Behaving Herself

by Yvonne Jocks

  “Lucy.” The storekeeper scowled at her from the stairs.

  The strange tension in the store didn't recede until the trio left. Audra repeated the name: "Mosier Valley. Is it close?"

  Mr. Hamilton said, “Maybe two, three miles. Why?”

  “Why do people talk so differently about it?”

  The storekeeper stared, as if surprised by her ignorance, but Jack smiled. His smile made her feel warm, safe, special. She did not know how to react except to look away, which she did.

  “I hear tell ,” Jack explained, “the folks in Mosier Valley were once slaves.”

  “Al of them?” She blushed at the foolishness of that question; the country had abolished slavery decades ago! “That is to say—it's a whole town of colored people?”

  Jack smiled wider, somehow amused. “Yup. A whole town of them.”

  Mr. Hamilton said, "Things are different here from up north, Miss Garrison. You'd be wise to keep your distance from the Mosier Valley folk."

  She'd thought more highly of him than that. “Surely they pose no special danger!”

  Mr. Hamilton said, "They don't. But if you mix with them, the rest of those rules you're following won't be worth a damn."

  Audra's mouth fell open at such foul language, but she did not have to rebuke Mr. Hamilton. Jack took care of it for her. “Watch your tongue around the lady, Ferris.”

  Mr. Hamilton stared at Jack Harwood, and then he laughed. And not at the idea of Audra being a lady—he did manage to gasp, “My apologies, miss.” No, he was laughing at Jack.

  Jack scowled back, and Mr. Hamilton laughed harder. It made no sense to Audra.

  Jack Harwood was, after all, such a nice man!

  By the time the slates arrived, Jack had sickened of being nice. He found himself countering a surfeit of daytime courtesy with nighttime wildness. By mid-November, he knew every backroom poker game and every source of bootleg liquor from Grapevine to Hurst. He smoked. He chewed.

  He cursed. He won and lost ungodly amounts of money.

  And he always wandered back to the mercantile before dawn, washed off the smell of cigarettes and whiskey, and fell into bed. The next morning would find him behind that damned counter, wearing clean clothes or even a shopkeeper's apron, ready to mind his Ps and Qs yet again. It seemed wrong; dishonest, even.

  But every time he considered leaving, Audra Garrison would come by, and the draw of Fort Worth's red-light district faded. She would raise her dove gray eyes to his with a sweep of long lashes, or blush at something he said, or smile shyly, or solemnly bite that luscious lower lip of hers. And Jack would think: There's still a chance. Don't give up yet.

  But he began to fear that, in those hopes, he proved even more naive than Audra herself.

  And danged if the gal wasn't naive as they came. Even when Jack took a chance on educating her a bit, she fought it. “That Claudine,” he warned one day, “is up to no good.”

  But Audra said, “I'm sure that she has good intentions. She's simply confused.”

  When he said, “Don't trust that Jerome Newton,” she used the term high-spirited, as if he were a horse instead of a youth of almost twenty. Jack had seen more damage done by such young men than he cared to relate—especially since the bulk of his anecdotes would contradict the sham of respectability he'd cultivated for his little schoolmarm.

  Even when he asked her to step out with him, she would simply say, “Be serious, Jack.” And he felt such pleasure to hear her speak his name that he let her go right on believing the invitations were playacting on his part. But sooner or later, her naiveté would get her hurt. At her age, Jack could've taken an out-and-out beating and suffered less than Audra seemed to suffer from an unkind word

  —even from Lucy the laundress's rebuff of her offer of used slates and books for the Mosier Valley school.

  “Thank you kindly, miss, but we don't need charity,” said Lucy. “We have a fine schoolhouse—it's our church. It's new. And our teacher is college educated. We get by.”

  Audra's face fell so visibly that Lucy added, again, “But thank you.” Then she glanced, concerned, toward Ferris. Did she think Hamilton would fire her over something like that?

  Jack didn't particularly care, and ignored both of them to draw Audra aside to suggest she go riding with him and take a look at that fine Mosier Valley schoolhouse themselves.

