Silver Heart (Historical Western Romance) (Longren Family series #1) (8 page)

             
My first concern was the healing wound on his leg.  Falling could have jarred it open, causing him to lose blood again.  My second was that he wasn't breathing.  I'd landed on him, I thought, and knocked the breath out of him.  Trying frantically to remember what to do, I started to force my arms under him, to raise up the small of his back and allow his lungs to relax.

             
But no sooner had I circled him than I realized he was laughing, so hard he couldn't even attempt to stand, and I pulled back, staring at the madman, a half smile on my own lips.

             
Which was quickly lost.  Because when he met my eyes, his laughter died away.  He looked longingly at me, as if memorizing my face before a journey, then he reached up with one hand, gentling the hair from my cheeks until his fingers wrapped behind my neck and pulled my face down to his.

             
His lips were sweet.  He'd been eating a peach; it had rolled away when we went flying. 

             
The kiss wasn't sweet.  It was hard, frightening, and full of our need.  It was a first and last kiss, there would never be another and I think we both knew it.  Something had happened, some connection had been made when we met, some spark kindled, and we were driving it out, sending it away before it could do damage.  We were making it possible to be friends, paving the way to my marriage to Hutch.

             
Just for that moment, we lingered.  Matthew on his back between the rows of corn, me still stretched across his chest, my hands on his shoulders, strong and more lean than his brother's shoulders.  His hands still cupped my face.

             
We had just pulled apart, staring at each other, each probably sure what the other was thinking –
never again, I'm sorry, you'll be my friend, but he's the man I love/but he's my brother
– when Hutch's shadow fell over us. 

             
There was no point in it but I scrambled backward into the corn, freeing myself of Matthew's embrace, as if I could change what had happened.  Cursing my skirts, I swiveled to my knees, forced myself upright, even as Hutch leaned down and grabbed Matthew by his shirt front, dragging him to his feet.

             
I stifled the instinct to cry out.  Matthew had been hurt; Hutch needed to –

             
be careful?  Let go?  Nothing I could say to that effect could possibly improve the situation.  I tried to step forward, tripped over something in the garden, still reaching for Hutch's arm, when his fist flashed forward and caught Matthew on the jaw, knocking him back to the ground.

             
He turned then without looking at me, said in a hard voice, without turning back, "I want you out of here before sundown.  When you are healed, return to the mines.  Don't come back here."

             
"Hutch, wait," I said, and tried to run after him.  His long stride took him through the front gate and out to his horse before I could cover half the distance.  I called to him, tripped again, swore, and finally stopped, standing stupidly with one hand out, tears threatening behind my eyes, hair loose and blowing in an afternoon wind.

             
"Let him go, Maggie," Matthew said from behind me and I whirled on him, furious, only to find his expression as miserable as I felt.  He stood, although awkwardly, keeping the weight off his injured right leg, and he didn't approach me or hold his arms out, only shook his head.  "You can't make anything better right now.  I'll go.  He'll blame me."

             
"That's not fair," I said, and I meant all of it, everything, from meeting Matthew at the wrong time to falling in love with Hutch without telling him, to confusion and the newness of everything and being afraid and in a strange place.  I meant Hutch leaving and having come back when he had and Matthew being shot.

             
"He's my brother," Matthew said, which didn't explain anything.  "It will be all right."  He moved through the corn and stopped beside me, a respectful distance away.  "For what it's worth, there would have been nothing else.  Ever again."

             
It wasn't worth anything.  I didn't say anything, just watched him as he limped to the house to collect his few belongings, and find a way back to his boarding house.

             
Only when the kitchen door closed behind him did I allow myself to whisper, "I know," and let the tears begin to fall. 

              He didn't talk.  Hutch went, as far as I knew, back to the mines that afternoon, leaving me standing in the dusty garden.  The corn rustled in the hot afternoon breeze, reminding me of the sounds it had made when Matthew and I had fallen into the neat, orderly rows.

