by Linda Howard
“The man who sells things from his wagon,” Carmita said.
“A tinker?” Victoria asked.
They both smiled at her. “Si,” Carmita said, relieved. “The tinker.”
“I didn’t know a tinker was here.”
“He arrived just before dark, señora. He and his daughter. They are spending the night.”
Victoria and Emma looked at each other. A tinker, being new to Celia, might attract her like a cat to catnip. “Where is the tinker’s wagon?” Emma asked.
“Next to the bunkhouse, señorita.”
The bunkhouse, where the men slept. Victoria hurried out the door. It was unthinkable that any of them would attack Celia, yet at the same time she thought Garnet capable of anything. Unbidden the thought intruded of asking Roper for help, and she flinched from the idea as if it had stung her.
Emma kept pace beside her and they both slowed as they neared the bunkhouse, with the hulking shadow of the tinker’s wagon beside it. Through the small window they could see the men sitting around a couple of small tables, or lying on their narrow cots. Nothing unusual seemed to be going on. Victoria was even more reassured to see Garnet playing cards at one of the tables. There was no one at all around the tinker’s wagon.
“Let’s separate,” she said, keeping her voice low so the men wouldn’t hear. “I’ll look in the stables and barn.”
“We didn’t look in the courtyard; I’ll go there, and check the blacksmith shed on the way.” Briskly Emma set on her way, and Victoria turned in the other direction.
Now that she was alone, the darkness seemed oppressive. Her heart began to beat faster as she quietly approached the long stables and entered. Most of the stalls’ occupants were dozing, though a couple of horses put their heads over the top rails and whickered at her. She patted their velvet noses as she passed by, reassuring them. It was too dark inside for her to see much more than their large dark shapes, but all of the stalls were occupied and there was nowhere else in the long, low building for Celia to find a nook. No, the barn was far more likely. The barn was also where Rubio was stabled, away from most of the other horses because of his tendency to fight.
She opened the barn door just enough to slip through, and this time her way was lighted by a single oil lamp hanging on a post at the far end, close to Rubio’s stall. The stallion, though, was quiet. Victoria could hear him making small rustling sounds as he shifted his feet.
She also heard another sound, the words indistinguishable but the timbre soft and definitely female.
If Celia were in the stall with Rubio .. .
On no account must she startle the horse. She lifted her skirts to keep them from dragging on the straw and quietly slipped nearer to the small pool of light.
She heard a groan and more rustles. Then a man’s voice, unmistakably deep. The woman again, this time sounding as if she were in pain.
A chill coursed through her entire body. Celia?
She went closer, and the rustling noises were louder. She was still in the black shadows when she realized they weren’t coming from Rubio’s stall, but from the opposite side of the barn, where there was a small, unused box stall. The edges of lamplight were just spilling through the open rails, and she edged still closer, her heart in her throat because she was afraid it was Celia. Yet she didn’t rush forward, and when she was close enough to see into the box, she was glad she hadn’t.
The first glance told her that the woman in the straw wasn’t Celia; she had a mass of dark hair. Nor was it Angelina. She didn’t know the woman. She felt relief, then shock as she realized exactly what she was seeing. Such were her own experiences with sex that she almost screamed, thinking the woman was being raped. Then another firestorm of recognition went through her, and she had to jam her fist against her mouth to keep from making an outcry anyway. She saw two things simultaneously. First, the woman, far from being raped, was clinging to the man and encouraging him with whimpering, pleading words in Spanish. And, second, the man was Jake Roper.
The knowledge was like a blow to the chest. Air left her lungs in a rush, and she could only hang there, unable to move or breathe. The most incredible, unreasonable hurt filled her, and she tried to turn away, to leave quietly. She didn’t want to see this, couldn’t bear it—
But her legs still wouldn’t work. Her muscles were frozen, and she could only stare helplessly, taking in details she didn’t want to see.
