“Spread your legs.” He lifted her, swearing that his words came out a soft, dark, sensual command. She wasn’t supposed to react with a trembling awareness that coiled around him. She wasn’t supposed to smell faintly of sweet pine, or catch her breath when he repeated his order.
“Spread you legs, Domini, or I’ll do it for you.” Without a sound he bore the bite of her fingers digging into his shoulders, sending a shooting pain down his arm as he set her on the saddle.
He’d made the stirrups too short. To adjust them he’d have to touch her again. She’d asked him for patience, and Luke didn’t think he had any left. He looked up at her and let out a long breath of cynical acceptance.
“Bend your knee.” While he worked the strap, lowering the stirrup, he distracted himself by thinking that he had made a good choice of the sorrel. The mare stood quietly, as if she sensed her rider’s fear. Reaching for Domini’s foot, Luke’s hand slid up the supple hide of her moccasin, and he found out that not everything about her was soft. There was strength in her calf, and while he’d never walked when he could ride, he knew that wasn’t true about her.
Once he’d adjusted the other stirrup, he took the reins from her hands. He lifted her bare hand to the saddle horn, and before he thought about it, he stripped off his gloves.
“Put these on. Hang onto the horn and leave the rest to me.”
The cutting edge in his voice brooked no argument. Domini swallowed. Once, twice, harder each time. She was trying to rid herself of the anger that rose with every bite he took out of her. No, don’t think about that. It wasn’t her fault she’d had no horse to ride. He had no reason to make her feel as if she had committed some unpardonable sin.
He had likely learned to ride before he could walk. Damn him! No. Lord, forgive me for that.
The strength of her anger shocked her. She had learned to control her temper. The lesson had been difficult, but with the nun’s help, long talks with Sister Benedict, hours of prayer, and enough penitent tasks, she had thought she had accomplished it.
Luke made a mockery of her belief. She wanted to snap back in kind, but she held her tongue.
The supple leather gloves were still warm from touching his skin. Domini put them on, hoping he would move away from her. The gloves were too large, but he didn’t seem to care.
She maintained her rigid posture as he secured her carpet bag with the strips of hide hanging from the saddle. The mere brush of his chest against her leg was enough to set off the tiny tremors that she couldn’t seem to control around him.
And he knew it. He had to, she decided, feeling the curve of his fingers over her calf, but with his touch she in turn felt the increased anger and tension rolling off him.
Using every bit of her formidable strength of will, Domini refused to look at him, refused to give in to the need to talk to him. But when he moved away to his horse, she couldn’t take her gaze from him as he stepped into his saddle with a smooth, fluid grace. Maybe she had been wrong. Luke had not learned to ride before he could walk. The man appeared to have been born in a saddle. She chided herself for the petty thought.
“Ready?” he called back, and without waiting for her answer, he neck-reined the grulla to move out of the livery yard.
Luke barely resisted the urge to set his heels into Devil’s sides to ride out the restless wildness he couldn’t shake. He wasn’t insensitive to the fact that if she hadn’t lied to him about not knowing how to ride, she’d be sore as a throbbing toothache after an hour in the saddle.
He had throbbing of his own to contend with, so he kept the grulla to a walk, feeling Aloysius’s speculative gaze follow them. Before one Gold Bar C hand headed for home, he’d hear talk about Luke and the woman. He wondered if the old man would have apoplexy knowing that he’d snatched her from under his nose.
Dominica Kirkland was a trusting fool. But that didn’t stop him from casting a quick look over his shoulder at her. With regret he’d noticed that she had already coiled and pinned that glorious mane of hair up by the time he’d returned to the room. He could have told her that her rigid seat was going to be hell on her body. He already knew she could move like a blade of grass bending to the wind.
“Sit easy,” he yelled at her. “Move with the horse, not against her. You’ll be stiff as a corpse by afternoon. And then I’ll have to touch you again to take you down.” He shot her another look. “We both know you don’t want that to happen, do you?”
