So he did what he had to, placing his hands the way he remembered, feeling Rachel’s hand in its white glove rest on his back. Her waist was small and firm, her gaze steady as he began to move his feet. A few other couples joined them on the polished wooden floor of the Blackwells’ big parlor, and instinct took over. After a minute or two he and Rachel were spinning around the room. Rachel’s whole body transformed into something made of light and air. Her skin was flushed, and her eyes shone like sunlight on still water, and all Heath could think about was the way she’d looked after he’d loved her by the creek.
He was amazed to find himself thinking the dance had finished too soon. Rachel pulled free before he thought to let her go. She gave him a long look, a warning and a plea, and walked with Amy and Eunice O’Hara to the table stocked with vittles brought by the guests.
Sean came up behind him.
“Did you find that amusing, Renshaw?” he asked in a low voice.
Heath turned slowly to face him. “I ain’t laughin’.”
Sean looked across the room at Rachel, who was listening with a smile to Mrs. O’Hara babbling about her new stove. Rachel glanced briefly at Heath and Sean, her brows drawing down in worry.
“You certainly appeared to enjoy your dance with Mrs. McCarrick,” Sean said. “Can it be that you two have become friends? More than friends, perhaps?”
Hellfire. Heath saw that he’d been a fool, so intent on his need to get Sean that he’d assumed McCarrick wanted to make friends with Rachel and manipulate her with the Blackwells’ help. It wasn’t that at all. He wanted to ruin her.
“You watch your mouth,” Heath growled.
“Would you prefer to discuss the subject here? I’m sure several of our guests might find the conversation quite fascinating.”
Heath’s muscles tensed with the need to Change and finish what he’d begun.
“Perhaps we should retire to the veranda?”
Another dance had started, and Rachel was accepting Rufus Mayhew’s hand. Without answering, Heath strode out of the parlor and along the hall to the kitchen. One of the Blackwells’ servants, a cook in cap and apron, glanced up from her pots in astonishment as he pushed through the door to the section of the porch that extended to the back of the house. Unlike the rest of the porch, which was lit by hanging paper lanterns, this area was dark except for the light of the moon.
Sean strolled out after him, whistling softly. He looked Heath up and down, leaned against the railing and smiled.
“Well, Renshaw. It seems you’ve been keeping more than your share of secrets.”
Bide your time, Heath told himself. “You got somethin’ to say, say it.”
The railing creaked as Sean adjusted his position. “Tell me…how long have you and Rachel Lyndon been lovers?”
Sean never had a chance. Heath laid him low before he finished the last word. “You filthy son of a bitch,” he snarled.
Blood dripped from Sean’s nose onto the porch. He shook his head, got up on one elbow and kept on smiling. “I see I was right.”
Heath dragged Sean to his feet by the lapels of his pretty frock coat. “Where did you hear these lies?”
“It couldn’t be more obvious, Renshaw. The way you look at each other, watch each other constantly…there are dozens of clues.”
Heath shook Sean so hard that the man’s teeth rattled. “If you’ve said this to anyone else—”
“I haven’t. Not yet.” Sean shook his head in mock regret. “Which do you think would cause a greater scandal, your diddling Jed’s wife—or the fact that she’s not Jed’s wife at all?”
It wasn’t any real shock to find out Sean knew, considering what Heath had already guessed. But why had Sean waited to bring it up now?
Because he wanted a fight. Heath had thought that Sean meant to do whatever he’d planned during the hunt, but maybe he had something else in mind, after all.
Heath let Sean go with a push. “You think you’ll ever get the chance to tell anyone, McCarrick?”
“What do you propose to do, Renshaw? Kill me here?”
A howling storm raged inside Heath’s head, a blackness that was nothing human. “You want a fair fight? I’ll give it to you.”
Sean pulled a clean white handkerchief from inside his coat and patted at his nose. “A pity Jed won’t have a chance to witness such a novelty.” He sighed. “Perhaps it’s best that he’ll never know how his fiancée betrayed him.”
