“Tell me.” She kissed his closed eyelids.
He expelled a long breath. “I sure as hell don’t want you to get on that train tomorrow.”
“Oh, Zach,” she said, her voice breaking. “You know that I—”
“Marry me, Dusty.”
Silence. She moved in his arms but didn’t speak.
“Zach. Oh—” Her voice broke, and Zach steeled himself. He knew what she was going to say. He didn’t want to hear it.
“I wish...I wish I could marry you, but...”
He gave a low groan. “No, you don’t wish you could.” He put his hands on her shoulders and drew back slightly. “Let’s not tell each other lies, honey. The life you want is back in Chicago writing for your newspaper.”
“And your life is raising cattle on a ranch in Oregon.”
He let his breath out in a long sigh. “I’ve wanted a ranch, my own ranch, ever since I was eleven years old, Dusty. I’ve always wanted it.”
“You know what I’ve always wanted?”
“A heifer named after you?” he joked.
“You’ll think it’s plain silly, especially since it has nothing to do with writing newspaper articles. But I’ve always wanted a ruffly apron with two big pockets in front. A pink one.”
“Kinda frilly for a newspaper writer, don’t you think?”
“Yes, I guess it is. I don’t know why I want it, really. I live in a boardinghouse and I don’t ever do any cooking. I don’t even visit the kitchen.”
“Sometimes we just want something. The reasons don’t have to make much sense. I guess everyone gets a little crazy now and then.”
She pulled him down next to her, and with a groan he stretched his long frame out beside her. She smoothed her fingers over his bare chest. “This bed is...well, it’s rather small, isn’t it?”
“It’s big enough.” He began touching her, moving his hands slowly over her thighs, pushing up her nightgown. She closed her eyes at the pleasure of it.
“Take this off,” he murmured.
She did, and he kissed her in places that made her moan.
“Zach,” she whispered. He lifted his head. “Remember the night you told me about your father?”
“Yeah. Kind of a funny time to bring it up, though.”
“Will you tell me why you don’t want to see him?”
He released a ragged sigh. “You sure you want to hear this?”
She wrapped her arms around him. “Yes. I want to know.”
He tucked her head under his chin and cleared his throat. “Pa kept a rifle over the door of our cabin. One day when I was about nine, I came home and he was yelling and pointing the gun at my mother. I went for the rifle and...”
He pressed his hand against her head, then tangled his fingers in her hair. “When Pa pulled it away from me it went off. The bullet went through my mother’s heart.”
“Oh, Zach. How awful for you. And that’s why you never went back, because of your father—”
“I don’t trust him not to kill me, too. He knows I’m the only one who witnessed what he did.”
She was silent a long time, moving her hand back and forth over his chest.
“Dusty? Are you sorry I told you?”
“No. Zach, I want to tell you something. I see why you don’t ever want your father to know where you are. I am not going to mention you in any of my newspaper columns. Ever.”
His mouth grazed her breast. “Thanks.” Then his tongue flicked across her nipple and she forgot everything but the hot, silky way he made her feel inside.
Afterward, when they lay in each other’s arms, she drew in a shuddery breath. “Zach?”
“Yeah?”
“What happens tomorrow?”
“You mean before your train pulls out? Well, early in the morning we’ll run the cattle up the chute and load them into rail cars. Should take till around noon.”
“Could I watch?”
He chuckled. “Thought you’d seen enough steers.”
“That’s true, I’ve seen a good number of them.”
“Thought you just loved drivin’ a thousand head of cattle across the desert and through rivers,” he teased, his voice lazy.
“I did not love that part, no. But...”
He lifted his head. “But?”
“But I did love knowing you. Loving you.”
He said nothing for so long that Alex thought he hadn’t heard her. Finally he nestled her head into his shoulder and again laced his fingers in her hair.
“Dusty, honey?”
“Yes?”
“I think you can love a place like you love a person. You understand what I mean?”
“I do understand, yes.”
“Lord knows I’ve never said this to a woman before, but I’m gonna say it now. I will love you until the day I die, Dusty. You know that, don’t you?”
