Explaining Herself (22 page)

The door to the jail opened again, and it was Sheriff Ward. Finally. "Had us some excitement?" drawled the lawman, looking over his visitors. He touched the brim of his hat toward Victoria, and barely noticed Ross before focusing on the cell. "Well, well, well. Looks like you've got yourself in a heap of trouble, sonny boy."

Ross stiffened so sub
tl
y, Victoria felt sure nobody else had noticed. She did.

"Sheriff," said Mr. Day. "May I ask you about what this rustler faces from our modern legal system? Miss Garrison, may I borrow that pad of paper? I don't think you're using it anymore."

She wouldn't get to write the story after all. Quickly, Victoria wrote some
th
ing, pocketed it, then handed the pad to Mr. Day. "I probably have typesetting to do," she said stiffly, and glanced hopefully at Ross.

He was still staring at Bram Ward.

So much for subtlety. "Mr. Laramie?" she asked, which seemed to startle him. "When you've spoken to the sheriff, would you walk me as far as my brother's law office?"

He blinked at her for a moment, as if he wasn't even sure who she was. Then he nodded and said to the sheriff, "Found him changing brands. Boss is pressing charges."

Then he opened the door for her. That, apparently,
was his version of talking to Sheriff
Ward.

But the sheriff seemed to have finally noticed him. Victoria had the strangest feeling that, if she waved her hand between them, the intensity might burn her.

Sheriff Ward asked, "Do I know you, boy?"

Since Ross said nothing, Victoria said, "This is my father's new range detective, Sheriff.
He's
the one who caught the rustler."
The rustler you couldn't catch,
she didn't add.

"Says his name's Laramie," added the deputy, grinning.

"Fancy that." And Sheriff Ward kept on staring.

So did Ross.

Something was going on that Victoria didn't understand, and she hated that. She swept past Ross, then waited sternly for him to join her on the sidewalk.

He took longer than seemed right.

"What's the matter?" she asked after he came out, looking from him to the now-closed door and back. "I know we may not feel..." She lowered her voice, and he had to bend nearer to hear her. "We may not think the sheriff is wholly honest, but we oughtn't antagonize him."

It took him a long while to say, "No."

Something
was
the matter. But she could see Thad-deas coming their direction, lifting a hand in greeting. She'd run out of time to ask questions
and
slip Ross the note she'd written him.

She chose giving him the note, in a handshake. "Well, Mr. Laramie, thank you for your time and your insight."

He looked vaguely confused by her words and her handshake
—but to his credit, he gave no indication of having received the crumpled bit of paper at all.

Then she turned to greet her brother and let him walk her
—as was only proper—back to her place of business.

The sheriff even had his dead father's voice.

Even out on the boardwalk, Laramie felt shaken by his first up-close look at the lawman. Big and blond, Bram Ward had grown into the spitting image of his murdering pa, a ghost come back to haunt him.

Sonny boy.

He felt ill, and worse, Victoria had noticed. Had he thought he'd pleased her? His pretense of being a range detective had pleased her, not him. Never him.

So her pressing a note into his hand, smoothly as a three-card monte dealer, took him by surprise. Then she turned and called, "Thaddeas! Mr. Laramie was walking me to your office. Did you hear the news? Isn't it exciting?"

"Thanks, Laramie," said the lawyer, somehow harnessing his sister's excitement long enough to get her hand on his arm, even while he ignored her. "I'll take her from here."

Nothing proprietary colored his statement
—not like that newspaper editor back in the sheriff's office— but Laramie felt the dismissal sharply all the same. If life had turned out differently, he could have walked her back to her job, even walked her home of an evening. If he himself had turned out differently . . .

But he hadn't. So he shrugged his unnecessary consent, said "Ma'am," by way of a good-bye
—and felt the hidden piece of paper crackle intriguingly in his palm until they'd gone far enough for him to risk looking at it.

Cemetery,
she'd written.
Five-thirty.

He frowned at her pretty handwriting.
Cemetery ?

Maybe he would never be free of ghosts. And yet the gaze he felt on him, then, was of the living. Slowly
—dangerously—he looked up.

The last person he expected to see across the street, watching him leave the sheriff's office, was Lonny Logan.

Chapter Sixteen

While many people still believed a young lady oughtn't
walk
unescorted down a city street, few disapproved of her taking a leisurely afternoon bicycle ride. So as soon as Thaddeas saw her home, Vic mounted her ladies' drop-frame bicycle, adjusted her skirts to make sure the weights pinned to her hem to keep her skirt from blowing were evenly balanced, and pedaled out toward Mount Hope. The cemetery lay on the edge of town, though closer than when it was established in
—

Oh dear.

Victoria was already coasting toward the cemetery gates when she realized the extent of her gaffe. Mount Hope didn't exist until
at least a year after the lynch
ings.

How could she have made that mistake?

Still, Blackie stood hitched by the lamppost, near the street, and Ross Laramie waited in the shadows of
the McCrae family's tomb, and Vic could not wholly regret her error. At least they were meeting.

Ross straightened, eyeing her bicycle warily as she pedaled toward him, and she felt so very glad to see him again that she couldn't regret much of anything.

"Hello," she called, dismounting to walk the rest of the way in, then leaning the bicycle against the back of the tomb, out of sight from the main road. "Thank you for
—"

She stopped talking when he bent down and kissed her.

His lips were seeking, tentative, wonderful. Too soon he straightened from her, his head down.

"I'm sorry," he started to say. "All day I've been
—"

She reached up, captured his cheek with her palm, and guided his mouth back to hers.

