Bride of the Wolf (20 page)

“It seems you know more about me than you ever admitted,” she said.

“I know that you was sent to live in an orphanage when you was a little girl and didn’t have no way out except workin’ jobs you hated.”

Her head jerked up. “I never said—”

“You didn’t have to.” He pushed away from the tree and went down to the water’s edge. “When you wrote about what you wanted in life…” He picked up a stone and tossed it into the center of the creek. “You told Jed a lot of things, but not everything.”

The quiet was so deep that it felt like every living creature in the Pecos had gone to sleep. “You’re right,” she said in a voice weary and sad. “I didn’t tell him everything.”

His neck started prickling again. She was about to say something important. Something that would finally explain why she was so afraid—afraid of her own passion, of losing her dream, losing Gordie.

“You once asked me if there had been someone…before Jed,” she murmured. “There was a man in Ohio. He—” She stopped, her eyes focused on a past he still couldn’t see. “What does it matter now?”

But it mattered to Heath. She’d known another man. A man who’d wanted her, taken her in his arms, heard her soft gasps of pleasure…

His upper lip lifted in a snarl. “What did he do?” he demanded. “Why did you leave him?”

“You have no right to ask me such things,” she whispered.

Heath spun around. “Who was he? What made you leave?”

A hawk cried above the willow thicket, and Rachel lifted her head. “I did not leave him,” she said. “He left
me.
”

T
HE BEAT OF
H
EATH’S
heart was louder than the rumble of stampeding cattle across hard-packed earth. “What did he do to you?”

“It doesn’t matter!” She closed her eyes. “Why do
you
care, Mr. Renshaw? It has nothing to do with you. You have no claim on me, and you never will.”

No claim? He wanted to prove just how wrong she was, grab her and throw her down on the blanket and erase that other man’s touch from her body.

“That’s what you’re runnin’ from, ain’t it?” he demanded. “This man you thought you loved.”

“You talk a great deal about love for a man who knows nothing of it!”

She was right. He didn’t know anything about love. Not a damn thing. For most of his life he hadn’t even believed it existed except in stories.

He threw his last pebble into the creek with unnecessary violence, and paced back and forth along the bank, tamping down his anger as hard as he could. He’d apologized only a few times in his life, and he wasn’t ready just yet to add another one to the short list.

But the fact was that she’d trusted him with information she could have kept to herself, knowing what a son
of a bitch he could be. She’d trusted him just to listen, and he’d attacked her instead.

If she kept on trusting him, she would end up being hurt worse than he could stand. But maybe she would hate him less if she knew a little of what made him what he was. Not everything, never that, but just enough.

With a sigh, Heath walked back to the trees and eased himself down against one of the trunks, knees up and hands dangling between them. “You said I know more about you than I’d admit,” he said. “Reckon it’s fair you know more about me.”

She looked at him narrow-eyed, as if she expected him to grow a pair of mule’s ears on the spot. “Perhaps I don’t wish to know more,” she said.

But she did. Like so many times before, her eyes gave her away…her eyes and her lips and the scent of her skin.

“You asked me once what
I
was runnin’ from,” he said quietly. “When I was a baby, younger even than Gordie, my ma gave me up. She didn’t want me because I didn’t fit in the world she was born to.”

Rachel covered her mouth with her hands. “Holden, I—”

He kept talking, knowing he would lose his courage if he stopped even for a moment. “She gave me up to a couple named Morton,” he said. “They didn’t have no kids of their own, so they was glad to have me to help on their farm. I wasn’t much use for a few years, but I was always strong for my age. Soon as I could follow orders they put me out in the field to pick the weeds, fetch and carry, whatever they could find. They didn’t have no time to raise me up as anythin’ but a servant.”

Heath had been careful to keep his voice level, but some of the feelings got through, the feelings he’d kept
hoping were dead and gone. Rachel was leaning forward with her fists tight in her lap, her eyes big, shining pools.

“I’m…I’m so very sorry,” she said. “Did you have any friends? Did you go to school?”

Easier to laugh than let her see even a little of the old hurt. “The Mortons liked keepin’ to themselves. They couldn’t spare me for no schoolin’. By the time I was ten, I was doin’ more work than the few hands they hired on. If I ever complained, Pa Morton was ready with the belt.”

“He beat you?” She swallowed. “What about your foster mother?”

“She tried to stop it sometimes, but she didn’t care enough to make it stick.” He shrugged. “For twelve years,” he said, “I took it. Didn’t reckon I had anywhere else to go. Then somethin’ happened. I finally stood up to Morton, and he took out his shotgun. That’s when I left.”