Domini didn’t answer him. She tried to do as he said, but it was a long way to the ground.
As if he knew she hadn’t obeyed him, Luke called out again. “You’ll learn. A damn painful lesson, too. One I might find pleasin’, but you sure as hell won’t.”
That low-pitched timbre of sensuality underscored his words, and Domini reacted with a curl of warmth stroking through her.
The threat had released some of his tension, although Luke couldn’t figure out why. He was ready to make the reluctant admission that he admired the way she controlled her fear. He couldn’t say the same for other young women that got hauled by overanxious parents to the ranch.
The Mayfields’ daughters, Bonnie Sue and Patty—a bookworm and a giggler, would have been whining by now. Netta and Maude Warren had the mistaken idea that their timidity appealed to a man. And Celia Tanner, with the rigid code her mother imposed on her, would never have found herself riding out alone with any man.
If Luke believed he had a conscience, what he felt would have been a prick to one. He hadn’t given her time to eat. He wouldn’t have minded a cup of Molly’s black brew himself. His saddlebags were already packed with the supplies he had bought yesterday before the grulla had thrown a shoe.
He had told her last night that he didn’t think she had had an easy time of it. But he wondered now how many times she had gone hungry. He was no stranger to the hollow, empty feeling. But he’d been too young, too stupid to understand what defiance earned him. He couldn’t even explain to himself what kept drawing him back to that mountain ranch time and again, hoping things had changed. They never had.
It was in the past, the far past, and it remained buried like the nightmares that sometimes plagued him because he’d wake shaking with a cold sweat and never remember what they were about.
He took a bracing breath of cool mountain air. He’d taken her out so early simply not to share her with anyone.
And he didn’t need another slip like the one Aloysius had made. She had no idea how ironic her remark was that Toma Colfax would reimburse him for expenses. The old man was likely to take another piece of his hide for interfering with his plans.
He wanted to avoid thinking what those plans might be. If Toma had made them, there couldn’t be any good to come from them.
Christ! She was an innocent and he, the bastard, more than ready to lead her. Lamb to slaughter. Dominica Kirkland to the Gold Bar C. It was all one and the same. Why had Toma raked up the past by bringing Jim Kirkland’s daughter here?
Instinct said she didn’t know why Toma had sent for his old partner’s sole heir. The greedy bastard couldn’t be thinking of giving her a share of the mine claims or the land their gold had bought.
Toma never gave anything away. He sold things. It was a lesson that Luke never forgot. And Toma’s prices were steep. He had to own you body and soul.
He recalled her telling him that she had wanted to take vows and become a nun. She’d need her faith and the Lord at her back to survive Toma’s brand of deviltry. He knew it wasn’t a fanciful term to describe Toma. The man had been born in hell, raised by and forever guided by the devil himself. Him and his wife.
And Matt? Who could figure which way Matt would bend? That he would benefit from whatever choice he made was a foregone conclusion. Matt was for Matt, first, last, and always. Luke had swallowed that bitter knowledge a long time ago, too.
He allowed the horses to pick their own way over the rock-strewn trail. They were heading for high co
untry, a place where he felt at home. The sky was already breaking the night’s hold, turning pale in the far distance. He wondered if Domini would find the same peace that filled him in this land.
This time he didn’t bother to look back, just settled himself deeper in the saddle. Time would give him all the answers he needed, and maybe a few he didn’t want.
Domini shivered as the morning’s chill lingered. She was used to a burning rising sun that brought unbearable heat to sear land and flesh alike.
She was feeling the ache of her spread thighs. Holding onto the high saddle horn with one hand, she used the other to tuck more skirt beneath her legs. Within the soft, supple skin of her moccasins, her toes curled with tension as she pressed down on the stirrups.
“Do we have far to ride?” she called out.
Until that moment Luke hadn’t really made up his mind. He urged Devil off the wide trail and into the lodgepole pine forest. “Two or three days if we’re lucky. Depends on the weather.”
“Two or three days?” she repeated.
