Open Country

by Warner, Kaki

  She looked so sad.

  Trapped by her gaze, unable to move or look away, he watched her almost-green eyes slowly fill with tears.

  “Hank,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”

  Heart pounding, his chest so tight he couldn’t take a full breath, he whirled and left the room.

  IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT. HANK WAS LYING UNDER A BLANKET on the kitchen table—the only piece of furniture other than his bed that was long enough to accommodate his length—watching firelight flicker across the ceiling when he heard a sound from the bedroom.

  He sat up and listened.

  The wind had died down, and outside sound was muffled by a foot of snow. Inside, it was quiet except for the crackling fire and the tick of the clock on the mantle. When he heard no other sound from the bedroom, he lay back, trying to ignore the itch coming from under the plaster cast on his arm.

  Anna Strobel had left hours ago after feeding Molly and settling her in for the night. He had stayed scarce splitting firewood. A weak excuse, but he didn’t trust himself around his wife. Given enough time, he could probably see his way past the circumstances of the marriage, but her silence about it afterward still ate at him.

  Or maybe that was something under his cast. Christ. Just looking at it made him mad. He wasn’t weak. He wasn’t helpless. But every time he looked at the damned thing, it reminded him of how out of control his life his become.

  He wanted it off. Now.

  Rising, he padded barefoot and clad in his half-unions—he was too tall to wear the full suit and had to settle for bottoms that barely reached his ankles—to the wooden toolbox by the hearth. After digging out his hacksaw, he returned to the table, settled on the bench beside it, and began sawing down the length of the cast.

  As he worked, he tried to reason through why he was still so angry. That’s what he did best; he analyzed, dissected, broke things down into manageable parts to see what they were made of and how they worked. But this had him baffled. This wasn’t something he could hold in his hand and examine dispassionately. This was all emotion, and he’d spent too many years walling off that part of his mind to understand what he was feeling now.

  Mostly he felt like hitting something, although hitting Brady hadn’t been nearly as satisfying as he’d hoped. Maybe he should try again after he got the damn cast off.

  Or he could walk away. Put it behind him like he’d done with Melanie. Hell, maybe he should hunt her up and try again. There would be no surprises with her. No betrayals, no pain. Living with Melanie would be easy because he didn’t care.

  It took almost an hour and several pieces of skin to get the cast off, then he regretted doing it. His arm looked skinny and pale and felt like it didn’t quite belong to him. There was no feeling on the surface and the scar was lumpy and puckered. His wrist and elbow felt stiff, and when he tried to wiggle his fingers, they seemed slow to react. But his arm was still there and it moved when he told it to, so he guessed he should be grateful for that.

  From the bedroom came that sound again.

  Rising from the bench, he stood for a moment, undecided. An image flashed through his mind—Molly, curled in his bed, her hair fanned across the pillows, her face innocent in sleep. The urge to go in there was strong inside him, but he knew if he did, he might not be able to walk away. He went anyway.

  The plank floor felt cold and gritty under his bare feet as he walked down the hall to his bedroom. Stopping outside the door, he listened but heard nothing.

  Lifting the latch, he eased open the door and looked inside.

  The room was cold, the fire down to glowing embers. He assumed Molly was under the mound of blankets piled in the center of his bed. He could hear her breathing, not the slow rhythmic breaths of deep sleep, but the quick, rapid exhalations of someone under tension or maybe dreaming.

  Moving quietly, he crossed to the hearth and added a log to the fire. Flames leaped up, brightening the dark room, and the hiss and pop of heating wood sounded loud in the silence. He stared into the fire, trying to convince himself to leave before he did something else he might regret. This woman wasn’t for him. She’d already stolen his name, his trust, his belief in himself and the man he’d always thought himself to be. He couldn’t give up his pride as well.

  Resolved, he turned, then froze when he saw her sitting bolt upright in bed, looking at him.

  MOLLY STARED AT THE TALL FIGURE SILHOUETTED AGAINST the flames, not sure if she was awake, or if he was real, or if it was one of the dead who haunted her dreams. Then he moved, and she knew who he was. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer. With his back to the fire, his face was in shadow, but she knew he was looking at her; she could sense it the way a blind person sensed a presence nearby, or a deaf person noticed a vibration a hearing person couldn’t. She felt it as surely as if he had reached across the room and put his hand to her cheek.

  “I heard a noise,” he finally said.

  She wasn’t surprised. After a bloody day in surgery, the dead frequently came calling, pulling her into a nightmare world of severed limbs and broken bodies and all the horrors she had blocked during the day. She often awoke crying. “I’m sorry I woke you.”

  “I wasn’t asleep.”

  She studied him, sensing something about him was different, then realized what it was. “Where’s your cast?”

  “I cut it off.”

  Concerned, although it had probably been long enough for healthy bones to knit, she threw back the covers and rose. After looking around for a robe, she realized she hadn’t brought one, so she reached for the shawl she’d draped over the foot rail earlier. Throwing it around her shoulders, she crossed toward him. “May I see?”

  He held out his arm.

  She angled it toward the fire to catch the light. “What did you use?”

  “A hacksaw.”

