* * *
Wyatt couldn’t leave Eternity. Not without getting that sixty thousand dollars and giving it to Leah.
Monday morning, he dressed at dawn and went to the mountain to begin work on a new excavation site. As he labored in the coolness of the early hour, he thought about what the money would mean for her. A future for her children. College tuition. Further education for Leah herself. She could go to New York and buy her way into that fancy school Stieglitz ran. Anything she wanted, she could have. She’d be financially sound while he . . .
While he eased the burden of guilt from his conscience.
He couldn’t make up for that day in Telluride, but he could see to it that Leah never had to worry about supporting her family on her own. Though Hartzell would never let her become destitute, he wasn’t going to live forever. Leaving the money with Leah would be the insurance she needed to keep her independence.
Starting a ranch didn’t seem as important to Wyatt as it once had. Sure, he still wanted to own a piece of land, but he couldn’t take the money for himself now. Not after he’d found out who Leah was. There’d have to be other ways to get what he wanted.
Raising the sharp point of the pick high into the air and crashing down in a powerful arc onto the sandstone, Wyatt’s thoughts drifted to yesterday afternoon.
He hadn’t planned on staying with Leah. Making love to her was time treasured. It had been so long for him . . . so long, that he had feared he wouldn’t be able to give her pleasure and would take only his own. He’d held back with all he had, but once he lost himself inside her, he’d felt such a gratification and completeness, the moment erased from his mind any woman he’d ever been with.
But he shouldn’t have taken Leah to her bed. Sharing and loving posed complexities in an already complex situation. And admitting he loved her had been the worst thing he could have said. The words meant hope and promises. He couldn’t give her either. Not without telling her the truth.
Not when Colvin, Thomas Jefferson, or Nate could find him.
Wyatt wondered how much time he had before the newspapers hit Denver. And how much time after that that someone could hunt him down and demand their share of the money, still thinking he’d double-crossed them.
The chances were remote that the boys were even in the area. It had been seventeen years. To return to Colorado would have meant being in hiding all these years until the statute of limitations ran out. Or to assume other identities by changing names and faces. But the Loco Boys had been good at that game. That’s why Wyatt knew the window of opportunity existed in which one if not all of them would find him.
He couldn’t afford to have Leah learn who he was. The only choice he had was to dig up the money, anonymously leave it with her, and ride out of town before anyone could confront him. He didn’t need one of his former gang members causing trouble, dredging up Telluride and the past. It would only hurt Leah to know the truth. There was no point in reopening old wounds.
In the meantime, he had to put some distance between them. He couldn’t touch her again. If he did, he’d be beyond logic and reason.
* * *
Leah had never truly known fulfillment through lovemaking until she’d made love with Wyatt. He’d given her a very special gift. Not only with the gratification of his body, but with the way he’d touched and loved her. Despite his saying he would still leave, she had no regrets. And perhaps, just perhaps, he’d change his mind.
Knowing Wyatt intimately had opened her eyes to total creativity. Leah knew what portrait she would enter in the New York Amateur Photography contest. Wyatt had given her the confidence to tear down her barriers and let the sensual woman in her be free. She could be the next Anne Brigman or E. Alice Austen, going beyond that famous woman’s self-portraits of cigar smoking while standing in her underdrawers. Leah’s vision of the perfect entry would have the great Stieglitz noticing her. All of New York would notice her. But by the same token, all of Eternity would see her, too, when the magazine came out. Geneva would never forgive her. And could she ever face Hartzell again, or Mr. Winterowd and Mr. Quigley?
Leah couldn’t think about that. What she was doing was art. There was no shame in the mastery of the human form.
Walking up the incline of Infinity Hill toting her camera and tripod, she imagined how the shot would appear. The object would be bold and unabashedly pure. In communion with nature and at one with the land. Biting her lip, Leah’s second thoughts surfaced once more. Oh, could she really go through with it?
Of course she could. She was a woman in love, and women in love had no boundaries.
