“Carrie and Hilda are taking care of them. Sarah’s already sound asleep. Now come along.”
Phoebe had the vague impression of passing a wall of disappointed, furry masculine faces as she limped off on Jack’s arm.
“Don’t walk so fast. My feet hurt.” She sounded querulous and was embarrassed.
“Well, now, we can’t have that, can we?”
When he swept her up in his arms, she thought about screaming, but all that emerged was a hearty sigh of relief. Oh, my, her feet hurt. She was so comfortable that she almost fell asleep as he carried her away. Dimly, she wondered if he planned to ravish her and then decided she truly must be crazy because the idea sounded utterly delicious.
When he plopped her down on a riverbank, she gave a little mew of disappointment.
“Here we are.”
She realized her eyes had been closed. With something of a struggle she opened them to behold the prettiest little pond she’d ever seen in her life, banked all around with willows and cottonwoods. It bubbled in the middle, and Phoebe gasped, delighted.
“Oh, my, how nice!”
“Thought you’d like it.” Jack sat down next to her, picked up a twig and began to fiddle with it. It was fiddle with a stick or grab her again, and he didn’t dare do that.
It had nearly driven him crazy to watch her dance in the arms of those other men all night long, especially since he knew very well they were all begging her to marry them and stay in Big Spring. He’d tried to keep his distance, to keep from dancing with her, thinking it would be for the best if she accepted one of their proposals. At last, though, he bowed to the inevitable. He couldn’t stay away from her.
“Take your shoes off and stick your feet in the water. They say it has healing properties.”
“Really?”
“Um-hum.”
A violent, bloody battle between propriety and comfort waged itself in Phoebe’s soul for a moment. Her resident Honeycutt belle lectured, and her feet argued back. Then she decided no war was worth the effort, untied her shoes, slipped them and her tattered stockings off, and dipped her aching feet into the sweet, cool water.
“Ooooohh. Lord have mercy, that feels good.”
Her sigh of contentment shot through Jack like a bullet and lodged in his groin. He had to squirm to get comfortable.
“You gathered quite a following tonight, Miss Honeycutt.”
He was disconcerted when he saw her brow wrinkle up and she frowned.
“I simply don’t understand it, Mr. Valentine.”
“What don’t you understand?”
Her hair, usually plaited with ribbons and pinned with inexorable rigidity to her head, now sagged from the exuberance of the evening. Tendrils had escaped to feather around her piquant face. Jack itched to finger one of those tendrils, to twist it around his finger and feel its silkiness.
“Well, I don’t understand—” she stopped, apparently embarrassed, and Jack grinned.
“How many proposals did you get?”
“How did you know?”
He did touch her then, although he knew it was a mistake. The back of his finger brushed her cheek. “The men who live here never see pretty girls, Miss Honeycutt. You’re like an angel straight from heaven to them; a breath of fresh air. They want to keep breathing is all.”
“But—but, I’m twenty-five years old,” she whispered.
“You’re a lovely woman.”
“I—I am?”
“You are.”
Her eyes seemed to get bigger and bigger the closer his face got to hers. Her mouth opened slightly in astonishment right before his lips captured hers. Then he heard her little sigh of surrender and felt a surge of triumph before his arms wrapped her up and he lowered her gently to the grassy riverbank.
Chapter Nine
Phoebe was grateful for Sarah’s company during the renewal of their trek to Santa Fe. Teaching the little girl to drive the wagon and mules kept her mind from dwelling on Jack Valentine.
Unfortunately for him, Jack didn’t have any such distractions. Antelope was tutoring William in the fine art of horsemanship and Pete was scouting for signs of Yves Basteau. That left Jack to his own devices. Time and time again he discovered Lucky Strike ambling alongside the wagon. His attention seemed inexorably drawn to Phoebe. Every single thing she did fascinated him. He couldn’t figure it out.
His brow furrowed as he listened to her fumbling attempts to impart driving skills to her niece. It took Jack no time at all to determine that Miss Phoebe Antoinette Honeycutt knew about as much about driving a wagon and team as he did about preserving peaches. The situation annoyed him.
