Rocky Mountain Man (Historical) (19 page)

He never wanted to change the way she lit up inside whenever she looked at him. She touched him with immense trust, and she treated him like a man without his godforsaken past.

If Grandfather had lived, the wise old man would have said that the ancestors had been watching over him during those bitter years in prison. Now they had chosen to balance that great wrong. To make right the injustice. To give him back the family that he lost.

While he worked stacking the wood he'd salvaged and cut from the rogue avalanche, he thought. And as
he thought, it became clearer. He had two choices. To take what time he could with her and accept that it would end when she found out about his past—which she surely would the instant her overbearing family figured out where she was spending her spare time.

Or he could tell her and hope she would understand. That, as impossible as it was, she would be the one person who could look past the lies and see the man he was. The man he'd always been.

Yes, it was strange how one woman could change everything. Maybe Grandfather had been right. One horrid woman had ruined him. One lovely woman had saved him. It was evenhanded. It was the chance to make right the wrongs of the past. And while it could not be undone, the wound to his spirit could be healed.

He was Duncan Hennessey, Standing Tall, son of Summer Rose, grandson of Gray Wolf. And he would fight for this woman he loved.

He could almost feel his mother's approval as the finest snowflakes kissed his cheek. He could hear his grandfather's voice in the thunder overhead.

And he was made whole.

 

“Yoo-hoo! Betsy!” Mama may think her false cheer appeared to be genuine.

Betsy wasn't fooled. She'd watched the calculations and the questions pass across her mother's face throughout the meeting that had gone overlong. If Mama noticed anything incriminating, well then good, because she had a few things on her mind to tell Mama.

She waved to her friends, letting them know she was ready. She'd had time to think on the way back to
town and then to consider Rayna's words through the nearly two-hour meeting. She accepted her friends' good-luck wishes, but since they didn't know whom she'd been with this afternoon, they couldn't know just how much luck she needed.

No, not luck. It didn't matter how this turned out, if Mama approved or not. Rayna was right. A second chance at finding a good man to love, and who loved her in return, was a rare gift. One she wasn't about to turn away. If she ended up marrying Duncan, then that was up to the two of them to find out. Not for her family to influence.

Or anyone else.

Night was falling, half the stores were closed, their windows dark on Main Street, and it was hard to see the expression on her mother's face. So she had no clue as to how to start the conversation.

Mama took care of that for her. “You. Were. Late. I worried.”

“I was perfectly safe.”

“I didn't know that! I sat there listening to Harriet Willington go on about how chocolate cakes and cookies were the highest and best-selling items at the last three bake sales, and was I listening? No, I was not! I was trying not to imagine the horrible things that could be happening to my only daughter.”

“Nothing happened, Mama.”

“I didn't know that. You're driving farther and farther out on your deliveries. Thank the heavens above you're no longer traveling up into those mountains!”

“I have been traveling up into the mountains. To pay my respects to Mr. Hennessey.”

“Alone! The least you can do is have one of the boys go with you.”

“Mama, the boys are all grown men with lives of their own. Besides, I owe Mr. Hennessey my life. Remember? Since he died saving me from not one but two bears?”

Mama sagged a little, unusual for the always-confident woman. A hand fluttered to her throat. “I have no malice toward that man, that is for sure. I can think of plenty of men who would run from a bear instead of fight to protect a lady. And for that, I am grateful because you are alive and unharmed. It was no small sacrifice he made.”

“You sound as if you speak from your heart, Mama.”

“You know by now I always do.” Lucille Gable was no sentimental sop, but she couldn't hide the emotion making her voice sound thick and her vision blurry. “This has only shown us you must take care. Perhaps you should keep the nearer customers and let some other person take the risks of driving from here to tarnation and back, for what would we all do without our dear Bets?”

“I'm not five years old, Mama. You have noticed, right?”

“You will always be my little baby girl. Now, come to supper tonight. I know you've got to be lonely, so I've invited nice Mr. Landers to join us—”

“I'm not interested in Mr. Landers.” Poor Mama, she meant well.

But there was no chance Mama could know that the bachelor she'd invited to supper was having an affair with a married woman in the next town. Betsy had
found a love letter from the unscrupulous woman in his pocket, and she'd done her best not to read more than the first few lines. “I have someone I would love to bring to supper sometime.”

