Mary Connealy (70 page)

Not that she wanted to. She just wanted to finish questioning him.

She pulled her hands away. “Don’t, Silas. I want us to talk. We never spend any time really talking. What do you have planned for tomorrow, because I …”

His strong hands tipped her head back. “You are more than just strong. You’re beautiful, too.” He whispered that nonsense against her windburned cheek and acted as if he were starving hungry for her chapped lips.

“And sweet.” Gently, he captured her hands again and pressed her palms against his cheeks.

“And soft where it counts.” Turning from her lips, he began kissing each callus, taking a side trip back to her mouth from time to time.

“Your eyes shine like gold.” He kissed each eye.

She found that she couldn’t open them again after his gentle caress. “Silas,” Belle whispered, trying to remember what she’d wanted to talk about.

“I love your hair down, like liquid silk in my hands.” He touched her hair, her coarse, neglected hair, as if he couldn’t deny himself the pleasure.

They never did go back to their talk.

And she never for a moment considered going after him with a frying pan.

After he was long gone the next day, she remembered.

She needed to move the cattle from a particularly dangerous stretch of high-up pasture, and she didn’t want Emma out on the rocky ledges they’d have to traverse. She was especially worried about it because a wolf pack had moved into her mountain valley. They kept her hopping trying to track them down while she rushed ahead of the oncoming winter.

She should probably tell Silas about the troublesome wolves, but she knew he’d say, “Leave it for me.” That’s all he ever said. But Belle was finished listening to empty promises. Time was short. She’d hoped she could convince him to abandon his
idea
for just a day and come with her.

“I’ve gotta go to the north high pasture today, Em. I’ll take Betsy along.” She’d faced that last high ridge alone before. She’d do it again.

“Let me ride with you, Ma. Them wolves are a mean bunch this year.”

“We’ve got to finish the haying. If you stay in and put in a long day on that and I get these cattle tallied, we’re done with the worst of the fall chores. I don’t like the feel of the wind. I want both of these things done today.”

“But you shouldn’t go so far alone.”

“I’ve done it many times.”

Emma stared at her.

Belle stared back. She could boss her children around just fine, but usually they agreed on things together. And Emma could smell snow on the wind as well as Belle.

Finally, Emma nodded. “You’ll be late. But I’ll be watching for you, too, Ma. We’ll put in a tough day today; then things’ll calm down. Who knows, maybe even Silas’ll stay around once the wind starts blowing. Anthony did.”

“Only ‘cuz the pass was closed. Whatever Silas is up to must be somewhere inside the valley.” Betsy shifted in the pack on Belle’s back and cooed through her bundling.

“Are you sure?” Emma eyed the horizon, turning in all directions. “He could be riding into Divide every day.”

Belle froze. She’d never considered that. Could he possibly be going in to find whiskey? “No, he’s not drinking. I’d know the smell.” But if he was careful, would she know? And would she know about dance-hall girls if he was careful to wash their perfume away? Anthony had done that at first.

Belle shook her head. A painful cracking feeling in her heart made her wonder for the first time if Silas might be betraying her. “Well, we’ll know for sure one of these days.” She briskly pulled on her gloves. “Until we do, I’ve got cattle to round up.”

Emma nodded, her face calm, but Belle had seen that calm falter for a minute. Emma loved Silas, too. “And I’ve got haying to do.”

The two women swung up on horseback. Belle, with Betsy, rode upland. Emma rode down. Heaven only knew where Silas rode.

Belle mused on Silas, denying he would drink or be untrue to her. But where could he be? She’d been all over the range. Then she realized she’d never gone near that high valley someone had claimed. Could Silas be doing something in that direction? She brought all the cattle down from up there before the drive and figured not to check that land again until spring.

For that matter, she’d never told Silas someone had claimed it. If he was working over there, she needed to tell him to quit. But why would he be over there? They’d been home over a month now, and she knew no further progress was being made with the house. When he watched her with those sad eyes, it didn’t cut quite so deep.

She traveled up-country with her rifle on her saddle and her six-gun strapped down, because the wolves were coming in closer to the place following the herd. She’d already thinned the pack some, but there were plenty left. She’d had wolves all the years she’d been here, and although the pack this year was especially large and more aggressive than most, she didn’t think much of their nonsense. She accepted a certain loss of cattle as the way things were but fought all the time to keep the losses small.

She worked a long, cold day in the rugged hills, dodging longhorns as wild and vicious as any grizzly. She’d be late getting home, but after today there would be no more long, bitter days. Only short, bitter ones with a husband who’d once again failed her. Before she headed home, she sat down in a sheltered spot to build a fire, have some coffee, and see to Betsy.

The little girl had stayed strapped on Belle’s back all day with barely a sound—except for a few necessary breaks that had also required a fire. It had slowed Belle down some.

Once Betsy was settled, Belle packed her horse and swung up. She rode a mile downhill until she came to an open meadow. Only then did she realize the weather had turned sharply colder during the day. Up until now the timber had cut the force of the wind. It was already late. Because Belle had no plans to come up here again until spring, she’d stuck it out doing everything that was needed.

She rode on for hours, winding closer to home with still a long, long way to go, when the cold got to be too much. Belle chafed at the delay, but she’d known she had to see to Betsy at least one more time, and she couldn’t unwrap the baby without a fire. She found an overhang, got a good fire going, and settled herself comfortably into a corner with the rock wall behind her. And suddenly she was waking up.

She’d only awakened because Betsy started crying in the bundle of blankets nestled beside her on the ground. Belle sat forward quickly, shocked at herself for falling asleep. Her stomach lurched then dived hard, and she just barely managed to set Betsy down and crawl a few steps away before she threw up in the grass.

