The Outcast (3 page)

And she smiled to offset the damning certainty that nothing would be the same again now that Reeve Garrett had returned.

The sound of approaching hoofbeats ended the need for further talk. Both women looked around. There was no mistaking the horseman. No one else melded into an animal to form one muscled unit. And few wearing Union blue traveled alone in Pride County.

Patrice stood slowly, forming an imposing column of support and defense at her mother’s side, no less wary than she’d been of the nightriders come to burn her house around her. She held a frail hand in one of hers, mindful not to crush the slender fingers in her agitation.

The rider dismounted, a handsome figure, proud in bearing, determined in manner. He paused long enough to loop his reins through the brass tethering ring before striding to the stairs. Patrice stiffened a degree with each step he came nearer until she was as rigid as buckram stays. She pulled quick, insufficient breaths between the firm clench of her teeth. The sound whistled ominously beneath the modulated greeting her mother gave.

“Why, Mr. Garrett, what a surprise.”

Hannah Sinclair was too well bred to reveal the nature of that surprise, whether good or bad. Instead, she smiled, showing no less welcome than she would to Breckinridge, himself, had he come to tell them the Confederacy had been saved. Her free hand extended in invitation.

Reeve took the frail hand and raised it gallantly to his lips. His gaze never strayed from the neighboring matriarch to the seething female at her side.

“Miz Sinclair, you’re lookin’ lovely, as always. After four years, a man gets hungry for such a sight to remind him that he’s come home.”

Ignoring Patrice’s indignant snort, Hannah
blushed prettily. “Go on with you, Mr. Garrett. I don’t remember you as given to such excessive flattery.”

“I’m not one for speaking less than the truth, ma’am.”

That pleased Hannah as much as it annoyed her daughter.

Only then did Reeve glance at Patrice for a perfunctory nod. “Miss Patrice.”

Patrice’s glare bored holes through him.

Hannah withdrew her hand but not her hospitable manner. Encouraged, Reeve lingered on the front steps, seeing an opportunity to learn things Patrice hadn’t stayed long enough to tell him.

“Is your family visiting here at the Glade, Miz Hannah?” He glanced about, seeing no driver or carriage.

Hannah indulged him with a sad smile. “Alas, Mr. Garrett, the Glade has been our home for the past months. The squire was kind enough to offer his generosity.”

“Seeing as how close we were to becoming family.” Patrice added that like a rapier stab. Her stony expression gave nothing away but her stare was razor-stropped sharp.

Reeve remained unflinching as he turned his attention back to the elder Sinclair lady. His brows knit with apprehension.

“Has somethin’ happened to the Manor?”

“We have more than just chimneys remaining, which is far luckier than most who’ve entertained Yankee vermin.”

“Patrice,” Hannah cautioned gently. “The Manor has been fortunately spared, but the squire didn’t
feel it was safe for us to stay there without our menfolk.”

“Too much dangerous riffraff roaming about,” Patrice added with a venomous purr.

“Your husband and son?”

“Mr. Sinclair fell at Chickamauga.” Hannah nodded at Reeve’s quickly expressed regret. “We haven’t received word of Deacon, yet. He was in the field on his own much of the time. No one can tell us … anything.”

“I’m sure he’s fine, Miz Hannah. Deacon’s a clever man, a survivor.” The way he said it wasn’t exactly a compliment. Remembering that he spoke to the man’s mother, Reeve took a moment before he could continue in a neutral tone. “There was a lot of confusion at the end and a lot of units broke apart and lost touch. It’s nothing to worry over.”

“We will surely rest so much better for your platitudes, sir.”

“Patrice, Mr. Garrett is trying to be kind.”

Patrice’s patience fractured. “Mr. Garrett might well have shot Deacon, himself, for all we know. He’s not above such things as he’s proved in the past.”

Reeve never twitched a muscle. His flat stare fixed with Patrice’s, absorbing its rancor without response.

Hannah paled dramatically, shocked by her daughter’s bad manners as well as by her words. “You will apologize—”

Patrice’s head shot up like a fierce wild horse’s.

“Not to him! Never to him!”

Her eyes glittering with furious tears, Patrice whirled away rather than recant before her mother’s persuasion. As the door slammed behind her, she
heard her mother’s stammered apologies to a man who deserved none. Not from them!

