Dust Devil (28 page)

Stephanie smiled. "I already do. I’ll simply go back East with you.”

"You’d hide in the East forever?” Jamie asked. "Give up Cambria?”

S
he put on her hat and tightened the chin strap. "I don’t intend to hide. But . . .” she shrugged her shoulders, "other things could happen between now and then. Now, are we going to hunt a bear?”

CHAPTER 30

Jamie wiped his sweaty palms on his canvas pants. He watched as Cody ran sensitive fingertips over the animal track. "It’s the bear’s?”

Cody rose. He squinted into the dying sun that just topped the spires of pine and aspen
dotting the low mountain’s hogback. "He’s got maybe forty minutes on us.” He swung up into the saddle. "Come on.”

"Shouldn’t we signal Wayne and Stephanie that we’re on the trail?”

Cody’s lips curled up on a one-sided grin. "It’s not bear that she’s hunting, Jamie boy.”

Jamie drew a deep breath that eased out in a weary and nervous sigh. Perhaps he should warn Stephanie about Wayne, even if Wayne were his friend. She was so inexperienced. Well, her virtue might not be at stake at the moment, but his own courage was. "I’m ready,” he answered and kneed his pinto into a trot behind Cody.

When first Jamie glimpsed the bear standing at a distance, he thought he must be mistaken, for it looked like an oak tree. The black bear, more cinnamon than black, was the largest he had ever seen. At that distance Jamie estimated the bear must be at least eight feet tall and weigh five hundred pounds. The click of a shell being shoved in Cody’s rifle told him that Cody already had spotted the bear.

In his heart Jamie knew that Inez would not feel him any more the man should he lay the bearskin at her feet. She didn’t measure a man’s worth by his courage to kill. Yet the blood that coursed through Jamie’s veins sang that this was something he must do himself. A melody that he heard over and over again, drumming in his temples. You are not afraid. You are not afraid. You are a man.

And as he slid his own shell into the rifle’s chambers, he knew the song was for his father. That tough, unbreakable man who had always seemed larger than life. Taller than Cody, fiercer than Yellow Dog.

"Leave the horses here,” Cody said beneath his breath. "If we miss him with the first shot, the horses will be useless in all this undergrowth. Take to a tree instead.”

"Cody, he’s mine. The bear. I want first shot.”

The cowboy peered around at him, then nodded his head in assent. "He’s yours, Jamie.”

They moved forward, always keeping downwind of the animal. Once the animal reared to its full height, scratched its back against a cedar’s shaggy bark, then ambled on. Several times it halted, raised its protruding snout to the air.

Jamie had always thought of bears as being clumsy
, lumbering animals. But this one was almost beautiful, if one could associate beauty with power. With its gleaming reddish-brown coat and splendid build, it was a magnificent beast, and he hated to see it destroyed. But he heard the song again and knew that only this way could he break away from his father’s dominance.

The two were close enough now to fire. As though it sensed the impending danger, the bear reared and whirled around, almost as if it were dancing to the same song that played in Jamie’s head. On its short, powerful legs it began moving toward the bush-tangled place where
he and Cody hid. Its forefeet with their long, heavy nails pawed the air.

"He’s scented us,” Cody said
softly. He looked at Jamie. "Are you ready?”

Steadily Jamie returned his look. "Yes.”

It moved with ponderous steps, each step like the heavy beat of the Indian cottonwood drum. He watched with growing surprise as the rifle’s sight began to tremor. It was as if he were totally disassociated from the rifle. He watched as the nervous spasm spread from his stomach outward like a ripple in a disturbed pond.

He saw the beautiful beast
drawing ever nearer — and saw the image of his father behind him, lip out-thrust, eyes flaring wide in disgusted anger.

The black bear loomed over Cody and Jamie, its shaggy coat blotting out the bright, white sun. It looked,
he thought, as the mammoth must have looked eons earlier, before the glaciers receded to the crests of the Sierras.