“You’re teaching her all wrong,” he snapped at one point.
He could tell Phoebe was aggravated when she raised her narrow gaze to him.
“We seem to be doing quite well, sir.”
“Doing quite well, my granny’s goat. Who the hell ever taught you how to drive a wagon anyway?”
“I taught myself.”
“Ha! That explains it.”
“It just so happens, Mr. Valentine, that some of us have had to make do in the past several years. My driving skills may not be much by your superior standards, but they have served me well these five years, and I’ll thank you to remember it.
“I remember you didn’t have enough sense to set the brake, Miss Honeycutt, and that you managed to let the mules wander off and get you stranded in the middle of the desert.”
“I had never driven this particular kind of wagon before in my life. It wasn’t my fault.” Phoebe’s voice had risen by this time.
“Doesn’t much matter whose fault it was, does it? The results were the same.” So had Jack’s.
“Oh! Why of all the ungentlemanly things to say, that just about takes the cake!”
“Ungentlemanly?” Jack expelled a gigantic gust of hot, aggravated air. “Take a good look around you, Miss Honeycutt. See any of your fine, fancy southern gentlemen out here at the moment? I don’t think so! It’s a damned Yankee who saved your sweet little bottom!”
Jack realized he had gone too far when Phoebe began to gurgle with inarticulate rage and he noticed Sarah, her blue eyes wide with interest, looking back and forth between them as though she were watching a fascinating lawn tennis match. He reined in his fury and took a couple gulps of hot, dry Texas air. Then he bowed to the inevitable.
“Pull the team up, Miss Honeycutt. I’ll take over the lessons for a while.”
“We don’t need your help, Mr. Valentine,” Phoebe said through gritted teeth.
“Pull up the team, damn it!”
His roar made both Phoebe and Sarah jump, and he regretted it immediately. Another deep breath did not help him much. The air was as hot as his temper. He muttered, “Sorry,” and scowled at her. He was not a man given to apologies, yet he’d given her two in as many days. The knowledge rankled.
“Very well.” Phoebe pulled up the team, making absolutely certain she set the brake.
Then, before Jack could secure Lucky Strike to the back of the wagon and clamber aboard, she said, “Sarah, darlin’, I do believe I shall retire to the inside of the wagon for a spell. It’s past time I composed a letter to that poor departed boy’s mama. I’m sure you will find your lessons from Mr. Valentine most valuable.”
So saying, she climbed into the back of the wagon with something that bore an uncanny resemblance to a flounce. Sarah just stared after her, obviously surprised and more than a little dismayed that the two chief adults in her life should suddenly have taken to hollering at one another.
It galled Phoebe to listen to Jack’s kindly imparted lessons on wagon-driving. It galled her even more when she found herself straining to hear every one of his New York-accented words so that she’d learn the skill, too.
After a while, though, when Jack gave the reins to the child and let her practice driving the team under his watchful supervision, Phoebe turned her attention to the letter she knew needed to be written. She didn�
�t want to write it, knew she had used the letter as an excuse to get away from Jack. But she also knew if a son of hers ever met such a horrible fate, she’d want to know about it. Painful as knowing was, not knowing was worse.
Phoebe knew that for a dismal certainty. There was an empty grave in the family plot back home attesting to her knowledge. Every time she thought about that empty grave, she ached. The spot was marked by a headstone with a name carved on it; but there were no bones inside, no certain proof that all her grief and tears and agony had not been in vain. All she knew for sure was that Paul had never come home.
She shook off her melancholy reflections, took out a pencil and a carefully preserved piece of second hand paper, and began to think. She wanted the letter to be perfect. There was no way, she supposed, to soften the blow of a son’s death by hanging, but there might be one or two ways to mitigate the dreadful facts surrounding the calamity.
So engrossed had she become in her task after a while that she didn’t notice the wagon slow and come to a stop. When she heard Jack call to her from the front of the wagon, she jerked her head up and looked at him, surprised. Only then did she realize she’d been crying as she wrote, and was embarrassed when she had to quickly swipe her tears away.
“What’s wrong?” Jack sounded sorely aggrieved and more than a little startled to see her thus.
