Lake of Fire (37 page)

The stable creaked in the wind. Thunder rumbled as the gale roamed the land.

“Listen,” he whispered. “On my ranch, the wind whistles across the sage like this on stormy nights.”

She wished they were in bed beneath a fur robe, miles away behind the door.

“I want to take you there.”

Laura twined her arms around him. His eyes looked enormous and dark in the dim light. “I want you to.”

To take her to his ranch, to take her …

It was supposed to hurt, but she felt only a smooth pressure where Cord fitted into her. “You do me honor,” he murmured, “to let me be your first.”

Like a string being strummed by a bow, Laura felt the singing inside her. It was as if she and Cord were both instruments, upon which they played. A rough melody at first, that rose and swelled like summer itself, into the sweetest of symphonies.

Liquid, supple and slippery, they moved together in the quicksilver lightning. Sweat slicked their bodies. In the stalls around them, restless whinnies rose as wind gusts beat against the stable. The rain began, drumming on the stable roof and lashing at the walls.

The storm flashed again, and Laura felt as if she became one with the pure light.

Cord must have slept, for he was fighting his way up through blood-soaked darkness, the screams inside him turning to sobs … sounds that must have wakened Laura, who knelt naked beside him. He fought the disorientation of returning from that faraway night, the vertigo that traveling from being six years old to the present produced.

Across Yellowstone Lake, thunder rolled hollowly. The rain’s pounding had subsided to a patter, dripping off the stable’s eaves. Hot tears slid across Cord’s cheeks and down his neck.

Laura wiped his wet face with both palms. He took her hands in his, managed a deep breath, and heard it turn into a hiccup.

“It’s all right,” she whispered.

She didn’t understand that it would never be all right for Franklin and Sarah Sutton.

Cord pulled Laura down and wrapped her with him in the blanket. For the second time in a week, he’d returned to that darkest passage of his life, just at a time when he believed fortune had begun to smile. He’d never told anyone about that night, not Aaron Bryce or his family, who’d taken him into their hearts and lives; not Constance, even as he considered making a life with her.

His chest felt as though an iron band constricted it.

Laura’s hair, soft beneath his fingers, brought back his father’s hand stroking his mother’s tresses in their
last moments … Cord closed his eyes against a crest of pain.

As if he had cried aloud, Laura raised her head. Her eyes shone in starlight that, with the storm’s passing, once more slanted across the stable floor.

“It was a dream,” she whispered.

“No. It wasn’t.”

Drawing her head onto a place near his heart, he told her his story.

Laura clung to Cord where they lay with the blanket drawn over them. She had lost track of time while his words painted an orphaned boy raised to riches through the kindness of Aaron Bryce … vivid pictures illuminating the man with whom she had cast her lot.

Cord’s arm tightened around her. “As long as the hate continues, the blood keeps being shed on both sides.”

“There’s so much hate. Captain Feddors is horrible to you.” She reached to slide her hand over his cheek, encountering the puckered ridge of raised flesh.

He went still beneath her tentative exploration.

“How did you get this scar?”

He fingered the welt. “A schoolyard fight got out of hand. A couple of older Mormon boys got wind of where I’d come from before Aaron took me in.”

“And you hate them still.”

In the silence that followed, Cord sat up, leaving
her uncovered. He drew his knees to his chest and, though he stared at the stall boards, she believed he saw that far-off battleground where bigotry turned children into monsters.

“I hate that I’m in the middle, neither white nor red. I hate that my adopted white brother, Thomas, has his name on the title of my Hotel Excalibur … he never misses an opportunity to point it out. I loathe the supercilious captain who marked me the moment he saw me and won’t let it drop. I abhor that poster on the wall of the hotel meeting room, showing the Northern Pacific line built on the back of a fallen red warrior. I despise that my grandmother, mother, and father died senselessly.”

His Adam’s apple dipped. “And I hate myself for thinking being adopted by a white man would wipe away the stigma of Nez Perce blood.”

A
lex!” Hank tried the brass door handle of the aft cabin on his steamboat. The
Alexandra
lay alongside the Lake Hotel dock, as dawn broke beyond the Absarokas.

The door swung inward.

The cabin bore his sister’s touch in the feminine floral wallpaper she’d chosen, lavender sprigs on white. A frilly petticoat frothed on the deck, and her favorite purple dress had been thrown over the top of the wooden wardrobe. A black-and-white cameo pendant with a knot in the gold chain appeared to have been tossed onto the table beside the bunk.

Alex wasn’t there.

She might have joined last night’s singing at Wylie’s tent camp … stayed with a young family up the hill, reluctant to walk back to the boat in the dark.

He shook his head. Alex had never been afraid of anything in her life.

She might have met a man at the hotel. Hank envisioned her charming petulant face, challenging eyes, her fall of blond hair, bright gold in contrast to his own dull wheat.

