Thea Devine (6 page)

It always came down to money and who stood to gain most and the hell with the consequences. It was Harold Danforth and his cronies’ attitude, and it was so blatantly self-serving that it was painful.

“Well,” she said finally, “now you’ve seen the homestead. It’s time to rout out those railroad men.”

With some difficulty, Reese turned the team around and the wagon bounced back to the road. From there Maggie directed him east, toward the most likely place the team might be.

“It’s so beautiful here,” she murmured at one point. And then again, after another three quarters of an hour: “This is Ramsey land now, and that adjoins leased acreage and the Danforth property.” She kept her eyes resolutely on the road, praying they wouldn’t see Logan. She felt ill-prepared to deal with him at the moment.

The sun was behind them now, warming her back and her chilled thoughts. Beside her, Reese was silent, companionable, making no judgments and asking no further questions.

She didn’t think it odd, either. Reese had been in town a day and had learned her side first. No doubt he’d hear the rest in the course of the next several days, at the hotel restaurant or around the stove at Bodey’s store or over the front desk at the
Morning Call
if he stayed in town long enough.

“I suppose now,” she said at length, “it could be said
we’re trespassing. This used to be Danforth land.” She pointed to a turn in the road. “They may be down there.”

Reese marveled. She knew her town and her territory like no one else. They could just see the big white tent and men moving around as they approached—and someone else.

“Damn, that looks like that Ramsey fella,” Reese growled.

“Yes it is,” Maggie said, her voice neutral and her heart filled with a sudden shot of resentment. What
was
he doing here, at this hour, and why did she feel as if his presence here took something away from her?

Reese drew the wagon up beside him, looking for all the world as if he would have liked to trample him. Logan came to Maggie.

“Mornin’, Maggie. They’ve set up shop here already.”

“So I see. You remember Reese?” Maggie asked pointedly.

“So I do,” Logan said laconically, but he kept his sky-blue gaze on Maggie. “They’ve plotted out a way to get around the basin, Maggie; I just went over it with them.”

“Sounds like you ought to hire this go-getter as a reporter,” Reese said ungraciously. He was just a little suspicious of Logan’s appearance on the scene so early, a little wary of how much information he had already acquired.

“Oh no, not me. I’m just a range-roving cowboy.” A faint smile quirked across his lips. “Want to come see, Maggie?”

“Sure, lead the way.”

“No, this is not accessible by wagon. We have to ride. I’ll take you up, and when we’re done, I’ll take you back to town.”

Maggie looked into his eyes. She had known him forever and had always felt secure with him. And yet, for that moment she hesitated, hesitated because of what he
had said, because of his kiss, because she would have to abandon Reese. But the lure of seeing the course was greater than any of her concerns, and she turned regretfully to Reese. “I’m going to do that.”

“If you must,” Reese muttered. Then, jacking himself up to appear enthusiastic, he added, “Of course you must. I can find my way back. It was a pretty direct route.”

“Right, just back along the track here and onto the road in the opposite direction. Take the turnoff to Colville; it’s clearly marked.”

“He’ll be all right,” Logan said. Swinging himself onto his big white stallion, he leaned over to give Maggie his hand, and hoisted her easily onto the saddle in front of him.

She mounted, Reese thought enviously, as though she had done it a hundred times just like that, with him.

But he couldn’t know the hundreds of little darting feelings that assaulted her as she sat before Logan on horseback for the first time in ten years.

Everything was different now, she thought, as they waited for Reese to turn the wagon and head off in the other direction.

“I do have you exactly where I want you,” Logan murmured in her ear, confirming her dread.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said primly.

“You could have at least asked where.”

“Nonsense, I know where I am. Logan, stop talking in riddles and let’s get started.”

“Oh, sweetheart, would I ever love to get started with you.”

“I think if you say one more word in this vein, Logan Ramsey, I will get off this horse and
walk
back to town.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Logan said meekly, hiding the smile he knew she could not see.

But she could hear it in his voice, and there was a sweetness in her in response to it that she hadn’t expected to feel. No, she hadn’t expected to feel anything: this was Logan, her childhood friend, dependable and secure.

