Indigo Blue (49 page)

“Dibs!” Hunter cried.

“My foot! I saw it first!”

Hunter shot triumphantly to his feet, his small brown hands curled into tight fists around his slippery catch. “I’m up to—” He broke off and frowned. “How many do I got?”

“Three,” she said with an impish giggle.

“No, sir! You’re cheatin’!”

“Pay attention to your ma during lessons so you learn to count, and I won’t be able to cheat.”

Holding the water dog threateningly aloft, Hunter lunged at her. With another shriek, she sloshed through the water to get away from him, her laughter chiming like crystal. “Don’t you dare, you little rascal! You stick that thing in my drawers, and I’ll drown you!”

“Hunter Chase Rand!” Indigo called from somewhere out of Chase’s sight. “You drop that water dog down her bloomers, and I’ll tell your pa. You mind your manners.”

Unintimidated, Hunter made a grab. The blonde clutched the waist of her underwear and fled a bit farther to get safely beyond his reach. She had a perfect little ass with plump cheeks that jiggled just enough to kindle a man’s imagination and make him wonder how soft she’d feel pressed against him.

Too late, Chase began to wonder if sitting here was such a champion idea. It had been a spell since he’d had a woman, and suddenly his jeans felt about a half-size too small at the inseam.

With the short attention span typical of a four-year-old, Hunter spotted another water dog and went chasing upstream after it. The angel with the turned-up nose went unnaturally still. Chase dragged his gaze upward from her breasts and found himself staring into the biggest, most startled-looking green eyes he’d ever seen.

She gasped and cupped her hands over her breasts. The next instant, she knelt in the water to hide her nether regions. Chase stared, unable to think of anything to say.

He settled for, “It sure is a hot one, isn’t it?”

She jerked at the sound of his voice, and her small face flushed.

“Chase Kelly? Is that you?”

Indigo stepped out from behind a stand of brush, her sleeping daughter, Amelia Rose, cradled in her arms. Her big blue eyes flashed with silver fire.

“Chase Kelly Wolf, for shame! What’re you doing, hiding up there? Spying on us? Didn’t Ma ever teach you any manners?”

“I was bored,” he admitted. “When I heard y’all down here, I didn’t figure you’d mind if I joined you.”

“Which we wouldn’t. If you had joined us.” Indigo came striding up the bank, her graceful legs flexing under her bloomers. She handed Chase his sleeping niece. “Make yourself useful while I find Franny’s clothes.” As she scampered back down the bank, she cried, “For shame, for shame. I beg his pardon, Franny. To say he’s an ape-brain would be a compliment.”

An ape-brain? Leave it to a sister to keep a man humble. It had been a while since anyone had dared to call Chase names.

“Hi, Uncle Chase!” Hunter came slogging from the water, his skinny little body glistening like wet bronze in the sunshine. “You wanna catch water dogs?”

Chase looked over the child’s bobbing head to see Franny, the green-eyed angel, trying to wade from the creek without showing off any of her charms. “I’m too stoved up with these ribs for water dog chasing, Hunter. Maybe another time.”

Keeping his gaze politely averted from the women, Chase watched Hunter return to the creek. Within seconds, the boy recovered from his disappointment and dove for another water dog. When Chase chanced another look in the women’s direction, Franny stood on the bank wearing a white choker-collared, long-sleeved blouse and a blue flared skirt, both of which clung to her wet body.

“Franny, I’d like you to meet my brother, Chase Kelly Wolf,” Indigo said sharply. “As I’m sure you recall, I told you the other day that he was home recuperating from a logging accident.”

“Pleased to meet you, Franny.” He thought “Fanny” would suit her better. “I apologize for interrupting your swim.”

Her face flooded with color again. “That’s quite all right,” she said in so low a voice he had difficulty catching the words. She swatted at her skirt and avoided his gaze. “Well, Indigo, I think I’ll be getting along.”

With that, she nodded in Chase’s direction, still not looking at him. Then she jerked on a bonnet with wide ruching that concealed her face. Even shadowed by the bonnet ruching, those eyes of hers packed a wallop. Chase gave her a lazy smile. “No need to hurry off, Franny.”

The tip of her turned-up nose pulsed scarlet. “I really must.”

