by Pam Crooks
Camille longed to have her own house someday. Reasonable rent at Lindell’s allowed her to board for as long as she needed to, and in the time she’d been there, she could all but run the place. Now was one time when Jack was glad she could.
She regarded him. “I didn’t know you were still in town. I thought you would have headed back to the ranch after dinner.”
He didn’t tell her he delayed his return to inform her of Black Jack’s death. Or that while he waited for her shift to end, he’d shoveled the walkways around the boardinghouse to make her life a little easier.
He didn’t want to inflict the inevitable pain from hearing how justice had finally caught up with her brother-in-law just yet. She’d picked up the pieces of her life after Sam Ketchum’s death. Reminding her of Black Jack would bring the turmoil back again.
The Lady in Blue—Grace, he corrected himself, Grace Reilly—concerned him more. Black Jack could wait.
“I had some unfinished business to take care of,” he said instead.
If she was curious, she didn’t show it. “Sit down. I’ll get you some coffee. Are you by yourself?”
Jack’s glance followed her as she strolled across the main floor into the kitchen, reach for a cup, then the hot pot on the stove. Without the apron she always wore while working at the restaurant, she looked more slender than usual.
“Yes,” Jack said. “Mick rode on out to the ranch.”
“He couldn’t wait to see Allie, I’m sure.” She smiled.
“It was burning a hole in him.”
It burned something different through Jack. Envy. A longing so deep, so intense, his stomach hurt, and his heart ached.
More and more often of late, he was haunted by how a man needed a woman to complete his life. Children, too. A family to make him whole and to give him a reason to keep living, day after day, year after year.
Jack had all but given up hope of finding a woman that could fill the hungry hole inside him. The perfect woman. One that wouldn’t see the ugly scar on his face or care how it got there. A woman who would be unaffected by the Ketchum roots that would forever make him kin of outlaws.
“They’re very fortunate to have found each other,” she said softly.
“I know.”
Jack heard the wistfulness in her tone and knew she felt the same sense of loss in her life that he did. His mother was a fine woman who would do any man proud as his wife. Jack prayed every day that she’d find the happiness and security she deserved.
“I’ll head out in the morning,” he said, pulling out a chair at the long dining table. He rested his cup on the crocheted tablecloth and wondered how long it would be before Grace Reilly was done “resting.” “Mind if I stay the night?”
“Your room is ready,” his mother said. “Anytime you get the inclination.”
She joined him at the table, stirring sugar into her coffee cup, and though she didn’t say it, Jack knew how much she missed seeing him more. But his life now involved being a cowboy with the Wells Cattle Company. It wasn’t unusual for weeks to go by before he found an opportunity to ride into Great Falls.
Might be Grace Reilly could give him one, now and again.
“You know anything about her?” he asked, taking a sip of hot brew to warm his belly. “Grace, I mean.”
“No. Except that she’s here to see Allie Gibson.”
His brow rose. “Allie?”
“She didn’t say why, but I’d guess Allie wasn’t expecting her. Otherwise, I’m sure she would have met her at the train.”
“She would.”
Mick hadn’t been expecting her, either. Granted, he’d been out riding with the posse, but Jack was certain Allie would’ve sent word that a friend of hers was due in.
Jack’s curiosity about Grace deepened, but before he could speculate about her further, a knock sounded on the front door.
“Anyone you know coming to call?” he asked, rising.
“No. No one.” His mother shook her head.
“I’ll see to it, then.”
He opened the door to a swirl of cold air and a man standing on the threshold. Unshaven, barely bundled against the night, he touched the brim of his hat in greeting.
“You got a woman by the name of Grace Reilly staying here?” he asked.
Jack turned wary in a hurry. “Who’s asking?”
“Got her trunk here. From the train station. Just delivering it to her, that’s all.”
Jack’s glance dropped to the rectangular shape sitting on the porch. He recalled Grace’s black satchel in the restaurant, but she’d had no other baggage with her than that. At least, not that he’d noticed.
