by Merry Farmer
He settled onto his back, still fully clothed, dug his head into the pillow and pulled the blanket up to both of their shoulders. Callie rolled to her side, facing him, careful and hesitant, and tucked herself against him. She slid an arm over his chest and rested her head on the pillow near his shoulder. It felt so right, so natural, that he started laughing silently again.
“What?” She demanded, slipping into giggles herself.
He couldn’t help it. He sputtered out to audible laughter, waving a hand to dismiss her question. His whole body shook. Callie squirmed against him as if she didn’t know whether to laugh with him or to be annoyed.
“Are you laughing at me?” she asked.
“No! No,” he insisted, still giggling. “I’m laughing at me.”
“John.” Callie lifted up on one arm and stared down at him. “You’re not that funny.”
It was dark in the wagon, but not dark enough to conceal her chest where the blanket had fallen from her shoulders. In just her chemise, her breasts weren’t exactly covered.
“John!” she scolded when she caught his wandering eyes. She hunkered down against his side and pulled the blanket up again, giggling in spite of herself.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He forced himself to stop laughing, took a few deep breaths, broke down one more time, cleared his throat and took one last deep breath. “Alright. I’m fine now. Go to bed.”
“You go to bed,” she muttered, stretching her arm over his chest. “John, you’re a strange, strange man.”
He sighed, reaching up with the arm that wasn’t trapped under Callie to rub his eyes with a last, weary laugh. “I know. I’m sorry. Go to sleep.”
Chapter Eleven
The next morning dawned bright and clear. Sunlight cut down through tiny holes in the canopy and the sounds of the camp were already humming by the time Callie pried her eyes open. She hadn’t slept so well in months. Maybe it was the fact that she hadn’t been that exhausted in months. Cleaning up after a tornado was tiring work. Maybe it was the safety of sleeping in the wagon instead of on the ground, although it was still a far cry from sleeping in a real bed. Or maybe it was the comfort of direct physical contact with John.
John was still asleep on his back, Callie curled against him. She’d twisted during the night onto her stomach, wedged up against him, her leg curved over his, her face close to his shoulder. Her hand rested on his chest, which rose and lowered softly as he slept. Still half asleep, Callie snuggled closer and smiled.
She liked John’s scent. It was rich and sharp with sweat, but still comforting. Familiar. Being close to him, touching him, was right and natural. The way things were supposed to be. Her hazy mind wondered what it would be like to touch more of him, to sneak her hand under his shirt to see what his bare chest felt like, to see if his stomach was soft or hard. Her hand inched across the buttons of his shirt to find out. Swirls of warmth zipped through her, centering in deep, excitable places that urged her to snuggle closer and explore.
With a sharp intake of breath she opened her eyes wide and sat up. What was she thinking?
She’d jolted John awake with her sudden movements. “Wha?” he mumbled as he wiped his bleary eyes.
Callie’s heart thumped as she watched him, disheveled and unshaven, but somehow as handsome as she’d ever seen him. Were those the thoughts she should be having about him? She scooted to the back of the wagon seat to see if her clothes were dry, aware of her body in all the wrong places.
“Good morning.” John sat and stretched, reaching for his glasses on the crate where he’d set them the night before.
“Good morning.” Callie smiled over her shoulder. Her tricky heart refused to slow. What was wrong with her? Why on earth did she feel like she’d been caught doing something wrong? “Did you sleep well?”
“Well enough,” he replied, sliding his glasses on. He groaned as he pushed himself to his knees and stretched. “You?”
“Fine. How’s your back today?”
“Stiff.” He answered then laughed, shaking his head.
Knowing that his silliness from the night before was still there put Callie more at ease. She picked up her clothes and shook them out. They needed to be washed. Everything needed to be washed.
“If Mr. Evans plans to give us another day here to set things right, I think I’ll try to do laundry.”
