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

by Amelia Rose

  "Was it blocked?" I asked. Maybe it didn't interest him overly, at least not tonight, but I still wanted to know if someone had done it on purpose.

  "Mr. Getties has a tendency to block up the stream at his place," Robert said. "Not the first time. William's taking him to court, but old Getties, he's never happy, even after California passed the no-fence law that means ranchers have to keep their animals off farmer's land and not the other way around. He's still insisting our cattle are in his garden and demanding recompense."

  Mr. Getties had a bit more than a garden. He owned nearly as many acres as Big Sky and he grew grains, but I understood what Robert meant. It wasn't the most romantic conversation, he was right there, but I wasn't blushing for a change, or stammering or completely unable to talk, and this was my sister's and her husband's concern we were discussing, so I followed my line of thought.

  "The day I arrived, there was a fire in one of the south pastures. Mr. Lord and I drove right into it." I bit my lip and watched the river briefly before asking, "Do you think that might have been Mr. Getties' doing?"

  He took a breath, as if uninterested, then said, "Ayah. No way to tell for sure. Look there, do you see that robin?"

  I didn't, actually, wasn't even sure there was a robin in the expanse of willow he was pointing at, but I took the obvious suggestion to change the subject and, after that, we talked about him.

  Which I really didn't mind a bit.

  "San Francisco?" I asked as we drew close to Redding. I'd only been to San Francisco once and the idea that Robert had been born there made him seem mysterious and elegant, even if he was currently living on a cattle ranch.

  "Went to school there, to university briefly. I thought"—he cleared his throat—"I was going to study law, but the more I watched my father's business dealings—he was a gold miner, in the rush of '49—the less I wanted that side of human nature."

  I sat back in the wagon, waiting for Redding to draw us in. I could hear fiddles playing now and see the gas lights flickering against the oncoming dusk. The hotel stood tallest of the structures in town, at two stories, and that was our destination.

  "So you chose animal nature?" I ventured. If I'd been born a boy, instead of my brother, Jacob, being the boy, I'd have studied veterinary medicine. Jacob wasted being a boy on engineering that would see him down in the ground when even my uncles had chosen to leave that life behind."

  He smiled at me, holding the reins loosely and letting the horses choose their own speed. "Left school, actually. Headed to Nevada briefly, didn't like that much, apologies, ma'am, but it was too dry."

  I laughed. "And this isn't?" I asked, waving a hand at the drought-ridden land around us.

  "Not supposed to be."

  He'd worked a couple ranches before finding Big Sky and said he liked the trail, being outside, working with cattle and the dogs, and being on horseback as often as not.

  We drew into town then, into laughter and loud voices, singing from the saloons and music from the hotel where we were headed. It seemed every person on the street knew Robert and greeted him, and I saw a lot of the ranch hands moving in and out of bars and restaurants, dancing in the street with women whose dress seemed a bit scandalous to me, showing too much skin and not covering quite enough.

  Robert escorted me in quickly and it wasn't until we were inside, finding a table and looking to see what was on offer for the evening, that I realized he hadn't asked anything about me.

  The hotel didn't hold a candle to The Faro Queen, but it's possible I'm prejudiced, given it's the Longren's hotel. The food was simple and hot and I didn't have to cook any of it, all of which I enjoyed.

  During the meal, Robert more than made up for any inattentiveness that had preceded the meal. He asked me about Nevada and about my parents, listened with sympathy about the loss of my father, and I wisely didn't tell him a thing about Mr. Overton's plans to marry me off.

  Having a man listen to every word should have caused me no end of fretting but, for once, I didn't trip over my words or forget my sentences halfway through. I made him laugh a few times, telling him about my adventures and Sarah's, which probably wouldn't make it any easier for Sarah to tell the ranch hands what to do, but I liked the way his eyes shined when he laughed.

