A Lady of the West

by Linda Howard

  Garnet smiled, a slow movement of his mouth that didn’t ease the cold ruthlessness of his eyes. “Don’t matter how fast a man is if you’re behind him.”

  Bullfrog lifted the glass again. “That’s true,” he said.

  The sunlight streaked across the tiles in the foyer, nothing like the night when the shadowed nightmare had taken place. But when the heavy front door opened and the shadow of someone’s head and torso spilled across the tiles, something flashed in Jake’s head. It was exactly as it had been the night he’d looked down and seen his father’s body sprawled on the floor.

  Blood drummed in his temples. He stood frozen just outside the library door, his face twisting as the hot tide of hate consumed him. There, to the left of the stairs, was where his mother had lain with her face bruised and distorted by McLain’s fist, where he had raped her while her husband’s body lay only a few feet away. Her blood and brains had pooled on those tiles.

  God damn McLain’s soul to roast in hell! If he even had a soul.

  He and Ben had watched him die, but they hadn’t won. McLain still lived within these walls, within the home he’d fouled with his presence. His flesh and blood still lived in Victoria’s body. The sight of her now, as she cast the shadow that had awakened Jake’s memories, enraged him all the more.

  She had been feeling well enough lately to get out of the house; the vomiting was gradually easing. Autumn was coming, and coming soon. It was September, and the aspens were golden.

  She closed the door and stood still for a moment to let her eyes adjust to the light in the house. There was no movement to attract her attention, no sound, but suddenly the hair on the back of her neck raised up as a sense of menace chilled her. She jerked her head around and saw Jake.

  His face was a twisted mask of hate, his eyes like green coals.

  In that split second of recognition, she was terrified. He looked as if he wanted to tear her apart with his bare hands. Without thought, obeying some wild instinct, she ran.

  Jake started, pulling his mind from the past as she bolted up the stairs. He started moving toward the steps, his warning call sharp. “Victoria! Watch the steps!”

  By some miracle she didn’t stumble. When the wave of dizziness hit her, she managed to grasp the banister with both hands and hold herself upright. Her vision wavered, then began to fade. She could hear him coming up the stairs at a run, his boots thudding, and she tried to haul herself up another step, but her legs were too heavy and wouldn’t obey. With a dull sense of alarm and astonishment, she felt her body begin to sag and could do nothing to stop it.

  Then steely arms were around her, arms that she remembered sometimes in her dreams that left tears on her face when she awoke. As the darkness became absolute, she wondered why he had caught her.

  Jake swung her limp body up in his arms, sweat breaking out on his face at how close she had come to falling. She was in a dead faint, her head lolling back over his arm. He opened his mouth to yell for Emma or Carmita, but shut it as quickly as the impulse came. Victoria was his wife; he’d take care of her. He’d seen enough unconscious men to know how to handle a simple faint.

  She didn’t feel any heavier now than she had three months before. Just the feel of her in his arms struck him with a sharp, nostalgic pleasure, piercing and bittersweet. It shouldn’t have been so long since he had held her; the chasm between them shouldn’t have been so wide and deep and unbridgeable.

  He started to carry her into their—his—bedroom, but changed his mind and went into hers; she would be less alarmed when she woke up if she wasn’t in his bed. She showed no signs of reviving even when he placed her on the bed, and with growing concern he unfastened her skirt, then the light blue shirtwaist that was buttoned high under her chin.

  He could feel the warmth of her soft skin, and the parting edges of the blouse revealed the pulse beating gently at the base of her throat. His own pulse began to throb.

  “Victoria, wake up,” he murmured, stroking the hair back from her face. She still didn’t stir. He lifted her skirt enough to remove her shoes, then took the pillow from beneath her head and slid it under her feet, slim and delicate in her white cotton stockings. His pulse beat faster.

  She was his; her body was his. He put his hand on her stomach, searching for evidence of the life that had torn their marriage apart. Her belly was smooth and as flat as ever.

