LEGEND

by Jude Deveraux

  “Snails?” Cole whispered.

  “It was either eat them or get shot by Juan,” Ned said in defense. “And, besides, we’ve all come to trust Kady. You should taste what she can do with a dove. She stuffs them with rice, then cooks ’em over charcoal—Garson made the charcoal. Anyway, them doves are crisp on the outside and the meat is so tender Toothless Dan can eat it.”

  For a long moment, Cole sat at the table in silence, looking down at his hands clasped tightly in front of him. “What else?” he asked softly; then when Ned didn’t answer, he looked at him. “What else?” he asked louder.

  “Well, everyone in town knows how you tricked Kady into marryin’ you. They feel real bad about turnin’ her away when she was hungry, so they . . . Well, they . . .”

  “Out with it!”

  “All the men have been offerin’ to marry her. You know that she’s the most beautiful gal to ever come to this town, and if she wanted to open a restaurant, people’d come from miles just to eat her cookin’, so she don’t need your money. So, anyway, all the men have asked her to marry ’em.”

  “Including you?” Cole asked nastily.

  “I was one of the first,” Ned said with his jaw set, preparing to be told he was fired from his job and to get out of town. But Cole didn’t say anything. Instead, he turned away and looked out the window.

  “I don’t blame any of you,” Cole said after a while. “She is beautiful, and there’s something about her that makes a man feel good. You know, don’t you, that she has no idea what a prize she is—which is, of course, half of her charm.”

  “Yeah, we all know,” Ned chuckled. “Kady thinks she’s fat.”

  At that the two men looked at each other, their eyes alive with laughter. “Fat,” Cole said, then chuckled as he began to think of all Kady had done. Maybe he should take offense at her action of feeding the entire town at his expense, but he couldn’t suppress his humor. “Hog’s Breath?” he said, making Ned laugh harder.

  “Thought he was gonna drop dead on the spot. And you should see Juan! Kady says he has the lightest hand with pastry she’s ever seen. She’s tryin’ to get him to open a French bakery and make somethin’ called cwoisannts. More butter than bread, but they sure are good.”

  For a moment Cole stared into space. What did money matter to him? Ever since the murders when he was a kid, he’d been afraid to spend anything. It was as though his whole family had died trying to protect that money, so it was his duty to keep it safe. But Kady had used the money to help people who needed it and to give joy. He had no doubt that the entire town of Socorro could live for the next two years off what she had paid them over these few days.

  “You ready to go back?” Cole asked Ned. “I seem to have worked up a powerful hunger.”

  “Then Kady’s the one to fix that.”

  “I think Kady just might be able to fix everything that’s wrong with me.”

  “And maybe the whole town,” Ned said under his breath so Cole couldn’t hear him. Cole may have owned the town, but in the last days Kady had given her opinion of what she called Cole’s “obsessive monopoly.” She said she believed in “free enterprise.” And, as they had seen, Kady put into action what she believed in.

  “I’m ready,” Ned said as he followed Cole out the door.

  Chapter 14

  WHAT COLE SAW WHEN HE RODE INTO HIS OWN RANCH WAS controlled chaos. At first he thought it was more chaos than control until he heard the shouts and a couple of shots fired into the air. It looked as though his ban on guns within the city limits had been forgotten.

  “I told you to get back in line,” came a man’s voice; then Cole had the reins grabbed from his horse as he felt a man’s hand on his leg.

  “You want to let go?” Cole said calmly, looking down at the man with his hand on Cole’s calf.

  “Oh, sorry, Señor Cole,” the man said. “But Juan ordered—”

  “I know what you’ve been told,” Cole answered as he dismounted and tossed the reins to a boy standing nearby.

  Cole had to practically shove his way through the people there to get into his own house. As far as he could tell, Kady was feeding a certain number of people at a time, and the people who weren’t eating stood around outside and waited for the next serving time assigned them. To prevent them from fainting from hunger between meals, they were served trays full of something that seemed to be called whorederves.

