Lady Sundown (#1 of the Danner Quartet)

by Nancy Bush

  “Lexie!” Pa bellowed.

  “Oh, dear. Oh, dear,” Annie murmured anxiously, balancing the heavy pitchers.

  Lexie couldn’t breathe. She yanked open the front door to find Tremaine scraping the mud off his boots. He glanced her way. “Lexie?” he asked tensely.

  She stared at him, her face ravaged, and he made an involuntary move toward her. The moment allowed Harrison to catch her arm. “Don’t leave,” he begged.

  Then Pa was there, standing by her left side. “Lexie, we’ve gone over this time and again. There’s no future for you being a horse doctor.” He sounded as sick with disappointment as she felt. “No farmer in his right mind would let a woman—”

  “Like you?” She cut him off, her lips trembling. “No farmer like you?”

  “It wouldn’t be safe and I—”

  “What kind of person do you think I am? I’m strong. I’m intelligent. If I were a man, would you let me go to Dr. Breverman?”

  “That’s a pointless question since you are a woman,” Pa answered stiffly.

  “You would rather trust a fool like Meechum because he’s a man than listen to your own daughter! My sex is my downfall, is that it?” Lexie saw her mother standing in the archway, her features pale and drawn. “Is that it?” Lexie choked out again.

  Eliza regarded her headstrong daughter compassionately. “Your father is only facing the reality of your situation, Lexie.”

  “I won’t listen to you anymore. Any of you. I won’t do what you want. You give me no credence as a thinking, feeling human being!”

  Eliza shook her head. “Lexington—”

  “I’m tired of being sheltered and coddled,” she said with suppressed fire, her voice gathering strength, her shoulders shaking. “I’m tired of being treated like a woman.” She fairly spat the word out.

  Tremaine stepped inside the door, closing it softly behind him. He stood close by Lexie, his expression unreadable. All the questions that had plagued her for years — all the questions that had bubbled in the cauldron of her mind, waiting for the right time to fulminate — burst forward. “I want to be treated as an adult,” she said with only the faintest quaver in her voice. “I don’t want to be lied to any more.”

  “You haven’t been lied to—” Pa began, but Lexie cut him off.

  “Then what were you and Tremaine talking about in the barn yesterday?” she raged, heedless of the pain she might cause her mother.

  Tremaine moved almost imperceptively, and she heard his breath hiss through his teeth as he inhaled. But Pa was puzzled.

  “You were talking to Tremaine in the barn yesterday. You were talking about me and how many brothers I had,” Lexie clarified, her words tumbling out, faster and faster. “What did you mean by that? Why don’t I know how many brothers I have?”

  It was so quiet she could hear the gentle hissing of the candle flames as they encountered molten wax. Eliza’s hands moved to the string of beads at her throat, trembling.

  Pa looked dazed. “Lexie, you shouldn’t have eavesdropped on a private conversation.”

  Lexie turned to Tremaine. “Will you tell me?”

  Tremaine’s eyes were very blue. Lexie pleaded silently with him, her stark need cutting through him like a knife. He glanced at his father, then slowly his gaze crept to Eliza.

  Lexie counted the seconds. He’d wanted to tell her yesterday. He’d tried hard to convince Pa it was the time. She didn’t care what the answer was. She just wanted everyone to quit hiding things from her.

  “Yes,” Tremaine said steadily.

  Eliza made a sound of protest. She looked helplessly at Joseph, who regarded her with solemn eyes. “It’s time,” he said, sighing.

  Lexie waited. Tremaine’s gaze was still on Eliza, and she felt the heat of their intense, unspoken exchange. Her heart somersaulted. This was a bigger issue than she’d realized.

  The clink of silver being placed around the table reminded them all of Annie’s presence. “That’ll be all for now, Annie,” Eliza called in a strained voice. “I’ll let you know when we need you again.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Annie said, taking her cue and leaving. Her gaze lingered on Jesse’s indolent form a moment too long but Jesse gave no notice of her. He, like everyone else, was waiting for some long-buried revelation.

  Eliza didn’t disappoint them. “I was married before,” she said. “Lexie, you are my daughter from that previous marriage.”

