Callie tried to smile, in spite of the way his use of the word “our” grated on her nerves, but she had to bite her tongue to keep from making a sharp remark in front of her future scholars’ parents. What a pompous person he was! And she had thought Mr. Fletcher was nosy!
“Oh, thank you,” she said, as graciously as she could, “but I have some errands to do and don’t know when I’ll be returning.”
The other women began giving her advice about the best places to trade in town, for they had been there overnight and felt like experienced travelers. Callie tried to pay attention, although the thought of spending any more of her meager amount of money made her stomach clutch in fear. She would have to buy food all winter, and from what her neighbors were saying, the prices here were worse than she had imagined.
“There he is,” Roger Timmons said.
They all turned to see Nick almost upon them.
“Mrs. Sloane, may I impose upon you to come with me for a moment? I would be much obliged for the use of your wagon to take home some supplies.”
She could only stare at him.
He actually flashed a thin version of his stunning smile at her, and then at the others.
“My packhorse turned up lame this morning and I couldn’t bring him,” he said smoothly. “You’d be saving me from starvation.”
Liar, liar, pants on fire.
But she couldn’t say that with everyone watching, with Mrs. Fletcher making sympathetic noises and Mrs. Sumner, she now saw, gazing up raptly at Nickajack’s handsome face. Refusing to haul his suddenly urgently needed supplies would be a serious breach of rural etiquette—one serious enough to make these people think twice about entrusting their children to her as a teacher.
What in the world was he doing? For days he had avoided her; now he was forcing himself into her company.
“You’ll have to wait until I’m ready to leave,” she said, “since I wrestled my obnoxious team all those miles to register my claim, not to start a freight service.”
He touched his folded number in the pocket of his shirt.
“The officials have assured me that these numbers are sufficient to hold our places in line,” he said. “We’ll be back in plenty of time.”
“How do you know that?” Roger Timmons demanded.
“They say it’ll be at least an hour until they reach number 100,” Nick replied.
He laid his hand possessively against her back, as he had done when she ran to warn him, and his huge palm and every finger set fire to her skin through her dress and her shift, as if she wore nothing at all.
Her treacherous body betrayed her will every time.
“Then come with me,” she said shortly, angry at herself as much as at him.
“It’s been nice visiting with all of you,” she said, forcing a smile for her new acquaintances.
They replied in kind and Nick escorted her out into the street. They waited for a wagon to pass in its cloud of dust.
“Now we can get home before it storms,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Leaving this town. Standing in line at the land office is no place to be when a storm blows through.”
“What storm are you talking about? And what about our registration assignments? I’m not leaving without one.”
“I got ‘em,” he said, moving on out between vehicles and horses, “for a week from today, the first day of actual registration.”
“Both of us? How?”
“A small bribe to a government official.”
She stopped in her tracks in the middle of the street until he pulled her forward.
“But that’s illegal!” she cried, feeling swept away by more forces beyond her control than his strong arm. “I resent it completely. You took it upon yourself to bribe someone on my behalf and without my permission!”
He flashed her a crooked grin. He looked for all the world like a mischievous boy.
“How dare you do something that might cost me my claim!”
She jerked away from him and stood staring.
“Back home, we know better than to ever trust a federal official. You should know that, too!”
He watched her, obviously waiting for her to calm down.
“Why would you take such a chance, Nick, after what Baxter said?”
She lowered her voice.
“What if that clerk heard him?”
“Better to strike first,” he said, “and let somebody know I might make it worth his while not to listen to gossip.”
“But you didn’t have to risk my claim! You cannot make such a presumption as to speak for me! That’s unforgivable!”
“You should thank me,” he said, “instead of bawling me out.”
She glared up at him. “My sentiments exactly, when I kept you from being brained by a falling two-by-four.”
He didn’t even have the grace to look chagrined.
“I’m going right back to the Land Office this minute and tell them you had no right to speak for me!”
He didn’t turn a hair. “And wait in line for two hours to get a registration date three months from now? Giving Baxter time to file before you can?”
That stopped her.
For a long time, she couldn’t even speak. They stood staring at each other while people walked around them and moved up and down the street.
“You are without a doubt the most infuriating man I’ve ever met in my entire life.”
He smiled down into her eyes, and the heat of her anger flamed into desire.
“Maybe so,” he drawled. “But I’m the man you won’t forget for the rest of your life.”
Chapter 9
Callie still could not believe Nick had said such a thing. Not even an hour later, after they’d ordered his supplies, brought her wagon to the back of the mercantile to load them, and driven down the crowded street to leave Santa Fe behind. As they took the faint trail across the prairie, she sat beside him on the wagon seat and sneaked a glance at his finely chiseled profile.
He must have meant that she would never forget him for his take-over-her-business bossiness. It was true that no one could ever be his equal in that.
