Daisies In The Wind Page 22

  A wan smile broke across the seamed features. Her sparse eyelashes fluttered wearily closed. “I’m ... glad. You’re a fine young woman,” she murmured. “You’re special, Rebeccah. And good. You have a ... sensitive heart. I knew that from the very first. Not at all like Clarissa....”

  What did that mean? Startled, Rebeccah could only gaze at Caitlin’s shuttered eyes. Not at all like Clarissa.

  She didn’t understand. But it was late, and Caitlin was too exhausted to endure even a single question. Noting the darkness that had come over the mountains, Rebeccah realized it was past time to be headed home.

  She found Wolf downstairs talking in low tones with Emily Brady. Billy had fallen asleep across the sofa.

  “I’m going to sit up with Caitlin tonight so Wolf can get some sleep. Billy needs to sleep too,” Emily commented with a worried glance at the boy. “He’s plumb tuckered out from worrying about Caitlin all last night. They were both up until dawn.”

  “She’s sleeping at the moment.” Rebeccah noted the chill that had seeped into the room and immediately took the Indian blanket folded across the back of the sofa and draped it across Billy’s inert form. She wanted to reach out and smooth the hair back from his brow, but, conscious of both Wolf and Emily watching her, she refrained. Instead she went to the fire and poked at it until the embers stirred to a brighter blaze.

  “I’ll be going now,” she said, reflecting with sudden self-consciousness that she had betrayed enough motherly instincts for one night. If she wasn’t careful, they would all see how concerned for Billy she was.

  “I’ll take you home,” Wolf said, rising and striding toward the door.

  “That’s not necessary.”

  “Don’t argue. Emily, I’ll be back within the hour.”

  He took Rebeccah by the arm before she could protest further and propelled her out to her buckboard. “Look, I need to talk to you anyway. I’ve been sending wires all over the west, but no one seems to have a handle on where this Neely Stoner might be,” he told her as he lifted her onto the seat. He deftly tied Dusty behind the buckboard, then sprang up on the seat beside her with an agile leap. “I’ve got a hunch he’s close by. If you think I’m going to let you traipse around at night alone with him and those other varmints gunning for you, you’re dead wrong, Rebeccah. And if you say one word about not wanting to be beholden to me, I’ll personally wring your neck,” he promised.

  But his tone was almost caressing, and she gazed at him in surprise. “I’m ... very pleased for the company,” she said meekly. “I only wanted to spare you any inconvenience, since I know how worried you are about Caitlin,” she explained.

  “You’re not an inconvenience, Rebeccah.”

  Snowflakes danced across her cheeks, but a tiny warm flame shot through her at his words.

  Suddenly the wind howled across the open land with an icy blast that made her shiver. Wolf’s strong arm slipped around her shoulders and pulled her close against the warmth of his body.

  “Better?”

  “Yes ... much better.”

  They rode in silence. It was almost unbearably wonderful to sit like that, with his arm around her, feeling cared for, protected. A longing grew deep inside of her. Sweetly hopeful emotions that she had never experienced before sprouted within, like warm, fertile seeds blooming in a barren garden.

  “I overheard what you said to Billy at the schoolhouse today. About change. I want you to know that I appreciate your talking to him like that. It won’t be easy for him if Caitlin—”

  “She’ll get well,” Rebeccah said quickly. “She must.”

  “I don’t make it a habit to lie to myself, Rebeccah, or to anyone else,” he said quietly. “I’ve faced some hard things in my life, and this is one of the hardest, but Doc Wilson doesn’t hold out much hope. He thinks it’s only a matter of a day or two.”

  “Oh, no!”

  He halted the horses as she began to cry. Both arms wrapped around her, and she was pressed up hard against the roughness of his coat, inhaling both his warm, comforting scent and his reassuring strength. “You’re a baffling woman, Rebeccah Rawlings,” Wolf muttered.

  He was stroking her hair with gentle fingers, comforting her in her grief, when she knew she ought to be comforting him.

  “You’re so calm,” she blurted. “So strong.” She leaned her head against his chest. “Were you this strong when Clarissa died, Wolf?”

