Megan Read online

He could see Trace redden up, even in the twilight. “It just makes sense, that’s all. You need a wife, and Megan needs a husband.”

  Webb narrowed his eyes, lowered his voice. “What do you mean, ‘Megan needs a husband’?”

  Trace rasped out a sigh. “Not that,” he said, and Webb knew if they hadn’t been such good friends, Trace probably would have punched him one, right then and there, just for daring to suggest that Megan, an unmarried woman, might be in a family way. “She does have, well, a certain reputation around here.”

  “Ah,” Webb said, and folded his arms. The sounds of laughter and clattering pots and dishes came out through the doorway, pulling at him, drawing him in. He stood his ground.

  “She ran away and became an actress.”

  Webb almost laughed out loud. “God, no,” he mocked. “Not that.”

  Trace smiled. “Well, it sure riled the ladies of Primrose Creek,” he muttered, and Webb knew he wasn’t referring to Bridget, Christy, and Skye. With nothing more said, the two men went into the house.

  Megan seemed subdued, if not downright retiring, that evening, seated across the Qualtroughs’ long trestle table from Webb; he caught her watching him twice, there in the midst of love and noise and children, and each time she flushed and looked away. Webb reminded himself that a shy McQuarry had probably never drawn breath and wondered if it wasn’t embarrassment, heightening that rose-petals-and-cream coloring of hers. No doubt she knew her family had hopes of swapping her for six hundred and twenty-five acres of prime land, and, whether she was a party to the plan or not, the whole thing had to be a strain on her pride.

  Thanks to his mean, sorry bastard of a father, Thomas Stratton, Sr., not to mention his elder brother, Tom Jr., Webb had long since learned not to let much of anything show in his face or bearing, and the skill stood him in good stead there among all those McQuarrys, Qualtroughs, Shaws and Vigils. Nobody needed to know that he was beginning to find the idea of marriage to Megan McQuarry intriguing, and this after all these years of thinking nobody but Eleanor could rope him in and pasture him out.

  He was stirring his after-supper coffee when he felt Megan’s gaze touch on him for the third time—it was like a sudden spill of sunshine, though he was sure she hadn’t meant to favor him with any sort of warmth or brightness—and looked up idly to meet her eyes. She was glaring at him fit to singe his hide, and that made him grin.

  She looked away quickly, and he chuckled under his breath.

  “You going to be hiring for spring roundup?” The question came from the other end of the table, and a few ticks of the mantel clock sounded before Webb caught hold of the fact that it was his to answer.

  He turned and saw Trace watching him, a biscuit in one hand and a butter knife in the other. “Yep,” he answered, more conscious, rather than less, of Megan’s presence and her regard. “I need a dozen men, at least. God knows where I’m going to find them, though.”

  Trace and Zachary made sympathetic noises, while Jake Vigil, the most recent addition to the family, having wed Skye McQuarry a couple of years back, looked downright grim. He ran a big timber outfit, as well as a lumber mill in town, and he and Skye had built a good-sized house on her section of land just down the creek. “Good luck,” he said. “Whatever help I’ve been able to get, I’ve had to scrape up off the floors of saloons.”

  Skye, a brown-haired, brown-eyed beauty with a generous mouth and a quietly vibrant nature, was watching her husband with an expression of warm admiration. They had two children in their household, Webb knew: Jake’s son, Hank, born of some previous alliance, and a plump baby girl of their own, blessed with her mother’s good looks.

  Zachary leaned forward in his chair, and, though he wasn’t wearing his badge, the nickel-silver glint of it was always in his eyes. He was quick with that .45 of his, the marshal was, and even quicker with his mind. “There’s been a lot of rustling and just general thieving down in the low country,” he said, addressing everyone. “Bound to move up this way eventually.”

  Vigil uttered a sigh of resigned agreement, and Trace nodded glumly. His gaze found Webb and leveled on him. “You might want to start carrying an iron,” he said. “Running that place all by yourself the way you do, you’d be easy pickin’s.”

  Megan looked at Webb in alarm, and that cheered him. In spite of herself, she was concerned for his safety. How-do and hallelujah.

