Heart of the West (46 page)

Deliberately she lifted her head and looked at good ol' Hannah in the fluted gold mirror. The lampshine was being especially kind tonight, but the wrinkles would come someday; no amount of strawberry cream was going to keep them away forever. The mirror showed Rafferty as well, a glass of whiskey balanced on his belly, cigarette smoke obscuring his face. Still long and lean and beautiful, after four years, lying naked on her bed.

Four years... She should end it now, leave him before he left her, and yet she just couldn't bring herself to do it. It was like Christmas Eve when she was a child. She'd always had all those dreams in her head of what she wanted—dolls and picture books and a pretty pink dress with lace ruffles—knowing full well her mother had barely scraped together enough pennies to stuff her stocking with some rock candy and an apple to fill up the toe. But still she'd had her dreams. And so she had stayed up throughout the night, wishing morning would never come, trying to draw out the moment and hold on to the hope of it.

Rafferty's gaze met hers in the glass. "Come here," he said.

She put on a seductive smile, a smile learned and practiced in a crib in the badlands of Deadwood, and went to him, discarding her wrapper along the way.

He took her hand and pulled her down beside him on the bed. "Hannah—"

"No," she whispered, laying her fingers against his lips. "Don't say anything. Just love me. Make love to me."

CHAPTER 19

The bear grass was in bloom the morning he came home. She saw him from her kitchen window. A man riding long-stirruped and easy on a big gray. Before him spread the plain, frosted lilac with the flowering grass; beyond him stretched the sky. She walked out the door and onto the porch. She touched the cameo at her throat, feeling the wild throb of her pulse beating in time with his horse's hooves as he rode toward her.

As he reined up at the sagging snake fence, her gaze fastened onto his face that was so much like the first time she'd seen him, all harsh planes and sharp angles, the black Stetson shadowing his eyes. Something shifted and tore loose inside her, a letting go of the pain of missing him.

And then he was on the ground and coming toward her and she was going toward him, not running, but walking fast and

smiling, smiling wide and laughing, really laughing, and if she hadn't loved him so much she would have thrown herself into his arms.

If she hadn't loved him so much.

"Howdy, Boston," he said, stopping first.

She said nothing, only smiled.

And so they stood like that, arms hanging empty at their sides, staring at each other across the space that separated them. A space that was the width of Gus McQueen's shadow.

She turned away from him, seeking an anchor in the familiar. The cottonwoods and larches, the ax-marked chopping block, the windrows of freshly mown hay curving like giant yellow commas down to the buffalo hunter's cabin. The wind came up, thickly sweet with the smell of the hay. It caught at her hair and snagged her skirts, whipping them around her legs. She raised one hand to her head to hold the flying strands of hair in place. The other she cupped beneath the swell of her pregnant belly.

Her gaze came back to his face in time to catch the flash of raw pain in his eyes before he shuttered them.

Moses thrust his head between them and butted her breasts. "Hey, now," Rafferty said, trying to smile but his mouth stayed tight. "That's no way to treat a lady."

Unable to touch the man, Clementine stroked the velvet gray neck of the horse. "Why don't you rub him down and come on into the kitchen? I'll put some coffee on the stove..." The words trailed off, caught in her throat as she stared up at his face.

"Oh, it's so
good
to have you home," she said, and for once she allowed the yearning in her heart to show in her eyes. "Please don't leave us again."
Don't leave me again.

"I'll stay." The wind snatched at a lock of her hair, plastering it to her mouth. He plucked it free, his fingers just brushing her lips. Her eyes drifted closed as she reveled in his touch, which was stolen and wrong and dangerous.

His fingers drifted down her jaw to the throbbing pulse in her throat. "I'll stay," he said again, "as long as I can bear to."

Clementine added a fresh stick of wood to the fire, punching with it at the coals. She heard the rasp of spurs on the porch, and her heart stopped, then started up again, drumming hard behind her breastbone.

She dropped the lid back on the stove with a loud clatter. She looked up, her face flushed by the heat of the fire, her eyes dazzled by the sunlight pouring through the open door. He leaned against the jamb, his weight slung on one hip, a thumb hanging off his gun belt, and his hat dangling from his fingers. It always surprised her, and frightened her some to see him again after a time apart. No matter how tame the country became around him, no matter how much of the wilderness was whittled away, he still seemed wild and lawless.

He straightened, tossed his hat on a wall spike, and headed for the washbasin, with no words, only the breath of the air he stirred as he passed her.