"Fire!” Cody
warned.

* * * * *

Stephanie knelt at the trickling stream and splashed the mossy water at her neck. She smoothed the loose hair back into its knot at the nape of her neck and pulled the broadbrim hat on her head before rising. All this took two and a half minutes. Long enough for Wayne to make some kind of overture.

When she could stall no longer, she turned and caught the brooding look that so captivated her. One day she knew she would be the woman to break through the shell of mystery that was also part of his charm. "Aren’t you going to help me mount, Wayne?” Her voice was barely a raspy whisper.

He smiled, a slow smile which she knew did not reach his heart. Maybe she was foolish to try and make him love her. But she could no more suppress her love for him than Jamie could hide his adoration of Inez. And she wondered why she tried. Why she had to pretend. No matter what the girls at the academy said, it seemed so unnatural to pretend indifference. She thought about her mother and knew that if her mother had ever loved anyone wildly, not the mild affection her mother had for her father, but loving beyond reason — she knew her mother would never have made the coy game of it.

Wayne cupped his hands for her boot. "I’m at your bidding, princess.”

"Why do you call me that — princess?”

His lips twisted sardonically. "Aren’t you the princess
— of a kingdom larger than that of any fairy tale?  The daughter of the richest man in the Territory?”

"I’m still a woman, Wayne,” she said huskily. She brushed his cupped hands aside. His arms slipped around her waist, pulling her against him, and his lips came down over hers. It was a hard, reckless kiss that left
her trembling when he at last released her.

Her fingers reached up to touch the golden mustache above the warm lips, the lips she ached to kiss once more, and he caught her hand and pressed his lips against the hollow of her palm.
Her breath sucked in at the exquisite sensation. She moved into his arms again, feeling her breasts turgid against his chest, feeling the ache that was becoming familiar deep in her stomach. Her arms wound about his neck. "Ahh, Wayne, I love you so!”

Hi
s fingers dug into her hair, kneading her scalp. “Dear God” he rusked, “if there is a woman for him, it you . . . part female, part wildcat-tomboy. Not some simpering ninny like my mother.”  He laid his forehead against Stephanie’s.  “How I hated her,” he muttered in the barest of whispers, “always badgering my father, himself, making life a hell when I was home. It was no wonder as a child I headed every summer for Cambria . . . and you. You are the best of me With you there might be hope.”

He felt Stephanie’s loins pressed against him, grinding urgently with her desire, and he forgot all else. "My God,” he groaned, "you’re a magnificent bitch, Stephanie!”

She reeled back as if slapped. Tears stung her eyes. Wayne grabbed her shoulders with an anguished moan. "I didn’t mean it like that!”

Her glistening black eyes searched his face. "I don’t understand you. I don’t know what you want
— or what you want me to be!”

"I don’t
— ”

The sound of the rifle shot ricocheted about them. They broke apart. "The bear,”
she breathed. "They’ve found the bear!”

The fragile moment of their tryst was broken; yet both were relieved at the interruption
— relieved for the time allowed them to sort out what had passed between them and gauge their feelings.

* * * * *

The next day, as they all sat around the oblong dining table toasting Jamie’s successful kill, Stephanie reflected on that revealing moment with Wayne. Her woman’s intuition told her that he wanted her badly. She watched him across from her, saw the habitual cynicism claim the handsome face but realized that this time the curl of the lips was a result of something going on at the table. Forcibly she brought her attention back to the conversation.

"I promise you, son, the bearskin shall lie in my office before the desk,” Stephen said at the table’s far end. He and Don Jiraldo had returned that evening from Santa Fe and despite his weariness he was elated at the news of the kill. The walrus mustache and Prince Albert whiskers did not conceal the flush of inebriation. "And every man-jack who enters my office
— from politician to peon — shall know my son can hold his own.” He rose, swayed, and raised his glass in another toast. "To the only man fit to inherit the largest tract of land on the North American continent . . . James Gallagher Rhodes!”