  Whatever she’d expected, it wasn’t this. Lexie blinked several times. “Wh-a-at?” she asked in a whisper.

  Pa laid comforting hands on her shoulders. “We’ve kept it from you because we wanted to protect you. I couldn’t love you more if you were my own daughter,” he said sincerely. “As far as I’m concerned, you are my daughter.”

  “Well, who is my father?” Lexie asked faintly. “Where is he?”

  “My first husband’s dead, Lexie.” Eliza sounded far away. “He died before you were born. He was your father.”

  “What was his name? Why wasn’t I told?”

  “I’ll explain it all later.” Eliza’s tone said the conversation was closed.

  “Did you know?” Lexie asked, turning blindly, swiftly toward Tremaine. She bumped against the hard wall of his chest.

  “Yes.”

  Her throat ached. She wanted to cry and rage but couldn’t shame herself in front of her family. Once again the urge to escape overpowered her. She yanked open the door and ran bareheaded through the falling rain. She ran blindly, straight ahead, stopping in a mire of mud and water, her breath catching in her throat. She couldn’t think. Couldn’t breathe! The structure of her life had broken down with one deadly fall of a lethal hammer.

  The front door opened behind her. Lexie didn’t look back. She bent forward against the rain and nearly fell over, stumbling, mud kicking onto her dress, cold water seeping into her shoes.

  She’d only run a few feet when strong arms encircled her. She knew Tremaine by his scent and she fought like a wildcat, a fierce silent struggle punctuated only by her choked breathing and Tremaine grunts of surprised whenever she kicked vital tissue.

  “Let me go!” she panted. “Let me go!”

  “Not until you listen to me,” he ground out.

  “I’ll never listen to you! I’d rather die!”

  She twisted and writhed and he finally pinned her hands behind her back, dragging her toward the stables. “Let me go!” she cried again. Sobs caught in her throat.

  “Lexie, for God’s sake.”

  “I don’t want you to touch me! I hate you! I hate all of you!”

  “I know how you feel,” he said through his teeth but his grip never slackened.

  She tried to hold on to the Dutch door but her fingers scraped helplessly on the wettened wood. Tremaine hauled her inside, then released her in one swift movement, slamming the bolt home before she could fight her way back outside. The horses moved restlessly, snorting, hooves stamping nervously. Lexie doubled her fists, then sank onto a hay bale. She hadn’t realized she was crying until she felt the warmth mingled with cold on her face.

  She heard Tremaine sigh in the darkness. “Lexie,” he began.

  “Don’t say anything. I don’t want to hear any more lies!”

  “You think this is a lie?”

  She buried her face in her hands. No, she didn’t think it was a lie. But everything else in her life had been.

  Tantrum nickered and Lexie stumbled toward him as Tremaine swore, reaching for the lantern. Lexie threw her arms around the gelding’s arched neck. Tantrum shimmied and sidestepped, but Lexie clung like a burr, burying her face against his warm coat, closing her ears, fighting back her lung-choking anguish.

  Tremaine lit the lantern and patterns of light sparkled across the stables’ shadowy corners. Lexie didn’t notice. Her eyes were squeezed shut as tight as she could get them.

  Finally, she laid her cheek against Tantrum’s sleek hide, drawing a long, unsteady breath. “How long have you known?�
�� she asked brokenly.

  “A while. Like you, I overheard a conversation I shouldn’t have, and it brought back some memories.”

  Her face felt hot and sticky. “What memories?”

  “Memories of when I was a boy. When Pa first met Eliza.”

  “You remember?”

  “Sort of.”

  Lexie tightened her jaw. “Were you sent to tell me?”

  His laugh was more an uncomfortable appreciation of her savvy than an expression of humor. “I suppose you could say that, although neither of them would have probably chosen me if they had any choice. Harrison, Jesse, and Samuel found out just now, too.”

  “Then tell me. I want to know everything.” Her fingers wound into Tantrum’s mane.

  He sighed. “Would you let go of that damned horse and make me think you’re ready to hear it?”

