Pearl, and look where she is now; and you made me see that Robbie had to fulfill his dream of becoming a doctor."
He brushed his lips over her forehead. "You've been my strength. You helped me get through that nervous collapse after the fires, made me see I had never let go of my feelings for Paul. You gave me six beautiful children. I could only enjoy one of them for six years, but I'll always have the memory. And, of course, we lost Nathan for a long time. I always blamed myself for that—"
"Luke, don't—"
"It's true." He grasped her hair and bent her head back more. "When I see how Nial Bentley looks at you, I remember what a treasure I have. When you're eighty, to me you'll still be the beautiful young girl I brought here twenty-five years ago."
Outside the wind began to rise. It made groaning sounds around the little cabin, much like the sounds that first winter they had spent in the drafty little outlaw shack. Already wolves were beginning their howling in the distant hills.
Lettie looked into her husband's handsome blue eyes, and she saw a young Luke Fontaine, who had defended her against those wolves, who had loved her all those years, had risked his life so many times to hang on to his dream. She loved him for that dream, that bravery, as much as she loved him for just being her Luke, for taking her as his own in spite of her rape, for loving Nathan as if he were his own son.
"I won't tell you anymore that you don't see so well," she teased. "If you want to see me as eighteen, I guess I should let you. I see you the same way, Luke."
He grinned. "Being in this shack reminds me of the early days."
She smiled in return. "What about your supper?"
"The sandwiches can wait," he answered. He picked her up and carried her to the small, homemade bed in one corner of the cabin. "This is at least better than a bed of robes."
More wolves howled, their cries echoing across the vast plains, valleys, and mountains that encompassed the Double L... through Pine Creek, where Will Doolan lay buried, along with several men who had been shot and hanged by vigilantes... around the elegant Fontaine home, where Tyler and Alice lay in each other's arms, where Nathan played in his cabin with his three children, one of them clutching a tattered old stuffed horse. The howling carried over the grave of a small child behind the house, and the graves of two men who had helped build the Double L, one of whom had died for it... the grave of a young Sioux woman named Ramona... and farther up the hill, over the hardly distinguishable graves of the outlaws who had once tried to call this land their own... until Luke Fontaine came along to claim it for himself.
Wildest Dreams Page 60