by Deborah Hale
Closing her eyes, she imagined John standing behind her wielding the washcloth. Letting rivulets of warm water course over her breasts, down her neck. Grazing the sensitive flesh on the inside of her upper arms, across her shoulders. Though the temperature of water was quite warm, goose bumps rippled over Jane’s skin where the wet cloth had passed. The pink crest of each bosom grew firm and thrust itself out.
Once or twice, when the full implications of her performance struck home, she barely restrained the urge to jerk her curtains closed. Then she reminded herself she was perfectly safe. John could not touch her, except with his eyes.
More important, he could not pull away from her.
True, he might stop watching, but she didn’t have to know that. And if he had seen every garment removed, every intimate swipe of the washcloth, he might understand this was her strange way of expressing repentance.
She was sorry she’d asked him to stop kissing her.
“I reckon Jane’s ready to get married now.” John stared into the black, bitter well of his coffee cup and saw his future.
Ruth stopped sweeping the floor of his cabin. She insisted on giving the place a thorough cleaning every now and then, usually when she felt she had reason to corner and question him. His absence from supper last night and breakfast this morning had likely brought on this domestic fit.
About all John did in the place was sleep, or in the case of last night, not sleep. The endless hours he’d spent in his lonely bed, writhing and burning with a need he dared not satisfy, had given him a grim foretaste of hell.
“So soon?” his sister asked in surprise. John scowled and shrugged. “That lady from Bismarck could be coming anyday, right? Except for a few hard cases, I can’t take weeks to gentle the mustangs. If I did, Caleb would soon go back to letting the cowboys bust them the hard way.”
“You must have potent medicine, hestatanemo.” Ruth pulled a handful of dried sweetgrass from her apron pocket, strewed it around the floor, then swept it into a pile. “To make such a highstrung creature ready to marry after only one party and a horseback ride.”
He wasn’t certain what to make of Jane’s mysterious transformation, either. Not that he planned to admit it to his busybody little sister.
“I didn’t claim it was all my doing. I reckon Jane’s always had more spunk than any of us gave her credit for. With or without me, she might have been ready for courting now if you hadn’t thrown those first three suitors at her head so fast.”
“I suppose….” Ruth didn’t sound convinced.
John wasn’t sure how much he believed his own explanations. He had spent half the night trying to fathom that sensuous performance of Jane’s. And the other half hotter than the inside of a sweat lodge as he recalled every inviting movement. Every button unbuttoned. Every hook unhooked. Every pin unpinned. Even calling it to mind hours later made his loins ache in his tight denim trousers.
All this time he’d thought Jane’s nervousness around strange men was on account of too much prudish modesty about her body. He’d sure ciphered that wrong.
Now he wondered if an old fusspot like Amos Carlton might be man enough to handle a woman like Jane.
“Well.” Ruth whisked a small mound of sweetgrass and dirt into her dustpan. “When Caleb gets back from Miles City and you and Jane have made your visit out to Sweet-grass, I’ll see if we can set Amos to start courting her. Maybe she could stay with Brock and Abby for a spell once Mrs. Muldoon gets here. That way she’d be closer to town for Amos to come calling.”
Hearing Ruth talk so casually about Amos courting and marrying Jane gave John a tormenting headache.
“Who said we’re going to Sweetgrass?”
He wasn’t sure he could look Jane Harris in the eye again. Much less make that long ride by her side. Then be her sole companion and interpreter for a whole day with his people.
“Sounded to me like Jane’s got her heart set on going.”
Ruth shoveled ashes out of the rugged stone hearth that took up most of the west wall of the cabin. Her tone told John that Jane wouldn’t be the only one upset if he canceled their plans.
“Besides, I have some cloth and needles and beads I wanted to send to Walks on Ice. And a tonic I brewed for the children who were sick.”
“Why don’t you go, then?”
And leave him alone in the ranch house with Jane for meals? That, or go eat in the bunkhouse. Neither of those choices appealed to John, either.
Ruth shook her head. Not just a busybody, but stubborn too.
“Caleb’s been away a few days and I’m anxious to see him when he gets back. Someday you’ll meet a woman who’s special for you. Then you’ll understand.”