The woman was naked except for her skirt, which was twisted around her waist. Victoria could tell that much, even though the shadows cast by the single lamp covered the lower halves of their bodies. Roper’s shirt was off, revealing a powerfully muscled torso that glistened with sweat as he moved over his partner, the muscles tightening and flexing with his movements. The woman was clinging to his broad shoulders, her head thrown back and her eyes closed. Victoria stared at Roper’s face, which she could see better than the woman’s. It was tense and concentrated with fierce sensuality.
The woman gave a low cry and thrashed wildly for a minute, locking Roper within the grip of her arms. He held her firmly and began moving even faster. Moments later a deep groan of pleasure sounded in his throat.
A sheen of tears blurred Victoria’s vision, and she bit her lip to hold back a sob. The small pain in some way released her, and she took a step backward.
Like an animal scenting danger, Roper’s head came up, and he stared right at her.
It was only a second, yet it lasted an eternity. His face was dripping with sweat, the skin still pulled taut in the immediate aftermath of orgasm, his eyes fierce and his hand already on the heavy pistol that lay next to him in the straw. Victoria stood with her fist held to her mouth, her eyes wide and glittering with tears. She knew that he saw her, even in the shadows. She knew she couldn’t stand there another minute, pierced by that strange pain. Her limbs stiff, she forced herself to step more deeply into the shadows, one step at a time, until she could no longer see them. Finally she was able to turn and hurry from the barn, no longer caring about silence, wanting only to get away.
Infuriated, strangely shaken, Roper lifted himself from the woman and hitched his pants back up. She was still lying on the straw, her lush breasts glistening with sweat. Those breasts had excited him just a short time ago, but now all he wanted was to get away from her, and she deserved better than that. Damn it, he couldn’t even remember her name. She’d made it plain, from the moment the tinker’s wagon had pulled in, that she was interested in him. He’d taken her at her word. It was just a little diddling, not meaning anything to either of them except for the physical relief.
But Victoria had seen them. He thought grimly that the sex she’d had with the Major was probably starched and restrained, done in the dark with her nightgown pulled up only as much as was necessary. She had probably never dreamed of such things as nearly naked bodies rolling in the hay, sweating and straining toward completion.
Thinking of what she’d seen made him feel ashamed. He tried to push the unfamiliar emotion away, but it stubbornly refused to go. Damn, he wished it hadn’t happened, wished Victoria hadn’t had that stricken look in her eyes, wished that he could go after her and explain that it didn’t mean anything. He wondered if she would understand that, or if she’d even care. But she’d looked at him as if he’d hurt her in some way she barely understood, and he was powerless to comfort her.
The woman—what was her name? something like Florence—was languorously sitting up, her face still dreamy. Not Florence … Florida? Fiorina, that was it. She stretched, lifting her arms to better frame her heavy breasts with their dark brown nipples, and eyed him with a kittenish sort of sensuality that made him feel hemmed in. He ignored her unspoken invitation for even further dallying and stuffed his shirttail into his pants.
“You’d better get on back to the wagon before your father misses you,” he said in a flat tone.
She pouted, but began cleaning herself. “He is already drunk and asleep.”
“He mig
ht wake up.”
“Even if he did, he wouldn’t care.”
Roper strongly suspected that her “father” wasn’t related to her at all, but it meant nothing to him one way or another. People got by as best they could. When she had dressed, he assisted her to her feet, gave her a kiss, patted her on her round bottom, then sent her on her way. As soon as she was out of sight, a black frown settled on his face.
Damn it to hell!
Victoria ran to the house, panting and near tears. Just before she reached it, Emma came to meet her.
“I found her,” Emma reported, her tone amused. “She wasn’t in a hidey-hole at all, she was in the courtyard counting stars.”
Victoria forcibly regained control of herself and blinked the stupid tears away. Why on earth was she crying? It had been something of a shock, of course, seeing that, but nothing tragic. She wrenched her mind back to Celia, and received another shock when she realized that she’d forgotten her. It wasn’t like her at all to be less than conscientious, and the lapse bothered her almost as much as what she had seen.
