McKettrick's Choice - Linda Lael Miller [51]
“I didn’t say it had to be him,” Melina pointed out, with a touch of satisfaction.
Lorelei reached for Angelina’s discarded apron and used it for a pot holder. Poured hot water over the fragrant tea leaves. “No,” she said weakly. “You didn’t.”
“Let’s sit in the doorway to have our tea,” Melina suggested, carefully taking the kettle of boiling water from Lorelei’s unsteady hands and setting it on the back of the stove. “Maybe there will be a breeze coming up off the creek.”
There was no breeze. The air was dense, like a blanket of steam. Still, the two women sat side by side on the step, holding their sensible crockery mugs gingerly and waiting for their tea to cool.
“Tell me about yourself, Melina,” Lorelei said presently. She truly wanted to listen, although they both knew the change of the subject had another purpose: Lorelei wished to distance herself from talk of Holt McKettrick, the mule ride and the kiss.
Melina sighed, staring sadly at the sparkling water as it tumbled past. “There isn’t much to say,” she said, in her own good time. “My father and mother died of yellow fever when I was ten, and I lived at a mission outside of Laredo until I was old enough to be on my own. I got a job on one of the ranches, cooking and doing wash. Then…” She paused, looked down at her rounded stomach. “Then I met Gabe Navarro.”
Lorelei rested her teacup on one knee and laid her free hand to her heart. “The man my—the man they’re going to hang…?”
“Yes,” Melina said. “The man your father sentenced to hang.”
So, Holt had told her about that. Lorelei’s throat ached. She remembered watching Navarro in the courtroom, during the trial. He’d been stoic the whole time, and when he testified on his own behalf, he didn’t waste a single word. When the judge pronounced sentence, he hadn’t looked surprised, nor had he flinched.
“Do you think he’s…?”
“Innocent?” Melina finished for her. “Yes.”
“What will you do if—if he hangs?”
“Same thing I would do if he didn’t,” Melina answered quietly, after considering the question at length. “Cry myself to sleep a lot of nights and keep working, so my baby and I won’t go hungry.”
“And if he’s set free?” That, Lorelei knew, would be a miracle. Men her father sentenced to death were never set free. They went to the gallows, were hanged and then buried.
Melina sighed. “I would still cry myself to sleep and work,” she said.
“You wouldn’t marry Mr. Navarro?”
“No,” Melina said, and shook her head slightly for emphasis.
“Do you love him?” It was a bold question, but Lorelei had to ask it.
“More than my life,” Melina confided. “But Gabe is— Well, he’s one to roam. Not from woman to woman—he loves me as much as I love him. But from place to place. Me, I just want to settle down in one spot, raise my baby and not be beholden to anyone.”
An unspeakable sadness swept over Lorelei. “You can stay here as long as you like,” she said, though it would be crowded quarters if Angelina and Raul came back.
If.
For the first time since Mr. Rafe McKettrick had driven Angelina and Raul away in that wagon, Lorelei let herself face the possibility that they might not return. Raul couldn’t convalesce on a pallet on the floor of a ranch house, especially one as rustic as hers, and Angelina, devoted to Lorelei as she was, would naturally put her husband’s welfare first.
“I can teach you to ride that mule,” Melina said, with some pride.
Lorelei looked at her new friend in horror. “Of course you can’t!” she protested. “Look at you! You’re—well, expecting.”
Melina smiled, blew on her tea, and took a sip. “I didn’t say I would ride the brute myself. I said I would teach you to ride him.”
“I’m not certain I have the nerve to try again,” Lorelei confessed. Holt McKettrick’s interference notwithstanding, she’d been terrified when that mule started to buck.
“Sure you do,” Melina said confidently. “What’s his name?”
“Seesaw,” Lorelei answered, remembering the way that freight man had smirked when she’d handed over the thirty-five precious dollars.
Melina laughed. “That suits him, all right,” she said, and sought the