Thea Devine (14 page)

The worst news. She schooled her face into a calm expression as she picked up the lamp. “I’m not scared,” she said finally, handing him the light, and preceding him to the door. “I’ll meet with him, and I’ll tell him no to his face.” She mounted the stairs.

“Well, you might want to reconsider, after all,” he said, as he followed her, holding the lamp high so he could have a clear view of the movement of her buttocks as she climbed the stairs.

Was she wiggling that way purposely? Her boots made the most desire-damping sound he had ever heard, but he could feast on the tempting contour of her bottom for the whole minute it took to make it up the stairs, savoring it because her flimsy robe hid absolutely nothing. It was as if she were naked just for him.

She was terribly aware of the nature of his thoughts, since she was still breathless from the excitement of
lovemaking and the thrilling scare of near-discovery. But he wouldn’t know that it was someone else who brought that particular light to her eyes. He would think it was her response—albeit an unwilling one—to his allure. He might even think she hadn’t meant a word of what she said.

Damn and damn. What a coil. It
had
looked as if she had been playing some coquettish game with him, especially the way she was dressed.

He was still looking at her in that knowing way, and she needed to get out of the parlor in thirty seconds unless she wanted him to be sure that what he was thinking might be true.

“Thanks, Reese,” she said finally. “I’ll look into it tomorrow.”

She knew his hot eyes followed her as she made her way down the hallway to her bedroom and closed the door emphatically behind her.

The lawyer, she thought, sinking onto her bed, was the least of her problems. The very worst thing was having to shunt Logan’s cataclysmic lovemaking to the back of her thoughts because something terrifying had just occurred to her.

Their dark haven was safe no longer.

And there was nowhere else they could go.

“I heard you were running around half naked last night, Maggie. I swear I don’t know what’s come over you. Supposing someone heard about it. Supposing someone thought you were trying to seduce Reese. Were you, Maggie?
Were
you? I won’t have it. I won’t have it in my house.”

“It’s
my
house, Mother Colleran, and the last thing in the world I want to do is lead Reese into temptation. I believe I have told him so as well.”

“Well, miss, what you tell and what you show are two different things. When you run around after intruders with nothing on under your robe, you can be sure a man will get a different message.”

“Oh really? How would you know, Mother Colleran? Did someone seduce you sometime when you were naked under your robe?”

The idea was ludicrous, Maggie thought, taking in her mother-in-law’s sputtering indignation. That squat old crow. It was hard to imagine that she had ever been young and beautiful and loved. Hers had probably been an arranged marriage of San Francisco dynasties, and her sons were probably to have been heirs to something or the other. She had probably seen herself as some kind of queen bee, instead, she had wound up a drone, and Maggie barely heard her words as she prepared to go down to Bodey’s store and hear the whole story of the coming of the lawyer.

“And how
do
you know this anyway?” she finally asked.

“Well, Reese just didn’t think it was highly likely anyone would break into the office, and he wondered whether anything like this had ever happened before. I told him no. I tell you, Maggie, your story sounds suspicious.”

“Well then, perhaps I was meeting my other lover,” she said facetiously from the door, pushed just that little step further into melding the truth and the lie.

And was that a mistake. The self-satisfied look on Mother Colleran’s face told her that it was just the kind of answer her mother-in-law hoped to goad out of her. Indeed, the old lady looked as if she could very well believe it.

So she had accomplished what she had come for, Maggie thought disgustedly as she made her way to Bodey’s store. She got the rise and she got a nice tidbit to
repeat to Reese.

“Maggie!” Arwin Bodey hailed her.

She thought again how much she liked him. He was a plain man with a no-nonsense manner and he always said what was on his mind. And he had a prescience that was very unsettling.

“You hear about that lawyer now, Maggie?”

“I heard,” she said bluntly.

“Yep, I heard Reese was in a tearing hurry to tell you the news. Wonder why?”

“Is there anything you
don’t
hear?” she asked good-humoredly. “Or are you the one hanging over the bar next to Reese every night?”

