Eden released a taut breath. “Feelings make no sense sometimes, Matthew. Rationally, I know none of what happened was my fault, but there are moments when I circle it, just as you said, thinking of everything I might have done differently. If I’d carried my Colts with me in a satchel, I could have defended myself and everyone else. If I’d stayed in my seat and just handed over our valuables, they might not have noticed me.”
He rested his cheek against her hair, and she felt his lips curve in a half smile. “You’d be hard to overlook with that pretty red hair of yours.”
It was Eden’s turn to sigh. “Thank you for talking to me, Matthew. I feel better, and from now on, I’ll try really hard to forget.”
“Forgetting something like that is damned near impossible. Time will help. But what you have to do is make your peace with it and be okay even when you remember.”
“I’ll try.”
“When it gets hard, think of how lucky you are to be alive. My Livvy didn’t survive. After each of them had a turn with her, they went at her with a knife.” His voice went thick. “Our baby died with her.”
Eden lifted her head to search his expression. In the firelight, his eyes glimmered like polished silver. “And you blame yourself.” She didn’t pose it as a question because she heard the guilt ringing in his voice. “Why, Matthew? Doesn’t everything you just said to me also apply to you?”
He puffed air into his cheeks and slowly released it through thinned lips. “It’s different for me. It was my duty to protect Livvy, and I didn’t.” He gazed off into the darkness. “We’d been at the creek for a picnic. It was our special place. I asked her to marry me down there. We celebrated our wedding night and all our anniversaries there. So she chose that place to tell me she was finally in the family way. I didn’t bother to take a rifle or revolver. We were on Lazy J land. There’d never been any trouble in the area. There aren’t even that many rattlesnakes to worry about. So I went down there unarmed.
“As we were driving home, the Sebastians came out of the trees and surrounded the wagon. They wanted our valuables, and all we had with us was Livvy’s wedding band, which wasn’t worth very much. My gold pocket watch was at the shop for repair.” He kept his gaze fixed on some distant place, his face tight with pain. “They were furious because we had nothing to give them, so they jerked Livvy out of the wagon to take it out on her. When I jumped in to defend her, two of them held my arms while Pete pistol-whipped me. After I went down, he started kicking me. Busted some of my ribs and fractured my hip. Then they dragged Livvy off a ways. I could hear her screaming my name, but I’d been beaten half-senseless, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get up. Pretty soon, the screaming stopped.”
“Oh, God, Matthew, how horrible for you.”
“It was far worse for Livvy. The Sebastians go out of their way to inflict pain when they rape a woman. When they finished with her, one of them shot me in the chest. The slug barely missed my heart, and I guess they thought I was dead. I had blood in my eyes, so I couldn’t see which one fired the gun. That’s the last thing I remember, the blast of the gun. My parents got worried when Livvy and I didn’t come home. They came looking for us. I was in a real bad way, and the doctor didn’t think I’d make it. If not for my mother’s efforts, I probably wouldn’t have. When I woke up three weeks later, Livvy and my baby were already buried, and life as I’d known it was over. It was as if everything had been made of blown glass, and quicker than you can snap your fingers, it shattered. That’s why I can never go back. I don’t have it in me to try to glue the pieces together again.”
“Oh, Matthew, I’m so sorry.”
He cleared his throat. His voice was gravelly when he said, “I’ve never told anyone about that day—haven’t been able to talk about it.”
Eden rested her head on his shoulder again. “Well, I’m glad you were able to tell me. You need to have your own words repeated back to you. It wasn’t your fault, and you shouldn’t blame yourself. I didn’t know Livvy, but if she loved you as deeply as you love her, she wouldn’t want you to feel this way.”
“Any man worth his salt protects his wife,” he ground out. “She was a timid little thing, my Livvy. She believed in me and trusted me to keep her safe. Instead, I just lay there by that damned wagon and did nothing while she was raped and murdered.”
