Sundancer (Cheyenne Series) (54 page)

      
Cheyenne, as the Wyoming territorial capital, was a convenient stopover on the Union Pacific line, an excellent base of operations. Although their brief exchange of telegrams had not allowed much elaboration, Jubal intuited that Cain might want to keep in touch with his mother's people now. Yes, Cheyenne would suit just fine. But first he had to clear the air with Roxanna.

      
The lass was no doubt spitting mad, feeling that he and Cain had bargained over her as if she were a racehorse or a piece of real estate. Sighing, he set his steps toward the house. For the first time in longer than he could remember—and Jubal MacKenzie had a very keen memory—he was nervous.

      
Roxanna had slept, eaten and read from the extensive collection of books in Jubal's library for the past three days. She was rested—and restless. “I'm just bored,” she scolded herself impatiently. It was past time for her to drive into town. Perhaps she could find something worthwhile to do. Although the raw young capital had no hospital, several physicians had hung out their shingles. Perhaps her nursing skills might be useful to one of them.

      
That resolution made, she set down her fork and shoved away the remains of the lavish luncheon the cook insisted on preparing for her. Everyone thought she needed to be fattened up, it seemed.
As if I won 't soon be fat enough!
Just as she stood up and stepped around the small table in the rear sitting room, the door opened and Jubal MacKenzie’s imposing body filled the sash.

      
“Oh, Jubal...I didn't know when to expect you.” In truth, their reunion had been preying on her mind ever since her arrival. “Have you had luncheon? I can have the cook serve some cold roast beef and vichyssoise.” Her voice sounded stilted, awkward.

      
He watched her standing with one hand braced on the table, her expression guarded, no more the smiling young woman who had hugged him and teased him and drank bourbon whiskey with him. “I ate on the train, thanks just the same. Yer lookin' in the bloom of health. Motherhood agrees with you.” He too was stiff and formal. With a mumbled oath, he stepped into the room and blurted out, “Is everything all right between you and yer husband?”

      
“Yes. I believe he cares for me...that he didn't marry me just to become your operations chief...” She smiled wryly and added, “Or at least if he did, that's changed now. While we were with the Cheyenne, he underwent a terrible ordeal for me and our child. Everything is fine between Cain and me.”

      
“But not between you and me, eh?” He smiled mirthlessly.

      
“How did you find out I wasn't Alexa?” The question had gnawed at her ever since Cain told her that the old Scot knew the secret of both their identities.

      
“I suspected a wee bit from the first,” he replied, pacing across the room to the window, then turning back to her. “Oh, you looked like the child I remembered close enough—physically. It was yer grit that surprised me. Alexa was like her parents, I think. Staid, timid, afraid of a challenge. How would a lass who refused to leave her home in St. Louis survive an Indian captivity?”

      
“She could’ve grown, changed,” Roxanna said. Remembering Jubal's repeated entreaties to join him and how terrified Alexa had always been, Roxanna knew her friend would never have voluntarily left the shelter of the house in Lafayette Square. If Alexa had been on that stage when Leather Shirt's warriors surrounded it, she would have died of sheer terror on the spot. “No, I suppose you're right. Alexa wouldn't have been able to do what I did,” she admitted.

      
“At first I was so delighted with yer courage, yer wit, yer sense of humor, that I puffed myself up thinking it was me you inherited them from.”

      
“Did you have me investigated?”

      
He shook his head. “Maybe I dinna' want to know the truth. But one day, a month er so after yer marriage to Cain, I received some documents from a law firm in St. Louis. They were assigned by the courts to sell the house and handle the probate after Alexa's death.”

      
A wave of remorse washed over Roxanna as she looked into his eyes and read the regret, the pain of loss. “I am so sorry that your granddaughter died. When I began the masquerade, I never thought I'd hurt anyone—”

      
“You've brought me only joy, lass. Have no fear on that,” he replied fiercely. “Once I read the documents, I knew Alexa had died of consumption and her companion had closed down the house and arranged her funeral. It dinna' take much to figure that she'd also come west in Alexa's place.”