Arms wrapped around her ribs, Rachel rocked just as if she was holding Gordie and needed to soothe him. “You were only a boy!”

“I should’ve left a lot sooner.”

“Where did you go?”

He shrugged. “Wherever I could find a way to keep myself alive.”

Tears squeezed out of her eyes. “Yes,” she whispered, as if she really did know just what he’d had to do to stay alive. He barely kept himself from jumping up and taking her in his arms and telling her not to cry over him. Not
him
.

“It’s over,” he said roughly. “Over and done.”

She wiped at her eyes and shook her head. “Is it?”

How many times did he have to remind himself that
she never let go of a notion once she had her teeth in it? “I stopped runnin’ when I came to Dog Creek,” he said, knowing how soon he would be proving himself a liar.

The big blue heron that had flown away when they arrived appeared among the willows across the creek and waded into the water, stately as a judge. Rachel watched its head dart down to catch a little fish in its long beak.

“What finally made you stand up to Morton?” she asked.

The question wasn’t unexpected. “Pa Morton beat me one time too many,” he said.

The way she looked at him gave him the feeling she didn’t believe him. If it hadn’t been for what had happened with Jed, he might have told her, taken the chance one more time. But he could still see Jed’s face. No outright shock or horror or disgust, just a mask he would wear as long as he had to, until he could get rid of the creature he’d treated as a son.

Oh, Rachel had found the wolf beautiful. She’d believed it had helped Joey. She didn’t want anyone to hurt it, and she said she wasn’t afraid. But if she knew the truth, she
would
be afraid. And worse.

But maybe there was part of it she could understand.

“A week before it happened,” he said slowly, “I saw a wolf runnin’ in the woods near our farm. He was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen, and he was free. He could go where he wanted, and no one could tell him different.” Heath removed his hat and rested his head back against the tree trunk, feeling the story unravel a knot beneath his ribs. “The wolf kept comin’ to the same place, got really close to me sometimes, and I got to thinkin’ of him as a kind of friend. One day I went to meet him and Pa Morton followed me. He shot the wolf right in front of me.”

Rachel bounced right up from the blanket, fingers curled into fists like a boy in his first saloon brawl.

“Why?” she demanded. “Was the wolf threatening your livestock? Had it hurt someone?”

“He didn’t do nothin’. Morton just wanted to punish me.”

Rachel took a short few steps one way, turned and marched back again. “He was your friend!”

“As much as any wild thing can be a friend.”

She lifted her chin and stood with legs apart and arms akimbo as if daring him to laugh. “If I had been there, I would…I would have shot the man instead of the wolf!”

His heart ricocheted around inside his ribs like a bullet in a tin can. Here was the she-cat in all her glory, the tigress Rachel didn’t want to acknowledge. He didn’t have any doubt that she could shoot someone if she had reason. Even if it was for him.

“Much obliged,” he said, trying not to let her see how much she’d affected him. “Only I reckon it wouldn’t be Morton you’d have shot if you’d had a gun before you came to Dog Creek.”

She blinked, flushed and strode to the bank, wrapping her arms tight around her chest. “If I had had a gun…” Her head dropped as if she couldn’t hold it up anymore. “The man I thought I loved…there was a baby. He refused to have anything more to do with me when I told him we were going to have a child.”

Heath stared at her rigid back. “You wasn’t married?”

“No. We were not married.”

The knot that had started to come apart snapped back together again.
No one should be compelled to pay for a single mistake for the rest of their lives.

Now he knew what that mistake had been. He’d started out looking for it so he could prove to himself that maybe she wasn’t worth his concern, the same reason he’d challenged her about loving Jed. But all he could think now was what being unmarried and pregnant would have meant in her world—a world where folks measured other folk by rules that kept everyone, man or woman, in his or her place. She didn’t have to tell him one more thing for him to know that she’d been cast out from her own kind, shamed and judged and condemned.

He
didn’t have a right to judge, not when he’d lain with a woman and gotten her with the child that…

The child.

A strange weakness washed through Heath’s limbs, and a strident humming filled his ears. He stood, bracing himself on the tree trunk. “Where’s the kid now?” he asked.

She tilted her face toward the sky, grief and longing and despair in every line of her slender body. “He died at birth. That is why I can no longer have children.”

Shame came over Heath so hard that he almost couldn’t catch his breath. She hadn’t given the baby away or abandoned him. She’d wanted him, just the way she wanted Gordie.

But her man hadn’t. He’d turned his back on Rachel when she’d needed him most.