She pumped water into a blue-speckled coffee pot, casting quick glances over her shoulder. As he bent over the basin, his soft, faded blue shirt pulled taut across his back. The swell and play of muscle, the breadth of shoulder, the dark hair that grew thick and curling over his collar. The way he was...

A trembling started deep inside her. She tried to still it by crossing her arms and gripping her elbows.

He dried his face, slicked back his hair with his hands, and swung around. Their eyes met and parted in the same breath.

He plucked an apple—they came fresh now on the train from Washington—out of the milk-glass bowl that sat in the middle of her table. He bit into the red fruit with a snap. Juice dribbled out the corner of his mouth and he licked it off. Clementine watched and thought how it would be to press her lips there, where his tongue had just been.

She jerked around and picked up the coffee pot, almost dropping it, knocking it with a loud clang against the pump handle.

She scooped a handful of ground beans out of the box mill and put the coffee on the stove. He prowled her kitchen, crunching on the apple. The sound was too loud in the quiet room, the smell of it too pungently sweet. He looked at the photographs displayed on shelves along the far wall. Gus had built the shelves to store tinned food and jars of preserves. She had put her latest photographs there not to irritate her husband or to defy him, but to make a statement: this is who I am.

Rafferty studied the photographs, a frown tugging at his mouth. Like Gus, he resented this other love of hers, but not for the same reason. He was possessively jealous of what she photographed, jealous of the wild and raw land that he thought of as his. He didn't want to share it with others. Those others who came with saws to cut down the larches and the pines, with repeater rifles to pick off the last of the bighorn and the buffalo, with giant powder to pockmark the rugged buttes with mine shafts and defile them with black heaps of slag.

"You caught an eagle in flight," he said, and she warmed to the awe she heard in his voice.

She came up next to him, closer than she should have.

"I took it from the cliff that overlooks the buffalo canyon." In the photograph the cliff cast deep shadows on the light, wind-flattened grass. Yet the sunshine limned each feather on the eagle's magnificent wingspan. A bird silhouetted in lonely splendor against the emptiness of the sky. "They've built a nest near there," she said. She could feel the man beside her as if he were giving off a heat.

"I know, Boston." He turned his head, spearing her heart with his gaze.

They both fell silent as their memories joined hands. In the four years she had known him, she could count on her fingers the times she had been truly alone with him. Yet the most piercing memory to her was that day at the buffalo canyon when she had seen Montana through his eyes and understood a little why he loved it so fiercely.

She babbled now, making noise, piling up words like stones, building a levee against the tide of emotion that surged between them. "There's a marvelous new photographic invention that makes it possible to capture images in motion. It's a gelatin emulsion so sensitive to light that it takes only an instant to expose the plate. And one doesn't need to develop the plates right away; so it saves having to lug that blasted dark tent everywhere..."

Her voice trailed off. The tension thickened between them, hot and heavy as a chinook wind. "L-look," she said, pointing blindly at another photograph. "Here's one of, uh... a calf, just born." The calf stood on wobbling legs, his mouth open in a bawl. "And one of Gus busting a bronc for the spring roundup."

He laughed. "You gotta be quick to have caught my brother still in the saddle."

As he reached for the photograph, his arm brushed the side of her breast. He went utterly still, except for his breath, which she felt on her neck, warm and caressing. She could not remember how she had come to be standing so close to him. Her breast burned where he had touched her.

A cloud smothered the sun, and the kitchen darkened. The coffee began to burp on the stove. The wind gusted through the cottonwoods, making them moan.

His arm fell and he took a step back. He was breathing fast, his chest rising and falling. Unconsciously she pressed her fingers to the side of her breast where he had touched her. His gaze followed the movement of her hand, then came up to meet hers. She stared into eyes that were wild and dangerous. The percolating coffee and the gusting wind faded until all she could hear was the sough of their breath rushing through the kitchen like a summer storm.

A great whoop split the air like the clang of a fire bell.

"Gus," Clementine said. "He... he must have just seen your horse in the corral."

She jerked around and went to the window. Early that morning Gus had gone to the south hay meadow with the sorrel team and the mower. Now he was back, leading one limping horse and riding the other, with no mower. He rode bareback with their son, Charlie, perched before him on the horse's withers.

Clementine felt the rush of relief she got whenever Gus took her son away from her and returned him unharmed. She knew Gus was careful with the boy, but she never quite trusted him to watch Charlie as closely as she would. So much danger lurked in the Montana wilderness: rabid wolves and rattlesnakes and black bears and coyotes. He could so easily become lost in the tall grass or fall into the river. The Grahams' youngest child had died last spring in just that way. The river was her greatest fear.

