Gaffney, Patricia (21 page)

They had walked out into the center of a wild-flower meadow.
Thigh-high asters and wild sweet william spread out on every side, nearly as far
as they could see. The air smelled so sweet, it almost made her dizzy.
"Let's sit," said Jesse, and they dropped down right where they were,
surrounded by blue and purple flowers. He put his arm around her, and she
didn't realize it was for comfort, not just pleasure, till he said, "To
hell with them, Cady. They're not worth two minutes of your time worrying about
'em."

"I know."

"What have they got against you, anyway? You're a
businesswoman."

"Right."

"They're jealous, that's all."

His indignation warmed her like sunshine. "Well," she
was moved to admit, "they think I'm a little bit more than a
businesswoman."

"Do they?" He stuck his deer bone toothpick in his mouth
and squinted at her. "How come?"

"Oh. You know."

"You mean because of Shlegel?"

She went stiff. "What do you know about Mr. Shlegel?"

"Nothing."

"Who have you been talking to?"

"Nobody."

She pushed away so she could see his face. He had only been
talking to one person who would've put doubts in his mind about her and Mr.
Shlegel. "Wylie."

"The hell with him, I don't care what he says. Cady—"

"What did he tell you?"

"Nothing.
Okay, okay, he said you used
to be together. You and Shlegel. That's all."

" 'Be together.' I'm sure that's exactly how he put it. Did
you believe him?"

"It's none of my business."

"Thank you very much."

He put his hand on her arm when she started to get up. "Wait,
now, wait. What I'm saying is, it wouldn't matter."

"What wouldn't?"

"If you had or you hadn't."

"It
wouldn't matter?"

"Shit." He needed both hands to keep her from streaking
away. "Hell's bells, I'm not saying this right. Cady, don't be mad."

"I'm not mad."

"Yes, you are. No, stay still, don't go leaping up like a
damn grasshopper. Hold on and let me explain."

She quit straining away from him and said. "No, let
me
explain.
Gus Shlegel was the kindest, best-hearted man I ever knew. He was something
Paradise hasn't seen since he died: he was a gentleman."

"Okay."

"I wish we
had
been together."

"Okay."

"I wish he'd
married
me."

"All right."

Why was she so riled? She sat there and fumed for another minute,
then let it go. "Sorry." She glanced at Jesse. He smiled at her
hopefully, but she saw something else in his eyes. Hurt? "Jess..." He
put his hand flat on the grass, next to hers. Their fingers touched. "What
do you think of me? You must have made some assumptions about me. My past.
Men—I'm talking about men."

He looked at her, but didn't answer. She didn't doubt he was
thinking thoughts about ten-foot poles.

"I run a saloon, I deal blackjack, I sell liquor to drunks.
Sometimes the girls I hire take men home with them. I tell them not to, but
they do it anyway. So—most people have an opinion about me. Given those facts.
What's yours?"

"Cady." He started shaking his head, laughing. "No
way."

"No, it's all right, you can tell me. What do you think of
me? How many men do you think I've been with?"

"I don't care."

"Yes, you do."

"Okay, I do, but I'm not asking."

"How many? Ten? Fifty?"

"Cut it out."

"Come on, guess."

"Would you quit?"

She heaved a sigh. "Well, if you're not going to even guess,
I'll just tell you."

"You don't have to tell me. I don't even want you to—"

"Two. Before you, I mean. One was Jamie, and the—"

"I don't need to know this."

But she couldn't stop. "And the other was a schoolteacher. He
lived in Monterey. That's where I ended up after I left Portland. I met him
when I was twenty. He wanted to get married—just like Jamie," she said
with a shrill laugh, "but he neglected to mention his wife in
Oakland."

Jesse lay back, pulling her down beside him. He didn't look at
her, but he brought her hand to his lips and pressed it there, over and over,
and he murmured, "Okay, baby. Okay."

She wilted against him, and all the prickliness and the strange,
unwarranted hostility drained away to nothing. Tears burned behind her eyes,
but she willed them away. "There was a minister, too," she said
tiredly, "but we didn't really do anything. I might've, but I made the
mistake of telling him about Jamie and the schoolteacher, and that was the end
of that."

"Good riddance."

"Yeah. Imagine me a minister's wife." He kissed her
wrist.

"Jesse," she whispered. He turned his head, and she
kissed him on the mouth. "Let me tell you. I'm almost finished."

"All right."

"I don't know why I want to tell you."

"It's okay. Go ahead."

She looked up at the high, streaky clouds scoring the blue sky.
"After that—after the minister—I decided to go home, back to Portland. I
got as far as Paradise, and Mr. Shlegel offered me a job in his saloon. Since I
was broke, I took it. I figured I knew what he really wanted, and I figured I
could handle it. But I was wrong on both counts. He turned out to be a
gentleman, and I ended up... halfway falling in love with him. What he knew and
I didn't was that he had a bad heart and a year to live."

"Ah, Cady."

"He was a big bear of a man, Jesse. German. He had a heavy
accent—at first I could hardly understand him. And such a beard—he looked like
Saint Nick. Toward the end, I took care of him, nursed him. And when he
died..." She swallowed. "I took it hard. I'd made him into my father,
I think, after he wouldn't let me be his lover."

"He wouldn't
let
you?"

His incredulity made her smile. "Nope." She could tell
him the truth, that Mr. Shlegel's illness had made him impotent, incapable of
being anybody's lover— but Jesse didn't need to know that. And Mr. Shlegel had
revealed that to her in confidence, with great sorrow and shame and
disappointment. Nobody knew it but her, and nobody ever would.

