Kit Gardner (4 page)

Jessica blew an annoying curl from her eyes and leaned closer to examine the clean wound. “Mama thought he was a bad man, Christian. He was a stranger. Mama has told you about strangers, hasn’t she?”

“Is he going to stay?”

“I don’t think so. No, no, he’s not.”

“But he has to get better, Mama. So he has to stay. He killed that snake. He told me it would bite me. It was a rattler, Mama.”

Jessica’s teeth slid together. “Mama knows what it was, Christian. Hasn’t Mama told you about snakes? That they bite, and that you must stay away from them?”

She could almost hear the indignant dipping of his chin. “Yes...but I just wanted to touch it, and Mr. Stark said I shouldn’t.”

Jessica glanced sideways at her son. “Why don’t you believe what
Mama
tells you, Christian?”

He stared at her, eyes enormous pools full of guilt and suspicion.
Because you have to prove everything you tell me.
“I don’t know,” he said slowly.

“Listen to Mama, Christian.”

“Is he going to stay and fix our barn?”

Jessica glanced sharply at Christian, then shook her head. “Reverend Halsey is going to fix our barn...and the house...as soon as he finds the time. He’s very busy at the church.”

“No, he’s not. He doesn’t like the barn or our house. He told me, Mama. He told me I was gonna live in his house soon. He told me that, Mama.”

“That must have been before he talked to Mama.”

Christian’s blond brows quivered as he stared down at Stark. “He’s big, Mama. He could fix our barn good.”

A shiver took up residence in Jessica’s belly when her eyes skittered over the muscled plains of chest. “We’ll see.” She sat back on her heels and surveyed the clean wound. “I have to get bandages.” She pointed her index finger at her son. “Stay here. And don’t touch him.”

Christian gave her a look that bordered on patronizing. How like his father he looked at times like that. “I can touch him.
He
doesn’t bite, Mama. And
I
want him to stay.” His tiny voice crept after her as she ventured into the kitchen in search of bandages. “Did you see how he killed that snake, Mama? Did you see? I want him to stay. Can he, Mama? Can he? He could sleep in the barn and teach me how to throw a knife.”

Jessica shuddered and slammed the cupboard doors.

“Couldn’t he, Mama? Say yes, Mama.”

“We’ll see.” She entered the bedroom with bandages in hand. Yet, try as she might, there was no denying the peculiar thrill that shot through her at the thought...of a repaired barn, of course. Avram wouldn’t get to it by September, if then—if he ever would, stubborn man. And the house, yes, the house required so much. After all, the further it sank into disrepair, the more fervently Avram would insist she rid herself of it. Perhaps if these bedroom walls were sporting a fresh coat of white paint to rival that of Sadie McGlue’s, if the barn weren’t threatening to collapse at any moment, if she could prove her strawberry patch a worthwhile endeavor...perhaps then Avram would cease this nonsense about selling the farm.

Her eyes drifted over the undeniable bulge of Stark’s biceps, the sinewed length of forearm, those large, capable hands and long, long legs. Even with a shoulder wound, he looked quite able, even more so than a sulking Avram on a good day. And he was awfully tall, tall enough, it seemed, to accomplish just about anything.

“We’ll see” was all she said.

I
nch by inch, Rance pulled himself from the sucking depths of a fathomless pit. The light drew him, and something more, a touch upon his brow, soft as thistledown, upon his lips, something cool, and then another touch...something tapping upon his closed eyelids, first one,
tap-tap-tap,
then the other.

“Wake up.”

A voice, bereft of all softness, all compassion, all the warmth his jaded ear sought, loomed out of the pervasive gloom. The voice brimmed with impatience, and the tapping upon his eyelids hovered near an agitated poke.

“Wake up, wake up.”

A growl blossomed in Rance’s chest, struggled up his parched throat and spilled from his lips. The tapping on his eyelids stopped. Only then did the heat in Rance’s left shoulder swell, then focus into one searing throb of pain.

He’d been shot. He knew this from both instinct and experience, even while all else hovered just beyond his grasp. If only the fog would part. If only he could move. Who the hell had shot him?

