Chapter 22
Jack Randall’s condition improved quickly, as did his charm. If Shea hadn’t read the letter, she would have been captivated by him. As it was, she found herself making excuses for him. Perhaps the letter hadn’t meant what she thought it did.
She held off her anxious questions until the fifth day. The posse still went out daily, which meant, according to Clint, they’d found nothing. Clint didn’t mention going to the mountains himself, but Shea knew he had, knew that he had told Rafe that his enemy still lived.
The doctor had returned on the third day and said it was not strange at all that Jack Randall didn’t remember anything about the shooting. It might come back, he said, and it might not. Head wounds were always unpredictable.
But he thought infection was now unlikely and told his patient he could start moving around, though his arm was to remain strapped to his chest.
Kate visited briefly. She had dropped in several times, the first to bring some supplies and several dresses. They needed a few tucks and were a little too short, but Shea had been grateful.
Kate was more reserved than the first day they’d met, and Shea wondered why. But she didn’t puzzle over it long, because other matters worried her more: how to broach the subject of Rafe Tyler with her father.
After Kate left on the fifth day, Shea made lemonade and carried a pitcher and glasses to Randall’s room. He was awake, sitting on the side of the bed. He had already walked around the room several times and now was breathing heavily, but his mouth broke into a broad grin when he saw Shea.
“You’re like a rainbow every time you come in,” he said. “You don’t know how happy you’ve made me by coming here.”
Shea set down the pitcher and poured them both a glass before she sat down in a chair next to him. “Why did you and Mama part?” It was the question that had been haunting her ever since she opened the box in Boston.
He leaned back against the headboard with a sigh. He took a long drink and then studied her carefully. “Didn’t she tell you anything?”
“She said you had died before I was born.”
Pain flickered across his face. Only after several moments of silence did he speak.
“Your mother was a city girl, gently reared,” he said. “She … never accepted the West, or what you had to do sometimes to survive.”
“I don’t understand,” Shea said.
“Moving frequently,” he said. “We didn’t have any money. Sometimes didn’t even have a place to stay. Good jobs were hard to come by. I think when she knew you were coming, she needed a safe place, and I … couldn’t provide that. Not then.”
“But later?”
“It was too late,” her father said. “I think she hated to admit … it hadn’t worked out.
Her family didn’t want her to marry me, fought it every moment until we eloped.
She might have been afraid they wouldn’t take her in, so she told everyone I had died.
I kept asking her to join me, but she begged me not to interfere with her life. She never told me about you.”
His eyes begged her to believe him. They were full of regret and grief and longing, and she believed he really felt those things. But she also knew that Sara Randall wouldn’t have been daunted by hard times. Not the Sara Randall that Shea knew.
“I … I found a clipping among her things,” Shea said. “About a court-martial.”
“There were several when I was in the army,” he said, a muscle twitching in his neck.
“It mentioned some payroll robberies, an officer named Tyler.”
There was a long silence. “I would rather not talk about that, Shea,” he said. “It … was very painful. He … I … liked the young man.”
Shea wanted to slow the fast beating of her heart. She had found a father, and now she might lose him. She shouldn’t care if he had done what she was now fairly sure he had. But she did care. She cared desperately.
“It was … your word against his.”
“They found some of the money in his quarters.”
“Someone else could have put it there.”
Her father’s face changed slowly as several minutes went by, aging as if each minute added years. He took her hand that was folded in her lap. “Why? Why are you so interested?”
His fingers pressed against hers, as if it were a lifeline.
“I … I just want to know more about you,” she said, not yet ready to give him information that might hurt Rafe but desperate to discover the truth.
But his gaze met hers, searching. “Where were you those days you were missing?”
“I told you. I was lost.”
“You’ve met Tyler.” It wasn’t a question but a statement.
Shea didn’t answer. But her heart beat even faster. She knew he would realize she was lying if she said no. Her interest had given her away.
“You were with him in the mountains.” His voice was sad rather than accusing. “The bastard,” he said then in almost a whisper. “He used you to get even with me.”
