by Heidi Betts
But there were only so many things she could dust or wash or fold or put away before the room sparkled and it became obvious she was hiding. And realizing she was doing just that—hiding—bothered her even more than Wade's kiss had.
Callie Quinn was not a coward. She would not let one little kiss make her quiver like a frightened rabbit. She would put her shoulders back, march into the other room, and confront Wade Mason head-on.
Well, maybe not confront, but she would certainly go in there, act as though nothing was wrong, and go on with her life.
And if Wade tried to kiss her again, she would simply . . . simply . . . melt into a puddle of spineless human flesh, damn his eyes.
Callie lifted her head in determination. She would just have to make sure he didn't try anything, then. She could do that. She could be in the same room with him and still be on the alert. And if all else failed . . . she would run.
Ignoring the brittle voice in her brain that wanted to know if she would actually be running from the man's advances or from her own growing weakness where Wade was concerned, she pushed through the kitchen door and made her way to the sitting room.
Wade was standing with his back to her, hunched over the long, high table between two west-facing windows, using the bright midday light to illuminate his task. He looked intent, almost desperate, as he scribbled and scratched at the piece of paper in front of him.
"What are you working on?” she couldn't help but ask.
At the sound of her voice, he started. Turning in her direction, he shook his head and ran an agitated hand through his now clean and closely clipped chestnut hair. His equally brown eyes were wild with frustration.
"I keep trying to picture what happened that night. Where everyone was standing, who saw what—something, anything that will help me prove my innocence.” He shook his head again and clawed the paper off the tabletop, crumpling it in fury.
"Somebody besides Lily has to be willing to tell the truth.” His mouth curled in a scathing sneer. “Of course, at the rate the witnesses are dying there won't be anyone left to recount the events at all."
"That isn't true,” she told him, moving toward him with a sense of purpose and prying the wrinkled-up paper from his tightly clenched fingers. “Let me see."
She took a seat on the edge of the nearest armchair and smoothed the paper out on her lap. It was a roughly sketched diagram of what had taken place the night Wade supposedly killed Neville Young. Everything was clearly labeled, the barn, the house, and each person's position.
It looked as though Wade and Neville were facing each other, likely in the confrontation Wade had mentioned. Jensen Graves stood to Neville's left.
"Where's Brady?” she asked, raising her head to glance at Wade, who had come to stand above her. “You said he was there, that he shot his father in the back."
"He came up behind me right after I arrived. Took my guns from me,” he said, sticking his hands in the front pockets of his trousers and hunching his shoulders.
"All right,” Callie instructed. “Hand me the pencil and a fresh sheet of paper."
"Why?"
"Just do it,” she told him, wiggling her open fingers and waiting as she continued to study the drawing in front of her.
Wade passed her the writing materials, and she patted a corner of the sofa nearest her. “Sit down. Let's go over this again."
He hesitated for a moment, then dropped to the blue brocade settee, slouching against the medallion-shaped back. Callie quickly re-sketched the basics of Wade's original diagram on the new square of paper.
Lifting her gaze, she said, “Now tell me what happened."
"I already did,” he told her with a frown that looked suspiciously like the beginnings of a pout.
"Tell me again. I want to know exactly what happened, who you saw, what everyone said, where everyone was standing. Every detail; don't skip anything, no matter how insignificant it might seem."
With a despondent sigh, he slid even farther down the back of the sofa. “Neville had been trying to buy my land from me for months, I told you that."
"Why was he so interested in your property?"
He hesitated and looked away.
She studied his profile, silently waiting for an answer.
Wade turned back to her, meeting and holding her gaze for so long, she almost squirmed.
"He thought there was a gold mine somewhere on my property, and he wanted it."
"Was there?"
"I suppose it doesn't much matter if there was or not,” he answered vaguely. “Neville got it in his head that I had gold on my land, and he wanted to mine it and make a fortune.” Wade took his hands out of his pockets and sat up a bit. “First, he started coming around as a friendly neighbor interested in talking about cattle and ranching. Soon after that he tried to buy my property, saying he wanted to expand his own business. When I turned down his initial offer he upped his bid."
"And then you turned him down again."
"Yep. His next offer was quite a bit higher than the other two, but it came with the underlying threat that I'd sell if I knew what was good for me. If I didn't, he said, bad things would start happening around the Circle M."
"Did they?"
"Oh, yeah. Within a week of sending Neville packing, I started finding fences cut, cattle missing—one of the watering holes was even poisoned. I lost a number of good steers headed for market before I figured out what was going on."
"What did you do?” Callie asked, incensed and horrified by the lengths Neville Young had gone to just for a strip of land that might or might not have harbored a gold mine.
"I rode over to Young's and warned him not to mess with my cattle again. That if he or any of his men were caught on my land, I'd send them home hanging over their saddles. Then I hired a dozen new hands to keep watch and ride guard along the fences. A couple of them were shot at, their horses spooked, but no one was hurt, and we never caught Young or his men on my property."
"And the destructive incidents stopped? No more cattle showed up missing or poisoned?"
