Color of the Wind

by Elizabeth Grayson

  McKay stroked his mustache, and Ardith saw some dark emotion skim the plane of his eyes. "If you're sure that's what you want, Miss Merritt," he said after a moment, "I will be happy to escort you."

  * * *

  At about three o'clock in the morning, Ardith realized who Cullen McKay was. She hadn't been able to sleep—not with the voices booming up the stairwell and the thud of boot heels moving past their door. When the rhythmic squeak of a bed frame began in the room next door, she all but bolted to her feet. Yet perhaps it was the enthusiastic tempo the headboard beat against the wall that helped her make the association between men, their illicit passions, and Cullen McKay.

  Because unless she was very much mistaken, McKay was Baird's uncle's by-blow, his child by the notorious actress who for years had been Earl Northam's mistress. If Ardith remembered the story correctly, the boy had been given every advantage—a privileged childhood, an education at the best schools, an entre to society. Every advantage, except his father's name.

  On the heels of realization came the certainty that if she remembered him, McKay would remember her. He was Baird's cousin, after all, and in the closed world of English society, scandals as ignoble as hers were whispered about for decades.

  As Ardith stood at the window staring down into the deserted western street, suffocating heat pressed up her chest. This was why she'd left England sixteen years before—so she would never have to face the smug smiles and the searing humiliation of meeting people who knew.

  Still, what choice did she have but to continue her association with McKay? She and the children needed passage to the Sugar Creek Ranch, and from what the desk clerk said, McKay was the most dependable companion they were likely to find. What she needed to do was prevent McKay from making some reference to her unspeakable shame in front of the children. It would never do for them to learn that their father had jilted her—that he and their mother had run away to Gretna Green the very day Ardith was to have become Baird Northcross' bride.

  * * *

  The sun was just cresting the horizon when their party assembled at the livery stable the next morning. In the midst of the preparations for leaving, Ardith gestured to Cullen McKay.

  "I'd like a word with you in private, if I may."

  Leaving the children with the ostler, she led the way out into the gray, wintry dawn. As McKay stood over her, his sandy hair and the fringe of his buckskin clothing fluttering in the April wind, Ardith recognized the Northcross stamp on him—the resemblance she'd missed the evening before. Now that she knew who he was, it was evident in the shape and color of his eyes, the cut of his features.

  The Northcrosses were most often dark like Baird, but the mingling of other traits sometimes mitigated that Norman-French heritage. Certainly that had happened in Baird's own children. China was blonde, like Ariel. Durban was fair-skinned and sandy-haired, more closely resembling Cullen McKay than his own father. Only in Khy did the Northcross traits run true.

  Ignoring the humiliation creeping upward from her diaphragm, Ardith raised her head. "I realized last night who you are." The words were almost an accusation.

  McKay's mouth quirked at one corner. "Phillip Northcross' bastard, you mean?"

  Ardith nodded, hearing the bitterness in his voice. "And I expect you know who I am, too."

  He lowered his chin in acknowledgment. "Truth to tell, Miss Merritt, I'm amazed you've come all this way for Baird Northcross' sake."

  "This has nothing to do with Baird Northcross," Ardith clarified. "My sister's last request was that I see her children safely to their father."

  "And you're making a noble effort to do that."

  Ardith felt the heat in her cheeks intensify. "There is nothing noble about it. The children have lost their mother. They're alone and confused. They need to be protected. Because of that, I'd just as soon they didn't know—" She hesitated and looked away, enmity for Baird all but choking her. "—what passed between their father and me when we were young."

  When McKay didn't immediately respond, she raised her gaze to his. "May I count on your discretion in this, Mr. McKay?"

  Cullen squinted at her long and hard, then nodded. "What kind of gentleman would I be if I disclosed a lady's secrets?"

  Any further discussion they might have had was cut short by the ostler leading the team and carriage Ardith had hired toward them.

  "Are you sure you can handle that horse and buggy by yourself?" McKay asked her, acknowledging the children's arrival by changing the subject.

  Ardith let out her breath. "Of course I can. I've been driving my uncle to his lectures for years."

