“Not that I know of.” Hell, he didn’t know much about the lady other than she’d awakened his sleeping lust and she didn’t know her way around the kitchen.
“Then what’s to stop me from spending time with her?”
Nothing but the fact that Reid didn’t want Erston to lay one smarmy finger on Miss Ellie Jo Cade. “Leave her be. If you’ve got a hankering for female companionship, take yourself off to Maverick. Ian Mallory has upstairs ladies at the Roost that’ll satisfy your needs.”
“Ah, so that’s the way of it.” Erston smirked. “Is Cheryl aware you’ve taken a mistress?”
Reid grabbed fistfuls of Erston’s frock coat and shoved him up against the wall so hard the windows rattled. “Miss Cade is my housekeeper, nothing more, nothing less.”
“Is she? Do you know I’ve never seen a cook with an enticing figure such as hers.”
Neither had Reid. “She’s not the type to trifle with.”
And he knew it was true, yet she’d let him kiss her twice. Where would it have stopped?
“Tried and failed, eh?” Erston asked.
“Miss Cade is here to cook and clean in Mrs. Leach’s stead. That’s all there is to it,” he said. “So keep your cock in your britches around her.”
“For one who professes all is on the up-and-up, you are terribly defensive of her.”
“She is a lady who works for me.”
Erston’s beady eyes took on an unholy gleam. “As I hold Kirby’s shares of the Crown Seven, she’s an employee of mine as well.”
Reid tightened his hold and was rewarded with a choking sound from Erston. “Stay away from her.”
“Very well,” he said, clawing at Reid’s steely grip. “I’ll not expect more from her for now. But should Miss Cade express a willingness to become better acquainted with me, I shan’t turn her away.”
He shoved free of Reid and sauntered toward the stairs where Hubert had just made an appearance. “About time you presented yourself.”
“I was occupied seeing Miss Morris to her room, sir,” Hubert said with all the pomp one would expect from royalty.
“By all means do the same for me, and then see that my baggage is brought up posthaste.”
“Yes, sir,” Hubert said.
Erston had to be the most arrogant man Reid had had the displeasure of meeting. He loathed that the man had him over a barrel. But he surely understood why Cheryl wanted to get away from her guardian, for Reid was possessed of the same inclination at that moment.
Reid shrugged into his coat, settled his hat on, then headed down toward the corral to ready the sleigh. Maybe a jaunt over to the sheepherder’s spread would help him steel himself for the inevitable. For what he dreaded most was becoming Cheryl’s husband.
Ellie’s thoughts were still churning with what she’d learned today about Reid and this ranch, long after she’d prepared a simple cake for dessert and slid it in the oven. It was all so confusing.
Kirby Morris had owned this ranch three years ago and had saved her pa’s life. Now Reid was marrying Miss Morris. Could she be a relative?
And why was Burl Erston accompanying Miss Morris to the ranch? There was no mistaking the hostility between Reid and Erston, and the two surely hadn’t tried to hush their terse conversation.
No, he seemed more interested in buying out Burl Erston.
Mercy, who did own the Crown Seven? Clearly it wasn’t totally in Reid’s control as she’d assumed.
It wasn’t her business to know. Why, she’d already gotten so absorbed in listening to Reid warn the odious Erston to stay away from her that she’d nearly forgotten her cake.
She took it from the oven and set it on the rack to cool. It looked firm, but she did as the recipe advised and inserted a clean broom straw in the cake’s thickest portion.
She held her breath and withdrew it, hoping it wouldn’t deflate or be uncooked. The straw came out clean, and the top stayed mounded.
Still, she hoped her creation tasted better than it looked. One side was a tad thin and crusty, while the other was as fat as a goiter.
“Whatever you have prepared smelled so absolutely luscious I had to come see for myself,” a woman said, her tone soft yet cultured.
Ellie faced Miss Morris, hiding her surprise at the woman’s lack of elegance. Wholesome best described her.
“Thank you,” she said.
