Chapter Forty-One
Evening.” Stot brushed Shark’s flank. Light flickered gold and dotted from a kerosene lantern looped over a nail. “Heard you clatter on in.”
I slammed open the stable door. “What the hell?”
“Mmm.” He bent, brushed Shark’s legs. “She won’t bite,” he muttered to Shark. “Well, not unpleasantly.”
I faltered over my boots. “What in fiery Sam Hill, you arrogant sonofabitch, you’re”—I touched my stomach, woozy, myself thoroughly soused—“telling folks we’re courting.”
His gaze flicked up. “You hear that?”
I knocked my shoulder against the wall beside the feed bucket, raised my brows. Stot brushed Shark’s ankle, irritatingly calm. “From whom?”
“Who all are you telling?” I flicked my eyes to an open window. A northeaster whipped by, howling and wrathy, rattling the walls. “You tell about—”
“No. Not that.”
I felt as if I’d been tossed from a racehorse, and not just because of the brandy sours, but because I had no idea what to do with this man. When I was wild, I chose it. But with him, I completely lost sight of direction, everything a’whirl, untethered to reason or topography.
Stot straightened his white paper collar and proceeded to brush Shark’s other ankle. The air smelt of melting ice and weapon oil and perhaps fresh butter, drifting on over from his home. “Folks ask, you know,” he said. “We’re together often. Ain’t no matter, is it?”
“Sakes alive, it absolutely does matter. You had no right.”
“Then what’s going on here?”
“Nothing now.”
He paused. Stood, clicked the brush down on the ledge.
Then he stepped forward, his broad shoulders just above mine.
I swallowed. It was quiet in the barn, the scuffling feet of his animals and the wind now muted beyond the hickory boards.
He fingered the ends of my hair, his voice gravelly, the texture grating my spine. “Nothing, huh?”
He ran a palm up my side, and a moan tumbled from my mouth. His eyes flashed as he slid his hand behind my back, pressing me closer.
I stepped away, slipped out beyond all the doors. Outside, I crossed my arms over my chest, swallowed a gulp of winter air, and blinked at the starlight pressing through the night. Stot stood behind me, his chest brushing my back. “You know there’s something between us.”
But there couldn’t be. I couldn’t be with him for a season, then let him go.
We stood awhile, watching Cricket nip at the grass.
Stot had put up fences, stained them a gorgeous mahogany.
In the moonlight, they were blue tinged and otherworldly.
I liked the way he did things. He stepped down the slight hill and stood before me.
Air currents skidded through the fibers of my blouse and chilled my bones.
His eyes were dark, shadows all over his face.
“We don’t have to be some unbound mayhem.
” He straightened the brim of his Stetson—I even adored the way he moved his biceps, settled his hat on top of his black hair, the controlled way he held his body, everything purposeful, reverential.
I didn’t know you could relish every nuance of someone, and it ached to like him so much.
“We can just see what it’s like to be together, as such,” he said.
His posture was relaxed, his face rugged with stubble.
We hadn’t kissed since the snowstorm, and it felt like a conversation forever unresolved.
I didn’t know how to keep living with this fire between us.
Didn’t know how to forget those moments in the dark, hadn’t known intimacy could be like that.
I brushed my fingers across his jaw, pressed my thumb into the cleft in his chin, as if claiming him.
I’d already fallen, but he couldn’t be mine.
He slid his arms around my waist, settling me closer. “Who you hear from anyway, that we’re courting?”
I wiggled away, leaned against the hickory planks of the barn, exhaled. “Frank Canton.” A beat. “The Wild Bunch.”
“What?” His fist flexed above the walnut handle of his pistol. “Sakes alive, why did you speak with them?”
“Told them ’bout the murders.”
“Come again?”
“You heard me.”
“Well, damn.” He grimaced and straightened the knot of his black cravat.
“What else was I to do? Vigilantes were rising against the Browns, outlaws coming for you,” I said. “Told them at the saloon tonight. Loudly.”
“Damnation, I requested you take me along.”
“I didn’t need you.”
“Fine.” Stot looked off, as if memorizing the horizon. He removed his hat, crown pointed at the loamy dirt.
The distant line of trees was a smudge of dark, like iron oxide pressed across parchment.
I told him of the confrontation, of how I’d go on into town tomorrow, sign an official statement.
His fingers wrought his gun belt, his black brows tugged together.
“But they didn’t shoot you, and the marshal didn’t arrest you? And no one will go after the Browns?”