  When the dishes were collected and the dancing started to the fiddles and the guitar player and one lone and somewhat lost looking girl with a flute, who everyone else instantly drowned out, I tried to resist. I'm light on my feet running a race or climbing a foothill or scaling a cottonwood, but I'm heavy on everyone else's dancing.

  Robert didn't take no for an answer, he simply stood, took my hand in the most courtly manner that set my heart spinning and my breath short, and took me out to the dance floor.

  Where I spun like moonlight and swept into footwork I couldn't possibly have known; light as a feather and light on my own feet, never on his. For the first time I could remember, since the days I'd been small enough to dance with my stocking-clad feet on my father's shoes, I enjoyed dancing and left the hotel breathless and flushed rather than tongue-tied and blushing.

  Robert McLeod was handsome and charming and I had daydreamed about this night since the moment I'd first seen him, when I had no way of knowing such a night was even possible.

  I didn't want that, though. Did I? So soon after Johnny, it truly felt like the path to another broken heart and I didn't have the spirit for it, or any more sisters to run to.

  My steps off the dance floor as we left the hotel were far more cautious.

  Redding's main street boasted grocers and a telegraph office, a feed store that was also the other grocer's, the hotel where we had dined and where people sometimes staged plays. There was a laundry and another hotel that had a rather less savory reputation. There wasn't much more to it. We walked the length of it, looking at the houses spread in a grid off the main street, and talked about the ranch. After Robert had abandoned the idea of university schooling and made his way north, he'd worked on a series of cattle drives, heading as far east as Idaho and, once, as far south as Texas.

  "It sounds like such an adventure," I said. When the trail team had ridden back onto the ranch my first day, they'd brought with them the dust of the trail, the contentment of men who'd done a job and seen it through from start to finish. I'd tried to say that to Sarah once and she'd snorted a very unladylike laugh and told me I was confusing contentment with filthiness, dust and exhaustion.

  Still, the men had been tall in the saddle, the dogs running at their feet, nearly herding them back onto the ranch. They'd been sunlit and grinning and it had looked quite the adventure to me. I think Sarah had half eyed me at that point, as if suspecting I might slip away after another adventure when I'd just begun one by escaping to Redding.

  Now Robert was eyeing me as if I weren't quite sane or, if I was, that sanity wasn't quite to be trusted. "It's dirty and dangerous work," he said. "Cattle are unpredictable things and so stupid, they'll die of thirst in the snow if they can't get past the snow to water."

  I almost laughed but by the look on his face it looked like he meant it.

  "There's rattle snakes and there's Indians." He strolled, hands in his pockets.

  "But you get to see the country," I said, wistfully. It sounded ideal to me, dangerous or not.

  Robert seemed ideal to me also, and possibly just as dangerous. Sarah had tried to warn me off him and William had looked askance when she told him, lightly and in passing, that I would not be joining them at supper and why. Later, I had overheard him asking Sarah whether McLeod wasn't still seeing that little girl from town, what was her name, Abigail? And Sarah asking what in the world William thought she spent her day doing that she would know such things and anyway, shush, if Mr. McLeod was asking me to step out with him, clearly he wasn't seeing anyone else. Her voice held a note of threat I thought Robert more than William should be wary of.

  As the night deepened, Robert took my arm to guide me and my skin felt full of sparks an
d stars where he touched my arm. I basked in the attention, listened to his stories of university and San Francisco,

  When he stopped under a spreading lilac bush on a corner just short of the hotel where the wagon and horses were tethered, I felt breathless and lightheaded rather than light on my feet. Some of my curls had escaped, tumbling down my back and some of them around my face, and he combed them back gently, then looked into my eyes before tilting my head up with one knuckle under my chin.

  The kiss was soft and undemanding, his lips gentle on mine. He left his knuckle under my chin and his other hand just brushed my shoulder. I shivered under his touch, my eyes closed, head tilted. When he drew away, he licked his bottom lip and smiled slightly at me, then collected my arm again and asked if I needed to get back or would I care to see another branch of the river by moonlight.

