Susan Johnson

by Susan Johnson

  Her anger was forgotten, borne away by a wave of tenderness, a restless intoxication only the man sleeping opposite her could evoke. We’ll see, she thought, green-eyed possessiveness gripping her senses, who’s first wife and who’s second. We’ll see if a second wife materializes at all. In her present frame of mind, her old assurance buoyed by Hazard’s presence and her overpowering love, she wouldn’t recommend anyone bet on it.

  At the next stop, Hazard woke with a startled, quick alertness until he recalled where he was. He held his head in his hands briefly, hunched over his legs. Then he got up and left to see to fresh horses. When he came back and dropped into the same tired sprawl, Blaze quietly said, her blue eyes extraordinarily large in her pale face, “Could we please start over again? I love you. I always have. I’d never intentionally hurt you. Please believe me.”

  Hazard’s gaze drifted over wearily. He looked at her, then looked right through her, his face expressionless. “The last time I believed you,” he murmured, his soft voice grating suddenly with aversion, “I almost died. It was a sobering lesson, pet.” He lifted a side curtain and glanced outside. “How far have we come?” His tone was conversational now, bland, Blaze’s attempt at reconciliation dismissed.

  “I want to talk about it, Jon. Tell me how you survived the mine explosion—how you got out. Were you hurt? You must have been. Tell me. I don’t care how far we’ve come.”

  “No, I don’t suppose you do.” He took a last look before dropping the curtain back into place. “I think we can outrun them, though,” he added as though her pleading questions had never been uttered. “Sorry to disappoint you, Boston,” he finished, flashing her a brief glance, “but we’re going to gain fifty miles on this route.”

  “Damn, Hazard,” Blaze exploded, “there’s no reason for me to side with Yancy. If you weren’t so stubborn you’d understand. Yancy and Mother would as soon see me dead now, too. Can’t you see that? Then all the money would be theirs without any legal maneuvering. And I want the baby, Jon. I do. Ask Curtis Adams. I willed everything to the baby!”

  “So you say,” replied Hazard, a shade of exasperation entering his deep voice. But the phrase “Willed everything to the baby” jarred momentarily against the solid wall of his defensive armor.

  “Damn you, it’s true.”

  He had had two hours’ rest. Because of necessity and the bringing together of the ragged components of his self-command not entirely drugged by fatigue, he was awake, but shadowed by a hovering temper. He shot her an irritated scowl, all her arguments overridden by his temper. “It’s also true that I’m only here because I was able to chip my way through eight feet of greenstone before I starved to death.” A muscle clenched along his jaw. “It’s also true,” he said very softly, “your note greeted me on my escape. I can’t begin to describe the indelible feelings it etched on my liver.”

  “How can I convince you I didn’t leave that note!” She was looking at him with a kind of hurt anger, aligned with a bravura challenge. “Why would I leave a note, anyway, if I’d had a hand in with Yancy?”

  “Protect yourself, I suppose. Hell, don’t ask me to figure you out. I gave up on that quite a few weeks ago.”

  “Talk to Hannah. She’ll tell you. She’ll tell you about mother and Yancy and how I wanted to die when I thought you were killed.”

  Hazard looked at her wearily. “Hannah? Who’s she? Another one of your cohorts?” He shook his head. “Give up, Blaze. None of it means a thing to me.”

  The carriage lurched momentarily as the horses settled into a gallop, but even that didn’t move the lounging indifference of Hazard’s posture. “I’m your wife,” Blaze insisted, impatient with his obstinate disinterest. “Doesn’t that mean anything?”

  “You won’t be for long … if I choose,” came the expressionless reply.

  “Meaning …?”

  “All I have to do is put your things outside the lodge and the marriage is dissolved.”

  “Damned convenient for you men!”

  “Oh, no, you misunderstand,” he mildly corrected. “A wife can do the same to a husband.”

  Blaze sniffed, mettlesome and moody as her husband when the spirit moved her, becoming increasingly piqued at Hazard’s detached attitude. “Maybe I’ll choose to exercise my option.”

