New Beginnings Spring 20 Book Box Set

by Hope Sinclair

  And so she departed from the hotel early that morning, retracing the steps she had left on the dusty road the night before, following them all the way back to Mr. Larson’s tidy little house on the outskirts of town.

  She knocked once, then twice, and then raised her knuckles to strike the door a third time when suddenly a voice came from behind her, spooking her so badly that she nearly jumped.

  “If you’re looking for Ahanu, you won’t find him here,” the male’s husky voice said, and Jane spun around to see a rugged cowboy sitting atop a copper colored stallion.

  “I’m looking for Mr. Wyatt Larson, actually,” Jane said, forcing a dignified smile.

  The man clicked his tongue, beckoning the horse to teeter closer to Jane, and as he did, he afforded himself a long glance at Jane that made her most uncomfortable. As the man approached, his face emerged from the shadows and she realized that he looked familiar. There was something that struck her about his face… something that she couldn’t quite place.

  “Same difference,” the cowboy shrugged. “Ahanu is what the redskins call him.”

  “The— I beg your pardon?” Jane was confused.

  “The redskins,” the cowboy repeated, stretching out the word in a way that made Jane’s skin crawl.

  She felt two sudden realizations. First, the man on horseback was so immediately unsettling that she found herself almost feeling a rush of fondness for Mr. Larrabee and the other strange men who haunted Bosko’s. They were gentlemen compared to this cowboy.

  And second, she realized that she was entirely alone with this man. That if what he said was true, and Mr. Larson wasn’t around… Well, that meant that she was entirely vulnerable in that instant. And vulnerability was a sensation that she hated.

  “What’s a pretty little thing like you doing looking for that no good derelict, anyhow?” the cowboy inquired, grinning menacingly.

  “That’s none of your concern,” Jane said curtly.

  The man was close enough that Jane could see him raise his eyebrows at her response, close enough to smell the booze on his breath as he chuckled.

  “I never did care for a woman with bite,” he remarked.

  Jane wasn’t sure what would happen next, but luckily she didn’t have to find out. There was the patter of hooves in the distance, and they both turned toward the road to see a horse approaching.

  Jane let out a sigh of relief when she saw who was in the saddle: Wyatt Larson himself!

  The cowboy on horseback beside her cursed under his breath as Wyatt rode into view, and he started to steer his own stallion away, but Wyatt was too quick.

  “What do you want, Harold?” Wyatt demanded.

  “Nothing at all,” Harold said, feigning casual friendliness that made Jane’s blood boil.

  He certainly hadn’t had much nice to say about Wyatt—or Ahanu—moments earlier. Why did he bother pretending to be friendly now?

  “I was just entertaining this lovely guest of yours,” Harold said, and though his voice was chipper, he cast a dark glare of disgust in Jane’s direction as he spoke.

  “Stay away from her!” Wyatt barked, and Jane was shocked by the pure rage pumping through his voice. This was nothing like the Wyatt she had met before, this side of him seemed angry, volatile, almost frightening.

  “Easy, brother,” Harold put up his hands. “I was just telling this nice lady that if she was looking for you, she’d do best to find you in town at the general store.”

  “Leave,” Wyatt barked at Harold.

  Harold continued to hold his hands up, but he flashed a cocky, crooked grin as he led the horse back toward the road.

  “Careful, brother,” he quipped. “You’ve got a feisty one on your hands.” He nodded back toward Jane, and she didn’t bother to restrain the grimace forming on her face as she watched him ride off.

  Once Harold had made his way down the road and disappeared in the distance, Wyatt turned to Jane.

  “Did he hurt you?” he asked, and Jane was struck by the protectiveness in his voice.

  “No,” she said quickly, swallowing and regaining her composure. “Who was that, anyway?”

  “My brother.” Wyatt shook his head, then corrected himself, “Half brother.”

  “Oh,” Jane said. “He called you something other than your name. Ahanu, I think it was?”