“Sounds good.” She heard him stand, hunched over since the canopy wasn’t very tall. “I’m sure they’ll need me to help repair wagons.”
He stepped across the bedding to Callie’s side and leaned forward to kiss her cheek. Callie’s eyes snapped wide and her heart rioted in her chest.
“I’ll go see if someone is cooking a communal breakfast or if we’re on our own,” he said.
Callie couldn’t find words to reply. She could still feel his lips on her red and heated cheek as he scooted away. When the wagon shook as he jumped down, she raised a hand to her face, blinking rapidly. What was that all about? It wasn’t the first time she’d felt his lips. He’d kissed her during their brief wedding ceremony. But this simple morning kiss was different. And it wasn’t even on the lips. The tornado must have scrambled her brain. She didn’t feel right at all. And yet, she felt uncommonly good.
In teasing counterpart to the stormy day before, the morning was clear and cheerful as Callie dressed then hopped out of the wagon. She drew in a breath of fresh air and smiled as she scanned the rest of the camp to see what was going on. John stood with a few others by the large fire pit that had been constructed the night before as one of the women poured something from a steaming pot into two of their cups. Several families were already laying out their clothes and drying personal belongings still soaked from the storm. Emma sat outside her wagon with both her mother and Dr. Meyers fussing over her. No one seemed to be in any hurry.
“This is for you.” John handed her one of the steaming cups when he walked back, a bright smile on his usually dejected face and light dancing in his formerly dull eyes. Had the storm changed him somehow?
“Coffee?” Was all she could bring herself to say.
“Do you drink coffee?”
She shook her head, raising the cup to sniff it. “Not usually. Although it smells good.”
“It is good.” He took a sip, watching her toy with her cup as he did. “Try it. It’s a new day, you should try new things.”
His words and the energy that accompanied him had Callie pulsing with excitement. Over coffee. She was mystified—mystified by her accidental husband. She sniffed her cup, then took a quick swallow. The coffee was sharp and bitter and truly horrible.
“Oh John, how can you drink this?” She grimaced, holding the cup away.
“It takes some getting used to,” he chuckled, sipping from his cup again. “Here. I’ll put some milk and sugar in it.”
He walked to the narrow gap between their wagons, setting the cups down and leaning into the front wagon, which now held all of their supplies. When he found a sack of sugar and a small jug of milk fresh from the Costner’s cow, he balanced them on the edge of the wagon bed. He added a little of each to Callie’s cup, swirled it around, and handed it back to her. “Now try.”
She raised an eyebrow at him and sipped. “All right, it’s not as bad now.” She chuckled, touched by his efforts. “But I still prefer tea.”
“I’ll drink it if you don’t want it.”
“You can—”
Callie’s reply was interrupted by a shout and commotion several wagons down. Still holding her cup, she stepped back so she could see what the trouble was. Two of the miners were fighting.
“You said it was still around here,” one shouted. “Where is it?”
“Shh! Keep your dang voice down,” the other, Cletus, replied. He twisted and squirmed, face going pale when he saw so many people stopping to watch them.
The first miner leaned in close to him and growled, “I don’t care who hears. You said you heard him say where he put it.”
“I… I,” Cletus stammered. He glanced up the line of wagons to where Callie and John stood.
“Tell me!” The first miner grabbed his shirt front and yanked him to his toes.
Instead of subduing Cletus, the show of aggression only made him angry. “Get yer hands off me!” He struggled, kicking at the other.
The first miner pulled back and socked him square across the jaw. As Cletus fell, a pair of women nearby screamed and jumped to get away. The first miner tackled Cletus before he could get up, pummeling him with a hard fist.
“You know something,” he growled between punches. “That piece of paper could make me a rich man. Where is it?”
“I don’t…. I won’t…. Get off me,” Cletus wailed.
The first miner continued to punch and Cletus to flail, until Kyle rushed up as fast as he could with his injured leg and drew a gun on the scuffle. “Hold it right there!”
