The Horseman

The Horseman

Jillian Hart

MILLS & BOON

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To Ernest Fraijo,

who gave me the inspiration for the Spirit Horse.

To Tony and Ryan, who will always be heroes to me.

Thank you.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Epilogue

Chapter One

Montana Territory, 1882

I should be holding my baby now. Katelyn Green sat up in bed and buried her face in her hands, unable to hide from the grief. Pain filled her up, cold and dark as the night. She didn’t want to feel it; the loss was overwhelming. She was empty, her stomach strangely quiet.

By all rights, she ought to be cradling her daughter, safe and warm in her arms.

But instead she had this horrible sorrow, deep like a well and as dark. With a groan she shifted carefully, ignoring the physical pain the early birth had brought her. She climbed from the bed as if she could escape her sadness, but it followed her like the gloom to the window where she leaned her forehead against the frosty glass.

If only the baby hadn’t come early. If only she had lived.

Try not to think of it and maybe you’ll be all right. She willed her heart to be as cold as the glass at her brow. As icy as the frigid world outside her window. As quiet as the hard frost that painted the black reaching limbs of the leafless trees a solid snowy white and coated the vast Montana prairie with a frozen hush.

The moon was out, a bright round disk that warmed the ice-cold light from a thousand stars scattered across the void of night. The silvered light glinted across the prairie, as if more stars had tumbled to earth and still shone where they had fallen in the rises and draws of the high plains.

Like a lure, the night beckoned her, as if in those deep shadows where the moonlight and stardust did not reach, Katelyn could hide forever in the cold and night. Surely the grief could not follow her there.

“What are we gonna do with her?” a man’s deep voice demanded from the kitchen down the hall.

A voice hard and violent with anger. Katelyn shivered, her insides coiling up into a hard knot. She feared her stepfather, Cal Willman, but not as much as the husband who’d cast her out.

“She’s not staying with us much longer.” Cal sounded adamant and forceful, the way he always did when he’d been drinking.

“She’s my daughter. I guess I have to help her.” Her mother’s voice answered, perplexed and put-upon, sounding thin and torn.

Katelyn could picture her mother in the parlor, hands to her stomach, helpless to know what to do. Katherine Lyn Willman was not good at decisions or seeing past her own needs. It was a weakness of character and one of heart.

Katelyn knew what her mother would say next. She’d learned from the hard experience of growing up in this house. And from similar conversations her parents had had about her since she’d arrived five weeks ago.

“But we must consider our reputation.” Mother’s words vibrated with the worry of it. “I’ve had plenty of sympathy from my friends. They say it’s terrible how her husband set her aside.”

“Terrible? It’s scandalous. It’s ruining my business, that’s what it’s doing, and I can’t have much more of it.”

“Yes, but if we cast her out, think of how that would make us look.”

“But she’s useless, nothing but a burden—”

Useless. That’s what Brett had called her, the man who’d vowed in front of God to honor and cherish her. Katelyn squeezed her eyes shut, soaking in the cold draft seeping through the single-paned glass.

If only she’d had someplace else to go. It hadn’t been easy coming back. Walking the mile from town after a difficult birth and surgery three days after losing her baby, a girl child and not a son. You’re useless to me, Brett had told her. Worthless and replaceable.

He was a judge, and he’d found a way to dissolve the legal ties of their marriage.

“No decent man will have her.” Her stepfather sounded deeply disgusted. “It’s not as if we can find someone to marry her. She’s barren.”

“When she’s well, she could help with the housework. We’d be able to get by without a second housemaid.”

“Did you hear me, woman?” Cal’s disdain rang bitter and cold as the night outside. “I don’t want to cast my eyes on that daughter of yours. She’s a disgrace, and I have my business to think of.”

Katelyn covered her ears, refusing to listen to her mother’s answer, for it would be filled with her own selfish worries, as always. This was no home, no refuge, the way it had always been. This place was only another form of hell that she’d married to escape.

