by Carol Arens
He nodded and shoved a spoon of potatoes in his mouth. It was almost as though she had forgotten the other night...or maybe that moment hadn’t been the earthquake of passion for her that it had been for him.
“What do you think, Colt?” she asked. “Cookies are easier but pumpkin pies would suit the season.”
He swallowed the lump of potatoes, hard.
“A chocolate pie would suit everyone, I’m sure.” Grannie Rose smiled and patted his hand. “It might even sweeten your cousin Cyrus.”
“We could send him one, I reckon,” he said, and lightly pressed the tissue-thin flesh of her hand. “Doubt if it would get to the Broken Brand in one piece, though.”
“But it wouldn’t have to. Cyrus is here. I saw him just this morning.”
“Here where, Grannie?” He was becoming alarmed by Grannie’s visions. They seemed as real to her as Aunt Tillie’s frown at this moment.
“He was at the carousel, sitting on the back of a giraffe...also in the garden, but that was later.”
“It’s a wonder he wasn’t run off by the alligator, Rose,” Aunt Tillie said with a sigh.
“The alligator wasn’t there today, but the monkey was. He was hanging on to Cyrus’s hat poking at his eyes. I did think it strange that Cyrus didn’t seem to mind.”
“Remember what we said, Rose? Those things you see aren’t real. If the monkey really had been poking Cyrus in the eye, he’d have shot him.”
“I don’t recall a gunshot, and the monkey was fit as a fiddle just before dinner.” Grannie Rose shrugged. “I’m still for chocolate-something... You decide, Holly Jane.”
“How about chocolate cookies and pumpkin pie?”
“Seems to me the younglings might like some apple cider to keep them warm,” Colt said.
“Or a hot toddy, heavy with chocolate and cream.”
“All right, Grannie Rose,” Holly Jane said. “Hot toddy for you, hot cider for Colt. We’ll sweeten everyone with chocolate cookies and pumpkin pie.”
“That ought to keep them all peaceable.” Aunt Tillie nodded her approval.
“By the way, Colt,” Grannie said, “you can move back into the house now. Your aunt Tillie and I have decided we were wrong. Holly Jane is not the one for you, after all.”
“I reckon Holly Jane is relieved to hear it.”
He glanced at Holly Jane to see what her reaction to this news would be. It was hard to tell; she wasn’t looking at him. She was frowning at Grannie.
Just as well, since damn it, he didn’t know what reaction he wanted from her.
If those brown eyes clouded in sorrow, he’d feel miserable. If they sparkled in relief, he’d feel worse.
That ought to tell him something, but he stuffed his belly rather than dwell upon it. The last thing he needed was his nosy relatives wondering what was on his mind.
* * *
Holly Jane flipped the sign on the door to Closed then walked across Town Square to Melinda’s Ladies’ Apparel. She hurried, helped along by the chilly wind.
Melinda, middle-aged, tall and slim, wore a white frilly apron over her dress. She stood over a trunk, lifting out gowns and shaking the wrinkles out of them.
She looked up when the bell over her door tinkled.
“Good afternoon, Holly Jane.” Melinda wiped her hands on the apron. “I’ve been meaning to thank you. Your carousel party has certainly sent business my way.”
“I hope there’s a gown left for me.” She had a new gown, the pretty one that she had purchased in Homerville with Colt, but she wanted one that he had never seen her in.
“Luckily, I got a new shipment this morning.” She dug through the trunk, pulled out a pink flowered dress, tossed it aside. Next, she pulled out a yellow one. “Yellow is your color, but I think something more... Here it is.”
“I don’t have anything red,” Holly Jane admitted, thinking that the crimson garment was beautiful but bold.
“It’s high time you did, miss. Hilde was in here yesterday trying on everything that would fit and some that wouldn’t. She and her mother are set on stealing away that young man of yours.”
“He not my young man to be stolen,” Holly Jane protested, but weakly. The reason she was in the dress shop was to help make him her young man. “You think red would help?”
“Hilde insisted on a gray-blue one that she thought was a match to her eyes. She’ll look like ice next to your fire, and no mistake about it.”
“It is striking.”
“Go in the fitting room and try it on. We’ll see.”
The gown covered her from the lace-edged neck to the ruffled hem, but it was the most alluring thing she had ever worn, even though it was wool.
“Oh, yes!” Melinda exclaimed, pacing a circle around her. “This was made for you. Besides, from what I’ve seen, Colt Travers would be bored silly by a woman in blue, no matter how immodest the bodice is.”
She was probably right. Colt was far too dynamic a man to be attracted to anything as ordinary as washed-out blue. But there was the bodice to be considered. No doubt he had encountered many alluring ones over the years.
What she needed was to stand out...to be different than any woman he had ever met.
It would be red or nothing.
“I’m going to trust you, Melinda.”
“I’ll have this pressed and ready for you tomorrow afternoon.”
Holly Jane stepped out of the dress shop, smiling. Come Sunday, she was going to be bold and flirtatious. Colt would not even know that Hilde was there. Not her nor any of the other pretty girls in town who had set their caps for the handsome new rancher in Friendship Springs.
