A Lawman's Christmas: A McKettricks of Texas Novel (16 page)

Something moved in Clay's handsome face.

Pain? Fury? Pity, perhaps? She couldn't tell.

Afraid she'd lose her courage if she didn't finish the story right now, Dara Rose went on. “I had no money, and no place to go, and after his brother's funeral, Parnell came to me and offered marriage. He was such a good
man, Clay.” She realized she was crying. When had the tears begun? “When he died upstairs at the Bitter Gulch, everyone felt so sorry for the children and me, and there was this huge scandal, and I couldn't—I couldn't explain that I wasn't a true wife to him. He must have been so lonely….”

When she didn't go on, Clay set her on her feet, and try though she did, Dara Rose couldn't read his expression.

He got up from his chair, his coffee forgotten on the table, and whistled for his dog.

Chester came to him eagerly, without hesitation, as Clay was putting on his duster and his distinctive round-brimmed hat.

“This calls for some thinking about, Dara Rose,” he said. “And I need to get Outlaw back to the livery stable, see that he's put up proper for the night.”

With that, Clay opened the back door, and he and Chester went out.

Edrina and Harriet appeared in the inside doorway the instant he'd closed the door behind him.

“Aren't we going to decorate the Christmas tree?” Edrina asked plaintively.

Dara Rose didn't answer. She hurried across the kitchen and through the front room to watch through the window as Clay rounded a corner of the house,
passed through the gate, gathered his horse's reins and mounted up.

“What about the Christmas tree?” Harriet trilled, from somewhere behind Dara Rose.

“After supper,” she heard herself say, as her heart climbed into her throat. “We'll tend to it after supper.”

And Clay McKettrick rode away, Chester following, leaving Dara Rose to wonder if he meant to come back.

 

W
HEN HE REACHED
the jailhouse, Clay let himself in, started a fire in the potbellied stove and nearly fell over the large crate waiting by his desk.

He approached the box, apparently delivered while he was away, peering down at the return address:
The
Triple M. Indian Rock, Arizona Territory.

He felt a twinge of homesickness, but it passed quickly.

Much as he loved the ranch, and his family, the Triple M wasn't home anymore. Home, for better or for worse, was wherever Dara Rose happened to be.

When had he fallen in love with her?

He wasn't sure. It might have been today, when she sat on his lap in her tiny kitchen and poured out her heart to him.

Or it might have been when he first laid eyes on her, just a few days before.

All he could say for sure was that it felt a lot like being kicked in the belly by a mule, this falling in love.

He was exultant.

He was crushed.

Dara Rose had loved another man, and that man had betrayed her, and if Luke Nolan hadn't already been dead, Clay would have cheerfully killed him.

His deepest regret? That he hadn't been there to step in and make things right for her and for the kids, as illogical as that was. Parnell had been the one to rescue her, give his two-timing brother's family a legal right to the Nolan name.

Clay McKettrick was jealous of a dead man and, at the same time, he knew he could never have settled for the kind of empty marriage Dara Rose and Parnell had had together. He was a young man, and red-blooded, and he needed more.

He wanted everything—wanted Dara Rose's heart, as well as her body. Wanted to adopt Edrina and Harriet, change their last name for good, raise them as McKettricks.

And he surely wanted to make more babies with Dara Rose.

Oh, yes, he wanted it all.

He drew in a deep breath.
Slow down, cowboy,
he thought.
Get a grip.

There was no telling what Dara Rose thought when he'd walked out on her that way, but he needed to sort things through, needed to
think.

That was the kind of man he was.

He fetched a knife, pried up the lid on the crate his mother had sent from the Triple M. She must have paid a hefty freight charge to get it there before Christmas, even by train.

Inside, carefully nestled in straw, he found a dozen succulent oranges, a tin full of exotic nuts and a number of his favorite books, some of which he'd owned since he first learned to read. There was more, but Clay's eyes were so blurred by then that he was lucky to be able to read his mother's letter and, even then, he only got this word and that.

