Her eyes looked forlorn. She started to leave, but paused long enough to say, “I’ll heat up some coffee to help you stay awake.”
Karl’s heart ached. He was going to have to figure out some way to fall out of love with Hetty. Because it hurt too much to love someone who didn’t love him back.
“Why are you so mad?” Griffin asked.
“If I didn’t owe you my life, I’d be a lot madder at you than I am,” Karl shot back. He knew he shouldn’t take out his ire on the kids. Hetty was the one who’d deceived him. Hetty was the guilty one. But he couldn’t stop himself from asking, “Where did you and Grace meet Hetty?”
Griffin’s mouth dropped open in shock before he recovered and said, “What do you mean?”
“I know she’s not your mother.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“Not in so many words. I figured it out.”
“Don’t blame Hetty,” the boy said, laying an imploring hand on Karl’s arm. “She only took Mrs. Templeton’s place to help out me and Grace.”
It took Karl a moment to process what Griffin had said. There had apparently been a Mrs. Templeton—the woman he’d corresponded with—but Hetty had taken her place. When? How? If Hetty wasn’t Mrs. Templeton, then who the hell was she?
Karl’s head was reeling. Who was it he’d married?
“Are you going to make us leave?”
The kid’s plaintive question cut to the heart of the matter. Was he going to throw them all out? And if he wasn’t, where did he go from here?
Hetty stuck her head in the door and said, “Coffee’s ready. Do you want me to bring you a cup, or do you want to drink it out here at the table?”
“At the table. Just give me a minute.” Karl turned to Griffin and said, “I haven’t made up my mind yet what I’m going to do. I suggest you sit here and think about how you’d feel if you were in my shoes and found out everyone you cared about had been deceiving you.”
Karl was halfway to the door when Griffin said in a fierce voice, “Nobody ever gave a damn about me except Grace until Hetty came along. Don’t hurt her. Or you’ll have me to deal with.”
Karl saw the kid had his jaw clenched in an attempt to keep the tears that had filled his eyes from spilling over. Karl swallowed over the sudden painful lump in his throat. “I have to do what I think is right.”
“I mean it!” Griffin warned.
“I know you do.” Karl left the room, determined to confront Hetty and get the truth out of her. But little pitchers had big ears, so he shut the door behind him, then crossed the house and checked on Grace. The lantern was out in the bedroom, but he could hear muffled sobs. He was tempted to try and comfort her, but he couldn’t do that until he made up his mind how he was going to resolve the situation.
“Come sit down, Karl,” Hetty called to him as she set a tin cup full of steaming coffee on the table.
“What if I don’t feel like sitting?”
She set a second cup of coffee on the opposite side of the table and sat down in front of it. “It’ll be easier to talk if we can look each other in the eye.”
He scraped a chair back, dropped down into it, and leaned his elbows aggressively on the table. “I can see how looking me in the eye wouldn’t be a problem for you, Hetty. You’re pretty good at lying right to my face.”
Even in the scant light from the lantern on the table he saw her cheeks flush. He couldn’t be sure whether it was shame for what she’d done, or frustration at getting caught.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“My name is Henrietta Wentworth.”
“Not Templeton?”
She shook her head.
“What the hell is going on, Hetty?”
She focused her gaze on her hands, which were knotted before her on the table. He watched her swallow hard, but she didn’t speak.
He reached across the narrow kitchen table and forced her chin up. “Look at me. Talk to me! Whose kids are those?”
She jerked her chin free, her eyes flashing, and said, “Mine!”
“They can’t be yours,” Karl retorted, grasping her wrist when she started to rise. “We both know why.”
Hetty turned her eyes down and to the side, an admission that she’d been untouched before he’d made her his wife.
Karl felt an unutterable sadness. He hadn’t insisted on having a woman who’d been untouched by another man. He hadn’t thought it would matter to him that his wife had already borne two children. But the masculine exultation he’d felt when he’d realized the truth, when he’d known for certain that no other man had touched her and he was the first, had been something he’d never expected.
Her flush deepened as she sat back down. “The children needed a mother and I was available. I’m their mother now.”
“Where did you find them?”
“I didn’t find them. They found me.” She tugged at her wrist and said, “You’re hurting me, Karl.”
Karl let her go and knotted his hands into fists, contemplating the beautiful woman sitting across from him. The beautiful, deceitful woman sitting across from him.
“You didn’t expect there would be consequences if you were found out?”
“I didn’t expect to be found out. How did you know—”
“I’ve never taken a virgin to bed, but I know what a hymen is, and I know when I’ve broached one.”
She covered her face at such plain speaking. He waited her out. When she lowered her hands he said, “Let’s start with how you hitched up with those kids. Did you meet them in Cheyenne?”
“I’ve never been to Cheyenne.”
“You just said—”
“Do you want to hear what happened?” she interrupted. “Or do you want to yell at me?”
He clamped his jaw and waited. He watched a half dozen emotions flicker across her face before she began speaking. Figuring out how to put the best face on her lies, he thought bitterly.