  Wyatt nodded reluctantly. “Listen,” he said. “I think we should go inside. I owe you an explanation…”

  That’s an understatement, Jane thought bitterly, but she reminded herself of the clarity and open-mindedness that she had woken up with that morning.

  She truly believed that God wanted her to give Wyatt a second chance. Or, at the very least, a chance to truly explain himself. That was why she had gone back to his home that morning in the first place.

  “I’d like to hear what you have to say,” Jane nodded, and she followed Wyatt back into his house for the second time in two days, this time with a clear and open mind.

  SIX

  “I’m not sure where to begin,” Wyatt said, cradling a cup of piping hot tea below his face and blowing gently at the tendrils of steam that rose up, tickling at his chin.

  Jane watched silently from across the table, waiting patiently. She could tell that there was a lot he wanted to get off of his chest, and she had no intention of rushing him. Not now, not once she had made up her mind to be open to whatever truth may await her. “What about your name,” she suggested gently. “Is your real name Ahanu?”

  “I suppose Harold was right about that,” Wyatt nodded. “Well, partially so. I have two names: an English name from my father, and an Indian name from my mother.”

  “I see,” Jane nodded. “Your mother was…”

  “Indian,” Wyatt confirmed. “My father came out west to forge a new life for himself. He was young, but not too young to notice a beautiful Indian woman. White men marrying Indians was frowned upon—still is by most, I reckon—but that didn’t make my father love her any less. It wasn’t easy, though. And I think my father realized too late that it’d be even less easy for any children they brought into the world.”

  Jane blinked and nodded, understanding.

  “I think they were both hopeful that their love would be enough to protect any children they had,” Wyatt continued. “That between their love and their obedience to the Lord, there would be a hedge of protection around their family. Unfortunately, their love was broken when I was born.”

  Jane swallowed heavily.

  “The pregnancy made my mother weak,” Wyatt said. “The tribe members told her that she was cursed… that this was her punishment for marrying a white man, a traitor. She didn’t listen. She told them they were wrong. She believed in love. But as she gradually grew more and more sick, weaker and weaker, she couldn’t deny it any more. She was dying.

  “My mother began bleeding, but it was too soon… My father rushed her to the doctor in town, but they wouldn’t treat an Indian woman. My father’s only option then was to take her to the tribal elders. He did, and by the grace of God they welcomed him with open arms, though it must have pained them to do so. They prepared an herbal remedy and tried to heal my mother, but after a few days, she was only getting worse. It was too late.”

  Jane felt tears sting her eyes, but she blinked them back and kept quiet as she continued to listen, her heart slowly simmering with the warmth of sympathy.

  “The tribal elders said that my mother had one foot in this world, and her other foot in the next—that she was trapped in the middle, and the only reason she was holding on so desperately to life was because of me.

  “After several days of growing worse and worse, my mother gave birth to me,” Wyatt said, his eyes dropping to the floor, almost as if he felt shame for something he couldn’t help, for an injustice that he had no part in.

  “I was born too early, but I survived,” Wyatt said. “My mother… well, the birth took the final shred of strength that she had. As she held me in her arms, she bre
athed the last breath she had. She lost her life, to bring new life into the world. And then… she was gone.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Jane said, blinking away the tears.

  “She and my father had already agreed on the name Wyatt, if I was to be a son,” he said gently, his own face crumpling with unease. “But once I was born, my mother called me Ahanu instead. So I’ve always had both names.”

  “What about Harold?” Jane asked.

  “My father tried his best, but he couldn’t raise a son alone,” Wyatt explained, regaining his composure and straightening his posture in his chair. “He ended up doing the same thing that I did, placing an advertisement in the newspaper. His bride came from the east and they were married at once, but their union was entirely different than my father’s marriage to my mother. There wasn’t love… instead, it was governed by a sense of obligation and responsibility. When Harold was born, it was if he sensed right away that he was different. My father was good to Harold’s mother, but he never truly loved her… and that devastated Harold. He always resented me and my father. Always.”

