A/N: The end of the last chapter was a bit of a tease, I realize, but I hope you won't be too disappointed by this one. There is, um, suggestive content in this chapter. I think it remains within the bounds of an M rating, but for those of you who prefer something even more indirect (and shorter), I'd skip the last couple of pages or so.
If she held her cup any tighter, it would shatter. But she was cold, and the cup was warm. The stove had been cold to the touch when she had staggered into the kitchen after her ride from the MacPherson ranch and she had had to restart the fire. She had needed to start a fire in the fireplace in her bedroom as well; the storm had cooled the house, and she had been shivering as she made her way up the stairs. By the time she had finished laying the logs in the grate, her fingers had gotten thick and stiff with cold, and she had fumbled several matches. It was an ornate and expensive fireplace, made out of a cream-colored marble and heavily sculpted, figures from classical mythology ravishing maidens and doing battle with monsters when they weren't doing battle with each other. It would be hours before the fire would fully warm the room, but it had already warmed the color of the marble, giving it the golden tinge of old parchment, and the light flickered over the mortals and immortals frozen in their acts of heroism and seduction, lending them the illusion of movement, Theseus plunging his sword into the Minotaur instead of eternally prolonging their embrace at its tip. There had been no room, apparently, to include the hero abandoning Ariadne as she slept. Where in literature did trusting young virgins not put their faith in some cocky adventurer with more bravado than common sense?
She had stared at the fire, recalling how unchanged the prairie had looked from a window in Claudia's kitchen, still brown and fissured by drought. It was as if she had never left, and then suddenly the prairie was alive before her, writhing in an agony of orange and red. It was the last moment of clarity she was to have until much, much later, those few seconds at that window in Claudia's kitchen looking out at a prairie engulfed in flames and realizing that Myka was out there in it. Trembling from the memory, she had turned away from the fireplace, wrapping her arms around her chest, and gone to draw her bath.
The water had been cold, but she hadn't wanted to take the time to warm it. She had sucked in a breath when she lowered herself into the tub. Her teeth chattering, she had doused her head again and again under the water, and each time she had resurfaced and opened her eyes, she saw the workshop contract, as if it were shrinking before the threat of the fire – although the threat was vanishing under sheets of rain – and then swell, fire suddenly in it, lifting it up from the ground. The sound had been flat, like the report of a rifle, but it had grown louder and deeper as the walls and roof collapsed simultaneously. A woman started screaming, and she had wished only for someone to quiet the poor thing until she understood, when her breath had snagged on a sob and the awful noise stopped, that she had been the one screaming.
She had vigorously shaken her head then, sending water flying, as she tried to rid herself of the haunting conviction that all that had happened after the workshop exploded, finding Myka, holding her, crooning to her that she was safe, was the illusion, and that tomorrow, no, today, they would bring her home, burned and broken. Climbing out of the tub with such clumsy urgency that she had caught her foot on its edge and nearly sent herself sprawling onto the floor, she had yanked on a nightgown, impatiently tugging it over her wet and still shivering body. She had stumbled back to the kitchen, putting on a kettle for tea, and waited for the sheriff to come.
She was still waiting. Helena put the cup down and noticed that the sky was turning from black to gray. It must be near dawn. He should be arriving soon, Sheriff Lattimer with his gouged face. She had put the rifle on her desk in the library, unfired but its stock ruined. MacPherson hadn't been home, of course, which she would have known had she let herself think things through. But reaction, immediate and visceral, had been all she was capable of. When Claudia said that the fire had threatened only the house and the outbuildings, Helena hadn't thought her way to the same conclusion as much as she had felt it, as if she had sniffed it in the smoke-filled air or scratched it from the burned ground. Later, as Steve and Claudia worried about the disappearance of one of the hands, she had run to Artie's office, scurrying in her haste as if she had no more forethought than a mouse seeking its bolt-hole. There had been no careful searching of his desk; she had pillaged it, opening drawers at random and flinging their contents onto the desktop.
Her ride to the MacPherson ranch had been just as wild and heedless, and when no one opened the door to her pounding and bellowing of his name, she had taken the rifle and slammed it through a pane of glass, battering the frame. She had groped through the broken pane for the lock, kicking the door in for good measure. Tramping up and down the halls on each floor, she had shouted for him to come out and face her. No one had left his hiding place to see who she was or to plead through a closed door for her to leave; finally, an old woman, most likely his housekeeper, peered cautiously around a doorway. Helena had instinctively leveled the rifle at her, and, with a muffled squeal, the woman backed away, slamming the door shut. Helena wanted to think now that had she been more rational she would have apologized for terrorizing MacPherson's help, but she could still feel no shame for having thundered through his home.