  For a moment Cole thought he was going to have to kill someone to be allowed in the front door, because Juan had decreed that no one was to enter. But after some words were exchanged, Manuel was called to verify Cole’s identity.

  “What the hell have you done to my house?” Cole asked once inside, his back to the door and looking about.

  In each of the downstairs rooms, all the furniture and rugs had been pushed to the side and covered with sheets so each could be turned into a makeshift kitchen. People and flour seemed to be everywhere.

  “They prepare the food in here, then bake what they can in here and take the rest outside to bake,” Manuel said. “Kady says—”

  Cole lifted one eyebrow. “I’m sure it’s either Kady or Juan,” he said with grea sarcasm. “Where is she?”

  Manuel gave him a look that said, Need you ask?

  With great strides, Cole went to the kitchen, then stood in the doorway and watched until he was pushed aside as people ran from one room to another. Any general of an army would have been pleased to have the authority that Kady did as she managed what looked to be fifty or more people moving quickly about the kitchen and entering and leaving through three doors. Cole was amazed to see the space so full, but no one was trying to murder anyone else. This was especially astonishing when he recognized three men whose faces he’d seen on wanted posters.

  Juan Barela came in through the outside door, three empty trays in his hands. He stopped abruptly, then turned and saw Cole standing to one side of the doorway.

  Nothing wrong with his instincts, Cole thought, and looking into Juan’s dark eyes, Cole knew Juan was questioning whether Cole was going to cause any trouble. Was he going to turn him over to the sheriff?

  Frowning, Cole nodded toward a pile of crescent-shaped rolls in a basket on a table by the wall.

  With a bit of a smile, Juan grabbed one and tossed it to Cole, then went to the ovens, where, as Cole watched with interest, the “hardened killer” pulled out three huge metal sheets covered with cookies.

  One by one, people in the kitchen began to see Cole as he stood to one side of the doorway, and each face asked what he was going to do. Would he stop feeding the whole town for free? Would he be so angry that he’d do something horrible, like kick everyone out of the town he owned?

  But Cole’s eyes were on one person, and that was Kady, with her dark hair tumbling down her back and one of his shirts covering most of her lovely body. The heat of the stove made her skin glow, and he’d never seen her look so meltingly beautiful.

  “You’ll burn those!” she said as she grabbed a copper saucepan that was nearly as big as she was, then slid it to the cool side racks of the stove. “Look at—” She broke off as she caught sight of the person in charge of that saucepan and saw he wasn’t looking at the stove.

  When Kady turned and saw Cole standing there, his heart leaped because he saw in her eyes that she was glad to see him. Maybe it wasn’t the love that he wanted to see, but she wasn’t angry with him, and she certainly didn’t hate him.

  It took her several seconds before she got her emotions under control so she could look at him the way she thought she should look at him, which made Cole smile. His little Kady of the Shoulds, he thought, always doing what she thought she should do.

  “Won’t you join us?” she asked sweetly. “We’re having a bite to eat. I do hope you have time to share a meal with us.”

  There were several snickers at that. Over the last days it had been agreed upon by the entire town that Cole was an idiot for leaving Kady alone for even seconds. The gen
eral opinion was that any man in his right mind would have all the time in the world for a woman like Kady.

  Cole, not really versed in the ways of women, was pleased by Kady’s tone. Maybe things were going to be all right now. Now that she’d seen that Legend wasn’t such a bad place, and since she’d seen the advantages of being his wife instead of returning to that Garvin, he was sure she’d come around.

  Still smiling at Cole, she said a few words to Juan; then he left the room. “We have a special table just for you,” Kady said, “and I am going to prepare your meal with my own hands. No one else will be allowed to touch it.”

  With two strides, Cole crossed the room to his wife. He meant to pull her into his arms, but she stepped back, so his kiss touched only her cheek. “You have to go now, or I’ll never get anything ready,” she said with a flutter of her lashes.

