Baby My Baby (A Ranching Family) (13 page)

“Sure. Elk Creek is a lot like the reservation—everybody’s friendly,” he answered as he turned from the windows, thinking that no matter how friendly the partiers downstairs, he’d rather be up here in this room with Beth. But he didn’t say that.

She was standing in the middle of the room, her hands in the two front pockets of her dress, her feet bare, one perched atop the instep of the other. She looked fresh and beautiful, and something hard clamped his heart at the thought that she wasn’t his anymore.

He told himself to leave the room and escape the feelings, but his desire to spend a little time with her was stronger. He crossed his arms over his chest to keep them from reaching for her, shifted his weight to one leg and searched for something to talk about.

The party—she’d asked about the party and his feeling like an outsider...

“Actually, I’ve been downstairs watching Linc get toasted into a stupor, and thinking that it isn’t too far from some Indian purification rituals that prepare a man for marriage. So I don’t feel too far from home.”

She laughed lightly and he let the sound wash over him like cool spring water over sun-warmed skin.

“He’s getting polluted, not purified,” she amended.

“Before a wedding ceremony, some tribes give the groom a drink that makes him violently ill to purge and purify him. I don’t know how Linc handles his liquor, but at the rate this is going, I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t get sick. Other tribes take the man into the sacred underground kiva, turn it into a sort of sauna and sweat the impurities out of him. With all the bodies, and the cigars burning, the living room is about twenty degrees hotter than it is up here—not quite a sauna but close.”

“I see your point.”

Ash glanced around the room, taking in the single bed without so much as a headboard, the tall bureau on which several pictures rested, the desk that was stark enough to have come from a military school, the small television he’d bought her the Christmas before. The single item that could be considered either feminine or pretty or anything more than purely functional was a cheval mirror in one corner.

“Was this your room as a kid?” he asked.

“This was it,” she confirmed.

Glancing around again, he assumed she’d stripped the place now that she’d taken up residence in it again, and hadn’t begun to redecorate yet. Not that he had anything on which to base that. He’d never seen the room before. When they’d come back here for the few visits they’d made during their marriage, Beth had always insisted they stay at the lodge, in spite of the fact that this house had plenty of room for guests. But her father had been alive then and this had been his house....

Samuel Heller. Shag.

Not a nice man.

He hadn’t liked the fact that his daughter had married an Indian.

“Have you cleared your little-girl things out since you moved back or were they gone already?” Ash asked now.

She laughed again. “Little-girl things?”

“Ruffled bedspreads and curtains, a dollhouse, dolls, stuffed animals, a dressing table—those kinds of little-girl things.”

She pointed to the mirror in the corner. “I bought that last week. With the exception of it and the TV you gave me, this is exactly the way my room was the whole time I lived here.”

Ash could feel his eyes widening at the thought. “I know you were a tomboy, but—”

“I did have a rag doll my mother bought for me before she died, but you’ve seen that.”

“And that’s it?” He couldn’t keep his surprise out of his voice.

“Shag wasn’t big on toys, and especially not dolls or stuffed animals. He said he might have gotten stuck with a daughter, but he sure as hell wasn’t having a prissy little miss in his house.”

No, his late father-in-law had not been Ash’s favorite person. He’d always resented the older man’s intolerance toward him as a Native American. But Beth had never said much about what kind of a father he’d been, just that after her mother had died, she and her brothers had lost what “rounded his sharp edges.” And though Ash had assumed Shag Heller hadn’t been overly kind or loving, he hadn’t known the details. Hearing some of them now did not endear the man to him.

“What did you get for gifts?” he asked, his curiosity roused.

Beth shrugged. “The same things Linc and Jackson got—a hunting rifle, a new saddle, new boots, fancy belt buckles, expensive cowboy hats, things like that. He was generous—he just wouldn’t allow anything froufrou, as he called it, anything that would make me a sissy.”

“But you were a little girl. Little girls are supposed to be sissies and have things that are froufrou.”

