McKettrick's Choice - Linda Lael Miller [64]
Lorelei shifted her attention to Melina and Tillie, who were chatting as they gathered bits of wood and dried cow dung for the supper fire. She joined them, for she would not have it said that she expected special treatment. She might be a greenhorn, but she meant to keep going until she collapsed, if that was what she had to do.
Using rope, which he wrapped around tree trunks at appropriate junctures, one of the cowboys constructed a makeshift corral for the horses and mules. Two other men took buckets from the back of the wagon and filled them at the spring so the animals could drink, and when that was done, all of them except Rafe, Mr. Cavanagh, the Captain and Holt went scrambling for the stream, hooting with exuberant laughter and pulling off their boots as they went.
Lorelei decided to explore the mission, partly because she knew it would be cool inside the adobe structure, and partly because she wanted to avoid Holt McKettrick for as long as possible.
The moment she stepped over the threshold, a sweet sense of reverence washed over her. The floor was stone, worn smooth by time and the passage of sandaled feet. The pale outline of a large cross marked one wall. The altar, if there had ever been one, was long gone, but one pew remained.
Lorelei took off her borrowed hat and drank in the silence. The sounds of men and horses were distant, and the light pouring in through the crude stained-glass windows was soft.
She sat down in the pew, lowered her head and wept.
It wasn’t just that every muscle in her body thrummed with pain. It wasn’t even that she’d set out on a journey and couldn’t let herself turn back, even though she didn’t know the first thing about running a ranch, with or without cattle.
It was poor Raul, badly injured and in pain, perhaps even crippled.
It was the fact that her mother had died in an asylum.
It was William, taking a fatal fall before he’d lived out his childhood.
It was the sound of that rifle shot, still echoing in her mind all these years later, and knowing the pony had paid a terrible price for stumbling with all of Judge Alexander Fellows’s hopes riding on his back.
“Lorelei?”
She stiffened. Of all the people who might have wandered into that dusty, forgotten little sanctuary and caught her with her face in her hands and her shoulders trembling, why did it have to be Holt McKettrick?
“Go away,” she said, and drew in a deep, shuddering breath, desperate to compose herself.
She might have known he’d do precisely the opposite of what she’d asked. He swung one leg over the pew bench and sat astraddle it, facing her, turning his hat in his hands.
“I was pretty rough on you today,” Holt said quietly. “I’m sorry.”
She knew he didn’t use those words often, both by his behavior and the awkward way he said them, but it was little or no consolation. “You flatter yourself if you think you’ve broken me,” she said.
“Lorelei, I’m not trying to break you.”
She met his gaze, defiant, swiping away the traces of her tears with the back of one hand. “Oh, no? Kindly do not insult my intelligence with lies, Mr. McKettrick. You’d like nothing better than to see me run back to San Antonio, leaving my ranch for you and Mr. Templeton to fight over.”
He lowered his head for a moment, perhaps searching his thoughts, and when he looked at her again, his eyes held an unsettling blend of laughter and chagrin. “If you weren’t crying about a hard day on the trail,” he began, “what was it?”
“It’s personal.”
He pulled a surprisingly clean handkerchief from his shirt pocket and handed it to her, but not before a thin blue ribbon, the kind a young girl might wear in her hair, wafted to the stone floor.
He bent to retrieve it, smiled as he ran a callused thumb along its length.
In the meantime, Lorelei employed the handkerchief to good effect, first swabbing her wet face, then, as delicately as possible, blowing her nose. The linen cloth was streaked