Cherish (19 page)

She knew he wouldn’t have. In the space of a day, she’d come to trust this man in a way she really couldn’t justify. How many times had her ma cautioned her never to place herself in compromising situations with men? According to Ma, the male of the species, no matter how pious, was cursed with powerful physical yearnings that could overcome his good sense. Race Spencer was far from pious, yet as she gazed into his dark eyes, she felt no fear of him.

“What?” he asked softly.

“Nothing.”

His mouth quirked at one corner. “There’s somethin’. Whenever you’re feelin’ upset or worried, it’s plain on your face.”

It was rather unsettling to have him verify her suspicion that he could read her so well. “It’s just that my ma would have conniptions if she could see me now. She maintained that it was perilous for a young lady to be alone with a gentleman.”

The grin that flirted with his lips took hold, deepening the slash in his lean cheek. Rebecca stared at it, wondering if it had been a dimple in his younger years that had
become more deeply chiseled by time and harsh exposure to the elements.

“And what, exactly, are you afraid I’m gonna do?”

“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “Ma just said gentlemen have powerful yearnings that can get the best of them sometimes. And that I shouldn’t trust them.”

He startled her by reaching up to grasp her chin. He traced the shape of her mouth with the pad of his thumb, his gaze holding hers. “Your ma was a smart lady,” he admitted in a gravelly voice. “You shouldn’t trust a man too far, darlin’. You’re too pretty by half, and it could get you into trouble.”

Rebecca’s heart skittered. Not that she believed for a moment that she was all that pretty. But there was a strange heat in the look he gave her that she found rather disconcerting. “Are—are you saying I can’t trust you?”

She realized he’d been staring at her mouth as she spoke. As her question trailed away, he lightly dragged his thumb across her lips again. After a long moment, he said, “No, I ain’t sayin’ that.” He smiled and lowered his hand back down to rest it on the rock. “You can trust me, darlin’. I give you my word.”

He seemed almost reluctant to make that promise, which she found even more alarming. Her lips tingled where he’d touched them. Regarding him with a concerned frown, she scratched with her teeth to make the sensation abate. “I’m glad,” she blurted. “If I couldn’t trust you, I don’t know what I’d do.”

At her admission, Race’s smile faded. An ache spread through him as he studied her small face. She truly would be in a pickle without him. That went a long way toward explaining the frantic expression he had glimpsed in her eyes several times.

“Well, don’t worry on it,” he told her. “You can trust me, honey.” Race meant to live up to that promise if it killed him. She desperately needed a friend, and he wanted to be that for her. Any overpowering urges that came over him would have to be set aside. It was just that simple. He offered her his handshake. “Friends?”

Almost pathetically eager, she crossed his palm with her fingers. “I hope so,” she whispered.

He enfolded her slender hand in his. There was an unmistakable note of doubt in those words. “Can I take that to mean you’re thinkin’ somethin’ could happen to make us not be friends?”

She averted her gaze to stare off into the darkness. “Are you certain we’re safe from the ruffians out here?”

Sensing that she needed to circle the question for a bit before she answered, he allowed her to change the subject. “I got men ridin’ guard. Six of ’em, now that it’s full dark. On top of that, we’re both wearin’ black, which don’t show up good at night, so we ain’t makin’ targets of ourselves. And if trouble comes callin’, I figure I’m handy enough with a gun to hold it off until my men out there can reach us.”

She sighed and began worrying the buttons of her bodice with tense fingertips. “That’s good to know.”

He caught her chin with the crook of his finger, forcing her to look at him. “Rebecca, what is it that’s troublin’ you?”

By her expression, he knew she dreaded telling him. She lifted her gaze to the star-studded sky above them, managing to avoid his gaze after all. “I, um…” She gulped. “I just don’t want to make you angry with me.”

“Why would I get angry with you?”

“Because of your cows. Losing so many, I mean. My being here has visited misfortune upon you, and I’m afraid that—” She broke off and looked back down at him, her eyes shimmering in the moonlight. “When you find out what those ruffians are after, I’m afraid you’ll detest me.”

Race could see that the possibility frightened her, and he supposed, if he were in her shoes, he’d feel the same way. “Because they’re after money?” he asked gently.