This was not a
man
in whom she was interested, and yet, and yet … she was insanely aware of the long length of his torso behind her, solid as a rock. And of his words, what he had said, what he meant. His arms around her now, where no man’s arms had been for the past two years or more.

“It sure is tough going here,” Logan said. “Hang on.” She wasn’t sure if he were talking about her or the rocky range they were about to travel, but his hands tightened on the reins and around her and she leaned back against him almost involuntarily as his horse began a descent.

When they hit level ground again he loosened his grip and one arm moved slowly from her waist upward to hold her shoulders. Or was it her imagination that his forearm brushed against her breasts? He held her so tightly she couldn’t be sure what he had done, and the heat of his body and the iron bar of his arm around her were like living things—pulsating with a life she was responding to in spite of herself.

This was crazy. Five words in the heat of a grueling day were going to change her life forever; she could never perceive Logan the same way again. “I’m going to win you …,” he had said, and now somehow, he had maneuvered her into his arms and for one moment she doubted that he even had anything legitimate to show her.

“They’ll be clearing out through here after they grade that little hill, and they plan to go around the basin and through Big Gully. Did you know?”

“No, I didn’t.” Instantly she felt ashamed of herself for doubting him.

“It may not work out, of course, but this is the way for now.” He nosed the horse through the back brush and along the free range that skirted his acreage. “They’ll have to add a hundred miles of track to the route; it’s the least direct—but you know that. I’m a little worried about how desperate the corporation feels about spending that money.”

“We all should be,” she said sourly. It wasn’t a pretty route either. There were odd hillocks and drops, and forests that would require a lumber crew to come in to clear it away.

“If they go through Big Gully,” Logan said, his voice close to her ear, “they’ll be beyond the far hundred by five miles.”

“But who is to say it still won’t affect the grazing fields?” Maggie commented, keeping her eyes resolutely ahead. She felt like she was going crazy. She had felt the faintest flick of his tongue against her ear.

“Yes,” he murmured, and his lips pressed ever so gently against her lobe. She pretended she did not feel a little jolt of incandescent sensation. “You’re right.” He reined in the horse as they passed into a copse of bushes. “Maggie …”

“Are they going to cut through here?” she asked doggedly, resisting the demand of the hand that had cupped her chin.

“Lean against me, Maggie.”

“No, I don’t want this.” She knew she didn’t want it, and she knew if she leaned against him she would feel the thrust of his desire, which had been nudging her for the past fifteen minutes. She wanted none of that… she thought … but his tongue tugged teasingly at her earlobe, and his insistent hand moved her mouth closer to his, and closer …

“Just a kiss, Maggie,” he whispered, “let me taste you,” as his tongue sought her lips, just to lick them, and
thrust at the moment she least expected into the warm honey of her mouth again.

She wasn’t prepared for him, for anything. Not Logan, not another man, not her hunger, nor her eager surrender to his forceful invasion of her mouth. Or his arms enfolding her in a way that rubbed against her breasts and cupped them, until his fingers found her hardening nipples with unerring accuracy even under the layers of material.

She held his hands and he held her captive with his kiss and his caress. Her body flooded with feminine heat, her mouth could not get enough of him. He was the first man to release this volcanic yearning in her.

Just when she thought that his stroking her nipples and his exploring, stroking tongue, would bring her to completion, she felt him pull away gently but abruptly. His hands slid down and away from her breasts to take the reins again.

She made a small sound in her throat.

“I love your kisses, Maggie,” he murmured.

Not enough, she thought violently. Her whole body was stiff with arousal and she did not know what to do. She felt frantic and scared and tense with unfulfilled desire. And
he
wanted to talk!

“I dreamt of your kisses for five long, barren years, Maggie.”

“I’m here now.”

“But I want more than your kisses.”

I want more too
, she thought, but she couldn’t say it. Her body was cooling down now, and she was utterly dismayed at what she was feeling, and what he had made her want.

“Logan, don’t…”

“But I’m going to. I made you come alive, Maggie, for the first time in years. Who else do you think could do that?”

