Only in My Arms (4 page)

"Please help yourself."

For a moment he couldn't think what she meant. He was staring at her mouth, at the smile that had some extraordinary power to tilt him off center. He blinked. His world was righted as her smile slowly faded under his penetrating stare. He looked away abruptly, picked up his fork, and stabbed at the pile of pancakes.

Out of the corner of her eye Mary watched Ryder stack his cakes, spread them with butter, and add the sweetened raspberries. She appreciated his appetite and wondered when he'd last eaten, though good manners dictated she couldn't ask. "How do you know Walker?" she said, lifting two pancakes to her own plate.

"We met at West Point." He saw her startled pause. The reaction didn't surprise him. "I was two years older than Walker, but we began at the same time. He finished. I didn't." She resumed preparing her pancakes. "But then that's probably more in line with what you'd expect of me."

Mary's red-gold brows arched. "I don't believe I've formed any expectations regarding you, Mr. McKay. We've only just met."

He said nothing and applied himself to his meal.

She was silent for a few minutes and then asked, "How is it that you came to go to West Point?"

Ryder looked at her frankly. "How is it that you came to go to the convent?"

Mary's head jerked a fraction in response to his candor. He couldn't have let her know any more clearly that she was intruding upon his privacy.

"Look, ma'am," he said. "If the price of breakfast is having to answer your list of questions, I think I'll pass." Waiting for her reply, Ryder leaned back in his chair and pushed away his half-eaten plate of food.

Mary found herself apologizing for the second time that morning. "You're right," she said softly. "I was being unconscionably rude. There are no strings to breakfast." She pushed his plate toward him again, even as she felt her own appetite fading. "Eat your fill. I won't bother you again." She noticed he did not require a second invitation. He tucked into his food with relish while she mostly pushed hers around her plate.

"This is a big house for just you," he said, looking around the kitchen again. "Are you here alone?"

"Right now I am. Jay Mac and Mama were up here for most of June and they'll return again next month. They hire some help in Baileyboro to maintain the house. I didn't want anyone here, so I sent them away." Her sigh was a trifle wistful. "But you're right, it's a big house to ramble in alone. Every room has memories, this one perhaps more than any other. Sometimes I can almost believe I hear the Marys laughing and bickering and chattering." She smiled gently now, thinking about squabbles at the kitchen table over who would clean the berries and who would make the piecrust, who would set the table and who would pour the milk. "There were too many of us and not always enough jobs."

"The Marys," he said thoughtfully, interested. "Is that what you call yourselves?"

Her smile deepened to a grin. "No. My father called us that. He came up with it after we started calling him Jay Mac. He mostly used it when he was thinking of some collective punishment."

"Collective punishment?"

"You know, when one of us had done something wrong and wouldn't admit to it. Jay Mac would line us up, oldest to youngest, and pace the floor in front of us, speaking to our mother as if we weren't in the room at all." Mary's voice deepened, her brow furrowed, and she tucked her chin lower and looked up, as if she were looking over the rim of invisible spectacles.

Ryder watched, fascinated by this imitation of John MacKenzie Worth. The man was a leader of industry, the owner of one of the most powerful and successful rail lines in the nation, a personal friend of presidents and generals. He was not a man to be taken lightly or to be made light of. Yet his daughter showed no compunction about sharing this intimate glimpse into their family life.

" 'Moira,' he'd say, 'the Marys have perpetrated a most heinous crime. I count two of my cigars missing from the humidor on my desk. Not one Mary will admit to it, so all the Marys must bear the responsibility.' " The impression she gave of Jay Mac was quite credible, but then all her sisters agreed she'd had more years to practice it. Mary straightened and resumed her own sweetly melodious voice. "He'd go on for a few minutes, hoping to wear us down, I think, but he never did. Being one of the Marys made us stronger. Against a force like Jay Mac, it was necessary to band together." Half her mouth curved in a quick smile that also lighted her eyes. "Poor Papa, he's smart about so many things, but he's never quite learned how to divide and conquer his five Marys."

If only a third of what Walker had written him about the family was true, Ryder imagined that five young Marys were a force to be reckoned with. "Why were you all named Mary?"

"Mother's idea." She took a sip of milk. "Tradition, I suppose. She's Irish, you know. And Catholic, of course. But Jay Mac's a thorough Presbyterian, and then there's the problem of us all being bastards because Jay Mac didn't marry my mother until a few years ago." She glanced at him, wondering what Walker had revealed to him. "Did you follow that?"

He nodded, but he was paying more attention to the fact that she had a milk mustache on her upper lip. Her youthful smile, the odd cropping of her red-gold hair, and now the milk outlining the shape of her upper lip made her seem as young as a schoolgirl. As innocent as one, too. He needed to remind himself of that. He cleared his throat and touched his own lip. "Milk."

She understood immediately. "Oh," she said a bit self-consciously. She dabbed at her mouth with her linen napkin and then looked to him. "Better?"

"You got it all," he said, not quite answering her question. "So you were all Marys."

"Well, yes," she said, picking up the threads of her story. "But not really. I'm called Mary. Sometimes Mary Francis. My sisters were always Michael, Rennie, Maggie, and Skye. They only heard Mary precede their name if they were in serious trouble."

Which sounded as if it had been rather frequent, he thought. "Who stole the cigars from the humidor?"

"What? Oh, the cigars." Mary gave up any pretense of eating. She carried her plate to the sink and scraped the uneaten pancakes into a pail. "It was Michael. She actually liked the smell of cigar smoke."

"What was your father's punishment?"

Turning to face him, she leaned back against the sink. Her nose wrinkled with the power of the memory. "We smoked until our faces were the color of pea soup."

"Michael, too?"

