Fool for Love (Montana Romance) (21 page)

A guilty rush sped up Amelia’s back.  She stole a sidelong glance at Jacinta.  A blind man could see that the tiny woman was not suitable for Eric.  She had shown herself to be a desperate termagant, just like Olivia.  There was no way that Amelia could ever conceive of that woman in bed with Eric.  Eric was too passionate, too expressive in the way he made love.  He needed someone open and equal to his passions.  Someone willing to explore every possibility.

Amelia stopped her thoughts with a sharp intake of breath.  She shot a glance over her shoulder at the whores in front of the saloon.  They were still watching, kohl-rimmed eyes knowing.

“Could you show me the rest of the town?” she asked, eager to get away.

“Sure.”

Eric adjusted the set of her hand against the crook of his arm and walked her away from the courthouse and whatever business Christian and Jacinta had to discuss.  The path they took led them toward the train station.  The train had gone, but only by a few minutes.

“How long do they usually stop in Cold Springs?” she asked.

“An hour,” Eric said with a shrug, “sometimes more, sometimes less.  Between the hotel and Michael’s general store and the saloon, Cold Springs has a lot to offer.  If the conductor is making good time they usually like to stop here to take a break.  But you never can tell.”  She was certain she heard him mutter, “So don’t get any ideas,” at the end of his explanation.

They reached the end of Main Street in front of the station and turned onto a perpendicular street running along the length of the platform and on in both directions.  The street was fronted with blocky warehouses and a yard of some sort in the opposite direction from where they walked.  The buildings on the side of the street that they traversed gave way to houses and a handful of side roads before opening out into a meadow.

Across the meadow stood a respectable white church.  It was empty now that services were over but several people milled around, busy with tables and blankets of some sort.

Amelia worked up her courage and said, “Eric, I am genuinely sorry for what I said.  I don’t believe you’re stupid at all.  In fact-”

“Looks like they had a picnic after church today,” Eric interrupted her, scowl dark.  Before she could say more, he blew on with,  “Cold Springs folks like their social events.  Most weeks in the summer you’ll find a picnic or a dance or something to get people together.”

Amelia shut her mouth and let out a breath.  He wasn’t going to let her apologize.  She winced at her own miserable foolishness.

“And in the winter?” she followed along with him.

Eric shrugged.  “The Ladies Auxiliary has quilting circles and stuff like that.  The men spend a lot of time at the saloon.”  His mournfully stoic expression broke into a sheepish grin at the words.  “Playing cards,” he insisted.

Amelia arched an eyebrow.

“Well I’ll be!  That must be the new school up there.”

Eric distracted her by pointing across the field to the most extraordinary building Amelia had seen in Cold Springs.  It was easily twice the size of the courthouse and two stories tall with bright windows.  Its stone edifice was set off by two marble pillars near a large brass door.  The building still had an air of being new and unused, but it filled Amelia with a thrill of hope nonetheless.  It was a marvelous structure for children to learn in.  There was even a set of swings in the fenced-in school yard.

“It’s lovely!” she exclaimed with genuine emotion.

Eric turned to watch her, his eyebrows climbing up.  “You think so?”

“Yes.  I would love to see the inside someday.  Your children will be blessed to have such a handsome hall to learn in.”

She realized a moment too late, when Eric’s look of hesitant encouragement burst into a full-fledged fit of joy, that he must have taken ‘your’ to mean his children personally and not every child in Cold Springs.

“I hadn’t thought about it like that,” he said, grinning hard.  “You could be a teacher there, you know.  Haven’t Michael and Charlie been saying all along that they’ll need good teachers?”

The pull was too much, too tempting.

“I doubt they would accept someone like me in those halls,” she sighed.

“Horse shit!” Eric exclaimed, then quickly muttered, “Sorry.”  He took a breath, shifted his weight, and said, “Why, any school worth its salt would be more than glad to have a teacher like you.  I saw the way those Hamilton girls looked at you.”

