“Are any of the hands still out on the range?”
Carlos shrugged a slender shoulder. “No, I don’t think so, señorita. You know how the cook’s triangle brings them all in, and none have left since supper.” The hostler’s white teeth shone in the darkness. “None that I know of, anyway, and I’ve been here all night.”
“Okay,” Annabelle said. “Gracias, Carlos.”
She swung around and started again for the main lodge that sprawled atop the hill to the southeast. She’d wondered if the shadow rider had been one of the Broken Heart hands. For several years, ever since she’d started filling out her riding pants and blouses, she’d been aware of the lingering scrutiny of her father’s men.
Mostly, the hands favored her with harmless and understandable attention in the form of playful ribbing. They were unmarried men, after all, and she was a young woman blessed with the kind of face and figure men paid attention to.
Some of the hands, however, occasionally showed her a little too much attention—the kind of sheepish interest and prolonged, dark stares that made her feel uneasy. There were one or two such men on her father’s payroll now.
She wondered if the shadow rider might have been one of them. She’d have to keep her eye out for him, though she didn’t want to get anyone fired. Her father had been, to her mind, a little too quick to fire those men whom he felt were crowding Annabelle a little too closely. On the other hand, she didn’t want to have to keep looking over her shoulder every time she took her horse out either.
But, she reminded herself, in the light of very recent events, she wouldn’t have to worry about any of her father’s men for much longer. The Broken Heart had been a wonderful place to grow up, but she was a woman now. She was about to be married. Soon she’d be living in a house of her own a good ways away from here with the man who was shortly to become her husband—Mr. Hunter Buchanon.
She muttered the name as she walked up the steps of the lodge house’s broad, wraparound veranda. “Mrs. Hunter Buchanon . . . Mrs. Buchanon . . . Mrs. Hunter Bu—”
“Well, well, well—look what the cat dragged in.”
Annabelle gasped and stopped dead in her tracks, slapping a hand to her chest in shock. “Cass!” she exclaimed. “What in the hell do you think you’re doing—giving me a fright like that?”
“What was that you were sayin’?” her brother, Cass Ludlow, asked her. “I couldn’t quite make it out.”
Cass sat in one of the several wicker chairs positioned about the porch. He was five years Annabelle’s senior, and her only sibling. The only one who’d made it through infancy and the war, that was. Cass was a handsome young man. Most would say devilishly handsome, with dimpled cheeks, a cleft chin, and high, tapering cheekbones. He was a ladies’ man, but he attracted all the wrong ladies.
He dressed a little like a Mexican caballero, in a red shirt with gaudy Spanish-style embroidering and ruffling down the front, and bell-bottom, deerskin trousers. A concha-studded shell belt encircled his waist. A fancy, horn-gripped .44 was snugged into a hand-tooled leather holster tied fashionably low on his right leg. His crisp, sand-colored Stetson with brightly beaded band hung on his right knee.
In his hand was a glass. Light from the curtained window behind him reflected in it. Tequila perfumed the cool night air of the porch.
“I wasn’t saying anything.”
“Oh sure, you were. Something about Buchanon, wasn’t it?”
Annabelle started toward the lodge’s front door. “Be quiet, Cass. I’m not in the mood for your—”
“Out kinda late, aren’t ya? Pa’s been holdin’ supper.”
Anna stopped, her ears warming a bit. Facing the door, she said, “I . . . I got turned around in the hills north of town. It hardly ever happens to me, but—”
“Oh I see. That must’ve been after you rode out of town with Hunter Buchanon.”
Annabelle turned to him, the warmth of her chagrin spreading throughout her face. “What?”
“Oh sure—I seen ya with my very own eyes. I was in town too. In a room with a view, shall we say?” Cass grinned, his dimples filling with shadows. His eyes flashed with amusement in the lamplight flanking him.
Anna knew what kind of room Cass had been in. She’d worried that friends of her father might have seen her in town with the Buchanons and gotten word to her father, making not only trouble for her but possibly more trouble for the Buchanons as well. She’d been right to harbor such fears. Her own ne’er-do-well brother had seen her.
