“You’re stupid to do this,” she couldn’t stop herself from whispering. “It won’t work. All your suffering will go for naught.”
He drew to a stop, his gaze holding hers and cutting off her breath. “Will it? Six weeks is a long while. Every time you hear that pick hit rock, remember this: I’m doing it for you.”
He bent and laid the package on her lap. “Open it,” he whispered.
Cassandra lowered her gaze to the package. “What is it?”
“Look and see for yourself.”
She tugged at the twine and peeled away the paper. Inside lay a pair of patent leather slippers, like those she’d once admired in Miss Dryden’s dress shop window. Tears blurred her vision as she stared down at them.
“If I didn’t care about you,” he said softly, “would I remember the things you wished for, Cassandra? Would I even have bothered to find out?”
Cassandra shoved the slippers off her lap and made fists in the wool blanket. “I’m not for sale, Luke. Not for any price.”
He smiled slightly. Then he turned and disappeared into the blackness.
“Crazy son of a bitch,” Milo Zerek muttered under his breath after lunch later that day. He pushed up from his bed on one arm, shaking his head. “Crazy, mule-headed, stubborn son of a bitch!”
Startled to hear her papa swear, Cassandra glanced up from the bucket where she was busy washing dishes. Her father was looking over at Ambrose.
“Did you see those rags on his hands?” Milo asked his older son softly. “Soaked through with blood.”
Ambrose, who’d been sipping coffee from a tin cup, emptied the mug with an angry fling of his arm. “Don’t go letting him get to you, Papa. The bastard came up here to eat his lunch in the hopes we’d notice. Don’t you see? He wanted you to look at that blood and feel guilty. And it’s working.”
Milo sighed and looked over at Cassandra. “What drives a man to punish himself like that?”
Cassandra met her father’s gaze evenly. “The man bleeds like any other, Papa. So, what? It changes nothing.”
“She’s right,” Ambrose seconded. “Remember that paper he made her sign. And the shame.”
Milo grunted as he sat up, a hand splayed over his chest. Concern for him made Cassandra’s heart jump about like a confused toad in a frog-leaping contest. “Papa, are you all right?”
“I’m fine, lass. Healing good. Just a little sore.”
Unconvinced because of the deep lines pleating his forehead and the shadowy expression in his eyes, Cassandra gazed at him, her hands frozen in mid-motion. “We’re supposed to change your bandages today. Maybe I should have a look.”
“I said I’m fine, and that’s the end of it!” Milo retorted with a snappishness that was uncharacteristic of him. He grimaced as he sought a comfortable sitting position. Khristos leaped up from his rock by the fire to run over and support his papa’s back. “Leave off, lad. Let me be.”
Khristos moved back, dropping to his knees on Milo’s pallet. “But, Papa, you look all sick-like,” the boy said, echoing Cassandra’s thoughts.
Milo sighed and turned his head to gaze down into the tunnel. The steady ring of steel hitting rock drifted up from the dig to them. “Damn him,” he finally said softly. “Every time I hear that pick drive home, I can almost feel the pain of it.”
“That’s exactly his aim,” Ambrose reminded him. “Just block it out, Papa. He won’t come back tomorrow. I’ve seen better men than him unable to work on the third day when they’re unaccustomed to swinging a pick. He’ll be lucky to roll out of bed and even luckier if he can walk.”
Milo’s mouth tightened. “That’s just it,” he said. “I’ve experienced it. You’ve experienced it. The pain in your back and shoulders and arms taking your breath every time you move. Yet he keeps swinging. He hasn’t done this kind of labor in a long, long time, Ambrose. You can’t tell me he isn’t suffering the agonies of the damned right now.”
Ambrose, who was occupying the rock Cassandra often sat on, bent his dark head, arms propped on his knees, hands dangling between them. “You aren’t starting to feel sorry for that bastard, are you?”
Milo hauled in a deep, shaky breath, the effort clearly causing him discomfort, for he once again grabbed for his chest. “I’m just wondering if maybe I wasn’t a little too quick to judge him, that’s all. Why? That’s the question I keep asking myself. What man in his right mind would put himself through this for what lies between a woman’s—”
Milo broke off, his face flushing scarlet. He glanced apologetically at Cassandra. She averted her gaze, a suffocating sensation filling her chest.
