Explaining Herself (35 page)

"I think," said Ross, low and even, "that he will hold still while you cuff him now, sweetheart. Please stay
low, in case I have to shoot through the back of his head."

So she crouched way, way down before putting the cuffs on the sheriff's trembling wrists and cinching them tight. Then she stepped clear, and Ross slowly withdrew the revolver from the man's mouth
—and nobody had died.

And she thought,
Sweetheart
¹
?

She liked it.

Ross touched her again, a steadying hand on her shoulder as he guided her back from the sheriff, then pressed his revolver gently into her hand. It had spit on the end of it, but she didn't let herself wipe the muzzle. Instead, she obediently held the gun while Ross patted his hands across the sheriff's arms and legs
—and she hoped she would not have to use it. From the man's boot Ross withdrew a nasty-looking knife, which he tossed over with the other weapons.

"Who the hell
are
you?" demanded Ward again, even as Ross shoved him over against the rock wall, away from the others, and beckoned Alden Wright to join them.

He might not deserve to die, but he deserved to be frustrated. So Victoria almost groaned when Alden, scrambling down the steep side of the arroyo in his impractical shoes, ended the sheriff's misery. 'You might want to rethink whether this place is haunted, Sheriff," he called, starting to tie up the men who were still lying on the ground. "It's Ross Laurence."

Ward's head swiveled back at Ross, eyes wide and disbelieving. Then he looked accusingly at Victoria, maybe remembering
the care she'd given the Laura
novic graves, or Ross's casual use of the term
sweetheart.
With a wrench, he turned back to Ross. "You goddamned bastard."

"Watch the language," warned Ross.

'You murdered my father!"

"And you murdered mine." Ross's gaze never wavered. "Maybe we're even."

Were they? Encouraged by the fact that almost all the bad men were securely tied, and nobody had died, Victoria reached out a needy hand.

To her soul-deep satisfaction, Ross took it. He drew her tight against him, her back against his front so that he could keep watch over her head as he slid one arm around her. He kissed the top of her head and even teased in a low voice, "I brought your beau."

"He's not my beau," she protested happily.

"Lucky for him," he said. Her gaze crept to where Alden Wright had finished tying the hands of the men on the ground. Alden was the one Ross had wanted all along. The one thing she still feared sharing with him.

But surely Ross was teasing. She wrapped her arms over his, and leaned back against him, and tried to trust him.

"Even!" spat Sheriff Ward. "We'll never be even. My father was worth the three of you I killed and more!"

Victoria said, "Three?" And she felt suddenly ill.

Was that why his mother had vanished?

Chapter Twenty-four

Three?
Laramie hadn't fully absorbed that part of the sheriff's boast before Victoria questioned it. Poppa, Phil... and who?

Then Ward said, 'You think your sister killed herself?"

And with slow loathing, Laramie understood. Maybe not Victoria's sigh of relief. Maybe not how Alden Wright spun in their direction, blanching.

But he understood the evil that was Bram Ward. He knew it in himself. Maybe it was just a matter of degree.

Reluctantly, Laramie let go of Victoria.

"Oh, Ross," she protested, reaching for his arm, but he dodged her touch. He could not touch her goodness and ever know, for sure, just how deep his own evil went.

"She went to Sheriff Howe about our rustling," continued Ward with de
sperate sadism as Laramie
stepped nearer him. "Said she had proof. But Howe was a pard of my pa's. So we waited 'til your ma was at the jail
—"

Laramie reached behind his head and unknotted his oversized silk bandanna which cowboys wore against dust and weather.

"
—and we rode over to that stinkin' cabin of your'n—"

Laramie began to flip the dark cloth into a loose coil.

"
—and we strung the bitch up, same as her pa," gloated Ward. "I done in three of you Bohunks, damn you! Whether you put me on trial or you murder me right here can't never even us up. /
won."

Then Laramie struck, looping and tightening the cloth around Ward's neck in one smooth movement. "Like this?" he rasped into the man's ear. "Is this how you won?"

Ward tried to hold his smile, but within moments his lips had parted in an attempt to draw air. Still, he gasped the word "Yeah."

It was easy, easy as Laramie remembered. He wanted this man dead. He had the ability to do it. He cinched the scarf tighter around the man's neck, tried not to imagine his once-pretty sister fighting for her life, her baby's life. "You think she felt like this?"

An odd, abrasive sound began to stutter out of the sheriff's mouth. His wide eyes bulged; his face reddened. He dropped to his knees, his arms beginning to yank against the cuffs, but Laramie just kneeled right beside him. He felt the man shudder, his ugly life fighting to continue even now. Life was tenacious, after all. Even bound and helpless. Even as dark a life as this.

And Ross respected that.

In a quick move, as Ward's eyes rolled up in his head, Laramie dug his fingers between the silk noose
and the man's throat and yanked it loose. He scooted back from his own horror, on his butt, as the sheriff crumpled to the ground, pants soiled, hands still cuffed behind him. Only then, drawing his knees under him, did he really look at the filth this man was.

So that's what winning looked like, was it?

Ward could have it.

"If you don't want a trial," he warned, beginning to shake, "find someone else to kill you."

And he stood. His heart raced; his head spun. History had almost repeated itself
—but with Laramie in the role of Boris Ward. It wasn't self-defense this time, only vengeance. And vengeance wasn't enough.

He wouldn't let a Ward make him kill again.

Laramie looked down and saw that his hands only felt like they were shaking. Then he looked at Victoria
— I
didn 't kill him
!