  “Be serious, Jack,” she murmured, a weak smile easing the worst of the pain from her eyes, and Jack felt the breathless sense of another close cal . Sometime soon, Audra Garrison would run into something that would hurt her too badly to be fixed with mere words.

  He couldn't decide if he wanted to be there when it happened or not.

  “Where is Claudine?” demanded Aunt Heddy, while Audra and Melissa started supper.

  Melissa said, “I think she's outside.” But something about the way she spoke, head down, concerned Audra. “Shall I go fetch her?”

  “Audra can do it,” declared the older woman. “No need to lose two of you.”

  So Audra put on her cloak and stepped into the slanting, late-afternoon light. She remembered being fourteen, how important it had felt to be alone with her thoughts . . . although she would keep her hands busy with chores at the same time. Could Aunt Heddy remember the uncertainty of becoming a woman? Poor Claudine could not even turn to her own mother, because Claudine's mother had died.

  So clearly could Audra imagine the poor girl's loneliness that she did not hear the strange noise until she'd almost come upon it. Startled, she stopped.

  Was there an animal behind the barn?

  If so, it wasn't an animal she'd heard before—Aunt Heddy had chickens, two old horses, and a few barn cats. This sounded nothing like those. It sounded vaguely like something in pain.

  Audra knew better than to approach a hurt animal unarmed, so she found the pitchfork, then investigated. Something about that moaning sound unsettled her deeply, as if she'd heard it before but erased the memory from her mind. Still, she would not let any creature suffer simply for her own comfort! She quietly circled the barn, to the shelter of the woodpile ...

  And she stared in shock.

  She'd come upon not one creature, but two—both of them her pupils. And what had them

  moaning stunned Audra into mortified paralysis.

  Jerome Newton—somehow she recognized Jerome, even from behind and staring at his bared

  bottom—had his pants down. Claudine, the sleeves of her gingham dress dangling to her knees, had wrapped her bare arms around his neck, and was making that moaning sound while Jerome tried to scoop armfuls of petticoats and skirt up off her stockinged legs.

  They were—Audra had of course never seen it before, but obviously they were about to—

  It looked so ugly!

  “Claudine!” screamed Audra, horrified.

  Claudine saw Audra and screamed, too. Jerome began to turn, wide-eyed, but Audra covered her eyes before she could see any more of this debauchery—or any more of Jerome.

  “Miss Garrison!” Jerome protested, over a rustling of denim. “This isn't what it looks like. I mean, we couldn't help ourselves—”

  “Don't tell Mrs. Cribb!” protested Claudine. “Don't you dare, Audra, or I'll tell that you—”

  At the blast of a shotgun, Audra screamed again. Whirling, she peeked enough to see her aunt shoulder the double-barreled shotgun she kept to chase varmints away from the henhouse. She still had one shot left and aimed it at Jerome Newton, who let loose an ill-chosen word.

  But at least he'd pulled up his pants. No way could he have skedaddled off past the corner of the barn, toward the shelter of the woods, if they'd still hung off his hips the way they had.

  Audra shut her eyes again, even though she faced only Claudine's bared bosom now. That seemed awful enough. She didn't cover her eyes, though, because she needed her hands to take off her own cloak and stumble blindly toward Claudine with it until the younger girl took it from her hands and—Audra peeked—wrap
ped it around herself.

  For a moment, the world had seemed a chaos of nudity, gunfire, screaming birds, and scrambling cats. Suddenly nothing remained but a blushing Claudine, a furious Aunt Heddy, silence, and the tang of gunsmoke hanging in the air.

  “Did he get your drawers down?” demanded Aunt Heddy, as if that question overrode any of the others— Are you all right? What were you thinking? —that Audra might have chosen.

  Claudine said, “No. Audra interrupted us first.”

  “Have you done it before? Don't lie to me, girl!”

  Claudine shook her head.

  Audra realized that Melissa now stood beside her, staring with shared awe at the drama before them. She welcomed the taller girl's hand on her arm. She felt ill . Another few minutes, and Claudine apparently would have been wholly ruined . . . and in so ugly a manner ...

  She feared she would never stop picturing Jerome Newton's bared bottom, the grimace on

  Claudine's face, the way they'd fumbled at each other.

