“You’ll have to lie down,” he said, with a slanted and roguish grin, “because I can’t bend to kiss those breasts of yours, and that’s something I’ve got to do.”
She couldn’t speak, just stood there while he stripped away her dress, her camisole and petticoats, leaving her in just her drawers, stockings and shoes. She’d intended to wear a corset, to trim her waist to a fashionable size, but Landry had forbidden that. She was never going to own anything with spikes in it, let alone wear it, he’d said, and that was the end of the discussion.
Now, he knelt, like the prince trying the glass slipper on Cinderella’s foot, untied Miranda’s laces and pulled off her shoes. Rolled her stockings down, slowly, slowly, over her thighs and knees, calves and ankles. Everywhere he touched her, with just the lightest pass of his fingers, seemed to leap with a pulse all its own.
He coaxed her to stand, in murmured words, when he’d taken away everything but her bloomers, and she felt his breath through the thin fabric and groaned when he kissed her there, in that most private place, then nipped at her lightly with his teeth.
She let her head fall back, surrendered without protest when he removed the drawers, too, and parted the nest of silk between her thighs to reveal a place even she had never touched before. When he tongued her lavishly and then took her into his mouth in one greedy suckle, she cried out in lusty, wordless welcome.
Hands splayed over her bare buttocks, Landry held her firmly, burrowed deeper, drew on her still more eagerly. She was not even trying to be quiet—it would have been a hopeless effort—and he certainly did nothing to silence her cries of steadily mounting pleasure.
Finally, finally, a fierce tremor shook her, beginning in the very core of her and spreading arms of fire in every direction. “Landry,” she sobbed, her hands buried in his hair, “Landry, Landry—”
He eased her onto the bed with the most infinite tenderness, and rose slowly, carefully, to his feet. He was breathing hard and his gaze left a path of heat as it swept over her, once and then again, hungrily. She held her arms out to him.
He was out of his trousers and shut of his boots in a moment’s time. He stretched out over her, magnificent, as hard and heavy as fallen timber, even though he was holding himself in such a way as to keep from putting all his weight on her.
Her own musky scent was on his mouth when he kissed her, and started everything all over again, from the beginning, drawing all the strings inside her up tight enough to snap again, like they’d just done. Maybe harder.
The thought of that took her breath away. She’d barely survived the last round; another climb like that, to burst against the inner sky like a Chinese rocket, might just be the end of her.
Even knowing that, she wanted him, and raised her hips in an instinctive invitation. Only then did he enter her, carefully at first, and then with a powerful thrust that sent her scrambling up one side of the sky again, and the faster he moved upon her, inside her, the higher she soared.
The silent explosion happened in a place where there was no air, no clouds or stars, either. Indeed, there was nothing to see or hear, but only to feel. She clung to Landry, lest she fall forever, and felt his cries of satisfaction as he joined her there, at the edge of heaven, just seconds after her own ascent.
When it was over, they slept, arms and legs tangled, utterly spent. When Miranda opened her eyes, it was dark, and Landry was teasing one of her bare nipples into a shape he favored.
*
Choteau was not a large place, but it had a dress shop, a general store, and other such attractions. It might have been London or Paris, so spectacular did it appear to Miranda, who had been raised without so much as coming within looking distance of luxury. She delighted in the colorful bolts of fabric on display in the mercantile, the ready-made yarn, the barrels and crates filled with wonderful things. The smells—leather and coffee beans, books and cheese, soap and smoke from the potbellied woodstove at the heart of the store—would live in her memory forever, and always bring her honeymoon trip to Choteau to mind.
They made a number of purchases—Landry did not seem overly concerned by the costs, though Miranda thought five cents was a perfectly ridiculous price to pay for a twenty-pound sack of flour—including small gifts for the boys and a bolt of flannel to make diapers for Isaiah. Too, Landry bought several things in secret, and arranged to have them sent to Springwater by stage, refusing to tell what they were no matter how Miranda plagued him. He said she’d find out at Christmas.