More people popped their heads out of wagons and stood from campfires to watch. Callie inched closer to John. The pair pummeling each other on the ground didn’t stop. Kyle pulled the trigger, but his gun only clicked. He threw it aside, and with a curse, he lunged at the struggling men. “You say anything, Cletus, and I will end you!”
At last, Mr. Evans came tearing across the camp to intervene. Reverend Joseph was on his heels, pale as a winter moon.
“I told you lot, no fighting!” Mr. Evans shouted, grabbing randomly at the belligerent men. Reverend Joseph, Bible clutched to his chest, squatted to retrieve the gun Kyle had lost. He remained squatted, hunched over, hiding the gun and his Bible.
Mr. Evans wrenched Kyle out of the fight, and instantly the other two were still.
“Enough of this!” he shouted. Kyle winced and clutched at his injured leg, but Mr. Evans shook him all the same before letting him go. “I have given you more than enough warnings. This is the end of it.” He stepped to stand toe-to-toe with the two miners who had been fighting. “You lot are coming with me.”
He grabbed their shirts and dragged them off. Kyle sniffed and spat. He adjusted his shirt and turned to Reverend Joseph. Reverend Joseph flew to him and said something that Callie couldn’t hear. Kyle came back with a murmured reply.
“Kyle!” Mr. Evans shouted. “Now!”
Kyle glared at Mr. Evans’ back before he and Reverend Joseph followed, Kyle limping. Reverend Joseph peeked over his shoulder at Callie as they left.
“What was that all about?” Callie hugged herself with one arm. A reverend’s look shouldn’t give her chills, but it had.
John shook his head, serious all over again. “It can’t be any good.”
He downed another long gulp of his disgusting coffee and walked around to the back of the wagon.
Callie watched for a few more minutes, waiting to see if there would be some sort of explanation. There was none. Their anxious neighbors murmured to themselves and returned to their breakfasts. Callie shook her head, turned back to the wagon, took another sip of coffee, and grimaced.
“I have no idea how you can drink this,” she told John.
The smile he gave her in return was strained.
“Is everything all right?” she asked, sniffing her coffee and trying another sip.
John nodded past her to where Mr. Evans was dressing down the miners who had been fighting. “I don’t like the look of that. I think there’s more trouble on the way.”
There was nothing good about two sober miners breaking into a fistfight in the early morning while decent folks were enjoying their coffee. John watched Pete Evans as he had words with Kyle and the other miners. He kept on watching Kyle and Reverend Joseph—who must have thought he was helping—when the scolding broke up. The situation made him uneasy. As raw and new as he felt after the literal and figurative whirlwind he’d gone through the day before, he had to get to the bottom of anything that could end up harming Callie.
“I’m off to see if anyone needs an extra hand today,” he told Callie once breakfast was finished.
She had already started gathering their laundry and washing things and replied, “All right,” with a distracted nod.
He swayed toward her, debating whether he could get away with kissing her before he left. For a moment, his seriousness melted into a warm smile. It had felt so right to kiss her that morning, to hold her through the night. That was what life was about and he wanted more of it. But life was also keeping the people you cared for from harm.
He fit his hat on his head, adjusted his glasses, and set out across the wagon train to see if he could lend a hand and get to the bottom of the business with the miners at the same time. They’d made progress repairing those wagons that had been badly damaged by the storm the day before, but there was still much work to be done. He stopped by Nick Costner’s wagon first.
“I don’t like working in a pinch without proper tools,” Nick grumbled as John helped him repair the wheels on the Sutton’s wagon. “And I most certainly don’t like working with thieves and brawlers every which way I turn.”
John jumped at his chance to dig for information. “Any idea why they were fighting?”
Nick shrugged. “Why do that sort fight anyhow? Probably had something to do with cards or whiskey.”
John shook his head and held a spoke in place while Nick hammered it home. “One of them was shouting like he was looking for something.”
