There were three riders to his left, three to his right. The youngest, a doe-eyed kid barely out of knickers, wheeled his horse around and approached, taking visible care not to make any sudden moves.
Tristan bit back a smile. He supposed the boy valued those shell-like ears of his, and didn’t want their shape altered.
“What’s your brand?” the kid asked. He sounded testy.
The mark was a crescent moon, and Tristan said as much, though he was sure it was common knowledge. Prominence wasn’t all that big a place, and there were no more than a dozen ranches within a fifty-mile radius.
“You just stay right here,” said the lad, “and we’ll cut out your cattle.”
“Like I said before,” Tristan replied dryly, “I plan to take an active part in that process, thanks all the same.”
There was no further argument, though the boy was plainly simmering with opinions to which he didn’t quite dare give utterance. He swept off his hat, dragged a forearm across his brow, and spurred his horse toward the cattle grazing placidly below. The other riders followed at a slower pace, and Tristan fell in behind them.
They cut out forty-odd head of beef over the course of two hours, and while Tristan suspected there were more, he decided to content himself with what he’d recovered, for the moment at least. The boy, who grudgingly admitted that he was called Fletcher—he didn’t say if it was his first name or his last—was nominated by the others to help Tristan drive the cattle back over the broken fence line onto his own land.
“You like working for that outfit?” Tristan inquired. He was setting up the posts Emily had pulled out by that time, using a flat rock to pound them into the ground. Fletcher lingered, without saying why, still mounted and looking fretful.
The boy shrugged. “It pays a decent wage,” he answered. “I get my grub and a place to sleep.”
Tristan spoke calming words to the gelding, who’d grown fitful from the pounding, before pausing to look up into Fletcher’s face. “I could use a good hand around here, if you’re interested.”
No smile. “I might be. How many men you got workin’ for you now?”
Tristan grinned. “Just you, I’m afraid. You’d have the bunkhouse all to yourself.”
Fletcher glanced back over one shoulder as if to see if he’d been trailed from the Powder Creek spread, then met Tristan’s gaze straight on. “What makes you think you can trust me?” he asked.
“I didn’t say I trusted you,” Tristan answered and, tossing aside the rock, he gripped one of the fence posts in both hands and gave it a good wrench, to make sure it was stable. It was. “I said I needed help. Either you want the job, or you don’t. That’s all we have to discuss right now.”
“I’d have to have a horse. This one belongs to Kyle.”
“I’ll provide a cow pony.”
“I can shoot, too.”
Tristan suppressed a grin. “That’s fine,” he said, “but I hope you won’t have use for that skill.” He murmured a few soothing words to the gelding and mounted, anxious to be gone. Miss Emily Starbuck was very much in his mind; he wanted to see her. Find out what mischief she’d made in his absence. He tugged affably at the brim of his hat. “We start at dawn. I’ll see you then.”
Fletcher swallowed, nodded, then turned and rode away. Tristan headed in the opposite direction, driving those knotheaded cattle ahead of him, toward his own herd. The noon hour had come and gone by the time he’d ridden back to the house, splashed himself relatively clean, brushed his hair and put on a fresh shirt. He set out for the hills in a hurry he didn’t want to consider too carefully, and found Emily there, with her sheep. She was sitting on a grassy knoll, watching them clip the grass to the roots, the dog resting beside her. Polymarr and Walter the mare were nowhere in sight.
“Still here?” he said, as though surprised. But he’d taken his hat off, and he was conscious that his hair was still damp from washing, and bore ridges from his comb.
The dog growled and sprang to his feet, and his dusty ruff stood out around his neck.
“Hush,” Emily said, stroking the animal’s head, and Spud made a whimpering sound and lay down again, muzzle on paws. Her attention turned, belatedly he thought, back to Tristan, and he felt a sweet sizzle somewhere behind his navel, just to look at her. “I live here,” she told him, as though that settled all disagreement.
He sat down beside her, letting her remark pass, and set his hat on the grass beside him. “This must be the sorriest way to make a living I’ve ever seen.”
