Brave the Wild Wind

  “I don’t think so, Jessie. Now, do you walk outside and mount up, or do I carry you?”

  Jessie stalked past him and out the door, stiff with anger. But if she’d thought to dash for her horse and take off ahead of him, she had to forget it, for Chase was right behind her. He took charge of Blackstar’s reins from the start.

  For the first several hours of that long ride to Cheyenne, Jessie simply fumed. But there were many more hours and she gave those to clear thinking. By the time they reached town, she had pretty much made her resolves.

  Late though it was, Chase rode directly to the church. They dismounted together, and then Chase drew his gun on her. But Jessie had expected that. She was amused but managed to hide it. It was so ironic. Hadn’t she considered getting him to the altar in the same way that night she had decided to marry him? And now here he was, ready to march her up the aisle with a gun in her back.

  She stayed silent while he roused the preacher, while he positioned her in front of the altar, while the first words were said. She knew the preacher couldn’t see the gun at her back. Her silence continued right up until it was time for her to respond.

  Chase gritted his teeth, waiting to hear Jessie speak. But she was being stubborn. He pressed the gun against her spine, not really expecting it to do any good, but as he did, her answer came out clearly and loudly. Chase was so surprised, it took him a moment to make his own responses. They were married in no time, and Jessie even hastily scrawled her name across the marriage certificate before she walked out of the church without waiting for Chase.

  He walked after her quickly. “I’m sorry I had to do it that way, Jessie.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” she replied. “We both know you wouldn’t have shot me. And you know I wouldn’t have gone through with it if I weren’t willing. But don’t think you’ve accomplished anything for yourself, Chase Summers. I’ve let my baby have his legitimacy, that’s all. Now you can go your way, off to Spain or wherever you like. I’ll stay here. You’ll be welcome to visit from time to time, but no more than that. I won’t live with you—is that clear?”

  She didn’t wait for him to answer but mounted up and rode toward the hotel. Chase stared after her, a dark frown settling on his features. We’ll just see about that. Damned if we won’t.

  Chapter 36

  CHASE woke to find Jessie dressing in an all-fired hurry. He didn’t say anything, only watched her covertly. Her face told him what kind of mood she was in. She probably wasn’t pleased to have awakened to find him in bed with her.

  He hadn’t followed her directly to the hotel, but had gone to the nearest saloon. He didn’t recognize anyone there, and he let himself be drawn into a game of 7-up for the distraction it offered. But he was recognized after a while, and in the course of the evening he received a good deal of ribbing over what had happened in Silver Annie’s room. He was a celebrity. During the evening, he heard an account of the part Jessie played that night. He was amazed. When he got to the hotel and found that Jessie had registered as Mr. and Mrs. Summers, he was further amazed. But his excitement ended when he got to the room and found some bedding and a pillow thrown on the floor for him. He put the bedding back where it belonged and took his place beside his wife.

  “So ‘no one messes with what’s yours,’ eh?”

  Jessie swung around to face him, her mouth open in surprise. But she quickly recovered.

  “So you heard about that?”

  “An amusing tale.”

  “Don’t go getting the wrong idea, Chase,” she said airily. “I’d just found out about the baby that day and decided I’d marry you. It wasn’t anything…personal.”

  “So that’s why you came to the saloon to find me that night?”

  “Yes. Of course, finding you the way I did put an end to all thoughts of marriage. But I was still angry that someone had nearly killed you. You are my baby’s father, after all.” She turned away, embarrassed. “I just said what I did to your lady love to make a point, nothing more.”

  Chase flinched. He should have known better than to bring it up.

  “That’s too bad,” he said softly.

  “Why?” She misunderstood. “I happen to think Silver Annie had more to do with your attack than she admitted. She needed a warning of some kind.”

  “Well, that episode is over and done with, and best forgotten.”

  Jessie gasped, her turquoise eyes rounding. “You’re kidding, aren’t you? You can’t mean you don’t want to find out who put a knife in your back?”