“No.” The word escaped Shea’s lips before she could think.
He closed his eyes, and pain flooded Shea. In a matter of weeks she had found a love and a father, and they hated each other and accused each other of motives and deeds so dark, she could barely comprehend them, much less accept them.
“No,” she whispered in denial again.
“What did he say, Shea?” he said defeatedly.
Shea rose and went to the window without answering.
“Did he …?”
Shea didn’t answer.
“Dear God,” he said, his voice strained and close to breaking.
Shea turned. “Did you? Did you lie during the court-martial?”
“No,” he said flatly. “And if he touched you, I’ll see him dead this time. Kidnapping a woman is a hanging offense.”
“I was just lost,” she insisted.
“Shea, don’t let him come between us. He’s a convicted thief.”
“What are you, Papa?” Shea hadn’t meant to use the word. It just slipped out, and she realized she had already been thinking of him that way.
“A man who wants his daughter,” he answered simply, and nothing else he could have said would have struck her so poignantly.
The letter.
I love you.
The words she had said to Rafe. Her mother’s words to Jack Randall.
She put her fists to her ears, as if to block out any more sounds. And then she whirled out of the room, out of the house, and down to the barn. She had to leave. She had to escape all the voices. She even wanted to outrun herself.
There was no one in the barn. In the past few weeks she had watched men saddle a horse, and she knew she could do it. She saddled the most tranquil-looking of the horses. She didn’t care that she was wearing a skirt. She didn’t care about anything but getting away.
She buckled the cinch of the saddle and forced the bit into the horse’s mouth, then led the horse outside. There was no one in sight. The few remaining hands were apparently still out.
She heard a shout and saw her father lean against the front door of the ranch house. “Shea, no!”
But another voice was louder. The one inside her head, which told her to find some kind of rest, some kind of peace, to sort out the warring emotions.
She swung up onto the saddle, her dress riding high on her thighs, and her knees nudged the horse. Its sudden reaction surprised her, and she held on for dear life as the horse spurted into an uncontrolled gallop.
Jack Randall wasn’t dead. The words kept repeating themselves in Rafe’s brain. He didn’t know how he felt about that.
For a brief time, before he knew Randall lived, Rafe had felt something like relief. It was over. Clint and the others could go on with their own lives. He would continue to track down McClary, and then …
Christ, what then?
He had lived these past ten years with only one purpose in mind: exacting revenge and, if possible, clearing his name. He had never thought ahead. Now he wondered what was ahead if he did succeed. Emptiness. Loneliness.
He hadn’t realized what loneliness really was until Shea Randall had left, until he’d had some knowledge of how it felt to be touched with warmth and tenderness.
How was she?
Had Randall charmed her as he had charmed too many others? She had been ready to be charmed. She had wanted a father so badly; it had shone in those eyes of hers.
Clint had ridden back up the night he had taken Shea home and had told him about Shea’s lies, the way she had tried to protect Rafe, protect them all. How long would that last in the comfort of the Circle R?
Why had McClary shot Randall? Tried to kill him?
Clint knew that McClary had done it. McClary had been at the ranch house when Randall had returned from a three-day absence.
Since Clint knew none of Rafe’s men had shot Randall, it left only McClary.
But Clint hadn’t been able to convince the sheriff of that.
Posses would be combing these mountains.
Restless beyond tolerance, Rafe decided to start his own hunt for McClary.
His business with Randall would have to wait.
McClary would have left the Circle R in a hurry.
Without supplies. He would have to steal them now, and the miners were still easy pickings.
Some had banded together for safety, but others were just too independent and guarded their claims with fierce possessiveness, regardless of how little gold they found.
In addition to those miners who worked the creeks and streams, there were still those who sought yet another vein in abandoned mine shafts picked clean. Those abandoned shafts would make fine hiding places for someone like McClary. They dotted the area, and Rafe concentrated his search on them.
Rafe had found nothing in the four days he’d been looking. He’d once seen the posse moving below him, and he had quietly backed away and ridden in the opposite direction.