Surely one of MacPherson's staff would have been looking for the sheriff, once she left, to tell him about the madwoman who had broken down the door and threatened their lives (although, really, only MacPherson's). And stolen a horse. She had ridden the Donovan horse too hard (which she had also stolen, although Claudia, charitably, would only consider her to have borrowed him) to continue riding him to Sweetwater, so she had taken the least skittish of MacPherson's horses and left him in an empty stall in the livery.
Her cup had cooled. She crossed the floor, trying not to let her bare feet touch any more of the cold floorboards than she had to. After pouring more hot water into the cup, indifferent to the fact that she wasn't letting the tea steep, she took a different seat at the table, one from which she could watch who came up to the back door. She didn't want to be surprised by the sheriff. This wasn't how she had envisioned her day ending when she had arrived in Sweetwater just after sunup. She couldn't remember how she had anticipated that the day might unfold, but it certainly wouldn't have involved grass fires and explosions and a rampage through MacPherson's house. The train from Chicago had no sooner pulled into the station than she had rushed from the car to the platform, paying a man to haul her trunks to the house, and gone directly to the livery to have the stableboy harness her horses to the buggy. She had passed the Journal's office without even looking at it. She hadn't dared to look at it, hadn't dared to see if Myka was visible through a window.
She had gifts for Claudia, chemicals and tools for her workshop, and, smugly believing that it would be the gift that Claudia would treasure most she had placed it on the seat next to her, a fossilized bone of a dinosaur, which she had begged from a collector – and paid a small fortune to acquire – who was an acquaintance of Mrs. Frederic. She had bought gifts for Artie and Steve and Marta and Liesl, too. Cigars for Artie and Steve and German chocolates for Marta and Liesl. Although Leena had said she didn't want Helena to bring her anything, Helena had collected for her medicines and surgical instruments so new that their steel still glinted. As for Freddie and the girls at the Spur, she had purchased for Freddie several new aprons and for the girls bolts of gaudy fabric that none of Sweetwater's merchants, including its milliner, would ever willingly order.
But most of her gifts were for Myka. Books, of course. Sets of Shakespeare and the Jacobean playwrights, American authors too, Irving and Cooper and Hawthorne. Translations of Balzac and Goethe. More than Myka and, most certainly, her father would ever feel comfortable accepting, but she had been unable to stop herself. Then there were the other gifts for her. Ones that made Helena's heart skip a beat every time she looked at them or rubbed their material between her fingers. Dresses in colors that would bring out the red in her hair and deepen the green of her eyes. A shimmering emerald dressing gown that Myka would most likely think was too luxuriant for the modest, very modest, quarters she and her father occupied, and which her father would think was meant to transform his daughter into a jezebel. But even the most respectable of women wouldn't be ashamed to wear it, unlike the others buried deep in the bottom of one of Helena's trunks, nightgowns and shifts so sheer, some of them, that Helena could not only see her hand through the material but the blue lines of veins crossing her skin as well. Others were so revealing in their style or cut that a woman might declare she was better off wearing nothing at all, which would be, of course, the desired outcome. There had been no need for her to guess Myka's measurements or to call over some shop girl or model whose figure approximated hers. Weeks after Myka's visit to the ranch, Helena could still feel the press of their bodies in the bed after her nightmare and on the blanket next to the spring. She knew intimately how long Myka's legs were (very long), how wide her hips (not wide at all), and how big her breasts (neither big nor small but a perfect fit for her hand, she had realized as they lay tangled in her sheets.)
She frequently imagined Myka in the nightgowns, although she couldn't actually imagine the scene in which she would give them to her. Only a lover, or presumptive lover, would present her with such daringly intimate apparel, yet Helena's mind seemed to stutter on the word. She recognized the sad irony of her embarrassment because, at one time, she had been willing to be anyone's lover if he had the right price. But almost from the moment Myka had joined her in the pond, as unself-conscious about her nudity as if she had selected it from a wardrobe, Helena had been running from her. When Myka had placed her hand between Helena's breasts, resting the flat of her palm against Helena's sternum with a warm, light pressure, like a bird nestling against Helena's skin, Helena had been transfixed, uncertain whether she should remain where she was or, as would have happened in other places and at other times, close the distance between them, turning so as to allow Myka's hand to slide over her breast. But when Myka had said, "I love you," she had become a bird, taking flight, beating against the water to push herself up and away. In less than an hour she had saddled Dantes and was riding north across a prairie treacherous in the dark, recklessly urging the horse to go faster, but it was a recklessness she understood; she was risking only muscle and bone.
Myka's recklessness, on the other hand, terrified her. To stand so calmly, smile so buoyantly, as if the saying of the words was the release of a burden rather than the assumption of one, Helena couldn't understand. Although Myka's hand never once strayed, fingers and thumb held tightly, decorously together between her breasts, Helena had felt as lightheaded and dizzy as she had at the spring when Myka had arched against her, offering her the column of her throat. Myka's was a queer kind of vulnerability, expressing in that immodest thrusting of her body a confidence that Helena would accept her surrender, leaving Helena to wonder who was seducing whom.