“A man?” Mama royally thanked the family's driver for offering her a hand up into the back seat of the fringed surrey. “Oh, praise the heavens! At last! It's Mr. Rutgers from the bank, isn't it? Oh, I know he has immense respect for you.”

Mr. Rutgers from the bank had a gambling problem—she'd found the IOUs in the breast pocket of one of his best jackets. “No. He's a customer of mine. That's how I came to know him. He saved my life, as it turned out, the mountains are very perilous. I am in love with him and it seems he feels the same way.”

“More danger! You will be the death of me. That's it. Marry this man, settle down in the carriage house on our property and then I shan't have to spend my days worrying and worrying.”

“He is not a banker or a lawyer or a businessman, but I want you to like him.”

“I put up with Charlie.” Lucille opened her mouth, considering staging an argument, then seemed to think better of it. In the lantern light swinging from the surrey frame, there was only concern and no deception on her face as she seemed to soften for an uncharacteristic moment. “I would give anything to see my little girl smile again, not a little smile, but big and beaming, the way you used to. Charlie was not my choice, but he made you happy.”

“Happy is what matters, Mama. It's a rare gift, to truly be happy in a marriage.”

“Yes, I had that gift once. I desperately want it for you. So if you must choose another working man, please, don't even tell me if he's another farmer! I will keep my mouth shut and tolerate him. But only for your happiness.”

“Better than you did for Charlie?”

“I didn't say I would like him. I didn't say I would speak with him. I said I would tolerate him.” Mama smiled. “Just be happy, my good girl. And next time you come from this man's bed, make sure you stop smiling so wide. Because you've got half the Ladies' Aid wondering what you were up to.”

“No good, as usual.”

Mama shook her head, ordered the driver to depart, and blew Betsy a kiss. “Tomorrow night for supper. Be there or I will hunt you down.”

“But—” There was no use arguing. Her mother had turned her attention elsewhere intentionally, so her royal edict would be obeyed instead of argued with.

Her mother! It was hard not to love a woman who cared so deeply about you, but Betsy could only rub at the tension gathering at the back of her neck. The first step had been made, and Mama didn't seem too opposed to meeting Duncan. She didn't know that he was still alive. So that meant—

A man on foot led his gelding by the reins from the shadowed alley that stretched behind the church. The hitching area was empty, except for her horse and buggy. Most of the members of the Ladies' Aid had hurried off to their homes, where supper and children and husbands waited.

Alone with a stranger in the gathering dark. Her
palms turned cold as the stranger stopped between her and her horse and buggy, a tall, square powerhouse of a man that looked strangely familiar. “Duncan? What are you doing here? I thought you hated to come to town.”

“I do. I came to talk to you.” He didn't look happy. No, he seemed as grim as the night, as cold as the bitter flakes drifting down from a frozen sky.

That didn't bode well, she realized, as he kept his distance, this man she had intimately loved only a few hours before.

Inside she felt as desolate as the night as she worked the reins loose from the iron bar at the hitching post. “My house isn't far away.”

He didn't answer. In fact, he'd become one with the dark shadows, and it was as if he were already gone. As if he'd finally turned into shadow and night and there was nothing she could do to draw him back to her.

“W
hat do you want to talk about, that you'd come all this way? And while it's snowing?” She was like the snow, fragile and delicate and white, so achingly white. In the colorless world of nightfall, her light-gray coat glowed like platinum and her matching hood framed her angel's face like a halo.

It made him ache to look at her, this woman he loved, the woman he'd possessed and claimed with his body and his soul. The one female he'd trusted above all else.

Her words came back to him, a comfort he clung to like a child's favorite blanket, his only reassurance on this cold night where decent people had scurried from his path. He doubted they knew anything about him, only that he was different. An outsider. An outcast.

He feared it wasn't his bitterness as much as the tarnish of prison that he could never wear off.
If it's real love, it can't break.
That's what she'd said. That's what she'd told him. That she would love him no matter what.

Now was the test. The time to know if her love was real. Or if any love, no matter how true and rare, could stand this test without shattering.

He feared he already knew how this would go, but when there was a war and his country needed him, he fought for the Union. When his mother found herself homeless and abandoned by her first white husband, he'd settled down, started a business and taken care of her.

When a spoiled little rich girl had lied, he hadn't run. He'd faced the vigilante's justice and then a trial with a jury who'd already made up their minds. He'd served time and he'd been released.

He was no coward, no quitter, no fop that would rather run than fight.