  McKay turned to where his own heavily loaded wagon stood, a white-stockinged roan tied to the back. "Would you like to ride my horse, son?" he called to Durban where he was dallying in the stable doorway.

  The boy shook his head. "I don't like horses."

  Baird Northcross' son not like horses? It was the first Ardith had heard of it. Riding had always been his father's passion, and she couldn't imagine Baird would have missed the opportunity to pass his love of good horseflesh on to his son.

  "I'll ride your horse for you," Khy offered, shifting eagerly from foot to foot.

  McKay ignored the younger child. "Would you like to ride in the wagon with me, Durban?"

  The boy glanced to where his sister was already ensconced in the rear seat of the carriage. "All right," he answered.

  "I want to ride Mr. McKay's horse," Khy complained. "I can ride. Papa had the stable master at Heatherleigh teach me."

  Stranger and stranger, Ardith thought as she turned to Khy. "I'd feel so much safer on a trip as long as this if you were here in the buggy with me," she said, taking a moment to smooth down his hair. "Would you mind riding with me so very much?"

  Khy looked wistfully across at McKay's leggy roan, then up at her. "Not if you need me to protect you, Aunt Ardith."

  The ostler hefted Khy onto the front seat of the carriage and helped Ardith clamber up beside him.

  "Are we ready?" McKay called back from his own wagon.

  Ardith waved in confirmation and snapped the reins over her horses' backs.

  * * *

  "Doesn't anyone live out here?" China asked staring out at the prairie. "We've been traveling three days, and all we've seen are deer and antelope—and lots of grass. Is this what it's going to be like at Papa's ranch?"

  Ardith looked up from where she was bent over the fire frying hog-back and beans for their noon meal. Dark smudges marred the delicate skin beneath her niece's eyes. Her nose and cheeks were red from the cold. Ardith cringed with remorse at having dragged this child and her brothers all the way out here. Nor could she think of a single thing to say to reassure her.

  None of the reading Ardith had done had prepared her for the vastness of this place, either. Not one of her precious books had hinted at how big the West was, how empty and overwhelming. She felt lost in this endless scrub country, buffeted by the wind, crushed by the weight of the sky. And the only shelter they'd had was at the tumbled-down road ranches where they'd stopped to sleep.

  "Cullen says we'll get to Papa's ranch tomorrow," Khy piped up. "Won't he be glad to see us?"

  Khy was the only one of them whose spirits were as high as when they'd begun, though all three children had done well, considering the hardships.

  "I'm certainly eager to see Papa," China agreed. "I've missed him so much!"

  "We'll have to tell him about Mother," Durban reminded them, casting a pall on his brother and sister's momentary pleasure.

  "We'll all tell him," Ardith spoke up, reaching to catch China's hand. "We'll do it together."

  "You'll feel better about coming all this way," Cullen advised them, "once we start to see mountains this afternoon."

  "Are they big mountains?" Khy wanted to know.

  "Some of the biggest," Cullen assured him.

  He was telling the truth. They had barely gotten underway when the peaks knuckled up on the western horizon. By mi
d-afternoon they had grown into towering, snow-capped giants that shimmered in the sunlight like chips of ice.

  They sheltered that night on a ranch owned by men McKay knew well, and supper was seasoned with stories and laughter. Once everyone else had gone to bed, Ardith and Cullen sat up finishing the coffee.

  "When we reach the Sugar Creek tomorrow," McKay began, "is your brother-in-law likely to welcome you?"

  Ardith shielded her doubt behind the rim of her tin cup. "I imagine he will tolerate me for a little while—long enough for me to explain about Ariel and see the children settled."

  "Then you'll leave, drive all the way back to Rock Creek?"

  She became aware of the intensity of McKay's blue eyes, the assessment in them, the attentiveness. It was how most men here in the West looked at females—a perusal that fell somewhere between blind admiration and asking to check her teeth. She supposed women as plain as she was ought to be flattered by such blatant interest. Ardith found it restrictive and uncomfortable instead, like wearing a fabulous gown that didn't quite fit.

