Legacy of Secrets. Sara Mitchell

hand jerked, and her eyes fluttered open. She blinked several times, then winced. “N-Neala? Did…I…What happened?”

      “Shh…You’ll be all right. You’re alive…Thank You, Lord! Oh, Abby…you’re alive.” One hiccupping sob escaped before Neala managed to throttle the wild emotion clamoring inside. Tenderly she laid her hand against her friend’s chalk-white cheek. “The Lord worked overtime today, dearest. Somewhere above us, a boulder dislodged and fell. Probably loosened from all the rain we’ve been having.” She struggled to catch a breath. “You s-seem to have been in its way. But you’re alive. I don’t know what I would have done…I couldn’t have borne it, Abby…If you’d waited with me instead of going ahead…”

      Abby’s cold hand crept across to brush Neala’s. “Do…hush,” she whispered, her voice clear but weak. “I’m just glad it didn’t…squash me like a bug.” A faint smile barely lifted the corners of her mouth. “But I think—I think you better…blow the whistle?”

      Chapter Eight

      The Grand Hotel, Philadelphia

      The rowdy bunch playing poker at a nearby table erupted into another argument. Gray and his friends, lounging up at the bar, turned to watch.

      “My money’s on the gent with a beard.” Carl toasted his choice with his half-full glass of ale. “Looks mean enough to settle the fight with fists.”

      “Nah…too civilized here. We’re not in Denver anymore,” Dan said. “I’ll go for the tall guy with the prissy middle part in his hair and too much pomade. Probably a lawyer. Fork-tongued pettifoggers can talk their way out of a hornet’s nest after convincing the hornets to sting the innocent bystanders. Whaddaya think, Falcon?”

      Gray clapped a hand on Dan’s broad-as-a-barn-door shoulder. “I think I know better than to place bets on anyone about anything. How ’bout having the barkeep send a round to the winner of their…What’s this one? The fourth shouting match?”

      “Sixth,” Carl replied with a sloppy grin. With his carrot-red hair and youthful face, he looked more like a tipsy leprechaun than Gray’s old buddy. “It’s the sixth altercation,” he repeated. “But who’s counting? I’ll pony up an’ send ’em a round, pal, but only if you pick the winner first. I wanna see if your luck’s still as bad at wagering as it’s good at shootin’.”

      Gray elbowed him in the ribs, causing Carl to stumble against the man on his other side. Everyone apologized and toasted each other…a companionable assembly of gentlemen enjoying a few after-dinner drinks in a high-quality tavern across the street from a quality hotel. No prickly sensibilities, no irrational reactions, or raucous tempers itching to explode like the ill-mannered foursome playing poker. Why couldn’t females understand a man’s need to fraternize with other men without feeling guilty about it?

      “Quit stalling, Gray,” Carl jibed.

      With a good-natured snort Gray gestured across the room, toward the saturnine man holding his cards in a white-fisted hand. His unmoving silence presented a stark contrast against his arguing fellow card players. “I’ll take the quiet one,” Gray said. “Been my experience the ones who make the least noise wind up the most dangerous.”

      His two friends solemnly nodded. Ten years earlier they’d all signed on as army scouts at the same time, then maintained a deep if largely disconnected friendship after they’d left the army. Periodically they’d meet somewhere between Kansas City and New York—wherever each could travel within a day’s time—to catch up on each other’s lives. Gray mused with fuzzy sentimentality that he hadn’t realized until now how lonely he’d been since Marty’s death.

      “I think we should consider establishing some kind of business together,” he announced, smacking his palm against the bar with a resounding thud. “Settle down in one place. Get respectable.”

      “Settle down? Get respectable?” Dan swiped a strand of wheat-colored hair off his forehead. “You been letting your aunt sweet-talk you into giving up your sinful ways?”

      “Not a chance. Aunt Bella knows better.” Gray spread his arms wide, almost knocking Carl off balance again. “She just welcomes me home like the prodigal son.” Then he scowled, for a brief moment remembering his motive for joining his friends in this saloon. “Sure wish I’d known there’d be a curly-headed little hornet in the jar this visit.” He swore ripely over the subject, not for the first time, causing Carl and Dan to roar with fresh laughter.

      “Never known you to react like this to any woman outside your mother,” Carl observed between chuckles. “Some of ’em you treat like they’re another man, and some a foul-tasting tonic you have to imbibe. Never understood why they all still flutter ’round you.”

      “Some young ladies seem to thrive on dreams of taming us wild ones.” Dan nodded sagely. “Did I ever tell you about this schoolteacher I saved from a scalping when—”

      “Yes!” Gray and Dan chimed in together.

      Unabashed, Carl grinned. “So how ’bout when Dan brought his purty little cousin to Richmond, two years ago, wasn’t it? Thought he’d finally found someone to pull the thorn out of Gray’s woman-hating heart.”

      “Don’t hate women,” Gray muttered, feeling heat steal up the back of his neck. Not even the one who irritated his memories, with her thick mass of hair he wanted to bury his hands in, whose voice tantalized his thoughts with its soft Southern drawl. Neala Shaw was the only woman in years who didn’t cower.

      And Gray didn’t want any part of her. Or any woman. He could enjoy a woman same as any other man—without allowing her to take over his life. “Just…don’t ever want to be tied down to one,” he finished, the words delivered almost defiantly. The clinging…the tears…the hurt looks calculated to instill permanent guilt—never again. No, sir, never again. He was a man, not a six-foot little boy, and he did not need mothering, or managing.

      But he didn’t hate all women. Fact was, he wanted to protect them, keep monsters from taking advantage, hurting someone weaker—no. If either of the species were weaker, it had to be the hapless male. Take himself, for instance. All he’d ever wanted was—

      “Well, don’t fret about Roberta chasing you down.” Dan interrupted his sodden musing. “She married a train engineer last October. You’re safe from her fluttering eyelashes—and me, having to pound your head, for breaking her heart.”

      “Ha! You’re the one who’s safe,” Carl interrupted with an inebriated guffaw. “’Cuz you’d’ve been the one getting his head pounded, not our friend here. Good ol’ Gray. Best man with a gun, best man with his stropped-razor tongue and falcon’s eyes, and best man with his fists.”

      For some befuddled reason, the turn of conversation pricked Gray on the raw. Deep inside he knew his behavior toward women, and at times men, as well, could be disrespectable, and more often than he cared to admit, ventured perilously close to dissolute. The idealistic boy out to save the world from evil was long dead and buried somewhere west of the Mississippi River, and Gray told himself he didn’t mourn over him. But surely at the advanced age of thirty-two Grayson Faulkner had not transformed into a misogynist, as that prissy urchin had accused him of. Surely he retained enough family honor to justify the moniker of gentleman.

      When he wasn’t three sheets to the wind, that is.

      “On second thought,” he abruptly announced, “let’s call it a night.” He waved toward the massive wall clock hanging between the stuffed heads of an elk and a ten-point buck. “It’s after eleven. Closing up in less than an hour, anyway. Tomorrow’s Sunday, y’know. Can’t have drunkards and carousers spoiling the Sabbath, remember.”

      “When’s the last time you sat on a pew for a church service, Gray?” Carl asked.

      Before Gray could answer, the quiet poker player across the room shoved away from the table and surged to his feet. “You there!” he called in a flat nasal