Wyoming Widow

She had caused his death herself, and fled, terrified, into the night.

Fully awake now, Cassandra curled onto her side and gazed around the little bedroom. The previous day was coming back to her now. Near the foot of her bed was the pine rocker where Morgan Tolliver—the enemy—had sat. Her sewing kit lay open on the bedside table, with her needle stuck into a spool of brown cotton thread. On the far wall, bathed in morning sunlight, the painting on the elk skin she’d barely noticed last night revealed itself as a swirling arrangement of horses, deer and buffalo, all pursued by mounted warriors in streaming, feathered war bonnets. So exquisitely drawn and positioned were these tiny figures that they seemed to be galloping over the creamy leather surface.

Cassandra sat up slowly, feeling the baby awaken and stir in its warm, secret world. “Getting a little tight for you in there, is it?” she whispered, patting the solid roundness. “Don’t worry, little one. You’ll be out in the world soon enough.”

Carefully she stood up, wincing at the bone-deep soreness in her legs and buttocks. She sighed as her hands massaged the small of her back. How long would it be? she wondered. A month? More? Her menses had always been irregular, and with no experienced woman to guide her through the strangeness of it, she had only a vague idea of how far along she was or what to expect when the time came. She had helped her grandfather at lambing time, and she supposed the process would not be so different. Except this would be her baby, and she would be its mother. She could only pray that when the time came she would know what to do.

But why was she standing here muddling when it was time she got dressed and faced the day? The Tollivers wouldn’t think much of her if she malingered in her bedroom half the morning. And it was essential that they think well of her, or at least that they care about her baby. She had made a poor start last night with Morgan Tolliver. But if she could find other allies here, even friends…

Impulsively Cassandra crossed to the window and peered out through the dust-streaked panes. Through the yellow-brown blur she could make out a vast maze of sheds and corrals, dominated by a weathered barn that jutted upward like a cathedral above a town. Behind the nearest fence, large, dark shapes swirled and shifted. Horses? Cassandra’s impatient fingers fumbled with the window latch. Her soft push swung the sash outward.

A light breeze swept into the room, carrying with it a pungent blend of prairie dust, wood smoke, horse dung and fresh morning air. A tantalizing whiff of bacon drifted upward from the kitchen, triggering a growl in the pit of her stomach.

Feeling alive for the first time in days, she leaned outward into the sunlight, her breasts resting on the windowsill. The house was set on a slight rise, overlooking the rest of the ranch. Now she could see the sloping tin roof of the bunkhouse and the fenced enclosure around the coop, where bustling red hens and their fluffy chicks pecked at the earth. Horses milled in the spacious log corral, rearing and nipping in spirited play. Next to the feed trough, Xavier, her own dear mule, stood placidly munching hay. Poor old thing, he probably thought he’d died and gone to heaven. She would go out and visit him later. With luck, she might even be able to smuggle him a treat from the kitchen.

Beyond the dusty sprawl of buildings and corrals, the rolling prairie swept outward like the waves of a yellow sea. Most summers the wild grass would have been pale green, but the drought had left it so tinder dry that the threat of a prairie fire had haunted Cassandra all the way from Laramie. Like a land rising from a far-off shore, the Big Horn mountains jutted the length of the western horizon, blue in the hazy distance, the sunlight glinting on their snowless peaks.

The trill of a meadowlark echoed pure and clear on the morning air. Listening, Cassandra suppressed a little shiver of contentment. This was a good place, she sensed, a clean and honest place, like her grandparents’ lost Nebraska homestead. She would give anything, do anything, to give her child the chance to grow up here, free from danger and want, free from shame.

If only there were some other way.

Below her window, a squat figure distinguished by a graying pigtail that dangled from beneath a blue cotton cap, hobbled off the porch and headed toward the chicken coop.

“Chang!” she said in a low voice. “Good morning, Chang!”

The startled Chinese cook glanced up, caught sight of her and grinned. “Morning, miss. Breakfast? I bring it up?” He motioned toward her with his hand. She had already come to like the small, lively man who’d served her a supper of roast beef and cloudlike buttered biscuits the night before.

