A slow flush crept, scalding, up Willow’s neck and into her face. What would happen if she told her father the truth? Surely the secret would be safe with him, and he’d know what to do about all its attendant problems.
On the other hand, knowing might be worse for him than what he was going through now.
“I don’t know why Daphne wants to stay here,” Willow lied firmly, and it appeared that her father believed her.
Unless, of course, that was merely what he wanted her to think.
* * *
Gideon left the saloon late, with Jack Roberts’s loud lecture ringing in his ears. Even though he’d deserved every word of it, he still smarted as though he’d been pelted with small, sharp stones.
He had just reached his horse and unwound the reins from the hitching rail when Zachary stepped out of the darkness. He had the damnedest way of just appearing like that. “If I had a wife like yours, Gideon,” he said companionably, “I wouldn’t be in town right now, dallying in some saloon.”
In no mood for a round with Zachary, Gideon scowled. He hung one stirrup from the saddle horn to check and then tighten the cinch around his horse’s middle. “You don’t have a wife like mine, though, do you?”
Zachary sighed heavily and gripped the post of the hitching rail in both hands. “Why the hell don’t you go home, where you belong? Sweep Daphne off her feet again, con Jack into thinking you’ll make a fine son-in-law in spite of it all. And then head back to San Francisco and your railroad shares and all your wheeling and dealing. You’ve had your tumbles in Willow Gallagher’s bed.”
Gideon had been about to mount up. Now, feeling cold all over, he turned to face his brother squarely. “Her name is Willow Marshall.”
“On paper, maybe,” Zachary countered smoothly. “But she’s a Gallagher, through and through, and we both know that.” He paused, smiled oddly. “Your Willow,” he said, “is a little outlaw. Eventually, she’ll get tired of being your dutiful wife, Gideon. She’ll run off with somebody more exciting, just like her mother did all those years ago. You might have kids of your own when she flies the coop. And, like the judge, there won’t be a damn thing you can do to stop Willow from going or to make her come back.”
Gideon felt a chill move through him. It had more to do with the tempestuous history he and Zachary shared than any worries he had concerning Willow.
Though, God knew, there were a few of those, too.
“Is that all you wanted to say?” he asked, refusing to rise to the bait.
“No,” Zachary said, as Gideon climbed into the saddle. He never knew when to quit. “Your life is in San Francisco, Gideon, not in this godforsaken wilderness. What the hell are you doing, buying land and cattle, playing like you mean to settle down?”
“You know,” Gideon drawled, looking down into his brother’s face, “it’s a curious thing, your interest in seeing me go back. And I’ve wondered the same thing about you—why you stay here in Virginia City, I mean.”
Light from the saloon fell on Zachary’s face, casting shadows that hid his expression. “Have you?” he countered mildly. “I thought you were smarter than that, little brother.”
The realization was no great surprise. So why did it feel like a kick in the teeth? “It’s Willow, then,” Gideon said. “You want my wife.”
Zachary nodded and smiled as he stepped back up onto the board sidewalk. “When you come to your senses, little brother, and go back to your board meetings and your rich mistresses, I mean to be right here, waiting to console her.” His shoulders moved in a shrug. “It might take some time, I grant you, but Willow will come around. Won’t that be convenient? She won’t even have to change her name!”
“You’re insane,” Gideon said, taking up the reins but making no move to ride away. “You just told me that you expect Willow to take up with an outlaw.”
Zachary’s grin was somehow chilling. “I’d make a fine outlaw,” he said. “Don’t you think?”
Gideon swung his right leg over the saddle horn and landed deftly on the ground, face-to-face with his brother. “What I think,” he said, “is that we ought to settle this, once and for all.”
Zachary held up both his hands in affable abstention and took another step back, probably to get out of fist range. “Oh, no,” he averred. “I won’t fight you, Gideon. I mean to wait and watch, that’s all. Bide my time. You’ll trip up soon enough. You’ll leave the territory, or you’ll get yourself killed—wouldn’t that be a shame?—who knows which? The point is that once one or all of those things happen, Willow will be in need of consolation.”
