Sundancer (Cheyenne Series) (19 page)

      
Roxanna' s cheeks heated, but she continued to meet his eyes.
Why is he asking me this?
“You know that gossip is all vicious lies.”

      
“Yeah, I know, but that doesn't stop it,” he replied enigmatically.

      
“The vaunted Powell name can't have a breath of scandal attached to it,” she said bitterly.

      
“I didn't bring up the broken engagement to hurt you, Alexa.”

      
“Then why, Cain?” She sensed a coiled tension in his body, like a great sleek panther, poised to spring yet holding its powerful body under the tightest control.

      
“Because I want to marry you.”

      
The words dropped between them like stones. He said nothing more, only waited for her to respond. “You're a bit late with your proposal, aren't you?” The anger began to churn in her then, oddly mixed with hurt. “Why didn't you ask me that night in Leather Shirt's village—or even the night of the ball when we...”

      
“Almost made love?” he supplied. “I couldn't, not while you had a chance to marry into society. If I'd taken advantage of you—forced you into marrying me as the only honorable course after you gave me your virginity—you'd have come to hate me.”

      
He combed his fingers through his hair and looked away, at the far western horizon with its jagged pale lavender ridge of mountains. She studied his profile, bronzed and harshly beautiful as the wild landscape at which he stared. Then he swallowed, painfully, and Roxanna realized what he was saying. She placed one hand on his arm, tentatively. “I could never hate you, Cain, even when you make me angry enough to kill you.”

      
He turned to her with that old mocking smile back in place. “We do strike sparks off each other, that's damn certain. It wouldn't be easy, Alexa. I'm a breed, no matter how white I live. I've always been outside the pale of respectable society. Most men like me marry Indian women—if they marry at all. I never thought to marry...until the day I saw you standing mother-naked in that river.”

      
She remembered the scorching hunger in his eyes when he had boldly interrupted her bath. The same glittering light blazed in them now and she knew he saw an answering hunger in her eyes. “I'm hardly respectable marriage material myself.” Thoughts of that long-ago night in Vicksburg flashed through her mind and she flinched, then suppressed the never-buried feelings of horror and shame, rushing on to say, “Grandfather thinks if we went east it would all be forgotten.”

      
“Could well be. Is that what you want to do?” he asked guardedly, volunteering nothing more, sitting very still.

      
She shook her head. “No, it isn't. I don't want to run away from my past.” Not anymore.

      
He let out the breath he had been holding. “I just don't want you to regret your lost chance to marry a man like Powell.”

      
“I never wanted a man like Larry Powell.”
I wanted you.

      
“Then I guess you'll marry me,” he said with a crooked smile, reaching out to pull her back into his arms.

      
“Yes, I guess I will,” Roxanna replied just as his mouth came down on hers, hard and hot, his lips working their magic. His tongue danced across her teeth, then plunged deep inside her mouth until she arched against him, wrapping her arms around his neck and burying her fingers in his thick night-dark hair. She felt his heart pounding as her bared breasts pressed against his chest. One powerful arm held her tightly while the other hand stroked her satiny silver gilt hair.

      
She cried out when his mouth moved from hers, traveling lower down her jaw to her throat. Then he buried his face in the fragrant cloud of her hair as she brushed small frantic kisses over his face, pausing to trace the narrow white scar on his cheek with the tip of her tongue.

      
He groaned, breaking away from her and holding her by her shoulders. His breath came in great panting gulps as if he'd just run a great distance. She reached out, cupping his face in her hands, eager for more kisses and caresses that he wanted so dearly to give. But he held her at arm's length, shaking his head until he could speak. “No, Alexa. Not here, not like this. I'm not some savage and I won't take you like one. We'll be married first and make love in a soft bed with candles and wine...and privacy. Besides,” he added with grim humor, “there's a dead man over there.”

      
She looked down, feeling the heat in her cheeks. “I've never behaved like this with any man…but you.”

      
Cain smiled and tipped her face up by touching her chin with his finger. His smile was pure male predatory possessiveness. “I know...and I like it that way. You belong only to me, Alexa.”