      
He hesitated a moment, then asked, “Do the names Tam O’Shanter and Elizabeth R mean anything to you?”

      
Roxanna paled, then sat down on the chair beside her as memories flooded back. “Elizabeth R was my code name during the war. A fine conceit,” she added bitterly, “likening myself to the virgin queen of England. Tam O’Shanter was the code name for the man in Washington who...I sent my reports to,” she said with dawning recognition. “You—you were Tam O’Shanter?”

      
“As President Lincoln's Undersecretary of War I was assigned to organize and run a network of spies in rebel territory. I suppose the reasoning was if I could outmaneuver the likes of Commodore Vanderbilt and Daniel Drew, I would be good running a spy ring. You were the best agent I had in the field.”

      
“Until Vicksburg in ‘63.” Her voice was quiet and she sat tracing the pattern on the linen tablecloth with one finger, unable to meet his eyes.

      
“Aye, until then. I received word you'd died in prison, lass,” he said with genuine concern in his voice as he took a seat across from her. “You seemed to drop off the edge of the earth.”

      
“I intended it that way, Jubal.” She pressed her fingertips to her temples as the memories returned, vividly clear, ugly. “I've told no one what really happened in that prison.”

      
“Not even yer husband,” he said gently, knowing she had not.

      
“Perhaps someday I'll be able to talk about it, but not yet...not now.”

      
He reached over tentatively and patted her hand with awkward solicitude. “Do na' think of it now. When I decided to learn yer real identity, I never intended to tell you that I knew you weren't Alexa. I was dumbstruck when the reports came back saying you were Roxanna Fallon.”

      
“Roxanna Fallon, spy, actress, fallen woman—hardly the sort you'd choose as the heiress for your empire,” she said bitterly.

      
‘There's where yer wrong, lassie. Dead wrong. Yer exactly the woman I'd choose to be my granddaughter, just as Cain's the man I'd choose to run all my business ventures for you.”

      
She looked up, startled, then read the earnest expression on his face.
This is the Jubal MacKenzie who's played poker with the Commodore,
she reminded herself, but she wanted to believe him. “Tell me about the arrangement you made with Cain to marry me off.”

      
He winced at her choice of words. “Och, lassie, you make me sound cold as Loch Ness in January,” he said in a thickened brogue. “I repented my bargain with old Andrew Powell an hour after I saw that whey-faced boy following him around like a lapdog, but I dinna' want the engagement broken because of ugly gossip. Then Cain came to me. He said that none of the Indians nor himself had touched you.”

      
“And you believed him?”

      
“Aye. I always thought I was a good judge of human nature, Roxanna.” His eyes were shrewdly assessing as they met hers. “Cain dinna' touch you, but it wasna' because he dinna' wish to. The lad wanted much more than the job—much more than even he knew.”

      
“But you knew...” It was not quite a question.

      
“I thought I did. For a while when he worked so much, leaving you alone...I worried that I'd been mistaken, especially when I could see how much you loved him.”

      
“He's never spoken of love...” she admitted.

      
“For a man like Cain it's not an easy thing to do. Nor for me.” His face, always ruddy and sun-darkened, turned red as he cleared his throat. “I've missed you, lassie. Yer the granddaughter I never knew, the one I've come to love. Yer all the family I have, Roxanna, and far better than an old curmudgeon like me deserves.” He studied her guardedly with tears glistening in his eyes.

      
She felt her throat tighten as she rose and reached out to hug him. He returned her embrace, enveloping her awkwardly in his arms. The scratch of his untrimmed beard and the faint aroma of Cuban cigars were as dearly familiar as if he had been her own father. “I've missed you too, Jubal, but you're right—you are an old curmudgeon!”