She couldn’t speak over the ache in her throat. She watched his bare chest rise and fall with his breathing and felt as if she were drowning.
“I’ve always wanted to mean something to somebody,” he whispered. “Tomorrow...” He hesitated. “Tomorrow I’m not sure I’ll be able to walk away from you.”
“Yes, you can, Zach. You have to.”
With a choked-off groan he reached for her again.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Before Dusty woke up, Zach pulled on his jeans and a shirt and fished his boots out from under the bed. He locked the door behind him and walked from the hotel down two blocks to the sheriff’s office.
The craggy-faced lawman removed his feet from the littered desk and gestured to an empty chair. “Can I do somethin’ for you, Mr. Strickland?”
Zach blinked. “How’d you know who I am?”
“Because one Herman Cassidy paid me a visit last night and lodged a complaint. Described you pretty good.”
“Complaint about what?”
“Oh, the usual. You know, assault. Said you punched him pretty good. I figure it was mostly humiliation talkin’, but with a guy like Cassidy, you never know. Kinda likes to blow things out of proportion.”
Zach nodded. “Actually, I came on another matter.”
The sheriff grinned. “Figured that, Mr. Strickland. Name’s Davidson, by the way.”
Zach studied the man behind the desk. “Yeah, it was assault, all right. He threatened one of my...trail crew with a shiny new-lookin’ Colt.”
“Maybe stolen,” Davidson muttered.
“Maybe. Cassidy rode with my trail crew out of Oregon till I fired him.”
The sheriff’s dark eyes flicked up in surprise. “What’d you fire him for?”
“He accosted someone riding with my outfit.”
“The woman, right?”
Zach blinked. “How’d you know that?”
Davidson chuckled. “Word is the prettiest girl within five hundred miles is part of your outfit. Newspaper lady, right?”
“Right. Cassidy made a pass at her on the trail, and he showed up at the Rocky Rooster last night and made a nuisance of himself again. I slugged him and my hands threw him out the saloon door.”
“Well, you made a mistake not shooting him,” the sheriff said slowly. “Now he’s hellin’ around town talkin’ big about gettin’ even. And more.”
Zach came to attention. “What ‘more’?”
“A lot of palaver about Miss Murray, about how he’s goin’ back East on the train with her.”
Zach went cold all over. “Over my dead body.”
“Maybe so, Strickland. He’s talkin’ real loud about killin’ you first.”
Zach said nothing for a long minute while the sheriff calmly rolled a cigarette and touched a match to it.
“Listen, Davidson, I came in to see you this morning about something else that might concern Cassidy.”
“Yeah?” The sheriff exhaled a puff of blue-gray smoke.
“Some miles back I had a hundred head of Rocking K cattle rustled one night. Another drover on the trail, Orren Gibson, lost about seventy head of his Double Diamond stock. Some days later, my boys and I caught up with three men who were busy doing some re-branding.”
“And?”
“We got all our stock back.”
“What’d you do with the rustlers?”
“Stripped ’em down to their long johns and ran ’em off.”
“You didn’t string ’em up? Rustling’s a hanging offense in these parts.”
“Nope. Didn’t want to take the time. I figured I’d report them when we got here to Winnemucca. I think Cassidy might have been part of it.”
“Got any proof?”
“Nope. Just a hunch. Thought you’d want to know anyway.”
“Interesting.” Davidson lifted his legs off the desk and clunked his boots onto the plank floor. “Listen, Strickland, you might want to stick close to Miss Murray.”
“She’s leaving on the eleven o’clock train this morning.” He swallowed. “Going back to Chicago.”
“Don’t let her.”
“What?”
“I wouldn’t put it past Cassidy to do what he says, get himself on that train.”
Zach jolted to his feet. “Sheriff, could you lock him up?”
“Well, yeah, I could do that. Might take some time to find the man, though. That bein’ the case, I think you should have Miss Murray delay her departure by twenty-four hours. Take the train tomorrow morning instead.”