“You were badly hurt. So badly hurt you couldn’t get up. How can you blame yourself for that?” Eden touched a fingertip to the paralyzed corner of his mouth. “You were on your own land, Matthew, at a picnic spot you believed was safe. You had no way of knowing that you needed to take a weapon that day. You had no idea the Sebastian Gang was in the area, or that they’d trespass onto the ranch. What happened wasn’t your fault. If someone else told you the story you just told me, would you blame that man for not saving his wife? Even if you’d been armed, it would have been one man against six, and at that time, you probably weren’t very fast with a gun.”
“No, but I should have been,” he whispered gruffly. “Instead I waited until after my wife was dead to practice with a gun. How does that make sense? I should have been prepared for any kind of threat before I asked her to marry me. A man should make sure he’s fit to be a good husband before he takes on the responsibility, and I didn’t do that.”
Eden felt so sad for him—and also for herself. Because of the Sebastians, they’d both endured terrible pain. Would either of them ever get past that, or would it haunt them for the rest of their lives?
“You know what, Matthew?”
“No, what?” he asked shakily.
“The way I see it, the two of us have a choice to make, probably the most important one of our lives. We can forget the terrible times in our lives and try our best to be happy—or we can live in the past and feel awful until the day we die. If we do the latter, the Sebastians win. Even if you finally manage to track them down and send them all to hell, they will still have won.”
“Yeah, I suppose you’re right.”
“I don’t know about you, but that thought doesn’t sit well with me. They got the best of me once, but I can’t allow them to get the best of me again.”
He finally met her gaze. Her heart caught when she saw tears shimmering in his eyes. “You’re quite a lady, Eden Paxton. And you’re right. You need to put it all behind you. Just please understand that it’s a journey I’m not able to make. It wasn’t only me the bastards harmed. My wife and baby died. I’ll never forgive myself for that, never.” He passed a hand over his eyes. “It’s been so long now that I can’t even picture Olivia’s face anymore. Can’t remember the sound of her voice. There have even been times when I’ve wondered what the hell I’m doing out here, chasing men that large posses have failed to catch. But even so, I can’t turn loose of it. Keeping that promise is the one thing from my past that I can still hang on to. I have to finish it.”
“And in the doing, punish yourself forever? Livvy wouldn’t want that. If she’s up in heaven, looking down on you—and I believe she is—her heart is breaking. She would want you to heal and be at peace. She’d want you to be happy. Imagine how painful it would be for you if the situation were reversed, and it was you looking down on her. Wouldn’t you want her to have a good life?”
“Of course I would. If ever anyone deserved to be happy, it was Livvy. She didn’t have a mean bone in her whole body.”
“Neither do you,” Eden told him. “I’m coming to believe that you’re a fine man, Matthew Coulter, and you deserve to be happy, too. Don’t let the Sebastians deprive you of that.”
Eden straightened away from him and reached for her coffee. After taking a sip, she glanced over at him. He sat unmoving, his gaze fixed on the horizon, where ponderosa pines rose in black silhouettes against the darkening sky.
After a few minutes, he stirred, stood up, and went to one of the packs. After rifling through the contents, he came up with a shirt, which he began cutting into strips with his hunting knife. When he approached the fire,
holding the lengths of cloth in one hand, Eden got a bad feeling as she met his gaze. Purposeful was the only way to describe the glint in his eyes.
“How tipsy are you feeling?”
Eden set aside the third drink, which was almost finished. “Why do you ask?”
“When we were down at the creek, I saw a big lump on those ribs of yours,” he said without preamble as he hunkered down in front of her. “They aren’t just bruised, Eden. Pete busted at least two of them, if not three. You should have told me.”
“There isn’t much to be done for broken ribs.”
“True, but wrapping them tight will at least hold them steady. Without binding, if one of them is broken clean in two, you could puncture a lung if you took a tumble off the horse.”
Eden angled a wary look at the strips of cloth he had started knotting together. “I don’t think they’re that bad.”