When Myka had nervously joked that Helena must take all her potential conquests to the spring, Helena had seen only Louisa, the times that Louisa had lain on a blanket or quilt with her superimposing themselves on this moment. But only for the space of a heartbeat or breath because, in the end, there was no true resemblance. Louisa, in her meekness and tractability, ever the compliant wife even with her lover, was a far cry from Myka, who, despite her hesitation, hadn't stopped canting her hips and legs against Helena and whose lips, after that breathy little laugh, remained parted, anticipating Helena's kiss. Louisa might have wanted a greater intimacy than what their two bodies were satisfied to achieve in the space of an afternoon, but she would have never demanded it. Feeling those pale green eyes searching her face, silently pleading for Helena to overlook her gaffe, Helena knew that Myka would demand nothing less of her than that she act as an equal partner in whatever was to happen. There would be no playing the role of the world-weary libertine, or courtesan, for that matter. Having mastered the art of hiding herself away just as her lovers believed they were losing themselves in her, Helena wasn't sure that. . . being present, fully present. . . was something she could give.
Masking her fear and self-doubt as offended dignity, Helena had stalked off through the grove of trees with her sketch pad and charcoal. Once on the other side, she had made only some desultory sketches of the prairie before she started drawing Myka, the drowsy, dreaming expression on her face as she had arched herself toward Helena, expecting Helena to kiss her awake. The drawing was rough and smeared, Helena' hand shaking from an unfamiliar mix of desire, relief, and regret. She hadn't been able to bring herself to relent, not upon seeing Myka win over Dantes or watching her continue to charm Zeb during dinner. When Helena had gone to the pond later that evening, it had been as much from a desire to escape a house suddenly become too small as a desire to escape the heat. And there Myka had found her and had said those words, which, more than anything, made Helena want to be a ghost in her own life, content to occupy its fringes, invisible and no more capable of being held or possessed than air.
Once in New York, the congestion of people, noise, and grime had slowed her flight, and she had felt solid, corporeal once more, the weight of visits to attorneys, to the businesses she still shared with Mrs. Frederic grounding her. She welcomed the paperwork the attorneys never seemed to stop producing, the complaints and inefficiencies that had flourished in the factories and shops in her absence. Myka's devotion was what seemed insubstantial now, her "I love you" only a whisper in Helena's ear. Though Helena thought of her constantly and bought her gifts without restraint, it was a manageable preoccupation, the kind of distraction that could be squeezed between meetings and appointments, Myka no more than a figure in a wrinkled photograph, had Helena had a photograph of her, something she could take out and look at when she wanted and put away when something more pressing required her attention. It was allowable, now, to let herself be sentimental about Myka, to run her fingers along the spines of the books she had bought her and imagine Myka's delight when she saw them. And as for the feelings that buying the scandalous nightgowns and shifts engendered, Helena could have those attended to. It would be difficult, as a woman, to arrange for that type of companionship but not impossible. She didn't consider being with someone else for an hour or two a betrayal, particularly as there was nothing, no promise or obligation, to be violated. It was a need to be met, or ignored, that was all. Helena chose the latter, not because it was the more honorable but because it was the more expedient. Or so she told herself. Besides, there was no sense in complicating a simple act by wishing and fantasizing that her partner was someone else.
So she filled the dead moments of her days, when the attorneys had closed their offices and the factories and shops were quiet and Myka's words threatened to become louder in her ear with plays and dinners. Most often Josef was her escort. He was a young man now. Helena still couldn't place his age, somewhere between 15 and 25, the face that had always looked either too old or too young for its age combining worry lines and cynical smirks appropriate for a middle-aged man with an avidity suggesting a youth yet to make his mark. He was something of a sport; his suits were loud and he squired her to the theaters and restaurants with a swaggering possessiveness that suggested she was his mistress. It was more amusing than irritating, and despite the show he put on for the public, he treated her as he had always treated her, with a bluntness tempered by a healthy dose of fear. He knew she wasn't above suddenly wrenching his arm if she thought he deserved it. But he was, in the main, trustworthy, he worked for Mrs. Frederic, and while she would tolerate a certain number of side arrangements – as she told Helena repeatedly, there was always dross in the mining of gold –ensuring that her interests were served always had to come first, and Josef served them ably enough.
They had gone to a Brownlee play one evening late in her visit, although Helena hadn't known then that it was late in her visit or that she would be purchasing a ticket the next day to take her back to Sweetwater. She had reserved a box, as she usually did, and Josef's swagger was especially pronounced as he guided her to a chair. He was a great admirer of Mr. Brownlee, finding him to be "crackin' smart and funny as a top," which, in Josef's unique vernacular, was high praise for a playwright. Josef was more attentive than usual to her, appreciative that he could enjoy the play from a box rather than the cheap seats of a Sunday matinee.
