Cowboy Heart (Historical Western Romance) (Longren Family series #3, Kitty and Lukes story)

by Amelia Rose

  "Will you be visiting long?"

  Probably he was just being polite. A man like that, he had to have a girl somewhere, maybe more than one; one at the end of every trail. And I wasn't sure what made me say it, maybe just that I wanted to stand out, I was Kitty Collins and, shy or not, I was used to being known in my own town and I wanted him to know who I was.

  "As long as I can," I said. "I didn't tell my—" I stumbled, not wanting to say Mother and seem too young—"family that I was coming here."

  "Devil may care," he said.

  Someone called him then, probably the cowboy they called Tiny, because the man was a giant, with shoulders like a mountain and legs like tree trunks, and Mr. McLeod shouted back not to leave without him, that he'd be right there, then turned back to me and nodded. "Maybe I'll see you at supper, then?"

  Maybe the cat would have released my tongue by then and I could respond like a normal person, say something like That would be nice or—something, if I knew what to respond I'd have done so. I'd like that.

  "I'd like that," I heard myself say with a curious sensation of standing somewhere behind myself, astonished.

  He gave me a smile that topped anything Johnny Littleton ever even attempted and turned to run to where some of the men were saddling fresh horses, obviously—hopefully—intending to return by supper, and he waved just before he rode out of the stable.

  I waved back, understanding exactly how Sarah had felt when she didn't want to go home from Alturas.

  Chapter 3

  Sarah wasn't anywhere in the house when I went back in, which didn't surprise me. Her husband was home. I wouldn't have been in the kitchen either.

  I made myself useful for the remainder of the afternoon, made more bread because I figured it would get eaten, and cleaned the corn and chopped apples for the pies I knew she meant to bake. Later, still alone, hearing cowboys out in the yard and thinking rather more about Robert McLeod than seemed wise, I busied myself dusting my sister's already clean house and thought about writing a letter to my mother, but I couldn't concentrate on anything sensible and I thought about writing a letter to Johnny, but such spite should never be rewarded and, besides, it was too soon to say if anything would come of my instant attraction to Mr. McLeod.

  Sometime before supper, I went upstairs and cleaned up as best I could, washing and combing my hair and dressing in one of the gowns I'd borrowed from Sarah, then changing because that seemed too obvious, then changing again because why shouldn't I look like I'd taken pains to look nice, and then changing again because, of course, I shouldn't and then sitting on the edge of the bed in my under things, the door securely locked, my own intentions locked just as well. I was still sitting there, frozen, when Sarah called through the door that she was going down to the kitchen to start supper and asking if I could come and help.

  I called back that I'd be right there, decided, correctly, that the dinner preparations would make me significantly bedraggled enough that I should start as neatly and completely as I could, and raced through combing and powdering and dressing again, almost decided against it, realized soon Sarah would come up with a skeleton key and drag me downstairs and that, if she had any suspicion at all that I found one of her ranch hands attractive, she'd either tease me mercilessly or send me packing back to Gold Hill in a panic, unwilling to be responsible for me and my behavior.

  I went downstairs, pleasantly overdressed, unpleasantly over-nervous.

  Preparing supper took over an hour in the sweltering heat of late afternoon. Sarah talked nonstop, happy to have William home, happy to have the ranch full of people again and happy, as far as I could tell, to have me there.

  The pies were golden, cooling on the window sill. "I forgot all about them," Sarah said. The Sarah I knew would have berated herself nonstop. This Sarah giggled. I wasn't too sure about that.

  I saw William crossing the dooryard, heading into one of the outbuildings, an office of sorts.

  "He keeps more books than our father did," Sarah said, "every record of every cow, every visit from the veterinarian, every calf."

  A shadow crossed the window again and I looked up fast, hoping to see Mr. McLeod but seeing only the tall, dark ranch hand named Mike, who had taken the message to send to my mother.

