Prewitt must have sensed the same thing, for he looked around him wildly. “I wasn’t the only one! I had help driving them beeves.” He looked directly at Bob Blackwood, who was standing rigidly. “Bob was in on it as much as me.”
“It’s up to Lance,” Harlan replied.
Summer looked down at her wounded husband. She was certain he was conscious, but he kept his eyes closed and remained silent. Perhaps he was in too much pain to care, or too indifferent. Perhaps he merely hated them all.
She took a deep breath, making the decision for him. There were too many people involved in the plot against him to banish them all, at least without increasing the enmity and resentment the rest of the community felt toward him. In the long run, forgiveness would win Lance more converts than stark justice. “I think Lance would be satisfied if only Mr. Prewitt were gone.”
Blackwood looked visibly relieved, and Harlan nodded. “You sell your place, Will, and move on. I’ll give you a fair price if no one else will. Otherwise we take you to jail right now.”
Prewitt gave one last desperate glance at the others, then spun on his uninjured leg and limped over to his horse.
Summer pressed her lips together tightly as she watched him ride off. With only a leg wound and banishment, Prewitt had gotten off too lightly, but at least it was over. He wouldn’t hurt Lance anymore. It was over, except that Lance was still badly hurt.
Shaking herself, she glanced at Pedro. “He should have a doctor.”
She stepped back while they lifted Lance and put him in the back of the buckboard. Climbing in after him, Summer cradled his head in her lap and tucked the blanket around his bare shoulders.
It made her heart sink when he refused to look at her. Lance kept his eyes shut, not acknowledging her—or Harlan Fisk, who came to stand beside the buckboard, twisting his hat in his hand.
“We owe you an apology, son,” Harlan said quietly. “A mighty big one. I guess none of us deserves it, but if you could find it in your heart to forgive us…Well, I just want you to know I’m damned sorry.”
Reed answered for Lance, and Summer, as well. “If you really mean it, Harlan, you’ll make sure the whole state finds out that he’s innocent. And that there never was any danger of Comanches.”
“I’ll see to it,” Harlan replied solemnly.
Reed nodded at Dusty, who, with a backward glance at his passengers, snapped the reins and urged the team forward.
Summer put her arms around Lance, bracing him against the jolt and sway of the buckboard. She felt no response, not even the slightest softening. Lance lay stiff and silent in her embrace, his eyes closed, his lips pressed together in a grimace.
Summer closed her own eyes as dread curled around her heart. Perhaps his continued silence had little to do with physical pain. Perhaps he simply wanted nothing more to do with her—because she was one of the people he couldn’t forgive.
Chapter 25
The Round Rock doctor patched up Lance’s wounds and declared him lucky. The bullet had pierced his side but failed to hit any organs or ribs. The arm wound, too, could have been much worse, splintering bone instead of tearing only muscle. His other injuries, though no doubt hurting like hell, were superficial. Summer was allowed to take Lance home with only a warning to yell if there were complications.
She would have been relieved, except for his continued silence. Lance had a high tolerance for pain, she knew, but he hadn’t made a sound through all the jostling and jolting of the buckboard, or when the doctor had poked and prodded him or stitched him with a needle. Nor did he curse or rant or even mention the incident just past that had nearly cost him his life. He merely maintained a grim silence that none of the Westons dared breach, not even to ask forgiveness for the part they’d played in doubting him. Only Dusty was entirely blameless. His graveness seemed directed at Amelia, who sobbed softly from time to time.
Summer felt like weeping as well; tears would have been a welcome relief to the self-reproach that ate at her stomach like acid. But they wouldn’t come.
It was nearly two o’clock in the morning when they reached the ranch. Dusty and Reed helped Lance into the cabin and put him to bed, then took their leave. Summer, bone-weary and filled with growing dread, settled into the rocking chair with a blanket to be near if Lance called her in the night.
He didn’t.
She dozed fitfully now and then, and started awake to gaze wildly around her, finding solace at the sight of his poor, bruised face whose bronzed hue was mottled with shades of black and blue. Lance was home, with her, battered but safe.
He woke at midmorning, showing no signs of fever. He drank some soup that Summer warmed for him, but he didn’t speak to her, or even look at her, and he insisted on feeding himself.
Her heart ached hollowly at his distancing silence. His manner wasn’t hostile, or even cold, but it aroused a terror in her nearly as great as when she’d watched him struggle helplessly against a deadly, strangling rope. There was an air of defeat about him, a supreme indifference, as if he no longer cared what happened to him, or between them. As if he’d lost the will to fight, to continue his defiant battle against a hostile white world. As if he’d decided he couldn’t forgive her for not believing in him, for not trusting him.
Afraid to press the issue, Summer couldn’t find the nerve to disturb the silence. What Lance needed most now was sleep, healing rest. When he had recovered enough, then she would be forced to face the welling fear that had already woven knots in her stomach.
He had gone back to sleep when Reed stopped by to ask how he was faring. Summer put on a brave face, assuring her brother that Lance seemed to be recovering and that she would call if he took a turn for the worse. It was only when Reed was gone that the tension of the past few days finally got to her and she broke down for a bout of weeping. She felt somewhat better afterward, but only in the way numbness is preferable to pain. When Dusty called a short while later, she was able to force a smile and thank him profusely for the part he’d played in saving her husband’s life.
She was there when Lance woke again in late afternoon—and so was the wall he’d erected between them. When she offered to wash him, Lance clenched his jaw and refused her help with a terse shake of his head. He took the wet cloth from her and performed his own ablutions, and when he was done, he turned his head on the pillow to watch the window, shutting her out. He seemed so far away, so unreachable, so unutterably alone.
It was all Summer could do to keep the tremor out of her voice when she asked if he wanted something to eat. He refused that, too, and made no reply when she offered to bring him a glass of lemonade. Helplessly she turned away, escaping into the next room on the pretext of fixing him a drink, unable to bear his remoteness any longer.
While she was gone, Lance watched the shaft of late sunlight streaming in the window. The warm brilliance made mock of the bleakness in his heart; the dancing dust motes taunted him with their cheerful gaiety.