by Warner, Kaki
“I’m not abandoning you, Jessica,” he cut in, his voice harsh and low. “I’m letting you go. There’s a difference. And don’t think it’s not the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
The brittle shell of her anguish cracked, leaving her open and exposed. “Show me.”
She watched his chest move as he breathed deep. “I’m trying to do the right thing here, Jessica. I can’t—”
“Please.” She opened her arms to him. “One last time.”
“Jesus, woman . . .” And the next instant he was pulling her against him with such force her ribs ached. “You’re killing me.”
Jessica clung to him with a desperation that robbed her of thought. Weeping with joy and need and a love so desperate it made her tremble, she ran her hands over him, pressed her face against his neck, dug her fingers into his back. If she could have climbed inside his chest, she would have. He was her lifeline, her salvation, everything she would ever need to sustain her for all of her life. “I love you, Brady.”
With a harsh sound, Brady swept her up into his arms and carried her to his horse. He lifted her into the saddle then swung up behind her. Locking her between his arms, he kicked the horse into a lope, away from the ruined buildings and out into the open valley.
Jessica leaned back against him. Lifting her face to the sage-scented wind, she felt time and the past fall behind, until there was nothing but endless open sky, and the drumming of the horse’s hooves, and the feel of Brady’s arms holding her safe.
They rode to a treeless knoll rising out of the valley floor. All around them tall tufts of buffalo grass rippled in the wind like waves on the sea. It was magical, like being on a tiny island awash in moonlight, with nothing between them and the heavens but the wind and stars.
The half moon perched atop the ridges as Brady lifted her down. In silence he cleared a space of rocks and pebbles, then untied the bedroll lashed behind the saddle. He spread it on the ground, then turned and held out his hand.
She walked toward him. There was a sweet solemnity as they joined hands under that vast, star-streaked sky, a sense of timelessness and rightness, as if they stood alone and together before a heavenly host preparing to make their vows. In Jessica’s heart she was already married. There could be no other for her than Brady. No matter what happened after this night, even if she never saw him again, there would always only be Brady.
As he slowly undressed her, Brady didn’t consider the right or wrong of what he was doing. He was in the grips of something beyond his control, beyond his strength to resist. There was just the two of them. No past, no future. Only this time, this moment.
Wanting to give them both a memory that would last through the lonely years ahead, he took his time, gave her everything he could, everything he had. And as she moved above him, her hair a soft, dark cloud streaked by moonlight, her beautiful body silhouetted against an endless spray of stars, he realized never again would anything be as good as loving Jessica, while her tears dripped onto his chest, and the wind whispered around them, and meteors shot in fiery arcs across the indigo sky.
“I’LL WRITE TO YOU. WILL YOU WRITE BACK?”
They had ridden in an hour earlier and now sat on Iantha’s porch steps, watching dawn trim the morning sky with golden ribbons and gauzy purple clouds.
When he hesitated, she gave him a prod. “You do know how to write, don’t you?”
His mustache lifted at one corner. “And count. All the way to twenty.”
She didn’t laugh, afraid it would come out a sob. She was trying so hard to be strong, but with each passing minute, she bled a little more. Lacing her fingers around her knees, she looked at the stark framework of the new barn. “How long to rebuild?”
“All of it? Years. Decades. Maybe forever.”
She couldn’t bear that, living on dwindling hope for so long. She would wither and die. “Ask me to stay and I will.”
He looked over at her, but said nothing.
Hope died, leaving a hole in her chest where her heart should have been. A distant part of her was amazed she survived the pain of it.
The sun cleared the ridges. A wash of golden light spilled down the east-facing slopes, then raced across the valley floor. When it highlighted the mesquite tree on the hilltop, Brady gathered himself to rise.
That terrible desperation gripped her again, and before she could stop herself, she flung herself toward him, her arms reaching around his neck. “I love you,” she whispered against his bristly cheek. “I will always love you.”
He held her hard against him for a brief moment, then gently pushed her away. He rose.