While Josef laughed uproariously at the jokes, Helena didn't find them to be among Mr. Brownlee's best efforts and, in search of distraction, she glanced around the theater, her eyes lighting on a box across the width of the stage from hers. The man's head was bowed, as if he was studying his program, but Helena could see his companion without any difficulty. The woman was young and pretty, with a heart-shaped face framed by blond ringlets, but there was a worn quality to her features, as though life had already rubbed up against them too hard. Helena took her for a chorus girl, and the girl's awestruck expression indicated that this theater was several rungs up from the ones she was acquainted with. Just as Helena's glance was about to settle elsewhere, the man raised his head, and heavy-lidded eyes opened wide in surprise.
Henry. The hair was grayer but the head no less leonine. She was chagrined she hadn't recognized him sooner since his head had rested on a pillow next to hers for the better part of five years. He was moving his chair back and beginning to stand up, his eyes never straying from her. Helena tapped an oblivious Josef on the shoulder of his green-and-tan checked suit coat. She murmured Henry's name into his ear, and he almost bolted up from his seat, pushing Helena through the back of the box with an urgency that was hardly gentlemanly. He had little desire to be cornered by Henry Tremaine with Henry Tremaine's former mistress on his arm. With a shrill whistle, he flagged a hansom for them outside the theater.
"If you need to move somewheres else to be shut of him, I can help." Josef volunteered as he helped her down from the carriage in front of her hotel, but she had only shaken her head and pressed more money than was required for the reservation of a theater box into his hand, telling him to enjoy the rest of Mr. Brownlee's play.
She wasn't afraid that Henry would find her or, rather, she wasn't afraid of what would happen if he did. Other than shedding the name Charlotte Ramsey, she had done little to hide herself after she had left New York three years ago. For a man of Henry's resources, she would have been easy to find. Perhaps he had and concluded that anyone who willingly left New York for some obscure hamlet in Dakota Territory wasn't worth reclaiming. But she had hurried from the theater and was now haphazardly throwing things into trunks as if she was on the run from him. She drew a breath and looked around the room. It was a hotel room, nicer than most, but only that, and this was no longer her city, if it ever had been. Just as Henry was no longer her. . . benefactor. She had never thought of returning to him, even during her loneliest moments in Sweetwater, and there had been many. While she might choose to live in New York again someday, it wouldn't be as his mistress. Nor would she be returning to participate in any more of Leena and Mrs. Frederic's mystical schemes. Sweetwater was the repayment of her debt to them, and after MacPherson was thwarted or driven from town or buried under the prairie for all she cared, she would be free.
She sat on the edge of the bed. Free to go "somewheres else" as Josef had phrased it. Not quite. There was the matter of Myka, and the uneasy, paradoxical sense that there would be no freedom to enjoy without her. Helena could continue to mistake fleeing for being free, as she had for years now, but she would be no less tied to Myka for all that she ran from her. Like Christina's, Myka's absence would be no hole in her life but, instead, something massive, inert, something Helena would have to surmount every day. While Helena mourned Monika and Henry, she could put them aside for weeks, months at a time. Stubborn, insistent Myka wouldn't be so readily banished. She was no "manageable preoccupation" as Helena had so fatuously thought just days before. With a laugh, Helena flung herself backward on the mattress. She might imagine herself as a bird taking flight from that pond and pride herself on the great beating of her wings but she could fly only as far and as high as the cord that Myka held let her. And she had gone as far as the cord would allow her to go.
It was hard not to feel something pulling at her, tugging at her on the train back to Sweetwater, and although once she saw its weathered buildings, stark and unlovely outside the windows of the car, she had no fonder appreciation of it, the knowledge that Myka was there was enough to have her shine an especially silly smile on the bank, the general store, even MacPherson's law office. Until she learned that Myka was also at the Donovan ranch, she had told herself that she would stop by the Journal on her way home; surely then she would be composed enough to talk to her, maybe even confident enough to invite her to dinner the following evening. (Of course, she would have to ensure that Leena would be willing to cook it and that Myka's father, the old curmudgeon, wouldn't prevent her from going. Either that or Helena would have to invite the both of them, which made her frown.)
Claudia being on one of her fossil hunts, Helena had amused herself by annoying Artie at his accounts, moving on, when he finally discovered that the best way to rid himself of her was to patiently answer her questions, to the kitchen, where, German chocolates notwithstanding, Marta still viewed her with suspicion and interrupted as often as she dared Helena's idle conversation with Liesl. Liesl informed her with great pleasure that Myka was staying for supper, and Helena silently made plans to invite herself to dinner as well, disliking the anticipatory gleam in Liesl's eyes.