“Yes, but you didn’t see the way they looked at me when I was dismissed,” she answered his enthusiasm by lowering her eyes.

“Amelia, if they looked at you with anything other than stars in their eyes, then I’m a goat’s aunt.”

A whisper in the back of her mind reminded her Eric was right.  Either way, the memory was too painful.  She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head.  “Let’s not talk about it.  We should talk about you, about what you’re going to do about your ranch.”

His broad smile faltered.  “The ranch can worry about itself at the moment.”

“You need to be there,” she argued.  “That ranch is what you love more than anything-”

“Is it?”

“-and you should be getting to the bottom of its – Oh!”

She gasped at the sharp jab in her belly.  It took her breath away.  Eyes wide, she cradled her stomach with both hands.  There it was again, a kick.  She’d been feeling something for the last few days, but with all of the stress and jostle of travel she’d ignored it.  Now the tapping was unmistakable.

“What is it?”  Eric fluttered around her.  “Are you sick?  Are you hurt?  You’re not having the baby right now are you?”

“No!” she breathed, blinking into a smile.  “No, it’s moving!”

Eric gaped at her, a thousand expressions working their way through his features at once.  “Moving?”

“Yes!”

She grabbed one of his hands and placed it on her stomach.  They waited.  In all of her life Amelia had never waited and wished for something so tremulously.  Then there it was, another light kick.

Eric sucked in a breath then burst into a laugh.  “Well I’ll be!  Is that…?”

He met her eyes.  She smiled, the first genuine smile she’d managed in weeks.

“Amelia, you’ve got a baby growing inside of you!” he said, face alight.

“I do,” she whispered.

Eric moved his other hand to her belly.  They waited to feel more movement, but the baby had other plans.  Eric didn’t seem to mind.  Instead of waiting he slid his hands around to her back and pulled her close.  Before Amelia could think to be wary he was kissing her.  Her heart was too full to hold back.  She clasped her hands on his arms and kissed him back.

Maybe, a tiny voice at the back of her mind murmured like a summer breeze, maybe she could let go of the past and let herself become Eric’s wife in truth.

She broke the kiss and stepped back with a rush of breath.  Eric looked puzzled for a moment before she smiled, a real smile at that.  There was no need to make a decision right that minute.

“Will you show me more of the town?” she asked, taking his arm.

He held his breath, glancing from her lips to her arm in his to the sunny world around them.  Then he let out a breath and smiled.

“I’d be mighty glad to, Mrs. Quinlan.”

Chapter Twelve

Love could do strange things to a man, Eric thought as he strode down the street leading to the livery.  It could make you plunk yourself down in town, smiling when every farm wife and shopkeeper’s daughter asked you to tea for four days straight.  It could make you go four days without a card game and nary a drink in spite of ample invitation.  And it could make you borrow a natty old nag to ride out to your ranch when your sort-of wife put her foot down.

Amelia had been bugging him for days to go check on his ranch.  He kept telling her he intended to go as soon as he could.  He’d meant it too.  But Curtis insisted he had things under control and Amelia was just so daggone pretty as every respectable woman in town decided to call on her at the hotel or invite them over.  Why she balked at the invitations he didn’t know or didn’t want to guess.  He nagged her about accepting just as she nagged him about going to the ranch.  In the end they both won.

“If I can make small talk with strangers over tea, then you can go out to your ranch,” Amelia had insisted after a particularly painful morning at Viola Jones’s house.

“That old maid never was satisfied with anything or anyone,” Eric had assured her.

Amelia hadn’t fallen for his diversionary tactics.  He knew he had to go home, but it’d been Delilah’s promise to keep an eye on her that had finally gotten him off his butt, looking for a horse.

“George, I need a mount for the afternoon,” he said to the old stable hand as he swung open the gate to the livery.  “You got one you can spare?”

