Secret Surrender--Jarrett Family Sagas--Book Four Read online

  Secret Surrender

  Jarrett Family Sagas: Book Four

  Vivian Vaughan

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1994 by Jane Vaughan

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition June 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-856-9

  Also by Vivian Vaughan

  A Wish to Build a Dream On

  Storms Never Last

  Sweetheart of the Rodeo

  Branded

  No Place for a Lady

  Reluctant Enemies

  The Texas Star Trilogy

  Texas Gamble

  Texas Dawn

  Texas Gold

  Silver Creek Stories

  Heart’s Desire

  Texas Twilight

  Runaway Passion

  Sweet Texas Nights

  Jarrett Family Sagas

  Sweet Autumn Surrender

  Silver Surrender

  Sunrise Surrender

  Tremaynes of Apache Wells Series

  Chance of a Lifetime

  Catch a Wild Heart

  For Donna Vaughn

  A true friend for all seasons

  Chapter One

  East Texas, 1880

  It was a danged fool idea. Rubal Jarrett became more certain of that with every mile he traveled toward the little deep-forest town of Apple Springs. Even before leaving Orange, he had begun to suspect the journey would end, if not in disgrace, certainly in futility. A danged fool idea.

  Decisions hatched in drinking sessions generally were. As were decisions spawned from desperation—his desperation to see Molly Durant again; his family’s desperation to draw rein on his bellyachin’ about not being able to get her out of his system.

  “For Pete’s sake,” Uncle Baylor had groaned over his whiskey glass, “ride on back into them Piney Woods and take a gander at the gal. See if that one-night fling warped your memory.”

  “Dang it, Baylor. She’d likely run off screamin’ at the sight of me.”

  “There’s a way to find out,” replied Jubal, Rubal’s twin brother. “Take my job with L&M. Hell, you can smoke out timber thieves same as me. Headquarter at the Blake House in Apple Springs—”

  “Her mama likely wouldn’t even board me,” Rubal brooded.

  “Convince her,” Uncle Baylor argued. “You’re good at bullshittin’. Less, of course, you jes’ like to bellyache.”

  Never one to back off from a challenge, especially when his gut was full of tonsil varnish and his heart was broken, Rubal had agreed to head into the deep Piney Woods of East Texas in search of thieves who were wreaking havoc on the finances of Lutcher & Moore Timber Company. In the process he would see for himself if Molly Durant was as sweet and sensuous as he’d thought that hot summer night he spent in her arms.

  “Moonlight in the Pines,” that’s the song they were playing when he and Molly sneaked out of her mother’s boarding house toward the end of a Saturday night dance and headed for the barn, nothing but passion on their minds.

  Surrounded on all sides by dense woods, Apple Springs sat that night like a spotlighted stage prop in the middle of a darkened theater. The moon shone down on Molly’s black hair, as Rubal led her—or had she led him?—around the side of the grand old antebellum mansion to the barn at the rear of the property.

  They hadn’t discussed what they were doing. It just happened. Earlier in the evening someone had spiked the fruit punch with moonshine, and that probably had something to do with it.

  But definitely not everything. The moment Rubal and Baylor stepped into the lamplighted foyer of the Blake House, Molly’s sparkling blue eyes had found his and he was a goner. So he was headed back—fool idea or not.

  Reaching Apple Creek, which crossed the only road into town a mile or so south of Apple Springs, Rubal drew up in a clearing beside the ruddy stream. After watering Coyote, his three-year-old line-backed dun, Rubal washed his face in water so red, he half feared it might dye his skin. Without consciously acknowledging his attempt to spruce up, he stripped off his travel-grimed shirt and splashed water over his torso, then settled back against a liveoak to allow his skin time to air-dry. He chewed on a piece of cold salt pork and a hunk of cornbread, purchased that morning from an old man who ran a ramshackle hut he called a hotel in an out-of-the-way clearing in the longleaf forest. After the fare he’d been served since leaving Orange, Rubal’s mouth fairly watered for some of the Widow Blake’s chicken an’ dumplin’s. The very thought of those fluffy dumplin’s renewed memories sweeter than hard rock candy.