She took a couple of deep breaths to calm herself, gratefully aware that Emma would think her state of upset due to Celia. “Sometimes,” she managed to say in a painfully even tone of voice, “I’d like to shake her.”
Emma chuckled, and hooked her arm through Victoria’s. “If you did, you’d spend the next month making it up to her, so there’s no point in it,” she said cheerfully. “Celia is Celia.”
Victoria knew that. Celia never changed, thank God. But when she sought the sanctuary of her room a little later, Victoria stared at her own pale, oval face and wondered why the changes inside hadn’t shown themselves on the outside. She still looked much as she had at the age of sixteen, but now she had known war and hunger, desperation, a loss of dreams, and the ugliness of a man’s sexuality. For a moment, thinking of the horrible touch of the Major’s hands, she felt nauseated again. Then another picture intruded, and the nausea changed to a moan of pain.
Jake Roper. His body rippling with muscles in the dim light and his hard face taut with pleasure. That woman’s hands clinging to his shoulders, her head thrown back in ecstasy. For all the violence and power of their coupling, there had been a gentleness in the way he’d handled the woman.
Victoria buried her head in her hands. God, she was so foolish! Roper was nothing but a hired killer; she had had a few moments conversation with him, had briefly felt his body against hers in an accidental collision, and she was jealous—jealous! But not of him, she fiercely told herself. Never of him! She, a Waverly and a Creighton, was jealous of a tinker’s daughter for the pleasure in her life. That wasn’t much better, but she could bear that thought easier than the other.
She heard the Major moving about in his room, and she froze in dread that the connecting door would open. When the seconds passed and the door remained closed, she slowly relaxed and began to get ready for bed.
But when she was lying between the cool sheets, she couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t get the picture of Roper out of her mind; every time she closed her eyes, she saw his muscled body surging rhythmically. So that was exactly what went on between men and women. That was what the Major had tried to do to her. Knowing the basics hadn’t enabled her to picture the scene in her mind, but now she could.
Her heartbeat was slow and heavy. Her body felt weighted down, and hot. She wondered how she would feel if it were Roper in the next room, Roper who opened the connecting door. She would lie there in bed waiting for him, and her body would feel as it did now, heavy and waiting. Again she saw him with that woman, but the picture changed and she was the woman clinging to him.
She turned onto her side, aghast at what she had been thinking. A lady never even thought such things about her husband; to think them about another man was scandalous. But her body ached, and she pressed her thighs tightly together in an effort to find relief from the shameful feeling. Her eyes burned with tears again. Damn Jake Roper!
Jake Roper damned himself. He lay in his bunk listening to the snores of the sleeping men around him and stared at the ceiling. He had made two serious mistakes, and now he had to deal with them. First, he should never have allowed Victoria Waverly to marry McLain. He could easily have had her kidnapped on the way and held her until he’d finished his business with the Major, but hindsight was as useless as it was clear. Or he could have killed McLain before Victoria arrived, and solved a lot of problems. Instead he had chosen to wait for his moment, to stay true to the plan he and Ben had decided on. Now it was too late to keep Victoria out of it.
His second mistake was in letting her get under his skin.
It wasn’t as if she’d even tried. She wasn’t a flirt; she was as straitlaced as a nun. She’d probably slap his face if he tried to kiss her. He grinned a little as he thought about it, though the grin was wry because he knew he was going to try it very soon. After what she had seen that night, he’d be lucky if she didn’t claw him like a wildcat.
First chance he got, he was going to send a telegram to Ben and tell him to gather the rest of the men and head toward the ranch. But it could be a few weeks before he could get to Santa Fe and another month to six weeks before Ben could get here. Say, two months. Two months left until the culmination of twenty years of planning. The broad valley, once known as Sarratt’s Kingdom and now simply as Kingdom Valley, would be Sarratt property once again, returned to its rightful owners—
—if he could convince Victoria to marry him. Force her, if necessary.
