Twilight

“I don’t think so. No, no, he’s not.”

“But he has to get better, Mama. So he has to stay. He killed that snake. He told me it would bite me. It was a rattler, Mama.”

Jessica’s teeth slid together. “Mama knows what it was, Christian. Hasn’t Mama told you about snakes? That they bite, and that you must stay away from them?”

She could almost hear the indignant dipping of his chin. “Yes...but I just wanted to touch it, and Mr. Stark said I shouldn’t.”

Jessica glanced sideways at her son. “Why don’t you believe what Mama tells you, Christian?”

He stared at her, eyes enormous pools full of guilt and suspicion. Because you have to prove everything you tell me. “I don’t know,” he said slowly.

“Listen to Mama, Christian.”

“Is he going to stay and fix our barn?”

Jessica glanced sharply at Christian, then shook her head. “Reverend Halsey is going to fix our barn...and the house...as soon as he finds the time. He’s very busy at the church.”

“No, he’s not. He doesn’t like the barn or our house. He told me, Mama. He told me I was gonna live in his house soon. He told me that, Mama.”

“That must have been before he talked to Mama.”

Christian’s blond brows quivered as he stared down at Stark. “He’s big, Mama. He could fix our barn good.”

A shiver took up residence in Jessica’s belly when her eyes skittered over the muscled plains of chest. “We’ll see.” She sat back on her heels and surveyed the clean wound. “I have to get bandages.” She pointed her index finger at her son. “Stay here. And don’t touch him.”

Christian gave her a look that bordered on patronizing. How like his father he looked at times like that. “I can touch him. He doesn’t bite, Mama. And I want him to stay.” His tiny voice crept after her as she ventured into the kitchen in search of bandages. “Did you see how he killed that snake, Mama? Did you see? I want him to stay. Can he, Mama? Can he? He could sleep in the barn and teach me how to throw a knife.”

Jessica shuddered and slammed the cupboard doors.

“Couldn’t he, Mama? Say yes, Mama.”

“We’ll see.” She entered the bedroom with bandages in hand. Yet, try as she might, there was no denying the peculiar thrill that shot through her at the thought...of a repaired barn, of course. Avram wouldn’t get to it by September, if then—if he ever would, stubborn man. And the house, yes, the house required so much. After all, the further it sank into disrepair, the more fervently Avram would insist she rid herself of it. Perhaps if these bedroom walls were sporting a fresh coat of white paint to rival that of Sadie McGlue’s, if the barn weren’t threatening to collapse at any moment, if she could prove her strawberry patch a worthwhile endeavor...perhaps then Avram would cease this nonsense about selling the farm.

Her eyes drifted over the undeniable bulge of Stark’s biceps, the sinewed length of forearm, those large, capable hands and long, long legs. Even with a shoulder wound, he looked quite able, even more so than a sulking Avram on a good day. And he was awfully tall, tall enough, it seemed, to accomplish just about anything.

“We’ll see” was all she said.

Chapter Two

Inch by inch, Rance pulled himself from the sucking depths of a fathomless pit. The light drew him, and something more, a touch upon his brow, soft as thistledown, upon his lips, something cool, and then another touch...something tapping upon his closed eyelids, first one, tap-tap-tap, then the other.

“Wake up.”

A voice, bereft of all softness, all compassion, all the warmth his jaded ear sought, loomed out of the pervasive gloom. The voice brimmed with impatience, and the tapping upon his eyelids hovered near an agitated poke.

“Wake up, wake up.”

A growl blossomed in Rance’s chest, struggled up his parched throat and spilled from his lips. The tapping on his eyelids stopped. Only then did the heat in Rance’s left shoulder swell, then focus into one searing throb of pain.

He’d been shot. He knew this from both instinct and experience, even while all else hovered just beyond his grasp. If only the fog would part. If only he could move. Who the hell had shot him?

The poking resumed upon his eyelids.

“Wake up, wake up.”

A child’s voice.

Rance forced open one eye. Sunlight blinded him and stoked yet another ache, this one dull, at the back of his head. He squeezed his eyes closed and rolled the lump on the back of his head over whatever it was he lay on. Something soft, as if placed there for his comfort. Who the hell would do that?

“Wake up, Mr. Stark.” Poke-poke.

Stark...Stark. His mother’s family name, and not truly an alias, then, but unrecognizable. Why Stark? And who was this little person? Memories slammed about in the throbbing recesses of his brain. Oh, yes, the boy, the woman.