And then she had looked out the window. She had no clear memory of what followed. At some point Marta or Liesl must have alerted Artie because Helena remembered running with him and Liesl toward the barn, until she realized that Claudia wasn't with them. Claudia hadn't been with them, hadn't been in the house for hours; she could still be out on the prairie hunting for fossils or she could have hauled her treasures to her workshop. Helena had spun around and taken off in the opposite direction, her lungs and legs aching as she raced toward the shop. A trap crested the rise, and she saw Myka, bonnet-less as usual, on the seat. She would think later that they had stared at each other as the fire smoked and popped in a wavering line not far behind the trap, fanning out as if it had been spilled onto the grass. But there had been no time for staring. Myka had only glanced at her, reading the fear in her face, and then she had jumped down from the trap and was running toward the workshop.
No, no, no, no, it wasn't supposed to be Myka who ran to the workshop. She should be the one letting the trap fly down the rise, she should be the one forcing the frightened horses to stop; Helena would have run to her and hugged her and kissed her, yes, kissed her like a proper lover and confessed to being a bloody fool about everything. But it was the sheriff instead, already looking ashamed that he wasn't the one in the workshop, shouting for Artie and Marta and Liesl to get into the trap. As he shouted, water began to squirt up from the ground, and the horses shied, and Helena believed that nature itself had gone mad until Claudia emerged from the storm cellar, shouting "Is it working?" Helena wasn't sure whose ears she most wanted to box, Claudia's or the sheriff's, but she couldn't spare the time to box either one's because she was running toward the workshop again, her breath tearing through her throat and the "No, no, no, no" that had run through her mind minutes before replaced by "Please, please, please." Her feet were still moving after the sheriff grabbed her arm, and she felt them scrabble for purchase as she was yanked hard against him. She had first hit him then to make him let go of her. But he had held on, saying "I can't let you do that." He might have also said, "She'd never forgive me for letting you go after her," but she couldn't hear anything above her own shouts of rage. Not even the thunder, not at first. The rain fell hard, stinging, like pebbles hitting her skin, and she and Pete had looked at each other, stupefied, before simultaneously turning to look at the workshop, waiting for Myka to come out.
She should have known what would happen long before she heard that horrible loud report, like thunder but not thunder, like gunfire but more like a hundred guns being fired at the same time. She had started running again and he had grabbed her arm again, this time to tell her to wait until he brought the trap around. Whirling around, she had punched him. She kept on punching him and kicking him, abusing him with words she had never said aloud unless someone had paid her first. And he had let her beat him, not raising his hands to defend himself; the bruises on her face were from losing her balance and crashing into his chest, the points of the star on his shirt digging into her temple and cheek. She had stopped only when she was crying too hard to lift her arms, and, not bothering to wipe the blood from his face, he had left her to retrieve the trap. She had climbed onto the seat beside him as, his voice hoarse, he shouted at the horses and slapped the reins. She let him fight their reluctance to cross the still steaming ground, dully scanning the burned grass around the remains of the workshop.
She wasn't thinking of the fire or the explosion or Myka, she was back in the squalid room she had been renting in London when Christina had taken ill, where Charles had met with her twice, the first time to set the terms and the second to take Christina away. The room had been furnished with an ancient bed and an equally ancient chair, its windows gray with dirt and patched with wood. Christina's fever had broken, but she was still fretful, whimpering and plucking at her gown. Helena had paled, but she ignored her daughter's distress as she placed her in Charles' outstretched arms. He had said "Helena" in a tone she hadn't expected, quiet and sympathetic and oddly pleading. She hadn't wanted to look at him, but he was her brother, and she met his eyes reluctantly. Although his eyes were as dark as hers, she thought she saw herself, small and forlorn, reflected in them, but the illusion passed, and with a twisted smile, she extended her hand. "I believe you owe me something." If she had thought to make him angry, enough so that the awful pitying expression on his face would disappear, she had misjudged. It only deepened, but he shifted Christina, awkwardly, unused to holding babies, and took from a pocket a folded slip of paper, laying it on her palm. He turned away from her, Christina still whimpering against his chest, and at the door, he had looked at her over his shoulder. "I'm sorry," he said, as if he knew better than she that she would never entirely leave this room, never stop reliving this moment, never stop breaking herself over it. "I'm sorry" was what Pete had endlessly repeated as she flailed against him, trying to complete the breaking that had started all those years ago. But here she was, whole, if a little bruised, sitting beside him as the trap wheeled between pieces of the workshop and across bare, blackened ground, while the world around her was in fragments.