The poking resumed upon his eyelids.

“Wake up, wake up.”

A child’s voice.

Rance forced open one eye. Sunlight blinded him and stoked yet another ache, this one dull, at the back of his head. He squeezed his eyes closed and rolled the lump on the back of his head over whatever it was he lay on. Something soft, as if placed there for his comfort. Who the hell would do that?

“Wake up, Mr. Stark.”
Poke-poke.

Stark...Stark. His mother’s family name, and not truly an alias, then, but unrecognizable. Why Stark? And who was this little person? Memories slammed about in the throbbing recesses of his brain. Oh, yes, the boy, the woman.

Frank Wynne’s wife.

Rance wrapped his fingers around a thin wrist, stilling that poking, then slowly opened his eyes. The fog lifted, and realization flooded over him the way sunlight flooded the room. The boy was perched over him—Christian, she’d called him—his jaw set and his blue eyes filled with an accusatory look.

Rance released that tiny wrist and felt his lungs deflate of all air. The boy was the image of his mother, clear to the thrust of that tiny chin. And just like his mother, he was small, compactly made, dressed in something that looked like it had once been bleached white and starched crisp beneath a loving hand. That grimy chin jutted forward, and one pudgy finger looked as if it yearned to poke into his nose before some silent reprimand brought it instead to scratch idly at his cheek. And still those hollow blue eyes probed unflinchingly through a curtain of straight blond bangs, just as they had from that photograph pressed in Frank Wynne’s locket. The locket tucked inside his watch pocket.

“My mama shot you.”

Rance rubbed his eyes and resisted a sudden, irrational urge to laugh. Shot by a woman... He could still see her there, looking as if at any moment she might crumple beneath the weight of the rifle. All that blond hair, tossed about by the wind, blinding her, distracting him. The hair...so different from her photograph that he might never have recognized her had it not been for her eyes, that unmistakable sorrow lurking deep there.

His fingers touched the bandage. Frank Wynne’s wife had shot him. The irony of it all. Had she known who he was, she might have left him to bleed to death in all that dust. Or she might have shot him again. But she didn’t know who he was, nor could she possibly guess. After all, what man in his right mind, a man still wanted for murder, would find himself within a fifty-mile radius of the home of the man he’d killed? And he still didn’t understand in the least any of his reasons for coming here—as if understanding it would have made it any less foolish. Hell, he deserved to be shot.

He had to get the hell out of here.

“My mama’s never shot anything. But she shot you. She thought you were a bad man. But you killed the bad snake, so she put a bandage on you.”

Regret, uncomfortable and entirely unknown, sliced through Rance, and he shifted his shoulders, as if he could shrug off any hint of compassion, of weakness, of that damned squirming that filled his gut whenever he met the boy’s eyes. Pain cut through his shoulder, spiraling down his arm and through his chest. He released his breath in a long wheeze. “Where is your mama?”

“Out back.” The boy gave Rance and his shoulder wound a deeply suspicious look. “You’re an outlaw.”

“I’m not an outlaw.” Rance shoved himself up on one elbow. The room tilted, then righted itself. He’d ridden in worse shape. He could sure as hell manage it now. Why
had
he come here? Damned stupid of him.

“Do you rob trains and stagecoaches?”

The boy looked altogether too anxious about that. Rance glowered at him, and pain sliced through his head at the mere shifting of his brows. “No.”

“This is my mama’s room,” Christian said with a slight narrowing of his eyes. Again the accusatory look. “You got blood on my mama’s hooked rug. She’s gonna have to clean it again. She’s gonna be mad.”

“She’s already mad at me.” And none of it had to do with him sullying her damned carpet. Frank Wynne’s carpet, in Frank Wynne’s house. Frank Wynne’s wife. Rance allowed his bleary gaze to roam about the sun-dappled room. Odd, but he couldn’t imagine this soft, gentle woman’s room, with its lace curtains and embroidered white coverlet, its corner rocker and carved armoire, its freshly cut white roses and prominent Bible, belonging to Frank Wynne. Toothy, lecherous Frank Wynne. A boastful, cheating Frank Wynne, yammering tale after tale of the women he’d had in every cattle town from Denver to Abilene as he chewed on his cigars.

