Matt (The Cowboys) (39 page)

Ellen leaned over and kissed him, her hair falling on his face. “I love you,” she whispered.

“I love you, too.”

She fell back on the mattress. “The judge was right. Wilbur did us a favor by forcing us to get married.”

“I was already half in love with you,” Matt said, “but I’d never have spoken.”

She put his arm around her and snuggled up close. “Isabelle will be happy.”

“She’ll say she knew it all along.”

“She probably did.”

“She’ll bring more furniture.”

Ellen laughed. “I guess you’ll have to build a bigger house to hold it.”

“I’d rather build a bigger house because I’ve got more kids.”

“How many children do you want?”

“It’s hard adopting boys Hank’s age. I don’t think I can handle many more.”

“I wasn’t talking about adoption. I was talking about our own babies, your babies.”

Matt had discounted that possibility so long ago, it was hard to believe he had this choice that everyone else took for granted.

“You do want children, don’t you?” Ellen sounded worried.

“Yes.”

Ellen laughed softly. “I want several boys who’ll grow up to look just like you.”

“Will looks just like me, and he’s an idiot.”

She thumped him on the chest. “And I want a couple of girls. Tess and I need recruits to help balance out the numbers.”

Matt found he liked the idea of having two or three sons. He liked the idea of watching them saddle their first horses, riding out at dawn flanked by one on each side. But the idea of having daughters unnerved him. You didn’t have to do too much for boys. Keep them fed, clothed, and out of trouble, and you pretty much had it knocked. Girls were a lot of work and worry. They had to have nice clothes, perfect manners, and fancy schools so they could find good husbands. You had to be upstanding and respectable. Any crime you committed would settle harder on a daughter. Sons could head west, put it all behind them. Girls would bear the shame.

He couldn’t have girls. What if people found out? They hadn’t, but there was no saying they wouldn’t some day.

He was such a fool! Why hadn’t he stopped to think? When he realized his having been abused didn’t make any difference in Ellen’s feelings for him, he had started to hope they could have a real marriage. It had still been a dream, but for that very reason he’d allowed his hope full rein. It could never happen, so he was free to entertain the fantasy.

Then it had happened. Ellen had said she loved him; she wanted to make love to him. His brain had shut down entirely. He’d made love to her, something he should never have done without telling her the whole truth.

If she never forgave him, he’d have only himself to blame. “I’ve got something to tell you.”

“Don’t sound so serious. We don’t have to worry about children quite yet.”

“It’s not that. It’s about something I did a long time ago.”

“What was it?”

“You’re not going to like it.”

“Stop sounding so serious. You didn’t murder anyone.”

“That’s exactly what I did.”

Chapter Twenty-three

Ellen felt the breath go out of her lungs. “What?”

“I killed a man.”

She remembered Hollender and how much it had taken for Matt to become violent. “If you did, I’m sure it was in self-defense.”

“Not exactly.”

She felt her body go rigid. “What do you mean
not exactly?”

“I stabbed him in the back eleven times. I wanted to make sure he was dead.”

Ellen could hardly believe what she was hearing. There must be some explanation. “What happened to him?”

“I threw him in the pigpen. I wanted to let the pigs have him, but Will was crying, so I buried him.”

Coming so soon after making love, the shock was like a dozen fists pummeling every part of her body. Her limbs went numb, and her body grew so cold she shivered. She saw again the man who’d murdered her parents, felt once again the hatred that had filled her after finding their bodies. She remembered that she wanted him dead, that she found a gun, that she …

She pushed the memory back into the corner where it had lain hidden for ten years. That was over. Forgotten. This was now.

Ellen sat up in the bed. She had to do something to make this nightmare go away. She realized she was naked, that she was gripping her arms across her breasts. She reached for her nightgown and pulled it over her head. She got up, slid it over her body. She stayed up, too jumpy to consider lying down again.

“Was it a rustler? You better not have scared me out of my mind over a rustler.”

“He wasn’t a rustler. He was my uncle.”

This had to be the uncle who’d abused him, but you ran away from people like that. You didn’t stab them in the back eleven times. This couldn’t be the man she knew. There had to be something more, some reason.

“Why did you do it?”

“He started after Will. I told him to leave Will alone, but he wouldn’t.”

“Why didn’t Will stop you?”

“Nobody could have stopped me. I wanted him dead.”

“Why didn’t you run away?”

“Nobody wanted a boy like me.”

Ellen started to say that was absurd, that not even young boys got that out of control; then the image of Matt with his hands around Wayne Hollender’s throat filled her mind. She saw Hollender’s face grow dark, his eyes protrude, heard his terrible gasps. She saw Matt’s face, a mask of pure hatred.

Was there a madman inside Matt? Had that attempt to kill Hollender been a warning she had not taken seriously enough, been distracted from too easily?

She looked at Matt. He was sitting up in bed, watching her, his face illuminated by moonlight coming through the window. He was a woman’s fantasy come true. He was gorgeous. He was strong. He was compassionate and caring. He was responsible and utterly dependable.

Yet inside him lurked a murderer.