John got up from his little table by the window. The one he’d been sitting at last night when he’d spotted Jane removing her clothes. He couldn’t bear listening to his sister go on about a “special woman.” The Kincaid men had enjoyed more than their share of luck in love. John knew better than to expect the same for himself.
“Is this place clean enough for you yet?” he snapped, jamming on his hat. “I can’t sit around all day. I have to go see if those shiftless ve’ho’e cowboys are getting any chores done while Caleb’s away. Then I have horses to work.”
“What’s got the devil hanging over you this morning, Night Horse?” grumbled his sister, rolling up the fleece rug John kept in the middle of the floor. “This needs to be aired and beaten. I’ll send Jane out in a while to wash your window.”
“Don’t bother.” John stalked out the door, muttering to himself. “It’s plenty clean to see through.”
Never one to pass up a chance at having the last word, Ruth called after him, “Can I tell Jane you still plan on taking her out to Sweetgrass tomorrow?”
He knew his sister too well to believe he had any real choice. Besides, the bedeviling Miss Harris would soon be out of his life for good, taking her dual spirits of blushing virgin and brazen temptress with her. Which was the real Jane? He thought he’d known, but she was clearly a trickster of confusing subtlety. Perhaps Caleb had been right about her in the first place.
Over his shoulder John growled, “Tell her whatever you want.”
“John’s looking forward to your trip out to Sweetgrass tomorrow.” Ruth beat the fleece rug from her brother’s cabin with vigorous strokes.
“He is?” Jane gnawed at her lower lip as she hung one of John’s shirts to dry.
When she’d seen it in the wash basket this morning, she’d had the scandalous urge to smuggle it up to her bedroom so she could wrap herself in it to sleep that night. What had possessed her? Something at once foreign and familiar. A curious power that terrified and thrilled her by turns.
Maybe she didn’t have Lizzie Kincaid’s golden appeal, nor Abby’s strong, striking beauty, but she had still made a potently attractive man like John Whitefeather burn with desire for her. Burn so hot it had taken a creekful of icy water to quench his ardor. So hot it had incinerated the massive barricade of his honor.
When a woman had been so vulnerable all her life, how could she help but let this kind of power go to her head?
Giving the fleece rug one last swat, Ruth nodded. “I talked to John about it just this morning.” Something in her voice didn’t sound entirely candid. What was John’s sister not saying?
Ruth dropped her rug beater and scooped her young son up from the ground. “What have you got in your mouth now, Thundercloud? Clover. I don’t reckon that’ll kill you. One of these days, I’m afraid you’re going to take a bite out of a rattlesnake.”
The child gave an infectious chuckle, drooling a cascade of pink clover buds out of his mouth. He held out his arms to Jane. “Na-na-na!”
“Yes, you can go to Nana.” Ruth passed her son to Jane. “Just like a man. He knows when he has a lady’s heart wrapped around his finger. I hope you’ll have many children of your own, Jane—you’re so good with them.”
Trying to ignore the intense, contrary feelings Rut
h’s words kindled in her, Jane wiped Barton’s mouth with the corner of her apron. “I think this young warrior has a new tooth.”
She nuzzled his ticklish neck. “Have you cut a big sharp tooth?”
The baby chortled and crowed with glee, and Jane hugged him tight, dreading the day she would hold him for the last time.
“Aren’t you putting the cart before the horse, Ruth?” She tried to sound flippant, but the thickness in her voice hit a discordant note. “I don’t have a husband. I’m not sure I want one.”
Those last words gushed out, unbidden. A week ago, she’d have vowed solid certainty she didn’t want a man in her life again. What had caused this sudden waver in her beliefs and plans?
“I know they seem like more bother than they’re worth sometimes.” Ruth made a face. “But they probably think the same of us. It’s often hard to believe men and women aren’t two different orders of creature altogether.”
Ruth did understand. Until coming to Montana, Jane hadn’t realized how deeply she craved sympathetic female companionship. Barton wouldn’t be the only one she’d miss when the time came for her to leave the Kincaid household.
