Thea Devine

by Relentless Passion

  “The word came down,” the supervisor said, shading his eyes to try to see the wagons and his men. “They want it done—and fast.”

  “Do they want it done right?” Maggie asked, and Reese shot her look.

  “They got a subsidy from the government, Miss Maggie; they’ll take on all the men they need to finish it right.”

  “They’re after the summer beef,” Maggie said, making a note on a pad she had brought with her.

  “I suppose they reckon by the time them drovers get ’em up toward Denver, they’ll be past Colville and coming on to Cheyenne. And by the time the train gets to Colville, they’ll have met up with that ole Union Pacific,” the supervisor said.

  “I thank you,” Maggie said. “Reese?”

  He climbed back into the buggy. “What’s next, Miss Maggie?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t think I want to interrupt those good ladies from their appointed rounds.”

  Reese snapped the reins and they moved forward. “Did you ever wonder,” he mused, “what it would be like to choose a life like that?” Did you, Maggie? Did you? You must have.

  She gave it some thought—or pretended to give it some thought. “I suppose every woman wonders,” she said finally. Hadn’t she? Hadn’t she—when Frank was suddenly gone all those long hours at night. Hadn’t she visualized it, the allure, the mystery, the smoky sex of it. Hadn’t she wondered why Frank had run toward it instead of exploring all that she had offered him; hadn’t he berated her for being the very thing he sought in another woman’s arms, a woman who was the whore that he called her? She was surprised she had answered him so dispassionately when she flamed with resentment everytime she thought of it.

  “And what do women wonder?” Reese asked offhandedly, leading her, guiding her to the point of no return. His first question had agitated her. Why? Because she pretended to be what she was not. She was a good woman, the respected wife and widow of his beloved older brother. How could Mrs. Frank be a stoked up bitch, mating with a cowdog every chance she got?

  “Women wonder why,” she said finally.

  “Why what?” he pursued it.

  “Why men choose not to see what they have and try to find it someplace else,” she said reluctantly. “I really don’t feel like talking about this, Reese.”

  “You should write about it, from a woman’s point of view,” he suggested. He was desperate to know her real thoughts. “How ladies are sitting home thinking their men are out there earning good pay and not knowing what they are squandering on a quick roll in the fields.”

  “Or elsewhere,” she added bitterly.

  “Oh, Maggie, you sound so sad.”

  “Nonsense. It was just the thought.”

  “Well, tell me then, have you thought about me?” Reese asked softly, jumping in, not because the moment was right but because he saw that she was vulnerable and there was an opening.

  “How do you mean?”

  Damned obtuse bitch … He felt his hackles rise. Her answer as good as meant not much. He calmed himself so he could proceed slowly and carefully. “We’re friends, Maggie, but you know I wanted more than that. I just want you to know I still feel the same way.”

  She was silent for so long he thought he might throttle her. “I don’t need a man, Reese. I thought I made that clear.”

  Oh God, you out and out bitching liar—he almost said out loud. She didn’t need a man, for God’s sake; right, she needed a man’s anatomy, the right part in the right place. And not his, she was telling him. Damn her to hell… if she only knew …

  “You need a man, Maggie.” A man, bitch, not a cowdog.

  “Reese, don’t…”

  “How can I not, Maggie?”

  “You don’t need to. I’m doing very well.”

  “You’re in agony, Maggie, over the paper, over your life, over the sale of the land, over those whores you saw parading around that work crew …” He stopped, biting back the words, the real things he was thinking, about her needs and how maybe she envied them their freedom to go after the thing they couldn’t live without. “Over all the damned things you can’t change, including A.J.’s death. You need a man, Maggie, not to take care of you …” no, just to take care of you … “only to love you.” He looked away from her to let his words sink in, the kind of words that would appeal to a whore who wouldn’t admit she was a whore.

  She felt a chill of recognition. Reese, of all people, had defined the thing that she hadn’t wanted to admit to herself. And more than that, she thought, she wanted a man to love. She had a man she could love.

  Only she didn’t want the attachments that went along with it.

  “That’s very perceptive, Reese.”

  “I care about you, Maggie.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  Appreciate it more, he thought while his lips said, “Give me a chance to love you,” and his engorged manhood reached for her.

  Now he had said it, and at least she didn’t snap out an immediate rejection. He felt a rush of hope. When she finally looked as if she were about to speak, he held up his slightly shaking hand. “Don’t say anything now, Maggie.”

  “I can’t let you …”

  “Let me,” he rasped.

  “Reese, it won’t—”

  “It could.” His frustration level was rising now. How could it matter to her who was giving it to her? How? She couldn’t have feelings for that cowdog, damn her. He wouldn’t let her.

  “I can’t talk to you.”

  He wouldn’t beg her again, he thought. Now he would tell her. “I’m taking my chance, Maggie.”

  “Fine.”

  That was too cavalier, as if it didn’t matter. She was really something, he thought. He really did admire her disdain. He would have believed it if he didn’t know different. He felt a distinct urge to show her, right there, right then, and make her beg for him. An image of her that night blasted through his mind: her intimate sigh … he couldn’t get the moment out of his mind, didn’t want to, because he meant to repeat it sometime in the future with her, oh yes, her….

