Reed Junior knew nothing of her past, her hopes, her dreams—and she knew nothing of him except for what Sofia had written. Nothing at all. Who was he? Who was this man she had given herself to last night?
Anger and shame far worse than any she had ever suffered in her life clung to her now. She clenched her fists and spun away from the window to face them both.
“How could you?” she cried to Sofia. “How did you think you could ever deceive us both? Old Mr. Benton was ill, possibly confused. But you, Sofia? How could you do this to anyone? How could you play with someone else’s life? Do you know what you have done?”
“How could I not do it, señora?” Sofia suddenly stopped rocking. Her hands lay in her lap, fingers entwined. “If you ever love a man the way I loved the señor, you will do anything for him. You will do anything in your power to see him live one more day, even one more hour. To see him draw one more breath. If you have to, you will bargain with the devil to keep him with you for as long as you can.”
With a tortured look, Sofia sank back, let go a deep sigh. “The señor could not wait to meet you. I only wish he had lived a few more hours. That would have been long enough.” The woman buried her face in her hands and coiled in on herself. Her shoulders heaved with silent tears.
Kate was no plaster saint. She was not moved enough to be merciful. “But, Sofia, after I arrived and he was already gone, you kept on deceiving me,” she said.
“The moment I saw you, Katherine, I knew you would be good for Reed. I hoped there was still a chance, that somehow the scheme might work. When Reed walked in, when he actually came home, and then when he passed out, I prayed that he might be attracted to you. I hoped you two would get to know one another while you nursed him back to health. I did not think beyond that.”
Reed had been watching Kate so closely that her shame made her turn away again. His stare was so palpable she knew without looking precisely when he turned his attention back to Sofia.
“I’d still like to know how you and the old man thought I would ever go along with this.” He sounded tired, as drained as Kate felt.
She turned to hear what Sofia had to say.
The housekeeper’s cheeks glistened with tears. “Once Kate arrived, I was going to send word to you that he was gravely ill, that you were needed here. By that time, Katherine would have already arrived, and you two would have met.” She shrugged. “We had not planned beyond that. The señor thought that Katherine, since she believed herself already married to you, would have no choice but to go along with his plan and would perhaps be willing to seduce you. I know how ridiculous it all sounds now, but you know your father. To him, nothing was impossible.”
“I know how well he enjoyed playing God,” Reed said.
“When I finally sent for you, it was to see him buried.” Sofia wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand, then she smoothed her impeccable hair.
“I never received word of his death.”
“Then why did you come home?” Sofia pushed up out of the chair.
“To bring the boy back.”
The housekeeper drew a handkerchief from beneath the cuff of her sleeve and wiped her nose. “Ah, yes. Daniel.”
Reed looked down at his hands. “Yes.”
His cool, shuttered expression struck a chord in Kate, one that made her cringe. There was no love for the boy in his eyes, no tenderness at all in his expression, merely confusion.
Kate stepped forward. “Did you hurt him?”
“What are you talking about?”
“That child. Did you hurt him? He can’t walk. His ankle is swollen. He’s covered with cuts and bruises. You saw fit to tie him up like a dog outside the house, and you haven’t even bothered to ask about him yet. Did you hurt him?”
“Who are you to ask me if I hurt him?” He turned away again, refusing to meet her eyes. “I didn’t touch him. Besides, he’s no concern of yours, anyway.”
“As a caring adult, any child’s welfare is my concern, Mr. Benton.”
“I don’t need a sermon from any sanctimonious spinster so desperate for a man that she agreed to marry one sight unseen.” He rubbed his chin, assessed her as if weighing her worth. “I’ll pay for a ticket to wherever it was you came from so you can go back.”
“I can’t go back.”
His easy dismissal fired her anger while the raw reality of her situation staggered her. There was no way she could undo what had been done last night. No way she could recover what she had lost in this room.
She was back where she had started, except that no decent man would want her now. “I can’t go back,” she repeated, summoning strength from an unknown reserve. She looked Reed straight in the eye. “The marriage has been recorded. Legally, I am your wife.”
Reed sounded just as furious. “I haven’t seen my father in five years. I sure as hell never signed any legal documents, marriage or otherwise.” Reed looked to Sofia for yet another answer. “Who signed that proxy?”
The older woman closed her eyes and sighed. “Your father forged your signature. That I would not do.”
Reed shook his head in disbelief. “This just keeps getting better and better.” He pinned Kate again with his stare. “What will it take to get you out of my life? How much, Miss Whittington?”
Insulted beyond belief, Kate thought of the child down the hall. Daniel was the only thing that kept her from walking out the door and waiting for the stage to pass by. She wasn’t about to abandon that child to this man yet.
She drew herself up, took a deep breath, and asked him, “How much is a woman’s innocence worth these days?”
Finally, he reacted with something beyond anger. He shifted uncomfortably and went very still. He lowered his voice and avoided glancing at Sofia. “What are you talking about?” he asked softly.
Kate could see by the heat that flared in his eyes that he knew very well what she was talking about.
“You weren’t trying to be rid of me last night when you begged me to make love with you.”