  Jane nodded. The revelation put Harold’s behavior into a fresh perspective. It explained why he spoke about his half-brother with such a sneer of disgust, and it explained why he had used Wyatt’s Indian name as an insult, rather than a compliment.

  “I think Harold’s resentment comes from jealousy,” Jane suggested gently, feeling sympathetic for both Wyatt and Harold in that instant.

  Wyatt laughed softly. “Ironically,” he said, nodding his head, “I was always jealous of him. As a boy, I would have given anything to be normal, to have fair hair and pale skin and freckles, and to not be looked at like the outsider everywhere I went. And to have a mother… Why, I would have given anything to have my mother.”

  Jane just nodded. She knew she couldn’t begin to understand what Wyatt’s childhood had been like, but she did understand the pain of losing a parent before getting the chance to truly know them. She had felt a similar pain when she lost her father.

  “Unfortunately, I must confess that my jealousy of Harold didn’t end in my youth,” Wyatt admitted. “When I wrote to you in my letters and said that I was a ranch handler…”

  Jane’s brow wrinkled. She remembered, of course, that Wyatt had labeled himself a career cowboy, a man in charge of a sprawling ranch. This detail had escaped her scrutiny when she had first arrived—she was admittedly preoccupied with more pressing discrepancies in Wyatt’s persona—but now that the topic was brought back to the forefront of her mind, she realized all at once that Wyatt couldn’t possibly be a cowboy, for the simple fact that he didn’t live on a ranch. In fact, though clear land was in abundance round his small and humble home, there was certainly no pasture full of livestock.

  “My brother is the ranch handler,” Wyatt confessed, his voice brimming with shame as his cheeks colored red. “Not me.”

  “Why would you lie about that?” Jane wondered aloud. Surely, of all the things that might have warranted judgment, Wyatt’s profession wouldn’t have ranked the highest.

  “It wasn’t entirely a lie,” Wyatt said. “I had managed my own ranch, for years in fact. I’ve never been as good at anything else, as I was at wrangling.”

  “But…?”

  “But then the Apache War called me away,” he said solemnly. “I was young, I was able-bodied… It was my duty, as much as it was the duty of any other young man to join the fight. The problem was… I wasn’t sure which side to join. In my heart, I felt an alliance to both the Indians and the white men. I was torn, I was conflicted. The only thing I knew was that I couldn’t do nothing. I had to act.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “The decision was made easier,” he said darkly. “My father owned a general merchandise store in town. The Indians knew about this, of course… They still resented my father, blamed him for my mother’s death, blamed him for raising me away from the tribe. And when the war broke out, those tensions escalated. One night, the Indians came and set fire to the store.”

  “No!” Jane gasped, her fingers rushing to cover her mouth.

  “Yes,” Wyatt said, nodding. “My father rushed to the store and tried to stop the flames, but he was working alone against the fire. He became trapped and…”

  Wyatt couldn’t continue, but he didn’t need to. Jane understood.

  “To the Indians, my father’s death was retribution: an eye for an eye. To me… it was the motivation I needed to choose a side in the fight. And so I did. I joined the white men. I left the ranch, assuming that I’d return after the war… assuming that everything would be just the way I left it.”

  He swallowed heavily, and then he looked down at his injured leg.

  “I did things that no man should do… I saw things no man should see. But that’s war, it brings out the darkness of every man. And then… then I saw the worst of it, when I was badly injured at the hands of the same Indian man who had tried to save my mother’s life.”

  Jane felt her own cheeks color as she remembered the shock she had experienced the first time she saw Wyatt, the first time she discovered his injury.

  “I’ll spare us both the discomfort of my account of what happened, but suffice it to say… it was horrific.”

  “I’m sure,” Jane winced, her heart swelling with pain at the thought of anyone enduring something so wretched.

  “The injury wasn’t just physical,” Wyatt admitted. “Though my physical impediment was certainly the first thing I noticed. It took me several months to adjust to walking with a cane, but even once I had mastered it… even once the burning pain finally seemed to have subsided… Well, that was really only the beginning. It was then that I realized the true depths of the injury to my mind… to my spirit, my faith, my integrity… to the core of who I was as a man.