  Chapter Fourteen

  Sheriff Edson was waiting for her when she and Reese returned.

  A feeling of foreboding settled in her gut. She felt the net pulling in around her, fractionally tighter, enough to scare her.

  “Sheriff? What can I do for you?”

  “Like to talk to you again, Maggie.”

  “Fine. What would you like to know? Sit down.”

  He sat where she indicated, by her worktable, and she sat opposite him and waited. Maybe it was better, she thought, not to have to respond to Reese’s heated looks and sulky manner right now. He was acting as though the sheriff had come by expressly to spoil the afternoon for him.

  “Well, we gotta go over this again, Maggie. We can’t find a particle of a clue to lead us to A.J.’s murderer. I have to consider other theories that could fit the facts of what we do know.”

  “And all you do know has come from me,” Maggie finished for him. She didn’t know what to think, what to do. And Reese was hovering, damn him.

  “That’s right, Maggie.” He sounded regretful, and she felt a pang of gratitude for that. He wasn’t a stranger to her, although he had come to town well after Maggie’s father had taken over the Morning Call. He didn’t want to accuse her of anything. He just needed to see the sense of her story, to understand where she was, what she was doing, and if she could have been anywhere else but where she had told him. “I hope you don’t mind going through it again.”

  She shook her head. “Maybe it would help if you understood that A.J. used to come in every day practically at the crack of dawn, and that my schedule pretty well met his. That is, usually he would be here before me, and I would come down from the apartment at about six o’clock. There would be coffee—sometimes I would make it, but most times A.J. did—and we would start our day’s work before anyone arrived. That Saturday I was down earlier, and I was in the back room when I heard the key be
ing inserted in the lock. And then I heard two shots, and I’m sure I was running in there before the second one was fired. It took me seconds to get in there—too late. He must have just opened the door because he was lying on the threshold as if the bullet had pushed him against it. There was blood everywhere. His head … well, you know.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d show me exactly where you were sitting that morning, Maggie.”

  She took him into the back room to show him the type case and the tall stool on which she had daydreamed the morning away.

  The sheriff sat in her chair. “About six in the morning, you say?”

  She nodded.

  “Came down early to …?”

  “Think.” How could she tell him about what.

  “Think. All right. So you are sitting here, you are having coffee? Having coffee and you are thinking.” He sat himself down on the stool as he considered her actions, almost as if he were trying to put himself in her place, to imagine it as she had told it to him. “And then …?”

  “I heard A.J.’s key.”

  “Ah, the key. Yes. Now Maggie, would you very much mind going out to the front door and inserting your key?”

  “No, not at all.” She stalked through the front office, telling everyone to be quiet, and she went outside, closed and locked the door, and then inserted her key and opened it. She did that twice and then she returned to the sheriff.

  He looked doubtful. “I’m not sure I heard that, Maggie.”

  “Well, of course it’s a lot noisier on the street now,” she pointed out, feeling a chill at his words.

  “Who cleaned up the blood?”

  “Dennis took care of it.”

  “All right. You heard this key, you heard the shots, you ran with the first shot—let me time it. You run, Maggie.”

  She took his place on the stool, and when he clapped his hands, she bolted off of it and dashed into the front room and stopped as if she could still see the body.

  “Ten seconds, Maggie,” the sheriff said behind her. “Maybe.”

  “He was shot from behind,” she said stiffly.

  “Early in the morning, Maggie. Early in the morning.”

  “Not by me. I don’t even own a gun.”

  “Not even for protection? Dennis never insisted?”

  “Never. I think he thought he would protect me.”

  Edson allowed himself a faint smile. “Well, now, there’s this other explanation …”

  “I know it. I supposedly hear him coming and run around front from the back door there, shoot him, and then duck back in here and pretend to discover the body.”

  “That’s the one. Care to try it, Maggie?”

  “Fine,” she said shortly, taking her place on the stool again. He clapped, and she ran across the room, out the door, around the short side of the building, timed her acted shots, and ran back into the building, angry and out of breath. Insane and impossible. “And besides,” she added for good measure, “someone could have seen me.”

  “Thirty seconds, Maggie, more or less. Not much time. Time for someone to forget he had seen you actually.”

  “Only if you are determined to make me the prime suspect. Where is the gun then, Sheriff?”

  “You tell me, Maggie.”

  “There is no gun. I had no reason to want to kill A.J. I just loved him.”

  “Frank’s man, Maggie. Maybe he’s a little resentful of Frank leaving him nothing and you getting everything. Maybe he’s pushing you a little too much …”

  “A.J.?” she said incredulously. “You can’t twist the reality to fit the facts, Sheriff. A.J. loved it here. I loved him, I did not kill him, and if he had wanted anything, I would have given it to him, including a lot more money.”

  “You say now,” the sheriff said complacently. “All right, Maggie. I have no more questions.”

