Teton Sunrise (Teton Romance Trilogy) (29 page)

“This time my aim was true. This is the man I should have shot a year ago,” Charlie said. His chest
heaved,
a fierce gleam in his eye.

“Alex?” Evelyn called frantically from inside the room. Alex turned his head in her direction.”

“I’ll be right there,” he answered to ease her worry, then directed his gaze back at Charlie.

“I love her,” Charlie said quietly, looking at Alex. “Since Henry brought her back, it’s become clear that I’ll never win her heart.  You have always been in possession of that. Make sure you treat her well.” Charlie met Alex’s stare for a moment, then bent down to grab hold of Henry’s lifeless body. “I’ll take care of him.”

“Charlie,” Alex called. He held out his hand. Charlie glanced at it, then reached forward and shook it. “My father owned 125 acres of good farm land. I don’t know what shape the house is in, but combined with this place, you’ll have quite a nice spread. It’s yours, if you agree to let Evelyn remain here until she is recovered from the birth.”

Charlie nodded slowly. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you need.”

A silent understanding passed between the two. Charlie reached down once again, and grabbed hold of Henry’s legs, dragging his lifeless body down the hall and out of the house.

Alex turned on his heels and rushed back into the room.
Evie
struggled to sit up, and console the crying infant in her arms.

“Is he . . . is Henry . . .?”

Alex nodded, not letting her finish her thought. “I’m sorry,
Evie
. I didn’t want it to end like this. Henry was your brother, after all.”  He sat at the edge of the bed. His eyes searched her weary face, and silent tears rolled down her cheeks.

“He’s someone I didn’t know anymore, Alex,” she said barely above a whisper. “I can’t help but think he would have always tried to find a way to hurt us.”

“I want to wrap you in my arms and hold you,” he said as quietly as he could and still be heard above the baby’s cries.
Evie
sniffed, and smiled.

“Perhaps you should hold your son instead.” She held the swaddled infant toward him, and a jolt of apprehension rushed through him. He swallowed, and tentatively held out his arms. Bending forward, he gathered the bundle to his chest. An intense feeling of love and pride rushed through him, and he gazed down into his son’s red and angry face. Alex stood and moved around the room, slowly swaying his arms back and forth while holding the bundle close to his heart. What if he held him too tight? What if he dropped him?

The baby suddenly stopped crying, and his little lips quivered and puckered. His eyes closed, and he appeared to be content.

Alex looked toward
Evie
, who watched him intently. A smile spread across her face. “I knew you’d be a great father,” she said. Alex grinned back at her.

“What should I do now?” he asked.

“His bassinet is ready for him.” She pointed to a wicker basket that Alex hadn’t noticed before, on the other side of the bed. Slowly, Alex walked around the bed. He didn’t want to let go of his son, but he also wanted to hold the child’s mother in his arms. Carefully, he placed the infant in the basket, and straightened. Observing his sleeping son for another moment, he tore his eyes away and turned toward
Evie
. He sat on the bed, and gathered her into his arms.

“Tomorrow, I’m calling for the preacher. It won’t be a church wedding, but I refuse to spend another day without a piece of paper that says you’re my wife.”

Evie
hugged him tight, then pulled away to kiss his lips. “I love you, Alex Walker, and I’ve told you before,
I
don’t need a piece of paper to know I’m married to you.”

“This is one argument you’re not going to win,
Evie
,” he said. “No one is ever going to take you from me again. And as soon as you’re well enough, I’m taking you and my son home so I can uphold my promise to you.”

“What promise?”
Evie’s
eyebrows
raised
.

He hugged her close and whispered in her ear, “That you will wake up each morning to watch the sun rise above the Tetons.”

Epilogue

Five years later

Laurent
Berard
ran his hand down the length his wife’s silky black hair, and Whispering Waters turned in his arms. Her soft smile sent a warm sensation through his chest.