And the joke was on her. Marriage had been worse than this place, and now she had nowhere to go, no one to turn to, and her future was gone, vanished like a puff of smoke in midair, evaporating as if it never had been.

Her stepfather had said it. No decent man would want her. And she had to wonder if there were any decent men, husbands who treated their wives with tenderness and honor.

Maybe there were no men like that, like the princes in the fables she’d read about as a child, or heroes in the novels she so loved to read. Heroes of heart and courage and integrity were fiction, and nothing more.

What am I going to do? She couldn’t stay here, and she wasn’t yet strong enough to leave. Hopelessness lashed through her, smarting like the tip of a bullwhip against the inside of her rib cage.

I can’t stay here a moment longer. She had to escape, even if only for a few minutes. Her fingers glided over the glass panes. She unlatched the lock with a flick of her thumb.

“There is another course.” Her mother’s voice sounded again. “We send her away. Find a situation for her and wash our hands of her. All anyone needs to know is that she’s gone to stay with relatives.”

The night breeze was blessedly cold and as welcome as a wish come true. Katelyn sucked in the cool scent of winter and held it deep in her lungs before she tugged her quilted housecoat from the closet and pulled it on over her nightgown.

It was the darkness and not the starlight that drew her as she climbed through the window. The bitterness of her parent’s voices dulled to a mumble, their words becoming indistinguishable and then nothing at all as her feet hit the ground beneath her bedroom window.

She hated the weakness that shivered like water through her limbs. The weakness that made her feet heavy as she shuffled through the dormant rose garden. The shrubs were bundled in cloth with straw tucked around their shadowed bases. Hibernating. Envious, she kept on going.

The last of the fallen leaves crunched beneath her slippers as she ambled toward the open prairie. Pain sliced from her stomach down to her knee with each step. The doctor had said it would take a long while to heal. She’d lost a dangerous amount of blood during the birth and after.

She limped across the yard, the grass crisp and dead beneath her slippers. She could feel the night around her, somehow alive and magical, as if the moonlight laid down a path of silver for her feet and the white ice of the stars glittered like hope in the velvet sky.

The last time she’d felt hopeful was for the one moment in her bleak marriage when she’d first felt her baby quicken in her womb, that faint, incredible flutter of new life. Gone.

Her hands covered her stomach, empty and hollow. She should have died with the child, she thought, turning her back on the moon and stars, closing her eyes so hard the tears of sorrow could not escape. She was dead in all the ways that counted.

It did not matter what her mother and stepfather decided to do with her. Whatever situation they would find could not be worse than this pain she was in. A pain so deep it was a perfect darkness, like a night without moon or stars or end.

She heard him before she felt the change in the air, like the whisper of an archangel, then she heard the booming crack of thunder so loud it shook the despair from the night. The drumming crashed through the silent yard growing closer. It echoed along the eaves of the house and the long row of stables and outbuildings.

A high, sharp neigh trumpeted a warning an instant before the black shadow galloped into sight, front hooves pawing the air as he reared into the sky, nostrils flaring, ears pinned back, fury in his cry. The sight of him lured Katelyn closer, despite the pain of each step.

She could feel the wild rage of the stallion, the untamed power of him as he called out again, a warning neigh that pierced her ears like a bugle’s call to battle. She hugged the flat board rail of the paddock fence and watched, spellbound, as the magnificent creature leaped a six-foot-high fence in a single bound.

He’s magnificent. She held her breath as he landed, skimming the ground. He flew with effortless grace toward the far stables. The night slowly disguised him until there was only the beat of his hooves on the frozen earth.

The door to the bunkhouse slammed open and the sharp smack of wood striking wood shot through the yard like a gunshot. Light spilled into the darkness from the open doorway.

“What in the blazes?” a man’s gruff voice asked in confusion.

“It’s the devil, he’s back.” Old Pete, one of the longtime ranch hands, answered as he shoved his way through the door. “I know how to handle this one. Stand out of my way.”