“You’re lying.”
“Unfortunately, I am not.”
Sofia drew their attention when she said, “I was troubled during the night and went downstairs for some water. Your door was not closed, Reed. I saw you asleep with Kate in your arms.”
Reed’s heart nearly stopped, but somehow he overcame his shock enough not to let it show. He knew Sofia well enough to know that she was not lying.
So, his hallucination about Becky had not been a dream. He had slept with Kate Whittington. He and the spinster had consummated the sham marriage. If that wasn’t his bloodstain in the center of the bed, then it had to be hers. His father had bought him a virgin.
Reed shot his splayed fingers through his hair and cursed under his breath. He must have been only half conscious last night, and somehow the past had become enmeshed with the present if he had mistaken the woman for Becky, his dear, darling late wife. The woman who had not only betrayed him, but who had given up without a fight and abandoned Daniel to the Comanche.
12
The place where they kept him now was not the wooden lodge for horses. Fast Pony rubbed his eyes and pulled himself up until he was sitting in the middle of the big, too soft bed. Silly, thin coverings filled with tiny holes that let sunlight pour through hung at the glass-filled openings around the walls.
He faced the sun and prayed for his mother, Painted White Feather, prayed that she was still alive and that his father, Many Horses, was, too.
Last night in the dark, before he tried to escape, he had cried for them, for all his friends and family and everything they had lost when the camp was burned—all the meat his mother had stripped and dried, precious, woolly robes that would keep them from freezing in winter, beaded clothes and shoes, painted shields and feathered lances. Years of his mother’s hard work had gone up in flames, destroyed in less than a morning.
Twenty scraped and cured hides had made up their tepee, the only home he had ever known. Now even that f
ine shelter was gone. So was the story of Many Horses’ life that Painted White Feather had drawn around the outside. Fast Pony had fallen asleep trying to remember every bit of that story, every colorful event, so that he would never, ever forget.
As the sun gained strength, he vowed he would cry no more. Babies cried. Not strong boys like him.
He would find another way to escape. His ankle was still swollen, but the pain was not as bad this morning. It was time to begin to fool the white woman with hands as soft as new spring grass.
Today he would stop fighting them, even Hairy Face. He would eat and grow strong. And he would heal.
As soon as he could walk, he would steal a horse, maybe two, and leave this land of white devils behind. He would get away this time and go back to the Comancheria, find his clan’s new camp, and return like a great warrior, like his father, Many Horses.
For many moons to come the Nermernuh would talk about his triumphant return around their campfires.
It felt good to have a plan.
He smiled to himself—a secret smile.
For the first time since the Ranger attack, he began to feel better, but then the silence was broken by the sound of voices raised in argument.
He recognized one as that of the tall Ranger with hate in his eyes, and he shivered. Maybe the man would kill him before his ankle had a chance to heal. Maybe they had been waiting to take him outside and torture him.
Tall Ranger was speaking in anger. The boy heard the women, too, and recognized Soft Grass Hands’ low voice.
Had he been fooled into thinking he saw kindness in her eyes? Was she arguing for his life or his death? Maybe she was angry that Tall Ranger had brought him to this cold dwelling where even he, a stranger, could feel the loneliness.
It would be foolish to wait and see if Soft Grass Hands won the argument. Fast Pony tried to untangle himself from the thin cloth covers and to untie the bonds that held him. He used his teeth and struggled with the knots in the cloth. Finally free, he scooted over to the edge of the bed. It creaked and groaned beneath him in the way a fierce storm wind whines through the branches of tired trees.
He looked over the edge. It was a very long way to the floor.
Kate was the first to hear Daniel’s cry. She turned her back on Reed Benton, determined to run out of his room with a purpose and leave Sofia and him behind. As she walked away, she felt his stare.
“Whatever you were led to believe, it’s all been a lie.”
“... a sanctimonious spinster ... so desperate for a man that she agreed to marry one sight unseen.”
Sofia had written the letters. Sofia!
The documents were forged. I am not Reed’s wife.
Blinded by tears, Kate nearly stumbled as she hurried down the hall. She forced herself to think only of the boy.
Daniel needs me.
She struggled to gather the tattered remnants of her self-respect. Daniel was as lost here as she. Caring for him would give her steady ground on which to stand.
She opened the door, gasped when she saw him sprawled on the floor beside the bed. The too-big shirt had bunched up, revealing his thin, sun-browned legs and thighs. He levered himself onto his hands and elbows, slowly turned his face toward her.
She could see one eye peering at her through his long dark hair. In that blue, icy stare she immediately recognized his father. More than that, she glimpsed his deep hatred of her and of this place.
Like father, like son.
She reminded herself that he was small but strong, and if he had a mind to, he would take advantage of any carelessness on her part.
She stopped halfway to the bed and took a deep breath, tried to put what had just happened in Reed’s room behind her for a few minutes, hoping an answer would come if she concentrated on something else.
“Good morning, Daniel. I certainly hope you haven’t made your ankle any worse. It will never heal if you keep this up.” She stepped within inches of him. “Let me put you back into bed.”