She looked mildly horrified. “I never—how did you find out about the money?”

He released her chin to scratch beside his nose. “Well, now, there’s a question. I reckon I just figured it out.” He allowed a smile to touch his mouth. “It seems clear as rain in March that they’re hellbent to get their hands
on somethin’. If it ain’t money, what could it be?” He let that hang there for a moment. “Maybe now’d be a good time for you to tell me about it, honey. Then you won’t be worryin’ no more about me gettin’ mad when I find out.”

She nodded, albeit without much enthusiasm. Then she slowly told him the story, beginning with the brethren’s decision to leave the Philadelphia area and their subsequent search for a suitable parcel of land on which to resettle, which they found outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. “We were being encroached upon by people of secular persuasion on all sides, you see.” She shrugged. “The elders felt the membership should be farther removed from such influences, and they voted unanimously to relocate.”

“What the hell is people of secular persuasion?”

Her eyes widened at the question, and for a moment, she looked flustered. “They, um…are worldly people. Ordinary people, I suppose you could say.”

“Like me?”

Even in the moonlight he saw her cheeks grow pink. “Yes,” she admitted faintly. “Please don’t be offended, Mr. Spencer. There’s nothing wrong with you…or anything. It’s simply that we lived in a religious cloister.”

“A what?”

“A cloister—in seclusion—insulated from the outside world so we might practice our beliefs without interference. To someone like you, we would probably seem quite peculiar.”

Studying her sweet countenance, Race thought it more accurate to say he found her angelic and precious, and now that he was getting a better grasp of how she’d been raised, he was beginning to understand why. She had been sheltered all of her life, kept apart from any kind of bad influence, her daily focus, from dawn to dark, on her religion. She gave a whole new meaning to the word “innocent.”

“Anyway,” she went on, “we had enough money in our coffers to purchase the land in New Mexico, construct the homes, and have some left over for living expenses
until the parcels in Pennsylvania were sold. The main body of the church made the move a year ago this spring.”

“But you and your folks didn’t go?”

She shook her head. “Six couples were chosen to remain behind, my parents amongst them, to sell the parcels of land outside of Philadelphia. They were to transport the sale proceeds to Santa Fe. If all had gone well, we would have arrived there in a few more weeks, just in time to settle in before the harsh winter weather.” She began wringing her hands. “I don’t know what the brethren in Santa Fe will do now. Without the money we were taking to them, they won’t be able to buy farming implements, work animals, or the seed to plant their crops next spring. Nor will they have the necessary funds to make a mortgage payment to the bank. The church will go under.”

“Where’s the money? Do you know?”

“My papa and the other brethren installed a false floor in the Petersens’ wagon, and they hid the money underneath it. As far as I know, it’s still there.” She dragged in a shaky breath and lifted her hands in a gesture of bewilderment. “I’ve no idea how the ruffians learned we were transporting a large amount of cash. Papa and the brethren went to great lengths to keep it a secret, even going so far as to install the fake floor in the wagon by dark of night. Yet somehow those ruffians got wind of it. Along the trail, somewhere, I presume. Perhaps when we stopped in one of the towns to purchase more supplies. Someone in our party must have let it slip.”

“I don’t reckon the how of it matters much,” he told her. “Somehow they found out.” He searched her gaze. “Forgive me for sayin’ it, darlin’, but it strikes me as plumb foolish, all them folks choosin’ to die rather than hand over that money.”

A stricken look came over her face. “Yes,” she whispered. “Foolish, for in the end, the money may never reach Santa Fe anyway.” Her mouth trembled and she gazed off into the darkness for a long while. When she looked back at him, she said, “In their defense, however,
I must point out that in their minds, the money wasn’t theirs to surrender. It belonged to God. And my papa and the other brethren also counted rather heavily on the heavenly Father to protect them, which He failed to do.” Her eyes went sparkly with tears. “Those of my faith believe that love is stronger than hate, and that if we love our enemy, he will be touched by God’s goodness and respond in kind.”

In Race’s opinion, that belief went straight past foolish to plumb stupid. “Out west, there’s some mighty evil men on the loose,” he told her. “A smart man loves his enemy, but keeps his gun well oiled. Ain’t you never heard the sayin’ that God helps them that helps themselves?”

