Frontier Woman (6 page)

“Like
hell
I will,” she raged.

“Like hell you
will!
” Rip raged back.

The two strong personalities battled as they had many a time before. Eyeball glared at eyeball. Hackles rose on the backs of two necks in anticipation of taking up the gauntlet and plunging into hostilities. Fists formed. Breathing quickened. Nostrils flared.

Bay shrank back against the open door while Sloan, the smallest of the three sisters at only five feet four inches, stepped farther into the room.

“This is getting you nowhere fast,” Sloan said, her dark, chocolate-brown eyes warm with humor. “I’ll go untie him.”

As one, the two combatants shifted the focus of their belligerance. Cricket was the first to respond. She hurtled off the bed, pausing only long enough to yank on her moccasins before flying past her father.

“No. I’ll get him.” She shoved past Sloan and raced out the bedroom door.

Rip pounded down the stairs after her, roaring, “You’ll be
polite
.”

“In a pig’s eye!” she shouted back, already out the front door.

Bay hung back by Cricket’s door, still frightened of being caught up in the terrifying clash between her sister and her father. Meanwhile, Sloan came down behind Rip and caught his arm before he could leave the house.

“You’ve made your point,” she said. “It won’t hurt to let her vent a little spleen before she unties him. Now that she knows who he is, she’s not likely to kill him, and anything less than that she does to him, he probably deserves. After all, he could have told her who he is at any time.”

Rip hesitated a moment, torn between his desire to observe how Cricket dealt with the Ranger and the knowledge that if he were there he’d probably be tempted to interfere and protect the man from Cricket’s wrath. No, it would be infinitely more fun to let the Ranger pay for his foolishness. He could see the sense of Sloan’s suggestion and, grunting his assent, turned away from the front door and back to the dining room. He only hoped Cricket would remember to bring the fellow in for breakfast when she was done with him.

Cricket’s pride hurt almost as much as her head and her belly. As she stomped toward the barn she planned all the horrible things she was going to do to Jarrett Creed before she untied him. He would learn she couldn’t be manipulated like the other females he knew. She was different.

She shoved the barn door open and slipped inside to the stall where Creed was tied, using her foot to hunt through the straw for her silver flask. The top of her head almost came off when she bent over to pick it up. She bolted down a slug of whiskey that burned her throat and did nothing to settle her stomach. There was no hope for her stomach. It was Jarrett Creed’s fault she was out of bed when she felt like a squashed cotton worm, and she was going to make him suffer the way she was suffering. No man made a fool of her and got away with it. That Texas Ranger was going to wish he’d never met Creighton Stewart. He was going to wish he’d never been born.

Cricket marched over to the sleeping man and slammed the toe of her moccasin into his ribs as hard as she could.

“Wake up!”

Before she could get in a second kick, the Ranger had scissored his legs around her feet and dumped her in the straw.

“That’s enough, Brava. I’m awake.”

Cricket scrambled onto her knees, nose to nose with the Ranger. “Good. Because I want you to hear every word I have to say before I hang you.”

“Look, you little savage,” he snarled, his golden eyes flashing, “before you do anything you’ll regret, let me tell you I’m a Texas Ranger. I got those mares from the Comanches who stole them from your father. The Rangers sent me here to trail the Comanches that have been raiding—”

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “You’re making that up so I won’t hang you, and it won’t wash. Try to be a man for a change, and take what’s coming to you.”

The Ranger’s flush at her insulting accusation pleased Cricket hugely.

“Ask your father—”

“My father rode away at dawn,” she lied. “He told me to do with you as I see fit. And I see fit to hang you!”

“Aw, hell.”

Cricket wanted to laugh but knew that would give away the game, and Jarrett Creed hadn’t suffered nearly enough yet to pay for what he’d done. “Do you have any last requests?”

“Would it be too much to ask for breakfast?”

“Sort of a last meal for the condemned man?”

“
Sí
, Brava.”

“My sisters and I were having breakfast when I remembered you were out here. Would you like to join us in the dining room?”

“You want me to join you . . . in the house . . . at your table . . . for breakfast?”

“Yes, since it’s your last request. Why not?”

“All right. You’ll have to untie me, though.”

Cricket pondered his request for a moment and came to the quick conclusion that Creed had offered her the perfect opportunity to pay him back for his deception before she delivered him to her father. She would pretend to have trouble untying the ropes. When she used her knife to cut him free the blade would slip and leave a little nick, a tiny scar which would be there always as a reminder of how a woman had held him in her power, rather than the other way around.

“You won’t try to escape, will you?” she said in a syrupy-sweet voice.

“Of course not.”

