“Because you couldn’t sleep with me.”
“Damn!”
“It’s true.”
“It isn’t true.” His hands moved to cover hers. His skin felt hot; the bar beneath her palms was cold.
Hot. Cold. Like she felt all over. Two days earlier they argued over a situation that had become untenable. He wanted her. She wanted him. She didn’t see any harm in it.
He did.
“It’s Hunter, isn’t it?” she inquired acidly. “My brother made you promise not to sleep with me.”
“He’s right, Jace. There’s no future for us. Come summer, I might not even be around. I don’t stick. Never have. Never will.”
“That has nothing to do with it,” she argued. “This is now. We’re here. And we want each other.” She kissed him then, nipping at his lips, stroking the sensitive skin beneath his jaw with her tongue, nibbling his ear, all to demonstrate how much she wanted him, to break down his resistance.
He got the message; she knew that. He quivered all over with the effort it took to resist.
“I haven’t done many things right in my life,” he vowed huskily. “This, I’m going to do right. I’ve never had a friend like Hunter. I’m doing it for him. And for you.”
She kissed him again, certain she could wear him down. They held each other until at length, in desperation, he thrust her aside.
“I’m no good at this, Jace. I’d better go cool off somewhere else. For a while, maybe we shouldn’t see each other alone.”
That made her furious. She wasn’t hurt, she insisted, but angry. Angry at Hunter for interfering in her life. Angry at Trevor for suddenly turning noble.
And angry with herself for feeling rejected; even more angry for caring. There were plenty of other men in the territory. She had long suspected her fascination with Trevor lay in the fact that as a hired hand, he was forbidden. Especially to the daughter of the next governor of Arizona Territory, which Drummond intended to become.
But in the jail that day, she knew that neither her father’s political aspirations nor her own social standing had anything to do with her feelings for Trevor Fallon.
She loved him.
He denied any involvement in the murder, of course. And any involvement with Ana Bowdrie.
“I never slept with her, Jace. I never even thought about it. And I didn’t kill her.”
Throughout the trial he stuck to that story, although Jacy had trouble believing him. Not that she saw him as a killer; she didn’t. But Hunter wasn’t a killer, either. And one of them killed Ana Bowdrie. The next time she tried to visit Trevor in jail, he refused to see her.
“He doesn’t want to make it harder for you,” his attorney explained.
“Harder for me?” Jacy was furious. “What about Hunter? What about the best friend he ever had? Isn’t he going to confess to save his friend?”
“Confess? Are you asking my client to lie?”
“I’m asking him to tell the truth.”
“The truth, Miss Kimble, is that Trevor Fallon did not murder Miss Ana Bowdrie, regardless how the letters make it look.”
The letters, it turned out, numbered not one, but four. All written by Ana’s hand, most of them more specific and as a consequence more condemning than the one brief note Trevor acknowledged receiving. They were found together, all four of them, in the little rock cabin back in the hills of the Kimble ranch, the cabin where Trevor lived alone.
The one letter Trevor acknowledged receiving—My house. 1:30 today.—didn’t do much damage. Or it wouldn’t have, if Trevor and Hunter hadn’t been caught holding the dead body. The others, however, all addressed Personal to Mister Trevor Fallon, convinced the jury—and Jacy—of Trevor’s guilt. Lilac is your favorite scent? I’ve bought tons of lilac. See you under the covers, big boy.
And…Stupid Drummond. I told him the laundress delivered your shirt by mistake, and he believed me. Your dirty shirt! Naughty, boy!
Each letter was signed with a capital A embellished with curlicues and flowers that perfectly matched other letters and signatures proved to have been written by the deceased.
“Hard to forge,” the prosecutor charged.
Impossible to forge, the jury decided.
Jacy hadn’t thought about that trial in years, hadn’t allowed herself to think about it. But on the way to town, she couldn’t help herself, and by the time she arrived at San Jacinto Plaza, she was frustrated to the point of tears.
Trevor’s return had shattered her hard-earned control, loosing a flood of emotions and memories she had struggled so long to suppress. The deluge of anguish swept her like a tidal wave when she saw her father passed out on a bench.
