Honor and Desire (Gold Sky #3) - Rebel Carter Page 0,43
Yes, honey, there was never any world where we got to stay the same.” He reached out, touching the cuff of the new lace button up she wore and smiled, “Can’t say that I’m sorry about it.”
“You aren’t?” She asked, confused by his words.
August shook his head. “‘Course not, Seylah. This way I get to keep you with me forever. This way, I get to be your man.”
“My man?” His words made this real, struck her in a way that she hadn’t let herself consider seriously, for fear that she might get too caught up in her daydreams when what was possible was so far removed from what August had just dropped on her.
Her man.
August nodded and set down the notebook he was carrying on top of her desk. “That’s what I aim to be. There hasn’t been a day between us that I haven’t been yours, Seylah. Now is when I make you see it.”
If Seylah had half a mind, or even possession of her arms and limbs to move, she would have flailed, but seeing as she was struck dumb, she did nothing and remained sitting.
“Oh,” she managed with a slight nod. Blessedly the door opened, saving her from doing or saying anything else that might result in her finding the motor skills required for a good and proper flail. They both turned to see Will enter the room wearing a look of annoyance.
“If those damned farmers that moved up the pass think I’m going to play servant to them, then they got another thing coming,” he announced to the room. “If either of you get a telegram from them, you burn it, y’hear?”
Seylah nodded at her father. “Right in the fire, daddy,” she swore, crossing her heart. The older man smiled at his daughter, the expression instantly making him look years younger.
Will nodded in her direction. “That’s my girl.” He turned to August and pointed at him. “Same goes for you, ignore those ranchers, or else.”
August held up his hands in deference to Will. “I won’t even so much as look at them on the street, but what’s got you riled?”
“They’ve been cordoning off land that isn’t theirs to begin with. Think just because they are up that way they own the whole pass. I’ve already told them that’s not how homesteading works. There are rules in place for a reason,” Will crossed the room to his desk and opened a drawer with a jerk of his hand, removing a firearm Seylah hadn’t seen for quite some time—a Colt .44 revolver her father had used during the war.
She raised an eyebrow. “Daddy, why are you getting out your old .44?”
“Because I’m mad.”
She steepled her hands and leaned forward, elbows on her desk. “What are you planning on doing? Going up there and running the homesteaders out? I thought you told us to ignore them, burn their messages?”
He scowled and looked down at the gun for a moment before he holstered and continued on rifling through his desk. Seylah groaned when she saw him pull the paper cartridges necessary to fire the gun. Her father’s bringing out the Colt was by no means for nostalgia’s sake. The man was intending to fire it.
“I’m not going to run them out…”
“Daddy. What are you going to do with that gun? Please be honest, because I can’t have August running himself ragged while Papa and the other deputies are trying to hold you back. We all remember what happened the last time newcomers caused a fuss.”
It was a not so well kept secret that William Barnes had single handedly sent more than one homesteader group packing from the area after they had, in her father’s words, “caused more trouble than they were worth” and that the “U.S. government couldn’t pay me to take them on, and besides the government still owes me wages from the war, they don’t want me going down there myself or I’ll get every last dollar. They won’t challenge me if I say the homesteaders are out.”
Coming to Montana was a dream for many, but it was known that the land around Gold Sky was a tad harder to get settled in on account of the locals who did things their own way. Seylah wondered if officials, or worse, U.S. Marshals would ever come to bring her fathers into line, but so far it seemed as though the government was inclined to allow her fathers leeway over who stayed and who went from the area. It still