The Promise of Jenny Jones (24 page)

"See?" Graciela shouted. "She said fricking."

He leaned forward too. "That is not the proper use of the word dulcet."

"I don't fricking care."

Her chin came up next to his, and she stood so close that her breasts almost pushed into his chest. If his niece hadn't been watching, Ty would have grabbed Jenny and kissed her senseless. He wanted to conquer her, wanted to crush the challenge in her eyes, wanted to drive into her and leave her whimpering for more.

"Yeah, you care." The color streaking up her throat confirmed it. She didn't like to use a word wrongly. A tight smile thinned his lips. "Do you like to fight in bed too?"

She threw a glance over her shoulder. "Shut up."

"Do you scratch and bite?" he asked softly, staring at her mouth, enjoying the crimson rushing into her cheeks. "Do you like it rough? Or do you prefer long gentle strokes?"

Her mouth dropped open, and she sputtered. "Are you crazy? Get out of here. Go! Right now." Shoving at him, she pushed him toward the door and almost into the man carrying a large washtub.

Grinning, Ty tipped his hat to Senor Armijo,then stepped into the late-afternoon sunshine.

She was weakening. She was going to topple and fall. When she did, he'd be there to catch her in his arms. By God, he thought with relish, this was going to be one coupling that he'd never forget. Neither would she.

CHAPTER 12

J enny was so rattled that she undressed Graciela without even tossing a hint that the kid should do it herself.Sanders was a crafty bastard. But she recognized his game. She'd heard enough about courting to recognize wooing when she saw it. The darlin's and honeys. The unexpected touches. The outrageous flattery and the suggestive remarks. It was all calculated to get her out of her trousers and into his bedroll.

"Dulcet, my butt."

"Jenny!" Indignant, Graciela drew wet knees up to her chest and stared out of the washtub. "You aren't listening. I'm telling you about the fricking snakes."

That caught her attention. Rocking back on her bootheels, her wrists hanging limp over the edge of the washtub, she stared at the bruises around Graciela's throat and felt her heart sink.

"Hand me the soap."

She didn't want to do this. But she was only as good as her word. That was all she had.

Graciela's eyes widened as Jenny grimly rubbed the soap between her palms, working upa lather . "No!"

"Oh yeah," she said firmly. The soap smelled rank and stung her hands. But either she washed the kid's mouth out, or she threw away everything she was. Her credibility, her self-esteem, herself.

It was a fight. The kid was slippery and full of spit and vinegar. By the time Jenny won, enough water had splashed out of the washtub that she was soaked and exhausted. Sitting on the dirt—now mud-floor she rested her back against the washtub, caught her breath, and examined her hand.

"You bit my finger, you little snot."

Crying and still spitting soap suds, Graciela shouted at her. "I hate you!"

"Your precious uncle Ty would have done the same thing." She rubbed the teeth marks ringing her forefinger.

"No, he wouldn't!"

"Listen, I don't give a rat's ass what falls out of your mouth. It's your uncle Ty who insists that you act like a lady." She hesitated, then turned around and said the rest of it. "And he's right. You started out prissy enough. All you have to do is go back to being what you were."

Graciela stood and snatched the towel Jenny held out to her. She wiped her wet eyes and nose. " You cuss."

"I know it, and I've been thinking about that." She grabbed back the towel and dried the kid's back, trying not to rub snot on her. Then she lifted Graciela out of the tub and stood her on one of the stools so she could drop a thin shift over her head. The shift had come from Senora Armijo. Anticipating the next demand, she automatically removed the heart-shaped locket from Graciela's jacket and pinned it on the shift. This done, she tucked the kid under her arm and dropped her into one of the hammocks.

Pulling up a stool, she sat down and wiped sweat off of her forehead. "Look, kid."

"Graciela. You promised."

"Graciela. I cuss. I don't talk nice, you're right about that." She looked into the kid's eyes. "But you don't want to be like me." A pang pierced her heart. She hadn't known it would be so hard to say this. "I'm everything you don't want to be." She drew a long breath and held it a minute. "I'm uneducated, crude, mean,mad at the world." Dropping her head, she examined her large, callused palms, remembering Marguarita's soft, smooth hands. "Until now, it didn't matter what I was or howl talked or what I did." She lifted her head again and frowned. "See, nobody ever cared what I did before."

