The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback) (18 page)

“
Be still!”
she snapped, like a fierce governess to a boy with a skinned knee, and Jared was still. She went on.
 

Pat, pat, pat, she dabbed at the wound, dripping the red-soaked cloth across the floor, ringing it out in a crimson puddle upon the timber, never thinking of the everlasting stain that it would leave on the scrubbed-white floors, and dunking it again into the steaming hot water. She supposed the water was too hot to be comfortable on his back, but she wasn’t scalding him and she had an idea that hot water would stop infection.
 

She thought that perhaps she ought to have known these things before she went traveling out onto the prairie to become an independent farmer, far from surgeon or barber. She thought that she would like to learn a great deal more about nursing, of humans and animals besides. She did not realize that she had started thinking again, that her blank terror had relaxed into a calm, business-like state, that she was going about the process of nursing Jared with a firm determination to do her job and do it well, and she had quite lost all her fear. The blood-flow stanched with the steady pressure of the towel; the hot water cleared away the smearing of gore upon his back, and she could see that what had happened to Jared truly amounted to a very nasty scratch—
very
nasty, to be sure, but nothing that could not be kept clean and dry until it healed without infection, nothing that was going to threaten his life. She found another clean towel—goodness, someone had taught this man to be very tidy with his things!—and laid it across his back while she considered what to do about a bandage.
 

***

Jared had since stopped worrying about how much his back hurt and was concentrating instead on how calmly and efficiently his Englishwoman was going about the business of fixing it up. He turned his head upon his pillow to regard her while she stood in the center of the room, hands on hips, and gazed about with a thoughtful expression.
 

“Rip a sheet,” he suggested, and she turned around at once, expression solicitous. It was the first time he could recall seeing such a look upon her face. Cherry was not one to give.

“You are laying upon your sheet,” she said. “Have you another?”

“In the press,” he said. “In the other corner.”

She hurried to the opposite corner of the cabin and opened up the doors of the press she had not noticed before, lurking as it was in the shadows. A flash of lightning lit the eastern windows and flooded the cabin with a blue light; he saw her clearly for a moment, going through his things so that she could see to his comfort, and he was so overcome with love and desire that he had to close his eyes.
 

No woman had ever gone out of her way for him.

The women he had known had always forced him to dance to their tune.

Cherry had seemed just as demanding as the rest, but, he could see now, she was capable of the same deep devotion and care that she showed towards her baby son.
 

Jared began to wonder what the hell he was going to do.

She turned around, hands full of white sheets, and smiled. He could see, even through the dim orange light of stove-fire and candle-flame, the brilliant humor in her face. A woman who could laugh in times of trial, he thought, and tumbled a little bit more into love. “Jared,” she said laughingly, “Jared, what sort of cowboy has so much clean white linen in his press? You have deceived me, I think. You are just a dandy after all!”

He smiled with cracked lips. “You found me out, Cherry,” he rasped. “You found me out.”

***

It was not until the next morning, when the sun rose triumphant on a world shivering and frightened, that they were able to ride to the Jorgenson homestead and fetch a safe, bright-eyed Little Edward home.
 

Mrs. Jorgenson was standing in the doorway, gazing out over the prairie, when they rode into the farmstead’s tidy yard. She wiped her apron at her eyes, a quick gesture, but Cherry saw and her heart was touched. She had family here, no matter what Cousin Anne would have her think. People cared about her out here. She glanced over at Jared and let a tiny smile play over her lips.

He saw her head turn and looked back, and the look in his eyes was so intense and smoldering that she gasped aloud. And then she looked away, quickly — it would never do for Mrs. Jorgenson to see such things.

“Gut,” Mrs. Jorgenson said, nodding her head rapidly as they dismounted from their horses. “Gut, gut.”

“Gut morning,” Cherry said, half-imitating her speech, and the other woman smiled.

“Gut mornen,” she repeated in reply, and they smiled at one another.
 

