Bride of the Wolf

by Susan Krinard

  Heath let out his breath and was about to stand up when he smelled human sweat and horseflesh downwind. He turned back to Rachel immediately and offered her his hand. She took it, cradling the baby close with her other arm.

  Charlie Wood came around the willow thicket on the other bank, whistling softly. He reined in his horse at the edge of the water, looking surprised to see them.

  “Mrs. McCarrick,” he called, touching his hat brim. “Mr. Renshaw. Didn’t know you was here.”

  Heath lowered his head. “What’re you doing here, Charlie?”

  “I was just on my way to check on a calf I saw limpin’ yesterday out by Blue Spring,” he said. He studied Rachel curiously. “Is somethin’ wrong, Mr. Renshaw?”

  “No. I been teachin’ Mrs. McCarrick to ride.”

  “I saw that back at the house.” Charlie showed dark, crooked teeth. “You’re turnin’ out to be a mighty fine rider, Mrs. McCarrick.”

  Rachel smiled without much enthusiasm. “Thank you, Mr. Wood.”

  “Well, I best be gettin’ on my way, then.” Charlie nodded to Rachel, turned his horse around and rode back the way he had come.

  Heath stared after him. Charlie couldn’t have seen anything that had happened or Heath would have smelled him long before. Once or twice Joey had been able to sneak up on him, but that was a rare event. Even so, he found himself bristling and inclined to ride after Charlie to…

  What? Ask him if he was following them?

  He shook his head sharply. “We’d best be movin’ on,” he said to Rachel.

  She turned her head slowly, taking in the creek and the horses and the open range. “Perhaps we should go back.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  Brushing her hair out of her face with a work-roughened hand, she steadied Gordie and moved to rise. “No,” she said. “I would like to go on.”

  Heath didn’t know why that felt like a victory. He should have wanted her to be scared, let her think that the Pecos was a deadly place no sane female would want to live in.

  But he’d lost that chance. He’d lost a lot of chances, and he would go on losing them if he let himself keep on thinking that what Rachel felt should make a difference in anything he was going to do.

  He’s where he belongs. The words had come out of his mouth as if someone else had said them. He’d made it sound as if he wanted her to keep Gordie forever.

  He was just as much a son of a bitch as Sean had ever been.

  “I’m going to lift you into the saddle,” he said. “You just hold on to Gordie.”

  Rachel fixed up the sling while Heath shook out the blanket and rolled it up again. Then he put his hands around her waist and lifted her and the baby into the saddle. If she was surprised at how easy it was, she didn’t show it. She squared her shoulders and looked straight ahead. They finished the second half of the trip without another word between them.

  Three-Oak Bend was one of the prettiest places along the creek, close to one of the springs that fed into it. Birds chittered among the leaves, and quail scattered as the horses approached. Small animals rustled the slender branches of the willows crowded on the bank. A blue heron spread its wide wings and lurched into ungainly flight. The ground along the bank was trampled, but there was no other sign of cattle. And no sign that any human being had been this way recently.

  Heath led Rachel down the gentle slope to the shade under the trees. He dismounted, helped her down—careful to let her go as soon as he could—and untied the blanket roll and small crate he’d brought for Gordie to sleep in.

  “He still asleep?” he asked her as she stood gazing at the clear water and the silvery fish darting near the surface.

  She stroked her fingertip across Gordie’s forehead. “Yes. I think perhaps the commotion exhausted him.”

  Heath set down the crate and rolled out the blanket. “You need to drink.”

  The way she looked over the ground told Heath she wasn’t done worrying yet. “No scorpions here,” he said. “It’s safe.”

  With a soft sigh she knelt beside the crate and laid Gordie in it, tucking the blankets around him. He didn’t even move. Heath filled his canteen with water from the creek, gave it to Rachel and unsaddled the horses.

  After laying the saddlebags in the short grass beside the blanket, Heath went down to the creek and pretended to examine the hoofprints around it. When he went back, Rachel was sitting on the blanket, examining the cold fried chicken, biscuits and little cake Maurice had sent along.

