“No,” he protested hoarsely. “No.”
She drew a deep, quivering breath. He knew that she was attempting to be brave for some reason, and it wounded him that she felt the need. “Yesterday, when I said I only married you for your money, I was lying,” she announced, in a tremulous voice. “I l–love you, Jeff.”
Jeff felt as though he’d just had a bucket of ice-cold water poured over his head. God, if he could only believe her! He reached for his trousers and wrenched them on. Believe her? Why should he, when she’d been nothing but trouble from the first? She had left him twice. She had accused him of betrayal and even of falsifying his own wedding. Furthermore, she had associated with Temple Royce.
“Right,” he rasped, pulling on his shirt, averting his eyes. “Get dressed.”
“Don’t you believe me?” Fancy persisted with dignity as she climbed off the bed.
“I believe you,” he lied. “I just don’t care, that’s all. This is a business arrangement. Let’s keep that in mind, shall we?”
She was crying; Jeff knew that but he steeled himself against it. Another trick, another tactic. Petunias would bloom in hell before he fell for that again.
“So far,” she began, her voice quivering with rage and hurt, “the advantages of this ‘arrangement’ have all been on your side! When do I benefit?”
When he could bear to, Jeff met her gaze. “Get dressed,” he ordered with a coldness completely unrelated to what he was feeling. “We’ll talk about your ‘benefit’ when we get to Spokane.”
Fancy stepped back from him as though he’d slapped her. He almost relented, almost made an ass of himself and told her that he loved her, wanted her, needed her. Had it not been for the crisp knock at the door, he would have.
“Don’t you dare open that door!” Fancy hissed, lunging for her clothes.
“Just a minute!” Jeff snarled.
“I’ve got all day,” sang Jewel Stroble, from the hallway.
* * *
Fancy knelt beside Phineas’s pallet in the wagon, forgetting her own concerns as she noted the deep blue smudges of pain beneath his eyes, the pallor of his skin. “Do you want me to get a doctor?” she whispered.
“No,” replied Phineas with surprising briskness. “I most certainly do not. Did you and that husband of yours manage to talk to each other, Fancy?”
Fancy swallowed hard. For a time, it had seemed that she and Jeff might be able to converse sensibly. Lord knew, their bodies had been in accord. But when Fancy had worked up her courage and declared her love, Jeff had flung it back in her face, just as she had feared he would. “Oh, Phineas,” she whispered, “it was a disaster.”
Fatherly concern shimmered in his eyes. “Why?” he wanted to know.
“It–told Jeff yesterday that I married him for money. I didn’t really do that—I was just speaking in anger—but he’s convinced that I meant what I said.”
“Oh,” said Phineas, and the expression on his face urged her to go on.
“I told him that I loved him and he—he said he didn’t care, that all w–we had was a business arrangement.”
“A business arrangement, is it?” chortled Phineas. “That kind of arrangement makes babies, if memory serves me correctly.”
Fancy blushed and looked away. “Yes,” she choked out.
“Are you in the family way, Fancy?”
The question was put so kindly that Fancy couldn’t be offended. “I don’t know. It’s too soon.”
Phineas groped for one of Fancy’s hands and held it tightly in his own. “Jeff loves you, Fancy. You remember that. You stay by his side, no matter what, and you go on loving him. The day will come when he’ll be able to get past all the barriers he’s set up to protect himself.”
“Protect himself? From me?” Fancy was truly startled. “I couldn’t hurt him!”
“You’ve done that already, Fancy—twice that I know of. I’d say Mr. Corbin is afraid to love you the way he’d like to. That would put a terrible weapon in your hands and men are shy of such things.”
Fancy bristled. “Well, he certainly isn’t shy of Jewel Stroble!” she argued, forgetting Phineas’s illness for a moment. “That woman had the audacity to knock on our door and ask Jeff to have supper with her tonight!”
Unbelievably, Phineas chuckled. “She’s a brassy piece, that one. And did she invite you, too?”
“Of course not! The bold thing—it didn’t even matter to her that I was standing right there!”
“And what did Jeff say to her?”
