by Edie Harris
At that moment, someone knocking on the door off the kitchen penetrated the haze of lust that fogged his brain.
A shudder rippled through her, and he tightened his hold. “Ignore it.”
“Del—”
“Whoever it is, they’ll go away if we don’t answer.” Writhing beneath her, nudging her slick entrance and needing to be inside her, he slipped a hand to the small of her back, urging her to move on him. “Honey, I need you to take me.”
“I…I can’t. The door—”
“Fuck the door.” His hand skated up her spine, under the cool fall of her hair to curve around her nape. He pulled her down, stealing a kiss, then another. His lips dragged against hers, teasing her open until she moaned into his mouth.
The knocking continued, and she tore herself away, tumbling to lie next to him in the bed. He immediately missed her heat. “Moira—”
“We can’t ignore the door.”
Growling in frustration, he stared at the ceiling’s exposed beams, scrubbing a hand over his face. “You were lookin’ for an excuse to stop, anyway.” These days, seducing his wife took every ounce of his concentration, not to mention more skill than he likely possessed. Even when he had her moaning, wet and wanting, she still managed to find a way to deny them both of intimacy—true intimacy that was not simply the meeting and melding of bodies.
Moira had created a gulf between them, starting in their bed and seeping into their daily lives. The events of the night before stood starkly in his mind—how she’d stiffened when he kissed her neck, the way she wouldn’t meet his eyes when he asked about her day after they’d taken their dip in the pond. How her shoulders had hunched against him when he curled his body around hers beneath the quilt.
He had no idea how to bridge that chasm, nor what had caused it. He only knew he missed his wife. He missed his lover. “You need to tell me what’s wrong.” When she sighed, he snared her wrist and tugged her so that she sprawled over him, legs tangling, hips brushing. “Don’t try to tell me things are fine. Things aren’t fine, Moira. And I will let whoever’s out there keep pounding on our door until you give me an answer.”
Her fingers splayed over his chest, but she remained stubbornly silent.
He turned his head to look at her, frowning as he traced the line of her jaw, skin soft and delicate under his callused fingertips. “You tell me, Moira. You tell me so I can fix it.”
She exhaled on a shaky breath. “I feel broken inside, Delaney. I wish I didn’t, for your sake, but I do.” Her voice cracked, and her gaze focused on where her hand rested atop his chest. “You deserve so much better than me.”
His heart stuttered beneath her palm, but finally, finally, they were getting somewhere. They were talking. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying…” Tears welled in eyes so pure a blue it hurt to look. “I’m saying I don’t know how to do…this.”
Breathe. He needed to remember to breathe. “What…what do you mean, this?”
Obvious pain made her expression tight, sorrowful. “Del, I—”
“Crawford!” His deputy’s voice cut through the heavy moment like a blade, and Del growled, tearing himself from his wife and the devastation she’d wrought within his chest.
If John had been reduced to shouting, Del couldn’t ignore him.
He purposefully didn’t look at her as she slipped from the bed, keeping his back turned as he tugged on trousers and a shirt. He heard her locating the nightgown he’d removed from her scant minutes earlier, and with every soft shush of fabric against her skin, his tension increased.
When he risked a glance, he immediately regretted it. Dark red hair, curled and tangled from his hands, tumbled down her back, and the need to touch, pet, soothe—and maybe shake her, just a little, until sense returned and she retracted her damning “this”—suddenly overwhelmed him.
So he exited the bedroom, following the sound of knocking through to the kitchen, masking his emotions with a cold emptiness he hadn’t felt since before meeting Moira. By the time he opened the door, he felt slightly more in control.
But only slightly.
John White Horse stood framed in the early morning light. “The fires will be here by nightfall.” His dark gaze flicked to where Moira was seating herself at the table, blue shawl wrapped protectively around her shoulders, before he turned his attention again to Del. “The settlement will go first, then the homesteads east of here. Then you. The winds will bring it right to you.”
Behind him, Moira sucked in an audible breath.
Del said nothing, but he felt that inhalation of hers to his toes.
The younger man continued, “We need to evacuate the mining settlement. It will be ash by midday.”
Del scowled. “You sound like a doomsday oracle. Keep the Book of Revelation talk to yourself, will you?”
For the first time since Del answered the door, Moira spoke. “Does Mrs. Matthews know?”
Both men shifted to stare blankly at her.
Moira tapped her fingers on the table but didn’t look up at them. “She owns the land, yes?” The Irish was starting to bleed through, a sure sign of her agitation. “There’s no chance she’ll want responsibility for rebuilding the miners’ quarters or to pay wages for the days they can’t work due to the fire.”
Del began to see where his wife was heading with this.
Her fingers kept tapping. “Not to mention what will happen if it hits the actual mine. The explosives could detonate. The sites could be ruined or closed down entirely.”
If Lucia Matthews retained her holdings through the disaster, her shares would be useless, except for the minerals living within the land itself—and Del suspected that wasn’t her plan at all. The widow wanted the town and its people to suffer, but she wouldn’t wish to beggar herself in the process.
