Stolen Little Thing (Little Thing Series Book 1) (10 page)

“It’s late,” Luke said quietly. “I’ve said what I came to say.”

Randolph’s gaze lifted and his eyes took on a soft glitter. “Why not stay and play a few hands of cards with me? Give me a chance to get some of that family money back?”

Luke shook his head and pushed up from his chair. “Not interested. I have a horse auction in the morning.”

Randolph sneered. “Please don’t tell me you’re going to spend honorable Duval money on those whoresons you foster out there?”

Luke stared at his father-in-law as primitive anger welled up. He’d given up his brawling for the most part, but there were times when a man needed to make a statement, when only a show of strength or a threat of violence would suffice. He stalked around the table and yanked Randolph up by his velvet lapels. Standing a head taller than the older man, Luke gripped his starched collar tightly, deliberately cutting off any cry for help the man might make. “It’s Crosby money and Crosby land now. Don’t forget it. Upset my wife, old man, and I won’t come after you. I’ll come after your sons. And when I’m done, they’ll be in the hospital for a month.”

He released his hold on Randolph’s collar and the man fell to his chair, his small eyes blazing with fury. He tried to respond but coughed instead. He shook his head with wordless rage.

Luke turned and strode past cowering waiters and out of the club.

A few evenings later, Esme sat on the fifth step of the staircase waiting for her husband in flickering candlelight. Her hair hung down her back, still damp from a bath. While drying off and dressing for bed, she heard him return from San Antonio. It was a noisy return. Horses whinnied, the ranch dogs barked in excitement, and from the window upstairs she’d seen the boys hanging on the corral, watching the new horses Nolan and Luke had herded in. Each boy searched for the perfect horse in the last rays of twilight.

The corral was a swirl of horses, buckskins, pintos and flashy appaloosas. The boys would have plenty to negotiate when it came time to pick. Some of the disputes would likely be resolved in fistfights in that very same corral. It reminded her that she wanted to discuss with Luke the policy of boys settling problems by fighting each other. It was Henry she most worried about. She already intervened twice to stop him from challenging older, bigger boys for no reason other than to see if he could take them.

Esme had a bath drawn and a plate of dinner warmed for her returning husband, unsure of what he would want first. It had been three days since he’d left, the longest three days she could remember. Loretta had grumbled over dinner about a groom leaving his bride after just a few days of matrimony, but Esme had come to his defense, stating simply that if Luke had business in San Antonio, he had better go take care of it.

“I suppose there’s always the homecoming to look forward to.” Loretta’s afterthought amused her deeply.

Esme waited until she heard his heavy footfalls on the porch. Luke pushed through the door, a tired smile spreading across his face. He leaned against the doorframe, lingering to gaze at her before stepping into the foyer. He kept his eyes on her as he shut the door.

“Esme,” he said simply. His hoarse whisper broke the silence. He set his sweat-grimed cowboy hat on the rack and combed fingers through his hair. “You’re a sight for sore eyes, sweetheart.”

When he came to the steps, she met him and kissed him gently on the lips. He shook his head, not wanting to touch her with his dusty hands. But Esme grasped them anyway and led him up stairs to their room. Luke was mostly quiet while Esme chattered about the boys. He offered only a word here and there as he undressed and sank into the waiting tub. While she washed his back, she laid out her argument about the boys finding other ways to reach agreements, ways that didn’t involve brawling.

Luke closed his eyes, feeling the satisfaction of Esme soaping his sore shoulders. She knelt beside the tub and alternately lathered and kneaded his tired muscles.

“Boys need to have a way to burn off steam,” Luke explained.

“I hate fighting. The girls at St. Adelaide’s threw things at each other, like cups and hand mirrors. By my second term, I was an expert at stitching up wounds.”

“Girls are probably worse than boys,” Luke assured her. “Boys would never throw anything. They punch each other until they stop.”

“Henry doesn’t seem to know when to stop,” she retorted.