“Breakfast, yes,” she replied. “But please don’t bother bringing it up to me. I’ll get dressed and come downstairs.”

“Good!” His smile broadened. “Mr. Jacob, Mr. Morgan, they can eat with you. Almost ready. Hurry.”

“Give me just a few minutes.” Cassandra felt her heart drop into the pit of her stomach as she spun away from the window and fumbled in the carpetbag for her only presentable dress. Once more it was time to begin the ugly game of lies and deception, playing her wits against the Tolliver men from behind the mask of Ryan’s grieving sweetheart.

The mask she was prepared to wear for the rest of her life.

Morgan sat in the dining rooming, leaning back in his chair as Chang carried in platters of bacon, flapjacks and scrambled eggs to accompany the steaming pot of beans he had already placed on the table.

In the Tolliver household it was a long-standing custom not to eat breakfast before the morning chores were done. Morgan had risen at six, gulped down a mug of hot black coffee and gone outside to look after the stock. Most of the ranch’s fifteen thousand head of Texas longhorns had been driven to summer pasture in the mountains, but there were horses to feed and water, cows to milk, orphan calves to tend and, this morning, a torn windmill vane to repair.

Morgan could easily have paid someone else to do the chores, but the truth was, he enjoyed them. He liked rising at dawn, watching the sky fill with light and hearing the morning chorus as each creature on the ranch welcomed a new day. He savored the slow rhythm of seasons, each one blending into the next, cycling like the spokes of the great medicine wheel. And he never lost his wonder at each new life that appeared on the ranch, from quivering foals to clutches of yellow-brown ducklings. Though he gave the matter little conscious thought, Morgan could not imagine his life without this work, without this land.

Earlier, he’d been on his way out of the barn when he’d glimpsed a figure in the upstairs window. Stepping back into the shadows, he had caught his breath at the sight of Cassandra Riley leaning into the sunlight, her creamy breasts straining the thin muslin shift where they thrust over the windowsill.

Her loose-hanging curls had caught fire in the morning sunlight, falling over the whiteness of shoulders and breasts to ring her delicate vulpine features with flame. Morgan had never thought her beautiful, but for one riveting instant, the sight of her in that sunlit window was almost enough to strike a man blind.

He would bet good money the little schemer knew exactly what she was doing.

For the space of a breath he had allowed his eyes to feast on the forbidden sight. Then, as Chang came out onto the porch, he had slipped back into the barn and made a discreet exit through a rear door. Cassandra Riley was looking for a protector, casting her web for any man within range, Morgan told himself. He would go straight to hell before he’d let her know he had almost stumbled into that trap.

The letter to Hamilton Crawford was already on its way to Fort Caspar, with wiry young Johnny Chang mounted on the fastest of the Tolliver cow ponies. How long would it take for Ham to come up with some answers? Two weeks, at least, maybe a good deal longer, Morgan reckoned. In the meantime he would be wise to watch Cassandra’s every move—a challenge in its own right.

A light bump on the table’s edge startled Morgan out of his reverie. His attention shifted sideways to where the elder of the two Chang boys had just moved Jacob’s chair into its customary position at the head of the table. The old man looked more haunted than ever, Morgan thought.

“Rotten night.” Jacob’s eyes burned like embers in the hollowed pits of their sockets. “You’ve got a strange look about you this morning. Care to tell me what’s going on inside that stubborn Shoshone head of yours?”

“Not much.” Morgan poured the old man a cup of coffee from the pot Chang had just placed on the table and added a generous dollop of cream. “Just wondering if we ought to get some of those new white-faced Hereford cows, like the ones Alex Swan’s been bringing in over on Chugwater.”

“What’s wrong with longhorns?” Jacob demanded, his gaze narrowing beneath the bristled crags of his eyebrows.