“I was traveling west on a wagon train with two of my sisters—I come from a family of six children—when we were attacked by Indians. I was wounded in the shoulder by an arrow.”
“I’ve seen the scar,” Karl said.
She put a hand to her shoulder where he’d seen the raised flesh that she’d kept constantly covered with clothing. “The savages went crazy when they realized Hannah and I were twins and let us alone. But they took my youngest sister Josie captive and stole the oxen pulling the wagon.”
“I have to give you credit. When you make up a story, it’s a corker.”
“It’s the truth!”
It sounded too farfetched to be the truth, but the anguish in her voice was real enough. “Where was the rest of the wagon train when all this was happening?”
“We were thrown off the train,” Hetty admitted.
“Why?”
“Does it matter?”
He thought about that for a moment and said, “I can’t believe a wagon master would abandon three women without a man to protect them.”
“My sister Hannah’s husband, Mr. McMurtry, was with us.”
“What happened to him during the attack?”
“He’d died earlier that day of cholera.”
“Helluva lot of bad luck, Hetty. Where’s your twin? What happened to her?”
“I don’t know,” Hetty said. “I was dying, so she went to find help. She never came back.”
“Then how did you get well?”
She hesitated.
Running out of convincing lies, Karl thought.
At last she said, “Bao found me and nursed me back to health.”
Karl was stunned. Bao had been a part of this charade? He’d thought the Chinaman was his friend! He’d trusted Bao to travel to Cheyenne and return with his mail-order bride. He’d returned with a bride, all right. Just not the one he’d been sent to get. How had someone he trusted as much as he trusted Bao become a co-conspirator in this tale of betrayal?
Karl realized he was letting himself get distracted. There was st
ill a big, unexplained hole in Hetty’s story. “Where did you find the kids? Were they with the wagon train, too?”
Hetty swallowed hard and said, “They traveled from Cheyenne with your mail-order bride. Mrs. Templeton saw what she thought was an abandoned wagon along the trail and stopped to see if there was anything left inside. There was. Me.”
Karl was trying to fill in the blanks between what Hetty had said and what she’d implied, trying to unravel the knotted string of truth she’d presented to him.
“So you’re not the one who wrote those letters to me?”
“Grace did that.”
Karl’s lips flattened. “I was corresponding with a thirteen-year-old girl?”
Hetty nodded.
“How did the kids get involved with Mrs. Templeton?” he asked.
“Grace paid Mrs. Templeton to bring them along because she was desperate to find a home for herself and her brother. They’d been living upstairs in a saloon where their mother used to work.”
Karl didn’t have to ask what kind of work Grace and Griffin’s mother had been doing. To clarify things in his mind, he asked, “So the children weren’t related to Mrs. Templeton, either?”
Hetty shook her head.
“Poor kids,” Karl muttered. It suddenly dawned on him that the poor kids he was feeling so sorry for were the same ones who’d manipulated him into this mail-order marriage. “If you’re not the woman Grace planned to marry off to me, where is she?”
“On the way here, Mrs. Templeton fell off a cliff.”
Karl snorted. “Of course she did.”
“It wasn’t my fault!”
Karl hadn’t even considered the possibility that Hetty was responsible for Mrs. Templeton’s death. Fortunately, he was too stunned to speak.
Hetty’s chin came up as she said, “Mrs. Templeton was going to beat Griffin. Again. So I intervened.”
“And pushed her off a cliff?” Karl said incredulously.
“I only punched her in the nose,” Hetty protested. “She was trying to hit me with a heavy branch and lost her balance and fell.”
“She couldn’t see the cliff?” Karl asked.
“It was dark.”
“Lord, lord, lord,” Karl said, thrusting both hands through his hair in agitation. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing.” He frowned as he had a sudden thought. “And Bao went along with this…substitution?”
“Bao suggested it,” Hetty replied. “I don’t think he liked your mail-order bride.”
Every answer Karl got made him think of more questions to ask. “Where did you come from? Where’s the rest of your family?”
“My father was a banker in Chicago. Our home burned down in the Great Chicago Fire, killing my parents. My two brothers and three sisters and I ended up in an orphanage.”
“Where’s the rest of your family?”
“My eldest sister, Miranda, took my two little brothers, Nick and Harry, with her when she left Chicago to become a mail-order bride in Texas. We never heard from her again.
“It was awful at the orphanage without Miranda there to protect us from the headmistress. So Hannah decided to become a mail-order bride to Mr. McMurtry, who was heading west to the Wyoming Territory, and he agreed to bring me and Josie along.”
“Lots of mail-order brides in your family,” Karl said scornfully.
“We weren’t left with many choices,” Hetty shot back with equal scorn.
“I just realized something,” Karl said. “We may not be legally married.”
“I signed my full name to the church registry.”
“Along with a false one,” Karl pointed out.
“I’m your wife, Karl. We were married in church. We spoke words before God.”
“You married me under false pretenses.”
“Those two children still need a father. And a home. You can’t throw them out,” Hetty pleaded. “Grace will end up working upstairs in some saloon, and Griffin will end up in some awful orphanage. He’ll be beaten and he’ll run away and starve!”
