To Tame a Wolf

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

PROLOGUE

Hat Rock, Texas, 1866

THE OLD DRUNK, Charlie, was the one who came to tell Sim his mother was dead.

Others would have known earlier, of course—the madam of the brothel, Evelyn’s fellow soiled doves…and any number of clients, respectable and less so, who frequented the Rose of Texas. Gossip traveled fast in a whorehouse.

None of them bothered to pass the tragic news to Evelyn’s only son. Charlie came not because he gave a damn about Sim, but because carrying the story made him feel important. More important than a worthless, troublemaking sixteen-year-old tramp.

Sim, standing in the dusty street in front of Hat Rock’s pathetic excuse for a bank, heard Charlie’s slurred speech without emotion. He’d learned to hide his feelings early on, when he figured out that Ma couldn’t be trusted from one moment to the next. Sometimes she cuddled him and called him “my son,” but more often she cursed him as the bane of her life, the burden who had ruined her for the better things she deserved.

Sim clenched his fists and walked out of the cloud of Charlie’s whiskey-soaked breath. He strolled down the center of Main Street, making the carriages and buckboards and horsemen go around him.

Ma was dead. She’d been going at it a long time, riddled with some kind of wasting disease. But she’d kept working, even when only the lowest clients would take her. And Sim had visited the Rose every day to see if she needed anything from her only kin, if she would accept a little of the money he earned or stole in every petty way he had learned in his years on the street.

On his last visit she’d spat at him. He’d wiped the spittle from his cheek and left, though Madame Rose had tried to bribe him with promises of a hot meal and a free ride after. He’d sworn he wouldn’t go back. He’d planned to break his oath this afternoon. He could have said goodbye.

She could have said she loved him.

He laughed, startling some fine lady’s skittish horse. Her male escort, a rich rancher decked out like a pimp, spurred his long-legged eastern gelding in front of Sim and slashed the air with his quirt.

“Get out of the street, you savage,” he snarled.

Sim tilted back the brim of his ragged hat and looked the man in the eye. The man yanked on the reins. “Filthy beggar,” he muttered. “No better than a—”

His horse squealed as a length of heavy rawhide rope slapped down on the animal’s well-bred rump. The beast took off like a shot, and the lady’s mount plunged after it.

Caleb laughed the way he always did, loud and long. He beat the rawhide against his palm. “Pelado,” he scoffed. “Thinks he’s too good for the likes of us.”

His glance pulled Sim in like a brother’s embrace. Besides Ma, he was the closest thing to real kin Sim had. Except Ma had known she was dying and finally told Sim that he had a pa. One even more important than Caleb’s.

Caleb stopped laughing and gave Sim a hard stare. “What’s wrong with you? Been eatin’ leftovers out of Mowbray’s rubbish heap again?”

Sim averted his face and headed for the nearest alley. He had a lump in his throat, and he was afraid he might start bawling. Bad enough to do it in front of Caleb, but if anyone else saw…

Caleb gripped his arm. “It’s the bitch, ain’t it? What’d she do to you this time?”

“Nothing.” Sim yanked free and strode deep into the alley, where the shadows made him feel safe.

Caleb knocked Sim’s hat off his head. “Liar.” He squinted in Sim’s face. “Your eyes are all red. She hit you?” Sim shook his head and snatched at his hat. Caleb held it just out of his reach. “I know damned well you’d never hit her back, no matter how much she deserves it.”

Sim’s heart balled up into a painful knot. “She don’t deserve nothing anymore,” he said. “She’s dead.”

Caleb whistled. “Damn.” He set Sim’s hat back on his head and gently pressed it in place. “Who told you?”

“Charlie.”

“Figures.” Caleb leaned on the wall and bent one knee, wedging his boot heel against the clapboard. “She didn’t leave you anything, did she?”

Trust Caleb to ask that first. He was the one who usually planned their petty thieveries and moneymaking schemes; there was always some little trinket he coveted, some luxury he just had to have, and his father damned sure wouldn’t give him the cash. Marshall Smith was as tightfisted as they came, at least with his own family. The whole town knew that Mrs. Smith and her son lived like the poorest Mexicans, while the marshall spent what he earned on himself and the pretty puta he kept in a house at the edge of town.

Sometimes Sim wondered if he was better off than Caleb. At least Evelyn hadn’t lectured him about the devil and hellfire all day and night like Mrs. Smith. Sim didn’t have his friend’s big dreams for the future, so he wasn’t disappointed. The only thing he had ever really wanted was forever beyond his reach.

Unless he could find his father.

“You better get to the Rose and make sure your ma didn’t leave anything, or one of the other girls’ll steal it for sure,” Caleb said, kicking the wall. “You have the right to take whatever she had.”

A few rags of clothes too big for a wasted body, paint to hide sunken cheeks, a handful of cheap costume jewelry. Sim wanted none of it. But he would go anyway, to make sure Ma had a decent burial. If she hadn’t saved enough, he would find the money somewhere.

His nose started to run from the effort of holding back the tears. He pulled out a handkerchief with the uneven initials stitched into the threadbare linen—S.W.K. Simeon Wartrace Kavanagh. Ma had sewn the cloth for him two Christmases ago, when she was feeling uncommonly charitable.

He shoved the handkerchief back in his waistcoat. Ma was better off dead than suffering. He’d wished her gone often enough. Hated her more than half the time. Hated what she was and what she could never be.

“Hey,” Caleb said. “I’ll make sure you get what’s coming to you, don’t worry. The ladies know me.” He slapped Sim’s shoulder. “Now you don’t have her to drag you down, you’re free. You can leave this stinking town. We can both get out of here and do all that stuff we talked about.”

“Finding lost mines and buried treasure?” Sim said. The words cracked shamefully.

“Hell, that’s only the beginning. We’ll both be rich before we hit twenty. I swear to you, brother, they’ll all remember our names.”

Caleb would make sure they remembered his. If he couldn’t force his father to pay attention to his misdemeanors around town—broken windows and pilfered store goods, mischief grudgingly permitted the marshall’s son—then he would find some other way of getting the kind of life he wanted. He would never be like his ma, trying to ignore humiliation and poverty by believing worldly goods were the paving stones to hell.

No, Caleb would take everything he could beg, borrow or steal, and he’d never look back.

“C’mon,” Caleb said, pulling at Sim’s faded flannel shirt. “Let’s go put the old bitch in her grave.”

Sim stiffened. “Don’t,” he said softly. “Don’t call her that again, Caleb.”

“Or what?” Caleb laughed. “You remember when we met? You were bawling behind the livery stable because your ma beat you and called you her ruination. She said she’d wished she’d gotten rid of you before you were born.”

“You think I don’t remember?”

“I cried once, when I was six and Ma took a belt to my back to whup the demons out of me. I used it all up then. You still have a little left in you, Sim. Get rid of it. Now the War’s over, there’s fortunes to be made in New Mexico and Arizona Territory. We got to find them lost Spanish mines and Aztec gold before someone beats us to it.” He slapped Sim’s shoulder. “We’re getting the hell out of this town, and we ain’t coming back.”

“There’s something I got to do first.”

“Go find your daddy?”

Sim acted without thinking, seizing the front of Caleb’s shirt. “What do you know about him?”

“I told you, the ladies like me.” Caleb shrugged him off. “Frank MacLean. One of the richest cattlemen in Palo Pinto county. I’m sure he’s just rarin’ to acknowledge his long-lost bastard son—if you really are his son.”