Located in the center of El Paso’s business district, San Jacinto Plaza was home to a couple of the city’s more notable citizens—two live alligators, who inhabited a pond in the center of the tree-shaded public square. Drummond explained his absences to the children by claiming the unlikely duty of putting the alligators to bed.
Seeing him sprawled on the park bench, his full head of white hair glistening in the afternoon sun as brightly as snow high in the Superstitions, futility flooded her. Where was the loving father she had known and depended on? At his domineering worst, he was far better than the decrepit old man who was drunk more often than sober.
With his mass of white hair and chin beard he would have resembled a kindly Father Christmas, had it not been for bloodshot eyes and body gone flaccid from misuse and abuse. His mind even weaker than his body, the Drummond Kimble of today bore little or no resemblance to the man who had wielded such power five years earlier.
Indeed, until today Jacy had experienced little trouble separating the two men in her mind. Until today when Trevor returned and with him a flood tide of memories—the cause of Drummond’s white hair, flaccid body, loss of home and power and mind.
Before entering the plaza, she glanced around nervously, aware that Trevor might have followed her. She had been careful leaving the house, though, and had seen no sign of him on the road. Scrutinizing the few strollers in the plaza, she peered beneath the awnings of buildings that flanked the plaza across four side streets. No sign of Trevor. She breathed a sigh of relief.
Coming into the plaza she skirted the strollers, ignoring them with practiced indifference, and passed a young man playing a doleful tune on a guitar. At first she thought Drummond was asleep, but when she called to him, he stirred, then slipped his black Homburg down over his eyes, ignoring her as she did the strollers.
It was a game he played. One she abhorred. It was embarrassing enough to have to come after him, to find him passed out in a drunken stupor in the middle of town.
“Papa?” Suppressing her embarrassment, she knelt beside him. The stench that arose from his alcohol-sodden clothing and sour breath staggered her. His striped woolen trousers were a mess. His shirt collar was missing and the collarband unbuttoned; his frayed frock coat was buttoned but in the wrong holes; the silk-faced lapels sported a new stain.
All in all, he looked like he might have been rolled in an alley, but she couldn’t fathom the reason. He had no money—his drinks were furnished by others. Nor valuables. His gold stickpin had vanished years ago. The only thing he carried of the slightest worth was the walking stick with its silver stag’s head handle which she saw beneath the bench. She shook him gently.
“Papa, it’s time to go home.” When he didn’t respond, she slipped an arm under his shoulders and lifted him to a sitting position. It was a struggle. She fought a wave of resentment. “Come on, Papa,” she encouraged. “Help me.”
But he only slumped forward, clasping his hands together between spraddled legs. “Leave me be, Sis.”
“Papa. It’s getting late. Mari and Tía Bella will have supper ready by the time we get home. Come.” Speaking, she retrieved his walking stick, forced it into one speckled hand, then shouldered him to his feet. But his legs might have been made of rubber. When she tried to walk him down the path, he coll
apsed.
At five feet, eight inches, Jacy was almost as tall as Drummond, but slighter in build. When he fell, he pulled her down on top of him. Instant despair blurred her vision. Despair and embarrassment and a flurry of angry emotions. She thought again how unprepared she was for the role of guardian, the role of parent. She hadn’t grown up herself before this burden was thrust upon her. And who was to blame?
Trevor Fallon. Damn his hide. Footsteps and voices reached her. Tensing, she glanced up and was relieved to see strangers. Not Trevor. But Trevor would find them. She had no doubt of that. She had to get Papa home before…When the couple came nearer she called to them.
“Help me, please.”
The man and woman, finely dressed, approached. Distaste tightened the woman’s expression. “Drunks!” With a sneer, she turned away in disgust. “Can’t the mayor do something to keep drunks and vagabonds from littering the plaza?”
“Ignore them,” her partner advised coolly. “Come this way. We’ll view the alligators from the other side.”
