The Untamed Heart

“It seems de rigueur.” He caught her quick glance over the rim of his cup. A disarming smile deepened the creases around his eyes. “Local custom. I haven’t seen tea since I left the steamer in New York, and the only words spoken in this country after the word coffee are ‘strong’ and ‘black.’ I’m pleased to say there’s remarkable variation in the taste. You outdo the Pullman Palace car, Wilhelmina.”

She hesitated, pondered her pinkening cheeks, then lifted her chin. “That’s no compliment.”

“It should be. The berth in first-class cabin accommodations aboard a Cunard steamer are less comfortable than the berth in a Pullman Palace car. It seems Mr. Pullman has taken as much care in the decorating and furnishing of his railcars as French decorators do in decorating the dwellings of the very rich. Were he up to dealing with the shoddily laid track in England, Mr. Pullman could revolutionize railway travel there and at the same time enrich himself beyond the dreams of avarice.”

“Then he will. All Eastern capitalists want richness beyond the dreams of avarice. All men do.”

“Not all men. To some, the ultimate rewards lie elsewhere.”

“Ultimate rewards begin to mean very little when food is scarce. Noble dreams die swift deaths when there’s no money and no work. Just ask any miner.” She stared up at him, realizing he was waiting for her to continue. Something about him made her want to keep talking, as if what she said and felt and thought was valid, worthwhile. And she wanted to spew it all out for him, all the misery, the loneliness, the guilt and the inevitable despair.

For one startling moment she knew a vulnerability that she hadn’t felt since the day her mother had died.

“I’ll show you where you’ll sleep,” she said, her voice taking on a chill. With head lifted, she led him to the front bedroom as if she were Mr. Pullman himself, stopping just outside the open doorway. Her first thought as she glanced into the room was that Sloan Devlin’s feet would hang off the end of the bed.

“Breakfast is at six,” she said as he leaned past her to peer into the room. Pressing herself against the doorjamb, she drew in her breath just as his sleeve brushed against her bare forearm. “Supper at one. Dinner at six. There’s a water pump out back for washing up.” She stared at the back of his head where a dark leather cord bound the thick length of his blue-black hair. Unbound, she imagined it would fall past his shoulders.

He turned and faced her and her knees gave a sudden wobble. “Where do you and your grandfather sleep?”

Her eyes skittered across the kitchen to a shadowed corner and the narrow steps there. “I sleep upstairs. There’s three bedrooms there. Gramps sleeps in his chair in the front room.”

“You’re alone here.”

Damn his gently coaxing voice, smooth as warm honey. Brant’s voice had been even smoother, when he’d wanted it to be.

She lifted her eyes to his and gripped the doorjamb at her back. “My mama died when I was ten. My pa and my brothers all went when the Lucky Cuss blew last year. Now it’s just me and Gramps and Huck, the dog. And the boarders.”

“Do you get many?”

“We get some.” It wasn’t a complete lie. They got a boarder every six months or so.

“People must not know what they’re missing.”

Something inside her went weak. Smooth as honey, just like Brant. So much like Brant and yet somehow so different Hadn’t she lingered just like this outside the room with Brant that first evening, mesmerized by his charm, captivated by his smile? Less than a week later she’d lain beneath him on the soft grass and watched him lean over her, blocking out all the sun.

Like a frightened rabbit she scooted past Devlin, tossing over her shoulder something about seeing to Gramps. Devlin’s softly spoken “Good night, Wilhelmina” followed her out onto the porch and halfway across the yard before it leapt up into the starry sky and vanished.

Noble dreams die swift deaths when there’s no money.

Sloan looked up from his journal and stared out into the moon-splashed darkness. The field of grass rippled like ocean waves in the milky moonlight, extending from the porch to a sweep of trees more than a mile out. Beyond that, rising from the earth like a majestic beast, loomed the blue-white peaks of the mountains. The moon seemed to hang just inches above the tallest peak. Sloan listened to the rustling of the grass, breathed in the scent of wildflowers and scanned the horizon from east to west before again lifting his pencil.

The senses are at once quickened and overpowered by thelimitless space. Those who people these vast tracts of land should enjoy a freedom far better than that of a wanton breeze, balmy with perfume. I feel a deep longing that the thousands who earn a precarious livelihood in England by tilling the soil of their taskmasters and lords could somehow come to a place where the strength of their arms would win them a comfortable subsistence and would enable them to possess the land which yields them their daily bread. But here, too, noble dreams die.

He lifted his head and stared at a tree standing alone in the field. Its branches glowed with silvery light What dreams remained unreachable for Wilhelmina Thorne? She was far too young to spend the rest of her life with a look of haunted longing in her eyes, far too compelling to live out her days here, a treasure hidden and undiscovered where the grass met the base of the mountains.

There was a loneliness about her that reminded him of the tinners’ widows. But where despair would have found a comfortable home long ago grim determination resided. Willie was searching for something, something to squelch her discontent. He wondered what her broken heart had to do with it.

A dim light from above cast a sudden splash of gold onto the porch. Sloan looked up at the window and watched a slender shadow move behind sheer curtains. Above the rush of the grass he heard her humming, husky and low. The curtain billowed, whispered apart, and he glimpsed pale womanly roundness and white skin as she leaned near the window, unaware.