And his heart sank.

She stood, her hands covering her mouth, staring in horror at the unconscious sheriff
—and Alden Wright was clutching her shoulders with white fingers, as if protecting her from Laramie. And she let him.

There was something between the two of them after all.

Laramie should never have started feeling again, because that realization almost destroyed him. When Vic lowered her hands to say, "Oh, Ross," he couldn't bear to hear what would surely be a lengthy explanation, so he turned away and focused on just doing what he had to do to get her home.

Careful, closed, he made sure their captives were gagged. He hitched the rustlers' horses to a lead rope and made Alden Wright help him hoist the tied men, one at a time, into their saddles.

Wright kept sneaking glances of building fury toward him, the whole time. Was he jealous that Ross had called Victoria "
sweetheart," or angry that Ross
had helped bring such ugliness into Vic's world? Only when the unsightly heap that was the sheriff groaned back to muffled consciousness did Wright finally say, 'You had him!"

Ross squinted at him, confused. "What?"

"You could have killed him!" Wright's voice cracked. 'You're a killer
—"

"Alden!" protested Victoria sharply from where she was packing weapons into a saddlebag.
She called him Alden.

"
—why didn't you kill the son of a bitch?"

Wright
wanted
Laramie to kill the sheriff? Laramie shook his head, disgusted. "That's what he wanted."

And Victoria was there. But that wasn't a good enough excuse, even if she
weren't
involved with Wright.

"Then don't tie the bastard onto his horse; drag him behind it!" Wright insisted. "Damn it, Laurence, he killed your sister; how can you let him get away with jail time?"

"Alden,
" warned Victoria again.

Laramie just shook his head and left the two of them, went to throw sand on the rustlers' fire. Something tickled at his awareness again, and he eyed the arroyo for danger, then conceded that it wasn't that sort of instinct. This was more what Victoria would call puzzle pieces.

The area looked clear, the horses calm, the bad men tied. Whatever it was could just remain a puzzle for now. The ruin of two months' worth of dreams sufficiently distracted him.

Laramie felt Victoria's gaze on him once, her confused gray eyes begging him to speak, to react, to do
something.
He wasn't sure what. Likely something to do with talking, something beyond his capabilities. When he returned from dousing the campfire, she and Wright were arguing by the horses. So the man wasn't
just wealthy and presumably respectable
—he had words, too. So what?

That's why it surprised him when Victoria turned away from Wright and asked
him,
Laramie, "May I ride behind you?"

Laramie looked at her gelding, still wearing her padded sidesaddle. The horse didn't seem hurt. When Victoria put an insistent hand on his arm, the sensation flashed through him like standing too near to a lightning strike. He closed his eyes against it. He could not do this, not here, not today. If he started feeling it all now . . .

"Please?" she insisted, as if he could deny her anything. "I don't want to ride alone."

So Laramie offered his hand and boosted her onto Blackie, glad his bullet wounds had finally healed. Her skirts rode up on her legs as she straddled the horse, behind the saddle's cande. She wore high, soft-leather shoes with little bone buttons that traced die curve of her ankle. Her stockings were knitted
in
an intriguing, zigzag weave that stretched for her calf.

Laramie mounted, careful not to kick her. While he found his stirrups, he felt Victoria draw one side of his split-tailed duster into place, and stiffened. It seemed so proprietary, so
right.
Then she wrapped her arms around his waist. Her bosom and jaw pressed against his back through his duster, and he realized what a bad call this had been. He could hardly
help
feeling her, this way! And if he began to allow one sensation, God knew where it would end. Hope?

Hope was more dangerous than firearms.

Not surprisingly, Wright protested. "Really, Miss Garrison! That's hardly proper." God pity any beau of Victoria's who presumed he could direct her behavior.

But she'd said Wright wasn't her beau.

"I'll move onto Huc
kleberry before we reach town,"

Vic assured them both, her tone cross. "For now, I am riding with Ross."

"Ross?" challenged Alden.

Instead of arguing, she said, "I want to go home." So they rode out.

Laramie tried to ignore the sensation of Vic's fingers across his abdomen and ribs. Her words seemed to vibrate into his spine when she asked, "Where will we take them?" Then she shifted behind him, perhaps to eye their prisoners. "Considering that we've captured the sheriff and the deputy, who watches them in jail?"

Don't. Feel. Anything.
Ross carefully shrugged.

"And we left the cattle," she noted, leaning a different direction. Every time she moved, her hands gripped another bit of him, warm and sure. "Will they be all right until someone fetches them? They won't get too hungry in there, will they?"

She paused after that question. Since Wright said nothing, Laramie assured her, "No."

"Good." She squeezed him a little more tightly, resting her cheek against his back, and he felt something anyway. A falter in his reserve. A cracking in his guard. It was all that the blows from this day
—Julije's murder, Wright's interest—needed to gain a fingerhold.

He took a deep breath, struggled to regain his balance against the eddying, swirling emotions in him. Then Vic cried,
"OH!"
and he nearly leapt out of the saddle.

"What?"

"We have to go back!"

Ross reined in Blackie, called "Whoa" to the train of horses following him and Wright, and twisted in his saddle to better see Victoria. "Why?"

Her hands slid innocently down to his hips, and he
definitely
felt that. "My camera," she explained, eyes pleading. "I drop
ped my camera when Deputy Frank
lin captured me. We have to go back for it!"

Wright made a frustrated sound. "For God's sake, I'll buy you a new camera! Could we just get this day done with?"