She hadn't dreamed a time would ever come when someone might want to emulate her talk or behavior. Consequently, it made her feel tight and strange inside to hear her words on the kid's lips. A small part of her was astonished and secretly flattered. But a larger part was appalled. Now that Ty had called her attention to the problem, it struck her as jarring and offensive to hear cuss-words on a child's lips.

Graciela sat up in the hammock and leaned over her knees to rub a spot of mud off her toes. "It's not fair that you can say things that I can't," she insisted stubbornly. A long silence stretched between them while Jenny tried to concoct an argument against fairness. Actually, she came up with several winning rebuttals, the best being: Adults can do and say things that kids should not. But she could guess how well that would go down with the kid. She wouldn't have bought that argument either if their positions had been reversed.

"I don't know how we solve this problem," she admitted, frowning. "But I can tell you this." She jerked her head back at the washtub. "I don't want to go through that again. You have to stop cussing."

Graciela's chin came up, and that one irritating eyebrow arched. "I'll stop if you will."

A short bark of laughter burst from Jenny's lips. "Me? I've been cussing since I was your age. It's one of the things I'm good at." Looking at the kid's freshly scrubbed face, it was hard to believe she was capable of uttering a cussword. But she was, and the problem would get worse because cusswords were what she was hearing. Jenny's shoulders slumped. She didn't like the direction or the inevitable conclusion of this conversation.

"Uncle Ty doesn't cuss."

"He doesn't do it in front of you,that's all."

And that, of course, was the solution. Seeing a partial reprieve, she immediately brightened. She didn't have to change her whole person to accommodate the kid. All she had to do was make a few changes when the kid was right in front of her. Probably she could do that. The more she considered, the better the compromise seemed. It answered the fairness problem, and that was the largest stickler.

"All right," she said slowly, "here's the bargain. Neither one of us says fricking anymore." Silently she added, in front of each other.

A mixture of triumph and disappointment gleamed in Graciela's eyes. "We can't say hell or damn or crud or Christ or son of a bitch either. Uncle Ty wouldn't like it."

Uncle Ty could jump in a tub of scum for all Jenny cared right this minute. Thin-lipped, she considered,then nodded with great reluctance. "This is going to be a pisser."

"We can't say piss either."

"Well my God." Jenny stared. "I'm not going to be able to talk. What did your mother say when she was really piss … irritated?"

Graciela pursed her lips in a prissy moue. "When Mama was angry, she said she was displeased."

"Huh!" She would have rolled her eyes and said Je-zus, but Je-zus was undoubtedly prohibited also. "Listen, I'm going to forget occasionally. You have to accept that up front. I've been talking like I talk for along, long time. A person doesn't change overnight. So don't go thinking I'm breaking a promise if a cussword or two slips out."

Graciela casther a sideways glance and a small smile. "If you forget and cuss … do I get to wash your mouth out with soap?"

Jenny blinked, then threw back her head and laughed. Every now and then there were moments when she enjoyed the hell out of the kid, and this was one of them.

"If you try I'll be very … displeased. Besides, I'm bigger than you are." They grinned at each other. "You know," she said softly, "when you're not beinga snot , you aren't too bad."

Pink flooded the kid's face, and she leaned forward, rubbing at her toes. "I'm hungry."

"Senora Armijo is fixing us something right now." She touched Graciela's shoulder blades, gazed at the bruises around her throat. "There's something I want to say. I'm sorry you had to learn that your cousins," she paused, searching for acceptable words, "are rotten, greedy people. But it's good that you finally know it. Because Luis and Chulo are still out there, and they're still looking for you. They're dangerous, Graciela. Maybe worse than the cousins we left in the desert."

Graciela's lip trembled. "Cousin Tito dropped the snakes right in front of me! He wanted them to bite me!"

"You were very brave, and I'm proud of you. It's hard to be alone and scared and have snakes poured on you."

The pink deepened in Graciela's cheeks and her eyes shone. It astonished Jenny how much the kid seemed to value her approval. And it worried her, too. As far as she knew, nothing she'd ever said had affected anyone. Now it seemed that Graciela absorbed her words like a sponge. It was a sobering thought, a little frightening to wield that much influence on another person.

"I'll bet you were never scared of anything."