  Buttoning on a clean blue chambray shirt that reminded him of Molly’s eyes, he ran fingers through his brown hair, tightened the cinch on Coyote, and stepped into the saddle with more enthusiasm than he’d felt in a long time. Anticipation had been building inside him for days. By the time he rolled out of the rancid hay in that old barn this morning, he was hard-put to keep a grin off his face.

  A forest of towering loblollies, yellow pines, liveoaks, and other hardwoods banked the red-rutted wagon road he followed. Their branches met overhead in a continuous green canopy, which hugged the road like a vast tunnel. Skeins of honeysuckle and other vines matted the tree trunks, and here and there red trumpet flowers blazed among the various shades of green. Now and again a single majestic dogwood punctuated the scene; its white flowers sprouted from stately branches as though an offering to the gods.

  The heady fragrance of honeysuckle, pine leaves, and numerous plants Rubal couldn’t put a name to, combined with the humus in the muggy air to suffuse him with a poignancy he hadn’t experienced in at least a year. His body reacted in all the usual places, and a song erupted from his lips. Before he knew it, he was singing to the faraway branches, to the tiny dot of black at the end of the tunnel of green, to the clearing he had yet to reach. The clearing where the little community of Apple Springs had sprung up beside a sawmill on the Angelina River.

  “Love me in the moonlight,” he sang, “…in the moonlight in the pines.” He wasn’t sure of the words, but they seemed to fit the situation.

  Recognizing his giddy state for what it was, he was nevertheless unable to curb his enthusiasm. Visions of Molly Durant as he had last seen her plagued him—curly black hair tumbling about her pixy face, a couple of strands sticking to her damp cheeks and well-kissed lips, a few pieces of straw in her hair. But it was her eyes that had haunted Rubal this past year—sparkling blue eyes, sensuous and dreamy blue eyes.

  Blue eyes, beckoning him, entangling him, as his hands had tangled in her black curls. Blue eyes that had caused him to jump up and run. Run as fast as he could, away from the Blake House, away from Apple Springs, away from Molly Durant, from an animal-like fear of being ensnared, captured, tied in a knot of marriage and children and responsibilities that he figured any sane man would shy away from.

  But he hadn’t been able to outrun visions of Molly’s blue eyes. For a year now, they had haunted him. He couldn’t drown them in whiskey, drive them away with whores, or sweat them out on a long trail drive.

  For somewher
e along the way Molly’s blue eyes had ceased to be dreamy and had become accusing. Accusing him of running away, of taking her innocence and leaving her alone.

  He tried to console himself that she had been an eager participant in their lovemaking; he tried to assure himself that a girl as lovely as Molly had her share of suitors, even in an out-of-the-way place like Apple Springs; he tried to convince himself that she hadn’t sat home pining for him.

  But for some reason none of his arguments worked. His family teased him from the first. Finally, they lost patience with his insufferable bellyaching. Jubal tried to talk sense into him:

  “Hell, Rube, Uncle Baylor was there, too. Could have been him. Didn’t you say the punch was spiked with rot-gut? Why, any man there could have taken that girl to the barn. Baylor, you, anyone.”

  Somehow the idea of anyone else spiriting Molly off to the barn hadn’t sat too well with Rubal. Baylor Jarrett, least of all. As much as he loved his hell-raising uncle, Rubal couldn’t see Molly dancing the night away with him or any of those other heathens present. To this day, he got riled just thinking about her running off to the barn in the throes of passion with anyone other than himself.

  Which didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. What did he expect, her to remain a spinster the rest of her life? The very idea was ludicrous, given the fact that she was just about the prettiest girl he’d ever laid eyes on. Why, her spirited nature and uninhibited passion could drive a man wicked just thinking on them.