She thrust a hand into the pocket of her robe and withdrew the piece of paper she had put there the evening before. She pressed it into his hand. “This is my direction. Come to me. I’ll wait a year, no more.” Who was she fooling? She would wait a lifetime for this man.
He stared down at the paper, then with shaking hands, carefully folded it and slipped it into his shirt pocket. He stood for a moment, staring down at the ground. When he lifted his head, she saw that the vibrant light she so loved was gone from his beautiful eyes.
“You were the best thing that ever came into my life, Jessica. Never forget that.” Then he turned and walked away.
An hour later, after a tearful good-bye to the women, she and Adrian left for England.
Twenty-five
NOTHING LASTS FOREVER, NOT EVEN MISERY.
Or so Brady told himself at least once a day those first weeks after Jessica and Ben left. There were no good days, only bad days and worse days, followed by nights so long and lonely he damn near paced a groove in Iantha’s front porch—until Buck got tired of hearing him tromp around and built him a new rocker. But that only made it harder, because all Brady could think about while he rocked were those evenings on the porch with Jessica.
Bad days or worse. After a while they all blended together. Somehow he managed because that’s what he did. He managed. He got by. He persevered. It wasn’t much of a life, but for those first six months, that was how it was.
Even so, progress was made.
Because of the fire, they were able to wrangle an extra week out of the Army so they could round up the scattered herd for their bid on the Reservation contract. That brought enough money to weather in the tack shed, bunkhouse, cookhouse, and several cabins before the first snow.
Elena delayed her trip to San Francisco, hoping the rail line through El Paso or Oklahoma might be completed soon. Doc worried that her hip wouldn’t tolerate a long trip in a bouncing stagecoach. But she was determined that come spring she’d go, whether the lines were laid or not. She still hadn’t told Jack.
In October, Hank spruced up and headed to Fort Union. Two weeks later he returned, empty-handed and untalkative. Brady asked him what happened. All Hank said was, “She married someone else.” Brady waited for him to say more. He knew his brother had no tolerance for weak-minded women, and Melanie Kinderly was surely that, the way she let her mother run roughshod over her. But Hank didn’t elaborate and Brady didn’t push it. He had his own problems; he didn’t need to insinuate himself into Hank’s. But it saddened him that Hank was even quieter than usual and had started growing the beard again.
Weeks became months. Jack continued to talk up Australia and all the things there that could kill you, not including climate or humans. An impressive list. He also spent more time around the compound—especially around Elena. He didn’t seem in a hurry to take off, which was a relief to Brady. Even with winter closing in, there would be plenty of work finishing the inside of the new buildings.
Plenty of misery. too. Soon after recovering from Sancho’s beating, Bullshot had a run-in with a rattler. He didn’t make it and Brady missed him sorely. He wasn’t sure when he’d get another dog.
Bad days and worse days. Brady moved through them in a constant state of exhaustion, because that was his only armor against memories he couldn’t face. If he stayed weary enough, he didn’t think—and if he didn’t
think, he didn’t remember. Except at night when he awoke aching from dreams of Jessica.
But things change. Sometimes they get better, sometimes worse, sometimes both at the same time. November sixteenth was both the high and the low point of that fall. That was the day Jessica’s first letter came.
She’d made progress, too. After hard legal battles, the liens against her home were lifted, although the debt remained and had to be repaid. Toward that end and with great reluctance, she began negotiations with the mining consortium.
The rift with her sister was harder to mend. That she had arrived with Ben in tow was a shock. To reveal who had fathered him was an even bigger shock. It drove a wedge between the sisters. He admired Jessica for not trying to hide the truth.I fear she blames me for leading her husband into indiscretion. She maintains the fantasy that John Crawford was a good man easily led astray. She even excuses his forgeries as a desperate attempt to provide for his family after I refused to sign over the deed. I understand she is frightened and alone. Hopefully, soon she will open herself to the truth and we can move past this coil of deception and distrust John Crawford has wrapped us in.
