Declan kicked his foot free from the stirrup and reached down his arm. Gripping the other man’s wrist, he helped him swing up in the saddle behind him. They didn’t speak. Sinclair pointed toward the corral with spare horses. The noise of the cattle was no longer quite so loud. Declan extricated himself from the herd, and by the remuda he waited for Sinclair to dismount.
Then Declan rode off.
Unable to face anyone.
For one moment, he had told himself it would solve everything if he simply left Sinclair with the herd. He could watch the man topple down and get churned into a mangled lump of human flesh beneath the pounding hooves. He’d have his revenge, and Victoria would never know. She would never have to face the pain of his betrayal, and he would never have to bear the cost of losing her trust.
But he hadn’t been able to do it.
Declan told himself it was because he wanted Sinclair to suffer, as Barbara and Louis Beaulieu had suffered, and that he wanted the man to know who had brought about his suffering, and the reason for it.
But he knew he was telling himself lies.
He had grown to like his father in law. Respect, even admire the man.
And that added another layer to the inner turmoil that was breaking him apart.
****
The storm had passed and the first rays of sun were peeking over the hills when Victoria saw the riders return. She had obeyed Declan’s command to remain inside the house, and was now standing on the porch where she could watch their approach.
Hank and Stan headed the procession. Swaying with exhaustion in the saddle, they lifted a hand in greeting, dismounted and left their horses with the blacksmith at the stable before vanishing into the cookhouse, drawn by the smells of coffee and frying bacon.
Declan and her father followed. Declan rode his blue roan, her father one of the cutting horses, a wiry paint pony that had no name other than Paint. In her mind, Victoria listed Flint, her father’s black stallion, as the first casualty. She had heard the stampede gather force and peter out again, and expected there would be more victims, although she prayed they would be spared the loss of human life.
Her boots splashed up mud as she hurried across the yard. Her first instinct was to throw herself in Declan’s arms. Then she noticed that her father cradled his left wrist in front of him and held the reins with his right hand. She paused in her headlong dash toward her husband. At times like this, tending to the injured must come first.
She halted by her father. “Can you get down by yourself?”
“It’s only a sprain, Ria. I fell. Flint broke a foreleg. I had to shoot him.” He spoke in short bursts, as if each word required more effort than he could spare. “That husband of yours pulled me out of the herd. Saved my life.”
Silver lining. The proverb flashed through Victoria’s mind. Every cloud had a silver lining. Perhaps the silver lining of the stampede was that the shared danger had wiped away the animosity between her father and her husband. The two people she loved the most in the world and could not imagine living without, had finally become friends.
Declan remained silent, sitting in the saddle, his face expressionless expect for the fraught look in his eyes that seemed as dark blue as the midnight sky. She gave him space, guessing that the horror of the stampede remained with him.
“How many head did we lose?” she asked.
“Around thirty,” her father replied. “They’d already been paid for.”
Her brow furrowed. That meant they would have to buy replacements or reimburse the purchaser, whichever had been agreed at the time of sale. It doesn’t matter, Victoria told herself. The money was not important. She needed no new gowns, no trips to big cities. As long as she had Red Rock Ranch and the two men she loved, she could be happy.
Declan dismounted and stood beside Vali, stroking the horse’s neck, facing away from her. A tiny strand of hurt unfurled inside Victoria. Instead of turning to her for comfort, her husband was avoiding talking to her, or even looking at her.
“I’ve got coffee in the house,” she told him, her voice light as she suppressed the sense of rejection, heightened by the hours of solitary waiting. “Cookie has breakfast ready. Do you want to eat in the cookhouse with the men or come into the house?”
Her father cut in. “We’d best go into the house. We need to talk.” He took a few limping steps. Victoria made an alarmed sound but he brushed her concern away. “It’s only a bruised hip from when I hit the ground.”
Rather than stop to wash, or track mud into the parlor, they settled around the long work table in the kitchen. Victoria poured coffee. She placed steaming mugs in front of the men, and then she sat down, cradling the hot mug of coffee between her hands.
“I’m sorry, Ria. I should have told you before.” Her father took a sip, paused to pick out a grain of grit from his lips and drank another mouthful. “We’ll lose Red Rock. There’s a loan payment due the day after tomorrow and I don’t have the money.”
Disbelieving, she stared at him.
And saw the truth in his eyes.
“I...I thought you were perhaps a little short on cash.” Her words were halting as she struggled to understand. “But when...how...?”
Her father didn’t reply, merely drank his coffee, his eyes dull and shuttered.
Anger flared within Victoria, a helpless anger at having remained ignorant, of having been denied the chance to help. “That expensive school...” She shook her head, her voice gaining a bitter edge. “I hated leaving home. I love this place, always have. I could have taken a job, earned wages. I could have—”
“What could you have done, Ria?” her father cut in. “What job could you have got apart from whoring? Ranchers don’t employ female hands. Before you went away to school, you didn’t have the qualifications to teach, you are useless as a seamstress or as a cook, and most store keepers who want female clerks employ their wives and daughters. What job could you have taken?”
“I...” None, she thought, but she didn’t say it out loud.
