The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback) (7 page)

“Sounds like you come from someplace pretty stuck up,” Jared remarked.

The lady clicked her tongue in annoyance and he sighed. Wrong thing to say. “Not stuck up,” she corrected him firmly. “We have a way of doing things. But…” she paused, looked around here in a measuring sort of way, and seemed to let herself slump in the saddle a little, as if suddenly realizing that she was not being watched by a thousand judging eyes. “It’s different here. It’s fresher, newer, you have to do things differently just to survive. I could never have lived alone there, you see. Without a chaperone? Oh no! But here, no one thinks anything of it at all.”

“It’s better here,” Jared suggested. “Than back East, or over there.”

“It is different,” she repeated. “I do not know if it is better. But,” she brightened a little, “Perhaps that is because I have kept too much to myself. It does not do to shut oneself up! I should have met the rest of the people here months ago.”

“They’re good people. Might not be what you’re used to, but plainsfolk are tough, and the city folk that just arrived, well, they have to toughen up real quick. I reckon you’ll need some help before winter sets in, so you best make the acquaintance of the rest of the county or you’ll be high and dry when you need someone.”

She frowned. He bit his tongue in consternation. He’d probably just offended her.
 
Miss High and Mighty was touchy. “I can assure you that I am plenty
tough,
sir.”

“Call me Jared.”

“I have done more than ornament drawing rooms and play the pianoforte.”

“I’m sure you have.”

“I have been a farmer since I was just a little girl learning at my father’s feet!” She seemed to grow
more
upset about things, instead of less, he noticed. “I used to train horses, you know, good horses, and I hunted with the most daring men in England. I am an sportswoman, sir, as well as a farmer. I am quite the equal of the task I have set myself. You needn’t worry about
me.
”

“Yes ma’am,” Jared would have tipped his hat, but she wasn’t looking. Miss High and Mighty was fuming, lips pursed, chin lifted so high he thought if it came to rain she’d surely drown. She sure was hot-tempered. Give her one tiny nudge, and she was off at a full gallop. He felt kind of sorry for the people of Bradshaw. They didn’t know what was about to hit them. This little tornado floated in like a cottony summer cloud and then just started knocking over buildings.

“I won’t be talked down to,” she fumed, the genuine lady in the fancy-cut faded gown, in the gleaming side-saddle strapped on the questionably conformed mule, and he thought he’d never seen anyone look so ridiculous and unsuited for ranch life in all his days, and he’d seen a lot of city slickers in shiny suits and carrying cardboard suitcases stumble down the steps of the train station and promptly fall face-first in the mud. And she wasn’t through. “I cannot abide being spoken to as if I am a child. Pray do not lump me in with these hapless
city
folk, sir, and you may warn the rest of your country-men to do the same. I am every bit as able to make a living for myself out here as you.”

He sighed and agreed with her, again, but she had already somehow slowed her mule, imperceptibly, without hauling back on the reins like most women would have done, mashing the sides of the mule’s mouth with the steel bit, but with a gentle squeezing of the fingers, and in doing so let the ungainly animal slip his big nose behind his little roan’s striped red-and-white tail, and the conversation was at an end. Jared decided that silence was probably just as well; she was all keyed up about meeting her neighbors, that was all, and it had been kind of mean of him to pick a fight with her the way he had. Of course she didn’t want to look like a soft new arrival in front of everyone like that! Why had he reminded her of that? He was going to have to be more considerate. Women’s feelings were so easily hurt, and their pride was so easily wounded. It was nice, really, how men weren’t like that. You could say
anything
to another man and he’d just laugh it off.
 

In the meantime, they had another twenty minutes of riding, and he was regretful that she hadn’t ridden on ahead of him, so that he could watch the graceful sway of her body in that preposterous saddle.

