Denim and Lace

by Rice, Patricia

  She stopped abruptly, and Sloan could almost hear the little wheels spinning around in her head. In less than a minute she had it worked out. She was a damned sight smarter than he was at that age.

  "Medical degree. You bastard. You have a medical degree, don't you?"

  Sam glared at him as if he'd just declared himself Lincoln's assassin. If there'd been anything on the table beside her to throw, she probably would have thrown it.

  "Dr. Montgomery, at your service, my lady, for all the good it does anybody," he answered cynically. "I never practiced. I came home from Scotland, discovered my father had died, leaving me a wealthy man, and my wife was having the time of her life with my inheritance. It took just about one year for me to discover that nothing I could say or do would make Melinda into a physician's wife, or even the loving wife of a rich man."

  Sam was sitting frozen, hanging on to his every word. It wasn't as if it were an unusual story, or even a sad one. Not what he'd told her so far, anyway. But she was listening to things that weren't there, as usual. Sloan supposed that a woman who could talk to grapevines could hear things that weren't said, too.

  "You blamed yourself for neglecting a young wife for two years," Sam surmised, quite accurately.

  He grimaced. "That's what I told myself anyway. I was a little older by then—a little more mature. I hadn't exactly been celibate those two years myself. I'd practically forgotten what she looked like. I wouldn't call what we had a love match, but I'd meant to make it work. There wasn't any reason we couldn't have."

  "Except Harry," she filled in for him.

  "Except Harry." Sloan thought his fingers must be numb by now from pressing his head into them. "I don't want to tell you the rest. Go on to bed, Samantha. In the morning I'll find some way to send you down to stay with my brother. It will be easier for Hawk to find you there when he has word of your father."

  "I won't go. I'll move back with my mother if you want me out. You don't have to bend over backward to protect my reputation. I figured you'd tire of me sooner or later. I think you've accomplished your purpose by now. Everyone will just think I'm your wife, but we can't get along." She stood up and started for the door.

  That was half of what he wanted, but not enough. "Sam," he called to her.

  She turned around, and Sloan saw that she was learning to keep her expression as closed as his. He didn't like that feeling. He wanted her to rage at him, to throw things, to go for her gun if nothing else. But she stood there calmly as if he hadn't ripped her insides out by telling her to get out of his life. She'd thought she was marrying him, for pity's sake. She'd actually agreed to marry him. Him, the bastard incarnate. Hell, he took it all back. She was even more naive than he'd been all those years ago.

  "Sam, it isn't you. The only way I could persuade Melinda not to contest the divorce was by promising her she could have my name and everything that I owned so there wouldn't be a scandal. The divorce would become public if I married you legally. I'm a doctor, not a lawyer. I don't know the legal ramifications of marrying you under the name Sloan Talbott, or even what would happen if I broke the agreement and used Montgomery. Besides, it wouldn't be right to tie an innocent like you to a man like me. It couldn't ever last. I simply don't want you blaming yourself."

  She gave him a watery smile, and he could see she was near tears. He hated it when she cried. Tears made him feel helpless. Melinda had used tears quite effectively until he learned they were fake. Sloan had the gut-wrenching certainty that Samantha's weren't fake.

  "I'm not exactly the wifely type, I know," she said quite clearly. "Once spring arrives, I'll probably forget to cook your meals, and the dust will be so thick I could use it for planting. I'm not pretty and delicate, and I don't need a man to protect me. So I guess I really don't need a husband. I'd never thought about having one anyway. It was kind of nice pretending for a while, even if you are as lousy a husband as I am a wife."

  She closed the door between them.

  If he was any kind of man at all, he'd go to her and promise her heaven. He would make love to her until they were both giddy and then look for a good lawyer. He'd left her thinking she wasn't the kind of wife he wanted, when she was everything he could ever hope to have and more. That thought grated on him worse than any other.

  But he stayed where he was because he was the kind of man he was: the kind of man who fell for the wrong sort of women, the kind of man who would desert his profession, the kind of man who could kill his own son.

