McKettrick's Choice (15 page)

 

H
OLT, HAVING COME TO
the water barrel fixed to the side of the wagon and found the ladle missing, rounded the tailgate to search for it. Seeing Lorelei on her lovely haunches, smiling and spooning something into the boy's mouth, stopped him with the efficacy of a blow to the stomach.

She was still clad in trail clothes, and covered with half the dirt that lay between San Antonio and this Godforsaken homestead. Her hair was tumbling down from
beneath her hat in untidy loops. The sight should not have been profound—but it was.

The moment, there in the midst of some of the worst carnage he'd ever seen, was a holy one.

He caught his breath.

She sensed his presence then, and looked away from the child's face to meet his eyes.

He cleared his throat. “Where's the ladle?” he asked, because that was all that came to mind.

Her mouth twitched slightly. “About six inches from your right hand, Mr. McKettrick,” she said mildly, and went back to what she was doing.

Holt felt himself color up, and he was glad as hell that she wasn't looking at him anymore, even though he'd felt the shift of her gaze like a tearing-away of flesh. “Thanks,” he grumbled, snatching up the ladle, which rested in plain sight on the floorboards of the wagon and would have bitten him if it had been a snake, and headed back to the water barrel. He drank his fill, then sluiced a couple of ladles' full down the back of his neck.

“Pearl likes beans a whole lot,” Tillie called.

Pearl,
Holt thought. Wasn't it bad enough that the kid had lost his whole family in an Indian raid? Did he have to be saddled with a female name into the bargain?

Rafe wandered over, appropriated the ladle, and wet his own whistle. “We've got the graves dug, and the Cap'n and I brought the woman and the little girls out of the embers. That's a job I'll see again in my nightmares.” He took more water and, as Holt had done, poured it down the back of his neck. “Seems like somebody ought to say a few words.”

“I'll do it,” said John, wiping his sweating, sooty face with his bandana as he approached. He hadn't done much digging, but he'd gathered piles of stones to cover the
graves, in the hope that the wild animals wouldn't get to them. “I can't say as I have much to say on God's behalf just now, though.”

“Just ask the Lord if maybe He'd trouble Himself to let four souls pass through the pearly gates,” Rafe said.

“Though from the looks of things around here, I'd say He was away from home, or maybe laid up with the gout.”

If the subject hadn't been so serious, Holt might have laughed. Rafe was a believer, but not an agreeable one, for the most part, and he had a contentious theology all his own. Holt, on the other hand, was undecided. Sometimes, when he looked out over a broad, green valley, he figured there had to be a God of some kind. On days like that one, his thoughts tended to come down on one of two possibilities: either there was no God at all, or He was a hardhearted old coot who didn't really give a damn about much of anything.

 

I
T WAS SUNSET
by the time the graves were covered. The men stood with their hats off, and John Cavanagh said a brief prayer. “Lord, we don't know what these folks' names were. We hope to find out, once we get to Laredo. We thank You that this little boy—Pearl—was spared. Receive these innocent souls unto Your bosom. Amen.”

“Amen,” Lorelei murmured, holding Pearl, now freshly diapered in a section of her favorite petticoat, with one of the Captain's none-too-clean shirts over that. He was a sturdy little fellow, perhaps six months old, and over the course of the afternoon, Lorelei had come to accept Rafe's theory—the child was not only an orphan, he was deaf.

They made camp about a hundred yards from the house, on the other side of the trees, but the smell of
death followed them, clinging to their clothes, their hair, their very skin.

“I would give ten years of my life for a bath,” Lorelei said, when supper—more beans, supplemented with jackrabbit—was over.

“There's a little pond down yonder,” Tillie said, nodding her head toward a stand of trees, well on the other side of the homestead. “I saw it when I was hunting rabbits.”

Melina, rocking the sleeping baby in her arms, widened her eyes. “What would Holt say if he knew you went so far? Land sakes, Tillie, there are Indians around here!”

“They're a long ways off by now,” Tillie said. Slow-witted and childlike though she was, she had moments when she almost sounded normal. “And I don't do everything Holt tells me no-how.” She sniffed. “I'm not a cowboy, so it doesn't matter that he's trail boss.”

“We couldn't,” Lorelei said hesitantly, imagining that pond and what it would be like to be clean. “Could we?”

“Reckon we could if we brought a rifle,” Melina said.

Lorelei frowned. “If the Indians are gone—”

“You want to bet your life on it?” Melina asked. “I'm not tossing mine into the ante.”

“All right,” Lorelei said. “Maybe we should just tell Holt—”

“And have a couple of cowboys watching the whole show, on the pretense of standing guard?” Melina shook her head. “Not me.”

