Hank supported himself on his forearms, tangled his hands in her hair, and rained feverish kisses on her face. He remained motionless, his lips searching her face, while she became accustomed to the feel of him inside her. Then, slowly, he moved, thrusting carefully. She could feel his muscles strain and stir beneath her palms. Naked hunger, sweet and violent, caught them both, and he plunged faster and faster. Hank quivered with the effort to love her tenderly. His heart thundered against her breast. She could feel it over the hammering of her own. Every part of him that touched her brought her nearer to the fiery unknown heights she had never before reached; frantically she moved her hips with the surging rhythm of his.

  When the pain-pleasure became so intense that she thought she would explode, she cried out his name. Then the explosion came, lifting and spinning her into a blissful eddy of sensation. Almost simultaneously, Hank thrust into her for the last time. The tip of him poised against the mouth of her womb. He held it there for exhilarating seconds before he gripped her fiercely, and the life-giving fluid exploded from his body. Then, he was quiet.

  Mary lay spent and still beneath him even though her heart beat like a hammer in her breast. Hank slid to the side and gathered her gently to him.

  “My love. My sweet lass—” he muttered thickly. He dropped soft kisses on her forehead, her eyes, and smoothed the hair back from her damp face. His hand moved down her back to her bottom, then on to her thigh, pulling it up to rest across his, settling her more snugly against him.

  “It’s almost frightening to be so . . . lost.” She spoke against his neck. “There was only you, Hank. Only you. We could have fallen off the world and I wouldn’t have known it. I’ve never felt like that before.”

  “Never?”

  “Never. Roy would have thought me shameless if . . . I’d moved or . . . acted like I enjoyed it.”

  “Sweet woman, there’s no shame to you wantin’ me to come inside you. The pleasure is one of God’s greatest gifts. He wouldn’t of given it to man alone.”

  “Oh, Hank! And you call yourself an ignorant Irishman. You’re the sweetest, wisest man I’ve ever known. Theresa already loves you.”

  “And you, Mary mine? Tell me again. It’s a hard thing for me to be believin’.”

  “Then, believe it, you thick-headed Irishman,” she whispered laughingly. “I love you, love you, love you.”

  “And . . . is the marriage bed something you’ll be likin’, sweetheart?” he asked anxiously.

  “Like it?” Mary cupped his rough cheeks between her palms and turned his face so she could kiss his lips. “You’ve made me feel so wonderful, so complete. You’re a special man, my love.” Emotion weakened her voice until it was a mere breath.

  “I liked it too,” he whispered unbelievingly, his voice almost as faint as hers.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-two

  In the saloon down the street from the funerary, Art Ashland sat with his back to the wall, his feet on a chair in front of him, a half-filled whiskey bottle on the table. Less than a dozen men were in the saloon. They all ignored him or appeared to. It was common knowledge among the men that when Art was drinking, he was meaner than a cornered rattlesnake. Tonight his attitude was, “Don’t bother me, or you’ll get your tail twisted.”

  Big John, on a high stool behind the bar, had the same scowl on his face that he’d worn since his team had lost the baseball game. Big John was a poor loser and was already looking forward to another game to avenge the loss. He kept an eye on Art, the four men who played cards at a scarred table, as well as the two, more than slightly drunk freighters, who lolled on a bench in the corner arguing about the charms of two of the girls at the Bee Hive.

  “I say Pearl’s the best gal-durned whore in the territory! Dammit it to hell, ya know it’s so. Ruby don’t hold no candle to Pearl!”

  “She ain’t no such thing. Holy shit! Her tits ain’t no bigger’n a walnut, if’n they’s that big,” his companion protested, holding his thumb and forefinger together to make a small circle. “I like big-titted women. Ruby’s tits is big as—let me see—” the drunk looked around the room for something to use for comparison.

  “Shut up!” Ashland snarled quietly, but his voice carried to the two drunks. The men gave him a blurry stare, looked at each other knowingly, and snickered behind their hands, but they stopped talking and quickly emptied their glasses.

