Cherished

by Jill Gregory

  “Are you all right?”

  She nodded, her eyes huge, brimming with vivid emotions that seemed too strong for her delicate face; but aside from being disheveled, her clothes torn and hands scratched, she looked whole, and he said a silent prayer of thanksgiving. He’d tracked her like a madman these past days, stopping only when darkness made it impossible to go on, for fear he would somehow lose the trail—thinking of nothing but finding her before whoever had slit Skunk’s throat could turn their viciousness on her. He had thought he was chasing another bounty hunter panting after that damned reward, but he couldn’t understand why Juliana’s captor was traveling southwest instead of toward Denver. He hadn’t ever expected John Breen himself, but it was just as well. This would save him the trouble of going all the way to Denver to deal with the bastard. He’d take care of Breen here and now so that he could never hurt Juliana or anyone else again.

  He hadn’t had a good look at Breen from up above; from there he couldn’t see much except his size and the shape of his hat, but as he shifted his gaze from Juliana’s face to the enemy who had hounded her for so long, shock tore through him, rocking him to his soul. Stunned, he almost dropped his gun.

  Jess Burrows.

  Impossible.

  His own astonishment was mirrored in John Breen’s handsome features. Breen’s color turned from fiery sienna to ash.

  “K-kid?” he gasped, then gave his golden head an incredulous shake. “No ... he’s dead,” he muttered, half to himself.

  Juliana stood like a statue, her gaze riveted to Cole’s face. Shock glazed his eyes and froze his lips. Oh, God, what was happening?

  At something in his expression, a chill colder than any mountain river trickled through her.

  “I saw your grave, Burrows,” she heard him mutter hoarsely. “Yours and Liza’s—in San Francisco. I tracked you there myself.”

  His words made Juliana gasp and turn to Breen, as if seeing him for the first time. They also seemed to penetrate John Breen’s stunned amazement.

  He shook himself out of his stupor, a muscle jumping in his neck. “Then I fooled you just like everyone else, Kid,” he said slowly. “Not a bad plan, eh?” He gave a short laugh. “Liza’s tombstone was real all right. I killed her after we hit Frisco. She talked too much. And she never stopped bawling about what we did to you. There’s some poor drifter buried where my grave is supposed to be,” he added with a sly half-smile. “I wanted a fresh start, you see, as John Breen. Not Jess Burrows, drifter, gambler, killer,” he said slowly, quietly, “but an honest man building a modest fortune. Only that fortune grew and kept growing. That gold I stole from Henley—it gave me my start, but I did all the rest. Whatever it took. Until I could have anything I wanted, anything in this whole damn world that money could buy.” His glittering gaze fell on Juliana, her arm resting now on Cole’s, her white face peering at the man she’d rejected as though he were an insect or a lizard crawled out from under a rock.

  “That is, I’ve had everything I wanted except for one thing. Her.” The way he said the word made Juliana’s skin crawl.

  “I don’t know how the hell you survived, Kid, but I’m glad to see you.” He moistened his lips. Juliana could see him thinking, picking his words. “Damn right I am. You were good. Hell, you were the greatest shot I’ve ever seen. Funny, you never told me your real name—and I never figured afterward you were Cole Rawdon. Hell, I thought you were dead.” He cleared his throat. “And after that day, I always regretted that you got so riled about Henley. We could’ve been partners for a long time —you could’ve had half of everything I’ve got now. And you still can.” His voice grew stronger, picked up enthusiasm as he went along, all the while studying Cole’s cold, set face, a face Juliana scarcely recognized.

  She had seen him furious before—icily furious—and she had seen him flash with anger—but never had she seen anything as unnerving as the complete lack of emotion she saw now. Merciless, that was what came to mind. Utterly cold, like stone—no, colder than stone—he looked like a man carved of iron, uncrackable, invincible.

  What was going through his mind?

  “Give me a day with her, Kid. One day. She’s beautiful, isn’t she? Well, you can have her—when I’m done. You just keep everyone away and let me have my fill of her—get her out of my blood—you know what I mean? And then I’ll turn her over to you and make you a full partner of every business I own. Fifty-fifty, that’s what it’ll be. You’ll have the girl for as long as you want her, and you’ll have millions overnight. More money than you ever dreamed of.”