“You two go on,” Tillie said. “I'll look after Pearl. If anybody asks about you, I'll just say you're in the bushes.”

Lorelei hesitated to leave Tillie alone with the baby, but there was plenty of help around if she needed it.

“It's the only way we're going to get a bath, I guess,” Melina whispered, with a combination of reluctance and urgency.

Lorelei looked around the camp. Holt, the Captain and Mr. Cavanagh were conferring again, over by the wagon. Rafe was probably there, too, but she couldn't make him out, what with all the shadows.

The rest of the men were either standing watch or playing a subdued game of poker in a shaft of moonlight underneath a lone oak tree.

“All right,” she said. “But how do we get our things, and a rifle? I've got soap in my bedroll.”

“Just walk right over to the pile of gear and get both our bundles,” Melina told her, nodding toward the heap that had formed when all the horses and mules were relieved of their saddles and bridles. “Kahill left his rifle leaning against the rear wheel of the buckboard when he went to join the poker game. I'll fetch it while Tillie and Pearl are bedding down underneath the wagon. Tillie, I know you don't want to wake the baby, but you need to make a little stir getting situated. That way, if anybody attracts attention, it will be you.”

Tillie nodded. It was probably all a game to her, and if anyone asked her directly, she'd most likely tell them without compunction that Lorelei and Melina had sneaked off to the pond to take a bath.

It was a chance they would have to take, in the name of personal hygiene.

 

“H
OLT?”
R
AFE SAID QUIETLY
, when the jawing fest was over and the Captain and Mr. Cavanagh went about their business. “Could I have a word with you?”

Holt shoved a hand through his hair. “I thought you were playing poker,” he said wearily.

“I like to size up the situation a while before I go betting on the other man's game,” Rafe replied. “I've just been walking around the camp, thinking. Wishing I could lie down beside Emmeline tonight. I miss her something fierce.”

Holt sighed. “I know,” he said, feeling long on sympathy but a little short on patience. “Is that what you wanted to tell me?”

Rafe's grin gleamed in the moonlight. Damned if he didn't know something Holt didn't. “It's about the women,” he said. “Lorelei and Melina, I mean. They just stole Kahill's rifle and lit out for the pond, down over that little hill on the other side of the homestead. They mean to take a bath.”

“What?”
Holt rasped, and started in that direction.

Rafe reached out and grasped his arm. “Wait. They haven't been gone more than a couple of minutes.”

Holt stared at his brother, baffled and furious. “God
damn,
” he growled. “Just when I'm thinking Lorelei might have sense enough to pound sand into a gopher hole after all, she goes wandering off in the dark, to lather herself up in some pond!” He wrenched free of Rafe's grasp, pulled his .45 from the holster and spun the cylinder to make sure it was loaded.

“Hold on, Holt,” Rafe reiterated. “They've had a hell of a day, just like we have. And women need to fuss with such things.”

“This isn't a fancy hotel in some big city,” Holt retorted.

“It's the goddamn middle of Comanche territory!”

“You know those bastards are off celebrating somewhere, Holt. Most likely roasting up whatever cattle they managed to scavenge from this pitiful place. I say we let
the women have their baths. We'll just follow along and make sure nothing happens. We don't have to let them know we're there.”

Holt peered at Rafe, even angrier than before. “If you think you're going to watch Lorelei take off her clothes—”

Rafe laughed. “As enjoyable as that would be, I'm a married man, and a happy one. I'd like to stay that way. What I'm suggesting is that we just hang around, within shouting distance. If they need help, we'll be right there handy.”

Holt considered. Lorelei, naked in the moonlight.

His groin ached, and he was glad as hell that it was dark.

“All right,” he said.

They started toward the pond.

“Why don't you just admit you're sweet on her?” Rafe taunted, as they walked.

“I'm not sweet on anybody,” Holt growled.

Rafe laughed, real low. “Bullshit,” he said. “If looking at a woman was the same as bedding her, you'd be in jail.” The word
jail
made Holt think of Gabe, which would have been a welcome distraction if his old friend wasn't a step closer to the gallows with every day that passed. “You're full of sheep-dip,” he snapped. “I don't even
like
that woman.”

“You don't have to like a woman to take her to bed,” Rafe reasoned, and given his colorful history, pre-Emmeline, he could claim a certain authority. “You don't have to like her to love her, either.”

“Now you're just running off at the mouth,” Holt accused, exasperated. “I might expect crazy talk like that
from our little brother Jeb, but you're supposed to have more sense.”

Rafe chuckled. “Just answer one question, and I'll let the matter drop.”

