Megan Read online

  She arose, washed her face at the basin on the table next to the window, then wound her already-braided hair into a coronet and donned the only really proper dress she owned, a blue-and-white flowered cotton with a modest collar trimmed in narrow eyelet. When she slipped out of her room, at the rear of the house, she found Caney already at the stove, building up the fire. Gauzy rays of pinkish sunlight seeped through the eastern windows and made glowing pools on the hardwood floors.

  “I figured I’d make up some oatmeal and sausage,” Caney said, and the quiet coolness of her tone injured Megan a little, for the other woman might have been speaking to an interloper instead of an old friend. “Zachary likes a good meal in the morning. Something that’ll stick to his ribs.”

  Megan nodded, a little shyly, keeping her distance. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  Caney set a skillet on the heat with a ringing thump. “Yes’um, there is,” she said with just the slightest snap. “You can sit yourself down there at that table and not get underfoot.”

  The words were not amicable ones, but they were familiar, and for that reason alone they reassured Megan, however slightly. She drew back a chair and sat, for no sensible person took an argument with Caney Blue lightly, not even the four McQuarry women. “I want to explain—”

  Caney held up one hand. “No, miss. I won’t hear no ‘explanations.’ All I want to know is, you gonna stay here at Primrose Creek where you belong, or go runnin’ off again, leavin’ us all to wonder and fret over you?”

  Megan lowered her head, raised it again. “I mean to stay,” she said.

  Caney regarded her in silence for a seemingly endless interval, then went back to her cooking. Zachary wandered in from the master bedroom, yawning expansively, his fair hair sleep-rumpled. He was wearing trousers, a button-up undershirt, suspenders, and boots. He nodded a cordial greeting to the ladies, ambled over to the wash stand by the back door, and squinted into the little mirror affixed to the wall. With a sigh of resignation, he bent to splash his face at the basin, then whipped up a lather with his soap cup and brush, and began the morning ritual of shaving. By nightfall, Megan knew, he would have to go through the whole process again, and she found herself wondering idly whether it was the same for Webb Stratton.

  Just the thought of Stratton attending to such an intimate and implicitly masculine function, ordinary as it was, made Megan feel as though a half-dozen grasshoppers were playing jump rope in the pit of her stomach. She blushed and looked down at her hands.

  “Trace spoke to Webb while you were resting yesterday,” Zachary said, already wielding the blade. “About selling back the land. He won’t budge.”

  Caney offered no comment, but it was plain that she was listening. A part of the family, she was privy to pretty much everything that went on in the three households.

  Megan nodded. “I know,” she said.

  Zachary looked back at her, over one shoulder, his face still half covered in foam, the blade in one hand. His grin was quick and boyish, and, for an instant, she envied Christy the passionate, unconditional love he felt for her. Like Trace Qualtrough and Jake Vigil, he was devoted to his wife and family, and he didn’t have any compunctions about letting the world know it.

  “We’ve got plenty of room right here,” he said. “Like as not, things will work themselves out, if you just stick around.”

  She blinked a little, touched by the assurance that there was still a place for her at Primrose Creek. She guessed that Zachary and Christy and all the rest of them expected her to take to her heels again at the first sign of difficulty. “I don’t want to be a burden to you and Christy,” she said. “I won’t.”

  “Burden,” Caney scoffed under her breath, tending to the fresh and fragrant sausage sizzling in a large black skillet.

  Zachary grinned again and went back to shaving.

  He had already finished eating and headed for town, wearing his badge and a well-used .45, when Christy appeared, clad in a lavender morning gown, her dark hair wound into a single thick plait, her cream-colored skin aglow with rest, good health, and some sweet, private secret. She made Megan think of an exotic night orchid, blooming in moonlight, folding back into a dignified bud by day. Joseph and little Margaret were close behind their mother, sleepy and serious in their flannel nightshirts and bare feet.

  Megan’s heart swelled with affection just to look at the children, her very own niece and nephew. Regret for all she’d missed seared the back of her throat, and she had to swallow hard before she could manage a hoarse good morning.