  Cole gazed at him a long time. “I dreamed about killing you, Jess,” he said slowly. “That’s what kept me crawling through that desert, that’s what kept me from quitting and dying in my own blood under the moon, before Sun Eagle found me after two days and saved my life.”

  Cole spoke with eerie quiet. Beneath Juliana’s fingertips, his muscular arm was rigid. “Then, after I tracked you to San Francisco and found the graves, I thought the dreams would stop. But they didn’t. Not for years. And never completely. I still have them occasionally. Now I know why.”

  Breen’s chin quivered, and Juliana saw the flick of his tongue as he licked a bead of sweat from his upper lip. Cole’s voice went on, low and methodical.

  “We have unfinished business between us, Jess. Business that’s been haunting me for years, keeping me from resting easy at night. Now I know why. There’s Henley, and there’s what you did to me. And now there’s what you’ve done to Juliana. Hell, that alone would be enough to seal your death warrant. It means you’d best save your breath, because you’re about to breathe your last.”

  “Now, Kid ...” Breen began, then started at something he saw above Cole’s shoulder, at the top of the slope from where the bounty hunter had first appeared. “Mueller, don’t shoot the girl ...” he yelled, and then everything happened at once.

  Juliana whirled instinctively in that direction, but it took her only an instant to see that the slope was empty. It was a trick. Breen was going for the hideaway gun in his boot, and he was fast, faster than Juliana could have imagined, but even as she tried to jump in front of Cole, screaming “No!” he shoved her aside and fired with his other hand.

  John Breen went down on his knees, but he still managed to shoot. The bullet danced off the rocks above Cole’s head even as the bounty hunter, never flinching, fired again, and this time, Breen thudded face first at Juliana’s feet.

  She couldn’t even scream. She stood staring at that golden head dripping with blood, at the arms twisted obscenely beneath him, and felt herself suddenly enveloped in strong arms.

  “It’s over,” Cole said.

  Then she was being cradled against him, sheltered from this awful place by his arms, his voice, his lips upon her hair. How many minutes passed before she lifted her face from his chest and looked into his eyes, she never knew. She only knew that all the coldness was gone from his features. He was her warm, handsome Cole, the man who had made love to her on a feather bed in a cabin tiny as nowhere, the man who had put his life on the line for her again and again.

  When he gazed down at her, his softened face tugged at her heart. An aching tenderness shone from those fire-blue eyes.

  “This might not be the right time to tell you this—or the right place—but all the time I was searching for you after I found Skunk’s body, I swore that if I wasn’t too late, I’d tell you the truth. What I should have told you long ago. What I know better than anything else in this world.”

  She waited, scarcely able to believe her ears. If he said what she thought he was going to say ...

  “I love you, Juliana.” The fierceness of his words was accentuated by the way his hands tightened possessively around her waist. “Heaven help me, I love you with all my life. I need you, dammit, and if you want to take a chance and hook up for life with a man like me ...”

  “You mean a man who’s wonderful, courageous, handsome, bullheaded, infuriating, stubborn—did I sa
y handsome ...”

  “I mean a man with a lot of enemies, who’s not very good at avoiding trouble, who gets shot at maybe once a day—or so it seems lately, ever since I met a beautiful little easterner who tried to steal my horse. Instead she stole my heart.”

  “Tried to steal your horse? I did steal your horse,” she reminded him as his lips tantalizingly brushed her cheek.

  “But I got him back,” Cole corrected.

  “Oh,” Juliana sighed, so blissful with his arms around her this way that she forgot where she was and what was directly behind her, “shut up and kiss me, Rawdon.”

  “You heard the lady,” came a shout from the slope above them, and turning as one, they saw Wade and Tommy, along with Gil Keedy, waving down at them, grinning like a trio of fools.

  “Took ‘em long enough,” Cole growled as Juliana called a joyful greeting. “I got back to the cabin first and had at least a few hours start on ‘em. Reckon Breen saw their trail dust from twenty miles away—I sure did. You’d think they’d have better sense ...”

