Memory's Embrace (2 page)

“Come out of the rain,” she said practically.

A wry grin twisted the peddler’s mouth, and he turned and vaulted up to sit beside her in the doorway of the wagon. “What’s your name?” he asked, watching her.

Tess gaped at him, let her eyes slide down his long, muscular legs to his feet. He was wearing one boot, but his injured foot was still bare. “Tess Bishop,” she said, after some time. “How is your foot?”

He laughed and ran one hand down his face as if to brush away the rain. The gesture didn’t do much good, of course, for his hair was sodden. “Fine, Tess Bishop. My foot is just fine.”

“I tried to warn you, you know.”

“About what? Burning my foot?”

Tess shook her head and droplets of rain water flew. “About jumping into the stream. It looks shallow there, because the water is so clear, but it’s actually over seven feet deep.”

Another wry smile. “So I discovered. Does your family know that you’re out wandering around in the countryside, Miss Bishop? In the middle of a rainstorm, yet?”

Tess sat up a little straighter. She didn’t have a family, really—just Derora, her aunt. And while she
was certain to catch the devil, if not pneumonia, she couldn’t see where it was any of this man’s business. “Does yours?” she countered.

The peddler grinned. “Actually, my family doesn’t have any idea where I am.”

Tess was intrigued. It was odd, she thought, the way the rain shut out the rest of the world, made it seem as though only she and Mr. Shiloh existed, “But you do have a family?”

His blue eyes were distant, and, even though he wasn’t looking directly at Tess, she could see a shadow of pain flicker in their depths. “Yes. I have a family,” he said, after a very long and introspective silence.

“You’re estranged from them,” guessed Tess, shivering.

Powerful, rain-sodden shoulders moved in a shrug. “You could say that.”

“Tell me about them.”

He looked at her now, keenly, almost suspiciously. “You’re probably freezing to death. Let me get you a blanket.” With that, he turned and scrambled into the dark depths of the wagon, returning in a few moments with a heavy woolen wrap, which he draped around both of them.

Again, Tess experienced that sensation of sweet isolation; they were creatures of the mist, she imagined, living in a special universe hidden away behind a thundering waterfall. “Thank you,” she said, snuggling into the warmth of the blanket. But, suddenly, a giggle erupted from deep within her.

“What is it?” asked Joel Shiloh, arching one butternut eyebrow.

“My aunt would kill me,” she confessed, “if she knew I was sitting here in a wagon, wrapped in a blanket—”

“With a man,” finished Mr. Shiloh, grinning again.

“Tell me about your family,” Tess insisted, blushing a little.

“I have two older brothers, a younger sister, and a mother. My father died several years ago, in an accident.”

He had told her what she wanted to know, and yet he hadn’t told her anything, really. “Why are you estranged from them?”

The beard-stubbled jawline hardened just a little. “Why are you five miles from town in a rainstorm?” he countered, and his voice was brisk now.

Tess was injured by his tone, but she squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. “I’m a grown woman,” she pointed out.

He was smirking at her. Smirking! Tess clasped her hands together in her lap, beneath the folds of the blanket, to keep from slapping him right across the face.

“Well, I am!” she declared.

“Sixteen if you’re a day,” he teased.

“I am eighteen!” defended Tess, furiously.

The peddler put one hand to his chest and drew in a dramatic breath. “As old as that!”

Tess had learned to bear many things during her tumultuous life, but mockery was not among them. “I suppose you’re so very old and wise?” she taunted, chin out, color aching in her cheeks.

He said nothing for a long time; he just sat there,
swinging his feet, looking amused. When he did speak, he shocked Tess to the marrow of her bones. “Take your clothes off,” he suggested affably.

“I beg your pardon?” whispered Tess, every muscle in her body poised to leap from the bed of that wagon and take desperate flight.

“You shouldn’t be sitting there in that wet dress,” he said rationally. “I’ll get you something else to wear and you can—”

“I have no intention of disrobing!”

He bit his lower lip—probably to keep from laughing—and although Tess was annoyed and still ready to run for her life and her virtue, she did not move. Could not move.

“Do you imagine that I plan to accost you?” Joel Shiloh asked, finally.

“You could. After all, you’re not sane.”