* * * *

      
You belong only to me.
Cain's words haunted her that night as she lay in her big soft bed in Jubal's railcar. The old man had taken the news of her decision to wed Cain with surprising equanimity. She had half expected him to rail about her marrying beneath the MacKenzie name or even fire Cain summarily for having the audacity to touch a white woman. Instead he had nodded to Cain, saying only that they would talk later.

      
Jubal had lectured her sternly about her folly in riding so far from camp, repeating the same warnings Cain had given her, albeit in a gentler fashion. Roxanna had acted duly chastened this time, still half expecting some question about her acceptance of Cain's proposal. The only thing he asked her was whether she was certain about her decision. Upon receiving her assurance that she was, he awkwardly embraced her and told her Cain was a good man. No one spoke of love. But considering that love had not entered into the arrangement with Larry Powell, she supposed it was reasonable that Jubal would expect this marriage to be no different.

      
Shouldn't a grandfather want his only granddaughter to marry for love? The question nagged at her. But then neither Jubal nor Cain knew she was not Alexa. Nor was she the innocent they both assumed. Nathaniel Darby, God rot him, had arranged that. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up, reaching for her robe. Belting it, Roxanna hugged herself in silent misery. There would be no sleep now. Whenever she let down her guard and allowed thoughts of Vicksburg to surface, the nightmares haunted her, ugly visions of herself soiled with blood and semen, clinging to the back of a horse.

      
I need a bath
. The thought came as it always did—as it had that night in 1863 when she rode north in shame and despair. As she had made the ghastly trek to Federal lines, she kept telling herself what had happened was not her fault, that she was a victim, not a fallen woman. But all she had been able to think of was purging herself with lye soap and hot water. Once she reached safety, her strong young body was cleansed and healed in that dreamed of bathwater. But deep inside of her soul, Roxanna Fallon still felt as defiled and filthy as she had the hour she escaped a hangman’s rope in Vicksburg.

      
Through the years since, many a fellow thespian had remarked on Roxanna’s zealous penchant for cleanliness, often making it the joke of the company. One leading man in Memphis had dubbed her “Lady Macbeth,” little knowing how close to the mark his barb had struck. Roxanna paced, trying desperately to hold her demons at bay.

      
But even if she succeeded, what would it profit her? Cain's harshly chiseled face and burning black eyes accused her. What would he think on their wedding night? Would he be able to tell she had already lost her virginity? There was no way she could fake the awful pain of Darby's first thrust or the subsequent blood. The Confederate officer’s assault had been meant to punish the canny Federal spy who had made a fool of him and the rest of General Johnston’s command. Surely if Cain had been the one to take her maidenhead it would not have hurt so much.

      
That thought brought even greater pain. She pressed her knuckles to her lips in anguish. He should have been the one, and he had been cheated of his rightful due—in more ways than her virginity. “Liar and impostor,” she murmured in the stillness, calling a spade a spade. Somehow deceiving a stranger she did not know so that she could marry him for his money had not seemed half so dishonest as deceiving a man she had come to love in spite of the fact he had no money.

      
“What can I do? Tell him the truth and risk losing him—or bind him to me through marriage and risk his distrust if he realizes I'm not a virgin?” She stared out the window into the darkness. The night gave her no answers.

* * * *

      
The infamous half-breed gunman, the Scot's Injun, and Miss Alexa Hunt of St. Louis, were married two days later in Cheyenne. The wedding was scarcely the gala event that had been anticipated when she was to marry Lawrence Powell in the Episcopal cathedral in San Francisco. The small private ceremony was held in a storefront church on Hill Street and conducted by the city's only Presbyterian minister. Cain and Roxanna exchanged their vows with due solemnity. Jubal MacKenzie and Reverend Fulmer's wife were their witnesses. After the reverend had pronounced them man and wife, Mrs. Fulmer brought forth the reverend's book for the bride and groom to sign.

