They sat in silence, listening for the sound of a gig coming along the road, until Les asked, “What is it like? Being married? I try to imagine it, but I can’t.”
“In what way do you mean?” Alex couldn’t recall having an intimate conversation with either of her sisters. Part of her wanted to encourage the fragile connection, but part shied away.
Les frowned and plucked at the folds of her skirt. “Did… Payton ever strike you when you disobeyed him?” she asked in a low voice.
Alex sat up straight and gripped the arms of her chair. “Does Ward strike you?” Staring, she watched Les unconsciously rub her left shoulder. “Les?”
“I’m just wondering if a husband might do that. If the wife did something to make him very angry, for instance.”
“Payton never struck me.” Payton’s weapon had been words, and he had wielded them with sharp precision. And oh how his words could wound. There had been times when Alex would almost have preferred a slap instead of the flow of criticism and sarcasm.
“Ward doesn’t mean to lose his temper,” Les explained, standing and moving to the porch rail. Her pale face disappeared in deep shadow. “But he gets so frustrated. For one thing, the store has lost business since his father died. And you don’t know how hard it is for a man like Ward to have to wait on people as if he were a menial. Last week the preacher’s wife dressed him down because she found mouse droppings in her sack of coffee beans. And he had to stand there and take it or risk having Mrs. Ledbetter move her business to the new store at the end of Main.”
“Did he strike you because he was angry at Mrs. Ledbetter?” Alex asked sharply.
“It’s just… you can’t imagine what it’s like to know you were destined for great things but find yourself trapped in a situation you can’t escape.”
“You’re wrong,” Alex said softly, touching the hard rubber rim that circled the wheels on her chair. “I know that feeling very well.”
“Oh.” Les whirled, distress pinching her face. “Of course you know. If anyone understands Ward’s anger and frustration, it’s you.”
Alex considered. Was she angry? Trapped was more accurate. She was trapped in this chair and in a life that had begun to shrink once she realized that every stair step was an insurmountable obstacle. She had stopped repaying social calls shortly after her period of deep mourning when she realized that Boston was a city of steps. Since she could not descend even her own porch without assistance, she had begun to restrict her outings. Consequently, the calls at her own door trickled nearly to a halt. Slowly her home was becoming her prison. There was justice in that, but also despair.
“I think I hear harness and wheels,” she said, desperate to escape. She rolled forward. “I’ll leave you some privacy.”
“Don’t go!” Les swallowed, and lowered her voice. “Ward admires you, you know. He’d like to hear about your home in Boston and your life there.” She glanced over her shoulder at the gig wheeling into the yard. “After we win our inheritance, we’re thinking about moving East.”
Alex hesitated. She had not liked Ward Hamm when she first met him during Joe’s illness, and she liked him less now that she suspected he had struck Les. But she also sensed that Les was not eager to be left alone with her betrothed. “I’ll stay for a moment, then I really must go inside. I’m tired tonight.”
They waited in silence while Ward extinguished the lanterns on the gig. If Alex hadn’t guessed that Les dreaded telling Ward about hiring Dal Frisco, she would have left at once.
“Good evening, ladies. How lovely you both look tonight.”
Les flushed with pleasure as if her betrothed’s compliments came widely spaced, but Alex doubted Ward could see either of them well enough to judge their appearance since they waited beyond the spill of light falling through the front door. The compliment impressed her as empty.
As Ward stepped through the light, Alex noticed he wore a broadcloth suit of an uncertain brown that matched the thinning hair exposed when he removed his hat. His collar and cuffs were made of stiff paper but it was a fresh set, not wilted from a day in his general store. Her first thought was that Payton wouldn’t have dreamed of wearing paper collars or cuffs, no true gentleman would. Her second thought was that she had turned into a judgmental snob.
Before Alex realized what he meant to do, Ward lifted her hand from her lap and brought it to his lips. The gesture was stunningly inappropriate and presuming. Ridiculous coming from a man who had been wearing a soiled apron less than an hour ago. It was all she could do not to express her irritation by wiping the back of her hand across her skirt after he released her fingers.
