Trail of Aces (Hot on the Trail Book 8)

by Merry Farmer

  “The mountains are all around us,” she said, feeling as if it was the first time she’d really spoken in days.

  “Pete says it’ll be slow going through the mountains for the next couple of weeks.”

  Olivia blinked, surprised that Charlie was the one who replied to her random statement. She blinked again and looked around. Charlie was driving his wagon directly behind the Hamiltons. Olivia had fallen back while lost in her thoughts, and was now following the ruts in the road made by years’ worth of wagons before them, at Charlie’s side. He hadn’t said anything until now—either teasing or serious. He’d simply let her have her thoughts and keep them to herself.

  The mountains now loomed on either side, making her feel as small as a mouse. “Did he say anything about how we’re going to bring all of the wagons and animals through this?” she asked, wishing she didn’t sound so timid.

  Charlie smiled—not teasing, not charming, simply reassuring. “Pete has made this trip a dozen times before and more. I trust that he knows what he’s doing.”

  Olivia nodded, but studied her husband’s face. How exactly did a man who had made a crooked living getting other people to trust him ever bring himself to trust someone else? For that matter, how could anyone trust a word that anyone else said? She couldn’t even trust her own heart these days.

  Part of the answer to her question came a few days later, when the small passage they were traveling through opened up into a wider valley on the other side of a mountain so high Olivia could barely comprehend it. The landscape on the other side was full of trees and greenery, hills with curving streams and boulders as big as the wagons. It was a far cry from the prairie they’d spent so many weeks wandering across. The only way to make it to Oregon City and the end of the journey was to keep moving forward and trust they would get there, no matter what changes they went through.

  The new, wider valley followed the course of a winding river—clearer, but faster-moving than the Platte.

  “We can follow the eastern bank for a few more days, maybe even a week,” Pete explained over supper one night, “but we’re going to have to cross it eventually.”

  “It won’t be like crossing the Platte, will it?” Estelle asked as she handed around steaming bowls of stew. The weather had been growing increasingly cold as they crossed through the mountains, and rather than find themselves out of firewood and buffalo chips and the other scant fuel they were able to carry with them in the wagons, larger groups were banding together for meals. Olivia sat on a crate beside Charlie, the Hamiltons on her other side. Neither she nor Charlie spoke, but the simple act of sitting close to each other was a comfort.

  “Not at all,” Pete confirmed, frowning into his stew. “The river is narrower up there, but we’ll have to contend with rapids. Plus, there aren’t as many men stationed there to help folks navigate on rafts. We’ll be on our own.”

  On our own. The words echoed in Olivia’s mind, turning her off of her food. She forced herself to eat as much as she could anyhow, feeling as though she would need the energy.

  “Don’t you worry, Mrs. Garrett,” Chet said from across the campfire. He’d been quieter lately, but in spite of the barely concealed animosity between him and Charlie, he’d stayed close. “I’m sure your fine husband will carry you across the rapids, if he needs to. He guards anything that’s precious with his life.”

  Coming from anyone else, those words would have been kind, encouraging. From Chet, they had the feel of a threat. What did he mean by that? Was it meant to emphasize how Charlie felt about her, or was he talking about the money and jewels?

  Olivia lowered her eyes, focusing on eating, even though Josephine and Estelle tried to draw her into the discussion of crossing rapids and traveling through forests. Since Chet hadn’t been able to frighten the box’s whereabouts out of her, he’d taken to watching her like a hawk. Enough to guess that she didn’t have the box with her anymore. She could almost pinpoint the moment he’d given up, three days ago when they were moving at a snail’s pace between two rocky outcroppings, Mr. Hamilton had asked Chet to help him change a wheel on their wagon. It had given Chet the opportunity to crawl inside of the wagon bed to fetch tools. His scowl was as dark as ever when he hopped out, and later, Olivia had discovered that someone had rifled through her things. After that, Chet had turned his attention to Charlie, but judging by the scowl he wore as often as a sly smile, he hadn’t found anything.

