Elizabeth Lowell (8 page)

Long before she had finished her sarcastic summary of Ty’s attire, Mad Jack was laughing so hard he nearly swallowed his cud of tobacco.

Ty’s smile was a bleak warning curve carved out of the blackness of his beard. “There’s more to a man than his clothes.”

“But not to a woman, hmm?”

“Kid, you don’t have enough curves to be a woman.” He turned away before she could say anything more. “I’m going to the Tub,” he said, using her nickname for the deep pool where they both bathed—separately. “Don’t worry about hurrying along to scrub my back. I can reach it just fine.”

Careful to show no expression at all, she watched him stalk from the camp. Then she turned and began preparing an herbal tea for Mad Jack.

“Sorry, gal,” he said said, watching her work. “If I’d thunk about it, I wouldn’t’ve opened my trap. You want I should stay with you?”

She shook her head. “It’s not necessary. I know how restless you get after you’ve been in camp for a few hours. Ty’s mad, but he’ll get over it.”

“That wasn’t what I meant. Now that he knows you’re a female, maybe you won’t be wanting to be alone with him.”

“There won’t be any problem,” she said unhappily. “You heard him. He thinks I’m about as appealing as a fence post.” She shrugged, trying to appear casual about her lack of feminine allure.

Mad Jack’s faded eyes watched Janna shrewdly. “And you be kinda wishin’ it was otherwise,” he said after a moment.

She opened her mouth to object forcefully, then realized there was no point in denying the truth, no matter how painful that truth might be.

“Yes, I’d like to be attractive to him. What woman wouldn’t? He’s all man,” Janna said. She added a pinch of herbs to the tiny pot. “And he’s a good man. Even when he was half out of his head with pain, his first instinct was still to protect me rather than himself. He’d never force himself on me.” She grimaced and added wryly, “Not that he’d ever have the chance. I’d probably say yes so quick it would make his head spin.”

Mad Jack hesitated, then sighed. “Gal, I don’t know how much your pa told you about babies and such, but more women have spent their lives wishin’ they’d said no than otherwise. When the urge is ridin’ a man, he’ll talk sweet as molasses and promise things he has no damn intention of giving.”

“Ty wouldn’t lie to me like that.”

“You can’t rightly call it lyin’. When a man’s crotch is aching, he don’t know lies from truth,” the old man said bluntly. “It’s natural. If menfolk stood around wonderin’ what was right instead of doin’ what come natural like, there wouldn’t be enough babies to keep the world goin’.”

She made a neutral sound and stirred the herbal tea. Despite the faint suggestion of red on his weathered face, Mad Jack forged ahead with his warning about the undependable nature of men.

“What I’m tryin’ to say,” he muttered as he dug around in his stained shirt pocket for a plug of tobacco, “is that’s a big stud hoss you found, and he’s getting right healthy again. He’ll be waking up hard as stone of a mornin’ and he’ll be lookin’ for a soft place to ease what’s aching.”

Janna ducked her head, grateful for the floppy brim of the hat concealing her face. She didn’t know whether to throw the steaming tea at the old man or to hug him for trying to do what he was obviously ill-suited to do, which was to be a Dutch uncle to a girl who had no family.

“Now, I know I’m being too blunt,” Mad Jack continued doggedly, “but dammit, gal, you ain’t got no womenfolk to warn you about a man’s ways. Next thing you know, you’ll be gettin’ fat, and I can tell you flat out it won’t be from nothing you et.”

“Your tea is ready.”

“Gal, you understand what I been sayin’?”

“I know where babies come from and how they get there, if that’s what you mean,” she said succinctly.

“That’s what I mean,” he mumbled.

She glanced up and made an irritated sound as she saw that he was sawing away on a plug of tobacco with his pocketknife. “No wonder your stomach is as sour as last month’s milk. That stuff would gag a skunk.”

Dry laughter denied her words. “I’m at the age when a good chew is my only comfort. That and finding a mite of gold here and there. I done right well for myself since your pa died. I been thinking ‘bout it, and I done decided. I want you to take some gold and get shuck of this place.”

The immediate objections that came to Janna’s lips were overridden by Mad Jack, who didn’t stop speaking even while he pushed a chunk of tobacco into his mouth and started chewing with gusto.