She’d changed and grown a lot in the past few years, but Hank wanted to believe that even at twenty, Alex would resist being swept off her feet by some handsome son-of-a-bitch like Cord Sutton.

Hank left his boat and turned east, following the Grand Loop Road to the soldier station. The rose glow swelled in the east, but the front door of the log building was secured. A check of his pocket watch revealed it lacked ten minutes to reveille.

He could raise the alarm, send the cavalry to search for Alex the way they had looked for Laura Fielding after the stage attack, but Hank had been through this with his sister before. With a sinking heart, he suspected she was with Danny in his lair. Knowing his brother’s insolence and daring, he’d probably returned to the abandoned cabin, correctly guessing that Manfred Resnick and Captain Feddors would think that move so foolish they would not bother to post a guard.

The shortest route to the cabin ran though the meadow past the stable, where Hank’s shoes became soaked from last night’s rain clinging to the grass. While he was some distance from the long building, the stable door swung open.

Feminine laughter spilled into the morning.

Hank stepped with haste into a copse of fir.

It wasn’t Alex’s girlish giggle but a waterfall’s
merry dance, sweet clear music. Hank had tried to draw that unselfconscious laughter from Laura, but had never managed more than a smile from her vivid green eyes.

He looked between needled branches.

In the shelter of the stable door, Laura smiled up at Cord. Wearing those damned trousers she’d affected yesterday, she managed to look incredibly fetching with her hair mussed and strewn with straw. Cord’s shirttails were out; her slender arm encircled his back.

Hank told himself he’d asked her to do this, to pump Cord about the letter and the inspection report. But as Cord bent to brush his lips across Laura’s, Hank flushed. She was taking her undercover role, if she were acting, way too far. At any rate, Hank’s assessment of Laura Fielding, Chicago lady, had been flawed.

If she would spend a night with a man in the barn, she was probably the kind of woman who’d do it for him, as well. Of course, she would, especially after he revealed what he knew about Mr. William high-and-mighty Sutton.

When Cord bent his rumpled head to kiss her, Laura wondered if anyone might be watching them come out of the barn. But all seemed quiet as they parted, he to saddle Dante and take him out, she to hurry back to the hotel.

Reaching her room without running into anyone,
she faced herself in the mirror. Lord, anyone who saw her must be able to tell she was not the same, with her high color and hair mussed by Cord’s hands.

Her former existence felt far behind.

She thought of calling for a bath, but didn’t want to see the boys who brought the tub and water. Instead, she ducked down the hall to the bathroom and filled the thick white china pitcher that matched the washbasin.

Stripping down, she soaped a cloth and washed her breasts where Cord’s moustache had left patches of pink around the nipples. Down her stomach where he’d laid his cheek and she’d dared to think of bearing his children someday. On to the tender flesh where they’d joined several times during the course of the night. She rinsed the rag and her skin, then wrung out and hung the cloth on the hook on the side of the dresser.

Then she brushed her hair, getting out the straw and sweeping it into a knot at the nape of her neck. Despite the demure style, she felt certain everyone who saw her would know what had happened.

In defiance, she donned Constance’s emerald silk dress with sweeping skirts, though it was clearly meant for evening.

“You’re up early,” Hank told Laura, pushing off the white wall of her father’s infirmary room. With a raised brow, he took her in, from the tortoiseshell comb
in her hair to the tips of Aunt Fanny’s satin slippers.

Forrest, propped on pillows in bed, looked somewhat better than he had the night before, though he greeted Laura with a weak wave. A thick pad of bandage covered his left shoulder. Hank, dressed even at dawn in a suit, bowed over her hand, giving a close-up of the narrow, knife-like bridge of his nose.

“I trust you slept well.” He sounded cold. “Did you get a chance to find out about that matter we discussed?”

Forrest watched them from bed, a puzzled expression on his drained face. Laura shrugged.

“You were going to try to find out where Cord got those letters to the Northern Pacific,” Hank pressed.

“I haven’t seen him.” She avoided Hank’s eyes and reached to plump her father’s pillows.

“I daresay,” Hank snorted.

Forrest subsided back onto the freshened mound.

A soft knock sounded at the door. Hank moved to open it as though he were part of the family.

A young woman in the blue-striped dress and white apron of a Lake Hotel maid dropped a swift curtsy. Her brown hair was pulled back so that not a strand was out of place; her pink cheeks glowed with abundant good health. “I have a telegram for Herr Forrest Fielding,” she said with a German accent.

Laura pushed past Hank to take the flimsy envelope, thanked the young woman, and closed the door. She offered the telegram to her father.

He gestured it away. “Read it for me.”

Going to the window, where a patch of sunlight spilled in a square onto the floor, she opened the envelope and glanced at the sender’s name. “It’s from Karl Massey.” It would be well nigh intolerable when Karl arrived and both he and Hank vied for her attention.

Dear Sir, I regret to inform you that I will be unable to join you in Yellowstone, as I am this day resigning
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