  “That explains the gouges.” She traced her fingertips over the scar. The incision had closed well, although there were lumps of scar tissue under the skin.

  “How does it feel?” she asked.

  “Itchy.”

  She rotated his wrist and bent his elbow. “Does that hurt?”

  “No.”

  She checked his fingers, joint by joint. Everything seemed to be working as it should. “I’ll sew a sand-filled ball for you to squeeze. That will help restore strength and mobility. If you rub coarse cloth along the surface twice a day, some of the numbness will pass.” She released his arm. “Do you have any questions?”

  “Why were you screaming? Out back, behind the church.”

  It wasn’t the question she had expected, and for a moment she wasn’t sure how to answer. The screaming was a private thing, and she considered it a weakness, just another indication of her unsuitability as a healer. But he had asked, so she would answer, if only to keep him talking. After two days of being apart from him, she wanted to know how he was, if he was still angry, or if that connection between them had been severed forever.

  “When I first started helping my father,” she said, “it would overwhelm me—the blood, the sickness, all that pain. Papa didn’t like emotional displays. But there were times when the suffering would fill me up until I felt like I was choking on it. So I would run to the tallest point I could find—a hill, a roof, one time a water tower—and I would look out to the far horizon and let all that pain go.”

  “By screaming?”

  She gave him a half-smile at the absurdity of such a thing. “Not as prosaic as working numbers, but it probably works as well.”

  “Why were you screaming this time?”

  Realizing she was clenching her fingers, she made herself stop. “I had to amputate a child’s leg.”

  “Billy Hartnet.”

  “He died anyway.” Saying the words aloud added fuel to the simmering anger that had sustained her during the long hours she had spent at Billy’s side watching him die. “Why was a child even in a mine? Why wasn’t he home doing normal things like climbi
ng trees or fishing or—” Her voice cracked. She battled for composure, found it, then added in a calmer tone, “He was too young to be a miner. He shouldn’t have even been there.”

  For several moments, Hank didn’t speak. Then in a flat, hard voice, he said, “He was fourteen. His father died of snakebite last year, and Billy was supporting his mother and little sister. He wasn’t a miner. We don’t hire kids to dig ore. He carried messages down the hole for us, that’s all.”

  She should have thought before she spoke. Knowing what she did of the Wilkins brothers, she should have realized they would never use children to labor in their mines. “What will happen to his mother and sister?”

  “We’ll take care of them. We’ll take care of all of them, even if we have to gut the ranch to do it.”

  She should have realized that too. Now she had made him angry again.

  “Which reminds me,” he went on in a harsh, angry tone, “what does a dead person go for these days?”

  If he thought to hurt her, he was too late. She already felt flayed to the bone. Trying to make her feel guilty wouldn’t work either. She had thought about it a great deal over the last days and had come to the realization that she had no regrets about their marriage. If she hadn’t married him and been there to take on the responsibility for his care, he would have been left to die. Instead, he stood before her, alive and whole. How could she regret that? Still, she should have told him once he recovered. That was the greater sin, and the one that haunted her most. A terrible mistake. But surely a forgivable one. Hiking her chin, she looked directly into his eyes. “The railroad pays three hundred.”

  “We’re thinking five.”

  “That’s quite generous.” She held his gaze, unwilling to be the one to look away first. She might be sorry, but she would never grovel for him; pride was all she had. Then she realized this wasn’t a contest or a battle of wills. This was Hank. Her husband. And they were both in pain. She sighed. “I should have told you.”

  “Yes. You should have.” His words were clipped, the tone, cold.

  “I’m sorry for that.”

  “Are you?” Lifting his hand, he pulled the shawl from her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. “Show me how sorry you are.”

  She stared up at him, not sure she’d heard right and not recognizing the Hank she had come to know in that hard expression. Suddenly she remembered what Brady had said about Hank’s temper. She edged back.

  He came after her. “Are we married? Are you my wife?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then act like it. Take off your gown.”

  “Hank, don’t do this.” She crossed her arms over her chest.

  He loomed over her, so big he blocked the light of the fire, so angry she could feel it, see it in the rigid muscles of his face. “I’ve waited, Molly. I’ve courted you. I’ve tried to be the man—the husband— you pretended I was. I’ve played my part in this farce. Now you play yours.” Reaching out, he pushed her arm aside and laid his hand over her breast. “Take off your gown.”

  She shrank back, seeing in him the same man who had pinned her against the door in the water closet. “Hank, I—”

  “Aren’t you curious, wife? Haven’t you wondered?” His voice softened. His hand grew bolder. Something shifted behind his eyes. “Isn’t this what you wanted?”

  She watched him look down, his gaze following the movements of his fingers as he stroked her, and something clenched deep inside her. Her heart hammered. Everywhere he touched, her skin quivered. Beneath the fear, desire built.

  This is what other women know. This is how it feels to be touched by a man.

  His gaze rose to meet hers. His eyes shimmered like golden pools in the firelight, filled with an expression she couldn’t define. Not anger. But a stranger’s eyes. A stranger’s smile. “I want to taste your skin, wife. I want to look into your eyes when I come inside you. Take off your gown.”