“Listen, Esme, you might as well know this right now. Every boy who comes here does crazy stuff at first, just like a horse that hasn’t been out of his stall for a while balks and bucks and tries to give everyone around a bad time. When a boy first gets here, if he doesn’t try fighting everyone around, he’ll do something else like steal stuff, hide it under his bed, as if no one is going to look there first off. Then there are some that do things like wet the bed. Some refuse to bathe, others have nightmares. Henry likes to steal, maybe because he went hungry a few times too many. The first few weeks he squirreled all sorts of food under his pillow, until he found rat shit in his bed. That cured him quicker than anything any of us adults could have come up with.”

Esme laughed at the idea of a rat nosing around a boy’s bed. She wrapped her arms around him and kissed his cheek and then grumbled about his beard.

She whispered, “I would never in a hundred years have thought you would be such a good shepherd to a rag-tag bunch of boys.” She pulled away. “Which reminds me, did you buy my sheep?”

Luke sank into the water to rinse off soap and when he rose from the water, Esme handed him a towel, a blush coming to her cheeks.

She stepped away and picked up her hairbrush from the table. “The ranch might be your domain, Mr. Crosby, but the house is mine, and if I don’t get my sheep, you menfolk won’t get dessert.”

The extent of Luke’s answer was a sort of growl that rumbled in his chest.

Esme ignored him. “I need to get started learning about animal husbandry if I’m to make any money with Simon’s land.” She set the brush down and braided her hair into a thick copper- colored plait.

Luke watched her intently. The last few miles of the ride home had seemed endless to him, and now he couldn’t stop staring at her like some witless boy. Being away three days had left him hungry for her touch. He’d promised himself that he’d tell her Simon had a bank account in her name, but the topic wasn’t one he wanted to talk about tonight. Right now all he could think about was undoing that braid that she was working on and getting her out of that nightgown.

“Or do I need to go buy my own sheep?” she asked.

His gaze drifted down, appraising her. “You sure got sassy while I was gone.”

Esme gave an impertinent shrug. She bit back a smile. “Never you mind, Mr. Crosby. I’ll just saddle up one of those new horses, go to Honey Creek when there’s an auction, and buy my own. I mean, how difficult can it be?”

Luke closed the distance between them. He walked toward her with his hands on his hips. Esme watched his approach in the mirror. Wearing only a towel, he looked even bigger half-naked.

“You promised to obey me, right before God and everyone. I don’t recall any vows about sheep, Mrs. Crosby.”

Esme tied her braid with a short white ribbon. Slowly she rose and stepped behind a chair, trying to maintain distance from her husband. She caught his predatory look and gave a breathless laugh. There was something about his eyes, even from her earliest memories, that always made her heart beat faster. His gaze was a caress. Heat skimmed across her skin. After hearing so many stories from her mother about how terrible the marriage bed was for women, it came as an utter shock to Esme how quickly, sometimes with a simple look, her husband could kindle such strong need in her.

While she stood behind the chair, she crossed her arms over her chest to mirror his domineering posture. “We had to have our first fight sometime, Mr. Crosby. It might as well be about my sheep. Do we need to take this down to the corral like all those little heathens do?”

Luke knit his brow as though considering it. He gave her a thoughtful look, and quickly shoved the chair against the wall, effectively cutting of any escape. With a fighter’s speed, he lunged, and threw her over his shoulder. He crossed the room, his prize draped over his shoulder, and tossed her onto the bed. Quickly she recovered her wits and scrambled away with a devious laugh. The escape was short lived. She got no more than a foot away before he was upon her again, flipping her to her back and pinning her down on the soft mattress.

“Mercy,” she cried. “Don’t take me to that corral. I’ve seen your handiwork. Forget the sheep.” She twisted and struggled beneath him. Her efforts amused him. She was no match for his strength, and as Luke held her, he kissed her, tenderly at first then more deeply. Esme wrapped her arms around him and returned the kiss.

“Your sheep are coming next week, Mrs. Crosby, a ram, ten ewes and two lambs.”

Esme ran her hands across his broad shoulders and down his back. “Lucky for you, Mr. Crosby, because you don’t want to make me mad.”