“Well, Alex—may I call you Alex? After all, we’ll be brother and sister soon.” Without waiting for her permission, he continued. “Are you finding Klees as provincial as Les and I do?”
That was exactly how she considered Klees, but she couldn’t bear to align herself with an unctuous little shopkeeper with grandiose pretensions. “Actually it’s been refreshing to rediscover the charming simplicity of rural life,” she lied, a smile on her lips. “I miss Boston’s cultural advantages, of course, but a constant round of society can be tedious.”
She was laying it on thick and felt ashamed of herself for doing so. It wasn’t Ward’s fault that she considered him unappealing—his mouth thin and meager, his eyes set too closely together. He was hardly to blame for the fact that she had disliked him on sight. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll retire now,” she said, smiling at Les and nodding to Ward.
She started to roll forward, but Ward blocked her exit. “I find your observations puzzling, Alex. Surely you recall how smothering it was to live in a rural community composed largely of people of the lesser sort. You did, after all, seize your first opportunity to leave.”
His rude reference to her elopement brought a rush of color to her cheeks. And impeding her exit was a petty act that she considered offensive in the extreme.
“Good night, Mr. Hamm,” she said coldly, fixing him with the same chilly stare she would have leveled at an errant servant. “Please step aside.”
At least he had the sense to grasp that he had offended her. He threw a frown in Les’s direction, then moved to one side. “Shall I push you inside, sister?”
His use of the word sister made her wince. “No thank you.” Though her arms were tired, she lifted her head and pushed on the wheels. “Good night, Les.”
“Good night,” Les answered in a toneless voice.
Once inside the door and out of their sight, she paused to smooth the irritation from her brow. Once the cattle drive began, she would not see Mr. Hamm again. Surely she could tolerate him for the few short weeks their acquaintance would endure.
“The whole town’s talking about you idiot women hiring Dal Frisco,” Alex heard him say. “What in the name of God were you thinking? If you want Lola to have the money that badly, why don’t you just hand it to her now? Why wait?”
Ward’s tone had altered from obsequious to furious. Alex hesitated, then sighed and shamelessly eavesdropped. The conversation was none of her business, but Les was.
“Oh Ward. It was thoughtless of you to refer to Alex’s elopement. I told you it caused an estrangement between her and Pa, and it upsets her to be reminded.”
“Are you listening? I’m talking to you!”
“Please, Ward. That hurts.”
What was he doing? Alex wished she could see, but she didn’t dare move for fear her wheels would squeak against the wood floor.
“Answer me. Why did you hire Frisco after I told you not to?”
“There was no one else. Ward, please. Let go of my arm.”
“No one else? Don’t you ever use your head for something better than a hat rack? Your Pa was rich. You could have offered enough money that every trail boss in Texas would line up for this job. For enough money, they wouldn’t have cared if every last hand was a female. Tomorrow tell your sisters to terminate Frisco and spend whatever it takes to hire someone
who isn’t going to lose half the goddamned herd while he’s in a drunken stupor!”
Les said something that Alex couldn’t hear, then she heard the crack of flesh hitting flesh. The shock of it made her jump, and her eyes darkened. Her first instinct was to return to the porch and rescue Les, but she paused with her fingers on the wheels of her chair.
She didn’t actually know what she had heard. Had it really been a slap?
In fact, Les was no longer a child but a grown woman, capable of making her own decisions and rescuing herself. If Les felt she needed assistance, all she had to do was cry out.
Her conscience absolved, Alex rolled away from the door, passing the archway that led into the parlor. To her embarrassment, Freddy was sitting on the ugly horsehair sofa, holding what looked like a script in her lap, her head cocked toward the porch window. They looked at each other for a moment, each aware the other had been eavesdropping, then Alex hurried past the archway and entered the hallway.
