A Man with a Past by Mary Connealy
TWENTY-FIVE
He’s gone.” Cheyenne swung down off her horse, disgusted. “Not much we could’ve done. We had to get Wyatt home. We left him in such a place it’d’ve been hard to know how to send someone out after him.” But still it stuck in her craw. “I had some questions I’d’ve liked to ask that man.”
The distant rumble of thunder told her rain was coming, and it sounded fierce. They’d lost their chance to bring Ralston in.
Falcon picked up a length of cast-aside rope. “Rope’s cut. I know he wasn’t armed with a knife. Someone was in it with him. Look for tracks.”
They were at it for about two minutes. “Hobart.” Falcon knelt. “A woman’s boots here.”
He looked up at the darkening sky, frowning. “Should we trail them?”
Shaking her head, Cheyenne pointed at the tracks. “They even got Ralston’s horse back. We didn’t get the man, and we left his horse behind. We could probably find them, but it’s rough country, and it looks like rain is coming. The rain will ruin any trail we might follow.”
“It might not.” Falcon looked at the tracks, sounding thoughtful. “I can oftentimes pick up bits of a trail left, even after rain has washed out most of it.”
“I want no part of the high country in a lightning storm.” She studied the sky and saw a streak of lightning brighten the dark gray, roiling clouds.
“Does this clear up any claim the man had on your land?”
Cheyenne rubbed the back of her neck. “His claim has already been overturned. But this oughta make things simple.”
“Him running like he done is as good as a confession.” Falcon headed for his horse.
“Reasoned like that, it makes Mrs. Hobart guilty, too.” Cheyenne stormed to her horse and swung up. Furious again.
“Do you have something against the woman? I didn’t think you knew much about her?”
Cheyenne gathered her reins, but instead of spurring her horse and running away from all of this, she looked Falcon in the eye. “Oliver Hawkins asked me to marry him. I was considering it.”
Falcon was silent as the grave. He reined his horse down the trail they’d ridden up. But he didn’t go all the way to the main trail, the place they’d split off from Wyatt earlier. Without explanation, he turned down a sharp slope that Cheyenne only recognized as a trail after they were on it.
It burned.
He was better than her, and she didn’t like it. Yet at the same time, she respected it deeply.
And though she had no idea where he was going, she trailed along after him like a cattle-drive-broke cow.
He reached some place that suited whatever his purpose was, or so she imagined, and he dismounted, led his horse to a wide spot in the trail, and hitched it to a birch sapling.
Cheyenne did the same.
Finally, they stood, facing each other, and Falcon said, “Have you taken leave of your senses?”
Anger. She hadn’t seen that in him.
And even so, she knew what he meant.
“He’s asked, or rather suggested it as something we should talk about, several times in the last few years.”
Shaking his head, Falcon said, “He never asked you to go on a buggy ride? He never told Wyatt or anyone else he was sparkin’ you?”
“We hadn’t, or rather, he hadn’t exactly done any, um, sparkin’.”
Falcon’s eyes narrowed. “Haven’t I heard someone say he was a lot like Clovis?”
“No,” Cheyenne snapped. “That’s not true. He planted himself at his ranch and stayed all this time.”
“He’s what? Twenty years older than you?”
“My pa was older than my ma.”
“Twenty years?”
Cheyenne shrugged one shoulder and didn’t answer. It’d been more like five, but that wasn’t the point.
“He doesn’t work the ranch. He’s lazy. That’s like Clovis.”
“I could work the ranch.”
“You’d hold no respect for him. Never, no matter how long you were married.”
Cheyenne thought she saw Falcon give a faint shudder.
Odd, but she thought of Oliver and was tempted to shudder herself. Instead, she got mad.
“As women go out here, I’m old.”
“Twenty-five?” Falcon snorted. “It’s a wonder you don’t have a head full of gray hair.”
“I’m twenty-six, and I’ve found a few, and it doesn’t matter that he’s not the perfect man. I’ve looked hard for a long while, and there aren’t any of those. In fact, the only other man who’s shown any interest in me lately is probably married.” Cheyenne shoved Falcon with all the rage and confusion and jealousy one woman could possess.