“Not with Shag as their father. I had to be as tough as my brothers. Sometimes tougher, and if I let him see anything less—” she rolled her eyes “—I’d pay dearly for it.”

“How?”

She laughed as if she found the reminiscence funny even though the reality hadn’t been. “How? Let’s see, double chores, worse chores or maybe I’d find myself sleeping in the barn for a month. One time he caught me crying over something—I was about ten and I don’t even remember what I was bawling about. He sent me out in a torrential downpour to herd cows from one pasture to another, in the dark, late that night, by myself, knee-deep in mud and muck.”

“Just for crying?”

“Especially for crying. Or letting him know how I felt about anything—he read that as a weakness. That time he said I was flooding his house and he didn’t want to look at such a sorry, soggy sight, that I might as well be out where everything was already wet so I’d fit right in.”

She was still smiling wryly, but Ash found nothing in what she’d said funny. “I can’t imagine that.”

“No, I can’t imagine your grandfather doing something like that to a little kid, either. But Shag? Well, he was nothing like Robert.” She shook her head. “He had an answer for everything. If we complained we were tired, he’d show us what tired was—he’d have us baling hay until our backs broke. Gripe that none of our friends had to milk cows by hand just to keep in practice, and instead of not using the machines for a day, we wouldn’t get to use them for six months. Whine that just once we’d like to sleep in on a Saturday morning, and he’d have us up at four instead of five every day. Complain about anything, and he taught us a lesson for it. We learned to keep our mouths shut about whatever was going through our heads.”

Or their hearts. “Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t get to know your father any better than I did,” Ash muttered through a tightness in his jaw muscles at the thought of someone treating
his
kids like that.

“He was a hard man,” Beth agreed. “That’s why I told you it wouldn’t do any good for you to try overcoming his prejudice. But he was still my father, and there were good things that came from his being a taskmaster. Just think of what a sniveling woman I might be if it weren’t for Shag.”

Or maybe she wouldn’t have to hide when she needed to cry, or get fighting mad at anyone who caught her at it, Ash thought.

But he didn’t say it. He just wondered why he hadn’t known these things about her before. Might understanding what made her do the things she did have helped him to be more accepting of them? Of her? Could it even have given him the chance to break down some of the walls her childhood had built?

“How come we never talked about this before?” he asked, moving to the bureau to look at the photographs there.

“I guess for the same reason we never talked much about your growing-up years as a welder and carpenter—we just plain never talked much.”

He had the sense that she could have said more on that subject, but she didn’t, and he didn’t pursue it. He didn’t know why she was being open with him now, but he was glad and didn’t want to scare her away from more of it.

He took a picture from the bureau top and studied it. In it, Beth was eight or nine years old, covered in mud, holding an equally grimy piglet under one arm and displaying a blue ribbon in the other hand. The grin on her face was so big, so proud, it helped to dispel some of the harshness she’d just shown him of her childhood. It hadn’t been all bad.

Or maybe not so much bad as tough. Or toughening.

“This is great,” he said, smiling over the photograph.

She came up beside him to see which picture he was looking at. “Cheyenne Frontier Days. I was the fastest kid to catch and keep a greased pig. I even beat out my brothers.”

Still holding the photograph, Ash glanced at the others. There were two of her mother—one just a portrait, the other of her feeding a baby he presumed to be Beth. There were pictures of Beth and Linc, of Beth and Jackson, of the three of them, of her graduation. “Why didn’t you bring these with you when you moved in with me?” She hadn’t brought anything besides clothes.

“It was your house,” she said simply.

“We were married. That made it your house, too.”

Again she shrugged. “It always just seemed like your house.”

He stared at her, at her delicate profile and the shine of her dark hair, and realized in that moment just how little he really did know about her. “If you didn’t feel comfortable there, why didn’t you tell me? What did you think would happen? That I’d make you live in the garage until you could appreciate it?”

“It was your house,” she repeated with emphasis. “You liked it and it was a perfectly nice place. What I felt about it wasn’t a big deal.”