  Christy paused as she passed, leaned down to kiss the top of her sister’s head, and then went over to shoo Caney away from the sink, where she was washing dishes. “Go and sit down this instant,” Christy told her friend.

  To Megan’s surprise, Caney obeyed and allowed Christy to serve her coffee and then breakfast. The children took their seats at the table, too, and tucked into bowls of hot oatmeal laced with fresh cream and molasses.

  “Do you go to school?” Megan asked, gazing at Joseph. Although he had his father’s coloring, she could see Christy clearly in the set of his jaw and the level, steady look in his eyes.

  “I’m too little,” he said. “But I can read. I can ride, too. I’ve got a pony.”

  Megan smiled. “My goodness,” she said.

  “I might not ever go to school,” he added after considerable rumination.

  “I beg to differ,” Christy stated lightly, joining the rest of them at the table and taking a delicate sip from her coffee. “You will most certainly go to school, Joseph Shaw.”

  He frowned. “I want to be Pa’s deputy. I figure I won’t have time for school.”

  Christy hid a smile, but Megan caught a glimpse of it, dancing in her gray eyes. “What use is a deputy with no education?” she asked reasonably. “Now, finish your breakfast. You have chores to do, unless I’m mistaken.”

  “Chickens to feed,” Joseph told Megan importantly.

  “And I could use a little help weeding that garden,” Caney announced.

  Megan made a show of pushing up her sleeves. “I might as well attend to that,” she said. “Make myself useful around here.”

  A brief silence ensued, and Joseph was the one to break it. “There’s a party tonight,” he said. “Over at Aunt Bridget’s place. She’s going to make a cake with coconut icing.”

  “That was supposed to be a surprise, young man,” Christy said. She was smiling, but there was something uneasy in her bearing, too. She gave Megan a nervous, sidelong glance, so quickly gone that it might have been imaginary.

  Aunt Bridget? Megan thought, a beat behind. While Bridget and Christy had made their peace sometime back, they had never been particularly close, even after they buried the proverbial hatchet. They were too different from each other and, at the same time, too much alike, these two cousins.

  Later, when she and her sister were working side by side in the corn patch, Megan wielding a hoe and Christy inspecting the stalks and ears for insects, dropping those she found into a can of kerosene, Christy brought up the matter of the party.

  “They’ll have invited Webb Stratton,” she said with a sort of breezy caution. “Bridget and Trace, I mean. They make a point of being neighborly.” In truth, most everyone did, for the West could be a hard and empty place, and much was made of even the simplest event.

  Megan offered no comment. The summer sun felt good on her back and in her hair; even the ache in her muscles and the new calluses from the handle of the hoe were welcome.

  Christy stopped, there in the corn patch, and sought out her children with her eyes. Seeing them tugging up weeds and the occasional sprout with gleeful diligence, a watchful Caney close at hand, she smiled. When she looked at Megan again, though, her gaze was somber. “There’s something I need to tell you,” she said.

  “I suspected that,” Megan heard herself say, realizing only as she spoke that she had sensed an undercurrent, almost from the moment of her return to h
er sister’s home. She paused and leaned on the hoe handle, gripping it with both hands. “What is it, Christy?”

  “You took off so fast, and we’d just reasoned it through—”

  Megan waited, braced. Was Christy or Zachary or either of the children sick—even dying? Or was it Caney?

  “Bridget and Skye thought we ought to talk about this tomorrow, just the four of us—that’s why they haven’t been to see you just yet—but I, well, I believe we’ve let it go too long as it is.”

  “What are you trying to say?” Megan was becoming frightened by then.

  Tears welled in Christy’s eyes, but, at the same time, she was smiling. It reminded Megan of spring rain showers sparkling in shafts of sunlight, Christy’s smile. “Granddaddy misled us, Megan. They all did. We—you and I and Bridget and Skye—”

  Megan closed her eyes, let the hoe fall, forgotten, to the ground. She felt too dizzy to retrieve it. Don’t say it, she thought. Don’t say we’re not really McQuarrys, because I couldn’t bear that.

