The Lover (6 page)

He gave her a big smile.

Maynell gave him another dipperful of beans. “Always did like a brown-eyed handsome man,” she said, flirting with him. “'Specially one who'd tell the truth and tell it straight.”

They laughed together like naughty children.

“Yes, Eagle Jack told the truth,” Susanna said, forcing a smile past her irritation. “So why don't y'all quit trying to get past me and do what I say?”

“No fun in that,” they said, together, and laughed again.

Susanna sighed. Now they'd be buddies for sure. Thank goodness, Maynell wasn't going with them up the trail.

Eagle Jack gave her a great big smile, too, as she served him potato salad and then he served himself some sliced beef and biscuits. “This food looks delicious, Susanna dear,” he said.

“It is,” she responded. “Maynell and I are both good cooks.”

“And very sure of yourselves, too,” he said, with a retaliatory gleam in his eye.

Fine. Let him try to boss her around some more. They might as well get this settled before they hit the trail.

The men ate quickly and in silence, as was the cowboy custom, then, one by one they finished and threw their plates into Maynell's big wash-pan.

“Come get another one of these bear signs,” Susanna called. “I made 'em for y'all to eat.”

“Thank you, ma'am, for the meal,” each man said, as he came by the table for another one.

Except for Eagle Jack. “Hope you get your wagon packed,” he said. “Tomorrow's gonna be a busy day.”

 

By the time she finally finished the work and started to get ready for bed, Susanna didn't even care what he'd meant by that. This had been a day to end all days.

And the last thing she would even consider doing now was set up her tent and sleep on the ground out there in the dust.

She pulled the brush through her hair one last time. Then she laid it on the dresser and smiled at her reflection.

Eagle Jack would learn that if he persisted in
giving her orders in front of the men, he would be the one who ended up embarrassed. He had better not be giving her orders at all.

Except maybe in times of danger on the trail.

Those images floated through her mind again, cattle skulls and dry marches, outlaw rustlers and swift rivers like Tucker feared. Then she'd be glad to let Eagle Jack take control.

She wasn't afraid, not really, but she shivered a little. The spring night was turning chilly.

There might even be times when it was cold on the trail, even though it would be full summer before they got out of Texas. There might be hailstorms, too, and with them the temperature could drop thirty degrees or more in only minutes.

She'd packed a slicker and Everett's old jean jacket jumper, but not her one wool shawl. She got up, went to the armoire in the corner, and began to look through its meager contents.

What she ought to take along in case it hailed was one of the board shelves. A hailstorm had come up when her neighbor Walt Terry's men were up by the Red River with not one scrap of shelter for miles. Finally they had held their saddles over their heads—it was the only protection they could find.

She stood still for a minute and tried to imagine how that would be. It would need to be a very fast-moving hailstorm if she were in that situation because, strong as she was, a saddle would get
very heavy in a very big hurry. Maybe they would be lucky and not be in a hailstorm.

Or any other kind of storm. Everybody said lightning storms could make cattle and cowboys both go crazy and it was a fact that they often caused a stampede.

Her stomach tightened and she closed her eyes, but against the black of her eyelids she saw the cattle running beneath a wild, dark sky full of white flashing lightning. She could just hear their hooves pounding, loud as the thunder.

Living out under the sky for months at a time was going to be a risky thing. Besides the weather, there could be rustlers and toll-taking farmers and other herds trying to get the same grass. Besides deep rivers to cross, there could be wild animals and prairie fires.

She opened her eyes, straightened her shoulders, and stiffened her spine. What she had to do was quit worrying and start gathering her strength because she was surely going to need it.

“Reckon you can find me an extra blanket or some kind of soogan in there?”

Eagle Jack's low voice.

“Dear Lord,” she cried, whirling to face him, “you nearly scared me to
death
! What are you
doing
in here?”

He was near enough to touch and she hadn't heard the sound of his steps. He filled her bedroom. His shoulders were broader than she'd
even realized and his head nearly brushed the ceiling.

But it was
he
who made her private space his, with his pulsing, unbounded, impetuous energy. And his boldness.

And his own wonderful smell, mixed with those of horse and leather and dust and sweat.

“I'm in my
nightgown
,” she said, clasping her hands across her breasts.

“Yes, you are,” he said. “And even more beautiful with your hair all long and loose.”

But it wasn't only her hair that he was looking at. His gleaming dark eyes moved over her, head to toe.

She couldn't stop looking at him, either. The lamplight limned his face and threw it into high relief as it hit his high cheekbones and the haughty line of his nose.

A brown-eyed, handsome man
.

And well he knew it.

“Eagle Jack,” she said, as she forced her breathing to slow, “what are you doing in here?”

He grinned. He looked tired, he really did, but he grinned with a mischief that nearly made her grin back.

