Explaining Herself

Night Secrets

Somewhere off in the distance, a coyote yip-yipped at the moon, as if to agree about ghosts. Victoria stepped just a little closer to Ross
—even if she'd spent her whole life hearing coyotes at night. Even if she knew what little cowards coyotes were.

It seemed as good a reason as any.

He stiffened beside her. "You ..." Then he swallowed. "Best get inside, where it's safe."

She looked up at him and nodded, not about to go inside yet. She was enjoying this excited, warm, tingly feeling of being close to him far too much. "Is that all you wanted to know? Ross?"

He had to tip his head downward to see her, they were standing so close. As ever, the movement seemed graceful, cautious, contained. "For now."

She felt like shivering, and not from wet petticoats. Only when she spread her hand on his arm
—to catch her balance, to catch her breath, to feel his hidden gun—did she realize that he was shaking too. A fine, almost imperceptible trembling. She had to know.

"If you asked me out here to kiss me ... I'll let you."

His eyes, lingering on hers, seemed so very sad.
Haunted.
Like the rustler ghosts. "I shouldn't," he said.

So
she
kissed
him.

Ranchers Daughters
:

Explaining Herself

Yvonne Jocks

Prologue

"Rustling," repeated Jacob Garrison in a low drawl.

Laramie waited for the accompanying accusation. When none came, he relaxed
—some. Garrison wasn't much of a fellow to ever truly unbend, and a man would do well to keep his guard up around the white-bearded cattle baron.

But it surely did help that Garrison hadn't recognized him.

"All the markings," Laramie agreed finally. He shifted in his saddle to glance over the neat, white outbuildings that flanked the two-story house, protective-like. The house itself had flower beds, shade trees, and a picket fence. Four girls of varying sizes added bright, calico color to the back porch. Sweet place, this. No wonder someone figured the family could afford to lose some beef. "Good brand burner."

He
expected
suspicion, after that comment. It spoke
well of the rancher that he merely challenged, "You'd know the difference?"

Laramie said, "Yep."

There had been a time when the weight of Garrison's steely, hat-shadowed gaze would have shaken him. No more. Nothing shook the man called Laramie nowadays.

"Looking for work?" the rancher asked.

Other, darker reasons had drawn Laramie back to the Big Horn Basin in northeastern Wyoming. But finding that cow, with its botched brand, seemed lucky. Laramie needed a place to bed down while he pursued his plans. And of all the local ranchers, he reckoned he trusted Garrison more than anyone.

Which wasn't saying a whole hell of a lot.

"Maybe." For an extra touch of honesty, he forced out a complete sentence. "I take issue with rustlers."

Garrison's gray eyes burned into him. "How big an issue?"

"Not big enough to make it yours."

The rancher studied him a long moment more, then nodded. "Won't have a hand what's cruel or belligerent. If you're lookin' for killing, callin' it frontier justice, you won't do it on my pay. This ain't a frontier no more."

The way he said that last part sounded almost sad, reminding Laramie of men he'd met in jail or at Robber's Roost, men who lamented the passing of the older days of Jesse James and Billy the Kid.

Of course, there was that train-robbing syndicate Laramie had declined to join, in favor of his personal vendetta. And here sat proof of cattle rustling. Laramie figured the frontier wasn't dead just yet, but what he said was, "Fair 'nough."

"Bed down in the bunkhouse. I won't have folks wonderin' who hired you."

Laramie nodded in grudging respect.

"No drinking, gambling, or the like, less'n you go into town for it," instructed his new boss. "Anything illegal or immoral, don't come back."

By the time Laramie got around to the illegalities, he wouldn't need the job anyway.

When Garrison turned away, Laramie thought the interview was over. Then the rancher reined his buckskin back and leveled a final, leather-clad hand in his direction. "And stay away from my girls."

Laramie said, "Not a problem."

The cattle baron nodded one last time, then rode away, business done. He didn't know who he'd just hired. Laramie aimed to keep it that way. Garrison'd had the reputation of a stand-up man when Laramie was a boy
—a boy with a different name, a different life.

