The Reluctant Bride (12 page)

Jem blanched.

“I guess it’s not surprising that he’s bigger, stronger, and
older,”
Tanzy added, “since he owns his own ranch and does the same work as his cowhands. Then there’s the matter of courage.”

“You saying I’m a coward?” Jem sputtered, completely shaken by the turn his little joke had taken.

“I don’t know anything about you, but Mr. Tibbolt captured two bandits by himself. Thanks for the offer of your company, Jem, but I’ll have to decline. Please take your seat.”

Tanzy turned her back on Jem, hoping he would go quietly to his seat so she could start her lessons.

“Are you saying you prefer an ex-con to me?”

“I haven’t stated any preference, but were I to do so, I’d prefer a man to a boy. Now please take your seat.”

He might have done what she asked if someone hadn’t snickered. “I don’t need to be locked up with children and little girls,” he said angrily. “I’m already a man.”

He turned on his heel and walked out. Tanzy expected his friends to follow him, but they remained in their seats, heads down.

“Good morning,” Tanzy said, addressing the students for the first time. “My name is Miss Gallant. I will be your teacher. Since I don’t know where you are in your work, I’ll need to test you. Please take out your slates and do the times tables through twelve. Don’t worry if you don’t know all of them,” she said when the younger children started to look panicked. “I just want to know where to start. While you’re doing that, I’m going to ask each of you to read for me. Tardy Benton, why don’t you come first?”

Some of the girls giggled.

“Sorry, I should have used your proper name,” Tanzy said.

“No point,” Tardy said, as he got up and shuffled to the front. “Everybody but Aunt Ethel calls me Tardy.”

Barely fifteen minutes had passed when the schoolhouse door opened with a bang and Jem entered, followed by a woman Tanzy assumed must be his mother.

“He’s to be in school every day,” the lady said, shoving him toward an empty desk and pushing him down into it. “You let me know if he’s not. Did he give you any sass this morning?” It was obvious Jem expected Tanzy to tell on him.

“None of the students have been a problem,” Tanzy said.

Mrs. Bridger appeared skeptical. “Well, you let me know if he does. I don’t tolerate his showing disrespect.”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t do that,” Tanzy said.

Mrs. Bridger harrumphed in a manner that said she didn’t believe Tanzy was up to the job and took her leave.

“It’s your turn to read,” Tanzy said to Jem. He came to the front, his attitude still defiant.

“Why didn’t you tell on me?”

“I expect you were just testing me,” Tanzy said. “I hope I passed the test.”

“We’ll see,” Jem muttered.

A sigh of relief escaped Tanzy as the last students left the schoolhouse. “You don’t have to wait today,” she said to Tardy. “I can get back to the hotel safely by myself.”

“But Aunt Ethel said—”

“It’s been a whole week and everything has gone smoothly. You don’t need to watch out for me anymore.”

“Aunt Ethel will break my head if I don’t stay.”

“I’ll tell her I wouldn’t let you stay. Now go. If you hurry, you can catch up with your friends.”

Tanzy pretended not to notice when Tardy blushed.

“I don’t have any friends. The kids think I’m a half-wit. Hell, who am I kidding?
Everybody
thinks I’m a half-wit.”

“I don’t,” Tanzy said, “and I’ll quite happily speak to anyone who does. You read as well as anybody in school, you know as much math as I do, and you can remember history better than anybody I ever met.”

“People in Boulder Gap don’t care about book learning,” Tardy said. “If I had my own ranch like Mr. Tibbolt, they wouldn’t care if I was as dumb as Jem.”

“Mr. Tibbolt’s ranch hasn’t made people like him, so maybe you’re better off just as you are.”

“They may not like him, but they respect him.”

Tardy’s statement surprised Tanzy. “Why do you say that? All the people I’ve met have done their best to convince me not to marry him.”

“They respect him because he stands up for himself against Mr. Pullet, against the whole town if need be. Nobody but Mr. Tibbolt ever has. They hate him for it, but they respect him, too.”

Tanzy understood that. Nobody likes the man who shows up the weaknesses of others, particularly when he compounds the injury by
not
throwing it in anyone’s face.

“Everybody likes you,” Tardy said. “If you was to marry Mr. Tibbolt, they’d be hard pressed to turn their backs on him. Besides, everybody knows Mr. Pullet doesn’t want you to marry Mr. Tibbolt. If you stood up to him—you being a woman and all—the women would have to stick with you. That would make Mr. Pullet mad, and nobody wants that.”

“Apparently it’s a good thing for the people of Boulder Gap I’ve decided not to marry Mr. Tibbolt,” Tanzy said with some asperity. “I’d sure hate to force them to start behaving like decent human beings.”

Tardy laughed. “I’d sure like to see them choking on their words.”

“Go home, Tardy. I don’t want to speak disrespectfully of the people who’ve entrusted me with their children’s education, but if we continue this conversation, I just might.”

After he left, Tanzy sat puzzling over why a town would hate a man who seemed to be the embodiment of the western ideal. She realized she didn’t know the
real
history of Russ’s relationship with the town any more than she knew what caused Tardy to be perpetually late. She knew it was intentional because he had never been late for her.

A sound outside the schoolhouse startled her. She looked at her watch, amazed to see she’d been sitting at her desk for nearly an hour without doing any of the work she’d stayed behind to do. Well, she’d have to do it tomorrow. It would be dark soon. She had no desire to be walking about town after dusk.

The sound of the schoolhouse door opening caused a frisson of apprehension to race down her spine. Rather than fade when she saw Russ framed in the doorway, it transformed itself into a quiver of excitement. She didn’t like to think that the mere sight of Russ Tibbolt could instantly charge her body with surplus nervous energy, but she couldn’t find another reason for the sudden tautness that aroused her body to full alert.