He inclined his head and opened the door wider. “Upstairs. Need some help?”
“I got it.”
“Room 3,” Camille said. She pointed toward the stairs. “At the end of the hall.”
“Obliged, ma’am.”
The railroad attendant dragged the trunk in, then hefted it onto his shoulder. Without a backward glance, he headed past them toward the sleeping rooms, dragging snow in his wake.
And Jack vowed, as soon as the man left, he was going up to see Grace Reilly, too.
A heavy-handed knock startled Grace from her dozing. Her sluggish mind strove to comprehend where she was, what the noise could be, who would be here demanding that she get up and answer the door—
She sat bolt upright. Her fingers flew to her hair and tidied errant strands. They smoothed her bodice and checked her buttons as she swept aside her skirts and scrambled off the bed.
It was likely Camille checking on her. Already, the woman felt like a friend, someone to be trusted. Grace didn’t know what she would’ve done without her help, or Margaret’s, after the savage attempted to kidnap her. Both women had fretted over her like she was a helpless pup caught in quicksand.
Which she’d been, of course. And sinking fast.
Grace hurried to open the door. Her smile stalled on her lips; she stared in stunned surprise at the man waiting in the hall.
Her half-brother, Carl.
He hadn’t changed in the time since she’d seen him last. Same lean, wiry body. Same long sideburns and scruffy moustache. Same long brown hair pulled back in a straggly queue. He even wore the same filthy hat she remembered—with its concho-studded hat band and a bent quail feather.
“Carl!” she exclaimed. “How did you—?”
“Quiet!” he snarled, slashing a glance down the hall and toward the stairwell, as if to see if anyone was coming up. Or going down. No one was, and he angled past her with one quick stride, entered the room and closed the door.
Grace’s gaze narrowed knowingly. “You’re in trouble again, aren’t you?”
“What makes you think so?”
“Because you usually are.”
“Don’t go hopping on your soapbox with me, Grace.” He scowled. “It’s nothing I can’t handle.”
His arrogance both baffled and exasperated her. Living an honest life, or working a decent job, had never mattered to him. Instead, he chose to skirmish with the law, always forced to stay one step ahead of jail time—or a lawman’s bullet.
Like their mother. Bess Reilly had a wild streak in her, too, that ended only with her death.
The somber thought swept away Grace’s disapproval and dropped a rush of worry into its place. Carl might be shiftless and no-good, but he was her brother, the only kin she had left. He just needed someone to take care of him now and again and give him the direction he needed, whether he appreciated it or not.
Which most times, he didn’t.
“Are you hungry?” she asked. “I can get you something to eat downstairs.”
“No,” he said sharply.
“Have a seat and warm up, then.” Acutely aware he intended to stay out of sight, at least for the moment, she indicated the fire snapping in the hearth. “It’s bitter outside.”
“I can’t stay,” he said.
She regarded him, thinking again how thin
he looked. How worn. Her heart squeezed. “Is it money again? Is that what you want?”
“I’m here, doing you a favor.”
She drew back in wary surprise. Carl Reilly had never done a favor for her or anyone else in his troubled life. “What kind of favor?”
“I brought your trunk from the train station. It’s sitting in the hall.”
Taken aback, she opened the door, just to make sure he was telling her the truth, and there the trunk sat, on the crimson floral carpet. One glance at the leather straps and distinctive brass latch engraved with her initials confirmed it was hers. In her surprise at seeing him, she hadn’t noticed it was there.
“How did you find me here?” she asked, turning suspicious. “How did you claim my luggage, when you never met me at the train?”
“I just asked a few questions at the station, and then I figured it out, that’s all,” he said, talking fast. “I came here ’cuz I got to talk to you. It’s real important.”
Thinking of Camille downstairs, Grace shut the door again. Firmly. “I’m listening.”
“It’s about Ma,” he said, a cold gleam in his eyes. “I found the last of her killers. The one left standing.”
