THE OUTLAW BRIDE

by Maggie Shayne

Now where the hell was she going with this? Elliot managed not to grin as he let her go on. "Are you now?"

  "Oh, sí! I kept my father's house spotless for him! And he used to say I was the best cook in all of Texas!"

  "Really?"

  She nodded hard. Her dark hair moved when she did, and the sun behind her made a golden halo around her head. A misleading halo, if Elliot were any judge of things.

  "I suppose we'll have to convince Chelsea to let you loose in the kitchen, then."

  She smiled demurely when he knew full well there wasn't a demure bone in her body. "I would like that very much." Then she looked up. "But you know that is not all I can do. I was raised on this … on a ranch, after all."

  He caught the slip. This ranch, she was raised on this ranch, that was what she'd been about to say. And she hadn't made any bones about telling him so before. So why skate over it now?

  "I can muck out stalls and pitch hay, groom horses and tend sick cattle, and string wire for fence. My father used to say I was as good as any two of his gauchos."

  "I'll bet he did," Elliot said. Again she nodded. "So why are you telling me all this?"

  Looking up slowly, she shrugged, then looked away.

  "You sound like you're applying for a job, Esmeralda. What's up? Hmm? What are you thinking?"

  "Nothing." She turned to the side, pretending great interest in the implements that hung from nails and hooks on the back wall. "I just did not want you to think I was … useless. I mean, I can do many, many things, even though I am confused by many others."

  "Well, sure you can. I never thought you were useless, Esmeralda."

  She peered up at him from huge dark eyes. "You didn't?"

  "Hell no. You're smart, and whatever you don't understand, you'll learn. I guarantee you that much. I don't know what you're worried about, Esmeralda, but you don't have to impress me."

  "I don't?"

  He came out of the stall, set the heavy shovel aside and tugged off his barn gloves as he looked her right in the eyes. "I saw you facing down a pack of killers. Remember?"

  She smiled a little, lowering her gaze.

  "That impressed me enough to last a lifetime. Okay?"

  "Sí. Okay."

  "Now why don't you tell me why you really came out here?"

  She lifted her head fast. "I … I guess I got lonely."

  "What, Bubba and Chelsea aren't enough company for you?"

  She shrugged. "They don't know the truth about me. I feel … false around them. Always on my guard, you know?"

  He nodded, sighing, understanding, but not having a clue what to do to make her feel more at ease. "I'm finished here. What do you say we take a ride together? I'll show you around the place and—"

  "You'll show me around the place?" Her head snapped up as if it had been held in place by a spring that had just given way. "You think I don't know my own ranch like the back of my hand?" As she spoke, her eyes flashed, her nostrils flared and her hands flew expressively. He half expected her to punch him in the nose, but she seemed to catch herself instantly. She bit her lip, lowering her head fast. "I am sorry! Dios, what is the matter with me?"

  Elliot stood still for a moment, not sure which was the real woman. The flash of fury and anger he'd seen a moment ago, or this recalcitrant lamb. He liked the lamb better, but doubted she was more than an illusion. "Forget it," he said.

  "Oh, no, please! I do want to go riding with you, Elliot. Very much! And … and I want to see how this place has changed over the years."

  Studying her face carefully, for he sensed some sort of a trap, Elliot finally nodded. "All right then. I'll saddle us up a pair of mounts."

  "Sí, bueno."

  She rode along beside Elliot Brand and wondered how she would manage to get him to bed her. The logical way would be to flirt and tease and tempt him until he gave in to her wishes, all the while believing it was his own idea. But that could take time, and she had no idea how long she would have here. She half expected the skull's magic to come to life from wherever it was and send her back to her own time without a moment's notice. Or maybe it would happen when they found it again … if they found it.

  No, she had to work fast, and that way was just too slow.

  But what else could she do?

  Other than getting past that first part of it, her plan was a good one. Elliot put a lot of effort into appearing to be an honorable man. It seemed that he and his entire family valued their good name. And no matter how many things might have changed over the years, one thing couldn't have, could it? A man would still feel he ought to marry a woman if he made her pregnant. Especially a man who considered himself, or wanted others to consider him, honorable.

