Deborah Camp (9 page)

“That’s nice,” Blade said, confused. Perhaps this sort of thing was acceptable in Baltimore, but in Crossroads, making poetry wasn’t the same thing as making a living.

She whipped her head around to glare at him.
“So you condone my grandparents’ behavior toward my father and his children, do you?”

“Condone …” He shook his head, unfamiliar with the word.

“You think it’s perfectly all right?” she elaborated.

“No. I was only saying that your grandparents might have thought he should support his family and not allow them to do it. A man is often measured by his pride.”

Elise opened her mouth to speak, seemed to think better of it and faced front again, her arms folded tightly against her body.

“I don’t mean to offend,” Blade ventured. “Your mother’s husband was a good father, and being loved and respected by his children is worth a lot.”

As her expression softened, so did his heart. Her smile was faint, but her body relaxed. She unfolded her arms and nestled her hands in her lap. Blade released a long breath, relieved to be back in her good graces.

“Yes, he was well loved by all of us.” Her voice sounded musical to him, like plucked harp strings, sweet and angelic. “And he loved us with all his heart. Why, there was nothing he wouldn’t do for us. Nothing.” She swallowed hard, and Blade knew she was near tears.

“You decided to come here instead of staying in Baltimore,” he said, guiding her away from memories of her father. “Why didn’t you accept one of the marriage proposals?”

“Oh, those,” she said, her tone harsh. “Those proposals and the men who posed them disappeared after my parents died and it became known that the Wellbys had disowned us. I was no longer
considered good marriage material. Society scorned us. We were outcasts.”

Outcasts
. He nodded with empathy. He’d felt like the odd man out most of his life. He’d left the Apache while still a boy, but had found no comfortable place for himself among his white relatives. By the time he’d decided he’d like to go back to the Apache, it was too late. His people had been rousted from their land and herded to a reservation. The life Blade had known with his tribe was gone—gone forever.

Only out in his fields, out on the land given to him by his white mother’s people, did he feel rooted, centered.

“We had a lovely house in Baltimore.” Elise tipped her head back and began to rock, slowly, peacefully, as memories wafted through her; memories that made her expression dreamy. “I had my own room, next to Penny’s. Adam was down the hall, closer to Mama and Papa’s big room. The two upstairs maids were not much older than I, but the downstairs maid and butler were ancient! Cook was a jolly old thing with a shiny black face and corkscrew hair. She called us lambs. ‘Skedaddle out of my kitchen, little lambs,’ she’d say.”

Elise’s voice drifted to a whisper and she closed her eyes. Blade found himself transfixed, struck by the perfection of her profile and the lush curl of her lashes. There wasn’t anything imperfect about her: not her mouth, her nose, her chin, her hair or her creamy complexion.

His gaze traveled from the enchantment of her face to the temptation of her body. Her breasts, round and high, were of average size for a body as petite as hers, and her waist was narrow. He remembered how his hands had spanned it, the tips
of his fingers touching. He found himself looking at her breasts again, wondering … were her nipples pink or light brown?

Something warm burst open in his stomach and flooded into his groin, giving life and strength to that part of him that had lain dormant for too long. He shifted his backside against the hard planks of the porch and let the sensation reign for a few more moments. It felt good and it felt right. He was a man in his prime. His marriage to Julia and her death had not changed that.

He forced his gaze away from Elise, feeling slightly ashamed but good all the same. What man wouldn’t experience a quickening when looking upon a woman as fine as Elise? The painted ladies at the Rusty Keg Saloon in town couldn’t hold a candle to her.

People would be talking. They’d be wondering why another nice-looking white woman was living out here with the half-breed Lonewolf. Damn, he couldn’t help but wonder the same thing himself!

“Do you want to bed down now?”

He jerked all over and heard the bones pop in his spine. His manhood pressed against his fly. She looked at him curiously, and he knew he wore the expression of a man caught with his pants around his ankles. What had she asked him? She hadn’t said
that
—he was dreaming, wool-gathering, putting words in her mouth.

“Do you?” she asked again.

“Do I what?”

“Want to go to bed?”

He couldn’t speak, couldn’t think.