Green as grass
, Creed thought.

I’ve got him now,
Cricket thought.

They both moved at the same moment. Creed’s hands miraculously came free just as Cricket leaned over to untie him. Stunned, Cricket didn’t resist when Creed caught both her wrists in one hand and quickly secured them with the same rope which had once tied him.

“You’re going to have to learn to be a little more considerate of your company, Brava.”

Cricket stared down at her hands in disbelief for a second, then looked up at Creed. He’d done it again. This was not to be borne. Like a lassoed bronc, she gathered her muscles to explode.

“You birdbrain! You hobclunch!”

“Now, now, Brava. Temper, tem—”

Cricket rammed her head up under Creed’s chin, knocking his teeth together and slamming his head back against the wooden stall. Creed grunted in pain. He was too dazed to avoid her next attack, as she threw her full weight behind her shoulder into his solar plexus. Cricket tried to bring her knee to bear, but Creed rolled to the right, using his legs to knock her onto her side. She could see him getting ready to lunge at her and knew if he caught her, his sheer weight would pin her to the floor. As he dove, she rolled, and he landed on his stomach in the straw next to her.

“You missed!” she taunted.

In the next moment, she slammed her knees down in the middle of his back. She surrounded his head with her arms and brought her tied wrists up under his throat, cutting off his air. Cricket could feel the rough hemp abrading Creed’s neck. She knew how raw a rope burn could be, and conscious of Rip’s wrath if she did too much damage to the Ranger, she slackened the tension slightly.

Creed was on his knees in an instant, and her arms, which encircled his head, slipped down around his shoulders almost to his waist as he struggled upright. Creed turned to face her and Cricket found herself embracing him with her hands tied behind his back.

“If you want to fight like a man, Brava, then so be it,” the furious man hissed. “But I’m going to prove to you once and for all that you’re a woman!”

There was no way Cricket could resist Creed when he put his arms around her. He shoved her against his muscular chest with one broad hand, wrapped a handful of her braid around the other, and urged her mouth up to meet his. Cricket could feel his heart pounding. The muscles of his chest were hard, like granite, unrelenting, like the man.

His breath rasped in her ear as he said, “You’re a woman, Brava.”

How could she deny it? But she’d labored so long and hard not to acknowledge her female nature. She fought against the savage kiss and all it represented, clenching her teeth, pressing her lips together so hard her cheeks bulged from the effort. Creed bit her lips until she opened for him, and then his rough, wet tongue thrust against her teeth, forcing its way into her mouth, plundering virgin territory.

“Don’t—” Cricket jerked back so hard she sent them both tumbling into the straw, Creed’s full, hard length pressed against her from breast to thigh. She could feel his arousal, at least she supposed that was what it was. She shuddered, and turned her face away.

She didn’t want to be a woman. Why couldn’t he understand that and leave her alone?

Creed’s strong hand cupped her jaw to turn her toward him. “Look at me, Brava.”

Cricket snapped her head around and glared at him, but his next words confirmed that he’d seen more of her distress than she’d wanted him to see.

“Ah, Brava, we make sparks together. You shouldn’t play with fire if you don’t want to get burned,” he said in a voice harshened by subdued passion.

“I’ll kill you for this,” she spat.

“Then I might as well die a happy man,” he crooned, lowering his head toward her mouth.

“Stop! You can’t do this.”

“You don’t want me to kiss you?” he teased.

Cricket sizzled with mortification. “That’s what I just said, isn’t it?”

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t finish what I’ve started.”

“Rip wants to talk with you.”

Creed’s eyes narrowed. “I thought you said Rip left this morning.”

“I lied.”

“So why should I believe you now?”

“Rip knows who you are. He made me come out here to get you and invite you in to have some breakfast. Coffee. Eggs. Ham. Sausage. Flapjacks. Grits with butter. Biscuits with jalapeño jelly.”

Creed took a deep breath and, to Cricket’s amazement, actually licked his lips. It was true, she thought, what they said about a man and his stomach.

Creed eyed her doubtfully, but said, “I could sure use a good meal, so I’ll make a deal with you. You promise not to try to kill me, and I’ll release you and we’ll go have breakfast.”

Cricket brightened. “Okay.”

“Lift your arms up over my head,” he instructed.

Cricket could feel her breasts rising against Creed’s chest as her arms came to rest stretched up over her head in the straw. She relaxed completely beneath him, her body molding to his. As she looked up at him, her lips parted.

His eyes were hooded, his gaze intense.

“You can get up now,” she said. When Creed didn’t move she added, “Aren’t you hungry?”

“I’m hungry,” he admitted. “But not for flapjacks.”