“Does Pa know?” she asked in a soft voice touched with dread.
“I didn’t tell him.”
Relief washed over her. “Thank you, Cass.” Annabelle started toward the door again.
“Max Chaney did.”
Again, Annabelle stopped with a gasp. She turned to her brother, mouth half-open, her chest rising and falling heavily as she breathed.
“He . . . saw?”
“Nah, he was up at the mine. Pa was here at home, preparing for a guest. Chaney got word up at the mine that Luke had been hauled into Tigerville dead as last year’s Christmas goose. Not only that but all of Stillwell’s deputies had been kicked out with cold shovels, to boot!”
Cass chuckled and shook his head in amazement. “Max rode down to get a look at his poor misbegotten son and get him over to the undertaker’s. That must’ve been when someone in town told him that you was in town only a few minutes ago with Hunter Buchanon . . . and them other three no-account hillbillies from the Rebel South!”
Cass grinned and threw back several swallows of tequila.
“Oh no,” Annabelle said, dropping her stricken gaze to the porch floor between her boots.
“Oh, it gets better,” Cass said, thoroughly enjoying himself.
“What . . . what . . . do you mean?”
“Chaney rode up here, blubberin’ an’ cryin’ over his dead no-account boy. He told Pa all about it . . . includin’ the part about you ridin’ out with that big blond Confederate devil, Hunter Buchanon. Headed for God knows where an’ doin’ what?”
Cass laughed again and then indicated the door with his tequila glass. “Oh, Pa’s waitin’ on ya inside. I’m sure he’ll tell ya all about it. Only, he might wait ’til tomorrow. Remember that guest of Pa’s I told you about?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he’s still here. He’s in yonder. I doubt Pa will want to talk about any of this nefarious stuff regarding his purty, virginal daughter—whose reputation, of course, is above reproach—until it’s just the two of you together. The two of you together with a bullwhip!”
Cass threw his head back, laughing uproariously.
He stopped abruptly when the front door opened.
Annabelle jerked her head toward it. “Pa!”
Graham Ludlow stood in the doorway, holding the stout oak door half-open. The tall, broad-shouldered, potbellied man studied her through gimlet eyes for a good five seconds before his big face, chiseled out of solid granite with a liver-spotted doorstop nose, drew up in a too-bright smile. “Here she is! The princess herself! Annabelle, what’s been keeping you? I hope you’re all right, darling. I have a surprise. A very special guest!”
Ludlow, clad in gray denims and hickory shirt beneath a black leather vest and bolo tie, stepped back, drawing the door wider.
Cautiously, like a girl walking into a leopard cage, Annabelle stepped over the threshold, doffing her felt hat and shaking her hair back behind her shoulders. She stopped just inside the foyer overlooking the lodge’s large, sunken parlor area furnished in heavy, leather furniture including bookshelves and hand-carved tables.
Her father’s and brother’s game trophies adorned the walls. Every mammal that had stalked the Black Hills within the past thousand years was represented. Even a stuffed wild turkey and an albino moose.
But what . . . or whom . . . Annabelle’s eyes were riveted on was the diminutive, impeccably attired young man just then rising from a quilted leather sofa near the flames da
ncing in the fieldstone hearth.
“What a pleasant surprise—eh, my dear?” intoned Graham Ludlow, sliding his coldly smiling eyes between his daughter and her wealthy young Eastern suitor, Kenneth Earnshaw.
CHAPTER 11
Annabelle’s heart turned a somersault.
As she stood staring in shock at young Kenneth Earnshaw looking back at her from the parlor, where he stood ramrod straight in front of the crackling hearth, he smiled fawningly and gave a courtly dip of his chin, his spectacles glinting in the firelight.
“Annabelle,” he said in his resonate orator’s voice—a voice made for battling other attorneys, imploring judges, and lecturing juries—“what a pleasure it is to see you again.”
He was a short, slender young man with a boyish face still a little plump with baby fat he would likely never outgrow, and an almost feminine mop of carefully combed, strawberry-blond hair, with sideburns of the same color, and a thick, bushy strawberry mustache. His carefully trimmed goatee did little to obscure the fact that his chin was weak.