But the look he’d given her, with his gray eyes hot as smoke, had said he meant something else entirely. Could he really have been feeling the same unbidden desire that she’d felt at that moment?
It was hard for her to believe. Men didn’t usually feel that way about her, for she was not the kind of woman who caught their attention with a willowy way of moving, or flowing black hair and porcelain skin, or quiet, thoughtful sayings. She was quick in her ways and her talk, and had freckles dotting her nose, which was too short for her ever to be called beautiful.
She sneaked another look at him, at his hands this time, wide and brown and strong as hickory on the lines. Joe and Judy were minding him like the most perfect team in the world.
Surely that kiss when she’d fallen off Judy into his arms had been a kiss of relief. It must have been an instinctive reaction to an escape from danger for both of them—something that any man and woman in the world would have done. It had not meant anything more.
The only explanation for his constant poking about in her life and trying to take it over, the only one that made a lick of sense, was that he liked to boss a woman and took it as his right. That scary thought made her heart beat so fast and loud that he surely could hear it.
What an irony! She had traveled over a thousand miles, vowing every step of the way that no one would ever have the power over her that her daddy had had, only to fall in with Nick Smith the very first thing.
“Now, Callie, admit it,” he drawled, sending her a teasing, sideways glance, “isn’t this a lot more pleasant than standing in line in the sun with Roger Timmons babbling in your ear?”
She gave him a sharp look of surprise. He almost sounded a tad bit jealous of Mr. Timmons’ attentions to her.
“Maybe so,” she said, “but if you really did spirit me away
from there because you think it’ll storm, you might’ve warned my scholars’ parents. If they all blow away, I won’t have enough children for a school.”
He chuckled.
“But if they don’t, you’ve got the job. They all seemed quite taken with you.”
“Until I shamelessly went running off with you at the snap of your fingers. And what are they going to think of me when I don’t come back in an hour?”
“Next time we see them, we’ll explain that we saw a cloud coming up and decided to worry about registering our claims another day.”
We. Our claims.
Any other time, she would have challenged that in her usual blunt fashion. She would have told him how strange that sounded, coming from a man who had sneaked into her camp so he wouldn’t have to see or speak to her only three days before.
But it had a companionable sound, too, and those three days had been the lonesomest time of all her eighteen years. Baxter’s sudden voice behind her and his beady eyes boring into hers had been downright scary. And every time she thought about the price of beans and meal and dried jerky in the mercantile and the precious baby she had to feed through the winter, she felt even more scared.
Right now, with the far-off dark clouds beginning to roll on the horizon, we was a pleasant word to hear. She was a strong woman or she wouldn’t be in the Cherokee Strip in the first place. She was strong enough to hold her own with Nick Smith.
Who had inexplicably bribed an official to get her out of that crowded, dusty town and out here into the rising breeze.
The thought struck her like lightning.
“Blast it! There’s another debt. Nick, how much do I owe you for the bribe?”
He gave her a look that reminded her, she couldn’t say how, of his kiss.
“You’re paying it,” he said. “Hauling my supplies.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” she cried. “You never intended to buy supplies until you’d already paid …”
She stopped.
“Nick, you bought these supplies and asked me to haul them just so you could say that it’s payment for the bribe! You can’t do that—it doesn’t count. I’m determined to pay my way.”
“But you didn’t bribe anyone. So you’re right, it doesn’t count.”
She drew a long, deep breath and prepared to argue.
Nick gave her a quick, sideways smile that stayed her tongue.
He had a beautiful mouth. Gorgeous. It was strong and proud and generous all at once. And it tasted sweeter than berries and cream.
She wanted to taste it again.
Heat rose in her cheeks. If the Fletchers and the Sumners knew that she’d already shamelessly kissed her bachelor neighbor once, and was longing to do so again, they would never let her be their children’s teacher. When schools hired a woman, they preferred an innocent, never-married one who didn’t know any more about such doings than the children, so she couldn’t corrupt them.
Panic assailed her. What had her love for Vance been, a travesty? He’d been gone such a short time, and here she was, feeling this way about another man!
To make it worse, he turned to look full at her and his gaze slowly left her eyes and drifted down to her lips. She felt the heat of it all the way down to her toes.
Never had there lived a more aggravating, arrogant man—and she actually felt this way about him!
“You needn’t sit so close,” she snapped, and scooted even more toward her end of the seat. “There’s plenty of room here.”
“Pretty soon there will be,” he drawled, “because you’ll be off in the dirt if you run away from me any more.” The chuckle in his voice made her face even hotter.
“I am not running away from you!”
To prove it, she slid toward him again and accidentally overdid it, ending up with her thigh pressed to his for a moment. Just that brief touch set her blood on fire. His muscles were like living iron, incredibly unyielding and powerful. Like the compelling look in his eyes.
It gave her a craving to taste his wide, sensual mouth again—which was all his fault. That kiss had been the sneakiest thing he’d ever done—including creeping into her camp to return the wheel without one word.