  She felt him tense. Every muscle went taut, and his sharply indrawn breath sounded loud as a drum roll in her ears.

  “Haven’t you learned by now that I don’t care to discuss my wife?” He released her abruptly, turning away.

  Rebeccah, her face still streaked with tears, realized she had again made a terrible mistake. Of course she knew that every time she mentioned his wife, Wolf either pulled away or worked himself into a fury. But she’d hoped by now, based on what Caitlin had said, that he was beginning to recover from her death, that he was starting to fall in love again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said miserably, feeling a weight like an anchor in her chest. “I know you must have loved her to distraction if even the mention of her name causes you such pain.”

  “Loved her to distraction?” He cracked out a hoarse, bitter laugh. “I hated her more than any human being I’ve ever known.”

  Blood pounded in Rebeccah’s ears. She swung around to stare at him incredulously. “Hated her?”

  It didn’t make sense. It seemed impossible to believe, based on the assumptions she’d been making ever since she’d heard about his marriage—but the harsh expression on his face and the banked fury in his eyes told her it was true.

  “I thought you were still grieving for her. I thought no one would ever replace her.”

  “Rebeccah, it’s wrong to speak ill of the dead, so I won’t say much about Clarissa. But what would you say about a woman who gives birth to a child and then decides she’s bored taking care of him, is tired of staying home every night tending to her family, and wants only to go out dancing and drinking whiskey with any cowpoke who winks at her? What would you say about a woman who took to lying to her husband, sneaking out behind his back with gamblers and drifters and riffraff, who left her own baby home all alone?”

  “She did that—to you and Billy?”

  He nodded grimly, his breath coming out in short white puffs as he spoke. “I knew the marriage was a mistake almost immediately. I met Clarissa only a few months after I met you that first time in Arizona. She was eighteen years old, beautiful and full of life, always laughing, restless for fun. Oh, we had fun together, that’s one thing I can say. I was never bored in those days with Clarissa. She enchanted me.” He paused, staring out at the vast expanse of glittering stars as if searching for answers to questions beyond comprehension. “I think there was always something restless and discontented in Clarissa, a coldness and an almost defiant wildness, but I was too much of a lovesick fool to see it. Maybe I just didn’t want to see it. Or maybe I thought that if she loved me enough, I could change her, make her happy. I knew I wanted her more than I’d wanted any other woman I’d ever met.”

  Rebeccah watched his face, her heart aching. All those nights on the run with Bear in Arizona after she’d met Wolf at the hideout, when she’d been thinking of him, dreaming her foolish little-girl dreams, he’d been pursuing and marrying Clarissa. And starting his family with her. Within months, Wolf told her, Billy had been conceived.

  “She was excited about having a baby at first, but she hated it when she started getting larger. Clarissa was so proud of her figure. I thought she’d be fine once the baby was born and she went back to her normal size and shape, but it soon became obvious that something was wrong. She didn’t seem interested in Billy. I mean, she fed him and changed him, but she didn’t like rocking him to sleep, she never sang to him or seemed to want to hold him—or even talked to him much. She told me she was going loco staying home with a crying baby all day.

  “I had taken a job as
a deputy in Texas.” Wolf’s voice was flat, almost emotionless, but his eyes shone with remembered pain. “The pay wasn’t much, but I managed to scrape together enough money to pay a local Mexican woman to come help out with the chores and the cooking—and with Billy—so that Clarissa would be happy. But she wasn’t happy. One time I came home to supper and she was drinking whiskey. Entertaining a gambler named Stone Dillon. Right in our front parlor.” His eyes narrowed with anger, and he clenched the reins until his knuckles whitened. “And Billy was squalling upstairs, hungry, his swaddling clothes sodden, but she was too busy to go to him. I went crazy. We had a terrible argument, and I nearly killed Dillon on the spot. Clarissa cried. She begged my forgiveness. She could do that mighty prettily too,” he said with a short bitter laugh. “She swore upside and down it would never happen again; she picked up Billy and started cooing to him and covering him with kisses. I thought maybe she’d realized she had to change her ways. But then I got called away to Waco to testify at a trial, and when I got back a few days later, the worst thing of all had happened.”