Gideon’s fists ached and the blood throbbed beneath his temples. “You’ll fight,” he breathed, advancing on his brother. “That’s the only choice you’ve got.”
Zachary paled, but a smirk played on his mouth. “Gideon, Gideon,” he scolded ruefully, “what would that do to your reputation in this town? You’re supposed to be an upright landowner, a cattleman. A deputy U.S. marshal. What will people say if they see you brawling in the street like some common roughneck?”
Shrugging out of his coat, Gideon smiled. “Why, Zachary,” he said, “you ought to know by now that I don’t give a damn what people say about me.” He undid his cuff links, dropped them into the pocket of his suit coat, then hung the garment from the horn of his saddle. Zachary backed up again as his brother calmly rolled up his sleeves. “You know, Zach,” he went on, in measured tones, “I’ve been taking all kinds of guff from you ever since you came here. Before that, too, from the time we were little kids. And I’m dead sick of it.”
“Gideon,” Zachary said, sounding nervous now.
Gideon advanced on his brother, filled with bloodlust, not just over the things Zachary had said about Willow, but over a lifetime of tricks and lies and out-and-out bullying. Of the two of them, Gideon had always been the one with a head for business, with the acumen to manage and increase the family fortune. Zachary, though several years older, had a less impressive set of skills.
He gambled, threw away thousands of dollars “courting” women he never intended to marry, and often had to borrow from their grandfather’s vast estate to make it through to the next dividend payment.
Although Gideon doubted he’d ever be able to prove it, he knew in his bones that several of the near misses he’d had as a kid—hurtling down a flight of stairs when he was three, being locked in a shed that conveniently caught fire when he was eight, almost getting trampled by a horse on more than one occasion—had been Zachary’s doing.
Zachary would have loved to see Gideon dead. He stood to inherit so much, in the event of his younger brother’s tragic death. Or, at least, he had, until Willow came along, anyway.
Catching the lapels of Zachary’s impeccable suit coat in his fists, Gideon rasped, “Thanks to you, dear brother, Willow is my wife. And I love her. So it looks like your little joke blew up in your face, doesn’t it?”
Zachary’s eyes went round, and his breath was quick, ragged. He tried to pull away, but he’d never been the stronger one. “Gideon, for God’s sake . . .”
Gideon was half-blind with anger now, with an accumulation of memories, things Zachary had done to him, said to him, set in motion behind his back. “No. God isn’t going to have any part in this,” he spat out. “I mean to do it all myself.”
“Wait!” Zachary cried. “Gideon, you can’t; I was only—”
“Let him go, Gideon.”
The voice was masculine, and somehow it reached through the fog of Gideon’s fury and touched his reason like a cooling hand. He sighed and dropped his hands, releasing his grip on Zachary, stepping back.
Zachary immediately bolted, his coattails flying as he whirled around, the heels of his boots making a clomping sound on the wooden sidewalk, fading away into the night. Gideon faced his father-in-law, head-on.
“I wanted him to bleed,” he said.
“I know,” answered Devlin.
It struck Gideon then that Devlin looked old. He was far thinner than h
e had been before Steven’s death, and his eyes had an unnerving, hollowed-out look, as though he’d been scraped raw on the inside.
“Is Willow all right?” Gideon asked.
“She’s fine, or so she says,” the judge answered. “I’d like to talk to you, though. Mind letting me buy you a drink or two?”
Gideon was brutally tired, but he sensed that Devlin would relate something important, maybe vital. “Anything but panther piss,” he replied.
* * *
Much later, Gideon collected Willow from the judge’s house and they drove home through the starlit night, in the buggy. The nearer they got to the ranch house, the more clearly they could hear the lowing of the weary cattle.
Gideon was pensive, the set-to with Zachary far from his mind, thinking about what the judge had told him. He’d seen Willow in the churchyard, Devlin had, placing flowers on the graves of Coy and Reilly Forbes and never casting so much as a glance in the direction of Steven’s. That bothered Gideon, as it had bothered his father-in-law.