  “We’re sisters. The four of us.”

  Megan stared at her sister, her eyes so wide they hurt. She was at once stunned and relieved. “What?”

  “We had the same father,” Christy said, her voice very quiet. “Different mothers, it would seem, but definitely the same father.”

  Megan couldn’t grasp it. “Papa? Uncle J.R.?”

  Christy shook her head. “There was another brother—Thayer. He was Granddaddy’s, by a mistress.”

  Megan remembered her grandfather’s passionate devotion to their beautiful grandmother, Rebecca. “Granddaddy had a mistress?”

  “It was before he met Grandmother,” Christy said gently. “I don’t know why they never married. The point is, Thayer was a pure disgrace, and Granddaddy sent him away forever when he was twenty-two, after some dreadful occurrence involving whiskey and a duel. He said Thayer’s name was never to be mentioned under his roof again, and, evidently, he meant precisely that.”

  Megan turned away, started down the row toward the edge of the garden, turned back. Anger was rising inside her, along with confusion and just plain fear. All these years, she’d thought she was one person, and the whole time she’d been another. She was a stranger to herself.

  “Don’t run away from this, Megan,” Christy said, and this time she was all big sister, strong and stubborn. “Thayer McQuarry was our father, yours, mine, Bridget’s, and Skye’s. Granddaddy didn’t want anything to do with him, but he couldn’t and wouldn’t turn his back on us, so he sent for us, brought us home to be raised by the sons he was willing to claim.”

  Megan felt sick, then jubilant, then sick again. She pressed the back of one hand to her forehead, let it fall to her side. “Dear God,” she whispered.

  Christy had put aside the can of kerosene; she came to Megan, sidestepping the fallen hoe, and laid a hand on her shoulder. “It isn’t so terrible—is it?”

  “Our mothers—?”

  “I don’t know anything about them,” Christy admitted. “Just that they were women Thayer took up with after he left home.”

  “How—how did you learn—?”

  Christy sighed. “When Bridget had the twins, I recorded the births in the McQuarry Bible. That was when I noticed Thayer’s name and saw that all four of us were listed as his daughters, not Papa’s or Uncle J.R.’s. I guess fooling us was one thing, in Granddaddy’s mind, and writing a bald-faced lie in the Good Book was another.”

  “I was here when little Gideon and Rebecca were born,” Megan recalled, and the realization stung. “You knew. You knew, Christy McQuarry, and you didn’t tell me!”

  Christy’s gaze remained steady, though there was pain in it. Pain and honest regret. “Bridget and I talked the matter out. We decided we’d tell you and Skye when you were older. More settled. Then there was the fire, and after that, you ran away.”

  “You had no right to keep something like this from me!” Megan accused, stricken. She felt like the lost and wandering ghost of a person who had never truly existed in the first place. “You had no right!”

  “I had no choice,” Christy corrected. “You ran away!”

  Megan clenched her fists at her sides. She’d never struck another human being, and she wasn’t about to begin then, but that didn’t mean the temptation wasn’t there, for it was. God help her, it was. “You had plenty of time!”

  “But not plenty of information. Eventually, Bridget found a letter from Granddaddy tucked into the lining of the Bible’s back cover. After that, we sat Caney down and pried what we could out of her. She still hasn’t told all she knows, not by any means.”

  Megan dashed at her cheeks with the heels of her palms. “She kept the secret? All that time?”

  Christy sighed. “She believed she was doing the right thing. Our father was every kind of rascal, Megan. He eventually got himself killed, down in New Orleans. He was—he was caught with another man’s wife. Caney thought we had enough grief, the four of us, without that stirred into the pot.”

  Megan was silent for a long time, trying desperately to regain her equilibrium, both physically and emotionally. When she spoke again, her voice was a raw whisper. “And Skye? How long has she known?”

  Christy averted her eyes, but only for a moment. “Since I had Joseph,” she answered. “She and Jake were married about that time. And you took off soon after that.”