  “As you like,” he said in clipped accents. “All I want is the child.”

  “And if I want it too?”

  “Don’t make me laugh,” Hazard scoffed. “Remember, I found you at Madame Restell’s.”

  “It was the only time in three weeks I’d been allowed out of my room. I went because it was my only chance for freedom, but I took my black pearls with me,” she insistently went on, “to barter that freedom from Madame Restell. These pearls are worth twenty times what an abortion would have brought her. Madame Restell would have accepted, I know, Jon. As God is my witness, I want our baby. How many times do I have to tell you I wasn’t planning on going through with the abortion?”

  “You haven’t enough breath to convince me,” said Hazard, his patience slipping. “Put on all the airs of affronted motherhood you choose. Cast those soulful Madonna eyes on the world at large. Weep tears of modesty and shame. Take up with the carriage driver once we hit St. Joe.… But kindly, spare me the theatrics!”

  “You’re impossible!”

  He frowned. “We’re impossible.” Then he shrugged negligibly, as he might have in the early days of her captivity. “I said it the first day at the mine. I was right then and right now.”

  “And in between?” Blaze significantly reminded him.

  The shrug this time was tossed off, one shoulder only rising slightly. And dismissive. “An unfortunate lapse in judgment.” But his thoughts dwelled on the memories.

  “How can you call our love an unfortunate lapse in judgment?”

  “I had time to reassess it, dear wife, those five days underground, chipping my way out. Do you know what a calculated guess is?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “That’s what my shaft to freedom was. I could have just as well been off five or ten feet and died in there. That sort of experience tends to temper one’s love. Like an asp bite, it’s deadly.”

  “Say what you will,” Blaze replied, bold and assertive, “I’m not leaving after the baby’s born. I never left you by choice and I never will. I might as well warn you now, so there’s no misunderstanding. With the pattern of error and misinterpretation in our relationship, I’d just as soon avoid any more.”

  His eyes met hers and held them for a long time, but she didn’t flinch or look away. He was reminded of the young virgin he’d told to leave so many months ago. She’d given him the same solid look and said she was staying.

  That flat, blue-eyed gaze was Blaze Braddock and determination and Jon Hazard Black’s wife. Its undeniable familiarity provoked the first fissure in Hazard’s armor of resentments, invisible yet to a consciousness nursing a moody bitterness, but a fracture nonetheless. “Fair enough,” he said. “I’m warned.” And perhaps in self-defense against an inexplicable pulsing sensation of warmth stirring his nerve endings, he added, “Remind me to warn Blue Flower as well. I hope you two get along.” The words were cynically said.

  “Bastard.”

  “That’s a yellow eyes epithet,” he said, a thin smile curving his fine mouth. “Try again.”

  “I’ll scratch her eyes out. She won’t stay long,” Blaze tightly declared.

  “I’ll have to protect her, then.”

  “I suggest you protect yourself as well.”

  Hazard’s dark brows rose fractionally, his mouth twitching into a wider smile. “Is that a threat, sweetheart?”

  “Read it any way you like, dear, dear husband,” Blaze sweetly replied, more determined than ever to see that Hazard never married Blue Flower. If he thought she intended to share him with another woman, he was seriously deluding himself. She had no intention of placidly handing him over to another woman. And if Hazard had examined his own feelings mor
e closely, he would have recognized the same possessive sentiment. Blaze belonged to him; no other man could touch her. And while the conscious impetus for his racing journey east had been his child, submerged beneath the intricacy of his rancor was the selfsame territorial imperative.

  THEY boarded the Michigan Central and Great Western Railway at Niagara Falls. Hazard reserved one of the new Pullman hotel drawing room cars, splendidly luxurious and well appointed, but insisted on locking Blaze in whenever he left her alone.

  “I’m not trying to get away from you,” she protested, one time when he returned from his regular round of reconnoitering.

  “And you won’t,” was all he said, pocketing the key, his voice as guarded as his expression. “We agree on something at last.”