He staggered back a step, but she thought he might’ve done it to get away from her.
“If I marry Oliver, I may not get the perfect man.” Cheyenne’s voice rose with every word. “But I will get a ranch.”
She caught up to Falcon and jabbed him in the chest with one sharp pointer finger. “One that can’t be stolen from me.”
She jabbed him again. “A ranch I can run to suit myself.”
Another jab.
Falcon swatted her hand aside. “Stop that.”
“I’ll do it because my husband will sit at a desk while I do the work I love, on land I own.”
She jabbed.
He caught her hand, dragged her against his chest, and lowered his head. She slapped him hard enough to knock some sense into him and herself. “You’re married.”
“I don’t believe I am.”
“You can’t know for sure.”
“You’re right. I know you’re right. Just . . . promise me you won’t marry Hawkins.”
“You know we can’t be together.”
There was too long a silence.
“You have to give me time to remember or find the truth. You have to.”
Cheyenne saw the kindness in his eyes and his own confusion.
All she could manage to say was “I have to.”
She cleared her throat. “Did you really think Oliver was in some way involved with Mrs. Hobart?”
“He acted mighty odd when Bud suggested Mrs. Hobart was Ralston’s woman. And he acted that way with the woman he’s proposed to nearby? Cheyenne, thinking you could marry a varmint like that, it’s cold.”
“Cold? I found him likeable. I thought we could deal well together.”
“No, you were plannin’ on making a deal. A contract as cold as signing to purchase a horse. ‘You let me run your ranch, and I’ll be a wife to you.’ No feeling. No notion of him being likeable, only a man you could endure because you are so unhappy at home.”
A strange breath of cool air washed through her. “That’s what Win has been doing at our house, isn’t it?”
Falcon hesitated. “Might be.”
“She found her home unhappy.”
“But she didn’t endure you and Wyatt. She loves you both and considers you her best friends, and now she’s joined your family.”
“If she can’t endure her home, why hasn’t she told me why?”
“Hasn’t she?”
“No, uh, well, I think . . . that is . . . she might’ve been going to say something once.”
“And you didn’t let her?”
“I was riding double with her that day we found you in the forest. I, well, I more or less pushed her off the back of my horse.”
“But she’s known you were considering marrying her father, and she never seemed to object?”
Cheyenne stepped away from him, crossed her arms, and said, “She’d known since about five minutes before I ran off. I announced it to her, then took off into the woods for a week.”
“And within a short time of finding you again—”
“You say that like I was lost.” Cheyenne cut him off. “I was not lost.”
He smiled at her. “As soon as she found you, she tried to tell you something about her pa, and you wouldn’t listen, made it mighty clear you weren’t gonna listen.”
“Maybe I should have a talk with her, huh?”
“Yep, because there’s no doubt in my mind there was something personal between him and Hobart. When she ran, Hawkins didn’t look like a man losing a good housekeeper. He looked like a man losing a woman he was . . . in some way of the heart . . . well, sparkin’.”
Like Oliver had never done with her, Cheyenne thought bitterly. Of course, he had no public relationship with Mrs. Hobart, either. “He’s carrying on with her in secret, while he’s planning to marry me if I’ll have him?”
“’Bout the size of it.”
“You could be a little more kind about it!”
He reared back, probably afraid she was going to slap him again, then arched one brow. Not exactly fighting back. More like, trying to figure out how to handle a loco longhorn. And none of this was his fault. His only fault was being blunt in his honesty.
“I’m tempted to ride over to the Hawkins Ranch and use my spurs on his backside,” Cheyenne said.
That must’ve shaken off his worry of being hit at because he laughed.
“No riding to Hawkins’s today. Wyatt’s hurt. Leaving for a spell was a good idea, too many worryin’ folks ganged up around his sick bed—or sick table, I guess.”
She wanted to laugh but thinking of Wyatt made it impossible. “Let’s go home.”
“Let’s go home.” He took her hand and walked her back to the horses. Just that, the hand-holding, the walk in the deep woods, the quiet as they mounted up, was the most romantic thing a man had ever done with her.
She was afraid that made her pathetic. It spoke of a barren sort of life.
On the other hand, she enjoyed every minute.