  Cole wanted to take her upstairs to bed, but there had to be at least a hundred pairs of eyes watching him, so he just nodded, then went outside. There’d be time for privacy later.

  Under the cottonwood trees at the back of the house were about twenty-five tables of different sizes set up, and each table was loaded with delicious-looking food. Cole started toward the biggest table, but one of Juan’s cousins held out a chair at a solitary table set deep in the shade of the biggest tree.

  When Cole was seated, he was aware that he was alone at the table, alone under the tree, and that he was the focal point of all eyes. Martha and Mavis were serving food, and now and then they would look at him, but when he glanced at them, they turned away. On the ride to the ranch Ned had made Cole laugh by telling him that Kady called the women the five Ms.

  Kady, he thought. In a mere ten days she had changed the town’s interest from silver to food—and to Kady herself. His hair still bristled when he thought of Ned’s telling him of all the marriage proposals made to Kady. What did they think she was going to do about the husband she already had?

  After about thirty minutes, Kady came outside, a plate covered with a big napkin in her hand, and a hush fell over the crowd. By now all the people from the front of the house had moved to the back so they could watch what was happening. What was Kady going to serve her husband?

  With feelings of pride, Cole looked at the plate Kady set before him, then took her hand and kissed it as she started to pull the napkin away.

  At first Cole could do little more than gape as the napkin revealed what was under it. On his plate were potatoes, carrots, slices of buttered bread—and a rat. A great big black rat that she had rolled in bread crumbs and fried, but leaving the head and tail intact, so there was no mistaking what it was.

  As Cole stared in disbelief at the monstrosity on his plate, the people around him began to laugh. And laugh. And laugh. It was as though they had been waiting years to play such a joke on him, and now their pent-up laughter could escape.

  Slowly, Cole turned to look up at Kady and saw that she was smiling as though he were what she’d just served: a rat for a rat, so to speak.

  It was at that moment that Cole changed. Why was he trying to force a woman to love him? Force her to stay here against her will? What did he hope to accomplish with a woman who didn’t want to be his wife?

  In one motion, he was out of his chair and had thrown Kady over his shoulder and started walking toward the stables. For a split second Juan stepped in his path, but the look Cole gave the man made him step aside. No matter how fierce an outlaw, he didn’t want to get between a man and his wife.

  As Cole strode through the people, they parted for him, and they were still laughing, but now the tone of their laughter had changed. Now they weren’t so much as laughing at him as with him.

  “Put me down,” Kady hissed, and when Cole ignored her, she pinched his side. For this Cole slapped her smartly on her fanny that was pressed so enticingly against his right ear.

  For once Cole was glad to see that no one had paid any attention to his tired horse and the poor creature was grazing, unattended, on the flowers at the front of the house. Cole threw Kady into the saddle, then mounted behind her.

  “I thought you could take a joke,” she said when he was behind her and had led the horse away from the house. “That’s all it was, a joke. Don’t you have a sense of humor?”

  Cole didn’t answer, and after a while Kady stopped trying to talk to him. If he wanted to sulk, let him, she thought, then folded her arms over her chest and decided that two could play at this silence game as well as one.

  They had traveled for only minutes before Kady realized where they were going. He was taking her back to the petroglyphs. He was going to send her back to her own time!

  As soon as she realized where he was going, it was as though her mind started a war with itself. Of course she wanted to return to Gregory and Onions and to all the people she knew and loved there. Well, truthfully, there weren’t many people outside of Gregory and his mother that she knew very well. And, truthfully, it had been difficult to find women who could be bridesmaids at her wedding. But it was where she belonged!

  But then, here in Legend she had made new friends. Many, many friends. In the last days she’d come to know people. For one whole day she’d sat with women and peeled and chopped vegetables. There wasn’t a child or adult from Socorro she didn’t know by name, and they appreciated what she had taught them about how to cook foods that grew for free on the mountainsides.