Miss Morris smiled, and she saw the true beauty in the woman at that moment. “What I could not determine was if it was chocolate or spice.”
“Actually, it’s both.”
“Excellent. Reid is partial to chocolate and it is wise to keep the head of the house satisfied in one area, at least.” Miss Morris flushed and stared at the floor, leaving Ellie Jo to wonder just what she was implying.
“Is there anything in particular you’d prefer for your wedding dinner?” she asked.
Miss Morris’s shoulders drooped. “Whatever you want to prepare is fine by me.”
“You’ve no preferences?” Ellie asked, stunned.
“None that would make a difference for a wedding feast,” she said. “Perhaps a favorite of Reid’s would be wise.”
After delivering that telling statement, she promptly took herself off. Good heavens, was she that unconcerned? Or had it been pounded into her to put her man’s feelings above her own?
Ellie silently fumed over the woman feeling subjugated by Reid. She wasn’t a rabid advocate of the suffrage movement, but she believed women should exercise their God-given rights. At the least, nobody should be dominated by another.
She slipped into the pantry for the tin of cocoa and box of powdered sugar to dust her cake, annoyed that she’d happened on another favorite of Reid’s. Just thinking how enamored he’d been of that ruined pie—
Heat flooded her face as that intimate moment she’d shared with Reid waltzed across her memory, pausing to two-step with the most recent one in the parlor. Even knowing he was a philanderer didn’t stop this powerful longing dancing in her.
Was that why Miss Morris was so acquiescent? Was the woman caught in Reid’s sensual aura as well? Had he made an earlier overture to her and gotten caught?
It was hard for her to imagine Reid forced into a shotgun wedding, but stranger things had happened. Whether that was the case or not, she felt duty bound to get Miss Morris aside and explain the type of man she was about to marry. That should be easy for her to accomplish.
She knew the perils that awaited the gullible woman. Likely Miss Morris had already fallen victim to such a fate.
Though a woman couldn’t recover lost virtue, she shouldn’t be forced to endure a feckless marriage. She could go on to lead a full life, and perhaps even find a good man who’d understand that one slip didn’t deserve a scarlet letter.
Trust should be earned, not blindly expected.
That was why she intended to confess her own fall from grace to Miss Morris. Holding herself up as an example should show that even a woman of her former station wasn’t beyond letting her emotions rule her in such instances.
She wasn’t a woman of loose morals, but she hadn’t stopped Irwin from having his way with her because she’d wanted to feel deep love for him. He was, after all, her fiancé with the wedding scheduled for a month away.
She wasn’t the type to lust after another woman’s man either. Except Reid had made the first overture in the pantry, and again in the parlor.
That was really enough for Miss Morris to know.
To Ellie’s shame, she still desired Reid with an intensity that incinerated sound reasoning. Try as she might, she feared those carnal yearnings weren’t likely to fade into obscurity any time soon.
Chapter 8
“I’ve always been jealous of you and your partners,” Cheryl said over the chink-chink of sleigh bells, breaking the silence that had fallen over them shortly after they’d left the Crown Seven.
“What the hell for?” Reid said as he guided the sleigh over the hardpack road.
She huddled under the buffalo robe. “You got to live with my father while I was fobbed off on Erston and his wife.”
The heat in her voice was enough to melt the snow-pack. “Kirby thought he was doing the right thing by leaving you with his kin.”
“A father and daughter is family,” she said. “He didn’t want me. That’s quite clear.”
Reid heaved a sigh. He’d heard this before and still didn’t know how to debunk her claim. Likely Erston had planted the seeds of abandonment long ago, and they’d grown into a thicket of antipathy.
He could understand her feelings in this, for he was the unwanted bastard of an English lord. But he’d never attempted to contact the man even that year he’d spent in England.
If he found out today that his kin had left him anything, he wasn’t sure how he’d react.
But Cheryl’s situation was far different. Her pa left her with family. He hadn’t left her in an overcrowded orphanage.
