by Linda Jacobs
“It’s all right, Father.”
It wasn’t. At any moment, the man in the hall would look up at her and say, “I’m here to take the house.” That couldn’t happen.
Each room still bore the touch of Violet; here in a Tiffany vase she’d chosen, there in the burgundy silk chairs before the fireplace. A thousand fragments of the years, each a tiny shining facet in the mosaic of time: hiding from her nanny behind the porte cochere and getting a gentle swat on her diapered bottom; learning to play the piano in the parquet-floored, glass conservatory.
Or poised at the top of the marble stairs, a skinny Cinderella hearing the stroke of twelve. Skimming down lightly like a bird, across the foyer and down the lawn to the lakeshore where an imaginary pumpkin lay lonely in the coarse sand.
Cord returned to his room, but did not turn on the light or disrobe. He shoved the sash of the window high and took a seat on the wide sill, while he spun images of his two worlds.
Though many people in Salt Lake City regarded him as Aaron Bryce’s charity case, he believed the majority of guests at Excalibur saw him as a gentleman with European roots, as well as a respected local Mormon. He could recount how the angel Moroni appeared to fourteen-year-old Joseph Smith, instructing him to translate the message so that all could read. How ironic that the leader of the non-treaty Nez Perce also bore the name of Joseph, biblical Joseph of the coat of many colors.
How many colors was Cord trying to wear?
Lightning flashed over the lake, revealing a pair of thunderheads, black towers against a slate sky. Shades of gray, like the fine line he’d walked this evening, trying to protect Bitter Waters from Feddors, but keeping his mouth shut when the impulse to claim his uncle as family struck him.
He reached to his trouser pocket and drew out his wayakin. Even in the dim glow from the hallway lighting over the transom, it took on a glassy sheen. As he had done a thousand times, he rubbed his thumb over the smooth surface, hoping the contact would calm him.
In 1877, he’d hated Bitter Waters and the Nez Perce, turned his back on them and all they represented, too youthful and insensitive to even consider their side … until he had approached the Wylie campfire.
Another lightning flash, and the thunderstorm looked a lot closer. Silver illumination revealed the lake, whitecaps roiling, while the air around the hotel remained stifling.
Dante hated storms.
The lobby lay quiet before Laura as she descended the stairs, the tulip lights on the redwood columns dark. She’d sponged off her trousers and put them back on with Cord’s laundered shirt … in defiance of her family and Hank’s expectations.
Stepping across the polished yellow pine floor, she went onto the porch and dropped into a rocker. Pushing it with her foot, she listened to it creak, an empty, aching sound.
The aroma of lake water mixed with that of sage and pine on the rising breeze. A fingernail moon had risen in the east, while a flash illuminated a towering cloud bank to the southeast. And was that also lightning on the high ridges? Surely not, for the orange glow was steady.
It must be the forest fire, visible now by day from the hotel as thin tendrils of white drifting up from the far peaks. Smoke that obscured vision, but hers was coming clear.
Were the bank and Fielding House in danger? She might love her father for swinging her into the air as a toddler while Violet looked on, might wish he were well and whole, but how many times had he manipulated her thoughts and feelings to his advantage?
Hank viewed the hotel as his own. But, as a consummate gamesman, did he deserve the place more than Cord, who had a dream?
In spite of her father’s and Hank’s assurance of their claims on her, she rose from the rocker.
Just a few steps down the darkened hall, she stood before the heavy door of Room 109. Her blood thudded in her ears.
With her hand raised to knock, she heard the tick of a latch at the far end of the hall. Though she turned quickly, she caught only a glimpse of a tall man with dark hair as he exited and closed the door.
Her father and Aunt Fanny would call her shameless, society would censure, but she went anyway, down the hall, pushed open the door, and stepped out into the night. The faint moon rode in a patch of clear sky.
In the midst of the meadow, she caught a moving darker shadow. “Cord!”