  As there was no moon that night it hardly seemed apropos. My heart beat far too quickly and my thoughts ranged far too sluggishly and I opted for river and moonlight and another kiss.

  "I'd like to see the river," I said. "But, perhaps on the way back to the Big Sky?"

  We had strolled back to the front of the hotel, where a crowd milled, people coming in and going out and the dancing still in full swing. I watched him as he slipped easily between people in pursuit of fetching the wagon and froze, looking directly at Luke.

  When he caught my gaze, he turned away abruptly, disappearing into the crowd.

  The night held its warmth and I'd brought a wrap so it was comfortable beside Mr. McLeod in the wagon. The river drifted past, dark against darkness, and I could hear sleepy croaks of frogs, the trill of crickets and the occasional rustlings of something larger in the reeds.

  Robert put one arm around my shoulder and it felt natural to lean into him, my head on his shoulder. His fingers traced up and down my arm through the sleeve of my dress, hypnotic and exciting all at once.

  Listening to the frogs, Robert said, "I used to catch tadpoles and keep them in a jar with water and rocks, feed 'em, and wait for them to turn into frogs. Right up until the time they all turned at once and my mother caught me with a room full of frogs all jumping everywhere and that's the first time I knew she hated frogs."

  I laughed and didn't mention that something surprisingly similar had happened to me, except that my mother took it in her stride and simply stated our house wasn't big enough for both me and the frogs and something had to go. I'd been eight or nine years old and chose to move the frogs out.

  I was distracted from the memory when Robert leaned down and kissed me for the second time, gentle and soft, his breath on my neck as he kissed along the edge of my jaw. I breathed in the scent of wood and brush, denim and flannel, the woodsy smell of him, and sighed.

  Johnny was the only man I had ever stepped out with regularly and his father's house was nearly a half mile from mine, so it was a strange feeling to have Robert see me home as the night wore on, knowing we were both headed for the same destination.

  He stopped outside the huge weathered gates that led to the Kennedy's 10,000 acres and gave me a kiss goodnight that left me witless. And now the tongue-tied, stammering, blushing Kitty tried to take over, because now I wanted to see him again, more than anything.

  Exactly the way I hadn't wanted to feel.

  Chapter 5

  The next morning at breakfast, Luke was distant and short in answers to questions. He ate fast and left before anyone else was halfway through.

  "I needed to go over a chore list with him," William said, throwing down his napkin. He rose to follow.

  Sarah didn't look up but said, apparently to the coffee mug in her hands, "Finish your breakfast."

  Tiny, Mike, the Juans, Robert and a handful of hands were finishing up breakfast. No one looked up or paid any attention.

  Except Sarah. She noticed my blush.

  She asked about the evening as we washed the dishes. I told her a little. The previous night felt like a dream. Luke had been strange. Me, I was half relieved and half in that wonderful, terrible place of wanting to see him again, giddy happiness followed a moment later by certainty that he had found me dull and wouldn't call again.

  He lived on the same ranch. I couldn't imagine seeing him daily if he had found me dull.

  Could he? I wasn't even certain I was the same Kitty who had to be called down from trees and told not to bring frogs into the house.

  Sarah went away after a few words about the evening. I watched her go as I dried the last of the dishes. She didn't seem herself.

  When Sarah didn't reappear by midmorning, I entertained myself, dusting a little, going out to check on the calves, which no one needed me to do. I didn't admit to myself I hoped to run into Robert, or dreaded running into Luke for no reason I could name.

  I saw Luke leaving the barn out the back as I entered. I called, but not loudly. The day was sullen, overcast and hot, and if there was anyone on the ranch who might be convinced to saddle a horse and ride to the lake I'd been told was no more than three miles north of the ranch house, it would be Luke. We could bathe our feet and skip stones. There was always work on the ranch but today seemed slow.

  But Luke slipping away as I entered made me rethink those plans. I went back inside, looking for Sarah and finding her correspondence instead.

