Deborah Camp (12 page)

“Oh, go on!” Darnella gave him a harmless slap across the shoulder. “Thanks for the hospitality. Bye now.”

Zanna stood on the porch with Grandy’s arm around her shoulders as the visitors scrambled into their vehicles and reined the horses away from the house and along the road. She endured Grandy’s touch until she was sure the others could no longer see her, then she wrenched away from him.

“You’re drunk!” she accused, angry at him for having a fine old time while she was squirming with uneasiness. “And keep your hands to yourself!”

“I’m not drunk,” he said, stunningly sober. “And I have every right to put my hands on you. You are my wife.” He spoke the last slowly and deliberately.

“Not like that. We have a deal.”

“I signed a contract to work my butt off, but it didn’t say anything about keeping my hands off you.”

Zanna saw Perkins standing near the barn and she knew their voices carried. She hurried inside. Grandy followed and shut the door behind him. Zanna whirled to face him, telling herself it was dangerous not to when he was fired by whiskey.

“I want you to do something for me,” he said, his voice low and scratchy as it had been the first time he’d spoken to her in jail. But this was different. The scratchiness came from something other than exhaustion.

“No. I won’t.” Zanna hitched up her chin, refusing to lie down and take his abuse. “I’ll fight you every inch of the way. I promise you that. I’ll scream until the other men come in here. They’ll kill you.”

His expression was unpleasant. “You sure were in the lead when tongues were handed out, weren’t you? Well, I hate to disappoint you, but I’m not after what’s under your skirt.” He ran a hand around the back of his neck. “Oh, I’d take it if it were offered, but I’m not wanting it so bad that I’d die for it.”

She eyed him with blatant suspicion. “What
do
you want then?”

“A gentle hand for two minutes. Think you can deal with that?”

“I don’t know …” She shook her head, unable to grasp his meaning.

“I’ve got a couple of places on my back I can’t reach. The doc gave me some medicine to pour on them.” He raised his brows, waiting for her to help him out or give him directions to hell.

Zanna regarded him for a full minute, looking for the trapdoor she might fall through if she consented. She couldn’t find it, so she nodded. “Bring me the medicine.”

He disappeared into his bedroom and returned with a brown bottle. “It burns like hell, but the doc said it would take the fever out of the infected places.”

Zanna took the bottle from him and made a circle with her forefinger. “Remove your shirt and turn around, please.” She pulled herself upright, fixing a hard expression on her face while he shrugged off his suspenders, unbuttoned his shirt, and pulled it from his waistband. When the shirt fell away, Zanna gasped and her free hand trembled a fraction of an inch from his blemished skin.

“Oh, my!” she breathed and felt sick and angry at the same time. “Look what they’ve done to you!”

“What?” he asked, peering over his left shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong?” she repeated, aghast. “Everything!” She stared, horrified, at the welts on his back. The white taping covering his ribs left only his shoulders exposed, but that was enough. Angry slashes, some hairline and others puffy and deep, crisscrossed his coppery skin. The bruises were fading, but still left greenish-blue imprints on him. “I … didn’t know you were so marked … so mistreated.”

“Oh, that.” He shrugged and faced front again. “What did you expect?”

What
did
she expect? she wondered. Did she think he was so tough that a trip across rough country on his back and stomach wouldn’t damage the goods?

“How f-far did they drag you?”

“I don’t know. I kept blacking out. They rode in circles mostly.”

“Just because you took a horse and cheated at cards,” she said, shaking her head as she uncapped the bottle.

“I didn’t cheat and I didn’t steal the horse. I won the card game and the horse was mine.”

She thought it wise not to argue. His voice had taken on a decided edge. Using her wretched handkerchief, she soaked it with the fulvous, pungent medicine and dabbed at the wounds on his shoulders. He flinched, but he made no sound.

“All done,” she said, capping the bottle again and thinking of the terror he must have felt when he’d realized what the men were going to do before they turned him over to the sheriff. To be roped and treated like a sack of beans instead of a human being! Torture was the retaliation of cowards.

“Thanks.” He turned to send her a smile, but froze when he saw the tears shining in her eyes. He touched his fingertips to her rounded chin, making her eyes meet his. “You’re a hard one to figure out,” he said in that unnerving, husky voice. “One minute you’re talking about having
me killed and the next minute you’re shedding tears because I’ve got some rips in my hide.”

