To Have and to Hold (Cactus Creek Cowboys)

by Greenwood, Leigh

***

  Naomi woke to the sound of raised voices, jingling harnesses, and squeaking wagon wheels. She sat up too quickly and bumped her head on the underside of the wagon. She looked around, but her father’s and Ben’s pallets were empty. Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, she scrambled to her feet and crawled from under the wagon.

  “I was about to wake you.” Her father sat near the remains of a small fire enjoying a cup of coffee.

  “Why did you let me sleep so long?”

  “You looked so comfortable, and there was no need to wake you.”

  “What about breakfast?”

  “Colby made it. He’s quite handy with a campfire.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He and Ben have gone to the ciboleros camp.”

  “Who or what are ciboleros?”

  “As near as I can gather, they’re Mexican buffalo hunters.”

  “What are they doing here?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Why didn’t you go with Colby and Ben?” she asked.

  “My desire for coffee was greater than my curiosity.” He took a swallow and sighed contentedly. “Colby makes the best coffee I’ve ever tasted. If he were a woman, I’d marry him.”

  Naomi walked over to the Dutch oven nestled in the dying embers and lifted the lid.

  “Bacon and beans,” her father informed her.

  Naomi found a plate and filled it. “Did you leave me any coffee?”

  “It was a struggle, but my love for you is greater than my love for coffee. But just barely,” he added with a grin.

  Naomi poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down to eat. The beans and bacon were good. The coffee was even better.

  “You might want to join them,” her father said.

  “Why?”

  “According to Colby, they sometime have things to sell.”

  “We don’t need anything. I’d rather save our money for later.”

  “Then go out of curiosity. Colby says they’re colorful fellas.”

  “How does he know so much about everything?” She wouldn’t have let her irritation show if she hadn’t felt so off balance. She’d lain awake half the night thinking about what Colby had said two nights earlier. Possibilities had battled with improbabilities until her head ached.

  “He hasn’t spent his whole life in a tiny village like the rest of us. Still, I get the feeling he’s paid a heavy price for all that knowledge.”

  “And now we’re paying a heavy price for the lack of it.”

  “That’s not why we’re paying it, but that’s no longer worth worrying about. What we need is a man like Colby to join us. He has the skills and knowledge we need. I think we could give him the family he’s missing.”

  “How?”

  “You could marry him.”

  Naomi slowly lowered the spoon she’d been about to bring to her mouth. She was relieved to know her hand didn’t shake because her insides did. She put her plate down and forced herself to take a swallow of coffee before meeting her father’s gaze. “What makes you think that’s possible?”

  His gaze seemed to intensify “Why do you think it isn’t?”

  “I don’t love him.”

  “But you do. I can see it in your eyes when you look at him. I can hear it in your voice when you talk about him. If I didn’t believe you loved him, I’d be very disappointed to know you were kissing him down by the river.”

  “If Ben told you—”

  “Not Ben. I could see it in your eyes when you came back. You had that vacant stare, the one that comes from being in a world all your own. I’m forty-nine years old. I’ve seen that look too many times not to know what it means.”

  Naomi didn’t know what to say. She didn’t believe she was in love with Colby, but neither could she say she wasn’t. It was hard to be in love with a man who stayed at a distance, who swore love didn’t exist, who didn’t want to believe in it.

  “Colby isn’t in love with me.”

  “He could be.”

  “He fell in love with a woman who swore she loved him. Yet she married another man. When he tried to see her, he was driven out of town and told he would be shot if he returned. That and abuse by his parents have turned him against any emotional relationship. He’s determined to isolate himself.”

  “All the more reason for you to convince him he’s wrong. He’s much too fine a man to lose.”

  “What makes you think I have him to lose?” She had never expected this conversation. She wasn’t prepared for it. She got to her feet. “I think I’d like to see these ciboleros. Where is their camp?”

  Her father smiled the way he did when she was a little girl and needed comfort. “I won’t ask any more questions. Finish your breakfast. Afterwards, we’ll go together.”

  She had to force herself to eat the last of her food. It didn’t taste good anymore. She wiped her plate and swallowed her coffee. She would have tossed it away if she hadn’t worried her father might consider it a worse crime than not admitting she was in love with Colby.

  The ciboleros had camped on the far side of Rabbit Ear Creek. It was a bewildering mix of colorfully dressed men with plain women and children. The forest of tents was interspersed with heavy oxcarts with solid wood wheels. Long strips of drying meat hung from wires or ropes strung between poles, oxcarts, and even tent poles. Bags of what looked like hard, coarse, brown bread hung from the sides of carts. A large herd of horses could be seen grazing in the distance. She spied Colby and Ben in the midst of a group of men wearing brightly colored jackets, close-fitting leather trousers, and flat straw hats who gestured excitedly and all spoke at once. Several people from the wagon train were standing a little apart, apparently awaiting the outcome of the discussion. The moment Ben spied them, he came running.

  “You gotta come,” he cried. “Colby says they’re trying to cheat us, and he won’t let anybody buy anything.”