  At least, if he drove Sam out of the hotel, he wouldn't be the kind of man who invited his past to endanger the future of anyone but himself.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Sam packed up and moved out the next day.

  Alice Neely came over and tried to persuade Sloan to reason with her, but he had the art of noncommunication down to a fine science. He put his boots up on the desk, listened silently, shook his head when she was finished, and began throwing darts at a painting of George Washington on his wall. He left her nothing else to say or do. He rather admired the grace and dignity with which she departed.

  Joe glared at him with hostility and retired to the saloon with a bottle of his best whiskey. Ramsey called Sloan every foul name in his vocabulary and pulled a few from his long-forgotten medical encyclopedia, then met Joe at the bar. Sloan rather wished he could join them, but he knew liquor would only compound the situation. He was a mean drunk. He was likely to drag Sam out by her hair and rape her before the effects wore off. And he couldn't afford to be without all his faculties if Harry and his hired killers were still around.

  Chief Coyote chose that moment to steal Sloan's best horse and ride off to parts unknown. Sloan considered going after him, but he was reluctant to leave town with a snake like Anderson around. He found someone willing to go off on a wild-goose chase and sent him after the mad Indian. He didn't expect results, but it kept him from feeling helpless.

  The first night without Sam, Sloan tried to retire to the bed she'd slept in these last weeks. He stripped off his clothes and collapsed against the linens as if she'd never been there, but the first thing that hit him was the scent of lavender. He hadn't changed the damned sheets. He grabbed a blanket and went to sleep on the sofa.

  It wasn't the same. He couldn't pretend she still slept behind that closed door in next to nothing, available for the asking. He tossed and turned and woke up the next morning on the floor.

  Cursing, he took to dismantling the bedroom as a relief from frustration. He ripped the sheets from the bed, only to find one of Sam's dainty undergarments caught beneath the mattress. He heaved the mattress out the hall door to air, and found one of her gardening gloves beneath the bed.

  A book she had been reading rested open on a table in his parlor. A bonnet hung on a hook downstairs where she'd taken it off and left it. Her pots of plants had multiplied and spilled over to his study windows and the gallery railing. He couldn't walk through a single room of his own home without finding some reminder of Sam, and every single reminder cut into him like the sharp point of a knife.

  He didn't know why it was so. Melinda could have dumped her entire wardrobe and all her perfume across his floor and he would have set fire to it gladly and without an ounce of remorse. But he left Sam's book where he found it, watered the pots of plants, and kept her damned lavender-scented undergarment in his trunk. The glove he placed with the bonnet downstairs, where she could find it if she came over to look at her plants. He was out of his mind.

  He methodically worked over his bookkeeping until he found every misplaced penny, then strolled over to the store to check on Harriet's ledgers. He forgot the ledgers when he found Sam taking her sister's place while Harriet answered a call of nature. She asked after her plants and he told her she was welcome to check on them anytime. Then he walked out as if that was all he had come in to do.

  Sloan knew he'd made a fatal mistake when he heard whistling later that afternoon and traced it to the kitchen. Copper hair tied up in a
scarf, slender fingers caked in mud, long legs encased in tight gabardine, Sam sat happily, replanting seedlings in a sunny spot by the window. Her whistling faltered slightly when he wandered in, but she managed a bright smile that faded immediately as soon as he turned his back and walked out.

  He'd made some giant mistakes in his life, but he didn't think any of them matched getting involved with one Samantha Neely. Deciding a single whiskey wouldn't be amiss, Sloan joined Joe and Ramsey at the bar.

  Joe picked up his bottle and retreated to a table as soon as Sloan came to stand beside him. Sloan glared at this defection and poured his own.

  "Kind of quiet around here," Ramsey said to no one in particular, before turning to acknowledge Sloan's presence. "Want me to shoot at you and liven it up a bit?"

  "You couldn't hit the broad side of a barn when sober," Sloan answered acidly.

  "And you don't know your ass from a hole in the ground." Ramsey replied in kind, then lifted his glass and swallowed the contents.

  "You're the one who studied anatomy in butcher's school. What did you get your degree in? Bullshitting?"