  “Why aren’t you more worried?” Olivia asked Charlie a day later, as the wagons drove up a slope through an icy wind. She shouldn’t be talking—she shouldn’t even have let herself fall back to walk by Charlie’s side again—but even with three layers of clothes on, she was so miserable with cold that she needed something to take her mind off of it.

  “I’ve known Chet for too long.” Charlie walked with his hands tucked into his armpits, the goad he used to steer the oxen sticking out behind him. “He’s a patient man. He’ll wait until he can cause the most damage with the least amount of trouble to himself before he strikes.”

  It wasn’t at all reassuring. Olivia let out a breath, watched it curl into a misty cloud in front of her. “How did the two of you really meet?”

  Charlie took longer to reply than Olivia was comfortable with. After a tense silence, he said, “We really did meet at a card tournament in Richmond. We did band together to knock the other man out of the final table. We both cheated to do it.”

  The biggest surprise to Olivia was that she wasn’t surprised. She only nodded.

  “After I collected my winnings and went back to my room, Chet came knocking,” Charlie went on. “Fool that I was, I let him in. He had a proposal for me. Working together to win the tournament had been easy and, as he said, fun. He suggested that we pool our resources, enter more tournaments and position ourselves to win with our skills.”

  “He wanted you to continue to cheat? But wouldn’t people catch on after a while?”

  Charlie nodded. “He did, and they did too. We won a few big prizes and split the winnings, but at the first hint that folks knew what we were up to, tournament organizers suddenly found they’d allowed too many players to register or mysteriously lost our entry fee. I was ready to call it a day and move on to something else.”

  “You were?” A twinge of hope pricked at Olivia’s heart. It gave her the energy she needed to start up a particularly steep slope, lined with rocks. Tiny flakes of white began to drift out of the cloudy sky.

  “I was,” Charlie went on. “But Chet had other plans. He explained a trick, as he called it, that he’d played on some unsuspecting folks back in his hometown. It was a sure-fire way to get a greedy man to part with his money in the hopes of making more. That scheme involved one of those patented medicines that everyone is so crazy about. The way it went, we offered an investor a crate of the stuff up front, and promised to have ten more crates delivered to them for a wholesale cost and franchising rights.”

  “But you didn’t deliver.” Olivia hugged herself tighter as the snow fell harder. Her nose must be red with cold.

  “Nope,” Charlie confirmed. If the cold was affecting him, he didn’t let on. Although his face had taken on a rosy hue that was attractive. “And the bottles we gave them were filled with water and some cooking spices. We skipped town before anyone noticed. The only reason I went along with that one was because I didn’t like the fools we suckered. As soon as I saw it was easy money, well, I’m not too proud to admit that I got greedy.”

  Olivia frowned, lowering her gaze to watch her half-frozen feet as she walked. The flurries were beginning to stick to the tufts of grass beside their path.

  “After the medicine trick, Chet came up with more plots, each a bit more devious than the next. I went along because…” He sighed and rubbed his arms to fight away the cold, and possibly memories. “When you grow up days away from starving to death, you come to appreciate cash when it comes your way, no matter what means of conveyance it took to get to you.”

/>   Olivia’s eyes widened and she studied him. “You nearly starved as a child?” Her heart was tangled enough without adding the image of a desperate, young Charlie to its burden.

  A grin quirked the corner of Charlie’s mouth. “You make it sound like it was a one-time occurrence.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think I had a full belly until I was ten and my ma dropped me at the door of the Brothers of Saint Benedict’s monastery.”

  “How horrible.” She took a few more steps, hoping her feet—and her heart—wouldn’t go completely numb. “So you followed Chet because you didn’t want to be in that position ever again.”

  Charlie chuckled, startling her. “Not too many people would give me the benefit of the doubt in connecting those things. But no.” He rubbed a hand over the bottom half of his face. “No, I followed Chet because his ideas seemed like good ones, at the time.”