“That depends on the
question.
”

“If that rider hadn't shown up when he did and prevented the wedding, would you have made love to your bride?”

“Hell, yes,” Holt admitted, because he knew Rafe wouldn't buy it if he said no. “But I don't see what that has to do with anything. I
liked
Margaret.”

“Exactly. You liked her. But she didn't get under your hide the way Lorelei does. She didn't piss you off. And I never once saw you kiss her the way you kissed Lorelei that day after you jerked her off that bucking mule, back there on her so-called ranch.”

Holt lengthened his strides. He could hear Lorelei and Melina up ahead, talking. Did they think they were being quiet? Hell, every Indian within fifty miles could probably hear them.

“I'm glad you didn't decide to be a lawyer,” he bit out, “because you don't have the knack for it. What does kissing Lorelei have to do with liking or loving or any of that other bull crap?”

“I'm saying,” Rafe answered, with exaggerated patience, “that you may not like Lorelei, but it seems to me that there's a pretty good chance that you love her.”

“You,” Holt said, wishing he had the time to stop and beat the hell out of Rafe, right there on the spot, “are three kinds of an idiot, and blind on top of it. The sooner I get shut of that woman, the happier I'm going to be!”

Rafe didn't say anything more, but he was smirking.

Holt jerked off his hat and struck his brother in the belly with it.

Rafe laughed, under his breath.

Up ahead, the women rustled through the trees and underbrush surrounding the pond. Holt stopped, still as a statue, trying not to let his imagination run away with him.

Lorelei.

Bathing.

Oh, God.

T
HE POND WAS TEPID,
a black expanse splashed with dancing fragments of moonlight. Having taken off her shoes and rolled the legs of her trousers almost to her knees, Lorelei waded back to shore to shed her clothes. She had never undressed in the open air that way, and there was a glorious freedom in the very recklessness of such an act. After pulling a bar of soap from her bundle, she splashed back into the water.

Melina soon joined her, though she still wore her bloomers and camisole.

Belatedly, Lorelei remembered the pins in her hair. She'd already lost most of them, but a few still held. Once she'd tossed them ashore, she ducked under the surface and came up with a sigh of purest pleasure.

Using the soap, she lathered her hair, rinsed it, and went through the whole process again. She scoured every inch of her body, and was floating peacefully on her back, soaking cool evening air and moonlight into her flesh, when Melina suddenly cried out.

Lorelei scrambled to her feet, shook her wet hair back from her face. “What is it?”

Melina gave a squeal and splashed for the bank. “Leeches!” she shrieked. “They're all over me!”

Lorelei stood absolutely still, too stunned to react.

“Lorelei!” Melina shouted. “Get out of the water!” She was sitting on the bank now, kicking her feet and clawing at her bare arms. Dark, liver-colored blotches clung to her flesh.

The sight spurred Lorelei out of her stupor. She rose out of the pond just as Rafe and Holt came crashing through the brush.

Lorelei ducked behind a scanty bush, as conscious of her nakedness as Eve after the Fall.

“What the devil?” Rafe demanded.

“Leeches!” Melina shrieked. “Do something! Do something!”

Lorelei looked down at herself, and her stomach lurched. The dreadful creatures clung to her thighs, her stomach, her bosom. She gave a little cry of despondent horror and nearly swooned.

Holt caught her by the arms before she got to her knees. “Take it easy,” he said. “They're not poisonous—they're just ugly.”

Lorelei was too distraught to weep, or to worry that she was naked. It seemed a bothersome detail, in comparison to those disgusting
things
attached to her, drinking her very blood.

“Help me,” she pleaded.

“Stand still,” Holt said. He pulled off one leech, and then another, tossing them into the brush. Just down the bank, Rafe was squatting beside Melina, who was prone and squirming, performing the same task.

“Turn around,” Holt urged. “They're all over your back and your—well, they're all over you.”

“Oh, God,” Lorelei whimpered.

“I think I've just found religion,” Holt remarked.

“Don't you
dare
tease me!”

He merely chuckled and went on plucking away the leeches. Each one clung tenaciously, and the pulling hurt, but Lorelei didn't care. She just wanted the beastly globs
gone.

“If Emmeline hears about this,” Rafe called merrily, “I'll be sleeping in the bunkhouse until I'm older than Pa is now.”

Holt laughed. “I reckon it qualifies as an emergency.” Lorelei felt a leech let go of her left buttock, and wished the ground would open up and swallow her.

“Please hurry!” Melina wailed.

“Stop that squirming,” Rafe counseled.

At last, at last, the humiliating ordeal was over. Holt gave Lorelei a cursory inspection. “Good as new,” he said. “Where are your clothes?”