The curtain stilled, but her shadow remained. Her humming seemed to swell and fill the air. Sloan felt his breath compress in his lungs as the breeze again stirred through the curtains.

He saw a splash of white lace, a cascade of copper curls and then the lamp was snuffed.

He didn’t realize he’d held his breath until it left him in a wheeze. Despite the cool breeze, perspiration suddenly dotted his forehead. He swept his palm through his hair then stood, pencil and journal gripped in one hand. He pondered the darkness. His room had smelled like citrus, the sheets like hot sun and starch. He wondered if Willie’s room smelled the same.

A young heart was broken on a grassy knoll in Prosperity Gulch.

Turning, he climbed the creaking porch steps to his room.

Willie awoke before the cock crowed, when dawn had barely lightened the night’s mantle a shade. Toes curling against the chill of the planks, she scooted from her bed, moved to the window and pushed the curtain aside. Something besides the creeping of dawn had awakened her. Her eyes probed the gloom. Her ears strained above the predawn silence. The moon had long disappeared over the mountains. Stars still hung low in the sky, winking at the morning. All was as it should be. Her eyes shifted and sought movement among the shadows.

She saw him the instant she heard him. Or was it him? Something moved in the far corner of the field where she’d chopped wood. A man, tall and shirtless, stood motionless at the edge of the woods, staring out into the trees. But the sound echoing out over the valley and up into the trees was inhuman, primal, savage. Like the haunting cry of a wolf.

Gooseflesh swept over Willie’s arms and prickled at her cheeks. Strange though it might be, a man howling into the woods was hardly reason to be frightened, especially since she’d chased wolves off her property many times over the years. But she understood the wolves and their reasons for venturing too far from the thicket She knew nothing of Devlin, or his howling. Surely he wasn’t howling at the wolves? Talking to them…

She gritted her teeth, appalled at the odd turn of her thoughts. Men didn’t talk to wolves, not even peculiar Englishmen out to see the elephant. No man would be so foolish as to attempt to lure a predator out of its den. Then again she’d seen no fear in Devlin’s eyes when Reuben Grimes had threatened him or when the cowboy had attempted to draw his gun. She suddenly wondered if anything would scare Sloan Devlin.

Or was he simply ignorant of the harm that could befall him at every turn?

Whirling from the window, she yanked her night rail over her head and reached for the Levi’s and shirt folded over the back of a chair. Before she left the room, she grabbed the repeating rifle in the back corner.

Gramps stood at the foot of the stairs, coffee cup in hand, staring out at the field. He didn’t look up when she bounded down the steps. “What the hell’s he doin’?”

“Howling at the wolves.”

“The hell he is. I heard a bear once sounded like that. He was dyin’, real slow. He cried just like Devlin’s cryin’.”

Willie checked the rifle, aware that her limbs felt jittery. Tossing her hair over her shoulder, she glanced at Gramps. “He’s not crying. He thinks he’s talking to the wolves.”

“You goin’ to kill him?” A strange twinkle lit Gramps’s eyes. “Or you gonna try to scare him?”

Willie set her jaw. “I haven’t made up my mind.”

“He’s like the wolves. He won’t scare easy.”

“I know.” Tucking the rifle under one arm, she pushed open the door. Huck awaited her at the foot of the porch steps, shaggy black tail pumping back and forth, tongue lolling out of one side of his mouth. She didn’t pause to ruffle his ears. “C’mon, boy.”

In long, loping strides, she set out across the field, Huck hunkering low into his trot right at her side. Dew clung to her boots and dampened her pants clear to her knees. The air hung still, chilled and eerily calm, the silence broken only by the swishing of her boots through the grass. And then he howled again and the fine hairs on the back of her neck stood up. The sound echoed up into the trees like the wail of a dying animal.

She quickened her pace, bursting into the clearing with the rifle gripped at the ready. She went instantly still. So did Huck beside her.

Devlin stood with his back to her, straight and still as a hundred-year-old sycamore, swathed in some mysterious cocoon of unawareness. He wore nothing except a pair of very tight black pants that looked as if they had been cut off to grip just below his knees. His legs were exceptionally lean and long muscled, nothing like the tree trunks that had powered her father and brothers through the mines for years. But though she’d seen her brothers in all stages of undress throughout their youth and into manhood, she’d never been so suddenly and completely fascinated with the shape of a man’s legs, the tapering breadth of his bare back or the meaty muscles of his buttocks.

Not even on the knoll.

The sun rising over the treetops colored his skin coppery gold and set his unbound black hair aflame with blue. Despite the air’s chill, his shoulders glistened with a smooth, dewlike sheen.. All along the curve of shoulder and bicep, his muscles rippled below the thinness of skin even as he stood motionless. Willie bit her lip, disturbingly aware of a desire to feel the heat of all that skin and sinew beneath her palms. Her blood hammered a pulse in her ear. Her mouth went dry.

Lightning quick he moved. One leg arced up at an inhumane angle toward the nearest thick tree, stirring the leaves that hung above his head. It was an explosion of energy and movement in the span of one heartbeat. Had she blinked she would have missed it. Had he misjudged his distance or his angle, he would have driven his bare foot into the thick, gnarled trunk.