Zach said, “Well...” He pushed himself away from the post and started for the door. He was leaving her, as he always left her, sitting in the darkness, alone.
“Zach.”
He turned, his hand on the doorknob. “Yeah?”
“I’ve been wondering.”
His eyes narrowed. “What?”
She cast about for something—anything—to keep him there a few moments longer.
“What is it, Tess?” Impatient. Eager to get away.
A subject finally occurred to her. “Well...about the rustling problem.”
“What about it?”
“You haven’t mentioned anything lately, about signs of trouble out in the pastures.”
“Nobody’s seen anything—not since Beau and Tim found those tire tracks back at the end of May.”
“Almost a month ago,” she said. “That’s good, isn’t it?”
He shrugged. “Could be. Who can say?”
“Maybe they’ve stopped.”
“It’s possible.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“No, I don’t. I think they’ve been smart and lucky. And that we’ve never been at the right place at the right time.
“And I think anytime you ride out by yourself, you should be sure and take that little Colt I gave you.”
Chapter Thirteen
“It’s hot,” Jobeth whined.
“It’s unbearable,” Starr agreed. She was sitting next to Jobeth, on the top step of the front porch. She leaned her head against the porch post and groaned aloud. “What we need is a swim.”
Tess and Edna, who sat back in the shadows of the porch, hemming twin panels of a set of curtains Tess had made for Starr’s room, shared a smile at the girls’ complaining.
Edna rubbed sweat from the bridge of her nose, sliding thumb and forefinger under the glasses she wore for close work. “Oh, yes. It feels like August and it’s hardly the end of June.”
“Mom,” Jobeth said.
“Um?”
“When are Zach and the others coming back?” They had headed out after the big noon meal, to fix a length of fence near the highway into town.
“I don’t know,” Tess said. “Anytime now, I’d guess.”
“We could ride out to meet them.” Jobeth looked at her stepsister with hopeful eyes.
Starr made a grotesque face, sticking out her tongue and rolling her lips back away from her teeth. “Ugh. Just what I need on a scorcher like this. To get on the back of some sweaty, fly-bitten nag and ride along a dusty road to meet up with my dad and two cowboys.”
“Sandygirl’s no nag.”
“She’s a horse. Horses sweat. They draw flies. I am not getting on a horse unless I’m riding it someplace I can swim. Get it?”
“Yeah. I get it.” Jobeth gave Starr a nudge with the toe of her tennis shoe. “Meany.”
Starr nudged back, playfully, with a bare foot.
“Hey!” Jobeth gave Starr a shove.
“Watch it....” Starr shoved back.
Seconds later, they were rolling around together on the little patch of scrubby grass at the foot of the steps, squealing and giggling. Tess and Edna shared another look and went on with their sewing.
Right then, Zach and the men drove into the yard. With a sigh, Tess stood from her comfortable swing chair. She gave a long whistle. The girls froze and looked up at her.
She pointed at the pickup. The girls pulled apart and jumped to their feet. Zach drove past them, no doubt on the way to park in the tractor barn on the far side of the sheds out in back. He waved as he went by—and so did Beau, who rode in the truckbed with the tools, the barbwire, and the leftover posts.
Tess glanced immediately at Starr, to see how she reacted to the sight of Beau. The girl appeared more interested in yanking her cutoffs back into place after her wrestling match with Jobeth than in making eyes at the ranch hand. Starr looked up and caught Tess’s glance. “Listen, Tess. Crystal Creek runs along on the other side of the horse pasture, behind that old cabin where Great-grandpa John used to live. We can ride above the bank until we find a decent place to swim. Let me take Jo and go. We’ll be back by five, I swear.”
Tess had been wary of letting either of the girls head out for isolated spots. If those cattle thieves were still doing their dirty work on the Rising Sun, she didn’t want Jobeth or Starr meeting up with them.
“Tess. Please. We are suffering here.”
