Two Brothers

by Linda Lael Miller

  When Tristan led her back to the table, where his brother and sister-in-law waited, talking in low voices, she felt almost presentable. She had decided that, in this one instance at least, she would suspend all thought of her troubles and allow herself to enjoy a pleasant meal in this merry and benevolent place. For much of her life, she had lived in the future, plotting and planning and worrying, anticipating and preparing, but tonight, by conscious choice, she would confine herself strictly to the moment.

  It proved dangerously easy to pretend that she had a place in the midst of this glad gathering, that she truly belonged. She forgot her dreary life in Minnesota, where she had been the child bride of a man her uncle’s age, and subsequently a widow, forgot the difficulties she had had to face on her arrival in Butte, and the long, lonely and perilous trip overland to Prominence. For a little while, in her mind at least, her clothes befitted a woman, her future was a thing of bright assurance, and she had every right to enjoy the laughter and talk crisscrossing the table.

  Only when the evening was drawing to a close, and the four of them were taking rich coffee from china cups, did the subject of sheep come up again.

  “There will be trouble when the ranchers hear about that flock,” Shay predicted. Although he was looking at Tristan when he spoke, Emily knew the comment was directed at her. After all, the sheep were hers.

  “I believe Emily expected to run them on her own land,” Tristan said. His glance touched her, from across the table, as effective as a caress. “She was cheated—probably by Eustace Cummings himself.”

  Shay sighed sympathetically. “That old swindler,” he said, with a sort of desultory affection. “The church was packed to the shingles at his funeral, but I suspect most folks just wanted to make sure he was really in the box.”

  “Shay!” Aislinn scolded, but her husband merely grinned and covered her hand with his, the thumb playing over her knuckles. She blushed prettily, but made no move to pull away.

  Once again, Emily felt envious. In four sterile years of marriage to Cyrus Oxlade, she had never been touched so gently. Indeed, she had been a servant, not a wife. A possession, not a companion. Aislinn, she could see, was a full partner to Shay, and he clearly adored her.

  “In any case,” Tristan said, “Emily expected to find a house and land waiting for her here. Instead, she found me.”

  The words gave Emily an odd little thrill, though they shouldn’t have done. She couldn’t have spoken then for anything; it was as if she were strangling on her own tongue. Instead, she found me.

  Aislinn passed her a kindly, knowing look. “Well, what will you do now?” she asked, in a practical tone, bare of prejudice or any preconception of justice.

  Emily found her voice, but it came dry from her throat. “I guess I’ll speak with a lawyer,” she said uneasily. It amounted to a bald challenge, but still, it was the truth. She wasn’t going to take Tristan Saint-Laurent’s word that the ranch was his; she couldn’t afford to do that. She had, after all, nowhere else to go, and some two hundred sheep to look after.

  “You’re welcome to stay here with us,” Aislinn said, her friendliness undiminished. “Until everything is decided, I mean. We have plenty of room.”

  Emily did not dare to look at Tristan for fear of what she might see in his face. “Mr. Saint-Laurent has been kind enough,” she said boldly, “to offer me the use of his—of the house, temporarily.”

  “‘Mr. Saint-Laurent’?” Shay echoed, in the same half-amused tone in which he’d said “Sheep?” earlier.

  There was a short silence, then Tristan pushed back his chair and stood. “It’s getting late,” he said, “and I’m sure Emily is tired.”

  “I’m sure she is,” Shay agreed mildly, standing too. Being nearest, he drew back Emily’s chair before going on to perform the same service for his wife. Emily could not decide whether or not she liked Shamus McQuillan, and though she knew him to be almost an exact duplicate of Tristan, physically at least, she saw marked yet not easily definable differences between the two men. As alike as they were, she was sure she would have no difficulty in telling them apart.

  “Thank you,” Emily said earnestly, to Aislinn, as Tristan ushered her quickly toward the door. “I can’t think when I’ve had a finer meal, or a more congenial evening.” That much was certainly true.