Anybody, she thought grimly. Any damned body, because she was more desperate and more greedy than even Frank had accused her of being. He had had a word for it, and she wasn’t sure, at this moment when she felt like devouring Logan’s mouth and stripping off her clothes to let him feel her naked body, she wasn’t sure that Frank hadn’t been absolutely right.

Chapter Four

They rode quietly back to town. Logan knew just when not to press a point and just when to keep silent. He knew, she thought trenchantly, exactly what she was feeling and what she was thinking. If it wasn’t a surprise to him, it had been a catastrophic revelation to her.

He even knew where to put his hands so as not to touch her again, and that annoyed her most of all. His body was like a wall behind her, solid, with no feeling. There might never have been the intimacy between them. He knew just how to handle it and she did not.

No one gave them a second glance as Logan drew up in front of the
Morning Call
building, but Maggie had the distinct feeling her mother-in-law was at an upstairs window, spying on her. She couldn’t wait to remove herself from the erotic heat of his body. She swung herself down from the saddle before Logan could lift a hand to help her, and turned a defiant face to him.

He spoke before she could think of what to say. “I’m coming for you now, Maggie. No one is going to get in my way.”

She bridled. “I hope you don’t think I’m just going to stand still and wait,” she said tartly, swallowing her anger and the words that bubbled up in her throat. She was
furious with herself and with him. Everything was changed now. Everything. Against her wishes, but not against her treacherous body, he had moved their friendship into a realm that went beyond anything she had felt with Frank. And she was angry that she had responded to him so flagrantly, scared that her hunger would scare him.

“Oh no,” he murmured, looking at her as if he had never seen her before, “I expect you to run as far and as fast as you can, Maggie. I promise you won’t get far.”

“Maybe you won’t,” she retorted, and he smiled a wicked little smile that set her hackles up like nothing else he had done so far. She wheeled away before she could find words to counter his smug male assertion.

She stared after him, fuming, for at least five minutes. She didn’t know this Logan Ramsey, she thought. Or she had never been aware of him while he had been lurking there all along, masquerading as her friend and wanting the same thing that all men want.

That was a laugh. Perhaps the truth was that Maggie Colleran’s little devil had been lurking there all along, wanting the same thing that all
women
wanted.

Except, she didn’t want it—not another marriage, another man in her life to tell her what to do and when to do it. No, she could do without that all right. She had had enough of that with Frank. The truth was that Maggie Colleran wanted the same thing that men wanted. What was unpalatable was just how much, and just how easily she could be aroused to reach for it.

A.J. met her at the door. “Oh, Miz Maggie, Harold Danforth is here, checking his article and having a fit.”

She froze. “Send for Dennis; I can’t negotiate with him. He’ll deny he said any of it if I start arguing with him. But he can’t get around my lawyer.”

Here was the last thing she needed, but as she made her way to the back of the office, she saw that Danforth had
indeed settled in at her worktable and was furiously scribbling away.

She sighed and said, “Harold.”

He looked up, his square pudgy face compressed into one round frown. “Oh, there you are, Maggie. This is all wrong. All wrong.”

She crossed her arms and leaned back against her desk. “I believe you and Dennis Coutts agreed on the terms and the wording. And I agreed to print whatever you wrote. I haven’t reneged on
my
part of the agreement, Harold. But I see you are doing a fair job of pulling back on yours.”

“No, no. Just a clarification. You didn’t change anything?” he demanded suspiciously.

“You had a written copy to compare, Harold.
I
don’t go back on my word. That’s not…” she died a little as she said it, “how Frank operated this newspaper. Or me.”

She stared him down, thinking he looked like nothing so much as a stuffed pig with his starched collar and bulging jowls. His suit was a size too tight, but he never would admit that he carried extra weight. The word was; he still rode out with his men, pretending to be the cowboy he never was. All he was, she thought, was lucky. He had bought some land in the right place and now it was the right time to sell up, take the money and run.

“All right, Harold,” she said briskly. “Take your problems, if they are real, to Dennis. He will contact me if I need to do anything. I trust,” she added ominously, “that I won’t. What you don’t have is the right to come in here and take over my office whenever you please. Excuse me now.”