  His brows snapped together. How far along did a woman have to be before her pregnancy began showing? The way he figured it, she should be more than four months along, certainly enough to be showing. But then, some women didn’t get as big as others; he’d seen some who looked huge and some who didn’t look very big the day they delivered. Maybe her clothing was disguising her shape.

  He tossed her skirt up, his hand delving beneath the froth of petticoats, finding her cotton-covered thighs and sliding upward to her belly. She was warm and flat.

  Her eyelids fluttered and struggled open. “Jake?” she murmured.

  He leaned over her. “You fainted, but you’re all right,” he said in a low voice.

  “I thought you were going to kill me.” The words were a little slurred as she struggled to push the last remnants of unconsciousness away. She blinked her eyes and focused on his face. She saw no sign now of the intense hatred that had sent her running for her life, and in confusion she wondered if she’d been imagining things.

  “No. Not ever.” Jake’s heart began beating heavily as he watched her. Her lips were soft and trembling slightly. Her wall of hostility was down; she was weak and disoriented. Before she could resurrect her anger he bent and covered her mouth with his, a muffled sound of pleasure coming from deep in his throat.

  He used the pressure of his mouth to open her lips and slipped his tongue into her. A dizzying surge of delight went through him as he felt her arms lift and slide around his neck. He gathered her to him, deepening the kiss.

  She had wanted him for so long, craved him for so long, that her whirling senses fastened on what he was doing. The taste of his mouth kept her from dying of thirst, his hands fed her in other ways. She moaned at the feel of his rough palm on her sensitive breasts, sliding inside both blouse and chemise and cupping the naked globes, then lifting them free of their cloth restraints. He left her mouth, his lips sliding down her throat and chest to close over one extended nipple.

  The feeling was so electrifying that she almost shot off the bed. Her breasts were so tender that she could barely tolerate the pressure of her clothing, and his hot mouth fastening on her nipple was a maddening mixture of pain and pleasure.

  She couldn’t bear it. Tears sprang to her eyes and she pushed against his shoulders. “You’re hurting me,” she choked.

  He lifted his head, his green eyes dark with passion. “Hurting you?” he repeated hoarsely.

  “Yes … my breasts are sore. The baby—”

  He drew back. The evidence of the child growing within her was here, in the larger swell of her breasts, the darkening of the nipples, the increased delicate blue veining running just under the creamy satin skin.

  She scrambled off the bed on the other side and stood with her back to him as she restored chemise, shirtwaist, and skirt to their proper positions. “Thank you for catching me,” she said in a tight voice.

  He remembered what she’d said when she had first regained consciousness; she had thought he was going to kill her, and she had run from him in terror. God, what had they done to each other?

  “I didn’t mean to scare you.” His own voice was gruff. “Be careful from now on going up or down the stairs.”

  “Yes. I will.”

  She was too slender. He watched her for several days, trying to handle his uneasiness. He counted the days just as she had told him to do, and tried to figure how far along she would have to have been before she knew she was pregnant. A month? Two months? He just didn’t know, but he thought surely she would have been showing by now. On the other hand, if he had gotten her pregnant immediately,
she would only be in her third month. And that would explain why she still wasn’t showing.

  The thought of it made him sweat as he remembered the things he’d said and done. Doubt, once admitted, gnawed at him.

  He sought out Carmita and found her alone. Carefully he watched her reaction as he said, “I’m worried about the señora, Carmita. She’s so thin. Shouldn’t she be bigger by now? Is something wrong with the baby?”

  Carmita beamed at him, shaking her head and making clucking noises. “You new fathers, you worry about everything! The señora has lost weight, she has been so sick, but the morning sickness is beginning now to go away.”

  “But her stomach—it’s flat.”

  “It’s just her third month, Señor Jake. It will probably be at least another month before the baby is big enough to begin showing.”

  Her third month. The pit of his stomach was cold. Jake counted the days again, but the numbers hadn’t changed. If she were just three months along, that would mean that he—damn it, it just wasn’t likely! That meant she would have known right away. She had been hiding something from him from the beginning; what else could it have been if not her pregnancy? And that absurd story about McLain not being able to have sex was a plain lie.

