Chapter Twenty-Six
The mare, a small bay creature with an exquisitely shaped head and bright, intelligent eyes, had a strength that belied her stature.
She stared at Aidan, her ears and tail raised in anticipation. She wasn’t like the other mares; he’d caught her wild on the range, and her instincts were difficult to overcome.
“All right, little lady,” he murmured, circling toward her forequarters again. He looped up a lariat loosely. All the while, the mare watched him, assessing.
Aidan flicked the rope at the mare, who snorted and took off at an energetic trot in the other direction. He smiled as she moved off. She had great conformation and an energetic way of moving. If he could gentle her enough, she’d make an excellent addition to his breeding stock.
Aidan flicked the rope in the mare’s direction again, encouraging her to pick up the pace. She broke into an easy, round lope. She was proving a quick learner, but wasn’t willing to give up her freedom easily.
“Come ‘round,” he called to her. He shifted his posture and waved the coiled rope by his side.
The mare put her ears back, but slid to a stop before pivoting nimbly and trotting off in the other direction, snorting, her tail raised.
“Good girl,” he called, coiling the lariat again.
From behind Aidan came loud, slow clapping. Startled, the mare jerked to a stop, head raised and nostrils flared. Aidan, too, whirled around.
A familiar figure stood at the fence rail, dressed in black. He had one boot propped up on the lowest rail, his arms dangling over the top.
“Kevin,” Aidan said flatly, his mood souring immediately.
Kevin responded by flicking the brim of his hat upward. “I must say, you got a horse to turn around—if that isn’t cause for celebration, I don’t know what is.”
Aidan inhaled, his chest filling with anger as much as air.
“No, no,” Kevin continued, putting his hands on the top of the fence and leaning backward. “I’m completely in earnest here. I, for one, would never have imagined that it would take so long to get a horse to move away from you. What a revelation.”
“What do you want, Kevin?” Aidan said, working hard to keep his tone even.
“Well, firstly, I’d just like to thank you for the opportunity to see how it is exactly that your brother was able to lose so much money,” Kevin said, his tone still full of false honey.
“You’ve been out here for an hour, and managed to get that mule to turn about once.
It’s a wonder you all were able to make any money at all. ”
“We take our time with the horses,” Aidan said, biting off each word crisply. “We want quality mounts, not to just turn them out as fast as possible.”
Kevin threw his head back and laughed, loud and mocking.
“Oh please,” he said. “Who do you imagine is out here buying fine horses? Look around you, you idealistic fool,” he said, gesturing to their surroundings.
“You and your brother always were uppity. Just throw a saddle on her, and if she gives you any trouble, tie her legs until she gets the point.”
Aidan narrowed his eyes at Kevin. “I sincerely doubt you came out here to discuss our differences in horse training,” he said.
Kevin slapped the fence rail and pointed at Aidan. “Now see, that’s why you always were my favorite Rawlins,” he said. “You’re the smart one. Your brother, on the other hand…” He trailed off and made a vague gesture with his hand.
Aidan gritted his teeth, his grip tightening until the braided rope creaked.
“No, I’m here on business,” Kevin continued, unbothered by Aidan’s irritation. “Y’see, we’ve still got a black mark in our ledger by the name of Rawlins,” his foot dropping back to the ground. “That needs rectifying.”
“That was my brother’s debt, not mine,” Aidan argued. “You’ve gotten enough money from me as it is.”
“Now see, that’s where you’re wrong,” Kevin said, his voice chummy. “Seeing as your brother isn’t here to settle his estate, that responsibility falls on you. And the sum’s grown some since we last spoke.”
Aidan went still. “Grown?” he repeated.
“Didn’t I tell you?” Kevin said. His eyes, cold and direct in his otherwise friendly face, bored into Aidan’s. “We’re charging interest. Every day you don’t pay, we add to it.”
“Then name it,” Aidan said. “Name the figure, and I’ll tell you to your face that it’s impossible.”