  “My role in the war cemented a betrayal in the eyes of my mother’s tribe,” he went on. “To them, I had spit on my heritage. And to the white men… no matter how hard I had fought, and no matter my loss… I still wasn’t one of them. When I came home from war, I was even more of an outsider than I had been before.”

  Jane knew that she couldn’t possibly understand Wyatt’s pain, that she couldn’t possibly fathom the hurt he had been a victim to. But she also did understand injuries that went below the skin’s surface, wounds that shattered from the inside out, that preyed on emotions rather than the flesh, that left no mark to indicate the brutality they had left behind in their wake.

  “I never intended to lie about these things,” Wyatt said. “But after facing so much rejection… Well, I suppose whatever semblance of pride that I had left finally got the better of me. I shouldn’t have been dishonest… I shouldn’t have misrepresented myself. All I wanted was a chance. But I understand now that my actions were the very thing that lost me that chance with you, Miss Brooks, and for that, I sincerely apologize.”

  The tea in his cup had long gone cold, but he took his first sip and savored the flavor. Then he cast his eyes back up to Jane, perhaps for the first time in the entire conversation.

  Jane felt lost at once in his gaze, caught off guard by the depth and warmth of his eyes.

  “I hope that in time you can forgive me, and that I haven’t caused too great a disruption to your life,” he said solemnly, his voice heavy and low. “I’ll make arrangements at once for your return journey to Chicago.”

  Jane took a deep breath, and she was suddenly overwhelmed by disappointment. It wasn’t disappointment over who Wyatt was, or how reality differed from the impression that Wyatt had made in his letters. She was disappointed—hurt, even—by the prospect of returning home without him. She was hurt that Wyatt would give up… that he would send her home, that he would let their courtship flicker out like a flame that has reached the end of a candlestick.

  Wasn’t he going to fight for me? Wasn’t he going to ask for a second chance?

  But as Jane watched Wyatt’s shoulders crumple, she realized the answer. This was a man
so accustomed to losing, that he had lost the will to fight. This was a man who had accepted defeat before he had even truly faced the challenge. This was a man made to feel so broken, so small, by his circumstances, that he had lost any ambition to aspire for greater things. In short, he didn’t fight for Jane because he didn’t believe that he deserved her. And that realization… that hurt Jane’s heart the most.

  “That won’t be necessary, Mr. Larson,” she said, and she reached across the table and placed her hand on top of his.

  It was the first time they had touched… the first sign of affection between the two of them, and Jane swore she felt a sudden spark ignite within her as she felt his smooth skin under her palm.

  “I’d like to stay,” she said firmly, but with a gentle smile—a smile that, she made certain, didn’t appear sympathetic. “I traveled to New Mexico with the intention of getting to know you, Mr. Larson, and it would appear that I’ve only just started to do so. If you don’t object… Well, I’d like to stay and continue our courtship.”

  Wyatt’s face was frozen for a moment with shock, pure surprise, rippling through his brow and crinkling in the lines of his forehead. The shock softened and a warmth as golden as honey spilled through his eyes, as his features lit up and he smiled. “Nothing would make me happier,” he said, “as long as that’s what you truly want, Miss Brooks.”

  “It is,” she said, returning the smile. And she knew that she meant it.

  SEVEN

  Jane admired the general merchandise store: the pristine glass jars of candy, the white burlap sacks of cornmeal and grains, the shiny red jars of preserves… She admired all of it as she spun around in a circle, taking it all in as the floor creaked under her feet.

  “It’s incredible,” she said appreciatively, smiling at Wyatt once she had stopped her rotation. “You really rebuilt the entire place?”

  “Right on top of where my father’s store had originally been,” Wyatt nodded proudly. “He had built that store with his bare hands. The fire claimed most of it, but I was adamant about keeping the location. This was my father’s legacy… He died to protect it, and I was going to keep it intact.”