A Fire in the Blood (26 page)

      
"Whatever is the matter?" the older woman asked in her most motherly voice.

      
"I—I don't know if I can go through with this—telling Mr. Jacobson, I mean. It's so awful." Her pop eyes bulged from their sockets as she affixed Germaine with an intent stare.

      
"Perhaps I could help. Could you tell me first, woman to woman?"

      
Taking a deep breath for courage, Dellia blurted out her story, ending with the scene she had just left at the hidden pool. "They've been—well, she's given herself to that breed."

      
Germaine sat very still, taking in the enormity of Dellia's tale. If they were still together at their trysting place, Marcus could catch them! She took Dellia's thin, bony hand and patted it solemnly.

      
Marcus was just totaling the last of Moss's tallies when Germaine knocked and asked permission to enter. What now? He muttered for her to come in, still holding the pen in his hand. Her expression was grave and unctuous as she stood to one side of the big walnut door frame and ushered in a very pale Cridellia Evers.

      
"Monsieur Jacobson, the young lady here has something of great importance to tell you."

Chapter Fifteen

      
Lissa lay with her head resting in the curve of Jess's arm, gazing up at shifting patterns of shiny green leaves against the brilliant azure sky. She was damp from bathing in the pool, satiated from making love, and frightened to death of what she must tell Jess. When she first arrived at their place, she had held her peace, needing desperately to have him love her, even if it was for the last time. Especially if it was for the last time.

      
Jess, too, was preoccupied, driven by his own demons, for he knew their idyll had to come to an end. He felt her snuggling against him, soft and warm, fitting so perfectly. Her arm lay draped possessively across his chest, pale against his dark skin. He took her hand in his and held it as he rolled up into a sitting position and looked into her eyes.

      
"You are so beautiful, Lissa," he began slowly, letting his fingertips trace the delicate contours of her face. She turned her head into his touch and kissed the palm of his hand silently, as if willing him not to speak. Steeling himself, he continued, "I know you overheard me talking with your pa this morning. My job here is over."

      
"Don't, Jess," she protested. "You don't have to keep on risking your life this way. You could've been killed."

      
"That's just the point, I could have," he replied flatly. "But I wasn't. And now I have to go."

      
She had known he would not stay from the first moment she had laid eyes on him. He was a drifter, a loner, a man without allegiances, who could not be tied down. "So it's good-bye, Lissa," she said, "and you ride away without looking back."

      
Oh, I'll look back, I'll look back plenty
. Aloud he said, "You knew it had to end when it began."

      
"You don't have to ride off to another gunfight. You could quit." Her voice was sharp with desperation.

      
His face grew shuttered as he nerved himself to destroy her impossible dreams. "Quit and settle down to raising cattle? You still think your pa'd turn J Bar over to me? Wake up, Lissa. He'd see me in hell first."

      
"I'll go with you—we don't have to stay in Wyoming."

      
"Where could we go where it wouldn't matter that you're white and I'm not?"

      
"That doesn't matter to me—I love you, Jesse Robbins! I'll never love another man," she cried out passionately.

      
"It's no good, Lissa. You've been raised on silk skirts and spun sugar. Your love would turn to hate," he replied in a flat, final tone. He rolled to his feet and extended his hand to her, pulling her up, then walked away from her.

      
"If you leave me, what am I to do? Marry Yancy Brewster?" She shuddered in revulsion, waiting for him to turn and face her.

      
Without doing so, he replied, "No. Marry Lemuel Mathis. He seems a decent enough sort."

      
If he had slapped her, she could not have been more staggered. "After what we've shared, you want me to go to another man. To ... to let him touch me . . ." Words failed her as she stood hugging herself in desolation, fighting the tears.

      
"What I want doesn't figure in this, Lissa," he said wearily as he reached for his boots and pulled them on, still refusing to look at her.

      
"The least you could do is look at me, the woman you're throwing away." She forced back the tears and replaced them with fierce, bright anger.