Fancy couldn’t help smiling. At least, out of all her defeats, there had been that one minor triumph. “He told her to stop behaving like a trollop and leave us alone.”
“There, you see?”
Fancy’s glory was short-lived. She colored at the memory of what had happened next. “He swatted her on the bottom!” she marveled angrily.
“Jewel’s got that sort of bottom,” observed Phineas.
“Phineas Pryor!”
“Well, she does. Not being a man, you wouldn’t understand.”
Fancy understood, all right. One woman wasn’t enough for Jeff Corbin. Even though he’d spurned Jewel’s attentions, he hadn’t been able to keep his hands off her. Drat it all, she’d seen the glimmer in his eyes as he assessed the bottom in question. “Is there anything I can do for you, Phineas?” she asked stiffly, tucking the blankets more closely around him and touching his forehead to check for fever.
“You can find that man of yours and you can tell him you love him. Tell him until he listens, Fancy.”
Fancy nodded distractedly, but she had no intention of laying herself open for another brutal rejection. If Jeff wanted to believe that she’d married him to assure her own comfort, then let him.
* * *
Smiling at her own cleverness, Jewel bent over as far as she could to place that hussy’s rabbit, cage and all, in the gondola of the balloon. Then she stepped aside, folded her arms, and waited. Jeff Corbin would come to her house for supper that night, all right. And for a lot more, if Jewel had her way.
Soon enough, Jewel saw Fancy approaching, her purple eyes flashing fire just the way her fingertips did when she was performing magic tricks. If it hadn’t been for that Jeff Corbin-sized ache inside her, Jewel might even have liked Fancy. As it was, she couldn’t afford to do that.
“Afternoon, Mrs. Corbin,” she sang out.
“Eudora said you took my rabbit!” accused Fancy, ignoring the neighborly greeting. “Where is he?”
Jewel thought she’d burst with glee, but she managed to point to the gondola and say, “In there.”
Fancy gave her a scathing look, then sprang quite deftly over the side of the big wicker basket. Jewel immediately released the ropes that kept the balloon on the ground, and it began to rise.
Mrs. Jeff Corbin clutched the gondola sides with white-knuckled hands and peered down in terror. She could have jumped, but she seemed too shocked to try it.
Jewel was already beginning to doubt the wisdom of what she’d done, when Jeff came bolting through the crowd and sprang into the air, just managing to catch hold of the gondola’s jutting brim before the vessel rose in earnest. It was about ten feet in the air, Jewel supposed, when Jeff managed to scramble over the side and join his petrified wife.
* * *
“Fancy?” Jeff was there. Everything would be all right. One of his arms slid around her shoulders and supported her. “Fancy!”
She drew a deep breath. “Down,” she said, with dignity. “I want to go down.”
Instead of complying, Jeff swore. Fancy opened her eyes, looked at him, then looked at the ground. She trembled and grasped the edges of the gondola even harder than she had before.
Temple Royce was standing in the grass, gazing upward, grinning. In his right hand a nickel-silver pistol caught the bright spring sunshine.
“Go ahead and shoot,” Jeff prompted with a responding grin. “With all these witnesses, old friend, you’ll end up where yo
u belong—at the end of a rope.”
Temple’s toothy smile faded to taut-lipped grimness. “Corbin, you son-of-a-bitch, come back here!”
Fancy slid to her knees and the gondola rocked sickeningly at the motion. “Oh, God,” she whimpered.
“Corbin!” Temple bellowed.
Jeff stood straight and tall while Fancy cowered. The way he smiled and waved one hand, reminded her of a politician making a speech from the back of a railroad caboose. “Do you remember the lady?” he called, as the balloon bobbed higher and higher. “She sings, she dances and, believe me, Temple, she does magic!”
“Get down here!” screamed Temple. Even from that height, he looked apoplectic.
“Sorry,” Jeff sang back. “Another time, another place.”
Fancy groaned. She couldn’t bear to look anymore. “Jeff—the balloon is loose—” she reminded her companion frantically.
“Yes it is,” he exalted.
