Patricia Potter (10 page)

At once, Marisa was surrounded by young men, and Willow returned to Sullivan’s side. There was a quiet desperation in her friend’s usually calm eyes, and she hurt for him, even more at that moment than in the past, for now she, too, had been touched by the magic of attraction, of infatuation.

Marisa was six years younger than she, and Willow had taught the girl one year, the first year Willow had been in Newton. Marisa had been seventeen then, very bright and fast, but with a hell-bent streak that resulted in constant mischief and misadventures. Her father doted on her, which, Willow thought, was part of the problem. Marisa was altogether too intelligent to do nothing, and that was all her father allowed her to do: nothing.

Willow smiled at the girl, who looked embarrassed and startled before cautiously smiling back. Willow realized suddenly that Marisa had not expected her to be there, particularly on the arm of Dr. Sullivan Barkley.

Marisa suddenly broke away from the crowd surrounding her and hurried over.

“I have to talk to you,” she whispered to Willow, but her gaze fastened on Sullivan.

“Now?”

“Privately,” she said as she motioned toward the foreman who had accompanied her. He was standing in a corner, drinking punch, but his eyes were trained on Marisa. “Four dances from now,” she said. “Will you meet me outside? In back?”

Willow nodded, and Sullivan captured Marisa’s attention. “May I have this dance?”

Marisa’s usually merry eyes glittered brightly. She nodded, taking Sullivan’s outstretched hand, her lips trembling slightly.

With interest Willow noted how Sullivan was a much better dancer with Marisa than with her. Or maybe it was just the instinctive understanding between the two. Willow wondered how it would feel to dance with her stranger, and she felt an aching emptiness as she watched Sullivan and Marisa together, their expressions rapt, their movements in total harmony.

Willow had frequently thought Sullivan foolish for not courting Marisa, despite what she suspected were his reasons. Sullivan had a chronic illness, and he had barely more than a livable income, while Marisa was one of the wealthiest young women in Colorado. Pride, Willow often thought, could sometimes be a terrible affliction.

And Marisa’s father, who had once regarded Sullivan as a friend, now looked at him as an enemy. Anyone not wholly with him in his feud with Gar Morrow was against him. Sullivan was no longer welcome on the Newton ranch.

Willow knew Sullivan, knew his pride and stubbornness. She had recognized his embarrassment the first time she had seen him suffering a spell of malaria, alternately shivering with chills and burning with fever, and she knew he was determined Marisa would never have to endure it.

And yet, as she watched them, she thought no two people could be better for each other. Sullivan’s quiet compassion and Marisa’s spirit would complement each other.

The banker asked Willow for a dance, and then Mr. MacIntyre, mostly, she thought, due to his wife’s urging. Canton stayed by Gar Morrow’s side, but his gaze continued to rake the dancers and study each newcomer.

Some of the men became more voluble after trips outside, and Willow suspected a bottle was enhancing the rather bland punch. But such thoughts were fleeting because nothing stayed in her mind long other than “the man.” She wished she could put a name to him, for it was awkward, even in her thoughts, to think of him as the man, or the stranger. He didn’t seem like a stranger, not now.

“Ouch.” Bob MacIntyre’s yelp was loud enough to summon attention, and Willow’s face turned red as she realized she’d stepped on his foot.

“Let’s rest,” she said, and smiled at his grateful face as he returned to his wife.

Frustrated with herself, Willow went outside, avoiding the small circles of men who were surreptitiously dumping liquor into their cups. She walked to the front of the building, surveying the dirt street that ran through the middle of town, and the buildings that faced it. They were rickety and poorly built for the most part, thrown up quickly to serve the growing number of ranches in the area as well as the wagon trains heading west. But this was home to her. Although she missed the great forests in the East, she loved the sunrises over these plains and the sunsets across the purple mountains to the west. There was challenge here, challenge and growth and opportunity.

“Willow?”

She turned and saw Marisa. “You look lovely tonight,” Willow told the younger girl warmly.

Marisa didn’t smile. Instead, her tongue nervously licked her lips. “Thank you, but I came to warn you.”

Willow couldn’t stop a smile. “You mean the gunfighter? Then you can join everyone else. I don’t think there’s a person in town who hasn’t.”

“But…I met him, and he’s everything they say. I tried to convince him to go away and he wouldn’t. Papa, well, he’s…I don’t know, but he’s—”

“Obsessed,” Willow supplied sadly. “Before all this started, I thought he was my friend.”

“He’s not any longer. Please sell the ranch.”

“I can’t, Marisa. You know that.”

“But the man he hired, he’s—”

“He’s what?” Willow asked gently.

“Frightening. I think he really would…do something terrible.”

“Do you think he’d hurt the children?”

“I don’t know. I just know he took Papa’s money and he won’t leave.”

“Thank you for telling me.”

“I’m sorry, Willow. It’s just that Papa hates Mr. Morrow so much.”

“I know.”

A tear appeared in one of Marisa’s eyes. “Nothing is going right.”

“You mean Sullivan?”

Marisa looked up at her with surprise.

“Miss Newton.” The voice was harsh and Willow and Marisa turned to see the rough-looking trailhand, the man who had come in with Marisa and the foreman, watching them.

“Are you spying on me?” Marisa said angrily.

“I don’t think your pa would think much of you out here with her.”

Marisa started to retort angrily, then looked helplessly at Willow.

“Go on in,” Willow said. “We’ll talk another time.”

Willow watched the girl go in. Marisa had grown up a lot in the past two years. Now if only she could climb out from under her father’s bitterness.