Brady admired her capacity for forgiveness, too. He might be able to carry a heavier load, but Jessica was far stronger than he would ever be.
Her letter indicated she battled loneliness as well. He regretted that. He had hoped time and distance would help her accept the way things had to be.
But a part of him was gratified she still cared.I miss all of you so much. I have not seen a star in weeks, and when there is a sunset, it seems bland and colorless compared to those over RosaRoja. I fear I no longer fit here. Now that I must once again bow to the rules of propriety and decorum, I realize how utterly ridiculous my pamphlets truly were. Have I finally opened my eyes? Or have I changed that much? I do not know. I hunger for news. I hunger for you.
Your Jessica
He didn’t sleep for three days after that letter, but at least he knew she was safe.
Winter was a howling sonofabitch that came too early and stayed too late. After each norther dumped its load of snow, Brady spent days patrolling the drifts, digging out what cattle he could find. There had been worse winters with higher losses, but this year they were on such a thin edge he was determined to save every cow he could.
An early thaw revealed at least a hundred dead. Then a late blizzard sent temperatures plummeting again. Desperation made him stupid, and he rode out when he shouldn’t have. If Hank and Jack hadn’t found him before the drifts filled in the ravine where he and his horse had fallen, he’d be there still, frozen stiff as a poker, waiting for spring. As it was, he was laid up for weeks with a bad knee and, for a month after, limped with a cane like a crippled old man.
Jack got a lot of enjoyment out of that.
February brought another letter from Jessica, which surprised him, since he hadn’t answered her first one. Nothing had changed the direction of his life, and he had no hope that anything would, so what could he say? He knew Elena wrote regularly. Any news he had would be the same.
But this second letter troubled him. A lot.
Apparently negotiations with the consortium had gone well. The debts had been paid and they were now mining Jessica’s land. Or rather, they were tunneling from the adjacent property to hers. She wouldn’t allow them to touch the surface, so the coal had to be carted through the tunnel to the mine entrance next door, then loaded on rail cars and hauled out from there.
Cagey of her. He admired that, too.
She also wrote that a mining engineer named Percival Frederick Bothingham III had been so helpful in the negotiations, she had hired him to oversee the mine.
Helpful. What the hell did that mean? How helpful? And what kind of weak-sister name was Percival Frederick Bothingham the Third, for chrissakes?
Brady didn’t answer that letter either.
He told himself life would look better come spring. As long as he didn’t think about Jessica and Ben he was all right. Like an amputee teaching himself to get by without a limb, he struggled to re-train his thoughts away from memories that festered like an unhealed wound in his mind. But the phantom pain of it never seemed to fade. He wearied of it.
Spring brought with it a blanket of wildflowers and a renewal of spirit. As Brady watched RosaRoja flourish with new life, he realized if he was ever to build a livable future he had to make some hard decisions. And he had to learn to let go.
He started with Elena.
“You still want to go to San Francisco?” he asked her one evening when he returned from Val Rosa to find her sitting in his new rocker on Buck’s porch.
She set her sewing aside and smiled up at him. “Sí.”
“The spur line to the Transcontinental won’t be laid until next year. You’d have to travel by stagecoach to Raton, and that’d be hard on your hip.”
She shrugged. “I will manage.”
He studied her a moment, Jessica’s bell ringing in his mind. What if something went wrong with her surgery? What if she never came back? She looked so fragile in the evening light, so full of trust and hope. Another delicate music box dancer, easily broken in the wrong hands.
He sighed, hoping he was doing the right thing.
“There’s a family leaving for San Francisco. Church people. Young, three kids. They would welcome your company.” He held out an envelope and a leather pouch. “Here’s a voucher and enough money to get you there. I’ll wire more once you arrive.”
She stared at him.
“You still want to go, don’t you?”
“Sí.” She nodded, her eyes brimming despite the wide smile spreading over her face. “Otra vez, you come to my rescue. How do I ever repay you, querido?”
“By packing,” he said gruffly. “The stage leaves next week.”
