Some of the strain disappeared from Junie Mae’s eyes. “He’s the most wonderful man. I don’t know what I would have done without him.” She seemed stricken by what she’d said. She jumped up, went to her closet, and began looking through her clothes.
“What did he do?” Idalou asked, fighting down a demon of jealousy.
“Nothing, really. I was just feeling really down and he made me feel better.”
Idalou didn’t believe that for a minute. Whatever the problem, it had been serious enough to make Junie Mae unwilling to face her. Now that she thought of it, Junie Mae didn’t look good. Idalou didn’t want to become enmeshed in Junie Mae’s problems, but she couldn’t ignore them after Junie Mae had offered to let her share her room.
“I don’t want to pry,” Idalou said, “but if I can help, just let me know.”
“Thanks,” Junie Mae said, her eyes swimming with tears, “but it’s nothing serious.”
Will surveyed what had once been the Ellsworth ranch with a sinking feeling. There was nothing to rebuild. He even questioned whether it was worthwhile trying. It wasn’t simply that the ranch buildings were gone. The landscape itself had been scoured by the floodwaters and the debris it carried. Mud was everywhere, sticky, viscous, and deep, making it impossible to walk over much of the area, but in a few days it would dry to rock hardness or become powdery and blow away in the wind.
“I don’t know where to begin,” Idalou said.
Will could hear the defeat in her voice. They were sitting their horses, not an easy position from whence to dispense comfort, but Will reached out to take Idalou’s hand.
“You don’t have to worry about that for a few days yet.”
She tried to pull her hand away, but he held on. Giving up, she gripped his hand hard.
“I can’t not worry about it. Carl’s out there with no one to help him or even know if he gets in trouble. Suppose the person who blew up the dam comes back. What about whoever took our bull?”
Will gave her hand a squeeze. “Carl is capable of taking care of himself. Besides, his horse is a better watchdog than any man would be.”
“I can’t stay with Junie Mae forever.”
Idalou turned big brown eyes up at Will, and he felt something turn over inside. It was a little bit like nausea, but today that didn’t seem like such a bad thing. He had an ominous feeling he was making a mistake, but he didn’t care about that either. He had the sinking feeling he was about to become more than slightly interested in a young woman. A week ago that would have sent him running for his horse. Now he just squeezed Idalou’s hand a little harder and stared back at her with what he feared was a really stupid look on his face.
“You can move to the hotel anytime you want, but I think Junie Mae likes your company.”
Idalou’s eyes narrowed. “Something’s wrong with her, and you know what it is, don’t you?”
“Why do you think that?”
Idalou pulled her hand from Will’s grasp but held his gaze. “She’s as nervous as a cat around her aunt, which I don’t understand because Ella dotes on her. Only last night she was saying she thought Junie Mae had been working too hard. She’s always encouraging her to eat more. Ella said she was glad I was staying there, that Junie Mae had been acting depressed for a while and that she hoped having someone her own age to talk to would cheer her up.”
“It might,” Will said, hoping Idalou wouldn’t dig any deeper.
“It might if she’d talk to me,” Idalou said, not letting up. “I’ve told her several times I’d be happy to help her, but she assures me it’s just delayed grief over her mother’s death.”
“She’s probably right.”
“Then why does she look at you like you’re her savior?”
Will should have known that Idalou wouldn’t give up so easily. He didn’t see what he could do except tell her as much of the truth as he felt he could. “Junie Mae does have a problem, but it’s confidential. I found out about it by accident. She only looks at me like that because I agreed to help her if I could.”
“If it’s so serious, why hasn’t she told her aunt?”
“That was her decision, not mine.”
Idalou studied him for a moment. “What is it about you that makes women depend on you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I look harmless.”
“That’s not why they’re falling over themselves to feed you.”
Will’s shoulders slumped. “Don’t start with my looks again.”
“I can’t help it. Everybody’s mesmerized by them. And you’re mesmerized by people in trouble. One look at Junie Mae with tears in her eyes, and you rush to help her like a knight in shining armor.”
Will frowned angrily. He’d spent his whole life hearing about his looks. Okay, so he’d taken advantage of them on occasion, but he had no intention of leaning on them for the rest of his life. It seemed impossible for people to understand that he wanted to be seen as something more than a face that earned him privileges for no other reason than that people liked to look at him. His brother Pete had once told him that he ought to be an actor, that women would pay a fortune just to look at him.
What Pete didn’t understand, because he was a pinch-faced little brat who was constantly in trouble, was that people didn’t see Will at all. They couldn’t get past his face. It had taken him many years to figure that out. The adulation was nice at first, but after a while it started to go sour. Everybody assumed he was going to use his looks and charm to ease his way through life, so they started expecting less of him. He’d been having an argument with Matt over how Matt was dealing with the orphans he’d adopted when Matt had flung that at him. Will had denied it at first. Later, when he was calm enough to think rationally, he’d realized it was true.
“Let me tell you what my looks have brought me,” he said to Idalou.