  Aislinn was looking at Tristan, and a small smile lurked at one corner of her mouth. “I daresay we’ll be seeing a great deal more of each other, Miss Starbuck,” she said, a moment before her gaze slid back to meet Emily’s. There was a merry sparkle in her eyes, part mischief, part welcome.

  “I’ll be quite busy with my sheep, I expect,” Emily said, with some regret. They were on the walk by then, and she was a little breathless, keeping up with Tristan’s pace.

  “Good night,” he called, without looking back.

  Perhaps half an hour later, they arrived at the ranch house Emily had expected to own, by virtue of her uncle’s bequest. It was dark, and the moonlight was thin. Tristan led the way inside, entering by the front door, and lit a lamp waiting on a table pushed up against the wall.

  Emily hesitated on the threshold.

  “Come in,” Tristan said patiently. Quietly. “I’m harmless, I promise you.”

  Instinct told Emily that he was anything but harmless—he wore the .45 on his hip with too much ease for that, and his smile alone was a weapon—and yet something deep within urged her to trust him, in this one instance at least. She stepped through the opening.

  He cocked a thumb toward the stairs. “Take the big room, at the end of the hallway. I’ll bring up a couple of buckets of hot water and be on my way.”

  She yearned for any semblance of a bath, and the thought of a real bed to sleep in made her throat tight with gratitude and wonder. “Why are you being so kind to me?” she asked. “I still believe this is my land—my house.” She had to keep believing, because without that, she had nothing.

  He gave her another one of those devastating grins, and as far as Emily was concerned, it constituted an unfair advantage. “I see no reason to be unkind,” he said. “If it turns out that you have a legal claim on this ranch—which you don’t—I’ll concede the point gracefully. In the meantime, you need somewhere to be.”

  She had gotten as far as the base of the stairs, and she paused there, one hand curled around the top of the newel post. “I could have stayed in town, with your brother and his wife,” she reminded him.

  He sighed, lit another lamp, and handed it to her for the ascent to the second floor. “You would have been too far away from your sheep,” he said, and it sounded so reasonable that Emily had nodded and covered most of the distance between the foyer and the door of the assigned bedroom before it struck her that Tristan’s concern for the welfare of her flock was at plain odds with his own interests as a cattleman.

  Not that Emily believed that sheep and cattle could not coexist, as many ranchers claimed. Granted, rams and ewes chewed grass right down to the roots when they grazed, but if the flock was confined to Emily’s own acreage, there was no cause for her neighbors to be concerned. Unless, of course, she didn’t have any land, in which case she did not know what she would do.

  She turned the knob and entered the room Tristan had offered. He had told her it was his, and yet she was unprepared for the dizzying sense of intimacy that swept over her when she caught sight of the spacious bed where he slept, the wardrobe where he no doubt stored his clothing, the washstand where he performed his ablutions, night and morning….

  The lamp trembling a little in her hand, Emily closed the door carefully behind her. She set the light on a bureau, bare except for a hairbrush with an ivory handle and a small photographic likeness of a man and woman standing in front of a log house. At variance with most such subjects, they were both smiling, and each had an arm around the other.

  The sight made Emily smile, too, and filled her with a strange, poignant affection. As a defense, against that ungovernable emotion rather
than against Tristan himself, she carried the room’s one chair to the door and propped it under the latch.

  She pulled the serape off over her head and hung it carefully from a peg on the wall, then went to sit on the edge of the thick mattress. She wondered uncharitably if the bed belonged to Tristan, or if it might properly be viewed as a part of the Eustace Cummings estate. A brisk knock at the door interrupted her musings, and she stiffened, as though caught in some act of wrongdoing. “Yes?”

  Tristan spoke from the hallway. “There was some hot water left in the reservoir,” he said. “I’m leaving it out here. You’ll find towels and soap in the cabinet under the washstand, and you’re welcome to use one of my shirts for a nightgown if you want.”

  Emily stood, somewhat shakily, her face warm. She was glad for the door between them, not just for virtue’s sake, but because it served to hide her state of renewed embarrassment. The prospect of wearing a garment belonging to Tristan against her bare skin, of sleeping on sheets that might still bear the invisible imprint of him, the scent and the shape, nearly overwhelmed her.