He didn’t speak of it, though. Instead, he considered odd bits and pieces torn from the fabric of the last week or so.
Grief-stricken women usually cried until the pain had passed, but Willow had not shed a tear, to his knowledge, since the day her brothers were brought in. She hummed and played her piano. She pored over seed catalogs and had already marked off plots for next year’s flower and vegetable gardens.
At night, or any time he came to her, actually, Willow was more than ready to make love. That very morning, in fact, she’d followed Gideon out to the barn when he went to do the chores and—well—there was no other way to explain it: she’d had her way with him. She’d knelt in the musty hay and straw and he’d had to brace himself against the outside railing of a stall, moaning as she took her pleasure.
Just the memory of it made Gideon harden and break out in a sweat. His release had been so explosive that it had wrung a shout from him.
Now, in the buggy seat, Gideon had to widen his knees slightly, to accommodate himself. The experience had been beautiful, and yet it bothered him for several reasons. For one thing, Willow had hated him, really hated him, the day Vancel Tudd brought her dead brothers to town. She’d spat at him and called him Judas. It was hard for Gideon to believe that her feelings had changed so completely and so rapidly.
And then there was her continuing habit of wandering in the night. Gideon had lost count of the times he’d found her outside somewhere, barefoot, her eyes haunted. Always, no matter how far she might be from that structure, she claimed she’d been to the outhouse.
Sadly, Gideon came to the obvious conclusion: Willow’s behavior was irrational. It was entirely possible that, losing her brother, she might also be losing her mind.
He reached the ranch, then unhitched the horse and buggy. Just as he was leaving the barn, Gideon remembered the presents he’d bought for Willow—it seemed a thousand years ago—and went back to the rig to get them. In the kitchen, dimly lit by just one lamp, he shyly extended the parcel.
“What’s this?” Willow asked, and it was impossible to read her face.
Gideon sighed. He’d given a thousand presents to a thousand women and never once felt this way. He might as well have been a little boy, for God’s sake, presenting something he’d made with his own hands to an adored goddess. “Just some things I bought in town a while ago,” he said.
It seemed, in the half light, that Willow’s fingers trembled a little as she untied the string and opened the crackly brown paper. The gifts inside were separately wrapped in white tissue, and she found the tiny piano first, gazing at it in wonder.
“Oh, Gideon,” she breathed, as though he had given her a chest full of faultless gems. She turned the little key on the bottom and the kitchen was filled with the soft, chiming music.
Gideon felt deflated. This was Zachary’s gift, not his; he hadn’t been the one to choose it for her. He wanted to leap at the table and snatch away the still-wrapped monkey before she could see it and know what a raving idiot she had married.
It was too late, though; she reached for it, undid the wrapping. A cry of startled glee escaped her when she saw the little monkey with his brass cymbals and stupid hat. “What does he do?” she asked in a small voice.
His hand trembling almost imperceptibly, Gideon reached out and turned a tiny key buried in the toy’s woolly fur. The monkey began to chatter and clap the cymbals together with surprising exuberance.
Willow cupped the little creature in the upturned palms of her hands, watching it with wide eyes. Then she threw back her head and laughed so joyously that Gideon was completely taken aback, not knowing whether his gift had succeeded or failed.
He blushed miserably. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Sorry?” The lovely golden eyes were fixed on him now, unreadable. “Gideon, why on earth would you be sorry?”
The monkey was winding down, clapping the cymbals more and more slowly, chattering only after lengthening intervals of silence. Gideon just stood there, his hands in his pockets.
“Gideon?” Willow prompted gently.
“I should have given you diamonds or something,” he burst out, unable to stop the rush of words. “Damnit, there isn’t a decent jewelry store in the whole town and . . .”
Slowly, Willow began to wind the monkey up again. “Diamonds!” she scoffed.
Gideon had never heard a woman speak of diamonds in exactly that tone before. Again, he was at a loss.