Kevin smiled, slow and satisfied, and Aidan understood that he had asked for precisely the thing Kevin had ridden out here hoping he would ask for.
“All in good time,” Kevin said. “When I say that number out loud, I mean to have an audience for it.”
“Well, good luck with that,” Aidan said, turning his back on Kevin. “I’ve given you enough money to pay the debt off, and you’re not getting any more.”
“Aidan, Aidan,” Kevin tutted behind him. “Your debt is cleared when we say it is.”
“I’ve got no more money to give you, so you’ll just have to keep holding out hope,” Aidan said. He passed a length of rope between his hands.
“That’s a right shame,” Kevin said, his voice full of mock regret. “If I really believed that you didn’t have any money with which to pay off your outstanding debt, why, I’d have to think of some other means of collecting it from you.”
Aidan half-turned and saw Kevin giving an appraising look around the ranch. “Seems to me you’ve got some horseflesh still that we could relieve you of. Or,” he said, a smile curling his mouth up cruelly, “we could relieve you of some other assets.”
Slowly, Aidan turned to face Kevin fully, an icy chill running down his spine.
Kevin smirked when he saw Aidan’s face. “That wife of yours, for instance,” he said, his voice low and leering, “we could just take her in trade. Wipe the proverbial slate clean.”
For a moment the words wouldn’t arrange themselves into sense. When they did, something behind Aidan’s ribs went white and went silent.
He saw her hand flat on Cyprus’s muzzle. He saw her at the stove with Gary hanging off her skirts, pushing her spectacles up with the back of her wrist because her hands were wet. He saw the whole of it gathered up in the hands of the man leaning on his fence rail.
“If you so much as—” Aidan began, his body in motion before he knew what was happening. His long legs ate up the distance between them in a couple of quick steps. He had a finger out, stabbing it in Kevin’s direction.
“Ah, ah, ah,” Kevin said, stepping back from the fence and opening his jacket to reveal the gun at his hip. “Let’s not be hasty.”
Aidan stopped short, glaring at Kevin. His hand dropped automatically to his own hip, his fingers clutching at nothing. Kevin saw the motion, and he sneered at Aidan.
Aidan’s hands were shaking where they hung. Six strides and a fence rail; that was the whole of what stood between them. He was aware of wanting it the way a man is aware of being hungry, and the wanting frightened him considerably more than the gun did.
“What? Did you think you’d shoot me? And just how would that look to the law, hmm?” Kevin said, backing up another step. “You owe me a considerable amount of money. You shoot me to erase that debt, there’s not a judge in the state that wouldn’t hang you.”
Staring at Kevin, Aidan forced himself to take a deep, ragged breath. He tilted his head, squinting. It was almost as if, could he only look close enough, he might see the Kevin Black that he knew once upon a time.
“What?” Kevin demanded.
“Just trying to figure out if you were still in there somewhere,” Aidan said. Kevin narrowed his own eyes. “We were schoolmates,” Aidan continued, softening his tone. “We grew up together—doesn’t that count for anything?”
At that, Kevin let out a bark of laughter. “Oh, you always were a sentimental fool,” he said. “Schoolmates, he says. Don’t kid yourself,” he said, his amused expression dropping in an instant. “You and I were nothing alike.”
“Yes, we were,” Aidan insisted, stepping closer. “Both of our pappies came out here together, same wagon train even. Down in the canyon, before any of this was here. We went to the same lessons in the same saloon. You remember that? It was the only building with a wood floor for thirty miles.”
His blue eyes never left Aidan as he stepped closer again.
“We were all boys together down there, weren’t we? Running the canyon, getting into trouble up at the diggings and catching grasshoppers,” Aidan continued. “We’re not strangers.”
At first, Aidan thought that his speech might’ve worked.