  She would have been far better off, she concluded, too late, to pass the night on the ground, with her sheep nearby and only Spud to protect her.

  “Thank you very much,” she called, in a tone as even and steady as she could make it. She moved the chair but stood pressed to the door, waiting, listening for his retreating footsteps. When she heard him descending the stairs, she stepped quickly out into the hallway to collect the two buckets of steaming water.

  Half an hour later, scrubbed and clad in a clean cotton shirt that reached almost to her knees, Emily sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed, grooming her hair with Tristan’s brush. The rainwater scent of him was all around her, just as she had feared it would be, but the reality proved comforting, rather than worrisome. She had no sensible reason to be frightened; if her host had meant to take unseemly advantage, he’d already had more than ample opportunity to do so. No, it was not him she was afraid of, but something in herself. Some longing, some unmet need she could not define. Her marriage had done nothing at all to prepare her for what she felt in the presence, even the shadow of the presence, of Tristan Saint-Laurent.

  After re-plaiting her hair, she turned down the wick on the lamp until the light was snuffed out, then crawled beneath the covers and stretched. She did not expect to sleep, but exhaustion must have claimed her right away, for the next thing she knew, sunlight was prodding, red-gold, at her eyelids.

  It was another moment before Emily fully realized that she was not lying on the hard, cold ground, fully dressed and tangled in her bedroll, but upon a nest of the softest feathers. And sheets—cool, clean, linen sheets, still crisp with newness.

  Tristan Saint-Laurent’s bed. The quilt might have been ablaze, so quickly was she out from under the covers and standing on the hooked rug, her breathing rapid and shallow, her heart pounding.

  She closed her eyes. Instructed herself to be calm. It wasn’t as if Tristan was in the bed, after all, or even in the room.

  Hastily, she shook out her clothes and dressed, wishing for more hot water in which to wash her face. Moving the chair from under the knob, she peered out into the hallway, in one direction and then the other. No sign of anyone.

  She made her way downstairs, saw that there were cheerful blazes crackling in the fireplaces at either end of the long, sparsely furnished room. Tristan was nowhere in sight, although she found a pot of fresh-brewed coffee waiting on the stovetop. She took an enamel mug from a set of open shelves and, using the tail of her serape for a pot holder, poured a generous portion. Her stomach rumbled, but she tried to ignore it. Bad enough that she was beholden for supper and a night of shelter, not to mention the engagement of Mr. Polymarr to look after her flock. Breakfast could only make things worse. Besides, she fully intended to take the matter to law, and when the judge decreed that this land was hers, she would thank Tristan for his cordial treatment, then ask him to pack his belongings and leave immediately.

  The door opened while she was still mired in these thoughts, and Tristan came in, carrying an armload of wood, which he tossed into the box beside the stove with an exuberant clatter. His grin was winsome. “I brew a fine cup of coffee,” he said. “Unfortunately, that’s all I can make that’s fit to offer company.”

  “I can cook,” Emily was flabbergasted to hear herself say.

  “Good,” Tristan answered, dusting his hands together. Before Emily could correct any misimpression she might have given him, he was out the door again, leaving it open behind him. She stood on the threshold watching him walk toward what was probably a springhouse. Her springhouse, she reminded herself, but it didn’t help much, staking mental claims. She was having a very hard time thinking of this man as an opponent, let alone a prospective enemy, but in reality he was both. This was probably her one chance to have a real home, and he had the power to thwart that dream.

  Momentarily, he came out of the little outbuilding, carrying a lidded stoneware crock under one arm, along with something wrapped in cheesecloth.

  “Eggs,” he said, tapping the side of the crock for emphasis. “I bought them yesterday at the general store.” He indicated the gauzy package with a nod. “And this is bacon.”