Chapter Twelve
“My parents died when I was four and my brother was nine,” Will said. “An aunt with five children wanted to take us in, but my uncle insisted she had enough children already. He was single and had a farm in Texas he said was perfect for two boys. For a while I thought things were perfect. He made sure we had plenty to eat, never worked us too hard, and always gave us a hug before we went to bed. He told us how special we were, and how fortunate he was to have two such handsome nephews. What I didn’t know was that he’d started sexually abusing my brother almost from the day we arrived in Texas.”
“My God!” Idalou’s hand covered her mouth; her eyes were wide with shock.
“I was too young to understand. When he started telling me how beautiful I was, putting his hands all over me, even kissing me when he put me to bed, I didn’t realize that his interest had turned to me. I was just seven. Several times I overheard my brother shouting at my uncle, but I didn’t know what it was about until he took me out behind the smokehouse, pulled my pants down, and bent me over. He was taking down his own pants when Matt found us.”
Will had to stop speaking. Twenty-one years later the events of that afternoon still had the power to make his blood run cold.
“He killed my uncle with a butcher knife and buried his body in the pigpen. He turned himself into a murderer to protect me.”
Overcome with emotion once more, Will turned away to stare at the scarred trunks of the cottonwood and pecan trees along the creek. They’d withstood the fury of the floodwaters, emerging with their roots still firmly planted in the ground, but they bore the scars of that conflict. That made Will think of Matt, standing tall for all the boys he’d adopted, yet bearing scars that could never be erased.
“It was this face,” Will said, turning toward Idalou with sudden anger, “that drew my uncle’s attention. It was this face that forced Matt to kill for me.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Idalou said. “You were only a child. There was nothing you could do.”
“We endured two years of being shuffled from one foster home to another because Matt wouldn’t talk, of being thrown ou
t of the orphanage and into the streets because he attacked anybody who looked at me too long or touched me by accident. Before my parents died, Matt was the kindest, gentlest person in the world. Most of the time, he still is. But there’s another part that is hard and unforgiving, and it was all because of my face.”
“I don’t know what to say. I never would have guessed.”
Will could see the tenderness, the compassion she felt for him, but he feared there might be pity, too, and that was something he couldn’t accept.
“But you can believe I like having women fighting over feeding me, I like having a silly little girl believe she’s in love with me. Now you think I’m helping Junie Mae because I’m bedazzled by her face. Nobody knows better than I how little can be behind a pretty face. And no one knows better than I do how few people can see beyond that face . . . or even try.”
Now that he’d relieved himself of the burden of his built-up frustration, he felt guilty for dumping it all on Idalou.
“I shouldn’t be saying any of this to you, but you’re the only woman in Dunmore who doesn’t give a damn about my looks.”
No sound disturbed the silence beyond the chink of metal whenever one of their horses shook its head to drive off flies or stamped a hoof into the soft ground. Even the birds had deserted the area.
“I’m not unaffected by your face,” Idalou said, “but we got started off on the wrong foot. I saw everything going your way, when nothing was going mine. I saw no reason for your good fortune and no honest reason for my misfortune. You were a double villain because you were not only buying the bull, you refused to help me find it. You defended Jordan, Mara fell in love with you, and I saw you kissing Junie Mae. I admit I was angry, and a little jealous.”
“You were jealous of me?” Considering how she’d acted toward him, he found that hard to believe.
Idalou looked down at her pommel. “Carl and Lloyd said you were interested in me. After you asked me to go walking with you, I decided they might be right. You can understand why I was so upset when I saw you kissing Junie Mae.”
“Junie Mae kissing me,” Will corrected automatically, his mind quickly processing what Idalou had just said. He’d assumed that the warming of Idalou’s attitude toward him was the result of his pulling her from the floodwaters. But if she’d been interested in him before her dam was blown up, then maybe she really did like him. At least a little. Now the question became, how much did he like her?
He had been attracted to several women over the years, but none seriously enough to ask himself that question. It wasn’t just a question of if he liked her. More important was how he liked her. As a friend, as a business partner, as a woman whose company he enjoyed on occasion, or was it more serious than that?
Did serious mean willing to risk his life to pull her from the floodwaters? Maybe, but he’d have done the same for anybody else. Even Van. Ugh. He hated that thought. Serious enough to pay off the loan? Now he was getting somewhere. No woman had cost him money before. Well, not much money. Isabelle said it was good he was a skinflint since he was so lazy. Hell, he couldn’t be all that lazy. He’d been busting his butt since he got to Dunmore, and all for some suppers that were getting to be more trouble than his job.
“I don’t know how women do things in Dunmore,” he said, “but if you want a fella to know you like him, you kinda have to give him a hint. And telling him to go walking with another woman isn’t going to do it.”
“I don’t know how to talk to a man,” Idalou said, still not willing to meet his gaze.
“You didn’t seem to have any problem with Webb or Van.”
She looked up. “I’ve known them for years. Besides, they didn’t leave me speechless when I first set eyes on them. Then you were concerned that I might have become overheated. You even brought me water.”
“I couldn’t ignore the fact that you looked about ready to faint.”
“Then you refused to help me look for the bull.”
“I refused to go with you to accuse Jordan of stealing the bull,” Will corrected.