“Now you just listen to me, gal. Territory’s gettin’ too damn crowded. One of these days the wrong man’s going to cut your trail, the kind of man what don’t care about sweet talkin’ or protecting or any damn thing but his own pleasure. And I don’t mean just renegades, neither. Some of them pony soldiers is as bad as Injuns, an’ the scum selling rifles to Cascabel is no better than him.”

Mad Jack looked at Janna as she worked gracefully over the fire, every line of her body proclaiming both her femininity and her unwillingness to listen to his advice.

“It’s gettin’ too damn dangerous out here for any woman a’tall, even one wearing men’s clothes. You be too good a woman to go to waste out here alone.”

“I’ve done fine for five years.”

He snorted. “Fine, huh? Look at you, thin as a mare nursing two foals. You want to get a man, you gotta put meat on them bones.”

“My mother wasn’t built like a butter churn,” Janna muttered. “Papa didn’t mind one bit.”

And neither had Ty, if his reaction to the drawing was any guide.

Mad Jack cursed under his breath and tried another tack. “Don’t you get lonesome chasing mustangs and living so small you barely cast a shadow?”

“Do you?” she countered.

“Hell, I’m different. I’m a man and you ain’t, never mind the clothes you wear. Don’t you want a man of your own an’ kids to pester you?”

She didn’t answer, because it was too painful. Until she had found Ty, she hadn’t really understood what life had to offer. Then she had met him—and now she knew the meaning of the word
lonely.

“The mustangs are all I have,” she said.

“And they’re all you’ll ever have if‘n you don’t leave.”

“If I leave, I’ll have nothing,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’m not the kind of woman to catch a man’s eye. Ty has made that real plain, and he’s the ‘stud hoss’ who should know.” She shrugged, concealing her unhappiness. “I’d rather live with mustangs than cook at a boardinghouse where men grab at me when they think nobody’s looking.”

“But—”

“I’m staying, and that’s that.”

The Tub’s slick-walled pool was far enough from its hot-spring source to have lost the scalding edge of its temperature and nearly all of its sulfurous smell. The water was a clear, pale blue that steamed gently in the cool hours of night and gleamed invitingly all the time. Though safe for animals to drink, the water didn’t encourage plants. Not much but sand and stone and willows ringed the pool. The high mineral content of the water had decorated the rock it touched with a smooth, creamy-yellow veneer of deposits that had rounded off all the rough edges of the native stone, making a hard but nonetheless comfortable place for a man to soak out the last legacy of Cascabel’s cruel gauntlet.

Usually Ty enjoyed the soothing heat of the pool, but not today. Today he simmered from more than the temperature of the water. Knowing that “the boy” was a girl made him want to turn her over his knee and paddle her until she learned some manners. When he thought how she had let him run around wearing nothing more than a few rags of blanket...

A flush spread beneath the dark hair on his chest and face. The realization that he was embarrassed infuriated him. It was hardly a case of his never having been nearly or even completely naked around a woman. Of all the MacKenzie brothers, Ty had been the one who had caught women’s eye from the time he was old enough to shave. What bothered him was that he must have shocked Janna more than once.

The thought of a girl of her tender years being subjected repeatedly to a full-grown man’s nakedness made Ty very uncomfortable.

She must have been dying of embarrassment, but she never let on. She just kept on washing me when I was delirious and putting medicine all over me and reading to me while I teased her in a way I never would have teased a girl.
A woman, maybe, but not a girl.
Why, she can
’
t be much more
than
...
Abruptly he sat up straight on the stone ledge, sending water cascading off his body.
Just how old is she?

And how innocent?

Ty remembered the look of desire he had once seen in Janna’s eyes. Instantly he squelched the thought. He was nearly thirty. He had no damned business even looking at a thirteen-year-old, no matter how soft her cheeks were or how her gray eyes warmed while she looked at him when she thought he wouldn’t notice. Besides, boy or girl, at thirteen a case of hero worship was still a case of hero worship.

If she was, indeed, thirteen.

