Heart of the West (36 page)

It occurred to her suddenly that if someone were to hand her a glass of mulled orange wine she could drink it now and there was no one to shake his head at her. The thought brought her such a marvelous feeling of freedom that she smiled. Freedom, she decided, tasted like mulled orange wine.

She stepped back from the fire suddenly as the muscles in the small of her back and lower belly clenched and spasmed with another fierce pain. Her gaze flew up to the clock. Seven minutes had passed since the last one.

She drew in a deep breath, trying to ease the ache and her fear. She bit her lip as she looked at the rope hanging beside the front door, the rope that was attached to the fire bell on the roof. But she did not cross the room to pull it. She would wait a while longer. Perhaps these were only phantom pains. Perhaps Gus was even now riding into the yard with the doctor. She waddled back to the window. She could barely see the hitching rail beyond the porch; it had started to snow again.

Seven minutes later her monstrous belly clutched and spasmed again. She balled up her fists to keep from screaming, not from the pain but with frustration. She felt betrayed by her body, humiliated, that it would do this to her, decide to bring her baby into the world early, without waiting for its father or the doctor. Her gaze strayed back to the rope. There was only he, and he...

He called on her three or four times a day to be sure she was all right. Most times he stood outside on the porch, keeping a tight rein on his mouth and his hat carefully shadowing his eyes. He looked different and yet like a cowboy still in his sheepskin coat and the winter chaps Gus called woollies, which were made of goathide and worn with the hair on the outside. On days when the wind blew hard, he tied his bandanna over his hat so that it folded the brim down to cover his ears. On any other man it would have looked silly, but not on him.

Because of her he left the ranch buildings only for very short periods, just long enough to make sure the cattle weren't freezing or starving. He kept busy, though. She knew this because she watched him as she hovered in the concealing shadows cast by the curtains on her parlor windows. He chopped so much firewood that it was now stacked as high as the roofs of both houses. He fixed the loose corral poles. He spent hours in the barn, mending tack, she supposed, and shaping horseshoes and tools at the forge. When he wasn't working, when he was inside the buffalo hunter's cabin, she watched the smoke drift from his smokestack into the winter sky. At night a pool of lampshine spilled from the cabin's window. Sometimes she saw his silhouette cross in front of it. And once she saw him leaning on the hitching rail outside his front door, his hand curled around the neck of a whiskey bottle.

When he had to, he would cross her threshold only long enough to fill her woodbox and take out the stove ashes. She did not like having him in her house. He filled it with his smell, that mixture of horse and leather and Rafferty. A smell that lingered long after he was gone. When he was in her house, she couldn't stop herself from watching him, noticing things, like the way his hips moved when he walked across her kitchen. The way he held his head when he stoked the fire in the range and set the damper. The way his hair curled over the collar of his coat, and the way the bones of his strong wrist showed above his glove when he reached for a piece of wood. The way he never let her see beneath the concealing brim of his Stetson, never let her see his eyes.

This morning he had surprised her by bringing her the Christmas tree and setting it up in a corner of her parlor in a bucket of river sand. Politeness demanded that she at least invite him to stay for a cup of coffee, but she never quite got the words out and she breathed easier when he was gone.

Another violent contraction squeezed her back and stomach and she sucked in a sharp breath. She looked at the clock— seven minutes. She could deny it no longer: she was freshening and the only one to see her through it was a hell-bent cowboy who knew everything there was about the making of babies and nothing at all about the birthing of them. A hell-bent cowboy whose dark, fine-boned hands had touched many women, but none in the way he would have to touch her. A man she could hardly bear to look at because he frightened her with the wild and forbidden feelings he stirred in her heart. Yet she would have to undergo the most indelicate and frightening experience of her life before his terrible yellow eyes.

She tried to take a deep, slow breath. She would not let herself be afraid. Her gaze went back to the rope. If she rang the bell he would come to her, but it would be hours yet before she actually gave birth. Her hands curled, her fingers tracing the scars on her palms. She would do what had to be done, but she could not bear to have him in her house, to see her... as he would see her. Not in the house her husband had built for her.

