Cherished (39 page)

“Let me get this straight,” Cole said, rising
to stare from Wade to Josie, choosing his words carefully. “After
you helped Josie clear out of Plattsville, long after the Sanders
job, that’s when Rivers got killed? We heard he was out with his
posse hunting for you when it happened.”

“That’s right. He had tracked us right after
the robbery, of course, but found no trace. Gray Feather had
already found us the cabin on Stick Mountain, and Rivers hadn’t a
clue where we were holed up. But after we helped Josie, McCray got
word of it and learned who we were. He realized that the
Montgomerys hadn’t only pulled the Sanders job but had also ruined
his fun with the lady. He decided to seek his own revenge. My guess
is he made sure Rivers got a false lead concerning our whereabouts,
then he had him killed. That allowed McCray to put his own man in
as sheriff—that idiot Dane—and also gave us a murder charge to
reckon with. We’ve been forced to stay pretty much away from any
town ever since. Except for Keedy. He’s the only one not actually
associated with the gang—yet.”

At the mention of Gil’s name, Juliana noticed
a light enter Josie’s dark eyes. But she had also seen the girl
perk up when Tommy’s name had been mentioned. Apparently, Josie
Larson was having a difficult time choosing between the two young
men competing for her attention. Of course, it was still only a
short time since her husband’s death, but Juliana realized that
here in the West, people couldn’t mourn for as long as custom
considered proper in the East. Life out here just kept going right
on, like a huge, raging river, and if you didn’t keep up with it,
you were swept under. She had a feeling that Josie, despite missing
her husband, needed someone to lean on, someone to love. It must be
terribly lonely for her here all alone. In addition, she had the
responsibility of raising her child. She would want a father for
him, someone to love and protect him in this untamed country. It
was only natural, Juliana reflected as the baby stirred and
whimpered in her arms, that Josie would seek out the companionship
of another man. But which one did she prefer? Juliana, despite her
fondness for Gil, felt a strong loyalty to Tommy. Couldn’t this
girl see how wonderfully handsome and fun-loving, and dear he was?
Of course, Josie certainly might feel that Gil, though not as
lankily good-looking or charismatic as Tommy, nevertheless had his
own special brand of charm. His gentle, drawling sense of humor,
courtly Texas manners, and easygoing demeanor must have had an
effect on Josie. Still ...

Her musings were broken by the sound of the
baby’s wails. Startled, she rose and hurried to Josie, who reached
for him with a weary smile.

“Looks like my little one wants his mama’s
arms. Can’t say I blame him.” She sighed, stroking the little boy’s
bald head with a work-callused finger. “Sometimes I wish for my
mama’s arms, too.”

“Don’t we all,” Juliana murmured softly,
thinking of the mother she had lost when she was nine, and whom she
scarcely remembered. If only she had a mother to confide in now, to
pour out all her doubts and hurts over Cole. Suddenly she felt a
strange bond with this young woman, who like herself seemed
destined to fight for survival alone in a world of men. “Don’t we
all.”

The two young women smiled at each other
then, each taking the other’s measure with eager interest, more
than ready to become friends.

“Tommy has talked of little else except
finding you ever since I met him,” Josie offered a little while
later as they cleared away the coffee cups. Cole and Wade had gone
outside and the two women found themselves alone in the kitchen,
able to talk together without the men listening in.

“Come with me and I’ll show you where Kevin
and I spend most of our time,” Josie said. “There’s a little
parlour in back that I’ve fixed up nice and homey.”

Sure enough, tucked behind the dark wood
staircase was a spotless, cozy chamber, perhaps originally a little
sewing room, where the lace-edged pillows on the chintz sofa were
arranged neat as a pin, where the cedar floor was swept and
polished to a high gloss, and where the iron stove in the corner
was as clean and bright as a newly minted government coin. Josie
settled Kevin down in a crib she’d discovered in the former nursery
upstairs.

“Gil carried it down here for me—in fact, he
helped me fix up this entire room. I didn’t want to make the rest
of the house look too lived-in, but I needed some little place
where I could feel at home.”

“Why didn’t you stay down at the hideout on
Stick Mountain?” Juliana asked curiously.