  It was the best bet she could make. She had nothing to lose. She only had to seduce the man into her bed and then claim to be carrying his child. It would, of course, be best if she were actually telling the truth about her condition. In this age, there were likely methods for verifying pregnancy. Yes, she should make sure she became pregnant. It would be easy enough to do. She didn't know what methods women used today, but her own aunts had taught her all about such things. She could figure out the perfect time using no more than her own monthly cycle and the phase of the moon. She would get pregnant. Elliot Brand would marry her, and then she would be entitled to half of her ranch, which was better than none at all.

  So the trick was to get him into her bed.

  He wanted her. She thought he did, anyway. But he was carrying this "gentleman" act of his so far that he was actually resistant to the idea of despoiling her, for it would ruin the noble facade. The fool.

  She'd never in her life encountered this particular problem. How odd.

  They rode past the small stream where she'd played as a child, and she eyed the area around it. There were more saplings, and the few trees that had been here had grown to massive proportions. She began to let her developing plan slip to the back of her mind as she looked at the land where she'd been born and raised. "Elliot, look!"

  She pointed, and he followed with his eyes. "That tree," she said, and she got off her horse and hurried toward it. "This is where I carved my initials when I was only six years old!" Running her fingers over the coarse bark, she searched around the tree for the spot. When she saw it, she was so excited she forgot about her scheme and barely noticed that Elliot had gotten off his horse and come to stand beside her.

  Her fingers traced the letters. E.M.

  "Esmeralda Montoya," Elliot whispered. "Well I'll be … you … you really did live here."

  She stared at the tree, though there was a dampness to look through now. "Sí. Did you not believe me?"

  "I did. I just … seeing this, makes it real, you know?"

  "To me, too. To see how much this tree has grown…" She shook her head, turned around, looking at the low hills and meadows in the distance. "Off that way, about five miles, was where my father first built. It was a small cabin. He abandoned it when he met my mother, and it fell to ruin. That was when he built the big house, on the site where your home now stands. I used to go out to the old cabin sometimes. Even though there was little left but the foundation of flat stones stacked one upon the other."

  Elliot nodded. "I've seen them. I always wondered who lived there, who left those stones behind."

  She smiled, nodded. "I found a cave near there. It was my secret place. As a girl, I wrote on its walls with chalk."

  "Yeah?" he asked, smiling. "I didn't know about any cave. What did you write?"

  She lowered her head. "The same as here. My initials … and those of a boy I thought I knew." Licking her lips, she cleared her throat, shifted her gaze and changed the subject. "My mother's grave, and my father's, are just over this way," she said, pointing. "Not too far from here. There is a clearing, beyond the stream. Mama called it her secret meadow. It was her favorite place…" Without thinking, she started forward, moving through the trees, seeking that old familiar spot. But when she got to the place where the grave
s of her parents should have been, she saw only more trees. Young ones, saplings, sprouting as thick as grass. Looking this way and that, Esmeralda whispered, "Oh, Dios, where are they?"

  "Now, hold on," Elliot said, coming forward, gripping her hand tight in his. "They must be here somewhere. Let's just look around." He drew her in among the young trees.

  But though they searched and searched. Esmeralda did not see her parents' graves. And she grew agitated, angry, more and more enraged with every step. "There were tombstones!" she cried. "Fine granite tombstones! Anyone would have known they were buried here! But no, you and your stinking ancestors, you had to tear them down. You had to wipe out every trace that my family had ever been here!"

  "For crying out loud, will you calm down already?"

  "No! I will not calm down! I cannot find my family, and it's all because of yours! Damn you Brands to hell! Damn you all!"

  She spun around, putting her back to him, covering her face with her hands, and when she did, she glimpsed something through the trees. The grave stones? Could it be them?

  "I vow, woman, I've never seen anybody blow up faster than you do in my life. We haven't even looked thoroughly yet, and already you're… Hey, where are you going now?"