Wade shook his head, one corner of his mouth lifting wryly. “There was no need. Somehow, Neville—or his whelp of a son, or one of his men—got into my house and stole the deed to my land."
Callie gasped.
"I didn't even know it until I received a letter from some St. Louis attorney Neville had hired to inform me that I was occupying privately owned property and had exactly forty-eight hours to pack up and get off or they'd send the law out to remove me."
"What did you do?"
"I went looking for my deed. I knew damn well I owned that land, fair and legal, and I wasn't giving it up without a fight. Not even to high-and-mighty Neville Young."
"But it was gone."
He nodded solemnly. “It was gone. I headed for the registrar's office to see if I could get a copy, since they keep all those sorts of records there. But the only thing they had on file concerning the Circle M was a deed in Young's name."
Wade swore, low and lethal. “The ink wasn't even dry on the cursed thing, and everyone acted like it had been there for a decade or more. I think Graves had something to do with switching the forged document for the original in my name."
"So it looked like Neville owned the land, and you were trespassing."
"That's right. Which is why I went over to Neville's house that night. I didn't think his underhanded ways would stand up in court, but I wanted my deed back.” Wade gave a dry, humorless chuckle. “I wanted to hit him, give him a few belts to pay him back for what he'd done to me. But I had no intention of killing him. I'd have been happy to just get my papers back, and his forgery out of the county register."
"What happened once you got there? Did you go in the house at all?"
Shaking his head, he said, “Neville met me before I even got to the door. Brady and some hand
I'd never seen before came up behind me, stuck a pistol barrel against my spine, and took the Colts out of my gun belt."<
br />
Callie began to make notes.
"I didn't even get worked up over it because I spotted the sheriff standing beside Neville and figured he could help me get the whole mess straightened out. I started to tell him about the trouble I'd had at the ranch, my missing deed, and the one with Young's name on it replacing the original at the registrar's office."
Wade's tone lowered and turned flat. “I shouldn't have wasted my breath. Graves just wiped those pork sausage fingers under a couple of his flabby chins and told me that if Neville Young's name was on record at the county seat, then that was proof enough for him of who owned the land. Said if I wasn't off the Circle M in two days, he'd be over with a couple of deputies to drag me off, just like the lawyer's letter warned."
Sometime during the telling of the story, Callie had shifted farther off the edge of the chair. The hand holding the worn-down pencil stub moved to cover one of Wade's knees comfortingly.
He leaned forward now, too, agitated. His breath danced across Callie's cheeks, and his fingers gripped the wrist of her free hand.
"What happened next?” she prompted, indifferent to the closeness of their faces, the nearness of their bodies.
His eyes fluttered closed, as though to better recall the details of that night.
"I was furious. I wished Neville and Graves both to the devil. Instinctively I reached for one of my guns. . .” His fingers clenched, mimicking the motion he'd made that night. “But Brady had disarmed me. I was weaponless."
"And then. . ."
"And then Neville said something about being tired of talking to me. That all of this could have been avoided if I'd just accepted his offer to buy the land in the first place. He owned it all now, anyway, and had gotten what he wanted, the same as he always did."
Wade grimaced. “I remember the look on his face when he said that, like there had never been any doubt he'd control my land and the gold mine he thought was located there—it was only a matter of time and how far he'd have to go to get it."
Wade's eyes opened and he stared straight at Callie. “Neville turned to go back inside then, but Graves was still facing me. I heard a shot, so close it sounded like an explosion, and I thought I'd been hit. But Neville fell instead. There was a hole in his back the size of a silver dollar."
"Who shot him?"
"Brady. Brady shot his own father. Either that, or the ranch hand, but the hand looked as shocked as Graves and I were.
"He stepped around me, gun still smoking in his hand, the bastard, and started yelling about how I'd killed his father. Before I could do more than blink, he cracked me on the skull with the butt of that still-hot revolver and started screaming for the sheriff to arrest me."
"But Graves had to have seen that Brady did it. He had to have known you were unarmed. Didn't he say anything, do anything?"
Wade shook his head miserably. “The only thing he did was check to make sure Neville was really dead, then stand there watching while Brady kicked the shit out of me. Oh, and he dragged me off to jail. Bleeding, slipping in and out of consciousness, with a couple of broken ribs, he hauled me into town and threw me in a cell to await trial. Nothing I said had any impact on him. Not even knowing the truth of what happened that night mattered to the son of a bitch."
"You think Brady bribed him, made it worth his while to keep quiet."
"I think Graves was a slimy jackal who didn't go out of his way very often to uphold the law. But, yes, I think Brady ended up bribing him somehow to keep him from telling the judge what he knew. Maybe they had the judge in their pocket, too, I don't know. I suppose it doesn't much matter at this point."
"But Lily was there, too. Upstairs, you said. Why didn't she come forward to tell what she'd witnessed?"
"Lily looked out for herself, and only for herself,” he said as Callie made another notation on the paper in her lap. “I guess you'd have to, being in the type of business she was. I don't think she wanted to get involved at first, maybe for fear of what Brady Young would do to her—he had no qualms about shooting his own father in the back; God only knows what he'd have done to a two-bit whore who tried to cross him."
