at least not when he was still making his money. He didn’t approve the spur because Reidsville needed it. There were plenty of boomtowns around that could have lasted longer if they’d had his rails. He recognized there was something here for him, and that’s how the partnership was formed.”
“Partnership,” Rachel said softly, more to herself than to her guest. She rose gracefully as water began to rumble in the kettle. “Tea, Sheriff? I have coffee if you prefer.”
“Tea’s fine, though I wouldn’t mind a spot of whiskey. I don’t suppose that you—”
“I have a bottle, but I’m surprised that you didn’t know that. You seem to know a great deal about my business.”
“Whiskey isn’t your business now, is it? I don’t ask myself what you buy from Rudy Martin when he takes delivery of liquor for his saloon.”
“It’s a wonder,” she said, turning her back on him. She found the routine of making the tea to be helpful in regaining her calm. Each tidbit he revealed set her teeth on edge, and she couldn’t say that she’d been very effective in hiding it from him. He must have wondered at the muscle jumping in her cheek as she clamped down hard on her jaw.
Wyatt watched Rachel’s efficiency as she made the tea. After the first few moments, she seemed to have forgotten him, and her slender, long-fingered hands moved briskly, not a motion wasted as she set out cups and saucers, measured, and poured. His eyes followed her as she made to leave the kitchen to get the whiskey bottle, and he was waiting for her when she returned from the dining room with it. She didn’t look at him until she was ready to pour the whiskey into his teacup, then she simply raised a questioning eyebrow.
He let her pour what his eyes told him was a full shot before he put out his hand to stop her; then she gave him pause by pouring an equal measure in her own cup.
“I don’t know why you’re looking at me like that,” she said. “If I buy the whiskey, I must intend to drink it, don’t you think? I imagine you know I don’t keep it around for visitors I don’t have.”
He knew it. Everyone did. “Molly Showalter comes by.”
“To work when I need her, not drink my liquor.” She sat down as he turned his chair completely around so that he faced the table instead of the stove. “She hasn’t said differently, has she?”
“Molly? No. She’s a quiet, serious girl. If she knows you sometimes drink alone, she’s not saying.”
Rachel’s mouth flattened. Wyatt Cooper made drinking alone sound pitiable, and she cringed from the notion that she was the object of anyone’s pity. “Go on with your story,” she said coolly. “You were going to tell me what the town had to offer Mr. Maddox.”
Wyatt lifted the delicate cup she’d given him in his palms and took a sip. Over the rim, he watched her drizzle honey into her tea, and when she put it aside, he drew it toward him and added some to his own cup. “Sweet tooth,” he said by way of explanation.
Rachel was not impervious to the half grin that changed the shape of his mouth and appeared briefly in his eyes. It made his simple admission a bit more like a confession, and therefore, made it intimate. She imagined he was used to drawing women in with that unaffected smile.
“Your story,” she repeated.
Wyatt was fairly certain that butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. She’d regained her considerable composure through the simple act of preparing tea, and she was full steam ahead now. “Maddox met with the miners.”
“That seems extraordinary, even for him.”
“Perhaps. I can only say that what he heard from the Reidsville miners made him decide to build a spur here.”
“What did they tell him?”
Wyatt shrugged. “That was better than twenty years ago, before the war, before the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific pounded their last spike in Utah. Benton and Frémont and others were still exploring and surveying the territory. The pathway west was trails, not rails, and I wasn’t there to hear what the early miners had to tell him. Very few people could envision the Atlantic and Pacific ever connected by a railroad.”
“Are you saying Mr. Maddox was one of the few?”
“Could be.” He took another swallow of tea. “Could be the miners were the visionaries.” Wyatt allowed Rachel to consider that. She appeared poised once more, unruffled. She held herself carefully, but not rigidly. The slender stem of her neck was no longer bowed under the weight of what troubled her. Her lips were parted a fraction, and the bottom one was slightly swollen where she had worried it. Her cheeks retained some of the pink that had infused them at her first blush, but her deep, coffee-colored eyes had not lost their veil of hurt, no matter how direct she kept her gaze. He wasn’t certain she was aware that tears washed her eyes from time to time, or that she blinked them back with a sweep of her long, sable lashes, seemingly without effort.
There was no hint of tears now. Curiosity had cleared them.
“When Maddox was ready to build his railroad in the West, he brought his line from California to Colorado by way of an alternate trail through the Rockies,” Wyatt told her. “He wasn’t beholding to the Central Pacific, and he used their same tactics to achieve his ends. Government grants, tracts of land at prices he couldn’t afford to pass on, and a cheap, mostly Chinese labor force, helped him become Central’s chief competitor, and once he reached Denver he hooked up with his own system of rails to the East. One standard gauge for all of his tracks and spurs. Only John MacKenzie Worth could boast of that back then.”
Rachel followed what he was telling her to its logical end. “So he built the spur to Reidsville to thank the miners.”
“You’re confusing Clinton Maddox with a generous man. He built the spur to secure the mining operation.”
Rachel blinked slowly, and her eyes were marginally wider when they opened. “He owns the mine?”
Wyatt wondered if he could believe that her astonishment was real. He would have bet dollars to doughnuts that she’d known it all along. “He’s a partner in it, or he was,” he amended. “He brought in the machinery needed to mine the deeper veins of ore after the placer gold and silver were gone.”
“I never knew,” she said quietly.
“Then maybe I was wrong to tell you, but I figured we needed to get past this pretense that you didn’t know Clinton Maddox.”
Rachel let that settle a moment before she spoke; then she asked the question that had been uppermost in her mind. “How is that you imagine I know him?”
“If I can speak plainly, until he sent you packing, you were his mistress.”
That revelation effectively knocked the wind out of her. She expelled a breath that whistled softly between her teeth. “Well, that’s something, isn’t it? Does everyone in town know?”
“If they do, they didn’t hear it from me. I’ve never heard it discussed.”
“Small mercies, I suppose. How do you know?”
“Mr. Maddox told me.”
“Told you?”
“Wrote