He continued at his task. “Maybe, maybe not, but there’s no sense in taking a chance. Besides, a tight binding will help ease the pain.”
Eden wasn’t about to strip down naked up top so he could wrap her ribs.
As if he guessed her thoughts, he said, “You can tie your shirttails snug under your protuberances. All I’ll see is your belly and back.”
His use of the word protuberances made her smile in spite of herself. She guessed he’d heard his sisters use the term. “Really, Matthew, the support isn’t necessary.”
“I say it is. Remember our agreement? I’m telling you to shed that coat.”
Reluctantly, Eden took off the jacket and tied her shirttails snugly beneath her breasts. He motioned for her to stand up, his expression so grimly determined that she didn’t know who felt more uncomfortable. As she gained her feet, she nearly lost her balance. He clamped a hand over her shoulder to steady her.
“You okay?”
“I think I’m a little drunk.”
His eyes twinkled with humor. “That was my aim, to relax you. I knew this would be too unnerving for you otherwise.”
It was unnerving for her anyway.
“Suck it in,” he ordered, “and hold it until I make a couple of passes. The tighter I get it, the better.”
It hurt to suck in her stomach. But she held her breath until he’d wrapped the cloth around her twice and told her it was okay to relax. She felt self-conscious, standing before him with her belly bared, but to his credit, he made fast work of the job. Before she knew it, he had finished and told her she could loosen the shirttails to cover herself again. To her surprise, the tight binding did ease the pain in her side. It no longer hurt so much when she moved, and she could take a deep breath.
“Better?”
“Much.”
“Maybe that and the whiskey will help you get a good night’s sleep.”
After spreading out the bedroll, he lay down on his side. When Eden joined him under the blanket, he looped his arm around her waist and moved closer. This time, she didn’t flinch or grab his wrist. She suspected it was because the liquor had numbed her, and she didn’t have the good sense to feel panicky. Drifting in the alcohol-induced haze, she relished the heat of his body, vaguely aware that his hand remained anchored in one place. The realization made her smile sleepily. Maybe some men got out of line with women when they drank, but Matthew Coulter clearly wasn’t one of them.
He reminded her of a gift her brother David had given her on her tenth birthday. It had been during the lean years, when they couldn’t afford fancy paper or many presents, so he’d wrapped it in newspaper, one layer after another, because he had wanted to prolong the opening of gifts for her. Only somehow the newsprint had gotten wet and the ink had bled, creating a sodden, blackened lump that looked extremely unappealing. Not wishing to hurt David’s feelings, Eden had pretended to be excited as she worked to pick away the tape, wondering all the while what awful thing he’d gotten her.
At the very center of that frustrating mess she’d found a beautiful little gold locket on a chain so fine and exquisite that it had felt like a strand of silk against her skin. David had saved back a portion of his wages every week for three months in order to buy it for her, and Eden had treasured it until the day of the train robbery, when she’d put it with all her other valuables in the knotted handkerchief.
She was coming to suspect that Matthew Coulter was very much like that locket in many ways. Before any of the layers had been lifted away, he’d looked extremely unappealing, but he’d cleaned up nicely, and tonight he’d revealed yet another surprise: that his feelings ran deep, strong, and true. If fate allowed them the time, she suspected that he might become a loyal friend.
That was her last conscious thought as she surrendered to exhaustion.
Chapter Eight
The next morning, Eden was dismayed to discover that the clothing they’d hung by the fire was still quite damp, especially the blue jeans. When she mentioned it to Matthew, he glanced up from where he was hunkered over the frying pan and said, “That’s one reason I gave up on washing my clothes very often. When you pack them away wet, they can sour before nightfall if the day’s halfway warm, and then you have to wash them again. That’s a lot of work.”
Scrubbing clothes on a rock was a lot of work, and Eden didn’t want their efforts to be wasted. After considering the situation, she got an idea. “Is there any way we could drape the damp clothes over Herman’s packs? They’ll dry by evening that way, and we’ll have fresh things to wear.”
