by Yvonne Jocks
Safe in the gallery, Vic smiled anyway. She seemed to be smiling all the time lately. They made a good team.
And she knew about the surprise.
Ross deliberately did not voice his concerns about Victoria's latest scheme. Whatever it was, she was enjoying it—and he adored her.
"Hurry," she insisted, dragging him onto Sheridan's railroad platform by one tightly held hand. She was walking backwards, trusting him to keep her from falling or backing into unsuspecting townsfolk. "It's a surprise."
Not only did he adore her, but next week she would become his wife . . . assuming no surprises got in the way.
"Oh, don't scowl like that," she chided, reading his expression despite his silence. "It's not the kind of surprise that could result in you accidentally shooting someone. It's my wedding present to you, and I'm sure you'll like it."
Only then did she bite her lower lip in further thought. "Well, almost sure. I hope. I mean you'll like it, but you might not like that I didn't tell you earlier. I found out so close to the wedding that I thought it would make a good present. But. . ."
Frowning now, she pushed his chest with one hand.
"Stop being so gloomy—now you've got me worried too."
"Don't worry," he assured her. It was the surprise part that concerned him, not the gift. Whatever she gave him would only add to the gift that was her hand, her heart, her future. Her world. Even after eight joyous months, he sometimes shook his head in wonder at how he'd ever become part of her world.
Compared to all that, she should not have bothered to get him anything, much less something special-ordered. But he would not argue that with her, either. He chose his arguments with Victoria carefully.
She was far better at words than he would ever be.
So he said, "Anything from you, I will love." And she rewarded him with one of her bright smiles, all the brighter for now knowing all of his secrets and still loving him.
"But this is special," she promised, turning anxiously toward the train tfiat was pulling into the station.
Special did not comfort a cautious man like Ross much more than surprise. Still, he caught her hand with his and tugged her gently against his side, weaving their fingers together. Some bystanders noticed, and a few whispered. If she did not mind, he refused to.
They had the dog with them, didn't they? And she was marrying him. Thanks to poor Audra and her unfortunate scandal, he and Vic hadn't even had to wait the entire year!
Sometimes, he thought as the train huffed and chugged to a reluctant stop, things really did happen for the best.
And then sometimes, one of the meanest outlaws Ross had ever known stepped off the train—barely a week before his wedding.
Taking in Harvey "Kid Curry" Logan's dark coloring and handsome, amoral face, Ross fell into his old, cautious posture without even thinking. It matched Logan's. When the outlaw's Cherokee eyes brushed across Ross, they widened in recognition, then narrowed with suspicion.
Ross set Victoria firmly to one side. "Stay here."
"But your present—"
"I won't be long," he assured her, and warned her with his eyes that she'd best not risk following him. He trusted that she would not. They'd had to come to some agreements over the past months. The joyful, loving, full months he'd had with her.
Maybe part of him had feared all along that his world wouldn't let them make it to the altar.
Assured of her safety, if not his own, he crossed the platform to stand in front of Harvey, poor Lonny's brother, the toughest gunman in the Wild Bunch. Unsure what name the man was going by today—Logan? Roberts? Curry?—Ross contented himself with nodding a greeting. "Howdy."
Harvey nodded suspiciously back, but said nothing.
"I was sorry to hear about Lonny," said Ross. And he was. Apparently his friend had tried doing what Ross had done—going home. For Lonny, home meant Missouri. Just that February, Pinkertons had shot him dead in his aunt's house. Ross heard they'd found him by tracking bills from the Wilcox robbery.
"Damned sons of bitches," agreed Harvey. Flat-Nosed George, another member of the Wild Bunch, had been killed by a posse in April. Elzy Lay was still in prison. Rumor was, even Butch Cassidy was struggling to go straight—and failing.
The frontier was really ending. Looking at Harvey Logan's hatred, Ross marveled at how close he'd come to ending with it.
"Ross!" called Victoria, down the platform, and Ross glanced over his shoulder. She was standing with a thin, gray-haired lady.
He looked back at Harvey and caught the outlaw's curiosity, so he laid his cards on the table. "I'm marrying her."
Harve Logan shook his head with a grimace of a smile. "Guess you ain't lookin' for a job, then."
"I've got one." He took a slow breath. "I catch rustlers."
Harvey raised his eyebrows, almost in challenge.
"In Sheridan County," Ross added. He'd refused to take the job without limiting the geography of his already unofficial jurisdiction. Unless someone from Hole-in-the-Wall or Robbers' Roost came after him or his, he didn't want to have to go after them. And he wouldn't take a job he couldn't do well.
The train blew its whistle, a warning for folks who were stretching their legs or grabbing a bite from the vendors to climb back onboard.
"I guess we're done, then," said Harvey.