“I’m sorry, lass. I didn’t mean to talk foul,” her father said hoarsely. “It’s just that I’m starting to question my own good sense.”
“No, Papa!” Ambrose put in, the thunder back in his frown.
“This is between me and your sister, Ambrose. I’ll thank you to let me say what needs saying.” Milo shifted his gaze to Cassandra’s face, his own frightfully pale. “Hear me, girl. I’ve been lying here thinking maybe I was a little too quick to snatch you away from him and talk so hard against him. A man doesn’t swing a sledge with hands that are nothing but raw, bleeding meat unless he cares for a woman, and cares deeply. Maybe you should—”
Cassandra cut him off by springing to her feet and throwing the rag she’d been using to wash dishes onto the ground. The sodden cloth hit the earth with a wet splish that seemed to echo in the tunnel.
“Stop it, both of you!” she cried, her hands clenched at her sides. “All this talk, like I’m nothing more than a brainless child.” She held up her hands. “You were right about Luke Taggart. He’s nothing but a conniving rake, a man without a conscience. You asked me to harden my heart toward him, and I have! Don’t be changing your mind now!”
Wheeling, Cassandra ran from the mine, shame scalding her cheeks. Though her father had cut himself short, he’d nearly said Luke wouldn’t swing a pick with bleeding, sore hands if all he wanted was what lay between her legs. It was humiliating to be discussed in such terms, especially in her presence. As if a woman’s greatest worth and most important function in men’s eyes was the physical pleasure she could provide.
At the creek, Cassandra sought refuge in a thick copse and sank down on a log. Mindless of the rain, she singled out a leaf to stare at, feeling a certain kinship with the triangle of green as it was pounded and buffeted by the wind and rain. Luke, her papa, the circumstances she suddenly found herself in—like that leaf, she felt pummeled and wind-tossed, unable to control her life.
Pregnant. She kept remembering the clause in the contract she’d signed that had stripped her of any legal right to her baby. Her papa was a good, kindly man with a heart as big as these Colorado mountains, and always before, she’d trusted his judgment implicitly. But not this time. If he began to waffle about his feelings toward Luke, it would be up to her to remain steadfast.
The bottom line was, she knew Luke Taggart better than anyone. She’d looked into his twinkling, expressive, convincing gaze while he lied to her through his teeth. She’d been completely taken in by his charm. Oh, yes, she knew better than anyone else how treacherously sincere he could seem.
TWENTY-EIGHT
For two weeks, Luke showed up at the Zerek mine shortly before dawn every morning and worked like a slave until nearly dark, stopping only to eat lunch. After the third day, Ambrose finally relented and went down to work beside Luke. Over the course of the next week, the two of them unearthed enough bits of gold to buy supplies to feed the Zerek family for the next month.
“By gum, there is some gold in that hole,” Milo said with unconcealed delight when Ambrose held up a vial of sparkling dust for his father to appraise. “I guess my nose wasn’t so far wrong, after all.”
Luke, who for the first time had joined the Zereks at their evening campfire, stood with his feet spread, his arms hanging loosely at his sides, his hands wrapped in crimson-stained bandages. Exhaustion
slumped his broad shoulders, and lines of weariness etched his bronzed face. It looked to Cassandra as if he’d also dropped weight—not that she cared. Maybe he’d made her papa and Ambrose start to doubt their own judgment, but her own convictions still stood firm.
“I’d like your permission to tunnel east, Mr. Zerek,” Luke said softly.
Milo squinted up at him from where he sat cross-legged on his pallet. These last few days, much of his strength had started to return, and his craggy face had lost its sickly pallor, taking on a more ruddy glow. “Why east?”
Luke rubbed at his jaw with the back of his wrist, undoubtedly to make sure everyone in her family saw how badly his hands had been bleeding, Cassandra thought testily. She fixed her gaze on the fire, refusing to reward his fine theatrical performance with so much as a second of her notice.
“I could be wrong, but I think that’s where the gold is,” Luke finally replied.