  "I found them! Oh, they are still here after all." She ran through the trees, found the stones and, falling to her knees, embraced them, one and then the other. Then she sat back, examining those granite faces, and shaking her head very slowly as she tried to read the inscriptions.

  "See that?" Elliot asked. "My infamous ancestors didn't tear them down after all."

  "No."

  "And if they had, Esmeralda, it wouldn't have been my fault. You've got to get that through your head."

  She nodded slowly. "I suppose you are right," she said in a softer voice. "But your family—your family—certainly has done nothing to preserve these graves, have they?"

  "What?"

  When she glanced over her shoulder at him, he looked confused. "Look at this!" She ran her hands over the tombstones again, and as she did, bits fell away like dust. "Crumbling. Ruined. You can barely read their names here!" She got to her feet, and looked around her. "And there are weeds and saplings and—"

  "Dammit, woman, will you slow down a minute!"

  She clapped her mouth shut, all but biting her lip to keep her temper in check. Oh, but she was furious. She wanted to strangle him, not make love to him. Which was not going to help her plan one bit.

  Elliot could see anger flashing in those eyes of hers. It had sprung out of nowhere, like a freak summer storm. "We didn't know they were here, okay?" he said. "If we had, we'd have kept the plot up. But, Esmeralda, you're talking about two crumbling pieces of granite in a thick patch of scrub brush on a fifty-thousand-acre ranch. We just never saw them there."

  She stared at him hard for a long moment. Then the fight seemed to go out of her, and her knees bent. Maybe the fight was the only thing keeping them straight. But she wound up kneeling on the ground, near those gravestones, her head hanging low, her palm still pressed gently to the cool, crumbling granite.

  "Ah, hell, I liked you better when you were screaming at me." Elliot knelt, too. He didn't want to, but he took hold of her shoulders anyway, turned her to face him, then brushed the damp tendrils of hair away from her tearstained cheek with one hand and studied her face. Smooth, dark skin, black eyes and thick glistening lashes. He thought she was like all four seasons wrapped in one unpredictable day. She could go from sunshine to blizzard, from heat wave to ice storm, from gentle breeze to lightning bolt, all in the blink of an eye. And he had no idea what sort of weather was coming next.

  "I'm sorry," he said, carefully, slowly. His nerves felt raw. Hell, it seemed he was always tense since she'd come into his life. What had happened to his legendary calm? "I … I'd be upset if I found my family's resting place in this condition, too." Tense, he stood waiting as she looked up into his eyes, her own probing and sharp.

  "Sí, you would. It is not right."

  He felt like he was in the eye of a hurricane, just waiting for the storm to kick in again and blow him to kingdom come. It was like tiptoeing through a minefield, talking to her.

  "No, it's not right. But now that we know they're here … we can fix it. We can make it right."

  Her brows rose. The storm clouds in her eyes seemed to part just a bit. "Fix it?"

  "Yeah," he rushed on, sensing he might, for once, have said the right thing to her. "We can." He got to his feet, tugging her up as well and looking around. "We can clear out all this brush," he said, moving his hand in a wide arc to indicate the area around the two dilapidated tombstones. "And rake up the ground, a bit, you know? Smooth it out, chuck the stones out of here." He was into the idea now, seeing it all in his mind's eye as he went along. "We'll plant some grass, some flowers, whatever you want. And then we'll put a fence up around the whole thing. Something pretty. Wrought iron or maybe…" He trailed off then, because he'd glanced at her and noticed the way she was looking at him.

  Her head was slightly tilted to one side, and her eyes were wide, and there was a tiny crease between her brows.

  "What?" he asked.

  Shaking her head slowly, still staring at his face, she said, "You … would do all this?"

  "Well, sure. I just said I would, didn't I?"

  Her eyes narrowed on him then. "Why?"

  "Oh, for crying out loud." Elliot took his hat off and ran one hand back and forth through his hair in frustration. "Because it's the right thing to do! Hell, Esmeralda, this not-trusting-any-man-as-far-as-you-can-throw-him routine is getting old, you know that?"

  She shrugged, turning slightly away from him, her glance sidelong now, rather than dead-on. "Why should I trust a man, eh? I have never known any man worthy of my trust."