“I suppose.”
“Of course you pulled off such an unhinged plan.” He shook his head. “Not many would protect someone else over themselves.” He grabbed my hand. “Come on, you can tell me the rest over supper.”
I hesitated. “Oh, I should—”
“Just stay.”
And so we cooked and ate, talking of what to plant this next week and his thoughts on how to take my fence before the wildwood.
He updated me on plans for rebuilding the Browns’ barn and had me tell the entire tale of the saloon, each and every facial tic of the marshal and the outlaws, and then, before I knew it, we’d spent all twilight before the fire, in his home, with such a natural ease and rhythm.
Far into the night, he helped me into my slicker.
Behind him, his saddle-brown leather bag slumped on the raw oak planks, a train ticket slipped in a side pocket.
He’d already planned when to go pick up his new family.
My inhale caught inside my chest. The air tinted golden brown, like a blur of linseed oil varnish swept across an oil landscape.
That dusk after Magnolia’s wedding the forest was sepia.
Crispy, saddle-brown bur oak leaves clattered above, the sun too low to shine through the branches, the forest lifeless and dull.
The delicate bones of Magnolia’s wrist as she climbed onto the buckboard, her translucent white veil coiling in the air; the tiny, embroidered bluebells along her wool cape shivering above her spotless white boots.
On the bench, Lark had snapped the reins, his lopsided grin tentative, and then they’d left, the buckboard off down the path, my two closest friends forever chasing a different sort of world.
I blinked. Back in Stot’s home my gaze fuzzed, his sable bag and train ticket blurry.
I didn’t know Magnolia anymore, besides a memory.
“Minnie?” Stot stood before me, straightening my slicker.
“I know how to put on a blasted jacket.”
His hands rested on my top button. “Can you just leave it—it was a nice evening.”
I closed my eyes and shook my head. I couldn’t leave it easy and calm, this rhythm that postured as family.
Couldn’t let Stot traipse all over my heart, spurs and all.
I couldn’t lose another friendship, couldn’t walk that line between destruction and ecstasy.
Couldn’t lose ahold of any more pieces of my heart.
Before, my heart was playing with a boy.
But Stot was a man from his Stetson to his black boots edged in mud.
He had strength I’d never encountered before—he was brave and resilient and handsome as the dirt is deep.
And I couldn’t even conceive of the capacity at which he could destroy me.
“I can’t do this,” I said, unable to look at him.
He threaded his fingers into the hair at my nape. “What, exactly?”
“Any of it.” I stepped back, hands pressed against the door.
His gaze ran over my face, his expression contemplative. “There’s no hurry, for anything.”
I crossed my arms, held myself together, an ache plummeting in my stomach.
How could he say such things, when a train ticket to pick up his soon wife and children waited in his saddlebag?
It wasn’t fair to Clara and the children, or to me.
I tugged open his door, fled into the atmosphere which just wouldn’t shake free of winter.
I strode to the barn, my life speeding forward, as stories do, spiraling into the deep of night like smoke.
Stot caught up with me before the barn, the oil lantern flooding the ground round his boots. He slipped an arm about my waist. “May I follow you on home, confirm no outlaws are waiting?”
I could feel his heat, smell his scent of nutmeg and evergreens. I pushed off his arm, stepped sideaways. “You’ve gotta stop touching me like that.”
“I thought we were taking it slow?”
“That’s what you said.” I held my shoulders. “I said none of it.”
He took off his hat by the crown, scraped his fingers through his hair, sending the black waves askew. “I don’t understand.”
I scoffed. I couldn’t make sense of him toying with me. It wasn’t like him. My heart withered and cracked.
“You’re quick-witted enough to figure it out,” I said. “I’m not fixing to be shucked.”
He pressed his hat back on, closed the distance between us. “Now, you know I don’t take to being spoken of as a scoundrel.”
“Then don’t mislead me.”
He leaned down, the rim round his green eyes gray. “I feel as if I’ve been forthright, with what I want with you.”
I gasped, clutched the barn’s ring doorknob. “When are you marrying Clara?”
“What?” He squinted at me.
“I saw the train ticket, in your satchel.”
He gasped something like a cruel laugh. He scanned the pasture, the faraway black distances. “You’re jealous.”
“You insufferable ass.” I made to yank open the door, but he caught my waist and tucked me up against him. “I said, stop grasping at me all the time.”
He gripped my chin, halting me. “You understand I’m not marrying her?”
Everything paused. “How would I know that?”