“Nothing.” Morgan poured his own coffee and watched the steam curl upward toward the rafters. “Nothing, that is, if you don’t have to put them in railroad cars. Got word last fall that a full third of the steers we shipped to Omaha were horn-gouged by the time they were unloaded. We had to lower the price for the whole lot.” Morgan had given his father this information at the time, but now Jacob looked as if he had no memory of it. Ryan’s disappearance had taken as much of a toll on the old man’s mind as it had on his body.

“Humph!” Jacob cleared his throat and spat into his cloth napkin. “Longhorns are range bred—tough enough to stand the winters in these parts. Those short-legged bally-faced meatballs over on Swan’s place will bog down in the drifts and starve to death. Take my word for it. Don’t waste time and money finding out the hard way!”

“Want to wager on it?” Morgan speared two flapjacks and dropped them onto his plate. Arguing was a long-established way of communication between the two of them. Now he used it deliberately, as a means to rouse the old man’s interest and draw his mind away from Ryan. “I’ll bring in a hundred head of Herefords this fall, early enough to season them to the cold. With that hay crop we’re growing down in the bottoms—”

“Hay!” Jacob snorted. “Hell, that’s another waste of time! We’ve never had any trouble finding winter pasture for the longhorns.”

“But we always lose some,” Morgan said. “In a killer winter, we could lose the whole herd. A good supply of hay would keep us from being wiped out.”

“Bull.” Jacob toyed with the scrambled eggs Thomas Chang had spooned onto his plate. “These damned newfangled notions of yours are going to—”

He stopped speaking, his mouth, like his fork, frozen in midmotion. Morgan turned in his seat to follow the direction of his father’s gaze.

Cassandra Riley stood, hesitating, in the doorway of the dining room.

She was modestly clad now, in a faded chambray gown with wrist-length sleeves, a high, crocheted collar and a shapeless waist, hiked up in front to accommodate her bulging belly. Her fiery mane of curls had been tamed into a coiled braid at the nape of her neck.

Eyes nervous, mouth fixed in a tentative smile, she walked toward the table. She looked as demure as a round little quail, Morgan thought, and almost as innocent.

“May I?” She paused next to the empty place setting on the far side of the table. Morgan scowled, annoyed at himself for having failed to notice the third plate earlier. Warned, he would have been prepared for her entrance and he would have made more of an effort to prepare his father.

Rising swiftly, Morgan strode around the table to pull out her chair. Her downcast eyes avoided his as she moved into place. “Remember, we have an agreement,” he growled in her ear. “My father’s not to be told anything.”

She nodded almost imperceptibly before lowering herself into the chair. She was every inch the proper lady now, hiding the siren he had seen in the upstairs window.

“Miss Cassandra Riley…my father.” Morgan mouthed a curt introduction.

“It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Tolliver.” Her voice was artificially bright.

“Ma’am.” Jacob acknowledged her greeting with the lift of a bristled eyebrow. Even after all these years, he had the manners of a mountain man. But that hadn’t stopped him from being the very devil with women in his day.

As Morgan took his seat, he shot her another warning glare across the table. Could he trust her to keep her mouth shut? Would she even care how much pain her lie could bring to a grief-stricken old man?

Glancing down, he realized he had lost all interest in breakfast. He could not venture to guess what the unpredictable Miss Cassandra Riley would do or say next. He only knew that if she so much as mentioned Ryan to his father, she would be one sorry woman.

Cassandra spooned a mound of scrambled eggs onto her plate, passionately wishing she’d chosen to eat in the bedroom. Were these two gloomy men all that was left of the Tolliver family? Were there no women and children to liven up this grim household?

“Flapjack?” Morgan passed her the stacked plate. She thanked him politely, took a warm pancake from the middle of the pile and drowned it in butter and maple syrup. He looked hard and angry, but at least he didn’t seem bent on starving her.

Clearly, no one starved on the Tolliver Ranch. But she was already beginning to sense how easily a woman could fall prey to loneliness here. Maybe that was why there were no women in sight.

Determined to be cheerful, she cut off a bite-sized piece of flapjack with her fork and thrust it into her mouth. The batter was crisp and airy, almost melting on her tongue.