  Lexie hated to give up her support; Tantrum was a rock in a swiftly changing sea. But she understood the sense of Tremaine’s words. She wanted them to treat her like an adult, so she had to act like one.

  Tremaine’s foot was propped on the same hay bale Lexie had forsaken for Tantrum. Now he lifted it and she sat down again, chilled to the bone.

  “I guess I was about eight when it all started. My mother fell off the roof and died. Pa started drifting after that and we just existed for a while.”

  Tremaine paused as if lost in thought. “We were somewhere in the South when we met Eliza — I found out later it was New Orleans. She was alone and she needed protection. Pa married her.”

  Lexie, who had been staring at the dust and straw littering the floor, glanced up. “Did they fall in love? Pa and Mother?”

  Tremaine hesitated. “I think they turned to each other in a time of need,” he answered carefully. He didn’t add his own belief that love was a highly overrated emotion known only to a select few and that trust between the sexes was rarer still.

  With a sigh Lexie rose from the hay bale. In the lamplight her face had more color than the ghostly shade she’d exhibited in the entry hall. Tremaine was not unaware of her beauty. He realized that their relationship was about to take an abrupt turn. He was no longer her brother, and whereas she might easily adjust to that knowledge, he’d been having trouble coming to grips with it for years.

  She paced the small scope of the stable floor, turning to him, her hands clasped tightly, her face serious. She was, he thought with wry humor, bewitchingly lovely. And so woefully unaware! It was terrifying to think what could happen to her out in the wide world. Maybe Miss Everly’s School was just the thing for an innocent green-eyed beauty who was about to be launched into society.

  As if reading his thoughts, Lexie shuddered. “So that’s why Mother’s been so adamant about me becoming a lady. She wants me to be like her.”

  “She wants you to have all the things she had to forsake,” Tremaine corrected gently.

  “Why did she have to forsake them?”

  Tremaine ran a hand through his black hair, dragging his gaze away from the soft, swelling mounds of Lexie’s breasts. “I don’t know all of it. I know your father was a wealthy southern gentleman and that Eliza inherited a substantial sum of money at the time of his death. The money’s in a Portland bank. Your mother met with an investment banker and her money’s been invested wisely in several profitable ship-building companies. She’s saved all these years to be sure and send you to school.”

  “And Harrison,” Lexie replied bitterly, her own frustration and disappointment swelling up painfully inside her.

  “And Harrison, and Jesse, and Samuel. And me,” he added as an afterthought.

  “Why didn’t she want me to know?” Lexie moaned. “Why has it been such a secret?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think she wanted questions asked.”

  “Where did she live? How did my father die? Why wasn’t I told before?”

  She was working herself up to a glorious fury, and Tremaine was glad to see a return of the Lexie he knew. He could hardly deal with the lost and lonely one whose rare tears wrenched his heart. “All I know is that you were named after your mother’s hometown. She grew up in Lexington, Kentucky.”

  “It doesn’t feel right,” Lexie murmured. Struggling to accept all this new information. “I don’t know anything about Lexington. Or Boston. Or anywhere but Rock Springs.”

  “I think that’s why Eliza enrolled you at Miss Everly’s school,” Tremaine pointed out.

  “I know why she kept it a secret,” Lexie said suddenly, her voice low.

  Since Tremaine had his own theories about that, he asked, “Why?”

  “Because it would be too hard to explain. She was pregnant when she married Pa. A lady wouldn’t want that known.”

  Tremaine felt it went much deeper than that but he kept his thoughts to himself. Who knew what made Eliza Danner tick? He’d puzzled over her for years. All he’d ever come up with was that there was something in her past — some strange secret — that she refused to disclose. Dryly, he said, “I think your mother could handle that kind of speculation all right. She’s tougher than she looks.”

  “My mother,” Lexie murmured. “Not your mother. Your father, but not mine.” She exhaled on a choking laugh. “You and I aren’t even related, Tremaine!”

  “I know.”

  He watched her face as this fact slowly took root. She was amazed, and slightly repelled. She glanced up at him, wide-eyed. “You aren’t my brother,” she repeated. “You aren’t even my half-brother.”