"Michael, too. She lasted longer than the rest of us—which of course confirmed her as the perpetrator of the heinous crime in Jay Mac's eyes—but eventually she succumbed. Jay Mac was pretty certain she'd never pick up another cigar as long as she lived."

"Did she?"

Mary shook her head. "Not that I know." She gave Ryder a dead-on look and added dryly, "She gave them up for cigarettes."

One corner of his mouth lifted slightly, acknowledging the irony and humor. He resumed eating while Mary collected the skillet from the stove, the crusty mixing bowl and dirty utensils, and began washing. She didn't hear him come up behind her, didn't know he was there until he slipped his plate into the dishwater. Surprised, she jumped a little. Before she could say that he had merely startled her, he was backing away as if he had been the one who'd been burned.

"Don't worry," he said tersely. "I'm not going to touch you."

Her forest green eyes regarded him curiously. "I didn't think you were. And I wouldn't jump if you did. You caught me unaware, that's all. I didn't know you were there. I'm not frightened of you."

He was quiet, measuring the truth of her words. "Is it because you feel safe in that getup?"

Her brows rose a fraction in reaction to hearing her habit described as a "getup." Her tone was patient but cool. "It's because I don't think you intend me any harm. You're Walker's friend, aren't you? Why would you want to hurt me?"

"You weren't so confident back at the water hole."

"Back at the... umm... the
water hole
I wasn't so confident you even knew Walker Caide." She turned her back on him and continued washing. "And, yes," she added softly, with almost pained honesty, "perhaps some of it has to do with my getup."

Then it had nothing to do with him, he thought, wondering if he could believe her. Nothing to do with his sun-bronzed skin, straight inky hair, or the gun belt he wore low on his hips. Ryder reached in the pocket of his jeans and pulled out an envelope. It was wrinkled and dog-eared. There were a few smudged fingerprints on the back. He opened it carefully and took out the contents. The letter was two pages long, front and back. It had been handled with more care than the envelope. He held it out to Mary.

"You don't have to prove anything to me," she said.

"Take it."

Mary pulled her hands out of the water, shook them off, and wiped them on a towel. She took the letter Ryder held in front of her. "This isn't necessary."

"Read it."

She had only taken note of Walker's handwriting once before, at the occasion of her sister's wedding when he'd signed his name to the marriage papers. Mary quickly turned the pages, and her eyes flickered to his signature. She would recognize the scrawled and sweeping lines of his "W" anywhere. Having established the letter was really from her brother-in-law, Mary went back to the beginning and read it through carefully.

Most of the letter was about Skye, about the hasty marriage, and the circumstances that had brought Walker to the Granville mansion. There was anecdotal information about Skye's family and descriptions which brought a smile to Mary's lips. Walker certainly had them all dead to rights. The letter concluded with an invitation for Ryder to visit Walker and Skye whenever he wanted. "Walker didn't know yet about his assignment to China," she said, returning the letter to Ryder. "He's been there and back and gone again."

"He didn't know when I would take him up on it," Ryder replied. "I haven't been much good about writing back myself."

"It was a rather nonspecific invitation."

"He meant it."

"I know that. Walker didn't make the offer to be polite. That certainly isn't his way." Mary was able to see the envelope clearly as Ryder replaced Walker's letter. "Is that where you came from?" she asked somewhat incredulously. "Fort Preston in the Arizona Territory?"

"That's where I was when I got the letter. I came from Fort Apache."

"You traveled over most of the country to see Walker without ever thinking to check if he was here?"

"There's no need to be scornful," he said evenly. "Or have I given you the impression I'm a stupid man?"

No, she thought, that wasn't her impression at all. "Quite the opposite," she said.

He folded the envelope and put it away. There was a gravity to his voice that hadn't been there before. "I came East to pay my respects to a teacher who died recently. I missed the funeral the military gave him, but I spoke to his widow and made my peace. That was what was important to me."

Mary saw that it was. The cleanly defined lines of his face were still impassive, but there was a certain solemnness about his eyes. "An instructor at West Point?" she asked, beginning to piece things together in her own mind.

He nodded. "General Augustus Sampson Thorn."

It was an impressive sounding name but one with which Mary was unfamiliar. "I don't believe I know of him."

"A veteran of battles at Shiloh and Manassas and some of the early Western campaigns against the Cheyenne. It's all right," he added when she continued to shake her head slowly in nonrecognition. "He would have rather been remembered for his career as a teacher."

"What was his subject?"

"Mathematics."

Once again she was disconcerted by his ability to surprise her. "This was a subject you liked?"

"Very much so."

"I see," she said, wondering what to make of him.

He almost smiled then. "No," he said. "You don't see at all."

Mary noted that he didn't seem bothered by the fact, which meant that he didn't care for her opinion one way or the other. She supposed that was as it should be. They were virtual strangers in spite of a common acquaintance and a perfunctory exchange of names.

Mary finished up the last of the dishes while Ryder stood by. "When do you have to return to the Fort?" she asked.

"I'm not going back to Fort Apache. I have a new assignment."

"Here in the East?"

"No." Was that disappointment he glimpsed? Relief? "In the Southwest Territory."

"You're regular Army?"

In Ryder's opinion there was nothing regular about the Army. "More or less," he said. "I scout for them."

Mary Francis Dennehy's laughter was not for the fainthearted. It exploded from her like a burst of Gatling gunfire. It was loud and raucous, yet wonderfully lively and infectious. The features that could be solemn and serene under the most trying circumstances became animated and mobile. Her eyes crinkled, her nose wrinkled, her generous mouth split widely, and she flushed from the hollow of her throat to her scalp. Her family appreciated it. Little Sisters of the Poor made allowances for it. Mother Superior suffered it. And Bishop Colden prayed it would never happen during his mass.