Every morning, every afternoon, and every night, they made love, sometimes urgently, sometimes in long and drawn-out rounds, sometimes standing up, sometimes lying down.
“I never felt like this before,” Miranda confided, on their third and last night in Choteau, snuggled next to Landry in their hotel bed, loose-limbed and sated with lovemaking. “All the pitching and hollering, I mean. Are we supposed to carry on like we do?”
Landry chuckled against her temple, amid the damp tendrils. He liked to let her hair down himself; it was a sure sign that he intended to make love to her, and right away. “Oh, yes,” he said. “The more carrying on, the better.” He kissed the side of her forehead. “I love you, Miranda,” he sighed. “I never realized how lonely I was, until you came to live at my place. I thought I’d lose my mind, with you lying just down the hall, on that lumpy spare-room bed,”
Miranda was as content as any mortal being had the right to be. She knew she and Landry would see their share of trouble and heartache in the years ahead, just like everybody else did over the course of a long marriage, but there would be joy, too. Laughter and mischief, plans and babies. The future stretched before her, bright as the land beyond the River Jordan, and, she sighed. “I would have taken you in,” she admitted. “If you’d wanted me, I mean.”
“I wanted you, Miranda,” he reminded her.
“And I wanted you.”
She heard a puzzled frown in his voice; it was odd, how often she heard or sensed Landry’s expressions and even his thoughts. Even if she went blind the next minute, she knew she’d always be able to see him clearly in her mind’s eye. “Then why didn’t you let me know?”
Miranda hesitated, then took the plunge. She couldn’t be holding things back from Landry if she expected their alliance to be a sound one. “I was afraid you’d think I was a loose woman. You know, since I’d had little Isaiah outside of wedlock and all.”
He rolled onto his side to look into her face. “He’s part of you, Isaiah is. What you did is part of you. And I love you, Miranda. Not just the pretty parts, like your eyes and your smile and your hair. Not just the places I like to kiss, either.” She could feel his erection growing against her thigh, but most of her attention was fixed on what he was saying, on what no one had ever said to her before. “I love all the things that go together to make you who you are, good, bad, and indifferent,” he finished.
She couldn’t hold back the tears then. She blinked rapidly, and tried to wriggle away, in a fruitless effort to hide the fact that she was crying, but finally gave up when he wouldn’t let her go, and slid her arms around his neck. “There isn’t another man like you in all creation, Landry Kildare,” she vowed.
“Not for you, there isn’t.” He grinned, showing those white teeth that she hoped her babies would have, and slid one hand down her belly to ply her shamelessly into almost instant arousal.
The sound of gunfire didn’t distract them.
*
The sky was dark with the promise of snow, that last morning, when Landry came back to the hotel from the marshal’s office down the street. Miranda was waiting in the lobby, dressed to travel and surrounded with boxes and crates containing all the wonderful things they’d bought. His expression was serious enough to worry Miranda a little.
“What is it?”
He spoke quietly, taking her arm, nodding to the boys who’d come to load their baggage into the pouchlike compartment at the rear of the stagecoach. “Some of Mike Houghton’s frie
nds tried to get him out of jail last night. The marshal and his deputies were ready for them, and Houghton was killed in the fight, along with several of the others.”
Miranda felt no particular grief for Houghton’s violent death—it had probably been inevitable, the way he lived—but she was sorry for the loss of a life that might have been spent in so many better ways. Experience had taught her that people didn’t go bad without reason; they went wrong someplace along the way, early on usually, and just never managed to get back on the right path again. She didn’t express any of her thoughts aloud, but simply nodded.
Outside, the wind was brisk, and the team of eight horses hitched to the stagecoach seemed restless, eager to run, even with a heavy burden behind them. Guffy came forward, inclined his head to Landry, took off his hat and pressed it to his chest when he turned to Miranda.
“Good to see you, Mrs. Kildare. The womenfolk up at Springwater are missing you somethin’ ferocious, I hear tell.” His voice took on a teasing note. “They mean to put together a quilt for you. You’ll be lucky if Mrs. Doc gives back that baby, though. She’s taken to him real powerful.”