Of all the men Ross Laramie might end up having to kill this summer, Garrison was the one he most hoped would prove innocent.

But he'd kill him all the same, if he had to.

Chapter One

Victoria didn't wait for her father to reach the fence. She hopped off the back porch where she was washing clothes with her sisters and crossed the yard to meet his horse, catching its bridle. "Who's that you were talking to, Papa?" she asked, as he dismounted. "The man on the black gelding. He's not from around here, is he? He looked tired. Did you hire him?"

Papa paused, one scuffed boot on the first step to the porch, to stare at her. One would think, after almost eighteen years, he would be accustomed to her. He said, "None of your affair, Victoria Rose."

He climbed the steps, tugging one of nine-year-old Kitty's brown braids and ruffling six-year-old Elise's blond curls in passing. But he didn't stop to talk.

As if
anything
about Victoria's family wasn't her affair, no matter how old-fashioned Papa was about that.

Vic's third younger sister, fifteen-year-old Audra,
watched from the hand-crank washing machine. She was old-fashioned, too.

"He's staying a spell, anyhow," guessed Vic, glancing over her shoulder as she followed her father across the porch. "He's unsaddling his horse."

Now that the stranger had dismounted, she saw that he was exceptionally tall. Instead of a cowboy's rolling lankiness, he moved with a tight, contained grace that made her wonder where he'd learned it
—and how. His only awkward move, a slight hitch when he first lifted his saddle, caught her attention. Was he hurt?

Had
Papa hired him?

Her father sighed. "Where's your mother?" When
he
wanted information, he did not hesitate to ask
her,
Vic thought grumpily.

"She's upstairs. What's wrong with him?"

Papa stopped, to squint at her in suspicion. So the stranger had hidden his injuries from her father? Interesting!

"The steer, I mean," Victoria added quickly. "Why'd you pen it? Is it sickly?"

"Best finish your work." Papa palmed off his hat as he disappeared into his wife's clean, modern kitchen.

"It is not polite
—" started Audra almost immediately after he was gone.

Victoria had heard it too often. "
—to pry into other people's doings." Not that finishing other people's sentences was polite, either, but they were sisters; politeness didn't carry the same weight between them. "Well, if folks don't want me to sneak around, they should tell me more. How else am I supposed to know what's going on?"

Audra shook her head with a Papa-like sigh. The girl still wore her strawberry-brown hair in a long, neat braid, but once she started putting it up she would
look just like the schoolmarm she meant to become.

A small, dainty,
prim
schoolmarm.

Victoria's hair, darker than any of her five sisters', was already escaping its knot and curling around her face in the heat of the day.
Prim
was not a word she would use to describe herself. She stayed too busy to worry about appearance. Busy doing chores. Busy writing columns and setting type for the local newspaper, three days a week.

Busy keeping informed about what went on around her.

Another glance told her that the tall stranger had shouldered his saddlebags and bedroll and was headed toward the bunkhouse. He no longer looked injured, but maybe he just hid it very well. And the bunkhouse meant
—

"Papa
did
hire him!" And he'd gone to tell Mama about it. "Wait here," Vic told her younger sisters, dropping a wet shirt back into the washtub with a splash and drying her hands on her apron. "I need something upstairs."

And she did. She needed to know what was being said.

"Oh, Victoria!" protested Audra while Vic slipped into the still air of the kitchen, then up the wooden stairs.

"
—I'll watch for him," her mother was promising in the upstairs hallway. "But I trust your judgment, Jacob. You picked
me,
didn't you?"

Her father's silent answer wasn't unusual. Nor was Mama's soft laugh. "Don't give me that look, boss. You did
so
choose me. I just may have chosen you first. . . ."

Victoria usually enjoyed hearing her parents talk like this. Unlike her older sisters, she'd never met a man who made her want to blush or smile the way Mama did around Papa, and it intrigued her. But this
was
not
what she'd risked getting caught eavesdropping to hear.

"Ain't your boss," drawled Papa finally.