  "My life is back in Massachusetts," she answered him. "I have my duties as my uncle's assistant, and books to write."

  McKay's eyebrows rose with interest. "Books? What kind of books?"

  "I write and illustrate books for children. I'm known as 'Auntie Ardith' to the younger set."

  "I've heard of 'Auntie Ardith!'" McKay's smile broadened. "Is it lucrative, your writing?"

  Cullen McKay wasn't the first man to show an interest in Ardith's money. The five thousand pounds a year from her mother's estate had made her both a tolerable dancing partner and a magnet for younger sons the year she came out. Nor did anyone need to explain that beyond her "settled nature" and her "maturity," it was her income that made an old family like the Northcrosses consider her an appropriate match for one of their own.

  "The writing gives me pin money," she demurred, deliberately downplaying the earnings had mounted steadily with every book. "But how is it you came to be raising cattle in Wyoming, Mr. McKay?"

  Cullen seemed unaware that she had deliberately changed the subject. "I came to America some years ago to seek my fortune. The Close brothers began a farming operation in Iowa to teach agricultural methods to men who would eventually inherit or manage land in England."

  "An interesting concept," Ardith observed. "Did you find their instructions useful?"

  "They taught me a good deal about ranching," he told her. "More than your brother-in-law will ever know."

  "You don't think Baird will do well out here?"

  The light in his eyes might have been malicious. "I think he'll have failed miserably with the Sugar Creek before the year is out."

  Ardith's stomach pitched, and she tightened her grip around her cup. Though she had every reason to wish Baird Northcross to perdition, she wanted him settled enough to take time with Khy, cosset his daughter, and get to know his older son. That she might well be expecting more from Baird than he was capable of giving disturbed her. But how else could she go back East and leave those children here with him?

  Ardith tucked her concerns about her niece and nephews away and climbed to her feet. "Since tomorrow looks like another long day, I'd better turn in."

  Cullen rose and smiled at her. "Sleep well, Miss Merritt," he said.

  Sleep well, indeed, Ardith thought as she made her way into the bedroom they'd been given. There wasn't much chance of her sleeping tonight. Not when Cullen had called up the devil in Northcross' guise. Not when she'd be facing the man himself tomorrow.

  But then, Baird had been dogging her footsteps from the moment she'd given Ariel her promise. He'd been hovering in the shadows of the parlor when she told the children their mother was dead. He was lurking at the back of the car when they boarded the train. He was here tonight, God help her, a terrifying phantom standing over the bed she shared with China.

  She didn't sleep, and once the ranch house had fallen silent, Ardith eased from the crackling dried-grass mattress. She crept back out to the hearth so she could confront the specter of the children's father in her own way.

  In the faint waver of the firelight she envisioned Baird Northcross as he'd been sixteen years before. Tall and lithe as a carriage whip. Graceful, wide-shouldered, black-haired, with the broad sculpted face of a fallen angel and eyes—

  Dear God! His eyes had all but consumed her as he'd come toward her across her stepmother's ornate gothic sitting room the first time they met. Those eyes had gleamed, reckless and alive, in a face sun-bronzed by a recent expedition to Africa. Baird's exploits on safari with the Royal Geographical Society had given him the cachet of an adventurer, a worldliness that made other young men of her acquaintance pale by comparison.

  No wonder she'd wanted him.

  Yet even as her father and Earl Northam had been negotiating the marriage contract, Ardith had known she was not the only woman to dream of cupping the breadth of Baird's jaw in her two hands or kissing that sensual mouth. She wasn't the first to want to stand sheltered by his height and breadth, to bear his name and children. To seek approval in his smile.

  Nor was she the last—as it turned out.

  When she'd come to Massachusetts, she had done her best to wall off her feelings for Baird, to put away the past. Even at nineteen she'd been wise enough to know that no one could build a productive life harboring the kind of enmity she bore him.

  When she saw him tomorrow was she really going to be able to say what she had to say without feeling the betrayal and resentment rise up in her? Would she be able to entrust the children's future to a man who had betrayed so many other promises?