“No. ma’am.” Luke tugged her gown, lifting it over her head. He ran his rough fingertips over her pale skin, and kissed her shoulder, pressing her back to the bed. “I certainly don’t.”

Esme gasped as he nipped her neck. “No corral?” she teased in a ragged whisper.

Tracing a line along her jaw he nibbled her earlobe. “No corral, not tonight. I have a better idea.”

Luke stood grim-faced at the window, looking at the barnyard below. Rain fell, a steady drumbeat on the rooftop and windowpane. He turned back to his bed where Esme lay sleeping. Around her slender neck, she wore the pearls he remembered to give her some time before dawn. Her hair lay cast across the pillow, one tendril over her pale shoulder. The sight of her stirred him, and he wished he could slip back into bed.

He buttoned his shirt, pulled on his boots, and walked around the bed to a small table. From a leather pouch, he withdrew the dark green bankbook to look at it for the second time that morning. Esme’s name was written across the front in black ink that over time had faded to a shadowy grey. Judging from the dates, Simon had established the account when she was a small child.

Why Simon never told her about the money perplexed Luke, but not as much as the amount in the last column. Esme had inherited a fortune. While Luke was by most estimates a wealthy man, he possessed nowhere near what was in the last entry, over twenty thousand dollars. Where the man had gotten that kind of money, Luke couldn’t imagine. He put the bankbook away in a drawer with other important papers.

Yesterday when he’d gotten the book in Blanco, the runt of a clerk gave him a sort of conspiratorial grin that didn’t sit well with Luke. Eager to return home, Luke stowed it in his saddlebag without so much as a glance inside the green covers, not remembering it until he had risen that morning. Luke wanted to wish it away. He wanted to imagine a little longer that Esme needed him desperately and in every way. He wanted his name on the bank draft for things like the new roof, the small flock of sheep, or anything else his wife might need or want. From six feet under Old Simon Duval was turning out to be a nuisance.

Outside, a pair of riders trotted into the barnyard. It was a deputy from Honey Creek bringing a new boy to the ranch. Luke slipped from the room to allow Esme to sleep another hour. He would wake her when Consuelo had breakfast ready. By the time he reached the foyer, the deputy and the boy were on the porch.

Henry met Luke at the front door. “Where’s Miss Esme?”

“Sleeping. Come out to meet the newest boy. You’re the welcoming committee.”

“I’ve never done that before. I hope he’s smaller than me. I hate being the littlest more than anything. I could take him to the kitchen, and Consuelo could make him a tortilla in the shape of a mouse, like she just did for me. “

Luke held a finger to his lips. “Generally, the welcoming committee is pretty quiet first thing in the morning, at least ‘til the other committee members have had coffee.”

“Sure thing, but what’s his name? How old is he?”

“We’re fixing to find all that out.” Luke pulled the door open. He greeted Deputy Preston and shook hands solemnly with the boy. Henry frowned to see that the new boy was a head taller than himself. The boy introduced himself as Will. Luke extended an invitation to the deputy for a cup of coffee and breakfast, but the man declined.

“Sheriff Barstow said the boy could keep the horse,” the deputy said. Will mumbled a few words of thanks. The deputy gave the boy a stern parting look.

Luke waited silently on the porch, flanked by the two boys until the deputy disappeared into the grey morning.

“That fella was all business, wouldn’t you say, Will?” Luke asked, nodding the direction the rider had gone.

“Yes sir,” Will said, his eyes downcast.

“Look a man in the eye when you talk to him, son,” Luke said. “No one’s going to give you grief around here, except for Henry. You just need one look at last week’s shiner to know he’s trouble.” Luke winked at Henry and grasped his chin. He turned the boy’s head gently, drawing a sharp breath. “Isn’t that a beauty? I’m not even going to tell you what the other boy looked like.”

Will glanced sidelong at Henry’s fading black eye, a hint of a smile on his lips.

“Henry, take Will to the barn and show him where to put his horse. He can have the last stall on the right. Let him take his belongings to the cabin, introduce him to the others, and meet me back here for breakfast. Don’t ask hordes of questions either. Let him breathe a little.”