But how many things had she felt and kept bottled up inside, he wondered, telling herself they were no big deal when they really were? Maybe, all together, they’d chipped away at their marriage, at their relationship, at her love for him.

“It’s not important,” she insisted, and he could see she was shying away from the subject, so he let it drop.

He replaced the picture on the bureau and then pointed an index finger at it. “I would have liked to have that picture in our home.”

He knew there wasn’t really anything for her to say to that and wasn’t surprised when she didn’t respond.

He leaned an elbow amidst the photographs and turned his full attention to her, wishing all over again that he could take her into his arms, that he could change the difficult parts of the way she’d been raised and put a little tenderness and understanding into those years, that he could comfort her for them, even belatedly.

But he only reached a fingertip to brush her hair back slightly from her face, just to be touching her in some way. “Is the baby kicking today?”

“It was quiet all day, but earlier tonight it seemed to be having a party of its own.”

“Can I feel?”

She hesitated, and he knew why. They were alone behind closed doors and there was intimacy in the air all around them. There was the intimacy of the room, the intimacy of the insights she’d given him into her past and what made her tick, the intimacy of their bodies only inches apart. And somehow he knew she sensed that, as much as he wanted to feel the baby move, he wanted the intimacy of contact with her, too.

“It seems to have gone to sleep now,” she finally said in a rush, as if she’d argued with herself about it and worried that if she didn’t hurry with a denial she might surrender.

It was in his mind to do it anyway. To press his palm to her stomach. To circle her small shoulders with his other arm and pull her closer still, to kiss her properly, thoroughly, without holding back all he’d held back until now.

For the first time he began to wonder if the force with which she’d rejected his kisses was more because she
did
want him than because she didn’t. Could it be her need to hide that fact that had made her so vehement?

It would certainly account for her responding one minute and shoving him away the next.

That thought strengthened his willpower and he kept his hands to himself. If she cared enough about him to hide it, she must care a lot. But he had to be cautious not to set off the mechanism that caused her to strike out to protect that hiding place.

And he wasn’t exactly sure how to do that, except that it seemed better to heed the warning of her refusal to let him feel the baby kick, and let her come around in her own good time.

“I’d better get back downstairs,” he said.

She nodded, but he could have sworn her agreement was reluctant, and he wondered if what flashed through her expression before she hid it could actually have been disappointment.

“Jackson and I have to finish the roof tomorrow, but I’ll come out and get you for the wedding in the evening.”

“I’m going over in the afternoon to help Kansas get ready. I’ll just see you at the church.”

“Okay,” he said, though he envisioned spending the day without her and then losing her in the crowd of the wedding, too, if they didn’t go together. None of it pleased him. Not any more than the thought of leaving her right then did, but he knew he had to.

He straightened away from her bureau and went to the door, not looking forward to rejoining the revelry down below. He hadn’t realized Beth had followed him until he stepped into the hallway and turned to close the door.

But there she was, standing in the opening, looking soft and beautiful and just the slightest bit rounder with his baby.

His resolutions wavered and he couldn’t resist reaching a hand to the bulge of her belly, after all—just for a split second when he said good-night, as if he were saying it to the baby at the same time.

But as his hand slipped away again, he nearly brushed her hand. Had she been about to cover his and hold it there the way she had the night before, or had she meant to stop him?

“Good night,” she said, sounding slightly embarrassed and making him hope for the better of those two possibilities.

But then, from the party, he heard Linc calling his name, and the uncertainty in Beth’s eyes reminded him to let well enough alone. For now, at any rate.

So he merely repeated his instructions to shut her door and keep her windows open against the smoke, and then he headed for the stairs.

He didn’t go all the way down, though. He stopped at the second step, waiting until she closed and locked her door again.

Even after that was done, he hesitated, staring back at the hallway behind him, at all those closed doors down its long length. He couldn’t help thinking about how difficult it must have been for a little girl growing up here. In a house without a mother and with a father who raised her not only to be a man, but to be a hardened one.