Chapter Nineteen
Rachel came slowly awake. Nearby she heard the crackling of a fire, which terrified her for a moment, but then she felt Joseph’s big, hard hand curled warmly around hers and she knew that she was absolutely safe. She slowly lifted her lashes. His darkly burnished face hovered above hers, his beautiful blue eyes cloudy with tenderness.
“There she is, finally coming around,” he said softly. “I thought you were gonna sleep until sometime next week. I tried to tell Doc not to dose you with that much laudanum, but he wouldn’t listen.”
Rachel only dimly recalled Doc’s being there. She glanced uneasily around. She lay on a dark leather sofa in a strange room. A fire crackled cheerfully in the hearth of a large river-rock fireplace. “Where am I?”
“My place. Don’t panic. Every window in this section of the house is boarded over, inside and out. Esa and David’s handiwork. And Ace blocked off the hallway just beyond the water closet. It’s not quite as good as your kitchen, but almost. We brought in a bed before he blocked the hall. We have the place trimmed down to one room, more or less.” He smiled and lifted her hand to trail silky lips lightly over her knuckles. “When I built this house, I think I was building it for you and just didn’t know it. I made the kitchen and sitting room all one area.”
Rachel turned onto her side to better see his face. Moving made her hands hurt. When she glanced down at her knuckles, Joseph said, “You kept them out from under the wet blankets to hold them close around you. The heat from the fire was pretty intense and blistered the backs of your fingers.”
Rachel sank back against the pillows. It all came back to her then—the fire, throwing blankets into the fishpond and draping them around herself to stay safe from the flames, smoke, and heat. “Oh, Joseph.” She gave him a questioning look. “Ray’s dead, isn’t he?”
He nodded, his expression going solemn. “Amanda shot him.”
Rachel squeezed her eyes closed. “Poor Mannie.”
“Who?”
“Mannie. It’s what I’ve always called Aunt Amanda. Ray was her son?”
Joseph kissed her knuckles again. “It’s a long story,” he said.
“Tell me,” she whispered, and so he began. Much later, when he finally stopped talking, Rachel said, “So that’s why my pa always said Mannie had brought shame upon the family name. Because she had a child out of wedlock.”
Joseph nodded. “I guess she never stopped pining for the baby boy she gave away. When she had the falling out with your father and left the ranch, she hired a detective to try to find her son.”
Rachel sighed. “I remember when Ray came to work for Mannie. She was always patting his arm and smoothing his hair. I wasn’t that old back then, about fourteen, I think, but I thought it was odd. I decided that she probably just liked him a lot.”
“A whole lot. He was her son, and she loved him.”
“But she never told anyone?”
Joseph ran a hand through his hair. The strands fell back to his shoulders, glistening like threads of spun gold. “Darby rode over a bit ago. He has the whole story now, straight from Amanda, and he wanted me to hear it first so I might explain it all to you.”
Rachel searched his gaze. “Is it bad?”
“Let’s just say your aunt Amanda isn’t entirely innocent in all of this. But let me start from the first. All right?”
Rachel nodded.
“Years ago, when Amanda was still a fairly young woman, she had a secret place on the Bar H where she often went to be alone. Your great-grandfather Luther Hollister and your grandpa Peter didn’t treat her very well. They never quite forgave her for getting pregnant. When their coldness toward her got to be too much, she’d go to her secret place, a cave that she’d found up in the rocks near the creek. One afternoon, she took a lantern with her to see how deep the cave went, and she discovered that there was gold in the rock.
“To spite her father, who’d already informed her that he had cut her out of his will and meant to leave her nothing, she kept the gold a secret, never telling anyone. It was her one little bit of revenge. In her defense, I have to also add that Amanda never thought there was a lot of gold. She had no way of knowing how deep into the rock the vein went, and generally speaking, this area hasn’t proved out to be rich, No Name being a perfect example. Keeping the discovery to herself was more an act of defiance, her only way of striking back at two men who had made her life a misery. She’d not only been forced to give up her baby, but she’d lost the only man she ever truly loved.”
“Darby.”
Joseph reached to smooth Rachel’s hair. She so loved the feel of his touch that she turned her cheek into the palm of his hand.