             
I didn't cry for long.  So much had happened in the last six months, some sort of black cloud had hovered over me.  As the year turned to 1880, my mother had died and my father gone silent.  He'd taken to drinking more than working and an accountant whose numbers don't add up any better than his clients' do soon loses those clients.  With no sons and only one of his five daughters married, he started looking for solutions.  Long before my mother had died, there'd been talk of me marrying Hutch Longren.  It seemed a good match.  He was looking for someone to share his life, someone to help around his house and to keep his accounts.  Maybe to start a family with.  News from the West was slow.  Though we knew the silver market was down as the War ended, we didn't know the silver itself was running out.  My father, he wasn't cruel, he was simply mourning and unable to care for our family as he once had, didn't know he was sending me from frying pan to fire.

             
Six months later, I'd come to rest somewhere I could have been happy.  Somewhere I could have built a life.  Instead, I'd jumped directly into a fire.

             
I cried for shame.  I cried because I was afraid of Hutch's anger.  I cried for the rift between the brothers, and for having found Matthew beautiful to begin with.  But mostly, I cried because I had hurt the man I was going to marry.  He'd been nothing but kind to me since I arrived, a stranger opening his home and his heart.  I had repaid him like this?

             
It would have been the only time.  Because I hadn't been marrying for love.  Because there had been a spark, something there. 

             
Because I knew, from Hutch's letters, from what Annie had said, I knew that Matthew wasn't constant and wouldn't be mine.

             
Because I wanted to marry Hutch, was falling in love with him, wanted to build a life with him

             
There was no way I could tell him that, and no reason for him to believe me.  And he hadn't given me the chance.

             
I stayed out in the garden for the short course of tears.  Then I weeded and picked corn for a dinner I couldn't imagine cooking, or Hutch eating.  I picked more peaches from the trees that didn't seem inclined to stop producing them.  I watered the kitchen garden, the fruit trees, and the ornamental border of bright flowers that blurred in my distracted gaze.  More than anything, I wanted to talk to my mother, who had known Hutch Longren all his life, who had known, although not as well, Matthew and Annie.  And if not my mother, then I wanted to talk to Virginia but even though there were telephones in Boston and a telephone in our house, there were no telephones in Virginia City or Gold Hill and a telegram wouldn't convey what I needed and would take too long besides.

             
I wasn't looking to be absolved of what I'd done.  I was looking to see if there was a way to recover from what I'd done.  Tension wound tighter and tighter inside me, swirling like the dust storms I'd seen as I crossed the West to come here.  I thought, eventually, I'd fly apart like some of those storms did, rather than settling, all the detritus dropping out of the funnel.  Through the garden I moved faster and faster, ripping up weeds as if I could rip out the shame, until I stopped, a handful of plundered carrots in my grasp, and thought of Annie.

             
Just that fast, I ran for the house, leaving corn and carrots on the bench, fetching a basket to carry more of the endless peaches and finding a hat.  I could have taken one of the horses, if I'd know how to saddle or had the patience to learn, but my heart beat frantically and I took to my heels and ran the distance to Annie's house.

              "Maggie!  What's the matter?" 

             
Annie stepped back and let me enter without hesitation.  Somewhere during my flight along the mile separating our houses, I'd started and left off crying again and I could feel my face was streaked with dust and tears.  Annie took the basket from my arm, put her other arm around me, and led me into the kitchen, where she put the tea kettle onto the stove and loaded the peaches into the deep sink, giving me time to catch my breath and my wits.

             
She made tea and slid it onto the table in front of me along with fresh cookies I couldn't look at.  Her girls weren't home, and her son was in college.  It was just the two of us, and she chattered inconsequentials as she made the tea, telling me about the hens that wouldn't lay and the lizard that kept sunning himself on her kitchen floor.

             
"Now," she said when she joined me at the table with her own tea, and a tray with the cream and lemon and sugar, "tell me what's happened."  Her warm blue eyes, so much like both Hutch's and Matthew's, met mine. 

             
How?  How could I tell her?  But it left me in a rush. 

