Never Love a Lawman (33 page)

“Either.” She dropped her elbow and let her head fall to the pillow. The rest of her reply was slightly muffled. “Both.”

“So not your sister.” A particularly ugly thought removed the hint of teasing from his voice. “Rachel?”

She was immediately aware of the change in him, though unaware of the source of it. Tension was suddenly palpable. She lifted her head a fraction. “What is it?”

“Was it Foster Maddox?”

At first she truly didn’t understand what he was asking her. “Foster? What about him?” Then she realized the direction his thoughts had taken him. “No, Wyatt,” she said firmly. “Foster only talked about wanting me in his bed. He was never more explicit than that. His attempts at forcing me were just that. Attempts.” She felt the tension that had set his frame so rigidly begin to ease. “If you must know, and it seems you must, I came upon an informative book at Miss LaRosa’s.”

Wyatt felt as if he had legs under him again. He pushed Foster Maddox to the back of his mind. “Informative?”

“A primer, one might say.”

“I doubt anyone would say that.”

“Well, I would. It was filled with illustrated lessons.”

“Is that right? I imagine you felt compelled to study it.”

“Of course. Virginia was mortified when she saw me examining it, and she really didn’t want to answer my questions, but I explained that I would put my questions to one of the other girls and that decided her. I don’t think she wanted me to have a conversation with Miss LaRosa.”

“Probably not,” said Wyatt.

“There would have been some awkwardness there, I think.”

“You don’t say.” Death Valley was not as dry as Wyatt’s tone.

“Well, it didn’t come to that. It also could be that Virginia was worried I’d keep her wedding dress hostage, though where she would get an idea like that, I can’t imagine.”

“Strange, I’m not having that same problem.” Wyatt rubbed his chin with the back of his knuckles. “You want to tell her that she did a damn fine job explaining things or should I?” He managed to avoid the fist Rachel thrust in his direction, catching her by the wrist and pulling her across the small distance that separated them.

She settled quickly and hugged his side, resting her head against his shoulder and securing him with an arm across his chest. “I was nervous,” she confessed, whispering.

“I couldn’t tell.”

“Really?” That pleased her ridiculously. “I thought you’d hear my heart pounding.”

“Above my own? Not likely.”

Rachel smiled, content. Not long after, she fell asleep in the middle of a thought.

Wyatt supported her until his shoulder went numb; then he eased out from under her. He didn’t think he could get her under the covers without waking her, so he drew the quilt up from the foot of the bed. Giving her a last look, he moved quietly to the adjoining washroom. When he came out, barefoot and stripped to a pair of drawers, it was apparent that she hadn’t stirred. Wyatt padded to the kitchen to add wood to the stove and adjust the flue and damper. He did the same in the parlor, ensuring that the house would remain relatively warm until shortly after he rose in the morning. He turned back the lamp beside his reading chair and the one where Rachel had been sewing, then wandered to the front window and drew back the lace curtain. The sky was milky, an effect of a full moon and a cloud cover. The flagstone walk and gated entrance were visible, but beyond that everything was a dark gray silhouette.

He hadn’t seen Sid Walker today, but he didn’t require the old miner’s rheumatic bones to know that a storm was on the way. There’d been an odd lull in the snowfall that everyone had come to expect in late autumn, and some folks were moved to say that it was downright balmy. As a Boston native, Wyatt didn’t think he had ever experienced balmy, so he listened to the talk without comment. He’d noticed that a certain foreboding accompanied all the discussion, the general feeling being that the weather would turn on them hard.

Looking at the sky now, Wyatt suspected it was about to happen.

He wandered through the darkened room, stubbed his toe on the chest of photographs that had been left lying on the floor in the wake of more important matters, and cursed under his breath as he hobbled off to the bedroom.

Rachel was still sleeping, although she had apparently roused herself long enough to put herself between the sheets. He noticed that while she’d stolen all the covers for herself, she was at least still in the middle of the bed. He wouldn’t have to drag her back from the edge.

Wyatt left the lamp burning on the dresser but turned it back so that light merely flickered inside the etched glass globe. He slid into bed beside her and tugged some of the blankets over him, although she was the real source of warmth. It was not unpleasant when she turned on her side and attached herself to him. He pressed his lips to the crown of her dark hair. He thought he heard her sigh, but it could have been his own.

