Explaining Herself (15 page)

As soon as they were alone, Laurel said, "So tell me."

Normally her family wasn't so curious. "About... ?"

"About my new skirt; what do you
think
about?" Laurel made a face since, of all Vic's sisters, she was the least likely to want to talk about clothes. "Tell me what's going on? Why'd Papa bring a
pistol
ero
up here?"

As if Ross were simply some hired gunman!

"Well, it is a daring skirt," teased Victoria, picking up a pitcher to fill with water. It was daring
—practically like wearing dungarees, but with a great deal more fabric. Dungarees
disguised
as a skirt. "Collier doesn't mind?"

"Collier ordered it for me." Laurel went to the pantry, then started rolling lemons across the floor at Vic. "Talk!"

Laughing, Vic stopped as many lemons as she could with her feet, kicking several gently back at her sister before she began to press them, one at a time, beneath her boot so Laurel could squeeze more juice. "He's not a
pistolero."

"Well, he's better armed than a cowboy."

"His name is Ross Laramie, and he's a range detective. Papa hired him to catch rustlers."

Laurel paused in squeezing lemons.
"Rustlers?"

"Not just that." Victoria fetched the sugar. "Mr. Laramie thinks they're hiding in the foothills, and Papa seems to agree. That's why we've come
—to warn you and Collier not to bother anybody who might seem suspicious."

"Not bother them? Some low-down, stinking cow
thieves sneaking around my foothills, and I shouldn't
bother
them?"

While Laurel spooned in sugar, Vic fetched the cut-glass tumblers the Pembrokes had bought for their fancy guests from England a month before. "I may be wrong, but I doubt Papa will like that reaction. How about Collier?"

Laurel scowled at her, but stirred the lemonade. "He'll tell me to stay out of their way too, darn it. But the British are extra civilized, don't you know."

"Then you ought to think up a different response," suggested Vic, lifting the tray of glasses.

Picking up the pitcher, Laurel paused by the door from the kitchen. "What is it you always say?"

"I
understand."
The beautiful thing about that response was that it didn't promise not to do anything, just that she comprehended why she perhaps oughtn't.

Laurel nodded. "Maybe, since I'm not you, I can try that."

All three men, even Ross, rose at their entrance. Collier took Victoria's tray to set on a low table, but he spoke to Laurel. "Hullo, dearest. Your father and Mr. Laramie were just explaining a rather disturbing situation."

Vic
knew
they would discuss important things
—although she had to wonder whether her closemouthed father or the closemouthed range detective had done most of the talking.

Collier was doing the talking now, explaining what Victoria already knew. She liked listening to his British accent. Normally, as pretty as Collier was, she liked watching him, too, but this morning she found her attention sliding appreciatively back to Ross.
He's taller than Collier,
she thought loyally, noticing how his shiny black hair caught the sunlight in silver highlights through the parlor window.
He's more . . . more . . .

The word escaped her for almost a full minute, during which time she sank into a ladder-back chair and accepted a full tumbler from Laurel. Ross was different, perhaps even more attractive, though in subtler ways. She could feel the difference of him across her skin and deep inside her; she just couldn't quite label it. It had something to do with his dark, deep-set eyes and his serious mouth, with his angled face and his sculpted hands and the revolver still slung dangerously off his hip. His difference felt. . . sharp. Fierce, even. Controlled
—always controlled.

She tried not to blush. Almost always.

Intensity,
she realized. That's what he had that the polite, shiny Lord Col
lier Pembroke did not. Ross Lar
amie was the most intense man she'd ever met, and she liked that.

He seemed downright startled in his chair when Laurel handed him a glass of lemonade, then he nodded nervous thanks. His gaze slid over to Victoria, then quickly away.

She liked him very much.

"So we have been requested," finished Collier, "to stay out of these men's way
—should we actually come upon them—and allow the law to handle the matter."

"The law?" Laurel sat rather abruptly on her settee, beside her husband. "Papa, you can't mean Ward!"

Ross seemed to deliberately avoid Vic's gaze. He looked down, took a sip of the lemonade. After a pause, he drank more
—several swallows—and she felt glad he liked it.

"Sheriff," noted Papa pointedly, meaning that if the man held the post of sheriff, he deserved some respect. Just like President McKinley demanded their respect simply as the leader of the nation, even if he
was
a Republican.

"You
hired an outside man," noted Laurel, about Ross.

"He works for me," warned Papa. True outside men generally weren't forthcoming about who hired them.

"A range detective, then.
You're
not sitting back and letting the law handle it."

Papa sat straighter.
"My cows.
"

"He does have a point, dearest," interrupted Collier, before this could escalate into another of Laurel and Papa's arguments. "If the scoundrels were stealing horses, then perhaps we could hunt them down like vermin, eh?"

'You're no help," accused Laurel.

Collier only smiled his lopsided smile
—the only thing about his face that wasn't perfect—and said, "That is exactly the point. We aren't to help."

Because she'd been keeping track of Ross on the edge of her vision, even while watching Laurel's husband, Victoria immediately noticed when Ross's head came up. She saw him frown. Then, before she could ask what was wrong, he put down his glass and stood, and everyone noticed.

Then, in the silence that fell over the parlor, even Victoria heard it through the open windows
—the scream of a horse. It didn't sound hurt. It sounded somehow . . . angry.

Laramie bolted for the door on those long legs of his, only bothering to call a single word
—"Trouble"— over his dark-shirted shoulder.