  Red-eyed, Ramsey gripped the bar rail and turned his glare on his nemesis. "I didn't get any highfalutin’ education like some fancy-pants easterners I know, but money can't buy common sense. If you had one ounce of brains, you'd know you threw away one of the finest creatures this side of paradise. Someone ought to shoot you just to put the world out of your misery."

  Ramsey straightened drunkenly, pulled his disheveled frock coat into some semblance of order, and tried to tug at his nonexistent cravat. "As a matter of fact, being a man of common sense, I think I'll court Miss Samantha myself." He lurched toward the doorway.

  Sloan grabbed him by the back of his coat, swung Ramsey around, and plowed his fist into his jaw, sending the drunken doctor flying across the polished floor. "Mrs. Talbott!" he shouted, standing over his adversary, daring him to return to his feet. "She's my wife, and you damned well can't court her."

  But Ramsey had passed out cold and didn't offer the fight Sloan wanted.

  Joe gave his employer a look of disgust and spat into a corner. "Looks like you'll have to go find your wife if it's a fight you're spoiling for. She's the only one who can stand up to you."

  The truth of that spun him back on his heels. Sloan wished he was drunk enough to ignore it, but one whiskey didn't begin to desensitize him enough.

  Walking over Ramsey, he left the saloon for the mining camp.

  With Sloan gone, Sam felt free to finish her project of restoring the kitchen. She supposed it was a futile effort since Sloan would never use it for cooking, but this part of the winter always made her restless. She needed something to occupy her hands, if not her mind.

  No one seemed to find it odd that she worked on a place that was not her own. The men still called her Mrs. Talbott. She suspected most of the town figured she and Sloan had had a little tiff that would blow over after a while. They all knew Sloan was a difficult man. Their misplaced sympathy was entirely with her.

  She didn't see any point in correcting them. No one would believe her anyway. Accustomed to ignoring public opinion, she went her own way as usual.

  Joe returned to painting the kitchen walls. Bernadette helped with the tiles when she wasn't with Harriet in the store or their mother in the restaurant. Jack mixed paint and ran errands when he wasn't digging for buried treasure in the garden or listening to tall tales in the saloon. Amos Donner offered to build a table and chairs, and he seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time discussing their dimensions with her whenever Bernadette was around. Sam smiled and blamed it on spring being around the corner, just as she blamed her own restlessness on the caprices of that season.

  She couldn't sleep at night. More often than not, she ended up staring out over the moonlit mountains stretching across the horizon. She found dozens of ways to exercise her energies during the day—climbing ladders, scrubbing walls, digging the soft dirt of the hotel's kitchen garden. Just as Sloan had warned, nothing helped.

  She not only couldn't scratch the itch that he had created, but she couldn't drive him out of her mind. If she heard the shouting of men in the street, she would hope it was Sloan returning. Footsteps coming down the wooden back stairs caused her heart to skip a beat, until she was it wasn’t him. She had dusted and swept Sloan's rooms in his absence, something she had never bothered doing when he was there.

  She ran her fingers over books he'd touched, and opened the humidor containing his cheroots, just to smell their aroma. She stole a shirt from his dirty laundry and wore it to bed because it still held a faintly masculine odor that conjured images of Sloan beside her.

  She was quite certain she would recover from these hallucinations once spring arrived and she found her valley. She just didn't have enough to keep her mind occupied at this time of year. Sloan would become part of her past as much as the old hound dog she used to sleep with when she was a child. She'd loved countless animals in her lifetime. Sloan was simply one more.

  At the end of February, Hawk's younger brother rode up the trail. It was late in the evening of a particularly stormy day when he rode his horse into the neglected livery everyone used as a stable. Sam saw him from the hotel kitchen window and slipped out to catch him before anyone else knew he had arrived.

  He gave her a brief, dark-eyed look, then returned to unhitching his saddle. "Where's Talbott?"

  "Still in the mining camp. What did you find out?" Sam hugged her shawl around her against the damp and moved as close to the warm horse as she dared.

  "Hawk has gone to Mexico. There are reports of your father there not too many months ago."