He came willingly.

Was there some reason she shouldn't be kissing him? She let whatever it was stay vague as she arched herself eagerly into Ross's hard arms, stood on tiptoe, and met his next kiss with her own. Gathering her against him, he turned to sandwich her neatly between him and the marble wall of the tomb, beside her bicycle. He braced himself with one arm, as if afraid he would fall, but his free hand cupped the nape of her neck, and his thumb stroked her cheek as he kissed her. He was so tall, and dressed so darkly, he seemed to block the light. She didn't care, as long as he didn't stop.

He didn't. Another kiss followed. Then another. She sensed that he was holding himself back
—physically. His hands were not wandering as they had by the creek; his hard body sheltered more than crushed hers.
Controlled.
But his kisses . . . his kisses, he gave freely.

Happily, Victoria looped her own arms up over his shoulders and
hung on. When his mouth explored
her lower lip, she pouted for him, so he would have more of it. When her head sank sideways, her neck oddly weak from the sleepy, seductive feelings running through her, he angled his to match her. At one point he suddenly drew back, and she feared he meant to end this. But Ross only gasped a mouthful of fresh air and then ducked back to her, and she caught a hint of his smile before he was kissing her some more.

They stood there and kissed until her lips felt wet and swollen beneath his, until her breasts felt heavy against his chest, until the rest of her was starting to feel unusually heavy too. They kissed until only Ross's arm, sliding in increments more firmly around her despite his control, kept her from sinking right down the tomb wall and into the grass. His thigh brushed her hip as he shifted to prop a knee against the wall.

She was, she decided happily, a wanton woman. The idea just made her lean more eagerly into him, made her open her mouth to him so that soon he was not just kissing on her mouth, but in her mouth
—and she his.

She began to feel shaky from expectation, curiosity, hope. She felt feelings she didn't fully understand
— but wanted to—and they dizzied her. He tasted smoky, and rich. She liked it, liked this. Maybe she shouldn't, but she did.

Only the sound of a mule wagon driving by
—more specifically, the gruff call of "Get on, now.
Move,
you mules, move!"—distracted her from the pleasures of being held, being made love to ... being wanton.

It must have had the same effect on Ross, because he leaned his face into her shoulder
—despite how far he had to bend for that—and just breathed. Hard. She thought she heard the trace of a moan in his panting breaths.

She whispered, "We weren't supposed to be doing this."

He shuddered, perhaps because she'd whispered that against the back of his neck.

"I know," he admitted, his voice a bare rasp. But he turned his head on her shoulder, nuzzled into her hair, so that she shuddered too. "I warned you. . . ."

From the road, the unseen mule-driver yelled, "For Chrissake,
get on!"

"No," she decided, her own voice unsteady. "If one of us is wicked, the other must be too."

She was a modern-thinking woman, after all. She rode a bicycle. And at that moment, being wicked seemed as attractive as being wanton, so she turned her head to find his lips again. But he sank sideways, bracing one shoulder wearily against the tomb, and didn't let her. His eyes burned down at hers for a moment. Then he took her shoulders and pivoted her around so that she was facing away from him, and he wrapped his arms around her from behind. As he held her against him, like a child with a doll, he leaned his cheek on her hair.

"Not you," he murmured, still breathless. "Never you."

"
I’m
the one who invited you here," she insisted, shifting in his embrace. She wished she weren't wearing so many petticoats. She wished she could feel more of him.

Wanton.

"You didn't invite me here for this," he pointed out. Then he leaned around her, so that he could better see her face. "You
didn't,
did you?"

She laughed at his sudden uncertainty, kissed his afternoon-rough cheek before he could evade her, then turned the rest of the way out of his arms. "What if I did?" she teased him, since she remembered now
why they weren't supposed to have done that. He wouldn't court her properly, that's why.

But she was giddily glad she'd forgotten for a while.

"What if I did? What if I slipped you that note just so that we could meet in private and you could ravish me?"

He opened,
th
en closed his mouth. Nod
d
ing came out. He leaned more weakly against the tomb wall and looked dark and mournful and confused.

"Actually, I made a mistake," she admitted with a doomed attempt at dignity, smoothing out her weighted skirts. "I thought we might find a clue here, but now I'm afraid I misjudged the dates."

"A clue," he repeated blankly.

"To the mystery, of course!" With a deep breath, an attempt to clear her mind, Victoria set her shoulders and started toward the back of the cemetery and what would be its oldest graves. Comparatively speaking. "I read the newspaper accounts today. It's just awful, what happened to the Lauranovics. Especially if they weren't even really stealing cattle at all. But you know, even if they
were
rustlers, they didn't deserve that. You and Papa didn't treat Harry Smith that way."

"No." In a moment, he'd caught up with her. His long legs made it easy for him. The jangle of his spurs somehow made even his walk sound dangerous. "What sort of clue?"

"I thought how terrible it would be to lose three family members, so close to each other. That reminded me of the Olson children who took fever and died, two in one week, and how sad their funeral was. Then I wondered if the Lauranovic family would have
had
funerals, considering the circumstances of their passing, and it occurred to me that their graves might tell us something."

"Something?" he prompted, clearly doubtful.

"We might learn who paid for the grave markers for
one thing, since I imagine all the family's money went toward Drazen's defense. And whether anybody's been tending the graves. After all, just because Julia's rancher betrayed her doesn't mean he didn't care at all
—-just not enough. Maybe once she died, he regretted what he'd done, especially once he learned of the baby. I can't imagine he would have betrayed her if he knew about the baby."