“That’s why I sent you to that fancy school, Ria. To give you a safety net in case things ever got this bad. So you could be a teacher. Or a governess in a big house. I even hoped that perhaps you might marry a rich man who could give you a new life. Replace everything you’ll lose when this place is seized by the bailiffs.” Andrew Sinclair lifted his mug to point at Declan across the table. “Instead you chose to marry an outlaw, and I can’t say I mind your choice. He might not be rich, but he is a good man. I trust him to look after you.”
“I’m Declan Beaulieu from Springville, Kansas. My parents were Barbara and Louis Beaulieu, and you killed them.” The man Victoria knew as her husband spoke evenly, paused to draw a breath and continued, “That’s why you’re losing your ranch. I’ve spent the last ten years ruining you.”
Victoria gasped. The words rippled through the kitchen like pebbles falling into a pond, their impact widening with each silent second that followed. Her eyes jerked up to the face she loved. Handsome features, golden hair, now tangled and streaked with mud. Every inch of that face was familiar to her...except the narrow, icy glare in the blue eyes as her husband stared at her father and continued his unnaturally calm speech.
“You were driving a herd up through Kansas, going across farmland. Your herd stampeded. My mother had a rose garden. Remember, I mentioned it at dinner last night?” Declan flicked a glance at her, the first indication he had given since he launched into his revelation that he even remembered her presence.
A vice of steel closed around Victoria’s chest, cutting off her air. Dear God, was it only last night my friends sat around my dinner table as I showed off my new husband, and now...and now he is turning out to be a resentful stranger...
“My mother, the foolish woman she was, wanted to protect her rose garden,” Declan continued. “So, she went out and stood in front of it, waving her arms in the air and yelling shoo, thinking that a stampeding herd of beef cattle is no different from a few
pesky sheep or a milk cow on the loose.” He swallowed, his throat moving in a labored rise and fall. When he continued, his voice was a hoarse whisper. “We had to scrape the ground to find enough of her to bury. I was five years old. I asked who owned the cattle, and I was told it belonged to a man named Andrew Sinclair.”
“Son, I’m sorry—”
“That’s not all,” Declan went on. “Times were tough. Draught, poor crops. My father fell deeper and deeper into debt, until one day the bank foreclosed. He couldn’t bear the thought of parting from my mother who was buried on the farm. So, he blew his brains out on the day the bank evicted him.”
Victoria watched, her eyes gritty with shock, as Declan got up and stood behind the chair he had risen from. His hands curled over the back of the seat, knuckles white at the pressure of his grip. “The bank said they owned the farm, so my father would have to be buried in the cemetery by the church. That night, I fetched his body from the undertaker, slung it across a horse’s back, and took it to the farm where I buried him beside my mother.”
The chair clattered against the floor as Declan pushed it away. “I was fifteen. For the next three years, I looked for you, planned how to ruin you. When I found you, I put together a band of orphans and misfits who didn’t care if they lived or died. For ten years, I’ve been stealing your cattle. I’ve never stolen from anyone else.”
“Son, you’re—”
“Three years ago, your water dried. It was because I had dammed the river upstream. Two years ago, one of your buyers pulled out. It was because I offered him a better deal.” Declan gave a small, cruel laugh. “And I was selling him your cattle, with a new brand burned on top of your triple-R. I ruined you, because I wanted you to suffer as my father did. I wanted you to be driven from the land where you have buried your wife, just like my father was driven from the land where he had buried my mother.”
Victoria watched in stunned fascination as Declan edged out of the room, moving with backward steps, his gaze riveted on Andrew Sinclair. Bits of drying mud scattered from Declan’s clothing to the floor. When he stood framed by the entrance, he shifted his focus to her. She met his gaze. His eyes were as blue as always, his hair as golden, his features as handsome, but now all those belonged to a hostile stranger.
His voice did not soften as he addressed his words to her. “You have to decide if you want to stay with your father or ride out with me. I’ll be leaving in one hour.”
And then he turned and walked out of the room.
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Chapter Nine
Seconds ticked by with excruciating lack of speed, slowly turning into minutes as Declan lay on the narrow brass bed, arms crossed behind his head, his eyes trained on the little spider that seemed to spend its whole life crawling across the whitewashed ceiling.
An hour. He could not bear the waiting, could not bear not knowing if Victoria would come with him or stay with her father. He should have given her only ten minutes, to shorten the waiting. No, he should have given her a week. For, if Victoria refused to leave with him, a longer waiting period would at least have given him a few more days with her.
He jumped up, unraveled the bedroll he’d already packed and took out the small framed picture of his parents on their wedding day. Gently, he smoothed one fingertip across the mottled glass as he studied their shining faces.
“Pa, I did it,” he whispered.
But the words brought him no solace.
Nothing did.
It was meant to be the hour of his triumph.
It was meant to be the culmination of half a lifetime of hate.
It was meant to be his reward for ten years of hard work, of taking crazy risks.
So, why did he feel so numb inside? Why, instead of satisfaction, did the hollow ache of loss throb somewhere in the vicinity of his heart? Why did the future open up as a bleak, empty void, with no joy, no peace, nothing to look forward to?