Willow waited a few more moments, taking the time to search the skies for her favorite constellations—the scorpion, the lion, the hunter. All had special significance. Tonight the lion seemed to stand out the strongest.

She wondered if her stranger was also looking upward, and she remembered lines from
The Odyssey.
“Looks ever toward Orion and alone, dips not into the waters of the deep.”

Odysseus, she mused. He was thought by many scholars to be a solitary, restless wanderer, endlessly driven by a lust for new experience, by others as a man not rigid in his adherence to the heroic code of conduct, a man who often lied, used poisoned arrows, and definitely not beyond deceit, as proven in the fable of the Trojan horse.

And what kind of man was her hero? Kind, certainly. Heroic, definitely. A wanderer, probably. The ache returned. The confusion. The undefined yearning.

She didn’t know what interrupted the fanciful flow of thoughts…perhaps the sudden silence inside the hotel.

Afraid, she went inside and stopped at the doorway. Canton was holding Marisa’s hand, as if they had been dancing. Newton’s trailhand was facing Canton and Marisa, his fingers on his gun. Everyone else was backing away, the music had died. The silence was overwhelming.

Sullivan moved over to Marisa, drawing her away.

“She don’t dance with dirt,” the Newton cowboy said.

A smile played around Canton’s mouth. “You like to elaborate on that?” His voice was soft, the words slightly drawled. There was death in them, in the restrained tone, in the look of his eye. It was, Willow thought, the look of a snake ready to strike, just that concentrated, that implacable.

Men were pushing their wives and daughters out the door, then returning, choosing locations out of the line of fire. Willow knew she should leave, but she couldn’t. Her legs just wouldn’t function. Neither apparently could Marisa’s, despite Sullivan’s attempts to make her leave.

“Yeah,” the man said, sneering. “I heard of your reputation, and I don’t see nothin’ so special. And the boss wouldn’t want carrion like you touching his little girl.”

The Newton foreman was moving forward. “Yates, not here.”

“Yeah, right here. Where everyone can see who’s the best gun.”

“Newton wouldn’t want this.”

“But I do,” the man said. “What about you, Canton? Or are you a coward?”

The man in black just smiled.

Yates reached for his pistol, but before it cleared the holster, a shot rang out, and blood spurted, staining Yates’s shirt as he sunk silently to the floor. Marisa turned her now-white face into Sullivan’s chest, and Sullivan held her tightly against him.

Canton looked around. “He drew first.”

A number of heads nodded as if it were a question rather than a statement.

“I’m sorry to interrupt your party. I didn’t intend it,” he added, and spun around, leaving a room stunned by sudden death.

The Newton foreman went over to Marisa. “I think we’d better get home.” Sullivan relinquished his protective hold and went over to the fallen man, checking his pulse and shaking his head slowly. He looked up, his troubled look finding Willow. She could almost hear him across the room.

Now you know what you’re up against.

She heard a man behind her. “It’s starting, by God. Gunfighters, range war. There’s not one of us going to be safe.”

Willow watched as two men picked up the dead man and dragged him out. Everyone else quietly left, each one avoiding her, even Bob MacIntyre.

6

T
he drive back to Willow’s ranch was quiet and tense.

Willow had never seen a man die violently before, although she had been with both her father and Jake when they had died.

But her father had been in pain, and death was a release, and Jake had been ready to go and join his beloved wife. He’d simply gone quietly to sleep.

Sullivan looked at her in the light of the full moon.

“Now do you see what you’re facing?”

Willow took a deep breath. There had been so little reverence for life during those few seconds at the dance.

“But why did it happen?”

“I imagine Newton’s man was disgruntled that his boss had sent for a gunfighter. He’d wanted to prove he was as good as any professional. He really didn’t give Canton much choice.”

“There’s always a choice,” she whispered, still seeing the blood on the dead man’s shirt.

“Not for a man like Canton. And from what I heard, he’s a preacher next to Lobo.”

Willow’s hands tightened together.

“It isn’t worth it, Willow. Jake couldn’t know it would go this far, that Newton and Morrow would send for men like these.”

“But the ranch is mine,” Willow protested. “I’ve never had anything that was really mine before…and the children love it.”

“And if that man hadn’t come along a few days ago, Sallie Sue might be dead, and Chad. You certainly can’t depend on Brady. It’s too much for you.”

Willow thought of the house she had come to love, of the livestock that had become pets for the children. They had all flourished, particularly Chad. They loved the ranch as much as she did. Not only that, Jake left her the ranch to keep peace; she wouldn’t deserve any money from its sale if she violated that act of faith.

“Perhaps I could hire someone….” Her thoughts went to the sandy-haired stranger.

“With what, Willow?”

“Room and board. The boys can stay in the living room. And if it rains, I might have some money from the garden.”

“It’s dying, Willow. And what about Alex? He isn’t going to give up.”

But Willow wasn’t listening. The seed of the idea she’d just mentioned was blooming. There had to be a reason their stranger kept showing up exactly when he was needed.

They reached the ranch and Sullivan was grateful to see it still standing after the events of the past few days. “You’ll send for me if you need anything?”

“Of course,” she said, “and thank you.”

“You’ll think about what I said.”

“No,” she said with a mischievous smile.

“Dammit, Willow.”

“We’ll be all right, really we will,” she soothed him.

He read her mind. “You can’t depend on a guardian angel all the time.”

The smile left her lips. “I know. But somehow I know…I just know everything will be all right. Even Brady.”

“I wish I shared that optimism, but after tonight…”

She reached over and touched one of his hands with affection, quickly changing the subject. “You know Marisa is in love with you.”

He shook his head in denial.

“Now
you’re
closing your eyes to facts.”