Still, he suspected Kirby regretted the estrangement between him and Cheryl. So much so that he gave her an equal share of Crown Seven as part apology and part inheritance.
“Kirby left one sixth of this spread to you,” he said to remind her that her pa had legally included her in his chosen family, either by guilt or duty or whatever drove him.
“Burl retains one-third, correct?” she asked, showing no interest over owning part of the Crown Seven.
“He does, but once we’re married, we’ll own a third of it.”
She frowned at that, and his gut clenched with renewed unease at the thought of making her his wife. “Do your partners own the other third?”
“They do, at least until the last day of this year,” he said, determined to forge on and make the best of a bad situation. “If Dade and Trey don’t claim their shares before then, they revert to Erston.”
She made a face that pretty much summed up his own displeasure over that outcome. “You’ll be under Burl’s thumb forever then.”
“Maybe not. Once my partners join with us,” he said, putting emphasis on that word that prompted a puckering of her brow, “we’ll have enough shares to hold sway in how the ranch is run.”
“Then I hope your partners arrive soon.”
So did he, for if they didn’t, his only chance to break free of Kirby’s cousin would be if he could get a good price out of his thoroughbreds and buy him out.
All he had to do was find a buyer for his horses before that damned old outlaw rustled another thoroughbred.
In the silence broken only by the tinkle of bells and muffled clump of hooves on the hardpack, he slid Cheryl a sideways glance to judge her mood. Appreciation for this rugged land shone in her eyes. If they had this in common, maybe they could kindle an interest in each other as well. Maybe he just needed to try a bit harder with her to get his blood pounding below the belt again.
Reid hauled back on the reins. Before the sleigh fully stopped, or he thought through the idea forming in his head, he rounded on Cheryl.
“I haven’t done you right,” he said. “For that I’m sorry, because you deserve a man that’ll give you all of himself instead of a portion.”
“What in the world are you talking about?”
“Us. If you’ll let me, I’ll begin making amends right now.” He blew hard, as if running from the truth had winded him. “We’ve been affianced for a year now, and I’ve yet to kiss you like I should’ve done.”
Her eyes went wide, then quickly narrowed. “That’s understandable, as you left for America as soon as the arrangements were finalized.”
Ran like hell was a more apt description. “Damned rude of me to do. Stupid to boot. A man fixing to part with his intended for nigh on a year should leave her with something to remember him by.”
“Such as?”
“I should’ve kissed you till your drawers started smoldering, then pressed you for more until you either gave in or slapped me.”
Her cheeks blazed an unbecoming shade of pink. “But you didn’t. You comported yourself in a gentlemanly manner, for which I’m grateful.”
“Are you?”
“Absolutely. Ours isn’t a love match and there is no reason to pretend it could be such.”
Her admission was as good as a wallop upside the head. No wonder she hadn’t asked him once how he’d been or if he’d missed her. She was doing what was expected of her without complaint.
“You deserve better than me,” he said.
She fidgeted on the seat, but he suspected it wasn’t from cold. “Don’t say that.”
“It’s the truth.” He snapped the lines and set the sleigh in motion again. “You know I’m in a fix, that I let your pa and my partners down. Hell, if not for me, Erston wouldn’t have any tie to the Crown Seven.”
“Yes, he would have,” she said. “Burl told me that my father wired him before you were arrested, asking for a loan.”
He bit off a curse, for that proved Kirby hadn’t believed that he, Dade and Trey could round up a herd of mustangs in short order. But they could’ve done it. Green breaking those wild horses for the army would’ve saved their asses, and all it would’ve cost them was a bit of time and a lot of sweat.
But what did it matter now? He screwed up before they’d had the chance to give it a try.
“So Erston was on his way to Maverick anyway?” he asked.
“Yes. I suspect that he saw this ranch as a means to fatten his own purse one day,” she said. “Your brush with the law just made it easier for him to achieve that end.”
“I’m sorry as hell you got dragged into this,” he said, and meant it.
“It will work out all right in the end,” she said.