"And don't you forget it, cowboy," teased Mama.

Then, just as Victoria began to back down the steps in disappointment, Mama said, "Now, go on
—you've got an empire to run and bad guys to corral." Papa must have given her another of his
looks,
because Mama added, "Rustlers are so bad guys! Ask anyone. Except the rustlers, maybe; I imagine they would be biased."

Victoria caught her breath. Rustlers on the Circle-T?

What
idiot
would rustle cattle from her father?

"Ain't no empire, neither," Papa chided.

Victoria tiptoed back down the stairs. This wasn't good news . . . but it opened a whole new, wonderful box of puzzle pieces. Had
rustlers
hurt the tall stranger?

Outside, Audra was still accepting wet clothes from Kitty and wringing them through the wash-rollers. Her young mout
h was set. While the two little
girls didn't ask what Vic had discovered because they didn't know she'd eavesdropped, Audra wouldn't ask from sheer principle.

It was hard for Vic to stay silent as Papa clumped across the porch to leave. "Take care, Papa," she called innocently.

He shook his head and went to his horse, his expression sour. "Curiosity killed the cat, Victoria Rose."

That's why they get nine lives,
she thought in retort. She watched him ride out toward the mountains and wondered what had hurt the stranger, and why he hid it, and why he was here, and what was so important about the steer they'd penned.

As soon as she finished here, she meant to find out.

The problem with stopping, reckoned Laramie, was that's when a fellow remembered to hurt.

And oh, did he hurt. Hole-in-the-Wall, where he'd been recovering for the last few weeks, was a long day's ride
—and a lifetime's—away from this place.

Surveying the empty bunkhouse from caution more than interest, he eased some of the pain in his shoulder by lowering his bedroll and saddlebags onto a bare bed. He kept his '95 Winchester in hand. That the bunkhouse seemed clean and well-furnished
— with shelves and a footlocker at each bed, two wash-stands and mirrors in the corner—he noticed only peripherally.

Six windows. He circled the room, glancing out each to make sure nothing dangerous lay outside to trip up a fellow in a hurry. One door. Good.

Only then did Laramie add his rifle to his small pile of belongings on the bed. He let his shoulders sag, took a deep breath
—and winced at the hot, sticky pain in his side.

Damn, gunshots healed slow. But they put things into perspective, too. If he'd died after that nasty business last month, he would never have kept his promise. All he'd lived for since childhood would be a lie. No, he'd ridden out the fever, and here he stood. If barely.

And he had no idea what to do next.

So he tended his wounds.

Laramie carefully unbuttoned his dirt-stiff shirt and, gritting his teeth, shrugged it off. Then he unhitched and peeled down his union suit so that its once-white sleeves hung along his trousered thighs. He gingerly unwrapped the bandages from his left shoulder, and the ones around his middle, then
—gritting his teeth— peeled back the stained wads of cotton beneath them.

Just more proof of what bullets could do to flesh.

Like he'd needed that.

He went to a water barrel in the corner and scooped shade-cool water onto his face and fingered it through his hair. It felt good. He splashed it onto his chest and arms, then dribbled it more carefully onto his wounds, hissing at both the pain and his inadequacies.

He was here. He'd come back. What now?

"He was rich," he muttered. This was an angry recitation that had gotten him through so many nights of hell, so many days of misery. "A rancher, maybe. A bachelor..."

When he dried his torso on a surprisingly clean, flour-sack towel, his seeping wounds left little yellow stains; something else to clean up.
"Maybe
a bachelor," he conceded, since he knew more of the world now. As a child, he'd never figured his sister could be seduced by a married man. But he hadn't been a child since . .. forever.

Whoever had seduced his sister had destroyed their lives, seen his father killed, reduced Laramie himself to ... this.

And the bastard had gotten away with it for too long.

Laramie's hands didn't falter as he bandaged his wounds with more rags from the saddlebag. He could handle wounds almost as well as weapons by now; it was people who gave him trouble. How did a man go about exhuming secrets from over ten years ago without revealing his own?