Luke remained on the porch and tucked his hands into his pockets, watching the two boys hurry through the rain to where Will’s buckskin waited at the hitching post. Consuelo came out of the house wordlessly offering a steaming mug of coffee to Luke.

He sipped the coffee while they stood quietly in the early morning chill.

“That corral’s pretty muddy,” Consuelo noted, her hands on her hips.

“You saying it’s going to be a muddy fight?” Luke asked.

Consuelo nodded, “Between him and Joseph, I bet you. Today, maybe tomorrow. He looks tough.”

“It’ll be today, before dinner. With the weather and all, they’ll be inside with nothing to do but figure out the new pecking order. By dark, we’ll have a brawl, maybe two.”

“Maybe even by lunch,” Consuelo ventured.

Luke smiled and took a swallow from his mug. Consuelo would, as usual, have the boy pegged before anyone else. It happened each time a new foster boy came. At the end of the day, when the adults lingered over a whiskey, she would take off her apron, sit down to pour herself a small drink and give Luke and Nolan a summary of the boy’s strengths and failings. Consuelo was always spot on. She’d been Mrs. Crosby’s cook when Luke had arrived, an eight-year-old boy, his arm in a sling. The director of the San Antonio orphanage had almost broken it. In return Luke dislocated the man’s jaw. Sometimes Luke wondered what Consuelo said to the Crosbys after she’d seen him for the first time so many years ago.

The distant splashing of horses approaching drew their attention, and Luke wondered if the deputy had reconsidered the offer of coffee. Instead, a pair of matched bays pulled a buggy through the misting rain. They slowed to a walk as they neared the house.

Consuelo gave Luke a puzzled look. “Are we expecting someone else?”

“Not that I know.”

After the buggy halted, the driver jumped down and offered a hand to the passenger, a woman clad in a somber grey dress and matching cloak.

Luke didn’t get many visitors out on the ranch, especially on such a dismal day. The driver climbed back into the buggy and drew his overcoat close. The woman ascended the steps, her wide brimmed hat obscuring her face. At the top of the stairs she removed the hat and cloak, and handed them to Consuelo. Luke waited for some word from the woman, but even as he did, he realized who had come to pay a visit. The rust colored hair, streaked with grey, the green eyes, so like Esme’s, and the slender stature, girlish even after having borne three children, the features unmistakable. She held out a hand for him to shake.

“Hello, Mr. Crosby, I’m Rosalind Duval. I understand I am your mother-in-law. Felicitations.”

Luke shook her hand. “Rosalind. It’s very nice to see you.”

The woman arched her brow. “I should have you shot.”

Consuelo turned away. “I have too much work to do in the kitchen.” She hurried into the house, slamming the door behind her.

Luke felt instantly at ease. There was something admirable about a person who was so up front. If someone, particularly a woman, told you flat out they hated you, they couldn’t be all bad. “And why is that exactly?”

“For stealing Esme, for taking her out of San Antonio with whatever empty promises you made her, for putting an end to her teaching career at that very exclusive school, to give her what? A house in the middle of a cow pasture?”

Luke sighed. He didn’t care to have this conversation on an empty stomach. Not with the aroma of Consuelo’s breakfast hanging in the air. “Coffee?”

“That would be welcomed, thank you.”

Luke held the door open for Mrs. Duval and escorted her through the foyer. He smiled to see her appraising the furnishings and rugs. Rosalind probably hadn’t expected to find refinement in the middle of a cow pasture. Luke felt a momentary wash of gratitude to the attention to detail Eleanor Crosby had given the house.

Consuelo, anticipating his requirements, was already setting out coffee in the best silver coffee pot and the most delicate china. The Wedgewood only came out when guests were being entertained.

“I want to know what you’re going to do with Simon’s house.” Rosalind settled in a chair across from Luke, her gaze roving around the dining room, from the Dutch oil landscape above the buffet, to the Italian figurines in the cabinet, and finally back to Luke. Without waiting for a response, she went on. “Everyone is under the impression that I adore travel. I don’t. I simply prefer to be as far away from my husband as possible. My daughter, against all advice I have given her, has made the rash decision to yoke herself to a man, so I imagine that little clapboard house is available.”