  Given his family’s penchant for funnin’ a feller, combined with his own nagging conscience and overtaxed libido, Rubal knew he’d been a sorry example of mankind the last year. Then Lutcher & Moore, the largest timber company in East Texas, hired his brother Jubal to head into the Piney Woods and round up some timber rustlers. L&M was experiencing a rash of timber thefts on land they owned up and down the Angelina, Sabine, and Neches rivers. In desperation, they turned to the Texas Rangers for help. Jubal, who had joined the Rangers after their older brother, Carson, dropped out to marry a pretty little filly from south of the border, took one look at the map Mr. Lutcher and Mr. Moore had drawn of their operations and decided this job would be the answer to Rubal’s problems.

  “Go back. Board at the Blake House. Bring that timber-theft gang to justice. By then you’ll know whether the flesh-and-blood Molly Durant is as desirable as that girl you can’t get out of your dreams.”

  Although Rubal tried to deny it, the idea was more than appealing. The only word he’d had about Molly in the last year came five months after he ran out on her. Uncle Baylor had occasion to pass through the Piney Woods, and the report he brought back relieved Rubal’s most worrisome fear at the time: that Molly had conceived his child that night in the barn.

  “Healthy and spunky as ever,” Uncle Baylor reported.

  “Healthy?”

  Uncle Baylor shifted his wad of tobacco from one cheek to the other, gathered a mouthful of spittle, then shot a stream of brown liquid to the side. “Skinny as a rail, same as before.” Uncle Baylor hee-hawed, and Rubal turned red. He hadn’t intended to divulge the exact nature of his and Molly’s tryst, but as Uncle Baylor suggested, “Would’ve had to be ignorant as a pine stump these last few months not to see what happened before you hightailed it out of Apple Springs, leaving me to eat your red dust.”

  So Molly wasn’t pregnant. Neither had she married, according to Uncle Baylor. But that was seven months ago. Anything could have happened in seven months.

  Rubal began to worry. The song died on his lips at the thought of riding up to the Blake House and seeing Molly with some backwoods husband, her belly swollen big as an East Texas watermelon. By the time he reached the edge of town, he considered turnin’ tail and runnin’.

  But he had already done that once. This time, if for no other reason than to prove to himself that he was man enough to do it, he intended to ride this critter to the finish—win, lose, or draw.

  The town hadn’t changed much in a year. One double-rutted red clay road, intersected by single roads here and there. The commercial side of the street rose to the east on a knoll of grassless red clay; to the west, the residential side sat on lower ground. Most of the businesses had a well-aged look to them. Their signs were faded, their fronts weathered. The smithy and livery stable in the first block didn’t even have a sign, but, of course, none was needed. Osborne’s Mercantile, and Crockett Butcher Shop shared a block and an extended boardwalk. The two newest buildings sat apart from the others, up a side street behind the Dew Drop Inn Saloon: the L&M Timber office and, next door to it, the Apple Springs Bank. Another block down, Rubal glimpsed the steeple of a white clapboard church, stark and welcoming against the backdrop of green pine.

  The west side of the nameless main street consisted of a row of pineboard houses. Neatly kept for the most part, each house had its own barking dog and solemn occupant, who stood on the front porch and stared, unabashed, at the stranger who rode down their street.

  To his right, merchants, called by the yelping dogs, stopped work to watch Rubal pass in front of their boardwalks. A few of the dogs broke with local custom and ran out to greet him with nips at his heels. Coyote warned them off with a swish of his black tail.

  Other than that, no one spoke or otherwise hailed him. Lack of a welcoming party didn’t come as a surprise. The isolation of Piney Woods towns gave folks the right to sit back and squint real hard at a stranger, any stranger. No one rode through Apple Springs. Anyone who came to town did so with a purpose. And until that purpose was known, local wisdom held it best to keep one’s distance.