Lulu waited for her on the front porch of The Sweet Treat, her corkscrew tail twitching.
“Come along then,” Holly Jane called. “Let’s go home.”
Lulu trotted beside her on small pink feet, into the woods behind The Sweet Treat.
All of a sudden Holly Jane felt uncomfortable, like someone was watching her. It was the same strange sensation that had overcome her the other day. Even Lulu glanced into the brush, seeming anxious.
“Holly Jane,” a man’s voice spoke from behind. She spun about, but it was only Henry Broadhower.
“My word, Henry, you startled me.”
“Could be that’s a good thing. Time’s up for you to be turning down every Broadhower who proposes.” Henry puffed out his chest, looking like a bristling porcupine. “This is the last time you’ll get a peaceable offer of marriage.”
“I hope it is the last time. You know that Colt Travers owns Granddaddy’s land now, not me.”
“That’s what he told folks, but you still own some of it. That property could be what keeps the water flowing to our land.”
“You and the Folsoms are just the same, seeing trouble everywhere. Mr. Travers isn’t going to do a thing to your water.”
“He might not, but if one of those pigheaded Folsoms gets a hold of you, there’s going to be a bloodbath.”
“No one is going to get a hold of me.”
“I’m done asking.” He yanked her to him with a wide fist around her arm. “You’ll marry me no matter what I have to do to get it done... You understand my meaning, Holly Jane?”
She kicked his shin. Lulu, as small as she was had razor-sharp teeth. She used them to nip Henry’s ankle.
He let out a bellow and balled up his fist, ready to swing a blow at her face. All of a sudden a rock hit the back of his head. Henry dropped to the dirt, moaning.
Shrubbery rustled. Footsteps pounded the earth, running away. She couldn’t see who her rescuer was.
Lulu dashed toward home on her short, quick legs. Holly Jane tried to keep up, but with only two legs, she wasn’t as swift.
As if announcing the danger, Lul
u squealed her piggy lungs out.
* * *
Colt paused, his pitchfork halfway into a scoop of hay when he heard Lulu’s caterwauling. The little porker sounded like the devil was trying to steal her twirly-gig tail.
He rushed out past the big barn door carrying his pitchfork with him.
What the hell? Holly Jane and her little pig ran across the bridge, skirts and cleft feet flying.
He dropped the fork and ran toward her, his fingers reaching for the hilt of the toothpick.
“Get back inside the house!” he yelled at Grannie and Aunt Tillie who had come outside to investigate the commotion.
Aunt Tillie grabbed Grannie’s hand and they hurried down the front steps.
He caught Holly Jane to him a hundred yards from the barn. She could have dashed for the safety of the house, but she’d run to him instead.
That stirred something in him. It made him want to claim her, make her his to defend.
“What is it?” He stroked her back, trying to soothe her labored breathing.
Aunt Tillie snatched up Lulu and rushed her to the water pump.
“There’s someone in the woods,” she gasped. “Throwing rocks.”
“At you?” he wanted to shout, but he said it as gently as his anger would allow.
She pushed away from his chest with both hands. She shook her head.
“At Henry Broadhower.”
His anger, which had begun to calm, seeing that Holly Jane was not injured or the target of the rock thrower, roared back to life.
“You were alone in the woods with Broadhower?”
“Well, no... There was the person who hit him with the rock.”
He hadn’t noticed Grannie standing close by until she spoke. “Cyrus always was a rock thrower. Even Tillie’s cane couldn’t make him quit.”
“He could hardly have thrown a rock from the Broken Brand, Rose,” Aunt Tillie pointed out.
“Not with the monkey poking him in the eye, at least.”
“Why don’t you ladies take Lulu in the house and give her a treat while I speak with Holly Jane.”
Grannie looked as though she wanted to say something, but Aunt Tillie shoved Lulu into her arms and hustled her toward the house.
Wind rushed across the ground. Holly Jane shivered. He led her into the barn and settled her on a saddle draped over a sawhorse.
“What was it Broadhower wanted?” He plucked his duster from a stall gate and tucked it across her shoulders.
“The usual.” She clasped the lapels of his coat together. Her fingers weren’t shivering any longer. “But this time he wasn’t asking, he was demanding. He threatened—”
Colt cussed, and this time not under his breath.
“Henry found out that I still own the carousel land and figures if a Folsom gets a hold of it before a Broadhower does, they’ll cut off the water to the Broadhower land. It’s the same old thing, except that he would have dragged me to the preacher if someone hadn’t hit him on the head with a rock.”
Dragging Holly Jane to the preacher was probably not what Broadhower had in mind. More likely he had compromise on his mind.
He cursed again, but this time under his breath so as not to alarm Holly Jane.
“Did you see who threw the rock?”
“No.”
“A Folsom, more likely than not.” He straddled the end of the sawhorse and sat down. “We need to call off the carousel party. There’s bound to be trouble.”
“I won’t call it off. If there’s to be any hope for Friendship Springs, it has got to be through the children.”
Colt crossed his arms over his chest and took a slow, patience-gathering breath. He didn’t like it that she was right.
“I agree with you... Don’t damn like it, though.”