      
He turned to her then, calling up a look of contempt. Damn her, she was not making this any easier for either of them! "It was your decision to give me your virginity, Lissa. I sure as hell wasn't the one doing the chasing."

      
Lissa had been on the verge of blurting out that he had given her a child, but she bit her lip at his cruel words. She would keep silent forever rather than abase herself for this arrogant savage again.

      
Jess watched the color drain from her face. Her lips compressed into a tight, pinched line. She stood before him, proudly silent with her back straight and her golden eyes glazed with tears. He would curse himself a thousand times for the abominable words he had spoken, yet knew he would say them again if he had to—to end it for her. Better that she should hate him and get on with her life.

      
Lissa turned and seized her dress, wanting suddenly to be decently covered in front of him, but before she could pull it over her head, Cormac barked, and the sharp metallic scrape of a rifle being levered echoed across the ravine.

      
Marcus Jacobson, mounted on a big roan, stood silhouetted at the edge of the escarpment. He raised the weapon as he looked in disbelieving horror at his daughter, caught alone with the breed gunman. She had nothing on but her sheer undergarments, and he was bare-chested. Both were damp, no doubt from bathing in the pool. What else they had done he refused even to think about as he drew a bead dead center on Robbins's chest.

      
Cormac, who had come bounding up to welcome Marcus, stood between him and Lissa, looking from one to the other in confusion.

      
Lissa dashed in front of Jess, throwing her arms about him. "Papa, no!"

      
"Get away from him, Melissa, or I swear to God I’ll kill you both," he yelled as he rode down the dusty trail to the floor of the ravine.

      
Jess pulled her arms from his neck and tried to set her aside. "He's got the right, Lissa. Move away before you get hurt," he said gently.

      
"No! I won't let him kill you," she sobbed, clinging to him.

      
"Get dressed and get out of here," Marcus snapped with cold fury in his voice.

      
"Do as he says," Jess reiterated, this time shoving her forcefully away. Cormac, who had remained a silent onlooker, let out a low growl at Jess, then subsided. Jess stood before Jacobson's leveled rifle, understanding the killing rage banked behind those ice-blue eyes. He met the old man's glare calmly, knowing he was going to die. Perhaps it had been inevitable ever since he rode into Cheyenne and first laid eyes on Melissa Jacobson. "Get it done, Jacobson," he said quietly.

      
"You can't kill him, Papa! I'm carrying his child—your grandchild. You have to let us marry," Lissa said in a breathless rush as she walked toward the father who had adored and cosseted her all her life. Now the hard coldness of his face seemed carved from granite. As her words sank in, she could see him struggle with his rage. He almost fired—at Jess or at her?

      
Marcus lowered the gun like a beaten man. His tall, elegant body seemed to crumple in on itself. He looked past her as if she did not even exist. "No white man will take your leavings, Robbins. She's got an Injun brat in her belly. You'd better give it a name. I sure as hell don't want it called Jacobson."

      
Jess stood rooted to the ground, shock radiating through his body as forcefully as if the old man had pulled the trigger. He turned his eyes to Lissa. "You never told me," he accused.

      
Her chin went up, and he could see her swallow before she spoke. "I was going to before you said what you did. Then . . ." Her words faded away.

      
He let his breath escape in a hiss, then turned to Jacobson. "I'll take her to Cheyenne tonight and marry her."

      
Jacobson nodded curtly, then turned away from his only child without so much as a glance, giving a curt command for Cormac to follow as he rode away.

      
Still confused, the dog looked from Lissa and Jess to Marcus. When neither of them moved to intercede, he trotted obediently after the old man.

      
Jess spoke to Lissa, his expression unreadable. "Can you ride to Cheyenne if we take it slow?"

      
"I'm pregnant, Jess, not crippled," she replied bitterly.

      
"Get dressed then." He turned away and shrugged on his shirt, then reached for his gun, strapping it on methodically while she quickly slipped on her outer garments.

