Magic and the Texan (7 page)

Best to return to the benign. Thinking about the modesty of the supplies hereabout, she said, “With no garden, how do you get enough food to eat?”

“We've got pinto beans. And beef. Lots of beef. Fish in the smokehouse. I hunt rabbits and wild turkey. Buy eggs from Isabel—she donates chiles.” He grimaced, but chuckled. “I sure wouldn't want to pay to set my stomach afire.”

Bethany enjoyed spices. But she laughed with him, glad for the less formal, and certainly less fractious, moment. “How do you feel about sending to San Antonio or Laredo for supplies? A touch of this and a dash of that, and I'll place some marvelous dishes in front of you.”

“Beth, you don't need to cook. I pay Isabel to do it.”

Probably not well, Bethany bit her tongue rather than say. Isabel Marin, wife of a vaquero gone to Rockport, now washed dishes, as Bethany had done so many times at the Long Lick. Isabel would next set the kitchen for breakfast.

“Besides,” he teased, “you cook for an army.”

Bethany had a tendency to overcook, and knew it. After serving meals to plentitudes of patrons at the Long Lick, she didn't know how to cook for two. Pa had taken sustenance through liquids. Or he'd gorged on pickled eggs and pig's feet, right at the bar. None of this, of course, would Bethany share.

Ducking her chin and yanking at another blade of grass, she varied the subject. “It's nice out here.”

“Why don't you recite some of your pretty poems, honey?”

Where did he keep his letters from the Buchanan miss? Bethany needed to commit a few verses to memory. As she'd claimed yesterday afternoon and again last night, she said, “I can't think of a one.”

“Bridal jitters.” He patted her hand; she almost jumped out of her skin. “Don't fret, honey. I've got just the ticket to lift your spirits. Longfellow's
Evangeline.
”

Jon Marc relaxed into the grass, propping on elbows and crossing one leg over the other. He began to recite from memory.

“Longfellow is a rather long-winded fellow, wouldn't you say?” Bethany could help but comment, no more than five minutes into the monologue.

“I thought he was your favorite.”

“Of course. Of course, he is! But, well, I must be overtired, not appreciating all those”—she coerced a grin—“murmuring pines in the hemlock.”

“I like your smile.” He also grinned. “Say. I've got a new book. Maybe you'd enjoy—”

“Jon Marc, please don't.” She couldn't take another moment of their mixture of uncomfortable silences and awkward conversation, nor one more word about moss-bearded trees and their equivalents. “It's late, and I need to give my hair a good brushing before I turn in. Why don't we call it an evening?”

Bethany assumed Jon Marc would play into her hands.

She was wrong.

It did not warm the cockles of Jon Marc's heart, Beth cutting another evening short. Obviously she couldn't wait to get shut of him. Wouldn't happen, by damn.

Not without a fight.

Thus, he followed her down the hill and into the house. She didn't turn into the bedroom, but chose the parlor instead, since he said, “If you're going to brush your hair, by darn, I'm going to watch you.”

Beth sat down in the rocker, ready to argue.

Black lashes settled against the crest of her high cheekbones as she stared at the small, dainty hands that were laced and rested on her lap. She seemed young, defenseless, a damsel out in a cold, lonely world. His virgin. His?

She
would
be his. He'd never let anything or anyone hurt her, especially some ole redheaded vaquero, but they had to get on a different plane than what was between them now.

“Beth . . . I'd love to watch you brush your hair. I love to look at you, period. If we've got a future ahead of us, you'd best get used to me looking at you.”

Her chin rose. Her eyes widened.

“Where's your brush?” he demanded.

“In my ... it's in my reticule.”

He dug in the handbag, bristle prickling his fingers. His grasp on the handle, he asked, “Shall I stand or sit?”

“Sit, for pity's sake. Sit.”

He eased back in the horsehair settee that he'd bought to please her, but had displeased her. Her gaze averted, she took pins from her hair; it cascaded past her shoulders. When she lifted her arms to swing the mass of those locks to one shoulder, Jon Marc got an ache of need in his groin.

