Explaining Herself (30 page)

At that, he turned back to her. Or upon her.
"Family's
honor," he added with an accusing nod. "Thank God your mother and sisters weren't here. Still scair't
your brother near to death."

And him. She'd scared him.

"I was fine," she assured him, more gently. "I had Duchess with me, like I promised, and I was safe th
e whole time. Although if
Thaddeas
had only taken me with him when I asked him to
—"

From his expression, that had not been the best answer.

"I went to the jail to see what happened," she offered.

"Dawson said as much," Papa drawled, and looked disgusted. "When he got 'round to it."

She felt a stab of guilt for poor Nate. "When I heard Thad tell Mr. Laramie to leave town, I went to the cemetery."

"The cemetery," Papa repeated, confused.

"I had a hunch he might stop by there, and I was right."

"Met him at the cemetery." His breath was ragged.

"To
talk,
Papa. To find out what had happened, why he was leaving." That wasn't all they'd done, but it was why she'd gone.

Besides, Ross didn't need anyone else gunning for him.

"To talk," repeated Papa now, more than suspicious.

'Yes, to talk about why he was being ordered out of town by a local cattle baron and his son."

He angled a hand in her direction, a warning against that tone of voice. "Middle of the night."

She said, "Apparen
tl
y, that's when he got his orders."

Thaddeas burst through the back door, breathless. "Thank God you're safe, you brat." Then he looked at their father. "I saw the light on the third floor. Thanks for the signal."

Victoria frowned. "Papa didn't go up to the third floor."

Thaddeas said, "Miss Taylor's still here. And weren't you a friend, leaving her to face us when we got in?"

Oh no. Poor Evangeline!

Where
was
poor Evangeline?

"Do you know what you put
us
through?" demanded Thad.

Papa said, "Met him at the cemetery."

Thaddeas made a face. "The
cemetery?"

The back door opened again, and Nate Dawson skidded inside. "Oh, thank God," he said, seeing Victoria.

Papa said,
"Git."

He said, "Yessir," and backed out the door.

Thaddeas said, "What were you thinking, meeting a man at night? And
that
man? I guess you
weren 't
thinking!"

Victoria had heard enough. "I met him at the cemetery because I knew that he would stop there. He was visiting his family's graves one last time, since because of you he has to leave them." Not that she'd known they
were
his family, at the time, but it sounded better this way than, "I had a hunch."

Both her father and brother went so still, it would have been funny. Under different circumstances.

Nothing was funny tonight.

"His family," repeated Papa.

"The Lauranovics," she confirmed. "Yes," she added, to Thaddeas's expression, so grateful to Ross for telling her himself that she could weep. "I
do
know who he is. I know a great deal about him, and he understands me, too. More than you do."

Papa narrowed his eyes at the challenge. "He does."

'Yes. I'm glad to be your daughter, your sister. I'm sorry for risking the family, and for frightening you. But I have a life beyond being just Victoria Garrison, whether you like that or not. I have dreams that are worth taking chances on."

"Did you think you'd become Victoria Lauranovic?" challenged Thaddeas, his sarcasm thick.

"Laurence,
" she corrected him. "They wanted to be called Laurence. And I
would
be, if I'd said yes tonight. Is
that
why you two were so scared? You thought he'd beguile me with promises, then light out when it was too late? Well I'm not Julie Laurence. Oh, I could probably get myself into trouble like her, if I fell in love with someone less honorable than Ross," she admitted, aware that they were staring at her with almost identical expressions of horror. "But if some man misused me, I certainly wouldn't commit suicide. I'd go gunning for him myself. I wouldn't rely on my father or my big brother to do it!"

Or even wait for a younger brother to grow up?

Victoria had been leaning forward from the chair
in her zeal, but slowly she sat back with realization. "He was going to kill the man who ruined Julie, wasn't he?"

Thad raised his eyebrows. "Figured it out, did you?
That's
why we fired him."

"But he thinks
you
ruined Julie."

"What?"
Sensing his father's
silent question, Thad
deas spread his hands. "Wait, I barely even knew Julie Laurence!"

"That's what I told him, but he thought you were the only one left, and he didn't kill you."
He really
does
love me.

Thad said, "Luckily for him, since I got him out of jail."

"He was innocent. It couldn't have been that awfully hard," she challenged right back. "And by the way, he made an excellent range detective, and you still have a rustling problem on your hands, because whoever's really behind the operation helped Harry Smith escape jail. You just consider that next time you feel all smug about firing Ross."

