A Lady of the West (37 page)

Victoria heard both the echo of what she'd said, and the silence of what he didn't say.

S
he counted again, then a third time, ticking the days off on her fingers to make certain. She had waited each day for the beginning of her monthly time, dreading it because Jake would have to know; husband or not, she didn't know how to broach such a subject with him. But the day when it should have begun had passed without sign, and a sort of incredulous certainty had begun to grow in her. She was never late, not even by a day. Now, a week later, she had no doubt as to the cause of her body's failure to remain on schedule: she was pregnant.

She wasn't surprised, really, though she hadn't thought it would happen so soon. They had been married barely three weeks. But he'd made love to her every night, at least twice a night, and sometimes during the day, too. One of those times had borne fruit.

A baby. Victoria smoothed her hand down over her flat abdomen, then looked at her own reflection in the mirror. Outwardly, nothing was different. Inwardly, everything was changing. She was both frightened and elated. She carried Jake's child.

He didn't love her, but his child would.

The young woman in the mirror, sitting half-dressed in her petticoats and chemise with her long hair streaming over her shoulders and down her back, had an eerily serene expression on her pale face. Her eyes were calm, although darkened by her introspective mood. Victoria didn't feel calm at all; she felt shaky. She wanted both to cry and laugh. She wanted Jake's arms around her, now, in this moment when she first admitted and faced the fact that his baby was forming inside her. She wanted his strength and his passion. She wanted to lie with him on the white sheets and take him inside her in the act that had created this new life.

Her breasts throbbed, and she put her hands over them. Her eyes closed, and her lips parted. For the first time she didn't regret blurting out that she loved him.

He'd said he would be out all day. She would have to wait through the long hours until he returned home before she could tell him. Should she tell him right away, or wait until they were in bed together?

She would wait and see what his mood was, she decided, as wives had for thousands of years. If he was tired and irritable, she'd wait until after he'd eaten dinner and rested.

As it happened, Jake and Ben got back to the house earlier than expected that afternoon. The sun was a hot red ball low on the horizon and Victoria was helping in the kitchen when she heard the ringing of their boots on the tile floor. She stopped what she was doing, her heart going wild with excitement. She felt a little dizzy and smiled to herself; was it because of the child or the father?

“Victoria,” Jake called.

“I'm in the kitchen.” She wiped her hands and hurried out to meet him.

Both he and Ben were extremely dusty, their faces caked with mud where their sweat had run. She
looked down in dismay at the clumps of dirt they had tracked onto the clean tile. They followed the direction of her gaze, then gave each other amused glances. They weren't accustomed to having to watch where they walked, but in the past three weeks they had been forced to adjust to the realities of living with three genteel women. Even Celia was growing up and becoming amazingly sedate, for Celia.

“We'll bathe outside,” Jake said, trying not to smile. “Get us some clean clothes so we won't have to track mud upstairs.”

“Certainly,” Victoria agreed, giving their boots another appalled look before she went upstairs.

“I thought we were going to have a hot bath,” Ben said.

“I haven't lived this long by being stupid,” Jake replied, and Ben laughed at them both. They'd killed at an early age and lived the past twenty years by the law of the gun, but here they were, not daring to take another step because of the mud on their boots.

Victoria returned with clothing for both of them, as well as fresh towels and a thick bar of soap. “Supper should be ready by the time you're both clean,” she said as she gave them their bundles.

There was already a line of men waiting to use the shower contraption. Cursing and mumbling under their breaths, they resaddled their horses and rode to the river, which was faster than waiting their turn. They stripped and waded into the water, catching their breaths at the chill.

Ben brought it up again. “We could have been having a hot bath.”

“We could have been having a war, too.” Jake whistled as he soaped himself. “Why didn't
you
tell her to have some water heated up?”

“She's
your
wife. It wasn't my place.”

Jake grinned. As much as he would have preferred a hot bath, too, he didn't like upsetting Victoria. Like Ben had said, she was his wife. It gave him a pleasant
feeling of possessiveness and of belonging. In the days since she'd told him she loved him he'd been treating her with a gentleness he'd never before imagined himself capable of. She hadn't said it again and the sadness was still in her eyes, but knowing that she loved him softened the hard inner core that had formed the day he'd seen his mother raped and killed. He was even more patient with her maddening reserve and withdrawals, knowing that she loved him.

Ben dunked his dark head, then came up blowing. He rubbed the water out of his face. “Ladies sure are a lot of trouble compared to whores,” he muttered.

“But they make life more comfortable.”

“Comfortable?
Comfortable?
We're freezing our asses off in the river instead of taking a bath in a warm tub the way we'd planned because you didn't want to upset your wife by tracking mud upstairs, and you call it comfortable? You've lost your mind.”

“We have clean clothes, good food, and fresh sheets on our
real
beds every night; they smell sweet instead of like cheap perfume and stale whiskey, and they wait on us hand and foot. When was the last time you had to fill your own plate at dinner?”

“We have to watch what we say,” Ben pointed out.

“As soon as we lose a button, it's sewn back on.” Jake's green eyes glinted with wicked amusement. “Your problem is Emma.”

“Ah, goddamn,” Ben said in disgust. “That's another thing that's wrong with ladies. A whore rolls over easy, but a lady thinks the world will end if she lets a man in her bed.”

“A whore lets any man who has the price get between her legs. Is that what you think Emma should do?”