She can
’
t be much older than that. I may be blind but I
’
m not dead. If she had breasts, I
’
d have noticed.
Or hips, for that matter.
Even under those flapping, flopping, ridiculous clothes, I
’
d have not
iced
...
wouldn
’
t I?

Hell, yes, of course I would have.

The reassuring thought made him settle back into the pool. A kid was still a kid, no matter what the sex. As for his own body’s urgent woman-hunger, that was just a sign of his returned health. It had nothing to do with a gray-eyed waif whose delicate hands had touched nearly every aching inch of his body.

But it was the aching inches she hadn’t touched that were driving him crazy.

“Dammit!” he exploded, coming out of the water with a lunge.

He stood dripping on the stone rim of the pool, furious with himself and the world in general, and with one Janna Wayland in particular. Viciously he scrubbed his breechcloth on the rocks, wrung it out and put it on, concealing the rigid evidence of his hunger.

Then he turned around and got right back into the Tub again. This time he remembered the bar of camp soap that Janna always left in a nearby niche. Cursing steadily, he began washing himself from head to newly healed feet. When he was finished he rinsed thoroughly, adjusted the uncomfortably tight breechcloth once more and stalked back to camp.

Janna was calmly tying twists of greenery to branches she had laid between two tall forked sticks. The stems of the plants turned slowly in the sun and wind as the leaves gave up their moisture. In a week or two the herbs would be ready to store whole or to crumble and pound into a powder she would use to make lotions, pastes, potions, and other varieties of medicine.

“How do your feet feel?” she asked without looking up from her work.

“Like feet. Where’s Mad Jack?”

“Gone.”

“What?”

“He was worried when he didn’t find me in any of the usual places, so—”

“Where are the usual places?” Ty interrupted.

“Wherever Lucifer’s herd is. Once Jack found out I was all right, he went back.”

“To where?”

“Wherever his mine is.”

Ty reached to readjust the breechcloth again, remembered that Janna wasn’t a boy and snatched back his hands, cursing.

“Do you think that zebra dun of yours would take me to Sweetwater?” he asked.

“I don’t know. She likes you well enough, but she doesn’t like towns at all.”

“You two make a fine pair,” he muttered, combing through his wet hair with long fingers.

“Catch,” she said.

Reflexively his hand flashed out and grabbed the small leather poke she had pulled from her baggy pants pocket.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“Mad Jack’s gold. You’ll need it when you get to town. Or were you planning to work off whatever you buy?”

“I can’t take gold from a thirteen-year-old girl.”

She looked up briefly before she went back to arranging herbs for drying. “You aren’t.”

“What?”

“You aren’t taking gold from a thirteen-year-old. I’m nineteen. I only told you I was thirteen so that you wouldn’t suspect I was a woman.”

“Sugar,” he drawled, giving her a thorough up-and-down look, “you could have walked naked past me and I wouldn’t have suspected anything at all. You’re the least female female I’ve ever seen.”

Her fingers tightened on the herbs as the barb went home, but she was determined not to show that she’d been hurt.

“Thank you,” she said huskily. “I just took a leaf from Cascabel’s book—hide in plain sight. The pony soldiers caught him way down south last year. He escaped from them. They went looking for him, expecting to run him down easily because there was no cover around. It was flat land with only a scattering of stunted mesquite. No place for a rabbit to hide, much less a man.”

Ty listened in spite of his anger at having been deceived. As he listened, he tried to figure out why her voice was so appealing to him. Finally he realized that she no longer was trying to conceal her voice’s essentially feminine nature, a faintly husky music that tantalized his senses.

And she was nineteen, not thirteen.

Stop it,
he told himself fiercely.
She
’
s all alone in the world. Any man who would take advantage of that isn
’
t worthy of the name.

“Because the soldiers knew there was no place to hide, they didn’t look,” she continued. “Cascabel is as shrewd as Satan. He knew that the best place to hide is in plain sight, where no one would ever look. So when he was convinced that he couldn’t outrun the soldiers and they would catch him in the open, he rolled in the dust, grabbed some mesquite branches and sat very still. The branches didn’t cover him, but they gave the soldiers something familiar to look at—something they would never look at twice. And they didn’t,” she concluded. “They rode right by Cascabel, maybe a hundred feet away, and never saw him.”