MC BIKER ROMANCE: Bad Boy Romance: BETRAYED: (New Adult Motorcycle Club Navy SEAL Romance) (Contemporary Military Romance Thriller) (73 page)

Chapter 3

Jane decided not to be put off by his way of speaking. A man who had the world his own way could afford to treat other people in whatever manner he pleased. That, she thought, might not be such a bad thing after all. The overly polite civilized society that she had grown up in had been full of people who flattered each other, even when doing so was against their best interest.

She had been raised in Concord, New Hampshire. The state had been so cold that people there were known to die of exposure in their own homes. The wind had howled through the holes in her log cabin house while she had huddled under as many blankets as she could, trying to stay warm. It had not always worked. The cold had seeped down through the house, into her room, through her blankets, and through her layers of clothing until she found herself shivering in the middle of the day. After one January of laying around in bed trying to keep herself as warm as she could, she had decided to find herself a new place to live. She would do anything she had to do, if only she didn’t have to worry about dying when the cold came.

When it did come in Texarkana, the cold there was so mild that she could hardly believe it. The natives of the area, those whose families had been there for more than one generation, found the worst cold of Texas winters to be oppressive. She found that Texas summers so hot that it was all she could do to avoid fainting. She had learned to walk everywhere with a large umbrella to keep herself as cool as possible. She found herself surprised when she began sweating through all her clothes. New Hampshire was a place where one rarely worked up a sweat- certainly not through teaching children.

It occurred to her that Earl must have his own background, his own story. Most everyone who lived on the frontier had come from somewhere else. She tried to guess where he had come from. She could not do so. He looked like a man who had been in the west for a long time, perhaps decades. Even though he did not appear to be over thirty years of age, he carried himself with a confidence that bordered on arrogance. She had never seen a man carry himself in such a way without doing so for the purpose of affectation. In Concord, truly confident men were few and far between.

She said, “I am responding to your advertisement for a wife to share in your property and profit. I have come here to marry you.”

He blinked with surprise, taken aback. He said, “Well sakes alive, I never did expect any such thing. You’re not putting me on, are you? Not having a joke at my expense?”

Jane said, “No sir, I promise you that I am in earnest.”

Earl turned back to the man with whom he had been talking. He raised his hand. The man raised his glass. Then he said to Jane, “How about I show you what you’re getting into. Might be you’ll have second thoughts.”

Jane said, “Certainly, I should like nothing better.”

He led her out of the saloon to a horse that he had tethered in front of a trough. The water looked murky, yet the horse had put its snout in to drink anyway. He undid the tether, then mounted his horse in an instant, as though he had done so a thousand times before. He held out a hand to her. He said, “Well come on, there’s room enough for two.”

She concentrated upon the stirrup that he had left open for her. She put her foot in it, then grabbed Earl’s hand. She immediately felt the strength of his grip and the mighty pull upon her shoulder. She grunted with the effort while she tried to mount the horse. She did so with difficulty, almost falling off when she managed to climb up behind him. She slung her traveling bag over her chest, then gripped his waist with both hands. His whole body stiffened.

He tapped his boots into the horse’s ribs. He said, “You ever rode a horse before, missus?”

Jane had closed her eyes so as to keep herself from getting sick. The question made her open them again. She found herself so high above ground, and with no feet planted upon the Earth. A wave of dizziness came over her. She resisted it as much as she could. She hoped against hope that her stomach would not become upset as well. There was nowhere to go if she became sick. She wasn’t sure she could dismount the horse without falling on her back, perhaps injuring herself. Horses, she decided, were beasts to be treated with caution and respect.

She said, “No, I must confess that I have not.”

Earl laughed. The sound was clear and pleasant. It was the laugh of a man who never felt self-conscious about anything. He said, “Just hold on to me and try not to fall off. We’ll take it slow as we go.”

What he did not say, and what she later knew to be true, was that he was far more worried about her taking his own gun from him and shooting him in the stomach. That, in his opinion, would not be the worst that she could do to him if and when she learned the truth.

Chapter 4

Instead of the sprawling ranch that she expected, she found instead a run down shack in the middle of the woods. It was so small that it could barely house one person, let alone two. There was just enough room for his clothes- all of which were piled up in a suitcase- and what vittles he managed to scrounge up. These consisted of silver cans without labels. There were five cans in all. A quail had been strung up outside the shack. The smell caused Jane to hold her nose. She could not imagine how anyone could ever get used to it. She wanted to bury the animal or burn it straightaway. She could not imagine why anyone would let a rotting carcass hang out in the sun for an extended length of time.

Instead of entire herds of cattle and chickens roaming free, she saw only a three-legged brown dog that wagged its tail and struggled forward to greet her. The dog’s pink tongue fell out of his mouth as it panted with happiness. Its eyes were a shade of milky gray. As she walked forward, the dog ran directly into her leg. She realized then that the dog was blind.

Earl said, “That’s old Smiley. Don’t mind him. He looks like he’s been through hell and back, but he doesn’t remember none of it.”