  He shook his head. He hadn’t carried a gun since—well, since the day he’d learned, to his horror, that he was capable of killing a man in cold blood—and he didn’t mean to start now. He had a rifle at the ranch, used for hunting and putting down the occasional sick cow or injured horse, but that was all. “No need,” he said, his mind swamped, all of a sudden, with stomach-turning images of his elder brother lying broken and bleeding on the ground. Webb had thought Tom was dead, thought he’d done murder, and it still scared him to think how close he’d come to committing the ultimate sin.

  “No need?” Megan echoed, speaking directly to Webb for the first time since the evening began. “There are outlaws and renegade Indians in these foothills, Mr. Stratton. There are bears and wildcats and snakes.”

  He took a sip of his coffee, paused to relish the taste. While his own brew might have served to strip whitewash off an old outhouse, Bridget’s was delicious. “I confess to a fear of wildcats,” he said mildly. “Outlaws, Indians, bears, and snakes don’t scare me much, though.”

  Megan narrowed those changeable eyes of hers—now a tempestuous shade of sea-green—and to Webb it seemed that everyone else in that crowded, jovial room receded into two dimensions just then, no more real than figures in paintings, leaving only him and Megan fully present. “Then you’re a fool,” she said, and her cheeks were mottled with apricot, which meant she hadn’t missed his reference to wildcats.

  He smiled. “That may be so,” he allowed. “Still, I’ll leave the gun-toting to your brother-in-law, the marshal here, and handle things my own way.”

  “I’d be curious to know,” she pressed, clearly irritated, perhaps thinking he was overconfident or even arrogant, “how you intend to ‘handle’—say—a wildcat?”

  A shrill jubilation welled up in his heart, pressed sweetly and painfully against the hollow of his throat, but he let none of what he felt show in his face. “Well, now,” he said, “I guess that depends on the wildcat.”

  Somebody cleared their throat, and suddenly the room was full again, alive again, virtually throbbing with energy, personality, and life. Megan continued to stare at Webb for a few moments, then made a point of looking away.

  Confound it, Webb thought. He didn’t want to care. He couldn’t afford to care, not about Megan McQuarry, anyhow. Much as he wanted a wife, she was an unsuitable candidate. Nonetheless, she stuck in his mind like a burr tangled in a horse’s tail, and it didn’t do any good at all telling himself she was an actress, an independent sort, bound to light out for parts unknown as soon as she got bored. He still couldn’t run her out of his head.

  Chapter

  3

  “ Well,” Bridget demanded, industriously drying dishes as Megan handed them to her, one by one, “what do you think of Webb?”

  Skye and Christy were nearby, Skye rocking her daughter next to the fire, Christy clearing the long table. Caney, normally a part of all their get-togethers, was in town, making supper for her beau, Mr. Hicks. The men, mercifully, had gone outside to smoke pipes and cheroots, and the other children were either asleep or chasing each other in the dooryard.

  Megan took them in, one by one. Bridget, Christy, Skye. Her sisters. She loved them all, and desperately, but she was furious with them, too. They might as well have abandoned her in some cold and desolate place, leaving her in the dark the way they had. “What am I supposed to think?” she asked, as the lid began to rattle atop her temper. “That he’d make a good husband?”

  They blushed, all three of them, but Megan’s mind had long since moved on to another, more pressing subject. “Chris
ty told me,” she said very quietly, fixing Skye with a brief, pointed glance. “About Thayer McQuarry and his many exploits.”

  Bridget’s smile was soft and a little rueful. “I only know of four,” she commented. “Exploits, I mean. Us.”

  Nobody commented. At least, not on Bridget’s pitiable attempt to lighten the moment.

  “How could you?” Megan demanded in a sputtering whisper, and she knew that her eyes were flashing with fury and hurt. “How could you, any of you?”

  “You didn’t give us much of a chance to explain,” Bridget observed, setting a clean, dry plate on the shelf next to the stove. Of the four of them, she was always the quickest to find her footing again when she missed a step, which wasn’t often. “Running off the way you did, I mean.”

  Skye’s brown eyes were round. “What does it matter now?” she wanted to know, and her tone was mildly plaintive. Family was what counted with Skye; as far as she was concerned, blood truly was thicker than water. “We’re all together again. We’re sisters. What else matters?”