* * * *

      
Jubal remained in Cheyenne attending to railroad business for the next several days. He and Roxanna resumed their old comfortable relationship, sharing meals, discussing problems with his work and now planning for the new baby. She described the ordeal Cain had undergone in the Medicine Lodge ceremony and their brush with death because of Lawrence Powell's treachery. At the end of the week, Jubal received a wire from rail's end indicating that a strike was imminent if the workers were not paid.

      
“It's criminal, the greedy stupidity of Durant and the other directors, lining their own pockets with dividends from the Crédit Mobilier while cash for payrolls is always short,” Jubal groused as he prepared to take the westbound cars for the Bear River camp.

      
“You can't keep paying the men out of your own cash reserves,” Roxanna remonstrated. “You've said yourself, the Union Pacific isn't going to show a profit for years after the transcontinental linkup—not until all the lands between California and the Missouri River are settled and developed.”

      
His gray eyes twinkled. “Aye, but in time that will happen. Meanwhile I intend to keep my reputation intact as a boss who pays his employees so they'll keep working for me when we expand rail links into the Rockies, to the Northwest, even south to Mexico.”

      
“You dream big,” she replied, kissing him on the cheek before he headed out the door.

      
“Aye'n so does that husband of yers. Take care of the bairn until he returns.”

      
“We'll both be fine,” she assured him, patting the slightly rounded swell of her belly with a smile.

      
Roxanna watched his rig pull away in a swirl of light snow. The weather, unseasonably warm all fall, had suddenly turned cold as winter pounced with freezing temperatures and icy blasts of wind howling down from Canada. The abrupt shift in seasons was one of the most difficult things she had to adjust to living on the High Plains.

      
As she closed the massive oak door and turned, her eyes were drawn to the foyer stairs which wound up to a high balcony extending across the second floor to the tower. A shiver of foreboding skittered down her spine. “It's just the sudden change in the weather,” she said over the echo of her own footsteps crossing the polished slate tiles.

* * * *

      
Several days later Roxanna rose with brilliant late autumn sunshine pouring into the windows of her bedroom. How large and lonely the big bed seemed without Cain. But soon he would return from San Francisco, she thought with eager excitement. Then she would have to convince him to allow her to go with him to the winter camp on the Utah border.

      
The Union Pacific track crews would work through the winter this year. With the Central Pacific already well into Nevada, the race was growing fiercer with each passing day. The men would somehow withstand gale-force winds, bone-freezing temperatures and torrents of snow just as their counterparts had crossing the Sierras in California. They would be hundreds of miles from Salt Lake, the nearest settlement. Would Cain and Jubal believe it safe for her, considering her pregnancy? Well, if they didn't...too bad for them!

      
Pulling off her nightrail, she stood in front of the mirror and eyed her naked body critically. No doubt about it, her waist had begun to thicken noticeably. Already her breasts were considerably enlarged and tender to the touch. All of her clothes were getting tight. Corsets would not have been an option even if she had still been wearing them.

      
“I suppose it's time I went into town and visited the dressmaker,” she said to herself with a sigh.

      
If Cain noticed her clothes pulling unbecomingly across her breasts and waistline, he would be more inclined to worry about her “delicate condition.” Perhaps some new looser-fitting gowns would disguise the changes until she could wheedle him into agreeing to her plan. Also, she would require quite a few confinement dresses cut without waists for the latter stages of her pregnancy. Ugh, not exactly the sort of shopping trip to elicit eagerness, even if she enjoyed dress fittings—which she did not.

      
Within an hour Roxanna had polished off a hearty breakfast of scrambled eggs, waffles and bacon. She and Li Chen were both overjoyed at the return of her appetite, but if she continued to be this hungry, she'd require the services of a tentmaker rather than a seamstress! After giving the household servants a well-deserved afternoon off, she set out to spend the day poring over pattern books and having her new, more ample measurements taken.

      
Over their liveryman's protests, she insisted on driving the small phaeton herself. “I'm not certain how long I'll be in town and you have work to do here at the stables. Really, Juan, I'll enjoy the exercise. It's only a short trip.”