* * *
Wyatt drank water from a canteen, his gaze on the box elder, sage, and juniper that littered the hillside toward Eternity. He always kept a cautious eye on the path that led to his digging spot, wondering if Scudder would come back looking for him.
He and Scudder had started something at the exposition, and Wyatt had been half expecting the marshal to come to his room and demand to know what he’d meant about his remark at the Aspenglow Stampede.
Lowering the canteen, Wyatt was just about to turn and go back to work when a swatch of color captured his attention. He quickly hid behind the scaly leaves of a juniper, peering at the path and waiting to see who was approaching.
A figure never came into view.
Wyatt was certain he’d seen something, so he slowly dropped the canteen and started forward. With his thumb, he flipped up the anchor strap of his holster and put his hand on the butt of his Remington-Rider. Walking without making a sound, he used a copse of scrub oak for cover as he came to a clearing due south of his cache.
Parting the yellowing leaves enough so he could look through the branches, Wyatt saw his intruder.
Leah set up her camera with a bag of equipment at her feet. In front of her lay a fallen tree, apparently from a lightning strike. Its stump was jagged and splintered. She aimed her camera in the direction of the great piñon pine that had toppled, the slant of the hill causing her to adjust the legs of her tripod continuously.
Wyatt didn’t want her to know he was there, yet he couldn’t walk away. He stayed hidden, watching her work. When at last she had ducked out from beneath the black camera cloth for the dozenth time, she smiled. Then she raised her fingers to the buttons on her long jacket and began to remove the coat. He had assumed she wanted to photograph the tree, and in her effort to align her camera just right, she’d grown hot. But the air had a fall crispness to it. The type of tart nip that a cold apple from the first harvest held when bitten.
Once she had shed the coat, she carefully folded the garment and set it on the ground. After that, she removed the pin from her hat, then the ones anchoring her hair.
Wyatt stood there, stunned with awe as he witnessed the falling mass of her hair. He watched like a voyeur, envious he hadn’t been the one to bring her hair down yesterday, that the tresses had remained pinned and he hadn’t had the foresight to see her with her crowning glory cascading to her hips.
The wind picked up the wavy skeins, caressing and kicking at them. He couldn’t remember ever seeing hair as long as Leah’s. Varying colors of brown caught the sun, emblazoning her with a burnished cloak made from her hair.
So taken aback by what he had seen, it took him a moment to register that she sat on a large rock and was now unlacing her shoes. After the shoes were off, then came her stockings and drawers.
Wyatt was at the point of calling out to her to ask her what in the hell she thought she was doing. But he couldn’t speak. He remained still and infatuated with the dance of disrobing she performed.
She undid the tiny buttons of her shirtwaist, shivering when she pulled her arms free. Then came the skirt. The navy fabric fell in a circle at her feet. At last, she stood only in her corset and chemise, the shortness of the latter barely covering her.
Wyatt felt himself stir and become hard and overcome with desire for her. Leah stopped, carefully looking over her shoulders, perhaps sensi
ng someone watching. Her gaze fell right on him, but she didn’t see him standing behind the scrub. Then she continued until she stood utterly nude.
Digging inside her bag, she produced a long strip of filmy, near-transparent cloth and wadded it in her hand. Then she went to her camera and made an adjustment, taking up the long tube with the bulb on the end. Visibly letting out a shaky breath, she squeezed the bulb then walked over the pebbled earth on tender feet until she reached the fallen tree.
The breeze brought out puckers in her nipples as she faced the camera. Her hair blew in strands of chestnut as she brought the fabric to her breasts and let the diaphanous curtain fall over her nudity. What was left to the image was more sensual, more stunning, than her standing bare.
At that moment, clouds seemed to come from nowhere to fill the sky, a backdrop to her self-portrait. She flung her head back, her hair waving like a glorious banner behind her. Her left arm stretched high, reaching heavenward. Her shape became treelike. Strong, earthy, full of electricity. She became a part of nature, responding to it, reaching toward the breaking clouds as the click of the camera shattered the stillness of the clearing.