A metallic rasping resounded in the dark. The sound of a rifle being cocked.

No! Katelyn watched in horror as the shorter, stockier man lifted the gun. Horror washed over her, launching her forward onto the bottom rail of the fence. She had to stop him—

A shot rang out, piercing the night. She clung to the top rail, helpless to do anything more than watch as the stallion neighed fiercely. He lived.

Relief left her dizzy. She’d had enough tragedy. She’d seen enough harm.

“Are you crazy?” a man’s voice boomed like winter thunder, deep and confident and angry. In the lit doorway across the row of paddocks, the strange man held the rifle by the barrel, as if he’d ripped it out of the old ranch hand’s grip. “You could have killed the beast.”

“That was the notion. He killed my only son last year, and I swore an oath on my boy’s grave that if that bastard dared to come back to these plains, I’d shoot him dead.”

“Get back to your bottle, old man.” The stranger jerked on the back part of the gun and the rattle of bullets clinked into his palm. “No one harms an animal as long as I’m here. Is that understood?”

“You wranglers come and go and think you know everything, but you’ll see that I’m right. The only way to handle a beast like that is with a bullet.” The old man shook his fist, as if in warning, or as if casting a curse, and then hobbled through the lit doorway and into the shadows of the bunkhouse.

The man was alone in the yard, standing with his shoulders broad, feet planted and the rifle in hand.

A dangerous man. Fear caught in her chest, watery and weak. Tonight, he’d made the choice of protecting the stallion.

The old man had called him a wrangler. He must be the new horseman her stepfather had hired some time back. Katelyn had overheard him discussing it more than once. He was a drifter by the sound of it, a man said to have been everywhere, done everything and have a rare touch with horses. It was rumored he had Indian blood in his veins.

The wind shifted. The shadows deepened. Katelyn felt the horseman’s gaze shift to her and focus with the same threat as if he’d loaded the rifle and aimed it straight at her heart. The hair prickled on the back of her neck. Her flesh rose in goose bumps as the night expanded around her.

The stars seemed to snuff out one by one until there was only the two of them. The powerful, intimidating man with a rifle and her, in her housecoat and slippers. If he was a dangerous man, she was alone with him. Perhaps that wasn’t the wisest course. She could simply turn around and scurry back the way she’d come.

She took a step back, knees weak. Scurrying wasn’t as simple as she first thought. The pain was worse, knifed down her legs in fine, cold slices. Maybe she’d stand here and rest up before heading in.

The man was staring at her. He looked like trouble. Although she could not see his face, there was something about him. Something raw and mighty, as if he were made of iron and not flesh and blood.

He stood in the faint shadows. The light gilded the broad strength of him, but his face remained in darkness.

She did not doubt his would be a hard face, one weathered by time and sun and violence. But why would such a man save a wild animal?

The stallion was calling again, pawing at the closest stable. He bugled a sharp protest. What was he doing? Then a gentle nicker answered from inside the stable.

The stallion lifted his head high and arched his proud neck. As if showing off for the mare, he pranced the length of the paddock. The fading starlight worshiped him, glinting like precious silver dust on the graceful line of his back and shoulders. A dream come true.

No man was a dream. Disenchanted, Katelyn turned away. Her uneven steps crackled through the frozen grasses loudly enough to pinpoint her location. The night silenced—even the wind fell still—and she felt the horseman’s presence as surely as the icy ground beneath her feet.

Something touched her cheek. Feather soft. Brief. Abrupt. She jumped, the fight rising up in her like a storm. She was alone. There was no danger as a second snowflake brushed the tip of her nose. A third caught on her left eyelash.

She felt foolish for being so jumpy. All around her was the whir of a million snowflakes, tumbling from the sky to tap against the ground. They filled the silent night like a symphony and softened the darkness.

There was the horseman. He was more than shadow now, and close. Too close. He was four fence posts away, leaning on the corner post without hat or coat. The stolen rifle rested against the long length of his thigh. He looked invincible standing there like a warrior of old.