Reluctantly he gave over her chair, and in a huff, snatched up the paper on which he had been writing and made for the door. “This isn’t the end of it, Maggie Colleran. Frank would have sold up, you know. He would have come in with the rest of us and allowed Denver
North up through the basin. They’re threatening to scale down the payments now because they have to lay more track and grade down the land. You’ll be sorry, Maggie….” His words drifted back from the door, and she sank into her chair and put her head in her hands.

He was so right, she thought. It would be far easier to sell or even lease a right of way than to hold out the way she was. She would have money to invest in the paper or to buy herself a new dress or to do any of a hundred other things … including sending her mother-in-law to perdition. But why, first and foremost, a new dress?

She didn’t like the way her thoughts were heading. She didn’t like anything about this day so far. She felt as though five different people had invaded her privacy and she wanted none of them there. She hated herself for invoking Frank’s name. Maybe she was distressed the most about that. It was too easy, and she was too prone to do it. And then,
they
wouldn’t let him die. They wanted his spirit, still alive, to walk among them.

Damn him.

She had never been able to make
him
do what she wanted.

She wondered who, after all this time, she was really fighting.

What she loved to do most was spiking type, and late Friday afternoon, when the sun streamed heavily in the back room windows, she sat at her type boxes, printer’s sticks in hand, and picked and laid the type one letter at a time, one line at a time, according to the layout. The office was closed. A.J. was at the books. Jean was laying out typefaces for the headlines. They worked quietly and well together, with a minimum of comment.

It occurred to her, in an edgy kind of way, that she and Jean had done this very chore every Friday afternoon for
a year since Frank’s death, and yet this was the first time she was aware of him as a man, the first time she wondered about his emotions in more than an abstract way.

He did everything with a thorough, graceful efficiency that was almost unobtrusive. His calm expression gave away nothing of what he was thinking. Nothing. And she had never thought to ask.

He stood beside her, tall and lean, pulling type, hardly ever saying a word, his practicality and common sense like a crutch to her, strong and stalwart, to be leaned on whenever she was in need. But what about him? What did he need? How did he make do? And what if, in the foreseeable future, he should want to leave Colville—leave
her?

She felt a moment’s pure terror sweep over her at how fragile the relationships were between her and Jean, and her and A.J.

And all because Logan Ramsey had kissed her.

She shook herself mentally. She was thinking utter nonsense. A.J. and Jean had stayed because they wanted to be in Colville, nothing more and nothing less. She was their boss. She didn’t need to know motives and life histories to employ a man, she only needed to know he could do his job well, as well as she did hers. It was as simple as that. Nothing would interfere with that and the paper would go on as it always had, and if one of them left her, she would find someone to replace him.

But still—Jean was not bound to her with a contract. He was young, vibrant, talented. He could pick up and go at a moment’s notice. Why hadn’t he?

He slanted a look at her as he sensed her eyes on him, and she turned her head away abruptly. “You’ll have to set the Danforth letter, Jean,” she said brusquely, reaching for a well-used cloth that was smeared with a thousand wipings of her ink-stained fingers. “I do not
have the stomach.”

“As you wish,” he said noncommittally, sliding onto her high stool as she moved across the room to examine and proof the first plates she had spiked.

“I’m tired of this railroad business,” she said suddenly, and she realized she was. Her puny protestations made no dent in the progress of things. Life would go on after Denver North passed through.

“It will soon be over,” Jean said comfortingly.

“No! What no one understands is, once they come through, it will never be over. Still…” She reversed several pieces of type on one long line, “everyone wants the bounty the railroad will bring.”

“Except Maggie.”

His stark comment startled her; she couldn’t tell if he were being sarcastic or if he agreed with her. She darted a look at him and was surprised to see his whole body turned toward her in a posture she could not define. In another moment, he had swiveled around again to focus on his work, and she thought she had dreamed the anger she saw in him, and—impossibly—the desire.

They pulled the first issues of the paper late that night and on into the morning, until the first two hundred bifold pages were stacked, ready for distribution.