Jacy watched the couple skirt the path where she struggled with Drummond. The woman, no older than herself, glanced back once and sneered again from beneath the veil of her stylish black hat.
The rebuff was only the latest of many and did little damage, other than to galvanize Jacy’s efforts to get Drummond away from the plaza. Tugging him to his feet again, she cut across the grass, determined to get him safely home before Trevor showed up. How she would protect him—indeed, all of them—from Trevor later, she didn’t know. She hadn’t allowed herself to think that far ahead.
In the beginning, aspersions cast by strangers devastated Jacy. Now, five years later, they were so commonplace as to be bearable. She added this man and woman—she refused to think of them as ladies and gentlemen—to what she called her list of indignitaries, people who would find themselves shunned when the Kimbles came back into their own.
In the meantime, she considered the situation character-building. Not that she needed another lesson. At the rate they were going, the Kimbles would be the most character-rich family in America.
They reached the far end of the plaza and crossed St. Louis Street before Drummond’s knees buckled again. Jacy stooped to lift him, but he was dead weight. Her back ached. The patience she somehow always managed to reserve for him was running out. She struggled to control her resentment.
“Papa, you’ve got to help me. Use your walking stick.” She had never been unable to get him home, but there could always be a first time. Today might be it, if she didn’t get some help.
Suddenly, as if in answer to her prayer, Todd raced around the corner from the old plaza, then cut diagonally across the intersection.
“Todd!” she called. Before he turned to face her, he took a couple of steps, cleared the old message post, and Jacy froze.
She watched Trevor push away from the post and step toward them. While her heart thrashed so loudly it sounded like horses’ hooves on the cobblestone street, he stopped in midstride. His attention riveted on her and Drummond. She felt weak, much too weak to deal with another problem.
But she must. Now she had Todd to worry about. With panic gnawing its way up her throat, she barely kept from screaming at him. She held her breath, watching helplessly, as Trevor turned and stared at the boy.
Like when he saw little Carter, she knew the instant he recognized Todd. This time he was within arm’s reach of the boy. And she wasn’t there to intervene.
Panic turned her to stone. Was she incapable of helping anyone in her life? Only able to watch their certain destruction? Todd, please don’t see him, she prayed.
Trevor glanced back to Jacy. Their gazes held. Communication sped between them. The only weapon she possessed was her will, and she used it, willing Trevor to disappear, to vanish, to leave them alone.
Couldn’t he tell she had enough problems without his interference?
The second time the old man stumbled, Trevor moved toward them. He still had trouble identifying the white-haired old drunk as Drummond Kimble, the meanest man in Arizona Territory.
“Mean as sin,” Hunter once said. Coming from a son that was high scorn. Hunter and Drummond never got along. They were too different. Hunter resembled his mother, or so he claimed to have been told. His mother had died in childbirth.
As if it were her last defiant act, Margaret Kimble bore, not a son in her husband’s image, but a daughter.
Jacy was the spitting image of her father. Not mean—Trevor figured meanness in a woman that pretty would have been a sacrilege even the Lord would not commit. But Jacy possessed most of Drummond’s other distinguishing characteristics. Heading the list with hardheadedness.
She was hardheaded way past being stubborn. There had been times he was certain she wouldn’t have admitted she was wrong if the devil stood ready to pitch her into hell. And her tolerance for danger ranked right up there with the toughest of men.
His own included, Trevor admitted early on. Which was one of the things at the root of their intense mutual attraction, he figured. It had been uphill from the beginning—Jacy defying her father; Trevor defying the odds.
“Drummond Kimble’ll tack my hide to the barn door and use it for target practice if he finds out about this,” Trevor recalled telling her the first time they kissed.
It hadn’t been just a kiss. Nothing with Jacy was just anything. Everything was a production. That kiss rocked him to his toes—innocence and vulnerability combined with one hundred percent pure impudence and a pinch of haughty insolence thrown in for good measure.
“What’s the matter, Trevor? Afraid?”
“Of Drummond? No way.” Of himself, that was a different matter. Jacy might think her superior social standing protected her from rogues like him, but Trevor knew otherwise.