Old George laughed at him.  “Curtis still riding Titan then?”

Eric’s hackles went straight up.  “Hell.  Curtis knows that Titan is mine!  If I’ve told him once, I’ve told him a hundred times….”

He stopped when he saw the smirk in Old George’s eyes.

“Well, I suppose someone had to keep a stallion like that exercised while I was gone,” he made an excuse.

Old George laughed and shook his head.  “I’m sure that’s it.”

Eric started out for his ranch at a moderate pace, afraid to push the poor horse any faster than was necessary.  That left him plenty of time to watch th
e Montana countryside roll by.

It hadn’t changed as much as Cold Springs itself.  Farms were farms and ranches were ranches and it took more than a few shiny pennies to change that.  The sameness of it set Eric’s mind and heart at ease.  Cattle roamed inside fenced-in pastures, rows of newly sprouted wheat and corn stretched back from the path he followed that barely qualified as a road.  He grinned from ear to ear when the Twitchel’s dog came down their lane barking up a storm as though he would chase Eric away.  It was so good to be home.

Eric’s free and easy feeling dropped dead when he reached the edges of his property.

The first sight of the ranch that met his eager eyes was a smashed section of fence near the road.  A fence post had been uprooted and the lengths of barbed wire fixing it to the posts on either side were twisted and buckled.  He sat straighter on his mount, searching for any sign of his herd.  If they didn’t get loose through this hole in the fence they would surely hurt themselves on the barbed wire.  Why hadn’t someone fixed it?

He rode on, assessing every inch of his land with a sinking heart.  The grass was high in the field along the road.  The herd might not have been out this way in days or even weeks.  The ranch was sprawling, the land he owned with Curtis vast, and it was meant to be used.

He finally saw signs of life as he turned off the main road and onto the lane leading half a mile up to his tall, blue-shuttered house.  Someone came out of the barn and stopped halfway through crossing to the cluster of smaller houses where his ranch hands lived.  Or had lived.  He heard an indistinct cry before the man ran for the big house.

“What the hell?” Eric muttered, tapping his horse to speed him up.

At last he heard the low call of a cow.  The herd, or at least part of it, was wandering around a smaller, tight corral on the other side of the barn.  Eric’s moment of relief and fondness for the dumb animals was cut short when he started counting them.  He rode on to the other side of the barn, dismounting and stepping to the edge of the enclosure as the numbers failed to add up in his head.

“Eric, what are you doing out here?”

He turned away from the jumble of cows to find Curtis striding toward him from the house.  He’d evidently just shaved and wore his Sunday best.

“What happened to the rest of them?” Eric asked without preamble.  “Near as I can count, there’s only about fifty or sixty head here.”

“Really?”  Curtis closed the distance between them, coming to stand beside Eric.  He crossed his arms and frowned at the herd.  “The rest of them must still be out in the pasture.”

“Where?” Eric asked.  “I didn’t see any of them as I came up by the road.  I did see a right big hole in the fence though.  Can’t you send Hernando and Butch down to fix it?” he ordered by rote.

“Hernando and Butch and their families both ditched on us back in February,” Curtis said just as Eric remembered the reality of the situation.

“Hell,” Eric muttered.  He swiped his hat off his head and wiped his forehead with his sleeve.  “What on God’s green earth would possess them to up and leave us like that?”

“Why, uh, as I understand it, they got a better offer,” Curtis explained, smile far brighter than it should be.  “A man from Idaho came into town over the winter offering to pay men two and three times as much to pick up and move to work for him.  A lot of the ranches in the area lost good men.”

The answer twisted in Eric’s gut like the ruined barbed wire down by the road.  “I thought you said they left because they were demanding higher wages and we couldn’t pay.”

“That’s right,” Curtis answered without pause.  “And then that man from Idaho showed up.”

“Oh.”  Eric twirled his hat.  Amelia would have read something into that answer.  “Well who’s minding the herd now?”