Papa shook his head in warning, clearly more concerned with her tone of voice than the loss of cattle. "Get upstairs."

"Gladly." She stood. His next words surprised her.

"Monday, you'll serve your notice and take yourself back home where we can keep watch on you." He narrowed his eyes in full accusation. "Since you ain't to be trusted."

What?
"I will not!"

"As long as you are under this roof
—"

"Then I won't
stay
under this roof." That took him by surprise, and she made the best of the moment. "By the time he was my age, Thaddeas had been at college in Virginia for almost two years. I can certainly manage living within a half mile of my family if I move out to a boardinghouse. So, if I can't go about my own
business without throwing this whole house into turmoil
—if I feel I have to sneak around to entertain whom I choose—it may be our only compromise."

Rather than push her luck, she headed for the back stairs. There, reluctantly, she stopped. She did have responsibilities beyond her own heart. "Evangeline's here?"

"Reckon she's hidin' somewhere," admitted Papa. "This ain't decided."

"No, sir," conceded Victoria. And maybe that was a good thing. "It probably isn't. Good night."

Then she hurried upstairs, to where Evangeline waited.

"You're staying the night," Vic said. At this hour, it was her only choice. Besides, she longed to talk about Ross
—about his truth, his proposal, the letter he would write to her.

She wanted to admit that she was in love.

"They're just scared," offered Evangeline solemnly. "They love you so much. They just want to protect you."

Victoria said, "Protection against one's will is sometimes called imprisonment." But it occurred to her, especially as an avid reader of Nellie Bly, that many troublesome women were committed to asylums for no more than what she'd done, under the assumption that any sane woman would behave herself. Despite Mama's work, such incarceration was still legal
—and she, Victoria, was very lucky to have the father and brother she did. As she'd told Ross, she knew quite a few decent men.

She wished he knew he was still one of them. But at least she could tell Evangeline.

For once, gifted with all that Ross confessed to her, she could tell Evangeline everything.

Chapter Twenty-one

"I'll live with my family after all," confessed Victoria, using a gardening fork to turn up topsoil. "I know, I know
—moving out was how I meant to establish my independence before Ross comes back. But Mama negotiated between Papa and me. He can be so single-minded about matters like independence and growing up ... and men." She made a face. "True, both Stuart and Collier were something of a shock to him. I should think that, in contrast, he would be
glad
to welcome Ross back. Someday."

Someday soon? A whole month had passed. The leaves were already changing, and so far she'd received no letters.

She sighed. "But you know Papa.
There's a right, and there's a wrong.
Rustling and gunfighting
—he sees those pretty much in the
w
rong
column. Maybe a man can change enough to work for him, but not enough to court one of hi
s daughters. I think Mama under
stands better because she sees
us
more clearly."

She considered that for a moment while she lifted some orange marigolds from the pot she'd carried to the cemetery. "Did you even know my mother?"

Of course, the silent graves of Josip, Filip, and
Julie
Lauranovic had no answer to that. With a shrug, Victoria scooped more dirt aside to make room for the flowers. The ground felt cool, even through her leather work gloves. "In any case, Mama pointed out that were I at a boardinghouse, I would still be in trouble. Respectable residences have a curfew, and Ross and I certainly broke that! She suggested that we try something similar to the arrangement they have with Thaddeas. I still live at home, where they can keep an eye on me; and really, I like that better. That way, I can also help with the household and watch after Elise and Audra
—and Thaddeas—when our parents take Kitty to that nice specialist in Chicago. I had to pay to fix my own bicycle, which hardly seems fair, but I get to keep my job. And as long as I behave like a responsible adult, they will attempt to treat me like one. Papa wasn't particularly satisfied, but he did get some concessions. Didn't he, Duchess?"

The dog lifted her dark head, ears perked at the sound of her name. Victoria grinned at her, then settled the flowers and scooped some dirt back over their roots. She felt foolish
—not just talking to the graves, which actually seemed natural, but presuming to pretty them up on her own. Ross had not asked her to. And although he'd offered to marry her if she left with him that night, she hadn't left with him; and he hadn't even promised to return, much less marry her later. Just to write.

And he still hadn't written.

Even after almost a month
—a month of mulling over all her questions, a month without his embrace or kisses to remind her of the ways she knew him be
yond mere facts
—Victoria believed better of him than to think he'd been trying to lure her away to scandal and desertion. But he could have changed his mind. Golly, she still hadn't wholly made up hers! And on the chance that he did not intend to renew his proposal ...