  Understandable as their aloofness was, however, combined with the solitude of being completely surrounded by dense forest, as Rubal rode through town, he was beset by the uncomfortable feeling of having been dropped into a den of angry rattlers. His body tensed involuntarily against the unfounded, yet perceived, threat. He suddenly entertained the uneasy notion that everyone in this town recognized him for the love-’em-and-leave-’em scoundrel who had dallied with one of their maidens and left her, like a thief in the night. Preposterous as that was, it nevertheless added to Rubal’s growing hesitancy to face Molly after a year’s absence.

  Then he arrived, although at first sight, he didn’t recognize the Blake House. The once-grand old house sat at the far end of town, perched on the highest knoll for miles around. Rubal rode toward it, his anxiety building by degrees.

  It was a large house with two stories and pillars framing a deep porch on three sides. If memory served him, Molly’s grandfather built the house before the War Between the States. He seemed to recall her saying that the land the town was built on had been one of her grandfather’s cotton fields. The lack of slave labor after the war shrank the cotton market to the extent that folks could hardly make a living farming. Acres of cotton land in the Piney Woods had by now been reclaimed by the forests around them. In her final days, Molly’s grandmother had turned their spacious home into a boarding house. Her daughter, Molly’s mother, learned to clean house and cook. Molly had always known how to work.

  Drawing rein at the hitching rail, Rubal’s anxieties gave way to incredulity. Had he imagined the grandeur of the place? Or had the music, the liquor, and the passion in Molly’s eyes dimmed his to the state of general disrepair? He sat his horse, gaping at the signs of neglect: The house was in dire need of whitewashing; several shutters hung by single hinges; the front yard was overgrown with weeds and vines; half the top porch step was gone, and when the screen door burst open, it squawked so loudly Rubal jumped in his saddle.

  A tall man stomped out the door. About Rubal’s age and height, he was dressed for the city—to Rubal’s eyes, leastways—in black breeches, stiff-collared white shirt, and fancy waistcoat. A black jacket was slung over his shoulder. He carried a narrow-brimmed bowler that would do absolutely nothing to protect its wearer from the elements, which was what Rubal had always figured a man’s headgear was all about.

  A slight woman wearing faded gray ca
lico and a large white apron followed the angry man onto the porch. Rubal squinted, trying to decide whether the woman could be Molly. If so, she had taken to severely braiding her hair: tight black braids wrapped around the top of her head like a crown. Like the hair style of an old woman, he corrected. If this washerwoman was Molly Durant, Rubal figured his dreams had hog-tied his brain.

  The man skirted the broken step, calling over his shoulder. “You’re being bull-headed, Molly. There’s no sense in holding onto that timberland and you know it. It’s worthless.” Turning, he shook his hat at her. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll let L&M take it off your hands while they’re still willing to.”

  Molly clamped fists to her hips, accentuating her small waist. Rubal exhaled pent-up breath, relieved, albeit a joyless sort of relief. Molly might not be carrying this citified son-of-a-biscuit-eater’s child, but from the sound of things she could well be married to him. The discrepancy between the way the man was dressed and the run-down appearance of both Molly and the Blake House stupefied Rubal. Anger, as potent as rattlesnake venom, simmered in his gut.

  “I’m not selling, Cleatus,” Molly was shouting.

  Shouting, Rubal thought, when for a year her soft voice had whispered sensuously through his dreams.

  “That land is back-up,”—she was still shouting—“for my brothers—and for Lindy.”

  Rubal watched the man called Cleatus square his shoulders. The feller must have lowered his voice, because Rubal couldn’t hear his words. Molly’s response, however, came clear as a dinner bell. “You can tell Prudence Farrington to stay out of my business.”

  “My mother had your best interest at heart, Molly. Both of our best—”

  “Your best interest, maybe. Certainly not mine. Nor my brothers’ or sister’s.”

  “Humph!” Swiveling on a thin-soled boot, the man stomped down the packed-earth walkway, his mouth set in angry defiance, his straight brown hair flying to each side, until he clamped his bowler over it. He brushed past Rubal with only a glancing frown.