  Naomi’s gaze swept over the campground with its shoddy tents, shabby women, and children before asking, “What do they have to sell that we would want to buy?”

  “Dried buffalo meat and bread,” Ben replied. “Colby says the bread is as hard as adobe, but he says it’s really good when you dip it in coffee.” Ben took hold of Naomi’s hand. “Come on. You’re missing all the fun.”

  Naomi didn’t see anything that made her think of fun. The camp was barely habitable, the women and children had a neglected look, and a diet of dried buffalo meat and hard bread was barely better than living off cornmeal mush. She had no idea what kind of agreement was being hammered out, but apparently one had been for the ciboleros stopped shouting and broke out in smiles. Expressionless women went away and came back with strips of dried meat while grinning children scampered about hawking bags of bread. A dirty little boy ran up to them and said something she didn’t understand.

  “He’s offering you his bag of bread,” Colby explained.

  “We don’t want any.”

  “Yes, we do,” her father said. “We’ll have some buffalo meat, too.”

  Colby said something to the boy who dashed off and came back with a woman holding strips of dried meat about a yard long.

  “How much do they want?” her father asked.

  Colby managed the negotiations and explained how many pesos were in an American dollar.

  “That was very cheap,” her father said after Naomi was loaded down with bags of bread and Ben was draped in strips of dried meat.

  “They hunt to support their families,” Colby explained. “Once they’ve sold what they don’t need, they’ll head back to Mexico.”

  Naomi indicated the bread and meat. “What are we going to do with that?”

  “Eat it,” her father said. “I haven’t had bread in so long I’ve almost forgotten what it tastes like.”

  “And the meat?”


  “I’ll show you how to cook it,” Colby offered.

  Just what she needed, one more thing Colby could do better than she could. She was surprised at the need to compete with him, to prove she was just as capable despite the fact that she knew she wasn’t. It didn’t make it any easier to tell herself that she was in a part of the country Colby had known since birth. She was still annoyed, sometimes to the point of being angry with him. She knew that was wrong. If she had to be angry with anyone, she should be angry with Norman and the other men who’d forced them to leave Spencer’s Clearing.

  Now everything had changed. The rules would be different. At home the men wouldn’t have invited a woman to take part in their decision making, wouldn’t have listened to her if she’d given her opinion. Colby was different. He was irritatingly capable and just as domineering at times, but he listened to her opinions, encouraged her to do things she’d never tried, and had made it clear he expected a woman to play an important role in her family’s life. It was a point of view that was new to her, one she wasn’t quite sure she could accept on face value, but she found it exciting.

  ***

  “I don’t know why I let you talk me into climbing this mountain,” Naomi said between gasps for breath.

  “It’s not a mountain,” Colby said. “It’s hardly a thousand feet tall.”

  “It would be a mountain in Spencer’s Clearing.”

  “Wait until you see a real mountain.”

  “I won’t mind seeing it. I just don’t want to climb it.”

  They had ridden ahead so Colby could decide whether to camp at Round Mound or Rock Creek. He had put off the decision until after they climbed the beautiful, round-topped cone. Though it wasn’t looking as beautiful now as it had been when Naomi was standing at the bottom looking up.

  “Don’t give up now,” Colby encouraged. “We’re close to the top.”

  Naomi grabbed hold of a scrawny sapling and pulled herself several feet up the slope. “Who said anything about giving up? After a thousand miles of flat prairie, I’m thrilled to find a mountain.” She was pleased Colby didn’t repeat his insistence that this wasn’t a mountain.

  After ten more minutes of stumbling over roots and crawling around boulders, they reached the nearly flat summit. To Naomi, the view was stunning. The country to the south was rolling or level, dotted with mounts and hills. The vast plain stretched to the north with occasional peaks and ridges.

  “What’s that?” Naomi asked, pointing to a silver stripe above an azure band.

  “That’s the snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains.”

  “They look bigger than this mound.”

  “At least ten times bigger.” Colby moved next to her, put his arm over her shoulder. “You ought to see them someday. They’re magnificent.”

  Naomi was more interested in the arm over her shoulder than she was in any mountain. Colby had placed it there casually, almost as though it belonged there, certainly in a manner that indicated he didn’t expect to be rebuffed. She didn’t want to rebuff him, but she wanted to know if the casualness of it—a familiarity that felt almost like a possessive quality—had anything to do with the kisses they shared so recently. His words said one thing, but his actions were clearly leading in another direction. Thoughts, ideas, hopes, dreams, even idle longings had been swirling around in her head for days in a kind of aimless meandering—not seeking a solution but unable to ignore that answers needed to be found—but her father’s words had brought them into focus. She had reached a point where she needed to know what Colby’s intentions might be. She’d never indulged in an idle flirtation or a momentary fling, but she was sure it wouldn’t feel like this.

  “You’re awfully quiet,” Colby said. “If you think the Rockies are impressive now, wait until you see them up close.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about mountains.”

  “What were you thinking about?” he asked.

  When she turned to face him, he let his arm slide off her shoulder, down her arm, until her hand slid into his.