“You don’t have to sleep in that tepee, you know.”

“I don’t?” He shook his head, denying his own
ears. Surely a woman like her wouldn’t offer to let him spill his seed into her without wanting something in return … or without screaming her lungs out.

“Of course you don’t. This is your house, and there is an extra bedroom in there where nobody sleeps. You used to sleep there, I take it, so you can sleep there again.”

Reality crashed down on him, and the first decent erection he’d experienced in months sagged.

“Did you sleep in the tepee before we arrived?”

“Yes.” He throbbed. He ached. Cold sweat dotted his forehead.

“But why?”

“I like it.” In fact, he had begun to hate it. The lodge had become too cramped, too lonely.

“I see.”

“You see what?” he challenged, his voice sharp after her unwitting refusal to bed him.

“I see that you don’t feel comfortable in the house, either because of us or because of your wife.”

He shrugged, unwilling to share the most personal parts of his life with her.

“I’ve often wondered what’s become of our house in Baltimore. It was sold, of course, and I can’t help but think how it must have changed with strangers in it. I don’t believe I’d be comfortable in it now. It would be too awful to go from room to room and face the memories.”

“That was Julia’s room,” he said, not meaning to speak aloud. Wishing he had kept a tight rein on his tongue, he averted his face and stared hard at the glittering horizon.

“Yes, it was her room, but it was your room, too. Your room together,” Elise said, her voice whispery
with understanding and sympathy. “As you told me, saying good-bye is hard. I suppose, in a way, it’s better that Mama and Papa were taken together. They loved each other so very much. They were inseparable. Was it like that with your wife?”

Pushing to his feet, he stretched and twisted from side to side to unkink his muscles, pointedly ignoring her question. She wouldn’t like his answer, he told himself.

“I’m sorry if I’m being too nosy.” She rocked, the toes of her lace-up shoes setting her in motion. “We’ve both suffered great losses and I just thought we might—”

“Did Airy show you how to cook breakfast?” he asked—no, demanded. He winced. Damn it all, he hadn’t meant to bite her head off!

She blinked, stopped rocking, and her back came away from the rocker’s support. “I … well, yes. I believe I can prepare something edible. If you’ll be good enough to awaken me in the morning, I’ll try my hand at it.”

“I’m not your upstairs maid.” Frustration gnawed at the edges of his self-restraint. “If you can’t get up by yourself, then never mind. I’ve been doing for myself a long time. I don’t need anything from you.” He gave her his back, his words ringing in his ears. An aching spread through his loins, branding him a liar. Why couldn’t he stop thinking about how her body had curved into his, so pliant, so perfect?

“Well, fine.”

He heard the chair creak behind him as she rocked, faster and faster.

“Forgive me my sad lacking in life,” she added.
“How have I survived all this time without being awakened by fowl?”

“I’m going to bed,” he announced, since there was no use trying to talk when his gut was in a knot and his loins burned with a persistent fire. Should be used to it by now, he thought. Sure wasn’t the first time he’d been consumed with a burning need, only to be hit with the cold splash of denial. Guess a man couldn’t ever get used to such a fate. It went against nature. After Julia’s death, he’d vowed never to mix with another fragile flower, and here he was, tending an orchid when he was a man better suited to dandelions.

“We’re going to have to find a way to get along, you know,” she called after him as he headed for his tepee. “It’s not good for Penny to be brought up amid hostility. I want to be your friend!”

He ducked inside the tepee and sprawled onto his pallet. Flinging an arm across his eyes, he cursed his fate, his inability to control his own urges, and her sky-blue eyes and rich auburn hair.

Friend
. He groaned and rolled onto his side. He didn’t want to be her damned friend.

S
he won’t last a month here, Blade thought as he trudged behind the plow the next day. Why, even her name didn’t belong in Crossroads. Elise St. John. So highfalutin. So out of place. Like his.

Blade put that similarity out of his mind. He didn’t need to be counting the things they had in common. He should focus on the hundreds of things they didn’t share.

A woman used to upstairs and downstairs maids, butlers and cooks had no business on a farm in Missouri. She’d never done a day’s work in her life. All she knew about were dances and high society, tea cakes and poetry.