They were soaring through the blue skies, free and, for the time being, safe, but Fancy couldn’t find any joy in the adventure. Still, if given a choice between this rash method of escape and facing Temple Royce in his present mood, she would certainly have chosen the balloon flight.
Somewhere over the Columbia River, she grappled to her feet. Jeff was too busy pulling the valve that released gas into the balloon to help her. “W–We got away,” she said, smiling thinly.
“For now,” replied Jeff. “He’ll follow, of course.”
Fancy hadn’t thought of that. “How do you suppose Temple found us in the first place?” she choked, sickness scalding the back of her throat. The fields below were like squares on a patchwork quilt, the river no wider than a ribbon.
“I told him where we were,” Jeff answered blithely.
Fancy hung her head over the side of the gondola and threw up.
* * *
They drifted for hours, it seemed to Fancy, sometimes brushing the lower borders of heaven itself, sometimes coursing along a few dozen feet off the ground. The great undulating shadow of the balloon spilled before them, rippling over rocks and bushes, making oblong circles in fields, flowing over the tops of barns and houses.
Finally, at sunset, they came down with a jarring thump in a field of new wheat. Fancy sprang out of the gondola and fled.
Jeff howled with laughter, but he did not pursue her. Over the pounding of her own blood in her ears, she heard a familiar hissing sound and knew that he was letting some of the hydrogen gas escape the balloon. She ran on, clods of rich earth breaking under her shoes.
Eventually her breath failed her and she stumbled, landing on her hands and knees in the dry dirt. Scrambling back up again, gasping, she turned to look back and saw that Jeff was hauling huge rocks from the edge of the field and placing them inside the gondola.
“You idiot!” she screamed, clenching her fists. “What are we going to do now? You tell me that! What are we going to do now?”
“I’m going to secure this balloon and you’re going to stop carrying on like a fishwife!” he yelled back.
“A fishwife?!” Fancy shrieked, stomping back toward him. Her hair was falling down around her shoulders and her dress was filthy and God only knew what would happen to them now. “How dare you call me that?”
“Shut up,” growled Jeff, still filling the gondola with stones.
Now that she was on the ground again, Fancy dared to take umbrage. “Don’t tell me to shut up, you pebble-brain! It’s your fault we’re in this mess!”
He stopped and glowered at her, his big, dusty hands resting on his hips. “What did you want me to do—stay there and let Temple Royce blow my brains out?”
“I didn’t know you were afraid of Temple,” she taunted, keeping her distance just in case.
Jeff stormed toward her and bent to snarl into her face. “I’m not afraid of Temple or anybody else! But he had a gun and a dozen men and all I had was a goddamned rabbit!”
“If you hadn’t baited him like that, there might not have been a problem!” cried Fancy, tired and sick and totally undone. “I’m not stupid, you know! I clearly understood what you meant when you said I do magic! You were referring to our intimate relations!”
He grinned obnoxiously. “Yes.”
“How dare you?!”
“You keep asking me that. ‘How dare I this, how dare I that.’ Well, I’ll tell you—I do whatever I damned well please and you might as well know it!”
“In that case, would you please jump off the nearest cliff?!”
Jeff grinned again and touched his mouth in that impudent signal he had warned Fancy to expect. She was so furious that she slapped him across the face, then turned in a huff to stomp away.
Blinded by tears, Fancy nonetheless managed to find her way out of the seemingly endless wheat field. She came upon a little stream, perhaps the same one that ran past the carnival camp, and knelt beside it to wash her face and hands. Looking up from that task, she saw a small flour mill on the other side, its wheel still and glistening with water-dappled spiderwebs.
Jeff came up beside her and set Hershel’s cage down on the grassy ground with an irritated briskness. “I am not afraid of Temple Royce,” he said evenly.
Fancy bit back a smile and turned her face so that he couldn’t see the effort involved. “You haven’t the sense to be,” she said in gentle tones.
He sat down beside her and the scent of the grass was the sweeter, the lusher, for the crushing it had suffered. “But you were right about one thing,” he admitted, after a long pause. “I’m an idiot.”