  Olivia shook her head. “He tricked you. You were a victim of his schemes as much as those people you took money from.” She wanted it to be true more than anything else. If it was true, then maybe she wasn’t married to such a blackguard after all.

  “You’re too kind,” Charlie said, almost whispered. “I don’t deserve you.” He swayed closer to her, reached sideways to take one of her hands.

  Olivia’s throat squeezed tight as she let him take it. What a wonderful thing it would be if she could forgive—

  The wagon beside them hit a rut, and without warning, the front wheel closest to them cracked and popped right off. Charlie’s oxen cried in alarm as the wagon tipped to the side. Crashes sounded from the wagon bed, along with a second snap as the back wheel on the same side broke. Charlie threw his arms around Olivia and dragged her out of the way as the wagon tilted to the side. The only thing that kept it from falling over completely was the damaged back wheel and the bulk of the oxen, though their yoke looked dangerously uncomfortable as it pushed the poor animals to the side.

  “Whoa! Stop there!” Pete’s call echoed up the line of wagons. “Hold up.”

  Charlie’s arms were tight around Olivia, his chest heaving with sudden alarm, as half a dozen men from nearby wagons rushed forward to help. A few put their backs into trying to get the wagon upright, while others tended to the oxen, making sure they weren’t hurt. Estelle and Graham rushed forward—as fast as Graham could rush with one false leg—as did Josephine and Luke Chance.

  “Get something to shore up the wagon.” Pete swept in to direct the men who were helping. They’d gone from sedately plodding along to chaos in an instant.

  “What happened?” one of the men holding up the wagon asked.

  “Wheel fell off,” another answered. “I saw it with my own eyes.”

  A third man scooped down to pick up the wheel in question. “Where’s the pin?”

  “The wheel pin is missing?” the second man said. He blew out a sharp whistle. “There’s your problem.”

  “What kind of fool drives a wagon with no pin in the wheel?”

  The question barely made it to Olivia’s ears before she caught a flash of movement over Charlie’s shoulder as he held her. Chet was walking swiftly toward the back of the wagon.

  “Charlie, look,” she whispered urgently.

  Charlie turned to follow her line of sight. His body tensed when he saw Chet. “Graham.” He caught his friend’s attention, then nodded toward Chet, who was eyeing the back of Charlie’s wagon as if he would jump inside.

  Graham flashed into action. He started to the back of the wagon, arms outstretched as if he would help the men looking at the back wheel. Then he turned his body and fell to the side, right in Chet’s path, before he could touch the wagon. Olivia blinked and gasped, but Charlie held her tighter when she jerked to help Graham.

  A second later, she saw why.

  “You okay, Lt. Tremaine?” one of the men at the back wheel asked.

  “Yeah. I lost my footing on the ice. Gideon’s fake leg is good, but not that good. Mr. Devlin, could you help me up, get me back to my camp?”

  Olivia’s mouth snapped shut, and admiration for Graham’s quick thinking blossomed through her chest, warming her. Chet frowned, his teeth bared in a snarl. He took one more, longing look at the back of Charlie’s wagon, snapped a vicious glance Charlie’s way, then transformed in front of Olivia into a helpful man with a smile on his face.

  “Why certainly, Lt. Tremaine. I’d be more than happy to assist a hero like you.”

  Olivia let out a breath of relief when Chet helped Graham to his feet and the two of them walked away. That only lasted as long as it took for her to remember what the one man had said about the pin in the wagon wheel.

  “He tried to hurt you,” she whispered, tense and cold all over.

  “Tried.” Charlie nodded. It was all he said.

  “Folks, we’re going to have to stop here for as long as it takes to repair this wagon,” Pete announced as the flurries picked up to a light snow. He looked up and scowled. “Don’t get too comfortable. We’re not stopping for long. Anyone with tools and a couple spare wheels, we need your help now.”

  It took a few hours to repair Charlie’s wagon. While some of the men muttered about driving a wagon without a pin in the wheel, neither Charlie nor Pete said a thing. From the looks they gave each other, Olivia was certain both men knew what had caused the accident. Why Charlie wasn’t willing to speak up and expose Chet and have him thrown out of the wagon train was beyond her…until the snow intensified and she realized that any man left behind now wouldn’t make it through the night.