He may have waited thirty years for a wife, but didn't know if he could wait much longer for Beth, not with passion and desire, deep in his veins. He yearned for her, his need building with each passing moment, as man wanted woman since Adam and Eve.

Beth put the brush to work. Lamplight caught the sheen of those locks. They were like the deepest of midnights, dark yet touched by sparks of blue. How many nights had he slept under the stars and worshipped the sky's hues? Poetry of the heart, midnight.

Poetry was Beth.

She was more than he'd ever dreamed of. Lovely, talented, poetic. Her presence brought light to dark.

Exactly how much
more
was she?

Her lovely hair recalled a question, one that nagged too often. Why didn't it curl? Why didn't a lot of things add up? Like why she hadn't squawked about the padre. Like why she'd written about blue eyes. This was not a stupid woman. Not the sort to be blind to the color of her own eyes.

Jon Marc couldn't quell his nosiness.
It's not suspicion. It's curiosity
. “Why doesn't your hair make little curls at your earlobes, as it does in the tintype?”

“Sir, don't you know about curling irons? Ladies use them all the time, especially before they sit for a photographer. A lady does seek to look her best for posterity.”

“Sounds reasonable. Guess I don't know much about ladies,” Jon Marc admitted slowly.

“What do you mean, you don't know much about ladies? Your letters were sensitive and sentimental. Every woman yearns for such. I'm surprised you don't know that. But maybe you do. Did you make jest with your remark?”

“I've lived a lonesome life, Beth honey.”

She laid the brush aside. “You've been in company with women, surely.”

“This may be the frontier, but it's not a monastery. There are ladies in La Salle County. None of them were for me.”

“You were at war,” Beth reminded him.

“War is for men.”

“Not every moment.”

“It was for me.”

Beth gave up on that line. “What about the ladies who weren't ‘for you'?”

He quit the settee and walked to the chair next to the rocker. “They're all señoritas.”

“Good Catholic girls.” Beth began to plait her hair. “Like Terecita.”

“Terecita López is nothing to me. You know that.”

Jon Marc wanted off the subject of women. He wanted off it. Bad. Clamming up might save a lie.

He went for diversionary tactics. “Did I tell you about the Mexicans who settled brush country? Most of them pulled out when the Anglos got claim to the disputed area between the Nueces and the Grande. This is the last part of Tejas to become Texas.”

“Did any of the grandees stay here?”

“One or two. And a nest of Mexican bandits.”

Beth wasn't a woman to give up. “I should imagine they have daughters and granddaughters.”

“They go to Mass at Santa María.”

“You found nothing attractive in the Mexican women?”

“Some of the prettiest ladies in Texas attend that church,” he answered honestly. “Rest assured, not a one is as pretty as you.”

“Jon Marc O'Brien, you're thirty years old. Surely you've courted at least one lady!”

He fidgeted. And knew that he and Beth were nearing an area best left unmentioned. “I've never
courted
anyone but you.”

“Are you saying you've never had a lover?”

Beth gasped at her own question. Eyes rounded. A flush blossomed in high cheekbones, a sure sign of embarrassment, even before she gave an even more telling one: covering her mouth with the fingers of both hands.

Several seconds passed before she said, “How very crude. Forgive me!”

He assumed it wasn't easy for a virginal plum like Beth to speak of the carnal.

“There's nothing to forgive.” He then said something he felt in his heart, even though he knew it invited trouble. “A couple needs to be frank. What good would come out of muzzling our mouths?”

“Nothing.” Gazing downward, she picked at a pleat of her skirt and moistened her lips. “I have a case of curiosity. Will you humor me with candor? Are you . . . untouched?”

A mantle of silence dropped. Jon Marc rubbed fingertips across his lips. Squirmed. This was the moment of reckoning. If he told the truth, he would lose Beth.

 

 

Just when Bethany decided the conversation had gotten interesting with Jon Marc, he again plunked down in a hideous chair, saying, “Maybe we shouldn't speak too frankly, us not married. Embarrasses me is what it does.”