The humor left Ruth’s striking face, displaced by ardent sincerity. “There’s strong magic in the balance of opposites, Jane. In the Big Sky, we need all the balance magic we can get. This land can be hard on its women and worse on a woman alone. You’ve only seen it in a pleasant humor.”
For the first time since stealing out of Boston, Jane thought about marriage with sentiments other than nauseating dread. In the past month she’d cultivated unexpected talents that a prospective husband might prize.
After an uncertain beginning, she’d become a pretty fair cook. Instinct tempered by trial and error had ripened her love of children into a true knack for managing them. To her amazement, she had come to enjoy all the little chores that made a home clean, warm and snug for a family.
Her acquaintance with Caleb Kincaid had shown her the vital importance of a settled home life to a man who daily wrested his living from this sometimes grudging land. Zeke had spoken of the messy, haphazard domestic arrangements he and his father had endured before Ruth took the Kincaid ranch house in hand. Might Jane, too, feather a cosy nest for the right man and their young?
While it had come as a surprise to her how much men on the frontier needed a woman’s softness in their lives, she didn’t for a moment doubt the truth of Ruth’s words. A woman of the Big Sky could use a strong, canny man to fight for her and provide for her.
“What if you pick the wrong man, Ruth?” Jane shuddered, thinking of Emery Endicott. She’d been so pathetically certain she needed him to survive, and instead he’d almost killed her. “Wouldn’t a bad man be worse than none at all?”
Ruth flashed her a probing look, then grabbed a pair of Caleb’s trousers and pinned them to the clothesline. “You’re right, of course. Some women haven’t much sense about the men they pick. Often I wonder if they choose for the wrong reasons.”
“Like…?” Jane prompted her.
“Like thinking nobody else will have them and the man who will is doing them some kind of favor. Like thinking they can reform an incurable outlaw. Like wanting a man for the things she thinks he can give her, instead of for who he is.”
No wonder her relationship with Emery had gone so disastrously wrong, Jane reflected, hearing herself declared guilty on all counts.
Barton began to fuss, bouncing up and down in Jane’s arms.
“I’ll finish hanging out these clothes,” said Ruth, “if you want to take him for a walk. John might not be too busy to take him for a little ride.”
“Go see unka?” Jane asked Barton, unsure whether she was ready to see John Whitefeather.
“Unka-unk!” the baby shrieked, wriggling to reach the ground.
“I reckon that settles it.” Ruth laughed.
Jane managed only a tepid smile in reply. One look into John’s deep-set blue eyes and she would know whether he’d been watching her last night.
She wasn’t sure which would dismay her more—discovering he had or finding out he hadn’t.
“Okay, Bronco Bart, away we go.” Jane let him latch on to her hands for balance as he tottered off in search of his favorite uncle.
As it happened, Barton’s leg power gave out long before they managed to track John down. They found no sign of him around the corral or the stable. Jane even stole a curious peek into the foreman’s cabin with the excuse of looking for him.
The place was tidier than she’d expected of bachelor quarters, though she knew Ruth had been in to clean for her brother just that morning. A long narrow bed occupied one corner, with a low chest standing sentinel at its foot. The only other pieces of furniture were a small table and two chairs in front of the window.
One of Ruth’s patchwork quilts and a wall hanging of beaded leather and feathers dangling beside the bed were the only splashes of color or personality about the place. The oversize stone fireplace drew Jane, as she imagined its hearth aglow with an inviting fire. This afternoon, it looked as cold and bare as the rest of the cabin, compared to the bright summer sunshine outside.
“Unk’s not around, Barton.” A mixture of relief and disappointment swirled deep in Jane’s belly. “Guess we’ll just have to try to catch him later.”
Two precious dark eyes crinkled up and one plump lower lip began to quiver.
“It’s all right.” Jane lowered him to the ground again. “We’ll walk some more. Walking always soothes your feelings.”
Sucking back a tearful sigh, Barton staggered off, towing Jane away from the part of the ranch with which she’d become familiar. They hadn’t gone far when she heard a male voice from behind a shed.
“Big Chief’s on the warpath, today, Clel. Mind you stay out of his way or he’ll scalp you good with that tomahawk tongue of his.”