  “We’d agree on a lot more if you weren’t so perversely intolerant.”

  “Not intolerant, just practical. I remember all your sweet talking from before.” There was a bitter set to his mouth and his dark, thick-lashed eyes were forbidding. “And I had five extremely long and painful days underground to remind me about your style of sweet talk. Lunch?” he said coldly, and handed her a sandwich with such indifference that nothing more was said in the compartment for some time.

  While Hazard kept Blaze confined, he maintained a low profile as well. Yancy was bound to be on their trail. Sooner or later. And he never worked alone. Bullies never did.

  The second day, Blaze had one of her rare bouts of morning sickness, and when Hazard brought in her breakfast on a tray, she took one look at it and bolted for the tiny bathroom.

  He opened the door she’d slammed shut and took in her green-faced misery for a silent moment before he reached down to help hold her steady while she vomited. After, he carried her to her seat and settled her comfortably with two pillows behind her head. “Are you sick often?” he anxiously asked.

  “No,” Blaze weakly replied. “Hardly ever. I think it’s the movement of the train. Junior’s objecting,” she added with a wan smile.

  “I’m sorry,” Hazard quietly said.

  “About Junior?”

  “No, it’s too late for that. I’m sorry about your sickness. If there’s anything I can do …” His concern was sincere.

  Blaze wanted to say, Forgive me for everything … for the mining company, for mother, for Yancy … but even in his tender attention, she felt the constraint and she didn’t dare. “Don’t bring breakfast in before ten,” she said instead with a light smile.

  “Never again, bia,” he replied with his own casual smile, but instantly shuttered his gaze when he realized what he’d called her. Rising abruptly, he moved over to his seat opposite and lapsed into the moody silence prevalent since New York.

  When Blaze complained of the boredom several hours later, he bought some books for her at their layover in Chicago. When she complained of his silence, he only looked up and said, “I’m thinking.”

  On the following afternoon, Blaze opened the window, dropped the books out, and demanded, “Talk to me.”

  Hazard opened his eyes and uncurled from the green and crimson upholstered seat which turned at night into a fine linen-covered berth. In extremely slow motion, he eased himself partially upright from his dozing sprawl. He’d been up at each stop during the night checking on passengers boarding. The closer they came to St. Joseph, Missouri, the more apt they were to run into Yancy. St. Joe was the jumping-off point for trails west. Yancy knew that, and although alternate routes existed overland, they were either too far south or passed through Lakota territory. Hazard might chance the Lakota on his own, but would never attempt it with a pregnant woman.

  So the logical choice was stage west from St. Joe; not only a logical one but the only option. Yancy would be aware of the limitations, he knew, and that was why Hazard slept very little last night.

  “Talk to me,” Blaze repeated. “We’ve been on this train two days and you’ve barely said a dozen words.” He had been either uncommunicative or abrupt to the point of discourtesy.

  “We don’t have much to talk about.” He didn’t seem inclined to change his pattern.

  Blaze wasn’t about to be ignored for a third day. “Are we going by stage from Council Bluffs?” she persisted.

  “Most likely.” He was lounging on one elbow, his voice as lazy as his pose.

  “I heard you leave last night, more often than usual. Why?” And when his eyes seemed on the verge of closing again, she firmly added, “I want an answer.”

  Slowly dropping his feet onto the deluxe compartment carpet, Hazard finally sat up. Apparently Blaze wasn’t going to be denied today. “Checked who came on board.”

  “Yancy?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Do you really think he’ll follow us? Wouldn’t it be more sensible for him to stay in Boston and spend my money?”

  “Yancy never struck me as a moderate man. More greedy than most and more vengeful. I’m sure he’ll come after you. And me. And our child.”

  “Can we get to Montana?”

  He shrugged. “We’ll make a damn good try.”

  “I could ride.”

  “Not now.”

  “I’m only about four months pregnant.”

  “This wouldn’t be a leisurely cross-country jaunt. You can’t hold up to eighteen, twenty hours in the saddle. It’s too dangerous for the child.”