“Yes, Darby. There’s been a lot of sadness in her life. Finally locating Ray was one of the few things that ever went right for her, or so she thought. He had been adopted by a Kentucky farmer and his wife, mainly so he could help with the work around their place. Ray had a terrible childhood, according to the story he told Amanda, getting whipped for the least infraction, sometimes not getting fed as additional punishment.” Joseph sighed and shrugged. “Who knows the real story? Maybe he was horribly abused, maybe he wasn’t. He could have made it all up to make Amanda feel even more guilty for giving him up as a baby.”
“So he could control her,” Rachel whispered.
Joseph nodded. “We’ll never know. But Amanda did feel terrible for him. She had so little to offer him, really, a small spread that made barely enough to keep the wolves from her door. He was her son, a Hollister by birth, and, in her mind, deserved so much more. She saw no point in legally claiming him as her child. She had no other children to contest her will. At that time, your father had the family ranch and was doing well. She knew he wouldn’t care who got her meager little patch of land. Claiming Ray as her child would have caused a scandal that might have reflected on her loved ones.” He smiled and trailed a fingertip over Rachel’s mouth. “Namely you. She saw no point in causing a bunch of gossip that might hurt you. So she just made Ray Meeks her sole beneficiary so he would get what little she had when she died.”
“Which wasn’t much,” Rachel observed.
“No, not much. So to make up for it, Amanda told Ray about the cave on her family’s land. If he was careful, he could sneak in and chip out some gold now and again. Small compensation, in her mind. She had no way of knowing that Ray would discover a veritable fortune inside that cave, enough gold that he would kill to protect the secret.”
Joseph stared at the fire thoughtfully. “The day your family was killed, I believe one of you children went up into the rocks and came upon the cave.”
Memories flashed through Rachel’s mind in a dizzying rush. “Tansy,” she whispered raggedly. “I remember that now. She went traipsing off right before lunch, and Ma sent me and Daniel to find her. She was already coming back down the hill when we came upon her. I remember her saying that she’d found a dark, scary place, and had seen a spook looking out at her. She was fanciful and often told whoppers. Daniel and I pretended to be interested, but we didn’t take her seriously.” An awful pain moved through Rachel’s chest. “We went back down to the creek and had lunch. Daniel and I were still eating when the first shot rang out.”
“It stands to reason that Tansy’s spook was Raymond Meeks,” Joseph said thickly. “Tansy had seen the cave and possibly his mining paraphernalia. He knew she would probably tell. He couldn’t take that chance, so he rode down the hill and opened fire on all of you, his hope being that Estyn Beiler, the marshal back then, would think it to be a random act, some drunked-up plug-ugly who happened onto your land and decided to do a little target practice.”
Rachel felt sick, physically sick.
“Only that wasn’t how it went. Instead, Amanda Hollister was the prime suspect. If all of you had died, she was next in line to inherit everything. She was the only person who really stood to gain by your deaths—or so everyone believed. You can bet Ray Meeks sweated bullets, terrifi
ed that Beiler would start digging and discover that another person stood to gain as well, namely Ray because he was the sole beneficiary of Amanda Hollister’s will.”
Rachel cupped a hand over her eyes.
“You okay?” Joseph asked softly. “We can let this go, honey. I know it has to be difficult for you to hear.”
Rachel lowered her hand. “No, no. I need to know, Joseph. Then I just want to put it behind me if I can.”
He sighed and resumed talking. “Ray left you for dead that afternoon, not realizing that the bullet glanced off your skull. He was probably in a hell of a snit when he heard you survived. It wasn’t as if he could finish the job, not without raising suspicion again. You went into seclusion, making it almost impossible for him to try to kill you and make it look like an accident. One good thing came of it for Ray, though. With your father dead, all the hired hands quit, and only Darby was left to work your ranch. By exercising a little caution, Ray was able to go to and from the mine with scarcely any risk of being seen. That’s a big spread, and Darby couldn’t be everywhere at once.”
“So he contented himself with that and worked the mine for all these years.”