Papa and Collier were up then, Collier darting to the fireplace for the sleek rifle hanging over it.

Was it rustlers? Victoria stood, still confused, and looked to Laurel for clarification. A mountain lion? A bear? But Collier, leaving with the rifle, called, "The stallion!"

Nobody would steal a wild horse that, thus far, the Pembrokes could not give away. That's when Victoria realized there could be other kinds of trouble than theft, and she followed Laurel out by a heartbeat.

Papa turned to point a stern hand at his older daughters. "Stay."

But then Victoria's ever-searching gaze stopped, frozen, on a flash of yellow in the stallion's corral. She could not have looked at anything else even if she wanted to. Just that. Yellow. Close to the ground. Yellow like calico. Yellow like a dress.

Then not even her father could keep her from breaking into a full run after Ross and Collier.

Chapter Eleven

Of course, Laramie heard it first. He'd lived his adult life watching, listening, waiting for trouble. It still surprised him when trouble came. But he'd kept alive staying ready for the surprise.

When the feeling came upon him in that fine parlor
—like a hum of danger, deep in his gut—he didn't question it. He was on his way out even as the others fell quiet enough for him to hear the horse. A horse, even in distress, shouldn't give him this cold clutch in his chest, this itch in his gun hand. But he knew better than to question it, so he kept going.

When Pembroke called, "The stallion!" Laramie knew which direction to head, his shoulders tight, his pulse rushing. Something felt wrong, smelled wrong, sounded
—

Then he saw the rearing stallion, and the flash of its deadly fighting hooves. He saw the heap of yellow calico lying beneath those hooves.

His hand moved even faster than his mind, so quickly did he have his left arm extended, his aim taken, his trigger finger squeezing. Once. Twice. Three times.

With the first shot, the stallion dropped to four feet and turned, star
tl
ed. At the second, it staggered back. With the third, it shuddered
—he was hitting it, he knew he was hitting it, and yet still it hadn't gone down.

Too far away. Even as he ran, it was too far away for the accuracy of a damned six-killer. But he fired again.

Someone screamed, behind him. He hoped it wasn't Victoria, and he fired again.

The horse was stumbling now, red starting to mark lighter patches of its coat
—and Laramie's revolver clicked on an empty chamber.

Men who rode with a sixth bullet tended to lose toes, but he would have sacrificed toes for this.
Click!

He spun on the man he sensed beside him. "Damn it!"

And Collier Pembroke, with the finest rifle Laramie had ever seen, fired the shot that took down the rogue stallion for good. The Englishman did not look handsome at that moment. He looked ill. But he did it.

In the midst of tragedy, that counted for something.

Then everyone was rushing past them
—Laurel and Victoria, their father moving faster than any old cowboy Laramie had ever known. And the two younger men were left standing in a sharp cloud of gun smoke, staring at a corral that looked to be too full of death for a kinder world.

"Kitty!" At Victoria's wail, a cry so full of grief it hurt to hear, Laramie felt sudden fury. Not at her. Not even at the damned horse.

Bad is bad.

He felt furious at the world, at God, for letting this happen. He'd always known
—well, learned early
enough
—that he didn't live in that kinder world.

He hadn't realized until this moment how much comfort he'd taken from the belief that Victoria Garrison did.

Papa's hat fell off as he swung himself between the corral rails. Victoria noticed that. Though hurrying, he didn't cry out or stumble, but his white hair seemed oddly vulnerable, without a hat.

Then he was gathering Kitty's frail little form up into his arms and carrying her out. The hat stayed, in the mud by the dead horse. /
should get his hat,
Vic thought numbly. But that was so she wouldn't think the worse thing.

Then she saw the broken spectacles, also in the mud, and she thought the worse thing anyway, and she pressed both hands to her mouth to keep any noise, any words from escaping and making this horrible thing real.

Not Kitty. Not little Kitty.

Collier was in the corral t
h
en, rifle in hand, checking to make sure the horse was dead. It was Laurel, the bravest of Vic's sisters, who flanked their father as he strode back toward the house with his precious armful and somehow asked what needed asking. "Papa? Is she ... ?"

Papa answered so low that Victoria, still standing where she'd stopped, couldn't hear. Laurel started to cry
—but she didn't stop walking with Papa and Kitty. She even ran ahead to the house, got the door.

What had he said?

Still not moving, Victoria wasn't sure she wanted to know. That depended on the answer. But want to or not, she
needed
to know. As Ross Laramie came to her side and took her arm with a gentle hand, she turned to him as her only hope. "What did he say, Ross? Did you hear? Is
—is she ... ?" She couldn't face the worse
question, any more than Laurel had, so she again begged, "What did he say?"

"He said she's breathing," answered Ross in that low, even way of his. She longed for his containment, his control. Collier jogged past them toward the house, while Papa carried Kitty inside, but Victoria could only search Ross's face, see the truth of his words
—and feel her heart begin to beat again. "Breathing?"

He nodded, the most beautiful answer she ever could have received.

"She's alive?"

He nodded, tugged at her arm. "They'll need you."

She glanced toward the corral
—at what she could see of the dead stallion—and she imagined poor Kitty's terror as the beast reared up, struck at her. "Why? Ross, why? Why would anything hurt a little girl?"

He framed her face in his hands, as if to make her hear him. The warmth and steadiness of his touch felt like salvation, like the only thing that kept her head from exploding. She was safe with Ross. She always had been. "Victoria," he repeated, "They need you."

She nodded. Yes. Poor Papa. Poor Laurel.