Ben snarled in bad temper and splashed out of the river to stand on the bank. He rubbed a towel over his muscled body, his hazel eyes stormy. Finally he said, “No, I don't want her to do that.”

Jake followed him, the crystal clear water sluicing
down his body. He knew how frustrated Ben was feeling, because he remembered how he'd felt every time he had crashed against Victoria's rigid ideas of what was proper and what wasn't. Ladies were far more complicated than whores. A lady demanded more from a man than he wanted to give, but what they offered in return was a whole new way of life. They offered physical comfort, a warm sense of security, a sweet body in the bed all night, every night. Marriage was a high price to pay to get all that, but it was worth it. Even without the ranch he would have married Victoria, he thought, and looked up at the lavender twilight sky with a sense of shock.

After a minute he looked at his brother. “You could marry her,” he said.

Ben pulled on his pants. “I'm not a marrying man, Jake. That hasn't changed.”

“Then if it's just fucking you want, go to Angelina.”

“I don't want Angelina,” Ben replied curtly. “Hell, she's been had so many ways she can't tell the difference anymore.”

“Exactly.”

Ben scowled at him, then finished dressing without saying anything else. He wanted Emma, but not enough to offer marriage and that looked like the only way he'd ever get her. In a way it had been easier when he and Jake had just been drifting around, rootless, planning nothing but killing McLain and taking their ranch back. Well, now they had the ranch and there was no more riding out whenever they got tired of a place. They had a home and responsibilities. Ben wasn't sure he liked the sensation. It wasn't the ranch or the work of it; getting the ranch back had eased something inside him. It was the domesticity that was irritating him, the feeling of being hemmed in by rules. He wanted Emma, but he couldn't have her because of all those damned rules that governed respectable people. Ben realized that he wasn't quite respectable and never would be, any more than Jake
would ever be just a rancher. They had lived too many years by the law of the gun. Under the surface the old instincts still ran strong. He just didn't know what to do with them any more.

Supper was ready by the time they got back to the house, and Victoria forced herself to be patient. Another couple of hours wouldn't make any difference; she would find the privacy she needed when they went to bed. She tried to imagine what he would say, how he would react, and found that she couldn't. They had never discussed having children. She felt a twinge of fear and gave him a guarded look, only to look away quickly again when she found him watching her.

She couldn't read him at all. He'd had too many years hiding his thoughts behind his hard face and expressionless eyes. She could see only what he allowed her to see. Sometimes she thought that open enmity would be less nerve-racking than passion from a man she loved but didn't know.

It was still early when he got up from the table and held his hand out to her. She felt the color rush to her face as she allowed him to help her up, and she didn't look at anyone as they walked out of the room. “Good night,” Jake said, and Ben, Emma, and Celia each replied as his heavy hand on her waist ushered her up the stairs.

Emma watched them leave and bit her lip at the longing welling up in her. It wasn't just physical need that tormented her, but the need for what Victoria had found with Jake, the belonging expressed in the way he put his arm around her to escort her to their room. She wanted to feel that closeness, the partnership of marriage and a shared life. She turned her head and looked at Ben, at the hard, chiseled features.

He met her gaze and lifted his eyebrows in silent invitation. All she had to do to accept was to get up and walk upstairs. He would surely follow. Heat ran through her, and if he'd been offering more than a
night or two, if it had been for forever, she would have gone and forgotten about marriage and propriety. But Ben wanted no claim on him, legal or otherwise. Her chest ached with the pain of having to deny both him and herself. She turned her head away and didn't move from her chair.

“Jake, there's something I need to tell you.”

Her tone was troubled and Jake froze, his hands on the tiny buttons that marched down her back. He sensed that whatever it was she had been hiding, she finally trusted him enough to tell him about it, and suddenly he didn't want to know. She loved him; that was enough. He didn't want to hear about anything McLain might have done to her. McLain was dead, damn his soul. How could he hurt them now?

“I don't want to know,” he said quietly, and pulled the pins from her hair to let it stream down over his hands in a warm flood.

She whirled to face him. She was pale, her eyes as huge as they had been the night he'd first come to her. “You
have
to know.” She managed a shaky smile, one that faded as quickly as it had formed. “It isn't something I can hide or that will go away.”

His stomach knotted. Suddenly Jake saw hell opening up at his feet. A flash of intuition told him what it was, and it made him sick. So that was why she had been so sad and withdrawn, why she had watched him so anxiously at times, why he'd sensed she was hiding something from him. God, why hadn't he thought of this? And how was he supposed to stand it?
He couldn't.

Victoria began shaking as she met his hard gaze. “I'm pregnant,” she said before she lost the courage to tell him. “I'm having your baby.”

The bottom dropped out of his stomach and he stared at her, unable to believe what he'd heard her say. He felt empty, as if his heart and lungs and guts had all been torn out. And then in a rush he was filled
with a bitter rage even stronger than what he had felt twenty years before, when he had watched his mother die.

Victoria's betrayal cut at him like a knife in the gut. How could she have said that, how could she have the gall to expect to pass McLain's child off as his? Did she think he was stupid? That he didn't know McLain had used her as his wife? She hadn't been a virgin the first time Jake had had her, and that was only three weeks ago. If she were pregnant now, the child could only be McLain's. Did she think he didn't know that? It was bad enough that she was carrying that son of a bitch's whelp, but if she thought he would let the little bastard have the
Sarratt
name, the name of the family its father had murdered—