             
"I've been confused since I came here, out of place, lost, I love it here, but it isn't Boston, I miss my home, I miss my sister, and I was determined, going to make a home here, and Hutch is the most handsome man, truly, I saw him in the train station and should have been afraid to speak to him if it weren't I had no choice.  Marriage of convenience, I mean, it was all arranged and it's not that either of us didn't know that but he's confided in me, told me things he didn't necessarily have to even if a husband should tell a wife and let her share the burdens, I'm not a wife yet, he's not my husband, I thought it was respect and I thought I was starting to care, we'd talked about when to have the wedding, probably just the justice of the peace unless we have to wait for a circuit judge, and it was all going according to plan, I mean, more so, you know?"

             
She couldn't have but she nodded. 

             
"I thought I was falling in love with him, that wasn't something I expected or anything I had to have, I thought how many marriages are and how many would work better if that came later and I thought it might but it might come later and then, well, that would be part of it."

             
She was watching me, very quiet, maybe the way she'd watch a potentially dangerous animal, maybe only giving me space to start making sense in.

             
I didn't know if  could do that.  "And then I met Matthew," I barreled on.  And stopped.  Because I'd seen in her face she'd just caught up to everything I had said.

             
"Matthew," she said.  "Of course, it's Matthew." 

             
I closed my mouth slowly.  There was no judgment in her face.  That almost made me feel worse.  Surely, I deserved some.

             
"I understand," she said and covered my hand where it lay on the table with hers.

             
"No, you don't.  You can't.  I mean, I didn't want.  I didn't mean to.  It was – there was something there.  I needed to know I could get past it.  I needed to know what I'd be walking away from, and that I could walk away from it."

             
She waited as if to see if I had finished.  I hadn't, quite.

             
"I'm falling in love with Hutch.  I wanted to be certain there was nothing there with Matthew."

             
"I understand,” she said with complete conviction.  And this time, I believed her. 

              Shadows gathered in the kitchen as we worked together, canning the peaches I'd brought.  Annie didn't need them; her own trees were groaning under the weight of fat pink fruit but we needed to do something with the bounty and keeping our hands busy made it easier to talk.

             
"I knew your mother," she said, looking contemplatively across the kitchen at nothing.  One hand hovered over a peach, clutching a sharp knife.  "She wasn't much older than me, though enough we didn't do much together.  Aren't girls silly?  We think a few years means you need a different set of friends."

             
I quartered another peach and discarded the pit.  "I thought she spent a lot of her time with her own brother and with Hutch."  Saying his name provoked a shiver in my stomach. 

             
Her gaze sharpened onto me.  "There was that, too.  Whatever they tell you about her being another mother to them, she was another playmate."  She curled off another piece of skin from the peach she held.

             
Surprised, I nicked myself with the knife.  "My mother?"

             
She nodded, set the peach down without paying attention to it, both hands on the sticky, juice-covered counter.  "A regular tomboy, always keeping up with the others."  She glanced at me. I could feel the uncertain smile on my face.  "I wish I could tell you stories, but she spent more time with them than with me."  She shoved the bowl of cut peaches out of the way, began moving aside the skins, dumped the pie crusts onto the board, and began rolling them out.  "Now, my brothers.  Them, I know."

             
I swallowed, stilled, wished I had more peaches to cut, and waited.

             
"Matthew is closer to your age than Hutch.  He's young, old enough to take a wife but hard to imagine him doing so.  We both followed Hutch out here, me with John, who thought a grocers would be a good choice and it was until..."  She stopped, didn't look at me, said, "Well. But we had many good years together, and I love this place.  And not long after John was lost that Hutch's Ellie took ill.  I couldn't leave then."

             
I hadn't realized it had been so many years since she'd lost her husband, and she'd remained for her brother or, more likely, both of them. 

             
How can you be so kind to me? I wanted to shout.  I've hurt both of those men you love.  But in the next instant, as she removed the bottom crust from the oven and began filling it with slices of peaches, she told me.

             
"Matthew's the youngest.  Back home in Alturas, when all of us were growing up, he was the special one, the baby of the family and my parents spoiled him.  We all thought when he came to work the mines with Hutch that he was growing up."  She made a fist with one hand, lightly tapped the edge of it on the counter, and turned so she could meet my eyes.  "He's not a bad boy.  Man, I guess.  He's 24.  He's just wild.  And not the wild that shoots off its guns on a Saturday night or gallops through town for the pure fun of covering everyone's clean hanging laundry with dust."