Tess chewed on her lower lip a little, thinking she wouldn’t mind a swim herself, but she did need to get started on dinner soon.
Edna said, “You take them. I’ll get the dinner going.”
Tess grinned. “Mind reader. I owe you one.”
“Good. Scrabble. This evening at my house. You’ll let me win and pretend you didn’t.”
“We can go?” Starr asked, looking hopeful and younger than her years for once.
“Yes,” Tess said. “Let’s get our suits on and saddle up.”
They’d caught the horses and were cinching up saddles when Zach came out of the barn and strode their way. Tess looked up and saw him coming. Patches of sweat darkened his old blue shirt, down the front and under the arms. Lines of sweaty dust had collected in the creases of his neck. His jeans were gray with dirt. Tess thought she’d never in her life seen a better-looking man.
He asked, “What’s up?”
Tess told her silly heart to settle down and answered with a calm she wished she could feel in his presence, “We’re going hunting. For a swimming hole.”
His glance flicked to the Colt at her hip. “You’ll be careful.”
“You know we will.”
The little gray mare she’d chosen whickered softly. Tess patted her forehead. “Easy. It’s okay.”
The girls were already mounted and ready to go. Reggie, who’d appeared from the barn when they started tacking up, sat to the side, waiting patiently, looking expectant. Tess swung into the saddle. As she fiddled with the reins, Zach stepped up and took the headstall. She looked down at him. He smiled. She felt weakness all through herself. Longing that could hardly be borne. Yet she would bear it.
He gave her a crooked smile. “I’ll get a shovel and follow along. If you don’t find a good hole, we can make one.”
She watched his mouth, wishing she could just bend down and plant a kiss on it.
He asked, “So what do you say?”
“Sounds good.”
He started giving instructions. “Okay then, pick up the creek down behind the old cabin. Follow it about two or three miles, toward the mountains. You’ll be on public land that nobody’s been using this season. You should find some good places there.” Tess took his meaning. Cattle tended to break down the banks of streams and flatten out the streambeds. On unused land, the creek would be more likely to keep a deeper channel. “I’ll be along, in a few minutes.” He let go of the bridle and backed away.
The girls started off and Tess followed after them, Reggie taking up the rear.
A half an hour later, they found a good spot, a wide bend in the creek that slowed down the water. It wasn’t that deep. But it was clear and inviting. Cottonwoods and willows grew close to the bank, providing tempting, welcome shade.
Reggie flopped down in the shade as the girls quickly dismounted and stripped off their clothes, revealing the bathing suits they’d put on underneath. They ran for the bank, hooting like wild animals, yowling in glee when they hit the water, going under for several seconds and then shooting up in the air, shivering and screaming.
“It’s cold!”
“It’s freezing!”
“It’s great!”
Tess spread an old blanket in the shade of a cottonwood and removed her own jeans, shirt and boots at a more sedate pace. She felt nervous, knowing Zach would come. She hoped she looked all right in her three-year-old suit. In the bright sun, the tropical print seemed just a little faded, she thought. Still, the colors were pretty and complemented her skin tone. And the cu
t was modest, so she didn’t feel too naked.
“Tess, come on! Hurry up!”
“Yeah, Mom! Get in!”
She adjusted the straps of her suit, then turned toward the clear water and the waving, shouting girls. “Look out! I’m coming!” She took off at a run, pausing a split second at the edge to jump and gather her legs up to her chest. Shrieking, she sailed out across the creek, hitting the surface in a beauty of a cannonball, sending water flying everywhere.
Zach heard all the screeching and shouting a quarter of a mile away. He slowed Ladybird and listened. The sounds told him that Tess and the girls had found a perfectly fine place to swim and wouldn’t need him or his shovel after all. He might as well turn back.