The face of the man who’d murdered her parents in a fit of rage forced itself out of the corner where she’d hidden it. He had cursed her when she identified him. He had cursed her again when he was led to the gallows. He had said she would be damned for life.

Was this her curse? To fall in love with a man who had also murdered in a fit of rage?

“What did you do afterward?” She didn’t know how she managed to get the words out. Her throat felt strange.

“We burned his things and told people he went away and left us. That’s when they put us in the orphanage.”

Ellen felt numb. Too exhausted to think. Matt was a murderer, and she had made love to him.

She had to think. But the first thing she had to do was get out of this room. She couldn’t stay here, not with him looking at her like she was his last hope. “I’ll make some coffee,” she said, moving toward the door.

“You’re going to leave me, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do. I have to think.”

“I shouldn’t have made love to you. Then you’d never have had to know.”

With a sob, Ellen turned and fled.

The last few days had been a strain on the children. They knew something was wrong when Ellen moved Tess into the bed with her and Matt slept in the room with Noah. The kids had enjoyed it at first. Noah felt more grown up, sharing a room with Matt. Tess enjoyed snuggling up to Ellen when she felt scared. Despite their excitement at the new arrangements, they sensed the tension. Their smiles grew forced; their laughter disappeared.

Toby and Orin knew immediately. Orin talked less, didn’t smile at all, and stayed close to Matt. Toby became openly hostile to Ellen. Matt tried to soothe his anger by telling him the trouble was his fault, but Toby didn’t believe him.

“I’m no fool,” he shouted, looking from Ellen to Matt. “You been tiptoeing around her like she was a queen ever since she got here. Whatever she wanted, she got. She didn’t want to cook, you cooked. She didn’t want to clean up, Orin and I cleaned up. She wanted a garden, we dropped everything and put in a garden. She wanted a new dress, you gave her money. Everything was perfect until she came here.”

Ellen’s behavior didn’t help the situation. She avoided looking at Matt, spoke only when she had to. She took over all the housework, but Matt knew she did it to keep him outside as much as possible.

They’d only had one real talk since that night. One morning, after the children had left the breakfast table to attend to their chores, he’d asked Ellen if she meant to stay until the adoptions were final. She said she would, that Tess and Noah were just as important to her as Toby and Orin were to him.

“What about Hank?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “Maybe they’ll let Jake and Isabelle keep him.”

“You’ve changed your mind about running your shop from the ranch?”

She had looked at him then. “I can’t stay here, Matt, not knowing my husband is a … what you did.”

“It won’t happen again.”

“How do you know? You would have killed Hollender if we hadn’t pulled you off him.”

He didn’t think he would have killed him, but he didn’t know.

“The boys need you,” he said. “I need you. I love you.” He’d seen the pain in her face as she turned away.

“Don’t say that.”

“Not saying it won’t change anything.”

She’d gone to the window, looked out at Tess and Noah on their way back to the house with the eggs and a bucket of milk. “Matt, I can’t keep talking about this. If you make me, I’ll have to leave now. The thought of killing someone, especially with a knife, makes me sick to my stomach.”

“I was sick for a month afterward. I had nightmares for years.”

After that she refused to talk about it.

Matt told himself he should be relieved that all his questions were finally answered. He wasn’t even sure her love for him had lasted through that first night. She didn’t hate him, but she was afraid of him. A woman should never have to live with a man who frightened her.

He could forget any possibility of a real marriage to Ellen. He’d known she would react this way, but to know it and to experience it were two very different things.

And while his mind realized that she had been lost to him forever, his heart continued to hope she would change her mind. He felt that as long as she remained at the ranch, there was a chance, regardless of how remote.

He threw himself into his work to keep from thinking about what he’d lost. He was grateful Drew had sent him some particularly difficult horses. Concentrating on not getting killed helped keep his thoughts off Ellen.

The nights were the worst. There was nothing then to distract him. Not even fatigue. He could be so tired he wasn’t hungry and could barely drag himself to bed, but he lay awake half the night trying to devise ways to convince Ellen to stay. It didn’t matter that he knew it would be a greater torture to have her at the ranch than in San Antonio. He simply couldn’t let go. He’d come so close. His mind said no, that there had never been a chance Ellen would stay once she knew he had killed his uncle. But his heart wouldn’t accept that.

So the battle raged on. He got little sleep, less rest, and no peace of mind. He was almost relieved when the sheriff showed up.

“You’re not going to like what’s happening,” he said.

“I haven’t liked anything else,” Matt said, feeling almost too tired to care. “What is Wilbur up to now?”

They stood at the corral, watching Toby and Orin work one of the horses. A stiff breeze rustled the leaves of the maples and cottonwoods that bordered the nearby creek. Matt expected they’d get some rain before long.

“Wilbur talked Mabel Jackson into convincing her husband he ought to call in your loan.”

“He can’t do that.”

“Wilbur says you’re outside the law now that you’re sheltering a runaway. He says Tom Jackson can’t be seen to be supporting anyone like that. He’s even threatening to tell the townspeople to take their money out of Tom’s bank.”

“And where are they going to put it, given Tom’s is the only bank in Bandera?”