  Megan swallowed. She’d been so anxious to rejoin her family, but now she realized shakily, what she really needed was some time apart, a chance to work things through in her mind and heart. She stared at her sister, still astounded, trying to take it all in.

  Christy spoke quickly, if calmly. “This is a shock, I know,” she said. “But Bridget and Skye and I have all been much closer since we learned the truth.”

  “You didn’t feel—angry?”

  “With Granddaddy?” Christy asked, folding her arms as though she’d taken a chill. “Yes, at first. But after a while, I began to understand. He thought he was doing the right thing—the best thing. He loved us, Megan. Enough to bring us home to Virginia, to be brought up as McQuarrys. A lot of people would have turned their backs, pretended we didn’t exist. That would have been a lot easier on him and just about everyone else in the family, don’t you think?”

  Megan’s throat thickened to the point where she could barely breathe, but she nodded. She understood—she truly did—but she was a long way from assimilating what she’d learned. When she’d recovered enough to move, she turned, went back to retrieve the hoe she’d dropped, and began hacking methodically at the dirt.

  Christy left her to the solace of her work.

  *

  Twilight was spilling across the hillsides in purple and blue shadows when Webb rode up to the Qualtrough house. The windows gleamed with welcoming lamplight, and, through the trees on the other side of the creek, he caught the glow of the Shaw place as well. He couldn’t help thinking of the darkened, empty rooms he’d left behind half an hour before.

  Trace came through the open front door, grinning in the fading daylight. “Where’s that yellow dog of yours?” he asked.

  “I didn’t reckon Augustus was invited,” Webb answered.

  “Well,” Trace allowed, “the least you can do is take him some leftovers.”

  Webb dismounted, started toward the barn, leading his horse. Trace fell in beside him.

  “Mighty glad you could make it,” he said.

  Webb kept a straight face. “I’m not going to change my mind about selling the land,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  Trace chuckled. “Hell, yes,” he said as they reached the corral gate. He worked the latch and swung it open to admit Webb and the gelding. “What I’m wondering is, do you know that saying no to a McQuarry woman is just the beginning of a discussion, not the end?”

  Webb grinned as he led the horse through, lifted one of the stirrups, and began loosening the cinch to remove the saddle. “I reckon I had an inkling,” he replied.
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  Trace took the saddle, hoisted it easily onto the top rail of the fence, while Webb slid the bridle off and hung it alongside the other tack. “Megan’s a fine-looking woman,” he said, stepping through the gate again, fastening it when Webb was beside him.

  It was all Webb could do not to roll his eyes. “Yes,” he agreed, and his voice came out sounding unaccountably gruff. “She surely is.”

  “You must be mighty lonely, living on that big place all by yourself.”

  “No more than the next man,” Webb answered. Which, he reasoned, was pretty damn lonely, when you thought of all the poor old cowpokes, miners, and timbermen who were living by themselves up and down the banks of Primrose Creek.

  Trace thrust a hand through his hair and heaved a heavy sigh. He was a straightforward man, uncomfortable with any sort of deception, however innocent or obvious. “You could use a wife, couldn’t you?” he blurted out.

  Webb laughed, stopped to face his friend there in the moonlit dooryard of a happy home. “I don’t know as use is the word I’d employ,” he said. “But yes, I wouldn’t mind marrying. I’m just waiting for the right woman, that’s all.”

  “Well,” Trace replied, exasperated, “maybe Megan is the right woman.”

  Webb considered the spellbinding red-haired creature waiting inside, with her equally lovely sister and cousins. It was no secret that Trace, Zachary, and Jake were all happy with the marriages they’d made. It was also no secret that the McQuarry females, beautiful as they were, were spirited, mule-stubborn, and overflowing with opinions that didn’t necessarily match those of their mates. Such qualities were trying enough in a horse—in a woman, they could cause all manner of sorrow and travail. He had enough to do, starting a ranch, keeping it going, without that.

  Didn’t he?

  “When did you take up matchmaking?” he asked.