“Sawyer wired that you're married…two stepdaughters…bring them home when you can…we're all so anxious to welcome your wife and your children to the family—”

Clay closed his eyes, drew a deep breath. That was Chloe McKettrick for you. If he loved a woman, and that woman's children, then his mother was ready to enfold them in the warmth of her heart, receive them as her own.

It was the McKettrick way. Babies were born into the family, or they arrived by marriage, and it made no dif
ference either way. Once a McKettrick, always a McKettrick.

No matter what happened between him and Dara Rose, Edrina and Harriet were part of the fold, now and forever. If he died tomorrow, or Dara Rose did, his pa and ma, his aunts and uncles and sisters and brothers and cousins—even old Angus and his wife, Concepcion—would take them in and love them like their own flesh and blood.

The knowledge made Clay's throat tighten and his eyes scald.

He wanted to go back to Dara Rose right then, wanted that more than anything, but he didn't give in to the desire.

Yes, she was his wife.

And yes, it was a safe bet that she wanted him as much as he wanted her, after that episode in her kitchen.

But what mattered now was the children.

And that was why Clay McKettrick decided to spend his second night as a married man in the spare room behind the jailhouse. If he'd gone back to Dara Rose's place, he wasn't at all sure he could have resisted her.

He needed her.

He
loved
her.

And that was precisely why he couldn't go home to that little house, with its tiny rooms and its thin walls.

Clay McKettrick knew his limits.

And, where Dara Rose was concerned, he'd reached them.

 

D
ARA
R
OSE LISTENED
for Clay's footstep on the back porch as she peeled potatoes to fry up for supper with some of the salt pork he'd bought at the store. When the meal was over and the dishes had been washed and put away and he still wasn't back, she declared that it was time to decorate the Christmas tree.

“We'd rather wait for Mr. McKettrick,” Edrina said, looking glum.

“Where did he go?” Harriet asked.

Dara Rose sighed. She'd been a fool to go against her own better judgment and marry Clay McKettrick. Men couldn't be depended upon to stick around. They lied and cheated and got themselves thrown from horses and killed, they died in the arms of prostitutes above some saloon or, like Mr. O'Reilly, they simply decided they'd rather be elsewhere and took to their heels.

Devil take the hindmost.

“To the livery stable, I think,” Dara Rose finally replied.

“He left a long time ago,” Edrina reasoned. “It's getting dark outside.”

Harriet's lower lip wobbled. “Maybe he's not coming back,” she said.

Dara Rose pretended not to hear. “I'll fetch the Christmas box from the cedar chest,” she told the children, marching into the front room. “And then we'll see what we can do with this tree.”

The girls didn't speak, so she turned her head to look at them.

They stood side by side, arms folded, expressions recalcitrant.

“That wouldn't be right,” Edrina said staunchly. “Mr. McKettrick cut that tree down himself. We wouldn't even have it if it weren't for him.”

Harriet nodded in grim agreement.

Dara Rose thought fast. “Wouldn't it be a nice surprise, though, if he came home to find it all sparkling and merry?”

Edrina, self-appointed spokeswoman for her little sister as well as for herself, stood her ground. “We'd rather wait,” she reiterated.

Dara Rose shook her head, proceeded into the bedroom to give the children a chance to change their minds and lifted the lid of the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. She kept the few simple ornaments they owned, most of them homemade, tucked away there, inside an old boot box of Parnell's.

There was a shining paper chain, made of salvaged foils of all sorts.

There were stars, cut from tin, with the sharp edges hammered down to a child-safe smoothness, and ribbons, and Parnell's broken pocket watch.

And there were two tiny angels, sewn up from scraps of calico and embroidered with Edrina's and Harriet's names, their wings improvised out of layers of old newspapers, cut out and pasted together.

Dara Rose had always treasured these humble decorations, as had the girls, but now, in the dim light of the rising moon, falling softly through the window, they looked humble indeed. Nearly pitiful, in fact.

She swallowed, straightened her spine, and returned to the front room with the dog-eared carton, only to find Edrina and Harriet busy with the one Clay had spoken of earlier.