It was the horse he was after. Not her. Katelyn stopped, grateful for the chance to catch her breath. She was quaking from fear and cold, but she could not tear her gaze away from the man, barely visible in the dark as he braced both forearms against the top rail.

“Hello, boy.” When he spoke, it was like harmony, low and sure and true. “Lookin’ to go courtin’, are you? You’re out of luck tonight, man. The stable’s locked up tight.”

Katelyn couldn’t believe her eyes. The stallion stopped pawing the ground and stilled. He swung his big head to stare at the man who dared to talk to him. The stallion’s ears pricked as he scented the stranger, then he snorted in obvious disdain of the human.

The man didn’t seem offended by it. “Folks tell me they call you the devil for a reason.”

The stallion bared his teeth and laid back his ears in answer.

“I see. You’re a tough one. Me, too, so I understand.” The easy friendliness in the man’s voice and posture remained. “It isn’t often a man comes across a mustang like you. Those are pretty distinct markings you have. Do you know how valuable that makes you?”

“Five hundred gold eagles,” called another man’s voice from the direction of the bunkhouse. Another one of the hired hands.

That seemed to get the horseman’s attention. “Why? Is he someone’s lost horse? Is there a reward on him? He looks wild to me.”

“Cal Willman wanted him caught and broke to ride. A stallion with markings like that would be worth something in stud fees, even if he is a cayuse. That horse put up a fuss and killed Old Pete’s son before he broke free and took a few prized Arabians with him. Cost Willman a bundle, I’ll tell you. Near about ruined him, far as anyone can tell. He fired a whole bunch of us, and we’ve been runnin’ this place with just a few hands ever since.”

“Wonder if Willman still has that reward out for him,” one of the hired men asked. “Reckon we can collect on it?”

“What do you mean ‘we’?” the other ranch hand argued. “I’d like that money for myself.”

So, that’s why my stepfather sold the house in town. Curious, she couldn’t help creeping through the shadows and swiping the snow from her eyes, edging close enough to better hear what the men where saying.

But it was the horseman her eyes strayed to. The way he remained motionless, snow accumulating on his dark locks, the width of his shoulders, his attention trained on the wild horse, his focus never wavering.

He’s going to catch the stallion. But how? If the animal had leaped into the paddock, he could easily leap out before he could be cornered. The fence could not hold him. What could? The magnificent beast’s hooves beat out a swift rhythm along the length of the stable, as if he knew it, too, and he wasn’t afraid.

Run, she silently pleaded. Run while you can. The stallion skidded to a halt, shaking the snow from his coat. He turned to face the horseman, nose up, ears forward, nostrils flaring wide to scent the man who watched and waited.

“We are going to be partners, you and me.” The horseman’s promise made the men behind him guffaw.

“Keep on dreamin’, Hennessey,” one of the men called. “You’re not man enough to get your hands on that big fat reward. Bet you’d like to.”

“I wouldn’t mind if I did. It wouldn’t matter if I didn’t.” The horseman climbed onto the rail and eased down into the paddock. He approached the stallion slow and sure, like a predator stalking his next meal, confident of the outcome. “You are a handsome one, aren’t you, boy?”

The stallion nickered, a low warning sound that sent shivers down Katelyn’s spine.

“We’ve got lassos ready,” one of the ranch hands said as he led the others toward the fence. “Stand back, Hennessey. Let the real cowboys take care of this one.”

“Fine, Ned, but you boys will scare him off.” The horseman lifted a coiled whip from his belt. “Go ahead. You catch him. I’ll just lean back, take a few minutes to rest and watch you rope him in. It shouldn’t be too hard for a seasoned wrangler like you.”

“You’re a son of a bitch, Hennessey. There isn’t a horse I can’t break.” Ned crawled through the fence, then shook out his lasso.