Fifty yards out, he disappeared into the trees. To keep up, she had to pass through the dense grove, arms out before her to stave off the trunks. Another lightning flash revealed him exiting the forest.
The stables lay ahead; he opened one of the tall wooden doors and went inside.
Another bolt from the heavens made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Wind swept in off the lake, tearing through grass and scrub, tugging at her hair. She should go back to the hotel.
Moments later, she felt the rough boards of the stable door beneath her hands.
Inside, all was dark.
From down the way, she heard the rasp of a match. Lantern light flared, casting flickering shadows on the walls and into the darkened stalls. She could see Dante’s open gate.
“Cord?”
He appeared from behind his stallion, carrying the lantern.
Laura stood at the stall door wearing her trousers and the shirt he’d loaned her at Witch Creek. Her eyes were fever bright.
“Your father?” he asked.
“The bullet’s out, and he’s still alive.”
“The caliber?”
“I don’t know.”
“Not small, like a pistol?”
Laura shook her head. “No one told me anything.” She looked up, her eyes clear green in his mind’s eye even in the darkness. “It’s like that terrible night when I was ten. We waited and waited while Mama and my baby brother died.”
Cord hung the lantern on a nail in the vacant stall next to Dante’s, then lowered the flame until the stable was lit by the faintest golden glow. It was warm, with the earthy smells of sweet feed, horseflesh, and manure. The wind whistled up colder and louder through the cracks as the storm took aim at them.
“I hope he pulls through.” He meant it, even with Forrest Fielding against him. “Hank accused me of shooting your dad … in front of Manfred Resnick and Lieutenant Stafford.”
“I know you didn’t.” Laura’s voice was steady.
“I’m hoping you can convince them of that, since you’re the only other witness to Forrest’s collapse.”
“I’ll try.”
Cord stood where he was, legs apart. “A while ago, I went up to the third floor where your suite is. I wanted to tell you I talked with Constance.”
“And?” Her expression gave away nothing.
“She’s free to pursue Norman.”
That hadn’t come out right, especially as Laura had followed him all the way out here in threatening weather. “I mean …” He brought his hands out and moved toward her. “I mean we’re free, you and I.”
For a heartbeat, they gazed into each other’s eyes. Gauging, wondering, fearing.
Then their arms went around each other in a grip so tight he had trouble breathing; she probably couldn’t, either. Yet, it was such a relief, as if a band around his forehead had loosened. She fit him, the way he’d believed she could the day they went fishing in the lake.
They were quiet for a long time, her cheek against his chest. Then he felt warmth and wet there.
“Hey, hey.” He pulled back and tipped her chin up.
“Daddy wants me to help Hank, to keep you from buying the hotel.” Tears glistened on her lamp-lit face. “Hank wants me to find out where you got the documents you showed the railroad.”
“What do you want?”
Her hand came up; she placed her palm atop his breastbone and spread her fingers. Closing his eyes, Cord thought the intense feeling could have been pain or pleasure.
“Are you sure?”
She nodded. And sealed the bargain by bending and blowing out the lamp.
Cord pulled a sadd
le blanket from where he’d folded it over the stall railing. Taking Laura’s fingers, he drew her into the vacant stall, fanned the covering, and let it settle onto the straw. The mix of faint moon and bright stars spread shafts of silver onto the stable floor, and he saw her clearly, her face aglow.
He drew her down with him onto the blanket. She smelled of lavender soap.
Outside, the weather front swept in. Clouds scudded across the sky, causing the stripes of light to waver.
Then the stable went dark, lit only at intervals … more flashes of dry summer lightning, the kind that ignited wildfires.
“No one I know would want me to be here tonight.” But all Laura felt was defiant joy. “Not Aunt Fanny, with her outmoded Victorian morality; not Constance, though perhaps she loves me enough to wish me happiness; not Father, who awoke from surgery asking me to promise I would help Hank defeat you.”
“Yet, you’re here.” His lips pressed her forehead.
“This afternoon at the canyon, when you and I were at the brink of the falls, I felt like I was on the highest cloud in a clear blue sky.”