Cricket could feel the changes in him, the tension that tightened the muscles in his arms and thighs, the bulge that grew against her belly. His breathing harshened, and his heartbeat pounded erratically. She remained still beneath him, waiting. She knew he wanted her as a man wants a woman. So she waited to see whether she would want him as a woman wants a man.

But nothing happened.

Of course, she did feel that same scorching heat everywhere they touched that she’d felt when he’d been naked at the pond.

But the day was warm, the barn even warmer . . . and his
skin was hot.

And she had the strangest urge to arch her back up into his hard chest.

But the straw was scratchy beneath her.

And her breats had gotten all swollen and pointy.

Obviously a result of the female miseries.

She felt a little relieved that the Ranger’s amorous advances hadn’t had any effect on her. What if she’d fallen under his spell?

Feeling safe from the threat that her “female nature” would betray her and subjugate itself to the Ranger, she allowed herself to speculate about what
might
have happened between them. She had to admit she was curious about the things men and women did together. Jarrett Creed had given her an opportunity she’d never thought to have, an opportunity to see what it felt like to lie beneath a man and to be kissed by that man.

His most recent kiss had been harsh and unforgiving, meant to punish. She’d liked the touch of his lips on her throat yesterday much better. They’d been so soft. As for the rest of his touches, well, aside from the ones that had bruised her, she hadn’t had enough of them to decide one way or the other. Perhaps if she lay still long enough, he would try again.

She held herself steady as Creed’s knuckles caressed her cheek. “I don’t know what game you’re playing this time, Brava, but what you’re offering is too delicious to resist.”

Creed bent his head until his lips closed over her mouth. As he deepened the pressure she closed her eyes to enjoy the sensation of his lips moving ever so softly against hers.

Suddenly, Creed’s weight was yanked away and a thunderous voice bellowed, “What the hell’s going on here?”

Chapter 4

I WANT AN EXPLANATION, AND I WANT IT NOW.”

Creed wasn’t sure from the look on Rip’s face whether he was about to be ushered to the altar or hanged after all, and cursed the day he’d ever set eyes on Creighton Stewart. “I know this looks bad, but—”

“This is none of your business,” Rip interrupted. “Well, Cricket?”

Cricket could feel the blood rushing to her face. She ground her teeth in chagrin. It was clear from the fact that her hands were tied that Creed had caught her unprepared and bested her. The worst of it was she’d neither achieved her revenge nor assuaged her curiosity. There was no way she could make this look any better to Rip than it did, but she certainly wasn’t going to apologize for what had happened. “I thought his hands were tied. They weren’t.”

Rip looked with new respect at Creed. “How’d you get free?”

“I carry a knife hidden in my moccasin.”

Rip spun back to his daughter. “Didn’t you check his clothes for weapons?”

Cricket frowned in recollection. “Yes, I did. Or rather, Bay did.”

Rip raised a bushy brow as though that explained everything.

Creed was confused. He didn’t understand the purpose of Rip’s cross-examination of Cricket. The sharp-tongued man ought to have been flaying Creed’s hide for throwing the girl to the ground. Instead, he was harassing his daughter for being bested by a man.

“Are you ready for some breakfast, young man?”

Creed shook his head as though to clear it. He must have missed something. Was that all Rip was going to say about the way he’d found the two of them? What kind of father was he? Where was the outrage for what Creed had done to Cricket? Where was the concern for his daughter’s honor? “I can explain—”

“There’s nothing more to explain,” Rip replied. “Cricket wasn’t paying attention, and you caught her unawares. She usually learns from her mistakes. I don’t expect it to happen again. Now, I’m ready for some breakfast. Coming?”

Creed watched dumbfounded as Rip stalked—he seemed to stalk a lot—from the barn.

“Are you going to cut me loose, or stand there with your mouth gaping open?” Cricket snapped.

“From the way your father talked, I’d have thought you could manage to free yourself.”

Cricket was in no mood for Creed’s wry humor. “Just cut the ropes.” She held her bound hands out to Creed, who pulled the concealed knife from his moccasin and cut her loose. While she rubbed her wrists where the hemp had scraped her skin, he reached down into the straw and located his two Patersons. Cricket winced when she touched a particularly sore spot.

“You all right?” Creed asked as he tucked the guns into the belt at the waist of his buckskin trousers.

“Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself.”

“So I noticed.”

Cricket’s fists clenched at his pointed response. “You caught me off guard this time. It won’t happen again.”

“This time? You mean there’s going to be a next time?”

Cricket snorted. “Not if I can help it. Frankly, I don’t see why men make such a fuss over kissing.”

