Explaining Herself Read online

  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 hea
ded 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 mouth 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?

  Ask questions, he reckoned. Talk to people. But—

  A light knock at the bunkhouse door caught him by surprise. He spun, dropping the end of a bandage to flare his left hand—then clenched a fist to keep from going for his revolver when he saw who peeked in the doorway.

  A girl. No ... a lady.

  "Oh!" Seeing that he wasn't wholly dressed, she spun away and covered her eyes. "Golly. I should have waited for you to say 'come in.' "

  Laramie didn't know how to answer that, so instead he quickly finished binding his shoulder, using his teeth to hold one end of the bandage as he tightened the knot with the other. A lady shouldn't be here at all.

  This had to be one of the daughters. He could tell that much by the cut and yoke of her yellow calico dress and the ruffled white apron she wore over it. She'd tied the apron in a big bow, the ends of which trailed down from her waist like rivulets of water, running into and out of the bright folds of her skirt. He could tell by the neat way she wore her hair up, despite the dark-brown curls of hair that trickled across her ears and the bare nape of her neck. Laramie had seen nice girls before—bosses' daughters, or hired girls—but never this close. Proper married women, yes, but not young ladies. He sure hadn't spoken to them.

  And even if he were better with words, he felt odd— his throat tight, his skin prickly—-just looking at this girl's neck. She looked so ... clean!

  "I brought some salves," spoke the lady toward the door, and lifted a pail with one hand. "And some of my mother's soup. I wasn't sure what was wrong with you."

  What was wrong. . . He pushed his arms back into the sleeves of his union suit, started fumbling buttons into place. When his gaze drifted downward again, to where the lady's apron ties dipped in and out of her skirt's flounces, even more of him felt tight and prickly. It embarrassed him.

  The last thing Laramie was, was clean.

  The lady peeked over her shoulder, her eyes quick, her lashes dark. Fingers still on his union suit, Laramie felt himself flush to be caught staring.

  "Aren't you going to put on your shirt?" she prompted. "I can hardly ask you questions like that."

  Questions? At least that explained why she would have wanted to help him. Laramie scooped a clean shirt out of his saddlebag, tugged it on—and missed his sleeve on the first try. "What questions?"

  "Are you decent?" She'd turned away again.

  "No." He was still tucking.

  She started tal
king anyway.

  "Well, first off, I was going to ask if you were all right. I saw how stiffly you moved, like maybe you'd hurt yourself. That's why I brought the salves and the soup. Here." She put the pail on a shelf by the doorway.

  He guessed he should thank her, except that she had no business in the bunkhouse. Even he knew that much.

  "Then I figured on asking your name," she continued, still speaking toward the door as Laramie finished tucking. "Since Papa didn't tell me that. I'm Victoria Garrison, by the way. Sometimes my family calls me Vic."

  When he still said nothing, she peeked over her shoulder again. Luckily, this time he was decent.

  Fully dressed, anyhow.

  She turned to face him. "So what's your name?"

  "Laramie." Some folks knew it for an alias as soon as they heard it. All Victoria Garrison said was, "What's your first name?"

  He didn't like this. He didn't like the risk of being alone with the boss's daughter. He didn't like that she'd seen his bandages—so much for hiding his injuries from Garrison. He didn't like how odd he felt at the sight of her skirt's flare or her bare neck, and he didn't like anything distracting him from what he'd come here to do.

  Even if he wasn't quite sure how to do it.

  He'd given her a handle to hang on him. She was rude to demand more. And yet, when she smiled with encouragement, he couldn't drum up enough energy for annoyance. All his energy was going into the prickly, tight feelings.

  The lady had pretty eyes. Gray, if the shadows of the bunkhouse weren't fooling him. Laramie liked how her lips turned when she ducked her head to slant a smile up at him, as if to be less threatening that way.

  Not that a little thing like her had to duck.

  "Some—" He cleared his throat. "Some folks call me Ross." It had once been Draz, but his parents wanted him to sound American. Since almost before he could remember, he'd been Ross—except sometimes to his momma. Draz had died years ago, not long after his father, his brother, his sister. It was Laramie who stood there with water dripping off his hair and onto the collar and shoulders of his shirt.