Sleep claimed him.

Rachel was sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed when he woke. The lamp that he had been careful to turn back had been given a twist in the other direction and the wick glowed brightly, casting light over her shoulder. Her concession to the room’s persistent chill was the quilt she’d tucked around her. Only the upper portion of her face was visible above it. From Wyatt’s vantage point, her hands were hidden behind the open lid of the chest she’d retrieved from the parlor. She appeared to be studying more photographs, her concentration so centered on her task that she failed to notice that he was watching her.

He took shameless advantage of it, doing nothing to call attention to himself.

Her head was bent slightly forward, her eyes lowered. He could tell, though, when her gaze shifted between photographs because the shape of her mouth invariably changed. Sometimes her lips parted. Sometimes the tip of her tongue rested at one corner. Sometimes she simply smiled. Occasionally her eyebrows would lift, or she would rub the bridge of her nose with a knuckle, but mostly it was the expressive tilt of her mouth that he watched.

That was how he knew when she finally came upon the photograph that he’d been alternately hoping and dreading that she would find.

It was not merely the suggestion of a frown that gave her away, but the quick indrawn breath that followed. She caught her bottom lip between her teeth and worried it absently as she made her study, angling her head, not the photograph.

“That’s Sylvie,” he said quietly.

Rachel looked up, startled. He’d spoken her precise thought. “How did you know?”

He didn’t think he could explain it properly, and after a moment, said, “Something in your face, I suppose.” He thrust an arm outside the covers and held out his hand. “May I?”

Nodding, Rachel leaned forward and extended her arm over the open chest lid and placed the photograph between Wyatt’s fingertips. “When did you make the picture?”

Wyatt stared at the photograph. The sepia tones softened Sylvianna’s features, making her seem more amenable to sitting for her portrait than she’d actually been. “A few months after I brought her here,” he said. “We had wedding portraits made in Boston, but they were in a trunk that didn’t follow us here. We never recovered it, and Sylvie…well, she never forgave me.”

He returned the photograph to Rachel, pushed upright, and leaned against the headboard. “She wanted to go to Denver for another portrait, but I convinced her to allow me to make one first. If she didn’t like it, I promised to take her to Denver.”

Rachel’s eyes fell on Sylvie’s heart-shaped face. Her chin was small, but it jutted forward at a sharp angle, hinting at her resentment. Her lightly colored eyes were steady, even compelling. The bridge of her nose was narrow, but the line of her mouth was full. She had high cheekbones and finely arched eyebrows. Her hair curled softly across her forehead and was coiled in a loose knot at the crown of her head. Red? she wondered. Perhaps strawberry blonde.

“I don’t think she wanted to like it,” Rachel said. “But it’s beautiful all the same.
She’s
beautiful.”

“Yes,” he said. “She is.” It did not seem strange to think of Sylvianna in the present tense. “And you’re right. She didn’t want to like it. She didn’t want to like anything about being away from Boston. I should have sent her back, but I wouldn’t make the decision for her, and she wouldn’t leave. If you’re thinking that was admirable, that her reluctance was because of the vows we took, then—”

“I was thinking she stayed because she loved you and that being away from you was more difficult than being away from Boston.”

“That was part of it,” he said quietly. There was regret in his eyes and a faint, rueful tilt to his mouth.

“Then what was the other part?”

“Punishment.”

Inwardly, Rachel recoiled from the notion. “You don’t mean that.” But even as she said it, she saw that he meant exactly that. She hardly knew what to say, so she fell back on an inadequate “I’m sorry.”

“Not for me, I hope,” he said roughly. “Sylvie deserves it. You shouldn’t forget that I punished her. That was the state of our marriage almost from the beginning, impossible to reconcile.”

“But you loved her.”

“Yes, I did. It made both of us miserable.”

Rachel was quiet, contemplative. It made a terrible kind of sense that neither would allow themselves to be happy at the expense of the other, but that they also could not live apart. Was it love that truly kept them together or something else? She looked at the photograph again and decided that perhaps the thrust of that small jaw wasn’t resentment at all, but determination, and the gaze was more gently persuasive than compelling.