She dressed carefully, as if she were paying a social call. She covered her hair with her black beaver bonnet. She put on black Limerick gloves and her traveling cloak, the one she'd worn the night of her elopement. Its voluminous folds barely met across the broad expanse of her belly.

She thought she could feel the weight of the clouds when she stepped outside. The snow was coming down heavily now. She had to stop a moment on the porch and let the bite of another contraction pass. Her gloved hands grabbed the rail, crushing the tiny glittering icicles that were suspended from it.

The blowing snow shrouded the whole world. She stepped off the porch and into the storm. The sharp-edged wind lashed the snow into a fury of whirling ice clouds. Within seconds she was caught up in a maelstrom of cold swirling flakes and white air. She couldn't see the buffalo hunter's cabin. She looked back to the new house. She couldn't see it, either, and she felt the grip of panic. She should have rung the bell. She should never have allowed her pride to keep her from ringing the bell.

She drew in a deep breath. She looked down and saw a path cobbled with frozen bootprints.

Yet she stood for a moment longer in the whirlpool of the storm, and a strange exhilaration burst inside her like a bubble rising through water and exploding on the surface.

She put her feet into the marks he had left in the snow.

Rafferty threw open the door. He closed his whiskey-blurred eyes for a moment as the wind-driven snow lashed his face. But not before he'd gotten a good look at the woman who stood before him—his brother's wife.

Melting flakes silvered the dark fur of her hat. Her face was a pale oval in the fading light, but her lips were full and very red. He could have dipped his head and kissed them. He was just drunk enough to think of kissing them.

Instead he hooked his thumb on his pocket, cocked his hip, and slouched against the jamb. "Well, 'pon my soul, if it ain't my starchy sister-in-law come a-callin'."

"Good afternoon, Mr. Rafferty." Her back was so stiff he was surprised she didn't break in the wind.

"It ain't, in fact, a
good
afternoon. And you don't have the sense God gave a prairie chicken. When a flurry kicks up like this, a body can get lost going from the house to the... woodshed," he amended at the last moment. He kept getting overtaken by this rather hopeless notion to try to watch his manners around her. To treat her like the lady she was and maybe show her that he had it in him to be the gentleman that he wasn't.

The snowstorm raged beyond them, but a tense silence filled the space between them. It thrummed like Indian war drums in his blood.

"I did not get lost, sir," she finally said. "I am right where i want to be."

He didn't know quite what to make of that, and he sure as hell wasn't going to ask. He took a stumbling step backward. It occurred to him how scruffy and disreputable he looked with his shirttail hanging out of his jeans and three days' growth of beard grizzling his jaw. He suddenly wished he was sober. He'd sure picked one hell of an afternoon to tie one on.

He gave her one of his surliest smiles. "Well, hell, step right on in and make yourself t' home." He started to perform a mocking bow and noticed the whiskey bottle in his hand. He drank deeply, then shot her a look that defied her to say something about it.

And for a moment he thought he saw fear in her eyes.

"You're drunk," she said.

"Nope," he said. "I'm still standing, and I'm still seeing only one of you. And I ain't got to feelin' randy as a tomcat on a hot night just yet. Definitely not drunk."

He took another swig of the whiskey, as if the situation could be easily remedied. He thought about belching and decided that would probably be pushing things too far. Christ, she really was driving him crazy. One minute he was trying to impress her, and with his next breath he was trying to disgust her.

She had knocked the snow off her boots and come inside, shutting the door herself and bringing with her the smell of wet wool and wild roses. She unclasped her cloak and hung it on the peg. She peeled off her gloves, then raised her arms to take off her hat. Her breasts lifted above the proud mound of her pregnant belly, and Rafferty's chest tightened, making it difficult to breathe.

Her lips parted as she tried to catch her breath. He wanted to take her face in his hands and kiss that mouth. He ached for her with a hunger that was a heavy hollow feeling in his gut. It didn't matter that she was great with his brother's child. He loved her. And he hated her for making him love her so, when it was so hopeless and so wrong.

He studied her out of angry, narrowed eyes. She had turned away from him, and her back was bowed slightly so that her shoulders looked small and vulnerable.