  “Only the child?”

  “You, too, obviously.”

  “Thanks for the concern.”

  “For someone found at the most expensive abortionist in the country, don’t question my concern.” His answer was spiny-tempered and curt.

  “I wouldn’t have gone through with it.”

  “And then again you might have changed your mind; women have been known to change their minds. I couldn’t take that chance … again.” His eyes were suddenly internally focused. And pained.

  “Again?” Blaze breathed, the word conjuring up unrevealed mysteries.

  Recalled to himself, to the green and crimson decorated railway compartment, to the wide-eyed woman opposite him, Hazard simply said, “There’re other ways besides the Madame Restells of the world. All cultures have their methods.”

  “Your wife,” Blaze whispered, understanding suddenly about the dresses carefully packed away as reliquaries.

  He didn’t move, hardly breathed. When he spoke at last, his voice was disembodied, speaking from the distance of time. “She mortally damaged herself and our child … my child,” he said very softly. He paused, all the old memories and pain vivid as bloodstains on snow. After a long while he looked up. “She was sixteen, and strong.” He went on quietly, “It took her a week to die. I held her hand and watched her slowly leave me.” And he saw her features again as though it were yesterday, saw her dying slowly in agony. He swallowed and exhaled gently. “We were young. I loved her very much. We were inseparable after our marriage. She’d come with me on the raids. When she discovered she was pregnant she didn’t tell me. I wouldn’t have allowed her to come along anymore. So she tried to abort herself—very crudely, it turned out.” His eyes drifted up and caught Blaze’s horrified gaze. “So don’t,” he said gently, a lifetime of regret in his voice, “do anything foolish. And don’t talk to me about riding the way we’d have to, to stay ahead of Yancy. I won’t let you.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know; I’d never have mentioned it had I known. Please, Hazard, don’t hate me.” Blaze murmured in a small, pained whisper. Don’t hate me, she thought, because of another’s mistake.

  Hazard sighed and watched the landscape slide by.

  “Can we be friends, at least … for now?” she coaxed, wishing it were possible to hold him and give him the comfort he needed.

  “I’ll try,” he slowly answered.

  It wasn’t much, Blaze thought, but a concession of sorts, the first harsh anger mitigated, a step in the right direction. And Hazard always kept his word, so he would try.

  It was better for the remainder of the day; they were able to tal
k a little, and when he locked her in, he apologized. He even smiled faintly—the first hint of a smile since he’d found her.

  He’d been careful, during their days on the train, to leave when Blaze readied herself for bed and when she rose and dressed in the morning. He’d learned his lesson well—learned it the hard way. Almost died from the education. And he didn’t intend to be lured or enchanted again by Blaze’s beauty or sensuality.

  Chapter 38

  All hell broke loose in Boston when Yancy returned with the news that Blaze had disappeared.

  Millicent had hoped Hazard wouldn’t get to Madame Restell’s in time, had even vaguely hoped he couldn’t find the place. But she had never considered he’d get past all of them to Blaze and manage to elude them as well. Millicent went so far as to feelingly declare, several decibels louder than those considered genteel, “You are a goddamned fool, Yancy Strahan. And if you don’t find her, I can’t imagine supporting you on my dower portion.”

  “He’s back,” Yancy brusquely replied. “It’s not going to be easy,” accepting her negation of their marriage plans with blunt agreement. He’d do the same to her under the circumstance.

  “How much!” Millicent snapped, well aware, with Hazard’s finger marks on her neck, that he was back. “Tell me how much it’s going to cost.”

  They were partners in a venture that could have realized millions. It still might. Neither was willing to give up yet. She needed him and he needed her: his brawn, her money, and between them a plain, bare-faced predisposition to let nothing stand in the way of the fortune they coveted. Like duelists they had politely parried those early weeks in Montana, dropping a word or tentative hint here and there, waiting to hear the other’s response, then moving to the next position, like calculating professionals until they were engaged fully, both understanding the other’s strengths, both sure after the initial moves, that they would make better partners than adversaries.