Autumn Lover Read online

  ELIZABETH LOWELL

  Autumn Lover

  for Mike Greenstein

  he knows why

  thanks

  Contents

  Dear Reader

  1

  “I hear you need a ramrod who can handle a…

  2

  For an instant Elyssa had the distinct feeling that Hunter…

  3

  Elyssa was jerked to a stop. Instinctively she threw out…

  4

  Well before dawn of the next day, Elyssa was up…

  5

  Hunter handled a manure rake the same way he did…

  6

  Elyssa’s first thought was that her shotgun was in the…

  7

  Leopard and Bugle Boy walked side by side along the…

  8

  Ruddy beastly fly,” Elyssa muttered.

  9

  With a sigh and a discreet knuckling of her tired…

  10

  With a startled sound, Elyssa spun around. In the moonlight…

  11

  For several days Hunter avoided being alone with Elyssa. She…

  12

  Hunter woke up as he had so often during the…

  13

  Freshly picked vegetables were heaped in baskets, kettles, bins, and…

  14

  As the rangy mare thundered across the landscape, Elyssa was…

  15

  Holding her breath, Elyssa crept down the staircase. She prayed…

  16

  That night, long after everyone was asleep, a stair creaked…

  17

  Hunter doesn’t trust me,” Elyssa said starkly.

  18

  Elyssa opened her lips to speak, only to discover that…

  19

  With outward composure Elyssa pulled on work clothing she hadn’t…

  20

  Broodingly Hunter stood in the doorway and watched while Elyssa…

  21

  “I have to show you something,” Hunter said.

  22

  Elyssa wished she could still the shakiness in her body…

  23

  By the time Hunter and Elyssa finally left the twilight…

  24

  I see fire,” Case yelled.

  25

  Elyssa stood near the rifle slit, peering out into the…

  Epilogue

  Hunter and Elyssa stood next to Case in front of…

  About the Author

  Other Books by Elizabeth Lowell

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Dear Reader,

  The Ruby Mountains of Nevada have always intrigued me. They are an isolated oasis in the vast western desert. Little has been written about the area, for it was off the track of westward migration in the nineteenth (and twentieth) century. Even with their abundant water, the mountains weren’t a magnet for settlers.

  The few people who were drawn to the vast silence of the Ruby Mountains were attracted by the desolate splendor of the land. Some of those people were outlaws. Others were hermits or prospectors. Still others were people with a dream. They saw in the springs and creeks of the mountains enough water to build ranches in the midst of wilderness.

  Once I saw the Ruby Mountains and the amazing Ruby Marsh, I knew I would have to write about the land and the kind of men and women who built a dream that has endured until today.

  Autumn Lover is my celebration of a unique place, and of a man and a woman who were strong enough to love. The characters are my own creation, but the land is as real as love itself.

  1

  Nevada

  Autumn 1868

  “I hear you need a ramrod who can handle a gun.”

  The voice out of the darkness startled Elyssa Sutton. She hoped her face didn’t show the lightning stroke of fear that went through her.

  The stranger had come out of nowhere, without warning, soundless as a shadow.

  She looked toward the man who stood at the edge of the ranch house porch. He was a dark silhouette just beyond the golden lantern light pouring through the windows. Beneath the brim of his hat, his eyes were like clear black crystal, as emotionless as his expression.

  A winter storm would look warm by comparison to this man’s eyes, Elyssa thought uneasily, biting her lower lip.

  On the heels of that thought came another.

  Yet he’s compelling, in a dangerous kind of way. Almost handsome.

  Next to him other men would seem like boys.

  Elyssa frowned. She had never particularly noticed men. They were simply wastrel sons of titled Britons, or sailors, or soldiers, or cowhands or wranglers or cooks.

  Or raiders.

  In the months since Elyssa had returned to America against her uncle’s wishes, she had encountered more than a few renegade white men. The Ladder S was a remote ranch in the Ruby Mountains. It drew prospectors, Spanish treasure hunters, wagon trains of hopeful settlers on the way to Oregon—and the renegades who preyed on all of them.

  The Culpeppers were the worst of a bad lot of raiders.

  If anyone can stand up to the Culpepper gang, this man might, Elyssa thought wryly. Question is, who gets rid of the ramrod after he gets rid of the Culpeppers?

  “Miss Sutton?” the stranger asked, his voice deep.

  When he spoke, he stepped into the lantern light, as though he sensed her unease at not being able to see him clearly.

  “I’m thinking,” she said.

  Elyssa let the silence grow while she openly studied the stranger. She wondered if she dared accept the challenge he presented.

  The thought made Elyssa’s mouth go dry. She licked her lips and took a deep breath. Then she concentrated on the man who had appeared out of darkness, instead of wondering at her own reckless impulse to meet this man on his own dangerous ground.

  A thick, straight, dark mane of hair came down to the stranger’s collar. His face looked tanned, with vague squint lines around the eyes and a neat, dark mustache above a well-formed mouth.