She couldn't. What if he, like Maynell, had decided he “might as well” be her husband for the next three months?

“Hunting a bedroll,” he drawled, then cast a
lazy glance at the bed, already turned down for the night. “Mine got stolen.”

Then that speculative glance of his came back to her and took her breath.

It was just because no one had ever looked at her like that, never in her whole life. As if she were the most desirable woman in the entire world.

Finally, she said, “Well, you don't have to sound so pitiful.” She squared her shoulders and got hold of herself. “And you didn't have to invade my room,” she added, a sharp tone in her voice.

She had to get him out of here or reach out and touch him. Like Maynell, she was losing her mind.

“If you'd pitched us a tent like I asked you to, I wouldn't even have had to come in the house and disturb your comfort.”

That roused her hackles. But still she couldn't look away from him.

“Oh? Everything's always my fault, is it?”

“I'd say so,” he said. “And it's because you're too damn stubborn to listen to reason. Now where can I find a bedroll?”

“In the wagon,” she shot back. “Mine's already in there.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

Neither one of them would break the stare.

“But I'm not going out there after it,” he said. “Give me one of those quilts in that cabinet or I'm crawling into your bed. My headache's back with a vengeance.”

Remorse stabbed her in the heart. He
was
hurt, after all, and he'd been working in spite of it, branding her cattle.

But she pushed the feeling away. She had to get him out of here.

Plus it was his own fault he was hurt and his own fault he was branding her cattle.

“From now on, maybe you'll stay out of drunken brawls,” she said.

She turned her back on him and pulled out a quilt. Then another, her only other one.

He took another step closer, she could feel it.

“I wasn't in a drunken brawl,” he said. “If you don't believe me on that, how can you trust me with your cattle?”

She spun around.

“And your life?” he said.

She thrust the quilts into his arms.

“Here,” she said. “Go on and lie down. I'll fix a poultice for your head.”

“No,” he said. “Leave it.” He turned away, walked to the lamp on the dresser, lifted the chimney, and blew out the flame.

“What are you
doing
?”

“Going to bed.”

He walked past her to the windows on the
south wall, started spreading out a quilt on the floor beneath them.

“Well, not
here
, you aren't,” she cried.

“Then where?” he asked.

He sat, toed off his boots, stretched out full length and pulled the other quilt over him for cover. The moonlight poured in and fell across his big form, peacefully, as if her heart weren't clattering in her chest.

“Out…side,” she ordered.

“Why, darlin',” he said, in his teasing drawl, “we don't want the men to think we're havin' trouble, now do we?”

“Eagle Jack, sometimes you make me so mad.”

“Sweet Susanna, don't worry. I won't bother you tonight.”

He was asleep before she got to her bed.

For the longest ever, she couldn't even close her eyes.

I won't bother you tonight.

Tonight
.

What had he meant by that?

D
id he mean that some night he
would
bother her?

After they were on the trail, after they'd left Brushy Creek far behind?

Susanna forced her body to lean back and lie flat. She sank her head into the pillow while she stared at the shadowy ceiling. Eagle Jack was a mystery to her, that was for sure. Only this morning she'd found him in jail, addled from drink and that blow on his head, yet on this same day he'd worked like two men with her cattle.

He'd been jailed as a drunk, yet he handled himself with the confidence of a land baron. He hadn't had the money to bail himself out, yet after he'd gone to the bank he'd bought a saddle and a horse and, after that, all the lease horses from Mr. Adams.

Eagle Jack Sixkiller. Who was he?

Susanna sat up carefully to look at him, as if studying his face would give her the answer. She needn't have bothered to be quiet. His breath came deep and slow, a little rough, as if he was very tired, which he must certainly be. The night wasn't a dark one and she could see that his head rested on one crooked arm.

She should've given him a pillow. That was the least she could've done—if for no other reason, out of old-fashioned hospitality.

Or, more basically, out of human compassion. What was it about him that unsettled her so completely that she couldn't think or find her manners?

His looks. The power in his dark eyes. The force of him—his smile, his voice, his implacable will.

I won't bother you tonight
.

What if some other night he did? Would she be able to resist him?

Of course she would. What was she thinking?

She threw off the sheet and swung her legs off the bed. It was time to quit being fanciful and get to sleep, get ready for the hard day coming up tomorrow, but first, common decency demanded that she find the man a pillow. He'd have a terrible crick in his neck in the morning.

And a paralysis in his arm, which most likely had no blood circulation now. He would need his
arms tomorrow to ride and rope and get her cattle ready for the trail.

That
was why she wanted to make him comfortable. She really wasn't doing it just for him. He didn't deserve any consideration because he'd been too bold. Entirely too bold.