His widow had a narrow waist beneath her loose-fitting dress, an undeniable length of legs hidden under those flapping skirts, full breasts that swelled from a narrow sweep of ribs.

Frank Wynne had bedded that woman, on this bed.

Rance heard his teeth click together, and he tore his gaze from the four-poster, forcing himself to his feet. He steeled himself against the inevitable pitching of the floor beneath his feet, gripped one of those fat mahogany bedposts, only to find himself staring at Frank Wynne, a dapper, sleekly combed Frank Wynne, framed in gilt and poised in loving memory upon a dressing table directly across the room. There he sat, Frank Wynne, amid several crystal flacons and an ivory-handled hairbrush, all cushy and cared-for upon a delicate sweep of white lace. A most precious spot for a departed husband to be revered from the stool set before that dressing table. A stool where his wife no doubt perched every night to brush all that curling gold hair.

And then Rance met with his reflection in the dressing table mirror. Big and dark, unshaven and smelling like his horse. He didn’t belong here, in this room, in this house. He’d killed the woman’s husband, left the boy fatherless.

Why the hell had he come here?

“You’re bigger than my pa was.”

The boy peered up at him through his bangs. Rance shifted his teeth and released his grip upon the bedpost. Slowly he moved across the room and through the open doorway. He balled his fists, and pain shot through his left arm. He entered a short, dark hall, then ducked into a small parlor when the place started spiraling about him. He took two steps toward the curved settee as Christian scooted around him.

“You can’t go in there,” the boy said, his chin tilted with its characteristic stubbornness. “Mama doesn’t let nobody in the parlor. Not even Reverend Halsey.”

And certainly not a man who smelled like a horse. Rance leaned his good shoulder against the door jamb and willed the spinning to stop. No, he wouldn’t want to disturb her parlor, with its precisely pleated white curtains hanging at the windows, the creamy satin settee and nearby overstuffed armchair. A soft, womanly room. The furnishings were sparse, the knickknacks few, but each had its proper, exact location. And the room bore not a trace of dust, was laced instead with a fleeting lemony scent. Somehow he’d expected the house to be as gray and bleak and dry within as it was from without, not cool and fragrant, smelling of bleach and lye soap, of sunlight and roses, of woman.

Rance regarded tiny, grimy Christian. “Where’s the door?”

Christian jabbed a finger toward the hall behind Rance. “In the kitchen.”

Rance turned about and again ducked into the shadowy hall. Damned ceilings were too low. The whole damned house was too clean, too damned small. He felt like a murderous trespasser. He had to get the hell out of here. He needed air.

Again Christian squeezed past Rance, reaching the sagging back door with a boastful half smile, as if he’d just won a most prestigious race. Yet with every step Rance took toward him, the grin faded beneath a cloud of suspicion descending over that dirt-smudged face. The boy seemed to be peculiarly fascinated with Rance’s bare chest, the bandaged shoulder.

Rance’s boots scraped against white floorboards, and he jarred a table set far too close to the door for a man to navigate with any ease.

“Look what you did,” Christian said, shoving a finger at the water sloshing out of a delicate vase of lavender flowers resting in the center of that table. “You got Mama’s doily wet. And you have to take off your shoes. See? The floor’s all dirty. My mama will be mad at you.”

“Yet another reason,” Rance muttered, twisting his way around the table and chairs. He paused in the sagging door frame, one boot poised upon the stoop. From a good four feet below him, the boy leveled a challenging look at him, which Rance returned before shoving the door wide and lurching through it.

He had to pause beneath all that sun and dusty heat that suddenly filled his lungs and set the blood pounding in his temples. His shirttails flapped in the hot breeze, yet perspiration instantly dotted his forehead and wove thick rivulets down his chest. His shoulder throbbed. Damned woman. She’d nearly killed him.

