Colorado Bride (11 page)

“And naturally everybody knows married women lose the urge right quick.”

“What
urge?”
demanded Carrie, her thoughts wrenched around by this unexpected statement.

Katie blushed scarlet. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t know exactly,” she admitted. ““I’m not stupid and I have a pretty good notion, of course, it’s just that no one ever saw fit to explain things to me. First they said I was too young to know, and then they said “I’d be better off not knowing, living in a house full of men like I was.” She paused, an arrested look in her eye. “Perhaps you can tell me, ma’am.”

“Tell you what?” Carrie asked, panic routing any other emotion.

“Do married women lose the urge for a man? Us young girls didn’t see how it could be true, but the older women say that having a baby takes it away.”

“I couldn’t say,” Carrie replied, praying she could think of some way to halt this conversation before she both mortified and exposed herself. “I’ve only just gotten married, and of course I haven’t had a baby.”

“I was forgetting that.” Katie sighed. “I hope it’s not true. It would be such a waste.”

Carrie knew she should keep her mouth shut, but she just had to ask, “Why?”

“Because men seem to like it ever so much, even when they can barely find the energy to stir from their own hearth. It seems a shame for a woman to have something she starts out liking turn into a misery, especially when the menfolks can’t seem to get their fill of it.” She sank her voice into a conspiratorial whisper. “I heard tell that some men who are quite old make their women’s lives a purgatory with their constant demands.”

“Do you know anything about Mr. Barrow?” Carrie asked, desperate to change the subject to something less likely to cause her difficulty breathing. She absolutely refused to allow any thoughts of Lucas coupled with
the urge
to cross her mind, but her body was not nearly so squeamish, and she soon found herself squirming restlessly in her chair.

“No more than I’ve done told you already. He was here when I got here. Not long I figure, but long enough for everybody to stop paying him much attention. He spends his time with those wild horses of his or sitting under that tree. It’s like he’s waiting for something, or someone, but he doesn’t miss a thing. The first night I was here, they decided I was to stay in the cabin. Seems they were too lazy to keep up two places and no one used it. Anyway, I went to bed early, but I couldn’t sleep, too tired from the stagecoach ride I guess, and I was standing near the window, looking at the moon when I caught a movement out of the corner of me eye. I stared hard into the dark, but I didn’t see anything for a minute. I had almost decided I was wrong when a man moved out of the shadows and darted quickly down the road to the next clump of trees. It was Buck and he was coming here. I had barred all the doors, but I tell you, ma’am, I was scared. I didn’t have a gun or anything else to defend meself with. I ran downstairs and found a knife in the kitchen, a real long butchering knife with a sharp blade. I tiptoed to the front door. I was going to let him think I was upstairs, and get him when he turned his back.”

“Weren’t you afraid to think of killing a man?”

“To be sure I was a little nervous over it, but I wasn’t upset about cutting him up. After all, what he was wanting to do to me wasn’t no nice thing.”

“No, but to kill a man.”

“I wasn’t hankering to do it. I just wanted to hurt him enough to let him know I didn’t want him sneaking back over the next night. Anyway, he no more than put his foot on the first step when I heard a pistol click. He heard it too because he froze and looked to either side, trying to see in the dark.”

“‘Well now, I’ll be dad-blasted,’ this voice said out of the dark, sort of conversational-like. ‘I didn’t know Cody walked in his sleep.’ It was Mr. Barrow, and he had a gun. Cody just stood there, not moving a muscle. ‘I sure hope he turns around and goes back. I’d hate to have to wake him up. I hear tell it’s better to put a sleepwalker to sleep forever than to wake him in the middle of one of his perambulations. Addles his brain forever.’ Well, you should have seen Cody. He slammed his eyes shut, raised his arms up in the air like he was levitating or something, and turned around and started walking back to the station.

“Guess I’d better tell Baca to lock him in at night for his own good,’ Mr. Barrow said loud enough for him to hear. ‘He might get lost in the woods and never find his way back. Or a grizzly might get him.’ You could see Cody walk a little bit faster every time Mr. Barrow spoke. He was nearly running by the time he reached the station steps.