What a nerve he had—barging into her room like this and falling asleep on the floor! If Maynell ever found out, she'd never quit carrying on about it.

The other two pillows Susanna owned were already in the wagon, ready to go up the trail. She could do without one tonight.

Snatching hers from the bed, she padded in her bare feet across the plank floor. It would be easy to slip the pillow beneath his head without waking him since he was sleeping so soundly—it would take only a moment, and then, her conscience eased, she would be able to sleep.

He lay on his back, with his face turned toward her, his head resting on his bent arm. The other arm was flung out in utter abandon.

Like an exhausted child's. But there was nothing else childlike about him—he was the manliest man she had ever known. That undercurrent of power that she always felt in him was still there, even in sleep.

It sent her blood pulsing faster in her veins. He was silly and funny and he did impulsive things,
like buying Adams's horses, and he was not half serious enough about life in general, but she'd known from the moment she'd laid eyes on him, from the moment she'd known he was honest, that whoever he was, Eagle Jack Sixkiller was a dangerous man.

The moonlight fell across his face. It lit the fierce curve of his nose and the sharpness of his cheekbone. It shone off his hair, long and black, spread underneath his shoulder.

It could have been paint, streaking across his copper skin as a declaration of war. She could just see him, naked and astride a barebacked horse, fitting a flaming arrow into his bow, riding at the head of a band of Cherokee warriors.

He was a big man, and, dear Lord help her, a handsome man. Maynell had reason to be besotted.

It was just a good thing that she, Susanna, was a much more practical, no-nonsense woman, a woman who'd had all the experiences with men that she ever wanted and more. Any entanglement with a man was a recipe for trouble. That was a lesson she'd learned at a very young age. She would never forget it.

She had just turned fifteen back in the mountains of her native Tennessee, when Mathias Hawthorne started hanging around while she did her outside chores at Uncle Job's place. He helped her chop the wood and carry water up from the
river when the well went dry. They talked about running away to Chattanooga together.

He even kissed her on the mouth, so she really thought he loved her. She really thought he would take her away from there.

But the first time Uncle Job caught him carrying the water buckets and her walking alongside, talking and laughing, Mathias got so scared he set the buckets down and ran. He never looked back. He never
came
back.

Mathias turned out to be the biggest coward in the county. Mathias didn't love her and he never had.

And then, of course, there was Everett. Everett, who was older, Everett, who already had saved up a hundred dollars. Everett, who was talking about going to Texas.

He had gone right up to Uncle Job the second time he had seen Susanna at the general store and asked for permission to come calling on her. The third time he came to the house and sat on the porch with her, he had asked Uncle Job for her hand.

Susanna had felt a terrible disappointment that he hadn't asked her first, but she was desperate by then. Everett treated her well enough, she supposed, and he could get her out of there. He could take her away from being the poor orphaned relation with no home.

At least he wanted her to go with him to Texas.
No one else had ever wanted her to go anywhere or to do anything except the hard work.

It hadn't been three days on the road until she knew that Everett wanted her for that same reason. She could do the hard work. And besides that, she could cook his meals and keep his bed warm.

Everett had done more than kiss her on the mouth, but he hadn't loved her, either.

Her arms tightened around the feather pillow.

She didn't want to get tangled up with any man, ever again, but she did want to try to make Eagle Jack more comfortable. He had a bad headache and he needed this pillow.

When she put it under his head, she would have to touch him. She
wanted
to touch him.

The moonlight moved then, danced gently across his face as the branches of the big live oak tree moved outside the window. The breeze, cool and sweet, drifted into the room and brought the night with it to fill her senses.

No, her senses were already filled with Eagle Jack. He had washed up but the smells of horse and dust were still on him and she could also catch the scent that was uniquely his. She couldn't look at anything else but his face in the moonlight.

His breathing was so close, so intimate, that the sounds of the cattle and the nightbirds seemed far, far away.

He turned then, shifted onto his side and to
ward her as if he felt her watching him. The moonbeam drifted back and forth over his lips. He had the most sensual lips in the world.

How did they taste? What would it be like to kiss him?

The thought came with such an overwhelming urge to find out that it shocked her. She had to get away from him, pillow or no pillow.

Yet she didn't move. The breeze strengthened. It lifted her hair that was falling all about her face and shoulders and brushed it against her cheek.

How would it feel if it were Eagle Jack's fingers brushing against her skin, instead?

Again, the little frisson of fear raced through her blood. What would it be like on the trail with him—with all the men believing that they were married?

Why, darlin', we don't want the men to think we're havin' trouble, now do we?

Would he come into her tent at night the way he had come into her room? What would she say or do if he did?

They needed to have a talk about that remark of his and reach an agreement before they ever started north.

But what would he say or do if she brought it up?

