by Jillian Hart
He knew by the look on the doc’s face that it was too little, too late.
She’d hovered like this before in the dreamworld of darkness. The only sense left to her was her hearing; all else had faded. She heard voices. Two men, talking low. Not Ham. She tried to remember what had happened to him, how drunk he’d been, how violent. She couldn’t recall. Only that she’d feared for her baby’s life and then someone had come—Joshua Gable—and driven him away. Shot the gun out of his hand, disarmed him and knocked him to the ground.
She remembered in a distant way how Mr. Gable had knelt at her side, his tentative touch to her shoulder meant to comfort her, to let her know she needn’t be afraid of him.
He’d protected her when she’d needed it the most. And while she’d witnessed the violence he was capable of, she saw too the kindness as he moved the broken piece of wood from the wagon that was pinning her down. Noticed the round of her stomach no longer disguised by the thick fall of her skirts, for the fabric was in disarray, and saw his pity.
Pity she did not need but knew this babe in her womb deserved. Consciousness had bled away as he’d gathered her into his arms and carried her. She’d remembered the last sounds of his boots crunching on the thick ice before silence reigned. And then awakening to an awareness of men’s voices.
Yes, that was what had happened, she figured out now. Mr. Joshua Gable had returned with the doc in tow.
The voices faded and returned and warmth came with it. Like a fire hotly burning. She could hear the crackling of the seasoned cedar popping in the stove. And water, hot, sweet, seeping into her bones, lighting a river of pain in her midsection that made her afraid for her babe.
She would endure any pain, any hardship, any loss. As long as her little one remained safe beneath her heart. Fierce love filled her and she held on when the clawing pain returned. Then the doctor laid something bitter on her tongue and the blackness reached out to imprison her.
But nothing—nothing—could diminish this love for her baby.
Just when he thought the chilblains couldn’t get worse, they did. Joshua growled like a hungry bear fresh out of hibernation and he knew he was about as surly as one. He gulped down the bitter concoction Haskins had steeped for him. Nasty. The chalky, acrid taste clung to his tongue like ice to a roof and didn’t let go.
That didn’t improve his mood. The traveling pain in his feet and both hands could have been spikes being driven into his flesh over and over without end. Hardly pleasant. If it had been any other circumstance, he’d have roared in fury at the unrelenting pain, but the truth was, watching Claire Hamilton’s life fade had silenced him.
“She lost too much blood. Some women do after a miscarriage,” Doc said, his examination through as he washed up in the Hamiltons’ tiny kitchen. “I can’t imagine what she went through out there all alone. It’s lucky you found her when you did.”
“Luckier that you found us both when you did.”
He poured two fingers of Ham’s Jack Daniel’s into a cup and tossed it back. The fire in his stomach took some of his attention away from the pain in the rest of his battered body. If he kept working and living at this pace, it would be time to put him out to pasture before General, who he’d best go out and check on.
Better than trying to imagine what Claire Hamilton had suffered alone in the storm before he’d found her. Since it was all he could think about, a change of scenery might help. Because as bad as this pain was, it wasn’t enough to keep his gaze from wandering toward the front room, where a fire blazed in the big stone hearth and, on the other side of the brushed-velvet sofa, he knew Claire lay motionless.
An odd feeling burrowed into his chest. Figuring it for pity, he jumped off the chair with a groan, the chilblain pain spiking new and his ankle tormenting him enough to chase away the hollow of feeling deep in his chest. He wasn’t a man with feelings. He had one feeling—anger. And it drove him now as he lifted his jacket from the back of a chair.
But he hadn’t taken two limping steps before he swung northward to where he could see the widow on her back with her knees elevated, draped in heated blankets. The blood stilled in his veins. “My grandmother will come sit with her, if you think there’s time for that.”
“It’s hard to say why she’s lasted this long.” Haskins dried his hands on an embroidered towel and hung it back up on the dowel over the basin. “Are you gonna let me take a look at that ankle?”