The sound of the door banging against the wall startled her, and the teacup jumped in her hand. She felt a stab of irritation, could that lummox of a sheriff do nothing quietly? She was ready to fix him with one of her murderous glares when she realized that the lummox who had barged into her kitchen was Myka. She sprang up from the table, but Myka was already limping to a chair. She was wearing a man's coat, which smelled of hay and cattle and was much too big for her; the fingers that poked out from the ends of the sleeves were red and chapped-looking from the cold. When Helena would have touched her, Myka said in an equally frozen voice, "Sit down," and as an afterthought, "Please."
Helena sat. She reached out to caress Myka's hand; she couldn't help herself, she needed to be reassured that she was awake and not having one of her nightmares. They always began happily enough, seeing Myka alive and more or less unharmed, for instance, but after that, they would devolve into evermore terrifying scenes until Helena awoke, crying or screaming. If this were a nightmare, Myka should be on the verge of bursting into flames or disintegrating into a pile of ash, and Helena needed to know that the woman at the table with her wasn't ash. Grabbing Myka's hand, she was appalled at how could it was, and she instinctively began to rise from the table again, intent upon getting her a cup of tea.
Myka flexed her hand, loosening Helena's grip. "I don't want anything," she said. "I need you to sit."
So Helena sat, nervously rubbing the top of one foot with the other. She needed to put more wood into the stove, the kitchen was developing a chill. Or perhaps it was only the icy seriousness of Myka's face, and she did look very, very serious. Helena had never seen her look this serious before, but her seriousness held a peculiar tension. It was apparent in the hunching of her shoulders under the coat, in the constant, minute movement of her lips, and in the flatness of her gaze, which had never once left Helena, and finally Helena understood that Myka was very, very angry.
"How. . . how did you get here?" Helena asked, because one of them needed to start the conversation.
It was a silly question and stammered out, but Myka chose to answer it. "I rode a horse, Helena. I rode two horses. One to get to MacPherson's ranch and, then, when we found out you weren't there, one to get here."
"You shouldn't have ridden, not in your condition," Helena said automatically, and Myka rewarded her scolding with a flicker of a smile. Helena knew better than to take any comfort in it.
"Someone had to stop you, or try to stop you." Myka began to remove the coat. She winced as she eased it off her shoulders, and Helena made a motion as if to help her, but at Myka's glare, Helena stilled. "I'm tired of smelling like a barn," Myka said, draping the coat over the back of a neighboring chair. She folded the sleeves of her shirt, inspecting the material with great care as she rolled it back. Focused on tucking in the ends of the sleeves, she asked, "Would you have done it, if he had been there?"
Helena realized that she should take more time to consider the question, but that wouldn't be honest, and she wanted to be honest. "Yes, I would have shot him."
Myka nodded, as though she hadn't expected a different answer. "Do you know what would have happened to you if you had killed him?"
Helena wasn't quite being addressed as a child, but she had always resented sentences that began with "Do you know." Of course she knew. She said evenly, "I would have been arrested and eventually sent to prison."
This time, Myka swung her head from side to side. She looked up, and although the kitchen was as gray as the sky outside, Helena thought her eyes looked suspiciously bright. "Maybe in New York, but not out here. You would have been arrested, and Pete would have put you in his jail. But the town would be angry, and people would start talking. They don't like James MacPherson, but he's a man and a powerful one. You're a woman, but you don't act like any woman they know, so they like you even less. Some hothead would start shouting about not waiting for justice to be done and others would join him, and then all that would be between you and a lynch mob would be Pete."
Helena swallowed. "I know that the rules out here are different, but I am a woman."
Myka said flatly, "You're a whore, a whore who would have killed one of the town's leaders, and that's all that they would see."
Helena felt her cheeks flush. She had called herself and been called a whore so many times that she thought it had become as neutral a description as shopkeeper or rancher. But to hear Myka say it, in such a hard, cold way, she heard all the contempt that it carried, that it had always carried and that she had always turned upon herself. She had rarely felt its lash, perhaps because it had so many layers of self-disgust to penetrate, but she felt it now. "Then I would expect the town could feel comforted that it carried out the saying that the only good whore is a dead whore."
"Don't make light of this, Helena."
"Hanged or imprisoned, what would it matter?" She demanded. "I would never see the light of day again, in any event."
"It matters to me," Myka shot back. "If you're going to be stupid enough to try to kill him again, shoot him in the leg. I would rather visit you in prison than bring flowers to your grave."
She gave Helena a wry smile, and Helena tentatively smiled in return. "You may be visiting me there sooner than you think. I'm sure Sheriff Lattimer will be arriving to arrest me for trespassing and stealing and frightening old women and who knows what else. MacPherson will undoubtedly add to the list once he returns."
"Pete and I smoothed things over at the house. You'll be expected to pay for the damage you caused, but none of MacPherson's employees seem to like him very much, so they won't be telling him more than what they have to. There will be no arrests today."