  Lexie stepped backward and her heel slipped on a knot in the plankwood floor. Tremaine automatically extended his hand, but she jerked away from him, her fists pulled tautly into her chest. So it does make a difference, he thought, frowning.

  “Why didn’t they tell us?” she asked.

  “I suppose they thought it wouldn’t matter.”

  Lexie shook her head, wisps of blond hair falling free of her braid, gently curling around her flushed cheeks. “It does matter,” she said, and he read the swift series of emotions that tumbled across her face. Shock, amazement, fear…

  “It doesn’t have to change anything,” he said, struck by the irony of him soothing her!

  “It changes everything,” she argued softly, regarding him through green eyes filled with something akin to horror. Before he could ask her to define what “everything” entailed, she’d unlatched the door and headed out into the wild spring rain.

  Tremaine stood silently in the center of the stables. “I suppose it does,” he said thoughtfully, and followed after her, seeing her collapse against the fence, oblivious to the blinding rain.

  ¤ ¤ ¤

  Lies, lies, lies. Incredible soul-destroying lies. Pa was not her father! Tremaine was not her brother! How long would they have kept the secret if she hadn’t stumbled upon some of the answers herself? Forever?

  Lexie’s arms lay weak and shaking on the top rail, her forehead pressed against their rain-slick flesh. Water slid in rivulets down her hair and eyes. It was too much to think about all at once. She had to divide it into pieces. Her real father was dead. Her mother hadn’t wanted her to know. She and Tremaine were not brother and sister.

  A shudder shook her. It was this that affected her most. It crashed down on her, made her stomach quiver, her legs turn to jelly. And yet a part of her had always known.

  Looking back through older, wiser eyes, she remembered Tremaine’s change of attitude toward her. He’d resented her when she’d been a young child, treating her with all the callous disrespect of a true older brother. Then things had suddenly changed. She could almost pinpoint the moment.

  It was summertime. She hadn’t seen Tremaine in a very long time, but he’d come home to help out with the haying. The fields were dry and hot and Lexie had foolishly forgotten to close the gate. The cattle had surged into the clearing, pounding as one straight down the lane toward the cool shade. It took hours to round them all up again, and when it was over it wasn’t Pa who gave her a blistering dressing-do
wn. It was Tremaine.

  “How could you be so careless?” he demanded furiously. “What a stupid thing to do! You’re old enough to handle some responsibility. Why don’t you—”

  She cut him off by shoving against his chest with all her might. “Shut up!” she screamed. “I’m sorry! I’ve said I’m sorry! You have no right to yell at me!”

  “The hell I don’t!” he roared. “You deliberately left that—”

  “Deliberately!” she gasped.

  “—gate open just to cause trouble. If I were Pa, I’d horsewhip you and make you do all the chores by yourself.”

  Lexie was so incensed that she stamped her foot and pushed at him again. They tussled, but his superior strength made her efforts pointless, and she stalked off crying, shamed and humiliated. He didn’t even try to apologize. He didn’t care.

  Her anger sustained her all through that next week, especially when Pa deemed some of Tremaine’s suggestions worthwhile and Lexie ended up spending long hours laboring with the pitchfork and plow. The only good that came out of it was that she didn’t have to stay in the house, sewing and embroidering.

  But then everything changed. From the nasty self-serving older brother, Tremaine suddenly became a cold and weary stranger. Lexie literarily ran into him that Friday night, slamming into his broad chest by mistake as she ran out the kitchen door on her way to the stables.

  “Excuse me,” she stated coldly, pushing away. “I’ve got to go cause more trouble.”

  When he didn’t rise to the bait, she threw him a haughty glance over her shoulder and the inscrutable look on his face made her heart squeeze uncomfortably. From that moment forward, he treated her differently, looked at her differently, and — or so she’d thought — liked her less.

  But now she was certain that in the space of those few days, between the fight and that Friday night, Tremaine had learned she wasn’t his sister. The look on his face had been a mixture of disbelief and dawning understanding. He became more cautious. Careful. Even gentle. After that, whenever his gaze fell on her, she subconsciously squirmed inside, sensing, but not understanding, the change that was taking place.

  Now she knew.