When she quit retching, she wiped her mouth and slowly sat back down. Alerted by a particularly loud squall from Betsy, she unwrapped her baby, just over nine months old, and put her to her breast, which Belle noticed now was tender.

Belle was no schoolgirl still in pinafores. She’d been up and down this trail before.

She held Betsy in the waning light and stroked the cheeks that were hollow and too tanned for a baby.

And Belle Harden cried.

She was going to have another one. Another precious little baby. She could already picture a little girl who looked just like Silas. A little girl who was too quiet because she was raised on horseback by a ma who didn’t have time to fuss over every little whimper.

God, please let it be a girl.

That same old prayer. The one she’d spoken into so many lonely nights.

Belle remembered what it had been like when she had Emma growing in her and Lindsay strapped on her back. She’d built the cabin in that condition and rode herd for long days just like this. Surviving that year and the one after, with Lindsay a harumscarum three-year-old and Emma at her breast, had taken every ounce of strength she had.

And these two, Betsy and the new one, would be almost that close in age. She thought of the branding time to come in the spring. She would be trying to brand these vicious, wild two-year-old bulls and heifers she’d scared out of the hills as well as the spring calves. Last spring had almost killed her. Dozens of times she’d been kicked or knocked to the ground. She accepted the rough-and-tumble ways of branding. But more than once she’d taken a hard blow to the belly because she was almost due to have Betsy and her stomach was in the way something fierce. More than one night she’d lain in bed and felt pains start then ease off, and she knew it was the brutally hard work that was pushing the baby to come before time.

Anthony had of course done none of the spring work. Claimed he had a bad back.

This spring she wouldn’t be quite as close to due, but it would be bad enough. And if the baby did come, unlike Betsy who was close to ready to face the world, this baby would be too young. She stood a good chance of killing the poor little baby with her work.

God, please let it be a girl.

The fear and sorrow of that made her wish the baby away, and Belle hated herself for that. No baby deserved to come into the world with a mother who felt such awful things. She
loved
her girls. She was grateful to God for giving her every one of them, because her life would be empty without them. But she was a bad mother.

Belle admitted the real reason she cried was because she was going to give birth to another little girl who would never know a mother’s time or soft hands. A little girl who was going to have to get tough, grow up hard, and quit wanting a mother’s tenderness fast.

She looked down at Betsy who was nursing with her eyes wide open, staring at her sobbing mother. Betsy reached her thin, brown hand up and rested it on the swell of Belle’s breast and opened and closed her hand as if to massage more milk for herself.

Belle wiped her eyes against the sleeve of her buffalo-hide coat and slid her work-roughened finger into the tiny hand.

Betsy clutched onto Belle and kicked as she nursed.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been better to you, baby.” With her voice breaking, Belle pulled her knees up to more completely cradle her neglected little angel and tried to sing a lullaby, stopping several times as she sorted through her mind for a song that wasn’t one she sang to the cattle on the drive at night. She couldn’t think of any, and that made her cry some more.

In the end, she just hummed and cried and let Betsy hold her finger. She tried to remember the last time she’d sung to her baby. And when she couldn’t think of a single time, she cried all the harder.

Through her tears she thought of Silas. She thought of his charm with the girls and his gift for making her feel like a beautiful woman when she was so far from being one.

It was all lies. She knew that now. Yes, he’d worked hard beside them on the trail, and he’d been nothing short of heroic helping them get home. But now she could see that it had all been lies. He’d worked his way into her life; then he’d turned into another man who used her.

Exhausted from the early morning and the hard day and from growing a new life inside her, she slid down until she lay on the ground and curled her body around both her hungry old baby and her hungry new baby who was already making demands on her strength.

She’d known keen disappointment with all her husbands, but none had ever hurt like this. And it wasn’t because he’d turned out to be lazy. It wasn’t because he’d charmed the girls into loving him. They were so starved for a man to admire them that they would have fallen for anyone who spared them a single kind word. And it wasn’t because he had lied, at least lied to Belle’s way of thinking, because he’d let her believe he would hop out of the cart and pull along with her instead of going along for the ride like the other husbands. It was because she loved him.

That love cut into her heart now like a dull-edged knife and carved out a piece of herself that Silas had awakened and warmed. Her love for him died along with her hope. She was going to have to go on handling the ranch just as she always had. She had been a fool, weak and stupid to want someone to carry the load. She deserved this. She had long ago learned she had to take care of herself. But now she knew, deep inside of her, she’d always clung to a tiny ray of hope that someone would come along and rescue her like she was some pathetic damsel in distress out of a fairy tale.

Well, there was no rescue coming. And she was no damsel. She was a cowpoke and a good one, and she was never going to be anything else.

Then she thought of the years ahead of her when she was going to have to be strong enough to deny Silas his husbandly rights. That had never been hard with the other husbands, but now the wonderful pleasure he’d introduced her to would have to die, too. If she didn’t keep him away, there would be more babies—the ones she took such poor care of. When he’d shown her how it could be between a man and a woman, she had longed for Silas’s baby. She had pictured herself with four more little girls, these girls chubby with light brown eyes and tawny brown hair streaked with gold from the sun. Silas’s girls wore ruffles and were easy to make smile, and her other girls fit right in with them, learning to laugh and dress pretty and work in the house.

Now she knew that for a fool’s dream. It would be impossible, because she didn’t have the strength to give Silas all his babies and run this ranch, too. In that moment she hated Silas Harden. She hated him for making her love him and for teaching her about what could pass between a man and a woman and most of all for giving her hope.