  She wasn’t sure she would make it through the night. They traveled on until after dark, when they reached a more open stretch of land. Judging by several circles of stones and blackened patches of ground, the spot was a common one for wagon trains to stop.

  Olivia helped the Hamiltons with supper. She even ate with them. But after the sun went down and families began to huddle together to fight off the snow and cold, she couldn’t bring herself to bed down with them. Her heart knew where it wanted to be, even if her head was uncertain. She swallowed her pride and tip-toed into Charlie’s camp.

  Instead of hunkering down beside his campfire, Charlie had opted to spend the night holed up in his wagon bed.

  “Hello?” Olivia peered through the closed canvas into the dark space.

  Charlie had a single lantern burning. It was enough to see his smile when he glanced up at her. “Hello, Sweet Pea. What brings you here?”

  She hesitated. How humiliating would it be to ask to snuggle close to him for the night? She let out a breath, opting for honestly. “I don’t particularly fancy the idea of bundling up with the Hamiltons to keep warm tonight.”

  Charlie’s smile brightened, and he extended an arm from under the blanket wrapped around his shoulders. “Say no more.”

  Olivia scrambled up into the wagon, refastened the canvas behind her, then crawled to Charlie. He folded her into his arms, swinging her legs around so that her feet were cradled against the warmth of his thigh. She sighed in relief as his warmth encompassed her.

  “Much better,” he said, nestling his face against the side of her neck.

  Whether it was the intimacy of the gesture of the coldness of his nose against her neck, Olivia jumped.

  Charlie laughed, the sound sending excited prickles through Olivia. “Sweet Pea, are you worried I might try something naughty with you?”

  “The thought hadn’t crossed my mind.” Until now. What if he did use this opportunity to take advantage of her? She was still his wife, after all, and she’d once heard that conjugal intimacy was a good way to keep warm on a cold night.

  Charlie continued to shake with mirth. “You’re the one who climbed into my wagon.”

  “Because I’m cold,” she defended herself. “And exhausted from climbing through these mountains, and sore, and worried about the snow and the wagon and…and Chet, and if I have to listen to Mrs. Hamilton tell me I’m not as good as I think
I am, I’ll…” She ran out of steam and sighed, sinking into him with defeat.

  Charlie’s laughter had stopped. “Mrs. Hamilton tells you you’re not as good as you think you are?” A heat rippled off of him that had nothing to do with intimacy.

  “It’s nothing to get angry over.” She spread a hand across his chest to calm him. “I’m used to it. Any time my mother or her friends or anyone got frustrated and needed to take it out on someone, they always snapped at me.”

  “That’s barbarous,” Charlie growled.

  She was tempted to let his quick defense of her go straight to her head and her heart. “As I got older, I saw it for what it was and ignored it.”

  “But when you were younger?”

  She lowered her head and bit her lip, resting her forehead against his shoulder. She didn’t want to think about when she was younger. Those scars had healed, she’d come into her own when she became a teacher and realized she could make a difference in people’s lives. She didn’t want to go back now.

  “I’m worried about this snow,” she said instead. “I don’t know why I didn’t listen to Pete all those times he talked about the importance of getting through the mountains before the first snowfall. Is this the first snowfall, and is it early this year?”

  Charlie took his time answering. His arms tightened around her. He adjusted the blanket to enclose them in as much warmth as they could create. “I would imagine this is early for snowfall,” he said at last. “I haven’t been in this part of the country before.”

  “Have you been to Oregon City before?” Resting against him was so comfortable that her weary body loosened and relaxed, and her eyelids drooped.

  “Not Oregon City, but I did visit Seattle once.”

  “Oh?” She closed her eyes.

  “It’s a lovely little town.”

  “Is that where you planned to go when you made it to the end of the trail?” If she continued to drift the way she was, she would be asleep before they finished the conversation.