“Mmm!” she exclaimed, seizing on an excuse to break the silence. “Manna from heaven couldn’t taste any better than these flapjacks! Did Chang make them?”

“Chang does all the cooking.”

Morgan’s cool answer reminded Cassandra that she had offered her services in the kitchen. Clearly her help was not needed.

Ignoring his rebuff, she turned toward the old man, who sat huddled in his wheelchair, toying with the food on his plate. His skin was gray tinged, his hollow cheeks etched with deep arroyos that flowed into the leaden tangle of his short beard. His flannel shirt was clean, his hair neatly trimmed and combed, but there was a wildness about Jacob Tolliver, a trace of the primitive that burned in his bloodshot yellow-green eyes.

She scrutinized his pitted features, searching for some resemblance to his offspring. But she found none. Morgan could have passed for a full-blooded Shoshone, and there was no echo of Ryan’s golden beauty in either of the two men. Jacob Tolliver’s sons, she concluded, resembled their respective mothers.

“The beef stew and biscuits Chang brought me last night were delicious, as well,” she said, pressing on. “Where on earth did you find such a treasure, Mr. Tolliver? Has he been with you a long time?”

For a moment Jacob Tolliver paid her no heed. Then the old man’s hooded eyes flickered toward her, as if he’d finally realized she was speaking to him. He cleared his throat as if he were about to launch into a story. Then his knobby shoulders sagged wearily. “You can tell her,” he said to Morgan.

Something flashed in Morgan’s black eyes. Was it hostility or only relief, perhaps even gratitude, that she’d steered their conversation onto safe ground?

“My father stole Chang from the railroad,” he said.

“Stole him?” Cassandra’s eyes widened.

“Stole him as slick as whiskey.” Morgan sipped his coffee, taking his time. “Chang came over from Canton in the mid-sixties to work as a dynamiter on the Central Pacific. When a rock slide crushed his leg, he was assigned to the kitchen crew. Chang had never cooked a meal in his life, but he took to it as if he’d been born in a stewpot. Before long, his reputation got around, and visiting railway bosses were coming by just to sample his braised mutton and biscuits.”

Morgan had settled back in his chair, cradling the coffee mug between his hands. Cassandra watched him, bemused by the discovery that this gruff, taciturn man possessed a hidden gift for words.

“My father owned title to some land in Nevada he’d won in a poker game a few years earlier. The railroad wanted to buy the parcel, so he traveled west to see the land for himself and negotiate the sale. The track boss made the mistake of inviting him to dinner. You can guess the rest of the story.”

Cassandra took what she hoped was a ladylike nibble of her scrambled eggs. The moist, frothy clumps were exquisitely seasoned—wild onion, she speculated, with a bit of sage and other flavorings so subtle she could not venture to name them. She took another bite, savoring the rich but delicate taste.

“I would guess,” she said, “that your father, the wily old pirate, found Chang, took him aside and made him an offer too generous to refuse.”

At her words, Morgan’s left eyebrow shot upward. The corners of his mouth twitched, threatening a smile—but only threatening. A real smile, she told herself, would probably crack that long granite face of his.

“Wily old pirate, am I?” Jacob growled. “That’s a right brassy tongue you’ve got in that curly head of yours, Red.”

“Well, aren’t you a wily old pirate?” Cassandra challenged him, her heart racing. “Besides, what makes you think I didn’t mean it as a compliment?”

He scowled at her. Then his thin lips stretched across his teeth in a skull-like grimace. “Right smart one we got here, Morgan. That’s just what happened. But Chang was a mean negotiator himself. Before he’d agree to come, I had to promise we’d send for the wife and two boys he’d left back in China.”

“Thomas and Johnny?” Cassandra took another forkful of scrambled eggs. “I met them last night when they brought in my bath. I must say, they have excellent manners.”

“Good boys.” Jacob nodded his agreement. “Weren’t knee-high to a grasshopper when they come here, but their folks raised them fine. Thomas sees that I’m decently washed and dressed, and helps his father with the house. Johnny took to cowboyin’ from the first time he laid eyes on a horse. Little squirt can rope any critter that runs on four legs and a few that don’t.”