Gus set Charlie on the ground and he hopped around on his sturdy three-and-a-half-year-old legs, chattering loudly. Clementine's breath caught as the sorrel mare shifted her weight and barely missed planting her hoof on Charlie's foot. These dangers were a constant thing, yet he was her baby no longer, and as Gus was always telling her, she couldn't coddle and protect him forever. Already she was losing him. To Montana, the land he was growing up to love as naturally as he breathed the wind-tossed air and ran through the tall grass and laughed beneath the big sky.

And she was losing him to his father, into that male world where cayuses were broken and rustlers hanged and calves branded. That masculine dimension that was so much a part of this place and that was still such an enigma to her, even after four years of dwelling uneasily within it.

She would lose him someday to that world, was losing him already. Yet she thought of the eagles that roamed the sky above the buffalo canyon. Her son would not grow up yearning to fly, yet afraid to try.

"He's growing up fast on us, Boston."

Rafferty's words, an echo of her own thoughts, pulled her gaze away from the window. He leaned in the open doorway again, his hat shadowing his face. But it couldn't hide the taut set to his mouth or the pulse that throbbed in his neck above the knot of his bandanna.

And she had heard the pain in his voice. He didn't leave only her; he left the land he loved and a brother he loved, and a little boy who meant as much to him as any son of his own loins.

Unable to bear it, she turned back to the window. Gus was leading the sorrel team down to the barn. Charlie pointed toward the house and said something that made Gus's head fall back in laughter. He bent over and swung his son up into the air. The sunlight glinted off two heads of caramel colored hair.

Something broke inside of Clementine in a terrible gush of guilt and pain. She wondered what kind of woman it was who loved her husband most when she was betraying him in her heart.

Gus always touched her so sweetly. His whispers to her in the night were of love and were lovely to hear; they soothed her heart. In his arms it was easy to let the strength of his feelings carry her along. To convince herself that it was enough. He needed her, and she wanted to be needed, needed to be needed. In return she gave him all she could. Her body, willingly and with joy, and her love. But there were degrees, so many degrees, of love. He would never make her burn.

She pushed words out of her throat, not even sure what she was saying. "That Charlie. He's gotten to where he can't sit still a minute. I've taken to tying a sheep bell around his waist when I'm at my chores, to keep him from wandering off when my back is turned. And he's talking lots more since you last saw him. Wears your ears out, he does, with all his questions. Do you know how a fish's gills work? And why the larches lose their needles in the fall and the pines don't...?" Her voice trailed off. There was only silence behind her.

She turned quickly and slammed into his chest. He steadied her with both hands on her shoulders. A stillness came into the room, a sense of breathless waiting and yearning. His eyes focused on her face and she held his stare, not daring to breathe, as the pressure in her chest built and built and built until it became unbearable.

His hands clenched hard, once, and he thrust her away from him. He looked seared by a fever, the skin pulled too tight over the bones of his face. His shirt fluttered with his heavy breathing. A crushing pain now filled the silence.

"You see why I got to go," he said, his voice raw. "Why I should've stayed gone for good this time."

"No!" She lifted her hand and he recoiled violently.

She let her hand fall. She snatched a half breath, feeling as if her lungs would burst. "Don't do this, Rafferty, please. It hurts me so much when you do this."

"Yeah, well I'm glad it hurts you, Clementine."

He took a step, not away from her but toward her, and her breath stopped again. His hand stole up to grip her chin. He brought his face so close to hers the moist heat of his harsh breath was like steam on her mouth. Her lips felt thick and hot, as if he had already kissed them.

His fingers tightened, hurting her. He brought his mouth closer still, almost touching hers. That close, but no closer. "Because loving you is killing me," he said.

And then he was gone and she was left standing in the middle of her kitchen floor, feeling shattered.

She heard the low rumble of the brothers' voices, Gus's laugh, and Charlie's piercing shrieks. "Raff'ty! Raff'ty! I was gonna help Papa mow the hay. But that stupid Daisy stepped in a gopher hole and hurt her foot. Papa's been teaching me how to rope, but he says you do it better. Will you show me now, Raff'ty? Now, now, now! Show me now!"

Her gaze focused on the kitchen table where a half-eaten apple lay, turning brown in the summer heat. She pressed her lips together hard to stop their trembling.