With This Kiss: A First-In Series Romance Collection

by Kerrigan Byrne

He had been puffed up with himself and boastful. He'd read, he'd studied, he'd researched. But when it came to the lessons of life, he really knew next to nothing. Practical tasks had always been left to lesser folks than himself. Lesser folks like Jesse Best.

  A loud sound cracked through the evening stillness of the clearing. Roe's eyes widened in shock.

  "My God," he whispered under his breath.

  He made it to the woodshed quickly. But not quick enough to stop the second blow. The shed door was wide open and Roe could clearly see the tableau inside. Jesse, his eyes dry now and his expression stoic, was bent over and supporting his weight on the crossbar of an old sawbuck. Onery stood behind him, his face a mask of pain as he raised the long green hickory limb he held in his hand and prepared to deliver another blow.

  "Stop!"

  Both men turned to face Roe, disconcerted by the interruption of a clearly distasteful task.

  "You'd best go back to the house, Roe," Onery said quietly. 'This ain't no concern of yours."

  "But it is," Roe insisted. "You don't know the truth about what happened today, Onery."

  "I told him right," Jesse interrupted.

  "You lied to him."

  "I didn't."

  "Jesse, I know you did. We are friends, remember, friends don't lie to each other."

  The young man swallowed hard and stared silently at the dirt floor at his feet. "I won't lie no more, Roe. But I cain't say nothing against you neither."

  Roe felt a strange lightness in his chest. No one had ever sacrificed anything for him before. Roe turned to face Onery.

  "Jesse wanted to plow the field the right way, sir," he said with deference. "I talked him into what we did. I thought I knew better than he. But it appears that I don't know anything at all."

  Onery nodded solemnly. Roe saw a new aspect to the old man's gaze. He recognized it as respect. "I thought as much," he said. "Although my boy didn't so much as even mention your name."

  "You should know he wouldn't," Roe answered. "He's an honorable man."

  "Yes," Onery agreed. "I suspect he is."

  "Then you can see that he shouldn't be punished."

  At that Onery raised an eyebrow and then shook his head. "Jesse's got to learn to do things right. Even when there is temptation not to. Wanting to please a man he likes and respects can be as dangerous a temptation as that snake in the Garden of Eden."

  "Mr. Best, please!" Roe said. "It was my fault. I admitted that. Don't hit Jesse anymore."

  The gray-bearded man looked over at him but didn't comply. "I've got to keep my word," he said simply. "I promised him five and five he's going to get."

  Onery turned away from Roe.

  "Wait!"

  Stopping once more, Onery gave Roe an exasperated glance.

  "He's got three more to go," the old man insisted.

  Roe nodded. "Then let me take them."

  Both men looked at him in shock.

  "You promised him five," Roe said firmly. "Five it should be, but rightly most of those should be mine."

  "Roe, no—" Jesse began.

  Looking at the tall, broad-shouldered young man in plain homespun clothes. Roe smiled. "You know I deserve it," he said to Jesse. "Friends tell each other the truth and the truth is those licks belong to me. I can't have my friend taking them for me."

  Onery looked at Roe thoughtfully, then at his own son. "I don't go around whipping strangers and visitors to the mountain."

  Roe nodded in agreement. "But I'm not like a stranger. You've promised to help me with my work and let me stay here like one of the family. If I'm not to be treated like one of the family, I can't accept your hospitality."

  "You don't have to take my licks, Roe," Jesse said with big, imploring eyes. "I don't mind 'em so much."

  'They aren't your licks, Jesse. They are mine and I don't want you to take them for me."

  For a long moment Onery and Roe stared at each other assessingly. Finally the old man nodded.

  "I suspect you are right about that. It ain't quite the thing to see another man punished when you are as guilty as him." Onery nodded brusquely to his son. "Move along now, Jesse. It's Roe's turn."

  His eyes wide with disbelief and admiration, Jesse moved to stand in the doorway next to Roe. Clasping hands, the two young men exchanged one brief moment of camaraderie before Roe took his place.

  "Bend over and grab the sawbuck," Onery directed.

  Roe did as he was bid, feeling a strange mixture of elation at having won the battle of words and humiliation at the ignominious position he found himself in.