  “I believe Maurice should have been a chef for some wealthy French nobleman,” she said in a high, light voice. “I wonder what brought him to Texas.”

  “Same thing that brings a lot of folks,” Heath said, leaning against the tree farthest away from her. “He wanted a life where nothin’ was holdin’ him back or fencin’ him in.”

  She looked out across the creek. “It does seem as if nothing could ever enclose this country.”

  “They already got bob-wire fences some places east of the Pecos,” he said, “but the cowmen around here don’t favor the Devil’s Rope.”

  “I think I understand why.” She smoothed her skirts over her legs.

  “Do you?”

  Hellfire. The last thing he wanted was to let loose more trouble between them, and asking her that kind of question was the worst kind of trouble. He turned his back on her, hoping she wouldn’t answer.

  “One builds one’s own fences,” she murmured so quietly he knew he wasn’t meant to hear.

  He should have left it at that. But he remembered her tears, the hurt in her eyes, the pain she had finally let him see. The feel of her sobbing into his shoulder, clinging to him, as if he could save her.

  “You broke out of yours,” he said. “All them jobs, that world that made you small. You traded ’em in for somethin’ bigger.”

  Leaves rattled in a little puff of wind. Heath could hear Rachel’s breathing, soft and fast.

  “I never spoke about my previous employment,” she said.

  Not to him. He could say that Jed had told him, but all of a sudden he was sick of lying.

  “I found your letters,” he said.

  He expected her to be mad, maybe storm at him in that schoolteacher way of hers. But she kept sitting where she was, staring at her hands folded on her skirts.

  “It seems you know more about me than you ever admitted,” she said.

  “I know that you was sent to live in an orphanage when you was a little girl and didn’t have no way out except workin’ jobs you hated.”

  Her head jerked up. “I never said—”

  “You didn’t have to.” He pushed away from the tree and went down to the water’s edge. “When you wrote about what you wanted in life…” He picked up a stone and tossed it into the center of the creek. “You told Jed a lot of things, but not everything.”

  The quiet was so deep that it felt like every living creature in the Pecos had gone to sleep. “You’re right,” she said in a voice weary and sad. “I didn’t tell him everything.”

  His neck started prickling again. She was about to say something important. Something that would finally explain why she was so afraid—afraid of her own passion, of losing her dream, losing Gordie.

  “You once asked me if there had been someone…before Jed,” she murmured. “There was a man in Ohio. He—” She stopped, her eyes focused on a past he still couldn’t see. “What does it matter now?”

  But it mattered to Heath. She’d known another man. A man who’d wanted her, taken her in his arms, heard her soft gasps of pleasure…

  His upper lip lifted in a snarl. “What did he do?” he demanded. “Why did you leave him?”

  “You have no right to ask me such things,” she whispered.

  Heath spun around. “Who was he? What made you leave?”

  A hawk cried above the willow thicket, and Rachel lifted her head. “I did not leave him,” she said. “He left me.”

  Chapter Thirteen

&nbs
p; THE BEAT OF HEATH’S heart was louder than the rumble of stampeding cattle across hard-packed earth. “What did he do to you?”

  “It doesn’t matter!” She closed her eyes. “Why do you care, Mr. Renshaw? It has nothing to do with you. You have no claim on me, and you never will.”

  No claim? He wanted to prove just how wrong she was, grab her and throw her down on the blanket and erase that other man’s touch from her body.

  “That’s what you’re runnin’ from, ain’t it?” he demanded. “This man you thought you loved.”

  “You talk a great deal about love for a man who knows nothing of it!”

  She was right. He didn’t know anything about love. Not a damn thing. For most of his life he hadn’t even believed it existed except in stories.

  He threw his last pebble into the creek with unnecessary violence, and paced back and forth along the bank, tamping down his anger as hard as he could. He’d apologized only a few times in his life, and he wasn’t ready just yet to add another one to the short list.

