by Mary McBride
His eyes slanted to the mirror. “You’re one sorry case,” he told his gaunt, dusty reflection. Pretty sad when the mere sight of feminine smallclothes bashed a man’s heart against his ribs and dried his tongue like so much jerky. But it wasn’t the clothes, and he knew it. It was the woman who had worn them. The little windflower who had gotten in his way, thanks to the banker’s indifference.
But Edwina Cassidy was gone. Gideon grinned in spite of his sullen mood as he pictured her shaking her fists at him from the back of the speeding train. She’d have jumped. He had known that instinctively. That was why he’d hitched her to the door with a succession of half-knots and slipknots that would take her a good ten minutes to undo. He hoped. Hell, his fingers had been shaking so bad while he was kissing her it was a wonder he hadn’t tied himself up right along with her.
He sighed. By now she was probably hunkered down in a seat, still mad as hell. He could almost see her, staring out the window, gnawing on her lip, attempting to conceal her lush bosom while she tried to figure out what to do next about the stolen money. But once she got back to Santa Fe and once she discovered nobody at the bank held her accountable for the loss, the tiny teller would calm down and go about her business as if nothing had ever happened.
Probably in a week she wouldn’t even remember him. Some young storekeeper or cowhand would walk into the Logan Savings and Loan to make a deposit, take one look at the little teller’s sea-colored eyes and hand his damn heart right over the counter along with his money. Probably in a month or two...
A sudden rapping on the door obliterated his thoughts. Gideon’s hand rested on the butt of his gun as he called, “Yeah? Who is it?”
“Angie.”
He opened the door in response to the feminine voice, then leaned against the frame, looking down at the redheaded whore from Missouri. From home. It flashed through his mind that here stood a kind of answer to his needs, and he wondered why it suddenly seemed to matter that she wasn’t the right answer. When he finally spoke, his voice was as taut and barbed as wire. “What do you want?”
The whore’s mouth twitched in quick disappointment, then smoothed out to resume its customary, half amused, half bored expression. “There was a man downstairs asking after the girl,” she said. “Just thought you’d want to know.”
Angie shrugged then and turned to go, but Gideon’s hand flashed out to catch her arm.
“Who?” he growled.
“Said his name was Logan. That’s all I know. Said he was looking for a girl, about twenty, about my height.” She lowered her voice. “He mentioned your name.”
“What did you tell him?”
She glanced at her arm, where his fingers were compressing her pale flesh. Gideon followed the direction of her gaze. He released her, cursing under his breath as he saw the crimson imprint that would soon turn black-and-blue. He closed his eyes briefly. “Sorry,” he said through clenched teeth.
“Hey. Don’t worry about it, Missouri.” Angie gave her head a little toss. “I’ve been treated worse.”
Ashamed because he had bruised her, unaccustomed to apologizing, Gideon simply stared at her. The whore’s mouth tilted into a small, fleeting grin.
“A lot worse,” she added. “And don’t worry none about Logan. He was looking for her, not you. I heard you’d put the girl on the northbound train, so that’s what I told him. He was out of here so fast it like to made my head spin. Seems to set great store by the girl.”
That was obvious, Gideon thought. It was obvious, too, that the banker had much more than an employer’s interest in his little teller if he had followed her all the way here.
Well, hell, what natural man wouldn’t? If Miss Edwina Cassidy worked for him, Gideon would open the bank early and toil late just to keep her in his sights. Why should Race Logan be any different? Still, it didn’t make any sense when the man had allowed her to face a hard-bitten bank robber all alone.
Angie nudged him with her hip now, reminding him of her presence. Her voice was husky, her words curling up like smoke. “You need a little something to distract you from all those troublesome thoughts, Missouri?”
He did. After five years in prison, he very much needed something, someone. But not this, not her. Gideon smiled as he traced his finger lightly over the discolored flesh of her upper arm. “Maybe later,” he said softly. “I appreciate the information.” He winked now. “And the invitation.”
She stopped him as he was digging into his pocket for a coin. “It’s on the house,” she said. “That and anything else you might be needing. I’ll be downstairs if you change your mind, Missouri.”