  By the time supper was ready, I felt every bit as bedraggled as I had expected. Men crowded into the ranch house kitchen, laughing and talking, politely greeting Sarah and deferentially smiling at me. William came in and sat at the head of the table, said a quick grace and began talking to his overseer, Mike, about the pastures and rotating the herd.

  Robert McLeod sat some distance away from me down the table, talking to a pair of Vaquero cowboys, lean dark men with moustaches who spoke part English, part Spanish, and didn't say much at all.

  I tried to help Sarah because, even after we set copious amounts of food on the table, biscuits and corn on the cob and chicken and gravy, she continued to rise from her seat every few minutes to fetch something else she'd thought of or seen one of the men needed. I thought most of them would have been willing to serve themselves but maybe Sarah didn't want them to move freely about her kitchen.

  I hadn't thought about conversation during the meal and it wasn't so much like any of the dinner parties I'd been roped into attending in Gold Hill and, worse, in Virginia City, where everyone acted a lot more cosmopolitan and my shyness was increased. It was more like the dinner parties my mother occasionally threw at The Faro Queen, big table, lots of people, and everyone expected to hold their own.

  I wasn't holding my own. Around me, a small pocket of silence existed. Probably no one knew how to talk to me anymore than I knew how to talk to them. It wasn't a dinner party; it was supper at a ranch. Even knowing that, I remained uncomfortably aware of my every move.

  Sarah is the garrulous one of us. Sarah can talk the ears off a donkey. My mother isn't reticent. My uncles are friendly and forthcoming.

  At home, I can spend an entire day sitting in a tree or following a family of beavers as they build a dam and not hold a conversation with another human until nightfall. Here, I felt unwieldy and obvious in my silence, and all the more afraid of breaking it because of that.

  Given that the meal lasted less than 30 minutes from the time the boisterous cowboys arrived until the moment I realized Sarah was stuck with a load of dishes like this at least twice a day, I still had far too much time to contemplate my social ineptitude and that I was in danger of spending my remaining visit with Sarah dreading the daily food ritual, or making everyone else even more uncomfortable by excusing myself and eating miserably in the pantry by myself.

  I had just started to wonder if going home might be the lesser of two evils, when Luke Michaels introduced himself.

  He'd been sitting to my left for the entire meal, but his ear was being bent by Tiny on his other side and he hadn't had the chance to turn to his uncommunicative right hand neighbor.

  He might not have been someone I would have noticed had we passed each other on the street. When we stood at the end of the meal, I discovered he was medium height, taller than my five-six but not overly, not like Tiny, David Lord, or Robert McLeod. He had dark hair and brown eyes and, tanned by the recent trail ride, he was the same color as the desert.

  I might not have noticed him in passing. When I met him at my sister's table, I was face to face. Looking into his eyes, I recognized a spark there. My father had the same look to him, the same inquisitive, looking-for-trouble, ‘what-shall-we-do-next?’ look.

  The same look my father said I had. The same look, truly, my father often said I had right before I did something truly inquisitive and horribly ill-advised, like the time I tested exactly how much cats didn't like bathwater and the time I proved to a young girlfriend that, yes, I could climb the oak she pointed out—I just couldn't get down again.

  "Are you from Redding, Mr. Michaels?" Now he'd discover I had no talent for conversation and politely answer a few questions before returning to a conversation w
ith Tiny about branding or animal husbandry or bacon.

  "Sacramento," he said, "Not so far away but this is a different world."

  "What does your family do?" I asked, because, if nothing else, asking questions meant listening rather than talking.

  "Little bit of everything. I've a brother who's a veterinarian and a pack of sisters my father's hoping will marry soon. My father is a banker."

  "You didn't choose his profession," I commented, already feeling the strain of conversation. Before long, he'd ask me something and I'd stammer and blush.

  "Have to be able to count above 10," said the man on Mr. Michaels' other side to general laughter.

  Luke Michaels took the laughter in his stride, then said, seriously, "Couldn't bear to be cooped up all day when there's all this good country to roam around in. Are you visiting for long, Miss Collins?"