  “If you had any sense, you’d kiss me to seal that proposal,” Juliana murmured, grabbing the front of his shirt. “Unless you’re planning to try to wriggle out of it ...”

  “The only wriggling that’s going to be done is beneath the blankets,” Cole told her, grabbing her firmly and staring down with glinting eyes. “You savvy, Miss Montgomery?”

  “I think so ...”

  “Shut up and kiss me then,” Cole grinned, and so, accompanied by shouts and cheers from the slope above, she did.

  28

  The wedding took place three weeks later in the big parlour at Fire Mesa. The last of the summer wildflowers perfumed the air and brightened the house, which had been scrubbed, polished, dusted, and gussied up, as Tommy called it, with new curtains and rugs and bright chintz pillow cushions ordered all the way from Denver. With Josie’s help, Juliana had brought a lustrous glow to the old oak floors and paneling, had freshened each of the spacious rooms with feminine, personal touches. Her mother’s old music box sat on the mantel, alongside Cole’s carved horses. Outside, autumn leapt into the canyons and hillsides with a burst of tingly cool air, but the sun shone like golden honey upon the magnificent hills and the valley stretching away in emerald splendor. Inside, its windows thrown wide, the house sparkled with life and beauty and seemed to catch the joy of its new mistress and to glow with a mellow warmth it hadn’t known in many years.

  Juliana descended the staircase in the white silk gown her mother had worn when she wed Andrew Montgomery. Wade and Tommy had saved a good many of Sarah Jane Montgomery’s prized possessions after Juliana had gone off to St. Louis. They had packed them away in a cedar chest and stored this chest in a bank vault in Independence all these years, always planning to bestow the contents on their sister one day when they were reunited. When the box had arrived a week before the wedding, Juliana hadn’t the slightest idea what she would find inside until a beaming Tommy presented her with the key. When she saw the music box, her mother’s favorite china cat, a crystal perfume bottle that had sat on Sarah Jane’s bureau in the bedroom above the general store, and the wedding gown, among a dozen other near-forgotten treasures, tears had sprung to her eyes. There was a photograph, too, of Mama and Papa, which Juliana hadn’t seen since she was a child. She held it between trembling fingers, staring at the portrait of her parents, Mama seated, Papa standing straight and tall, with a hand upon her shoulder.

  As a grown woman, Juliana had studied the dear faces remembered so blurrily from her childhood. In her father, she saw clearly once more all the sturdy strength and rugged handsomeness she remembered, and the sound of his voice and his laughter when he threw her in the air and caught her seemed to float back to her as well, causing the tears to stream down her cheeks in bittersweet recollection. In her mother’s portrait she saw again the pale beauty who reigned over her childhood memories, but with a woman’s eyes she now observed as well the sad eyes and careworn set to her mother’s thin shoulders that she had never noted as a child. This delicate woman whom Aunt Katharine had characterized as disreputable because she had once worked in a saloon was no harpy or tramp, but a fine and gentle lady, who at one point in her life had faced poverty and desperation, and had worked at the only employment she could find in order to survive. Juliana knew now in a way she had never known before that there was no shame in that: hadn’t she herself labored to exhaustion as a hotel maid on the Colorado border when her money had been stolen? And hadn’t she learned in a way never to be forgotten that the wealthy and powerful could sometimes be lower than a snake, and those whom society might judge harshly could hold the kindness of angels within their hearts.

  Like Cole, she thought. Shunned by some, feared by most, Cole had ridden his own lonely, perilous road, keeping his own counsel, burying the need and pain and kindness inside him so deep, he had even convinced himself it was no longer there. Mama would have adored Cole. And Papa would have respected him. He was so strong, so proud and independent, yet like Papa, he needed the love of a family. He just never realized that until he met me, she thought rather smugly, and then hugged her parents’ photograph to her breast.

  Wade and Tommy insisted that she keep it as a wedding gift—the first part of their wedding gift, they added. The second part, they told her the morning of the wedding, was somewhere in the pile set on the mahogany side table in the parlour, among gaily wrapped gifts from Josie and Gil, Gray Feather and Yancy, all of whom attended the wedding dressed in their Sunday best.