Her gaze swept the tall, thin trunks of pine trees and rose straight as ship’s masts. Their yellow-green branches curved upward at the tips. Cones were clustered at the ends, surrounded by a tight bundle of reddish knots. The growth was dense, so crowded that the branches were entangled from one tree to another.
The sound of the horses was muted here. She forced herself to look down at the thickly carpeted ground. Brown pine needles soaked up noise, and she felt as if they were alone in the world.
The sudden ripple of bird cries through the pines startled her. She hadn’t realized she had made a sound until Luke spoke.
“What you’re hearing is the warblers and—”
“That whee-twee noise?”
“Yeah. And the jays. Whatever happens, never cry out like that. You never know what animals might be around. And they don’t all have four legs.”
“I’ll remember.” Birds? She’d been frightened of small birds? The repeated klak-klak made her seek out the bird that sounded as raucous as the old village women at market. The noise was unpleasant, but Domini smiled when she caught sight of the rich blue plumage and ebony crest of the jay gliding from one tree branch to another above them.
“And the trees, Luke, what are they called?”
He drew rein and the mare stepped up close to the grulla. “These are lodgepole pines, named because the Indians use them as the lodgepole for their tepees.”
In a deliberate move, he crowded the mare. “I told you to keep your voice down. You keep your questions till we make camp, and even then you wait for my word. Voices carry. You don’t want trouble, you don’t invite it. I’d have a time protecting you if we get jumped.”
“Jumped? I’m not a mining claim.”
“Honey, where we’re heading you’re worth your weight in gold.” His gaze roamed over her, and the ache that had barely subsided rose with double force. He was tempted, so damn tempted, to sweep her off the mare and show her the kind of trouble she courted in a man.
The small hitch in her breathing told her she was very aware of the danger she faced. Luke backed Devil away from her. “Just remember what I said.”
“Yes. This time I will.” Two or three days alone with him? Alone with a man whose heated touch set off a storm of seething emotions she couldn’t name and couldn’t control? Domini glanced at the darkly clad body ahead of her. She was riding off alone with a man who wanted her, made no effort to disguise it, and was angry that he did.
The hunger she had been feeling disappeared as fear took hold. Knowledge settled in its place like a cold, hard knot in her belly.
Had her instincts been wrong? Had she made a terrible mistake in trusting him?
Chapter 4
Matthew Colfax listened to the masculine laughter appreciating his father’s brag that the only pleasure they could find missing from his office on the Gold Bar C was an accommodating woman.
He smiled with the rest of them as Toma led the way inside and wondered what their reaction would be if he told them what he had learned late this morning. Luke was back. After five months of no word, he’d been seen in Florence last night. Matt wasn’t about to share that information with these men, least of all his father, but he knew laughter wouldn’t greet the announcement.
Matt had to agree with his father’s assessment of the room. But he couldn’t watch Toma swig down another glass of the raw whiskey he still insisted was the only drink for a man.
One corner of the room was dominated by a card table with places for five chairs. Any more, Toma declared, and a poker game lost its edge.
The floor-to-ceiling book-lined walls boasted the fortune he’d spent on books. It was a shame that their leather bindings had never been opened. Red cedar paneling had come from the trees felled on their land, milled by Colfax saws and installed by a small army of carpenters that Toma had personally hired on a trip to Seattle.
Butter-soft leather chairs built to take a man’s weight were quickly filled by the same men who gathered for these monthly Sunday suppers with their sons.
The company would be pleasant enough, the aromas rich as cigars and cigarettes were lit to satisfied murmurs, and the thickness of the wood insured that no words spoken here would pass these walls.
Matt poured himself a brandy from Waterford crystal, and slipped his gold pocket watch from his vest pocket. He’d remain an hour and no more. Supper had been the same long, leisurely meal it always was. Lavish praise had been politely whispered to both Josie, their housekeeper, and Ellamay, the cook, as they left the dining room.