  It seemed she must have just left the table before I arrived. The big wood block of the kitchen table held her mug of coffee and a stack of the same stationery she'd brought out when I wrote the missive to our mother, the paper I used when I wrote letters now and that I intended to gift Sarah with more of once I was home. Her ink was still capped; her pen lay on a blotter, an untidy stack of stationery near the edge of the table.

  "Sarah?"

  No answer. She could have gone out to William's office in the outbuilding, or she could be in her bedroom. She could have gone looking for me, even, or be in the garden. Restless, I spun on my heel. I'd go into the garden, pull weeds, viciously perhaps, driving away the extra energy that filled me when I thought about the kiss Robert had given me, about wanting to dance in his arms again and talk about everything from cattle to horses to his family and mine, about The Faro Queen and my uncles, my mother, my sister, my brother at university studying mining engineering and my fear of him spending a life below ground. I'd been able to talk with him about everything and he had shared his life and I wanted to be with him again, he was the one I wanted to ride to the creek with but doubtless he was with William, the two of them going over accounts William would later go over with David Lord, or discussing the next strategy for freeing up the near eastern pastures from Mr. Getties' water grab or—

  I spun, took a step, brushed my skirt against the table and sent Sarah's stack of stationery sailing straight down from the table. The papers landed face up, still in a stack.

  "Damn!" Not ladylike, but the need to get out of the house and back into the fresh air had doubled in the last minute. Maybe I would see Robert. He'd still be on the ranch, wouldn't he? He couldn't dodge me, didn't have any reason to, I just had to catch my breath and stop being silly.

  I stooped to retrieve the stack of pages from the floor, caught my knee on the table when I started to rise and dropped the pile again.

  This time, the pages fanned out, the top empty sheet catching the air and sailing under the table out of reach.

  I didn't chase it. I didn't look away from the letters lying on the floor. There were half a dozen of them or more, each starting the same way.

  Dear Kitty.

  My hands stilled and the panicky need to get outside and moving fell away. I reached for the pages, picked them up gingerly, as if somehow they were dangerous, stood more gracefully than I'd lowered down to the floor and stacked them together as if I had every intention of retrieving that top piece and leaving everything the way I'd found it.

  Of course, I didn't. These were the letters I'd seen my first day at Big Sky Ranch. The ones I hadn't found a way to ask Sarah about. With one hand, I spread the letters out, taking
a look. There were seven of them, all of them addressed to me, and none of them went farther than the first page.

  They all started brightly: Dear Kitty. Sometimes, Dear Kitty with an exclamation. One started My Dear Sister. The ink was smeared on that one, but I didn't think that's why she had abandoned them.

  Dear Kitty: I apologize for not writing sooner, as I promised to do. We are simply so busy!

  Dear Kitty: I am remiss in my correspondence and pray you'll forgive me. So much happens every day, I set out to put it down on paper and I find…

  Dear Kit: You must be wondering why I haven't written…

  I had been wondering. It was part of what had brought me here. I stood looking for a long time at the letters she'd never sent me; that she hadn't even been able to finish. They were my letters, meant for me, but reading them felt like spying on her. There was something unsaid in those letters. She'd been stopped every time by something private that she still hadn't shared with me.

  I was still staring at them when she reentered the kitchen and stopped short at the sight of me. "Kitty?"

  "Came looking for you." I didn't move away from the letters, or comment on them. Her gaze moved rapidly back and forth between me and the letters; she didn't ask.

  "Did you need something?"

  "To do!" I said with all the pent up feeling I actually possessed.

  That made her smile. "There's not many days like this on a ranch. You should take advantage of it."

  "I haven't been here long enough to need to," I said, and added promptly, "Besides, I will if you will."

  Her protest was automatic. Too much to do, food to prepare, cleaning to do, weeding, the calves needed tending…

  "I tended the calves," I said. "Your dishes are clean and one meal the hands are forced to find for themselves from cold repast will not kill them."