“Another tunnel? It’d take new timbers,” Milo pointed out. “That means money’d have to be spent.”
Cassandra braced herself, convinced Luke would offer to become an investor. Instead, he surprised her by saying, “You’ve got the capital in those bottles. It takes spending money to make it.”
Cassandra shot a look at the vial Ambrose held. That gold dust wasn’t going to buy any tunneling timbers. They were going to need the money it brought to get a wagon, so they could get out of these mountains before the first heavy snow.
She fixed a worried gaze on her papa. Milo’s eyes were glinting, which was a bad sign. Cassandra knew that look: Gold fever. Her papa had had a bad case of it for years, and once he got on the trail of what he called “a big find,” she’d be hard put convincing him to leave here. She would have to talk to him soon, she decided, to tell him about the baby. Once he realized the urgency, he’d be as anxious as she was to get away from Black Jack. He wouldn’t want any grandchild of his to be raised by a man as heartless as Luke Taggart.
Like a portent of doom, snow was falling when Cassandra awakened the next morning. Shuddering with the cold, she huddled under the cloak of her wool blanket and stood at the mouth of the tunnel to gaze out at the drifting flakes of white, a sight she’d always delighted in. Only now, she didn’t envision carolers trudging through pristine drifts to sing Christmas songs to their neighbors. No thoughts of flickering Christmas tree candles or gaily wrapped packages or sugarplums danced through her mind. All she could think about was the mountains, and how quickly they would become impassable once the snowstorms of winter finally struck.
Directly after breakfast, when Khristos had gone off to play in the fluffy white stuff and Ambrose had disappeared into the tunnel with Luke to start the day’s work, Cassandra approached her father.
“Papa, I have to talk to you,” she whispered as she sat down beside him on his pallet of cast-off quilts they’d been given by Father Tully.
Her father settled a loving gaze on her. “I’m glad, for I’ve been wanting to talk with you as well.”
“What about?”
He smiled slightly. “You go first.”
Beneath the blanket she had draped around her, Cassandra pressed a protective hand over her waist. “Prepare yourself for a bit of a shock, Papa.”
He inclined his head. “I’m braced.”
She sucked in breath. “I’m pregnant.”
“Ah…I suspected as much.”
She shot him a startled look. “Am I showing, do you mean?” The thought that Luke might have guessed as well nearly made her heart stop. “Oh, no!”
“You’re not showing, Cassie, love. But there have been other signs.” He reached up to smooth her hair. “I’ve fathered three children, you know. And that’s not counting the four wee babes your mama lost. I know what an expectant mother goes through, especially early on. You’ve not been eating much. And you take so many trips out yonder to douse the bushes, I’d swear you were working fire brigade. I’ve also heard you retching a couple of times.”
Cassandra bent her head, relieved she wasn’t showing, yet embarrassed even so. After a long moment, she said, “You have to get me away from here. I know you aren’t up to traveling yet, and I’m sorry to burden you with such a worry right now. But I was thinking. Maybe if we bought a wagon, we could make you a nice soft bed in the back of it, and we could take it real easy, so as not to jostle you. We could winter in Denver if we had to. Boulder would be better, probably, it being farther away. But—”
“Hold it!” Her papa held up a hand. “Who says we’re going anywhere?”
“Papa,” she whispered urgently, “we have to. If Luke learns about the baby, he’ll take it away from me.” Tears filled her eyes. “I can’t give up my baby. I just can’t.”
Milo sighed and looped an arm around her shoulders to draw her against his chest. “Ah, Cassie, love, what have I done to you? God forgive me.”
Mindful of his wound, which wasn’t yet completely healed, Cassandra clung to him, remembering all the times as a child that he’d held her this way. “Oh, Papa, please, get me away from here. Please don’t let him get my baby. I’d die.”
Milo stroked her hair, then patted her back, much as he always had, his touch comforting her as nothing else could. “Luke isn’t going to take your baby, honey. Trust me on that.”
He suddenly grasped her by the shoulders and forced her to sit upright so he could see her face. His mouth twisted in a sad smile as he wiped the tears from her cheeks. “Just look at you, so pale and with shadows under your eyes. And thin, Cassie, love. You’re starting to look like a scarecrow with bubbies.”