“I don’t like to see anyone abused,” she said, then swallowed hard. “Beaten, whipped. It’s horrible.”

He started to turn away, but something sent his gaze back to her liquid eyes again. She handed him the medicine and released a quivering sigh that seemed to galvanize him. He dipped his head, and his mouth nudged hers. She made a strangled sound of surprise, but he finished the kiss by sucking gently before drawing away.

Her heart had become ice in her breast during the moments his mouth rested on hers. When his lips lifted, pulling hers along for a shattering second before peeling away like a second skin, a tingle ran from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet. Zanna felt as if she’d been struck by lightning.

“Thanks again for the gentle hand and the day of rest,” he said, then headed toward his bedroom. He stopped on the threshold, shirt in hand, suspenders hanging loosely at his sides.

“You can have tomorrow to rest as well,” she said because she couldn’t think of anything but the way her heart was beating like a wild thing.

“I’ll take it.” He smiled, his eyes crinkling at the corners and his teeth white against his tanned skin, then he stepped inside the small bedroom and closed the door.

Zanna touched her lips with trembling fingertips and stared at the irregular planks of the door. The bedstead creaked, taking his weight. His heavy, moaning sigh floated out to her. Zanna blinked and a single tear licked a path down her cheek. Who would have thought that a man so uncouth, so untoward, so unwholesome could be so unpredictably attractive? His kiss should have been rough and unwelcome, but it had been unparalleled in its gentleness. Zanna went to her own bedroom where, for no reason she could fathom, she wept.

Zanna was cleaning the hen coop, replacing soiled straw with clean, when she heard the whooping and hollering coming from the corral. She finished spreading the straw, then went outside and looked toward the knot of activity. Shading her eyes with one hand, she watched the familiar sight of a cutting horse doing its distinctive stop and whirl dance as it winnowed a speckled-face calf from the others in the corral. She was puzzling over why the other cowhands were so entertained by such a commonplace event when the horse spun completely around to give her a glimpse of the rider’s face.

“Grandy!” The word exploded from her. She strode toward the corral, arms pumping, face set in an unrelenting frown. That rapscallion!

Softened by the sight of his wounds and her own guilty feelings about working him so hard, she’d not only given him a couple of days to rest, but the whole week, and now he was astride a horse showing off! Well, if he was
that
fit he could hitch up the mules and plant cotton.

She stopped beside Packsaddle Bill at the corral fence. Packsaddle glanced down at her and slapped one palm against the fence post.

“Ain’t he somethin’?” he asked with a chuckle. “Who’da thunk he could ride like that? Hell, he’s one of the best I’ve seen. Sits a horse like he was glued to the
saddle. Look how he handles that hay burner. Just like he handles them mules.”

“He’s got the touch,” Lefty said. He was sitting on the top rail, watching the show as he chewed on a piece of straw. “I seen a couple of men like him before. Them Injuns got the touch. Most every Injun I ever saw could walk right up to any strange horse and jump on his back like he’d raised and broke it.”

“Yeah, but watch that boy ride,” Packsaddle said, shaking his head in awe. “Don’t he have a light seat? Hell, he ain’t even using the reins.”

“Using his knees and ankles,” Perkins said, coming up to stand next to Zanna. “We could use him out on the range, ma’am. Could you cut him loose from the field?”

“I most cer—” She chopped off the rest because Grandy whirled his mount and sent it right at them. The white-faced mare stopped on a dime, a mere foot from the fence. Grandy grinned and doffed his hat.

“‘Morning, darlin’. Enjoy the show?”

“I had no idea you were so fit,” she said, barely keeping herself from spitting fireballs at him. She hated his endearments, thrown with as much affection as slop to a hog.

“I’m feeling much better,” he said, then puffed out his chest until his shirt buttons threatened to put out her eyes. “Guess it’s all this clean living.”

“That’s a good one,” Lefty said, whacking his hat against his thigh as he let out a whoop.

Zanna didn’t see anything funny about Grandy showing off for the boys at her expense. She crossed her arms at her waist and waited for the others to wipe the grins off their faces.