She needed him to leave. She could empathize with his plight, be angry that the townspeople appeared to be treating him unfairly because of their fear of Pullet’s retaliation, but none of that was her concern.

“There’s nobody here,” she said. “Whoever you’re looking for has been gone for over an hour.”

“What would I be doing looking for a student?” he asked as he came inside and closed the door behind him.

“Since I know nothing of your affairs, I couldn’t possibly answer that question.” She wanted him to leave, not walk toward her. “What are you doing here?”

“I’ve come to see you.”

“Why?” She couldn’t see his expression. The sunlight coming through the window blinded her to everything beyond its reach. “Have you come to make sure I have a job so I can pay you back the money you spent on me?”

“No.”

She didn’t believe him. She was surprised he hadn’t checked on her before now. “I have this job until the town finds a new teacher. Since the parents seem satisfied with my work so far, they aren’t looking very hard. I should be able to repay you in a couple of months.”

It annoyed her that he didn’t go away, that he remained in the shadows. More important, it disconcerted her that she didn’t need to see his face to feel the effect of his presence. Merely hearing his voice was enough to call forth a clear memory of the man who’d sat across the table from her that first evening, dust and blood staining his clothes without detracting from the animal magnetism that had aroused in her a sensual response unlike anything she’d ever experienced. She wanted it to stop. She didn’t want to experience it again. Nothing good could come of it.

“How do you like teaching school?” he asked.

“I can’t say yet.”

“You’ve been doing it for a week.”

“I’m still too busy trying to figure out what to do. Every student is in a different place, and I don’t have enough teaching materials to work with.”

“Tell Ethel Peters. She’ll see you get something.”

“Why do you speak so highly of Miss Peters? You’ve got to know she warned me not to marry you.”

“Ethel’s feelings toward me are based on her sense of what is right and wrong. She doesn’t know the information they’re based on is all a lie.”

“It’s a shame you can’t be as forgiving with Stocker. If you could, that might put an end to the feud.”

“We’re not having a feud. And even if Stocker could forgive me, I could never forgive him.”

“What did he do that’s so terrible?”

“That’s my business.”

She hadn’t expected him to be so blunt, but her refusal to marry him had broken the only link between them. He had no reason to share confidences with her.

“Forgive me for being so inquisitive. I’ve always wondered why people do the things they do. I call it curiosity. Others probably call it nosiness.”

“If you don’t want to marry me, why should you be curious about me?”

“Nothing I’ve heard about you has led me to believe you’re given to asking stupid questions.”

“Why is it stupid?”

“Come out of the shadows. I don’t like talking to a man I can’t see.”

“Do I make you nervous?”

“No.” It wasn’t exactly a lie because he didn’t
exactly
make her nervous. Her feeling was more like apprehension mixed with anticipation. Physical attraction she could understand, but this feeling that there was a connection between them was ridiculous as well as hard on her peace of mind. She tried to tell herself to stop being fanciful, but talking to herself didn’t do any good. She had to face the simple fact that something about this man affected her as no other had.

“I just don’t like people hiding in the dark,” she said. “It was men hiding in the trees at night who killed my father and brothers.”

“How many brothers did you have?”

“Four.”

“How many died?”

“All of them.”

He didn’t answer for a moment. “What about your mother?”

“She’s dead.”

“Any sisters?”

“No.”

“Why didn’t you stay in St. Louis?”

“I discovered men there were too much like the men in Kentucky.”

“Surely there was at least one man in St. Louis who would have offered you a respectable marriage.”

“No man—at least not the ones I met in St. Louis—believes a woman who works in a gambling hall is respectable.”

“So you came west thinking we were different?”

“Only to discover that men are the same everywhere.”

“That must have been a disappointment.”

“I’ll get over it. I’ve got to be going before it gets dark, so tell me what you’re doing here.”

Russ stepped forward out of the shadows. “I want you to teach me how to read.”

Chapter Eight

Tanzy was tired, cranky, and feeling the stress of trying to control her reaction to Russ. “I don’t know whether you’re angry that I won’t marry you or whether you think it’s fun to bait the schoolteacher, but I’m in no mood for jokes. If your presence has a purpose, state it.”

“I just did. I want you to teach me to read.”

If losing her temper would have done any good, Tanzy would gladly have done so. “You had to be able to read my letters to write yours to me.”

“I didn’t write those letters. I didn’t read them either. Welt Aldred, one of my cowhands, wrote all of them.”

“He wrote them for you?”

Russ looked a little uneasy. “Not exactly.”

Tanzy was losing patience. “Then what exactly did happen?”

“Welt read the letters and wrote the answers.”

“You mean he wrote what you told him to write?”

“No.”

“If this is the clearest you can express yourself, no wonder people in Boulder Gap don’t understand you. What are you talking about?”

“I’d better start at the beginning.”

Tanzy sank into her chair. “Maybe you’d better.”

“I wasn’t looking for a wife. No young woman here would have married me if I asked.”

Tanzy had a strong feeling that more than one young woman would have gladly braved parental anger, as well as the wrath of Stocker Pullet, to have a husband like Russ. No woman could think straight when he was around. The physical attraction alone was enough to cloud a girl’s thinking. When he looked into her eyes like she was the only person in the world, nothing else mattered. When he smiled … well, there was no way to describe his smile except to say most any woman would sell her soul to have its warmth for the rest of her life.

“Welt kept telling me I needed a wife. J didn’t pay any attention to him until he told me you were on your way to Boulder City, that he’d already sent you the money. I was mad as hell at him, but there was nothing I could do to stop you.”