“I may not have book smarts, Miss Lang, but I do pay attention.”
“Book smarts are not all they seem.” She twisted her hair again and sighed. “Sometimes…” But she didn’t go on.
Testing his shield limits since they’d handled her mock punch so well, he nudged her with his shoulder. “Sometimes?”
“Sometimes I get angry at Daddy.” The soft admission jerked his attention off the braided leather, but Evelyn’s gaze was on the water. “I think some of this would be easier if I’d learned how to control it from childhood. If he hadn’t been so strict and taught me that never using it was better. If he’d encouraged other aspects of my education—riding, sewing, whatever that is you’re doing with the leather—are you braiding it?”
He let the words sink in for a moment and then held up the lengths of leather. “Braiding it tight let’s me use it for repairs, say, on a bridle. Or to make a lunge rope, or just about anything, really. Shaping leather can be difficult, but it’s good discipline.”
“Will you show me?”
“Yes.” He nodded. “When you have gloves.”
A tiny frown crinkled her brow. “Why do I need gloves? You’re not using any.”
The swift transformation of melancholy to challenge was a facet of her personality he’d rapidly grown to adore. Sadness might be at her core, and she’d never truly allowed herself to grieve her father, instead burying it repeatedly until he wanted to drag it out into the sun and beg her to cry just to get the pain out, but her sharp mind and rational thinking always seemed to arrow her away from that path. Finishing another tug of the leather, he secured the end of the braid with one hand and extended his other toward her.
“I have callouses and I have been doing this for years.” Even so, the pad of his thumb and a section of his palm were ruddy red from pulling and tightening the leather. “Your hands are softer and far more likely to blister.”
She traced her fingers over the center of his palm and left a trail of tingling awareness in her wake. “I had gloves when I started riding here.”
Sitting still, he let her play her fingers over his, the feather light touches maddening. She’d been a mess when he’d found her, but he didn’t recall her hands, just the bloody gouges on her arm.
“What happened to your gloves?” It took all his concentration to keep steady while she marked a path up and down each of his fingers and then across his palm to circle the redness at the base of his thumb.
“I have no idea. I barely remember that ride. Do you remember the pendant I had? The one Wyatt took?” Her gaze rested on his face, not his hand, but her caress continued.
He nodded once, not quite trusting the power of speech.
“It’s a map. It had instructions on how to find this place, but they were all landmarks after leaving San Antonio. I guess the town was there when my father received it. He taught me how to read the symbols inscribed on it when I was little. So, reading it, I locked onto each landmark as the next one I had to find and…I don’t know. I think I rode and kept riding west until I found each one, and then followed the instructions to the next. It all blurs together now.”
“You pushed yourself hard, especially if you’re not used to riding like that.” His own journey to the mountain had been marked by darker, blurrier moments. Moments he couldn’t quite remember and illness. Considering all of that knocked a kernel of information loose he’d almost forgotten. “How did you get a Flying K horse?”
“A what?” The gentle stroke of her fingers paused, but she didn’t release his hand. He didn’t know whether to curse or to be grateful.
“The horse you were riding, he’s one of the geldings raised on the Flying K. You can tell by the brand. He’s probably one of the five year olds.”
Her pretty pink mouth formed an ‘o.’ “I met a gentleman in San Antonio at the stables. I wanted to buy a horse after the stage brought me in. But the stablemaster—keeper? Whatever he is called, he only spoke Spanish and apparently the deal he tried to offer wasn’t a good one. Mr. Kane…oh.” Realization batted through her.
“Which of my brothers?” It couldn’t have been his father. Jed Kane didn’t leave the ranch if he could help it and hadn’t in years. Sam occasionally went to San Antonio, and Micah. Jason didn’t know horses as well, but he had a habit of picking up stray women in need. Tucking that thought away for later, Kid focused on Evelyn.