  Lee Longstreet sat alone at a table and surveyed the scene with interest. He had learned to listen. He never knew when he would pick up news that would be to his advantage. He hated this place, hated the whole town, hated the necessity of kowtowing to men like Ashland and Weston. He considered himself more on a level with Garrick Rowe. Rowe had traveled in higher-class company than what was here in Trinity, and why he was associating with these ignorant louts was a mystery to Lee.

  Lee looked with distaste at the muddy wet floor where the rain had blown in under the bat-winged doors and at the other set that led into the dimly lit hotel lobby. Good God! How had he arrived at such a low that he would even consider staying in this place and running a bug-infested hotel? Of course, he had not considered staying any longer than it would take to get enough money to leave. Since, fortunately for him, the miners he played cards with were unskilled and had little else to do with their time after working hours, Lee now had money in his pocket. When he shook the dust of Trinity off for the last time, he would be alone. He’d had a millstone about his neck long enough.

  However, Lee had something important to do before he left Trinity. He might be slightly impoverished at the moment, he told himself, but he was a man of pride who settled his accounts. He bristled when he thought of the humiliation he had faced when forced to leave the wagon train. His ancestors had come from England to establish a class of distinction in America. All his life he had been contemptuous of the lower forms of humans who made up the world outside his own class. He had been set up to be ridiculed by a woman of dirt-farm mentality. The memory of that scene played in his mind and ate at him like an infected sore eating away at his flesh. He would have his revenge. It mattered little what people would think of him after he left town. What was important to him was that the Chandler woman would suffer.

  The doors were flung back suddenly, and two wet, miserable-looking men stomped into the saloon. They paused and blinked against the light, then dropped their saddlebags beside the door and went to the bar.

  “Howdy,” Big John said. “Just ride in?”

  “What the hell does it look like?” one of the men retorted as he flung his dripping hat down on the bar. “Do ya think we’ve jist been standing out there ’cause we needed a bath?”

  “I wasn’t thinkin’ anythin’,” John growled. “What’a ya want?”

  “Wal, we ain’t wantin’ tea.”

  The two drunks on the bench laughed uproariously and slapped their thighs with their hands. The stranger turned to look at them through close-set eyes, then turned back to John.

  “Whiskey.”

  John set a half-filled bottle on the counter. “Two dollars.”

  “Two dollars? That’s robbery!”

  The other man threw a dollar on the bar and snatched the bottle just as John reached for it.

  “Pay your dollar, Sporty, and bring the glasses,” he said and headed for a table at the end of the room.

  The man glared at John, sent a dollar spinning down the bar, pinched two glasses between his thumb and forefinger, and followed his friend.

  “Goddammit, Cullen. That bottle ain’t worth no two dollars,” he said loudly enough for every man in the room to hear.

  “We’ve paid five for less,” his friend murmured and sank wearily down in a chair.

  Each of the men downed two drinks in rapid succession before the one named Cullen wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and took off his rain-soaked hat. He was short, with a hard face and alert blue eyes. His friend was taller, slimmer, with the face of a fox. He had a gun tucked into his belt and a knife in a holster. Both men looked as if they hadn’t seen soap or a razor for weeks.

  “I ain’t liking this place.” Sporty Howard was a swaggering, two-bit gunman with more mouth than brains.

  After riding with Sporty off and on for more than five years, the short hard-faced man knew that Sporty would rather gripe than eat. Cullen had often told Sporty that he’d complain if it was raining soup and biscuits were growing on trees.

  “There ain’t nothin’ here,” Sporty continued between gulps of whiskey. “I didn’t even see no bank or stage station. And I’m hungry enough to eat the ass out of a skunk.”

  “What the hell place is this?” Cullen raised his voice and addressed the question to the room in general. “It’s deader than a graveyard.”

  No one said anything for a minute, then Art said, “Who wants to know?”