  “I was thinking about you,” she said. “About us. About the future.”

  He looked as though she’d suddenly started speaking in a language he didn’t understand.

  “Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about,” she demanded. “You’ve made a point to seek out my company. We’ve been alone together. We’ve climbed this mountain together. We’ve kissed and held each other. I think I have a right to ask if you intend to ask me to marry you.”

  Seventeen

  Colby’s throat threatened to close on him. He’d never pretended he wasn’t attracted to Naomi, but neither had he expected his interest would last beyond the time he left the wagon train. Her father inviting him to travel with his family had made it inevitable they would be thrown together. They ate together. They rode together. They even argued together. It was inevitable that a close relationship would develop between them.

  But that didn’t mean he was going to ask her to marry him.

  He didn’t want to marry just for companionship, for a helpmate, for the mother of his children. Least of all did he want to marry for a convenient way to take care of his physical needs. He found it difficult to say exactly what would be sufficient to make him fall in love, but he hadn’t found it despite the strength of his feelings for Naomi.

  Suppose he did ask her to marry him and she changed her mind? He’d nearly killed Elizabeth’s father when she jilted him. What would he do this time? Naomi had said all he had to do was look at Paul and Wilma Hill or Haskel and Pearl Sumner to see that love was real. Observing them had added to his conviction that what he wanted from marriage, what he needed to take the risk, didn’t exist. He wanted fire. He wanted excitement. He wanted to feel desperate just thinking of losing her. He wanted her touch to ignite a desire in him that was unquenchable. The mere sight of her should drive every other thought from his mind. He should feel that her every breath was his breath, that her heartbeat was his heartbeat. Separation from her should be agony, while being with her was sheer bliss. He wouldn’t waste a second glance on another woman no matter how beautiful, fascinating, or alluring because, to him, she was the most beautiful, fascinating, and alluring woman in the world.

  That wasn’t how he felt about Naomi. There was no desperation, no fear, no bone-crushing need.

  “I’m never going to marry, but if I were, you’d be the woman I’d want to be my wife.”

  “What kind of answer is that?”

  “A less hurtful way of saying no. I don’t believe in love. Without it, I’d rather live alone.”

  “You mean you would deny yourself friendship, companionship, even children because you haven’t found a kind of relationship you’re convinced doesn’t exist?”

  “Yes.” It seemed unnecessary to say more than that.

  “One day in the company of Pearl and Haskel or Wilma and Paul, and it’s impossible to imagine them being married to anyone else. What more is there?”

  If she didn’t know already, it was impossible to explain. It was something she had to feel as deeply and intensely as he did. It had to come from within her. It couldn’t be learned. It had to have been there since the day she was born.

  “I can’t put it into words, but I’d know if I found it.”

  “If you can’t put it into words, you don’t know what it is.” Naomi pulled away. “We’d better go down. If the others arrive and you still haven’t decided on a place to camp, they won’t be happy.”

  Naomi started down without waiting for Colby. He wanted to call her back, but what could he say that hadn’t been said already? He didn’t want their time together to end so quickly, but hadn’t he been the one to effectively end it? There was something between them that was unfinished, but he didn’t know what it was. He did know that in turning away from him, she was leaving a big hole in his life. He would miss her
as he hadn’t missed anyone since Elizabeth. This was the end.

  But the end of what?

  ***

  Naomi woke with a headache that wasn’t improved by the smell of cooking grease and the sound of rain on the canvas covering. In an ironic reflection of the situation between her and Colby, it had rained for the better part of three days during which they had hardly spoken. Her father had cocked a curious eyebrow but said nothing. Ben hadn’t been as tactful, but he’d been too happy for the chance to ride each day to push the issue. Ethan was too involved with Cassie and Little Abe to notice anything that wasn’t shoved under his nose. The rest of the caravan was too concerned with keeping dry and preventing the wagons from getting mired in mud to have time or energy to be aware of the death of a romance.

  Had it been a romance, or had she been deceiving herself from the start? Colby had told her from the beginning he didn’t believe love existed. He’d had twenty-seven years to be confirmed in that opinion. Why should she think she could change his mind in two weeks? Had she been trying to change his mind, or had she wandered into this blind?

  Her father, who’d slept next to her, sat up. “Drat,” he said when he realized it was still raining. “I guess it’s cold breakfast again.” He sniffed the air, a puzzled expression on his face. “I must be dreaming.”

  “You’re not,” Naomi assured him. “I smelled it, too.”

  “It smells like beef. Where can it be coming from?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ll find out.”

  “You can’t go out there. It’s still raining.”

  “I won’t dissolve.”

  Neither of them had to leave the wagon because the flap at the end of the tent opened to reveal Ben’s grinning face.

  “I thought you two would never wake up, but Colby said it was okay if you overslept in this weather.”

  “It’s not oversleeping when it’s still dark outside,” Naomi pointed out.

  “Colby fixed breakfast for us,” Ben announced.

  Her father, less interested in the weather or whether they’d spent too long in bed, asked, “How did he manage it in this rain?”