Jacob Tolliver chuckled humorlessly at his own joke. Then his eyes went hard. “That’s enough talk about Chinamen. What I want to know, Red, is what brings a woman in your condition all the way to this godforsaken spot. Hell, it’s a dangerous trip alone, even for a man. You and that old mule could’ve got yourselves drowned in a creek or picked clean by wolves…” His gaze narrowed and sharpened. “Did you come all this way to find your baby’s pa? Maybe get the bounder to marry you? Is that it?”

Cassandra laid her fork on her plate, her appetite suddenly gone. She felt the old man’s eyes drilling into her, felt the cold, silent threat in Morgan’s gaze.

“I don’t like secrets in my house,” Jacob said. “Tell us, Red. Now.”

Chapter Five

Cassandra felt her stomach clench. A wave of cold nausea crept into her throat. Determined not to disgrace herself, she willed it back. It was panic, nothing more, she told herself. She could—and would—control it.

“Cassandra doesn’t feel she owes us an explanation,” Morgan broke in before she could reply to his father’s question. “But, yes, she has reason to think her baby’s father might be working for us—maybe up with the herd in the summer pasture.”

The old man twisted a dangling strand of his drooping mustache. “Well, whoever he is, the damned fool ought to be horsewhipped, runnin’ off and leavin’ a young girl in a family way. Bring him in and I’ll do the job myself. What did you say his name was, Red?”

Cassandra felt her stomach clench again. The flapjacks and eggs swam before her eyes. “Would you please excuse me?” she said, rising. “I’m afraid I’m not feeling well. I need some…air.”

With as much dignity as she could muster, she strode out of the dining room and, once out of sight, bolted for the front door.

The morning breeze struck her face as she staggered onto the porch. She gulped it frantically, leaning over the rail like a seasick ocean passenger.

Little by little the urge to retch diminished. Cassandra closed her eyes, letting the wind cool her sweat-dampened face. It was all right—she was all right. But she could not make herself walk back into that dining room and face Jacob Tolliver’s question.

What should she have told him? Not the truth, heaven forbid. And not the lie she had carried all the way to the Tolliver Ranch. Morgan was right—the old man was not ready to hear the shocking news that her baby was Ryan’s.

If she’d had her wits about her, she could have given Jacob Tolliver the first name that came into her head. Then she could have made a dramatic show of searching for her lost sweetheart, bursting into tears when she learned he was not on the ranch. That, at least, would have satisfied Morgan. But it would have added one more lie to the sickening tangle she’d woven, a tangle that was already threatening to drag her down to eternal fire and brimstone.

Impulsively she stepped off the porch and wandered across the yard toward the corral. Waiting there, just beyond the fence, was her single true friend in this place—the one friend who had no need for lies.

“Xavier!” She held out her hand, wishing she’d thought to steal a biscuit from the table. No matter. At her call the old dun mule pricked up his ears and trotted toward her, his limp noticeably better.

“How’s it going, old boy? Are they treating you right?” Cassandra’s eyes misted as she stroked the velvet nose, then moved her hand upward to scratch between the long, rabbity ears. The irascible creature had been her confidant, her protector and her only companion on the northward trek from Laramie. “It’s a good thing you can’t talk,” she whispered, laying her cheek against the bony neck. “I’d have no secrets at all in this place, would I?”

The mule snorted, bobbing his massive head up and down as if sharing the joke.

“And what secrets would he be telling about you, Miss Cassandra Riley?”

The rough whisper, coming from just behind her ear, startled Cassandra into a fit of hiccups. She glared up at Morgan Tolliver, struggling to maintain her dignity while her diaphragm convulsed in painful spasms.

“Don’t you ever…hic…do that to me again!”

His mouth remained as grim as a hatchet blade, but his eyes, Cassandra noticed, glimmered with sparks of amusement.

“Do you make a habit of…hic…sneaking up on people and scaring them? What if I’d had a gun, or a knife? You could be…hic…bleeding right now!”

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