  The short man’s eyes turned to the big man leaning against the wall. He had been in enough rough towns to know that this man was not to be fooled with even if you had him hogtied. He was the kind of man who could explode and rain all over you, so Cullen answered him in a civil tone.

  “Cullen McCall, late of Californey and Oregon Territory. Is there work around these parts?”

  “What can you do?”

  “Name it and I’ll give it a try.”

  “Goddammit! A man that works for me gives it more than a try. He does the job or I break his damn neck.”

  “What’s your business?”

  “It ain’t no business of yours what I do. But when I do it, I use real men, not two-bit drifters.”

  “Now you just hold on there!” Sporty rose up out of his chair.

  “Sit, Sporty,” Cullen said sharply. “The man meant no offense.”

  “The hell I didn’t!” Art growled. “I meant just what I said.”

  Art had been in a fighting mood since Lizzibeth had turned him away from the Bee Hive. John knew this and stepped into the conversation before Art’s fuse was ignited and chairs began to fly.

  “This is Trinity, stranger. It’ll be a real thrivin’ town again before long.”

  “Looks like shit to me,” Sporty growled and poured himself another drink. “Is there a hotel in this thrivin’ town, or a place where a man can get a decent meal?”

  “The man sitting right over there runs the hotel. You can ask him.” John tilted his head toward Lee Longstreet, picked up a rag, and wiped the water from the bar where the stranger had flung his hat.

  “Are you robbin’ strangers too?” Shorty looked pointedly at John, then swivelled around to glare at Lee. “What’er you askin’ for a room?”

  “Step into the lobby when you’ve finished your drink and I’ll tell you.” Lee stood, pulled his watch out of his vest pocket, flipped open the case, and checked the time as if he had an important appointment. He smoothed his black hair carefully and walked through the bat-winged doors leading to the hotel lobby.

  “Well, now, ain’t he a highfalutin cuss?” Shorty sneered.

  Lee heard the remark. It pleased him. He was highborn, and glad that he was recognized as such. Whenever he lived among a group of people, he strove hard to set himself above them. Lee had lived in one of the finest plantation houses in the South, and he had been waited on hand and foot from the time he was born. Now, with a look of utter disdain on his face, he viewed the bare floors of the chairless lobby of the hotel. Lee believed firmly that the future would right itself, that this was merely a stop along the way.

  He removed his hat and placed it on the shelf beneath the counter before he went down the narrow hallway to the two rooms that served as living quarters for Vera, Agnes, and Taylor. His room was upstairs at the front of the building.

  His wife sat in a chair beside the cookstove. She looked up from her knitting the instant he appeared in the doorway. Vera was a tall, thin woman, and strong. She was in her midthirties, and every dream she had ever dreamed had been knocked out of her during the time she had been married to Lee. Now, the only thing she lived for were her children, Agnes and Taylor. Vera was tired most of the time and exceedingly weary of Lee and his demands. Not that he bothered her at night. That part of their marriage had ended when Taylor was born. He never spoke to her or the children unless it was to demand that they do something.

  Lee had squandered her dowry the first year of their marriage. At his insistence, she had asked her father for more money and had been turned down. It was the last time she had seen any of her family. There was no question in Vera’s mind that her husband was a scoundrel. Lee was able to justify every sin he committed by saying it was in defense of his honor. Honor! He didn’t know the meaning of the word.

  Vera was neither stupid nor dull as Lee would have liked everyone to believe. Being quiet and staying out of the way, she had found, made her life and the lives of her children much less difficult. She felt shame before the women of the town for the way her husband treated her, just as she had while on the wagon train, but she tried to keep her head high, nonetheless. She was sure, however, of one thing. When Lee left Trinity, he would go alone. She and the children were not going to leave the town. For the first time in her married life she had found a place where she could work and take care of her children. She had spoken to Mr. Rowe, and he had assured her Trinity would grow and the hotel would prosper so that they could earn a living. Until the time when paying guests arrived and the hotel was earning its way, he would pay Mr. Longstreet a wage. Although Vera and the children had done all the work, she had not seen a penny of the salary Mr. Rowe paid to her husband. Agnes and Taylor were growing resentful, and Vera feared an open display of the children’s hatred for their father would lead to trouble.

