Sundancer (Cheyenne Series) (12 page)

      
Roxanna felt suddenly bereft of the warmth and comfort his body had given her. She lay stunned, watching as he untied the horses' reins. The thick white hail littering the ground made sharp crunching noises beneath their hooves, bringing her out of the numb trance. She sat up, brushing the faint remnants of sand and dust off her buckskins.

      
She drew in a shaky breath and tried to tell herself it was for the best that he had refused to interfere with Jubal MacKenzie's plans. The bitter aching lump in her throat made her realize just how dearly she had wanted him to...what? Tell her that he loved her? That he wanted to marry her himself?
Well, Roxy, I guess you have your answer. Even an outcast like Cain doesn’t want you.

      
Love and happy endings were the stuff of fairy tales. Being worthy enough to belong to someone was a girlish dream, shattered that morning she'd ridden away from Vicksburg after cheating a hangman’s rope. Even if Cain had wanted her as Alexa, he would not want Roxanna. He did not know her, but he did know he would lose his job if he lay with her. One brief encounter to satisfy his lust was certainly not worth it.
It wouldn’t 't have been worth it for me either,
she stubbornly assured herself.

      
As he led the horses out of the ravine, Cain mulled over his brush with disaster. He suspected that she had been waiting for him to spout some nonsense about love and promise her a wedding ring. Alexa was an easterner, completely unaware of what it meant to be a breed out West. She probably thought her grandpa's money could buy anything. Hell, if he was fool enough to marry her, she'd learn quick enough what civilized white folks thought of one of their own who stooped to consort with a man like him. She'd be disinherited and widowed inside a week.

      
Alexa Hunt was young and naive, but he should know better.
No excuse in hell for letting my cock override my brain,
he chastised himself. A dangerous mistake he had never made before in his life. Oh, he'd taken chances, risked death on more than a few occasions, but never over a woman. No, in the past he only laid his life on the line for cold hard cash and the chance to better his position in a world where the deck was stacked against a nameless half-caste bastard. Damn lucky she'd reminded him which way the wind was blowing before they both regretted it.

      
Roxanna climbed up from the ravine, clutching the bedroll they had wrapped around them during the fury of the storm. His scent still clung to it faintly. She wanted to throw it down, almost did, but then something inside her made her hold it fast instead. Tears stung her eyes and she blinked them back furiously, damned if she'd give him the opportunity to see how his turning away had hurt. At least he had been decent enough not to press his advantage. He did not deceive her with promises of love which he never intended to keep.

      
Be grateful he 's an honest man.
Faint amusement at that irony was tinged with sadness for all the deceptions she had practiced in twenty-three short years of life. A small burble of hysterical laughter welled up, but she quashed it, asking instead, “Why aren't we making camp in the shelter of that gully?”

      
Cain did not trust himself yet to look back at her. “Too dangerous if rain comes later on in the night. That arroyo could turn into a torrential river in minutes and trap us,” he explained as he checked the gear on his chestnut. That's when he noticed the bedroll was missing and remembered why.

      
“Here,” she offered woodenly as he turned, shoving the blanket at him, quickly withdrawing her hand when his fingers brushed hers as he took it.

      
He felt her flinch and her hurt and anger cut through him more keenly than a slap. Sighing, he said, “Look, Alexa, I apologize for what happened back there—”

      
She cut him off, saying, “Nothing happened, Cain, nothing at all.” At his look of patent disbelief she added in her best boarding school voice, “At least nothing we should dwell on any further.”

      
He nodded. “We can make camp over by those trees. The hail's not so thick underneath. Use some of those broken-off branches to sweep the earth around it clear for our bedrolls while I get a fire going.”

      
She did as he ordered without speaking. Soon they had made camp once more, with two pallets laid out beside a cheerily crackling fire. The cool night air hung heavy, freezing their breath in front of them. Roxanna thought the weather perfectly suited the mood. She lay for hours that night staring at the dark vault of heaven stretching above her, unable to sleep, longing for the sweet comfort of his embrace. He had made her feel so safe, sheltered from the storm, but the storm was over now. Time to get on with her life, she reminded herself grimly, and rolled over, turning her back on the man who had rejected her.