Dillon Hennessey had learned long ago how to manage fools like Ned Ritter, so he was careful not to let anger get the best of him. He had a quick trigger when it came to the way men treated horses. It was just the way he was. He believed in respecting animals.

And women, too.

He’d noticed her before tonight. What man wouldn’t? He’d caught sight of her in the windows of the house, quiet and pale and moving slowly, as if in pain. She’d lost a child. That was hard on a woman. He could understand that.

What he couldn’t understand was why any man would have set her free.

She was beautiful. Probably the most beautiful woman he’d ever laid eyes on. She was delicate, refined and as fragile as those china dolls he’d seen in the store window in town. She was far too fine for the likes of him. Why are you even looking at her, Hennessey?

Because while he tried his best to make wise decisions, he made mistakes. And watching the owner’s daughter out of the corner of his eye had to be the worst mistake a man like him could make.

“You’re spookin’ him, Ned.” Dillon couldn’t believe his eyes. What were the four men going to do? They could toss all the rope in the county around that stud’s neck, and it wouldn’t do any good. They couldn’t hold him.

The truth was, nothing could hold that horse.

Nothing except his loyalty. A stallion like that one decided if he’d trust a man or not. That was the secret to dealing with difficult animals. That, along with no small bit of kindness, did the trick.

It was a secret Ned didn’t seem to know as he tossed the fat noose through the air. The hemp smacked the horse in the head.

With one great shake, the stallion knocked the rope aside. Another sailed through the air and he pivoted, a blend of shadow and substance, and fled.

“I got him! I got him!” Ned braced his stance and whipped the lasso tight.

“Hold on, Ned!” the hands advised.

This ought to be good. Dillon settled back to watch, wondering how long Ned would last. Thirty seconds at most. The stallion bunched up into a powerful jump that sent him sailing like Pegasus himself over the fence railing, hauling Ned into the fence with a crash.

Ned’s groan of pain was followed by a long string of vile curses as the end of the rope sailed out of sight along with the horse. The stallion returned to his herd of mares and galloped for the foothills of the Big Horn Range, until there was nothing but the faint drum of their hooves. Then nothing but wind and storm.

“You stood there, you lazy cuss!” Ned moaned, finding his feet and swiping the snow from his backside. “If you would’ve helped, I could’ve held him.”

“You said to let the real cowboys handle it, and I did.” That comment only made Ned mad, but Dillon didn’t care. He ignored the ranch hand’s tirade.

What Dillon did care about was the stallion. He was a runaway, was he? From this ranch? Interesting. Dillon figured he’d find out about the reward. And why the stallion had returned to this spread.

A mare’s nicker sounded from inside the stable, lifting on the rising wind, and it was a sad and lonely sound.

A female. It always came down to that. When she was special, what was a poor male to do?

Suffer, that’s what. Dillon glanced over his shoulder to the shadows near the far fence. She was gone. There was only shadow and a thin blanket of snow. Fat flakes tumbled relentlessly, covering over her footprints.

Dillon stared down at the imprints. Small and delicate.

Just like her.

Warmth filled him. It was a strange thing. A dangerous reaction.

He was lonely. He wanted a wife. But there was no chance in hell that beautiful Katelyn Green would want a man like him.

Yep, he knew when to draw and when to fold. He stood in the storm a long while with the snow falling all around him and thought of her, as elusive as that stallion in the night.

And twice as unreachable.

Chapter Two

Katelyn carried her morning cup of tea to the dining-room window to watch the snow fall. Peace. It covered the landscape in a blanket of white, the gentle rolling whiteness covering up the mud and dirt and the season’s dead grasses, making the world new and beautiful. Heavy ice-gray clouds hung low on the horizon, masking the proud peaks of the Rocky Mountains on one side and the Big Horn Range on the other.

With the snow falling, it felt as if the sky was so close to the ground that if she went outside, she could almost touch heaven. Wishful thinking, she knew, but it remained a hard longing within her. Probably because she wanted to escape this house and this pain.