There was nothing that made this week different than any other, Maggie thought as she wearily climbed into bed, except that Reese Colleran slept in a bedroom down the hall from hers and two men whom she had considered friends suddenly wanted to be more. Nothing different.

Or was she different? Had she somehow changed with Frank’s passing and a year’s solitude?

On the surface nothing was different that morning either. Mother Colleran carped as usual as she made her way downstairs to let in the delivery crew. Maggie hadn’t
slept much, nor had she come to any conclusions while she tossed and turned. The whole day had been an aberration, something out of context, never to be repeated again because she had imagined the whole.

But she wasn’t imagining the tall bulk of Logan Ramsey’s body relaxing against the doorframe, waiting for her as if he had always been waiting for her.

Instantly she felt closed in, surrounded. His appearance made things complicated and lent credence to the things he had said, the things she didn’t want to know.

There was only one way to handle that: she would have to keep as far away as possible from him so she didn’t have to listen to his words or feel what he could make her feel.

“What do
you
want?” she asked briskly as she swept into the room and past him without looking at him.

“I won’t say the obvious thing,” he drawled, amused by her testy tone.

“Good.” She knelt beside A.J., who was counting out and bundling papers on the floor, and took the first bundle up into her arms. “I’ll take this over to Bodey’s store.”

Two male voices said simultaneously, “I’ll help,” and she looked up, startled, to see Reese standing in the stairwell door, and Logan’s grim expression.

“Let’s hire these ole boys on,” A.J. said, heaving a bundle up into Reese’s arms. “These can go by the express office and the stage stop if you don’t mind. These to the hotel, Logan—” Another packet flew through the air toward Ramsey, “and I thank you kindly, gentlemen.”

“Just a range-rovin’ cowboy,” Maggie murmured as Logan passed her as she held the door open for him and Reese.

“Nothing more, nothing less,” he agreed, as he waited
for her to fall into step beside him. “But a man of many talents nonetheless. Don’t you agree, Maggie?”

“You roped in a bundle of newspapers at ten paces. I’m mighty impressed,” Maggie said lightly, utterly avoiding the question and wondering what passersby thought of the odd triumverate making its way down the plankboard walk. She felt like she was enclosed in a parenthesis. This early in the morning few stores were open except Arwin Bodey’s general store and the hotel, which kept round-the-clock hours.

“Ah, Arwin,” she said gratefully, hailing him as he poked his head out the door. “Reese, you can just dump those by the express office door. Someone will pick them up in about an hour. Logan, those go to the hotel desk, please. Excuse me, gentlemen,” and she left them both standing nonplussed outside Bodey’s door.

“Oh, Maggie, come on in and tell me all the news,” Arwin said comfortably as she plunked her bundle down on his well-worn counter.

“The usual,” she said noncommittally as she watched them slice through the cord with his pocket knife.

“Beg your pardon, Maggie, but isn’t this issue Harold Danforth’s moment in the sun?”

“Oh that, I believe so. Except I know there’s a lot of people who agree with him, Arwin, and there’s nothing I can say that will sway them.”

“You’re right. The really big news will be when you decide to sell up,” Arwin said, scanning the tightly printed front page. “So, what can I do for you this morning, Maggie?”

“Mother Colleran has prepared her usual list, so I’d appreciate delivery on those items later on today. We’ll need a sack of coffee for the office, and I guess that will do it.” She handed Arwin the list, and thought again how much she liked him. He was kind, straightforward, and personable without being invasive. Except this morning.

“Hear tell Mother Colleran and you have a visitor,” he said idly as he turned the page to read Danforth’s letter.

She stiffened. “Then of course you’ve heard tell who it is.”

“Staying with you and Mother Colleran?” Arwin pursued, rubbing his chin and staring at the printed page.

“If that’s what you’ve heard.”

“Now, Maggie …”

“Whose business is it?”

“But it’s Frank’s
brother
,” Arwin said reasonably.

“I believe I made mention of it in the social notes,” Maggie said stonily. So there it was, everyone knew and was aware Reese was living with her. Why did she care anyway?

Arwin sighed. “Well, Harold’s letter will give them a load of fodder to chew on, Maggie. They won’t jaw over you above an hour, rest assured.”