      
Across the other side of the small fire, Cain too lay awake, acutely aware of the woman he had held in his arms. His body still throbbed with desire for her. He cursed himself for seven kinds of a fool, knowing he would wait out the night sleepless. By the time they reached MacKenzie’s work camp, he'd have to prop his eyes open with matchsticks just to see where he was going!

* * * *

      
Jubal MacKenzie read the telegram and let out a sigh of blissful relief. Thank God Alexandra was safe. Cain estimated they'd reach Cheyenne in two more days. Propitious timing, since the Powells were scheduled to arrive on the twenty-third in Denver. He had held Andrew Powell off with excuses and evasions ever since his granddaughter was abducted. Finally the Central Pacific chief had wired him last week that he must either produce the girl and sign the agreement or their whole deal was off. MacKenzie suggested Denver as the logical place for such an announcement, saying the prosperous mining center was far more civilized than the wild Hell on Wheels railroad towns on the Union Pacific's trail.

      
The trip south into Colorado provided more time for Cain to return with Alexa. Now he would make it without a day to spare. Cain's wire was deliberately terse, simply stating that he would arrive with his “package none the worse for the journey.” Jubal took that to mean the savages had not harmed her in any way, or at least he prayed that was what Cain meant.

      
Horror stories of Indian atrocities against settlers abounded on the frontier. Conventional wisdom stated that any white female taken captive was better off dead by her own hand than alive after the red devils finished with her, but being a Scot who made his first fortune back East, MacKenzie rejected the idea out of hand. However, he knew the power of ugly gossip and how it could destroy a young woman's reputation east or west, hence the carefully worded telegram and sizable bribes to ensure the silence of the stage station manager and telegrapher who had originally notified him of his granddaughter's abduction.

      
Cain knew how to follow instructions as well as he knew savages. They had met the day the deadly half-breed had coolly walked into a crowd of half-drunken track workers and faced them down, saving MacKenzie's life in the process. He had offered Cain a job immediately and never regretted it once in the past year. No one else could have located Alexa so quickly and quietly. Much as Cain hated his Indian blood, it had certainly proven valuable this time. Jubal sat back in the heavy leather chair behind his desk and steepled his fingers, idly trying to imagine the two of them together, Cain forbidding and taciturn as always, and Alexa—what about Alexa?

      
MacKenzie could not even picture what she might look like at age twenty-one. All he had was one blurred photograph taken on her fifteenth birthday. He had not seen her since she was twelve—or was it thirteen? Guiltily he realized he did not remember. Well, he would make it up to her now, or young Powell would. The boy had seemed quiet and affable when they had met in San Francisco last fall, attractive enough to the ladies, he supposed. Let the old warhorses like him and Andrew keep their noses to the grindstone while their children enjoyed the fruits of their labors. Thoughts of the interest in Central Pacific spur lines he would gain from the alliance made him rub his hands in anticipation.

      
He opened a desk drawer and took out a bottle of ten-year-old bourbon. Pouring himself a small shot, he savored the smoothly potent aroma, then raised it with his usual salute: “To America, the land of opportunity—and damn good whiskey!”

* * * *

      
The tall black-haired woman stood on the porch of the way station looking as out of place as a lead crystal goblet beside a dented tin plate. Picking up the skirts of her plum silk traveling suit, she stepped off the rotting boards, which creaked in protest. Dusty, vile, smelly cesspool that the stopover on the overland stage route in western Nebraska was, she did not care. Misery and inconvenience were a small price to pay for what she had just learned. She allowed herself to smile, thin red lips turning faintly upward as one of the odious shotgun guards assisted her onto the stage, which was bound for Cheyenne. Once there, she would assess her next move.