Then the daughter came slipping out with Little Edward’s hand in hers, and he smiled a great smile that lit up his entire face. Cherry dropped to her knees, suddenly aware of how terrified she’d been that he might have been hurt in the storm. But no — this pristine place had barely been touched, there was scarcely a puddle in the yard. How strange and frightening prairie weather was!

“My own darling,” she told Little Edward, her lips in his fluffy gilt hair. “Did you have a big rain last night?”

“Loud,” he announced gravely. “Loud rain. Loud sky.”

She looked up at the Jorgensons, the mother and daughter so alike, so stoic and strong and utterly suited to this rough western life. So utterly unlike her! She thought she would never be as capable and steady as them. “Thank you,” she said fervently. “God bless you all.”

***

“They aren’t like me,” she mused aloud as they rode back towards Cherry’s own claim. She was still worried about what she might find there. Despite the lack of damage at the Jorgenson’s, her own property sat that much closer to Jared’s and thus the path of the storm, and so she could not dare to hope that the same cyclone had not touched her own shanty and barn.

“I don’t quite know what you mean,” he said after a moment.

She looked at him. He was gazing at her with concern in his dark eyes. The stubble on his face was dark and thick after their long night and morning’s ride. Wipe the dirt from his face and put him in clean clothes, she thought, and he
was
a true gentleman, despite his western drawl. But he was made of harder stuff than most gentleman.
 

She supposed that perhaps she was, too. It was possible that she had never been a true lady; not in the way that Cousin Anne or Uncle Richard or Lady Walsall might have meant, to be sure. But she did not know many people from her old life who could have survived last night’s terrors without lapsing into hysterics. Even so… She tried to find words that didn’t make her sound like an utter fool, but it was a challenge. “They are…
westerners
,” she said slowly. “They look out at the prairie and they don’t feel fear; they just see their homeland. All this grass and space and empty sky: it doesn’t unnerve them. It is simply part of their world.”

“And it unnerves you?”

“It does,” she admitted. “I am used to a smaller world.”

“You should be happy then,” he said. “Not frightened.”

She looked at him again. He smiled at her. “There’s no borders here, don’t you see? There’s no one to tell you stop, you’ve gone too far, go back.”
 

She bit her lip in thought.

“That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?” He looked at her in a knowing way. “That’s why you left England? Because you wanted your freedom.” He swept one arm out across the silver-green prairie, the grasses nodding and waving on the never-ending swells. “And look — you’ve got it.”

She followed the curve of his arm with her eyes. She thought she saw, but still… “It’s bigger than I expected, I suppose,” she said with an attempt at a laugh. “Freedom, that is.”

“It’s easier when you’re not alone,” Jared said then, his heart in his words, and she had to pull up her horse then, and put her hand to her head, and try to stop the dizziness he gave her with that simple suggestion.

He pulled up as well, let the roan sidle close to Galahad. The ponies nibbled at one another’s muzzles and squealed, but he ignored their bad behavior. “If we were alone —” and he used the word
alone
in an entirely different manner this time.

“We aren’t,” she stammered, too quickly. Little Edward was asleep, lulled by the motion of the pony, but once they stood still a few minutes ago he would awaken and demand to know where they were.

“I know,” he growled. “But — and I mean no insult — I wish we were, Cherry Beacham.”

Her heart was pounding and she clutched at Galahad’s bristling mane for security. He had to stop setting her head to swimming while she was mounted — one of these days she would fall right off her pony. And then she knew, and her mouth opened, and she said it: “I wish we were too, Jared.”

He smiled, and pounced. Before she could react, his mouth was on hers, a searing, demanding kiss that took all the strength right out of her limbs. She dropped her reins and with the hand that wasn’t holding on for dear life, she reached up and took his head in her hand, knocking his Stetson askew as she returned the kiss. His lips were hot and hard on hers, and when he opened them and asked her to do the same with his actions, she could not resist him. Together in the center of the great, wide prairie they melted together, and it wasn’t until the baby began to stir that they were able to separate, and ride, boot to boot, towards home.