“Yancey will return with our daughter very shortly. We should take advantage of our time alone,” she breathed against his shoulder, and wrapped her arms around his neck. Laurent groaned. He leaned toward her, and their lips met in a kiss that started slowly and quickly grew in urgency.

“You are insatiable, wife,” he said, and lifted her onto their bed.

“Very soon, we will not have much time to ourselves,” she said huskily, and stared up at him. An expectant look flashed in her eyes.

Laurent’s heart skipped in his chest. His eyes searched his wife’s face. “What are you saying,
mon
amor
?”

“By next spring, you will be a father again.” Her smile grew wide.
“Perhaps a brother this time for Raven.
Perhaps then she will cease to torment Shadow Walker and Evelyn’s sons. She follows poor Joseph around so much, he hides each time they’re together.” She laughed softly. “At least Lucas and she are of the same age, but for some reason she has taken a liking to Joseph.”

Laurent chuckled.  Joy and contentment filled him. He ran his hand along his wife’s flat abdomen, envisioning her full and round with another child growing in her belly. For the first two years of their marriage, they had tried for a baby.  He remembered how Whispering Waters had blamed herself, saying she was barren and useless as a wife. She had watched and doted on Evelyn’s young son, never showing her deep sorrow and perhaps even jealously that her friend was a mother. When Evelyn and Alex announced another pregnancy, Whispering Waters had cried for days. Nothing Laurent could do would snap her out of her sorrow, until one day she came to him, the biggest smile on her face that he’d ever seen. The birth of their daughter, Sophia, who was known as Little Raven among her mother’s people, had been nothing short of a miracle. Now, he would be a father again?

“Perhaps our beautiful daughter will marry Joseph someday.
Although he might be as reluctant as his father was to finally admit his love for Evelyn.”

Whispering Waters laughed. “She will have to behave more like a proper young woman should before he takes notice of her.  All she wants to do is dig in the dirt and steal away his toys. She has not made a good impression on a potential future husband.”

Laurent leaned over his wife and kissed her. “She is only two years old. She still has time. She will grow up to be as beautiful as you, and then no man will be able to resist her. I will have a difficult time fending off all of her suitors.”

“She has our friend Yancey wrapped around her little finger. He loves her as if she was his own daughter.”

Laurent smiled. The eastern dandy certainly had a way with his daughter. “She will miss him when he returns to the big city in the east.” Laurent unbuckled his belt and tossed his pistol on the table in the center of his cabin.

 “Perhaps he will choose to stay here with us. I know of a young woman who would make a suitable wife for him.” Whispering Waters smiled.

Laurent wasn’t sure that Yancey planned to stay in the mountains. He had learned what he had come to learn, and his father was calling him back to the eastern city to run the family business. “He has learned a lot over the years. Perhaps he will stay. He hasn’t said.”

“Let’s not speak of him now, my husband.” Whispering Waters tugged on his shirt.

Laurent kissed his wife. He dropped his belt to the ground and joined her on the bed, then pulled her into his arms. No sooner had he relaxed next to her, when a loud bang jolted them apart. Laurent leapt from the bed, his eyes darting to where his pistol lay on the table a few feet away, then to the man who stood in the doorway. Whispering Waters gasped behind him.

A man wearing a leather patch over his left eye leered at him, exposing rotting black teeth. He held a pistol in each hand, and slowly stepped into the cabin.

“Sabin,” Laurent said quietly. He was alive! The name sent a jolt of dread through him. He knew he couldn’t reach his weapon without getting shot. He took a slow step in front of his wife, his foot stepping on his belt that held his knife.

“We meet again, Laurent,” Oliver Sabin sneered. “I have waited a long time to repay you for what you’ve done to me.”

“I thought you were dead,” Laurent said. He eyed the man’s pistols warily.

Oliver Sabin laughed. “I’m not dead, but you will be, along with your squaw. I also heard you had an offspring. I aim to wipe you and your family off the face of this earth, Laurent.”