  But the fact was that she’d trusted him with information she could have kept to herself, knowing what a son of a bitch he could be. She’d trusted him just to listen, and he’d attacked her instead.

  If she kept on trusting him, she would end up being hurt worse than he could stand. But maybe she would hate him less if she knew a little of what made him what he was. Not everything, never that, but just enough.

  With a sigh, Heath walked back to the trees and eased himself down against one of the trunks, knees up and hands dangling between them. “You said I know more about you than I’d admit,” he said. “Reckon it’s fair you know more about me.”

  She looked at him narrow-eyed, as if she expected him to grow a pair of mule’s ears on the spot. “Perhaps I don’t wish to know more,” she said.

  But she did. Like so many times before, her eyes gave her away…her eyes and her lips and the scent of her skin.

  “You asked me once what I was runnin’ from,” he said quietly. “When I was a baby, younger even than Gordie, my ma gave me up. She didn’t want me because I didn’t fit in the world she was born to.”

  Rachel covered her mouth with her hands. “Holden, I—”

  He kept talking, knowing he would lose his courage if he stopped even for a moment. “She gave me up to a couple named Morton,” he said. “They didn’t have no kids of their own, so they was glad to have me to help on their farm. I wasn’t much use for a few years, but I was always strong for my age. Soon as I could follow orders they put me out in the field to pick the weeds, fetch and carry, whatever they could find. They didn’t have no time to raise me up as anythin’ but a servant.”

  Heath had been careful to keep his voice level, but some of the feelings got through, the feelings he’d kept hoping were dead and gone. Rachel was leaning forward with her fists tight in her lap, her eyes big, shining pools.

  “I’m…I’m so very sorry,” she said. “Did you have any friends? Did you go to school?”

  Easier to laugh than let her see even a little of the old hurt. “The Mortons liked keepin’ to themselves. They couldn’t spare me for no schoolin’. By the time I was ten, I was doin’ more work than the few hands they hired on. If I ever complained, Pa Morton was ready with the belt.”

  “He beat you?” She swallowed. “What about your foster mother?”

  “She tried to stop it sometimes, but she didn’t care enough to make it stick.” He shrugged. “For twelve years,” he said, “I took it. Didn’t reckon I had anywhere else to go. Then somethin’ happened. I finally stood up to Morton, and he took out his shotgun. That’s when I left.”

  Arms wrapped around her ribs, Rachel rocked just as if she was holding Gordie and needed to soothe him. “You were only a boy!”

  “I should’ve left a lot sooner.”

  “Where did you go?”

  He shrugged. “Wherever I could find a way to keep myself alive.”

  Tears squeezed out of her eyes. “Yes,” she whispered, as if she really did know just what he’d had to do to stay alive. He barely kept himself from jumping up and taking her in his arms and telling her not to cry over him. Not him.

  “It’s over,” he said roughly. “Over and done.”

  She wiped at her eyes and shook her head. “Is it?”

  How many times did he have to remind himself that she never let go of a notion once she had her teeth in it? “I stopped runnin’ when I came to Dog Creek,” he said, knowing how soon he would be proving himself a liar.

  The big blue heron that had flown away when they arrived appeared among the willows across the creek and waded into the water, stately as a judge. Rachel watched its head dart down to catch a little fish in its long beak.

  “What finally made you stand up to Morton?” she asked.

  The question wasn’t unexpected. “Pa Morton beat me one time too many,” he said.

  The way she looked at him gave him the feeling she didn’t believe him. If it hadn’t been for what had happened with Jed, he might have told her, taken the chance one more time. But he could still see Jed’s face. No outright shock or horror or disgust, just a mask he would wear as long as he had to, until he could get rid of the creature he’d treated as a son.

  Oh, Rachel had found the wolf beautiful. She’d believed it had helped Joey. She didn’t want anyone to hurt it, and she said she wasn’t afraid. But if she knew the truth, she would be afraid. And worse.

  But maybe there was part of it she could understand.