“I want you to take me seriously,” she said, primly sitting away from him again. “How much do I owe you for the bribe?”
He slanted a long, slow look at her.
“Let’s wait and see if it works,” he said.
His eyelids grew heavier and at last he let his gaze drift to her mouth, where it lingered.
“I do take you seriously, Callie.”
His voice held the slightest edge of teasing, which irritated her.
“Is that why you followed me to town today? Do you take me so seriously that you watch my camp all the time, so you can sneak in and out when I’m not there and trail me if I go someplace?”
He grinned.
“Right. And in between I ride six or seven head of horses and do all my chores.”
“Why are you riding so many every day?”
“To get them started on a useful life. To fit them to sell.”
“Do you think you can sell enough to make your living?”
He nodded and glanced back at his big black horse, tied to the wagon.
“That’s the plan. The Shifter and I don’t want to be hitched to a plow.”
“So the settlers you call intruders and always want to send to perdition will be your customers,” she said. “You’ll make your livelihood off them.”
“Maybe,” he said wryly. “But if they weren’t here I could sell to the cattlemen who’d still be leasing the Strip.”
“But then you wouldn’t have anybody to follow around.”
Anger sent a dark flush across his high cheekbones.
“I told you before, I don’t want to ride up on your dead body one of these days on my way to town. That mare of yours is wild as a buck, and I didn’t know whether you could keep her from running away with the wagon the way she did with you on her back.”
“I told you before, I came out here to prove up a claim alone, and I can do it.”
But her silly heart was beating out of her chest because he really did care if she lived or died.
He cocked his head and regarded her studiously from beneath the brim of his hat.
“You’ve got the try,” he said, and she heard admiration in his resigned tone.
Well. Caring and admiration both in the same day.
“You’ve got the mystery,” she said. “You don’t speak to me for days, not even when you bring back my wheel, but then you worry about me enough to follow me.”
“I reckon I was bound not to speak to you if you didn’t want me to,” he said. “I haven’t forgotten that silent ride taking you home from my place, which you wanted to leave so bad that you couldn’t even stay until your clothes got dry.”
Nick heard those words come out of his mouth, he knew it was his voice saying them, but he still couldn’t believe he had spoken his feelings right out loud. What had come over him?
Callie gave him a sharp look.
“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” she said. “But I was … torn up by my memories that day.”
Great. Not only had he sounded like a whiny child, he had reminded her of her dead husband when she hadn’t been thinking about him at all.
“My feelings weren’t hurt,” he said quickly.
“Why not? I hardly said a word to you all the way to my place.”
“I didn’t wait to see you when I brought back your wheel because I was ashamed for letting you take that Judy home without me putting a few days on her,” he improvised.
“That’s not your responsibility,” she said. “But if you’re still willing to do that, when I get my school I’ll pay you to teach her to behave.”
That made him feel like a lazy skinflint.
“I’ll do it for free,” he said quickly.
“Why?”
That was Callie, always cutting to the
quick.
“Because she’s a mighty challenge,” he said, and they both laughed.
Because I never knew anyone like you. Because I’d want to kill myself if that horse hurt you.
“Then why did you let me bring her back?”
To keep from getting tied to you. To keep from seeing you and talking to you and wanting to hear your voice.
To keep from wanting to kiss you again.
“So you could go somewhere if you wanted to. Ol’ Joe probably couldn’t pull this wagon all by himself.”
Sudden darkness fell as a cloud blew across the sun.
Callie examined the sky. “You may be right,” she said. “I think it’ll storm.”
“You can bet I’m right. But if you listen to me and do what I say, you’ll be all right.”
She laughed and turned her face away from the rising wind.
“Oh, sure, and who saved you from a two-by-four slamming into your head?”
He chuckled. “You’ll never let me forget about it, will you?”
“Never.”
Now, why had he said that? It sounded as if they planned to be together for months—or years—when that could never be true.
He scanned the sky, noting the gray-blue cloud layers building a wall in the southwest, feeling the heaviness of the air and the new moisture it held. The wind rattled his hat on his head.
“We may have to hunt a hole,” he said. “It’s hot enough to brew up a big one.”
“Big what?”
“Dancing devil, my daddy called them. Cyclone, the white folks say.”
“Would your daddy ever have thrown you off your homeplace—for any reason?”
The question sliced at his heart because of the hurt she tried to hide in her carefully calm tone.
“Only if I really crossed the line in a big way,” he said. “If I hit my mother or set fire to the barn or ruined a horse on purpose.”
He held his breath, paralyzed by the sudden, sharp need to know more about her.
“Did your …”
The word came slow to his tongue. Because he hated to think of her with another man.
“… Husband’s people run him off, too, when you married?”
She opened her mouth, then hesitated. She laid her hand on her belly.
The Renegades: Nick Page 12