She blushed and ducked her chin. “I could be a rack of bones and still be cursed with those.”
“Cursed or blessed?” He winked at her. “I’d say Luke’s vote would be for the latter.”
Cassandra opened her mouth to protest, but he laid a finger over her lips.
“Cassandra Zerek, you listen to your papa. Until now, God bless you, you’ve always been a good girl and heeded my every word. Now, suddenly, you’re turning mule-headed on me. Am I going to have to turn you over my knee to get your attention?”
She blinked. Her papa had never laid a hand on her in all her life. “My attention? How can you say that, Papa? I’ve never ignored you.”
“No, and more’s the pity. Maybe you should have.” He cupped her chin in his hand. “I’m only a man, Cassie, love. I try to be a good one, but sometimes I make mistakes. My faith tells me to forgive, and I didn’t when I should have. My faith tells me to turn the other cheek, and instead, I struck back.” A suspicious brightness misted his eyes as he ran his gaze over her face. “And, God forgive me, the weapon I used was my daughter. I retaliated against Luke through you, child, and dealt him a fell blow by turning you against him and making you hate and fear him.” He leaned forward to press a kiss against her forehead. “I was wrong to do that.”
Cassandra gulped. “What are you saying? That I should go back to him? Papa, are you forgetting the baby? He could take it!”
Milo chucked her under the chin. “Cassandra, would you say I’m a stupid man?”
“Of course not!”
“Would you say I’ve given you bad advice your whole life long?”
“No.”
“Then listen to me. Luke won’t take your baby from you. I’d stake my life on it. He’d be more likely to lay the world before you and then kiss your feet. The man loves you, sweetheart. It’s there in his eyes, every time he looks at you.”
Cassandra closed her eyes. An awful pain welled up inside her. “Don’t do this to me, Papa. You’re asking me to gamble with my baby!”
“There is no gamble.” He sighed and rested his arms on his bent knees. “I’ll tell you what. Let’s strike a little bargain. Tonight, after Luke goes home, you go down the mountain to talk to him.” He held up a hand to forestall her words. “Hear me out! You go with your heart open and ready to forgive. You tell him about the baby, and that you’re afraid he’ll take it away from you. If he
doesn’t tell you then that he loves you, we’ll buy that wagon and make me a bed in the back of it, and we’ll hightail it for Denver tomorrow, weather allowing.”
“He won’t say he loves me. He’s never said he loves me. Not even when we were getting married would he say the word. He said cherish instead. Don’t you see, Papa? He isn’t capable of the emotion! If I tell him I’m pregnant, he’ll have all the power. He’ll hold that contract over my head. To be with my child, I’ll have to stay the rest of my life with a man who doesn’t love me—if he doesn’t grow bored with me and toss me out on my ear! Think what you’re asking!”
“I already have.” Her papa turned a solemn gaze on her. “You go home to your husband tonight, lass. You have this out with him. Let Luke do his own talking; see what he has to say. If it isn’t that he loves you, I won’t let you be forced to stay with him. I swear it.” He paused a moment, his expression conveying his conviction. “Think about this until you go to see him. He isn’t holding the contract over your head now, is he? If he were, you’d be a prisoner in his home and sharing his bed every night.”
By nightfall, the snow lay ankle deep and fluffed like icy cotton. Cassandra slipped and scrambled for balance beside Ambrose as they descended the mountainside, heading for town. Clinging to her brother’s arm, Cassandra fought desperately to quash the dread that rose within her like bile. Never in all her life had she been as frightened to confront anyone as she was when she contemplated facing Luke.
“Are you mad at Papa for asking you to talk to Luke?” Ambrose asked, his words oddly muffled in the chill night air, as though the drifting snowflakes absorbed some of the sound.
Cassandra considered the question, acutely conscious of the muscle that flexed in Ambrose’s arm when he tensed to support her weight. It didn’t seem all that long ago that they’d been children, romping in the snow like wild little hooligans, their voices and laughter ringing in the air. Ambrose—her older brother, her constant tormentor, yet always her friend. Now, it seemed, he wanted to assume the role of her confidant as well.