If Jane had not been on a strange horse that she did not entirely trust, she would have grabbed at Earl’s knife, or one of his revolvers. Anger bubbled to the surface. The deception that he had practiced became clear to her at once. He had neither property or money. Despite how he looked, despite how he carried around two revolvers, despite the confidence with which he carried himself, he was poor as dirt. If she married him, she would be worse off than she had been as a schoolteacher.

She found herself regretting the expense of the two train tickets, and the long wagon ride across the country. During the entire seven-day trip, she had been afraid that the man she had hired would take advantage of her. She had been a woman all alone with no one to call to for aid. He had been a man out in the wilderness with no one to observe him who could testify before a judge about what he had done at a later date. That he had not done so seemed a miracle to her. Those days of trepidation, of never being sure whether she was safe while asleep, now appeared to her as an ordeal that he had put her through. She blamed him for it. Everything that had happened to her since leaving a situation in which she had been respected and valued was his fault.

He dismounted first, then helped her down. It was all she could not to fall on her face. She resented him for that as well. When she managed to right herself, she gathered all the strength that she had into her right arm. She slapped him as hard as she could. He reeled to one side. A wide red mark sprung up on his left cheek.

He responded at once, without even thinking. He drew one of his revolvers, then cocked back the hammer. He held it in front of her chest. His eyes burned with a furious anger that had sparked up inside of him all at once. His front teeth bit down on his bottom lip so hard that a rivulet of blood ran down the side of his face.

Despite the danger of being shot there and then, her own anger did not abate. Instead, it only grew. She resented him for daring to draw a weapon on her when it was he who had tried to defraud her. She thought that if it was she who had not the gun and not him, she would not hesitate to blow him away. She thought that she would discharge all of the bullets into his body, then keep pulling the trigger while the gun clicked away. Six bullets was not enough for him. He might, by some miracle, manage to survive that.

She said, “You have deceived me, sir. I demand that you take me back to town at once.”

The calm, resolute attitude that he had displayed before returned. The fire went out of eyes a little at a time. He lowered his gun so that it pointed at the ground, but did not put it back in its holster. He said, “It is true that I have led you astray. I promised you a large ranch with a significant stake. That is clearly not what you see. Therefore, since I do not wish to fight with a lady, I will tell you the truth.”

Jane said, “Now that would be a first. Let’s hear it then.”

He took a moment to compose himself. A deep breath passed in and out his mouth. He said, “I am what folks in polite society might call a fugitive from justice.”

She clenched her fist tight, then unclenched it. White half-moon shapes appeared on her palm. She had come close to scratching his eyes out. A glimmer of reproach manifested within her. She had doubted the veracity of his claims. Now that they had all turned out to be untrue, she kicked herself for believing him so easily. She blamed him for that, too. It was all too easy for a deceptive man to practice upon the honest, trusting nature of others. Snake oil salesman did it all the time with their alcoholic elixirs. She had heard of carpetbaggers who gained unsavory reputations by traveling up and down the Mississippi River fobbing off useless items to people who knew no better. To her, Earl was not very different.

She held to her white-hot anger. She had become so enraged that she felt sure that she would either force her to murder him, or she would murder him instead. She had enjoyed the life that she had before. The unease that she had about her future prospects in Texarkana paled in comparison to what she might face married to him. That future was filled with want, hunger, and poverty. She would no longer be able to spend her leisure time reading Seneca. She would have to beg for what scraps she could find, or else end up at the end of hangman’s noose as an accomplice in some heinous crime or other. She didn’t want to be hung by the neck until dead. She imagined it would be quite painful.

She said, “That’s fine and dandy for you, Mr. Hubbard. But don’t you go thinking that I’ll have any part of any tomfoolery of yours. I won’t have it. I won’t.”

She turned on her heel to walk away from him. Even though she had spent most of the ride over with her eyes closed, she found that she could not stand the sight of him any longer. She would find her own way back to Texarkana, even if she had to take a job mucking out stables to do it. She was determined to go on living without him and, more importantly, without any man in her life for as long as she lived. Spinsterhood, so she had always been told, was the worst outcome for a woman. Women were brought into the world to provide children and comfort to their husbands. A woman who did not fulfill that purpose was not one capable of earning respect. Everyone had said so. Yet, after her experience, she was determined to prove everyone wrong, even if it meant standing against the whole world to do so.

He grabbed her wrist. She stopped dead in her tracks. She was on the point of slapping him again for daring to touch her when he said, “It’s not as you might think.”

She wrenched her wrist away from him. She said, “It’s not? So tell me how it is then. Tell me how you became an outlaw by accident, or some such nonsense.”

He looked her straight in the eyes. She found his gaze unsettling. She wanted to turn away from him. She found the desire to see whether he was lying more compelling.