There's some stuff for the Christmas tree in the box I left on the settee,
he'd said.

The children looked wonder-struck as they lifted one glistening item after another out of the box—a porcelain angel, with feathers for wings and a golden halo fashioned of thin wire; shimmering baubles of blown glass, in bright shades of red and blue and gold and silver; a package of glittering tinsel that flashed in the lamplight like a tiny waterfall.

Dara Rose spoke in a normal tone, but it was a struggle. “Shall we decorate the tree after all, then?” she asked.

But Edrina and Harriet shook their heads.

Slowly, carefully, they put all the exquisite ornaments Clay had purchased back into the box from the mercantile.

“We'll wait,” Edrina said.

And that was that.

The girls went off to get ready for bed, without being told.

Dara Rose, not quite sure
what
she was feeling exactly, put on her cloak and went outside to make sure the chickens were safe in their coop, with their feed and water pans full.

When that was done, she tarried, looking up at the silvery stars popping out all over the black-velvet sky, hoping Clay would step through the backyard gate.

He didn't, of course.

So Dara Rose went back into the house, to her children, to oversee the washing of faces and the brushing of teeth and the saying of prayers.

Edrina, hands clenched together and one eye slightly open, asked God to make sure Mr. McKettrick and Chester found their way back home, please, and soon.

Harriet said she hoped whatever little girl had Flor
ence would take good care of her and not lose the doll's shoes or break her head.

Dara Rose offered no comment on either prayer.

She simply kissed her precocious children good-night, tucked them in and left the room.

In the kitchen, she brewed tea, and sat savoring it at the table, with the kerosene lantern burning low on the narrow counter.

After Luke, and again after Parnell, Dara Rose had solemnly promised herself she would never wait up for another man as long as she lived.

And here she was, waiting for Clay McKettrick.

 

H
AVING MADE HIS DECISION,
Clay locked up the street door and banked the dwindling fire, and he collapsed onto the bed in the back room of the jailhouse, not expecting to sleep.

He must have been more tired than he thought, because he awakened with sunlight streaming into his face through the one grimy window, and Chester snoring away in the nearby cell.

Clay got up, made his way into the office, made a fire in the stove and put on a pot of coffee. He let Chester out the rear door and stood on what passed for a porch, studying the sky.

It was bluer than blue, that sky, and the day promised to be unseasonably warm.

Even with half his mind down the road, following Dara Rose around that little house of hers, there was room in Clay's brain for all the things that needed to be done before the kit-house arrived.

He heated water on the stove top, once the coffee had come to a good boil, and washed up as best he could, but his shaving gear and his spare clothes were stashed behind the settee at Dara Rose's.

In the near distance, church bells rang, and Clay realized it was Sunday.

The good folks of the town would be settling them selves in pews right about now, waiting for the sermon to start—and then waiting for it to end.

The ones who wouldn't mind working on the Sabbath Day, on the other hand, were probably gathered down at the Bitter Gulch Saloon, defiant in their state of sin.

Since he needed a well dug, and a foundation, too, Clay figured he'd better get to the latter bunch before they got a real good start on the day's drinking.

An hour later, Chester stuck to his heels the whole time, he'd hired seven men, roused a blinking and grimacing Philo Bickham to open the mercantile and sell him picks and shovels, a pair of trousers and a plain shirt,
and rented two mules and a wagon from the livery to haul the workers and the tools out to the ranch.

For a pack of habitual drunks, those men got a lot of digging done.

Clay worked right alongside them, while Chester roamed the range, probably hunting for rabbits. He'd make a fine cattle-dog when there was a herd to tend.

At noon, Clay drove the team and wagon back to town, Chester along for the ride, bought food enough for an army at the hotel dining room and returned to the work site and his hungry crew.

He'd felt a pang passing the turn to Dara Rose's place, having finally remembered that he'd promised Edrina and Harriet that they'd decorate the Christmas tree the night before, but he'd make that up to them later.