  “What could be worse?” Rebeccah whispered, her heart going out to him. The painful memories were etched deep within his eyes, and she longed to gently kiss away the grim, tormented set of his mouth. “Tell me, Wolf,” she said in a low tone, sensing it would be healing for him to talk about it, to purge such awful memories from his mind.

  “I came back from Waco a day early. It was late at night, but I’d ridden straight through the day and evening to reach home—to be with Clarissa, to see my wife and son.”

  “And?” Rebeccah breathed, feeling a prickly dread begin to grow.

  He stared straight ahead. “And I found Billy in his crib, covered with flies, burning up with fever. And no Clarissa.”

  “Wolf!”

  “He was screaming, sobbing loud enough to wake the devil—as ill as I’ve ever seen a child, Rebeccah—and he was all alone. Alone, damn it. Clarissa, it turned out, was in some saloon in town, hanging all over Stone Dillon while he cleaned up at five-card stud.”

  “How could she do a thing like that?”

  “She claimed Billy wasn’t sick when she left, that he was only asleep. As if that made everything right.”

  Wolf turned to meet her gaze. “After that I knew I couldn’t trust her to care for Billy,” he said heavily. “Something was missing inside her, some bond between her and the boy—between her and me too. I wrote to Caitlin and asked her to come live with us so that I would know Billy would be looked after whenever I wasn’t there. But Clarissa didn’t wait for Caitlin to come. She up and left one morning, ran off with Dillon and didn’t even leave a note.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I let her go. I was relieved, if you want the truth. It hit me hard, how wrong I was about her, the weakness of my own judgment. It shook me badly. That she could run off and leave her child like that and never even write to ask how he was—” He broke off, as if aware of the heavy bitterness in his voice. When he spoke again, his tone was clearer, calmer, but just as solemn. “She died three months later—caught in the cross fire in some saloon fight in ‘Frisco. She was with another gambler by then, I don’t even remember his name. Larson, maybe. Earl Larson. Not that it matters worth a damn.”

  Rebeccah sat beside him in stunned silence as the horses restively pawed the ground and a frigid gust of wind sent the ends of her hair flying. Shyly her hand stole out to clasp Wolf’s, still taut on the reins.

  “I’m sorry.”

  The words sounded hopelessly inadequate, and she immediately cringed at having uttered them, but to her surprise Wolf suddenly turned and swept her into his arms.

  “I’ve never told a soul that story except for Caitlin. We left Texas and moved here, and as far as anyone else knows, Billy’s mother died of cholera in her own bed. My son will never know that his mother abandoned him. He keeps a picture of her by his bed—but I’ll be damned if I’ll keep one on the mantel and look at it every day.”

  Fury suffused him again, but as he stared into Rebeccah’s wide, worried eyes, the tension evaporated from his body and the anger died out of his face.

  “I’m not sure why I told you all this.”

  “Perhaps so I’d have sense enough to stop bringing up her name,” she muttered ruefully.

  At this he laughed. His eyes softened, and his spirit suddenly seemed to grow lighter. She had that effect on him. “That’d be a pleasant change, Rebeccah,” he teased.

  “When I think how many times I’ve thrown her in your face!”

  “Maybe you can make it up to me,” he suggested with a hint of a smile, watching her eyes widen and glow in the moonlight.

  “Do you have any suggestions how I might do that, Sheriff Bodine?” she questioned softly, amazed at her own boldness.

  His deepening grin was her reward. “Matter of fact I do.”

  But as he pulled her up against him on the cold seat of the wagon and Rebeccah felt her limbs go soft as candle wax and her heart flutter like a mad, wild bird, there came the quick clatter of hooves and rustling of brush on the road behind them.

  Whoever was coming was riding fast up the trail. In an instant Wolf had thrust her from him and drawn his gun.

  Twisting on the seat, Rebeccah peered through the darkness and saw Chance Navarro riding over the gray-shadowed ridge directly toward them. She recognized his wiry build and jauntily set derby, illuminated in starlight as his bay bore down on them.

  “Whoa,” Chance called, and reined in smartly beside the buckboard.

  It sounded to Rebeccah as if Wolf was grinding his teeth.