      
"You would have just stood there and let him shoot you." There was almost accusation in her voice.

      
"Like I said, he had the right. I'm not proud of what I've done, but at least I'm willing to pay the price." His voice was as emotionless as his face.

      
"Even if it means marrying me?" Her hands trembled as she gripped a boot and pulled it on. The task complete, she turned and looked at him. He was gathering the horses and did not answer her. "Would you have preferred to have my father kill you?"

      
"What I'd prefer has never much figured in my life, Lissa," he said wearily, handing her the reins to Little Bit. His hands circled her waist, and he hoisted her effortlessly into the saddle, then mounted Blaze.

      
They rode in silence for several hours. The late summer air was redolent with the tang of pine, and the bawls of calves echoed in the distance. Thick, powdery dust rose from the horses' hooves, churned up like a flour cloud when Vinegar mixed biscuits. Lissa fought back her tears and focused on the future. Once they were married, things would work out all right.

      
Married. She had dreamed of the day ever since she was a girl back in St. Louis, envisioning then a proper courtship followed by an expensive engagement ring and an elaborate wedding at St. Stephens Lutheran Church. She looked down at the dusty riding skirt and boots she wore. Some bridal outfit! But when she surreptitiously turned her eyes on Jess's chiseled profile, she knew that the fancy accoutrements were unimportant. All that mattered was that she would wed the man she loved—and that he would love her in return.

      
I'll make you love me, Jesse Robbins, see if I won't!

By the time they arrived in Cheyenne, the last pink and gold rays of light were vanishing behind the Medicine Bows.

      
"We'll have to get hotel rooms for tonight and find a preacher in the morning," Jess said, as raucous noise from an outlying saloon greeted their arrival.

      
Rooms. Plural. She smiled at his concern for her reputation. "I know where Judge Sprague lives. He's an old family friend. He'll marry us right now," she said quietly.

      
"Where does he live?" Jess listened to her directions, then turned Blaze down a tree-lined side street. For the past hours he had tortured himself with the insane idea of taking her with him back to Texas. She would be his wife. Only he would ever have the right to touch her, not that vicious Diamond E foreman or that ham-handed Association president. All summer long, thoughts of them putting their hands on Lissa had tortured him. But old Marcus had been right. No white man in Wyoming would take her after the shame of bearing a child with mixed blood.

      
However much he wanted to believe their marriage could survive; he understood it could not. Picturing her in his small, crude one-story ranch house, he knew she would quickly grow to hate it, hate him. Life in Texas was hard on women, even those born to it. For Lissa, raised with every luxury, it would be unendurable. She would end up wrinkled and careworn, old before her time, her bright gold eyes flat with defeat and her fiery hair faded to gray. He had seen so many of those women, dressed in ragged homespun with several small children tugging on their skirts and a baby on their hip. Women with thin, pinched faces, beyond despair, hopeless, dreamless.

      
Better that Lissa go back East where she had grown up and take their child with her. There the stigma of his blood would not be as bad. Perhaps if the babe resembled her, no one would even suspect. In time, she could have their marriage set aside and remarry. Perhaps he would oblige her sooner by stopping a bullet and leaving her a widow. Either way, he would never see her again—or see the child they had made.

      
The pain clawed at him as they reined in and dismounted in front of an elegant brick house. When he reached up to help her down, he fought the urge to pull her into his embrace. Instead, he woodenly set her away from him and they walked silently up the steep stairs of the porch. He lifted the heavy brass knocker and let it fall. Its sepulchral sound echoed down the deserted street.

      
"Good evening," a servant said in equally grave tones as he held the door partially ajar. When his pale eyes lit on Lissa, his demeanor changed immediately. "Miss Jacobson. What brings you to Cheyenne?" he asked with a smile wreathing his wrinkled face. Quickly he opened the heavy oak door to admit her and Jess, eyeing the armed and menacing-looking stranger warily.