“Oh now, Reese can hold his liquor, same as Frank could. No, Lilah don’t cotton to men and their drinking over the counter. They just all come by in the morning for some headache remedies and I see no point to hushing them up when they’re telling me their sad histories.”

“Amazing. I could swear I thought you read minds.”

“Well, I wish I could read someone’s mind. This here lawyer, they’re settin’ him up in the luxury suite in the hotel with an office in one room and a parlor and a bedroom. It sounds like he’s here to do big business, Maggie, and I don’t feel that bodes well for Colville.”

She shook her head. “Sure, he’ll buy a few thousand more acres here and there and patch together the line and that will be the end of it.”

“No, Maggie, you don’t understand. I think he’s here for you and Logan and the Mapes, but primarily for you.”

“That’s absurd. The Colleran ranchland couldn’t be all that vital.”

“Maggie, you’ve looked at the map. You know if you draw a straight line from Danforth down to Gully Basin, the line to Cheyenne goes right through Logan and you. You don’t think they want it? Or that the cost to them
would still be less than grading down the gully and retracking for however many miles they’ll have to down that long quarter of rangeland. Oh, Maggie, be careful. Too many people want the rail line, and you’re in the definite minority of those who don’t.”

“I just can’t see it being that critical.”

“You’re being naive.”

She was shocked. Arwin was a good friend, and never once had he ever hauled her down as harshly as he did just now.

“I’ll protect myself,” she said finally.

“Oh, but Maggie, how you going to tell the sharks from the whales?”

“Yes, and who will gobble up the town faster. Maybe I’ll throw them some bait, and we’ll see who gets bloodied first.”

“And maybe,” Arwin added somberly, “they’ll all take a damned big bite out of
you
.”

After that, she thought she didn’t want to see Arwin again for a month. Every visit ended with a prophesy of gloom. She felt as though she were a branch of a tree caught in a turbulent storm, where it would take only a crack of lightning or a strong wind to destroy her altogether.

She couldn’t fight lawyers and railroad directors. She could barely keep her own end up with her mother-in-law. And she had allowed herself, even knowing the consequences, to pitch headlong into something with Logan that could never lead to anything concrete—ever.

She had needed only one night, one incident, to bring it home forcibly to her. It had been sheer folly to encourage him, to allow herself to wallow in his unleashed desire.

That was the thing that gnawed at her this morning,
not lawyers and mothers-in-law, or what Reese might have been led to think last night. She cared about none of them; she cared about Logan, and she knew there was nowhere to go with him, nowhere that wasn’t a dark office, a hideaway, a room somewhere where no one knew them, but there was nowhere like that in Colville, or his ranch, assuming she could travel at night with impunity, which of course she could not. There was no hope, none.

And she knew too that things could only escalate from last night. She already felt the driving need for completion, to have him within her. And it would happen. She knew it would happen the first night she crept down the stairs to meet him.

And if it happened … she could have joined with him last night, so urgently did she feel the force of her feminine response to him … if it had happened …

She took a deep breath. There was no going back. There might be a child. He would want her to marry him. She would have to live at the ranch that was his livelihood. He wouldn’t live in town.
No,
she didn’t know whether or not he would live in town, but it seemed likely he would not want to. And she didn’t want a child now, she didn’t want constraints. The decision had to be that she had stored up enough memories and could not chance another near-discovery and the drenching fear that utterly decimated her passion.

She could live without that now; she knew it in a way that she had never felt it with Frank. She could even have a wrenching regret that Logan had not been the one to court her first, but she couldn’t go back. She couldn’t go forward either, and she damned the fates and blocked out all the words they had said and all the things he made her feel.

She never should have allowed him to seduce her.

She had been a partner to it all because in the dark
words were easy and the molten sensations all seemed part of something not real, something that would never reach beyond that room and that passion-fraught darkness.

But it had gone outside the room, and now she was in danger—from her feelings and from external forces that sought to control her as completely as her passions. She didn’t even know which was the worse threat.

