Rustler Mountain

Chapter 9

Went to see Jasmine’s girls at the saloon and left feeling worse than when I rolled in. It’s a hell of a thing to have your pick of any woman you want, and to wish you were with the one you can’t have.

—Austin Wilder’s journal, September 25, 1855

A lice was checking out, but slowly, and Millie felt a little bit overcharged knowing that Austin was going to come in soon. Because he had a historical revelation to share that necessitated a private, in-person meeting.

That was all.

“Do you read romance, dear?” Alice asked.

Millie blinked. “No.”

“You should,” Alice said.

“Alice,” Millie said. “My wedding just got called off a couple of months ago.”

“I know. That’s why you should be reading it. Because let me tell you, that Michael Hall could never have been a romance hero.”

In spite of herself, Millie was intrigued.

“Why?”

“It’s hard to explain if you don’t read the books. But I always thought there was something about him. And I was right, considering his behavior.”

Millie couldn’t argue with Alice.

“I tried to read one,” Millie said. “I found . . . certain scenes.... They were just terribly unrealistic.” She felt her face getting hot. Just mentioning those scenes made her feel missish.

Alice’s eyebrows shot upward. “Did you really? Well. That is sad. I don’t find them unrealistic at all.” A sly smile creased her wrinkled face, and as she touched her cheek, her wedding ring, which had been firmly on her finger for fifty years, twinkled. Millie knew a moment of envy for this woman, who was beautiful and happy and lived in her skin with ease. She had known a lifetime of love, and did not find the sex in romance novels unrealistic.

“Maybe I’ll try them again,” she said, the words coming out in a rush.

“I have a list of recommendations for you,” Alice said. “When you’re ready.”

She patted the counter and then took her stack of books and walked out the door. Millie was left feeling uncertain what to do while she processed that information and waited for her next interaction, which was not going to do anything to settle her.

The door swung open again, and in came Austin. Black on black on black, and looking like an outlaw without ever pulling any costume pieces out of her crates. He had a folder in his hand.

“I guess you’re the first one to show up with a folder,” she said, smiling weakly.

He looked down at his hand. “What?”

“You were excited about folders earlier. Because I said I had some that would help with our planning.”

“Oh.”

She had just let him know that she remembered every word of every conversation they’d ever had. While he clearly didn’t. That was maybe not the best thing.

No. Maybe not.

“I thought it was funny.” She forced out a nervous laugh. It sounded worse. More desperate.

“There’s no one else in here, is there?”

“No.”

She stood up and slowly made her way around the reference desk, very conscious of the fact that she had thought of it as a barrier between herself and Austin on more than one occasion. Now, she didn’t have it, and they were here alone.

She opened up the door and turned the sign. Then she turned the lock on the door. Now they were locked in.

“Officially closed,” she said, moving past him and making her way toward a table in the center of the room.

“You can sit down with me here. It’s a good place to. . . .” She realized that she had left all of her things behind the desk. “Just . . . just a second. You can sit down.” She went back to the desk, collected her planner, and on a whim, grabbed a sheriff’s star from the costume boxes. Then she went back to the table.

“Okay. Now I have all of my things, and we can discuss Gold Rush Days, and your . . . your revelation.”

“Which do you want to do first?”

“I want to know what you found.”

He opened up the folder and pushed it across the table.

She frowned, looking at the slip of paper inside.

“Butch Hancock paid Lee Talbot for . . . services? Something?”

“Something. Take a look at the date stamp on it,” he said, pressing his forefinger to the date.

It was two days before Austin Wilder had been killed.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“I can’t prove it, but I think Butch gave up the gang, then paid Lee to look the other way so that he could get away. I’ve always thought that. I wasn’t sure how it happened, or who approached who, but this definitely suggests that Butch wanted to get free of the gang, and he was willing to pay for it.”

“But . . . so you think that Lee Talbot just let a notorious criminal escape?”

“I do. I’ve always thought so. Butch Hancock the Traitor.... His name is mud as far as we Wilders are concerned.”