      
“You must put down your full Christian name, Mr. Cain,” the reverend prompted carefully.

      
“My name is Cain. I earned it,” he replied in that cold deliberate tone Roxanna had come to know so well. When he approached Mrs. Fulmer, who stood by the register, she backed away as if he held a scalping knife in his hand instead of a pen. He signed the single name with a bold flourish, then he handed the writing instrument to his wife.

      
With trembling hands she forged ” Alexandra Leonora Hunt Cain” under the old harridan's thin-lipped disapproving stare. She could not help but wonder if the document was legal. But they had pledged themselves to each other before God and tonight those vows would be consummated.

      
After leaving the hostile presence of Mrs. Fulmer, Jubal took the newlyweds to the Pilgrim House Hotel for a wedding supper. The lobby off the dining room was crowded with the usual assortment of frontier types who frequented an upper-class hotel—traveling businessmen in expensive dark suits, leather-faced cattle barons in hand-tooled boots and occasionally their wives, well decked out in what they supposed were the latest eastern fashions.

      
Still feeling tense and awkward in their new roles as husband and wife, Cain and Roxanna said little, letting Jubal ramble on about his problems building a bridge over Dale Creek Canyon outside Laramie. As they wended their way toward the dining room, a few people who had heard about the shocking marriage between MacKenzie's heir and his half-breed subordinate stared and murmured among themselves. Jubal ignored them.

      
“I think we'll have to go at least one hundred thirty feet high because the wash is nearly seven hundred feet long. Timber's only a stopgap. We need iron supports but Durant and Company say the Union Pacific can't afford it.” He snorted in disgust.

      
From the corner of her eye, Roxanna suddenly caught sight of a tall dark-haired woman dressed in dove-gray silk gliding down the hotel stairs. Something about the tilt of her patrician head and the hauteur of her carriage made Roxanna turn for a better look. Hate-filled brown eyes glared at her. A slow, malicious smile of triumph spread over Isobel Darby's thin elegant lips, then vanished.

      
“What is it, Alexa?” Cain asked when her hand stiffened on his arm and her step faltered abruptly.

      
Roxanna tore her gaze from her old nemesis, trembling violently.
Why now?
her mind railed in silent misery.

      
“Yer white as a wee ghostie, lass. What's wrong?” Jubal demanded.

      
Isobel Darby swept past them without a murmur, vanishing out the front door. Whatever game she played, she did not intend to unmask Roxanna before her marriage was consummated, although from the look she had given Cain, it was quite apparent that she knew precisely what was going on. “I...just felt a trifle light-headed, that's all,” she temporized, glad of the steady strength of Cain's arm supporting her.
My husband
.

      
“We just need to get a bit of food in you. Bridal nerves,” Jubal said to Cain with an indulgent smile for his granddaughter.

      
Cain studied his wife's pallor and wondered. They entered the crowded dining room, which exuded a certain rustic charm, its walls lined with racks of elk and deer antlers and a snarling grizzly's head mounted over a large fireplace. The heavy-hewn pine tables were each set with a bouquet of spring wildflowers. Jubal signaled a waitress who deferentially showed them to the table he had reserved in an alcove away from the noise of clattering crockery and whispered conversations.

      
Most of the diners were talking about them, Cain was certain. He had spent a lifetime becoming inured to sly glances and sotto voce murmurs behind his back, but he knew Alexa had not. Was she already regretting their marriage? The way she held tightly to him as if drawing support from him did not indicate regret. Perhaps she was feeling as confused and ambivalent about their arrangement as he was.

      
Cain did not intend to love his wife. Ever. He had been hurt too painfully in the past. Everyone he had loved had either died like Blue Corn Woman and Enoch or had betrayed him like his father and High-Backed Wolf. He would never be caught in that terrible trap again. Cain had assured himself that this woman was purely the means to an end. He had not lied to Jubal when he promised to treat her well, but he had not said he would love her either. Then why should it bother him so much if she was upset at the way people were reacting to their marriage? He'd warned her how it would be, he thought with an angry, silent oath.