It was then Wyatt couldn’t keep himself hidden any longer. He came storming from the scrub, startling a scream out of her when he barked, “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Covering herself with her hands, Leah stammered, “W-Wyatt . . . w-what are you doing here?”
Wyatt made no reply. He picked up her jacket and brought it to her. “Put this on.”
Leah mutely slipped her hands inside the sleeves and wrapped the jacket tightly around her as the breeze dashed her hair in front of her eyes. Swiping the tresses back, she stared at him wide-eyed. “Did you follow me?”
“What if it hadn’t been me to see you? What if Scudder or somebody else saw what you were doing? What if your kids stumbled across you like this? What would they think?”
“Rosalure and Tug began their fall term at the Eternity Normal School this morning.”
“That doesn’t exclude Scudder.”
“No one comes up here.”
“Then what am I doing here?” he shot back before he thought the better of it.
“Precisely.”
Leah shivered and Wyatt was tempted to draw her into his arms to warm her. But he held back, shoving his hands into his pockets instead and slouching in a defiant manner.
“Just what are you doing here?” Leah went on. “You look like you’ve been digging in the rocks again. I never pressed before, giving you your privacy, but if what you’re doing up here is part of the trouble you’re having, I want to know.”
With her unbound hair, and bare slender legs peeking out from the hem of her short jacket, Leah’s appearance distracted him. He could easily forget that he wasn’t the right man for her. That he couldn’t have her because he had wronged her so very long ago. And that his misdoing had cheated her from a life with her mother. He couldn’t let her close to him. Not ever again. If it meant pushing her away with a shock of the harsh truth, then she would have to hear it.
“Put your clothes back on.” Wyatt ground his teeth, plucking up undergarments from the ground and shoving them at her. He couldn’t talk to her when she was naked. “Then I’ll tell you.”
Turning his back while she dressed, Wyatt folded his arms across his chest. He gazed skyward. The clouds were edged with gray linings, their roving shapes growing turbulent and stormy. The weather seemed appropriate for the jolt he was about to give Leah. A temperate gust blew through the clearing, and he fit his hat lower over his forehead.
“You can turn around.”
Wyatt did so and found Leah sitting on the rock, putting her shoes on. She hadn’t done anything with her hair. A full wave fell over her shoulder next to her cheek. She absently dashed it behind her back, but the length returned to tease her throat. Sitting straight after lacing her shoes, she caught the hair in her fist and attempted to put it in order with a quick braid. In fascination, he followed her nimble fingers as they tidied her hair but left wispy curls to frame her face. Once finished, she let the coil fall into her lap where she folded her hands, and gazed expectantly at him. “Well?”
Rubbing his jaw in contemplation, Wyatt mulled over the best way to say what he had to without her being able to justify anything he’d done. There shouldn’t have been any justification, but Leah had a way of seeing the good in bad things. “Some years ago, I buried something up here by that cross, but I haven’t been able to get to it until now.” He carefully watched her face for her reaction when he admitted, “I couldn’t, because I’ve been in the penitentiary.”
If Leah flinched, Wyatt didn’t see her move. She kept her composure as cool as a spring pond. “What did you do?”
“I was convicted of grand larceny, but I’ve committed other crimes that the prosecutors didn’t have enough evidence to bring me to trial with.”
Her eyes never left his. “Other crimes?”
“Petty theft, armed robbery, and rustling.” He drudged up the earlier charges, not embellishing that he’d been acquitted of some. “Illicit racehorse gambling, mavericking, horse stealing. I was not liked by the Union Pacific for relieving them of their gold bullion. But mostly I held up banks for a living. One day I got caught and was sent to prison. I’m an ex-con, Leah.”
She didn’t say anything for a long while, her eyes studying him. He had wanted her to be offended, to look upon him as if he were beneath her, but if she was thinking such thoughts, she wasn’t showing them.