"Yep," said Ross, shifting his weight more comfortably. He did still carry a gun. He did still know how to use it.
But they'd been done for a long time.
They didn't shake hands. But when Logan climbed back aboard the Burlington and Missouri train, Ross couldn't help but feel part of himself leaving as well.
Luckily, it was a part he was just as glad to see go.
He backed up, watching for Harvey through the windows out of both habit and instinct. When the train chugged away, with the outlaw safely on board, Ross's shoulders sank in relief.
Maybe fate would let him get married after all.
"Are you done chasing away the bad men?" asked Victoria at his elbow. He'd grown so accustomed to her over the last months, he didn't even jump. Instead, he smiled at her teasing.
"For today," he assured her, turning—and now he saw Victoria's gray-haired lady friend up close.
Ross tried to swallow, and couldn't. He opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out. He'd known Victoria had been searching, but he'd never believed that even she . . .
"Ross?" asked the woman, her voice still accented, her green eyes crinkling into a delighted smile. "Can my little Draz be so tall?"
He managed to mouth the name, even if his voice hadn't returned. Momma?
She nodded—as if she could be anyone else! "Your Miss Garrison, she writes to my brother Goran in Chicago and says, Do you know her? I must find her. Goran brings me her letter, and I ask him to write back, and she sends me tickets for the train, so I can come see your wedding. She is an angel, your Miss Garrison."
But he'd never doubted that.
Dizzy with the shifting of his worlds—his recent past leaving on the same train that had brought his true past—Ross gave up words for action and drew his mother into his arms. He held her carefully at first, afraid that she was an illusion, or a ghost, and might vanish at his touch. But she wrapped her arms around him, tight and real—arms that had rocked him to sleep as a child, hands that had tended his boyhood wounds.
"My baby," murmured his mother, despite that he now towered over her. "My sweet baby. I never stop looking. I save money, I hire detectives, but they find nothing. Laurence, nothing. Lauranovic, nothing. I am so afraid for you. Then Goran brings me Miss Garrison's letter, and again my life is whole."
My life is whole.
He pillowed his head on her gray hair—and, his eyes still open, he took in the sight of Victoria and wished she could know even a portion of the joy she'd given him.
She was happily crying for the three of them.
When he held out an arm for her, she joined their embrace, and his world
became something he'd never guessed even existed.
Someday, he would make Victoria explain how she'd done it.
Epilogue
Victoria's friend Evangeline played piano, as she had at Marian's and Laurel's weddings. Kitty, now with only a slight limp, hovered adoringly at Ross's side until the ceremony. Alden Wright spoke earnestly to Ross's mother, perhaps discussing the new tombstones they'd purchased for "Joseph," "Philip," and "Julia Laurence"—or perhaps just discussing Julie.
Papa—as Mariah and Laurel had warned he might— said little more before the service than a quiet, "You don't have to do this, Victoria Rose."
"Trust me, Papa, I do," she assured him. Then, as his concerned gaze sharpened into suspicion, she hurried to clarify herself. "Because I love him, not because we have to! Golly, you and Thaddeas and Duchess have certainly seen to that."
Mariah had pointed out, rather sulkily Victoria thought, that at least Papa hadn't had Ross beaten, although Ross probably deserved it more than Stuart.
Luckily, by their wedding day, the sisters were back on speaking terms. Mariah's new baby boy, hers and Stuart's second, had helped smooth that reconciliation.
Even if Ross was still a range detective.
When Vic saw Ross waiting with the minister, she almost ran across the room to take his hand. Once Papa reluctantly delivered her to him, Ross spoke his vows clearly and confidently. So did she—except for having to stop midway and bite her lower lip, to keep from crying her happiness. Once, he couldn't promise her anything. Now he promised her everything. And oh, that was so much more than she'd ever dreamed.
Mrs. Victoria Laurence.
Ross, Vic's hand in his, made sure to seek out her father during the reception. "Thank you," her new husband said. "Thank you for allowing me to marry your daughter."
Papa, behaving himself with Mama on his arm, still snorted. "Allowin'."
As if Victoria were as headstrong as that! Although, from the way both Mama and Ross smiled over her head, she wondered if they thought so too.
"Thank you anyway," said Ross softly, looking at Victoria as he said it.
"You hurt her," warned Papa, "you'll regret it."
"I thought the West wasn't a frontier anymore," challenged Victoria.
Mama smiled. "I think it may always be, where daughters are concerned. The boss tends to change his mind on the topic, depending on which answer suits him better."
Then Mama kissed them each on the cheek, assuring them that she had no qualms about Ross at all, and let them get back to their guests.
"Ain't your boss," Victoria heard Papa complain, behind them, and she and Ross shared happy smiles.