“Why?” he asked hoarsely. “Why did the son of a bitch leave you?”

“I was to inherit most of my aunt’s considerable fortune. That was all he wanted, and when she disinherited me because I…”

He wasn’t even thinking when he went to her and
opened his arms. She walked into them, pressing her face into his collar. Heath rested his chin on her hair and shivered with wave after wave of rage and pity.

“I’d kill him,” he said. “If I knew where he was, I’d—”

She gave a little hiccup of a laugh. “Shall I fetch your revolver?” Her fingers dug into his shirt. “No. I was very young then, and it was long ago. I survived.”

Any way she could. Heath felt helpless, wanting to ease the pain she still felt and knowing he never could. All her secrets were clear to him now, from the reason she loved Gordie so much to why she was so scared of what her body wanted. It had betrayed her before. It was still betraying her.

“You never told Jed, did you?” he asked, hesitantly stroking her hair.

She started to pull away. “No,” she said. “I’m not worthy of him. I never was.”

He took her arms and made her look at him. “Maybe he was—isn’t worthy of
you
.”

Rachel searched his eyes, wondering how she could ever have thought that Holden Renshaw was a villain. In the past few hours he had become a different man. There was no disgust in his face as he held her now, no contempt, no judgment. He didn’t regard her with lust in his heart. He was comforting her just as he had when she had endangered Gordie’s life with her carelessness, as if she deserved such comfort. Such acceptance.

It could not be real. In a moment he would walk away. She could
make
him walk away.

“Most men would consider me a whore,” she said, giving the word a bitter edge. “I thought I had changed, but I haven’t. I haven’t learned from my mistakes.”

“Rachel—”

“If not for Jed and Gordie, you would have been glad to accept an invitation to my bed, wouldn’t you? It would have been my sin, not yours.”

His grip on her arms loosened, and she broke free, stepping back until her shoes splashed in the creek. “I lied to Jed. I didn’t tell him about the baby, or that my own aunt threw me into the street for debauchery. Do you suppose he would still want me if he knew?”

Rachel could count on one hand the number of times she had observed any sort of vulnerability in Holden Renshaw, but she saw it now in the movement of his throat and the bewilderment in his eyes.

He doesn’t know what to say. He can’t deny any of it. He can’t tell me it will be all right, that Jed will understand
.

“He never knew me,” she said. “He wanted a good woman, a companion who didn’t expect anything more than a stable home and wholesome work. What he got was—” The words caught on her tongue, and she shook her head wildly.

He lunged toward her and caught her chin in his strong, callused fingers. “You think Jed’s perfect, Rachel? He’s not.”

Now he was angry. At Jed? She had come to believe that his loyalty to his employer was real, not some bid for power as Sean had claimed, but that anger…

Water had begun to leak into Rachel’s boots. She tried to move past Holden, but he put his hands around her waist and lifted her onto the bank. She walked quickly toward Gordie’s crate as soon as her heels touched firm ground.

Miraculously, the baby had slept through the com
motion, his face untroubled, innocence unsullied. Rachel lowered herself to the blanket. There were still things she had to explain before he woke. Holden had to know all of it, even though she could see no hope.

“I didn’t lie only to Jed, you know,” she said, silently counting Gordie’s gentle breaths. “I lied to everyone when I came to Javelina. You see, I never married Jed, in Ohio or anywhere else.”

Perhaps it was odd to expect outrage from him now, given what she had already revealed. But he didn’t speak again until he was standing on the other side of the crate, looking down at Gordie with that strange, vulnerable expression still on his face.

“I knew you wasn’t married,” he said.

Gordie yawned, and Rachel held very still until she was sure he was sleeping again. “You knew?” she said numbly.

“It was clear from the letters you sent Jed.”

The letters that revealed every dream she had come to cherish since she had lost Timothy, dreams she had never shared with anyone but the man she was to marry.

“You knew,” she said thickly, “and yet you asked those questions, tried to make me—”

He dropped into a crouch, balancing on his toes with the careless grace that never ceased to fascinate her. “I was mad for a while,” he said, “but I understand why you had to do it.”

Rachel believed him. His very past spoke for his sincerity. But if he had felt that way, why hadn’t he revealed his knowledge of her deception before?

Of course. Gordie. He’d treated her as a necessary evil when she’d first arrived at Dog Creek so that she could care for the baby, and he had continued to leave Gordie in her care even after he had briefly suggested
she give the baby up to Lucia. He must have believed she would leave if her secret was exposed.

Was there any sense in thinking that his concern for Gordie was
not
his only reason for letting her think he’d believed her?