Lorelei's face flamed. “There—that bundle beside the rock,” she said desperately. It seemed to her that Holt McKettrick took his sweet time fetching her nightgown, and he indulged himself in a long, brazen look at her before he handed it over.

“You were watching us bathe!” she accused, as soon as she'd pulled the garment over her head.

Melina, apparently free of leeches, sat shivering in the blanket from her bedroll.

“I swear we weren't,” Rafe declared. “We were just up the trail a ways.”

“Lucky thing, too,” Holt said. He was trying not to grin, and he was a miserable failure at it. “If you'd had to depend on each other, you'd still be jumping around, screaming.”

Lorelei drew herself up on a swell of pure exasperated
embarrassment. “You might have warned us that there were leeches in this pond,” she said.

“You didn't ask and, anyway, we wouldn't have known for sure. One thing about Texas—there can be some real nasty critters in the water. Snakes, for one, and flesh-eating fish.”

Lorelei suddenly felt dizzy. “Flesh-eating…?”

“They've been known to eat a whole cow in five minutes,” Holt said.

“Holt,” Rafe protested. “I believe that's more than the lady really needs to be apprised of right now.”

Holt leaned in, his nose an inch from Lorelei's. “Be glad it was leeches,” he whispered.

Lorelei trembled with rage, and a good bit of residual fear. “If you say one single thing about this, to
anyone
—”

Holt raised his eyebrows. His arms were folded, each of his hands tucked beneath the opposite elbow, as though to keep himself from touching her. “Oh, I won't tell,” he said. “I like to keep my encounters with naked ladies to myself.” A corner of his mouth quirked with infuriating delight.

Lorelei longed to slap him, yearned for the release of her palm making contact with his smug face, but she restrained herself. For one thing, she feared she'd use up the last of her strength if she did, and for another, he
had
rescued her, woefully arrogant creature that he was.

She plopped down on a rock and picked up one of her shoes.

“I'd shake that out first, if I were you,” Holt said mildly.

A thrill of terror went through Lorelei.

“Could be a scorpion in there, or a tarantula.”

Lorelei peered into her shoe and then turned it upside
down and shook it with all her might. Nothing fell out, but that wasn't good enough. She banged the heel against the rock she was sitting on, which relieved some of her tension, and wrenched it onto her foot. While she went through the whole process again with the other shoe, Holt watched her with a sort of quizzical good humor.

“In two days we'll be in Laredo,” he said. “Maybe you'd like to think some more about this whole ranching idea.”

Lorelei shot to her feet, wavered and slapped Holt's hand away when he tried to steady her. “Don't
touch
me!” she snarled.

He grinned. “Too late,” he said. “Like it or not, there's been some touching done here tonight.”

Rafe hefted a dazed and speechless Melina to her feet. “That'll do, Holt,” he said quietly. “Best we get back to camp before we run into some Comanches. They won't be as easy to deal with as leeches.”

Holt ignored his brother and gestured for Lorelei to pass ahead of him. Rafe led, with Melina and Lorelei following.

“Sometimes leeches get such a good grip on a person's hide that they have to be burned off with matches,” Holt said cordially. “One time, on the Brazos River—”

Rafe turned to catch Holt's eye, glaring. He carried Melina's borrowed rifle in one hand.

Holt shrugged affably. “Folks ought to know what they're getting themselves into, in country like this,” he said. “Especially
women
folks.”

 

A
N HOUR LATER
, Lorelei lay under the wagon, cosseted in her bedroll. Tillie was sound asleep beside her, the little boy cuddled in her arms, and Melina rested on the other side of them, curled into a little ball and making
a soft sniffling sound. The rest of the camp was quiet; except for the men keeping the first watch, everyone had apparently gone to sleep.

“Melina?” Lorelei whispered. “Are you all right?”

“I can still feel them on me,” Melina answered.

“Me, too,” Lorelei admitted. “Does it make you want to go back?”

“Go back where?” Melina murmured despairingly. “I don't have a judge for a father, or a big house in San Antonio.”

Lorelei swallowed. “I don't, either,” she said.

Melina sat up, taking care not to bump her head on the bottom of the wagon. “I'm sorry,” she told Lorelei, wiping her eyes. “I shouldn't have said that. I was just feeling sorry for myself, that's all.”

Lorelei was in a forgiving mood, except when it came to Holt. Sure, he'd helped her with the leeches, but he'd been insufferable about it. If it hadn't been for Rafe, he would have joshed her all the way back to camp.

“It was like acting in a play,” she reflected. “Living in my father's house, I mean.”