  “Not particularly,” Chase replied, grinning at her indignant expression.

  Chase had no thought for revenge. He was grateful to his assailant. If not for his wound, Jessie would never have taken him back to the ranch and he would have left Wyoming without knowing about the baby. Remembering that she hadn’t intended for him to know, his warm mood fled.

  “Were you planning on sneaking out of here this morning without waking me, Jessie?”

  “It happens to be afternoon already. We both overslept.”

  “Answer my question.”

  “I wasn’t going to just leave,” she said sullenly.

  “I doubt that.”

  “Doubt all you like, but the fact is I had something to ask you and couldn’t very well leave without asking.” She stopped, apparently at a loss for words.

  “Well, go on. You have my rapt attention.”

  She hesitated, then blurted out, “I want you to come back to the ranch with me.”

  “I had planned to.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “At least until Rachel leaves.”

  “Ah, yes, I had forgotten all the benefits you will be getting out of this marriage.”

  “You don’t have to be sarcastic, Chase.”

  “Oh? Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I’ll wager you just can’t wait to inform Rachel of our wedding. I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “Not this time, you’re not. I want you to tell her. In fact, I had planned to ride directly back to the range. I don’t want to see her at all.”

  “Not even to say good-bye?”

  “I’ve got no reason to say good-bye to her,” she replied stiffly. “I never invited her, and I’m not going to pretend I’m sorry she no longer has an excuse to stay.” Her voice turned softly pleading. “Will you tell her for me?”

  “And what happens when she finds out I’m expected to be an absentee husband?”

  Jessie’s eyes darkened. “You don’t have to tell her that!”

  “Why not? Afraid she might consider it her duty to stick around for a few more years?”

  Jessie glared at him. Chase got up slowly and straightened out the clothes he had slept in. He let her stew for a while, his mood greatly improved.

  “You know, Jessie, this new situation is really quite amusing.”

  “If you’re considering blackmail, I would hardly call it amusing. That is what you’re thinking, isn’t it?” He grinned, and she snapped, “It would only work until Rachel left!”

  “True. But when will she go? Are you going to go home and tell her to pack immediately?”

  “If you won’t, then I guess I’ll have to! What are you fighting me for, anyway?” she cried in exasperation. “You didn’t want to settle down. You may have forced me to marry you, but we both know why. It was quite generous of you, and I do thank you. So why can’t you thank me for allowing you the freedom you really want? You have your father to find, remember? Go to Spain, Chase. Find him. You can’t do that with a wife in tow.”

  “Why not? You could come with me, you know, after the baby is born.”

  “I’ll never leave the ranch, Chase.”

  She wouldn’t soften up to save her soul. “Perhaps you haven’t realized it yet, but that ranch now belongs to me as well,” he said irritably.

  Jessie’s body stiffened. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, dear, that if I want to stay, I’ll stay.”

  “Suit yourself,” Jessie said i
cily. “But you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

  Chapter 37

  THE ride back to the ranch was a tense, bitter journey, with both Chase and Jessie bristling silently over their stalemate. They reached the valley just before dusk, riding up to the ranch as sullen and uncommunicative as they had been all the way from Cheyenne.

  Jessie was and wasn’t looking forward to the confrontation with Rachel. She wanted Rachel gone, but she realized it would be the last time she would ever see her mother.

  Seeing Rachel waiting by the kitchen door as she came from the stable didn’t bolster Jessie’s confidence that she could handle this meeting in a calm, unemotional way. She drew on past memories to strengthen her determination, memories of her father sitting at the kitchen table with a whiskey bottle, mumbling about the treachery of whores. Memories of him angrily explaining away the absence of her mother. Memories of him shouting about finding Rachel with Will Phengle.

  Rachel blocked the doorway, looking neat and clean in a flower-sprigged dress. Just once Jessie wanted to see that woman with a little dirt on her face, a little dust on her clothes, a few hairs out of place—anything to make her seem more human.