***

She stalked away from him the moment her mule had been secured, leaving him fumbling to attach the reins to the hitching post as he stared after her departing back. He swallowed hard, foolishly mesmerized by the swinging of her hips, and swore as he dropped one of the split reins in the dust at his feet. The roan looked at him curiously, being accustomed to a certain level of professionalism in his handling, but Jared just shook his head and continued to watch the disdainful woman. Those extra folds and drapes of cloth resembled nothing so much as an angry mare switching her tail to display her simmering resentment. Jared had never been much good with mares, and he knew it. They were too quirky, too uppity, too quick to temper and hard to predict. Didn’t mean he didn’t want this one, though. He felt a stirring of lust just watching those swaying hindquarters. Sometimes you just have to have the toughest horse in the corral. Sometimes, nothing else will do.

“Mind your manners,” he instructed the roan as he finished tugging the knot tight. The horse ignored him and immediately reached out with yellow teeth for a hunk of wood from the post. Jared only sighed. No one listened to him these days. It was nearly enough to send a man on that cattle drive Matt had been yammering about. 

He went through the little side-yard between the general store (MAYFIELD’S CENTRAL EMPORIUM AND HARDWARE, the gilt letters announced from the front windows) and the Mayfield’s tidy two-story house, the nicest in town after Miss Rose’s palatial manse, past the sour smelling patch of weeds next to the back door where Mrs. Mayfield emptied the dishpan three times a day, past the stable where the Mayfield Morgans grandly crunched at their hay, and reflected ruefully that he was in the wrong business. He had some money put away (he’d once had quite a lot) but leading cattle drives had never landed him the kind of wealth that the Mayfields were clearly enjoying, and farming a homestead hadn’t shown itself to be much of an improvement.
 

“Should’ve been a shopkeeper,” he muttered to the Mayfield Morgans as they poked their shapely heads over their stall doors and regarded him curiously through thick forelocks. But then again, he never was happy stuck indoors for a long while.
 
Standing behind a shop counter day in and day out, rainy days and fine, would have been a kind of hell. Wintertime, now, that about drove him to distraction. The thought of wintering in Galveston revisited him then. But he couldn’t see living in the same town as Hope and her family. Hope and her husband. Hope.

Beyond the Mayfield barn, the prairie stretched out again, jungle green and endless as the sea. Bradshaw was a one-street town yet, and one side looked exactly like the other. Except today, with the color and music and delicious smells of Patty Mayfield’s handiwork dotting the grass and the little stand of cottonwoods that stood knotted together along Bradshaw Creek. He looked for Miss High and Mighty, for the excess of fabric and frippery and the bird feather curling from her silly bonnet, but she had disappeared. There was a little throng gathering near the cottonwoods, and he supposed that was where she had gone, to stand in state and be gaped at by the local yokels. He thought of that tight-lipped accent speaking the homesteaders’ names:
Patty, Sven, Johnny, Billy, Suzie,
and then he realized, with a ridiculous sense of disappointment, that she had outright refused to speak his Christian name on the ride over. Just that one time, when he’d told her, “Call me Jared,” and she had repeated it so softly…

He wanted to hear her say it again. He needed to hear her say it again. Maybe over and over. Maybe moan it. Maybe scream it.
 

And then he’d whisper her name against her throat, breathing the sound of it so that her skin trembled beneath him…

And that was when Jared realized that he
still
didn’t know her name.

Well, it wasn’t the worst decision she’d ever made, coming to the party. Cherry was feeling quite adored at the moment, and after all the time she had been spending alone, she couldn’t help but enjoy the sensation of being the center of attention. She might never have been the belle of the ball in London, but she had received her share of flattery and gallantry. The rough-hewn citizens of Bradshaw weren’t exactly what she had known before, but still, they were lovely to her.

The well-wishers who had gathered around her were darling folk, really, with their sweet country accents and their funny rustic ways. More than one of the ladies had pressed cloth-wrapped bundles into her hands, full of freshly-baked bread or cookies, and Cherry accepted the parcels, one after another, with promises to return the dish towels or the bandanas or the burlap sacks, and smiling at reassurances that she needn’t bother, she was sure to pass along the favor one day, wasn’t she?