He gave a startling shout of laughter and then looked at her with those ice-blue eyes. They seemed to caress her, as well as laugh at her, but there was no threat in them and no vestige of madness. “You are referring to that shouting match I was having with God,” he said.

“With God?” echoed Tess.

He nodded and the rain eased at the same moment. “I’m going to build another fire under those trees over there,” he said, with a smile in his voice. “You’ll find dry clothes in the drawers built in under my bunk. Change into them while I make some coffee.”

Tess’s face felt like it throbbed with color. “You threw the coffeepot at God, remember?” she reminded him, in acid tones, to hide her alarm and the strange, tingling wonder that came hand in hand with it.

Joel Shiloh chuckled, unwrapped himself from the
blanket, and leaped nimbly to the ground. “Fortunately,” he said, with a sweeping spread of his arms, “he threw it back.”

Tess couldn’t help smiling, but she made no move to follow his orders and change her clothes. No, she just sat there, watching him through the drizzling rain as he built the promised fire and gathered up the coffeepot and its lid.

When he finally looked in her direction, there was an expression of good-natured sternness on his face. “Under the bunk!” he shouted.

Tess stiffened and looked back over one shoulder. “It’s too dark in there—I wouldn’t be able to find anything,” she retorted, in lame tones.

He was striding, long-legged and effortlessly masculine, toward her. Even wearing just one boot, he managed to look authoritative.

Tess found herself huddling deep in the blankets, the side of the wagon’s door frame digging into her back. A chill shook her and her teeth began to chatter. “Stay away from me,” she whispered.

Joel Shiloh laughed and sprang past her into the wagon. “Your virtue is safe with me, Miss Bishop,” he said, rummaging around in the darkness behind her. “I prefer grown women.”

“Grown—” Tess choked out, in aborted protest. A sulphur match was struck, its scent acrid in the moist air, and then the light of a kerosene lantern flickered, revealing an unmade bunk, stacks of wooden crates, and Tess’s camera.

“Women,” he finished for her. “You, of course, are only a girl.” He wrenched open one of two drawers beneath the quilt-tangled bunk and plucked out a shirt
and a pair of trousers. Trousers! “Now, put these things on or I’ll do it for you.”

“I am not a girl!” argued Tess, as the garments were literally flung into her lap. Why was it so important to impress him with the fact that she was old enough to support herself, and did; that she was not a child as he obviously thought?

Glacier-blue eyes swept her; it was as though he could see through the blanket to her small but wellshaped breasts, the slender waist and smoothly rounded hips of which she was circumspectly proud. “I could have sworn you were,” he replied, and then he was gone, leaping out of the wagon, gasping at the insult to his burned foot, and limping back to the struggling fire he had built in the limited shelter of the trees.

Tess looked down at the trousers and shirt and knew that she was going to have to obey his edict, however improper it was. She was cold to the bone and it was still raining, and the walk back to Simpkinsville and her aunt’s boardinghouse would be a long one. The chances were that she would come down with a bad cold, or even pneumonia, if she didn’t remove her wet clothes and warm herself a while beside the peddler’s fire.

Drat him anyway, she thought, as she got awkwardly to her feet and made her way into the privacy of the wagon, wrenching the door shut behind her with a clatter that elicited another shout of amusement from the direction of the fire.

Glumly, muttering to herself all the while, Tess Bishop removed her calico dress and the muslin drawers and camisole beneath it. Then, teeth clattering like a telegraph key sending an emergency message, she
pulled on the trousers and the shirt. They were much too large, of course—the shirt hung well down her thighs and the trousers had to be gripped tightly at the waist or they would have fallen off.

Grateful that she could at least wear her own shoes and stockings, Tess moved toward the wagon door. She would stand by that fire, all right. She would wear those outrageous clothes. And she would let Mr. Joel Shiloh know, in no uncertain terms, what she thought of his orders and his condescending manner. He had his nerve being so patronizing, a man who carried on arguments with and even threw things at God!

She was just reaching for the catch on the door when a well-worn Bible caught her eye. It lay open in the twisted bedding on the bunk, and, for a reason Tess could not have explained, she took it up. The print was smudged here and there, and passages were underscored. Why would a man with so obvious an animosity toward heaven make such thorough use of the Scriptures?

Frowning, Tess turned the book and read the name embossed in gold on the front cover. Keith Corbin. Keith Corbin?