“Precisely. It wasn’t an ideal situation. He had to do all the picking and digging and hauling on the sly. But judging by what I’ve seen, it was very profitable. Maybe he hoped to eventually play the mine out, pull up stakes, and live like a king somewhere else. I only know that he left you and Darby alone for a good long while.”
“Until Darby rode up into the rocks, searching for a stray.”
“Ray apparently believed that Darby had seen the mine. A fortune was at stake. So Ray shot him in the back. When Darby came riding into my place, my first thought was that he’d taken a stray bullet. But Darby insisted it was too much to be a coincidence and believed he’d been shot by the same person who murdered your family.”
“And you came to my house to look after me.” Rachel smiled sadly. “Something lovely to make up for all the bad, that. I met you.”
He lifted her hand to nibble at the base of her thumb. “Yeah, and just for the record, Mrs. Paxton, I’m as thankful for that turn of events as you are. But I want to finish this.” He smiled and winked at her. “Contrary to what Ray evidently thought, Darby hadn’t seen the mine. And the new marshal, David, was as baffled as Estyn Beiler had been five years ago, with no real clues to solve either shooting incident. It’s highly unlikely that Ray would have done anything else to arouse suspicion if Buddy hadn’t seen or heard him up in the rocks yesterday, raised sand to alert me, and then taken off up there.
“I’ll never know how that dog knew that Ray Meeks was a polecat, but somehow he did. He wasn’t barking a friendly hello, like he normally does. Buddy knew the man was dangerous. When I called him back, he didn’t listen. He just charged on up the hill, and Ray hit him in the head with something to shut him up. When I went looking for my dog, I found the damned mine.”
“And the secret was out.”
“Essentially, and Ray stood to lose a veritable fortune in gold. Even worse, everything else was going to hell in a handbasket as well. His mother had suddenly up and decided to get married. He realized that Darby, as her husband, would have legal right to her property and could probably contest her will, cutting Ray out cold. They were planning to marry in less than a week. He panicked and hatched a plan to kill his mother and you both. He hoped to make Amanda’s death look natural—she is old, after all, and Doc might have thought her heart just stopped. And your death could appear to be the murder it actually was, with all the evidence carefully laid by Ray to implicate the Pritchards.
“It was a pretty clever plan, actually. He apparently eavesdropped on Darby’s conversation with Amanda last night and knew of my and David’s decision to round up a posse to search Jeb’s property at ten this morning. Sometime last night, Ray sneaked into Jeb’s barn to plant a couple bags of gold. Then bright and early this morning, he cut Jeb’s fence wire, herded the Pritchard cows off the property, and then went by Jeb’s place to tell him that his cattle were running all over hell’s creation. When we got to Jeb’s, no one was there. Then Buddy came racing in, acting deranged and trying to make me follow him.” Joseph’s eyes went bright with wetness. “I’m so glad now that I had the good sense to pay attention to that dad-blamed dog. He knew you were in danger.”
Rachel shivered, remembering. “Right after Ray showed up, Buddy started snarling. When Darby scolded him, he ran off and wouldn’t come back. I didn’t know he was going to find you, but I’m ever so glad he did. If you hadn’t come—”
Joseph laid a finger over her lips. “Don’t say it, Rachel. It’s a miracle you survived. Right after I entered the courtyard, a birdhouse exploded from sheer heat. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Buddy saved my life by going for you, Joseph. I can’t leave that unsaid. He knew Ray meant to harm me. Somehow he knew.”
“Maybe dogs can smell evil in a person just like they smell fear. When I reached your place and got you out of the courtyard, I would have believed Ray’s story in a heartbeat if it hadn’t been for Buddy snarling at him. If not for that, everything Ray told me would have played into what I already believed, that the Pritchards were behind everything. I knew Jeb and his boys had been gone from their place when we got over there. Then Ray said he’d seen them riding away from your house right before it went up in flames. It all fit, and I would have believed him, I think.” He sighed. “I feel bad about that now. Jeb’s dirty and unlikable. I almost made a terrible mistake, something I never would have forgiven myself for, all because I don’t like the man.”
Rachel glanced around. “Where is Buddy, by the way? I owe him a big thank-you hug.”
“I figured he deserved a treat and let him go home with Ace tonight so he can play with Cleveland until he drops.”