“Maybe. When I get back from the barn.”
“You just keep walkin’ on it. That’s sure to make it better.” The doc rolled his eyes, as if he knew better.
Joshua had no time for a broken ankle. He had the last of the work to get done before the midwinter storms hit in earnest. Until Thanksgiving, a man could expect a lot of sunny days—not warm, mind you, but bright enough the snow would melt and give him plenty of time to finish up with leaky roofs and surprise chimney problems. Livestock moving and hauling in enough grain for the barn and supplies for the house. All of that required hard physical work. None of it would get done if he was favoring his ankle.
Why he didn’t head straight to the door between the front room and the kitchen, Joshua couldn’t explain. He found his boots heading north when they ought to turn east and the roaring heat from the hearth burned against his outer leg as he stared down at Claire.
He’d seen her unconscious and wounded too many times. He’d first thought the Hamilton brothers had found her, then he realized, when the doc explained, something equally sad had happened.
Losing the promise of a baby was no small thing. He was old enough to remember the brother that was stillborn before Jordan—the last of the family—was born. And James’s wife had miscarried twice.
The sorrow had been palpable the last time he’d seen that woman, even if she was a dreadful moneygrubbing leech—well, he’d promised his mother he would try not to dislike the woman so much, but it was like pushing a boulder uphill with his nose. He believed his sister-in-law embodied everything essentially female that he despised. Greed, manipulative behavior and selfishness.
But Claire looked so innocent and guileless lying beneath thick buffalo robes, she hardly made a shape beneath the blankets. He couldn’t stop the roll of emotion—it had to be pity—that tumbled out of him. It was a surprise that he could feel even that. His heart had become too hard over the years. Ma said that it was a sorry result of not marrying, that a woman would have kept him from hardening up and spoiling like forgotten milk in the cellar.
He’d always figured it had more to do with his father’s death. He’d been the one to find him, twisted in agony, dead and stiff with rigor mortis, and Joshua had lost his faith in any member of the human race the moment he’d spotted his father’s body and pulled him into his arms.
So, why did he feel anything at all when he was near Claire? She was a lovely woman, but he’d been around plenty of lovely women. They were everywhere in town, in the stores, serving meals at the diners, and yet he’d never felt this spark before.
Obviously, it wasn’t simply that Claire was a sight to behold, her skin like porcelain, her hair thick and lustrous and a beauty of its own. Maybe it was her vulnerability that appealed to him, since he’d witnessed Ham’s brutality to her. Joshua wouldn’t treat a rabid dog the way Hamilton had taken a whip to his wife. Maybe that was why he ached as he turned his back on her motionless form. Why he closed down his heart like a fire’s damper and left the sparks to smolder out.
He pushed open the door, welcoming the biting sting of winter. The cold gave him something to think about besides the beautiful widow. He had enough troubles—his cracked ankle was killing him. And General had been pushed beyond his own strength. Once that happened, sometimes a horse was never the same.
Yes, he cared about his horse. They’d been buddies for a long time. And General had given his all to save them. What a great animal. Warmth edged into Joshua’s heart as he climbed into the stall. His equine friend didn’t acknowledge his presence
, too exhausted to do more than blink.
“You did good, boy.” Joshua eased down beside him and ran his hand along General’s firm neck.
Maybe it wasn’t right that a man’s best friend was a horse, but they’d been through a lot together. He trusted no one like he did General. “I was gonna come back for you, buddy.”
The gelding nickered low in his throat, as if he understood both the English language and the situation, the choice Joshua had had to make. “I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw you coming up behind us.”
General nickered again and, with a painful-sounding sigh, closed his eyes. Drifted off to sleep.
A good horse. A better friend. Joshua creaked to his knees, limped through the cramped, dirty-smelling barn, and found a few horse blankets that hadn’t been cleaned or aired, but left to gather dust in a corner. Ham had been a lazy rancher. God knows how he managed to have enough animals survive to keep this place.