Frank Wynne’s wife.

Rance wrapped his fingers around a thin wrist, stilling that poking, then slowly opened his eyes. The fog lifted, and realization flooded over him the way sunlight flooded the room. The boy was perched over him—Christian, she’d called him—his jaw set and his blue eyes filled with an accusatory look.

Rance released that tiny wrist and felt his lungs deflate of all air. The boy was the image of his mother, clear to the thrust of that tiny chin. And just like his mother, he was small, compactly made, dressed in something that looked like it had once been bleached white and starched crisp beneath a loving hand. That grimy chin jutted forward, and one pudgy finger looked as if it yearned to poke into his nose before some silent reprimand brought it instead to scratch idly at his cheek. And still those hollow blue eyes probed unflinchingly through a curtain of straight blond bangs, just as they had from that photograph pressed in Frank Wynne’s locket. The locket tucked inside his watch pocket.

“My mama shot you.”

Rance rubbed his eyes and resisted a sudden, irrational urge to laugh. Shot by a woman... He could still see her there, looking as if at any moment she might crumple beneath the weight of the rifle. All that blond hair, tossed about by the wind, blinding her, distracting him. The hair...so different from her photograph that he might never have recognized her had it not been for her eyes, that unmistakable sorrow lurking deep there.

His fingers touched the bandage. Frank Wynne’s wife had shot him. The irony of it all. Had she known who he was, she might have left him to bleed to death in all that dust. Or she might have shot him again. But she didn’t know who he was, nor could she possibly guess. After all, what man in his right mind, a man still wanted for murder, would find himself within a fifty-mile radius of the home of the man he’d killed? And he still didn’t understand in the least any of his reasons for coming here—as if understanding it would have made it any less foolish. Hell, he deserved to be shot.

He had to get the hell out of here.

“My mama’s never shot anything. But she shot you. She thought you were a bad man. But you killed the bad snake, so she put a bandage on you.”

Regret, uncomfortable and entirely unknown, sliced through Rance, and he shifted his shoulders, as if he could shrug off any hint of compassion, of weakness, of that damned squirming that filled his gut whenever he met the boy’s eyes. Pain cut through his shoulder, spiraling down his arm and through his chest. He released his breath in a long wheeze. “Where is your mama?”

“Out back.” The boy gave Rance and his shoulder wound a deeply suspicious look. “You’re an outlaw.”

“I’m not an outlaw.” Rance shoved himself up on one elbow. The room tilted, then righted itself. He’d ridden in worse shape. He could sure as hell manage it now. Why had he come here? Damned stupid of him.

“Do you rob trains and stagecoaches?”

The boy looked altogether too anxious about that. Rance glowered at him, and pain sliced through his head at the mere shifting of his brows. “No.”

“This is my mama’s room,” Christian said with a slight narrowing of his eyes. Again the accusatory look. “You got blood on my mama’s hooked rug. She’s gonna have to clean it again. She’s gonna be mad.”

“She’s already mad at me.” And none of it had to do with him sullying her damned carpet. Frank Wynne’s carpet, in Frank Wynne’s house. Frank Wynne’s wife. Rance allowed his bleary gaze to roam about the sun-dappled room. Odd, but he couldn’t imagine this soft, gentle woman’s room, with its lace curtains and embroidered white coverlet, its corner rocker and carved armoire, its freshly cut white roses and prominent Bible, belonging to Frank Wynne. Toothy, lecherous Frank Wynne. A boastful, cheating Frank Wynne, yammering tale after tale of the women he’d had in every cattle town from Denver to Abilene as he chewed on his cigars.

His widow had a narrow waist beneath her loose-fitting dress, an undeniable length of legs hidden under those flapping skirts, full breasts that swelled from a narrow sweep of ribs.

Frank Wynne had bedded that woman, on this bed.

Rance heard his teeth click together, and he tore his gaze from the four-poster, forcing himself to his feet. He steeled himself against the inevitable pitching of the floor beneath his feet, gripped one of those fat mahogany bedposts, only to find himself staring at Frank Wynne, a dapper, sleekly combed Frank Wynne, framed in gilt and poised in loving memory upon a dressing table directly across the room. There he sat, Frank Wynne, amid several crystal flacons and an ivory-handled hairbrush, all cushy and cared-for upon a delicate sweep of white lace. A most precious spot for a departed husband to be revered from the stool set before that dressing table. A stool where his wife no doubt perched every night to brush all that curling gold hair.