At length, she asked, “Are you sorry?”
Her question threw him off-kilter. He’d been sorry about a great many things in his life. Getting caught was one of them. But had he been left to continue his destructive ways, he might not have lived past his twenty-fifth birthday. He wouldn’t be the man he was today if he hadn’t had the influence of the Idaho State Penitentiary to discipline him. But had he to do things over, he wouldn’t have chosen the prison system to mold him into what he was. Most every day in the institution had been torment and misery. He could not look back with any fondness. Only bitterness and unhappiness. And long, lonely hours.
“No,” he finally replied. “I’m not sorry for what I did. I am sorry I was caught, though.”
“How long were you in there?”
He noticed she didn’t speak the word prison. That perhaps meant she was seeing him differently. Not as any good for her. For her children.
“A long time.”
“How long? A year? Two?”
Wyatt shook his head with a crooked smile that had no warmth in it. “Seventeen, Leah. Seventeen years of my life. I went in when I was twenty-one.”
Her fingers rose to her pale lips and she spoke behind them. “But how old are you now?”
“Thirty-eight.”
“That means . . .”
“That means that up until three months ago, I was living as Convict 628 in Cell House Number Two.”
* * *
Leah tried to digest what Wyatt was telling her. She had had no clue, no notion, that he’d been where he’d said. He was kind and good-hearted. Warm and friendly. He wasn’t the type of man she took mug shots of for Marshal Scudder.
Wyatt had never brandished a gun down Main Street or was drunk and disorderly. In fact, she’d never seen him take a drink at all. He didn’t even smoke—a habit of so many cowboys—and as far as she knew, he didn’t gamble. He was generous with his time and helpful when she needed him.
Leo had told her Wyatt never missed a day of work, wasn’t late or slovenly on the job. She had seen for herself that he had had the opportunity to steal money from Leo’s cash box. The receipts and currency were kept in the kitchen on a shelf, but Leo had never mentioned anything was missing. If Wyatt was a bad man with criminal thoughts, wouldn’t he have been tempted, and even acted?
Not if he’d changed. And he had. The Wyatt she knew was no outlaw. The man she’d brought to her bed had been loving and tender . . . min
dful of her feelings and needs.
“You should have told me sooner.” Leah smoothed her hair from her eyes. “I wouldn’t have thought badly of you.”
“You sure as hell would have.”
“But having the chance to know you, I—”
“You don’t really know me,” he shot back, angry lines at the corners of his mouth. “And you wouldn’t have taken the time if I’d told you I was an ex-con right from the start. Admit it.”
Swallowing, Leah looked down at her hands, then back at Wyatt. “You may be right.”
“Of course I’m right.”
“But none of that matters now. I think I do know who you are, Wyatt. And despite what you said, I believe you are sorry. I can see in your eyes that you feel bad.”
“What I feel badly about,” he said in a jagged voice, “has nothing to do with robbing banks and living the life I did. It has everything to do with . . .”
She thought he’d ended with “you,” but the wind plucked the word from his lips and she wasn’t sure. “What do you mean? Is there more?”
Leah didn’t want to hold Wyatt’s past over him. People made mistakes. He’d paid for his. What did he want her to do? Hate him? Push him away? Did he think so little of her that she would judge him in such a prejudiced way?
“Let it go, Leah.”
She stood, going to him. “No, I won’t. What else is there? Did something happen in prison?” She recalled the scars on his chest and wondered how they’d come about. If he’d been beaten and tortured. If he’d had to defend himself in the penitentiary. She’d read about the brutality inflicted by guards. One day, had he had enough and struck back?
Without backing down, she confronted him. “Did you ever kill someone? Is that why they kept you in there so long?”
Wyatt looked ready to break. His eyes were hooded and dark, his nostrils flared. The vein at his throat steadily pulsed while he tensed the muscles of his neck.
“Would it make a difference to you if I said yes?”
“You can’t convince me you’re a cold-blooded killer, so quit trying to scare me.”
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