He was dressed to the nines in a black swallowtail coat over a silk white shirt and paisley vest adorned with a gold watch chain. Round, steel-framed spectacles perched on his delicate nose. Pince-nez reading spectacles dangled from a black ribbon pinned to his lapel. Tweed trousers were stuffed into the tops of polished black riding boots that rose nearly to his knees.
“Kenneth,” Annabelle said, swallowing down the slight obstruction in her throat. She slid her gaze to her father, who stood to her left, smiling nervously down at her. Looking back at young Earnshaw, she said, haltingly, “I . . . I’m afraid . . . I . . . I don’t know quite what to say . . .”
A small V appeared in the skin just above the obviously puzzled young Earnshaw’s compactly conservative nose sprinkled with small, light freckles.
Graham Ludlow broke the uneasy silence with a nervous guffaw. “Well, tell him you’re delighted to see him, Annabelle!” He gave his daughter’s shoulder a not-so-gentle shove. “Go on over there and let him kiss your cheek!”
Ludlow laughed again, too loudly, nervously.
Annabelle found herself dropping down the three steps to the sunken parlor, but it seemed as though someone else were steering the ship. Her feet were filled with lead, and she felt as though a strong, hot hand were splayed across the back of her neck, squeezing.
“Hello, Kenneth,” she said as she slowly, haltingly crossed the room until she found herself standing before the young man who was roughly as tall as she was, his shoulders hardly any broader. She extended her hand to him, wanting to forestall anything more intimate.
“The honor is mine, sweet Annabelle.” Ignoring her hand, young Earnshaw leaned forward, placed his hand on her arm, and pressed his brushy, moist mouth to her cheek, which made her innards recoil.
Straightening, smiling at her again, customarily obsequious, he said, “I see you’re surprised.”
Annabelle tried to smile, but her mouth wouldn’t cooperate. She knew she must have looked stricken, like someone getting bad news about the fate of a family member. “I can’t tell you how . . . how . . . surprised . . . I . . . am.”
She glanced at her father again still standing by the door, smiling a little too broadly, nervously. Cass now stood beside the elder Ludlow, drink in hand, grinning like the cat that ate the canary. He thrust a boot back to close the heavy door with a bang!
“Pleasantly surprised, one would hope,” Earnshaw said to Annabelle, gently imploring.
Annabelle stared at her unexpected guest, then turned to her father once more.
“No,” she heard herself saying, shaking her head slowly. “No, Kenneth. I’m sorry. But it’s not a pleasant surprise at all.”
“What?” Earnshaw said, canting his head and frowning, as though he thought he’d misheard her.
“You know what, my pet?” Graham Ludlow said, clapping his big hands together loudly and wringing them together, changing the subject. “I think what you need is a quick bath and a change of clothes. Then we’ll go ahead and sit down to supper. Chang has been keeping the food warm long enough. I bet you’re a little sunburned and tired.”
To Earnshaw, he said, “The girl just needs some food in her belly, that’s all, Kenneth. She’s always cranky when she’s hungry! Ever since she was yay-big! You go on upstairs, now, Annabelle.” He turned to their middle-aged Chinese cook, Chang, standing in the doorway between the parlor and the dining room, looking confused in his crisp white smock. “Chang, heat some water for Annabelle’s bath. Chop-chop!”
“I’ll take the bath, Chang,” Annabelle said, then, turning to her father and Kenneth Earnshaw, added, “But I won’t be sitting down for supper.”
As Chang shuffled off, glancing warily over his shoulder, Graham Ludlow said, “What on earth are you talking about? Kenneth came all this way from the East Coast just to see you, Annabelle. He’s done with school, he’s gone to work for his father’s railroad—a very big, important position, I might add—and he’s come all this way to ask you a very important question!”
To Earnshaw staring at her hang-jawed, she said, “The answer is no.”
“Wha-wha-what?” Earnshaw shuttled his exasperated gaze to Ludlow. “What in God’s name is going on here, Mr. Ludlow?”