  He still wasn't looking at her. Sam frowned. He hadn't struck her as the particularly shy type. Perhaps he worried that Harriet had told her about his improper advances. That was scarcely what was on her mind now.

  "Mexico." His words finally began to sink in. Her father had been seen alive not many months ago. Why hadn't he written? "Did those reports say if he was ill?"

  "If all the other reports we've heard are true, I'd say he was. But Hawk told me not to report hearsay. I've come to talk to Talbott."

  He was ostentatiously brushing down his wet horse and ignoring her. He was a young man, not as hard-bitten as Hawk, but his face was dark and uncommunicative as she watched him. It looked like she wasn't going to get another word out of him.

  "What's your real name?" she asked, just to see if she could pry anything off his tongue.

  "Riding Eagle will do," he answered curtly.

  "Well, I'm sure it makes you feel more manly than Samuel or Henry, but it sounds perfectly silly when somebody tries to use it. If you'll leave that horse alone, I'll get you some coffee and soup. Those are two things I know how to cook without difficulty."

  Sam swept out of the livery and ran through the grape arbor to the kitchen door, dodging raindrops. Riding Eagle followed her with some reluctance, but she knew about the empty stomachs of young men. She'd hit him where it would do the most good when she'd mentioned food.

  She kept the huge stove burning to keep her seedlings warm. Her mother often used it for the overflow from the restaurant. Soup went fast on a day like this, and the stove at the hacienda couldn't hold enough. Sam had been tending this pot all afternoon. She scooped some in a bowl and offered it to the wet young man.

  "You'd have to pay for this over at the restaurant, so don't tell the others I fed you," she warned.

  He nodded and ate a few bites greedily, then sipped the coffee she handed him. He was beginning to notice she existed, Sam realized with some satisfaction. She intended to pry the rest of his information out of him before he left here.

  "Donner is making a table and chairs, but they're not ready yet. I'm sorry I can't offer you a better seat than the floor. I think I'll make Sloan pay for the furniture. That would serve him right for calling Donner worthless and throwing him out." She pushed aside some flowerpots and took a seat on the windowsill.


  Riding Eagle remained standing, setting his cup on the stove while he ate from the bowl. He watched her warily. "I thought Talbott was your husband. Why are you so angry with him?"

  "I'm not angry with him. Or maybe I am. It doesn't make any difference. He thinks I'm a helpless female and that he's God. Apparently my position in life is to teach him differently."

  A hint of a smile cracked his angular face. "Sloan Talbott is an arrogant man. I have his horse down in Ariposa. My adopted grandfather thought Talbott needed to be cut down a peg or two."

  Sam grinned in delight. "The chief is an intelligent man. But that is getting us neither here nor there. What did you find out about this Harry Clark?"

  Riding Eagle's face shuttered closed again. "I will tell Talbott when I see him."

  Sam gave a sigh of exasperation. "Men are God's plague upon the world. I thought you might have a little more sense than most. I know all about Harry Clark or Anderson or whatever he's calling himself. I know more about Sloan Talbott than any man in this town. And I know your name isn't Riding Eagle and you're not an ignorant Indian, whatever you would like to pretend. Now, are you going to tell me what I want to know or shall I call Harriet over here and begin to give her explicit details about your reading abilities?"

  The look he gave her would have done Sloan credit. Sam returned it with an angelic smile.

  "Do you know you're not really Mrs. Talbott?" he asked curtly.

  "My, I did manage to make you angry, didn't I? I thought Indians were supposed to be as stoic as the ancient Greeks. But then, you're not all Indian, are you? The Spanish are supposed to be an emotional people." Sam waited to see if he would throw the bowl at her or leap at her with the wicked knife in his belt. When he merely gave her a thoroughly disgusted male look and reached to help himself to more soup without being asked, she nodded approval. "Very good. Harriet isn't nearly as meddlesome as I am, but she can be extremely irritating when she sets her mind on something. I know I'm not really Mrs. Talbott, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't spread the word around. Sloan is a mite sensitive on the subject. Why were you talking to the priest?"