Well, wouldn't she look silly, having put this effort into prettying up his family's cemetery plot. Her sister Audra had already voiced concern. People might notice, and then they might talk.
Acting as if he'd given her a ring.
She'd heard enough gossip in her time to imagine it well enough.
And him no better than a gun-slinger. Poor, abandoned Victoria.

She realized she was chewing her lip, and slowly released it. He
was
better than a gunslinger. Once he came home .. . well.

In any case, she
liked
spending time in the cemetery.

"By the way, the fall roundups showed that ours isn't the only ranch losing stock." She assumed Mr. Lauranovic would find that particularly interesting. "The local cattlemen collected a reward for the capture of the rustlers, preferably alive. Papa doesn't want any more lynchings. I don't know if it will help, though. Nobody knows how Harry Smith got out of jail, though I have my
—"

Duchess's head came up again. When Victoria glanced toward the front of the cemetery, cautiously craning her neck to see past the gravestones, she saw a man hitching his horse by the lamppost. It wasn't Ross; the horse wasn't Blackie, and even from the back, the man was neither tall nor dark.

He didn't seem to notice her bicycle, leaning against the back of the McCrae tomb. Perhaps it would be better if he didn't notice her either. For her scandal-shy sisters' sake, Victoria ducked behind Josip Lauranovic's tombstone. Then noticed how her skirts spread out beyond it,
and swept up armfuls of weight-
pinned material and petticoats
—three times before she had them all—so they wouldn't give her away.

Duchess sat up, clearly intrigued, then looked back toward the cemetery's visitor, ears even more alert than usual. Victoria realized that the man was whistling to himself.

Well, that wasn't uncommon.

But he was whistling "Clementine."

She felt a shiver across her whole body
—puzzle pieces! Of course, everyone knew the words to that song, which had gotten popular in the mid-'80s.
"Oh my Darling Clementine, you are lost and gone forever.
..."

But that line was engraved on Julie's tombstone!

As the whistling approached her hiding place, Vic tried to sink even lower, her knees practically pressed to her face. Duchess, still sitting in the open, glanced back at her and cocked her head with canine curiosity. It was probably too late to extend an arm and order her away.

Perhaps if she was very, very quiet?

The whistling faltered into a slow, descending note. "What have we here?" murmured a man's voice. About the flowers?

Then a shadow fell over her. Reluctantly she looked up, into the face she now recognized as Alden Wright's, heir to the Triple-Bar ranch.

"Well, hello," he said slowly, as if choosing his words carefully. "Aren't you Victoria Garrison?"

It occurred to her that she needn't keep on huddling like this, so she released her armful of skirting and slowly sat up, trying to regain her poise. "Yes, I am. Mr. Wright, isn't it? When did you get back to Sheridan?"

Alden Wright spent a great deal of his time in St. Louis. Even today he was dressed in a fine, single-breasted suit coat of brown worsted, complete with
matching trousers, a businesslike watch fob, and fashionable cloth-topped shoes.

He looked older than she remembered him. Certainly older than Ross. Almost as old as Thaddeas.

Instead of answering her question, he glanced at the Lauranovic graves, the newly planted marigolds. "I
—pardon my inquisitiveness, Miss Garrison, but are you the one who . . . ?" Then he noticed her dirty work-gloves. "Of course you are. But you're too young to have known Julie Lauranovic."

As if Victoria needed any more proof, he had a big, white chrysanthemum in his hand. Unlike Ross, Alden Wright didn't look at all dangerous. Or even annoyed. He just seemed curious.

That made two of them.

Victoria stood
—he caught her hand to help her up, being a gentleman—and she took off her work gloves, just as glad when Duchess trotted to her side to sniff her hand. "Julie," she repeated softly, confused. He'd called her Julie. So she took a chance. "Mr. Wright, if you paid the undertaker to add that quote onto her tombstone, why did you still let her be buried under the name
Julije
?"

Alden Wright stared at her for a searching moment. Then he took a deep breath, and as he released it, his shoulders sank as if from under the weight of years of secrecy. "Because she matched her father and brother that way," he told her. "And Julije is three syllables."

She cocked her head, not understanding.

Alden smiled, a little sadly. "It fits better in die song, Miss Garrison," he explained evenly. "In place of Clementine."

Until that autumn, Laramie had never cared so he'd never noticed. But in under two months, he discovered why most cowboys "married" only ladies of easy virtue, and merely fo
r a weekend at a time. Even sav
ing every cent from the fall roundups, he had nothing to "write home" about
—neither a place to stay nor a stake to start building any kind of a respectable life.