Even if that fight would cost him Betsy's love.

She twinkled like the stars in the heavens. How could it be that no other man had snatched her up and made her his wife? How could it be possible that this amazing creature brightened in his presence? That she looked to him with love and trust and came to him with her hands out, ready to take his. Expectation lighting her up.

It was all going to end. He knew it.

He should say the words. Just spit it out. It didn't have to be pretty. It didn't have to be nice. It just had to be honest. The truth, plain and simple.

No embellishment, no explanations, just the stark facts. And then he'd better prepare for her to hate him. To shudder at the thought of letting a man like him touch her intimately, love her tenderly, and dream of cherishing her forever.

“That was your mother?” he found himself saying instead. Coward, he wanted to call himself, but how could any man, regardless of how strong, knowingly say anything that would cause her pain?

“How long were you watching? It was odd that I didn't know you were there. You are…so distant. I can feel you, isn't that strange?”

“No, because I can feel you, too.”

“I can't now.”

“No.” How could he tell her he'd made himself as frozen as the night. As empty. As dark. “I would not be a man, or what a man ought to be, if I don't tell you the truth.”

“What truth?” Her hands found his and her touch was as startling as lightning from a clear blue sky. As snow in June. As a twister pointing from the clouds to the sky and touching down without warning.

He was not so well shielded, after all. “I'm not a little in love with you.”

“You're not?” Her brow wrinkled.

He leaned his forehead to hers, an intimate connection, tender as she gazed into his eyes and the worry lines fell away. He searched for the right words, words for feelings he could not describe or name. Only wish he didn't feel.

“And I'm not just a lot in love with you.”

“Me, either.” As if she understood, her lush mouth curved into an inviting grin. “You are a gift. You know that, don't you? When I never thought I would ever feel this way again, I found you. A man I love more than anything. I didn't know it was possible to love someone so much.”

Hell, she was killing him. As if shot in the gut and mortally bleeding, his knees turned to water and it was all he could do to stay standing. To force the confession from his soul. “Yes.”

It was only one word, but her breath caught like a sob and her fingertips brushed his chin, pulling him to her kiss.

He hungered for her. Not out of lust, it went far deeper than that. It was love overwhelming him, flooding him with a fierce need to make her his again and again. To hold her tight while he could. Before she knew the real Duncan Hennessey, past and scars and all, and could not accept him.

He'd seen her mother. One of those proper society matrons who judged no one ever to be good enough. She was the kind of woman who'd been the most hateful to him those long years ago. In another town, in another time, but he would never forget the outraged mothers who'd wanted him hung and only after a good beating for daring to harm a judge's daughter.

And not only because of the rape; those women had made it seem doubly worse that he was a half-breed, a man without social or financial clout. A working man with nothing but a storefront and a savings account at the town bank.

Betsy's mother was the kind of woman who condemned without mercy and if she knew of his past, there was no way Betsy would be standing before him alone and unguarded by all of her brothers and half the town.

“You've ridden all that way and you've got to be freezing. Your hands are ice.” She kissed his knuckles, her lips caressing and nibbling and sucking.

All proper woman, but warmhearted and passionate, too. He swallowed, trying not to remember exactly how passionate, how tenderly she'd shown him how much she loved him, for remembering would only make it harder.

“Do you want to come home with me? You can warm up by the fire in the parlor and I'll warm up some stew and cornbread.”

“What I have to say won't take long.”

“Something
is
wrong, and I have a suspicion I know what.” She could feel the hurt rolling off him like vapor from an icy pond and she wasn't about to leave him alone. Mama might be innocent of the cruelty her family had shown him, but that didn't mean Joshua hadn't decided to intervene.

Well, she knew exactly how to handle him. As for Duncan, he was like a warrior of old: powerful and silent and invincible.

A real man, who'd stolen every last bit of her heart.

“Come home with me.”

“Home with you? Alone?” There were houses lined up in orderly rows, their windows golden rectangles, and they seemed so close. He felt so closed in.

But it wasn't the structures or the town. It was him, twisted up until his skin felt so tight he was ready to pop right out of it. He'd felt like this while he waited for the jury's verdict. It had taken them exactly forty-five minutes to declare him guilty. Despite his alibi, despite the discrepancies in the young lady's story. Truth didn't matter, he'd learned that the hard way.

What had Betsy said to him?
You're such a good man. What possible bad thing could you have done?
Words that had given him faith to hold her hand in his and to know there was nothing he would ever do to hurt her.