“Nothing is the matter,” she snapped, peeved that he should have caught her in a moment of weakness. Drat her silly soft heart. Her mama had been forever scolding her about letting her emotions run away with her.
Jack sounded even more irritated when he said, “God damn it, Miss Honeycutt, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing!” If Jack was irritated, Phoebe had become furious. Blasted man didn’t have the grace to allow her a moment of privacy to compose herself.
“Sarah, hold the reins for a minute. I’ll be right back.”
So saying, Jack handed the reins to the surprised Sarah, leapt down from the wagon, and stormed around to glare at Phoebe through the opening in the back of the wagon. Phoebe was mad as fire when he appeared there, big and glowering, with his black mustache bristling and his dark brows bent into two slashing lines above his angry blue eyes.
“Damnation, Miss Honeycutt, why are you crying? What’s wrong?”
“Will you stop swearing at me? Nothing is the matter!”
“Stop lying to me!”
“I’m not lying to you!”
Jack passed a hand over his face in a gesture of frustration. Then he whispered so furiously that the sound tore at Phoebe’s sensibilities like claws, “Damn it, if it’s about that kiss the other night, I already apologized for it. I’m sorry, damn it all! I didn’t mean it!”
His words pierced Phoebe like sharp, wicked needles, and she recalled one of the very first nasty things this fiend had ever said to her. She swallowed the last of the tears she’d shed for her sixteen-year-old criminal’s unhappy mother and drew herself up as straight and tall as her confinement in the wagon would allow.
In an icy voice that would have done any of her Honeycutt ancestor’s proud, she said, “You needn’t apologize further, Mr. Valentine. I understand how, in the absence of scorpions, a person of your propensities might sink to committing deplorable acts with someone like me.”
She saw his eyes open wide. When he had the gall to look confused, she itched to slap his insolent, handsome face. Wretched beast.
Well, she guessed she knew exactly what he thought of her now. Not that she didn’t before. He’d rather bed a scorpion. Ha! Of course, her life being what it was, his attitude was for the best, but he didn’t know that. And she’d make damned good and sure he never found out, either.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I do not choose to speak to you on the subject any further, Mr. Valentine,” she told him tartly. “I believe, however, that you should not leave poor Sarah to tend the mules any longer. They seem to be getting restive.”
A surge of unladylike triumph shot through her when she saw him give a start. He appeared to notice for the first time that the wagon had started rocking slightly as the mules fidgeted.
“Damn,” he growled. Then he stomped off, leaving Phoebe with a parting shot. “I’m not going to let this matter drop, Miss Honeycutt. Damn it all, you have no right to sit in the back of the wagon and cry!”
Phoebe would have glared at him if he’d been there to glare at. She felt the wagon sag and wobble as he climbed back onto the driver’s seat. Then she heard him speak pleasantly to Sarah. “I have no right to cry, my hind leg,” she muttered.
Then she heard the sound of rapidly approaching horses and peeked out of the back of the wagon to see Pete and Antelope, with William sitting in front waving his hat happily, galloping up to them.
Just as she stepped onto the wagon’s back bumper in preparation of making a leap to the ground, she felt strong hands encircle her waist and uttered a tiny shriek of surprise. She knew her face was burning when her feet touched ground and she swirled around to bump square up against the aggravating, hard, incredibly strong chest of Black Jack Valentine.
She was all set to scold him soundly for his impertinence when his expression stopped her cold. Or, rather, not cold but hot. Very, very hot. Lord have mercy.
“We have to make a dry camp here, Miss Honeycutt, because there’s no water until we hit the Pecos.” His voice sounded gravelly.
“Very well.”
“Oh, Aunt Phoebe,” cried Sarah, running up, her face awash with glee. “Jack taught me everything about driving a wagon and team. I’ll teach you tomorrow!”
Phoebe stopped herself before she could tell the child she’d eat hog slop before she allowed her niece to impart unto her any knowledge gleaned from Jack Valentine. She knew it would be not merely unkind, but perhaps foolish. Instead, she said, “I’d like that just fine, Sarah, darlin’. I’m sure you’ll be a splendid teacher.”
