A Lady of the West Read online

  “But they make life more comfortable.”

  “Comfortable? Comfortable? We’re freezing our asses off in the river instead of taking a bath in a warm tub the way we’d planned because you didn’t want to upset your wife by tracking mud upstairs, and you call it comfortable? You’ve lost your mind.”

  “We have clean clothes, good food, and fresh sheets on our real beds every night; they smell sweet instead of like cheap perfume and stale whiskey, and they wait on us hand and foot. When was the last time you had to fill your own plate at dinner?”

  “We have to watch what we say,” Ben pointed out.

  “As soon as we lose a button, it’s sewn back on.” Jake’s green eyes glinted with wicked amusement. “Your problem is Emma.”

  “Ah, goddamn,” Ben said in disgust. “That’s another thing that’s wrong with ladies. A whore rolls over easy, but a lady thinks the world will end if she lets a man in her bed.”

  “A whore lets any man who has the price get between her legs. Is that what you think Emma should do?”

  Ben snarled in bad temper and splashed out of the river to stand on the bank. He rubbed a towel over his muscled body, his hazel eyes stormy. Finally he said, “No, I don’t want her to do that.”

  Jake followed him, the crystal clear water sluicing down his body. He knew how frustrated Ben was feeling, because he remembered how he’d felt every time he had crashed against Victoria’s rigid ideas of what was proper and what wasn’t. Ladies were far more complicated than whores. A lady demanded more from a man than he wanted to give, but what they offered in return was a whole new way of life. They offered physical comfort, a warm sense of security, a sweet body in the bed all night, every night. Marriage was a high price to pay to get all that, but it was worth it. Even without the ranch he would have married Victoria, he thought, and looked up at the lavender twilight sky with a sense of shock.

  After a minute he looked at his brother. “You could marry her,” he said.

  Ben pulled on his pants. “I’m not a marrying man, Jake. That hasn’t changed.”

  “Then if it’s just fucking you want, go to Angelina.”

  “I don’t want Angelina,” Ben replied curtly. “Hell, she’s been had so many ways she can’t tell the difference anymore.”

  “Exactly.”

  Ben scowled at him, then finished dressing without saying anything else. He wanted Emma, but not enough to offer marriage and that looked like the only way he’d ever get her. In a way it had been easier when he and Jake had just been drifting around, rootless, planning nothing but killing McLain and taking their ranch back. Well, now they had the ranch and there was no more riding out whenever they got tired of a place. They had a home and responsibilities. Ben wasn’t sure he liked the sensation. It wasn’t the ranch or the work of it; getting the ranch back had eased something inside him. It was the domesticity that was irritating him, the feeling of being hemmed in by rules. He wanted Emma, but he couldn’t have her because of all those damned rules that governed respectable people. Ben realized that he wasn’t quite respectable and never would be, any more than Jake would ever be just a rancher. They had lived too many years by the law of the gun. Under the surface the old instincts still ran strong. He just didn’t know what to do with them any more.

  Supper was ready by the time they got back to the house, and Victoria forced herself to be patient. Another couple of hours wouldn’t make any difference; she would find the privacy she needed when they went to bed. She tried to imagine what he would say, how he would react, and found that she couldn’t. They had never discussed having children. She felt a twinge of fear and gave him a guarded look, only to look away quickly again when she found him watching her.

  She couldn’t read him at all. He’d had too many years hiding his thoughts behind his hard face and expressionless eyes. She could see only what he allowed her to see. Sometimes she thought that open enmity would be less nerve-racking than passion from a man she loved but didn’t know.

  It was still early when he got up from the table and held his hand out to her. She felt the color rush to her face as she allowed him to help her up, and she didn’t look at anyone as they walked out of the room. “Good night,” Jake said, and Ben, Emma, and Celia each replied as his heavy hand on her waist ushered her up the stairs.

  Emma watched them leave and bit her lip at the longing welling up in her. It wasn’t just physical need that tormented her, but the need for what Victoria had found with Jake, the belonging expressed in the way he put his arm around her to escort her to their room. She wanted to feel that closeness, the partnership of marriage and a shared life. She turned her head and looked at Ben, at the hard, chiseled features.

  He met her gaze and lifted his eyebrows in silent invitation. All she had to do to accept was to get up and walk upstairs. He would surely follow. Heat ran through her, and if he’d been offering more than a night or two, if it had been for forever, she would have gone and forgotten about marriage and propriety. But Ben wanted no claim on him, legal or otherwise. Her chest ached with the pain of having to deny both him and herself. She turned her head away and didn’t move from her chair.

  “Jake, there’s something I need to tell you.”

  Her tone was troubled and Jake froze, his hands on the tiny buttons that marched down her back. He sensed that whatever it was she had been hiding, she finally trusted him enough to tell him about it, and suddenly he didn’t want to know. She loved him; that was enough. He didn’t want to hear about anything McLain might have done to her. McLain was dead, damn his soul. How could he hurt them now?

  “I don’t want to know,” he said quietly, and pulled the pins from her hair to let it stream down over his hands in a warm flood.

  She whirled to face him. She was pale, her eyes as huge as they had been the night he’d first come to her. “You have to know.” She managed a shaky smile, one that faded as quickly as it had formed. “It isn’t something I can hide or that will go away.”

  His stomach knotted. Suddenly Jake saw hell opening up at his feet. A flash of intuition told him what it was, and it made him sick. So that was why she had been so sad and withdrawn, why she had watched him so anxiously at times, why he’d sensed she was hiding something from him. God, why hadn’t he thought of this? And how was he supposed to stand it? He couldn’t.

  Victoria began shaking as she met his hard gaze. “I’m pregnant,” she said before she lost the courage to tell him. “I’m having your baby.”

  The bottom dropped out of his stomach and he stared at her, unable to believe what he’d heard her say. He felt empty, as if his heart and lungs and guts had all been torn out. And then in a rush he was filled with a bitter rage even stronger than what he had felt twenty years before, when he had watched his mother die.

  Victoria’s betrayal cut at him like a knife in the gut. How could she have said that, how could she have the gall to expect to pass McLain’s child off as his? Did she think he was stupid? That he didn’t know McLain had used her as his wife? She hadn’t been a virgin the first time Jake had had her, and that was only three weeks ago. If she were pregnant now, the child could only be McLain’s. Did she think he didn’t know that? It was bad enough that she was carrying that son of a bitch’s whelp, but if she thought he would let the little bastard have the Sarratt name, the name of the family its father had murdered—

  Black fog clouded the edges of his vision. A dull roaring filled his ears. He saw her pale face, the soft lips that had just voiced a lie so monstrous he couldn’t believe it, and without planning, without knowing he was going to do it, he struck her.

  The full force of his arm was behind the blow. If he had used his fist instead of his open hand, it would have broken her jaw. Victoria saw it coming, had a split second of comprehension, but that wasn’t enough to give her time to move. His hand crashed into her face, slamming her around and to the side. She thudded against the wall and slid to the floor like a broken doll.

  He stood over her