“Poetry,” he said, spitting out the word.

Up ahead, Belle and Tom, his two other plow mules, faltered to a stop and skinned back their ears. Blade clucked his tongue to get them going again.

While he’d like to meet Elise’s grandparents and teach them a thing or two about charity, he could understand that they might have been disappointed in a son-in-law who’d been content to lounge on his backside and rhyme words while
they put bread on his table. But how could they lock out their grandchildren? They must have hearts of lead to be able to disown a sprite like Penny. He didn’t know much about the boy. In fact, he couldn’t recall what Adam looked like, having seen him only at the train station. Adam hadn’t received favor by being adopted by the judge. Judge Mott wasn’t an easy man to please.

As if his thoughts had acted as a summons, Blade caught sight of the judge’s fancy red buggy jostling along the road that shot through the middle of Blade’s land to the house. The older man pulled the buggy to a stop and waited for Blade to reach the end of the rows near the road.

Blade guided the team into a turn and set them on other straight furrows before he tugged on the lines.

“Good morning to you, Lonewolf,” the judge said, tipping his black, flat-crowned hat. “I see you’re making progress. That double plow cuts your time by half.”

Blade cocked one hip and removed his handkerchief from his back pocket. He mopped sweat off his face and neck. “I’ll be ready to plant when it’s time. You need something?” He didn’t waste pleasantries, since the judge never came around unless he had a reason.

Judge Mott grinned and his black eyebrows jumped higher on his forehead. “Heard you took yourself a wife. Some say you plucked her right off the orphan train along with that little girl you and Julia ordered up.”

“I married again.” Blade shoved his hat back to push the shadow off his face. He wanted the judge to see that he was serious and wouldn’t take kindly to any smart-alecky remarks. “She’s the sister of
the little one. That boy you adopted is their brother.”

The black eyebrows lowered menacingly. “So it’s true. He told me his sisters were living around here somewhere. Hope that doesn’t cause problems for us.” He popped his buggy whip again and again, making it sing. The powerful black gelding hitched to the buggy quivered like an animal familiar with the vicious kiss of the whip.

Blade’s gut knotted as it always did when he had to talk to his neighbor about delicate matters, and he cursed the day he’d become indebted to Judge Lloyd Mott. He’d shaken hands with the devil when he’d borrowed money from the judge and put up his land as collateral.

“So your wife is white. Just like Julia.” Judge Mott chuckled and the whip sang out, slicing the air. “You attract white women like a magnet, Lonewolf. Did you have to buy her like you bought her sister, or did she come along just to keep close to her kin?”

“I didn’t buy her, and I didn’t buy her sister. I paid for the train ticket and for the care the Society had given her, same as you did.”

“That’s right, except I had the money to do it.” The judge’s gaze slipped to Blade like oil across water. “Does your bride satisfy you?” He looked down the road toward the log cabin. “I’d like to meet her. In fact, I’ve brought a welcoming gift.” He held up two jars. “Harriet’s pickled pigs’ feet.”

Blade’s throat flexed and it was all he could do not to make a disagreeable face. “She’s not here. She’s at Airy’s.”

It was a lie. A bold-faced lie. But everything in him resisted a meeting of the judge and Elise, especially if he couldn’t be there to protect her. Not
that the older man would do anything vile. Judge Mott had a way of saying one thing while his expression said something entirely different, usually something odious.

“What’s she doing there?” Mott set the jars down in the buggy again.

“Woman things, I guess.”

“Better keep her on a short leash for a while. I wouldn’t let Harriet spend any time with Airy Peppers. It’s not proper for her and her cousin to be making moonshine in the woods. If I was the law around here now, I’d smash that still and put those two old birds out of business.”

“They aren’t the only ones making whiskey around here.”

“They’re the only
women
making it,” the judge asserted, squinting one black, fathomless eye. “Brewing whiskey isn’t seemly for women. If men allow women to indulge in such activities, our society will become depraved. Mark my words, Lonewolf: It’s a man’s obligation to keep women in line. Since Eve, they’ve been as conniving and cunning as the devil. It’s in their blood.” The buggy whip danced in his hand and sang its wicked tune.