Joshua shook the blankets out and covered General with them. Time would tell if he’d make it. Or have to be retired to pasture.
Loss. It clung to him like the ferocious air; it speared at him like the pain from his thawing flesh.
He’d take the Clydesdale back to the homestead. He had his conscience to ease and his family to protect.
And if he added a prayer for Claire’s unlikely recovery, then it wasn’t an actual, real prayer. Just more of a hope, for Joshua Gable was not a praying man. Life was a gamble, and he felt as if he were holding the lowest cards in the deck next to a dealer’s king and an ace.
Not good betting odds, but life was far from a sure thing. A wager everyone lost in the end.
Chapter Five
The sound of a gunshot brought her to awareness again. The single shot had seemed to come from far away, too. She knew instinctively that she was home safe, that the single, distinctive pop had come from behind the barn. It was Ham.
Ham being shot. Her mind spun forward, as if it were a nightmare, bringing her to the edge of the grave where her husband’s casket gleamed in the failing daylight. Where snowflakes began to fall one by one as if to bury the image from her sight. The confrontation with her mother-in-law, Ham’s brother’s confronting Joshua, the horror of collapsing in the snow as contractions seized control of her midsection—
No. That had been a nightmare. None of it was true. She couldn’t let it be. Because if the baby was gone, then she’d lost everything that could ever matter. She would be alone without anyone to love. She had so much love in her heart. So much she’d planned on giving to her child. And now…
It was gone. She was empty, hollow. Her mind had been playing tricks on her. Letting her hold on to what had been long gone. What should have been a terrible wave of grief seemed to be at a distance, too. She’d learned sometimes the greatest of pain was that way. A sudden shock that kept a person from feeling the initial blast of agony.
But eventually the shock would break away and then there would be no escape.
The sounds came again. The door, she realized. Someone was approaching the door. It wasn’t Ham; he wasn’t here anymore. The funeral, the ride home, all of it had been real. Her mind kept trying to reject what was only fact. The shock faded away and the grief came in a hot, strangled wave. She was suddenly alive, the darkness was gone and tears rolled up from her soul.
Alive, she opened her eyes to stare at the stone wall hearth in the cabin. At Ham’s six-point elk head hanging above the mantel. His collections of knives and revolvers and his tin of tobacco. The fire roared in colors of orange, yellow and red. Flames writhed and twisted in on themselves, and she thought hell would have fires like that.
She shivered, although she was not cold, but her heart was freezing, as if buried six feet under snow. Wetness rolled down her face, warm rivulets that trailed over her cheeks and ran along her jaw and along her neck to drip onto the pillow. Someone had brought one from the bedroom—the pillow slip had her favorite pattern she’d embroidered. A spray of honeysuckle, their trumpetlike flowers delicate, their vines curlicued, framing the mated pair of hummingbirds.
The two birds had seemed so happy together, that was why she’d chosen the pattern when she’d made the pillow slips for her hope chest, naive girl that she’d been. She rubbed the tip of her finger along the hue of tawny thread she’d used to stitch the outline of the female bird’s chest. The design was easier to concentrate on than the man whose boots knelled in slow, steady steps closer.
Joshua Gable. She didn’t need to rip her gaze away from the embroidered design to know it was him. She could feel his presence as if it were the radiant heat from the fire.
The image of how he’d come to her rescue that first night, protecting her from Ham’s drunken violence, telegraphed into her mind. The image of him towering above her at the funeral, genuine concern etched into his strong face, swept into her mind’s eye. Followed by the feel of his iron-solid arms around her, carrying her through the blizzard.
Maybe it was this almost dreamlike place she was in, maybe that was why she could sense a strange connection to him. Why her very being seemed to turn toward him, like a sunflower to the dawn.
He stood over her now, and she could feel the shape of him, thrown like a shadow on her skin where his body blocked the stifling heat from the fire. She’d never felt such a thing before. Surely never with Ham, even before they’d married when she’d thought herself so much in love with him.
