“And I’m gonna be well fixed, you know I am. I’ll co-own the train station with Raymond Parker, thanks to the land your papa left me. Trinidad will boom before long, and I’m the county sheriff and the acting marshal now. How about that?”
She curled her fingers in the hair on his chest. “I guess I can put up with having a rich husband.”
“Good. Because as tax collector, I get a nice cut, plus my share of rewards for outlaws too dumb to know what it means to face Caleb York down. They’re providing use of a house, you know.”
She smiled a little, amused by how talkative the normally taciturn Caleb York could be in her bedroom. “You don’t need a house,” she told him. “I have a house.”
“Well, we can have two houses, or maybe we’ll sell yours and—”
The smile went away. “If I sell out to that witch, why would I have my house?”
He shrugged. “She said you could keep it. Could keep enough land to farm a little, as well. She just wants the range, and what’s left of your cattle.”
“Oh, is that all she wants?”
“I can only tell you what she told me. But if you have this place, it’s not so far out of town that I couldn’t put down stakes here. Ride back and forth.”
Her brow furrowed. “Caleb . . . if . . . when . . . we marry . . . you intend to stay a lawman?”
“I do. Money will roll in from the train station and I’ll invest in businesses in town. A man can’t be a gunfighter forever.”
“But as long as you wear a badge . . . two badges . . . young fools like William Hammond will face you down. And some day one will be quicker than you or a better shot or just . . . luckier than you.”
His smile said he didn’t take the threat of that seriously. “Sweetheart, the West is changing. Blink and a new century will be at our feet.”
She was shaking her head. “Don’t you see, Caleb? You can live here with me. Into the next century. We can run this ranch as a business. A smaller herd, with fenced-in grazing . . . some farming. No cowboying for you. No fixing fences or riding herd or roping runaways.”
“That’s not the future your father imagined for the Bar-O.”
“No, but he never suffered a winter the likes of what we did. And what I’m talking about is real. It’s practical. And it’s not dangerous. No drunken boys with six-shooters to deal with, or brothers of men who you justly sent to hell. Just me and you and . . . a family.”
He didn’t respond at once. He was digesting it.
“I do want a family with you,” he said finally. “But I’m not a rancher. I’m not a farmer.” His gaze intensified. “Do you know where I grew up?”
He had never told her.
“No,” she said.
“Ohio. My father was a farmer. He struggled, he near broke his back toiling, and he never got anywhere. I worked in his fields and I hated it. I hated it. Long, hard, punishing days for nothing. When I had the chance to enlist, just a boy really, I joined the Union Army and I killed Confederates. Then they sent me west and I killed the Red Indian in my blue uniform. I’m not sure anybody I killed deserved it, grayback or redskin, but I learned how, all right. To kill. To use guns.”
“Caleb . . .”
He was out of the bed and getting into his clothes, now.
“I got a job with Wells Fargo and I fell into man hunting. I was still a killer, but I became a detective, too, which is a better trade than soldier. I didn’t mind tracking down Southern boys when they’d robbed or killed, or Indians when they’d done bad things also. Didn’t mind taking their lives if they tried to take mine. It made what I did not so . . . horrible.”
He was pulling on his boots. She had never heard him say so much all at once.
“So that’s who I am, darling girl. I am a man who would rather kill than farm. Who would much rather eat beef than raise it.”
She was still naked and he was fully dressed when he leaned in and said, not without humor, “This is what we call in my trade a Mexican standoff.”
Then he was gone.
CHAPTER FOUR
Shortly after Caleb York left the library at the Circle G, Victoria Hammond—her features set in a scowl that challenged their loveliness—called for Byers.
“Yes, ma’am?” he said from the doorway. The stout little bookkeeper was trained to know that half of the time his mistress wanted an errand and the other half desired his presence at her desk for business. Only in the latter case would he enter the chamber.
This was an errand.
She asked, “Is Mr. Colman with the contingent at the creek?”
“Yes, Mrs. Hammond. He and half a dozen armed men are positioned there. They’ve set up camp.”
That was less than a mile away.
“Send for him,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Her black lace–gloved hands were spread apart, clenched very tight, as if she were a child about to beat her fists on the desktop in a tantrum. But tantrums were not something Victoria Hammond allowed herself. Still, it had taken all of her self-control to withhold the depth of her feelings, to quell the extent of her hatred, while the Trinidad sheriff who had slaughtered her boy was in her presence.
William had been flawed, as were all human beings. But he was her son. The sheriff should have known that the progeny of Victoria Hammond, who was already an important landowner in his county, should have been handled with care. With courtesy. With forbearance. For William to lose his life over some slatternly Mexican wench was a travesty of justice.
Victoria Hammond’s definition of justice, as with so many in the Southwest after