  But beside Cole, everyone else paled that day in Juliana’s eyes. When she floated down that staircase tightly clasping her bouquet of yellow roses, her silk slippers making the barest rustle upon the oaken floor, she saw not the array of smiling faces staring up at her, not the beautiful old house nestled like a dark jewel amid the glorious Arizona scenery, not the Plattsville preacher waiting to perform the marriage ceremony—no, she saw no one, nothing but Cole. With his carefully combed black hair just touching the white collar of his lawn shirt, his dark, handsome face tilted up to watch her approach, he filled her mind and her heart with an outpouring of love so intense, it made her burn inside. Never had she seen him more devastatingly handsome or magnetic as he looked that bright morning in his elegant black suit, white shirt, and knotted silk cravat. Each step she took toward him made her heart pound faster, her blood heat within her veins. When she reached the bottom of the staircase, where he waited for her, her smile could have lit the desert at the moment of blackest midnight.

  Cole leaned down and gazed at her through the gauzy curtain of her veil. She saw the fierce love glinting in his eyes, the softened desire in his face. In that moment, from the trees outside the window, came the song of a hummingbird. The heart-stopping beauty of it sweetened the crystalline morning air for a precious moment, then ceased.

  Cole gazed intently into the beautiful green eyes of his bride. “Come live with me and be my love,” he implored Juliana softly, so no one else could hear.

  Her rapt face spoke her reply. This man who had needed no one, and had wanted nothing but the solitude of his own campfire and his own path, needed her, wanted her. And she needed and wanted him with every fiber of her being, every part of her heart, body and soul.

  She placed her hand in his.

  The ceremony was simple, charming, and heartfelt. Afterward, there was dancing, feasting, champagne. Wade and Tommy toasted the couple, Juliana danced with all the men and hugged Josie, teasing, “Soon perhaps we’ll be dancing at your wedding—yours and Gil’s,” and consoled her brother over the loss of the young woman who had been the latest to consume his thoughts and attentions.

  “Please try to be happy for them,” she coaxed Tommy when at one point he stalked out the kitchen door to sulk in the vegetable garden. “Josie needs someone steady and reliable to be a father to Kevin, and you don’t exactly strike me as being ready for that just yet,” she pointed out.

  To her surprise, Tommy had given h
er a half-smile of agreement. “Well, actually, Wade and I are planning to settle down, maybe start a horse-ranching business with Cole—if he’s agreeable, of course—but as for this husband business—you know, Juliana, I don’t reckon I am quite ready for that yet. A little too settled for my taste. And”—his smile widened to a full Tommy Montgomery grin—“I have to confess, when I rode into Plattsville to pick up that cedar trunk from the stage, I ran smack into the new schoolteacher just arrived from Kansas City. Lord, but she’s a pretty little thing. Sweet, too. Matter of fact, I’ll have to leave the wedding a little early, if you don’t mind, because I’m taking her on a picnic ...”

  She didn’t worry any further about Tommy’s broken heart.

  The guests were gone by sunset. She and Cole were alone at Fire Mesa.

  Autumn wind rattled the window panes as Cole swept her into his arms and carried her up the stairs to their bedroom. The last fading rays of the sun burnished her hair to glistening waves of gold as she leaned her head against his chest, listening to the low, rhythmic beating of his heart.

  A small black velvet box sat upon the sea-green quilt covering the huge four-poster bed.

  “Open it,” he told her, placing it in the palm of her hand as he set her down beside the bed. “It’s my wedding present to you.”

  Juliana had never seen him so happy. His blue eyes glowed, his whole body was relaxed, warm with pleasure and anticipation. “Marriage agrees with you,” she teased as she slid open the box.

  “The honeymoon sure will,” he shot back.

  She laughed, then let her gaze drop to the gift in her hand. And there, nestled in a bed of velvet, was a heart-shaped gold locket and chain, which Cole lifted out and fastened with sure fingers about her throat.

  “It’s exquisite,” she breathed, and felt she was going to burst with happiness.

  Cole cupped her chin. “When I first met you, you stole my heart, Juliana,” he said quietly, and she was touched by the quiver of emotion in his voice. “Now I’m giving it to you. All of it. I hope you’ll remember that—in case I forget to show it sometimes or to say it ...”