  Why would anybody want to do something so ... so ugly?

  Was this what the gossips of Sheridan suspected her of doing with Peter Connors?

  “You will go to your room,” instructed Aunt Heddy, grasping Claudine urgently by the cloaked arm and dragging her toward the house. "And you stay there until week's end, when I shall take you home for your father to deal with. Melissa, stay out here. If anyone comes by to ask about the gunfire, say we had a coyote sniffing around. Audra, come with me."

  Grateful for her aunt's clear thinking, if not her terseness, Audra obeyed, shaken. Did her married sisters do that? Did her— No. She refused to think of her parents!

  “Put down the pitchfork,” instructed Heddy as they reached the house. Audra belatedly leaned the tool against the wal , then followed her aunt and pupil inside.

  Aunt Heddy said, “Do you have something to confess, Audra?”

  Audra blinked, startled. “Me?”

  Her aunt turned to Claudine, who stood wrapped in Audra's cloak, her sleeves still hanging outside her skirt. “You told Audra not to tattle, or you would tell me what?”

  Claudine had said that. But what could she possibly tattle about Audra?

  Claudine's face took on a pinched, angry look. "Or I'd tell you her friend Jack Harwood is nothing more than a professional gambler."

  Audra's mouth fell open. “How dare you lie about him!”

  "Jerome told me so. He's a gambler, and he met Mr. Hamilton at a poker game, and he's only staying in town because Mr. Hamilton paid his gambling losses in store credit. You think you're so proper and pure, and you've been friends with a gambler!"

  Audra swallowed back dizziness. Jack?

  Perhaps Jack pushed the boundaries of polite behavior, grinned a little too broadly, smiled a little too intimately. But ... a gambler? Someone who, instead of doing an honest job, made a living cheating foolish people out of their earnings?

  Aunt Heddy said, “Write a note explaining why you will not be by the store again.”

  “But she could be lying!” Audra did not care how childish her protest sounded. She trusted Jack more than Claudine. Jack had warned her about Jerome and Claudine both!

  “Audra—”

  “No,” insisted Audra, even more disoriented by this accusation than by the scene she'd interrupted behind the barn. “I will not be rude to him on mere gossip. I shall ask him myself.”

  “You will do no such thing,” commanded Heddy. She dragged Claudine into the bedroom to pack and to speak in private.

  Audra took her aunt's cloak to hurry to the mercantile before it closed. Disobedience or not, she would ask Jack herself, give him a chance to explain ...

  But as soon as she reached the store, as soon as she saw him look up from the counter in surprise

  —playing cards in his hand—she knew the truth.

  Jack Harwood was so obviously a gambler, she'd been blind not to see it from the start.

  Chapter Seven

  Teachers will not associate with people of questionable character.

  —Rules for Teachers

  “How could you?”

  Audra Garrison stood before Jack-—an Audra he'd seen only in his dreams. Slips of sorrel hair escaped her bonnet to brush her flushed cheeks and neck, but her fingers did not dart out to tuck them back into order. Her bodice expanded and receded with deep, desperate breaths, and her eyes—

  Passion flamed in those large gray eyes. Here stood no malleable, fragile china doll . Here stood a lady with grit. And she was gunning for him.

  “How could you make such fools of us?” she demanded, clutching at the glass counter. “How could you let us believe you were honorable when in fact you are a... a no-account...”

  He waited, wary and fascinated at the same time. Ferris Hamilton hobbled closer from across the store. “Is anything—”

  “A cardsharp!” accused Audra.

  Ham spun and began to limp wisely away.

  Obviously Audra knew. More than anything, Jack felt relief. The masquerade had ended. Stiff with anger, Audra raked her accusing gaze across him, but for once it was him she saw.

  “I'll venture that you disapprove,” he guessed, folding his arms.

  “Do you deny it?”

  “I've never once denied it.” He spoke carefully, as to a skittish animal, but she jerked back.

  “You did so!” Then her gaze fell away from his, haunted, as she apparently reviewed their brief history. “You said . . .” she began. “You called yourself...”

