The Texan's Bride (23 page)

The wind chimes sang wildly in the breeze as he took the turn to the inn. Branch gave the dun his head as they traveled the last quarter mile to Katie’s home.

Striker rounded the final curve, and the inn came into view. Branch grabbed the saddle cantle for support at the sight that met his eyes—a vision as shocking in its way as the one of a week ago when dead cattle hung from the roof. He abruptly reined in Striker, and the horse pranced in a circle in the yard. “Damn!” Branch exclaimed.

Scarlet underwear. She had scarlet underwear hanging in the front yard where God and everyone could see it.

In a daze he slid from the gelding’s back and walked to the clothesline. He lifted his hand and fingered the sleeve of a cambric camisole, a red cambric camisole trimmed in—Branch murmured, “Holy hell”—black lace. Next to the camisole hung a petticoat, chemise, drawers, and—he choked out, “Holy hell on Sunday”—a scarlet corset with black laces and black and purple roses embroidered across the bust and in a line down the front to the—his strangled voice groaned, “Holy hell on Sunday in church!” At the end of the line hung her most demure, navy-blue cotton dress.

He backed away, slowly shaking his head. No, these weren’t Katie’s. No way they were hers. He’d come closer to believing she’d up and turned Gallagher’s into a whorehouse and had been doing the madam’s wash.

Something must have happened to her. “Katie,” he shouted, turning and sprinting for the kitchen door. “Katie, where are you?” He banged the door open and rushed inside. Nothing. He checked her bedroom. Empty.

Outside, he ran for the inn, his legs pumping, his heart pounding. “Katie, Katie are you all right? Katie!”

“What’s the fuss, Kincaid?” She leaned out of an upstairs window, a scowl on her face. “You’re interrupting my work. What’s going on?”

He stopped and stared up at her, catching his breath as his heartbeat slowed. She looked as healthy and as beautiful as ever. Thank God nothing was wrong. Then his gaze sneaked back to the line of laundry. “Katie, what are you doing up there?”

“The same thing I’ve been doing for two days now, sewing mattress covers.”

“Is someone with you?”

“It’s just me and my needle and thread. I have almost a dozen ready to stuff. As soon as you finish the bed frames, we’ll be a big step closer to reopening. How was San Augustine? Was Strickland’s information correct? Was there a fight?”

“Yeah,” Branch called absently as he tried to figure a way to inquire about her underclothes. Ordinarily he’d have just jumped right up and asked, but ever since their chat by the river the other day, talk between them had been a bit strained. In fact, Katie had been acting downright strange. It spooked him. One minute she was as friendly as a pink-eyed bunny, and then an hour later she wouldn’t speak to him.

Framed by the window, Katie waited expectantly for him to elaborate. Branch couldn’t manage the words he wanted to say, so he fell back on the reliable. “Um, do you have anything in the kitchen I could eat? I left San Augustine before noon, and I’m as hungry as a coyote with a toothache.”

She smiled smugly. “Sure. In fact, I’ve not eaten since breakfast myself. Why don’t you wash up, and I’ll put something on the table.”

After caring for his horse, Branch made his way to the well. He’d taken off his shirt and dumped a pail of water over his head when he heard a song drifting from the kitchen. He turned his head, ear pointed toward the cabin. Katie was singing a tune that sounded suspiciously like that bawdyhouse song he used to hum all the time.

Funny, he didn’t do much humming anymore.

Katie had set out clean clothes for him to wear, and it was while he was buttoning the crisp denim pants that the breeze carried to him the aroma of freshly baked cobbler. Gathering his discarded clothing, Branch followed the scent toward its source. Noticing that the rope no longer stretched from the dogwood to the porch, he approached the kitchen door like a condemned man walking to the scaffold.

What in the hell was she up to?

He stepped into the kitchen and caught his breath at the sight that awaited him. Katie had changed clothes. She wore the prim navy-blue dress that had hung outside earlier. Next to the scarlet corset.

“What’s for supper?” he rasped as he stared at the dress, desperately trying to block the mental picture of what lay beneath it. He failed.

She smiled brightly. “Bacon and beans, but I’ve made a cobbler for dessert. It’s going to be good, too. I picked the blackberries yesterday afternoon, and I’m afraid I ate almost as many as I put in my pail. They were so delicious—that one bush in particular seems to make the sweetest, juiciest berries. That one out by the oak, you remember which bush I mean, don’t you, Branch?”