Her eyes met his, and for an instant, Chase felt as if he had once again been sandwiched between two logs. Talk about pretty—this young woman gave a whole new definition to the word.

Not wishing to startle her, he tempered his voice and said, “I hope you’ll come again, Franny. Maybe next time you’ll stop by the house afterward and have some of Ma’s lemonade. It’s the best in Wolf’s Landing.”

For a moment, she froze there and stared at him, for all the world as if she couldn’t credit her ears. Then her face flushed crimson again. Without a word, she swept on by and disappeared into the trees, never looking back.

“That wasn’t very nice,” Indigo said in a quavery voice. “How could you, Chase? I didn’t think you had it in you to be so mean.”

Chase’s bemused smile disappeared and he turned to regard his sister, who stood near the water, hands on her hips, her tawny head tipped angrily to one side.

“It was mean to invite her for lemonade?”

“You know very well she’d never impose on Ma. Not to say Ma wouldn’t welcome her, and our father, too. But Franny’s too sweet to put them on the spot that way. You know how all the holier-than-thou people in this town are. Tongues’d buzz for a week if a woman of Franny’s occupation was to call on anybody.”

Chase digested that. “Did I miss something? The way you talk, you’d think she was the local whore.”

Indigo’s eyes went wide. “Surely you can think of a politer word than that, and it isn’t funny, you acting as if you don’t know. I swear, working with those rough-talking loggers has ruined you for respectable company.”

A vision of Franny’s sweet face swept through Chase’s head. With those gigantic, innocent eyes of hers, she couldn’t be a—No, it was impossible.

“Indigo, are you trying to tell me Franny’s a whore?”

She made a frustrated sound. “Don’t call her that, I said. What she is is my best friend, and I won’t have you saying mean things about her. If you’ve got to call her something, call her an unfortunate.”

Chase stared at his sister. She was dead serious. He shot a glance up the bank at the spot where Franny, the angel, had disappeared. Then he looked back at his sister, still unable to believe what he was hearing.

Franny, the blushing, green-eyed angel, was a prostitute?

MATTHEW COULTER AWAKENED TO A SOFT hissing sound, the faint smell of kerosene, and the dim glow of lantern light. A nearly blinding pain knifed from his left eyebrow into his temple, and as he struggled to focus, he was filled with a terrible sense of dread. When, his eyes had adjusted, he realized that he was abed in his childhood sleeping nook, a rectangular space with rough plank walls that was barely large enough to hold a cot, battered dresser, and small wardrobe.
Strange.
He’d been married five years ago and hadn’t stayed overnight at his folks’ place since. But there was no mistake. The familiar scent of his mother’s Irish stew drifted in from the kitchen to tease his nostrils, the air redolent with pan-browned lamb chops simmered to perfection, and the unmistakable fragrance of thyme, a spice his wife, Olivia, seldom used.

Matthew yearned to slip back into the darkness of sleep that had so recently enveloped him, but that niggling sense of dread grew stronger as he came more awake. Something was wrong, horribly wrong, but his head hurt so badly that he couldn’t remember what.

“Ma?” he croaked, and pushed up onto one elbow with a low groan because a sharp stitch in his side nearly took his breath away.

The room spun around him, the shadows that lurked beyond the sphere of light seeming to dance and sway. He wrapped a hand over the mattress edge to keep from pitching off onto the floor.
What in Sam Hill?
It felt as if every bone in his body had been broken, and the pain in his temple throbbed with each beat of his heart.

“Ma!”

A blurry female figure dressed in blue appeared in the archway. “Matthew! Thank God!” The lilt of her faint Irish brogue was as familiar to Matthew as his own voice. “We were starting to think you might never wake up.”

Matthew lay back against the pillow and closed his eyes as his mother sat beside him and placed a cool, soothing hand on his right cheek. The gesture reminded him of the early days of his childhood, when she’d checked him for fever or fussed over him when he was sick. He let himself enjoy the sensation for a moment before prying his eyes open again to fix his gaze on her face. Even at fifty-six, Hattie Coulter was a lovely woman, with black hair and eyes the deep blue of a summer sky. The years had lined her skin, but on her the traces of age were like the tiny cracks on the surface of an old oil painting, only adding to its beauty.

“Where’s Livvy?” Matthew asked hoarsely.