He watched her going down the hallway, one hand trailing provocatively along the wall. He saw her add an extra little twitch to her backside when she started down the stairs, as if to tell him what a damn fool he was and to demonstrate just what he was missing. Not that he needed it pointed out. Not when every nerve in his entire body was screaming what an infernal idiot he was.
* * *
With her lower lip snagged between her teeth, Honey glared at her own reflection in the train window. Hugging her arms more tightly over the indecent bodice of her dress, she had managed to build up a head of steam to rival that of the locomotive that was carrying her relentlessly north. To Santa Fe. Home. Empty-handed. And dressed like a dance hall delight.
Well, she was lucky she was clothed at all, she thought now, after practically having to take her dress off to untie the knots that Gideon Summerfield had rigged. After that, she’d had to pound on the door for ten minutes before the conductor reluctantly opened it. The man had even had the nerve to ask her for her ticket. When she’d told the officious little man just what he could do with his precious tickets, the conductor had taken her by both elbows and hustled her to the only empty seat in the last car.
“I’ll deal with you later,” he had told her before turning to the woman in the rear-facing seat across from Honey, doffing his cap and profusely begging her pardon for the inconvenience.
“It can’t be helped, I suppose,” the iron-haired matron had sniffed, drawing up her overstuffed, pigeon-purple bosom. “Trash will travel.”
Honey had started to inform the battle-ax just who this piece of trash was, but—after an initial and indignant “excuse me, madam”—she had slumped into silence while her face fairly burned with embarrassment and shame. It had suddenly occurred to her that if the woman did indeed know who she was, her reaction might be exactly the same.
There were women in Santa Fe—big, pigeon-breasted paragons of virtue and their nervous, sparrow-faced sisters—who looked at her mother the same way this matron was looking at Honey now. Along with references to trash, people whispered the name that had followed Kate Neely Cassidy Logan across a thousand miles and twenty years. “Kate the Gate.” Never to her face. No. And certainly never anywhere around Race Logan. But it happened.
Honey remembered an afternoon when she’d been about seven or eight years old when her mother had returned in tears from a lemonade social, followed a short while later by a fire-breathing, bruised and battered Race Logan. Her Uncle Isaac had taken Honey aside and had tried to explain to her that day about her mother’s unfortunate and undeserved reputation.
“See, your mama grew up poor, Miz Honey. So poor she didn’t always have shoes to put on her feet. And sometimes folks with nothing else to do, they make up stories about pretty, shoeless girls. Miz Kate didn’t have nobody back then to protect her. Not till your daddy came along.”
“I’m glad I’m not poor,” Honey remembered saying as she had cuddled within the circle of Uncle Isaac’s one arm. “And I’m glad I’ve got you and my papa to protect me.”
She sighed now, watching the rough landscape pass outside the window. Between the two of them, they had probably protected her a bit too well. One of the reasons her father had sent her away to school was to shield her from the gossip that continued to circulate around Santa Fe. To shield her and to see that she acquired the polish a
nd the fine veneer that her mother had never possessed.
Some veneer, she thought dismally as she glanced down at her outrageously exposed bosom. The gossip about Kate the Gate would pale after Honey the Whore arrived home, half-naked and empty-handed.
“No. Absolutely not,” she muttered, earning a sniff and grimace of disgust from the matron sitting across from her. There had to be a way to get that money back and redeem herself. After all, the train was barely a half hour out of Cerrillos, no more than ten or fifteen miles away from that rat, Gideon Summerfield. She could still go back. She could still recover the bank’s money. She could...
The train’s whistle shrilled and the brakes squealed as it chugged to a rumbling halt. All the men in the car began to grumble and consult their watches while the purple-swagged woman Honey had christened Mrs. Pigeon leaned her bulk toward the window and peered out with a sour expression on her face.
“Why are we stopping?” Honey asked her.
“I’m sure I wouldn’t know.”
When Mrs. Pigeon withdrew from the window, Honey took her place. “Oh, Lord,” she breathed, seeing exactly why the train had come to an unscheduled, screeching halt in the middle of nowhere. Race Logan!