Without warning, Sabin fired his pistol. Whispering Waters screamed behind him, and hot pain shot through Laurent’s insides. His hand clutched his stomach, feeling warm liquid oozing into his hand. Before he could reach for his knife, dizziness washed over him, and he sank to the ground. All noise around him sounded far away. Another shot echoed in his head, accompanied by an evil laugh. His wife’s screams died in the background.

Laurent gasped for air, and he tried to get to his feet. A heavy weight shoved him onto his back. Blinking to clear his blurring vision, Laurent stared up into the gleaming eye of his killer.

“Now where is that precious half-breed baby of yours?”

Laurent gritted his teeth. “You will never find her,” he gasped between labored breaths.

Sabin laughed, and straightened. “Oh, I’ll find
her,
you can rest in peace with that, after you die a slow and agonizing death.” Laughing coldly, the man disappeared from view, and an eerie stillness swept through him.

Laurent squeezed his eyes shut, hoping to hear Whispering Water’s soft voice, knowing that he wouldn’t. His wife was dead, and he would join her very soon. The bullet in his stomach would slowly kill him. He didn’t have the strength to move, to be at his wife’s side, so he lay there, waiting for death to come. His eyes closed, and he prayed for Sophia.
His beautiful, raven-haired little girl.
He had no doubt that Sabin would carry out his promise and kill her, too.

All sense of time passing left him. Laurent didn’t know how long he lay on the hard ground, gasping for each breath as the blood drained from his body.

“Laurent?
Oh my dear Lord!”
The faraway voice echoed in his mind. He tried to open his eyes. At the sound of a baby’s cries, he turned his head. A blurry figure bent over him.

“Laurent?”

He recognized Yancey’s voice. The greenhorn grabbed for his hand. It felt so warm, while his was as cold as death itself.

“Take . . .
take
Sophia and run,” he rasped.

“What?” Yancey leaned close to his face.
“Laurent, who did this?”

“Sabin . . . he will kill her, too.”

A sudden urgency raced through him, the last of his strength gone. With one final effort, he grabbed Yancey’s hand, and stared him in the eyes. “Take my daughter. Protect her. He will kill
her,
too . . . swear that you will protect her.”

Yancey stared blankly for a moment,
then
nodded.

Laurent relaxed. “He must never find her,” he gasped,
then
he loosened his grip. His hand fell to the ground, and suddenly there was no more pain, only peace and happiness. A beautiful raven haired young woman smiled down at him, and he closed his eyes, letting the darkness carry him away.

Dear Reader

Teton Sunrise is set in the 1820’s, the decade when the fur trapper and mountain man era west of the Mississippi was at its peak. By the 1840’s, the beaver was nearly trapped to extinction, and silk replaced beaver fur for hats. In 1822, William Henry Ashley advertised in the Missouri Gazette for “enterprising young men to ascend the river Missouri” to trap for beaver. The group of men who joined the expedition became known as Ashley’s Hundred, and included Jim Bridger,
Jedediah
Smith, Hugh Glass, and Thomas Fitzpatrick, among others who would become famous mountain men later on. This was the beginning of the fur companies who employed men to venture into the Rocky Mountains and bring back beaver pelts that were in high demand in the east and overseas. A “company man” was no more than a day laborer, outfitted by the company he worked for, and paid roughly $200 per year for his hard and dangerous work. Everything these trappers caught belonged to the company. A “free trapper” was exactly that. He answered to no one, and made his own decisions. He might join up with a group of other trappers for safety, but he traveled and trapped where he chose, and sold his furs, or
plews
, to whomever he wanted.

Jackson Hole was named for trapper David Jackson, who spent a lot of time trapping the area. A “hole” is a general term that was used by mountain men to describe a valley surrounded by mountains, and so the area where the town of Jackson, Wyoming sits today, was referred to as Jackson’s Hole in the days of the trappers.