  "That's bull. It's bull, Esmeralda. A big fat lie. Just an excuse you use for your lousy behavior and your bad manners and your own fear."

  Her chin went up, but she kept her face averted. "I have no fear."

  "Oh, yes, you do. You're scared to death, Esmeralda. I'm not sure why yet, but I know it's the truth."

  "You know nothing!" This time she did spin to face him, her hair flicking over her shoulders, her eyes pinning him to the spot and threatening to toast him to a cinder.

  "I do so," he said, daring to face her and tempt her wrath. "And I'll tell you what else I know. You're lying when you say you've never met a man you could trust. Lying right through your pretty teeth, Esmeralda. You know all men aren't bad. You know it because of the one who's buried right there," he said, nodding toward her father's tombstone. "Or are you going to tell me he was a faithless bastard like the rest of us?"

  The blaze in her eyes fizzled as if he'd dumped water on it. She looked toward her father's grave. "He was … he was a good man. A fine man."

  "Shoot, I know that."

  Slanting a damp, sideways glance at him, she said, "How would you know that, Elliot? You never met him."

  "No, but I've met his daughter."

  Their eyes held for a long moment, and for the life of him Elliot didn't know why the hell he'd said what he had, much less in the tone he had. It had sounded almost … intimate. "I mean," he added, tearing his eyes away and focusing instead on the scuffed toes of his boots, "I mean, you loved him a whole lot. That's obvious. You wouldn't have if he wasn't a good man."

  When he peeked up at her, she was staring hard at the tombstone. "Sí. But even he…" Then she slammed her eyes closed tight, shook her head.

  "Even he what?"

  "Nothing. Nothing. I will not discuss my father with you, Elliot Brand. You are right, he was a good man."

  "And you trusted him."

  "Sí."

  "Then what makes you think he's the only one in the world, huh? Why do you just blithely assume I'm rotten to the core and that every nice thing I do has some ulterior motive behind it? Why can't you give me the benefit of the doubt and assume maybe I'm one of the good guys, like your dad was?"
<
br />   She drew a long, slow breath. "It is a mistake to trust a man," she said, her voice thickly accented and slightly hoarse, "Even one of the good guys."

  Elliot gave his head a shake and wondered how the hell he'd lost what had seemed like a winning argument. "Why do you say that?"

  Lowering her head, she shook it quickly. "I … I don't know. I shouldn't have spoken."

  He put a hand to her face, cupping it, making her look at him. "But you did say it. And I want to know why."

  "No."

  She closed her eyes, as if to keep his probing gaze away. And all of a sudden, Elliot glimpsed the truth. She was hurting. Hurting down deep, and not just from her father's death, either. He'd let her down in some way. The one man she'd believed in, the one man she'd trusted, had let her down. Or that was the way she saw it, at least.

  "Is it … because he died? Because you know damn well he didn't have a choice about that, Esmeralda. He wouldn't have left you if it had been up to him."

  Those black eyes flashed open so suddenly he almost jumped backward. Their impact when they landed was like a blow every time. "Oh, no? Then why did he send me away, eh? Why did he decide my life for me, and like some mighty king send me to my aunt's in Mexico when my place was with him?" She pulled free of Elliot's gentle hands, turning briskly away. "I should have been here. Fighting to defend our home, right at his side." Her voice broke, wobbled here and there, and Elliot knew she was battling a full-blown crying jag.

  He went to her, turned her around, and wrapped his arms around her shoulders, even though she stood stiff as a statue, holding her face frozen like a mask. "You know what I think?" he asked, as she stood stiffly in his embrace. She shook her head. "I think it's not your father you're mad at, so much as it is yourself."

  Again, her head moved, but her body was softening in his arms now, head resting on his chest and shoulder. God, her hair smelled like heaven. And her body fit against his as if it was the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle.

  "Why would I be angry with myself, Elliot? He forced me to leave. I had no choice."

  "I know that. But you feel guilty all the same. You think maybe, if you'd stayed, he might still be alive."