He knew the hour wasn’t up yet, but he could bear the waiting no longer. Bedroll gathered beneath one arm, his damp, dirt-encrusted clothing chafing against his skin, he set off to find Victoria. As he climbed up the stairs toward her bedroom, he realized that his whole body was shaking. With exhaustion. With fear.
He knocked on her door. “Victoria?” He’d never knocked before, not even when he entered at night. Already, he was letting go of her. No longer expecting his wife to be his.
He heard the softly spoken words. “It’s open.”
So, she was in her room. Waiting. For an instant, Declan let himself dream. He pictured her packing a saddlebag, already dressed to ride. Of course I’ll come with you, she’d say. You are my husband, and I love you. Or, she’d be standing by the window, dressed in a long white nightgown, the rising sun gilding her silhouette. She’d open her arms to him and say, I can’t leave my father, but stay. Stay just one more day, love me one more time.
His fingers closed around the brass knob, the metal cold and hard beneath his palm as he waited one more second, so he could hold on to the dream a moment longer. Then he turned the knob, stepped into the room, and faced reality.
Victoria was sitting by the window. But not dressed in a nightgown. She wore her working clothes and muddy boots, and she was statue-still, her gaze fastened on the pink clouds that streaked the eastern sky. Her dark hair was loose, cascading down her back.
Declan walked closer, his footsteps shattering the silence.
She didn’t turn.
“I’m leaving,” he told her. “Will you say goodbye?”
“Goodbye.”
“Victoria, I...” His throat closed. No words seemed adequate to express what he felt, no words formed in his mouth to beg her to understand and forgive him. In that moment, everything he’d done crashed like a landslide over him. “You should have let me hang,” he said, and believed it to be true.
“Yes,” she replied. “Perhaps I should have.”
Finally, she turned around. Her eyes were rimmed with red, her skin puffed. Silent tears trailed down her face. It occurred to Declan that he had never seen her cry since that day five years ago when he had rescued her from being raped. He had seen her misty-eyed, but never broken down to weeping. And that drove home the depth of her anguish now.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Tell me one thing,” she asked. “Was I part of your revenge plan? Did you come to my bed so you could spoil my chances of marrying one my rich suitors, who might have lent my father the money to save the ranch?”
“No. Victoria, I...” I love you. He longed to say it, but a belated sense of decency and restraint locked the words inside him. No use making excuses now. Better if she learned to hate him. It would serve her well to bury all the good memories, to remember him as a worthless criminal who had been nothing but a misguided, youthful indiscretion.
“You could still marry one of those men. The English earl, or the railroad magnate, or the senator, whatever his name is.” Even as he spoke, a bitter brew of jealousy churned in his gut. “I haven’t given you a year’s labor, so the marriage ordinance is void. They’ll hang me if I’m caught. You can claim to be a widow to explain...” He didn’t finish the sentence. To explain why you are no longer untouched.
He saw Victoria’s chest rise and fall as she took a deep breath. A sneer flickered across her face as she pushed aside her grief and let the anger flood in. Suddenly she sounded very much like her impervious father. “Let me tell you this,” she said, “I’d never have married any of those men, even if my plan to rescue you had failed and they’d hung you while I watched. This is my home. I have never wanted to live anywhere else. We might lose Red Rock now, but I’ll find a way to buy it back. One day, the ranch will be mine again, and I hope and pray that my father will be alive to see that day.” She jerked up her chin, like a queen dismissing an unworthy subject. “Goodbye, Declan. Ride away fast and far, for I will take no pleasure in seeing you swing at the end of a rope.”
That hollow feeling inside D
eclan expanded until it grew to an ache that seemed to break his heart apart, that seemed to shatter the whole of him. He feared the pain would never go away, as long as he lived.
“What will you do?” he asked.
“My father listed the options, I believe. Whore. Housemaid. School teacher. I’m sure one of those occupations will suit.” She gave him a hard glare. She is going to cut me out of her life and her thoughts, Declan realized, and although he knew it was the best for her, he couldn’t help but feel a terrible sense of emptiness.
“Please, don’t, Victoria...”
“What,” she snapped. “Don’t throw my life away? Too late. I’ve already done that, as my father pointed out, on a worthless outlaw.” She turned back to face the window and lowered her voice, defeat and sadness replacing the hard edge of anger.
“Goodbye, Declan.”
He couldn’t say it, couldn’t manage the words to seal their parting. Declan eased out of the room. He didn’t seek out her father for any final confrontation but went out to the stable, saddled Vali, tied on his bedroll, fitted his boot in the stirrup and swung up.
As he rode out of the yard, urging the blue roan into a gallop, he knew that his premonition had been right. They would each suffer in their own way, but his suffering would be the greatest, because he knew that he had brought it upon himself.
****
The ground around Declan steamed in the morning sun, the humidity of last night’s storm evaporating. Above him, the leafy canopy of the hanging oak gave him shade. He sat on the bare earth, his back against the rough bark of the tree.
This was where his days would have ended if Victoria hadn’t stepped forward to save him. I will take no pleasure in seeing you swing at the end of a rope, she had told him, even after learning that he had betrayed her.
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