“I was just telling your missus that we could use you out on the range. You got a way with a cutting horse,” Perkins said.

Grandy’s eyes lit up. He swung out of the saddle and looped the reins around the top rail. “Now that’s more to
my liking. Farming fields has never been on my list of favorites. Riding the range …” He rubbed one glove along his jawline. “I reckon I could get used to that right quick. I’ll saddle up tomorrow morning and join—”

“No, you won’t,” Zanna said and her voice held such rocky conviction that Lefty slid off the fence and made tracks with Packsaddle Bill hot on his trail. Only Perkins remained and he couldn’t seem to lift his gaze from the toes of his boots.

“Come again?” Grandy said, although he’d heard her the first time. He was asking for a clarification, not a repetition. Mainly, he was challenging her, trying to browbeat her in front of her foreman.

“Now that you’re back in the pink, there’s cotton to plant,” Zanna said as she executed a neat turn and started for the barn.

“I’m not planting cotton, Suzanna!” he called after her, then released a string of colorful, juicy swearwords.

His use of her full Christian name didn’t go unnoticed by Zanna. She smiled, despite herself, and was glad to be swallowed by the shadows in the barn. She picked up a pitchfork and started tossing clean hay into the wheelbarrow. She thought of the days just past when she’d gone about her chores while Grandy lay sprawled in his bed or in the hammock suspended between two elms in back of the house, and her blood simmered. She didn’t begrudge him the time to heal, but it got her goat that he’d jump on a horse and give a lesson in cutting cattle before he’d offer to help her with her work. Men! Weren’t they all worthless? Well, all of them save Theo—and maybe Doc, although Doc Pepperidge could be about as useful as a bucket of hair sometimes.

“Zanna!”

She hadn’t heard his approach, so her heart clawed up into her throat before she spun around to stare, wild-eyed, at Grandy. She didn’t know she’d raised the pitchfork as if to plunge it into his chest until she followed his own
wild-eyed gaze to the sharp tines glinting in the pale sunlight. Feeling foolish for having reacted from her gut instead of her head, Zanna brought the pitchfork down into the hay stack again and continued loading the wheelbarrow.

“Sometimes you’re downright scary,” Grandy said as he came closer. “Who did you think I was?”

“You, that’s who,” she said through clenched teeth. “When I’ve got this thing piled high, you can wheel it over to the stables and muck them out since you’re feeling so frisky today.”

“I want to go with the other men tomorrow to round up the strays.”

“No, I said.”

“Hey, I’m not your child to be given permission,” he said, grabbing one of her elbows and jerking her around to face him. “I’m going.”

“You’re planting cotton tomorrow,” she said, wrenching free, only to be seized again, this time by both elbows. “Let go of me!”

“I’m riding tomorrow!”

“You do and I’ll go get the sheriff and have you thrown back into that pit where I found you,” she threatened, trying to wriggle from his hold.

For a few tense moments they stared at each other, nose to nose and eyeball to eyeball, then Grandy pushed her away and turned his back on her. He removed his hat and ran one hand through his light brown hair before replacing the hat on his head. His hair was getting too long, she thought irrelevantly. He needed a haircut before he got to looking shaggy.

“I’m asking you nice,” he said and the passive quality in his voice alarmed her more than his shouting had done. “Please let me go with the men. I’ll come back. That’s a promise.” He turned around and his eyes were a clear shade of green that reminded her of mossy rocks and new
leaves. “Just don’t make me plant cotton, Zanna. Don’t make me do that.”

She could take his ridicule, his arrogance, his teasing, and his foul temper, but she found that she couldn’t take his “asking nice.” Zanna bent over to retrieve the pitchfork and when she straightened, she was shaking her head in slow confusion.

“You’re still saying no?” he asked.

“Why are you so dead-set against planting cotton?”

“Because I hate it.” His hands gathered into tight, angry fists at his sides. “I promised myself a long time ago that I’d never plant, chop, or pick it again. Please, Zanna. I’m not one to beg, but please!”

She wasn’t one to
want
to see a man beg, so she sent the pitchfork sailing sideways in a burst of irritation. “Oh, hell’s afire!” She ignored his blink of surprise at her outburst. “Go muck out the stalls.”