He lifted her hair with one hand and moved it to the side of her neck, kissed her in the place where her pulse fluttered. It was right, so right that they shed their clothes and lie together upon the bed of scratchy wool and straw.
The stable creaked in the wind. Thunder rumbled as the gale roamed the land.
“Listen,” he whispered. “On my ranch, the wind whistles across the sage like this on stormy nights.”
She wished they were in bed beneath a fur robe, miles away behind the door.
“I want to take you there.”
Laura twined her arms around him. His eyes looked enormous and dark in the dim light. “I want you to.”
To take her to his ranch, to take her …
It was supposed to hurt, but she felt only a smooth pressure where Cord fitted into her. “You do me honor,” he murmured, “to let me be your first.”
Like a string being strummed by a bow, Laura felt the singing inside her. It was as if she and Cord were both instruments, upon which they played. A rough melody at first, that rose and swelled like summer itself, into the sweetest of symphonies.
Liquid, supple and slippery, they moved together in the quicksilver lightning. Sweat slicked their bodies. In the stalls around them, restless whinnies rose as wind gusts beat against the stable. The rain began, drumming on the stable roof and lashing at the walls.
The storm flashed again, and Laura felt as if she became one with the pure light.
Cord must have slept, for he was fighting his way up through blood-soaked darkness, the screams inside him turning to sobs … sounds that must have wakened Laura, who knelt naked beside him. He fought the disorientation of returning from that faraway night, the vertigo that traveling from being six years old to the present produced.
Across Yellowstone Lake, thunder rolled hollowly. The rain’s pounding had subsided to a patter, dripping off the stable’s eaves. Hot tears slid across Cord’s cheeks and down his neck.
Laura wiped his wet face with both palms. He took her hands in his, managed a deep breath, and heard it turn into a hiccup.
“It’s all right,” she whispered.
She didn’t understand that it would never be all right for Franklin and Sarah Sutton.
Cord pulled Laura down and wrapped her with him in the blanket. For the second time in a week, he’d returned to that darkest passage of his life, just at a time when he believed fortune had begun to smile. He’d never told anyone about that night, not Aaron Bryce or his family, who’d taken him into their hearts and lives; not Constance, even as he considered making a life with her.
His chest felt as though an iron band constricted it.
Laura’s hair, soft beneath his fingers, brought back his father’s hand stroking his mother’s tresses in their last moments … Cord closed his eyes against a crest of pain.
As if he had cried aloud, Laura raised her head. Her eyes shone in starlight that, with the storm’s passing, once more slanted across the stable floor.
“It was a dream,” she whispered.
“No. It wasn’t.”
Drawing her head onto a place near his heart, he told her his story.
Laura clung to Cord where they lay with the blanket drawn over them. She had lost track of time while his words painted an orphaned boy raised to riches through the kindness of Aaron Bryce … vivid pictures illuminating the man with whom she had cast her lot.
Cord’s arm tightened around her. “As long as the hate continues, the blood keeps being shed on both sides.”
“There’s so much hate. Captain Feddors is horrible to you.” She reached to slide her hand over his cheek, encountering the puckered ridge of raised flesh.
He went still beneath her tentative exploration.
“How did you get this scar?”
He fingered the welt. “A schoolyard fight got out of hand. A couple of older Mormon boys got wind of where I’d come from before Aaron took me in.”
“And you hate them still.”
In the silence that followed, Cord sat up, leaving her uncovered. He drew his knees to his chest and, though he stared at the stall boards, she believed he saw that far-off battleground where bigotry turned children into monsters.
“I hate that I’m in the middle, neither white nor red. I hate that my adopted white brother, Thomas, has his name on the title of my Hotel Excalibur … he never misses an opportunity to point it out. I loathe the supercilious captain who marked me the moment he saw me and won’t let it drop. I abhor that poster on the wall of the hotel meeting room, showing the Northern Pacific line built on the back of a fallen red warrior. I despise that my grandmother, mother, and father died senselessly.”