“Is that why you hate the Hancocks?” she asked.

The reason for the long-standing feud had never occurred to her. It should have, she supposed, since this whole town was powered on grudges that seemed to be as old as the dirt.

“Yes,” he said easily. “I mean, also because the Hancocks haven’t changed—a bunch of lousy, no-good, untrustworthy. . . .”

“You’re exactly like everybody you don’t like,” she said brusquely. The conflicting feelings rattling around inside her made her tone firmer than she would have used otherwise.

“ Pardon ?”

“You’re so angry at everybody in the town for clinging to the past, but you do the same. You’re angry at the Hancocks, you’re angry at me—”

“It’s not just the past,” he said. “I was born being told that I was bad news. I was a ten-year-old boy who walked into the library and wasn’t welcome. And yes, I did my part to earn the reputation I had been given on day one, but you tell me this, Millie, do you think that I would’ve had a hope of maybe turning out just a little bit differently if people hadn’t told me who I was before I ever knew?”

This was the truth of him. This deep, unrelenting anger. And as she stared down at the papers, trying to grasp the full implications of what this receipt meant, she had to wonder how much of what he said was true of her.

She had spent her whole life trying to measure up to an ideal. A level of bravery, of goodness, brilliance, that might not be real.

The town was divided. Lawmen and outlaws.

But what if the past had never been so clear-cut?

What if the lawman hadn’t been trustworthy? What if she had built her entire life on a foundation of shifting sand?

It would mean....

Freedom. The realization, the feeling, took her by surprise. She felt overwhelmed all at once by a total and complete rush of adrenaline, of relief.

And yes, there was grief too, but she was so familiar with grief at this point. With loss. The loss of a legend could never compare to the loss of a human being. She had lost both of her parents.

But slowly, she felt pain start to creep in. All the stories she had heard on her grandfather’s knee about the largesse of the Talbot family just weren’t real.

Because of course they couldn’t be.

Because no bloodline could be all bad or all good.

But people wanted narratives to be simple and straightforward.

Because they didn’t want to get into the complexity of people.

It was why the telling of history could be so contentious. Why people resisted looking beyond tales of bravery, looking at the ways their heroes had hurt people to get what they wanted.

This was just another example.

To ensure the legacy her family had benefited from all these years, there had been bribery. There had been betrayal.

Worst of all, if what Austin had said earlier was true, that there was no mention of murder in his namesake’s journals, then that would make her ancestor a murderer. Because it would mean the Wilder brothers had been wrongfully executed. Criminals they might’ve been, but it was possible they had never spilled blood.

And suddenly the celebration of the death of Austin Wilder, of his bleeding out in the street, seemed a horrendous thing.

Heroes were enshrined. Made larger than life. More than human.

Villains were somehow made less.

In the end they were all just men, and that was the hardest thing for people to accept.

She knew it, and it was hard for her too.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “And sorry I reacted that way. I can’t pretend that it isn’t . . . that it isn’t entirely likely you’re right.”

“Well, it must be disturbing for you. Taking away the legacy that you trade on for Gold Rush Days.”

“Yes,” she said. “It is. It’s taking away the easy story. Now what we have is a historical mystery. And, actually, that is pretty interesting.”

She tried to push away the personal implications. She wasn’t going to cry over her own ancestor being less than she’d always been told. Not when the Wilders were the ones who’d truly been harmed.

She was caught somewhere between elation and horror, and there really was no way to sit there in front of this man, with his blue eyes that were far too keen, without feeling as if she wanted to slide through the floor.

“Well, I’m going to work on getting more information,” he said. “Somehow. I’ll dig through everything in that museum basement if need be.”

“You didn’t tell me what made you think Austin was betrayed in the first place.”

He had alluded to it, but he hadn’t said.

“There’s an entry in the journal. Where Austin says that he suspects Butch is planning to make a run for it. They had just done a bank job, and there was a lot of money. Austin wanted to make a change. His kids were getting older, he had been writing a lot about what he was going to tell his sons. He didn’t want them to be outlaws. Neither did Austin’s wife. And whatever you might think about him, I can tell you for certain that he loved that woman. He was willing to do anything for her. He wanted to give her a good life. Something she could be proud of. He was obsessed with her.”

