Texas Lily (30 page)

Lily cleared her plate and quietly went about cleaning up. Juanita joined her, and they scraped food onto a plate to take out to the pigs, poured hot water into a bowl to clean the dishes, and silently did their women's work while the men at the table finished their coffee and darted furtive looks at Cade.

When Lily went off to bed, they waited for Cade to follow. When he finally rose, they breathed mixed sighs of relief. When he walked out the back door, they looked at each other in puzzlement.

Lily heard the window open, but she was already stripped to her drawers and chemise and didn’t have time to grab a robe and flee. She had shot the door latch to indicate her displeasure, but she hadn't expected that to deter Cade. Actually, she hadn't thought he would even bother to try. The window had never occurred to her.

He stepped through as silently as the Indian he was. His silhouette filled the window, and the light of the candle flickered across his sharp features, shadowing his cheekbones into copper. Lily couldn't read the dark depth of his eyes as he crossed the room. She held her breath and tried to keep her gaze from the broad expanse of chest revealed by his untied shirt.

He was large enough to do anything he liked with her.

Chapter 24

Cade gently began to unbraid Lily’s hair, pulling the silken strands through his fingers until they settled in a pale cascade over her shoulders and back.

"I am coming back, Lily." Cade said, as he would to a skittish horse. He had grown up with animals as his only friends. He knew no other principles to apply.

"Jim didn't." Lily set her brush down and pulled away. But there was nowhere she could go without walking out the door or over to the bed.

"I am not Jim. I have been taking care of myself most of my life. What are you afraid of, Lily?"

Her back stiffened. "Nothing. Go where you will."

Cade didn't know what to do. He couldn't leave with this anger between them, but he didn't know how to alleviate it. He could wrestle a steer to the ground, track a man through open prairie, live in the wilderness with ease, but he didn't know how to talk to a woman.

His hand dropped to his side. "There's some things a man has to do, Lily."

She swung around and glared at him. "No, there are some things a man
wants
to do. It's his choice. There's a difference."

She was a slender flame in the darkness. Cade wanted to touch the beauty of her, to know for certain that she was actually his to have and to hold, but flames burned. He kept his hands to himself.

"I don't want to leave you, Lily. It would be much easier to stay here and hold you in my arms and let the world go by, for the present. But not for the future. It is our future I seek, Lily. I may not succeed. I may come back empty-handed. But I have to try. Lily, can you see that? I have to try."

There was almost a plea in his voice. It seemed impossible to believe. His eyes were as dark and impenetrable as ever. The angular lines of his face revealed nothing. Without thought to what she did, Lily lifted her hand to touch the stony line of his jaw. It was warm and very, very human.

Cade gave up the fight and jerked her into his arms. Just her touch shattered something inside of him, something that had held him immobile for too long. He did not know what it was to need someone. He did not want to know. But right this minute he needed her.

Lily's arms slid around his neck, and Cade held her close, doing nothing more than feeling her breathing against him. "I don't want you to hate me, Lily."

"I don't." She rested her head against his shoulder. "I was angry. And afraid. I'm afraid of you, Cade. I'm afraid of what you do to me. I'm afraid of what you are. I'm afraid of what I don't know."

He could understand those emotions, but he couldn't admit it. He ought to just carry her to bed and end this foolishness, but she had touched something inside of him that he hadn't known existed, and bed wasn't enough any longer. Caressing her back with one large hand, Cade asked, "What do I need to do to show you, Lily? Show me what you want."

"It isn't that easy. There has to be trust. We don't know each other well enough to trust." Lily had lain awake most of the previous night discovering these things. When she had married Jim she had been too young to do anything else but trust an older man as she would her father. She was older now and wiser, and she trusted far less easily. And Cade didn't trust at all.

Cade pressed his cheek against her hair and drank in the fragile scent of her. She was light in his arms, with the suppleness of a willow wand. She had the same kind of inner strength, the kind that might bend but would never break. He knew he had chosen wisely, but he did not know how to make her see him in the same light.

"I would not have given you Serena and my child if I did not trust you, Lily. I do not know how to make you trust me. It will not be easy with men like Ollie whispering words of hate in your ears."

"You would have married Maria if she would have taken Serena off your hands. You'll start sounding like Travis if you're not careful, Cade." Lily jerked free from his arms and strode to the window, staring out at the rainy night and remembering the day she had come across Cade and Maria fighting in the street.

"Where in hell did you get that idea?" Growing angry at this resistance, Cade came up behind her, refusing to let her get away with this.

"I heard the two of you fighting the day before you were to come out to the ranch. You offered her a home and respectability. You knew you couldn't take the job without someone to take care of Serena. She refused you."

"She was keeping Serena in town. I wanted her here at the ranch. I offered Maria a home and a way out of the life she was living. I didn't offer to marry her. Maybe that was what made her mad. I think it was more a matter of her finding life out here with only one man too boring to consider."

Lily took a deep breath and stared at the cabin just visible from this corner of the room. It could have been worse. Maria could have been living out there now. She felt Cade standing behind her, knew his massive solidity and his gentle hands. She couldn't fault him for what he had done in the past. She had known there were other women. She wasn't precisely an innocent herself. They had to go forward from here.