He said, “I had a family once. A mother, and a young sister. Not my father. He died working a coal mine out in Kentucky. After he died, my mother decided to bring us all out here. Might have been she figured that I was of an age where I could support the two of them with my earnings. I was seventeen at the time, almost a man. I certainly tried to do so. I tried my damnedest, even after Mr. Lincoln’s useless war ruined the country for young men everywhere. I worked at the First National Bank in town. Things were going well. I thought perhaps I had a future with the company. I didn’t have my letters, mind you, but I understood numbers well enough. I’ve always had a head for numbers.”

Jane could not feel sorry for him being illiterate. A great many people on the frontier did not know how to read. Those that could not found someone else who could read them off letters and newspaper articles. She suspected that he had hired a clerk to read her letters out loud, then to write replies. That man, whoever he might be, had to know nothing of Earl’s past history. Otherwise, the clerk would never consent to scrawled out such scandalous lies.

He continued, “The day came when my mother’s farm burned down. It wasn’t a big farm, mind you. We couldn’t feed ourselves on what we grew there, let alone any animals that we wished to keep. She wanted sheep. She never got the chance. She and my sister died in that fire. I was talking a walk through the country, as I was in the habit of doing on my days off. This was a Sunday afternoon. The bank had not opened that day. So after the morning’s church service, I had my whole day to myself. I had intended to walk where I would and return in the evening. When I saw the pillar of smoke from a distance, I hurried back as fast as I could.

“It transpired that my mother had a life insurance policy. She had been paying money to someone at the bank. She didn’t really have it in her budget. None of us did. I don’t know exactly where she got the money from. Maybe she was whoring. Maybe she wasn’t. The result is that she had named my as the primary beneficiary on the policy.”

Jane began to see where this was all going. She thought that, for someone who didn’t know how to read and write, Earl Hubbard spoke very well. She hoped that this wasn’t an attempt at deception too. She said, “And then the sheriff got it into his head that you wanted that life insurance money.”

“That’s right. The bank declined to pay before the sheriff had his say. I chose not to say anything about it. I just went right on working on the bank as best I could. I won’t say that I continued as though nothing had happened. That’s not precisely true. I wore black, and tried not to think of all the tragedy my family has been through. My sister, she was an innocent. She-”

Earl choked back his tears. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes.

Jane said, “Is it true, what they said?”

It was a silly question to ask. If she believed that he would lie to her about at any time- which she thought might be the case- then there was no sense in asking him whether anything was true or not. Yet, she had blurted out the words before she knew what she was saying.

He said, “They said I burned my own house to the ground to get at the insurance money. I don’t know that I will ever be able to figure that one out. I deprived myself of a house, a home, a mother, and a sister just for the sake of a few dollars. Might be there are some in this world who can do that, Miss Russell. I do not count myself amongst them.”

She put her hands on her hips. Her anger was beginning to fade. Now, instead of clawing his eyes out, she only felt like kicking him in the shin. She said, “Then why did you send all those letters claiming to be something that you’re not?”

He answered at once. That made her think that he wasn’t lying. Not about this, at least. He said, “I don’t know my letters. I might have told you that. I had to go to a man in the next town over- that’s a good twenty mile ride- to write down the words that I said to him. He didn’t know me from Adam. There are wanted posters for Earl Kittredge, of course-”

“Your true name is Earl Kittredge?”

“It is. I might have used a false Christian name as well, except then I wouldn’t have responded when someone called my name. You know how people turn their heads at once when they hear their name spoken, even if they’re not a part of the conversation? It’s like that for me. I wanted to react when anybody said my name, if ever they did.”

“And? Did you? Did you react in that tavern of yours?”

Earl realized then that he had been holding a pistol pointed at the ground for some time. He pushed the hammer back up, then holstered his weapon. He said, “I sure did. Funny thing is, I thought you were part of a honey trap. Do you know what that is?”

She recalled the schemes that she had heard of in which women were used to flush out someone being sought by the law, or by a gang of criminals. No one thought that a woman might be doing anything untoward until it proved that she was. The phrase derived from traps that had been used to capture wild bears and other animals. She nodded without responding.

He said, “That’s why I was so abrasive to you. I apologize for that.”

Jane found it impossible to hold on to her anger when he said that. Though he had caused her to fall into an unwelcome circumstance, when she began to see him for what he truly was, she felt the first beginnings of sympathy for what he had been through.

She still had one question lingering in her mind, though. She said, “If you are an outlaw, how is it that you let yourself be seen in town today?”

“That was only on account of the letters I sent out. I wanted to see if anyone would answer them. Mind you, I’d never go out during the evening?”

“And this man who was working the bar, Zebediah. He didn’t recognize you from any of the wanted posters or suspect that you might be using a false name?”

“Zebediah knows my secret. He’s one of the few who does. He hasn’t reported me to the sheriff, not yet.”

“And this other man that you were with? Who was he?”

Earl held up a hand. He said, “Now I’m afraid that is none of your business. Suffice it to say that there are still people in this world who require my services even knowing who I am.”

Jane decided to leave it at that. She had enough to verify his statements. If they were false, then she would have nothing further to do with him. If they were true then...she did not know what she would do.