  “Your coming in, does that mean the trouble is over?” Rachel asked as Jessie reached her. “You have the cattle all herded together finally?”

  Jessie just kept walking, forcing Rachel to step back so she could enter the kitchen. She stopped at the kitchen table and took off her hat and gloves, dropping them there. She was tense and getting tenser. Thank God she had slept past her nausea that morning. Her stomach couldn’t handle so much disturbance in one day.

  Rachel was watching her carefully. “Will he be leaving now?”

  Jessie met her gaze firmly. “The answer to all your questions is no, Rachel.”

  “Oh. Well. You did say you wouldn’t be coming back from the range until everything was settled.”

  “We’ll be going back out tomorrow. Actually, Chase and I just came from Cheyenne.”

  “Oh?” Rachel’s brow knit in concern.

  “What?”

  “Well, Jeb took Billy out looking for you. You see, I’m sending Billy back to Chicago. I can’t let him continue to neglect his schooling,” she explained. “But he did so want to say good-bye to you first. I hope they don’t hear you’ve gone to Cheyenne and decide to follow you all the way there!”

  “You get anxious over nothing,” Jessie said impatiently. “Jeb has enough sense not to take the boy that far.”

  “Take the boy where?” Chase asked, appearing in the doorway.

  Rachel wouldn’t look his way, so Jessie had to.

  “To town to find me to say good-bye,” Jessie answered as pleasantly as possible. “She’s sending Billy away for his schooling.”

  Chase raised a questioning brow at Jessie. “You didn’t tell her yet then?”

  “Tell me what?” Rachel demanded.

  “I’ll let Jessie have the pleasure, lady,” he said. “I held up coming in here just so she could. What’s the holdup, Jessie? Having trouble finding the words?”

  Jessie gave him a withering look.

  “We went to Cheyenne yesterday to get married, Rachel. Chase is my husband.”

  Rachel looked back and forth between them, slowly appraising but not the tiniest bit surprised.

  “I see,” she said at last. She was smiling. “When you left, Chase, I wondered whether you’d come to your senses. Oh, well, as long as it’s all worked out.” She beamed at them, delighted.

  Jessie was incredulous. “Just what the hell does that mean?”

  “Why, that I knew this would happen, of course,” Rachel said calmly.

  Jessie’s eyes flashed. “That’s impossible!”

  “Is it? Any two people who affect each other the way you two do are destined for each other. I can’t tell you how delighted I am that you realized it.”

  There was a moment of shocked silence. “How can you say that? You turned against him, remember?”

  “Yes.” Rachel smiled. “And when I did, you defended him. You might call it…a bit of strategy.”

  “I call it a crock!” Jessie snapped. “Strategy!”

  Chase chuckled. “Did you really defend me, sweetheart?”

  Jessie glared at him furiously, then glared at Rachel. No words would come that could adequately express her anger, so she swung around and left them.

  Chase was still amused and grinning when his eyes met Rachel’s. “You sure had me fooled, lady. You had Jessie fooled, too. You know that’s why her temper’s up, don’t you? She had you figured for a different reaction altogether.”

  “I know.” Rachel smiled. “I shouldn’t have tried trickery with her. It’s not that I wasn’t upset over what you did to begin with, mind you, Chase Summers.”

  “Naturally,” Chase agreed, solemn-faced.

  “But I felt so sure you were right for each other,” she went on.

  Chase was chagrined. If only she knew the truth about why they were married.

  “Don’t worry,” he offered. “She’ll calm down.”

  “Will she? Before I leave?”

  “When are you leaving?”

  “I was going to put Billy on the train tomorrow. There’s no point in my not going with him now, is there?”

  “That soon?”

  “Yes. So I’d better talk to Jessica now, before she has a chance to stew too long. I can’t leave here with her angry.”

  “Well, if you’re going to talk to her, Rachel, don’t you think it’s time you cleared the air about some other things as well? It may be the last chance you’ll have to make her see your side of the past.”