The corner of her mouth quivered, but she didn’t smile. “I don’t mind it,” she said, after an interval of consideration. “It’s an easy job.”
Tristan rubbed his lower lip with the back of one hand. He sat cross-legged on the soft ground, enjoying the sweet, mingled scents of Miss Emily and the summer grass. “Yes, ma’am,” he agreed, with a brief glance at Spud. “If a dog can do it, I reckon it is.”
A slight flush climbed Emily’s slender neck, and she wet her lips with the tip of her tongue, a gesture that was vengeance enough in its own right, if only she’d known it, but she didn’t rise to the bait. “Spud,” she said, “is a very smart animal.”
He laughed, then looked around, squinting. “Where’s Polymarr?”
“I sent him down to get his things out of the line shack. He’s moving into the bunkhouse at the ranch.”
“Is he, now? And here I told young Fletcher he’d have the place to himself.”
Her flush deepened prettily and she cleared her throat in a delicate fashion. “I suppose it seems audacious, my hiring Mr. Polymarr away from you—” She fell silent, wretchedly embarrassed and, at the same time, determined to press for what she wanted.
Tristan was utterly charmed, though not ready to show it. “Listen, Miss Starbuck. If you want to live on the ranch and spoil whatever reputation you might have made for yourself, that’s your business. Quite frankly, I would enjoy your company, but if you think I’m going to pack up and leave on your say-so, you are woefully mistaken.”
“I could pay you something—some sort of compensation, I mean—after the shearing next spring.”
Tristan barely refrained from rolling his eyes. “Even if I were willing to put up with those miserable sheep of yours—which I’m not—the other ranchers won’t be. Once the word gets out that they’re here, and that won’t be long, believe me, the place will be under siege.”
She blinked back tears, quickly, but not quickly enough. “We have to be somewhere,” she said, evidently referring to herself and the sheep, and Tristan wanted to put his arms around her, though for the sake of her pride, he refrained. “Somewhere,” she repeated, so softly that she might have been talking to herself, or to God.
He ran his tongue along the inside of his lower lip. “You could sell the sheep,” he said. “There must be somebody who’d want them.” He knew he sounded doubtful, but there was no helping that. He wouldn’t have given a beer token for the whole band.
She kept her head turned away, dabbed at one cheek with the edge of her grubby serape. “I’m not going to sell my flock,” she said fiercely, when she’d recovered herself a little. Her eyes were puffy, but they flashed, and her nose, while reddened, was pitched at a stubborn angle. “If I have to fight to defend it, I will. It’s all I have.”
Mingled with the admiration he felt for this woman, and the very elemental attraction toward her, was a quiet annoyance. “You’ll fight? One woman and an old man against half a dozen ranchers and their hired hands?” He thrust a hand through his hair. “I hope you don’t plan on making a hell of a lot of headway, Miss Starbuck, because the two of you won’t be much of a match for those outlaws.”
“I’ll do what I must to hold on to what’s mine,” she said.
He let out a ragged sigh. “Maybe you want to get yourself killed. Is that it? Life is just too hard and you’re giving up?”
He’d been trying to exasperate her, but when she spoke, she sounded haughty as a duc
hess at high tea, which was amusing, in an irritating sort of way, her sitting there in men’s pants and a serape that smelled pungently of sheep, acting fancy. “I assure you, my life is precious to me. If I was going to give up, it would have happened long before this.”
The words intrigued him; he wondered, not for the first time, what sort of past lay behind her. Since he wasn’t ready to talk about his own, however, he didn’t raise the subject. Instead, he stood and dusted off his pants with both hands, then bent to retrieve his hat. In the process, he nearly bumped heads with Emily, and the desire to kiss her came over him with such sudden force that he felt unsteady.
She had fixed her attention on the .45. “Are you good with that?”
The question might have caught Tristan off-guard if he hadn’t been paying attention. “Fair,” he replied, and cleared his throat. He was not a shy man, not by any stretch of the imagination, but there was something about this woman that made him feel as awkward as a schoolboy in short pants.