The storm shredded Heath’s insides like paper. It wasn’t just what Sean had said, but the way he’d said it, grinning at Heath because he wanted him to know. He wanted Heath to react so he could say Heath knew Jed was dead. Just like he did.
He’d murdered Jed. Heath was certain of it now, and he planned to make Sean suffer for that before he died.
Heath backed up, took off his hat and Jed’s second-best coat, and unbuttoned his vest. Sean did the same, the sneer never leaving his face.
No fair fight was possible between a human and a loup-garou, but Heath managed to hold back just enough. Sean feinted a few times and connected once when Heath let him, but he mostly kept his distance, dancing around like a possum on a tin roof in summer. When Heath let Sean slip under his guard, Sean didn’t even try to hit him. Instead, he reached for Heath’s neck, caught hold of the tails of Heath’s neckerchief and yanked down hard.
Warm air hit Heath’s scar like scalding water. He fell back and jerked the neckerchief back into place. Sean took the chance to hit him in the mouth. Heath’s fist smashed into Sean’s face a second later. He jumped on top of Sean and drew his arm back again.
Someone screamed.
Heath let his hand fall and sprang to his feet. Amy was standing in the kitchen doorway, her hands pressed to her mouth. Crowded among the other women, Rachel hovered behind her, such a look of horror in her eyes that Heath almost felt ashamed.
George Saunderson moved past the women and helped Sean to his feet. “What the hell’s goin’ on here?” he demanded.
Sean held the handkerchief over his split and swelling lip. “A friendly disagreement,” he said. “It was meant to be a private affair.”
Amy hurried to him and began dabbing at a cut on his cheek with her own lacy handkerchief. “This is intolerable!” she cried. She turned to glare at Heath as she worked. “My father will have you thrown out!”
Rachel slipped past the crows clustered at the doorway. “I do not believe that Mr. Renshaw provoked the fight,” she said.
Lips tight, Amy stepped away from Sean and stared at Rachel. “You didn’t see it any more than I did,” she said.
“Mr. Renshaw,” Rachel said, “did you start the fight?”
He met her gaze. “Depends on what you mean by ‘start.’”
Saunderson looked from Heath to Sean and back to Heath again. “You should know better than to tussle around the womenfolk.”
“I apologize,” Sean said with a stiff bow. “I did not intend for the matter to get so out of hand.”
Heath couldn’t believe that Sean would take the blame so easily. “Reckon it was wrong,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”
No one knew just what a lie that was. Heath nodded shortly and picked up his vest. Amy was still glaring at him as she chivied Sean into the house. The other women followed, whispering loudly and shaking their heads.
Rachel stayed behind. “If you intended to let everyone know that you hope to kill Sean,” she said, “you could not have gone about it more skillfully.”
“I had my reasons.” He touched the already healing cut on his chin and sniffed the air. No one was near, not even the cook, who’d probably been the one to tell everyone about the fight. “You should have stayed away.”
She drew a handkerchief from somewhere in her dress and held it out to him. “Nothing has changed, Holden,” she said.
“Plenty has changed.” He ignored the handkerchief and stared down at her as if she was still a stranger. He knew what he was about to say would hurt her, but
if there was any chance of getting her to leave, he had to take it.
“Do you know what he said, Rachel?” he asked. “He knows you ain’t married. And he’s guessed that you and me…”
He didn’t have to finish. Rachel’s face lost its color. “How?” she whispered. “How is that possible?”
“I don’t know. But you don’t want to be out here with me right now.”
Her jaw set. “I am here holding a simple conversation with my husband’s foreman. No one—”
“Sean will tell everyone what he’s guessed if it suits his purpose. Do you want to be anywhere around here when that happens?”
Her eyes were nearly black in the darkness, wide and scared. But her gaze never wavered. “Are you so certain he will be believed?”
“He can make anyone believe anything he wants.”
“I am not so certain. I have spoken with Amy. She was far from pleased that Sean let himself be drawn into a fight. I’m no longer convinced that she intends to manipulate me on Sean’s behalf.”