Fancy laughed, her legs drawn up, her arms wrapped around them. It was safe to look at him now and reveal her amusement. “What accounts for such a major concession?” she teased, resting one cheek against her knees.
Jeff glared up at the sky, annoyed. “You’re my wife. I promised to protect you. And here we are in the middle of some god-forsaken wheat field with night coming on and a choice between starvation and eating the family pet!”
A sweet tenderness swept through Fancy, for she loved the little boy in Jeff as well as the man, and the former was so visible now. “I doubt that we’ll perish for missing one or two meals,” she comforted, reaching out, without thinking, to smooth his rumpled hair.
“It really did you a lot of good to marry a rich man, didn’t it, Fancy?” he drawled, lying prone on the grass now. There was no rancor in his voice, at least none directed at her.
“Do you think Temple will find us here?” she asked, ignoring his question.
“He might. That balloon is sure to draw his attention if he’s anywhere near.”
“But we drifted miles—”
“And Temple has horses.”
Fancy shuddered. “Oh, Jeff, why did you have to let him know where we were? Why?”
He sighed. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Shadows were dancing on the stream as twilight flung itself, in shades of maroon and gray and lavender, over the mill and the little patch of ground where they rested. Fancy swallowed further criticisms and concentrated on the sights and sounds around them.
Frogs and crickets began their chorus and the breeze rustled in the young wheat. Jeff sighed again and stretched out his long legs, the heels of his boots almost in the water.
Suddenly, despite everything that was wrong in her life, Fancy was brimming with mischief. She undid her shoebuttons, kicked off her shoes and plunged into the stream to wade, shivering deliciously at the cold.
Jeff sat up and stared at her as though she’d gone mad. She laughed at the expression on his face as she bent to scoop up icy water in her hands and fling it at him.
He bellowed a curse, bolted to his feet, and then plunged into the water after her, boots, trousers, and all. A water fight ensued that left them both drenched and weak with laughter.
Fancy’s black dress clung to her, sodden, clearly revealing her turgid nipples and the smooth curves of her hips. Her hair escaped its pins and cascaded down her back,
wild and tangled and free.
And Jeff stood stock-still in the rushing water, his blue eyes darkening. In an easy motion, he lifted Fancy up into his arms and carried her across the stream and through the sagging doorway of the mill.
There were rats there, no doubt, and fallen beams stretched across the dusty floor. But the place might have been a palace, for all Fancy knew.
She stood silently as Jeff slowly undid her dress with its water-dulled silver stars. She remained still as he removed it and then the drawers and camisole beneath. She was proud of her nakedness. Before this one man, she was proud of it.
He bent his head and kissed her, and her lips, shivering and blue from the cold of the stream, immediately parted for his warm conquest. Their tongues battled briefly and then caressed. A moan filled the musty little building, a moan that might have come from either one of them.
Finally, Fancy pushed Jeff away, with a gentle thrust of her palms, and then unbuttoned his wet shirt. He groaned and closed his magnificent eyes as she slid the garment away from his skin.
With surprisingly deft hands, considering the numbing cold that possessed them, Fancy proceeded to unfasten his trousers.
He gasped and drew her close again, kissing her, consuming her, and at the same time lowering both of them to the floor. They knelt, facing each other, on Fancy’s discarded dress, neither noticing, neither caring.
Fancy escaped the dazzling kiss to nibble at his neck and the muscular planes of his chest. His nipples were still wet from the spirited water battle in the stream and she made them wetter with her tongue. A throaty rumble came from his chest as he surrendered fully, his head thrown back, his eyes closed in ecstasy.
Fancy bit and nibbled her way down over his hard stomach, her hands preparing him for a fuller conquering. “What I need is a signal,” she teased in a whisper. “Something to let you know that I mean to do this to you at the first opportunity.”
The answer was a fevered gasp, the tangling of strong hands in her hair.
Having thus repaid him, Fancy proceeded to pleasure him, fully, shamelessly, and with love.
He made a growling sound low in his throat, and shuddered. “I’m going to—oh, God, Fancy—please—”
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