“Micah.” She grinned a little. “I don’t know why I didn’t make the connection, William. I know you said your last name when we met, but…”
Waving that concern away, he curled his hand around hers. “It’s okay. I saw the brand, and I meant to ask, but we had more important things to focus on. How did Micah look? Was he alone?”
“No. He had a pair of others with him. An Indian—I think he called him Buck—and a very gruff blond man.”
A wild grin widened his mouth. “Cody. Buck is Quanto’s son. Cody was also raised by him.”
“Oh.” Evelyn looked startled. “So they were…?”
“Fevered? Yes.” He nodded, still grinning. He missed all of them and he’d half expected Buck to show up in his dreams to bring him messages from home. Perhaps Quanto had told him not to? Or, more realistically, Buck respected the fact that Kid hated it when he did. “Micah isn’t, but his wife, Jo, is.”
Wonder filled Evelyn’s expression. “So many of you in one place.”
Kid shrugged. “I blame the Morning Stars for that…”
“Why?” She slid her fingers through his.
“It’s a very long story.”
“I like long stories.” It was all the encouragement he needed. Kid told her about the night of the bank robbery in Dorado and how Sam caught Scarlett and Kid followed the other brothers. How he’d tracked them for days. When he described his confrontation with Cody’s wolf for the first time, her face paled.
“Weren’t you terrified? Wolves are huge.”
“No. It’s hard to explain, but I think I could sense the intelligence in him and the emotions from him made sense to me. His interest wasn’t in hurting me, it was in getting back to Scarlett. They’d left their sister behind and were desperate to get rid of me and the hunting party so they could break her out.” He leaned back against the rock and stretched his legs out in front of him, the braided leather half forgotten. “I wanted to help him. Turns out we have barrier on the ranch and they couldn’t cross over it, but Cody’s wolf could.”
“I don’t understand.”
“My Pa has a lot of contacts, a lot of friends, and he’s done favors for people through the years, favors they’ve paid back repeatedly. One of those favors was apparently for an old shaman—not Quanto, though every once in a while I used to wonder if it had been him. Pa and he haven’t met, to my knowledge. Regardless, this shaman had been injured and ill. Pa saw he was treated and treated well and later he returned. Micah knew him, used to follow him around the ranch. Whatever he did, it erected a boundary around the borders of our land. No Fevered can cross it without an invitation from one of us Kanes.” Arguably Scarlett and Jo were both Kanes, but he had no idea if the invitation grant included them or not. Something worth testing at another time.
“So I couldn’t enter the ranch without your invitation?”
“No. Though Wyatt managed it somehow.” He frowned. Another question he’d let slide because he’d been so focused on leashing his ability. Maybe Wyatt’s relationship to the other Morning Stars and the tight weave of connections between the two families allowed him to do it. Kid made a note to ask him about it later.
“You snuck Cody onto the ranch and helped reunite him with Scarlett? What happened next?”
Grinning, Kid skipped over his visit to the brothel in San Antonio where Sam and Micah found him and described his first journey to the mountain. They’d encountered all of her brothers, Wyatt and Quanto. After a long discussion between the shaman and Sam, it was decided the brothers would return the gold they’d stolen. It was also the first ti
me Quanto approached Kid about his gift.
“I didn’t want to know. I’d always known I was different, but the things the others could do—I didn’t want to be that different.”
Her hand flexed on his, a gentle squeeze and open offer of comfort. Kid smiled, appreciating her gesture, and he lifted their joined hands to kiss her knuckles once.
“Maybe it was childish on my part, but I wasn’t ready. We had a long journey back.” He described the wagon train they’d formed and the subsequent ambushes. He wanted to skate over the bloodier aspects, but decided against it. Evelyn was Fevered and, if she truly wanted to embrace all that it meant, understanding the consequences was important.
“She burned them all?” Horror rolled beneath her words.
Kid nodded slowly. “Yeah, she did. Those we hadn’t shot or that Cody hadn’t ripped open with tooth and claw. In all fairness, they attacked us. We didn’t go looking for trouble.”