Jamie, Wayne, her mother’s face
— Stephanie saw the same indefinable expression on each of them. Only Inez, Rita, and the nine or ten guests who had drifted in to sample the famed generosity of the Rhodes dining table seemed unaware of the tension in the room as they again raised their glasses of imported champagne in toast.

Jamie’s chair suddenly tilted backward and fell over as he shot to his feet. His face wore a tortured look that was unbearable to watch. "I can’t stand it! I can’t take the credit, father. I couldn’t kill that bear. I froze! Do you understand? Cody killed it. Not me!” With a strangled sob he spun from the table and ran from the room.

Stephen’s florid face whitened. "You cowardly imbecile!” His voice thundered through the stunned silence.

CHAPTER 31

Stephanie watched from the veranda on the Castle’s west side as Ignacio and Julio shoveled the dirt from the pit they were digging beneath the cottonwood. Despite the perspiration that dotted her upper lip and rivuleted the valley between her breasts, she shivered — whether from the fact it was her grave they were digging or just the sight of the two loathsome men, she did not know.

Bodyguards her father called the two men, who went with
Him everywhere. Leeches, she called them . . . Ignacio, the fat bloodsucker, and Julio, the small, beetle-eyed tick. She would not hesitate to crunch both beneath her boot if she could. Cody would have fired them long before were they not personally hired by her father.

It was Cody who set the two henchmen to work, digging Stephanie’s mock grave. "When Yellow Dog returns,” he told her father, "tell him Stephanie died from cholera or whatever
— make sure he sees the marker along with the other under the tree.”

Stephen seemed satisfied with the deception. Not so
her mother, when she had learned of her husband’s egregious pact with Yellow Dog.  Hell had no fury like that of her mother’s.

"It won’t work,”
Wayne said, coming up behind Stephanie. He stood in the veranda’s shade, not touching her but so close she could hear his own irregular breathing. They had not talked since the day she had offered herself to him at the stream.

"Do you have a better suggestion?” she snapped. Why couldn’t she make him want her
— want her enough to marry her? "The idea is to stall for time.”

"And then what?” he demanded.

She tore her gaze from his eyes, which burned blue-hot like the center of a flame. Another second beneath that mesmeric flame and she would foolishly throw herself at him like the proverbial moth. Instead she watched the progress of the digging. The July sun shimmered the air, and against the rising heat waves the two Mexicans looked like ghoulish creatures. "After that I don’t know,” she whispered.

Absently her hand slipped up to wipe at the perspiration that collected at the V-neck of her open blouse. She looked back to find Wayne’s enigmatic gaze fastened on the curve of her breasts. Now perspiration dotted his temples. Her eyes dared his. "Unless you want to marry me.”

Wayne moved against her, trapping her between him and the veranda post. His hand cupped her breast. "You don’t understand, do you?” he asked before his mouth brutally possessed hers.

"
Senor
Raffin?” Pedro asked.

The two broke apart, and the houseservant looked at his sandaled feet with embarrassment. "El Patron wishes to talk with you,
Senor
Raffin.”

* * *
* *

"Mother?”

Rosemary looked up from the book in her lap, opened at the poem "Lady Geraldine’s Courtship.” It was her favorite of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry, and she sometimes wondered if she weren’t being foolishly romantic after all the years.

And what lay before her but more years? Empty years. Why did she keep hoping?

She laid aside the book. "Come on in, Jamie. I’m not really reading. Just sort of daydreaming. Talk to me.”

He stepped just inside the doorway.
“That’s what I most admire about you, Mother. Never in all these years since your return have you ever been too busy to talk to me and to listen to my own daydreams of helping people recover from the thousand and one minor illnesses that seem to claim their lives just as surely as a plague. An insignificant cough, a rusty nail, spoiled food. Instead, I’ve somehow ended up practicing law.”