"Of course everybody
assumed
we were lovers. Everybody
in the whole damn town. Well, except Levi."

"I like Levi."

"I love Levi."

They rolled their heads together and touched foreheads, smiling

"Are you through now? Is this the end of your life
story?"

"I guess. Mr. Shlegel left me everything he owned, and here I
am."

"Here you are."

"You could tell me
your
life story."

"Read the
Reverberator,
it's all there." He
rolled onto his side and put his hand on her stomach. She knew him now: when he
put his hand on her stomach, he wanted to make love.

"Jesse. We're outside. We're in a field."

"So?"

"So—"

"I thought you and Wylie used to have something.
Together."

"Wylie! And me?
Wylie?
Are you crazy? I
wouldn't—"

"I was wrong," he said calmly. "It's just that you
two hate each other so much, I figured somebody must've broken somebody's
heart."

"Oh.' She relaxed again. She could see how he might've
thought that. Why did she get so mad at him for thinking the exact same thing a
hundred other people had thought before about her? With them she shrugged it
off; with Jesse she got furious. Why was that?

Why was she asking herself questions with such obvious answers?

"I pulled a gun on him once."

His jaw dropped open. "You what?"

"What made it worse was that I was in his saloon at the time.
People saw. If you humiliate Merle in public, you can get yourself into a peck
of trouble."

"Yeah," he said feelingly. "Why'd you pull the
gun?"

"He tried to— Well, he took me out to dinner once," she
said, starting at the beginning. "This is back when I thought he was
nice,
if you can believe that. I'd heard some stories, but I was giving him the
benefit of the doubt."

"Uh-huh."

Even Mr. Shlegel had liked him, she recalled; they had been fairly
friendly rivals. "So afterward, we were in his saloon, and he made a
suggestion. I declined. Politely. I got up to leave, and he put his hands on
me. I couldn't believe it! He really wasn't going to let me go."

"So you pulled out your .22."

"I had no choice."

"I guess not."

"Ever since then, we've been enemies. Oh, Jess, thank
God
you
straightened him out today." She came up on her elbow and hugged him with
fierce gratitude. "Wylie's been poisoning the town for months and months.
If you hadn't come along when you did, I don't know what he would've tried
next." She kissed him soundly. "Thank you."

"I'm tired of talking about Wylie," he said uneasily,
and she thought,
Aha,
an unexpected side to Jesse: modesty. "No
more, okay?"

"Fine with me." She sat up. The asters grew two feet
high in this fragrant meadow. No one came here, but even if somebody did, she
and Jesse would be invisible. Especially if they were lying down.

She smiled a soft, dreamy smile, and began to open her dress for
him.

Jesse's eyes warmed. Such sweetness, such—appreciation. In a
corner of her mind, Cady wondered if there was anything she wouldn't do for
him. Slipping her arms out of the sleeves of her pretty flowered frock—her
best, she'd worn it for him—she basked in the heat of the slanting sun on her
shoulders, her cheeks. She started to untie the ribbon at the neckline of her
shift, but then she stopped. She wanted him to do it. She sat back, braced on
her arms, aware of the thrust of her breasts against the thin white cotton.
Smiling, she offered herself to him.

He sat up fast, but his cupped hands when he touched her were
gentle and patient. Painstaking. Pleasure-taking. To please him, she'd worn no
corset. He caressed her through the material of her chemise, stroking and
pressing, softly squeezing, rubbing his thumbs and his fingertips over her
nipples. She closed her eyes. She sighed. She slipped her hands through his
hair, smelling the hot sun in it. He put his mouth on her breast and kissed
her, right through her shift. The cool and the wet and the friction of cotton
made her nipple tighten and peak, and he drew on it until she couldn't bear it.
Then he soothed her with kisses, soft trails of them across her chest, in the
hollow of her throat. Her chemise came away in his hands, and she was bare to
the waist. "Sorry," she murmured.

"For what?"

"This." She fingered the little blue bird, the mark of
her foolishness. "I know you don't like it." She didn't either, but
eventually she'd forgiven herself for it.

He put his lips there. "There's nothing about you I don't
like."

It wasn't just talk—he said it as if he meant it. Something was
happening. As good as it had been last night, this was different, and she
thought he knew it, too.

She unbuttoned his shirt quickly and pressed herself to him,
needing to be as close as heart-to-heart. "Jesse," she said between
kisses, "oh, Jesse." He took her down, laid her on her back, with his
hands for a pillow under her head, kissing her and kissing her. Tears kept
clogging her throat, and she kept swallowing them down.
Silly,
she
thought. As sweet as it was to give Jesse her body it was only a symbol. The
real gift she'd already given him, and it was the truth about herself. Did he
know it? Could she stand for him to know it?

Probably not. The likelihood of this affair ending in
happily-ever-after was so remote, it was a laugh. On her.
Oh, Cady, you've
done it this time.
Picking men who were good for her had never been her
strong suit, but oh, this was going to be a disaster.

Off came their clothes. They came together, and everything seemed
to get brighter. Her skin was flushed, sensitive, and the way he touched her
wasn't so gentle now. She loved the sweat on his forehead, the passion and the
helplessness
in his face when they made love. He couldn't stop kissing her; he held her as
if he would die without her. "Ah, Cady, ah, Cady," he panted, and she
loved the frankness of his desire for her. She'd never been with a man, never
even kissed a man who didn't try to hide something of himself, no matter how
far the sex carried him away. But Jesse let her know how much he wanted her
without an ounce of shame, and she was learning there was nothing more
seductive than that.

"Hurry," he advised in a rough mutter, arching over her.
She could feel his muscles straining, trembling. He was hanging on for her.