Heath laughed. “You’re makin’ a mistake if you think that. She wants Sean as much as he wants her.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m not afraid of either one of them.”
Oh, she was afraid, all right, but she was ready to face the humiliation and disgrace of exposure if it meant she could stop Heath from going after Sean. He grabbed her shoulders, afraid that if he let himself soften even a little, he would take her in his arms and tell her everything would be all right.
“If Sean says anything before the hunt,” he said, “I’m goin’ to have to kill him here.”
She didn’t even try to get away. “The hunt,” she said. “That’s when it will happen, isn’t it?”
He let her go. He wasn’t going to tell her that had been his idea all along.
A warm evening wind picked a few dark strands free from Rachel’s tightly bound hair and caught at her skirts, pressing them against her legs. “Sean planned the hunt, too,” she said. She flung her arm toward the darkness beyond the house. “It is a trap. Anything can happen out there, can’t it?”
Heath remembered Sean’s mocking grin. He’d wanted Heath to believe he’d murdered his uncle. He knew Heath would never accuse him openly. It was still just between them. But Heath saw now that Rachel had to know everything about Sean, because the weak, soft part of him still wanted her to understand.
“Sit down,” he said.
“You haven’t answered my—”
He took her by the arm and marched her to the rocking chair by the kitchen door, pushing her down onto the seat. “Jed’s dead, Rachel,” he said.
It was hard telling her the rest, hard to look at her face…the shock and horror at first, then the despair that came over her when she was clearheaded enough to realize how badly Heath had betrayed her. Her breath was ragged, her face etched with grief and anguish.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” she said in a voice hoarse with unshed tears. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
It wasn’t a long story. Heath had made it a point not to remember all the details of his life since he’d left the Mortons, and he’d already told her part of it. Just not enough.
So he told her about the weeks of near starvation after he’d run from the Mortons, the desperation, the petty theft just to keep himself alive. The hard fights he so seldom lost. The petty crimes that got bigger as he learned from the most skilled and hardened outlaws west of the Mississippi. Years of rustling horses and cattle, and never being caught. The first bank robbery. The first train. The first time he’d killed a man who’d planned to kill him first. The killing he hadn’t done but had been blamed for, setting him on the run again. The new life Jed had offered him. Everything but the betrayals, his real name and the wanted poster with the scar.
And what he could become.
“I thought it was an accident,” Heath said, talking to the wall over her head. “I didn’t see no sign that anyone else had been there, and I knew how it could look to them what already blamed me for the foreman’s murder. So I kept Jed hid.”
Rachel wrapped her arms around her chest, no expression on her face at all. “But it wasn’t an accident,” she said.
“When you told me about being bribed, I started to think Sean could have done it. Now I know he did. He knew you was comin’. He murdered Jed because he found out Jed was goin’ to take away his inheritance.”
“Then…it was because of me that Jedediah—”
Heath dropped to his knees. “It wasn’t you. Jed would have cut him out even if he wasn’t plannin’ to marry you. Sean would have gone crazy when he found out, but maybe…”
Maybe I would have been there to stop him.
“He knows where the body is,” Rachel whispered.
“I ’spect he’s been back there since he done it, lookin’ for anything of value Jed was carryin’.” And Heath wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d gone out there again right before the party. In fact, he expected it.
“You see how it is,” he said, touching Rachel’s cheek with the tip of one finger. “No one’ll believe Sean done it. There ain’t no proof. I’m the only one who can make it right.”
“But you won’t.” She reached to pull his hand against her face. “You said you tried to leave your old life behind. You can’t go back to it now. It will destroy you.”
He got up, even though he wanted to keep on touching her for the rest of his life. “That doesn’t matter now,” he said gently. “I got somethin’ for you. It’ll give you a chance to start over.”
Suddenly she jumped up from the chair and closed the space between them in two steps, her chest rising and falling fast, and her eyes sparking with familiar fire.