Should she sell today, however, before the fires hit the settlement, perhaps they could avoid any suffering beyond that caused by the fire. “John, I need you to ride to Denver and find Marshal Hood.” Del began pulling on the dirty boots he’d left by the kitchen door last night, after coaxing Moira to take a dip in the pond and playfully wash the ash from his sweaty skin. “He’ll know if there’s a chance someone might want the widow’s shares, and if there is—” He speared John with a grim look. “If there is, Hood needs to make that happen. Today.”
John nodded solemnly. “I will return as soon as possible.” With a respectful tilt of his head to Moira, the Cheyenne disappeared through the door.
“What happens if the buyer isn’t any better than Lucia?” Moira asked quietly into the silence that had fallen. “What if he lets the mine sit and the miners starve after the fires are over?”
“You heard that saying, about the devil you know?” He leaned into the washroom off the kitchen to snare the pair of braces that had been hung to dry the night before. Quickly tucking in his shirt, he drew the braces over his shoulders. The Remington and its holster were next. “I think we’re probably better off with the devil we don’t. At least then there’s a chance the mine might stay open, when this is over.”
Red Creek needed its mine and its miners. Ore mining had drawn the town’s first settlers nearly two decades ago, and bit by bit commerce and more families had followed. Jacob Matthews had held four-fifths of the mining shares and, in doing so, had held terrible sway over the town.
Lucia Matthews may have been willing to let Red Creek burn for what happened to her husband, but Del wasn’t. “I’m gonna head to the settlement.” After it was evacuated, he’d take some men to the mine to secure the explosives. Moira had been right to point out that deadly risk.
She stood abruptly. “They’ll need somewhere to go. Send them to the boardinghouse first, then to the saloon. If we can’t house them after that, I will…I will come up with something.” For the first time since leaving the bedroom, she met his gaze. Blue fire snapped and crackled in those eyes, and an answering burn seared his chest.
He opened his mouth, in
tending to give her words of reassuring confidence, but his throat clamped shut.
I feel broken inside.
I don’t how to do this.
The ice within him splintered painfully, and he grabbed his hat from the hook next to the door and left.
***
Moira finished arranging bed linens at the foot of a cot, one of several that had been set up to house the fire’s refugees in the upper level of the Ruby Saloon. The usual occupants of those second-story rooms—the whores who made their living serving Red Creek’s lonely males—had graciously agreed to bunk together, leaving half the quarters available for the now-displaced miners trekking in from the soon-to-be ravaged settlement.
Certain responsibilities came along with being the sheriff’s wife. As the town’s citizens looked to Delaney for safety, its people had begun to turn to her for guidance. She was welcome in every house, no longer an outcast who lived in a one-room cabin at the end of the main road. The privileges afforded her as the town’s schoolteacher—a position she would continue to hold only until an unmarried teacher was brought in—had tripled the moment she married the law.
One of those so-called privileges was leading the charge when Red Creek faced a challenge. Which was why she was in a saloon and whorehouse less than an hour after Delaney had left to officially clear the mining settlement.
Finished with the cots, Moira went in search of more work. A sizable parlor situated in the middle of the upper level housed a pair of divans, upholstered in worn green velvet, as well as a mismatched collection of chairs. Books were stacked haphazardly on the many small tables scattered around the room, and a writing desk with a painted glass lamp stood in one corner, a sheaf of cream-colored stationery stacked neatly on its lacquered surface.
All the clean linens in the building—and some donated by the townspeople—were piled in the center of the parlor atop a faded Oriental rug. She had just gathered an armful of unfolded toweling when she sensed she was no longer alone in the room.
“Mrs. Crawford.”
The voice was low and sensual, matching the woman who stood behind Moira. “Miss Pike.” She smiled politely as she faced the prostitute who, along with her fellow working girls, owned the Ruby Saloon in consortium. “Thank you so much for letting us run roughshod over you.”
The lushly curved brunette waved away Moira’s thanks. “It’s our town, too. And you really ought to call me Juno like everybody else.”
“Juno.” With a hesitation so minute she hoped the other woman hadn’t noticed, Moira nodded, relaxing her smile. “You must call me Moira, then.”
Juno’s lovely gray eyes were sympathetic, her expression wry. “I’m not good people like you, Mrs. Crawford. I can’t presume to use your Christian name.”
The word Christian jarred Moira from her unwitting and unexpected descent into prejudice. Who was she to judge another? Her social status within Red Creek had nothing to do with who she was as person, as a human, but everything to do with the job she held and the job of the man she’d married. She was no better than the woman in front of her.
Hell, she had killed a man. She had lifted her pistol, taken aim, and put a bullet in the center of Jacob Matthews’s back to save Del’s life and the life of one of her Cheyenne students. The incident may have been deemed “self-defense,” but it felt a lot like cold-blooded murder to her. The bad dreams that had followed in the wake of that horrible day had faded over the intervening months, but that didn’t mean Matthews’s death didn’t haunt her, some days more than others.
Juno Pike’s sinning paled in comparison to Moira’s.
Moira sank to the floor, the bath towels falling in a heap across her lap. “I’m not good people either, Juno. Come help me fold these and call me Moira.”