Leaning back against the papered wall, Patrice squeezed her eyes shut, forbidding the dampness to escape while she hung on the husky timbre of his speech, feeling it thrill along her senses with maddening results, berating herself at the same time for succumbing to that frailty of heart. It shouldn’t have been Reeve Garrett out there charming her mother with his soft drawling manner and awkward charm. It should have been Deacon, Jonah, any number of loyal Southern patriots whose honor was blighted by that traitor’s very presence.

But Reeve returned, mocking their sacrifice, torturing her resolve.

And she could never forgive him for that. Never.

“Patrice? Is something wrong, child?”

Her gaze flashed up wildly, her upset and turmoil clearly displayed before she was able to mask both with a genteel smile. “I thank you for your worry, Squire. I’ve had a bit of a shock, is all.”

Byron Glendower held most of the power in Pride County in one well-manicured hand, but no one would guess it by looking at him. He wasn’t big or blustery or surrounded by an air of self-importance. With his wispy hair, rail-thin figure, and myopic eyes, he appeared more a gangly egret than an aggressive bird of prey. But that was outward appearance. Within roared a lion-strong ambition, an ambition to pull a man from his home in Virginia to stake new territory in a raw lush land where dreams were measured in horseflesh and success by the legacy a man could pass on to his heirs. A legacy not worth much in the war’s aftermath.
Not with one son dead and the other unwilling to accept his place.

“Shock? Your brother—”

“No.”

How could she prepare him?

Then she didn’t have to.

The sound of Reeve’s voice brought a wash of shameless joy into the squire’s eyes. Patrice glanced away, honoring his privacy, resentful of the welcome she saw in that flash of recognition. Because it echoed her own traitorous response. But when the squire spoke, his words were rough with caution.

“What does he want here?”

“You’ll have to ask him.”

Byron Glendower went out onto the porch to do just that.

Father and son exchanged long, stoic looks. Assessments were done with no flicker of warming. Glendower broke the silence with a restrained statement.

“You look well, boy.”

“Not a scratch in four years.”

His claim hung, almost a challenge in the way it was defiantly rendered. Finally, the squire nodded.

“Are you here to stay or just passing through?”

“Depends.”

“On?”

“I’d like to stay on at the cabin. I’ll work off the cost … like my mama did.”

“Reeve—your mother—”

The lines of his face tightened into chiseled planes. “I know. I saw her grave. I’ll want to know about it … later.”

The squire nodded again, sorrow seeping into his tired gaze. Then, a slight edge of hope nudged in.
“The cabin is yours, of course, but you don’t need to stay down there. The house—”

“The cabin’s fine, sir.” And that put an end to his invitation, the one extended time and again but similarly discarded with a prideful contempt. As if the offer was beneath consideration.

“Come in, Reeve. You must be hungry.”

“No, thank you. I’d just as soon settle in.”

The second, more obvious rejection, took a greater toll upon the elder’s expression. It hardened to mask the pang of disappointment. “Whatever you want, Reeve. Come up to the house when you’re ready. We’ll talk then.”

With a bow to Hannah Sinclair and a quick glance toward the door through which Patrice had disappeared, Reeve turned without a sound to remount his horse.

“I see you’ve taken good care of Zeus.”

Reeve patted the stallion’s finely arched neck. “I promised I would, didn’t I? He’s glad to be home.”

Just as he, despite all his arguments, was glad to be back.

“Reeve, it’s not going to be easy, you being here. Not for any of us.”

“Nothing’s ever been easy for me, sir.”

He wheeled the animal away, leaving his father to stew on the complexities his arrival would cause as soon as word got out that a traitor was back in their midst.

Chapter 2

“Kill ’em all!”

Reeve shifted in the rocking chair as the fierce Rebel yell cut through his dream.

“No prisoners!”

His head rolled against the wooden back as wild war cries echoed in his mind, as memories caught on the sunlight glinting against the cold steel of brandished sabers. Memories not from any battlefield but from the smooth lawns of the Glade as pounding hooves churned up great clods of Kentucky bluegrass. It wasn’t an engagement between North and South he looked back upon but a skirmish of young Pride County blades trying to impress two of its loveliest belles.