  Ardith shivered and drew her shawl more closely around her, terrified by what was at stake. Not just for the children but for herself. Would she have to sacrifice her pride a second time to keep her promise to her sister?

  She closed her eyes against the sudden burn of tears and wished with all her heart that she had never agreed to bring the children to their father. She needed the quiet and solitude of her uncle's house, the comfort of her worktable with its mugs of brushes and tubes of paint. She longed for the bustling streets of Boston, longed to see Gavin.

  She so desperately needed the glow in Gavin's eyes, his sly wit and tender smile to remind her of who it was she had become. To remind her that Ardith Merritt was no longer a woman to be scorned and cast aside.

  But before she could go back to all that was familiar and safe, she had to confront Baird Northcross. And here in the midnight silence of a house in the wilds of Wyoming, she tried to muster her courage to face the devil one last time.

  Chapter 4

  "Is that Papa's ranch?" Khy demanded, lurching to his feet in the jolting carriage. Tightening her grip on the reins and reaching out to steady her nephew, Ardith nodded.

  "Oh, Aunt Ardith," China breathed with evident relief. "It's so much nicer than the other places we've stayed!"

  Ardith might have agreed if she'd been able to suck a breath past the burr of apprehension lodged in her throat. As they rumbled closer to the cluster of buildings at the base of the mountains, she could see that the main house was rustic and handsome, its log walls thick enough to withstand both the howling cold of a prairie winter and the relentless beat of summer sun. Cullen McKay pulled his wagon to a stop in the ranch house yard, and Ardith drew up behind him.

  "Do you think there's anyone here?" she called out.

  Just then the door of the house snapped open and a tall, deeply sun-browned man dressed in jodhpurs, boots, and a white, collarless shirt came bounding across the porch.

  Ardith froze, her fingers knotting around the reins. It's Baird.

  Her heartbeat staggered, then surged, beating harder and harder. Spangles of cold danced through her veins. This was the man who was supposed to have been her husband. It was the man who'd had a letter delivered the morning of their wedding to inform her he'd run off with her sister.

  How can he look the same as he did then? she found herself wonderin
g. Every bit as vivid, every bit as arrogant. And so damned beautiful.

  "Papa!" Khy cried out and burst into tears. Before Ardith could think to grab the boy, he had flung himself out of the carriage and was racing toward his father.

  Something about the way Baird caught Khy up in his arms, as much in self-defense as real affection, made Ardith catch her breath. As she sought to make some sense of the impression, China jumped out of the carriage and followed Khy.

  "Oh, Papa! We've missed you so!" she gasped and also set to weeping.

  Ardith never dreamed the children would cry the moment they saw their father. They'd been so eager, so excited...

  She'd also imagined she'd have a moment to explain about Ariel before Baird had to greet his family. But Khy and China had just scattered her intentions like matchsticks.

  All at once, Ardith realized Durban had made no move to go to Baird. He stood beside McKay's wagon instead, his back straight, his head tilted defiantly.

  A frisson of uneasiness shot down Ardith's back.

  Baird's eyes skimmed over to his son. "Hello, boy," he said.

  "Sir," Durban acknowledged. Baird glanced past him to Cullen McKay.

  In that instant something about the way the child stood between McKay, who looked enough like him to be his father; and Baird, the man who was, sent queasiness skipping through Ardith's middle.

  Then Baird raised his gaze to where Ardith sat on the carriage seat. She felt herself flush as his eyes moved over her. They were all fire and ice, all shivery blue intensity—just as she remembered.

  Then Baird's brows narrowed and his expression darkened. She wasn't Ariel. Ardith's gravest fault had always been that she wasn't Ariel.

  Determined to face him head-on, Ardith looped the reins across the dashboard and climbed down from the carriage.

  "Hello, Baird," she said, glad that her low, frosty tone didn't reveal the turmoil bubbling inside her.

  Judging from his expression, Baird didn't have the faintest idea who she was. This man had wooed her and scorned her, turned her life inside out, and made her a far different woman than she'd intended to be. This man had shamed her so horribly that she'd fled England for America. And he didn't even recognize her.