“It just goes against the grain with me to
stay in a cabin with a bunch of men and not be married or related
to any of ‘em. My folks raised me strict, I guess.” She shrugged.
“So every day or so one of them is kind enough to ride down and
visit, seeing if Kevin and me need food or supplies or anything,
and in the meantime, we just wait.”

“For what?”

Josie glanced up from where she was busily
folding a pile of the baby’s newly washed clothes. “For word that
McCray is gone, so me and Kevin can go back to Plattsville. Tommy
promised me we’d be able to go home again soon.”

“Did he?”

Noticing the interested manner in which
Juliana waited for her to continue, Josie gave a self-conscious
laugh. “Tommy has been real nice, real concerned. He’s here to
visit almost as much as—”

“Gil Keedy?” Juliana suggested with a
smile.

When Josie blushed and nodded, Juliana added,
“They’re very different, aren’t they?” She couldn’t help wondering
what Josie’s assessment was of her two suitors and hoped the
question would prompt some insight, which it did.

“Tommy is ... well,
Tommy
,” Josie
chuckled. “He acts without thinking sometimes—just plunges right
into mischief and to heck with the consequences. Lucky for him, he
shoots fast as lightning, so he can get away with it. That night
those men tried to drag me off,” she explained, her expression
sobering, “it was Tommy who saved the day. Wade would’ve been shot
in the back by one of McCray’s men, but Tommy saw him and plugged
him before he could get off a shot. If you’ve never seen him shoot
a gun, Juliana, you ain’t never seen any real shooting.”

Thinking of how expertly Cole handled his
Colt .45 pistols, Juliana wondered fleetingly if her brother could
possibly draw any faster. But more on her mind at that moment was
the admiring glow on Josie’s face when she discussed Tommy.

“He thinks a lot of you, too,” she said by
way of a reply, and studied the girl’s reaction.

Josie flushed the color of baby rosebuds,
shook her head vigorously, and said, “Oh, Tommy’s just a big
tease.”

“And Gil?”

“Gil ...” Josie’s confusion grew. “Gil is
sweet, too. All the boys are dears—I don’t know what Kevin and I
would do without them.”

Suddenly she turned to Juliana and lifted her
hands helplessly. “To tell you the truth, Juliana, both Gil and
Tommy have been more than just sweet. They’ve been downright
attentive ... and though they wouldn’t neither of them be
disrespectful enough to Clint’s memory to actually court me yet, I
can tell that they both want to.”

“How do you feel about that, Josie?”

The girl stood over the baby’s crib, staring
down at the sleeping child, whose breath came in slow, light beats,
calm as sunrise. “It’s too soon after Clint to say. And even though
Clint ... well, our marriage wasn’t exactly a Sunday picnic—” She
broke off, hesitating, then something in Juliana’s expression, a
glimmer of compassion, of interest touched by genuine caring,
spurred her suddenly to continue in a rush: “He drank sometimes,
you see—and when he was very drunk ... he would sometimes ... beat
me ... but not often, and it wasn’t really so very bad—not
usually.”

Her voice trailed off. She was still staring
down at the baby, but Juliana could see tears on her cheeks.

For a moment, Juliana was speechless. Then
she went swiftly to the girl and put her arms around her. “But
that’s terrible, Josie. Even if it only had happened once—it would
have been one time too many. Why didn’t you leave him?”

“Leave him?” The girl looked blank. “He was
my husband. I took a marriage vow to love and obey him.”

“Pledging to put up with beatings isn’t part
of any marriage vow I know about.”

“I was scared,” Josie whispered in a tortured
voice. “I ... wanted to run away sometimes ... Oh, I didn’t know
what to do. And then there was Kevin ...”

Juliana struggled to understand. Compassion
for the girl crying in her arms warred with her fury at the man who
had beaten her, and indignation that any woman could find herself
caught in such a cruel trap. What frightened her most was that
Josie had hardly realized she had had a choice. She
could
have left. It might not have been easy, but she could have done
it—just as she had left Plattsville when Line McCray’s attentions
became too threatening.