“Have you been kissed often, Brava?”

“You’re the first who has—and the last who will. If you hadn’t gotten lucky, you wouldn’t have kissed me, either.”

“Luck had nothing to do with it,” Creed replied. “I’m simply a better wrestler than you are.”

Cricket opened her mouth to argue the point but was interrupted when Creed continued placatingly, “Which is only to be expected. You’re a woman. I’m a man. Men are stronger than women.”

Cricket’s second attempt at a response was also cut off as Creed added, “But I’d be willing to wrestle you again, if that’s the only way I can prove my point and win another kiss from you.”

“You won’t be kissing me again.”

“Why not?”

“Kissing leads to other things.”

“Such as?”

“Fornicating, for one.”

Creed’s brows rose.

“I have no intentions of laying myself down under some buck like you, because fornicating leads to marrying.”

Creed shifted uncomfortably, but Cricket didn’t seem to notice as she finished, “And I want more out of life than being stuck at home as some planter’s wife, being told by my husband what to do and when to do it. It’s a trap I’m aiming to miss, thank you very much. I’ll be no man’s other half. I plan to spend my life doing just as I please. So, like I said, you won’t be kissing me again.”

With that, Cricket stalked—a perfect imitation of Rip, Creed thought—out the barn door ahead of him.

“Ah, my fierce, wild woman,” Creed replied softly to Cricket’s retreating form. “You’re so very wrong about that.”

He quickly followed after her, shaking his head at the female logic that had deduced that kissing led to fornicating and fornicating led to marriage. She was at least half right, Creed thought, chuckling. It might behoove him to expand his acquaintance with a woman who had no intention of marrying. But first he was going to have breakfast. Coffee. Eggs. Sausage. Grits with butter.

Creed followed Cricket to the house. It was built, as were many of the houses in Texas, as two square, separate buildings, with an open dogtrot in the middle connecting them. Only, in the case of Three Oaks, each of the two buildings was rectangular and had two floors, the dogtrot had been enclosed to make a spacious hallway in the center of the house, and a double gallery porch graced the front of the entire abode, giving it a feeling of being a single structure. Stairs in the central hallway led to the second floor. Otherwise, the hallway was bare except for an open-sided sleightype daybed centered along one wall and a rocker bench on the other.

“Rip’s office is over there,” Cricket said, gesturing to the first room on the left, “and the guest bedroom is the next door back.”

Creed could see a canopied four-poster bed through the door she’d indicated.

“The dining room is this way. Follow me.” She led him into the parlor through the first door on the right off the hallway.

Creed was impressed by the subdued elegance in every facet of the simple furnishings: silk and brocade in the curtains and upholstery, polished cherry and maple in the furniture, porcelain figurines, pink marble surrounding the fireplace, silver candelabra, and Persian carpets on the hardwood floors. He was sure there wasn’t anything that could begin to match it anywhere else in Texas.

The graciously appointed home was neat and spotlessly clean, and he couldn’t imagine Cricket being comfortable living there. When he thought of her, he pictured the more traditional Texas home of unfinished pine, with its earth floor and stone fireplace. She belonged in a room with cedar tables, simple ladder-back chairs with rawhide seats, home-spun tablecloths, and linsey-woolsey curtains.

He imagined Cricket standing in an open doorway leading to the shaded dogtrot, with the smell of spring wildflowers wafting around her. For his
brava
he envisioned a home where everything was raw and natural, in a land as wild and untamed as she was.

Cricket led Creed through the rear parlor door into the dining room. Rip, Sloan, and Bay were already seated at the table, eating breakfast.

“I see you made it,” Rip said.

Sloan stood and reached a firm hand out to Creed. “I’m Sloan.”

Creed hesitated, then shook the work-hardened hand offered by the petite woman.

“Help yourself to whatever you want to eat,” she said.

Cricket had already taken a Wedgwood china plate from the stack at the end of the sideboard and filled it to overflowing with a healthy sample of each of the dishes provided. She then comfortably straddled the needlepoint seat of an almost-fragile cherrywood chair.

She’d thought she was hungry, but one look at the plate of delicious food in front of her changed her mind. She was going to be sick. There were buffalo stampeding in her stomach, and her belly would have made a nice drum, it was so taut.

“Hell’s bells,” she muttered. “I give up.” She grabbed an unbuttered biscuit and shoved the plate away, pulling her coffee cup over in front of her.

“Is that all you’re going to eat?” Creed asked, setting his plate of food down at the place next to Cricket’s.

“Mind your own cotton-picking business.”

“Cricket’s feeling a little under the weather,” Bay excused.