The boy materialized before him, squinting up at him, one thin arm jabbing at the ground. “Mr. Stark, your knife.”

Rance glanced at the black handle protruding from the dead rattler lying at Christian’s feet. His throat was parched, closing up on him, and the sweat burned his eyes. “Don’t touch it.”

The boy thrust out his lower lip, blond brows diving indignantly over his nose. “I didn’t.”

Rance forced his gaze about. “Where’s your well?”

Christian lingered over that snake, over that knife, and Rance thought he was weighing the risks of disobeying. And then he darted past Rance with such a flourish that he nearly toppled him in the dust. Rance made it to the well and, without hesitation, plunged his head into a full bucket of cool water resting upon the stone ledge. He surfaced, eyes closed, mouth opened to retrieve the water that spilled down his face. The water plunged down his dry throat and washed over his chest and into his waistband. A growl tremored through him, and again he dunked his head, surfacing to sputter and spew water with a vigorous shake of his head. Another growl rumbled through his lungs. That done, he leaned his elbows on the well’s edge and hung his head, listening to the droplets plopping deep into the well and the fading of the blood rushing in his ears. He forced the stones into focus. They blurred, then focused again.

He listened to the lonely creak of the wooden windmill.

There. Now he could ride. He’d be fine. Just fine. He’d been shot before, dammit, and he’d survived, though he vaguely remembered he’d found recuperating a hell of a lot more appealing than mounting his damned horse and galloping off into the barren prairie, particularly when recuperation meant a week spent beneath the gentle ministrations of some soft and eager little saloon gal.

His horse. Where the hell had he left his horse? Why couldn’t he remember?

He gripped the ledge and forced himself upright, then turned. Frank Wynne’s wife stood not two paces from him, an empty bucket in one hand. But no rifle.

A peculiar tightening filled his chest as the wind whipped her hair about her face and her eyes darkened to a deep blue. He wondered if she might try to kill him again. One hit on the head with that bucket could do it.

“Mr. Stark, you should be lying down.” Her gaze darted to Christian and narrowed.

“I didn’t do anything, Mama. He woke up.”

“You don’t look well, Mr. Stark.” He wished she’d stop calling him that. And looking at him like that, as though she feared he might topple into the dust at any moment. She seemed about to move a step nearer, and he gripped the ledge behind him.

“Ma’am, my horse. And I’ll be going.”

She blinked at him and dropped the bucket. “I rather think you won’t be going at this moment, Mr. Stark. You’re not fit to sit a horse. Your eyes are glassy. Your face is white as death, and your wound...” Her full lips compressed, then parted, and Rance was reminded of a pink rose in full bloom. “It’s beginning to bleed through the bandage. You might die out there on the hot prairie, and I would then be a murderess.”

“You didn’t seem to give that much thought, ma’am, when you shot me.”

“I thought you meant to harm my son, sir. I would gladly kill anyone with such a purpose.”

Yes, he believed she would, this small woman with the proud chin and tilted nose, even if she couldn’t shoot, or even hold a rifle. Not at all the sort of woman Rance would have ever envisioned married to Frank Wynne. How the hell had she allowed herself to become the man’s wife?

Something dripped into his eye. Water... No, the sweat again, beading on his brow. He felt the heat pulsing in his skin. The world resumed its spinning. Damn.

Frank Wynne’s wife moved swiftly, her grip surprisingly firm upon his good arm. A warm, lemony scent seemed to emanate from her, so fleeting he would have been compelled to lean closer to her to fill his lungs with the elusive scent. Rance felt his chest expand, and fiery talons clawed at his shoulder.

“Ma’am.”

“Hush, please, Mr. Stark. You need to rest. And get out of this sun. I do rather owe you, do I not?”

Owe him? If only she knew.

“No, ma’am, you don’t owe me.” He tensed his arm, resisting her tugging, and she glanced swiftly at him, a frown of concern hovering over her brow. He stood a good eight inches taller than she, and a soft haze had fallen over his eyes, yet he could detect the dusting of freckles upon her nose. As if she had been kissed by the sun. She looked God-almighty young.