  His black pants and jacket were clean, tailor-made, and had seen hard use. It was the same for his pale gray shirt, which was clean and rather worn. The shirt fit well to the masculine wedge of wide shoulders and narrow waist. A faded black bandanna was tied loosely around his throat.

  Behind the stranger a horse stamped and blew softly through its nostrils. Without looking away from Elyssa, the man reached back and stroked the animal’s neck with long, soothing motions of his gloved hand.

  His left hand. His right hand—which had no glove—stayed where it had been, near the six-gun he was wearing at his side. Like his clothes, the stranger’s gun was both worn and clean.

  And like the man himself, the weapon had an aura of harsh use about it.

  Yet for all the stranger’s hard eyes and dark presence, Elyssa noted that he handled his horse gently. She approved of that. Too many men in the West treated animals as though they felt no pain from spur or lash.

  Like Mickey. If I didn’t need every hand, I’d send that swaggering fool packing, even though Mac thought the world of him. But I do need every hand.

  Now more than ever.

  The stranger’s horse shifted, bringing the saddle within reach of lantern light. There was a rifle in a scabbard, and what looked like a shotgun in another scabbard on the far side of the saddle.

  There was no silver on the guns or saddle, no fancy trimmings, nothing that would catch and reflect sunlight, revealing the man’s presence.

  What looked like a Confederate officer’s greatcoat was tied behind the saddle on top of a bedroll. Whatever rank the stranger might have held had been stripped away from the greatcoat as ruthlessly as the saddle had been purged of shiny decora
tions.

  The horse itself was a big, rangy, powerful blood-bay stallion that would have cost three years’ wages for the average cowhand.

  But then, the stranger obviously was no average cow-hand. He was waiting for her response with the indrawn stillness of a predator at a water hole.

  Such stillness was unnerving, especially for someone whose spirit was as impulsive as Elyssa’s.

  “Do you have a name?” she asked abruptly.

  “Hunter.”

  “Hunter,” Elyssa repeated slowly, as though testing the sound on her tongue. “Is that your name or your profession?”

  “Does it matter?”

  She closed her lips against the retort that was on the edge of her tongue. She had been told often enough that she was like her dead mother, impulsive and intelligent in equal and sometimes conflicting parts.

  This man’s deep stillness brought out in Elyssa a reckless desire to pry beneath his composed surface to the heat and seething life of him.

  But life had taught Elyssa that recklessness could be very costly.

  Warily Elyssa measured the cool reserve in Hunter’s eyes. A deeply feminine part of her wondered where he had been and what had happened to take from his soul all but ice and distance…and an echo of pain that cut her like a razor.

  Why should I care about this man’s past? Elyssa asked herself fiercely. He evaded whichever Culpepper was on guard out in the pass, and that’s more than Mac with all his hunting skills managed to do.

  That’s all I should care about. Hunter’s skill.

  Yet it wasn’t all Elyssa was concerned about, and she was too intelligent not to know it. This man drew her as no other ever had.

  Nervously she licked her lips and took another deep breath.

  I should tell him to leave.

  “Do you want the job?” Elyssa asked, before common sense could make her change her mind.

  Black eyebrows rose in twin, oddly elegant arcs.

  “That fast?” Hunter asked. “No questions about my qualifications?”

  “You have the only qualifications that matter.”

  “Guns?” Hunter asked sardonically.

  “Brains,” she retorted.

  Hunter simply looked at her, waiting silently for a better explanation.

  “I didn’t hear shots,” Elyssa said, “so you got past whichever Culpepper was sitting at the opening to the valley or in the pass itself, all set to empty saddles.”

  Hunter shrugged, neither confirming nor denying Elyssa’s words.

  “How did you sneak by the dogs?” she asked.

  As she spoke, she looked around for the black-and-white border collies that usually were the first warning of any strangers near the ranch house.

  “I came in downwind of them,” Hunter said.

  “You were lucky.”

  “Was I? The wind has been blowing down out of the canyon behind the house for days.”

  Silently Elyssa conceded that Hunter was right. The autumn wind had been usually steady. For the past week it had flowed down the many canyons of the Ruby Mountains in a cool rush that smelled of piñon and rocky heights.

  Then she realized that Hunter was watching her as closely as she was watching him.

  “What makes you think I’m not a member of the Culpepper gang?” he asked calmly.

  “Too clean.”

  The corners of Hunter’s eyes tilted slightly, heightening the faint lines.

  Elyssa had a feeling that was as close as this man came to a smile, so she smiled in return.

  Although Elyssa didn’t realize it, the smile transformed her. It gave an animation to her face that was startling.

  Whereas before she had been a fairly pretty blond female with wide eyes and a pleasant voice, now Elyssa was a temptress with hair the color of moonlight, blue-green eyes radiant with sensual possibilities, and a body that set a man to thinking about what it would be like to get past all the buttons and muslin to the sultry flesh beneath.

  Abruptly Hunter looked away.

  “Missy, why don’t you tell me more about the job? Then I’ll decide if I want it.”