Her heart fell into a slow, thunderous pounding inside her chest. The last killer. The man who’d been responsible for their mother’s death. A single shot fired by a member of the posse during an ambush near the Cimarron River, just outside of Folsom, in New Mexico Territory.
Grace would never know who pulled the trigger or whose bullet claimed Bess Reilly’s life. No one would. But Grace knew there were six men in Sheriff Edward Farr’s posse and that just by being there, lying in wait for the Ketchum brothers’ gang, each one was as responsible for her mother’s killing as the other.
Grace knew, too, all of them had died in the shoot-out.
Except one.
She lifted trembling fingers to her mouth and teetered on the edge of profundity.
“Who is he?” she whispered.
“Jack Ketchum,” he said, triumphant. “But he goes by Hollister now.” A feral smile darkened his wind-chapped lips. “And he’s right downstairs.”
Grace hissed in a breath of shock. Hollister. Camille’s son, Jack? The one who had saved her from the stranger’s kidnapping attempt?
“Hollister’s breathing down my neck, Grace. He’s working with the law again.”
“Why is he looking for you?” Her alarm grew. Jack had confronted the long-haired stranger this afternoon without a shred of fear. She could only imagine the courage he’d shown, too, that awful day when his posse battled with her mother’s gang, defying the gunfire erupting around him. He was a man who wasn’t afraid to confront danger; he lived and breathed justice. “What have you done, Carl?”
“I ain’t telling you the details. But I’m telling you this. I’ll kill him, Grace, if he gets too close. I’m not going to let him do to me what he did to Ma.”
Grace’s throat closed, holding back the truth hammering inside her conscience. The knowledge, difficult to admit even to herself, that it had been her mother’s crimes, nothing else, which landed her in the posse’s path. Crimes she’d taken part in of her own volition, her own stubborn disregard for what was right and what was wrong. In her desperation to outwit them, she’d fought the lawmen, and they’d fought back.
It would forever be Grace’s biggest loss that there’d been no winners that day. No survivors except Jack Ketchum.
Hollister, she corrected. Jack Hollister.
Bess Reilly had suffered the consequences from bad decisions, but Grace couldn’t tell Carl as much. He was too much like their mother, too unfettered and callous to listen to reason. To care.
Grace, on the other hand, was bred to her grandmother’s thinking. Lucille Reilly had despaired of her only daughter’s penchant for crime, but she’d taken Grace in and raised her as her own. Through her, Grace had learned about honesty and virtue, respect for the law and contempt for anything that rode against it.
Out of love and desperation, Grandmother had saved Grace from a life of crime.
Now, whether he appreciated it or not, it was Grace’s turn to do the same for Carl.
Chapter Four
The vow had barely settled into Grace’s brain before the door swung open. A rude and unexpected intrusion into the privacy of her room that pulled a startled gasp right out of her.
But the man standing in the doorway, one hand gripped on the knob, the other curled around the butt of his Colt, didn’t notice.
Suspicion darkened his expression. His sharp glance latched on to Carl, like a wolf over a meaty bone. Clearly alarmed, Carl took a swift step backward.
Jack Hollister. Seeing him now, again, a strange new fascination coiled through Grace, like ribbon around a maypole.
He had the look of a lawman about him that she hadn’t noticed earlier in Margaret’s Eatery. A calculated way of holding his body, like a predator on the hunt. As if he prepared himself for attack against whatever he encountered.
Power. He had that, too. A cold kind of power that warned he wasn’t a man to be crossed. He was a man who could take care of himself and anyone else he chose to protect. God forbid the unlucky soul who dared to defy him.
Like Mama.
She wouldn’t have had a chance against him. Had she been afraid? Was there time to regret her sins? What would it have been like to face down a whole posse of men like Jack Hollister?
Grace’s eyes stung from the pain of her mother’s mistakes. Why couldn’t she understand the life she led would inevitably end in violence?