  He heard the faint whistle of green hickory through the air only an instant before the switch landed with considerable force against the seat of his trousers.

  "Yeow!" Roe straightened immediately and turned to the man behind him. "That hurts!" he told Onery.

  From the doorway of the shed came a little giggle. Roe turned to see Jesse's big silly grin. "It's supposed to hurt," he told Roe. "But you're not supposed to yell."

  As the sting on his backside lessened, Roe could almost see the humor in the situation. "I'm not supposed to yell?"

  Jesse shook his head. "No. It ain't manly. Ain't you never took a dose of hickory limb oil before?"

  Roe shook his head. “This is my first time."

  Jesse nodded gravely. "Well, think real hard about not yelling out or making any noise and it takes your mind off the pain some."

  "You don't have to do this," Onery said quietly beside him.

  Roe nodded firmly. "Yes, I do."

  Bending once more over the sawbuck, Roe dug his fingernails into the soft pine and willed himself to take the next blow in what Jesse would consider a more manly fashion. He secretly hoped that the old man would stint on the delivery, but the second blow was laid across his backside with the same force as the first. Roe clenched his jaw and ground his teeth, but he managed not to yell out. The third blow came almost immediately, before Roe had even a chance to catch his breath and a slight moan escaped through his lips. But apparently it wasn't too noticeable because when he stood up, Jesse was beside him, smiling and eager with praise.

  "You did real good," he told Roe generously. "The first time Pa switched me, why I cried for half a day for sure."

  Jesse's smile was so warm and so full of admiration, Roe found he could almost ignore the sharply stinging stripes on his backside.

  "We're going down to the crick," Jesse told his father.

  Onery nodded. "Don't you fellers be too late. I'll have Meggie set some supper in the warming bin for you."

  Roe followed Jesse outside and they headed down the wooded path to the creek. The young man was laughing excitedly and talking about their shared punishment. Walking behind him, Roe listened with amused interest.

  Taking those licks was exactly the thing to do. He felt a strange sense of pride in his actions. Still, he couldn't help but wish that they had made less of an impression upon him. When they reached the wide flat place where they usually fetched water, Jesse turned upstream. Roe followed him up the narrow snaky creek bank for nearly a half a mile.

  The scratchy cadence of crickets portended the lateness of the day. The riffling and babbling of the little mountain creek beside him was surprisingly loud in the gray light of the evening. The air was alive with flying and buzzing creatures. And Roe watched with pleasure as the lightning bugs glowed in mixed concert across the creek and in the woods.

  A big brown river rock jutted out into a wide place in the stream. A couple of inches of cool, clear white water flowed rapidly across the rock. Jesse stopped and began undoing his overalls.

  "What in the world are you doing?"

  The young man smiled at him. "Ain't nothing like an ice-cold mountain stream to take the fire out of hickory."

  A few minutes later both men were naked and lolling out on the river rock, laughing and talking and sharing the beauty of the clear summer night, their stripes cooling in the crisp, clear water.

  The moon was
high in the sky before the two returned to the cabin. Onery was snoring in his bed and Meggie lay silently in her pallet on the floor as Jesse and Roe retrieved their supper tins from the small square warming oven built above the firebox.

  Tiptoeing, the two went back outside to eat on the porch. There was a quiet companionship between the two men who, in the last hours, had become equal partners for the first time. The cool waters that had eased their pain and forged their companionship now chilled them in the evening breeze and spurred their appetites. Meggie Best's plain beans with fat back had never tasted better.

  "Jesse, are you all right?"

  The words came from the doorway and both men turned to see Meggie standing there. She was bundled up in a thin cotton wrapper over her josie, her long hair hung loose down her back, nearly to her waist. Her blue-grey eyes were drooping with sleepiness.

  "I'm as right as rain," Jesse answered, his voice a whisper in concession to his snoring father. He looked over in pride at the man beside him. "Roe took three, I only got two."

  Meggie stepped out onto the porch. "I know," she said. "Pa told me."

  She looked over at Roe, her expression free of its usual wariness. "I thank you very much, Mr. Farley." Her voice was soft and sincere.