Luke considered the question. The night of their wedding, Esme had suggested that she herself might live there one day, an idea that was unacceptable to Luke. He wondered if Esme might still harbor some ideas on the subject. If her mother lived in Simon’s house, that conversation would end before it even started.

“How about I give it some thought and let you know? We might be able to work something out. For a price, of course.”

Consuelo came and set a tray of sweet rolls on the linen tablecloth and returned a moment later with a platter of eggs and sausage.

Rosalind waited for her to leave before speaking. “You’re a clever boy, aren’t you? Always angling for ways to make a buck or two. I heard about you collecting the reward from Randolph. He was as mad as I’ve ever seen him. You really set him off.” She lifted her coffee cup to her lips and sipped. Twinkles of delight danced in her eyes as she recalled her husband’s outrage.

Luke took two rolls, and then heaped eggs on his plate. He wanted to tell her all he’d ever wanted was Esme and maybe how happy they were together. There was a hardness to the woman that made him think she wouldn’t understand any of that, and would ridicule what he and Esme had. He decided to give her a response a woman like her might understand.

“Men are dogs.”

Rosalind frowned. “That’s not a very nice thing to say about dogs.”

Luke spooned salsa over his scrambled eggs. “If a dog takes something from another dog, it doesn’t matter what even if it’s an old piece of gristle, they remember. They’ll spend their time thinking about how they’re going to get it back. Randolph took Esme from me. I took her back.”

Rosalind nodded solemnly. “What a charming comparison.”

Footfalls on the staircase drew their attention, and Esme appeared in the doorway. “Mama? I thought I heard your voice!”

“Why there’s your little piece of gristle now!” Rosalind rose from her chair.

Esme stood motionless, staring in astonishment as her mother rounded the table to embrace her.

“You’re alone?” Esme asked cautiously.

Her mother made a face. “Of course.”

Esme tried not to gape at her mother, but her heart beat erratically. The ranch felt like a sanctuary, and now it had been breached. In her confusion, she couldn’t decide what to think of her mother standing there in her dining room. Before she could ask questions, footsteps on the porch sounded.

The front door opened, and boys began filing in. Consuelo yelled something in Spanish from the kitchen, and the group made an about face, back to the entry to remove muddy boots before they moved silently down the hallway in stocking feet. Mornings were quiet in the Crosby dining room. Too sleepy to make conversation, the boys said little to each other. They did notice Esme’s mother, however, and each boy either nodded respectfully or said a soft “Good Morning”.

Rosalind stared as the group settled around the table. Wordlessly, they passed around the platters.

“What are all these boys doing in here?” Rosalind’s eyes were wide.

Esme poured a cup of coffee, her hands shaking. “They’re our foster boys. They live with us.”

Rosalind grimaced. “When do they leave?”

Luke looked up from his breakfast. “Not for a long time, Rosalind. I never left.”

The front door opened once more. This time Will and Henry walked in, and again Consuelo hollered from the kitchen.

Henry put a hand on Will’s shoulder. “That means take your boots off in Spanish. The one person you don’t want to make mad is Consuelo. None of the adults around here except her will whoop you or box your ears, but Consuelo makes up for the rest of them. If you back talk, she’ll slap you right across the top of the head. Sneaky too. She’s big and all, but she steals up behind you fast when she’s mad. One minute you’re just minding your own business, and then wham! Next thing you know, you’re seeing stars and hearing a whole bunch of Spanish cusswords.”

In the dining room, Henry’s eyes sparked with pleasure to see Esme. He began his usual chatter. “Morning! Sleep well? Did you ask Luke about my kittens? We have a new boy. Too bad he’s bigger ’an me. Want me to sit by you?”

Esme saw her mother’s expression take on a look of amusement. A smile spread across her face as she looked down at Henry. “Why I declare, Esme Louise. That boy likes you!”

“How long are you staying, Mama?” Esme asked, pulling Henry to her side.

Rosalind pursed her lips. “Well, that’s a little rude. I want to take you for a ride over to Simon’s. I have the buggy outside.”