“We’ll just have to be wary.” Holly Jane stood up. She shrugged out of his coat and handed to him. “See you at supper.”
“Sell me the carousel land.”
That would finally keep her safe from both families. He wouldn’t have to maim anybody, either.
She turned at the small barn door, holding it open to the sunset.
“It’s all I have.”
“I reckon you could marry me. That would keep you safe.”
Moisture dampened her eyes all of a sudden. She shook her head then stepped outside and closed the door behind her.
What the hell had possessed him to say that? As proposals went it was garbage. A woman like Holly Jane deserved to be wooed and courted.
She needed a gentle man, one who was as respectable as a preacher on Sunday.
* * *
Holly Jane came downstairs in her red dress at noon on Sunday. With the scent of snow in the air, she was grateful for the high neckline and the warm fabric. She looked out the window. It was cloudy, but with any luck the weather would hold off until the party was over.
So much work had gone into the preparation that she would turn on the carousel even if there were a blizzard and she and the ladies the only ones to enjoy it.
Last night, she and Colt had worked until late in the evening getting the barn ready. They’d made a table of sawhorses and an old door. Planks of lumber had been fashioned into benches.
Things had seemed easy between them, but only in the way that a still surface covered agitated waters. It had cut her to the quick when he had asked her to marry him. No “I love you...be mine,” not even a “we could be so happy.”
To him it was a solution to a problem.
She did not intend to be a problem; she intended to be a blessing. It took most of the night to get her emotions in order, but today was a new day.
Today, Colt Wesson would learn that she was not only helpful, dependable and a good cook, but more seductive than any woman he had ever hankered for.
Decked out in her new crimson gown, she felt like forbidden fruit, fresh and succulent.
She picked up a tray of cookies and a pie then carried them out of the house, past the carousel and toward the barn. Cold air nipped her skin through the dress, but she was not going to cover the pretty garment with a drab coat.
She nudged the small barn door open with her hip. Welcome warmth wrapped her up the instant she stepped inside.
She set the tray of cookies and the pie on the table.
“Colt?” she called into the softly lit barn.
He didn’t answer. She wouldn’t blame him if he’d gone to his stall and fallen asleep. He’d worked far later than she had getting the barn warm and ready for the party.
She knew it because she had been watching the barn from her bedroom window. All right, mooning at it more than watching, but it had been 3:10 a.m. when the lamps had gone out.
“Colt?” she called again.
This time she heard a soft brushing sound coming from an empty stall in the back corner.
She found him sitting on a stool, drawing the length of his long knife against a leather strop hanging from the wall.
It glinted in the lantern light, sliding back and forth over the leather with a lethal hiss.
He looked up at her, grinning. “You ready for the big shindig, for everybody to make friends?”
“That’s what I’m counting on.” She walked up close to him and touched his wrist, stilling the swipe of the blade. “Colt, can’t you leave that thing here?”
“Wouldn’t be smart, Sunshine, not with the Folsoms and the Broadhowers within punching distance of each other.”
“I’m sure you’re right, but the children need to be considered before anything else.”
“It’s their safety I’ve got in mind.” He stood up, sheathed the knife and hung it on a wall peg. “But it’s your party.”
She wanted to kiss him. All she would have to do
is step forward two steps, rise up on her toes and cup his jaw in her hands, then stake her claim.
If only capturing a man’s love were as easy as that.
Colt Wesson was not the kind of man to be taken so simply. All she could do was wait for him to see what was right in front of his face...really, only a few inches away.
Waiting would take a good deal of patience this afternoon, with Hilde in her low-cut gown going after him like a frog after a fly.
And not just Hilde... She imagined that a few women in town were looking in boudoir mirrors, arranging curls, pinching their cheeks pink and practicing flirtatious smiles.
Well—she shook herself—they were not her concern at the moment. Bringing peace to Friendship Springs by way of the children was the main thing that mattered this afternoon.
“You cold, Holly Jane?” Colt rubbed her upper arms briskly with his big calloused hands.
She shook her head. “Just a little anxious about how things will go today.”
“I can bring the Toothpick.” Both dimples creased with his grin.
“I can’t hold a friendly get-together if you’re going to carve up the first guest who gets out of line.”
The sound of buggy wheels crossing the bridge made her stomach flip. This would be the second step toward Friendship Springs becoming the peaceable place to live that most of the citizens longed for. The first had been the Folsom and the Broadhower girls meeting at The Sweet Treat.
If they came today, would they associate with each other openly?
She straightened her shoulders and turned toward the small barn door.
Colt touched her elbow and spun her back to face him.
“You look beautiful, Holly Jane.” He touched her cheek with the work-roughened skin of his knuckles. “Let’s go make this town a friendly place to live.”
* * *
It didn’t set well, leaving his blade in the barn. Tingles crawled along the back of his neck, a warning that, in spite of the pretty scene going on all around him, something wasn’t right.
Children rode the carousel; they ran about playing tag while their mothers sipped warm drinks and gossiped.
Even though this was an event for children, for making friends and bringing peace, Colt worried that all the sugar in the county would not make some of the folks sweet.