  I wanted to say, "Call me Kitty," and then propose we go out and start roaming through the good countryside. Mr. Luke Michaels looked like he could shimmy up a tree faster than I could.

  Noncommittal, safe, and proper, I said, "I hope so," and let the conversation drift away.

  Sarah and I cleared the table. William disappeared into the parlor with coffee and his overseer and trail boss, and with Robert McLeod and Tiny. From there, the scent of cigar smoke and the sound of male laughter reached us. All my life, ever since I was old enough to carry plates, I'd been clearing tables with my sister. Briefly, everything felt familiar.

  When washing, though, Sarah asked what I thought I'd like to do when I returned to Gold Hill.

  I could hear Robert McLeod's velvety voice coming from the parlor. I knew nothing about cattle ranching, of course, but enough about cowboys to realize my presence wasn't likely to be missed or requested in there. I still wanted to go in and just watch Robert. In some households, it's traditional for the young ladies to perform when there's company, but the ranch hands weren't company and I wasn't accomplished at singing, painting, or playing an instrument. There was no reason for me to go into the parlor.

  Except maybe to escape the questions about what I wanted to do when I went home. I took so long trying to come up with an answer that Sarah stopped washing and looked at me seriously.

  "Mr. Overton really is talking about marrying you to someone of his choosing? You didn't say that—" She hesitated. Before she'd moved to California, she would have simply said it.

  "For sympathy? No. Mr. Overton believes a young lady should marry and I think he wants to be alone with Mother."

  Sarah slowly reached back into the wash water. "What other choices do you have?"

  "I've been asking myself that. I could teach. Or nurse. Or find someone I want to marry."

  Sarah frowned at that. "You've never wanted to teach or nurse."

  "I wanted to marry." I tried to say it lightly but didn't quite manage.

  "You could stay here." She said it slowly and without looking at me, and I wondered if she was as lonely as I was, missed home and family and familiarity. My sister, who had birthed calves… Maybe the Sarah I knew best was still the same Sarah and the calving what she had to do.

  Circumstances dictate behavior. "I can't impose like that."

  "You'd work here," she said simply. "Same as I do."

  That made me shiver. "You're married."

  She paused.

  "Sarah, you're happy, aren't you? With William?"

  A very quick smile at that. "Very happy," she said. "With William."

  Later, as we finished drying and started yet more bread and had one more piece each of the apple pie, I thanked her for the invitation. I couldn't imagine spending two or three meals a day trying to fit in with a boisterous group of men. I hadn't felt so uncomfortable in years.

  But then, I couldn't imagine fitting in anywhere else, either.

  After supper, when the chores for the evening were done and the last meal prepared, the next day's bread rising, the dishes cleaned, I went outside to sit with Sarah on the front porch. There was a light breeze and the intense heat of the day ebbed away to cricket song.

  "We used to sit out like this at home," Sarah said. "Remember?"

  I began to nod, and shook my head instead. "Truly? No. Did we?"

  She smiled at that. "Maybe that's a dream memory. Mother and Father used to sit out sometimes, but you were always running somewhere. Mother would start to call out, telling you that young ladies do not run and Father would stop her."

  I turned so I could study her face. "Did he really?"

  Sarah's long-distant gaze didn't sharpen. "He said to let you run. He said someday you'd have to stop running."

  We were both quiet then, for a time, until Sarah said, very quietly, "Then sometimes, he'd add, '…and that will be a shame.'"

  The evening light thickened like honey. Clouds over the distant mountains to the west turned apricot and peach. There were mosquitoes, but not enough to stop us being out. I was still thinking about running, about my father having never told me he'd stuck up for me that way and wondering, very vaguely, what he would have thought of Mr. Overton's edicts (but then, of course, had Father still been with us, he'd have taken a dim view of Mr. Overton wishing to marry Mother) when Luke Michaels came across the porch.

  Sarah rose, about to offer her chair, obviously thinking of something else she could be doing. He put a hand out.

  "Don't get up, ma'am. I came to see, actually, if Miss Collins would accompany me for a constitutional this evening."