  “That’s good.” She escorted him to the door, a stormy expression on her face. “You can’t believe I would do anything to hurt A.J. after all these years.”

  The sheriff saluted her grimly. “Someone did, Maggie. Someone did.”

  By the time she dragged herself upstairs to go to bed she was exhausted. Reese had gone ahead of her, only after much importuning on her part, and she had had the feeling after he left that he had wanted her to coax him like that.

  She did not need the burden of Reese’s touchy little demands right now. She didn’t want to have to prove that she recognized he had feelings for her. It was too wearing; it was like catering to the petulance of a child.

  The net had been pulled tighter tonight. It seemed to her that the sheriff wanted to convince himself that only she could have fired the shots that killed A.J. It was appalling to her that he had made her reenact his fictitious version of events, and positively shocking how little time it would have taken to commit the murder.

  … So little time that someone else had gotten away with it.

  But why A.J.? Why?

  It was the question that accompanied her dreams every night. And sometimes she almost thought she would find the answer in her dreams too.

  Logan pervaded her dreams too, always lamenting the lack of time, demanding to know if she didn’t mind that people were watching. Those dreams took place in a strange world where the passion only escalated no matter where they were and what they did, and in those dreams she never cared who was watching as long as she could have Logan’s caresses:

  Come to the ranch, the Logan of her dreams this night said, and everyone around her clapped and agreed she should go to the ranch.

  But then they can’t watch us, she protested, as if that were the most important of the things between them. I must have them watching us. Anywhere we want to go, anything we want to do, we have the freedom now. I can’t lose my freedom. I can’t lose the thing that drives me. I can’t lose you. I want everything.

  The watchers began clapping rhythmically in a corner behind her. You have to make a choice. You have to make a choice.

  Another burden pulling her down weighting her, Logan’s weight, so welcome, so hot for her, and then gone. She clutched the darkness in this dream. I’ll make a choice, she swore. When I find A.J.’s murderer, I’ll make a choice … I’ll make a choice …

  A crashing thump. A voice this time frantic: “MAGGIE!” followed by a jarring, smashing, splintering noise. She jolted awake to the smell of smoke and a fierce heat and Reese in her room, reaching blindly for her, grasping her hand as she choked on the smoke and reached for her robe. “Don’t take anything, Maggie. We’ve got to get out of here, now!”

  She moved, pulling the robe behind her, following him by hanging onto his hand to the parlor, to the door to the outside stairs. She heard the crackle of flames below, felt the heat of the floor under her feet, heard the rush of the fire as it ate through the wood. “Oh my God,” she moaned, “the office …”

  “Maggie!” he hissed urgently, throwing open the door. She ran to him and out the door onto the cold wooden staircase. “It could go any minute. Mother got out. Get down there now!”

  “Oh my God, oh my God …” She scrambled down the stairs and onto the street. There was a crowd watching and a bell clanging somewhere in the distance, summoning the haphazard crew of fire volunteers.

  They would be too late, she thought. The fire was suddenly everywhere, licking merrily through the windows and flaming up the wood. The office was burning, all the paper … Frank’s desk. Lord! Frank’s desk, the painting, the files, the worktables … She heaved a huge sigh and then became aware that onlookers were watching her.

  In the glow of the fire she looked down at herself in her thin cotton gown and bare feet. The watchers! She became aware suddenly that she was clutching her robe. She threw it around her hastily, but their eyes watched her. They knew who she was, and it was just like her dreams.

  Reese came to her finally and watched it to the end with her, as the bucket brigade threw ineffectual little buckets of water anywhere they could and beat at the flames.


  “It’s gone, Maggie,” he said finally, slipping his arm around her shoulders. She didn’t protest, and for a moment it was perfect. She was in her gown and her thin robe and she was totally his, needing him, needing a man just at that moment. “We’ll go to the hotel, Maggie. I already sent someone to make arrangements.”

  She nodded, she couldn’t keep her eyes from that fearsome blaze, or bear to look at the watchers all around her.

  “I can’t believe this,” she murmured. “My father bought the building and restructured it for the newspaper. And Frank …”

  “Frank’s gone, the Morning Call is gone. Only we are here, Maggie, you and I.”

  “I …” she started to say and stopped short. The sheriff was watching her and watching the building burn; she felt that chill again as he began walking toward her.

  “Well now, Maggie.”

  “Sheriff,” she whispered.

  “Mighty convenient fire,” he said conversationally.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean, Maggie. I’m hot on your tail and suddenly the building burns down? Evidence gone, things I hadn’t even thought to look for yet? Think about it, Maggie. It’s a mighty timely fire, wouldn’t you say?”

  In the morning Dennis came to their suite of rooms, which consisted of a sitting room and three bedrooms all interconnected. He didn’t look pleased, and Maggie wasn’t too happy either.

  “Who is paying for this, and for how long, Maggie?” he asked her briskly, sitting himself at the table with a briefcase and a scad of legal papers. She sat across from him in her robe and nightgown, feeling acutely uncomfortable because she felt as though he were scolding a child.