Damned right he knew which one she meant
. He saw her there again, lying on the brambles—only this time she wore a scarlet chemise. “Sounds good, Katie. Only, I really need to split some firewood before dark. I’d best not eat too much. I’ll get dessert later.”

She shrugged and offered him an enigmatic smile. “Your loss.”

Branch ate his dinner quickly and rushed outside to the wood pile. A few days earlier he’d dragged a fallen cedar to the pile and cut it into logs. Now as he went to work splitting the logs for firewood, the image of a scarlet-clothed Katie kept him company. He brought the ax down on a cedar log and found himself talking to the ghost. “Stay away from me, woman. I’m tryin’ to do the right thing here, and it’s not an easy proposition.”

Chickens clucked at him from the henhouse as he argued with the scarlet specter and cleaved a second log in two. “You’re a good woman, Katie Starr, and you deserve more than a man who’ll not commit himself.” He stooped to pick up another hunk of wood and stood it on the block. He swung the ax hard as he recalled the heat of her love making. “You’ll be getting no promises from me, lady, no matter how nice the idea sounds when I’m walking around stiff as a new rawhide rope.” He swung the ax again as he said, “I’ll be solving my mystery and heading home soon.”

Katie’s image vanished to be replaced by the long dreamed vision of Riverrun with its tall white columns and red brick facade. Branch stared at the ax blade, wiping away a stream of sap with his fingers as the familiar ache washed over him—the need to go home. It was a throb in his soul, something he’d carried with him for twenty years, an elemental part of himself. And now that he’d been given the opportunity to return, no one, not a murderer, not even a very special lady, would stand in his way.

The niggling voice whispered in his mind, “You could take her with you.”

“No,” he said, tossing down the ax. He couldn’t do it. Katie Starr wasn’t part of the dream. The dream was Riverrun and Eleanor. The beautiful, elegant daughter whose father’s plantation, Bentwood Hills, bordered Riverrun. The woman he’d once loved and planned to marry.

Branch carried the wood he’d cut to the stack, where he laid it atop a healthy pile of wood. Katie must have known he was lying about chopping, and he winced over the foolishness of the lie. Damn, he hated feeling the fool.

Like how he’d felt at his brother’s seventeenth birthday party.

Restless, Branch wandered over toward the hog pen, remembering the night he’d left Riverrun and fled to Bentwood. The Nichols family had given him a room in the bachelor’s hall, and for four years he had lived there, working and learning sugarcane, falling in love with the Nicholses’ daughter. It had been a mutual affection; Eleanor had given him her heart and soon afterward her virginity.

None of that had mattered when her father gave her hand in marriage to Branch’s own brother, thereby uniting the two most powerful families in South Texas. That Eleanor went to her bridal bed no longer virgin apparently bothered no one, no one but himself. To a young, passionate Branch, Eleanor’s desertion had seemed the greatest of betrayals.

Time had taught him differently, however. Her choice had been logical, the reasonable thing to do. Of course, she
should
have chosen to become the lady of Riverrun. What had Branch to offer her, anyway? He was nothing more than a hired hand. No, Eleanor had made a sound decision based on facts. Her heart had no business in the matter.

Just as now, his heart had no place in his dealings with Katie Starr.

Branch kicked at the slop pail sitting at his feet. “Heart”—where in the hell had that word come from? “My heart is not involved with Katie Starr,” he growled at the wide-snouted red hog snorting in the slop. He propped a boot on the railing, determined to repeat the declaration often—until he convinced himself he believed it.

Branch would find Rob’s killer, return to Riverrun, and marry his brother’s widow. Eleanor was his first love, his only love. She was beautiful, sophisticated, and after years of marriage to his brother, Riverrun’s lady. That was her place, she’d earned it. No one could replace her, no one should even make the attempt. Especially not a squirrel-slinging, auburn-haired innkeeper. “My heart is not involved with Katie Starr.”

Damned if his body wasn’t, though.

The shoats’ squeals drowned out the sound of her approach. When she sashayed up to him and flashed a red petticoat hem right at him, his boot slid off the railing and he caught hold of the fence to steady himself.

