A Lady of the West Read online

  As Jake started to lift Celia, Luis said, “I’ll take her.” His voice was tight. “You see to your woman and I’ll see to mine.”

  Jake gave him a sharp look, seeing what was etched in Luis’s eyes. He looked back down at the small, still girl and touched her bloody cheek with gentle fingers. Then Jake left Celia to the man who had loved her, and walked to Victoria.

  She was no longer fighting Ben, but stood motionless in his grip with her eyes the only spot of color in her face. She didn’t even have a shawl.

  Ben released her and she stood alone, her body rigid. She searched Jake’s eyes for any sign of hope and found none. Still, she had to ask, had to hear it said. “Is she alive?”

  Jake wanted to sweep her up and carry her inside, have her warm and cosseted in bed before he told her what he had to tell her, but she was waiting, holding herself tight inside, and he knew she wouldn’t leave until she knew.

  “No,” he said.

  Victoria swayed and he reached for her, but in the next instant she drew herself up straight, her chin high. “Bring her inside, please,” she said in a brittle but controlled voice, as if she would shatter if she let her control slip at all. “She’ll need … she’ll need washing.”

  Luis carried Celia inside, his face rigid as the wind blew her hair over his arm and teased his cheek with it. Victoria and Emma were behind him, their shoulders back despite their sudden haggardness. Jake and Ben followed, both of them watching the slender, unbending spines ahead. Jake wanted to take Victoria in his arms and give her what comfort he could, but held back. Comfort now would soften her, and she needed all the strength she could muster.

  Carmita and Lola were sobbing softly into their aprons, while Juana had her hand stuffed into her mouth. “We’ll need water, please,” Victoria said softly as she directed Luis upstairs.

  He placed Celia on her bed and knelt beside it, slowly wrapping a bright tendril of hair around his finger. The blanket covered her face, but her hair was free. “I love you,” he said to the motionless girl, but there was no answer, and his heart was dying inside him.

  Victoria put her hand on his shoulder. She hadn’t known, but now she realized that she should have guessed. Celia had changed in the past months, since meeting Luis. “She loved you, too. You made her happy.”

  He swallowed and carried her hair to his face. It still smelled like Celia. “We were lovers,” he said thickly. “It never felt wrong.”

  “It wasn’t wrong.” It went against everything they had ever been taught, but it wasn’t wrong. Victoria was struck by how much their lives had changed, how much she had changed, since coming to this wild land. When she had first stepped down on territory soil, her life had been ruled by what society designated as proper or improper, but propriety no longer mattered to her when measured against love.

  Love had changed Celia from a child into a woman. She had been content, no longer running from flower to flower as if in search of enough beauty and happiness to satisfy her need for it. She had found it in Luis.

  Still sobbing, Carmita brought the water, but as she put it down she said. “I will wash the señorita, if you like.”

  “Thank you, but Emma and I will do it,” Victoria said gently. It was the last thing they would be able to do for Celia.

  Jake came up and took Luis away with him. Ben was overseeing the building of a coffin and having a new grave dug. Gently Victoria and Emma cut away Celia’s torn clothing and began washing the mud and blood from her pale body. Rubio’s sharp hooves had opened numerous deep cuts, but they were mostly on her back; she must have cowered with her arms over her head in a futile effort to protect herself. The back of her skull was flat and soft where the killing blow had landed, but her face was unmarked except for a small scrape on her forehead. They washed her hair and brushed it dry. Her eyes were closed like a child’s in sleep, her long lashes resting on marble-white cheeks. Looking at Celia lying on the bed as they dressed her in her favorite clothes, Victoria thought that she looked as though she would wake if only they shook her, but the essence of Celia was gone.

  Victoria didn’t sleep that night. Jake insisted that she go to bed, and she did, but lay in his arms with her eyes open and burning. She had cried, but the tears hadn’t brought a sense of release and now they wouldn’t come at all. The pain clenched at her heart, sharp and unending. She had never been able to imagine life without Celia. Her sister had been as bright as the sun, and without her everything now had altered, become darker.

  Her baby moved, and Victoria touched it. “She was looking forward to the baby so much. Now she’ll never see it.”

  Jake hadn’t slept either. He was too aware of Victoria’s suffering, and his own sense of loss was acute. There would be no more conversations about riding astride or determining the sex of kittens, no more small shocks every time she opened her mouth, no more searches for items she had left in bizarre places.

  He held Victoria close; he hadn’t released her all night long and didn’t intend to. “If it’s a girl, would you like to name her Celia?”

  Victoria’s voice almost cracked. “I couldn’t. Not yet.”

  An hour later she said, “She looked pretty, didn’t she?”

  “Like an angel.”

  “We’ll have to take care of her kitten.”

  Dawn was a miracle of colors, gold and red and pink streaking across a lightening blue sky. Celia would have been entranced. Victoria looked at the sky and thought of all the dawns that would be less appreciated now, without Celia there to watch them. She got up and dressed. She had no black dresses for mourning, but out here it didn’t seem as important as it had in Augusta. Grief was in her heart, not her clothes.

  She twisted her hair into a careless knot, and Jake fastened her dress for her. She looked out the window again and said, “I want that horse destroyed.”

  Jake knew the need for revenge, knew how it could burn and fester. His hands tightened on her shoulders. “He’s a dumb animal, Victoria. We had warned her time and again to be careful around him.”

  “He’s a killer. He trampled one of the Mexican hands after you’d left that time, did you know? He should have been shot then.”

  The plans Jake had made for Rubio’s get would never come to pass if he put the stallion down. Sophie was with foal, but he’d planned on buying other mares good enough to mate with the stallion. He wanted to produce a whole line of big, strong, fast horses. His heart ached, but destroying the animal wouldn’t bring Celia back, wouldn’t accomplish anything except Rubio’s death and with it his outstanding blend of speed and strength. Victoria had been irrational about the stallion from the beginning, so Jake didn’t expect her to make a rational decision now.

  Still, it might become necessary to put him down. If no one could work with him without fearing for their lives, there would be no choice. Jake wanted to wait and see before he did something irrevocable.

  “I won’t order him shot,” he said, and watched her face become even more withdrawn. He whirled her around to face him. “Not yet. I’m not saying I won’t, I’m just saying that I’m going to think about it before I do something that can’t be undone.”

  “Celia can’t be brought back, is that damn horse worth more than she was?”

  “No, damn it, but killing him won’t bring her back, either.”

  “It’ll accomplish one thing, at least.”

  “What?”

  “I won’t have to look at the barn and know he’s in there, safe and warm and well-fed, while my sister is in her grave.”

  They buried Celia with the sun shining brightly on her coffin, making the pale new wood gleam with a golden hue that almost matched her hair.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  They all retired early that night, too dispirited even to try and talk. Emma watched Jake lead Victoria into their bedroom, his arm around her waist both possessive and tender, and the door closed to lock them in their private world where no one else could enter. Ben walked past her with a quiet goo