Her father’s favorite horse, a dun mare named Jonquil, stood waiting patiently beside the tracks, dipping her graceful head to a bunch of broomweed. Honey didn’t see her father, though, which only meant one thing. He was probably already on the train.
She lurched to her feet, stepping on Mrs. Pigeon’s toes as she moved quickly into the aisle, not even bothering to apologize as she rushed for the rear door, whisked up her satin skirt and clambered over the rail. Once down on the ground, Honey slunk along the side of the train until she reached the quietly grazing mare.
“Hello, Jonquil,” she said softly, reassuringly. “You remember me, girl, don’t you?”
The horse lifted her head, snuffling, nodding, and Honey reached out to stroke the mare’s velvet nose while moving slowly to her flank. After a nervous glance over her shoulder, she wedged her foot in the high stirrup, then grabbed the saddle horn with both hands to haul herself up. Leaning down to grasp the reins her father had dropped, Honey patted the horse’s slick yellow gray neck and whispered, “I know you’re tired, Jonquil, but you and I are going for a quick little ride.”
* * *
In the parlor, Kate was lighting a lamp against the oncoming darkness when she thought she heard Race. By the time she had picked up her skirts and rushed into the front courtyard, her husband was slamming through the tall wooden gate in the adobe wall that separated their house from the street. He closed it with such force that the gate bounced on its frame and swung open again. Tethered just beyond it, Kate caught a glimpse of a flea-bitten, one-eared mule.
She tried not to laugh, but she couldn’t help herself. “That’s about the sorriest excuse for transportation I’ve ever seen. What are you doing riding an old, broken-down mule, Race?”
He reached back and pulled the gate closed with a curse. Then he just stood there like a lightning bolt, trying to decide where to strike.
“Your daughter stole my horse,” he howled.
Kate pressed her hand to her heart and breathed a sigh of relief. “Well, at least that means she’s alive and well.”
“Only until I get my hands around her neck,” he snarled as he brushed past Kate into the house.
She glanced heavenward, with quick thanks and grim frustration, before turning and following in her husband’s wake.
Just inside the door, Kate encountered her oldest son, Zack. The seventeen-year-old’s angry face was a dark mirror of his father’s.
“What’s Papa so sore about, Mama? He nearly bit my head off and all I did was ask him about Honey.”
Kate reached out and smoothed a lock of dark hair from his forehead, accustomed to her role as buffer between her volatile husband and their children. “Just stay out of his way for a while, Zack.” Her mouth quirked now into a grin she couldn’t quite suppress. “Your sister stole Jonquil right out from under Papa’s nose.”
The boy’s turquoise eyes, so like his father’s, widened as his breath whistled through his teeth. “And he let her live?”
Still smiling, Kate nodded. “Apparently,” she said. “Apparently Honey’s very much alive.”
* * *
It was only much later, in the quiet darkness of her bedroom, that Kate allowed her worries to unfold in her heart. She ached for her daughter—the beautiful child who longed to be praised for more than her beauty—the headstrong young woman who yearned to be released from beneath her father’s protective wing, to spread her own wings and take flight.
It was so for all their children, she thought now. Honey. Zack. Creel, at twelve, and ten-year-old Aitch were already bristling under their father’s protectiveness. Even Baby Neely, only three, was learning to shake his fist in his papa’s adoring face. The only one who seemed to have escaped Race’s steadfast, loving grip was their adopted son, Cass.
When it came to seventeen-year-old Cass, Race seemed to forget his enmity for anything Cassidy. He forgot that Kate had married Ned Cassidy when she’d despaired of ever seeing Race again. He forgot that her sister-in-law, Althea Cassidy Sikes, had done her level best to bring both Race and Kate to ruination, or that it was “that cold bitch” who’d given birth to the boy who had become his fair-haired favorite, the boy who was now back East studying hard so he could one day take his father’s place at the bank.
“Now that boy’s got a head on his shoulders,” Race would say. Or, “Cass is the only thinker in this litter of hotheads we’ve spawned, Kate.”