Katie hooked her elbows over the fence. “I’m on my way to the inn and those mattress covers. I wondered what you had planned for the afternoon, if you might could help me with the stuffing.”

He saw cotton ticking and red cambric. “Hell, Katie, I planned on working on bed frames. I have seven left to build, you know, and I’ll be leaving in another week when the Widow Craig and Rowdy Payne arrive.”

“Oh, all right. Are you through here? We can walk over there together.”

Branch envisioned bed frames and cotton ticking and red cambric. “Katie, it’s all of fifty yards to the inn. Besides, I need to milk that cow of yours. I swear she could give milk for all of Nacogdoches. Don’t you hear her bawlin’?”

“Do you think Lizzie misses Delilah and the calf?”

“Naw, Katie, her teats are full.” Oh Lord, he thought as his gaze went right to her bosom—wrong thing to say.

Katie arched her back and said, “Well you’d better do something about it, hadn’t you?”

Delilah, bosoms, beds, mattresses, red underwear.
Hell and Texas
.

He stared at her breasts as he said, “I can’t. I’ve gotta milk the cow.” Then he headed for the barn.

Katie sighed heavily as she worked the thread in and out of the mattress ticking. This seduction business was harder than she’d imagined. She knew the underpinnings had affected him, she’d seen it in the way his stare had continually drifted to her bosom during dinner. His gaze had been as hot as a scorpion’s sting.

She’d not exactly been a bucket of ice herself. To her surprise, the lacy underclothes had affected her also. They made her feel, well… naughty.

As befitted a woman of strong moral principal, embroidery and lace trimmed only those parts of Katie’s unmentionables that occasionally might be seen, such as the hems of her petticoats. She never considered adding lace to her corset, and what lace she did wear certainly wasn’t red or black!

But when she’d sat across the table from Branch’s hot amber gaze, she’d wondered if perhaps the soiled doves didn’t have the right idea. There was something to be said for being on the receiving end of a look like the one he’d given.

With thoughts of victory in her mind, she’d thought to escalate the battle by displaying a flash of red and then enticing him up to the inn, where earlier she’d placed a finished mattress on a bed frame Branch had built.

The skirmish never happened. The other party failed to meet the challenge. Branch had milked the cow and gone fishing.

It was one more blow to her pride to know that a lure was more alluring than she. It hurt. Damn Branch Kincaid for having the ability to hurt her.

Her finger slipped and she stuck herself with her needle. As she squeezed her thumb and stared at the drop of bright red blood pooling on its tip, she said softly, “Damn me for allowing him the power.”

NIGHTFALL EASED over the eastern Texas landscape like a gentle death. The wind lay and the forest fell silent but for occasional sounds made by nocturnal animals as they slipped from their burrows and caves to wander the forest in the pursuit of sustenance. As the moon rose and floated across the sky, beams of milky light bathed Gallagher’s in an eerie glow, and from an oak tree at the edge of the clearing, the low, purring
chuck chuck
of a bullbat added to the spectral atmosphere of the night.

Ghosts played inside the kitchen’s walls, delving into the mind of the sleeping man, stirring up the nightmare which occupied that comer of the mind reserved for hell.

Branch was Britt again, seven years old and playing with his brother in the attic of Eagle’s Nest, the Garrett family plantation home in Virginia. Outside the dormer window, slaves labored in field after field of tobacco, singing a haunting spiritual song in rhythm with their work. Neither Britt nor Rob were interested in what happened in the fields; their concentration centered on the leaves Rob had stolen from the drying sheds.

Britt wrinkled his nose at the production of rolling crushed leaves inside a larger one. “I don’t see why you want to light it. It makes a great haystack for my soldiers to hide behind.”

“Hush, Britt. You’re such a baby. Now, hand me those matches.”

The dream altered, and the man in the bed tossed and flung up his arm to guard his face from the phantoms whose features burned black and crusted. They leaned over the young boy Britt, shrieking in his ear. His grandfather, his grandmother. His mother. Fire crackled around them, dancing, its smoke oozing over him and carrying the stench of death. “Your fault… your fault,” they chanted, reaching for him with bony hands.

“No!” he screamed.

“Branch, Branch, wake up.” The soft, soothing angel’s voice summoned him back from hell.

As he opened his eyes and gazed at Katie, he knew a relief so encompassing that his naked, sweat-soaked body shook with it.