For some reason, hearing him say that made her profoundly sad. She had been dimly aware of the original Austin’s wife and children, but not his feelings. Because it had never occurred to her to attribute feelings to him. “That he was married and had kids is a footnote in the historical record,” she said.

“It wasn’t a footnote in his life. It was everything to him. And I know, you would think in that case he would’ve stopped robbing, but I don’t think it was that easy. It was the only way he knew how to provide.”

“It would be nice if everybody had access to that journal.”

“Not enough people read. You and I both know that.”

“But some do. And if it’s a compelling story, then maybe people will be more interested in it. Maybe they’ll understand.”

She realized that for Austin, the past was more real than it had ever been to her, because he had that journal. He had a full, complete picture of the man he was named for, and she didn’t have that with Lee. She had dry historical record, she had paperwork that you could piece together, like that receipt Austin had brought. But it didn’t fill in the substance of who the man was. Didn’t give an idea of his inner thoughts, or the voice that he used to speak.

Austin knew his forebears in a way that she couldn’t.

“Until we have more information,” Austin said, “I don’t know that there’s any point marinating on this too much.”

She narrowed her eyes. “I have a feeling that you’ll be marinating on it plenty.”

“I’m still investigating.”

“Maybe I’d like to help.”

“Maybe I don’t trust you,” he said, leveling his gaze at her.

Her heart rate started to pick up. There was something exhilarating about this, but she couldn’t quite pinpoint it. “Well, I guess maybe we have to start over. If we can’t rely on our legends.”

“I know you plenty well enough.”

“Does that mean I know you?” she asked.

“You do know what I read.”

“That is true. And that means I know a fair amount about you. But I’m sure there are things I don’t know.”

He lifted a brow. “You know my arrest record.”

He was throwing that out like a hand grenade. Trying to be provocative. To see what she’d do. She could feel it. That anger simmering beneath the surface. “True. I do. Is that who you are, though?”

She’d never bantered like this before so she hadn’t known she could do it. But here she was. Firing right back at him, as if she might have something wild in her blood too.

She had never talked to a man like this before. Gone back and forth, felt the exhilaration of a challenge.

It was.... Maybe it was almost flirting, except it felt a little too sharp for that, and when she breathed in deep it hurt a bit.

Very Good Girl Millie Talbot would never.

But the Millie Talbot who had mysterious danger in her background? Who knew. Who could say at all.

“Does it make you feel better to think so?” he asked.

“I’ve always found it hard to figure you out,” she admitted. “Not that I spent a whole lot of time trying.”

“Really? I’m so complex that you can’t figure me out? You, who read as many books as I do, can’t sort through who I might be?”

He looked way too pleased by that.

“I said I didn’t try .”

“Yes, but I don’t believe you.”

Damn him. She felt hot and itchy now.

“I used to get very angry at the girls I knew, because they all thought you and your brothers were so . . . dangerous. And handsome.”

She shivered when she said those words, because they felt too close to a truth she was trying not to delve into.

“ Did they?” He leaned forward, clasping his hands and looking at her far too intently.

There was something dangerous about him right now . Not just in the past.

He was angry, but it wasn’t the kind of anger that made her scared he’d hurt her. It was intense. Pitched his voice lower, made his eyes go sharp. She could feel his voice resonate inside her. She could feel the intensity of his gaze.

The feeling was more powerful than being touched all over by Michael, and that realization had her wishing she’d worn a string of pearls for the express purpose of clutching them now.

“Yes,” she said. “They did.” She put the emphasis on did . “But I knew that I didn’t want anything to do with somebody who had broken the law.”

“Then you don’t want anything to do with your own bloodline, now do you?”

She swallowed hard.

“Apparently,” she said.

She felt warm .