  “The truth matters,” Megan said in an outraged whisper, resting her hands on her hips, the dishtowel dangling like a flag along one thigh. “Loyalty matters.”

  “You’re a fine one to talk about loyalty,” Bridget remarked calmly. It was hard to nettle her, but once she got her bustle in a tangle, reasonable folks took cover. “Running off like that. Leaving us all to wonder and worry.”

  Megan slanted a sidelong look at Skye. “Not all,” she said, and took no satisfaction in the way her cousin—sister—squirmed.

  “You made me swear not to tell anyone where you were!” Skye blurted, and her small daughter fidgeted a little, there in her mother’s arms, then nestled close and went to sleep. “I should never have promised—”

  Bridget and Christy exchanged looks but offered no comment.

  Megan wrapped her arms tightly around herself, held on. It was a habit she’d developed as a child, one meant to anchor her emotions, keep her from being carried away by their intensity. Rationally, she understood the situation well enough, but her heart and spirit were still assimilating the reality that she was not the person she’d always believed herself to be. Indeed, her whole sense of identity had been undermined. Perhaps her sisters were content, knowing so little about their common past, but Megan was full of questions, dizzy with them.

  One by one, she considered these three beloved strangers who were the heart and life’s blood of her family. Bridget had Trace and their flock of children; Christy had Zachary, Joseph, and little Margaret; and Skye had Jake, her stepson Henry, usually called Hank, and baby Susannah. No doubt the hectic pace of their daily lives left them little time to wonder about their disinherited father, their separate mothers, and this final loss of the parents they’d believed to be their own, faults notwithstanding, all these years.

  “The letter,” Megan managed at last. “Let me see Granddaddy’s letter.”

  Bridget nodded, fetched the McQuarry Bible down from its place of honor on the mantelpiece, and carried it over to the table. Megan sat down, weak in the knees, and stared at the giant black book as though it might contain still more shattering secrets.

  It was battered and peeling, and the gold lettering impressed into the cracked leather had worn almost completely away. The corners were curled, the spine was coming loose from the binding, and the pages were translucent with age. Gently, leaning over Megan’s shoulder to reach, Bridget turned the Bible facedown and raised the back cover. A vellum envelope protruded from a tear in the ancient lining.

  Megan’s hand trembled as she removed the missive carefully, opened it, and took out a single sheet of paper.

  The handwriting, though faded, was strong, clear, and slanted just slightly to the right, and it was Gideon McQuarry’s, without question. Just seeing the familiar shapes of the letters and words made her miss her grandfather with ferocious force, but she was angry, too. Oh, yes, she was angry, and her eyes were so full of tears that she couldn’t see to read.

  Christy took the letter, sat down beside her with a sigh. “April 17, 1862,” she began in a quiet voice. “McQuarry Farm, Virginia.

  “My beloved granddaughters,

  “Every man must confess his sins, if he is to have any hope of heaven, and deception is certainly a grievous sin. I have deceived you, as have my sons, Eli and J.R., and their wives—they are weak people, all of them, and I dare not depend upon them to make things right when I die. For that reason, I am writing this letter, in the earnest expectation that you will find it one day and learn the truth, however belatedly. It is my prayer that you will come to forgive me in time—”

  The letter went on to describe Thayer McQuarry’s birth, to an unnamed young woman of Granddaddy’s acquaintance. When he married Rebecca, shortly after discovering that he was already the father of a son, Gideon had arranged to raise the boy himself. His son’s mother had been relieved, and Rebecca had welcomed the child as her own.

  Throughout his life, Granddaddy wrote, Thayer had been a trial, and by the time he reached manhood, he was a blight on the family honor, a blasphemer, drinking to excess, gambling and fighting with his fists, dallying with other men’s wives. Granddaddy had finally paid him to leave the farm, and Virginia, forever, and, as Christy had told Megan the day before, he had forbade the remaining members of the family even to speak the man’s name in his hearing. Apparently, his instructions had been well heeded, for none of the sisters had ever dreamed their grandfather had sired three sons instead of two.