She bent her head. “I’m not defending their beliefs, Mr. Spencer. Since the arroyo, my faith has been badly shaken, and I’m no longer sure I believe in much of anything.”

She sounded so forlorn and lost that he touched a hand to her hair. “That’ll pass, honey. You’re just bleedin’ inside right now. In time, you’ll heal, and your thinkin’ will all come right again.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“I am. But for right now, that ain’t the most important thing we need to talk about.”

She looked up, her eyes so big and appealing he felt the tug on his heart.

“I wanna discuss you bein’ afraid I’m gonna get mad at you. Can you explain that to me?”

She closed her eyes and sent tears spilling down her cheeks. He caught a glistening droplet with the backs of his fingers. “You’ve been financially devastated because of me,” she whispered. “I feared that you’d be furious when you learned it was over someone else’s money, and even more furious because I might have warned you early this morning so you could have guarded against trouble.”

Race took his time in forming a reply. A glib talker, he wasn’t. What he said to her and how he said it might make all the difference in how she felt from now on. “I’m gonna take the last point first, about you warnin’ me. To start with, last night you was in a bad way, so deep in
shock you wasn’t aware of nothin’ happenin’ around you. Then, when you come right this mornin’, it was to find me in bed with you. You was scared, and rightly so. I didn’t blame you for that then, and I don’t now. On top of that, I think you tried to tell me about the money. Right before I left to go get us our breakfast. Am I wrong?”

“No. I did mean to tell you, but you left, and then the herd stampeded, and then those men—”

“Whoa, whoa!” Race flashed her a grin. “You don’t gotta convince me, honey. I know things got crazy after that and you never got a chance to tell me.”

She looked at him incredulously. “You truly aren’t angry?”

“Why would I be? You want the truth? I think you’re a mighty brave lady, comin’ out there to the graves and tellin’ me in front of my men. I never once felt you had a chance to tell me sooner, and I ain’t the least bit angry, I promise.”

“But if not for me, none of this would have happened to you!”

“Rebecca, when I found you in the arroyo, I figured them plug-uglies must’ve been after somethin’. The wagons was ripped apart, all the trunks had been rifled. Judgin’ by the things they done, I also knew they was mean-hearted bastards. But I went ahead and brought you here. That was my decision, not yours.”

“What choice did you have? If you’d left me, I would have perished.”

Perished? Race decided to let that one pass. He could more or less figure out what the word meant from the rest of the sentence. It made him want to smile, nonetheless. The girl sure knew a passel of strange words. “It’s true. I didn’t have no choice,” he admitted. “The same goes for you. You didn’t choose for any of this to happen to you. Sometimes, darlin’, bad things just happen. It ain’t by nobody’s choice, and it ain’t because of anything they done. I don’t want you blamin’ yourself. You hear? I should have taken extra precautions to protect the herd. It ain’t your fault that I didn’t.”

“I feel as if it is.”

He framed her face between his hands. “Well, I want you to stop feelin’ that way. If anything’ll make me mad, that will. Them stampedin’ the herd and shootin’ Blue. What happened to Cookie. If you go blamin’ yourself, I’ll tan your hide and hang it on a post to dry. You understand? It’s like blamin’ yourself if it rains.”

She drew away to wipe her cheeks. “You’re a very kind man, Mr. Spencer. I wouldn’t blame you at all for feeling resentful. I am so very sorry. You’ll never know how—”

He cut her off by touching a finger to her lips. “You’re apologizin’, and you’ve done nothin’ to apologize for.”

She averted her face to free her mouth. “Perhaps you should go get the church money from the Petersens’ wagon. The brethren would want to recompense you for the damages, I feel certain.”

He sighed, feeling at a loss. Despite all he had just said, she seemed bent on holding herself responsible. He understood why. But he wished with all his heart that she didn’t. “I thought you said the church’ll go under without that money, and now you’re offerin’ some of it to me?”

“I’m sure they could spare that much. We could send the remainder to them in Santa Fe.”

“I’ll think about it,” he conceded. “But if there’s another way, I’d rather not. Like you said, it’s God’s money. Not only that, but a lot of fine folks died tryin’ to protect it. I’d feel funny about helpin’ myself to it.”