Inside her bedroom, she removed her shawl and folded it into a bottom bureau drawer. She of all people knew the truth in the old saying: You made your bed, now you must lie in it. Les had chosen Mr. Hamm, and now Les had to deal with the consequences. Alex had problems of her own, which no one was offering to solve for her.
Picking up a cookbook from her bedside table, she placed it on her lap, then rolled to the window and looked out at the land she hated.
Dear God. How was she going to manage on a cattle drive? The coppery taste of panic burned her throat.
Clearly Alex had overheard the same conversation and the same sounds that she had, Freddy realized. Laying aside the script she’d been reading, she leaned closer to the window, but Ward and Les had stepped off the porch and she couldn’t hear more than a murmur of voices.
Frowning, she gazed across the parlor at the low fire burning in the hearth. Her instinct was to charge outside and order Ward Hamm off the ranch. But Alex hadn’t believed it necessary to intervene. That made her wonder if she had actually heard what she had assumed she had. After all, Les had insisted to Alex that Ward didn’t hit her. Maybe the crack of a blow was really just Les or Ward slapping at a bug or a fly. There were plenty of both buzzing around the ranch.
Annoyed at herself, Freddy didn’t know why she was worrying about Les, anyway. If their situations had been reversed, Les certainly wouldn’t have worried about her.
Picking up the script, she tried to concentrate, but her thoughts wandered. It was a pity that you couldn’t choose your relatives. If she and Alex and Les hadn’t shared the same father, very likely they would never have found themselves in the same room. They had nothing in common, seldom liked the same things or the same people. They didn’t even like each other.
Leaning her head against the high back of the sofa, she closed her eyes and wished she had not agreed to move into the ranch house for the duration of the preparation for the stupid cattle drive. It irritated her that Alex had taken the largest bedroom, and that Les continually played hostess, seeing to meals and dealing with the housekeeper and maids, then asking everyone if she had made the correct decisions. Once again Freddy felt invisible, inhabiting an unseen place between Her Majesty, the oldest, and Pa’s favorite, the youngest.
Well, once this outrageous cattle drive was over, there would be no reason to see Alex or Les again, and that was fine with her.
Setting aside the script in her lap, she wandered down the hallway and stepped outside the back door. The cold night air felt good against her cheeks and throat. Walking past Señora Calvos’s kitchen garden, she approached the old magnolia tree that she had climbed as a child. Restless, she circled the tree, then meandered toward the fence that set the house apart from the rest of the ranch, wondering if Jack and Lola were together tonight. Probably.
The problem, she decided, was that she was attracted to the wrong kind of man. Put ninety-nine good, decent men in a room and one son of a bitch, and she’d pick the son of a bitch every time. Sighing, she leaned on the fence rail.
Her penchant for picking the wrong man very likely explained why she kept thinking about Dal Frisco, much as she hated it. What she disliked most was the certain knowledge that Pa would have admired him. Pa wouldn’t have cared that Frisco was an ex-drunk. Pa would have recognized a man like himself, a cattleman, a man other men feared and respected. At least that’s how Frisco would have been perceived before he lost his last two herds. But Pa wouldn’t have put much stock in that fact either. He would have said every man deserves a second chance. Of course, Pa wasn’t staking his entire future on Dal Frisco.
Idly she wondered where Frisco was tonight and what a nondrinking man did to amuse himself. Had he already found a lady friend in Klees? It wouldn’t surprise her. A man that good-looking, that virile and sure of himself, wouldn’t have trouble attracting a certain kind of woman.
A woman like me, she thought with a long sigh. Damn.
Well, she’d learned her lesson. No more men, not for Freddy Roark. And especially not a cattleman, perish the thought. She’d grown up with a man who smelled like cowhide and cow manure, who talked cows at breakfast, lunch, and supper. There were cattle in the yard, horn chairs on the porch, and a longhorn’s head mounted over the parlor fireplace.
That wasn’t what she wanted. If she ever took up with a man again, he’d better be able to recite Hamlet. But she wouldn’t mind if he looked and moved like Dal Frisco.