“You okay, Miss O’Malley?’ Mr. Barrow asked real softlike.

“I had me a butchering knife, ‘I told him. ‘I always did want to see what a skunk looked like skinned.

“‘Same as any other wild animal, Miss O’Malley. They all look pretty much the same.’ I never did see him. He just faded into the night, but I knew he was there and I didn’t have any trouble sleeping after that. Why do you ask about him?”

“I’m not entirely sure, but he doesn’t strike me as the type of man to be a wrangler. When he got mad about me holding on to those horses, he forgot himself and he didn’t talk or act the way he had earlier. There’s something about that man he’s not telling anybody. I don’t know what it is, but I’ll bet you a new dress he’s not what he says he is.”

“I don’t know about that, but you won’t have any use for a new dress. Seems to me like men just don’t care about what a woman wears out here.”

They care,” Carrie said, remembering Lucas’s kiss and the look in his eyes. They may have a different way of showing it, but they care just the same.”

Chapter 6

Katie’s story of Lucas’s helpfulness did nothing to restore order to Carrie’s emotions or still the tumult in her mind. And after she had decided what should be prepared for lunch and helped Katie get the cooking started, she said, “I think I’ll set a wash pot on to boil in the back yard and turn out these bedrooms. They can’t be used as they are, and we might need to stay over sometime.”

“I’ll give you a hand if you choose to wait a bit,” Katie offered. “Twill be me room when your husband gets here, so I ought to be the one to do the cleaning.”

“There’s no need for you to move out of the cabin, not even after Robert arrives,” Carrie said. “We can’t use two bedrooms at once.”

“Just the same …”

“I know what you’re going to say, but you’re wrong. Now you get on with lunch, and I’ll see what I can do with these rooms.” But Carrie found that even hard work couldn’t keep her unwelcome thoughts at bay. She built a fire under the wash pot, stripped the beds and took down the curtains, put everything in boiling water with strong lye soap, hung the mattresses outside to air, and started scrubbing down the rooms with hot, soapy water, but she still couldn’t keep her mind off Lucas.

When Carrie had decided to pretend she was married and tell everyone her husband would be joining her in a few days, she had done it solely to get the position of station manager and prevent the company from dismissing her before she had a chance to prove she could do me job. It never occurred to her that it would also be a bar to any man developing an interest in her. She had been so preoccupied with Robert’s death and figuring out how to keep from having to go back to Virginia that she hadn’t thought of anything else. It wasn’t that she hadn’t thought men and women in the West fell in love and married; it was just that she hadn’t thought at all.

Now she knew Lucas was interested in her, his kiss told her more than any words ever could, but she also knew he would hold back, might even leave Green Run altogether, because he thought she was married. One of the things she had learned was that most Western men had a solid respect for the institution of marriage, and they would do practically anything rather than tamper with that sanctified relationship.

Carrie wasn’t at all sure she wanted Lucas to be interested in her, there was too much about him she didn’t know and the idea of falling in love with a stranger with a mysterious past didn’t appeal to her—there was too much risk in that—but she was sure she didn’t want to drive him away. Setting aside his physical appearance, if you could set aside such a powerful factor as that, he was the most interesting man she had ever met. The very fact that he was mysterious added to his attractiveness, but there was more to it than that. For one thing, he was a gentleman. He had repeatedly come to her rescue without being asked, and he obviously expected no thanks. And Carrie knew the reason he’d slept in the barn was to be closer to her in case anything happened. He hadn’t let Baca or the runaway horses hurt her, and those two men with the shotguns wouldn’t bring another gun to the station, if they ever dared to come back at all.

She had to grin. What would Emilie and Luanda have done if they’d been faced with what Carrie had been through in the last few days? A good look at Lucas’s piercing eyes would have scandalized their maidenly modesty, and one glance at Baca Riggins would have sent them into a fainting spell. She admitted she had felt a little faint herself when he grabbed her, but she had managed to pull through, with Lucas’s help.

But when it came right down to it, she couldn’t say what it was about Lucas that captivated her. She might be able to put a name on it when she got to know him better, but all she knew for certain now was that he was the most compelling man she’d ever met.