He could see Patrice Sinclair and her friend, Starla Fairfax, languishing in the shade like hothouse blossoms in bright petals of aqua and jonquil-colored silk. Over the fluttering of their fans, excited eyes
followed the boys on horseback as they played at war with Mexico. His friends, though he was not their equal; Noble, Mede, Tyler, and Jonah, still at the age where social standing didn’t matter when it came to roughhouse. Only Noble could sit a saddle half as well as Reeve, and all vied to have him on their side as they reenacted the stories Mede’s father told them of his forays in the frontier of Texas. It was afterward, when they’d be called up to the house, that Reeve couldn’t follow. To the illegitimate son of Byron Glendower, the county’s tolerance extended only so far.

While good enough to rattle sabers with, he wasn’t acceptable when it came to clattering fine silver over meals. As a young man just coming into his own awareness of self and place, he resented the hell out of it.

And the one he resented most, was Jonah Glendower.

It was impossible not to be jealous. Jonah had everything he wanted—a name, a fine home, the best horseflesh in Kentucky, the respect of the county. All just because of who he was, not because he’d done one damn thing to earn it.

And if whispers were believed, he’d have Patrice Sinclair, as well. It was common practice for sprawling families of wealth and stature to interbreed. Jonah and Patrice were considered a prime match … by everyone but Reeve and Patrice, herself.

Patrice was the best the county had to offer, though certainly not the most traditional. She was a rule breaker, a reined-in hellion, chomping at the bit. It would take special handling to gentle her, and a willingness to be thrown more than once. Not every man could appreciate that trace of wildness.
Few would be wise enough to recognize the value of that spirit and not break it. He wasn’t sure Jonah was one of them, even though he knew his half brother had loved their neighbor just about forever. And it looked like he’d have her.

Something about that wedged up tight and hurtful beneath Reeve’s ribs.

It was when Mede called for a horse race that the idea came, a shameful stab of envy overruling all else. Patrice, ever outrageous, named a kiss from the lady of choice as the winner’s reward. He wanted that kiss more than anything—anything except the chance to humiliate his rival in front of all.

Jonah didn’t ride. He had a deep abiding fear of horses, considering them unpredictable and a touch demonic with their high-strung manner, flashing eyes, and flaring nostrils. He looked stricken when Reeve jumped down from his huge stallion, Prometheus, to offer the reins and a silky, “Here, Jonah. You can take my horse.”

Apprehension shadowed his half brother’s gaze, but when he glanced back at the lovely Patrice Sinclair, all sunset-soft with her burnished hair, sky-blue eyes, and pastel gown, he took the reins with a tentative courage.

“Reeve, his daddy’s gonna wear welts on you if you put his boy up on that black of yours,” Tyler warned. “He’s gonna git himself kilt.”

His daddy.
Not
your daddy.
Reeve’s resentment simmered. He gave the reluctant Jonah a nudge. “Go on, Jonah. All you have to do is hang on.”

And he’d smiled encouragingly, seeing his half brother’s fear, knowing he wouldn’t be able to control the big horse once it sensed its rider’s lack of confidence. He watched Jonah square his shoulders,
trying to be worthy of Reeve’s pride, trying to win over Patrice’s admiration. Then he’d climbed aboard.

Four horses broke from the line, surging forward as one. Three returned. They found Jonah lying bleeding and broken in the woods, where he’d been thrown, just as Reeve had known he would be. But he hadn’t known that Jonah’s leg would be so badly shattered, he’d suffer months of agony and be left with a permanent limp.

When Squire Glendower, in a rare and frightful fury, demanded to know who was to blame for his son’s laming injury, he never expected Jonah to speak up weakly, insisting that his own foolishness was at fault. He defended Reeve against Tyler’s recollections. In his relief not to be named responsible, he thought Jonah a gullible fool. Until his half brother, on his bed of pain, met his gaze, and with one direct exchange, let Reeve know that he was aware of what had been done and why.

Reeve jerked from his dozing. Something awakened him. He felt a presence before actually hearing anything again, a skill developed in self-defense while on picket duty. Hairs bristled at the nape of his neck as intuition rustled by on the way to stiffen all his major muscles into a pose of readiness. He drew his pistol from the cartridge belt hanging over the back of his chair.

Alerted senses picked up tiny clues of identity even as he stepped out onto the narrow porch. The scent of warm bread and warm woman teased his nostrils into a welcoming flare. The sound of fabric playing loosely about a soft-footed stride told him it was a woman, but that didn’t necessarily lessen his danger. Threat came in all sorts of guises. He
squinted against the brightness, concealing the gun behind his back.