A brilliant, genuine smile greeted the invitation. “Thank you.” Juno settled next to her on the rug, adjusting her simple gray skirt to pool around her legs. The top three buttons on her bodice were undone, likely in deference to the summer heat, and Moira caught a glimpse of royal blue satin encasing full breasts. It was an indecent amount of exposure for polite company, but Moira didn’t feel as though she qualified as such. Not if a woman like Juno didn’t.
After arranging her dress to her liking, Juno started in on the large pile of unfolded linens on the rug. “I know it’s terrible, the wildfire,” she said, her tone careful even if her smile wasn’t, “but I’m kind of glad to spend time doing something as mundane as folding linens and talking with another woman about nothing in particular.”
While Moira’s life was often filled with what one could term the mundane, she warmed to the idea of female company that was a tad outside the bounds of strict propriety. “I don’t mind it, either.”
“Do you have many friends in this town? Women friends?”
“No.” There were days when she missed the camaraderie she’d found with the nuns in Boston, living and working alongside her sisters of the cloth at Our Lady of the Bleeding Heart. “Do you?”
“I’ve got the girls here at the Ruby.” The brunette folded a hand towel. “Not many respectable women, of course.”
Juno wanted a friend, too, Moira realized. Perhaps she needed one—as Moira suspected she herself did. “It’s not common knowledge,” she murmured, “but did you know that I was a nun before I came to Red Creek?”
Gray eyes widened in surprise. “I…did not know that.”
Moira could almost hear Juno’s inner dialogue, see the racing mind behind that studiously bland expression, and she found herself laughing. “Don’t worry, I was a terrible nun, always questioning my faith and finally giving up on it.”
“Why did you give up your faith?” Noticing Moira’s hesitation, Juno shot her an assessing glance. “I’ll keep your confidences, Moira. I promise.”
“It’s not….” She shook her head. “Anyway, I learned of the teaching position here and wanted a fresh start as a woman, not a nun, so I travelled west.”
Juno didn’t push for more and adopted a teasing tone. “Then you met and fell in love with the sheriff.”
Moira couldn’t help her blush. “That I did.”
“And?”
“And it’s wonderful.” Except when it wasn’t, but the when-it-wasn’t was her fault. Without pausing to consider the wisdom of her words, she blurted, “But things aren’t happening.”
“Things?”
Moira’s face burned. “You know—things. Children.”
A soft chuckle escaped the woman seated beside her on the floor. “I know a few folks who’d be all right with that outcome.”
“I’ve discovered I’m not one of them.” The discovery that she, rather desperately, wanted children of her own had surprised her.
It had hit her a couple of months ago. School dismissed for the summer in mid-May, except for those students requiring tutoring. Teaching for Moira was a year-round occupation, but there were a couple of short weeks between the end of lessons and the start of tutoring sessions when the schoolhouse sat empty.
The afternoon she had bid her students good-bye for the summer, she had stood on the schoolhouse steps and watched the children’s retreating backs, waving to those who turned to wish her well. The thought had struck her that, someday soon maybe, another teacher would be standing on that stoop waving good-bye, and Moira would be waiting at home to greet her smiling son or daughter and hear all about what happened on the last day of school.
Warmth had spread through her chest as she considered the possibilities before her. She could start a family with Del, a family she would never be forced to leave when she grew too old, a family to replace the one the war had decimated for her husband. If they had a child, it would mean their pasts were truly past.
No shadows hanging over their heads, no darkness smudging their souls.
Between the two of them, it sometimes felt as though there were an awful lot of darkness.
“What if there’s something wrong with me?”
“Wrong?”
“I mean, what if something has…has happened, and that means I can’t get pregnant?”
Juno shook her head. “I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understand. I’m more in the business of preventing pregnancy than urging it on.”
“When…when I lost my faith, it was—” She swallowed, her voice breaking. “I was raped.”
This shabby parlor had just become her confessional and a whore her confessor, and somehow, that seemed about right. “I learned later that he had…had hurt other women.” She paused, keeping her gaze on the linens in her lap. “Women like you, mostly.”
Moira felt more than saw Juno’s sage nod. “And women like me don’t go to the law with those sorts of concerns.”
“I was asked to give testimony, and the man was hanged.” Her shrug was jerky, though due less to the memory and more to the awkwardness of speaking about such a private matter. Yet if anyone was going to understand, Moira felt it would be Juno. “I worry that what happened to me…broke me. Inside.”
“I see.”
“I feel broken, because I can’t—” She shook her head and attacked the linen with more vigor. “I visited Doc Browne last week. He told me there was no reason to think that incident has had any lasting effect on my…my reproductive capabilities,” she muttered, remembering the concern in the physician’s gaze as he attempted to reassure her with medical facts, murmuring that conception often took time.
Obviously, the man had no idea exactly how much time Del and Moira had already devoted to the process. Remembered pleasure made her blush. “But I don’t know what else it could be.”
“Doc’s right, it doesn’t work that way. Rape,” Juno stated, “isn’t just a physical trauma, but your body eventually heals, inside and out.” She spoke as if she knew. “This was more than a year ago, correct?”
Sorrow for the woman who so obviously had experience in this sort of thing swelling in her chest, Moira simply nodded.