That was another thing. When was he going to set a date?

First, Bethany needed an answer to her question. “Sir, we must move past embarrassment. I'm not without some knowledge of the animal kingdom. My father spent his lifetime in the cattle business.” When he wasn't drunk. “I know how calves are made.” Beth Buchanan had said similar words, somewhere between Fort Worth and Waco. “You needn't be shy with me.”

The oil lantern flickered, popped. Jon Marc sat straighter. He twitched his lips. Squirmed again.

Bethany felt somewhat guilty for putting him on the spot. Somewhat. “Are you untouched?” she repeated.

At last he said, “Fitz O'Brien, my grandfather of record, took me to a bordello to learn ‘the sweetness o' lasses.' I was sixteen. I didn't take the ‘lass' up on her sweetness.”

“You've never been to a house of ill repute?”

“One. In Laredo. Terecita's old haunt. Didn't stay.”

“You've never tasted forbidden fruit?”

He glanced downward, bashful as all get out. “Would I do something like that?”

Of course not.

Holding onto the rocker arms as if for dear life, Bethany had to swallow a groan.

A virgin. For pity's sake, the man was a
virgin!

 

 

“Hellfire and damnation,” Jon Marc muttered, reverting to his Calvinist upbringing. Had he out-and-out lied to Beth? No. But he'd led her to believe an untruth. How could he get out of the mess he'd made?

Gathered up in the saddle, making a midnight check of the herd, Jon Marc groaned. A familiar voice cut into his thoughts.

“¡Patrón!”
The vaquero Luis de la Garza rode up, reining in. “The horses, they have broken out of the corral. It is too much for me and Diego. You must help.”

It took two hours to round up the strays, a blessing in that Jon Marc didn't have time to think about his lie. Work finished, he headed home, where light spilled from the bedroom window. Beth, awake. He ought to tell her the truth.

As if choking life out of the reins, he turned toward the Nueces and walked León along the riverbank. Dismounted. Skipped a few stones across the water. “Damn Persia Glennie to hell.”

After her husband choked to death on a chicken bone, that widow made a habit of finding ways to waylay Jon Marc.

He'd been in San Antonio, ordering Beth a piano and feeling sorry for himself at Christmas—both from spending yet another holiday with no one to share it with, and from being perturbed at letters filled with poetry rather than a definite answer to his proposed April wedding date. He let Persia lead him astray. Twenty-nine years of celibacy, out the window.

Up to that point he'd sworn to bring his own honor to the marriage bed. It hadn't been easy, keeping his pecker in his britches, but he'd done it, until Persia and her cognac and the black mood of a forlorn hombre did him in. As he'd mentioned to Beth, only a hypocrite asked for purity when he couldn't give it.

“I'm a hypocrite. Dammit.”

He now kicked a stone into the water.

He'd lured a virginal bride here.

He'd lied to her.

The only way out was to hope that Beth would forgive him.

He climbed back into the saddle to head for the house, again seeing that light in the window, a beacon that urged him forward. To honesty. Wait. Why should he ask for trouble?

Beth hadn't been frank with him, yet he hadn't held dishonesty against her. But a little thing like eye color was just that, little. Confessing his sins was no small matter. She'd be done with him.

Maybe he'd get lucky. Maybe Beth had something to hide. Something big. A sin. Of the flesh?

Did she have something he could bargain forgiveness with?

Hellfire and damnation!

How far had he fallen that he would trade off the one thing he'd spent a lifetime looking for?

He needed help.

That was when he took himself off to the church of Santa Maria. Reaching the sanctuary, he let himself in the heavy wooden doors. Padre Miguel was nowhere to be found. Jon Marc lit an altar candle. Genuflecting in one of the pews, he asked for divine guidance.

When he left, he knew what he must do.

Tell Beth the truth.

About Persia.

About the other secrets that troubled him.

But he'd wait for the perfect moment.