Cherished (48 page)

He hadn’t had a good look at Breen from up
above; from there he couldn’t see much except his size and the
shape of his hat, but as he shifted his gaze from Juliana’s face to
the enemy who had hounded her for so long, shock tore through him,
rocking him to his soul. Stunned, he almost dropped his gun.

Jess Burrows.

Impossible.

His own astonishment was mirrored in John
Breen’s handsome features. Breen’s color turned from fiery sienna
to ash.

“K-kid?” he gasped, then gave his golden head
an incredulous shake. “No ... he’s dead,” he muttered, half to
himself.

Juliana stood like a statue, her gaze riveted
to Cole’s face. Shock glazed his eyes and froze his lips. Oh, God,
what was happening?

At something in his expression, a chill
colder than any mountain river trickled through her.

“I saw your grave, Burrows,” she heard him
mutter hoarsely. “Yours and Liza’s—in San Francisco. I tracked you
there myself.”

His words made Juliana gasp and turn to
Breen, as if seeing him for the first time. They also seemed to
penetrate John Breen’s stunned amazement.

He shook himself out of his stupor, a muscle
jumping in his neck. “Then I fooled you just like everyone else,
Kid,” he said slowly. “Not a bad plan, eh?” He gave a short laugh.
“Liza’s tombstone was real all right. I killed her after we hit
Frisco. She talked too much. And she never stopped bawling about
what we did to you. There’s some poor drifter buried where my grave
is supposed to be,” he added with a sly half-smile. “I wanted a
fresh start, you see, as John Breen. Not Jess Burrows, drifter,
gambler, killer,” he said slowly, quietly, “but an honest man
building a modest fortune. Only that fortune grew and kept growing.
That gold I stole from Henley—it gave me my start, but I did all
the rest. Whatever it took. Until I could have anything I wanted,
anything in this whole damn world that money could buy.” His
glittering gaze fell on Juliana, her arm resting now on Cole’s, her
white face peering at the man she’d rejected as though he were an
insect or a lizard crawled out from under a rock.

“That is, I’ve had everything I wanted except
for one thing. Her.” The way he said the word made Juliana’s skin
crawl.

“I don’t know how the hell you survived, Kid,
but I’m glad to see you.” He moistened his lips. Juliana could see
him thinking, picking his words. “Damn right I am. You were good.
Hell, you were the greatest shot I’ve ever seen. Funny, you never
told me your real name—and I never figured afterward you were Cole
Rawdon. Hell, I thought you were dead.” He cleared his throat. “And
after that day, I always regretted that you got so riled about
Henley. We could’ve been partners for a long time —you could’ve had
half of everything I’ve got now. And you still can.” His voice grew
stronger, picked up enthusiasm as he went along, all the while
studying Cole’s cold, set face, a face Juliana scarcely
recognized.

She had seen him furious before—icily
furious—and she had seen him flash with anger—but never had she
seen anything as unnerving as the complete lack of emotion she saw
now. Merciless, that was what came to mind. Utterly cold, like
stone—no, colder than stone—he looked like a man carved of iron,
uncrackable, invincible.

What was going through his mind?

“Give me a day with her, Kid. One day. She’s
beautiful, isn’t she? Well, you can have her—when I’m done. You
just keep everyone away and let me have my fill of her—get her out
of my blood—you know what I mean? And then I’ll turn her over to
you and make you a full partner of every business I own.
Fifty-fifty, that’s what it’ll be. You’ll have the girl for as long
as you want her, and you’ll have millions overnight. More money
than you ever dreamed of.”

Cole gazed at him a long time. “I dreamed
about killing you, Jess,” he said slowly. “That’s what kept me
crawling through that desert, that’s what kept me from quitting and
dying in my own blood under the moon, before Sun Eagle found me
after two days and saved my life.”

Cole spoke with eerie quiet. Beneath
Juliana’s fingertips, his muscular arm was rigid. “Then, after I
tracked you to San Francisco and found the graves, I thought the
dreams would stop. But they didn’t. Not for years. And never
completely. I still have them occasionally. Now I know why.”

Breen’s chin quivered, and Juliana saw the
flick of his tongue as he licked a bead of sweat from his upper
lip. Cole’s voice went on, low and methodical.