She withdrew her hand from his cheek and brought it to rest on her lap in a tight fist. Matthew knew then that something really was amiss. The thought that it might involve his wife filled him with panic.

“Ma?” he pressed. “Where’s Olivia?”

Hattie pushed to her feet. “I’ll be back in a moment, dear heart. I need to tell your father that you’re awake.”

Matthew watched her hurry from the room. Something dark hovered at the back of his mind—something so ominous and unthinkable that he didn’t want to acknowledge it. He flung his forearm over his eyes to shield them from the light and immediately regretted it when pain exploded in his left temple. Gingerly he explored with numb fingertips to discover that his head was wrapped in gauze. An injury of some sort? He couldn’t recall having an accident, but after working with horses most of his life, he knew he might not remember if he’d been kicked in the head.

Matthew had almost convinced himself of a horse’s kick when he heard the heavy tattoo of his father’s boots on the kitchen floor. An instant later, Matthew Coulter Senior filled the doorway, his weather-bronzed face creased with worry, his blue eyes shadowed with sadness. He slowly approached the bed, his wife hovering behind him.

In that no-nonsense way of his, he wasted no time hemming and hawing. In a brogue much more pronounced than his wife’s, he said, “Your ma says you don’t remember what happened, son, that you been askin’ where Olivia is.” He cleared his throat. “You need to brace yourself, boy, ’cause I can’t think of no easy way to say this, and I ain’t good with words at the best of times. Your Livvy was kilt by a gang of ruffians. Happened nigh onto three weeks ago now.”

“What?” Matthew couldn’t wrap his mind around the words bouncing inside his head. He pictured Olivia’s precious face, her soft brown eyes and gentle smile. Dead? She was so young. That couldn’t be. His father had to have it wrong. “No,” Matthew grated out. “No!”

His father shook his head and sank heavily onto the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry, son. It pains me more’n you can know to be the one to tell you such a thing. We loved her, too, your ma and me. She was like a daughter to us.”

Though the discomfort was excruciating, Matthew shook his head in denial. “No.”

Even as he whispered the word, Matthew knew by the dark sorrow in his father’s eyes that it was true; Olivia was dead. The ensuing silence drove that home to him. His ma didn’t interrupt to say that his pa had it wrong, nor did she offer Matthew any assurance that everything would come right in the end.

“How?” Matthew forced himself to ask. “Ru- ruffians? We don’t have . . . It’s safe hereabouts.”

“The sheriff says it was the Sebastian Gang.” Matthew Senior cleared his throat. “You’ve heard tell of ’em. We read about ’em in the
Crystal Falls Courier
a few months back. A couple of days after the attack on you and Livvy, they struck again over near Medford. Shot a boy dead for tryin’ to stop them from stealin’ some horses. Them Sebastians are wanted damned near everywhere west of the divide. A posse out of Sacramento was hot on their heels, and the gang took a detour through here, tryin’ to shake ’em off.” The elder man’s voice had gone almost as hoarse as Matthew’s. “You and Livvy—well, near as we could tell, you was on the way home from a picnic by the crick. The gang must’ve come out of the trees, all of a sudden like, and surrounded your wagon. You wasn’t armed, and there wasn’t much you could do. Livvy . . . she was—” He broke off as if the words had stuck in his throat. Then he passed a gnarled, work- roughened hand over his craggy face. “Well, we can only pray she went quick and didn’t suffer overmuch. Doc believes you was already unconscious by the wagon when it happened. Pistol-whipped, kicked after you went down, and then shot in the chest and left for dead. Doc did all he could, but you was in sorry shape with busted-up ribs, a hole near your heart, and an injury to your head he couldn’t fix. If not for your ma’s prayers and nursin’, we might’ve lost you, too.”

Wringing her hands in her apron, Matthew’s mother moved closer to the cot. “It’s true, dear heart. I’ve barely slept a wink since they brought you in. It’s been touch and go. We were afraid you might never come back around.”

Matthew wished he hadn’t. His sweet Livvy, dead? He didn’t want to believe it. How could something like that have happened and he had no memory of it?

Embarrassed to lose control in front of his father, Matthew rolled onto his stomach and pressed his face into the pillow to stifle his sobs, even though the pressure against his temple hurt like hell.