“Oh for heaven’s sake.” One minute she was giving up men forever, and the next minute she was deciding a future lover’s profession and how he should look.
On the positive side, Pa’s inheritance opened interesting new possibilities. With a fortune in the bank, she could go to San Francisco, where theater people were not regarded as degenerates. There might be a good man in San Francisco who wouldn’t care that she had appeared on the boards.
Of course, she’d sworn off men forever. But aside from that…
Dal Frisco popped into her mind again, and she sighed. She was willing to wager her best hat and the pile of scripts she’d collected over the years that Dal Frisco couldn’t quote a word of Hamlet if his sorry life depended on it. He was insolent, arrogant, and ungrateful. Domineering and demanding; a cattleman. He was one drink away from falling backward into ruin.
He was the best-looking man she’d encountered in years.
And a son of a bitch if she’d ever seen one.
Chapter 4
The first thing Dal did was instruct the King’s Walk hands to begin branding the two thousand beeves provided in Joe’s will. Next, he hired five brush poppers and sent them out to the thickets to cull wild cattle out of the brush. Yesterday he’d heard back from his wrangler, and Grady Cole was on his way to Klees. Once Grady assembled the remuda, Dal would ask him to gentle the horses the women would ride. He didn’t want them up on green-broke mounts.
It felt good to be working and productive again, to be juggling a hundred details in his mind. He had a future now; all he had to do was grab it.
Before he cantered up to the ranch house, he reined in and studied the King’s Walk spread. The ranch was everything Dal had ever wanted, except he wanted it in Montana.
Touching his heels to his horse’s flanks, he rode up to the house, expecting to see Freddy and Les practicing some rope work in the yard. He didn’t see Les, but he spotted Freddy between the house and the barn. Damned if he could figure out what she was doing, but he had to admit that she looked fine doing it. The black bodice of her dress fit snugly enough to satisfy a man’s imagination and suggested a figure that made him blink twice.
For a long moment he stood beside the fence, enjoying the sight of her and trying to puzzle out what she was up to. She appeared to be drawing lines in the dirt with a long stick, while shielding the sun from her face with a tiny, black silk parasol. When he gave up trying to figure it out, he climbed over the fence and studied the lines she’d drawn in the dirt.
“What are all those chicken scratchings?”
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“I am an actress,” she answered grandly, twirling her parasol above a little hat that wouldn’t have kept the sun off a flea. “I’m blocking a cattle-cutting scene.” Stepping briskly past him, she pointed to an X with her stick. “Here is where I enter. The lines near stage front represent the herd. I ride along this line.” She retraced a path with her stick. “Then suddenly, a cow—”
“Steer,” he corrected, frowning at the lines and x’s. “We aren’t trailing a mixed herd.”
“A steer breaks out of the pack.”
“Herd. It’s a herd, not a pack.”
“See this small x? That’s the runaway steer. This larger X is me. The steer darts left, but I’m not fooled, it’s not returning to the herd.” She dragged her stick along the lines, her brow furrowed in concentration. “I pull back on the reins, and assess the situation. Then I gallop in front of the steer, and he stops, turns, and goes back to the herd.” Looking up she gave him a triumphant smile that might have taken his breath away if he hadn’t been so flabbergasted.
“Miss Roark,” he began. But he couldn’t think where to go from there that didn’t involve a string of cusswords. Fuming, he grabbed the stick out of her hand and broke it over his knee.
“What are you doing? And how dare you!”
“Come with me.” Grabbing her elbow, he half walked, half dragged her toward the corrals behind the barn. Little x’s and lines. What the hell was she thinking of?
Outraged, she tried to jerk free, tried to hold on to her parasol and at the same time lift her hem away from splats of manure. Ignoring her indignation, he dragged her forward.
“How dare you lay hands on me? How dare you—”
He almost flung her against the log fence circling the branding corral. “Shut up and watch!” Gripping her shoulders, he turned her around. Instantly, she stopped shouting, stiffened, and sucked in a quick deep breath.
The Best Man Page 4