Willow set the monkey in the center of the table and laughed again at its gyrations, clapping her hands in delight, like a child. “Oh, Gideon, it’s so wonderful.”
“Wonderful?” he echoed hoarsely.
And she flung herself into his arms, burying her face deep in his neck. “I love you!” she cried, her voice muffled by his flesh. “Oh, Gideon, I love you so much!”
Despite his relief in knowing that the gift had pleased her, Gideon was aware of the desperation in her tone. It was almost as though she feared they would be parted somehow.
Unnerved by this prospect, Gideon carried his wife up the stairs and into their bedroom, where their joining was fierce and bittersweet. Sometime later, when she thought Gideon was asleep, Willow left the house.
For a few minutes, Gideon lay still in the rumpled bed, thinking. And then it occurred to him that Willow might not be behaving strangely because she was losing her mind but because Steven Gallagher wasn’t dead.
16
Willow’s heart leaped into her throat as the long shadow near the house solidified into a man, and she started violently. “Gideon?” she croaked.
A cloud passed over the waning moon, moved on again. In the thin light, Willow saw the nod, made out the familiar frame. “Yes,” he said.
She cast a furtive look toward the outhouse, which was so far away as to be invisible in the night. She could not say she’d been there, not again. The lie had grown and grown and now it lodged in her throat, the size of a Christmas orange.
“Steven is alive,” Gideon ventured evenly, letting no emotion show in his voice.
Willow was torn between relief and terror. “How did you know?” she managed, shivering a little in the chill, drawing her shawl more closely about her shoulders.
Gideon reached out, took her arm in a grasp that betrayed no anger, and squired her toward the back of the house, then inside. There, he lit a lamp before answering. “It was just a guess, until now. You’ve been behaving very strangely, for a bereaved woman—stuffing yourself after the funeral, when no one else had an appetite, riding into the hills that day with Daphne, making love with me as though you hadn’t just suffered a shattering loss.”
Willow sighed and sat down at the table, bracing her head in her hands. She was too tired to lie anymore; the secret was too heavy to carry, just as Steven had warned it would be. “You must have thought I was losing my sanity.”
“At first, yes. Tonight, after you left our bed again, I started to think about the day Tu
dd brought the bodies in. You went into the back room to view them, remember? And you cried out and fainted.”
Willow nodded.
“You had opened Steven’s shirt; I was too worried about you then to think about it much, but that was how you knew that Tudd had shot someone else by mistake, wasn’t it?”
Again, Willow nodded her head. “The hatchet wound—Steven had been injured in a fight with Red Eagle a few days before—”
“And there was no wound,” Gideon guessed, quite correctly. “You must have suspected something before that, though, or you wouldn’t have bothered to look.”
Willow’s mouth went dry. She nodded. There had been so many things, really, but she’d been in shock. It had taken a few minutes to absorb the truth—that the hooded man sprawled belly-down across Steven’s saddle wasn’t Steven.
“I knew almost right away,” she admitted.
Gideon was standing near the sink by then, watching her, his face expressionless, his arms folded. His voice was like gravel when he spoke. “Put your clothes on, Mrs. Marshall,” he said. “You and I are going into town.”
Alarm leaped through Willow like a fire, out of control. “Why? Gideon, it’s the middle of the night—”
“And your father believes his only son to be dead. We, or more specifically you, are going to tell him that the man lying in that grave in the churchyard, next to Coy and Reilly Forbes, isn’t Steven.”
Gideon was right, of course.
Her father needed to know Steven was alive—whatever the consequences of that knowledge might be. Holding it in, especially in the face of Devlin’s terrible grief, had been killing Willow.
So with a nod, Willow got up from her chair, made her way toward the back stairs, then climbed them and moved along the dark hallway and into the room she and Gideon shared now as married people.
It took, or seemed to take, a very long time to get dressed, but when Willow joined her husband in the kitchen again, she was clad in a lightweight woolen dress and wearing a bonnet.
Gideon hitched up the horse and buggy, saying nothing as he worked.
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