She found out on Thursday, when A.J. picked up the readyprint from the express station. He returned with something more: a handbill that was being placed all around town publicizing construction jobs on the railroad, with good pay and accommodations. And on the inner page of the supplement, a small ad announced the news: “Come one, come all, ready money and good jobs for everyone on the Colville line.”

“Well, the lawyer’s name is Mr. Brown,” Dennis told her, “and he wants to see you at your convenience.”

“I don’t trust lawyers named Mr. Brown, and I’m sure we have nothing to discuss,” Maggie said plainly, sifting through the papers on her worktable in order to give Dennis the impression she was inundated with work so that he would not bother her any further with this lawyer nonsense.

“You should at least give him a chance to speak with you,” Dennis said.

“Why?”

He looked uncertain for a moment. “Because he contacted me, as the executor for Frank’s estate, to see whether there is some way, under the terms of the will, around your adamant refusal to hear their offer.”

“And you told him there was none of course and that we had nothing to talk about.”

“I’m not sure that’s true, Maggie.”

“I see. You’ve gone through the clauses with a magnifying glass and you’ve found something that could be
construed
, but doesn’t
say
in as many words, that…”

“Maggie!” He was at the end of his tether at her sarcasm.

“All
right
. So I meet with Mr. Anonymous Brown and he offers me many thousands of dollars to sell up and I say no and that is the end of it. Is that what you want?”

“I want you to listen very carefully to what he has to say, Maggie, and make an
informed
decision, always remembering your duty to Frank’s mother, and your own monetary need, especially concerning the paper, which isn’t going to run at a profit any time soon.”

“Fine. Now we know whose side you are on.”

“I am on your side, Maggie. The land is useless to you and the money is not.”

“That is one way of looking at it.”

“And what is the other? That in twenty or thirty years you’ll retire and want to be bucolic in your old age and run cattle? Please Maggie. You are really being quite irrational about this. Believe me, the cost of buying the land is less than rerouting, and they will dig deep in the corporation’s pockets to find a sum that you will find very attractive.”

“I suppose you might have some idea of what it could be?”

“I don’t. But you will tell me, Maggie, and we will discuss it, and then we both will come to an informed decision as to what you should do.”

More pressure. Pressure from all sides: Arch Warfield’s smug assurance that Maggie now had to let him have a free hand with his coverage of the railroad’s progress since she had let them advertise in the paper. Pressure because of the fact that Logan was returning the next day and she would have to deal with him sometime on the weekend. And now Mr. Brown, the
mysterious, glad-handing, high-rolling Mr. Brown, with his dollars falling out of his pockets as he walked, paving the dusty streets of Colville with promises.

“Going to see Mr. Brown are you?” Mother Colleran said as she found Maggie rummaging through her closet for her most severe dress.

“Oh, did Dennis incite you to put pressure on me as well, Mother Colleran? I hope you know that your comfort is not my first concern,” Maggie said edgily as she discarded one dress after another, finally settling on the one she had worn to Frank’s memorial service even though she would swelter in it on this warm day.

“I think all you have to remember is that Frank would have sold that land in a trice, Maggie. He was forever regretting even having started the ranch in the first place. It’s not hallowed ground or anything.”

“Oh my heavens, it
isn’t?
You mean there is one place that Frank touched that isn’t consecrated by his mere presence?”

“Don’t blaspheme, you shameless girl. I always knew you hated Frank anyway.”

“No one would believe you if they were told, Mother Colleran. I would deny it, and everyone knows how valiantly Mrs. Frank has carried on, shouldering the burden of her indigent mother-in-law. Have you never heard them say that?”

Mother Colleran shook her head. “Poor Maggie. You live in a dream world, and your lies will drive you mad someday. And then I will take over everything.”

That statement was stunning. “Oooh?” Maggie murmured consideringly. “Is that the plan? The wonder is you’ve waited so long.”

“You’re right about that,” Mother Colleran snapped, and she turned on her heel and left the room.