Miranda was eager to see and hold Isaiah, never having been away from him before. “Savannah will have a family of her own in no time,” she said, and then blushed, because that was a mighty personal thing to say about a person, and to a man in the bargain.
Beside her, Landry laughed and took her elbow. “Time to board the stage for home,” he said, and opened the door. He turned to Guffy, once Miranda was seated. “Any other passengers on this run?”
Guffy’s voice was loud enough to echo off the mountains and roll back over them all in a wave. “No, sir. You and the missus have the coach to yourselves, all the way to Springwater.”
Landry looked through the window of the coach at Miranda, wriggled his eyebrows mischievously, and grinned. “Hear that, Mrs. Kildare?” he teased. “We’re traveling alone.” He put just the slightest emphasis on the last word.
Miranda felt a delicious shiver move through her, and she blushed, too, but she said nothing as he climbed in and took a seat beside her, laying a proprietary hand on her knee.
The stagecoach bolted forward at a shout from Guffy, and Miranda might have tumbled to the floor if Landry hadn’t caught her in the curve of his arm. Easily, he pulled her up onto his lap. By the time they were out of town, he’d arranged her astraddle of his thighs and was slowly unfastening the buttons of her dress.
“I’m going to make love to you, Mrs. Kildare,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Right here, right now.”
Mrs. Kildare offered no protest at all.
Jessica
CHAPTER
1
Winter 1880
BEHIND HER, Alma was weeping.
Plump, glistening flakes of snow swayed like languorous dancers past the bay windows set into the rear wall of the tiny parlor, but Jessica Barnes took no note of their feathery beauty. Her attention, indeed the whole of her being, was fixed upon the new grave in the churchyard just across the way. The place where her brother, Michael, a true and devoted friend through all twenty-three years of her life, lay buried. He had died precisely one week prior to her arrival yesterday in the remote Montana Territory town of Springwater.
How he had gone on about this place in his letters: the scenery was breathtaking, he’d written; the people had gathered him and Victoria in like family; there was so much sky that you could lie on your back in the deep, sweet grass, looking up, and lose yourself in all that blue. Not that he ever had time for such things, he’d been quick to stress, always working on the next issue of the paper the way he was.
Jessica swallowed a bitter sob. They had killed him, in her opinion—the work and the town. He’d always been a frail man, physically at least, and as far as she was concerned, the whole enterprise—buying that ancient press, traveling across prairies, deserts, and mountains in a wagon drawn by oxen—had been plain foolhardy. He should have stayed in Missouri, put aside his pride, and worked on their uncle’s newspaper, as he’d been raised to do, instead of traveling way out here and exhausting himself. But no. Instead, he’d sold what little he had and turned his back on a respectable family business. He’d bought that huge, greasy, secondhand contrivance he called a press, dismantled it, and loaded it up—along with his frightened bride, a few sacks of dried beans, and a paltry assortment of supplies—for the journey west. Jessica recalled the day of their leaving with a clarity that stung even now, nearly six years later; seventeen and strong, she had begged to accompany Michael and Victoria on the trip west. Michael had refused her gently, saying it was far too dangerous a trip for a scrap of a girl like her—she was but a year younger than Victoria—and she’d realized that she would be in the way, an unwanted encumbrance.
So it was that she had, with her uncle’s hearty approval, stayed and accepted a post as companion to an elderly but spry widow, Mrs. Frederick Covington, Sr. For two years she and Mrs. Covington had traveled on the European continent, and Jessica had enjoyed the experience and learned a great deal from her lively minded charge.
The dear old woman had passed away in her sleep on the journey back across the Atlantic, leaving Jessica a small, secret legacy and several pieces of jewelry, neither of which had been directly mentioned in her will. By that time Jessica’s uncle had died as well, but there was no bequest this time—only a stack of demands from his impatient creditors.
She had sold everything—the newspaper, her uncle’s modest house and personal belongings, even the clock from his mantelpiece—to settle his debts, and waited for Michael to send for her.