It was tricky because of the secrecy involved. Elena insisted he not tell Jack until after she was gone. He guessed she wasn’t sure if Jack cared enough to go with her, and wasn’t ready to find out. Brady wasn’t sure either. Even though Jack could be guileless as a kid, he was hard to read sometimes. So Brady sent him to check the water holes in the north range, then took Elena to catch the stage.
Another hard good-bye. Another woman gone from his life. He’d miss her.
THAT EVENING, HE WAS STANDING IN THE SHELL OF THE OLD house, wondering why he should rebuild it if there was no one but him to live in it, when Jack rode up.
“Red said you needed me?” he said as he dismounted.
Brady pointed up at the few remaining timbers. “I was thinking two-foot beams across here. Something sturdy, like the porch.”
Jack made a sound of exasperation. “You brought me all the way from Quartz Creek to talk about beams?” Sighing, he pulled off his hat to scratch the top of his head then put it back on. “Although, I admit I’ll be glad to have a room of my own again. Red smells worse than the ass end of a dead pole cat.”
Brady studied his brother, trying not to see him as the kid he once was, but as the man he had become. Despite their differences, Jack had always been there when he was needed. Brady appreciated that. And although he would miss the little sonofabitch—the laughter, the antics, that open-eyed innocence he envied—it was time Jack moved on. Brady knew what it meant to lose a dream to duty and he was determined that didn’t happen to Jack, too.
Unless staying was what Jack wanted, of course. Brady wasn’t trying to control anything, just offer choices. There was a difference.
“So when do we start?” Jack asked.
“We don’t. I’ll start next week. You’ll go to Australia.”
So maybe he was a little controlling, but he did it for Jack’s own good.
Jack blinked at him, clearly confused. And not nearly as grateful as he should be. In fact, his entire reaction was wrong. Brady watched his brother pick up a shard of broken crockery, make a show of studying it, then toss it aside.
“Maybe I’ve changed my mind,” Jack said.
Brady looked
at him.
“Maybe I’ve decided to stay.”
“Because of Elena.”
Jack shrugged. “Maybe.” Then his seeming indifference gave way to a sheepish grin. “The truth is, Big Brother, I’m smitten with the woman. The conniving wench has me wrapped around her finger.” He looked as pleased about that as a kid with new boots.
Brady stared up at the charred beams and rocked on his heels. “You’re giving up Australia for Elena?”
“Hell, yes. I’ll give up anything, do anything, so long as she’ll have me.”
Brady bit back a smile. When the men in this family fell, they fell hard. At least Jack seemed to have better luck at it than him.
“Is that okay?” Jack dug the toe of his boot into the ashes. “I mean, I know you and Elena have been, well . . . is that okay by you?”
Brady sent him a sidewise look. “Would it matter if it wasn’t?”
“No.”
“Then it’s okay.” Controlling might be bad but it sure felt good.
For a while, they stood in a companionable silence, enjoying a respite from the crowded bunkhouse and the endless chores RosaRoja demanded. Brady tried not to look too far ahead or dwell on how quiet the place would be with everyone gone. He’d made his choices. He just had to find a way to live with them.
Jack punched him in the arm. “So when you going after Jessica?” Brady resisted the urge to punch him back. “We’ve had this conversation.”
“I thought you had feelings for her.”
“I did. I do.”
Jack threw his hands up. “I don’t understand, Brady. Explain it to me. Explain how you can give up a woman like Jessica for this.”
The way he said “this” told Brady that whatever hold RosaRoja had on him, it didn’t stretch as far as Jack. That saddened him yet relieved him at the same time. A man had to follow his own dream, not someone else’s, and RosaRoja had never been Jack’s dream. There were times when Brady wondered if it had ever been his either. Then he would wake up to the smell of sage and greasewood and cattle—when dewdrops flashed like tiny diamonds on a thousand cactus spines, and the air was so crisp he could make out every dip and spike on ridges ten miles away—and he would know this was his dream after all. This was where he belonged.