  “What a lucky chance running into you here, Rebeccah. I was just on my way to your place to see if something was wrong.”

  “Wrong? Why would you think ... oh!”

  Her hands flew to her throat. “I was supposed to meet you for supper at the hotel tonight! Oh, Chance, I clean forgot. I’m so sorry. Caitlin Bodine took ill, and I was helping out at the Double B. Everything else completely slipped my mind.”

  Chance was no longer looking at her. He and Wolf were glaring at each other, sizing each other up like two hound dogs ready to do battle over a slab of raw meat.

  “I’m real sorry to hear about Mrs. Bodine,” Chance said, turning back to Rebeccah at last.

  No, you’re not. You couldn’t care less about Caitlin, she realized with a flash of insight. You only care about being cheated out of time with me. She had been meeting Chance in town for supper once a week since the schoolhouse dance and had even cooked Sunday dinner for him once out at the cabin. And then there had been their picnic. They’d brought a basket of food down to the stream, and he’d played the mouth harp and later carved a rose from a block of wood and given it to her.

  He was good company—lighthearted, attentive, and charming. But he didn’t care much about most people, she’d learned. There was a coldness beneath his lively attitude, a curious purposefulness that led him to mock those people and events that didn’t fit in with whatever amusement or game he had in store for himself. He cared about gambling—and winning—and about pursuing her, Rebeccah knew. She also knew that for a man like Chance Navarro the chase was everything. If she allowed herself to be easily caught in that web of charm, he’d quickly lose interest.

  But much as she enjoyed his lighthearted company and his gallant compliments, Rebeccah was in no danger of losing her heart to Chance Navarro. Even on the picnic, when Chance had surprised her by dancing wildly with her up and down the stream bank and lavishly praising her chicken sandwiches and strawberry tarts, she had rebuffed his attempts to kiss her, feeling complete disinterest.

  There was only one man whose kisses she sought. Considering the torment she’d suffered at the hands of Neely Stoner, she’d never expected to experience anything close to soaring physical desire, but when Wolf kissed her, her entire body burst alive.

  With Wolf everything was different from what she would normally expect.

  Even now. His response to
Chance’s arrival and the discovery that her original plans for the evening had included supper with another man prompted him immediately to climb out of the wagon and begin untying his horse.

  “I reckon Navarro will be glad to see you the rest of the way home. I’ve got to get back.”

  “My pleasure,” Chance agreed, and winked at Rebeccah.

  Wolf saw the wink, and an iron hardness settled over his face as he swung into the saddle.

  Rebeccah bit her lip in frustration. She wanted to cry, I want you to take me home! Chance Navarro means nothing to me—but you do. You mean everything.

  But of course she couldn’t say anything so foolish. Chance was watching her, watching and listening. And besides, she and Wolf had already spent a long time talking—she knew he had to get back to Billy and Caitlin.

  “I hope Caitlin is better tomorrow,” she said instead, feeling a curious hollowness inside.

  His only reply was a curt nod. Then, without another word to either her or Chance Navarro, Wolf headed Dusty at a gallop back the way they had come.

  “You’ve had a mighty long day, Rebeccah. Come on, I’ve got a flask of brandy in my saddlebag. A shot of that will soothe your nerves. And warm you up. It’s damned cold out here, and I can see you’re shivering.”

  She picked up the reins and glanced at him numbly. He gave her an encouraging smile. “Let old Chance take care of you,” he urged, moving his bay close alongside the buckboard. “When it comes to building up a good fire, there’s no one better than old Chance.” He gave a funny kind of laugh, as if amused at some secret joke he shared with only himself. When she gazed at him uncomprehendingly, he cocked his slender head to one side. “Come on, Rebeccah, let’s get back to the cabin. Trust me, honey. I know exactly how to get you warm.”

  I’ll wager you do, Rebeccah thought wearily, not answering as she started the team across the uneven ground, past the copse of alders sloping down toward the stream. But she wasn’t interested in Chance Navarro or his flirtations—nor in getting warm or even in eventually going to sleep. Her thoughts were centered on Wolf Bodine, riding back alone toward the Double B Ranch with Caitlin in the grips of a deadly fever and Billy sleeping, exhausted, on the parlor couch.