She shook her hair back and made herself stop imagining. She couldn't even think right. How could he do this to her when he was
asleep
?

Resolutely, she knelt beside him. Get this done, get back in bed, get to sleep. Get on the trail tomorrow.

One day. She had known this man for one day and he was taking over her thoughts and her imaginings. She would have no more of that.

Susanna lifted his head gently and, when he moved his arm, she began to slip the pillow into place. But a bruise ran from his cheekbone down across his jaw, and in the moonlight she could see that the knot on the back of his head had grown since Salado.

She should make a poultice for it. She had mentioned it, and he had refused, true, but she should've insisted.

Eagle Jack could've ridden off and left her the minute he was free and out on the street. Instead, he'd kept his word and, as Maynell had pointed out, he had not only worked her cattle but had risked getting shot for her sake.

Gratitude or not, though, she had no call to be sitting here on her knees all night, holding his head. Her fingertips brushed along the line of his jaw as she slipped her hand out from between his head and the pillow.

She let them touch him again and linger, then she skimmed them across the aristocratic rise of his cheekbone. His looks were a fascination to her.

That thought brought her scrambling to her feet. She was losing her reason, and that was no
condition to be in while trying to drive a herd of cattle across a pasture, much less for hundreds of miles.

Silently, she berated herself as she made her way through the dark room and into the kitchen. She had been chary of her feelings for her whole life, she guessed. Especially since she'd been old enough to know that her mother died and left her when she was born. All her growing up, her cousins and aunts had called her the no-nonsense one because all her life she had kept a strict control on her emotions. Now here she was, on the eve of her biggest venture, going off into some dream world that didn't make a lick of sense.

Forcing her mind onto practical matters, which was where it almost always stayed, she went to the box of medical supplies that she'd already packed. She took out the jar of antipholgistine and set it on top of the stove, which was still warm enough to soften its sticky, waxy consistency. Then she cut a circle of cloth from the tough canvas scrap in the bottom of the box and held it against the stove to warm it, too.

As soon as she had doctored him, she'd get into bed. As soon as she got into bed, she'd go to sleep. Her conscience would be satisfied, and she would sleep.

This racing of her heart would slow to a normal pace and she would stop thinking about how his mouth looked in the moonlight.

She would forget about the feel of his thick hair falling like heavy water through her fingers and the feel of the impervious line of his jaw. That hard jaw was one more thing about him that was so at odds with the mischief in his eye and the silliness in his banter.

But she wasn't going to think about him anymore. She would sleep, and when she woke in the morning, she'd be herself again. He would be her trail boss instead of the fascinating, mysterious man who'd barged into her bedroom, and as business associates, they would start north with her cattle.

And his remuda.

To put a fine point on it, the horses that would be supporting all their lives, human and bovine alike, belonged to Eagle Jack.

While she spread a layer of the salve on the circle of cloth, she thought about that. It didn't worry her the way it should—the way it would if, say, Mr. Adams still owned them and was going along for the ride. Somehow, deep inside, although he'd barged into her room and talked about bothering her, she still trusted Eagle Jack implicitly.

He wouldn't hold the horses over her as leverage to demand sex or anything like that.

She stopped and took a deep breath, plus a firm handle on her wild thoughts. Hadn't she already
decided that she wasn't going to let herself think about him anymore?

Desperately she forced her mind to everyday details and their place in the fight for survival. Yes, she had put an extra bedroll in the wagon in case one of their drovers lost his in a river crossing or some other disaster. Yes, she had her box of medical supplies ready to go. Yes, she had two spare sets of clothes for herself, plus a dress—her only good dress—for when they got to Abilene. It was for the meeting with the cattle buyer.

A vision of herself in the dress, dancing with Eagle Jack in the street in Abilene, flashed across her mind.

Foolishness. She didn't even know how to dance.

She scraped the residue off the broad knife and twisted the lid onto the jar.

This would teach Eagle Jack to come barging into her room for the night. He'd get poulticed whether he wanted to or not.

She carried the patch, sticky side up, into the bedroom through the moonlight, which seemed to be growing stronger by the minute. Eagle Jack seemed still asleep, although his breathing wasn't as deep. Thank goodness, he'd turned more to his side so it'd be easier to get to the wound.

Susanna knelt and used her free hand to hold his hair to one side. She bent over to study the
swollen wound in the moonlight, centered the patch on her fingertips, and brought it forward carefully, so as not to get it stuck in his hair.

A hand caught her arm, she screamed, and the patch went flying. Eagle Jack sat up, narrowly missing bumping heads with her as he turned and she tried to pull away.

“What do you think you're doing?” he growled.

He looked so angry that it scared her for an instant.

“D-doctoring your wound,” she said, forcing the air back into her lungs so she could speak. “What I should've done the minute we got here.”