“Probably something one of them stole,” Nick huffed a humorless laugh. He finished with the one spoke and reached for another to finish fixing the wheel. As he did, he smiled. “Say, how’s that pretty, new wife of yours? They tried to steal from her, didn’t they?”
“Callie seems to be doing just fine.” He couldn’t help but beam and seek her out at the edge of the river where she was now washing clothes with a pair of other women.
Nick laughed. “You’re a lucky man. She’s a beauty, that one, and seems to have a good head on her shoulders.”
“She is and she does.”
“We all thought the two of you were plumb crazy hitching up so suddenly when her brother died,” Nick went on. “But you seem content.”
“Yes.” John let out a breath, shoulders relaxing as he turned from watching Callie to helping Nick. “Yes, I am content. I think Callie is too.” He remembered the feel of her in his arms the night before, the blossom of desire she’d provoked in him when he’d thought that part of him was long dead.
“Is she a good kisser?” Nick asked with a wink.
Heat rushed to John’s face. He would love to know the answer to that himself. There were plenty of worse things he could think of to fill his time than working on finding out, if Callie was willing.
“A man never talks about those special moments between him and his wife,” he answered Nick.
When he was finished helping Nick with the wagon wheels, he moved on to assist Pete as he repaired and reattached the tongue on a wagon so that the yokes could be fixed back on to pull it.
“Whatever it is that lot is looking for,” Pete growled when he was asked about the fighting, “it had better not be trouble. I’ve had more than enough on this one journey alone to last a lifetime.”
“It’s been an interesting trip,” John agreed.
“Interesting?” Pete’s back was up in a flash. “It’s been hell! I’ve had folks getting sick and dying on me. That’s bad enough, but I’ve always prided myself on keeping my trains healthy and happy. Then I’ve got that crazy Miss Tremaine and her escort, or whatever you want to call a man who follows her like a shadow, and whoever’s trying to do her harm. I don’t know if I want to tell them to get on with it or if I want to stick them at opposite ends of the train.”
“Get on with it?” John asked, trying not to grin and failing.
Pete shook his head without any humor. “Them two are randier than a pair of rabbits in heat. The reverend might disagree with me, but if a man’s got a willing woman by his side and if it would put the two of them and everyone else in the county out of their
misery to just do what God intended for men and women to do, then by all means, get on with it and give the rest of us some peace.”
John laughed in spite of himself. He wondered what Pete thought he and Callie got up to at nights alone in their wagon. Of course, until yesterday, he hadn’t thought intimacy with his wife would ever be something he’d need to worry about. Now that he was alive, now that he knew how she felt against him, it raised more than just certain parts of his anatomy. It raised a whole new set of possibility and problems.
“But the worst of it is those miners,” Pete railed on. “I’ve had rough sorts before, and for the most part I’ve been able to keep them quiet. But there’s something with this lot that just doesn’t sit right with me.”
“I know the feeling.” John set aside his heated thoughts about his wife and focused on the other problem. “If we knew what the two who were fighting this morning were looking for, it might shed some light on how to settle them.”
Pete shook his head. “Could be anything. Money, gold nuggets lost during poker games, that deed Barney keeps prattling on about. Hell, they could be looking for their momma’s bonnets for all I know. I just want them to behave.”
They finished with the tongue and yokes and John moved on. Most of the major repairs were done by that point, but he was able to lend a hand with a hammer and even a kind word as he continued his search for answers. As he was on his way back to his own wagon—where Callie was now laying out scrubbed clothes to dry in the sun—he crossed paths with Reverend Joseph. The man had his head down and was muttering to himself as he walked the line of the wagons.
“Reverend Joseph,” John called out to him.
The reverend jerked to a stop and flicked his head around as though someone had fired a shot. “Huh? What?”
John turned and walked back to where Reverend Joseph had stopped. “You were talking to the miners after they got into that fight this morning, weren’t you?”