From the belches released the moment the doors had been closed behind the men as the women continued down the hall to his mother’s gold and white drawing room, Matt didn’t doubt that the compliments were sincere. Toma enjoyed playing host. He was generous with his hospitality. But Matt knew why. It made him feel powerful, and power was the only thing that mattered to his father.
Matt couldn’t quite figure out what these monthly suppers meant to his mother. With her sharp tongue that was quick to criticize and slow to praise, he knew she thought herself above the wives and daughters of the men liberally indulging in the liquor that Mr. O’Malley served.
Matt refused to have his glass topped by the bandy-legged Irishman who had come west with a younger son of Irish gentry hoping to make his fortune in the gold fields and ending up dead over a questionable poker hand.
Toma had been present, and promptly hired the man to work for him. Matt wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that his father had done the questioning and the shooting that followed. When Toma wanted something, he went after it. Nothing and no one was allowed to stand in his way.
At twenty-eight Matt was the oldest of the sons in the room, Frank and Marty, sons of Martin Mayfield, a man whose wealth in mining and land almost equaled Toma’s, were both in their mid-twenties. Vincent, at twenty-five, was the oldest of the Warren sons. Sinclair was younger by a year, and Kenneth had just passed his nineteenth birthday.
Moving to stand near the glass-fronted walnut gun case, a recent addition in a room already overcrowded with testaments to his father’s wealth, Matt did what he did best. He watched and he listened.
The talk was general, of yields and stocks, and his gaze roamed the room. No one would claim that Toma did things by halves. Shelves had been cut from the upper levels of the bookcases to display Toma’s hunting trophies. Two massive heads of bighorn rams were mounted on opposite walls, side by side with a dozen antlered racks of moose, elk, and white-tailed deer.
His father stood in front of the native stone fireplace, commanding the attention of everyone in the room, one arm resting on the mantel, standing as straight and tall as a lodgepole pine. The gleaming polished black boots were a perfect match for his eyes. A tailor in Boise City custom-made his clothing from the finest materials available. Toma had come a long way from the saddle tramp who couldn’t put together a miner’s outf
it.
Matt glanced at the grizzly bear’s skin beneath his father’s boots. It lay over the thick Turkish carpet, and a black bear’s fur cushioned the boots of Martin Mayfield and his sons where they sat on the long sofa built to accommodate Toma’s six-foot height.
Peter Warren was giving a heated accounting of the latest failed attempts by the army to get the Nez Perce Indians to move to the reservation lands at Lapwai. The whole issue bored Matt. It had been going on for over a year. War, he believed, was the only way Chief Joseph would give up his claim that he’d been promised he could move his people to the Umatilla Reservation.
Ray Tanner jumped into the argument of what was to be done to insure their safety. By virtue of his placer miner yielding nuggets worth between fifty to seventy dollars each, Ray had bought up the hotel, café, and freighting line in Florence. Two months ago he had taken title to land that bordered the Gold Bar C, where he was building himself a house and ranch to rival the Colfaxes’s. And he was dangling the prospect of marriage to his lovely daughter, Celia, in front of him.
But Matt had his own agenda. It didn’t coincide with his father’s, but then, they rarely saw eye to eye.
He smiled at the man he hated, the one whose blood ran inside him, and savored the withholding of his news. He knew what Toma’s reaction would be if he found out that Luke had been sighted this close to the ranch. He knew it, and he had insured that Toma wouldn’t know about Luke.
Not until Matt was good and ready to tell his father.
And he just might wait until hell froze. His smile deepened with the thought. He tossed back his brandy and decided that he would remain and have another drink.
Domini bit back a groan. She wouldn’t waste the energy. This was the second time he had called a halt since breakfast. She knew he expected her to get down, and she mentally went over the moves he had made to dismount earlier.
Clinging to the saddle horn with her left hand, she forced the screaming muscles of her right leg in a wide swing over the mare’s rump. She grabbed hold of the raised back edge of the saddle seat and hung suspended, unable to kick her left foot free of the stirrup so she could collapse in a heap on the soft, pine-carpeted ground.
Whisper My Name Page 4