Rachel laughed softly. “Good. He does deserve a reward. When he comes home, you need to kill a steer so I can feed him steak until it comes out his ears.”
“What about me? Don’t I get a reward?”
Rachel pushed up on an elbow to hook an arm around his neck. “Oh, yes, but I’ve something better in mind for you.”
Rachel smoothed his hair, kissed him just below his ear. “It’s over, Joseph. It’s finally, truly over. From this moment forward, I don’t want to think about Ray Meeks ever again. I want to concentrate on our life together and on making you happy.”
“I can go for that,” he said with a growl. “You sure you’re feeling up to it? You had a pretty horrible experience today.”
A nightmarish experience, and Rachel wanted to put it completely, forever behind her. “I feel fine, thank you. I just need you to help me think about something else.”
Within seconds, he went from serious to passionate, tearing at her clothing, laving her body with kisses. Rachel forgot about the fire—forgot about Ray Meeks—forgot about Mannie.
She was alive, and that had to be celebrated.
Later when they lay satiated in each other’s arms with only a film of sweat separating their naked bodies, Joseph whispered, “Shit.”
“What?”
“I just ripped your shirtwaist, getting it off you.”
Rachel tasted his ear, wanting him again. “It’s okay. I didn’t like that shirtwaist very well, anyway.”
He nibbled just below her jaw. “It was your only shirtwaist. Every other stitch of clothing you owned went up in flames.”
Rachel realized he was right and burst out laughing. “Oh, dear. I guess I’ll have to run around the house stark naked.”
“Hmm. Now there’s a thought. Stupid me. I was thinking more along the lines of going shopping to get you new clothes.”
She nipped the underside of his chin. “Shame on you.”
He grinned and kissed her. Against her lips, he whispered, “No worries. I’ll get you one of my shirts to use as a nightgown for tonight, and tomorrow I’ll go shopping.” He trailed his mouth toward her breasts. Then he went
still and let loose with another curse.
Rachel grinned and ran her hands into his hair, trying to direct him to where she desperately wanted to have his mouth. “What now?”
His wonderful hands cupped her breasts. “Ace boarded off the hallway. I forgot to get any of my clothes out of the bedroom.”
Rachel started to giggle. She was still laughing when Joseph thrust himself deeply into her. Suddenly all thought of laughter abandoned her. Heaven on earth. Caitlin had told her exactly right.
Some time later, Rachel stood before the fire, her only covering a blanket from off the sofa. A loud crash of breaking glass came from the back of the house. She smiled and turned to warm her backside. Joseph, breaking through a window again. Except for it being in his house instead of hers, it seemed they’d come full circle, with one small difference.
This time, she wouldn’t shoot at him when he reached the kitchen. The man had his fine points and was definitely a keeper.
Chapter Twenty
Three months later
Rachel sat in her new courtyard on a bench fashioned for her by No Name’s only sawyer, Ron Christian. It was a gorgeous July afternoon, and she had nothing better to do than enjoy the sunlight that poured down through the iron bars to warm her skin and make her roses and violets bloom.
Heaven. Jesse Chandler, the chimney sweep, had built her another trio of birdhouses, and his wife, Dorothy, a gentle, soft-spoken blonde who made gorgeous candles, had decorated each of them. Harrison Gilpatrick had defied his wife yet again to bring her several more rosebushes, and the first spring buds had now matured into gorgeous full blooms. The patches of lawn were a brilliant summer green. Her new school of goldfish loved their new pond. Everything in Rachel’s world was absolutely right. Joseph had seen to that.
Just as he’d promised, he’d created a safe world for her at his ranch. She had everything she could possibly need at her fingertips within her living area: a water closet, a brand-new washing machine, retractable clotheslines to dry the laundry, and designated areas for comfortable living—a kitchen, a dining room, a bedroom, and a parlor—the only remarkable difference being that now her area was larger because, without knowing it, Joseph had built his house just for her, combining his kitchen, dining area, and sitting room into one large open section. In the days since her near brush with death, he had added on a vestibule, just as he’d promised, and Bubba White had fashioned more ironwork for the doors, ceiling, and gate, making her feel absolutely safe.