  “A week before it happened,” he said slowly, “I saw a wolf runnin’ in the woods near our farm. He was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen, and he was free. He could go where he wanted, and no one could tell him different.” Heath removed his hat and rested his head back against the tree trunk, feeling the story unravel a knot beneath his ribs. “The wolf kept comin’ to the same place, got really close to me sometimes, and I got to thinkin’ of him as a kind of friend. One day I went to meet him and Pa Morton followed me. He shot the wolf right in front of me.”

  Rachel bounced right up from the blanket, fingers curled into fists like a boy in his first saloon brawl.

  “Why?” she demanded. “Was the wolf threatening your livestock? Had it hurt someone?”

  “He didn’t do nothin’. Morton just wanted to punish me.”

  Rachel took a short few steps one way, turned and marched back again. “He was your friend!”

  “As much as any wild thing can be a friend.”

  She lifted her chin and stood with legs apart and arms akimbo as if daring him to laugh. “If I had been there, I would…I would have shot the man instead of the wolf!”

  His heart ricocheted around inside his ribs like a bullet in a tin can. Here was the she-cat in all her glory, the tigress Rachel didn’t want to acknowledge. He didn’t have any doubt that she could shoot someone if she had reason. Even if it was for him.

  “Much obliged,” he said, trying not to let her see how much she’d affected him. “Only I reckon it wouldn’t be Morton you’d have shot if you’d had a gun before you came to Dog Creek.”

  She blinked, flushed and strode to the bank, wrapping her arms tight around her chest. “If I had had a gun…” Her head dropped as if she couldn’t hold it up anymore. “The man I thought I loved…there was a baby. He refused to have anything more to do with me when I told him we were going to have a child.”

  Heath stared at her rigid back. “You wasn’t married?”

  “No. We were not married.”

  The knot that had started to come apart snapped back together again. No one should be compelled to pay for a single mistake for the rest of their lives.

  Now he knew what that mistake had been. He’d started out looking for it so he could prove to himself that maybe she wasn’t worth his concern, the same reason he’d challenged her about loving Jed. But all he could think now was what being unmarried and pregnant would have meant in her world—a world where folks measured other folk by rules tha
t kept everyone, man or woman, in his or her place. She didn’t have to tell him one more thing for him to know that she’d been cast out from her own kind, shamed and judged and condemned.

  He didn’t have a right to judge, not when he’d lain with a woman and gotten her with the child that…

  The child.

  A strange weakness washed through Heath’s limbs, and a strident humming filled his ears. He stood, bracing himself on the tree trunk. “Where’s the kid now?” he asked.

  She tilted her face toward the sky, grief and longing and despair in every line of her slender body. “He died at birth. That is why I can no longer have children.”

  Shame came over Heath so hard that he almost couldn’t catch his breath. She hadn’t given the baby away or abandoned him. She’d wanted him, just the way she wanted Gordie.

  But her man hadn’t. He’d turned his back on Rachel when she’d needed him most.

  “Why?” he asked hoarsely. “Why did the son of a bitch leave you?”

  “I was to inherit most of my aunt’s considerable fortune. That was all he wanted, and when she disinherited me because I…”

  He wasn’t even thinking when he went to her and opened his arms. She walked into them, pressing her face into his collar. Heath rested his chin on her hair and shivered with wave after wave of rage and pity.

  “I’d kill him,” he said. “If I knew where he was, I’d—”

  She gave a little hiccup of a laugh. “Shall I fetch your revolver?” Her fingers dug into his shirt. “No. I was very young then, and it was long ago. I survived.”

  Any way she could. Heath felt helpless, wanting to ease the pain she still felt and knowing he never could. All her secrets were clear to him now, from the reason she loved Gordie so much to why she was so scared of what her body wanted. It had betrayed her before. It was still betraying her.

  “You never told Jed, did you?” he asked, hesitantly stroking her hair.

  She started to pull away. “No,” she said. “I’m not worthy of him. I never was.”

  He took her arms and made her look at him. “Maybe he was—isn’t worthy of you.”