Then she startled Sarah into a wide-eyed stare by ruffling her blond braids and giving her a quick kiss on the cheek.
Her lips pressed together when she heard Sarah whisper to William, “What’s the matter with Aunt Phoebe? She just kissed me!”
# # #
Jack vowed he’d get to the bottom of Phoebe’s tears if it was the last thing he did on this earth. The certainty that she’d been vilifying herself for succumbing to his practiced kisses ate at him until he was jumpy as a frog on a hot rock. He’d been furious when she’d retreated to the back of the wagon because he’d wanted to sit beside her, to feel the warmth of her seep into him. Then, when he found her crying, well, he’d nearly snatched her up and begged her to forgive him and—God help him—marry him right then and there.
Damn. He had to get hold of himself. He hated the mere thought of marriage. Oh, he knew he’d probably marry someday. And he knew, from his parents’ example, that marriage could be a fine institution. But he liked his life as it was, damn it. Besides . . . marriage to a southern belle?
Too well, Jack recalled the marriage of his brother Josh to his southern belle. She’d made his life hell on earth. And then when the war started, she’d left. Just up and left. Abandoned Josh and their baby girl and run back home to her blasted plantation in Virginia.
Except that his heart had ached for Josh, Jack hadn’t been sorry to learn she was dead. Thank God Josh had finally found a good woman to marry and was happy now. Josh’s new wife was a good, solid Northern girl, reared in the same traditions he was, and they were making a family together. That’s the way it was supposed to be. A body wasn’t meant to marry out of his kind. Josh had proved that point beyond a doubt, and Jack wasn’t about to make the same mistake any time soon.
Besides, just think about what he’d have to put up with if he married Phoebe. The idea made him cringe. Having to listen to that damned crawling drawl for the rest of his life? Having to put up with her silly fits and fusses?
And waking up next to Phoebe for the rest of his life? Sleeping next
to her? Feeling her soft body pressed against his every night?
Jack decided he’d thought enough about the matter for one day. The idea of marriage gave him the shivers; it was out of the question. It was past time to put the idea out of his mind. Now, if only his mind would cooperate.
After Phoebe settled the children down for the night, the four adults sat by the fire to chat. In spite of himself and his resolve, Jack toyed with the thought of asking Phoebe to walk with him for a moment or two. He fought the impulse because it smacked of loverlike behavior, and he certainly didn’t care about her. Not like that. He just wanted to find out why she’d been crying, is all.
Talk was desultory. Phoebe was still mad at him and didn’t seem inclined to pretend she wasn’t. Also, she hadn’t yet warmed up to their two Comanche companions. Jack had a shrewd suspicion her standoffishness was due not to the fact they were Indians, but that they’d made her feel like a fool. He couldn’t much fault her for it, although he wanted to.
When Antelope finally said, “Well, I reckon we’ll head on out a ways and bed down,” Jack was hard-pressed to keep from muttering, “Thank God!”
“Yes,” agreed Pete. “When Basteau comes, I don’t aim to be sleepin’ by the fire, all lit up and posed pretty for him.”
Jack saw Phoebe shudder and heard her soft, “Ugh.” He felt compelled to say, “Don’t worry, Miss Honeycutt. They’re just teasing you.”
“No we ain’t,” Pete sang over his shoulder as they took off. Jack could have thumped him.
After the two men left, silence held sway. Even the fire seemed tired tonight as though it, too, had left its energy and happy spirits back in Big Spring with Carrie and her friendly neighbors.
Jack felt Phoebe stir. Afraid she was going to get up and make off for her bedroll, he shot a hand out to grab her arm and keep her still. It irked him to feel her stiffen, as though his touch were abhorrent to her. Quickly, he removed his hand.
“I’m not going to do anything to you, Miss Honeycutt.”
His voice sounded like that of a surly little boy and he gave himself a mental slap upside the head, much like the physical ones his father had given him in his sassy adolescence. He was a good man, his father, and all at once Jack missed him something fierce. They used to be able to talk, his father and him, man to man. Jack could use one of those man-to-man talks right about now. He wished his dad weren’t far away in New York, but right here, beside this fire in Texas.
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