“Have you ever killed anybody?”
He pretended not to hear. “I’ve got work to do,” he said, moving toward the gelding. “I’ll see you this evening.” He mounted, tipped his hat and rode away.
Chapter 4
RETURNING TO THE BIG HOUSE THAT EVENING, after a long, dirty, hungry day, Emily felt her confidence slipping. Light glimmered through the windows of the kitchen, as she made her way toward the back door. After a moment’s hesitation, during which she considered walking right in, regarding the property as her own the way she did, she knocked instead.
“In,” commanded a good-natured voice, from the other side. From the place of light and warmth and belonging.
Emily entered, and found Tristan at the stove, cracking brown speckled eggs into a pan. He flashed one of his wounding grins at her. “I’m afraid this is all I know how to make,” he said. “Never been much of a cook.”
She hoped he hadn’t heard the rumbling of her stomach and raised her chin. “I’m obliged,” she said.
He gave her a look that seemed to take measure of her very soul, though there was nothing unseemly in it. “Are you?” he asked, his voice soft.
Why did she find this man’s presence so soothing and, at one and the same time, so disturbing? He was fine-looking, yes, and he certainly had charm, but Emily had been practical all her life, and therefore not susceptible to such allure. Or so she’d thought.
She took a basin from its hook on the wall, carried it over to the stove. The eggs looked and smelled like ambrosia to her, though he’d nearly ruined them. “May I?” she said, indicating the water reservoir, with its chrome-handled lid.
“Be my guest,” he said, removing their supper from the fire and setting it, skillet and all, in the center of the table.
Emily filled the basin and carried it outside, to the bench, where she found soap and a towel that smelled pleasantly of fresh air and Tristan. Hastily, she scrubbed her hands and face, fretted a moment over the sorry state of her hair, and went inside.
While other men would have gone ahead and begun the meal without her, Tristan had waited. He sat down only when she was seated, and nodded toward the strange mixture of over- and undercooked eggs.
She murmured her thanks and scooped out a healthy portion. It took all her willpower not to gobble the food, so ravenous was she, and she was halfway through when she realized Tristan wasn’t eating.
“This stuff is terrible,” he said, shoving his plate away.
Emily agreed, but she was starved, so she kept on, taking slow bites when she wanted to bury her face in the skillet, like Spud would do. “Yes,” she said, refilling her plate. “Dreadful.”
He laughed. “You are a woman of contradiction, Emily Starbuck,” he told her.
The desperate hunger had finally begun to abate, and Emily laid down her fork at last, finished chewing, and swallowed, at a loss for a reply. She had been too busy surviving, of late, to ponder what sort of woman she was, and suddenly it was something she very much wanted to know.
Tristan got up and brought coffee to the table—coffee, that luxury she had gone without for so long—and set a cup in front of her.
“How,” he began, in the same moderate tone as before, “did you manage to drive all those sheep from Montana to California by yourself?” He was standing a few feet away by then, at the stove, the blue metal coffeepot in his hand, and his quiet regard was a great if inexplicable solace to Emily. She felt a peculiar need to take shelter in his arms, to rest her head against his shoulder, to share her hopes and secrets with him.
She stiffened, determined not to venture down a path that could only lead to degradation and heartbreak. Men like Tristan Saint-Laurent, handsome and prosperous, fitting easily into whatever place or circumstance in which they found themselves, merely dallied with women like her. And Emily did not intend to be dallied with.
“I didn’t have a choice,” she answered straightforwardly. She was tired to the core of her being, yearning for bath and bed, and yet there was an ember burning somewhere in her depths, a wanting for something else entirely. “I had inherited the sheep, and this land.” She paused to let the latter part of the statement sink in. “I had nothing else, nowhere to go.”
He studied her narrowly, standing next to the table with one foot braced against the bench, his own mug of coffee in hand. In anyone else, that would have been a breach of manners, but Tristan managed to look stately, and very much at ease. “You could have remarried.”