  He sweated over it for a while, then decided to put his mind to rest about one part of it, at least. It was likely he wouldn’t know the truth until the baby was born. But he went to Angelina Garcia’s room behind the bunkhouse.

  He realized that he hadn’t seen her in a while, and he wondered if she had left. He would have run her off himself a long time ago, but Victoria hadn’t mentioned it and Jake felt vaguely sorry for the woman, so he hadn’t pursued it. How would she leave? Walk? So far as he knew, she owned nothing except her clothes.

  But when he knocked he heard scrabbling behind the door and eventually it opened to reveal Angelina, her hair hanging uncombed down her back, her eyes puffy with sleep. He ran his eyes down her opulent figure, and almost stumbled backward in shock. Angelina was visibly, undeniably pregnant.

  The pregnancy hadn’t changed her natural bent. “Well, if it isn’t the patron,” she purred. “I knew you’d come to see me sooner or later.”

  He looked quizzically at her. In a mild tone he asked, “Why would you think that?”

  She threw back her head and laughed. “Because of what I can do for you, why else?”

  “Whose baby is it?”

  She shrugged. “How would I know? Soon I will be too big for anyone to be interested, but right now there are several who like it. Men.” She shrugged again, as if to say she would never understand their tastes.

  “McLain used to visit you a lot, didn’t he?”

  A tiny, self-satisfied smile curved her lips. “He couldn’t stay away from me. He came to me the night after his marriage. He thought he was a great lover, but he had nothing, I barely knew he was inside me.”

  “Then he never had any trouble having sex with you?” Jake’s voice was expressionless.

  Angelina laughed in his face. “No man has trouble with me, not even the Major. He couldn’t get it hard with the señora because she was so cold—” Abruptly she remembered that the señora was now Jake’s wife and she halted, her face turning sullen.

  Jake felt as if someone had punched him. He had difficulty sucking in enough air to talk. “How do you know he couldn’t?”

  “He told me,” she muttered. “I didn’t tell anyone else because I knew he would have me thrown off the ranch, if he didn’t kill me.” She refused to say anything else. But she’d told Jake enough.

  His face pale, Jake walked back to the house. Victoria had been telling the truth. It was his baby she carried, not McLain’s. God, the things he’d said! He remembered the cold fire in her eyes, and for the first time understood the real violence behind it.

  She had said that she would take the baby and leave; he’d been so angry at the time that he hadn’t taken the threat seriously. Now that he knew the truth he realized just how furious she had a right to be, and a cold fear grew in him that she really might do it. He would lose both Victoria and his baby.

  His baby! She really had been that innocent about sex. He was the only man who had ever made love to her. And she was so angry even after all these weeks she hadn’t thawed a bit, hadn’t even begun to forgive him. Hell, why should she? Up until now he had still been insisting that the baby wasn’t his!

  He had to apologize, make it up to her somehow—but when he remembered the coldness of her face whenever she looked at him, he felt his stomach muscles tighten. He never would have thought that sweet Victoria could stay that angry for so long, but she had. Well hell, why not? He’d insulted her, slapped her, threatened her, and she was as proud as she was sweet. It wasn’t just aristocratic breeding that kept her spine so straight; it was pure steel.

  There was no point in putting it off. The quicker he apologized and got things straight between them, the better off they all would be. He looked for Victoria all over the house, and finally found her in the courtyard where the walls protected her from any autumn breeze that might chill her. She was taking advantage of the bright sun to stitch a tiny gown. The sight of that delicate garment in her hands made his throat tighten.

  When she looked up at him, her eyes were carefully blank. “Yes?”

  He squatted down in front of her, trying to think of the words he needed. He was painfully aware that these next few minutes might be the most important of his life. Finally it just seemed best to say it right out. “Victoria—I was wrong. I’m sorry. I should have believed you. I know the baby’s mine.”