But he didn’t turn back. He just kept on moving toward the laughter and happy voices. Finally he came up a small rise and there they were below him, not thirty feet away. He reined in. Leaning on the saddle horn, he watched one doozy of a water fight—a battle in which Starr showed herself willing to play dirty, but Tess definitely had the best hand for serious water spraying. Jobeth, outsized and outclassed, mostly cowered between the other two, squealing and howling.
Tess, as pretty as a mermaid in a suit with big, bright flowers all over it, spotted him first. She stopped and tried to wave, which gave Starr a chance to mount a serious attack.
“Come on, Jo!” Starr commanded, fanning water hard and fast at a disadvantaged Tess. “Get her! Help me get her!”
Jobeth turned on her mother with glee. The two girls sprayed and splashed until Tess dived beneath the surface. The girls looked around. Tess came up near the bank and started right for the edge.
“No fair! Chicken!”
Tess waved a hand at them, hardly glancing back, leaving them to turn on each other—which they immediately did.
“Zach. You came.” Her slanted eyes were on him, only on him, as his eyes were only for her. Right then, their splashing, giggling daughters might not have existed.
She emerged from the creek, her long, slim legs revealed to him for what must have been the first time. She looked so good, the water running off of her—she looked womanly, everything sleek and strong and yet soft at the same time.
When she got up on the bank, she kept coming toward him. He watched her come, knowing she felt his gaze on her, though his eyes were shadowed by the brim of his hat. At a blanket spread beneath a cottonwood, near where Reggie lay asleep, she stopped to scoop up a towel, then came the rest of the way, drying herself as she walked.
I love you, she had told him the other night.
He didn’t believe it. He knew it couldn’t be true.
But damn. It had sounded good.
And now, looking into her welcoming eyes as she came on, he didn’t know if he even cared anymore who she loved or how she might hurt him if he let himself get too attached to her.
He was already attached to her.
He couldn’t imagine his life without her.
He might as well go ahead and surrender all the way to her.
Because she was going to have him in the end.
As he would have her.
Sitting there on his horse as his wife approached him on that hot June day, Zach Bravo at last came to understand that it was only a matter of time. He would keep her at bay as long as he could bear to—keep his pride and his distance till he just plain couldn’t stand not having her. But sooner or later, he would fall.
She stopped a few feet from him and rubbed her hair with the towel. He watched the tender flesh of her inner arm, the hollow where her arm met her body, the slight rounding of her breast before it disappeared under the suit. She went on rubbing, drying her hair. His gaze trailed up, over the sweet curve of her shoulder and the singing line of her neck. He met her eyes and saw a woman’s knowledge.
She knew exactly what she was doing, drying her hair that way, looking at him so steadily, a half smile on that mouth of hers.
Maybe he didn’t have her love. But he had her desire. She wanted him now—as she had not on their wedding night. Now, when he took her, he would be able to tell himself it was his own face she saw when she closed her eyes.
That was something.
Not enough for him, but better than nothing at all.
“Come swimming,” she said, hooking the towel around her neck.
“Naw.” He reached back to put his hand on the shovel he’d tied behind his saddle. “I just came in case you needed help.”
She gestured over her shoulder. “We found the perfect spot. And the water’s great.”
Starr yelled and waved from the bank across the stream. “Daddy! Come on!”
Jobeth, standing beside Starr, chimed in. “Yeah, Zach, come swim!”
He shook his head and waved. “Some other time!”
The two girls groaned in unison, then jumped back in the water and started splashing each other again. Watching them, Zach thought that Starr really did seem to be coming out of her sulky shell more and more every day. He also remembered the promise he’d made to Jobeth a while back. He would have to talk to Tess about it soon.
He saw no reason that she would say no. His adopting Jobeth would only give his stepdaughter a firmer claim on the land she loved so much. Still, he hesitated to bring the subject up with Tess. Somewhere inside himself, he couldn’t help fearing that she would turn his offer down. Maybe it was all the years of dealing with Leila. It had ruined him for thinking a woman would ever do the right thing when it came to her own child.