“No. In fact, with the marshal with you, you were doing the right thing.”
Another nod. “We thought so. It took a while to track down Ryker, but eventually we did and Cody took care of him. The gold was returned and Sam and Scarlett married on the ranch.”
“It seems very romantic.” Her sigh underscored the sentiment and Kid hid a smile.
“Maybe. Not everyone took it well.” He hadn’t, not after the revelations from Quanto and his constant struggle with the barrage of emotions. All Kid had wanted was to leave. “I decided it was time for me to go. That maybe, just maybe, if I were far enough away it would all be better. I rode out the night after the wedding, but I didn’t go alone. Cody insisted on going with me.” Another wry smile. “He’d gone wolf and stayed that way for a long time while we rode west.”
Judiciously editing his assignations out of the story, he described their journey into the New Mexico territory and crossing the hostile expanses. He also kept Cody’s private hell out of it. It wasn’t his story to tell, but he did have to confess his trip into Fort Courage and he watched her expression carefully as he brought up how he met Antonia and Delilah.
“How many women have you been with?” she asked after he admitted to the assignation.
Kid winced. “I don’t really want to put a number on it.”
“Don’t want to or can’t?” The dry reply carried a tinge of humor. Surprised, but delighted, by this particular aspect of her personality, he allowed a little shrug.
“I don’t think of it that way. It wasn’t about keeping score or counting coup. It was a raw need, a visceral one. I know why I needed it now and my only regrets are those others who may have been hurt by my choices.”
The long silence following the admission concerned him, but Evelyn didn’t let go of his hand. If anything, she tightened her grip. “Did you ever hurt the women you were with?”
He shook his head immediately. “No, ma’am.” The idea of violating a woman against her will was evil. He’d only ever wanted to give them pleasure, to get drunk on how wonderful they felt. In some ways, it allowed him to feed his gift until he’d twisted it.
“Then I cannot find fault with your choices. You needed them and you didn’t hurt them.” The blaze of understanding eased tension knotting his shoulders he hadn’t even realized he’d been suffering. “What happened next?”
Encouraged by her insight and tone, he talked about heading deeper into the mountains and how they met Mariska. When he described the accidental poisoning, Evelyn’s mouth tightened. “She could have killed you.”
“She didn’t mean to.” The defense was automatic. Cody and his wolf had both been incensed and they’d taken care of him—but that anger fed a divide between Cody and the gypsy that could have had brutal consequences for both of them. “Her entire clan abandoned her because of it. I think she paid her price.”
A scowl darkened her face. “Go on.”
Touched by her protective fierceness on his behalf, he kissed her hand again. “It was a long few days as we crossed the valley.” He edited away the number of times he left Cody and Mariska to their passions. The two had been pretty drunk on each other and the connection they’d begun to form. When he described the attack by the enemy wolf, Evelyn tensed next to him. Selectively describing the injuries he’d sustained and how Mariska took care of him—and finally made him to confess his ability—didn’t ease her frown of disapproval over Mariska’s initial actions. But that was a difference they could bridge when he introduced the women.
That he wanted to introduce them didn’t surprise him. That he’d planned for it did. The last part of the story was difficult to tell. He had to describe the agony he’d felt from Cody. How he’d consumed it all and pulled every drop of pain into himself, until Cody could brutalize his own body to get free and shift over and over until he’d healed. Unconscious for what happened after, Kid could only explain that Cody killed the wolf and that Wyatt and the other brothers had found him. He woke days and days later back at home. Though the others said he’d stirred on the journey, Kid didn’t remember it.
“And when you woke, you couldn’t feel anyone anymore?” Her teeth dragged across her lower lip and he wanted to do the same, but kept his attention on the question.
“Not a bit. I thought it was the greatest gift in the world. I could have a conversation and not know the person didn’t want to be there or had a dozen other things on their mind or was impatient for me to shut up so they could get back to their life. I didn’t feel their disappointment, their anger, or any of it.”