Someone’s home. Cherry laced her fingers through Jared’s, their horses nestling close together, and decided then and there that she would be alone on the prairie no more.

When Jared had tied down the last bundle, and hopped down from the side of the buckboard, the bed of the wagon was not even remotely filled. A few boxes, a few bundles of linens bound up with string. The cookstove and the iron bed, her most bulky furnishings, were staying in the shanty. Patty had a furnished spare room just waiting for her. Of all her furniture, only the Beechfields cradle and rocking chair were coming along, and Cherry was almost ready to admit that Little Edward was quite growing out of the cradle. Not her lap, however. It would be a long time before she admitted
that.

Cherry looked at her little collection of worldly possessions without regretting its lack of size. “At least it will all fit into Patty’s spare room,” she said cheerfully. “I shall not be crowded by a bureau cluttered with curios or tripping over unnecessary bits of furniture.”

“Very sensible,” Jared said approvingly. He climbed out of the wagon and wiggled it with a few hard shakes to check the stability of the parcels and barrels within. Cherry watched the bold outlines of his biceps bulging in his flannel shirt and caught her breath a little. She didn’t look away, though. She encouraged the feeling, the naughty stirrings of desire that she knew too well. She was coming to enjoy this return to life, this second chance at love. If, late at night, she lay awake on her pillow and thought wildly that she was being unfaithful to darling lost Edward, those feelings were easily kept at arms-length during the day. When the sun was shining, it was simply more pleasurable to be happy than sad, to be a woman loved instead of a forgotten almost-widow. And she had little doubt that Jared loved her.

As if hearing her thoughts, the cowboy crossed the dying, crackling autumn grass and put a calloused finger beneath her chin. She smiled as he turned her face up to meet his.

“Do you want something, Mr. Reese?” she asked mischievously, and his smile crooked.

“I most surely do, Mrs. Beacham,” he breathed huskily, and she parted her lips unconsciously, her own eyes darting down to his lips in anticipation.

His hand left her chin and slid around to the nape of her neck, pressing her up against him as he stole a deep, possessive kiss. She nearly went limp in his arms, her knees weak and trembling as desire stole through her limbs, and he slid his other hand behind her back, his arm strong against her, tilting her hips up, so that she pressed against his sudden hardness and felt his need. Her arms came up of their own accord and drew him still more tightly against her, and they were still locked together when Patty came out of the empty cabin with Little Edward on her hip and suggested that they tie the knot before they got themselves into trouble.
 

Cherry laughed like a child watching a Punch & Judy.

Jared blushed crimson beneath his scruffy whiskers and mumbled something about seeing to the mule.
 

Patty shook her head and climbed into the wagon’s front seat, still clutching stout Little Edward in one strong arm. “You’re getting heavy, young man,” she told him, and the boy smiled and laughed at her.

Jared, eventually cured of his blush and apparently satisfied that the mule was adequately harnessed, climbed up on the wagon-box as well. “Are you coming up?” he asked Cherry gravely, and she nodded and accepted his hand.
 

It was the middle of October, a full month after the cyclone that had brought down Jared’s lovely barn and brought together Jared and Cherry, and they had been enjoying themselves most wantonly ever since. Cherry, because she was a respectable widow, kept her distance from Jared when visiting in town; Jared, because he was hopelessly in love with Cherry and would have given her the moon if she had asked for it, followed her into town and spent the empty hours until she left at the saloon, drinking with Matt whenever he could coax him out of the house, leaving Patty and Cherry to giggle and drink tea in the parlor of Patty’s pretty little house on the edge of town, while Patty tried to get the details on Cherry’s love affair and Cherry denied her absolutely everything, but with enough blushing for the truth to be readily available. Patty, faithful friend, kept her mouth shut, and so Bradshaw remained ignorant to the passion between the Englishwoman and her neighbor, the stranded cowboy.