Callie flinched at his crass description of the mother of his child but said nothing.
"Then, when Lily thought of something she wanted and could use the information to get it, she decided to come forward."
"What did she want?” Callie asked.
A muscle in Wade's jaw ticked slightly and he looked away, fixing his gaze on something across the room.
"What?” she asked again. After all, it couldn't have been that terrible.
"She wanted me to marry her."
Callie blinked. Of all the things he might have said, she hadn't expected it to be anything even close to that.
"Marry you?” she repeated, embarrassed by the rasp of her voice around the words.
Wade seemed reluctant to say more, studiously avoiding her gaze. “That's how Matthew . . . came about."
"Matthew? But didn't—” She'd been about to mention that babies usually came after the wedding vows, but in this case, she knew that to be untrue. And with a woman like Lily, things had never been very likely to be played out in proper order.
"She came to visit me in prison,” Wade said by way of explanation. “We . . . spent a little time together before she told me why she was actually there."
"And why . . . um,” she cleared her throat, “was that, exactly?"
"She wanted to stop working, I guess, leave the Painted Lady. And she thought the best way to do that would be to marry me and set up a home of her own."
"And you didn't want to marry a prostitute, is that it?” Callie snapped. She wasn't sure why that idea made her so angry, especially when the thought of Wade wanting to marry Lily had bothered her so much to begin with, for reasons she couldn't have explained even to herself.
"It's not that,” he answered automatically, and then tempered his response with a bit more honesty. “I don't know if that was a part of my refusal or not; I'd never considered marriage at all before. Lily announcing that she'd seen Neville's murder that night and would tell the authorities if I agreed to marry her came so out of the blue, I hardly had time to take it all in. And if I'd known she would get so mad and run off the way she did, without telling anyone the truth of what she'd seen, I probably would have gone along with her scheme just to get out of that hellhole at Huntsville. But I didn't want to hurt her. I didn't want her to end up miserable because she'd married me—and forced me to marry her—for all the wrong reasons."
Damn him. That sounded so bloody noble, when Callie had been fully prepared to rake him over the coals for his shabby treatment of Lily.
Instead, he'd actually had her best interests at heart and refused to marry her even though it could have been the key to his very freedom.
It was a hard fact to wrap her mind around.
Callie glanced down at the paper in her lap, at the small stick figures she'd drawn, with names written beneath each. So far, she'd arranged Wade, Neville, and Sheriff Graves, Lily high behind them in a bedroom of the house, and Brady and the unnamed ranch hand Wade claimed had been there, as well.
"You still have Lily's letter, telling what happened that night, right?” She waited for an affirmative gesture from Wade. Though he'd never shown her the letter, she knew how protective he was of its contents and assumed he was either carrying the missive on his person or had hidden it somewhere in her house for safekeeping. “But it won't do you much good unless you have someone else who can testify that what she wrote is the truth."
Again, he nodded.
"Then we have to find the only other person who was there that night. The only other person besides Brady and yourself who isn't already dead."
Wade looked at her askance.
She held up the paper for him to see. Only one stick figure had a question mark beside it instead of a name.
"The hired hand,” he uttered almost beneath his breath.
"The hired hand.
All we have to do is find him. Convince him to go to Sheriff Walker, and make it worthwhile for him to do so. If we can do that, we may just be able to clear your name."
Chapter Nine
Wade stared at the picture in his hand, his fingers so tight, one corner of the paper crinkled. The noise echoed through the room, breaking the almost deathly quiet that Callie's shocking pronouncement had produced.
He looked from the diagram to her, to the diagram, then back to her. Could she be right? Could the unnamed man Wade had seen only that once be the solution to his problems?
It seemed too easy to be true.
And then Wade realized it was too easy to be true. How in God's name were they supposed to find this stranger who had shown up only long enough to witness Neville Young's murder and Wade's beating and then—for all Wade knew—disappear again?
With a muffled curse, he shot to his feet and balled the brittle paper in his angry fist. “It's useless. No way in hell are we going to be able to track that fellow down. He could be all the way to Stockton or Philadelphia by now."
"But what if he's not? What if he's still in Purgatory?"
Wade spun around, only to find Callie's gaze following his quick, caged movements.
"What are the chances of that?” he demanded with a derisive snort.
"What are the chances of you breaking out of prison and keeping the law from finding you for this long?” Callie returned, a hint of annoyance coloring her words. “This may be your only chance to prove your innocence, Wade. It may be a long shot, I admit. But wouldn't you rather take the chance and consider the possibility of finding someone who can testify on your behalf than sit around here waiting for the posse to track you down?"
Wade ground his teeth together until his jaw ached. How could she sit there so primly and tell him to bet everything on such a lousy hand? She didn't know what it was like to be accused, tried, convicted, and thrown in a squalid pit like Huntsville for a crime she hadn't committed. She didn't know what it was like to be on the run, to look over her shoulder, to live in fear every minute of every day. To not even be able to take her son home and be a proper parent because she was still wanted by the law.