Myka was still smiling, and the flatness had left her eyes, but Helena could still see the tension in her shoulders and those red, chapped fingers were moving around aimlessly on the table. "And what about the old woman I nearly shot?" She asked lightly. "I doubt that she's forgiven me."
"Pete gave her the cash he had on him. It seemed to quiet her down."
"I'm rather in his debt, it appears," Helena said. "When we thought you were dead, I. . . blamed him."
Myka's fingers moved more quickly on the table, and she looked away from Helena. "He didn't think I should ride on to Sweetwater, but I needed to know that you were safe. He said to tell you not to feel bad about what happened, that he knew firsthand what grief could do to someone."
"It's not something I care to experience again, seeing Claudia's workshop explode and believing that you were in it," Helena said softly.
"Like I felt when I couldn't find you in Claudia's house and saw the rifle missing from the rack," Myka responded, and the hardness was back in her voice.
Helena reacted to the tone, not to the words. "Nothing like at all," she corrected sharply. "I thought you were dead."
"I thought you were as good as dead." The rejoinder was just as quick, just as sharp.
"Oh, that's right," Helena said waspishly. "You had visions of the town whore swinging from a tree branch. As you can see, I'm quite all right but still a whore, I'm afraid." She needed to stop talking, right now. She wasn't even angry, she was . . . she didn't know what she felt. Rattled, shaken, by the fire, by believing that Myka was dead and then discovering that she wasn't, by wanting to kill MacPherson and then actually riding to his ranch to kill him, but most of all by the one little thing among all those more significant ones, Myka calling her a whore. You couldn't love a whore, want her, yes, but not love her, and maybe Myka had realized that in the weeks Helena had been gone. "Don't worry, I won't hold you to what you told me when we were in the pond. It was the heat, darling, and, frankly, perhaps a little inexperience on your part."
Myka scrubbed furiously at the table. Eventually she stopped and pushed back her chair. She stood up with care and reached for the coat. "I'm going to go home. It's been a long, very upsetting day for both of us." She stiffly walked toward the door.
Helena followed her, although she knew the wiser course of action was to have remained at the table. "You asked me at the spring how many lovers I had brought there, do you remember? Do you want to know, Myka, how many people I've been with? It would probably take the better part of the day to tell you, and those would be the ones whose names I remember."
Myka bowed her head against the doorframe, the door already partially open. Without moving it from the frame, Myka turned her head just enough so that she could look at Helena. "Who else would run a brothel, Helena? I may be inexperienced, but I'm not naïve. And it doesn't matter to me, what you used to do or how many you did it with. What matters to me is what you do now, how you feel now." More fiercely, she said, "I don't want to take back anything that I've told you. I thought I had lost you earlier tonight, do you understand? You were doing something impulsive and wrong-headed, and for all I knew MacPherson would be there and have his own gun and kill you first. And then I come here, after falling off the horse at least three times on the way, and I see you, in your nightgown, drinking tea as if nothing has happened." Myka had stepped away from the door and her head was up and Helena could almost count the nicks and scratches in her face. Her eyes were red-rimmed with exhaustion, but the pale green of her irises seemed lit from within by her intensity. "You're safe and MacPherson's not dead and I didn't lose you, but I wanted to strangle you. Just strangle you," she repeated. But she faltered midway through, as if she wasn't sure strangling was really what she had in mind.
It wasn't strangling that Myka had in mind. The part of Helena that had learned to recognize and then heighten someone else's desire knew that, probably would have known it sooner if the rest of her, the rest that she walled off when she was alone with a client, her own needs and emotions, such as they were, and, when she was around Myka, all the ridiculously tender things she wanted to say, hadn't obscured its cool practicality. But that part still had enough force to prompt her to say into Myka's tired, puzzled face, "So strangle me."
And then that part was lost, lost as Myka pushed her back farther into the kitchen, stumbling into her at the same time as she stopped to pull Helena, not gently, to her, irretrievably lost as Myka's lips closed roughly, awkwardly on her own and as she strained up to wrap a hand around Myka's neck to crush Myka's mouth harder against hers. She knew what would come next, all the possible variants, but she heard herself cry out in surprise as Myka, who had been fumbling one-handed with the collar of her nightgown, leaned away from her to bring both hands up and rip the collar open. Myka paused, at Helena's cry and at the sight of the torn nightgown, and Helena, in the space of those few seconds, wished this were happening differently, not for her own sake but for Myka's. The blanket at the spring, which had smelled a little too strongly of horses, would have been better than the kitchen, which had nothing of even the romance of cooking about it to Helena's mind, and for another second, Helena thought about stopping them, if only to suggest they leave the kitchen. That was what she would have done if someone had been paying her, that was what she would have done if she had been with Monika because, really, there was going to be no comfort in being intimate in the kitchen. But as Myka bent her head to nip, not gently, at Helena's neck and as her hand continued to tug at the torn collar, tearing it further, something that was heavy and light at once seemed to rise within Helena, rising so fast she thought it might take the top of her head with it, and she could hardly catch her breath for wanting to press Myka ever closer, and neither comfort nor romance seemed very important.