“But it wasn’t a gift.” That she’d picked up on it so quickly reminded him of her intelligence. He adored the way her mind worked, even when it frustrated him.
He admitted to his part in allowing the foreign firestarter onto their land and included the details of everything that went wrong—from the rapid spread of the fever to the multiple deaths. Telling her about Caroline proved the most difficult, but instead of pulling away, she shifted closer until her damp head rested on his shoulder. The nearness should have caused his fledgling shields to shudder and collapse, but instead they held. Her conflicting emotions were about him and they wrapped around him as though holding him in an embrace.
Determined to finish the story, he discussed the battle that raged and how he’d ended Harrison Miller. A death he felt no guilt in being a part of, not after what the man had done to Jo, to Kid’s family, and what he had every intention of doing to Micah. Saving Micah had been the next step and Kid hadn’t even known he knew what to do, but driven by instinct and the fierce need to protect his family, he’d stripped out the emotional command Harrison had implanted—one that would have forced Micah to murder the woman he loved.
Half-exhausted from the tale, he went quiet. The next part proved more difficult, and he wasn’t sure if he was ready to bare the rest of his soul to her. That she hadn’t walked away or flinched out of disgust turned out to be the most precious action he’d ever been the recipient of.
“I love that you weren’t alone through all of that.” The loneliness in her statement wrenched at his heartstrings and, though he understood where it came from, he couldn’t let her think it was simple when it came to family.
“You can be alone in a crowd, Evelyn. Conflicting needs, terrible desires, falling in love—everyone is truly preoccupied by their own lives. It’s how it should be and after what happened with the attacks and the fever, we had a lot of orphans to look after and a lot of grief to work through.”
She went very still next to him. “Dear Lord, William. I didn’t even think of that. Everyone around you would have been grieving.” She shifted and when she would have moved away, he tightened his grip on her hand and tugged her back. He liked having her there and his shields were steady.
“It was unpleasant and I did everything I could. Again, most of it was instinct. They needed the relief. I soothed, I took the pain, and kept taking it every time it became too much. But I don’t think I should have.” The last was tougher to admit than he thought.
&nbs
p; “Why not?” She’d settled back against him and rubbed the side of his hand with her thumb in slow, soothing strokes.
“Pain tells us we’re alive.” He’d parroted Wyatt, but he’d had a long time to think on it since he’d shattered and the other man had held him together, supported him through any number of dark realizations. “It also encourages us to grow. If you bury your sorrow, if you don’t deal with it…the agony can sneak out and attack you when you least expect. And taking all their pain—was killing me. I didn’t know what was mine—it didn’t let me feel my own grief.”
At least now he could think of Caroline with affection and soft regret and not the gut churning agony of those first few days. “Helping means I don’t take all of it, but I didn’t know how to be and I didn’t realize how badly I’d been losing the struggle until I tried to kill Jason.”
The cavalry soldiers he’d attacked had been bad enough, but even now in the warm sunshine of the mountains, the air cool and a beautiful woman leaning against him, he didn’t think he would have acted any differently. They’d been attacking Ben and something inside Kid snapped that day. He’d been so tired of others hurting and hating those who caused the hurt.
But Jason?
His brother hadn’t deserved what Kid attempted to do. Right or wrong, he and Jason had differences they needed to discuss and, to his credit, his brother had tried.
“Why did you attack him?”
“Because sometimes brothers fight. Even when they’re wrong. Family—family is the best and worst thing that can happen to a man. They have your back, they’ll fight to the death for you, and they’ll always try to protect you and do what’s right. But sometimes they’re blinder than anyone else.” Setting the braided leather aside when he realized he’d gripped it tight enough to leave indentions in his palm, he reached up and rubbed the back of his neck. “I grew up thinking I was different and strange. I could do what no one else could. Jason? He was the good son. The diligent, academic one. He was smart, real smart, but he’s also Fevered.”
Raising Kane Page 24