A Lady of the West (10 page)

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.

It was supposed to have been just as simple for the Sarratts. Kill McLain and take over the land. He'd had no heirs; the land would have reverted to the government and been available for filing. This time it would be the Sarratts doing the filing.

It would even be legal. There was no law against killing a man in a fair fight. Jake allowed himself his
own cold smile when he thought of it. With his own men in place to protect him from a bullet in the back, he'd face them one by one in a gunfight. Until the end of the war there had been no such thing as a quick draw, but with thousands of ex-soldiers pouring westward it was a skill that had quickly developed within the past year. Hell, McLain's holster still had a flap on it. Jake had cut the flap off of his and practiced for hours to develop both speed and accuracy. McLain wouldn't stand a chance. The only one who came close to him in speed was Quinzy, but he tended to hurry his shot and often missed the first time. Pledger was more accurate, but slow. Garnet was respectable in both speed and accuracy, but Jake was faster and he knew it. He should be able to take them all without trouble. If not, Ben would finish the job.

Only now the ranch would belong to Victoria.

He wondered what he'd have done if McLain's chosen wife had been ugly or ill-tempered or a whiny idiot. He couldn't kill an innocent woman, but he didn't think he could force himself to marry a woman like that, either. Victoria, on the other hand, was just right to be the mistress of Sarratt's Kingdom. He hated to admit it, but McLain had chosen well. She was a lady, she had courage, and she didn't simper.

Marriage wasn't such a bad idea. He'd never considered it before, but once he and Ben had the kingdom back, it would be time to settle down anyway. Jake figured Victoria would do for him, circumstances being what they were.

Victoria sat upright with a jerk, clutching the sheet to her chin while her body went cold. The Major stood in the open door, outlined by the light coming from his room. Dear God, she couldn't bear it again….

“I been thinking,” he announced, his words slurred, and with horror she realized he was drunk. She could smell the stench of alcohol from across the room.

“‘Bout them horses you and the other gals want. Ain't no horses on the ranch fittin' for ladies, they're all work horses ‘cept for Rubio. We'll go into Santa Fe to buy some fancy ridin' horses, and maybe find some of them fancy saddles ladies use. That's what we'll do, we'll go to Santa Fe, and let all those bastards get an eyeful of my womenfolk.”

He laughed and lurched farther into the room.

“They'll be so jealous they can't stand it,” he predicted, and seemed to take great pleasure from the thought. “Yessir, when they find out you three ladies are up here, I'll have men from all over the territory sniffin' around. Not no trash, mind you, but men who mean something, and they'll all be beggin' to court them other two gals, especially that fancy little sister of yourn—
yours,”
he corrected himself, and laughed again. “We'll leave in the morning. I can't wait to see their tongues hangin' out like hound dogs in a pack.”

He took another step toward her, and suddenly she knew that she'd do anything, even run screaming from the house, to prevent him touching her again.

“If we're leaving in the morning, we'll have to get up early,” she said, fear making her voice sharp. “We need all the sleep we can get. I'll see you tomorrow, Major, bright and early.”

He stopped, weaving back and forth on his feet. She waited, holding her breath. Then he said, “We need sleep. Good thinkin', sugar. You ladies need to rest a lot, you ain't used to life on a ranch, or on a trail, either.”

“Good night,” she said, and lay back down, tucking the sheet around her. Then she bit her lip and called, “Major?” as he turned to go. “I—thank you for the horses. It's very generous of you.”

“Nothin's too good for my wife,” he said with heavy self-satisfaction.

It wasn't until he'd left the room and closed the door behind him that she relaxed. She didn't know if
he had intended to try again to bed her, but just having him that close had been almost more than she could bear. If he had actually tried to do to her what she had seen Roper doing to that woman—

The remembered image flashed in her mind again, tormenting her. Damn him! Why should she care what he did? “I
don't”
she whispered into the darkness, and knew that she lied. God help her, she did care. She was horrified by the admittance. She was married; Jake Roper and every other man, except her husband, was forbidden to her. There were only two classes of women, good women and bad women. For a woman to consort with any man except her husband, in any way except socially, was for her to cross the line between good and bad. For her even to think of Jake Roper in such a manner was sinful.