Privately, Cherry wasn’t sure how these women found the time in their day to provide treats to
her
as well as get through the drudgery of taking care of their own families. She had only Little Edward to concern herself with, and that was exhausting enough. But some of these women had six, seven,
eight
children! Her eyes followed the little creatures as they rough-and-tumbled out on the prairie. Some clad in patched hand-me-downs, some clad in clean denim and new calico: all in all the children of Bradshaw outnumbered the adults by a goodly number.
 

Cherry watched a little girl set a tea party on wide flat stones, using bark for plates and curled leaves for cups, and a gaggle of small girls gathered together to partake of the fairy’s feast. They were as close and affectionate as sisters, and she supposed that with those red heads, braids blazing like fire-brands in the mid-day sun, they probably were. Lucky girls. Cherry had always wanted a sister. But her mother had not enjoyed good health, and there had been no children at Beechfields but Cherry.
 

She felt a sudden stab of jealousy. Looking at their bright faces, so animated in conversation with one another, she felt that all the china tea-sets and porcelain-faced dolls in the world didn’t make up for a childhood spent alone. Without a playmate, she’d been forced to make best friends with first her pony, and later her mare — not the worst fate, to be sure, but these girls would have so much more when they were grown: friends that they had been close to their entire lives. Possibly, Cherry thought, she could have used a sister to rely on in the past two years. Or even a brother to defend her against the gossip against her name.
 

She wondered, nodding with absent enthusiasm as she took a grubby handkerchief bulging with cornbread, if there would be a brother or sister for Little Edward, and then she was surprised at herself for having such a thought. How could there be, with Edward gone?

Edward was dead, she reminded herself sternly, and so with him all the other children she might have borne him. She’d lost more than her honor and her place in her own family, her name and her position in society; she’d also lost the husband and the family she could have had. She
knew
that. She had always known that, since the day she found out that Edward would not be coming home.
 

Remembering that moment when her heart had felt ripped from her chest, Cherry blinked away a sudden tear; she coughed and turned her head so that she could flick away the offending object without being seen by the sharp-eyed homesteaders. Patty Mayfield, close at her side like a faithful chaperone, made a noise of dismay and snatched Matt’s handkerchief from his breast pocket; it was not a terribly clean handkerchief, predictably, but she passed it to Cherry eagerly and Cherry was obliged to set down the bundle of cornbread on the growing pile of baked goods next to her and accept the grubby hankie.
 

“Dust,” she sniffed, smiling thinly at Patty, and dabbed delicately at her nose, as if she had been sneezing. “I am so plagued by the least bit of dust.”

Patty’s eyes widened a little. “I hope there isn’t too much dust for you out here, ma’am. It can get almighty dry sometimes.”

“Not too dusty, no, let us hope,” Cherry said confusedly, not sure she should have admitted a weakness in her constitution. “I shall certainly grow accustomed to it. It is merely — ah — a new sort of dust, one knows. The very soil is quite changed from what I knew in England.”

Patty nodded eagerly. She was just as ready to exonerate Cherry from any sort of city-bred affliction as Cherry was to deny it. “It takes time, yes it does ma’am. Why when we came out here from Minnesota, I scarcely knew what to do with myself. All the trees was gone. I asked my mama where all the trees was gone to, and she started to cry a little. But we got so we were used to it, and now I wouldn’t live anywhere else. Trees and buildings, they’d choke me. I wouldn’t be able to
breathe.”
She said this last in a dramatic, slight accent, daring to appropriate Cherry’s delicious accent into her own broad voice for just a few words, and she could not help but thrill at the sound of it.

Cherry heard the inflection and smiled a little, distracted from her sudden sorrow over Edward and their unrealized family, and Patty smiled back, a warm glowing hero-worship sort of smile, and Cherry felt her own lips widen and her eyes warm, so awash was she in a sudden sweet feeling of camaraderie and friendship, and into their sunny aura of good feeling strode Jared Reese, dark-browed and creamy-Stetsoned, thumbs hooked in his wide leather belt, and he flashed a rare smile of his own at them all.