He didn’t. The offer of a new position, in the household of Mrs. Covington’s only son, Frederick II, and his wife, Sarah, had seemed a godsend. Appearances, however, were deceiving—unhappy in his marriage, Frederick soon began pursuing Jessica.
She had managed to avoid being alone with him for a very long time. Then one of the maids found the jewelry his mother had given Jessica on her deathbed, and, thinking Jessica had stolen it, turned it over to Mr. Covington. It was exactly the blackmail he needed. After that, he’d threatened her with ruin and scandal at best, prison at worst, if she continued to refuse him her bed.
She’d been prepared to plead with Michael and Victoria to take her in when, on the very day of Covington’s ultimatum, her brother finally broached the subject himself in one of his more revealing letters. Things weren’t going well, he’d written. Victoria was having a hard time with her pregnancy, and his debts were mounting. He suspected a certain lawyer, a Mr. Gage Calloway, of persuading the bank in Choteau to call in his loans. That was when she’d fled St. Louis for good and used part of the money Mrs. Covington had left her to travel west. What remained—and there was precious little—was secure in a Missouri bank.
Jessica brought her mind back to the present with a forceful tug. The injustice, the humiliation—all of it was too much to bear on top of losing Michael. She must think of it another time or, better yet, put it behind her forever.
Now, watching as the snow outlined her brother’s plain wooden marker in an airy, lace-trimmed script, Jessica pressed the back of one hand to her mouth in yet another effort to contain her grief—and her fury. The world ground and clanked and clattered around her like the works of some enormous mechanism, and on the edges of her consciousness she was aware of Alma Stewart’s soft voice singing a lullaby in the next room; the fretful whimpers of the two babies, left orphaned only weeks after their birth; the damnably steady, ponderous ticking of the mail-order clock on a rickety side table.
Wagons and buggies jostled by over rutted ground frozen solid beneath the snow, and both men and women called to each other in jovial, wintry voices. But beneath her feet, in the offices of the town’s fledgling newspaper—the Springwater Gazette—the press was utterly still.
“Jessie?” Alma’s gentle inquiry caused her to turn at last from considering Michael’s final resting place. No one, save her brother, had ever called her
Jessie, but she did not protest. Alma, too, was mourning, not only for Michael, but for his wife—her niece—Victoria. Weakened by her own illness, Victoria had perished in childbirth, barely a month before Michael’s fever, born of exhaustion and despair, took his life.
Jessica turned to face the deceptively delicate-looking woman who was just entering from one of the two nooks they called bedrooms. “Yes?”
Although she had a husband waiting for her on a ranch some forty miles away, Alma had come to Springwater when Victoria was due to have the babies, just to lend a hand. She was generous and capable and understandably anxious to get back home.
“He tried,” Alma said staunchly. “He tried his best to hold on, Michael did. But when Victoria died, it was like something had been torn out of him. He worked himself blind after that, down there setting and resetting type and repairing that secondhand press all day and half the night. That was what finished him, Jessie. He just used himself up.” Alma paused; her chin quivered and she dabbed at red-rimmed eyes with a wadded handkerchief. “You understand, don’t you—I can’t raise these babies? I’m an old woman, past the age for such things, and frankly it’s all I can do most days to look after what’s mine to tend. I’ve left a good and patient man alone too long as it is.”
Jessica had given little thought to children in general or to her infant nieces in particular, having been met with the news of both Victoria’s and Michael’s deaths directly after stepping off the stagecoach, though she had practically lived for word of them before fleeing St. Louis. Now, suddenly, she felt a fierce, almost primitive desire to protect them. They were so small, so fragile, so beautiful! Was this, then, what it felt like to be a mother, this swift and ferocious love?
They were a beacon of light, the twins were, in the otherwise impenetrable darkness of her grief, something to cherish and move toward. As dear as the Covington children—Susan and young Freddy—had been to her, and she had loved them with the whole of her heart, despite the contempt in which she held their father, this was a keener, deeper sort of caring. These babies were blood of her blood, bone of her bone, soul of her soul. They were family.
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