For himself, Trevor had no qualms. He would be neither tempted nor tricked into the bondage of marriage. Hell, he wasn’t cut out for it. He was a drifter like his old man.
Trevor learned early and well that the drifter’s life was no life for a woman. His mother, rest her soul, had followed his pa clear across the country and halfway back before she died an untimely death, burying babes at just about every stop.
“Hitch your wagon to a star, not a stump,” Trevor’s old man advised. Trevor had no intention of doing either. For his main goal in life was to be different from his father. To act different, live different, be different.
So far the only way he differed from Jack Fallon was that he hadn’t hitched his wagon to anything. And he didn’t intend to, whether star or stump.
Five years ago, though, a dalliance with Jacy seemed harmless. Especially since she had no more designs on him than he had on her. From the beginning, they met in the middle and never looked to either shore.
Their physical attraction, powerful as it was, was just that. Trevor wanted her body. He wanted to take off her clothes and tame the wildness out of her. He wanted to hear that seductive laugh of defiance turn to soft moans of acquiescence.
Power. That’s what he wanted. Power over this creature who was simply the most beautiful and tempting person he had ever known. It wasn’t only her sun-browned complexion, blond hair, blue eyes. It wasn’t only her voluptuous body that swelled and dipped from her clothes like Venus begging to be disrobed. It wasn’t only the physical Jacy he wanted to conquer.
He craved to master the inner Jacy. The woman who laughed at life; the woman who flouted convention. The woman who was stronger than he had ever imagined a woman could be.
Yes, Jacy Kimble was a shining star. Enticing, tempting, forbidden. And oh how she did tempt. He never thought of her as promiscuous. It was his own arrogance, he supposed, but he was pretty sure she didn’t flirt with anyone else the way she flirted and teased him. From the beginning he and Jacy were honest with each other.
He knew when Drummond forbade her to see him; she told him so. He knew when Drummond tried to persuade Hunter to fire him. Jacy told him that, too. And he had been on t
he verge of deciding to leave, when Ana Bowdrie was murdered.
Then there was the Jacy that Trevor dreamed about in prison. His wild memories and fantasies in prison were of a different Jacy—a woman he had glimpsed in real life only once, the time she came to him in jail—the woman who loved him. Not that she said it, or ever would.
But he saw it in her eyes, heard it in her voice when she accused him of sleeping with her father’s mistress. It wasn’t anger she felt that day; he had seen Jacy angry. That day she was hurt. He saw it and felt it—a deep, soul-wrenching hurt.
The idea that he might have slept with her father’s mistress hurt Jacy more at that moment than the fact that he might have murdered the woman.
Thereafter, he refused to see her. At the time, and for five long years since, he fooled himself that it was for her own good. This morning proved differently.
With all doors closed to him in Arizona, he had still been unable and unwilling to leave Hunter to his own fate and run for Mexico. So he came here to seek the Kimbles’ help. Not knowing whom to trust, where to turn, freedom had seemed more curse than blessing until he arrived in El Paso and stood in the doorway to the hovel where the Kimbles had been reduced to living. He looked into Jacy’s angry but still proud eyes. Then and there he knew that, regardless what the future held, one sight of her had been worth the risk.
Not that she still loved him. Hate had a way of killing love in short fashion. No matter how she felt about him, however, one look in those crystal clear eyes warned Trevor that his feelings for her were just coming into blossom. If she had anything to do with it, of course, his feelings would wither on the vine.
Finding her in a faded gown, living in a hovel should have validated his earlier assessment of her. But all it did was leave him guilt-ridden and hungry.
The best thing he could do for Jacy was leave her alone. But first, he had to save her brother.
His friend. The best damned friend he would ever have. After Hunter was safe, Trevor would do exactly what Jacy wanted him to do—get the hell out of her life.
From the distance, he had watched her get the children off to school. With more difficulty than he would have guessed, he resisted approaching them. He hadn’t realized how much he missed those kids. But they had been hurt enough already. Carter didn’t know him; Sophie would and she would ask about her father.
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