  “Really?” she replied coolly after a moment of silence when his heart almost didn’t beat. She bit off a thread. “How do you know that now, when you were equally certain a couple of months ago that it wasn’t?”

  Damn, she wasn’t going to give an inch, and he couldn’t blame her. She deserved her revenge. He looked at her delicate white skin, flushed with the sun’s warmth and returning good health. Her breasts strained at her bodice, and he was suddenly consumed by a deep need to see just exactly how much this child of his had changed her body.

  “I know I acted like a bastard—”

  “Yes,” she agreed, then returned to the question she’d asked. “What made you change your mind about the baby?”

  “You haven’t grown any—”

  “The Major died only two days before you took me.”

  He got to his feet, furious that after all this she would throw McLain in his face when she knew damned good and well that bastard hadn’t touched her, and now he knew it, too. Women were the most contrary creatures on earth; after the way she’d cried and begged him to believe her, now she was trying to convince him that the baby wasn’t his after all! His hands knotted into fists. “Damn it, I know McLain didn’t sleep with you!” he said. “Angelina told me that he couldn’t—”

  Victoria’s head snapped up, and too late he saw the error that anger had led him to make. Her voice was frosty when she spoke. “Am I supposed to be happy that you’ll take the word of a whore before you’ll take mine? That you’ve been discussing me with that whore? You can take your apology and go to hell with it, Jake Sarratt!”

  She surged to her feet, stuffing her sewing into the basket. Red spots of color decorated her cheeks.

  “Calm down,” he said, moving to catch her elbow in case she got dizzy. “You might faint if you move too fast.”

  “Whether or not I faint is my business, Mr. Sarratt. I’m none of your concern and my baby is none of your concern.”

  His eyes narrowed. Victoria had always pushed him further than anyone else dared, like a child who played with a tiger and never quite realized the danger it was in until it was too late. He watched her sail into the house, her haughty nose high, and the bright sun dimmed as he realized the truth in a paralyzing instant.

  He loved her. He hadn’t at first, but there had always been that strong sexual attraction drawing him to her. If he hadn’t loved her
, thinking she was pregnant with McLain’s child wouldn’t have hit him so hard. Had it been any other woman, he would have shrugged, sent her to Santa Fe, and he would have gone on with his life. Had it been any other woman, he wouldn’t have been married to her to begin with.

  But Victoria … he couldn’t bear the thought of living without her. Now that he knew how much she meant to him, he panicked at the thought of losing her. He couldn’t let it happen. He’d stop her from leaving even if he had to keep her prisoner in the house until he could make it up to her and she forgave him. He had already wasted three months with his stupidity. Three damn months!

  But not one more day.

  He strode quickly into the house after her, boot heels ringing on the tiles. His face was set in hard lines.

  She had paused in the dining room to speak to Emma. Carmita was doing something at the table; he didn’t pay any attention to what. He crossed the room, intent on Victoria. She looked up and saw him; a startled expression flitted across her face, followed swiftly by wariness, then naked fear. She dropped her sewing bag and took a step back. Emma’s mouth opened with surprise, then she too got a good look at Jake’s face and instinctively got out of his way.

  He reached Victoria and bent, catching her behind the knees and back and swinging her off her feet. She gave a little cry of panic and struck at him, but he jerked his head to the side. Before she could try again, he shifted her in his arms and smothered her mouth with his. The kiss was deep and rough and hungry; he felt as if he could never get enough of her mouth, of the feel of her in his arms.

  She pulled her head away, twisting it to the side so he couldn’t kiss her again. She pushed at his chest. “Put me down!” She sounded frantic.

  “I’ll put you down,” he said with hushed violence. “In my bed, where you belong and where you’ll damn well stay.” Leaving a gaping Emma and Carmita behind, he carried her up the stairs, taking them two at a time. She made no allowances for the possibility that he might drop her; she kicked and fought and arched her back, trying to squirm from his grip, but his strength was too overpowering. He simply crushed her tighter against his chest. He reached his bedroom and carried her inside, kicking the door shut behind him with a resounding thud.