“It seems to me,” he said, “that we really do need to work on dispensing with some of the narratives around this place. Because the founding families kind of suck, and they’re resting on legends filled with half-truths to justify their place in town.”

“Well,” she said. “That is true.”

“And, I would argue that it’s pretty obvious your ex-fiancé is one of the worst.”

“I can’t argue with that.” She didn’t even want to.

“And frankly, it makes him an even worse person that after he left you for somebody else, he’s also actively participating in undermining something that’s important to you.”

“Well, he’s aligning himself with the woman that he.... With her.”

“Sure. But don’t you deserve some loyalty for all your years with him? How long were you with him, anyway?”

She did not like this question, because she didn’t like the answer to it. “Six years,” she said. “I can be glad at least that it wasn’t a lifetime.”

“I’m surprised you were with him that long without marrying him. Doesn’t seem like a very good-girl thing to do.”

“This isn’t 1950,” she said. “Or 1850, regardless of how the town might occasionally feel.”

“True, true.”

“Anyway, I only lived with him for a couple of years before we decided to . . . before the engagement.”

She really didn’t want to talk to him about this. It felt sticky. Oddly intimate in some way, but maybe that was weird of her.

“Wow. You were even living with him.”

“Yes. Though thankfully I had actually moved out to start getting our house ready, and I really should’ve seen that as a red flag. That he didn’t want to come with me immediately, but it made sense, because our lease wasn’t up, and I was busy with the renovations. It turned out, he just wanted to stay in his own place because it gave him more opportunity to cheat.”

“What ended up happening to the house?”

“Well, it was my dad’s house. So, it’s mine now. I’m very thankful for that. Thankful that I hadn’t gone to the trouble of adding Michael to the deed. I was going to, after we got married.”

That Michael had almost walked away with part of her inheritance made her heart beat faster. Not in a good way.

“Outlaws are everywhere,” Austin said.

“Yeah. No kidding.”

“So, about the Gold Rush Days.”

“Well, I think we have to start planning it without any reenactments. You know, of the shoot-out. Because until we know all the details. . . .”

“Yeah. Actually, I don’t want to have one no matter what we learn.”

“I understand,” she confirmed. “But we might.”

She pushed the sheriff star forward on the table. “I have costumes.”

“Costumes.” He pressed down on the edge of the star and picked it up, turning it over and examining it. “Well, I’ll be.”

“I definitely want to do some living history. Covered wagon rides. That would be amazing.”

“Well,” Austin said slowly, still hanging on to the star. “As it happens, we have a wagon.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. I mean, we have the base of a wagon. It doesn’t have the big covered part on it anymore, but that would be easy enough to fix.”

“You’re not telling me that it’s an original Conestoga wagon.”

“It actually is. It’s been on the property for a long time, in one of the barns. Carson and I got a hankering to do some restoration on it maybe ten years back. He’d be the last one to tell you this, but Carson is actually a brilliant woodworker. He can make any sort of furniture, or restore old things. He’s done a lot of repairs on family heirlooms for people willing to trust a Wilder. But the wagon was maybe the start of that. We worked on it when he was on leave, and it’s in pretty good shape now.”

“I would love it if you would drive a covered wagon for the kids.”

He flipped the star from between his thumb and forefinger, to rest between his forefinger and middle finger, then stopped. “I don’t know about being the driver, but I’ll consider it. My sister would probably love it.”

“Does she know how to drive a horse team?”

He flipped the star back. “Cassidy knows how to do just about everything. If you wanted somebody to be your Annie Oakley, she would be your girl.”

“Well, Annie Oakley isn’t really connected to the history of Rustler Mountain.”

“I know,” he said dryly as he put the star back down on the table.

Her face got hot, and she was very afraid that she was blushing.

She put her hand out to grab the sheriff’s star, but he reached out at the same time and took hold of it, and as he did, his fingertips brushed hers.

It was like being struck with a lit match.

Her whole body lit up.

And suddenly she understood something. As her stomach leapt into her throat and her heart sped up, as she felt an ache between her thighs that began to expand. She began to understand that scene she’d read in the romance novel all those years ago that she’d dismissed as unrealistic.