His Adam’s apple dipped. “And I hate myself for thinking being adopted by a white man would wipe away the stigma of Nez Perce blood.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
JUNE 28
Alex!” Hank tried the brass door handle of the aft cabin on his steamboat. The Alexandra lay alongside the Lake Hotel dock, as dawn broke beyond the Absarokas.
The door swung inward.
The cabin bore his sister’s touch in the feminine floral wallpaper she’d chosen, lavender sprigs on white. A frilly petticoat frothed on the deck, and her favorite purple dress had been thrown over the top of the wooden wardrobe. A black-and-white cameo pendant with a knot in the gold chain appeared to have been tossed onto the table beside the bunk.
Alex wasn’t there.
She might have joined last night’s singing at Wylie’s tent camp … stayed with a young family up the hill, reluctant to walk back to the boat in the dark.
He shook his head. Alex had never been afraid of anything in her life.
She might have met a man at the hotel. Hank envisioned her charming petulant face, challenging eyes, her fall of blond hair, bright gold in contrast to his own dull wheat.
She’d changed and grown a lot in the past few years, but Hank wanted to believe that even at twenty, Alex would resist being swept off her feet by some handsome son-of-a-bitch like Cord Sutton.
Hank left his boat and turned east, following the Grand Loop Road to the soldier station. The rose glow swelled in the east, but the front door of the log building was secured. A check of his pocket watch revealed it lacked ten minutes to reveille.
He could raise the alarm, send the cavalry to search for Alex the way they had looked for Laura Fielding after the stage attack, but Hank had been through this with his sister before. With a sinking heart, he suspected she was with Danny in his lair. Knowing his brother’s insolence and daring, he’d probably returned to the abandoned cabin, correctly guessing that Manfred Resnick and Captain Feddors would think that move so foolish they would not bother to post a guard.
The shortest route to the cabin ran though the meadow past the stable, where Hank’s shoes became soaked from last night’s rain clinging to the grass. While he was some distance from the
long building, the stable door swung open.
Feminine laughter spilled into the morning.
Hank stepped with haste into a copse of fir.
It wasn’t Alex’s girlish giggle but a waterfall’s merry dance, sweet clear music. Hank had tried to draw that unselfconscious laughter from Laura, but had never managed more than a smile from her vivid green eyes.
He looked between needled branches.
In the shelter of the stable door, Laura smiled up at Cord. Wearing those damned trousers she’d affected yesterday, she managed to look incredibly fetching with her hair mussed and strewn with straw. Cord’s shirttails were out; her slender arm encircled his back.
Hank told himself he’d asked her to do this, to pump Cord about the letter and the inspection report. But as Cord bent to brush his lips across Laura’s, Hank flushed. She was taking her undercover role, if she were acting, way too far. At any rate, Hank’s assessment of Laura Fielding, Chicago lady, had been flawed.
If she would spend a night with a man in the barn, she was probably the kind of woman who’d do it for him, as well. Of course, she would, especially after he revealed what he knew about Mr. William high-and-mighty Sutton.
When Cord bent his rumpled head to kiss her, Laura wondered if anyone might be watching them come out of the barn. But all seemed quiet as they parted, he to saddle Dante and take him out, she to hurry back to the hotel.
Reaching her room without running into anyone, she faced herself in the mirror. Lord, anyone who saw her must be able to tell she was not the same, with her high color and hair mussed by Cord’s hands.
Her former existence felt far behind.
She thought of calling for a bath, but didn’t want to see the boys who brought the tub and water. Instead, she ducked down the hall to the bathroom and filled the thick white china pitcher that matched the washbasin.
Stripping down, she soaped a cloth and washed her breasts where Cord’s moustache had left patches of pink around the nipples. Down her stomach where he’d laid his cheek and she’d dared to think of bearing his children someday. On to the tender flesh where they’d joined several times during the course of the night. She rinsed the rag and her skin, then wrung out and hung the cloth on the hook on the side of the dresser.