  Emily’s mouth watered. She’d been living on hardtack and beans since she’d left Butte, and she’d counted herself lucky to have that much, given the state of her late uncle’s finances. He’d had nothing but the sheep and a marker for a thousand acres of land—this land, on which she stood. She turned and went inside to set a skillet on the stove, telling herself that cooking one meal for Saint-Laurent was the least she could do, given the hospitality he’d offered.

  “Please cut that bacon into thin slices,” she said, over one shoulder. “And wash your hands first, if you don’t mind.”

  Tristan executed a salute that might have seemed cocky if it hadn’t been for the smile in his blue eyes. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. She heard him leave, watched through the window while he scrubbed at the pump, using bright yellow soap.

  Twenty minutes later, they were seated across the table from each other, sharing a meal. Emily felt a bit dizzy, and for a brief and unnerving interval, she could not recall how she’d gotten from the decision to leave without accepting anything else from her charming adversary to this present, companionable moment. It was as if she had been bewitched.

  “What did you do in Minnesota?” Tristan asked. He’d eaten with good appetite, but now he seemed to have lost interest in the food.

  Emily drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I was married.” she said.

  He considered her in silence for a while. Why, she wondered, did she want to tell him everything—how Cyrus had never been a real husband to her, how she’d sometimes felt so lonesome in the night that she’d curled up in a ball on her bed and held her belly with both arms, like somebody dying?

  “What became of your husband?” he asked. His tone was easy, moderate, but he cared about her answer, she could see that in his eyes.

  Emily looked down at her hands. Even though she wore leather gloves every day, her skin was callused and reddened, her nails broken. “He died,” she said. “Just collapsed one day, out in the fields.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tristan said, and for some reason it shamed her, his sympathy.

  She met his gaze. “It’s your turn,” she told him briskly. “You and Shay McQuillan are clearly twins. Why do you have different names?” Who is that smiling couple in the daguerreotype upstairs?

  “That’s a long and rather remarkable story. To be brief, Shay and I were born on a wagon train, somewhere in the Rockies, to a young couple making their way west. Our father—his name was Patrick Killigrew—was killed by Indians the same day we came into the world, and our mother, Mattie, died that night. A family called McQuillan took Shay in, while I went on with the Saint-Laurents.”

  It was indeed an amazing tale. “Did you know where he was while you were growing up?” />
  Tristan shook his head. “My mother—my adoptive mother, that is—told me what had happened when she took sick a few years back, and gave me a remembrance book that belonged to Mattie. I found out where Shay was by other means, but I might never have come here if I hadn’t been looking for somebody else.” For the first time since she’d met him, and then just for the briefest moment, Tristan looked uncertain. “I meant to move on, once I’d taken care of business.”

  Emily felt uncomfortable. Although Tristan Saint-Laurent seemed affable, and even boyish, she sensed that there were uncharted depths to his nature, knew somehow that the currents could be dark and treacherous. “Business?”

  His smile was dazzling, like a sudden show of sunshine on a cloudy day. “I got what I came for,” he said. “And I found out I liked having a family again.”

  Emily waited. She wouldn’t ask about the likeness in the frame on Tristan’s bureau top, wouldn’t ask if he’d ever had a wife and children of his own.

  “Shay and I butt heads on a fairly regular basis,” he went on, and a rueful light danced in his eyes. “All the same, it’s a fine thing to have a brother. Were you close to your uncle?”

  The question caught Emily quite unprepared. She had never really been close to anyone, except for some of the characters in the books she read and the made-up people she turned to when she was alone too long, or scared. “Well, no,” she said, in a surprised tone. “My father died before I was born, and my mother passed on soon after. I boarded on a neighboring farm—that’s where I learned to cook.” She blushed. “I don’t usually talk so much.” At least she hadn’t blurted out that the farm was Cyrus’s, and she’d joined the household to take care of his ailing wife, Mary.

  He laughed and glanced at her empty plate. “Or eat so much, I reckon.”

  Now it was Emily who laughed. She’d consumed twice as much food as Tristan had, and she could have eaten more, if the platter between them hadn’t been scraped bare. The ease she felt frightened her more than all those nights alone on the trail had done, and she composed herself, bit her lower lip, sat up very straight in her chair.