“Cricket’s stomach is still full of whiskey,” Sloan said with a laugh.

Cricket frowned at her sisters and then turned a sullen eye on Creed. “I’m not hungry,” she grated out.

“Whatever you say, Brava,” Creed murmured so softly only Cricket could hear him.

The table quieted as everyone concentrated on the business of eating.

The thing that struck Creed, now that he’d met them all, was how very different the three sisters were from each other. Their choice of clothing, perhaps, told the story better than words. Bay wore the purple chintz long-sleeved day dress of a proper plantation owner’s daughter. Sloan wore a plaid gingham shirt with a tan linsey waistcoat and dark-brown fitted osnaburg trousers tucked into knee-high black Wellington boots, a working-man’s costume, to be sure. Cricket wore the skin of a wild animal.

As for their personalities, unquestionably, Bay was the most timid of the three. He already knew she was kind-hearted, unsure, and unsatisfied with herself. On the other hand, Sloan exuded self-confidence. You could tell a lot about people from their handshakes, and based strictly on Sloan’s grip, Creed thought she possessed a maturity, a sense of who she was and what she wanted from life, that seemed lacking in Cricket. Cricket was arrogant as a man, spoiled and willful as a child, and totally unconscious of her femininity.

Yet they were all three beautiful women. Perhaps Bay was the most distinctive, Creed thought, with those violet eyes, and hair that, like her father’s, was red and brown and bronze all at the same time. She was tall and still growing. A promise of perfection if he’d ever seen one. Sloan should have seemed petite next to her two statuesque sisters, but again, her presence and confidence made her seem taller than she was. Her dark, chocolate-brown eyes offered intelligence and humor, and the waist-length sable hair she’d captured with a black ribbon at the base of her neck was indeed a crowning glory. As for Cricket, her smoky gray eyes promised nothing but trouble, and that lustrous auburn braid—he wanted to unravel it and run his fingers through it, have it drift across his naked body, have it tease him, titillate him, taunt him. And she wanted nothing to do with him, or any man, so it seemed.

“This is a nice place you’ve got here,” Creed said, finally breaking the silence that had reigned at the table.

“Bay’s responsible for the look of the house,” Rip replied. “When she got back from Boston a year ago she brought a lot of fancy ideas with her. I let her have a free hand, and what you see is the result.”

“I’ve been wondering,” Sloan asked, “how you found those mares so fast.”

“I happened across a band of Comanches camped in a cedar brake. They had the mares hobbled nearby.”

“How’d you know they belonged to us?”

“I didn’t, but they weren’t Spanish ponies, and they weren’t Indian mounts, either. I figured if I could get them back from the Comanches, the owner would turn up sooner or later to claim them.”

Sloan shook her head. “You took a pretty big chance. You could’ve gotten killed.”

“I enjoyed the challenge.”

“You’re lucky you got away with your hair.”

“Luck doesn’t help much where the Comanches are concerned,” Creed said.

Creed had stared at Cricket when he spoke, and she knew he was referring to her drunken ride back to Three Oaks. She opened her mouth to retort but never got a chance because Bay asked, “What made you become a Ranger?”

“It’s a job,” Creed answered. “You provide your own gear and ammunition, but it pays thirty-seven fifty a month, and you get to fight outlaws and Mexicans and Comanches. How could I pass it up?”

“You don’t make it sound like such a good deal,” Sloan said with a laugh.

“I like to fight,” Creed replied quietly. “I’m good at it.”

Cricket shivered at the ruthlessness in Creed’s eyes. She remembered the scars she’d seen on his body. Oh, yes, he’d fought before. She realized now how careful he must have been of his strength when he’d wrestled with her. Well, she hadn’t asked him to be careful!

“It sounds like Jack Hays sent the right man to catch those horse thieves, all right,” Rip said. “By the way, was there any news in San Antonio about whether the Mexican government is cooking up another plot to invade Texas?”

“When aren’t they plotting?” Creed replied.

Cricket watched as Creed’s glance darted quickly from Rip to Sloan before he added, “There’s been nothing definite since that letter we intercepted from Manuel Flores last year, but the Rangers are on the lookout for any suspicious activities.”

“I’m glad to hear someone’s keeping a close eye on those Mexican bastards,” Rip said.

“We do what we can,” Creed said. “Sometimes I wonder if it will be enough.”

There was a silence at the table as they considered Creed’s words.

Cricket remembered the cold and hunger they’d all endured four years ago when they’d fled Three Oaks in a panicked escape from Santa Anna’s ravaging army. Continued Texas independence from Mexico depended on constant vigilance by the Texas Rangers.