“We have unfinished business between us,
Jess. Business that’s been haunting me for years, keeping me from
resting easy at night. Now I know why. There’s Henley, and there’s
what you did to me. And now there’s what you’ve done to Juliana.
Hell, that alone would be enough to seal your death warrant. It
means you’d best save your breath, because you’re about to breathe
your last.”

“Now, Kid ...” Breen began, then started at
something he saw above Cole’s shoulder, at the top of the slope
from where the bounty hunter had first appeared. “Mueller, don’t
shoot the girl ...” he yelled, and then everything happened at
once.

Juliana whirled instinctively in that
direction, but it took her only an instant to see that the slope
was empty. It was a trick. Breen was going for the hideaway gun in
his boot, and he was fast, faster than Juliana could have imagined,
but even as she tried to jump in front of Cole, screaming “No!” he
shoved her aside and fired with his other hand.

John Breen went down on his knees, but he
still managed to shoot. The bullet danced off the rocks above
Cole’s head even as the bounty hunter, never flinching, fired
again, and this time, Breen thudded face first at Juliana’s
feet.

She couldn’t even scream. She stood staring
at that golden head dripping with blood, at the arms twisted
obscenely beneath him, and felt herself suddenly enveloped in
strong arms.

“It’s over,” Cole said.

Then she was being cradled against him,
sheltered from this awful place by his arms, his voice, his lips
upon her hair. How many minutes passed before she lifted her face
from his chest and looked into his eyes, she never knew. She only
knew that all the coldness was gone from his features. He was her
warm, handsome Cole, the man who had made love to her on a feather
bed in a cabin tiny as nowhere, the man who had put his life on the
line for her again and again.

When he gazed down at her, his softened face
tugged at her heart. An aching tenderness shone from those
fire-blue eyes.

“This might not be the right time to tell you
this—or the right place—but all the time I was searching for you
after I found Skunk’s body, I swore that if I wasn’t too late, I’d
tell you the truth. What I should have told you long ago. What I
know better than anything else in this world.”

She waited, scarcely able to believe her
ears. If he said what she thought he was going to say ...

“I love you, Juliana.” The fierceness of his
words was accentuated by the way his hands tightened possessively
around her waist. “Heaven help me, I love you with all my life. I
need you, dammit, and if you want to take a chance and hook up for
life with a man like me ...”

“You mean a man who’s wonderful, courageous,
handsome, bullheaded, infuriating, stubborn—did I say handsome
...”

“I mean a man with a lot of enemies, who’s
not very good at avoiding trouble, who gets shot at maybe once a
day—or so it seems lately, ever since I met a beautiful little
easterner who tried to steal my horse. Instead she stole my
heart.”

“Tried to steal your horse? I did steal your
horse,” she reminded him as his lips tantalizingly brushed her
cheek.

“But I got him back,” Cole corrected.

“Oh,” Juliana sighed, so blissful with his
arms around her this way that she forgot where she was and what was
directly behind her, “shut up and kiss me, Rawdon.”

“You heard the lady,” came a shout from the
slope above them, and turning as one, they saw Wade and Tommy,
along with Gil Keedy, waving down at them, grinning like a trio of
fools.

“Took ‘em long enough,” Cole growled as
Juliana called a joyful greeting. “I got back to the cabin first
and had at least a few hours start on ‘em. Reckon Breen saw their
trail dust from twenty miles away—I sure did. You’d think they’d
have better sense ...”

“If you had any sense, you’d kiss me to seal
that proposal,” Juliana murmured, grabbing the front of his shirt.
“Unless you’re planning to try to wriggle out of it ...”

“The only wriggling that’s going to be done
is beneath the blankets,” Cole told her, grabbing her firmly and
staring down with glinting eyes. “You savvy, Miss Montgomery?”

“I
think
so ...”

“Shut up and kiss me then,” Cole grinned, and
so, accompanied by shouts and cheers from the slope above, she
did.

The wedding took place three weeks later in
the big parlour at Fire Mesa. The last of the summer wildflowers
perfumed the air and brightened the house, which had been scrubbed,
polished, dusted, and gussied up, as Tommy called it, with new
curtains and rugs and bright chintz pillow cushions ordered all the
way from Denver. With Josie’s help, Juliana had brought a lustrous
glow to the old oak floors and paneling, had freshened each of the
spacious rooms with feminine, personal touches. Her mother’s old
music box sat on the mantel, alongside Cole’s carved horses.
Outside, autumn leapt into the canyons and hillsides with a burst
of tingly cool air, but the sun shone like golden honey upon the
magnificent hills and the valley stretching away in emerald
splendor. Inside, its windows thrown wide, the house sparkled with
life and beauty and seemed to catch the joy of its new mistress and
to glow with a mellow warmth it hadn’t known in many years.