  And there was Legend itself, a town she planned to help, just as soon as she got it out from under Cole’s rule.

  “There,” Cole said coldly as he dismounted, then pulled Kady down to stand beside him. As usual, Cole had taken a shortcut, and they were already at the petroglyphs. When she didn’t move around the horse so she could see the rock, he grabbed her hand and pulled her.

  Before her was the opening, that odd fading of the rock, and beyond it she could see her dim, gray apartment, just as she’d left it, the rusty flour box on the floor. How different it looked, away from the Colorado sunshine that brightened everything here.

  “Go on,” he said, giving her a little push. “It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she said tentatively, but she didn’t move. She looked back up at him. “I left some puddings steaming on the back burner, and I didn’t take the bread out of the oven. I think I better go back and—”

  Cole put his hands on her shoulders, making her turn back to the scene before them. “That is where you belong. Not here.”

  “You’re angry because of the money I spent, aren’t you? And the rat. Look, I’m sorry. I’ll cook you a dinner that will bring tears to your eyes. You’ll see.”

  Again, Cole turned her back toward the opening, slowly but steadily pushing her toward it.

  When Kady’s foot stepped through the opening, she could see that her leg was already in the apartment. Cole’s hands were pressing down on her shoulders, refusing to allow her to back up. Maybe the dark man on the horse will show up, she thought, looking about her. But there was no sign of him, and Cole kept pushing.

  At last she was standing in her apartment, Cole’s hands no longer on her shoulders and she turned back to look at him. For a moment her breath caught in her throat, as she feared that she’d see only the wall, but he was still there, looking at her, the sun shining on his blond hair.

  As she watched, the opening through time was growing smaller and Cole seemed to be getting farther away. Suddenly it seemed that a thousand images went through her head as she remembered him dressed as an eagle. She thought of the ribbon he’d tied to the outhouse and how he’d prepared a bath for her at the hot springs. He’d raced down the side of a cliff when he thought she was injured.

  Now, with the opening growing smaller, she looked into his eyes, but she could not read them. Why wasn’t he holding out his hand to her? Why wasn’t he telling her that he loved her? Why wasn’t he telling her that he needed her and wanted her as no one else in the world had ever told her?

  As she looked at him, she saw a
stain on his shirt on the left shoulder. It was a stain that was growing darker and larger as she watched, and all of a sudden she understood. Those ten days he’d been gone, he’d been trying to keep her safe. He had ordered her not to leave the ranch not because he was a monster but because he wanted to protect her in case there was any trouble. Maybe protect her in case he didn’t return.

  Kady didn’t think about what she was doing, she just leaped. Like a dog jumping through a burning hoop, she dove through the circle that was left in the wall and leaped into Cole’s arms.

  “Kady,” was all Cole could manage to say as he held her so tightly her ribs nearly cracked. “Are you sure? Are you sure?”

  “I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I don’t seem to know the answers to anything anymore.” She was kissing his face. “You’re hurt and bleeding and—”

  He pulled away to look at her. “You came back to be my nurse?”

  She looked into his eyes. “I really don’t know why I came back. I still love—”

  To keep her from saying the name, he kissed her. “Maybe you’ll change your mind later, but I’ll take what time we have now. Shall we tell it to go away?”

  Turning in his arms, Kady looked back at the rock and saw that the hole had widened. There was her apartment, her clothes still tossed over the couch, the light on her message machine still on.

  “You can still go,” Cole said softly. “I won’t force you to stay here.”

  Tightening her grip on him, she put her head against his neck. “No, I think I’ll stay,” she said. “At least until I get bored with you.”

  At that he laughed. “As long as I have money, I think you can occupy yourself.”

  “Is that what you think? That I only like your money?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Isn’t that what all the women like about me?”

  “Well, not this woman! I like the way you take care of people and the way you put others’ needs before your own. And I like the way . . .” She trailed off because she could feel him chuckling against her.