Several men broke into harsh, scornful laughter. Jane felt something foreign and frightening brewing inside her. How dare they talk about John this way? Why, he was worth a dozen of them!
“He’s a fine one to talk about us not pulling our weight around here.” The bitter words spat out like a disgusting gob of chewing tobacco, and Jane recognized the voice of Floyd Cobbs. “Lazing around the corral petting those wild mustangs instead of busting ’em like a real man.”
“Shucks, Floyd,” joshed a third fellow. “You’re just sore on account of Kincaid made his brother-in-law ranch foreman over you. Or is it ’cause Big Chief rode off with that pretty little Boston filly yesterday? I reckon that’s what put him on the warpath today. Got a whiff of her and now he’s all hot and bothered like a stallion in rut.”
“I reckon you got a damn big mouth, Clel Harding!”
Jane grabbed Barton as the sound of a scuffle broke out. Twelve years of life in Beacon Hill told her to run the other way, but six life-changing weeks in Montana propelled her forward.
The flabbergasted looks on those leathery, unshaven faces as she rounded the corner of the outbuilding might have been comical, if Jane had been the tiniest bit disposed to laugh. She wasn’t.
“M-may I assume Mr. Kincaid pays you gentlemen to do something besides fighting and gossiping?” Jane couldn’t believe she was scolding a bunch of Montana ranch hands like they were so many schoolboys, still wet behind the ears.
“Now, ma’am, no need to get riled.” Floyd Cobbs winked, as though telling his cronies he could handle her. “We was just funning is all.”
He took a step toward her, and it was everything Jane could do not to turn tail. They wouldn’t dare lay a finger on her while she was holding their boss’s son, she tried to reassure herself as her mouth went dry and her heart raced. Besides, the house was within screaming distance.
“Y-you’ll think it’s a good deal less funny if you’re run off this ranch on the barrel of a smoking gun, Mr. Cobbs. And I imagine that’s just what Mr. Kincaid would do if he heard you’d been speaking of his wife’s brother with such disrespect.”
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br /> “Now, ma’am—”
A sharp elbow in the ribs stopped Floyd. “Shut up, now, before you land us up to our necks in fresh cow pies!”
“An admirable suggestion, sir.” The combustible mixture of fear and anger inside Jane almost exploded in hysterical laughter. What a pungent image the cowboy’s words conjured up!
She hadn’t been on the receiving end of Mrs. Endicott’s haughty stares for nothing. Now she mimicked one for the benefit of Floyd Cobbs and company.
“If I hear one of you so much as whisper your disgusting insinuations about Mr. Whitefeather and me again, I will take the matter directly to Caleb Kincaid. Is that understood?”
“Loud and clear, ma’am. Loud and clear.”
They vanished like so many nasty insects confronted by a bright light.
Jane let Barton slide to the ground. She wasn’t sure she could sustain her own weight, let alone his, on legs that felt like twin columns of mashed potatoes.
Just then, John Whitefeather came charging around from the other side of the smokehouse. “Jane, are you all right? I heard your voice and some of the men’s. They didn’t hurt you or Barton, did they?”
He looked so anxious on her behalf, and maybe a tiny bit…jealous? An urge to swoon almost overcame Jane. She did feel a bit unsteady, and she longed to revisit the sensation of being cradled in John’s strong arms.
But she’d finally learned to stand on her own two feet and she wasn’t about to let go of that hard-won accomplishment for anything.
She willed her voice not to tremble and her chin not to quiver. “We’re both fine. I just told the men they’d better get back to work. By the way, how early will we be heading out for Sweetgrass tomorrow morning?”
Chapter Eleven
Early the next morning, while a mild breeze sighed through the western fringes of a prairie wet with dew, John and Jane prepared to set off for Sweetgrass.
“Are you sure you don’t mind us leaving you by yourself again today, Ruth?” John asked as they drank coffee around the kitchen table.
His sister waved her hand as if to sweep them on their way. “Caleb should be back from Miles City by noon. You need to get away before it becomes too hot to travel. Jane, you won’t forget to give those sewing supplies to my auntie?”