Juliana descended the staircase in the white
silk gown her mother had worn when she wed Andrew Montgomery. Wade
and Tommy had saved a good many of Sarah Jane Montgomery’s prized
possessions after Juliana had gone off to St. Louis. They had
packed them away in a cedar chest and stored this chest in a bank
vault in Independence all these years, always planning to bestow
the contents on their sister one day when they were reunited. When
the box had arrived a week before the wedding, Juliana hadn’t the
slightest idea what she would find inside until a beaming Tommy
presented her with the key. When she saw the music box, her
mother’s favorite china cat, a crystal perfume bottle that had sat
on Sarah Jane’s bureau in the bedroom above the general store, and
the wedding gown, among a dozen other near-forgotten treasures,
tears had sprung to her eyes. There was a photograph, too, of Mama
and Papa, which Juliana hadn’t seen since she was a child. She held
it between trembling fingers, staring at the portrait of her
parents, Mama seated, Papa standing straight and tall, with a hand
upon her shoulder.

As a grown woman, Juliana had studied the
dear faces remembered so blurrily from her childhood. In her
father, she saw clearly once more all the sturdy strength and
rugged handsomeness she remembered, and the sound of his voice and
his laughter when he threw her in the air and caught her seemed to
float back to her as well, causing the tears to stream down her
cheeks in bittersweet recollection. In her mother’s portrait she
saw again the pale beauty who reigned over her childhood memories,
but with a woman’s eyes she now observed as well the sad eyes and
careworn set to her mother’s thin shoulders that she had never
noted as a child. This delicate woman whom Aunt Katharine had
characterized as disreputable because she had once worked in a
saloon was no harpy or tramp, but a fine and gentle lady, who at
one point in her life had faced poverty and desperation, and had
worked at the only employment she could find in order to survive.
Juliana knew now in a way she had never known before that there was
no shame in that: hadn’t she herself labored to exhaustion as a
hotel maid on the Colorado border when her money had been stolen?
And hadn’t she learned in a way never to be forgotten that the
wealthy and powerful could sometimes be lower than a snake, and
those whom society might judge harshly could hold the kindness of
angels within their hearts.

Like Cole, she thought. Shunned by some,
feared by most, Cole had ridden his own lonely, perilous road,
keeping his own counsel, burying the need and pain and kindness
inside him so deep, he had even convinced himself it was no longer
there. Mama would have adored Cole. And Papa would have respected
him. He was so strong, so proud and independent, yet like Papa, he
needed the love of a family.
He just never realized that until
he met me
, she thought rather smugly, and then hugged her
parents’ photograph to her breast.

Wade and Tommy insisted that she keep it as a
wedding gift—the first part of their wedding gift, they added. The
second part, they told her the morning of the wedding, was
somewhere in the pile set on the mahogany side table in the
parlour, among gaily wrapped gifts from Josie and Gil, Gray Feather
and Yancy, all of whom attended the wedding dressed in their Sunday
best.

But beside Cole, everyone else paled that day
in Juliana’s eyes. When she floated down that staircase tightly
clasping her bouquet of yellow roses, her silk slippers making the
barest rustle upon the oaken floor, she saw not the array of
smiling faces staring up at her, not the beautiful old house
nestled like a dark jewel amid the glorious Arizona scenery, not
the Plattsville preacher waiting to perform the marriage
ceremony—no, she saw no one, nothing but Cole. With his carefully
combed black hair just touching the white collar of his lawn shirt,
his dark, handsome face tilted up to watch her approach, he filled
her mind and her heart with an outpouring of love so intense, it
made her burn inside. Never had she seen him more devastatingly
handsome or magnetic as he looked that bright morning in his
elegant black suit, white shirt, and knotted silk cravat. Each step
she took toward him made her heart pound faster, her blood heat
within her veins. When she reached the bottom of the staircase,
where he waited for her, her smile could have lit the desert at the
moment of blackest midnight.