She set the Bible carefully back in its place, open to the same passage, and bit her lower lip as she once again worked the catch on the wagon door. Why would the peddler carry a book with another man’s name embossed on its cover?

The name—Keith Corbin, not Joel Shiloh—was familiar, too. Where had she heard it?

Tess was startled to find Mr. Shiloh standing just outside the wagon door, and a guilty flush moved up her face. Did he know that she had been snooping?

His bright blue eyes moved over her with a look of mingled amusement and appreciation, and then he extended his hands to lift her down from the bed of the wagon. His fingers lingered, it seemed to her, at her waist, but the time was so brief that she might have imagined it.

“The fire is going and the coffee is ready. Be careful—the cups are metal and they get hot.”

Having made this announcement, he moved past her to climb into the wagon and shut the door. Tess didn’t move until she heard a drawer open and close and realized that he was changing clothes, too. Her face hot again, she bolted toward the inviting fire.

There, she warmed her hands and ran outspread fingers through her thick hair, trying to dry it. She noticed for the first time that a mule was grazing near the wagon, its long ears down. As if to acknowledge Tess’s instant surge of sympathy, it gave her a mournful look and brayed.

“Poor thing,” she muttered, starting toward it, but the reappearance of Joel Shiloh stopped her, distracted her so completely that she forgot all about the mule. He rounded the wagon at a bound, wearing clean, dry clothes, grooming his hair with the fingers of both hands as he moved.

Tess found herself wondering distractedly whether his hair was brown, like her own, or blond, or some color in between the two. Because it was still wet, it was impossible to tell, though she could see that it was slightly too long.

He joined her at the fire and, after tossing her one look of good-tempered reprimand, crouched to take the coffeepot carefully by its wooden handle and fill the
two mugs he had set out. He held one out to Tess, without rising.

She took the coffee, letting go of her borrowed trousers in the process, and very nearly disgraced herself. “Why do you leave your poor mule out in the rain?” she asked, while grappling to catch the waistband without dropping the cup.

Joel Shiloh took a leisurely and ponderous draught of his coffee, and Tess had the distinct feeling that he was hiding another smile. Finally, he answered. “Last time I put him inside the wagon, he complained that the bunk was too narrow for the both of us.”

Tess lowered her head to hide the grin that had come, unbidden, to her lips.

Mr. Shiloh sighed philosophically and went on sipping his coffee.

“Why were you throwing dishpans and coffeepots at God, Mr.—Mr. Shiloh?”

Her hesitation over his name brought Joel’s eyes slicing, sharply, to Tess’s face. He rose slowly to his feet, both booted now, his coffee mug cupped in both hands. “I don’t think that’s any of your business, Miss Bishop,” he said coldly.

Tess was as stricken as if he’d slapped her; she felt the color drain from her face. “I’m sorry—I—I guess you’re right—”

He looked exasperated, distracted. And quite miserable. “Finish your coffee,” he snapped, “and I’ll hitch up the wagon and take you home.”

“No!”

He stared at her, that butternut eyebrow arched again. “No?” he repeated.

Tess regrouped, realizing that she had protested too
quickly and too earnestly. “I mean, I have my bicycle and it really isn’t that far—I can make my own way home.”

“Nonsense,” he said, and unaccountably he flung his coffee into the fire, where it sizzled and snapped. “Simpkinsville is five miles from here, and you’ve got that camera to carry. Besides, it might rain again.”

Tess felt her shoulders slump a little. If it weren’t for the flat tire on her bicycle, she could get home just fine, rain or no rain, camera or no camera. But pushing the contraption all that way in another downpour was a disheartening prospect to say the least. “Derora will murder me,” she muttered.

“Who, pray tell, is Derora?” He was being deliberately caustic, and Tess was hurt.

“She is my aunt—although it’s none of your business,” she pointed out stiffly.

“Touché,” he said, with a gruff laugh, lifting his empty mug in a corresponding gesture. “Now, tell me why your aunt would ‘murder’ you, as you put it?”

“Derora Beauchamp is a very difficult woman,” Tess answered, with miserable dignity, “and she doesn’t like me very much as it is. Her opinion is bound to plummet when I appear in the company of a bedraggled peddler, wearing these clothes!”