  Sarah looked a little puzzled and a little uncomfortable. I rose and walked past Mr. Michaels at the edge of the porch. "I'd like to take a walk, Sarah, if you don't mind. Or you could join us?"

  "I was about to go in," she said. "Will you be long?" In Sarah Speech, that meant, Don't be long.

  "Just stretching my legs," I said, which probably slighted Mr. Michaels.

  Mr. Michaels nodded to Sarah and I took my leave, all but skipping down the front porch steps. The breeze felt wonderful, the evening heat wrapped around me, I was outside.

  He led me along the path of the low-flowing creek that bounded and separated the pastures. Shadows fell long in the evening light. We walked north, up the creek, out of sight of the ranch house as we wound through willows and grasses across rocky, sandy ground. Black birds and sparrows darted in and out of the trees and bushes. On either side of the creek stretched meadows, wild on one side and full of brush and grass, pasture on the other side.

  "If you follow the creek, you come out on Mr. Getties' farm," said Luke. "Have you seen much of the ranch?"

  "Some of it," I said. "There's a farm that way, right?" I pointed north, the way we were heading.

  "That's the Getties' farm," he said, his face serious. "Your brother's involved in a lawsuit with Mr. Getties because Mr. Getties likes to dam up the creek and Big Sky Ranch has water rights. Also there's the no-fence law here, means we have to put up fences to keep the cattle out of Mr. Getties' farm but it doesn't mean Getties can just cut through the barbed wire whenever he chooses and take a steer for dinner."

  Thinking I didn't want to run into anyone by mistake if there was this kind of acrimony going on, I asked, "Has he caused trouble?" and received a curious look as if I should already know.

  "You could say that," Luke said, and pointed east. "Pasture and open land."

  "And farther?"

  "Redding."

  "What's south?" I asked.

  "California," he said, sounding both serious and uninterested, so I neither laughed nor pursued it.

  There was a stand of cottonwood ahead of us, poplars and birch, before the forest growth started. The forest was thick enough, though even here I could see where some logging had taken place but close to the river where the trees were thinner, I could see evidence of the drought.

  The cottonwoods, trees that love water, were dry.

  We stopped beside them, close to the low flowing stream, and I longed to take off my boots and soak my feet in the cold water. I resisted, some propriety seeing m
e through, but the trees called to me.

  "If I were home," I said into a friendly silence that had fallen between us, "I'd want to climb these trees, see what I could see from the tops, or just sit in one of them until the animals felt safe enough to roam around me."

  I glanced at him then, wondering if he'd be staring in horror at the horrendously improper girl he had innocently asked to go for a walk with.

  To my surprise, he was smiling, a broad smile on his open, cheerful face.

  "Race you to the top," he said.

  My father used to say that taking dares would land me in hot water some day. Certainly, Sarah wouldn't be pleased to hear I was going up trees again, not when, as far as she was concerned, I'd curbed the impulse.

  Sarah was back at the ranch.

  "Same tree? Different trees? Climb at the same time? Do you have a watch? Otherwise, how will we know who won?"

  Luke Michaels began laughing. "Same tree. Same time. Winner is the one who figures out a way past the other to the top."

  The trees were dry, leaves already turning brown, which they shouldn't have, with lots of whiskery twigs sticking out every which way. There were plenty of handholds as long as no branches snapped because they were dry.

  "Ready?" I asked.

  We scrambled up the tree, each taking a side without consulting about it. Handholds came naturally. The main trunk didn't split into branches until it was more than six feet off the ground, and then I took one side and Luke Michaels took the other and we kept going up, batting at insects, sending sprays of dry leaves crumbling and falling earthward.

  The race ended in a tie as we took branches that spread away from each other and climbed, snagging clothes, getting leaves in our hair, until the dry tree branches snapped with warning and groaned with our weight. When I'd gone as high as I could, I leaned into the tree branch, securing my position, and looked around from my vantage point. From there, I could see almost to the neighboring farm to the north, but that was probably my imagination. There was forest in the way, and the Kennedy's ranch was many acres.