True, he was handsome. Not handsome like the men you saw in some magazines, but in a rugged way that sort of frightened and thrilled her at the same time. What she remembered about his clothes was not that they were clean or neat but that they were
tight.
She doubted there was a corset in the whole of the South that fitted its wearer’s waist any more tightly than Lucas’s Levi’s fitted his bottom, and she expected his shirt to rip open every time he flexed a muscle. It would take a little time for her to get used to a man walking in high-heeled boots and wearing a flat-crowned black felt hat eighteen hours out of twenty-four, but it took no time at all for her to become captivated by his silver-gray eyes, angular jaw, and flat-planed cheeks. He always looked like he needed a shave and the wisps of curly black hair peeking out from under his collar promised an equally furry chest, but the impact of all his parts came together in his face, in the smiles that could caress her like a soft summer breeze or frowns that could leap from his eyes with the impact of a shotgun blast.

He had a kind of magnetism that attracted the attention of everyone he passed, that drew her to him, that warned her of his presence even before she saw him. To other people it said this was a man to pay attention to; to her it whispered that here was a man she would never forget.

Carrie broke off her daydream. It was all fruitless speculation, all a useless distraction, until she had proved to him she could run this station by herself, that she would not be run off by anyone. Also she had to figure out a way to tell him that she was not, and never had been, married.

*     *     *

Lucas kicked a rock out of his path. As long as he was this worked up over Carrie, he had no business going to the station, not for lunch or anything else. He ought to go after those mustangs now, his bunch was getting down to just a few decent animals, but he knew all the while he was going to stay and have lunch with Carrie. That woman was in his craw and there didn’t seem to be any way to get her out. He had thought he was being real smart when he kissed her. He had wanted to make her so mad she would stay far away from him until her husband came. He might have done that, it would serve him right if he had, but that single kiss had also pushed him helplessly over the edge, and there was nothing he could do to right himself.

He could just imagine what his Uncle Max would say if he knew his nephew was getting himself worked up over a woman in the middle of a job. Max Barrow had a tongue that could take the paint off a barn, and he never spared it even though Lucas was his only living relative. Old Max was the oldest boy in a Texas family where thirteen babies died between the first and last children, the only two that lived. Max had left home early and wandered over the West only to come home one day and find his father and brother had been killed in a range war and his sister-in-law dying of a broken heart. Max buried his sister-in-law and then finished up that range war. Afterward he took his nephew and headed west again, and during all those years, he’d never let Lucas forget he had to be tough, that he had to fight his own battles because there was no law in the West to fight them for him. What law there was had its hands full with the Indians and the worst of the outlaws. Everybody else was on their own.

Max had also taught Lucas to take his pleasures where he found them, to never postpone until tomorrow what he should do today, and no matter what else he ever did, not to get tied up to a woman until he was too old to break his own broncos. By Max’s reckoning, Lucas had at least twenty more years to go. Lucas had never given much thought to settling down before now, but all at once twenty years seemed like a long time to wait. It wasn’t that he would feel particularly old at forty-four—Max was older than that and he could still outride and outdrink men half his age—it was the sudden feeling of loneliness that seemed to discolor all those long years ahead.

For some reason, building the stage company into the biggest line in the West was no longer important enough to devote twenty years of his life to it, any more than finding the men who stole the gold shipment was the only reason he wished to remain at Green Run. Whereas before he used to spend hours trying to approach the problem of stealing a gold shipment as an outlaw would and studying the country so he would know it as well as any native, he now found time weighed heavily on his hands. There was no real need to round up any more mustangs because he could have extra horses sent in from Denver; there was no need to break his neck over the holdup because the shipment was still weeks away; there was no need to hurry back to Denver because, even from his sickbed, Uncle Max could run things without him; there was no reason to worry about expanding the line because he intended to move into railroads as soon as the company was his; there was no reason to eat his meals alone when he could have them with Carrie and Katie; and there was absolutely no reason to try and convince himself Carrie was just another woman when he knew he was lying.