With a quick turn of his head, he whipped his long hair back off his face. Although he was watching her with unflinching wariness, he did not move to strike.
Kate cautiously lowered herself until she was hunkered down beside him.
“Daniel, I’m going to pick you up now. It would be best if you cooperated.”
Trying not to show fear, she reached for him with measured slowness. First touching him lightly on the shoulder, she brushed his long hair back. He supported himself with his hands, pushing the upper half of his body away from the floor.
Kate gingerly slipped her hands around him and lifted as she rose until he was standing on his good leg. Then with one hand she steadied him and used the other to draw back the sheet and coverlet and plump up his pillow.
“Very good, Daniel,” she told him. “That’s very, very good. Now, I’ll help you up again.” Carefully, half expecting him to bite or scratch or fight back, she lifted him onto the bed and arranged the bedclothes around him as he stared at the wall beyond her. She released the useless strips of cloth from which he had escaped and laid them aside. When she straightened away from him, she heard his little stomach growl.
“Are you ready to eat?” She kept smiling, but he refused to turn her way, so she reached for his chin and gently forced him to look at her.
“Daniel,” she touched his chest lightly and then she moved her hand to rest over her own heart. “I am Kate.” Then she added, “I’m going to help you get better.”
She longed to see him healed in mind and body, see him adjust to his new life. Surely that is what his mother would have wanted for him.
Helping this wild, lost little soul, even for an hour more, might keep her sane. She would help him for Becky, the mother who was no longer here.
What she didn’t know was how to help herself out of the predicament she was in, how to make her heart stop loving a man who did not even exist.
13
Reed waited to hear something, anything that made sense from the woman who had helped usher him from boyhood to manhood after his mother died. Sofia had taught him how to dance, how to dress, and apparently, she had also helped his father bait a trap.
“What were you thinking, Sofia?”
“Only of your father. Of you and the future of Lone Star.” Her eyes lowered; she shrugged. “I became caught up in it. I thought perhaps it would work, that if you came to love Katherine Whittington, your heart would finally heal.”
Talk of healing a heart he no longer possessed made Reed uncomfortable. He looked down at his hands, scarred and callused from a life spent outdoors—riding, fighting, killing.
“I used to think of you as my friend, Sofia. I would never have seen this coming.”
“You say you thought of me as your friend, yet you have not been home in five years. You have not written to me once. Sometimes people would speak of you when I went into town, and I knew you had been close by, yet you never came to see me.”
He looked up, surprised when he heard her voice break. “I couldn’t come back,” he said quietly.
“Why not?”
The reasons were deep seated and obvious to him. Pride had forced him to keep them secret from everyone else, including her. “Because he was here.”
“This hatred of your father is irrational, Reed.”
“You know nothing of my hatred or where it comes from.”
“I know you blame him for your mother’s death.”
He heard her sigh, saw her straighten and wipe a tear from the corner of her eye. She was hurting terribly. He was not surprised to see what losing his father had done to her. She had always looked at the old man as if she thought the sun rose and set in him.
Had his father ever even noticed?
Brisk, purposeful footsteps echoed in the hall. The spinster was heading downstairs. Sofia had not moved. Her unwavering, judgmental stare made him want to walk out.
“Does anyone else know about this? That she came out here as my wife?”
“Only Scrappy. We told everyone at the funeral she was visiting from the East.”
“Seems you thought of everything. What are you going to do about her?” Reed asked.
“Nothing. I am leaving this afternoon when the stage comes by,” Sofia said softly. “I cannot give any more years to you Bentons.”
“What do you mean, you’re leaving?”
Her eyes were so full of sadness that her pain threatened to reach him. He hated her for that more than all the rest put together. He didn’t want to feel.
“I am going back to Santa Fe. To my family’s rancho. After what I have done, you should fire me anyway.”
“New Mexico?”
He had almost forgotten that Sofia once had a life beyond the boundaries of Lone Star, before she had been swept into the whirlwind of his father’s life. He could not blame her. If he wasn’t weak as a newborn foal, he’d be heading out, too. But Sofia had been instrumental in bringing the spinster here. He was not about to get stuck with her.
He shifted, trying to relieve the ache in his throbbing shoulder. “Before you go, do me one favor and send that woman packing, would you?”
Her eyes narrowed. Her expression darkened with anger she no longer tried to hide. “Katherine is the innocent one in all of this. A pawn, just as you were.” Then she eyed him with a pointed, knowing look. “After last night, she is no longer my concern. She is yours.”
“She can’t stay here.”
“Why not? What are you afraid of?”
Afraid of feeling. Afraid that if half of what he remembered from last night had really come to pass, that he was in danger of wanting the woman again, perhaps in danger of much more.
“Have you no heart left at all?” Sofia prodded.
“None.” He wanted to keep it that way.
“You need a housekeeper, Reed. Someone to care for the boy. She was a teacher at a girls’ orphanage. She knows how to deal with children. She can look after Daniel until you are able. Perhaps she can even cook.”
Daniel. He had tried to forget.
Summer Moon Page 9