  “Hank . . .”

  “Take off your gown.”

  She could hardly breathe, hardly think. “Will you forgive me then?”

  He looked at her without answering, his fingers hot and insistent.

  Needing to stop him before she lost all reason, she put her hand over his, anchoring him against her breast. Her heart was beating so fast she wondered if he could feel it. She wondered if the rush of arterial blood into her head would cause her to faint. She wondered if she had the courage to do what she wanted to do.

  “Will you forgive me then?” she demanded, her throat so tight it came out a whisper.

  She waited. One second. Two. A lifetime.

  “I don’t know,” he finally said.

  His honesty was her undoing. She would have believed no other answer, no matter how badly she might have wanted to hear it. But the pain of it almost crushed her. She stepped back.

  His hand fell to his side.

  Instead of forgiveness, he offered lust. Instead of love, he would give her passion. He wouldn’t force her. The decision would be hers. But she instinctively knew if she pushed him away now, whatever fragile thread still bound them together would be forever broken.

  An hour of passion. And perhaps a lifetime of regret. But a lifelong memory as well.

  Moving quickly before her courage failed her, she pulled the gown over her head and dropped it to the floor. “Come on, then,” she said and walked to the bed.

  MOLLY WAS FAMILIAR WITH THE FUNCTIONING OF THE human body, both male and female. She understood the mechanics of sexual congress through her medical books and conversations with camp prostitutes, but none of it by personal experience. She knew about the various physical responses to erotic stimulation. But she didn’t understand about the emotions and how necessary they were to mask the realities of the actual act of copulation.

  He came at her like a man in desperation. His hands were everywhere. His mouth touched her everywhere . . . except on her mouth. His heat fanned an answering fire within her own body. It was exhilarating and arousing and created within her a breathless wonder and shivery need.

  Then something began to change, nothing she could pinpoint at first, but a subtle shifting. Or perhaps it was a growing awareness within herself. Even though they were as physically close as two people could be, he wasn’t truly with her. He didn’t kiss her. Or speak to her. Despite the closeness of their bodies, there was no intimacy at all.

  “Hank,” she whispered, trying to reach out to him, to slow him down, to bring him back to her. But he wouldn’t allow even that, pinning her hands at her shoulders so she couldn’t touch him.

  Ardor instantly cooled. She stiffened beneath him in confusion. “Hank?”

  His dark gaze never left her face as he rose above her and, in one quick motion, thrust inside her.

  Her body recoiled. Her mind splintered in panic. This wasn’t a joining, or a chance for them to overcome the pain they’d caused one another. This was a cold, loveless coupling. Anguish swept through her, burned against the back of her eyes. Old feelings of inadequacy crowded into her mind, driving her back into the shadows, back into that safe sepia world where she could observe without feeling and drift without pain. Dry-eyed and detached, she looked up at him looking down at her and felt something wither inside. This wasn’t even passion. This was punishment.

  Hank. What have you done?

  As if from a distance, she watched sweat bead at his temples and roll down his straining neck to drip onto her breasts. She watched muscles flex in his chest, felt the tremble of tension in his braced arms, saw the flash of his clenched teeth as spasms shook his big body. And through it all, his gaze never left her face.

  Never a word, a kiss. Not even a look of regret.

  Somewhere in her mind she stood on a hilltop and screamed.

  Then finally it was over, and he rolled away from her and onto his back. His breathing sounded harsh and ragged in the stillness. Cold air prickled skin that was slick with his sweat. His scent cloaked her, choked her. Unable to move, she lay as h
e had left her, staring blindly up at the ceiling, too numb to cover herself. After a while, without his heat, she began to shiver.

  He leaned over, pulled up the blanket, then lay back. “Why are you crying?”

  She wasn’t aware that she was. She turned her head to find him watching her.

  He was stretched on his back, nude. His hair clung to his forehead. Damp skin gleamed through the faint dusting of dark hair on his chest. She wanted to hit him, claw him, mar his perfect beauty. “I don’t know,” she answered and turned her face to the ceiling again.

  “Did I hurt you?”

  “No.” At least not in the way he meant. He hadn’t raped her. She had come to him willingly. She had wanted this joining and had no one to blame but herself. But to be used so dispassionately . . .

  God. She wished he would go so she could wash.

  Abruptly he rolled away from her to sit on the edge of the bed, fists planted on the mattress by his hips. His head drooped and firelight gilded his shoulders and the long sloping curve of his back with gold. “Why, Molly? Why did you marry me, then lie about it?”

  For a moment she hated him, wanted him to suffer as he had made her suffer. But she hadn’t the energy or the will to sustain such a strong emotion, so it quickly faded, leaving her feeling drained and empty. “I told you. For the money.”

  He didn’t respond. For a long time he sat staring at the far wall. Finally, “I didn’t mean to hurt you. Earlier. That wasn’t . . . I’m not usually so . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “Selfish?” she snapped, anger coiling in her chest.

  He turned his head and looked at her.

  “Distant? Cold? Uninvolved?”

  “Damnit, Molly.”

  Damn you she wanted to shout back at him. How could you do this to me? To us? How do we go on from here?