“Thanks for coming to help.” Tess stepped forward and took Ladybird’s bridle the way he had done with her gray mare back at the horse pasture. “—Even if we didn’t need you in the end.” She patted the horse’s neck and smiled up at him.
Something softened deep inside him. She was not like Leila. Not in any way. She would be kind in her power over him.
And she was fair.
He said quietly, “Jobeth would like me to adopt her.”
She went on smiling, though the smile changed, grew tender and a little bit sad. “I know.”
“Will you allow that?”
“Yes, Zach. I will.”
Zach and Tess drove to Buffalo the next day to consult with the family lawyer, Philo T. O‘Hare. O’Hare said that since Jobeth’s natural father was deceased and Tess was the girl’s sole guardian, the adoption should be no problem at all. He had them fill out a petition for adoption and assured them that the finalizing court date would occur within a month or so.
Tess seemed lost in her own thoughts on the way back. Zach didn’t disturb her. He felt good, to know that within weeks, he could claim Jobeth as a true daughter. He also felt grateful to his wife, for granting him that claim.
At home, the girls and Edna were waiting for them, hungry for news of how it had gone.
“You’ll be a Bravo within a month or two,” Zach told Jobeth.
She let out a yelp of glee and launched herself at him, hugging him hard. From him, she jumped on Starr, then she grabbed Edna and squeezed her a good one.
Last of all, she went into her mother’s waiting arms.
“Oh, thanks, Mom,” she said. “Thank you so much.”
“There’s nothing to thank me for,” Tess replied. “It’s the best thing. The right thing.”
“Oh, Mom. It is. I know it is.”
They rang the bell for the hands and then went in to the midday meal that Edna had prepared.
After they ate, Zach decided to take Jobeth out to poison weeds. He invited Starr. She grunted. “No, thanks. I think I’ll stick around here.”
“You still have vacuuming to do, young lady,” Edna reminded her.
“I know, I know. It’s just a thrill a minute around this place.” The words were sarcastic, but then she grinned.
Zach congratulated himself again on how much progress they were making with her.
An hour later, in her swinging chair on the front porch, Tess tied off the last stitch on the last hem of the last panel of Starr’s new mi
dnight blue curtains. By then, Zach and Jobeth were long gone, and Edna had wandered back across the yard to her own house for a brief nap. Starr was inside—presumably dusting, but probably sprawled across her bed with her headphones on, thumbing through one of her rock and roll magazines.
Humming happily to herself, Tess rose and carried the final two panels she’d been working on inside. The other four panels were folded and waiting in the master bedroom. Tess had set up her sewing machine in there, as well as the iron, all hot and ready for a final pressing. Tess ran the iron over the curtains.
Then she carried her handiwork across the hall to Starr’s room. At the door, she gave a light knock. “Starr?”
No answer. The girl probably had her headphones cranked up loud. Tess peeked around the door. No Starr. Tess shrugged. Who could ever say where that girl might get off to? She was probably out in the barn, leaning against a hay bale, woolgathering.
Tess went on into the room, set the curtains on the midnight blue quilted spread she’d made a few days before and returned to her own room for the stepladder she kept in the closet there. Back in Starr’s room, Tess set up the ladder, grabbed a curtain rod and began feeding a panel onto the end. Once she had the curtains strung on the rods, she moved to the window to hook the rods in place.
She’d just raised her foot to the first step of the footstool when she looked down on the backyard—and caught sight of Beau Tisdale as he pulled a very willing-looking Starr through the open door of the barn.
Chapter Fourteen
For an endless moment, Tess just stood there with one foot on the stepladder, staring blindly out the window at the door of the barn, wishing with all of her heart that she hadn’t seen what she’d just seen.
Already, the cowhand and Zach’s daughter had disappeared into the shadows beyond the door. Nothing marked their passing. If Tess had looked down a few seconds later, she wouldn’t even have seen them.
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