“What happened, Wyatt? In the end, I mean. How did Sylvianna die?”

“I killed her.”

Rachel could have understood if he’d hesitated, or offered it reluctantly, but his flat declaration surprised her and revealed the certainty with which he had come to accept it. She said quietly, “I doubt that it’s true in the way you intend for me to believe.”

He shrugged. “It’s straightforward, Rachel. I was in the mountains making photographs, and she was at home. She hated when I left her, especially when she knew I’d be gone for days at a time, so we argued as I was leaving. I invited her to come with me. She was a good, confident rider, and sometimes she would accompany me. But not this time. She was insistent about staying back, more insistent than usual that I remain with her. She wouldn’t explain herself, so I thought we were repeating one of those arguments we had from time to time, the kind that start in a fog and end up clearing the air for a while.”

“So you left,” said Rachel.

He nodded. “I was gone four days. I wasn’t sheriff then. I didn’t have responsibilities to the town, only to Sylvie. And I was gone four days.”

Rachel slowly closed the lid on the chest. She still held the photograph in her hands, but didn’t glance toward it. Her eyes remained on Wyatt’s.

“Grace and Estella had her laid out on our bed when I got home. It was Ned and a couple of Sid’s boys that rode out to find me. I was heading back by then, but that hardly mattered. Sylvie didn’t know I was coming home.” He took a steadying breath, absently rubbed his palm over his knee. “She was taking a walk with the pastor’s wife. There was a disagreement over cards at the Miner Key between a couple of sharps. Rudy Martin told them to take it into the street. He just didn’t want his place busted up in a brawl. He didn’t know they were going to shoot it out with their fancy derringers.

“Sylvie was hit when the first shot went wide. It nicked an artery in her neck. She bled to death in Mrs. Duun’s arms. Doc never had a chance with her.”

“That’s a tragedy, Wyatt, but you aren’t responsible.”

“Some days I’m almost convinced of it. Most days, not. I brought her here, remember. That’s the part that always sticks. And I know, too, that if I’d been the one walking with her that day, there would have been a different outcome.”

“You can’t possibly know that.”

“But I do. I would have been walking on the street side of the sidewalk, and Sylvie would have been on the inside. That’s what a man does for a woman. He protects her by providing escort on the outside. That bullet should have been mine, Rachel. I would have taken it in the back, not the neck, and I might not even have died, but I wasn’t there, and Sylvianna was.”

Rachel closed her eyes momentarily, remembering the evening they’d left the Commodore together. Wyatt had moved immediately to the outside, the time-honored way of making certain a woman wasn’t splashed by carriages rollicking through puddles or wasn’t accosted by clumps of mud thrown up by a horse’s hooves. Or, in Reidsville, wasn’t the victim of a stray bullet.

“It’s not important that you say anything, Rachel. You looked at my photographs and thought you knew my soul, but you didn’t know this. It seemed to me that you should.”

“Then say it all, Wyatt.”

Perhaps she did know his soul, even the darkest regions, because she was pressing him to say the thing that always stuck in his throat, the thing that was known to one other person at the time of his wife’s death and only shared with him afterward with the greatest reluctance. But he had pressed Doc Diggins just as Rachel was pressing him, and he wondered if the time finally had come to say it aloud. To say it all.

“Sylvie was pregnant,” he told her. Tears burned, first at the back of his eyes, then along the rim of his lashes. They hovered there. “She was carrying our child.”

Although it was the answer Rachel had expected, it was difficult to hear, more difficult yet to look upon the despair shadowing Wyatt’s face. The photograph fell from her nerveless fingers. She threw off the quilt and crawled across the bed toward him. He opened his arms, took her in, but she was the one who offered shelter.

She hugged him to her, pressing one hand to the back of his head, the other to his back. He didn’t sob, but she felt his tears dampen the thin fabric of her gown. She offered no words. He would have fought those. It was her silence that broke him, and her silence that kept him sane.

He shuddered once, then was still. She stroked his hair, waiting him out the way he often did with her. When she felt his shoulders bunch, she let her arms fall away. He sat up and rubbed his face with his hands. When he came out from behind them, his eyes were clear and his features were no longer shuttered.