Kevin stared at Aidan. For just an instant, Aidan could almost see the boy that Kevin once was, the same boy that had cried the first time he saw a mouse get caught in a trap at the saloon.
The other boys had teased him mercilessly for it, but all Aidan could see was a scrawny lad without the stomach for violence.
What happened to him? Aidan wondered.
That was when Kevin’s face closed off again, his nostrils growing pinched and his lips pressing together coldly.
“Don’t you believe it,” he said from between his teeth.
“We weren’t the same then, and we aren’t now.
You all had your homes with your mommies and daddies lookin’ after you.
My pa was a drunk, and you all sneered down your noses at us, living in a tent because he drank all the money away. ”
Aidan opened his mouth to protest when Kevin’s gun was in his hand like a flash. Aidan put his hands up at shoulder height, freezing in place.
“Don’t you dare try to deny it,” Kevin said, his voice low.
“Don’t you lie to me. Debt or no debt, I will shoot you dead right now.
You all think you’re so much better than us.
You always have.” His face screwed up, his mouth pulling into something that wasn’t exactly a smile but still showed teeth.
“Now, I’ve got a whole crew. You’re outnumbered and outgunned. ”
Kevin continued to stare at Aidan for a long moment. Aidan didn’t move, just stared back, scarcely daring to breathe. All at once, Kevin blinked at Aidan, then down at the gun in his hand as if he didn’t understand how it’d gotten there. He slid it back into his holster.
When he looked up at Aidan again, his false-friend guise was back in place.
“I’m real glad we could have this little chat,” he said.
“I think it’s really helped to clear the air, to set expectations, if you will.
” Kevin made a great show of adjusting his jacket.
“You hurry along and get our money now,” he said.
Without another word, Kevin turned and walked away, whistling a jaunty tune. He didn’t seem to be in any particular hurry, and Aidan didn’t see a horse hitched anywhere nearby.
Aidan didn’t take his eyes off him until Kevin reached the road.
It was only then that Aidan saw someone waiting on horseback, holding the reins of another horse.
The other rider had positioned himself deliberately out of Aidan’s line of sight.
Kevin swung up into the saddle, and the pair galloped away, disappearing into a cloud of dust.
Aidan let out the breath he’d been holding through his nose. Oddly, he didn’t mind the threat of violence, at least not as it was directed to him. In some ways, he’d prefer a straight-up fight—it was honest.
What he couldn’t get past was that Kevin had known exactly where to put the knife.
Of everything on this ranch he might have reached for—the horses, the buildings, the boys—he’d chosen her.
And he’d chosen her because he had looked at Aidan across a fence rail and read his face like a printed page.
Aidan had given him that. Free of charge, without knowing he was carrying it where a man could see.
He shook his head; it wouldn’t do anyone any good for him to settle this with frontier justice.
He turned to look out over the ranch, the few remaining horses and the mostly empty stables. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d felt so hopeless, so trapped. His gaze fell on the house.
Aidan sighed. How am I meant to provide for an entire family?
Only one solution remained: he’d have to sell Cyprus.
He made himself look at it squarely. Cyprus was the finest animal he had ever put a hand on, and every foal that stallion might have thrown was a year of the ranch’s future that would now simply not occur. That was the arithmetic, and the arithmetic he could stand.
It was the rest of it he couldn’t. Brendan had never once laid eyes on that horse.
Aidan had bought him with his brother in mind, had stood in the corral that first week with his hand on that copper neck, hearing Brendan’s laugh somewhere just behind his shoulder.
Selling him felt like pulling a door shut on a room where somebody was still standing.
And she had named him. She’d gone pink and given him some old Roman business about copper and said she wouldn’t presume, and Aidan had let it stand, and had let it stand every day since.
It was the first thing he had ever given her.
He hadn’t known at the time that he was giving her anything at all.
Now he was going to sell it out from under her.
With a weary step, he exited the corral, leaving the little bay mare. He had no idea how to break the news to Alexandra.