangle of emotion was back and it confused everything. He knelt beside her, the little thing that she was, and knew she’d pull away when he set his hand on her elbow.
She didn’t. She gazed up at him with big eyes brimming with anger. “Did you hear? He…he thought I wanted this. As if it were all a fun game to him.”
“I heard.”
Grim, he studied her. Blood stained her mouth and red thumbprints marked her throat. At the sight of peeping lace and womanly undergarments from the V of her unbuttoned dress, fierce and blinding violence coursed through him, overtaking him like a river at high flood.
Yeah, he could punch Dayton into the next county and keep on going.
“He never would have dared behave like that when Kol was here.” Rayna put her dress to rights, her cheeks flaming. “Is this how it’s going to be from now on? Men thinking that I’m missing that particular closeness?”
“Probably.”
For the second time since he’d known her, he took the clean, folded handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed her soft lips. Lush and made for kissing, not drawing blood. What was wrong with men like Dayton?
When he was done dabbing at her wound, she gingerly felt her lips, winced when she hit the cut from her front teeth.
Rage squirted anew into his veins and he had to take a deep breath. Be calm. He was a big and rough man, and he didn’t ever want to scare her. Make her look up at him with fear.
“You were doing a fine job of defending yourself. You swing a mean pitchfork.”
“I only wish I’d been able to hit him harder. I wish—” She looked so tense, as if she were holding herself up from sheer will. Her porcelain complexion was so pale, her skin was nearly gray. She seemed tired and beaten and as if she hadn’t got a lick of sleep all night.
There was that tenderness again, drawing up like a fist right in the center of his chest. “Let’s get you inside. Get some coffee in you. I’ll ride into town and fetch the sheriff. I don’t know what good he can do, but it’s worth a try.”
Rayna nodded, as if in agreement—about the sheriff coming or his ability to do anything, Daniel didn’t know. He cradled her elbow and she winced.
“Hurt my arm, I guess.”
She didn’t look too happy, and he didn’t know where to hold her, so he slipped an arm across her slender back and gripped her by the waist. He was big for a man and he knew it, and Rayna felt so delicate as he helped her stand.
There was that tenderness again and that hard punch of heat in his loins. He stepped away before that single urge could go any further. She wasn’t his to have and never would be. But for some reason he couldn’t figure, he was in her life.
Maybe he could make a difference, he didn’t know. “Want me to take a look at that arm?”
“What are you, a rancher, protector and a doctor, too?”
There were sparkles in her eyes, as blue as pictures of the ocean he’d once seen in a book, and so he knew she wasn’t scared of him.
Either that, or she was too fine of a woman to let him know his display of violence had frightened her. “I’ve done a lot of things in my life.”
“Then come inside, have some coffee and I’ll let you take a look. And you can tell me why you’re here at this time of morning. You didn’t come over just to send old man Dayton on his way.”
There was hurt when she mentioned that old man’s name, and he knew she’d been scared. What happened was no small thing. This is what happened to the weak, without a strong man’s protection. Daniel didn’t know how to say it. This was the first of many injustices in store for a pretty widow and her boys. He’d lived through most of them. Remembering made him hold her again, supporting her at the waist, although it was her arm that had been hurt and not her leg.
The sound of harnessed workhorses and the rattle of an empty wagon stopped them from stepping into the kitchen. Rayna swung away from him, cradling her arm, hurrying along the wraparound porch to the front.
Daniel drew his Colt. If it was Dayton bringing more trouble, then he was ready.
“Oh, it’s Mr. Wright.” The only sign of emotion was the slight tremble of Rayna’s chin. “He’s here already. Come for the furniture. And my piano.”
Her heartbreak lifted on the morning winds, an intangible emotion. No outward display of tears or drama. Daniel watched in amazement as she greeted the banker and his hired men, come to move the heavy wooden pieces, and offered them coffee and breakfast first.
Maybe he’d imagined her sadness, he thought. Until she touched his shoulder, drawing his attention.
“Come and eat with us,” she said.
And he saw it then, the grief in her heart. Like the shadows stretching over the land, long and silent, and it touched him. Not that he was wanting or wishing, but Kol Ludgrin, dead and buried, had to have been the luckiest man in the world.
“I’ll ride into town,” he said, because the last thing he wanted to do was to sit in her kitchen and look at her across the table. “You’ll be all right?”
“I have no other choice.” She closed off her heart, just like that.
Leaving him to wonder if he’d really seen what he had, and if it was possible to look inside another person like that.
Chapter Nine
Hans squeezed her hand so tight, her finger bones felt as though they were fusing together. “How are we gonna know when to leave for school?”
“We will use the kitchen clock to tell the time.”
Rayna turned her back on the movers carefully hauling the beautiful cherrywood and etched-glass grandfather clock out the front door. It was only a bauble and didn’t matter in the slightest.
She knelt before her son, who truly mattered, and brushed the huge tears from his cheeks. “You’re not to worry, baby. When you’re ready to go back to school, we’ll get you there before the first bell.”
“But where are we gonna sit?” Hans gazed around the empty parlor, his bottom lip trembling.
Her poor little boy. If she could protect him from this change in their circumstances, she would have gladly traded her life for Kol’s. He would have known what to do. He would have made sure to have kept the boys’ lives as normal as possible by marrying for convenience, providing them with a mother, and, if he had to, would have found work in town or on the railroad for the winter. Other men in this area had done the same.
It was why dear Mariah had married—her husband had been widowed with small children and a big ranch to run and he’d had to have a new wife. It was a cold,
practical fact that it took two adults both willing to work hard to survive on the wild Montana prairie.
But it was different for men who’d been widowed. They had the chance to work for good wages. As for her—
She could teach, but she didn’t have certification and that would take time she couldn’t spare. Kol’s brother’s solution was simply not an option. She was not about to put her sons to work. She had one job cleaning the boardinghouse, but it wasn’t nearly enough. There were no other jobs to be had.
The movers returned. They were courteous as could be. Grateful for the meal she fried up for them. Good thing she still had her chickens. There were plenty enough fresh eggs for everyone. But Mr. Wright had warned her he would be needing her out of the house very soon. She’d move in with Betsy until a room at the boardinghouse came open. And then she didn’t know what she’d do.
The kitchen table whisked by her. The men stopped at the door to tip it to get it through the door.
Hans was silent. He said no more as the movers paraded back through the house, their boots echoing loudly in the empty rooms. The chairs were next. Then the bedroom pieces. Hans had grown so pale, she led him outside and sat with him on the back porch. He said nothing as larks darted up to the rose vines to sing. The barn cat came wandering over, looking for company.
She was almost out of good options. Sure, she’d hold out hope that the other letters she’d sent would be answered and a perfect solution would present itself in the form of an able relative willing to take them in. But she wasn’t going to count on it.
If you’re out there watching over us, Kol. Help us. Show me what I should do.
The leaves overhead rustled, but it was only a gusting of the wind and no answer from heaven. Yet she swore she could almost feel him, just beyond reach and sight, a whisper in her soul that said everything would be all right.
Against all hope, she clung to that thought.