  He waited for her to work it through—and Lordy, but he wanted to hold her. His hands itched to grip her shoulders, if only to decide if he felt heat off her or a chill , or both. Tension charged her so subtly that tendrils of her hair quivered. Standing across the counter from her prickled at his skin.

  This was why he had stayed in Candon—this strong young lady.

  Yet even as he admired her outrage, it began to crumple. She began to crumple, eyes brightening, lips pressing tight, and he couldn't stop his own attempt at comfort. “Now, Audra ...”

  Her head snapped up and her glare struck him. “How dare you be familiar with me? I don't even know you. Did Mr. Hamilton realize that he was taking in a ... nothing but a ...”

  She turned her back to him, looking at Ferris, who quickly occupied himself with some inventory.

  From Audra's sharp huff, it seemed she disapproved of the unspoken admission. It was not surprising; she disapproved of quite a bit today.

  “A no-account cardsharp,” Jack finished for her, using her previous words.

  She nodded a single, jerky nod.

  No-account. Now that bothered him. He'd always considered himself a particularly admirable example of a cardsharp. He leaned his elbows on the counter, bending closer to her. "And have you known many cardsharps in the past, Miss Garrison?"

  She spun back to face him, chin high, cheeks flushed. “Of course not!”

  “So how would you know we're such a bad lot?”

  Her mouth opened in outright astonishment. As if she were so worldly-wise, herself.

  "If I'm the only gambler you've ever had truck with, and I struck you as a decent enough fellow until now, what makes you assume any different about the lot of us?"

  “I assume different because I've been told so. By my father, my brother—by people I trust,” she added. “And you aren't decent. You let the whole town believe you were a respectable, law-abiding gentleman. You let us ... me .. .”

  She swallowed hard.

  He spoke carefully again. “I let you believe what you wanted to believe.”

  “And you did nothing to disabuse us of it!” She might have been accusing him of high treason, from the way her mouth pursed primly around the words. Tarnation; if he did grasp those

  shoulders of hers, would he rather kiss her or shake her? Lucky for her, he was too much of a gentleman to do either. That thought annoyed him.

  “Could be folks ought not be told what to think,” he fire
d back. "Could be someone as intelligent as you might not wait for scoundrels to declare themselves before she recognizes 'em. Could be, Miss Garrison, that as long as you insist on holding yourself so all-fired distant from fellows like me, you dupe yourself, no assistance required. Maybe instead of marching down here to scold me like I'm one of your pupils, which I am not, you ought to be thanking me for not taking worse advantage of that cursed innocence you've been yoked with."

  “Yoked?”

  “Downright shackled.” Jack stalked around the counter to get closer to her. Much closer. Her eyes widened as she looked up at him, but she stood her ground. "Not everyone in this world waits for permission, and not everything that's the least bit fun is a sin."

  Her eyes narrowed at him, as though he were crazy. Maybe he was, expecting her to understand.

  “But you've got those Sunday-morning blinders on,” he pushed on. "You've been harnessed up for respectability as surely as if your folks or your minister or your aunt put the traces on you themselves, and you just stand there and let 'em do it."

  He could smell her, some kind of fancy soap covering her own, richer scent. The fit of her dress molded the swell of her breasts, the nip of her waist. He realized that he wanted something a lot earthier from her than a kiss. The idea seemed blasphemous ... and liberating.

  He watched her throat clutch when she swallowed, followed the tip of her tongue when, gazing up at him with wary fascination, she licked her lips. They seemed so close now.

  “You're trying to confuse me,” she accused, her voice barely a whisper.

  “I'm trying to free you.” His voice softened. "Take a gamble, Audra Garrison. What's a sterling reputation going to do for you except hold you in that suffocating job and find you a boring husband who'll just loop on more chains? Loosen those corset stays ..."

  And of its own accord, his hand brushed lightly down her ribs to the flare of her hip. Lady or no lady, she was hot—hot and starched and real. And she did not wear a corset.

  She shuddered, caught her breath, but continued to stare up at him, dazed.

  He leaned nearer, brought his lips close enough to hers that he could taste her breath. “What,” he whispered as he closed the last few inches between them, “do you have to lose?”