  “Two men rode in. They’ll be wanting a room,” Lee told Vera.

  “Mr. Ashland and his men are using the rooms.”

  “I know that. Put them in the room in back.”

  “That’s where the children sleep.”

  “In the same bed, I suppose,” Lee said sarcastically.

  “Of course not!”

  “It isn’t fitting for them to be sleeping in the same room. How old is that boy? Eleven? Twelve? I’d plowed a half-hundred wenches by the time I was his age.” Lee liked to tell Vera about his wenching days. She always snapped her mouth shut with such a look of indignation on her face. “He may be a scrawny little good-for-nothing, but he’s got enough Longstreet in him to know what his pecker is used for.”

  “Don’t talk like that about Taylor.” She spoke sharply.

  “I’ll talk anyway I please and you’ll listen. My papa used every buck he sired as a stud and raised the finest crop of niggers in Mississippi. That gimpy little bugger knows what he’s got and by now he knows how to use it.”

  Lee hated Taylor because he was born with a twisted foot that caused him to limp slightly. The fact that the boy was exceedingly bright didn’t matter in the least to his father. He saw the boy’s deformity as a reflection on himself and regularly reminded Vera that it was her inferior blood that had caused it. He used the boy to get to Vera because it was one of the few things that riled her enough that she gave him cause to slap her.

  With a great effort Vera controlled her anger and refused to comment. Instead she said, “Why don’t you tell the men to go to the bunkhouse? I’m sure they’d not be turned away on a night like this.”

  “I don’t think you heard me correctly. Wake up those damn kids and put them in here on a pallet. I want you to fix those men some supper. Fry the meat the hunter brought this morning.”

  “The meat was for us. Taylor worked for it.” Vera got to her feet, flung open the firebox to the cook stove, and shoved in a chunk of wood.

  “Haven’t you learned not to argue with me? You know you’ll do what I tell you to do. You’ve gotten lippy lately, Vera, and I don’t like it. Now, are you going to get those kids out of there or am I going to have to do it?”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “I thought you would.”

  Lee went back down the narrow hallway to the dimly lit lobby and waited for the two strangers to come from the saloon. The price of the room for a night or two and the meals would add a little more money to his pocket when he left this place and took the stage to Salt Lake City.

  Two quiet days passed. On the sixth of July, late in the afternoon, Katy and Rowe returned to Trinity. Modo, Rowe’s dog, met them at the far end of town as if he knew they were coming and had been waiting for them. Rowe dismounted, squatted down, and scratched the ears of his old friend.

  “Miss me, boy?” The dog licked his hand, frolicked for a moment, then sedately led the way up the main street to the funerary where Mary and Theresa, attracted by Modo’s welcoming bark, waited on the porch.

  “Oh, Rowe!” Katy said regretfully as they approached. “I didn’t get anything for Theresa.”

  “I did. I forgot to tell you about it. It’s in my saddle bag.”

  “You’re a constant surprise.” Happiness spread warmly throughout her body when she looked at the man who would be her mate for life.

  “And you’re a constant delight.” His dark eyes adored her.

  “You’d better watch it. I’m going to be spoiled,” she murmured and smiled into his eyes.

  “It will be my pleasure to spoil you, Mrs. Rowe.”

  “Aunt Katy! I’m glad you’re comed back!”

  “I’m glad to be back,” Katy called. “It seems as if we’ve been gone a month, and it hasn’t even been a week.” Katy stepped down from the saddle before Rowe could alight to help her. She hugged her sister, then bent down to hug her niece. “I’ve missed you both.”

  “You don’t look at all unhappy . . .” Mary’s voice trailed when Rowe stepped up on the porch and put his arm across Katy’s shoulder.

 

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