Harlot (Bartered Hearts 2)

Their laughter had tumbled over Caleb’s head like rocks. He hadn’t realized he’d reached for his gun until the barkeep put his hand on the rifle that hung below a mirror. “Mind moving your hand, son?” he’d suggested calmly.

Caleb had done so. He’d also left, barely registering the outraged talk behind him. “What?” someone had snapped. “How are we supposed to know what kind of whore he can afford?”

Outside, the bright sun had added to the rumble in his ears somehow, as if the light had set off an ore grinder to work the thoughts in his head.

The drunks had it all mixed up. Jessica and her father must have moved out of their house in town before he’d died. Some unlucky family had moved in and that daughter had sold herself for money. It wasn’t Jessica.

He’d been walking blindly back to his mother’s house when a hand had clutched his elbow. In that moment, he’d known without a doubt that it would be Jessica when he spun around. Jessica laughing up at him, her eyes sparkling with intelligence and warmth as she explained that she was living with some spinster aunt now, and that—

His mother had beamed up at him. “You’re really home! I thought you wouldn’t be here for weeks yet, but here you are, and oh my heavens, look how big you are, Caleb.”

His arms had hung loosely as she’d hugged him. “Mother,” he’d finally managed. “Where’s Jessica?”

It was only then that he’d believed it. His mother had gone stiff, her throat closing around some strained sound of horror.

She’d stepped away, her face bone-white. “Jessica?” she’d whispered, as if she wasn’t sure whom he meant.

But then she’d smiled, a sick curve of her lips that trembled before it was even in place. “Her father died, my darling. She had to leave town. You’d been gone so long, anyway. I daresay you hardly remember her at all.”

“Where is she?” he’d pressed.

She’d pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed it to her forehead. Despite the heat of the day, she was still pale as death. “I’m sure I can’t say. Once she’s settled somewhere, perhaps she’ll be in touch. Now let’s get you home so I can have Sally start something special for dinner. I can’t believe you’re here.”

He’d left his mother still talking on the street, and he’d walked straight to the public stable where he’d boarded his horse. Then he’d found out the truth for himself.

Caleb set his fork down hard and swallowed to keep his breakfast from coming up.

“I suppose,” Theodore started again, not looking up over the newspaper this time, “that I could find you a place at the bank if you mean to stay. Collections, maybe. Although—” his eyes rose, skimming coolly over Caleb “—you look better suited to California now.”

“I am,” Caleb muttered.

“There’s work in the silver mines here in Colorado if there was trouble in California.”

“I’m not a miner, and there was no trouble.”

“No?” He snapped the paper. “You certainly look as though the wind has fallen from your sails.”

“I’m fine.”

“All right. It’s just that you’d planned not to return until next spring and you changed your mind so suddenly. I assumed there was a problem of some kind.”

“There was not.” Not in California. The problem was all here.

“Well, I’ve promised your mother you may stay as long as you like. She’s very pleased to have you, which means that I am pleased to have you, of course. But you’re as much a man as I am now. Idle hands and all that.”

Caleb didn’t say what he meant to say, which was that he’d been working hard since he was twelve years old and he’d been more of a man than Theodore since then. But he kept his mouth shut.

Theodore was nothing like Caleb’s father. In fact, it was strange to picture his elegant, smooth-skinned mother as she must have been once: bold enough to have married a steely man like John Hightower. But she’d been raised on a farm herself. Lucky for her, her mother had been a schoolteacher, so she could play the part of educated banker’s wife now. Women were changeable like that, apparently.

Caleb pushed his chair back. “I’ll only stay for a few days.”

Theodore folded his paper and frowned at Caleb. “Yes. Well. Your mother will be disappointed. But every man must make his own way. When things don’t turn out as planned, a new plan must be formulated.” Theodore cleared his throat, but if he was thinking of the new circumstances of Miss Jessica Willoughby, he looked only mildly uncomfortable with the idea.

It was Caleb’s fault, really. He was a quiet man, as his father had been. He’d never declared his starry-eyed love and devotion to Jessica, though inside he’d been as fervent as any poet. If his mother and stepfather thought Jessica’s fall into sin was a disappointment Caleb would soon get over, he couldn’t blame them.

And it was easier this way. If they knew about the awful, gnawing agony in his chest, he’d have to add humiliation to the pile of hurt. He’d never asked her to marry him. No one knew they’d been anything more than childhood sweethearts. No one but Jessica and Caleb.

She’d been his everything. She’d made him more than a rough hired hand caught awkwardly between ranch life and the china dishes in his mother’s new dining room. Jessica had transformed him into a boy who loved the strange, intoxicating words of Shakespeare. An adolescent who knew the names of English flowers because Jessica had given him a picture book about them. A man who’d known who he loved most in this world and just how hard he’d work to be worthy of her.