Sometimes she loved his smile most of all.
Ross doubted even Victoria could ever report the fulfillment that was their wedding night—and not just because it would fly in the face of both common decency and the Comstock Law.
It couldn't be described because it transcended words, an erotic wonder of buttons coming undone, mouths seeking and finding each other, careful hands exploring private places—what they'd started calling "married places," during their lengthy courtship. It couldn't be described because surely she could never explain how she so clearly enjoyed something that he feared would hurt her, despite his best efforts.
And after he lost control at last, shuddering his completion into the purity and acceptance and trust that was his Victoria, he doubted his loyal wife would ever tell anybody about the wetness that she kissed off his cheeks. Everything he'd gone through in his life, and he hadn't cried. Now, at this ...
She was his own untainted piece of the world. She cleansed him, whole and holy, a completion unto herself.
And not even her excellent words could describe that.
In their bed together, naked and damp and still intertwined, Vic drew her soft cheek across the scratch of his, and Ross knew happiness. Every breath tasted distinctly like her, of soap and cinnamon and Victoria. Her breath and heartbeat serenaded him.
And they were even home.
At her urging, he'd kept the rooms above Thaddeas' law office. In two years, the money that they'd save would buy them a far better house than anything they could afford now, even with his bounty money— and Victoria said she liked the apartment, that it made her feel modern. She had insisted that they come here instead of going to a hotel for their honeymoon. "I want to go home with you," she'd said, as if she understood.
She understood him better than he understood himself sometimes.
"Are you all right?" she whispered now, before he'd even regained the strength to move after ... well, afterward. He did not mind the paralysis, as long as he got to keep a naked leg between hers, an arm draped across the tuck of her velvety waist. As long as he got to gaze at her in the nighttime shadows, her pretty face framed by the dark, wild hair spread across the pillow, he welcomed his fate. "Oh, Ross, is it as wonderful for men as for women?"
He might not be able to move his body, but he managed to widen his eyes, both relieved and amused. Surely she owed anything wonderful about their marital relations to her enthusiasm more than to his skill. And more than that, on both sides, to their love for each other. But oh, he had tried. He wanted to please her so badly, he'd tried very hard.
Now he could let more fears slide away.
"Now I guess I know everything," she admitted, tracing her delightfully curious fingers across the corded muscle of his shoulders, down the length of his arm. "What's this scar from?"
Damn. He'd forgotten about the scars. "Bullet."
"And this one?" Her hand found his side.
"Bullet." From my other life.
"And this one?" The white mark sliced across his midriff.
"Knife," he admitted, and when she started to lift the blanket to investigate more of him, he laughed and found he could move after all, and kissed her. Levering himself over her, he kissed her flawless collarbones, then the round tops of her beautiful, luscious breasts—and then the rest of them, until she moaned. Then he kissed lower....
"I like your scars," she admitted, between encouraging sighs. "They make you seem dangerous."
He paused in kissing her gently curved belly—the belly that, God willing, would someday carry his children—and looked back up at her through a fall of hair, uncertain.
"But not dangerous to me," she assured him. "Can we do this every night?"
He kissed his way back up her body, then tucked an elbow under his head to better watch her. "We can try."
"Good," she decided, "I knew when we were kissing sometimes that it—this—must be wonderful, as badly as I ached for it, and that was before I even knew what it was. Well... in detail."
He'd never known women ached for it too. Trust Victoria to admit to something like that.
"Ross," she said solemnly, and he raised his eyebrows and waited, loving her. "Do you know how I feel right now?"
He shook his head, just a little.
She said, "I don't either. What I feel is so big, there aren't words for it."
He considered that, considered her. He took a deep breath to steady himself in a world of such happiness. "I have a word."
"Love?" she suggested, then smiled, wanton. "Lust?"
He smiled back, waiting patiently for her to finish.
"Happy? Married? Wife? Husband?"
He particularly liked those words.
"What?" she demanded finally, climbing on top of him, heaven in a little, curvy body—and a dangerously bright mind.
"Home," he said.
She folded her arms on his chest, gazed down at him. "Because this apartment's our home now, yours and mine."
Partly that. But he shook his head.
"Because you're back in Sheridan, as a Laurence."
That too. He had family buried here, and family visiting. He had a job, and he'd made friends. But he shook his head.
She bit her lower lip for a moment, suddenly shy. She knew him well enough to guess, after all. "Because of me?"
&nbs
p; He nodded, wrapped his arms carefully around her, and rolled her onto her back, illustrating that they could possibly even do this more than once a night.
He loved how her eyes shone up at him.
"Welcome home, Ross Laurence," she whispered.
Then he kissed her, long and hard, and settled into saying the same thing back to her.
Without any words at all.