“It didn’t matter. I was too angry to notice the difference. Then they made you sheriff, and I was sure they’d made a huge mistake. Even though I was mad, I began to notice you got things done in a quiet way.”
“Are you trying to say you don’t think I’m an incompetent idiot?”
Idalou laughed. “I guess so. Was I doing such a bad job?”
The tension in Will’s stomach relaxed, and he smiled. “Women have a way of talking about a thing without ever using the word. ‘You’re an idiot.’ ‘You’re not an idiot.’ That a man can understand. All this other stuff leaves too much room for misunderstanding. And if there’s one thing that makes a woman mad, it’s a man misunderstanding her, even if what she said didn’t make a lick of sense.”
“Are women really that hard to understand?”
“Sometimes I think they feel they’re required to use up a certain number of words every day. Hell, I’ve got two brothers who can go for days without saying a word, and they understand each other perfectly.”
Idalou laughed so cheerfully Will couldn’t help laughing, too. “I like you, Will Haskins. I don’t understand you, but I like you. Is that clear enough for you?”
“I like you, too. I don’t know why, but I guess I’ll figure it out soon enough.”
Idalou looked at him with a kind of confused amazement. “Are you always like this?”
“Like what?” That didn’t sound good. It was the kind of question that could be followed by either a kiss on the cheek or a knockout punch.
“Open. Without guile. Saying what’s on your mind without worrying about how it sounds.”
“Isabelle says—”
“I’m sure your mother is a remarkable woman, but I want to know what you think.”
It wasn’t often that anyone wanted to know what Will thought about anything. The notion was kind of unsettling when he came to think of it.
“It’s a whole lot easier on everybody if they know exactly where you stand right from the get-go,” he said. “Beating around the bush just confuses people. As for saying what’s on my mind, it’s just easier to go on and get it out of the way. People are going to have to hear it sooner or later. Honesty saves a lot of time.”
He wasn’t sure he liked the way Idalou was staring at him. He had enough sisters-in-law to know how women looked at the men they loved, and this wasn’t it. There was an element of fondness there, as if for a child or a small dog, but not the I’m crazy about you expression that made a man feel like he was king of the world. This was closer to the kind of look that made you want to slink away and think about a complete change of wardrobe. He decided to change the subject instead.
“You’re going to have to stay with Junie Mae longer than you thought,” he said. “You won’t be able to set up a tent here for at least a week.”
“What about the animals?” Idalou appeared surprised by the change of subject.
“If they survived, they can take care of themselves for a while. I could get some wire to pen up the chickens, but you’ll have to feed them. The ground has been swept clean of anything they could eat.” He supposed coyotes would get most of the chickens if they weren’t rounded up soon. “You could take any we find to Alma McGloughlin.”
“Will you help me?”
If he was willing to go tramping through mud looking for chickens—not to mention catching the flapping, squawking, pecking things—he supposed he had to be serious about Idalou. But catching chickens didn’t seem much like courting to him.
“I think my aunt knows,” Junie Mae said tearfully to Will, “or at least suspects. “She’s been looking at me very closely these last two days.”
Junie Mae was crying on his shoulder again. It made him very uncomfortable, but he didn’t have the heart to deny her. The poor woman had no one else she could talk to. “Has anything changed?” Will wasn’t conversant with the details of pregnancy, but he had too many sisters-i
n-law not to know about morning sickness.
“I’ve lost my appetite.”
That didn’t sound too terrible. It could be blamed on a lot of things.
“This morning the smell of bacon nearly made me sick.”
Morning sickness in its infancy. Another day or two and she’d have to confess or claim she had influenza. But even that would only postpone the inevitable. He needed to hear back from Isabelle soon.
“Well, there’s no point in worrying until we know what she’s going to do.” Junie Mae pulled away from Will, and he had to struggle not to heave a sigh of relief.
“She’ll throw me out.”
“I’ll make sure you have a place to stay until you have a chance to decide what to do about your future. Has Van spoken to you since you told him?”
Junie Mae wiped her eyes and sniffed. “Not a word. The other day he crossed the street when he saw me coming. What did he think I was going to do, proclaim my shame before half the town?”
Men who found themselves the fathers of babies they didn’t want weren’t liable to think too clearly, if at all. Most took the first opportunity to get out of town. Since Van didn’t have that option, he probably hoped that if he stayed as far away from Junie Mae as possible the whole thing would go away.
“Then all we have to do is decide what to do about your future.”
His remark brought on another bout of tears that wet the few places on his shirt that weren’t already damp. By the time Junie Mae had stopped crying, dried her eyes, and slipped out the back door, Will was ready to jump on his horse and go chase a few steers. He hadn’t had time to reach for his hat before Mara stormed in.
“What was that man-stealing Junie Mae Winslow doing in here?” she demanded. Her color was high, and her breasts were heaving.
“We were discussing a problem that has come up,” Will said, hoping that explanation would stall her curiosity.
“I was looking through the crack in the door,” Mara informed him. “She was crying, and you were hugging her.”
“Well, if you saw what happened, why did you ask?” Will demanded, feeling aggrieved. “It would have been a fine thing if I’d lied with you knowing the truth the whole time.”
Texas Tender Page 16