Maybe it was simply because she felt so alone. Isolated and drifting and he was a man made of granite, anchored and unyielding. Seemingly good and decent and strong, when she was used to being around Ham, who was not one of those things.
And she admired the good qualities in a man, for they had once seemed rare. And now that she knew the truth about men, they were even rarer still. Or maybe it was because he’d helped her when no one else had or would. When her neighbors and acquaintances and family all looked the other way over the years, ignoring the bruises marking her face or the way she shielded her sore ribs or forearm or leg. She’d craved help when there was none.
When others, including her own aunt, would see her situation and turn away. It ain’t no one’s concern, she could hear her aunt’s voice in her head, the one time Claire had outright asked for help early in her marriage. The reverend said, what God joined together let no man put asunder. You lay in this bed of marriage you made, jus’ like the rest a us.
And Joshua had not stood aside. He’d not looked the other way. Back when she’d been young and dreamy and believed in the fairy tales and the novels of romance she used to read, before she’d ever heard Ham’s name, she would have thought him her champion. A hero. A man to admire. But she’d learned that no man was that. No man was that great, that strong, that good. Men didn’t need to be kind to get what they want. Men didn’t love. Men made the laws and the rules, and as far as she could tell, men cared only about themselves.
And if she saw something admirable in Joshua Gable, then it was only illusion. Or her own wishful thinking, nothing more.
So, why did her entire being prickle with awareness of him? She was foolish, that’s why, because deep down, beyond the pain and the weakness and the miscarriage, when it would have been easier to give in to the darkness, she’d chosen life. Because beyond all of her experience, she could not let go of the tiny thread of hope she clung to with both hands.
That even when the logical, undeniable fact was that she’d lost everything and there was no reason to hope, she did hope.
Tears burned in the corners of her eyes and tapped onto the pillow. The roar and crackle of the fire filled her ears. The spikes of pain lancing her entire body came to full awareness and she could smell the wood smoke, the soft down of the buffalo blanket covering her, the scorching heat from the warming irons tucked alongside her and the gnawing agony of her unfreezing feet as if a bear were feasting on her bare toes.
“Claire?”
His baritone rumbled low and resonant and whiskey-rough, and the vibrat
ion of it seemed to sink inside her like a sensual stroke.
No. It was instinct to protect herself, to stop the flood of sensation into her drained heart. She was vulnerable and weak, and that was the reason she was responding to him so stridently.
Don’t turn to him. She knew it would only make her more defenseless to the caress of his voice, the fiction of his presence, and only stroke the sparks of hope fighting for life within her. Fighting to keep that undefeatable hope from rising up.
She heard the rustle of his denim trousers and the creak of boot leather as Joshua Gable knelt. The cool shadow his big body had tossed over her was gone—the heat radiated across her entire being. She did not know where he knelt, only that he was close, that he was watching her in a way that felt as tangible as a physical touch. She knew he could hardly miss the tears gleaming on her cheek and trickling sideways down her face.
Why did this man, this stranger, know the most intimate piece of her life? Her family did not know it, Ham’s family did not know she’d miscarried, let alone that she’d been pregnant. Ham was not a proud father-to-be. He had no love for mewling brats, he’d told her. He hadn’t wanted to hear more about the pregnancy, and she’d watched the exciting early changes her body went through alone.
Eleven weeks later, it was as if there had never been a new life started within her, at least to those looking in from the outside on her life.
And Joshua Gable’s knowledge and pity lapped over her like a shallow lake’s warm waters in mid-August. Lulling and comforting and sweet enough to sink into, and it was tempting to give in when his baritone rolled through her again.
“I have to ask you a few questions.” Joshua Gable cleared his throat, and that rough sound moved through her, too.
She squeezed her eyes more tightly shut. Don’t give in to the impulse, Claire. Don’t believe in him.