McKettrick's Choice - Linda Lael Miller [74]
Rafe hesitated, then surrendered the baby. He stood, stretched and reached for Holt’s shovel. Holt’s fingers locked around the handle, but then he let go.
He approached Lorelei, holding his hat in both hands.
“It’s a far cry from the life you’re used to, isn’t it?” he asked. There was no disdain in his tone or manner; he was simply pointing out a lamentable fact.
“Yes,” she said bleakly, thinking of the tea parties she’d attended in San Antonio prior to her ignoble expulsion from the Ladies’ Benevolence Society, of the smooth, crisp sheets on her bed in the judge’s house. She’d spent the majority of her days reading or sewing or playing the spinet. The hardest decision she’d been called upon to make was whether to wear a bonnet when she went out to the shops, or what Angelina ought to fix for supper. “There—there was a massacre?”
Holt might have made something of the fact that the answer to her question was patently obvious, but he didn’t. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand and thrust out a sigh.
“Four people are dead,” he told her, straight out. “A woman and two little girls in the cabin, and that’s the man of the family under that blanket.”
Lorelei closed her eyes. The heat of that place was intense, as though a crack had opened in the earth and hell itself had broken through. The smells were enough to turn her stomach, and the sounds of those shovels, striking stone…
She shuddered, and felt Holt’s hands close on her shoulders. When she opened her eyes, his face was inches from her own. His skin was brown from years in the sun, she noticed, and his features had hardened in the brief time since she’d seen him leave camp that morning.
“We’ll be in Laredo in a day or so,” he told her.
“Maybe you’ve seen enough now to convince you that life in San Antonio wasn’t so bad, even with your father calling all the shots.”
She blinked. “I can’t go back,” she said.
“I know you had words with him,” Holt reasoned, “but he’s your father. He’ll take you in.”
“I don’t want to be ‘taken in’!” Lorelei burst out in a fierce whisper. “I was safe in that house—I had everything I needed and most of what I wanted. But I wasn’t alive! I was just marking time, waiting for things to change. Waiting for something—anything—to happen. I won’t go back to that!”
A muscle bunched in Holt’s jaw, and his grip on her shoulders tightened.
“Maybe if you looked under that blanket over there, you’d change your mind,” he growled. “This isn’t a game, Miss Fellows. This is what it’s really like out here!”
Lorelei pulled away and half-stumbled toward the body on the ground. “Oh, God,” she whispered.
“Come away,” Holt said, in a tone that might have been gentle if it hadn’t been for the fierce urgency underlying the words.
She nodded miserably.
“What—what can I do to help?”
“Stay out—” Stay out of the way, he’d been about to say. But he stopped himself. “See if Melina needs help with the baby,” he said. “And keep Tillie occupied. She’ll get underfoot if you don’t.”
Lorelei bit her lower lip. “It doesn’t seem like much,” she said, after a quick nod.
“It’s what there is,” he replied, and turned away from her, striding back toward the trees, where the graves were being dug.
For a long moment, she stood staring down at that blanket-covered body. Then, after straightening her shoulders, Lorelei headed for the wagon.
The tailgate was lowered, and Melina sat in the wagon bed, legs dangling, attempting to interest the baby in a twisted bit of cloth, soaked in sugar water. Tillie hovered, and Lorelei could see restraint quivering in every line of her lithe body—she wanted to reach out and take the child into her own arms.
“He needs milk,” Lorelei said.
“You see a cow around here anyplace?” Melina countered, though not unkindly.
If there had been a cow, the Indians had taken it, along with whatever other livestock the homesteaders had possessed. There wasn’t even a chicken in sight.