  Thayer had fathered four children after his banishment, and after each birth Granddaddy had sent Caney to fetch the infants home to the farm. As the wives of both his remaining sons had failed to conceive, he had given two babies to Eli and two to J.R., to raise as their own. He’d thought it might have a settling effect on his boys, giving them some real responsibility, but in the end they hadn’t done much better than their elder brother would have.

  Megan’s throat tightened with a welter of emotions as she listened. Granddaddy might never have known their mothers’ names, and if he had, he evidently hadn’t recorded them, nor did he say where they had been born or, for that matter, precisely when. Even her birthday might be merely an invented date, just another lie.

  She flipped to the front of the Bible, where the generations of McQuarry “begats” were recorded, and sought her own name, running a fingertip down the yellowed, brittle pages. Megan Elizabeth McQuarry, she read, at long last. Born in the summer of 1850.

  She swallowed and looked up at her sisters’ faces. All of them, to their credit, met her gaze steadily. “Surely someone can tell us—-”

  Christy sighed again, slipped an arm around Megan’s shoulders. “I believe Caney knows,” she said, “but she’s already said more than she wanted to.”

  “I thought she’d be here tonight,” Megan said, still dazed.

  Bridget bit her lower lip, then nodded. “She’s bound and determined to get Mr. Hicks to the altar before the first snow, and she’s been spending a lot of time herding the poor man in that direction.”

  Megan recalled her exchange with Caney that morning in Christy’s kitchen and wondered if Mr. Hicks was the real reason her friend had stayed away from the celebration supper. Caney had been furious with Megan for going off without a word of farewell, two years before, and she’d made no secret of the fact. Very likely, she had simply decided there was nothing to celebrate.

  “I need to talk to her,” Megan said.

  “There’s plenty of time for that,” Skye assured her. Little Susannah, a sweet, miniature version of her mother, was sound asleep in her arms by then; she carefully rose from the rocking chair, laid the child on Bridget’s horsehair settee, and covered her with a crocheted blanket. “Besides, we’ve all tried.”

  “Why wouldn’t she tell us everything?” Christy ruminated, frowning. “Caney, I mean.”

  Bridget was at the stove, pouring hot water from a kettle into a blue china teapot. “It’s possib
le, isn’t it, that she truly doesn’t know anything more?” she said.

  Christy and Skye looked as skeptical as Megan felt. “She knows,” they said in concert.

  Bridget chuckled ruefully. “I’m sure you’re right,” she admitted. “I suppose there’s some terrible scandal involved.”

  “How could it be any worse?” Megan demanded.

  Bridget rolled her eyes at this, but Christy reached over, took Megan’s hand, and squeezed it reassuringly.

  “They could have been married to other men—our mothers, I mean,” Bridget said. “Or perhaps they were women of ill repute.”

  Skye paled a little and glanced nervously toward her sleeping child, as though Susannah might have overheard and been scarred by the stigma. “Bridget!” she hissed.

  Bridget smiled. She enjoyed stirring embers into flame, always had. “Well, it’s possible, isn’t it?” she whispered. “It doesn’t sound as if our dear old daddy was the sort decent women want to consort with, does it?”

  “Nonsense,” Christy put in crisply. Both Megan and Skye were somewhat in awe of Bridget, she being the eldest of the four and the most direct in speech and manner, but Christy suffered no such malady. “Men like Thayer McQuarry are precisely the sort decent women want to consort with. All we can really conclude concerning our mothers is that they probably weren’t overly intelligent.”

  A silence fell while everyone absorbed the implications of this possibility, and, one by one, they dismissed it with firm shakes of the head. Stupidity was as unacceptable a quality in one’s mother as a lack of moral character.

  “What does any of this matter?” Skye asked. “It’s all behind us. Can’t we just move on from here?” Her gaze found Megan, lingered. “Maybe you’re not happy to find out that Bridget and I are your sisters, not your cousins, but I think it’s some of the best news I’ve ever heard!”

  Megan’s heart softened, at least toward Skye. The two of them had been close since babyhood; they’d shared cradles and prams, dolls and ponies, sorrows and secrets. She rubbed her temples with the tips of her fingers. “It’s not that simple—at least, not for me.”