He hoped to hell so. “No regrets then that you’ll be marrying a Wyoming rancher before long?”
She stared at her lap and smiled, looking as coy as a young girl. “None whatsoever. In fact, that day can’t come soon enough.”
This was more like the Cheryl he knew. She was a straight shooter like Kirby had been. But right now she was having the devil’s time looking him in the eye.
He sensed there was something else she wanted to say, but she was holding back for some reason.
At least she wasn’t dreading their marriage. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something different about her.
“You said Pearce is a friend of a friend?” Reid asked when the silence grew too loud for him to bear.
“Yes, he’s the brother of a school chum from Shrewsbury. Their family owned a sheep farm there for generations, producing the most exquisite fleece.” This time, she stared at the horse’s gray ass instead of the one sitting beside her, for Reid surely felt like a fool.
“What the hell is going on, Cheryl?”
Her rigid shoulders seemed to lose their starch. “Mr. Pearce was a tenant farmer on land that Burl recently acquired from a baronet who’d squandered his fortune. You know how Burl covets property.”
“That I do.” But no matter how much money or land Erston amassed, he was still a money-grubbing businessman.
“Unfortunately, the baronet failed to tell Burl that the sheep on his land belonged to Mr. Pearce.”
“Erston didn’t believe him,” Reid said.
“Not a word. When Mr. Pearce moved his sheep to another parcel of land, Burl accused him of stealing them and went straightway to the authorities.”
Reid whistled long and low. “Mr. Pearce is wanted in England for rustling sheep?”
“I’m afraid so.”
A crime punishable by death on both sides of the pond. He took another gander at the fat woolies penned near a ramshackle lean-to that served as a shelter.
“How did Pearce get himself and those sheep out of England?”
“I overheard Burl say he was shipping cattle to the Crown Seven, so I altered the docket a bit and told Pearce to have the sheep delivered to the ship.” She smiled. “As he was obliged to travel under a different name, and all the papers were in order, nobody questioned him
.”
If that didn’t beat all. He never would’ve figured Cheryl would do anything underhanded, but she’d surely pulled the wool over her pompous guardian’s eyes.
“Why’d you do it, Cheryl?”
She gave him a look that said he was daft to ask such a thing. “If I hadn’t stepped in, Mr. Pearce would have hanged for a crime he was innocent of.”
Reid was still trying to digest the scheme she’d devised when the unmistakable bleating that annoyed the hell out of cattlemen drifted his way. He turned his attention back to the sheep farm.
A stocky man paused in shoveling a wide path to the front door of a cabin that looked like a brown box slapped down amid a field of blinding snow. His rough farmer’s clothes and windswept hair lent him an unkempt look, but his smile was quick and affable.
Reid reckoned the sheep farmer hadn’t had many visitors of the friendly sort to his spread. Even the man’s dog wagged his tail in greeting. Dangerous things in a land where sheep and their herders were reviled.
“Mr. Pearce, I presume?” Reid asked her as he drew close to the cabin.
“Yes.” Was her voice a tad breathy?
Reid tossed her a glance, and her wistful smile raked rowels down his spine. He’d barely gotten a hello from her, whereas her friend’s brother gained a tender greeting and a sigh. Hell!
He secured the sleigh and jumped down, intending to come around and assist Cheryl. The quick-footed Mr. Pearce beat him to it with his dog yapping at his heels.
“I trust your journey was a pleasant one,” he said, holding Cheryl’s hand a bit longer than necessary as she fussed to right her skirts.
Cheryl cleared her throat and extracted her hand from Pearce’s, though Reid would swear she did so reluctantly. “Quite, though I tell you truly it seemed to take forever to get here.”
“What of your guardian?” Pearce asked, flicking a glance from Reid to her.
“As odious as ever.” She pulled a small packet from her muff and handed it to him. “From your sister.”
The sheepherder’s eyes went wide. “How thoughtful of you.”
The two stood there in the cold smiling at each other. Reid got the burn in his gut that told him there was more going on here than met the eye.
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