She had to know the truth about him. He didn't want it coming from her overbearing brother or that fierce granny of hers. She deserved to hear the story from him, and the freedom and time to decide for herself what she believed. If the words she'd said were ones she meant.

And if not…

Then at least they both knew. They could end it here, before they became more involved and before it was even harder to walk away. To minimize the pain and the heartbreak.

“No, I don't want to be alone with you. This is fine. There's no one around and this won't take long.”

“You are starting to scare me. What's happened?” Her hand stroked his chest, as if he were a cat to calm. In the shadows, silhouetted by the streets of houses, he could see the round worry of her eyes. “Did you hear what my mother said?”

“No, this isn't about your mother, but it is about your family. There's no other way to do this, and I know it's going to hurt you. And I'm sorry.”

“Are you ending this? Please, don't tell me that. I meant what I said this afternoon and I thought you did, too.”

He could feel how he'd hurt her, and it was killing him. There was no way he could let her think he didn't love her. “Being with you is the very best thing that has happened in my life. I can't tell you—”

There were no words, only actions, and so he kissed her one last sweet time. The brush of their lips, the mix
of their very breaths, the sweep of their souls was like touching heaven. He savored her as long as he could. Love beat in his heart as he broke away.

“Remember how I told you that I have a past I'm not proud of?” He stroked her chin with the pad of his thumb, doing anything to touch her, to remain connected to her.

She leaned into his caress, feeling the connection, too. “And I said what possible bad thing could you have done?”

The way she said it was as if she saw the real Duncan Hennessey, the man he'd always been. It was a heartening experience to have someone so good, someone who cared truly for him and saw the truth in him.

But would her opinion hold when she knew more?

Please, don't fail me,
he pleaded as he took a breath. “You hardly know anything about me. About what I've done. A while back I spent ten years in the territorial prison.”

There. He'd said it. He wasn't waiting around to see the look of horror on her face. He already knew how she would recoil. It was predictable. What woman on earth would want a man like him? He was hard. He was obstinate. He was cold. A convicted felon, a rapist, had no chance of a normal life. None at all.

He didn't blame her one bit for the shock dragging down her jaw. For the way she stammered, unable to speak, too confused by what he'd said.

“I don't understand.” She shook her head, but it didn't clear it of the thunder crashing through her ears so loud, she couldn't think. Only it wasn't thunder, it was her pulse and she couldn't seem to take in enough breath. “Y-you were in prison?”

“Yep. I was sentenced and sent to the hard labor camp up near Deer Lodge. The quarry, where I worked from sunup to sundown every day for ten hellish years. I paid my debt, and I don't intend to go back.”

Jail. Ten years of hard labor. It didn't make sense. She couldn't get her mind to think. She'd expected him to have overheard what her mother said, about the banker and tolerating whomever it was Mama had chosen.

But not this. She hadn't expected him to say this. “Prison?”

“Yes. I'm a convict.”

She said nothing more, and that said everything. He couldn't wait for the shock to wear off and her disgust to sink in, so before she could say anything that would break him, he walked away.

She didn't call out for him.

He didn't expect her to. He kept going, leading his gelding down the shadowed road, his boots crunching in the accumulating snow, until he reached the main street. Looking back, she was still standing in the lot next to her buggy. Snow crowned her. Made her shimmer like an angel in the background light from all the windows up and down the street.

You disappointed me, Betsy.
His soul throbbed with a pain that felt worse than defeat. More encompassing than sorrow. He'd lost his future; he'd lost more.

He'd never hold her again. Never bask in the cheer of her smile. He'd never know what it would be to call her his wife. To hold her in his arms at night while they drifted off to sleep. Never know what it was like to be loved, truly loved.

It was a pretty high price to pay, and to keep paying. But she'd behaved about the way he'd expected. She was a proper town lady. Her mother had appeared to be a matron of society in her finely tailored clothes and expensive surrey and with her personal driver. Betsy Hunter was a rich woman's daughter, and women like that didn't marry men like him. Loners. Outcasts. Convicts.

It was a good thing he was made of steel. Nothing could hurt him. Not anymore.

He mounted up, nosed the gelding into the frigid wind and rode through the snow and the night where no moon lit his path. Where no stars shone on the polished nightscape.

It was a dark night, cold and mean. He rode until he was like the night, desolate, and without a speck of hope to save him.