Michael wasn’t a romance hero....

She swallowed hard. Austin Wilder wasn’t one either—how could he be?

You’re my hero.

She’d said those words to him, but she hadn’t meant them like that.

She hadn’t.

She could actually feel sweat beading on her forehead, and she was afraid he’d be able to see it. Was afraid she was telegraphing her feelings all over her face. That he could read her right now the way he could one of his books. She wanted him.

She really did want him, right then.

Maybe what Heather had suggested wasn’t so out of the question, maybe she could be an outlaw.

Maybe she didn’t have to be so good.

What had being a good girl gotten her anyway?

Six years wasted on a man who hadn’t really loved her. Who she hadn’t really loved.

What was love anyway?

She’d been certain she knew. She’d been certain she wanted it, yet now she really had no idea. What had she actually been after? Security, knowing she’d done something to continue her family legacy. The Halls had always been well-respected, but Austin was right. They actually did suck, and there was extensive documentation of their misdeeds, but they had started the first bank and so there was an air of respectability about them that they weren’t entitled to.

But all these stories were so entrenched in town lore, even when they were challenged, it didn’t seem to change much.

Michael felt entitled to his good name in the same way Millie felt pressured by hers and Austin felt stained by his bad one.

Finding common ground with Austin Wilder had not been her goal. But she had found it. Here in the disruption of her many losses. It had taken an earthquake. It had taken cracking the ground she was standing on, but here she was.

She looked up at him, and their eyes clashed, and she felt something tremble inside her. Another earthquake. Another seismic shift.

Did she only think that something was changing because she found him attractive?

Just letting herself think that she found him attractive, rather than merely acknowledging his general handsomeness, was like ringing a gong inside her soul.

She breathed out, shaky, unsteady.

“I think it’s a great idea. The covered wagon, I mean. I would love to . . . to come up and see it.”

“Sure. You’re free to come up anytime. We’re there most of the time. And if I’m not home, Cassidy could show you around.”

The idea that it didn’t matter to him whether or not he was there when she came was a jolting one. An injection of reality. Of course he didn’t care.

She shouldn’t either. He had mentioned that Cassidy might want to participate in the Gold Rush Days, so honestly, she should try to connect with Cassidy. It would be better than filtering everything through Austin, that was for sure.

“I want to put together a children’s program,” she said. “So that I can contact the elementary schools and try to arrange field trips.”

“Sounds good,” he said.

She looked at him. “Do you really think so?”

“It’s a polite thing to say.”

“I think it really will be good,” she said.

She suddenly felt desperate to get him to understand. Because she felt buoyed by their common experience, and she wanted to extend it.

“Especially if we get all this new information about what actually happened.”

“Yeah, you really think that people are going to be interested in that?”

“Yes. I do.”

“Well, I hope so, considering I’m writing a book on it.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know why it surprises me that you’re writing. Of course you are. You love books.”

“Because even you can’t quite believe that I’m not a big idiot?”

His question scraped against her skin, because she had just been castigating herself for that very thing.

“No. I don’t think you’re an idiot. I never have. But I admit that I find you confusing.”

“So you said. And also that you didn’t care to try to figure me out.”

Her ears went hot. “It wasn’t that I . . . I didn’t think I should try to figure you out.”

“But rather that you shouldn’t think about me at all?” He lifted a brow, his expression provocative now. But that didn’t seem possible. That he’d bother to provoke her. “Even thinking about me was forbidden, wasn’t it?”

His voice was pitched low and her heart started to beat faster.

“I . . . I . . . well, you were bad. I mean . . . you did bad things. You did all that stuff when you were younger. The things that you’re accused of.” She sounded unconvincing and ridiculous.

“I was angry. If you were a kid just trying to make your way around this town and you were told you weren’t welcome by half the adults, wouldn’t you be angry?”

Yes. She would’ve been.