She felt color sting her cheeks, looked away, then met his gaze again, fiercely proud. “I had one husband—that was enough.”
“You must have been unhappy. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she replied.
Tristan gave a low, exclamatory whistle. “I guess the poor bastard must have frozen to death,” he said, after a few moments spent weighing the matter privately.
“It was not a love match,” Emily said, her face still hot. She did not reach for her coffee, as her hands were trembling.
“All the same, you might be expected to at least like the man.”
Emily did not look away, but neither did she reply. She had not felt anything for her late husband, except the devout hope that he would never, ever touch her. After his death, she had not even kept his name.
Tristan expelled a sigh. “All right, so you didn’t even like him. Why in hell did you hitch yourself up to the man in the first place?”
There was within Emily a longing to know and be known, and for a brief interval that desire did ferocious battle with her pride. In the end, the former prevailed, a surprise in itself, for she had kept her spirit alive all these years by nurturing her dignity, that being pretty much all she had. “I needed a place to live. He needed someone to look after the house, after his first wife died.”
Tristan was quiet for a long while, and when he spoke, there was no condemnation in his tone, no judgment. He was merely reflecting aloud, or so it seemed to Emily. “Why didn’t you just hire on as a housekeeper?”
The question struck Emily like a slap, even though she knew it wasn’t hostile. “He would have had to pay me then,” she said evenly. “Cyrus didn’t spend any more money than he had to.”
“You’d marry a man just to get a place to live?”
Emily rose, swept over to the cast-iron sink and set her plate inside. “I suppose I could have joined a brothel,” she said, fully intending to shock him, and out of the corner of her eye she saw that she had succeeded, if the hardness of his jawline was any indication. She began scooping hot water from the reservoir to wash the dishes. “I was not trained to teach, and there were no fancy houses in our part of the country, where a maid might be wanted. So I married the first man who asked.”
Tristan stepped into her path, stopping her fevered progress back and forth between the stove and the sink, taking the small bucket out of her hands and setting it aside with a thump. “I want to be the second,” he said.
It was a good thing Emily wasn’t
holding the hot water any longer, because she would have dropped it and drenched them both. “What?”
“I need a wife. I think you’d do as well as anybody. You’d have a home and half-interest in this ranch. Our property dispute would be settled, too.”
Emily stared up at him, stunned. Her first husband had been well past his virile years, God be thanked, but this one was young and vital, of an age to father children. He would make demands—intimate ones. “You can’t be serious,” she said, though some part of her hoped he was. “We’re strangers. How do I know you’re not a mean drunk, or even an outlaw?”
A tiny muscle in his cheek flexed, and Emily wondered distractedly if it was the word “outlaw” that had perturbed him. She saw a counterquestion take shape in his eyes, but with visible effort he quelled it, and spoke carefully. “I guess you’ll just have to take me at my word,” he said.
She raked her teeth over her lower lip. The offer, outlandish as it was, was not one she could afford to dismiss out of hand. While she felt certain that her claim on the ranch was just, she could not assume that a judge would agree. This was cattle country, after all, and Tristan had a foothold here. She had already experienced enough prejudice, because of the sheep, to know her position was a tenuous one, be it right or wrong, and while the injustice of that galled her sorely, she had to take it into consideration.
“What about my sheep?” she asked.
“Sell them. Tuck the money away someplace—I won’t make any claim on it.” He sounded so sure of himself and his ideas. What was it like, she wondered, to walk boldly through the world the way Tristan did, with that apparently innate sense of his own value, his right place in the scheme of things?
She balked. The sheep were all that she had, and much as she would have liked having a nest egg, the animals represented an asset with the propensity for renewing itself. Besides, whatever Tristan said now, as her husband, he could take the money away from her, with the full blessing of the courts. For that matter, he could sell, shoot or drive off every one of her sheep, with the same impunity. Once he put a golden band on her finger, she would have about as many rights as Spud did.
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