Chapter Thirty-Five
Aidan didn’t know a word for how he felt, and he suspected Alexandra would.
The lane up to the house had never seemed so long, nor his feet so heavy.
He had walked the last half mile to spare his horse, who was as weary as he was, and they plodded along together with their heads down.
It wasn’t only the physical fatigue. Aidan’s very soul felt tired.
He went straight to the big house, skipping the barn.
He hadn’t intended to be gone so long; at two days, it was the longest he’d been away from all of them at once, and the thing that had surprised him out on the road was that he hadn’t once been afraid for them.
He wasn’t ready to look too closely at what that meant.
Aidan hitched Cyprus haphazardly to the porch railing.
He loosened the girth so that the stallion might at least be comfortable before he tended to him properly.
He paused on the porch, one foot up on the step, and leaned on his leg for a moment.
The house was quiet, strangely so, but there was no denying the smell of baking that wafted out of the windows.
He inhaled deeply, and his dry, dusty face broke into a smile. Reinvigorated by the promise of a proper meal, he crossed the porch and opened the front door… and stepped right into the muzzle of a rifle. Automatically, his hands flew up.
“Easy, there,” he said. “I’ll only rob you for your pie, I promise.”
“Aidan! It’s you!” Alexandra breathed, her eyes wide behind the rifle. Her face was lined with fatigue, dark circles under her eyes. The barrel came down and kept going, the rifle sliding out of her fingers, and he caught it before it hit the floorboards. “You’re back,” she said quietly.
“Yes, I do believe that, by definition, I’m back,” Aidan responded with a teasing smile, fully prepared for her to take him to task over the state of his boots, or his disheveled hair, or even his limp attempt at humor.
What he was most certainly and positively not prepared for was for her to burst into tears.
Aidan stared at her, a new kind of helplessness coursing through him.
Tears ran down her face, and her hands seemed to be at loose ends, lifting vaguely to chest height and falling again.
In all their weeks together, no matter what he’d thrown at her, he’d never seen her break like this.
It was like a flash flood in spring, when the washes and gullies would suddenly fill up with raging water.
He hadn’t a clue what to say to her. Instinctively, he reached out, pulling her to him by her shoulders. She went willingly, colliding with his chest and burying her face against him, seeming not to mind the sweat and smell of horse that clung to him. Her shoulders shook as she sobbed.
“You all right?” he asked at last.
He could feel her pull in a shaky breath. “I’m—just—so glad you’re home,” she managed.
“Well, that’s… that’s mighty fine,” Aidan replied.
They stood together like that for a moment longer. At length, Alexandra pulled back from him, swiping at her face. She glanced at him, then quickly away.
“You’re so dusty,” she said in a strangled voice, “I think I’ve made mud on my face.”
Aidan huffed out a surprised laugh, relieved. He didn’t know what had happened to make her react in such a way, but he would infinitely rather have her snark than her tears.
“Ugh,” she said, pulling an embroidered handkerchief from her pocket and dabbing at her eyes. “I can’t let the children see me like this.”
“Come sit on the porch with me for a minute,” Aidan suggested. Shifting the rifle around, he opened the door wider and gestured for her to go out.
Alexandra nodded and went out onto the porch. She leaned on the railing with both hands, her head dropping. Aidan stood next to her, leaning his hip against it so that he was facing her. He set the rifle against a beam supporting the awning.
“Well?” she said, without lifting her head. “Did you find anyone?”
Aidan looked out at the yard a good while before he answered.
“Fella at the feed store shook my hand and said he’d think on it.
Next one shut the door in my face without a word, and I’d call him the more honest of the two.
” He rubbed at the back of his neck. “Eleven doors, Alexandra. Every man in that town is paying Black or watching his neighbor pay him, and not one of them will say so anywhere it could be written down.”
Alexandra’s face didn’t change much. Something behind it went down, though, like a lamp turned low.
“My aunt’s taken poorly again,” Alexandra said. “It’s not that I can’t handle everything on my own; I just… I’ve never felt so helpless before.”
“How bad?”
“She hasn’t turned yet. That’s the most I can tell you.”
Aidan started to say something comforting, a gentle argument against her fears. She looked up sharply at him, her green eyes fiery.
“He was here,” she said in a tone that was quiet and hard.
“Black?” Aidan asked. When Alexandra nodded, he demanded, “When?”
“Last night, I think,” she said. “I can’t be sure.
The children said they saw a ghost, and—that doesn’t matter.
I thought I saw someone out by the chicken coop, then this morning, there were all of these footprints out there…
” She pulled her shawl tighter. “I’ve kept the children in the house since sunup. Danny hasn’t left the front window.”
“That could’ve been you and the children,” Aidan argued.
“No,” Alexandra said, standing up to face him more fully. “It really couldn’t have. The boot prints were all wrong.”
Aidan gazed at her for a long moment. The size of what she was telling him landed on him all at once.
The skin on the back of his neck prickled.
“Tarnation,” he muttered. “I was worried about this. I thought we might have longer—” He stopped when he saw Alexandra’s face.
“He has to know I’ve been asking about him in town, and Antony’s out talking to the miners. ”
“You think he’ll retaliate, then?” she asked grimly.
“I think it’s just a matter of when,” he answered.
Alexandra nodded, and folded her arms over herself.
She looked out to the road that led up to the ranch, her face awash in the last golden rays of sun.
For all of her tiredness, there was still an air of quiet determination about her.
He couldn’t begin to imagine what it was like for her to come so far from everything she’d known, and then to be thrust into the middle of a mess that was none of her making.
“I’m sorry,” he said abruptly, making her turn back to him.
“For?”
“Just… the way things are,” he said awkwardly, fidgeting with his hands as he looked down at them. He glanced back up at her; she was watching him curiously. One side of his mouth pulled up into a grin. “And for that,” he said, nodding toward her face.
“What?” Her brow furrowed.
“You’ve got a smudge of dirt on you,” he explained, pointing vaguely toward her chin.
Scowling, she swiped at her face, and Aidan thought of a cat that had something in its whiskers, which made his grin widen.
“Here,” he said. Without thinking, he reached out and wiped at it for her, his thumb just brushing her bottom lip. She froze.
Aidan froze too, hesitant to move further. Her expression changed, warming, and color came into her cheeks, replacing the pale tiredness. His grip on her chin shifted, gently encouraging her to tip her face up.
He wasn’t sure who closed the gap between them first—all that he knew was that suddenly there was scarcely a breath left.
“I didn’t know how much I missed you,” he admitted softly.
Her eyes lifted at the corners. “I knew how much I missed you,” she replied.
Aidan exhaled a laugh and bent his head toward hers. Her eyes fluttered closed, her fingers twined in his, and he was so close that he could feel her breathing when something out of the corner of his eye caught his attention.
He turned toward the road. A cloud was forming, dust kicked up by hooves moving quickly. Aidan tensed.
“Someone’s coming,” he said, releasing Alexandra. He picked up the rifle and worked the lever to be sure.
Alexandra leaned on the porch railing again, squinting into the fading light. “Maybe it’s Antony coming back,” she suggested. “Maybe he got help.”
“It’s not Antony,” Aidan replied tersely. At the head of the column, he could see a man in all black—it was Kevin, coming on toward the ranch like a thunderhead.