Damn it, he should have prevented the wedding, but he hadn’t realized the implications until it was too late. With McLain dead, the kingdom would belong to his widow, Victoria. The only way to bring it back under Sarratt ownership was to marry her, as a woman’s property became her husband’s. So Jake would have to marry her.
It was amazing that one young woman could, with her mere presence, wreck twenty years of planning. Not that those plans hadn’t changed a lot over the years anyway. As boys, their dreams of revenge had been wholesale destruction of McLain and all his men, of everyone living on the ranch. But as they had grown older, the plan had changed. There were no doubt innocent people living on the ranch, people who had had no part in McLain’s treachery, people who had begun working there only after the slaughter and had no idea what had happened. For all their grim focus on revenge, the Sarratts weren’t murderers. Killing McLain and his men was one thing, more like killing rabid dogs than taking a human life. But years had passed and there had to be new people hired, servants, women, maybe even children. An attack like the one McLain had used wasn’t feasible to them any longer.
Twenty years. They had drifted for twenty years, not aimlessly, though it might have looked that way. Anywhere they could find work, they had taken it and begun saving their money dollar by hard-earned dollar. They had dug in mines, hired out their guns, worked as ordinary cowhands. Jake had trained horses, Ben had gambled, using their own particular skills. They knew they would need money to implement their evolving plan.
So twenty years had passed. He was thirty-three now, not a thirteen-year-old boy wild with grief and rage. The rage still burned, but it was under control. An eye for an eye … he didn’t want McLain’s eyes, he wanted his blood for his father’s blood, his mother’s blood. The bastard was living in the Sarratt house, sleeping in Duncan Sarratt’s bedroom, walking daily across the tiled foyer where he had raped and killed Elena. It ate at Jake, seeing McLain walk into that house every night. Only his iron control kept him from getting out of bed and walking across to the house right now. It would be so easy; he could climb the stairs, go into the bedroom, and lay his gun barrel against McLain’s temple. A little squeeze of the finger, and it would be over. But it would probably be over for him, too, and that wasn’t his plan. He and Ben were going to own the valley again, so it had to be legal. Not only that, he was reluctant to see Victoria in bed with McLain; the very thought made him angry, and sick.
The plan they had settled
on was for Jake to hire on at the ranch, find out how many men were left from the original bunch that had attacked them, and who they were. While he was doing that, Ben would be hiring good men they could trust, men who were standing ready to assume their new jobs. When Jake had arrived and seen the situation, he knew they’d have to replace a good two-thirds of the hired hands. The hired guns would go; Jake had no use for them. He didn’t expect any of them to interfere, as they had no real loyalty to McLain. He also figured about half of the regular cowpunchers would drift away, for their own reasons. Some wouldn’t like working for the Sarratts; some would be afraid too much attention would be turned on the ranch, and they would want to remain unknown. Jake didn’t question a man’s motives; he had some things in his background that couldn’t stand too much light on them, either.
So Ben had men standing ready to take up the jobs that would be left vacant, and Jake had identified the men who had taken part in the raid. Charlie Guest had been one of them, and Jake had enjoyed killing him. He’d deliberately done it in a manner that was sure to make the others wary of him. That left five: McLain, Garnet, Jake Quinzy, Wendell Wallace, and Emmett Pledger. Wendell was going on seventy and was almost blind, so Jake discounted him as a threat. Garnet was a back-shooter. Quinzy wouldn’t turn a hair at much, but neither would he put his life on the line for McLain or Garnet. Quinzy looked out for himself first. Pledger, on the other hand, was mad-dog mean and cold-blooded into the bargain, willing to kill for the pleasure of it.
When McLain had murdered the Sarratts and stolen the ranch, the only form of law had been the United States Army, which had more than had its hands full with the Navaho and the Mexican Army. Law had existed only in the immediate vicinity of the army, and then only army law. General Kearny hadn’t concerned himself with the small, bloody wars being fought all over the vast new territory for control of huge tracts of land. McLain was as smart as he was murderous; first he’d killed the Sarratts, then legally filed on the land.