A smile curved her lips. "Well, you'd lose that bet. I've been scared plenty of times."

One of the things that scared her opened the door and swaggered inside.

"Senora Armijo is right behind me with supper," Ty announced, tossing his hat toward a wall peg. "What happened here?" Frowning, he inspected the muddy floor.

"Nothing," Jenny said, noticing the anxiety fade from Graciela's eyes when the kid realized she wasn't going to reveal the soap incident. "Put the food on the table," she instructed Senora Armijo.

They didn't speak until Jenny had thanked the senora, and she had withdrawn. Then Ty lifted Graciela out of the hammock and placed her on a stool in front of the table.

"Looks like beefsteak cooked with tomatoes and onions," he said cheerfully. He brought up a stool for Jenny and one for himself. "Are you ladies as ready as I am for something besides beans and tortillas?"

Slowly, Jenny seated herself and tucked a gaily colored napkin inside the collar of her shirt. It felt strange to be sitting down to supper with a man and a child. Suddenly she recalled a picture she'd seen in a catalog of a family sitting at a table together. They had been dressedbetter than she and Ty and Graciela, and the furniture was a hell of a lot nicer, but Jenny had studied the picture and she'd known the man and the woman and the child were a family.Not a family like any she had known, but a family like her heart wanted a family to be.

"You're supposed to put your napkin in your lap," Graciela commented. "Like this."

"Well la-de-da." Now she noticed that Ty had placed his napkin in his lap, too. A dull throb of color heated her cheeks. "I like my napkin tucked in." Reaching with her fork, she speared a chunk of meat and dropped it on her plate. "What are you doing?" she demanded when she noticed Ty leaning toward the kid.

"What's it looklike? I'm cutting my niece's steak."

"She's not crippled. She can cut her own damned meat."

"You're not supposed to say damn." Graciela gave her one of the superior smiles that Jenny detested.

"Jenny, she's six years old."

"Which is plenty old enough to feed herself."

"I'm not allowed to use knives," Graciela said, turning a charmingly helpless look on Ty.

Jenny lowered her fork. The little snot liked being waited on. "Let me ask you something. If someone," she squinted at Ty, "didn't cut that meat for you, what would you do? Pick up a hunk and gnaw on it?"

"No!" The kid looked appalled.

"Would you sit there and starve?" Graciela glared at her. "If you were hungry enough, I'll bet you'd figure out how to cut your own meat. So," she said, deliberately issuing a challenge, "are you hungry enough?"

Ty placed his knife and fork on his plate, dropped his napkin on the table. Scowling, he rose to his feet. "I'd like to speak to you outside."

"We're eating."

"Right now." Turning on his bootheel, he strode to the door and stepped into the fading light of sunset.

Jenny pulled her napkin from her collar and threw it on the table. She glared at Graciela. "Figure out how to use that knife. And be careful. I'll be back."

The ramshackle collection of shacks looked picturesque in the dying light of the day. No boys and a dog ran down the rutted lane toward the smell of frying chilies. Laughter rose from the shack next door, and a woman's voice singing the slow, sweet notes of a lullaby.

Jenny walked across the dirt yard to a wooden cart with a broken wheel. "What do you want?"

Ty placed both hands on his hips and gazed at her in silence. The coppery twilight bronzed his skin and emphasized the hard, clean lines of cheek and jaw. Looking at him made Jenny feel weak inside, which she hated. They had hardly started this confrontation, and already she felt at a disadvantage.

"You expect too much of her."

"Well, you don't expect enough." Leaning against the cart's side slats, she crossed her arms over her chest.

"When is she supposed to learn how to cut her own food? When she's twenty? Fifteen? Twelve? She has to learn to do things for herself."

The sunset reflected in his eyes like points of flame. He'd washed for supper, but trail dust still lay in the creases of his shirt and waistcoat. He smelled of leather and horse and sweat, the scents she associated with the best of men. He was lean and taut, a whiplash of a man. Ruthless enough to do what he had to without a pang, confident enough to touch a woman with gentle fingers.

Frowning, Jenny turned her face away from him.

"She's an heiress. Graciela will inherit more wealth from Don Antonio Barrancas than she'll be able to spend in a lifetime. And she's also my brother's heir. For the rest of her life she'll be surrounded by servants. They'll dress her, dress her hair, prepare her food,see to her every need."