Salvation in the Rancher's Arms(32)
Again Caleb chuckled, and the incongruous sound startled Rachel to such a degree she didn’t have time to stop Ethan as he crawled into her lap, erasing the extra body between her and Caleb. She leaned her back against the closed door of the bunkhouse, sneaking a gaze heavenward, wondering if she was being tested.
If so, she had a sinking feeling she was failing miserably. As much as her mind resisted Caleb’s sudden presence in her life, her body responded to him in ways she had no remedy for. Is this what her mother had suffered?
The somber tune Caleb chose to play reverberated through her, the tender vibrations strumming against her taut nerves. She closed her eyes against the onslaught and beat back the memories of happy, easy times. She rarely visited those memories. It was too painful, remembering everything they’d had and how quickly it had fallen apart. The knowledge of how easily life could be taken away from you if you didn’t hold tight to what was important was a lesson she’d never forgotten.
The music lulled her, easing her anxieties and soothing the tension gripping the muscles of her neck and shoulders. She relaxed, comforted by Ethan’s warm body curled into hers. She wrapped her arms around him, holding him tight. All too soon the song ended, and the echoes of the music died away.
“Don’t move.”
Caleb’s quiet instruction intruded. Rachel snapped her eyes open, mortified she had allowed herself to let go so easily in front of him. He nodded toward her arms and she glanced down at Ethan. In a matter of minutes, the boy had fallen asleep.
Chapter Nine
“I can’t remember the last time I did that,” Rachel whispered, the words escaping before she could call them back. She blushed at the admission, unable to look at Caleb.
“He do that a lot? Fall asleep at the drop of a hat?”
She nodded, thankful to turn attention away from herself. “Hard to imagine, after all he’s been through, that he can find solace in a solid night’s sleep, but he does.”
“If he doesn’t belong to you, where’d he come from?”
The inference raised her hackles. Robert had refused to consider Ethan a member of her family, a wound that still cut deep. “Make no mistake, Caleb, he belongs to me every bit as much as if I had given birth to him myself.”
Caleb held up a hand, shaking his head. The dying strands of sunlight caught the edge of his jaw, turning the whiskers a glowing red, contrasting with the dark brown of the hair poking out from beneath his hat. “I meant no disrespect. He’s a fine boy. Anyone would be proud to call him son. I only asked out of curiosity. He said you weren’t his natural ma, and I just wondered how he possessed the good fortune to end up here.”
His words surprised her given his propensity to avoid her as much as she had been avoiding him. She pulled her mind away from that path, refusing to explore it further, and focused on Ethan, whose deep breathing indicated he was well into dreamland and not likely to wake any time soon.
“Ethan’s ma and pa rode in from the east, coming with a small wagon train. It had been larger when they set out, but they’d encountered one hardship after another, and their numbers had dwindled to less than half their original size.”
Rachel adjusted Ethan in her arms, a wave of love enveloping her as he snuggled closer.
“His pa died shortly before they reached Salvation Falls. They hadn’t meant to stop here but to pass by farther up on the trail. But Alma, his ma, couldn’t manage the wagon without Ethan’s pa, so she pulled in here, hoping to find work to support her and Ethan.”
“And did she?” The low timbre of his voice matched the still night air.
Rachel shook her head. “I suspect you know there aren’t too many respectable options available to a woman left on her own. And, by then, she had taken to the laudanum to dull the pain of her loss. She needed to feed Ethan and her addiction. She ended up at the Seahorse, trading her body for cash. Cyrus, the owner, he let her keep Ethan there in one of the back rooms, but she had to pay extra, which meant less money in her pocket and less chance of escaping that way of life.”
“What happened to her?”
“Same thing that happens to most of the women forced into that line of work,” Rachel said. “Their bodies wear out, they get diseased, or they simply give up and take the only escape they can find by ending their own lives.”
Caleb leaned forward in his chair. He reached over to her and Rachel froze, unsure of his intentions. His knuckles grazed Ethan’s sleep-flushed cheek. The tender ministration touched her somewhere deep. The breach in her defenses made her want to bolt, but Ethan’s body kept her rooted to the stair. If Caleb was aware of the effect he had, she couldn’t tell. His sharp focus remained honed on Ethan.