“I’m telling you no,” Annabelle said, firmly, confidently. “I’m telling you both no. I won’t marry you, Mr. Earnshaw. I tried to make myself clear on the subject in the letters we exchanged and the last time you were here, with your father.”
She looked at Ludlow, who was flanked now by Cass. The younger Ludlow leaned back against the wall, laughing into his hand as though at the funniest joke he’d ever heard.
“I told you both no,” Annabelle told her father. “Now, I suppose I could play along with the charade this evening. I could take my bath and dress myself in some frilly, silly gown. I could sit down for supper with you and then join you on the porch afterward, where you would take my hand, get down on one knee, profess your love for me, and ask for my hand.”
Anna shook her head, scowling from her suitor to her father and then back again. “I see little point in keeping up such a farce, especially since you both seem incapable or simply unwilling to take no for an answer. You are both bound and determined to believe that I will be your wife, Kenneth. But I will not. I’ve promised myself to another.”
“Who?” Earnshaw demanded, his face suddenly red and bloated with outrage.
Annabelle turned to her father, whose slab-like face was a mask of exasperation, his eyes wide and hard.
“Hunter Buchanon,” Annabelle said proudly, holding her chin in the air. “I’ve loved him for nearly two years now. I’ve known since the first time I met him that we were meant for each other. I am truly sorry, Kenneth. I’ve never returned your feelings for me, though I hardly see how you could feel much of anything for me at all since we’ve seen each other a total of three times, each time no longer than a few hours.
“I think that if you were honest you’d admit that you don’t really love me at all. You only feel forced into this union by both of our fathers. Such a marriage would be nothing more than a business relationship between them.”
Anna shook her head with defiance, casting an accusing glance at her father, who appeared to have turned to a statue. A statue with eyes carved out of pure, mute rage.
“I will have no part of that,” the girl continued. “Especially since Hunter is the man I’m in love with.” Turning to her father again, she said, “He’s asked me to marry him. We’re eloping tomorrow. It wouldn’t have to be that way if you’d accepted him. We could have been married here. But I know that’s not going to happen. So I’ll be riding out of here before noon. I hope you can accept that, Pa. I’m old enough to make my own decisions.”
She glanced once more at young Earnshaw, who now seemed as lost for words as her father was. “Please forgive me, Kenneth. And please excuse me.”
Anna swung around and headed for the carpeted stairs at
the back of the room. She stopped halfway to the top, then turned around. Both her father and Earnshaw were staring after her, as though they were both in some sort of trance.
Cass had disappeared into the kitchen during the height of the dustup, probably searching for a fresh tequila bottle.
“I truly am sorry,” Annabelle said, meaning it.
She swung around again and hurried to the top of the stairs.
Once inside her room, she closed the door and pressed her back against it, blowing out a long sigh of relief. She was still standing there several minutes later, trying to calm down, going through the entire, embarrassing scene in her head, feeling guilty but also relieved that her secret was out in the open.
And that she’d made her intentions clear.
A soft tap came on the door. Recognizing Chang’s tentative knock, she drew the door open. The Chinaman had brought up a long, copper tub and a bucket of water.
Anna sat on the bed while the Chinamen poured the bucket of hot water into the tub, which he’d set on the wooden floor at the foot of the canopied bed. He fetched two more buckets of hot water from the kitchen and then hauled up a bucket of cold water and another of hot, for rinsing, which he left sitting on the floor beside the steaming tub.
Bowing, eyeing the girl warily, incredulously, the Chinaman shuffled back out of the room. He poked his head back in to say, “Miss Anna want supper? Here?” He smiled, showing the gap where he’d lost a front tooth. “I bring. No problem, I bring. Girl must eat. Especially if girl getting married tomorrow.”
He snickered, then looked quickly, cautiously behind him, making sure none of the other men in the house were near enough to have heard him.
Annabelle smiled at the Chinaman, whom she considered a close friend and even a confidant at times. “I don’t think I could eat a bite after all that.”
“I bring plate anyway, leave here.” Chang patted the top of the dresser to his left. “Just leave.” He shrugged exaggeratedly. “You eat, no eat. Up to you.” He smiled, winked, pulled his head out, and closed the door.
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