  "Don't be too nice to me, Meggie. I ain't sick," Roe answered, mimicking Onery's heavily accented words and the little Ozark joke he often used.

  Meggie giggled, delighted.

  Roe felt a strange lightness in his head. In the silvery moonlight, Meggie Best looked like an angel. Her sweet-spoken words had a gentleness that was both innocent and enticing. And tonight, to Roe's eyes, she was beautiful. Her long hair glistened and fell in loose attractive waves down her back and across her bosom. Those shiny curls lured a man's hand to reach up and touch them. Her amply curved figure was finely displayed in the soft, oft-washed homespun cotton. And Eve in the Garden of Eden couldn't have managed more womanly allure.

  Roe felt a tightening in his groin and an expansion in his heart as he looked at her. Neither feeling was especially welcome. He hadn't completely forgotten his startling view of the naked Meggie Best. Or her overenthusiastic kissing. But he had no business thinking those kinds of thoughts about a woman he hardly knew and to whom he had no intentions at all.

  "He's just fooling with ye, Meggie," Jesse said with a happy giggle that echoed across the barnyard in the stillness of the night. He scooted over, leaving a broad empty space between himself and Roe. "Sit down with us, Meggie. It's as pretty a night as you can see on the mountain and the lightning bugs are twinkling all over the place."

  She waited a long moment, giving Roe a hesitant glance before seating herself on the worn wooden slats between the two men.

  Roe attempted to ignore her. Resting his arms upon his knees and studying the ground before him, he determinedly sought to cool the sensual warmth of the sight of Meggie Best in the evening.

  But focusing his attention on the chicken-scratched yard in front of the house, and the big brown chunk of sandstone that was used as the porch step, also brought Meggie Best's long, narrow bare feet, pale in the moonlight, into his line of sight.

  The scent of her surrounded him also. It wasn't the heavy, seductive fragrance of women of questionable repute. Nor was it the smugly sweet scent of lavender or rose water favored by Bay State debutantes. It was the natural, clean odor of plain brown soap and the barest whiff of fresh baked bread, the blackberries she'd been cleaning, and wood smoke from the fire. She was close, desirably close, and the warmth of her nearness in the crisp darkness of the evening lulled Roe into an unexpected sigh of contentment.

  Jesse smiled. "You like it here, don't ye?"

  Catching his wandering thoughts before they ran further adrift, Roe nodded, pretending that it was only the beauty of the Ozark night that held him spellbound.

  Still avoiding eye contact with Meggie, he gazed off into the distance to a hill beyond these he knew. It showed up as only the barest outline in the evening sky.

  "Is your home in the Bay State like this?" Jesse asked.

  Roe was momentarily startled by the question.

  "Like this?" The raw, primitive country around him was not at all what he would call home.

  "No, it's very different."

  "But it's pretty, too?" Jesse asked.

  Roe shrugged thoughtfully. "I suppose so. I never really gave much consideration to it. Yes, I suppose in its way it is just as pretty as here."

  Jesse grinned and turned to Meggie. "And Roe says back east they is privies near everyone. You don't ever need to poot without one."

  "Jesse! Your language." Meggie flushed with embarrassment and hid her face in her hands.

  Roe cleared his throat uneasily.

  Jesse's brow furrowed. "Meggie, you've heard me say that plenty of times."

  Roe couldn't hold it back any longer. His body began to shake with the humor he could no longer suppress.

  "Roe's laughing," Jesse announced. "Roe's laughing."

  He did laugh then, loudly and from deep inside himself. Chokingly, he indicated an apology to Meggie. "The two of us will just have to watch what we say around Jesse, here. He seems compelled to repeat what we least want overheard."

  Meggie smiled shyly. It was a friendly moment. The most friendly the two had ever shared.

  "If back east is your home," Jesse continued, "then I'm sure I'd like it. I like anything my friend likes."

  "Maybe sometime you can go there," Roe said.

  Shaking his head, Jesse disagreed. "No I cain't never," he said. "I'm safe here where folks knows me. I cain't never wander to some strange place."