Melina frowned, looking puzzled, and reached out absently to pat the sleeping baby when he stirred against Tillie's chest. “I don't reckon I understand what you mean,” she said.

“My dresses were really costumes,” Lorelei went on.

“I played the judge's spinster daughter. He wrote the lines, and I said them right on cue—most of the time anyway. But none of it was real.”

“A play,” Melina muttered thoughtfully, working her way through the metaphor. She was bright and found her way quickly. “I'm not so sure I'd choose Indian raids and dusty trails and leeches over a nice clean life like that, though.”

Lorelei sighed. “It was easy enough, I guess. There was a bathtub, and plenty of hot water. We never ate beans, or slept on the ground or had to worry about leeches. But I never really
felt
anything. It was as though I was walking in my sleep.”

Melina shook her head, smiling a little in the diffused moonlight, which fell through the floorboards of the wagon bed in silvery streaks. “You are an odd woman, Lorelei Fellows,” she said. “I never knew anybody who took to hardship the way you do. It's as if you
like
trouble.”

“I don't,” Lorelei said quietly. “But I do like feeling alive.”

“You must like fighting with Holt, too, because you sure do a lot of it.”

Lorelei considered that. Creighton had largely ignored her, underscoring the sense of invisibility that had plagued her from childhood. Michael, sweet, affable Michael, had always agreed with her, as though he thought she'd shatter if he didn't. Holt, on the other hand, seemed to relish a challenge as much as she did. And every time he pushed her, she grew a little, just by taking her own part.

“He is the most obnoxious man I have ever met,” she said.

“Then how come you're smiling?”

“Hush up, Melina, and go to sleep.”

Melina giggled.

Lorelei stifled a giggle of her own.
“Go to sleep,”
she repeated.

“One of these days, Lorelei, Holt's going to want to make love to you. And I bet you'll let him.”

The idea caused an expansive, melting sensation in the most private part of Lorelei's body. “Melina!”

Melina yawned and lay down again. “Good night, Lorelei,” she said, with laughter in her voice. “Sweet dreams.”

Lorelei's dreams that night were anything but sweet. They were urgent. They were fiery. She was naked again, and lying in the grass with Holt, not just letting him touch her, but thrilling to every pass of his hands, every brush of his lips. Crying out in hoarse welcome when he thrust himself inside her.

She awakened in a fever of delicious heat, almost expecting to find him lying on top of her, joined with her.

It was both a relief and a disappointment to realize she was alone, tangled in her bedroll and the hem of her nightgown.

Tillie sat up, blinking. “Are you taking sick, Lorelei?”

The baby stirred, whimpering, but didn't awaken.

“I'm fine,” Lorelei said, but it wasn't true.

She wasn't fine.

She wanted the wrong man.

After that, there was no going back to sleep.

When the first birds began to sing just before dawn, she gave up the effort, crawled out from beneath the wagon, gathered up her clothes and found a place to dress in private. Wearing the second of the two pairs of trousers she'd borrowed from Tillie, along with a clean shirt, she brushed the wild tangles out of her hair, braided it into a heavy plait and left it to fall down her back.

She already had the fire going and the coffee started when Mr. Cavanagh joined her, yawning and stretching his arms. His smile was pleasant, but there was nothing
knowing
about it. Apparently, neither Rafe nor Holt had told him the story of last night, but of course that didn't
mean they wouldn't, despite Holt's promise to the contrary. Rafe could probably be trusted to be discreet—he was a gentleman, if a rustic one—but Holt was another matter. He would do whatever served his purposes, and make no apologies for it.

Lorelei flushed, remembering her dreams the night before. The ache of her arousal was still with her, clamoring for a satisfaction she didn't fully understand.

As luck would have it, Holt was the next person to come to the campfire. He'd slept in his clothes, like all the other men, but he still managed to look good, damn him.

He gave her a slanted grin, helped himself to one of the row of metal coffee mugs John had set out and filled it from the pot sitting at the edge of the fire. Leather gloves protected his hands from the heat.

“Morning, Miss Fellows,” he said.

Lorelei couldn't answer. She just stood there, burning up on the inside.

“You look real nice,” he allowed, after looking her over from head to foot. “I like your hair that way.”

She blushed even harder. Dreams were supposed to fade with the coming of day, weren't they? Well, hers hadn't. And she felt as if he could see right through her clothes, to her pinkened, leech-bitten flesh.

“Thank you,” she said, but the words were hard-won.

“I think there'll be a mutiny if I serve these cowboys beans again,” John said, busily slicing salt pork into a skillet. “We'll need to get us some perishables in Laredo. Eggs and the like.”