“You can start over, too, Holden,” she said. “We can do it together. You and I and Gordie. I’ll tell them I never married Jed. We’ll find some way to prove that Sean killed him, and then—”
A door opened for Heath then, gleaming heavenly gates that offered him a glimpse of paradise. He took Rachel’s face between his hands and lowered his head.
Then the door closed, and the Pearly Gates snapped shut. Heath let his hands fall.
“It can’t be done,” he said. “Even if we could find the proof, they’d start wonderin’ why you knew Jed was dead and didn’t tell anyone. Even if you told ’em now, Sean would make somethin’ ugly out of it. Maybe he’d even think of a way to blame you for it.” She started to speak, and he covered her lips with his fingers. “I’m sorry, Rachel.”
Her throat worked up and down, but she didn’t do anything except step back again and walk to the porch railing, where the wind teased her hair like a lover.
“You said you had something to give me,” she said.
“Meet me at the stable three hours past midnight. Make sure no one sees you.”
She stood by the railing a little while longer and then went into the kitchen, passing him by without a word or a glance.
He didn’t return to the party, which had gone so quiet that even he could barely hear the voices from the parlor. When Rachel joined the others, they sounded friendly enough. No shunning yet, no cruel gossip about a married woman and her foreman.
But that was cold comfort. Nothing Heath had said to her, from revealing Jed’s death to telling her exactly what he was and what he’d done, had made her turn away from him. She would keep coming back, keep trying to interfere, keep hoping he would change.
Only one thing would make her realize the truth and answer the question that had festered in his heart since he’d started caring for Rachel Lyndon.
The alcohol in Heath’s empty stomach seethed like a pit of vipers. He went out to the stable, saddled Apache and turned him toward the range.
Twenty minutes’ ride out, when he was just about far enough away from the house to Change, he caught a scent that had him off Apache’s back in a heartbeat.
The man who came out of the darkness on his rawboned dun looked like any other cowhand drifting between jobs, we
ary and wind-beaten and a little ragged. But Heath knew he wasn’t any regular cowhand. Apache jigged, flattening his ears, and Heath set his hand on the gelding’s shoulder.
“Who are you?” he growled.
Swinging his leg over the saddle, the man slid to the ground. “My name is Gavin Renier,” he said in a voice smooth and low and educated, like Rachel’s. He peered into Heath’s eyes, and his nostrils flared. “I’ve been looking for you for a long time.”
Heath’s hand went to his hip, but he didn’t have his gun, hadn’t touched it since Rachel had put it away. He knew he could get out of his clothes fast if he had to, but that wouldn’t do him much good when this man who called himself Renier could do the same.
“I don’t carry a gun,” Gavin said. “And I wouldn’t shoot you if I did.” He pushed his black forelock out of his face and let his hands fall to his sides. “Unless I’m much mistaken, you’re my brother.”
After all the shocks he’d given Rachel, Heath couldn’t say he wasn’t due for at least one of his own. He wanted to deny it, wanted to Change and drive this loup-garou away from his territory like any self-respecting wolf would do.
But he couldn’t deny what he saw: the black hair, the lean face, the eyes that looked so much like his own. He could smell it even better than he could see it, the unique signature that could only belong to another of the same blood.
“I ain’t got a brother,” Heath snarled.
“You do if your name is Heath Renier.”
“Like hell!”
They moved with equal speed, shedding clothes with such ferocity that cotton shredded and wool tore at the seams. Heath finished first by a split second and leaped for Gavin’s throat.
He couldn’t get a grip. Gavin, as black as he and almost as big, ducked under his attack and bounded aside, swift and sinuous as a ferret. He snapped at Heath from behind, a feint that wasn’t meant to wound but to warn.
Spinning around, Heath crouched for another leap, his wolfish mind torn between bitter rage and despair. Gavin held his ground, swiveled his ears and cocked his head in a gesture as eloquent as any human speech. Do you really want to fight?
Bride of the Wolf Page 25