"I'm trying to move ahead, Cade," she whispered to the window. "I didn't want to marry again. I didn't want another man taking away my choices. But it's happening all over again, and I don't like it. Can you understand that, Cade? Can you understand how I feel?"

His hands captured her shoulders and pulled her around. His face loomed over hers as he spoke. "Give us time, Lily. We can make it work. Living without anyone else is an awful lonely business."

He didn't give her time to argue. Closing his mouth over hers, he drew the sweetness of her response with his tongue, found an answering eagerness in the swell of her breast, and carried her to the bed.

Before they slept, Lily felt Cade's hand slide to her side and test her growing roundness. Sleepily, she murmured, "He is larger than Roy at this stage, I think. I am getting fat already."

"You'll never be fat. You are beautiful. I want to hold both of you." Cade adjusted her so she lay contentedly against his side.

He had called her beautiful. No one had ever called her that before. Smiling, Lily finally drifted off to sleep.

Cade lay awake a long time later, learning what it felt like to have another person in his life, making certain that what he meant to do would not in any way harm what they had between them. It couldn't. What he had to do was too important. Lily would have to understand that.

* * *

Lily didn't understand it at all when Cade rode out the next day despite an icy downpour, but she held her tongue. He had called her beautiful and told her he trusted her, and like the young fool she once had been, she had believed him. Since there wasn't anything she could say to stop him, she might as well take what consolation she could.

The cotton would be wet and moldy and not worth picking after the downpour. Cade had given the men their orders for the length of time he would be gone. At this time of year there wasn't much they could do beyond mend harness and watch over the cattle. A norther could catch the herd out on the prairie and freeze them if they weren't kept somewhere protected. Newborn calves could die or be carried off by wolves. The men were experienced enough to know what needed to be done.

Juanita read the misery in Lily's eyes easily enough, but there was little she could say. When Lily sat down, Juanita dumped Serena into her lap and went to fix her some coffee and cake. Food was the only solace that she knew.

While Roy worked at his lessons, Lily read to Serena from one of the old books she had brought with her from Mississippi. But after a page or two, Lily was too restless to sit still any longer. Serena protested at being put down, and Ephraim held out his hand to take the book. Gratefully, Lily gave it to him, and Serena willingly exchanged laps.

With the rain pouring down outside and the fire spreading a cozy warmth inside, she should be feeling safe and comfortable. She had much more than the average woman on these plains did. Perhaps the comforts weren't quite as civilized as those back home, but they were hers, and that's what should matter.

But all Lily could think of was Cade riding out in the storm with nothing more than an old buckskin shirt and poncho to cover him. She had made him wear Jim's old felt hat, but that would be little protection against cold winds.

Lily got out her sewing basket and the material that she had bought—or rather, that Cade had bought for her. She had never asked where the money came from. Perhaps it was better not to know.

Travis came in and helped Roy with his arithmetic as Lily spread the material across the table. Lily noticed that Juanita was immediately on hand to serve coffee and ask what Travis needed, although she should be preparing dinner for the men. Lily lifted a questioning brow to Juanita, but the other woman didn't heed her.

She really ought to learn to spin and weave and make her own cloth like some of the other women, Lily thought. As she smoothed one of Roy's old baby gowns over the soft material as a pattern, Lily tried to imagine herself doing something so domestic, but the image failed her. Sewing was about the only household task she could manage with any dexterity, and that was because it was challenging and creative. There was nothing creative about spinning.

The rain stopped after dinner and Lily sighed in relief. Cade would dry out before nightfall. She didn't have any illusion that he would shelter for the night in any cabins along the way. He would be taking the Indian paths, staying out of sight of civilization and the dangers of being mistaken for what he wasn't. He would sleep on the prairie tonight.

She didn't know why this should concern her. It was his own damned choice. But she couldn't bear to sit inside and think about it any longer. She pulled on Jim's old cracked leather boots after stuffing socks into the toe and heel, wrapped herself in an old deerskin coat, and went outside to see to the horses.

By this time word had gotten around that she was pregnant, even though she still wore Jim's trousers. The men in the barn raised hell when she tried to take a horse out, and even when she convinced them she would only take a look at the river, one of them insisted on accompanying her.

It was too early in the season to be worrying about flooding, but Lily felt better once she was outside the house. The air was brisk and damp, but it didn't smell of smoke and burned grease and wet clothes like the cabin. She surveyed the rising river and the damp cotton field, noted the plowed river bottom where Cade meant to put the corn, checked on the horses in the near field, and quietly rode back to the house, with Red trailing behind her.

She heard his quiet imprecation before she noticed anything else. Red was new, but she had already noticed he had a tendency to preface every sentence with an epithet. When he thought she wasn't listening, he frequently used a curse word as a descriptive to every noun. Lily found it more amusing than offensive and didn't think twice about his cursing now. She merely looked up to see what he was seeing.

And then she added an epithet of her own. Digging her heels into the horse's side, Lily galloped across the pasture in the direction of the house, with Red following as fast as he could.