They had been shuffling around the kitchen until Myka blindly backed her up against a wall, and Helena pulled up her nightgown, rucking the material around her hips. "Please, dear God, Myka, please." She was begging, just as she knew she would when Myka had first touched her hands, working the printer's ointment into her skin. Begging was undignified and showed a lack of control and it was the one thing she had never been able to pull off very well when she had been paid to beg and whine and plead. She hadn't been able to keep a thread of laughter from her voice because it was absurd to want something so transitory so desperately. Yet now she was begging and there was nothing comical about it because if Myka didn't touch her soon Helena would strangle her, she really would. As if sensing Helena's thoughts or perhaps just wanting to play with her, which Helena would be able to respect when she was calmer, Myka drew back, eyes searching Helena's face. But Myka wasn't trying to tease her, her expression a reflection of what Helena knew was her own, desire and frustration and confusion. "I want," she began hesitantly. More strongly, she said, "I want –"
"Yes," Helena hissed, thrusting her hips up and forward, and with more energy than grace, although Helena found even the rough, misplaced poking arousing, Myka found her way in, and Helena cried out again. It shouldn't have felt this intense, this new, but it did, and Helena couldn't stop from crying out. She had been taken against walls and doors and, more than a few times, against the backs of theater boxes, and it was always awkward and usually, blessedly, quick, and sometimes depending on her position and the man's, she would be able to see over his shoulder and she would count the flowers on the wallpaper until he was done. It was still awkward, more so because Myka was having to hold her up, but Helena wasn't trying to look at the wallpaper, couldn't focus enough to look at the wallpaper, she could come like this, which was a revelation in itself, but she didn't want to come like this, when all she could feel of Myka was the smooth finish of her shirt and the rough weave of her trousers, and just the thought that Myka was taking her wearing a man's shirt and trousers was enough to make her cry out louder. Jesus. "Not here," she gasped.
After a clumsy disentanglement, with Myka groaning more from pain as Helena clutched her back to prevent herself from falling to the floor, they trip-stumbled to the table, Helena losing the rest of her nightgown but not really losing it because Myka had simply torn it away from her with a snarl. A snarl that had propelled Helena into tearing at Myka's shirt, with strange little whines and yelps of frustration that Helena hadn't known she could make. Before she pushed her back onto the table, Myka had found her coat and spread it on the top, and as Helena breathed in the scent of hay and cattle and noticed that the back door was half-open allowing anyone coming up to the kitchen a full view of what was happening, she realized that she didn't care that she had started begging again or that she was rocking her hips with a wildness that the former Helena Wells, the one who had existed before Myka stormed into her kitchen, wouldn't have believed possible.
As Myka leaned above her, the green eyes bright and wide with desire, she said with all the confidence she had lacked before, "I want you."
And all of the parts of Helena were in synchrony now and she had no doubt that she was fully present, with Myka, in this room, and she said, "So take me." Not ungently, Myka thrust into her, and Helena didn't know how much of Myka was in her, only that she could take more, and she begged and pleaded, unashamed, for more, and Myka, her own breathing ragged and uneven, moved harder, faster, farther, and Helena dug her fingers into her, feeling Myka's skin, warm and pliable and ever so alive, and Myka groaned and that . . . bubble, Helena didn't know what else to call it, but heavy, as though the bubble was weighted, began to expand in her chest, making her arch higher. Her cries were higher too and prolonged, as if the bubble was pushing them out before she was quite ready, and the rhythm that she and Myka had established became rougher and more uneven and she tugged at Myka as if she wanted to envelope her whole, which she thought might be able to do because she had never been this wet this long for anyone. The bubble was pressing up against her lungs and her cry was so thin and high she felt it slicing through her, through the bubble, and all the parts of her that had been in such marvelous synchronization before fell away from each other, speeding outward, and she sensed that this must be what it felt like to explode or shatter or break, before she issued one more cry, soft and surprised, in acknowledgment that it hadn't been so terrifying, the breaking. She might be in fragments, but the world around her was whole. The kitchen was all of one piece, amazingly enough, and Myka stretched out on the table beside her, half-undressed, with the dreamiest of expressions on her face. Helena closed her eyes and groped for Myka's hand. It was warm and slightly sticky, and it squeezed back. Helena placed it between her breasts. She could hear Myka shifting, rolling onto her side to lay her palm flat on Helena's chest. "You love me," she said, and Helena could hear the smile in Myka's voice. Helena said nothing, letting the quiet, regular beating of her heart answer for her.