      
Luck had finally come her way, she mused as the coach started off with a lurch. She ignored the obscene curses of the driver lashing his team and thought back over the past year. How terrible—frightening, really—to have lost all trace of Roxanna Fallon. For a while it had seemed as if the earth had simply swallowed the damnable creature. But anyone as distinctive-looking as the Fallon bitch always received notice.

      
That was how her agents located Roxanna in St. Louis at the time of Alexandra Hunt's death. By then the tricky actress had assumed her dead friend's identity and escaped west—right into the hands of a pack of ravening savages. She closed her dark brown eyes and imagined what they might do to a white woman, especially one with all that pale silvery hair. She only hoped they had not simply scalped the strumpet without first using some of their fiendish torture on her...or far better yet, done what was whispered about out in the barren wilderness—made her a squaw, the ‘‘fate worse than death.” Any decent woman would kill herself first.

      
Of course, Roxanna Fallon was not a decent woman and she did possess an unnerving knack for survival. That was the reason for enduring this last leg of the journey to the infamous Hell on Wheels, Cheyenne, in what was soon to be the new territory of Wyoming. If Roxanna Fallon had somehow escaped the savages and was masquerading as Alexa Hunt, the pleasure of exposing her as a fraud despoiled by bestial red heathens would be the finest revenge imaginable.

      
Isobel Darby rested her head on the upholstered seat back and dreamed of fashioning one last final humiliation for the woman who had destroyed her husband's brilliant career.

* * * *

      
The city of Cheyenne in the spring of 1868 had six first-rate hotels, over a dozen fine restaurants, a school, three churches...and seventy saloons. Its population was roughly ten thousand. Next to the saloons, the cemetery was the busiest spot in town.

      
“Once the rails reach Laramie, half the transients—whiskey peddlers, card sharks, whores—will pack up their gear, whole saloons and bordellos, and ride to the next stop on the road. Last fall there was a gold strike up at South Pass on the Sweetwater. The city filled up with miners over the winter. Now that the weather's breaking in the mountains, they're already gone. Still, since your grandfather plans to build a roundhouse and repair shop here, the place should prosper well enough,” Cain said.

      
At the mention of Jubal MacKenzie, Roxanna quickly forgot about the excitement of the raucous city. Soon she would meet the man who was supposedly her grandfather. Could she deceive such a sharp businessman?

      
Cain sensed her nervousness, different from the tension that had simmered between them since the night of the storm. “How long since you've seen Jubal?”

      
Roxanna moistened her lips, unconsciously fussing with the heavy skirt of her riding habit. “Eight years. I was only a skinny girl then.”

      
A dark light gleamed sardonically in his eyes as he looked her over. “I think he'll be pleased enough with the way you've grown up. So will your bridegroom,” he added grimly, kneeing the chestnut into a swifter pace. He had stopped at a well-stocked trading post on the North Platte to purchase a few suitable articles of female clothing for Alexa. She could hardly ride up to Jubal's private Pullman car dressed like a Cheyenne squaw. The cheap ready-made twill riding skirt and white cotton blouse were hardly elegant, but her curves filled them out admirably. He had guessed right about the sizes.
Don't think about it
, he admonished himself, remembering her slender long limbs entwined with his.

      
Roxanna followed him as they approached the outskirts of the city, feeling the scorn radiating from him. Twice her body had betrayed her with this...savage...and now he dared to look down on her for going through with the marriage to Lawrence Powell. A wave of desolation washed over her, leaving her to wonder about what might have been, but one lesson Roxanna Fallon had learned well in life was to forget what might have been and focus instead on what was.

      
They rode down Eddy Street, as wide open and raw as any boomtown described in the dime novels that were becoming so popular back East. The Whitehead Block was an imposing two-story frame structure a city block square, housing all manner of business and professional offices, but just down the street sat one of the loudest and most gaudy pleasure palaces in the West, “Professor” James McDaniel's Eddy Street Saloon. A huge stuffed grizzly peered malevolently from one window while a pair of rare white monkeys played inside a cage at the door. An immense pipe organ blared out a lively tune, deafening passersby on the street.