She had never really been angry a day in her life, that was the thing. She had never pushed back or rebelled against her role in Rustler Mountain. She had just tried to live up to it. No matter how difficult it seemed. It had felt like an important thing to do, because her family was so revered. And now . . . now she felt a slight simmering of anger. Or something adjacent to it. Because all her life she hadn’t felt quite good enough.

She had never really fit the image of a Talbot.

And now she wondered if that image was a lie. If the beautiful portrait that had been painted of her family was a counterfeit.

She had seen a documentary once about art thieves who painted over famous portraits to conceal their worth. She wondered if the real piece was buried beneath a reproduction. She wondered if she had been living a lie, and she felt an echo of the same anger that must’ve dogged Austin since birth.

“I don’t blame you for being angry,” she said. “I guess you aren’t actually confusing. I think I just didn’t know enough. About life. Because I was so insulated. It’s just that sometimes insulation can suffocate you.”

“Suffocate you right into a relationship with an asshole,” he said.

She bit the inside of her cheek. To keep from laughing, actually, because Michael really was an asshole. “I can’t argue with that.”

“The older I get,” he said, “and getting older is kind of a surprise to me considering my family history, the more I realize everyone has a story. Reading was sort of the foundation of that realization, I guess. I always liked redemption stories. Where somebody starts out low and ends up somewhere good. It was what I could relate to. But everybody has a story, no matter how bad they are, even Michael. I assume he’s the product of a lifetime of indulgence. Of getting his way. Of never thinking that perhaps he doesn’t get to treat people however he wants.”

“Don’t make him a sympathetic character,” Millie said.

“Oh, I don’t find him sympathetic. It’s just that when you understand everyone has an origin story, they’re less confusing.”

“What do you think mine is?”

She realized her mistake as soon as the words exited her mouth. But it was too late.

His blue eyes raked her up and down, and she felt it like a physical touch. As if he had popped a button on her blouse, and then another. As if he had pushed the fabric away and looked through her skin. Not at it, but straight into her.

Her soft, vulnerable heart. Her frailties. Her imperfections.

The deep fear that she was nothing.

Not good, not bad. Just nothing. A bland, beige smudge on her family tree. A branch that would end right where it stopped growing.

He stood up and she felt that something was slipping through her grasp. That he was drawing a line under this moment, and she didn’t want him to.

She wanted to keep talking to him.

She wanted him to stay.

In the library, the only place where a Talbot had ever been able to meet a Wilder without handcuffs or bloodshed.

She stood, feeling dizzy, and wasn’t quite sure why.

He picked up the sheriff’s star again and began to walk toward her.

“You’ve been trying too hard from day one,” he said. “All that effort, it’s invisible to you because it’s all you know. I can see it because I never tried at all.”

He took a step closer to her and then another, and she thought her heart might beat straight through her chest.

He opened up the pin on the back of the star, his big hands sure and quick. Then he reached out and plucked at the fabric of her dress, not touching anything but the garment. But he was close, so close. She could hear him breathing, she could smell his skin. The soap he used, the hay from his horses.

Then he pushed the pin straight through the fabric and fastened it, his knuckle brushing against her and releasing something in her knees that made them buckle, just enough to make her wobble but not fall.

And there that star sat, pinned to her chest.

She looked up at him, and she felt the color flood her cheeks like a tide as her heart throbbed painfully and her palms went sweaty.

She saw something then, in those electric-blue eyes, that she’d never seen before. It sent her mind careening down paths she’d never explored but suddenly....

What if he moved closer?

What if he touched her?

What if?

He lowered his head and her breath caught.

“Keep trying, Sheriff,” he said, his voice a husky whisper. “You’ll be all right.”

Then he straightened and moved away from her, and it was as if a bubble had been popped. Whatever had been there a moment before was just gone, evaporated into the air.

“Come up tomorrow and check out that wagon,” he said.

“S-sure.” Her mouth wasn’t working. Her brain wasn’t working.

“See you later.”

“Yeah.” She nodded and followed him to the door, closing it behind him and relocking it. Then she pressed her hand over the star, over her heart, and waited for it to calm down.