“I’m not trying to say I’m glad Clint died in
that fire,” the girl added quickly, lifting a tear-streaked face.
“I would never have wished such a thing on him in a hundred years,
but if it hadn’t happened ...” She took a deep breath and went on.
“I would never have met Gil or Tommy, and wouldn’t have known how
... how truly nice and kind a man could be. And that’s why,” she
said, plunging ahead with a determined glint in her dark eyes, “I’m
not going to rush into marryin’ anyone again—I don’t want to make
any more mistakes. I’m going straight back to Plattsville and start
over—and I’m going to just sit tight and see.”

“Let’s just hope Line McCray gets what’s
coming to him,” Juliana muttered. And John Breen, too, she thought
as she picked up a flowered china vase from the desk, studying the
wildflowers arranged on it. She couldn’t help being struck by how
similar her predicament was to Josie’s. Both of them had been
forced into hiding by men determined to possess them at any cost.
Both only wanted the freedom to live in peace. Of course, she
sighed, unlike Josie, she had found a man she
did
want to
spend her life with—but he wasn’t sweetly love-struck the way Tommy
and Gil were; he was by turns unpredictable, arrogant, rude,
indifferent, and heartbreakingly gentle and tender, not to mention
entirely too self-sufficient to need or want her or anyone
else....

She found herself wishing suddenly, for the
first time in her life, that she didn’t have these infernal
freckles marching all across her nose. And that her mouth was not
quite so wide. It did ruin the symmetry of her face. Maybe if she
was prettier, with the classic, perfect porcelain beauty common in
so many girls she’d known in St. Louis....

What would it take to make Cole love her?

Idiot
, she chided herself in silent
fury,
you’re supposed to be forgetting him!

His voice at the door shook her out of her
thoughts, jarring her so badly, the vase dropped from her hands and
crashed onto the wood floor into a thousand delicate shards of
china, waking little Kevin, who immediately started to cry.

“Oh,” Juliana gasped, “I’m so sorry.” As she
knelt and began hastily collecting fragments of broken china, she
cursed herself for a clumsy fool—she who had whirled so gracefully
about countless ballrooms and never trod on a partner’s toe. She
had always thought that love made one happy, whole, and perfect—not
that it reduced intelligent, able young women to fumbling
idiots!

“It’s all right,” Josie told her as she
picked up Kevin and soothed him in her arms. “Don’t trouble
yourself. I’ll fetch a broom ...”

“Ouch. Damn.”

Cole was by her side in three quick strides,
frowning as she stuck her cut and bleeding finger into her mouth.
“Let me see that.”

“It’s nothing ...” she protested.

“Let me see it, Juliana.”

He forced her to hold her hand still and
studied the gash in her finger, from which blood spurted like a
small crimson fountain. Snapping off his neckerchief, he quickly
bound up her hand while Juliana ground her lip.

“You’re not going to faint are you?” he asked
quickly.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She was tougher now,
since she’d started traipsing through the West. She had to be.
Still, she was feeling a trifle light-headed. Maybe because he was
standing so close to her, holding her hand, taking care of her.

“I guess I’m clumsy today,” she offered in a
faint voice to Josie, who was watching the little scene with one
brow lifted.

But Cole cupped her chin in his hand.
“Today?” His face softened. Then he sent Josie a wry look. “Every
day,” he informed her.

“That so?”

“I beg your pardon ...” Juliana fumed.

“First time I met you,” he murmured, ignoring
Juliana’s outrage and continuing to hold her hand in his large one,
“you fainted in my arms. Next time, you fell down in the dirt in
Cedar Gulch right at my feet. After that, you stumbled over the
edge of a canyon so deep, you’d have aged five years before you hit
bottom. And this morning, you nearly fell just getting off your
fool horse ...”

“That’s enough!” Juliana gasped between
clenched teeth, humiliated, and wondering what on earth Josie was
thinking. She yanked her hand from his. “And do you care to tell us
why I almost fell over that canyon? Who was chasing me, scaring me
half to death before I even got anywhere near the edge of that
cliff?”

“Maybe we should tell the whole story,” Cole
suggested with a grin. “What about the bear—maybe you could
demonstrate your tree-climbing ability.”

“I prefer to forget every minute of the time
I spent with you,” she flashed.

“You sure about that, angel? You didn’t enjoy
any little part of it?”

“No!”

She saw Cole’s eyes glint beneath his dark
hat, but before he could embarrass her further, Wade’s voice
interrupted from the doorway.