She was painting an especially gruesome picture, but Karl could tell she believed every word she was saying.
“I would never have married you if I’d only been thinking of myself,” she continued. “I had to save those children from a fate worse than death. I had to!”
“Why?”
“Because I know what it’s like to be orphaned. I know what it’s like to find yourself in an orphanage at the mercy of someone cruel. I could never condemn Griffin to that life, or Grace to the sort of life that faced her without my help. You see why I had to deceive you, don’t you, Karl?” she said, her hands held out to him in supplication. “It wasn’t for myself. It was for the children.”
Why else would she accept marriage to a man as plain-looking as he was? She’d made love to him to be certain the marriage couldn’t be annulled.
“I don’t care about your motives,” he said in a harsh voice. “You still lied to me. About everything.”
She didn’t bother denying it.
Karl finally knew the truth. It hurt even more than the lies had. His throat ached, but he forced himself to speak.
“What you did was despicable. How do you expect me ever to trust you again?”
“I’m so sorry, Karl,” she whispered. “So very sorry.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner? You sat in front of that fire with me night after night and said nothing. You lay in my arms night after night, listening to my heart beat with love for you, and said nothing.”
“I didn’t know you loved me, Karl.”
“I don’t,” he said flatly. “Not anymore. How could I? I don’t even know who you are. All you’ve done since I married you is tell one lie after another.”
Hetty sobbed. “I’m sorry, Karl. I never meant to hurt you.”
“A lot of good that does me,” he snarled.
Karl felt like he might be sick. He could understand Hetty leaping before she took the time to think, accepting the role of mail-order bride to save those two kids. He could understand her believing that she needed to lie to him before she’d had a chance to find out the kind of man he was.
What he couldn’t forgive was how she’d continued to lie to him long after she must have known, from their conversations in front of the fire and later in bed, that he’d never throw those two kids out in the snow.
Most of all, he couldn’t forgive her for letting him fall so deeply in love with a woman who was unwilling to love him back. A woman he was afraid to trust and who was afraid to trust him.
Karl rubbed the nape of his neck. Tired and unhappy and confused. He needed time to think. He needed time to figure out exactly where they should go from here.
“Have you told me everything, Hetty? Is it all truly, finally out in the open?”
He saw the flicker of something pass over her face and realized there was indeed something more, at least one more secret she wasn’t telling him. Karl gritted his teeth to keep from saying anything, waiting her out.
Instead of confessing whatever it was, she took a deep breath and said, “That’s everything.”
Like hell it is, Karl thought. What else are you hiding, my devious wife? What other surprises do you have up your sleeve?
Suddenly he knew. It was something about Clive. The mysterious man in her past. Karl opened his mouth to mention the man’s name and closed it again. He’d had enough pain for one night.
“Are you going to let us stay?” Hetty asked.
Instead of answering her, Karl said, “Looks to me like you didn’t fare any better in this fiasco than I did.”
“What do you mean?”
“You ended up with two kids you never wanted. And me.”
“I was alone, Karl, without any way of taking care of myself. I would have needed to marry someone. I’m not sorry it was you.”
“You’re not?” He noticed Hetty couldn’t meet his eyes. He waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. “If you want out, tell me now.�
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“What about the children?” Hetty said, keeping her gaze focused on her lap. “What would happen to them if I left?”
His heart sank. If she wanted out, he would have to let her go. Maybe that was for the best. “I’ll find somewhere for the kids to go.”
He could see she was tempted to walk away. There was nothing here for her. Except two children she clearly loved.
She met his gaze again and said, “You can’t put the children in an orphanage, Karl. They need a home. If you need to punish someone, punish me.”
“How do you suggest I do that?”
“You could send me away,” she said in a small voice.
“And leave myself without a wife? Without the helpmate I need to cook and clean the house and do laundry? Without a nurse for the loggers? Without a caretaker for those two kids? Without a woman to take to my bed? Or to give me more children?”
“But you can’t want to keep me as your wife,” she protested. “You’ve told me all the reasons that will never work. You won’t ever be able to trust me. I’ve managed to destroy whatever feelings you had for me. You don’t love me anymore.”
“In order to punish you, I’d have to punish myself worse. I choose not to do that. I choose to keep you here. For all the reasons I mentioned, but especially so I have a woman in my bed. And a wife to bear me children.”
“What if I don’t accept your kind offer to stay?” she said bitterly.
He shrugged. “Then you’re welcome to go. I’ll make sure Bao gets you back to Butte. But take Grace and Griffin with you.”
She gasped. And then said nothing for a very long time.
Karl was tempted to fill the silence that grew while she contemplated the future she could expect with a husband who despised her for what she’d done, versus the brutal existence she and the children would face on their own in a wilderness mining town.
He forced himself to wait her out.
When Hetty spoke at last, her eyes were bleak. He saw guilt and remorse. And something he hadn’t expected, but which he found both exciting and promising. Defiance.
“I’ll stay.”
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