  Rachel’s smile faded. “I suppose I should try—again. Maybe if she knows I’m leaving, she’ll hear me out this time.”

  Rachel didn’t wait for Jessie to answer her knock, but opened the door to her room and stepped determinedly inside. One look at Jessie’s cold face and she nearly faltered. She had no idea how to begin.

  “Ah…Kate started a roast, and it’s almost done. Will you be joining us for dinner, Jessica?”

  “No.”

  “I wish you would reconsider,” Rachel said evenly. “It will be the last time we can dine as a family. I will be leaving with Billy in the morning.”

  There was a pause. “I never considered us a family, Rachel. And I can’t say I’m sorry you’re going. You won’t mind if I’m not around to see you off? I do have work to do, you know.”

  Rachel felt the sting of those words like a slap. She wanted to run, but she couldn’t leave like that. She knew she would never forgive herself if she didn’t make a full effort this one last time.

  “Why would you never listen to my side of it?” Rachel said abruptly.

  Jessie turned away and stared out the window. “Why? So you could malign Thomas and make him out to be a liar? He was a hard man to love, even to like, but he was all I had. If I thought the hell of these last ten years had been for nothing, I would dig up his grave and put a few more bullets into his carcass. But when a man tells the same story, drunk or sober, it usually tends to be the truth.”

  “The truth as he believes it, yes. But what if the truth as he saw it wasn’t the truth at all?”

  Jessie turned around slowly. Her eyes were as hard as turquoise stones. “All right. You’ve been dying to say it ever since you got here, so say it and then get out.”

  “I was never unfaithful to your father, Jessica.”

  “Of course. And next you’ll be telling me Billy is Thomas Blair’s son.”

  “He is.”

  The words were barely audible, but Jessie heard them.

  “Damn you, if that’s the truth, why didn’t you tell him before you left? You know that all he ever wanted was a son!”

  “It was too late to tell him anything, even if I could have.”

  “A nice try, Rachel,” Jessie sneered. “I’m not buying it. He saw you with his own eyes in bed with Will Phengle—in your bed. He’d been gone a month, a m
onth you no doubt took advantage of to be with your lover the whole time. If Billy is anyone’s son, he’s Phengle’s.”

  “My God!” Rachel turned quite pale. She sat down on Jessie’s bed. “That night…Thomas mentioned Will, but he never said exactly what set him off into such a blind rage. In my own bed!”

  “That’s good, Rachel,” Jessie said dryly. “That’s really excellent. You have truly missed your calling.”

  Jessie’s sarcasm sparked Rachel’s usually placid temper. “If your father saw Will Phengle making love to a woman in my bed, then that woman had to be Kate, because it wasn’t me, Jessica. I wasn’t at the ranch that whole day.” She stopped, then went on. “A homesteader had come by to ask for my help that morning because his wife was in labor. The wife and baby both died. I came home that night sick with exhaustion and anxiety. You had been a difficult birth, you see, and I knew I was pregnant again. There was no doctor even remotely near here, not back then.”

  “It was a miracle Thomas didn’t kill Billy, he beat me so badly the moment I walked into the house. He never gave me a chance to say anything, Jessica, anything. After he was finished, I couldn’t speak. My jaw was broken, and I was barely conscious.

  “Ask Kate. She was the only other woman here, Jessica, so it had to be her with Will. Ask her.”

  Jessie said nothing. Her expression didn’t change, and when she finally spoke her voice was hard. “You’ve had ten years to perfect that story. Who’s here to deny it? Phengle isn’t. Thomas isn’t. Kate will naturally deny it, but she’s just an Indian, and who would believe her over you, right?”

  “Ask her, Jessica,” Rachel pleaded quietly.

  “I wouldn’t demean her by asking her such a thing. My God, do you realize what you’re implying?” Jessie’s voice rose. “You’re saying Kate held her tongue all these years, that she never stepped forward to right a terrible wrong! Why would she keep silent? What for? This place was hell with Thomas’s hate. There was never any warmth here. Why would she let that go on?”