And yet… as Grace stood there, riveted in time, a lone detail about that terrible day surfaced from the fringes of her memory. Information she’d gleaned about the last man standing.
Sam Ketchum had died at the hands of his own son.
Jack understood violence.
He’d suffered, too.
“What the hell is going on in here?” he growled. Though it appeared he spoke to both of them, he leveled hard eyes over Carl.
Carl lifted his hands. “Whoa, mister! Ain’t nothing wrong going on, all right? Nothing.”
Jack swiveled his head toward Grace and raked his gaze over her. “You okay?”
“I’m fine. He brought my trunk,” she said in an unsteady voice. “From the train station.”
“Yet it sits in the hall. And your door is closed.”
“Yes.” She conceded how it must look to him. The impropriety of it. And the risks. Did he have an inkling of who Carl really was? “We were chatting, that’s all.”
“Chatting.”
“I was just leaving, too.” Carl jerked his chin toward the open door. “And I will, once you put away that shooting iron of yours.”
A moment passed, as if Jack warred with his inability to trust. Or believe. Finally, he nodded. His stance eased, but the Colt remained leveled. He stepped away from the door, deeper into the room. “You can let yourself out.”
“I’ll do that.”
Carl headed toward the hall but paused long enough to acknowledge Grace with a nod.
She understood the unspoken message he gave. The warning that he wouldn’t always be so agreeable with Jack Hollister, that when their paths crossed again, it wouldn’t be pretty.
Swallowing hard, Grace forced a cool smile. “Thank you for bringing my trunk in this frightfully cold weather. I do appreciate it.”
“Glad to help, ma’am.”
Carl made his escape, and Jack stepped into the hall to watch him descend the stairs, making sure he left without causing trouble. Striving to calm her scattered nerves, Grace busied herself by striking a match and lighting the lamp. She kept her movements careful, controlled, making it appear as if everything she did was the perfectly normal thing to do.
When she was feeling anything but normal. How did a woman act when she was left alone with the man partially responsible for her mother’s death? Or God forbid, if it came to it, her recalcitrant half-brother’s, too?
/> Downstairs, the front door slammed. Jack appeared in her doorway again.
“Where do you want your trunk?” he asked.
The low timbre of his voice reached her from across the room. No longer threatening, but deeply masculine and… appealing.
She squelched the thought. It wouldn’t do to be so easily affected by him, by something as silly as hearing him talk. She gestured toward a space along the wall. “Over there would be fine.”
Hefting the trunk appeared effortless for him, and after setting it where she’d indicated, he straightened, strode toward the door and closed it. He turned toward her, apparently unconcerned by the impropriety of being with her, an unmarried woman, like this.
Grace wondered why he didn’t leave. Mostly, she wondered if she should be afraid….
For a moment, a strange sense of intimacy encircled her. The two of them in her small, unassuming sleeping room. Jack Hollister filled the space with his presence, and the lamplight wrapped around him, taking away the shadows and gifting her with her first real glimpse of the man who’d participated in the carnage leading to her mother’s death.
Grace gave into the curiosity and allowed herself to stare. He was different now than he’d been with Carl. No longer a predator with the skill and inclination to kill.
Instead, just an ordinary cowboy.
This new, unexpected side of him intrigued her. She’d never seen a real cowboy before, but from the toes of his scuffed boots, past his denim-clad thighs, and up to the red bandanna tied loosely around his throat, Jack Hollister epitomized this wild land. Hair the golden color of buckskin hung past the collar of his shirt, the ends just reaching his shoulders and held back from his face with a careless sweep of his fingers.
Yet of anything, it was the scar on his cheek that gave him a ruthless look, a titillating sign of how he’d once lived with danger, and Grace was hard-pressed to keep the forbidden zing of excitement firmly—and properly—out of her blood.
All too aware of how he watched her, too, as if she consumed his every thought, she gathered her wits tightly around her and attempted to break the disconcerting web that had spun itself around them.
