Chapter 6

Calder

Word travels fast in a county this size, faster than a man might like when the news concerns him directly, and it hadn’t taken more than a week for the whole of Dry Creek to know that Calder Vance had gone and married the Chinese widow who used to run the dry-goods store. I’d expected talk. What I hadn’t quite braced myself for was how fast that talk found its way back to Rourke, and how little time it took him, once it had, to come see for himself whether the marriage had changed anything about how easy I might be to push off my land.

He rode up on a Thursday morning, two of his hired men trailing a length behind him the way dogs trail a man they’ve learned to fear more than respect. I was working the fence along the near pasture, close enough to the house that LilLi heard the horses before I did and came out onto the porch, Emmie’s hand caught up in hers the way she’d taken to holding it whenever something in the day felt uncertain. I saw LilLi’s spine go straight the moment she recognized who was riding up, and something in me went hard and still at the sight of it, the kind of stillness a man goes to right before trouble, rather than after it’s already arrived.

Rourke didn’t dismount. He never did, when he came calling like this — sat his horse instead, looking down at whoever he’d come to trouble, because a man on a horse has an advantage over a man on foot that costs him nothing and buys him plenty. He was neither young nor old, somewhere in the stretch between the two where a man either hardens into something worth respecting or curdles into something worth avoiding, and Rourke had gone the second way, sometime before I ever knew him, and never once looked back.

I set down my tools and walked to meet him at the fence line rather than let him ride further into the yard, close enough to the house to unsettle Emmie any more than his mere presence already had. It was a small thing, choosing my ground rather than letting him choose it, but I’d learned, in years of dealing with men like Rourke, that where a conversation happened mattered near as much as what got said in it. He watched me cross the yard with the patient, assessing look of a man who enjoyed making other men come to him, and didn’t bother dismounting even once I’d reached him, content to keep that small advantage of height for as long as I’d let him hold it.

“Heard congratulations were in order,” he said, and there wasn’t a shred of warmth in it, only the flat, practiced pleasantness of a man who’d learned that courtesy could be its own kind of weapon, if you knew how to sharpen it right. His eyes moved past me to the porch, to LilLi and Emmie standing together in the doorway, and something in his gaze lingered there a beat too long for my liking. “Didn’t figure you the marrying kind, Vance. Guess a man’ll do most anything, faced with losing what’s his.”

“Say your business, Rourke, or ride on. I’ve got fence to mend.”