"Clementine..." He started to reach for her, then let his hand fall. "If you needed something why didn't you just ring the bell?"

She turned to face him. She regarded him out of wide, solemn eyes. "Because I cannot bear having you in my house."

His face tightened. "Yeah? Well, pardon me all to hell," he said. He took another long, hard drink of the booze so that she couldn't guess how her words had hurt him. The whiskey burned going down, and he almost choked on it. Her image blurred as he glared at her.

Then he saw a trace of a strange smile soften the severe curve of her mouth. "Oh, Rafferty," she said, her voice so low and aching that he had to lean forward to hear her. "What woman would be so brave as to open the door and invite lightning into her heart?"

He shook his head, thinking she must have said "house" and not "heart." Something seemed to explode inside his chest in a gush of pain and yearning, so that when he heard the wet splash he thought for one astonishing moment that it had come from him, that his own heart had burst.

Clementine took a startled step back and looked down. A puddle of pale straw-colored liquid was spreading over the pegged floor; the front of her gray wool skirt was dark with it. Her gaze flew back up to his, more surprised than embarrassed.

Rafferty, however, had hurtled past every other emotion on the spectrum and gone directly to holy terror. "Jesus Christ!" he exclaimed.

She started to say something, but just then her body jerked and spasmed and a low moan escaped past her clenched teeth. He could actually see her stomach contracting.

"Jesus Christ," he said again, more softly.

She took a couple of shallow, panting breaths. He could hear his own breath coming out fast and uneven, and the sound they made together was like the sough of the wind through the cottonwoods.

"As you can see," she said with utter calm, "I am having the baby."

"Jesus God." He took a step back and then another, until he bumped into the sawbuck table. He shook his head again, trying to clear it of the pumping blood that suddenly roared in his ears. "You got to stop this now, Boston," he said. "Wait until Gus gets back with the doctor."

She actually had the brass to laugh. He was in a gut-panic and she was
laughing.
"Oh, Rafferty... having a baby is hardly something that can be stopped once it's started."

He carefully set down the whiskey bottle. He raked the hair back out of his eyes with his fingers. "But I can't... but I don't know... shit! What the hell did you come to me for?"

That strange smile still hovered on her mouth, but he saw the fear now plain in her eyes. "Believe me, sir, if the good Lord had offered me any midwife other than an uncouth, drunken, and debauched excuse for a cowboy, rest assured I would have taken her."

A taut silence had come over the cabin, underscored by the hissing of the oil in the lantern and the spitting of the snow against the window. Clementine closed her eyes on a stifled moan of pain, and a flutter of renewed panic stirred Rafferty's guts.

"Should you just be standing there? I mean, shouldn't you be lying down?"

"Not just yet, thank you," she said, so calmly that he wanted to shake her.

"How long before... it happens?"

"Oh, I shouldn't think for hours yet."

Hours... He collapsed onto one of the nail-keg stools. He pressed his fingers against his closed eyelids. There was a pounding in his temples worse than a brass band. "God." He lifted his head and stared at her out of eyes that felt as dry as last year's tumbleweeds. "I ain't ever going to forgive you for this."

"Why, I do believe you are scared, Mr. Rafferty."

"'Scared' isn't the word for it." His throat clenched as he swallowed, but he did manage to fire a cocky grin at her. "I feel like I'm standing bare-assed naked in a nest full of rattlers."

On her face there was a softness now that he had never seen before. A tenderness. Her eyes were oceans deep, and he wanted to drown in them. "You remember that day I first came to the RainDance country?" she said. "You had brought that baby calf into the world after its mother was killed by timber wolves."

"I don't reckon it's the same, Boston."

"I don't reckon it's that much different, though, either," she said mimicking his drawl.

Her chin had gone up and she looked down her nose at him in that way she had that could make her seem so starchy. The thought of that little nose leading the way so bravely into the world made him want to gather her in his arms and hold her safe against his chest. She was hardly older than a child herself, and she was about to have her first baby; it was kicking up a blizzard outside, and she was alone, with no one to help her but an uncouth, drunken, and debauched excuse for a cowboy.