What Race kept conveniently overlooking was the fact that his natural children were perfect copies of himself. All of them. They had his dark hair and his beautiful turquoise eyes. They had his bearing and his intelligence. But most of all, their children had his hot blood and his mulish streak.
Kate sat up in bed now, punched the pillows into a pile behind her and lay back with a sigh. For undiluted stubbornness, Honey was probably the worst. Kate supposed it was because she was the first and the only female child. Race’s protective cloak had smothered their daughter ever since he’d come home from the war to discover her existence.
Kate’s fingers worried the thick braid of red-gold hair at her shoulder and she frowned, trying to recall something Isaac had said not so long ago when she had been grumbling about Race’s tyrannical ways.
“He don’t know no other way to love, Miz Kate,” Isaac had said. “Just like he never knew any other way to work except to do it all hisself.” The old man had grinned slyly then. “Strikes me, too, that it’s just Horace’s way of doing for you by taking pure care of your babies.”
She knew, in the depths of her heart, that what Isaac said was true. For her sake, Race was “taking pure care.” Somehow—and particularly with Honey—he was trying to make up for all that had been missing in his wife’s young life. Kate had never had anyone to truly take care of her until Race had blown into her life like a wild, hot wind on that Fourth of July when she was seventeen.
The night her daughter had been conceived, she reminded herself now. “Honey,” Kate whispered into the darkness. “First you walked out of school, then you clamped yourself onto a vicious criminal. What in the world are you hoping to prove except maybe that you can get yourself hurt without anybody’s help?”
The bedroom door opened slowly, slanting light from the hallway across the bed. Kate’s breath caught when she saw Race’s tall, sturdy frame silhouetted there. Even after twenty years—despite quarrels or sorrows, trials or mere aggravations—her husband still managed to take her breath away.
He stood there quietly, leaning against the frame, until she raised an arm toward him. Then he closed the door behind him and walked to the bed. Kate scooted over to make room for him.
When he stretched out beside her, sighing as forlornly as she’d ever heard, Kate could feel the tautness of every muscle in his big, familiar b
ody.
“Race,” she whispered. “Let somebody else...”
“Don’t fight me, Katie,” he answered, his voice gentle despite his words, his arms moving to surround her. “Just love me, darlin’, and sleep close.”
He’d close his eyes, perhaps, but he wouldn’t sleep tonight. Not a minute. And tomorrow, unless the Lord Almighty could somehow prevent it, Race would saddle up a fresh horse and ride off once more after his daughter and Gideon Summerfield.
God help us all, Kate thought as she slipped out of her nightgown and curved her body against the man she loved more than her own life.
* * *
Dawn was just glimmering in the window when Kate and Race were awakened by Zack’s shout.
“Papa! Mama! Hurry! Something’s wrong with Uncle Isaac.”
Race stepped into his long underwear on the run and Kate didn’t even bother with her robe, but simply wrenched her cast-aside gown over her head before following her husband down the dark hallway. When she reached the kitchen, Race was already kneeling on the floor beside Isaac. Kate struck a match and lit a lamp.
Young Zack’s face was pale. His turquoise eyes were huge and glistening with tears. His voice, normally deep and defiant, trembled now, as did his hands. “Uncle Isaac fell, Mama. We were standing here talking about Honey and how somebody ought to do something about getting her back, when his legs just plain folded.” The boy’s voice broke. “I don’t know. Maybe it was my fault. We were arguing. I said Papa ought to have gone back last night, instead of coming home, but Uncle Isaac...”
Kate clasped an arm around her distraught son as she looked down at Isaac Goodman’s huge, crumpled body. “Hush, Zack,” she said softly. “Race?”
“He’s breathing, Kate.” Race twisted his face toward their son. “Zack, you run get Dr. Cullen. You pound on his front door and if he doesn’t answer, then go around back and pound on his bedroom window. Tell him it’s an emergency.” Race dragged in a breath before he continued. “You tell him your father said for him to get over here yesterday, if not the day before.”