  "It wouldn't be a strange place," Roe said. "It would be my home. And if I were with you, you would be with folks that know you."

  Jesse grinned. "You're a good frien', Roe. But I ain't ne'er going nowheres 'til I go to heaven."

  Roe opened his mouth to speak, to tell Jesse that he wasn't bound to this mountain, but free to see the world as he might choose. But then he remembered the wrongly plowed cornfield. The Bests had made life safe for Jesse on the mountain. Tempting him to travel to far-off places was wrong and possibly dangerous. Fortunately, Meggie changed the subject, allowing the introspective moment to pass.

  "Well, tell us what it's like," she said. 'Tell us about this Bay State."

  Roe turned to Meggie to find she and Jesse both staring at him curiously. He was thoughtful for a long moment. He didn't really know the Bay State. He knew Cambridge. And Cambridge was merely Cambridge. The things he knew most about it were the college, the library, the homes of his family and friends, the parks he had occasionally roamed in, the schools he had attended, and the stores where he had spent his money. Home was simply where he'd lived, where people that he knew lived, and he'd hardly given it more than a thought before.

  "Well," he said. "It's big. And there are lots of people."

  The two blank faces on the porch beside him seemed unimpressed. "I mean that it is very big and a tremendous number of people live there. It's so big that those people can't get from one side of town to the other by walking. There are cable cars that run on tracks day and night and take all those people from one side of the city to another."

  "Why are they going to the other side of the city?" Jesse asked.

  Roe shrugged. “To visit friends or go to their jobs, or maybe just to see what's on the other side of the town."

  Jesse nodded. "I did that once. I walked all the way down the mountain to Plum's Ford just to see what was down there."

  Meggie looked surprised. "What is down there?"

  "Nothing worth seeing," Jesse answered.

  "There is plenty worth seeing in Cambridge," Roe continued. "There are houses as big as churches. And churches with pipe organs as big as your cabin."

  Jesse and Meggie both giggled with delight.

  "For true?" Jesse asked.

  Roe nodded. "I've seen them myself."

  Jesse shook his head in disbelief. "I bet you can hear
a big pipe organ like that all over the mountain."

  "There are no mountains," Roe said.

  "No mountains?"

  Roe shook his head. "There are a few little hills, some higher-up places, but no real mountains, nothing like these."

  Jesse nodded solemnly. Meggie's expression was worried.

  "Must be pretty flat if there's no mountains a'tal."

  Roe nodded. "Yes, I guess that it is. There's a river, though, and it's not very far from Boston, where the harbor meets the Atlantic Ocean. The ocean is bigger than any river in the world."

  "I heard the Mississippi River is a mile wide," Meggie said.

  "That's true, it's a mile wide in places," Roe answered.

  "How wide's a mile?" Jesse asked his sister.

  Meggie thought for a long moment. "It's about from here to the Sumac Falls on the good trail."

  Jesse whistled with appreciation. "A water that wide? Seems kindy impossible. And this ocean place is wider than that?"

  "Much wider." Roe nodded. "It is hard to imagine if you've never seen it. But it's the truth."

  A silence lingered among the three as they all contemplated the marvel of the big river.

  "Do ye catch a lot of fish there?" Jesse asked.

  Roe shrugged. "I guess people do."

  "But you don't?" The question was Meggie's.

  "I've never been fishing."

  "You've never been fishing?" Jesse was clearly shocked.

  "No, I can't say that I ever have."

  A wide, joyous grin spread across Jesse's face. "I been fishing lots of times, couple of days nearly ever' week when the crick's not froze. I'll take you fishing tomorrow."

  "Not tomorrow," Meggie corrected him hastily.

  "But, Meggie, he ain't never—"

  "Oh, no you don't. If he hasn't been fishing for his whole life another couple of days aren't going to matter. You two have got to replow that cornfield tomorrow. And if you don't get it done early, Pa won't let us go to the Literary."

  Jesse nodded gravely. "And you'll be fit to be tied if you don't get to go do some gossiping at the Literary."

  "It has nothing to do with gossiping," Meggie insisted. "It's merely catching up with friends. Roe needs to go to the Literary. Pa said that's how he'll do his work."