Matthew frowned thoughtfully. “How would we keep everything from falling off? Those packs rock back and forth when Herman’s walking. Nothing’s going to stay on them unless it’s anchored down.”
After breakfast, Matthew left the damp clothing on the drying rack while he got the animals ready for the trail. Once the gear was on Herman’s back, he stepped away to regard the wooden pack frames. “If I string a line between one packboard and another, do you think tucking the clothes partly under the rope would hold them fast?”
“It’s worth a try,” Eden replied. “I can keep an eye on them. If they start to work loose, we can stop and tuck them back under the line again.”
In minutes, Matthew had their wet clothes dangling from the packs. Eden couldn’t help but laugh. “Poor Herman. He’s become a walking clothesline.”
Matthew chuckled. “He doesn’t care how he looks, and I think it’s going to work.” He glanced at Eden with a smile. “Good idea.”
Before Eden knew it, she was back in the saddle and struggling to keep the grueling pace that Matthew had no choice but to set. They rode in another circle, but in an entirely different area today, with Matthew yet again taking to a stream and brushing away their tracks at other times. Ever concerned for the horses, he stopped for a breakfast break, again for lunch, and also in the midafternoon, always removing the gear from the animals’ backs to rub them down.
That evening, Eden was so spent that Matthew announced that he would do all the chores, which made her feel useless and more than a little guilty. It wasn’t in her nature to lounge around while others worked, but her ribs, though less uncomfortable with the binding, still hurt, and the relentless pain seemed to have sapped what little strength she had.
When she went to the creek to bathe, she was once again assailed with an urge to scour her skin. This time, she was prepared for the irrational feelings that swamped her and was able to overcome them. The taint was all in her imagination, she assured herself. And Matthew was right: She couldn’t wash away the memories. She simply had to deal with them.
After drying off, she was unable to rewrap her midriff tightly enough to do any good, so she stuffed the binding into a jacket pocket and washed her clothing without any rib support. Each time she rubbed the jeans over the rock, the pain in her side grew so intense that black spots danced before her eyes.
On the way back to camp, she wrestled with the knowledge that she would have to ask Matthew to wrap her ribs again, and this time she would have to endure the embarrassment without any whiskey to nu
mb her sensibilities. That was not a pleasant thought, but she saw no way around it unless she wanted to ride all day tomorrow without the binding.
Matthew had soaked beans all day in a leather bladder of water suspended from his saddle horn, and after she’d draped her wet laundry over another makeshift drying rack, she saw that he already had the legumes cooking over a bed of red-hot embers. He’d tossed in pieces of jerky, chopped onion, and carrots to flavor the concoction, and when he gave it a stir, the aroma was divine. Eden winced as she lowered herself to the ground at the opposite side of the fire from him.
Matthew cocked a dark eyebrow at her, his amazing blue eyes locking on hers. “You need me to wrap your middle again?”
“If you wouldn’t mind,” she replied. “I tried to do it myself, but I can’t get it tight enough.”
“Of course I don’t mind.” He searched her expression and smiled slightly. “Knot your shirttails.”
Eden’s hands trembled as she removed the jacket and tied the shirttails beneath her breasts. As Matthew approached her, she got up, fleetingly met his gaze, and then averted her face, unable to bear looking at him when she felt so exposed.
“Honey, there’s no reason to feel self-conscious. When it comes to partially unveiled ladies, I go blind in one eye and can’t see out of the other one. Where’s the binding?”
His use of an endearment startled Eden. “I, um, put it in my coat pocket.”
He bent down to search for it. When he straightened, he spent a moment untangling the cloth. She stared at his big hands, remembering the warmth that radiated from them at night, but still dreading their touch.
“Suck it up,” he said. “I promise to be quick about it. I’ve roped, thrown, and hog-tied a steer in less than a minute and a half during rodeo competition. I guess I can make fast work of this.”