He looked at Ben.“Which is the best route to Colorado?”
Ben’s eyes met his.Understanding was there.Not pity, thank God.“The way I came.”
Rafe didn’t say any more.He turned his horse and pressed his heels into its side, prompting it to a canter.
He was finally on the road to redemption.
The funeral was small.Quiet and dignified, which was the way her mother would have wanted it.
The burial expenses took all the money they had saved.Shea had the millinery store, of course, but she didn’t know whether she could run it on her own.She didn’t know whether she wanted to.She had enjoyed the creative part, but she had no liking for the business end.Her mother had handled that.
Still, she had to do something.
The shop itself was not worth much.They had rented the space, and their only asset had been Sara’s hard work and Shea’s imagination.
She found it so difficult to make a decision, which was unlike her.But she was cloaked in a cloud of disbelief, of loss.She was floundering, and she knew it—and didn’t like it.
Shea said all the proper things.She heard herself as if from a distance.She was present, yet she wasn’t present.
The last guest finally left.The lawyer had read the will, which left everything to Sara’s “beloved” daughter.
Shea wandered through their empty rented rooms.Her gaze went to the wooden box on her mother’s desk, the box she hadn’t had the heart to open.
Why had her mother wanted it so badly, so badly that she had died alone?
And where was the key?In her need to do something, anything, Shea became obsessed with the box.Shea found a knife and started working on the lock.When it resisted her every effort, she worked around it, trying to dig it out, scarring the lovely wood, but she couldn’t stop.She had to open it.Now.
The room had darkened before it came open, but she didn’t stop to light an oil lamp.She lifted the lid, and what she could see of the contents stilled her.She sat there, drinking in the implications.
Shea finally rose and lit the oil lamp, then returned to the box.Money.Lots of money.New bills wrapped in paper with the name of a Kansas bank.Used bills.
And letters.She picked one up and saw the name at the bottom.Jack Randall.Her father.She looked at the date.Ten years ago.Her hand shaking, she picked up another letter.Three years ago.There was a Colorado address.A town named Rushton.
Other letters.A total of ten.And beneath them a clipping from a Boston paper.She quickly read the story.A court-martial.A Major Jack Randall was the main prosecution witness, the man who had discovered and caught a traitor involved in army payroll robberies.There were drawings of the convicted man and of Major Randall.She glanced at the former, caught for a moment by the handsome angles of the man’s face, but then she moved quickly to the latter.Ten years ago.She would have been thirteen at the time.Why hadn’t she seen this before?And if she had, would it have made any difference?Randall was a common enough name.
But that, with the letters and money, posed unsettling questions.Dear God in heaven, what did it mean?She read the letters.At first they asked her mother to return to the writer in Kansas.And then they merely hoped Sara was well and stated that money was enclosed.They said nothing about Shea.Nothing at all.
Shea closed her eyes, trying to think.The major had to be her father.Her birth certificate listed a Jack Randall as her father.Thoughts whirled in her head like flying debris in a tornado.She tried to remember everything her mother had said about him.Honorable.The clipping she’d read seemed to verify that.
Why had her mother left him?Why had she never told Shea he was alive?And why had she never spent the money when they’d so often needed it?
Why had her mother lied?
Suddenly, Shea’s whole existence seemed a lie.The foundation, once so solid, quaked and wavered, and she felt she would fall through the flimsy flooring.
Who was she?
Shea knew she had to find out.She had to find Jack Randall.She had to find her father.
Chapter 2
It took Rafe and Ben three weeks to reach Casey Springs, Colorado.Three weeks in which Rafe tried to accustom himself to freedom.He had thought it would be easy.It wasn’t.His mind was still caged by the past, by feelings of anger.He’d lost part of himself: the old confidence, the simple enjoyment of basic things.
The first night of freedom had been the best and worst.Every sensation struck him with poignancy.They’d ridden all day before stopping, and despite Rafe’s having spent nearly twenty years on horseback, his muscles rebelled, reminding him of how long it had been since he last sat atop a horse, how much time he had lost.
Aware of how rusty he’d become with a gun, he practiced shooting.He had a long way to go to regain his former familiarity with a gun.When darkness made practice impossible, he tried to sleep and found himself unable to.
The night sounds were strange to ears used to curses and moans and restless movements, to the screeching of iron doors and the beating of guards’ batons against bars.Serenity had become more jarring than gunshot.Every star mocked him, instead of pleasuring, and the moon … Hell, he’d started adding up the number of new moons he’d missed.Nothing was satisfying, only teasing, reminding, torturing.He thought of the nightmares that wouldn’t go away, that sensation of waking in a coffin, in that prison box, away from light and sun and everything that gave life.