  His voice was clipped, almost rough. As he spoke, he snapped the reins between his fingers. It was the action of a man who wanted to be going about his business without further interruptions.

  Missy. As though I was a child, Elyssa thought.

  The word and the gesture rankled. It reminded Elyssa of her English cousins. They had been haughty and dismissive of the ill-born American girl who just happened to be a blood relative.

  But not the right kind of blood. Not all of it.

  In her cousins’ eyes her plainsman father had been little better than a savage.

  “I’m not a little miss,” Elyssa said, no longer smiling.

  Hunter shrugged.

  “You look real little from here,” he said.

  “You’ll sleep in the ranch house with us,” Elyssa said curtly.

  He nodded with absolute indifference.

  Elyssa wondered what Hunter would have done if she had told him that he would sleep in her bed. Then she looked at his remote, watchful eyes and doubted that anything she said would have changed his reaction.

  Little miss.

  The thought irritated Elyssa even more. It increased the reckless temptation to bait Hunter into something other than male aloofness.

  She had gotten rather good at that kind of baiting during her years in England. It had been her revenge for being treated as little more than a downstairs maid with a come-hither smile.

  “For your information, Hunter,” Elyssa said distinctly, “I’m no more a little girl than you’re a little boy. I’m twenty.”

  “You look more like fifteen.”

  “The last foreman I hired was shot to death in the bunkhouse three weeks ago,” Elyssa added gently.

  Hunter showed no reaction.

  “That’s when Mac went for help,” Elyssa said.

  “Did he get any?”

  “We heard a lot of shots. Mac didn’t come back, but his horse did. There was blood on the saddle. Still want the job?”

  Hunter nodded as though the fate of other men had nothing to do with him.

  “I take back what I said about brains,” Elyssa said.

  Hunter gave her a cool black glance.

  “The house might not be any safer for you than the bunkhouse was for the last ramrod,” she said, speaking slowly, as though to an idiot.

  “I understand.”

  “Do you? You don’t look like a man expecting to die.”

  “I’m not.”

  Belatedly the border collies caught a strange scent and started barking. Three of the dogs dashed up from behind the house. Two others raced out from the dark ribbon of willows along the creek beyond the barn.

  “Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, hush!” Elyssa commanded. “Comet and Donner, that goes for you, too!”

  All five dogs stopped barking.

  Hunter looked at the rangy, long-haired, black-and-white animals seething around the two people.

  “They don’t look much like reindeer to me,” he said.

  “What? Oh.” Elyssa smiled, remembering. “A few years ago, there was a litter born just before Christmas.”

  “Where’s Dasher and Cupid?”

  “A hawk got Dasher when he was barely five weeks old. We already had a cat named Cupid, so we moved on to Vixen.”

  The dogs circled Hunter and his horse, sniffing. Then they looked at Elyssa. She waved her hand. The dogs trotted off in whatever direction they had come from.

  “They might bark at you a few more times,” Elyssa said, “but they won’t attack anything except four-legged predators. They’re cattle dogs, not guard dogs.”

  “From what I’ve heard, the dogs can’t have much cattle work left on the Ladder S,” Hunter said dryly.

  Elyssa didn’t argue. The raiders had been systematically stripping her ranch of livestock.

  In another month she would be bankrupt.

&
nbsp; Hunter is right, she thought unhappily. I need a ramrod who can handle a gun.

  “Do you have anything but meadow hay for my horse?” Hunter asked. “Bugle Boy has come a long way on grass.”

  “Of course. Follow me.”

  Elyssa stepped off the porch.

  “No need,” Hunter said. “I take directions well.”

  “Somehow I suspect you give directions a lot better than you take them.”

  Black eyebrows lifted again.

  “Are you always this sassy?” Hunter asked.

  “Of course,” Elyssa retorted. “Uncle Bill has called me Sassy since I was old enough to crawl onto his lap and tweak his beard.”

  Hunter watched while Elyssa stepped past him into the darkness. She paused to speak softly to his horse along the way. The clean, subtly female scent of her caressed Hunter’s nostrils, shortening his breath until he could barely force air into his lungs.

  Like sunlight on a meadow, Hunter thought hungrily. Clean and sweet and hot.

  Hot most of all.

  With narrowed black eyes, Hunter looked at the girl who was even now walking away from him.

  In the moonlight Elyssa’s hips swayed delicately against the fragile silk skirts of a dress that had been stylish in England two years ago. The layers of cloth lifted on even the smallest puff of wind, revealing the pale glow of stockings beneath.

  Hunter forced himself to breathe deeply despite the vital tightening of his body at the sight of her slender calves caressed by delicate cloth and moonlight.

  Cool off, soldier, he told himself curtly. She’s just another empty young flirt, like Belinda. All big eyes and girlish sighs and a soft pink tongue sliding along her full lower lip.

  I should have known better than to take the bait the first time Belinda offered it, but I didn’t.

  I damn well know better now.

  And it was my kids who paid the price of my learning.