Hot metal bands seemed to be tightening themselves about her heart, squeezing it until she thought she would die. What if he was relieved to discover she hadn’t interpreted his kindness as anything more than a desire to help a young lady? It would be too much to discover she was in love with him only to learn he regarded her as nothing more than a friend.
It was a good thing she wasn’t singing tonight. She suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to burst into tears. There’s no use in crying before there’s any need, she told herself. Besides, Lucy will never forgive you if you get tear stains all over your face.
She would keep dry eyes if it killed her, but oh, please, let him like her just a little bit.
Chapter 10
Upwards of two hundred people were crowded into the schoolhouse yard when Eliza arrived, their wagons and buggies forming a backdrop against the limitless Wyoming horizon. Eliza was nearly the last to appear because Ira didn’t want her to go at all.
“But I’ve got to be there. How would it look if I stayed home after asking all those people to give money to the school?”
“I don’t give a damn about those people or their school. You’re a fool to waste your time on a pack of ungrateful brats.”
“I still have to be there,” Eliza said firmly.
“Then we won’t leave until late. Having a lot of cowboys hanging about getting ideas won’t do the saloon any good. You’re wonderfully popular with everybody, and I want to keep it that way.”
“Then you ought to thank Mr. Stedman.” Eliza hadn’t meant to say anything so certain to enrage her uncle, it just popped out before she realized what she was saying, but when Ira exploded with a tirade of harmless curses, it struck her with numbing impact that she had the power to say something her uncle didn’t like and not fear him. It was a small thing perhaps, but so important her mind leapt with excitement. It was like chains falling away; for the first time in her life she tasted freedom, and it buoyed her spirits so she didn’t care if they were late.
There were no unmarried girls in sight when they reached the schoolhouse, but the porch was nearly covered with baskets. “At last” sighed Mrs. Burton, relief and reproof in her voice. “I had begun to fear you did not mean to attend.”
“I’m sorry to be late” Eliza mumbled, and put her basket down with all the others.
“You’re here, and that’s what counts,” Mr. Burton said as he motioned the crowd to get quiet so he could begin the raffle. “We can’t rightly get started until everybody’s been paired up,” he said with forced heartiness, “so we’ll start with the wives and husbands.” It was obvious from the widespread grumbling that some in the crowd had hoped to be spared a few hours of domestic togetherness, but Mrs. Burton’s mouth was folded and pressed into an expression no one could misunderstand.
“And just so you won’t think you can get away with bidding a quarter, I’m going to start with ten dollars for Mrs. Burton’s basket,” Sanford announced as his wife held up a prettily decorated basket large enough to hold food for a dozen people. “Now how much will you bid for your wife’s fried chicken, Fred?” he called to one of the town merchants as Jessica held up a second basket smaller than her own. The man responded with five dollars, a bit more than he had intended to pay, but Mr. Burton refused to let him go until the poor man, embarrassed by the public nature of the event, also bid ten dollars. The message was unmistakable, and the bidding progressed rapidly, but not as quickly as the feeling of gaiety fled. Even two dollars was a sacrifice for some of the homesteaders.
“Now we come to the fun part, bidding for the unattached ladies. You married men step back so the single fellas can come up to the front row. I don’t want anybody bidding nickels when a better view would encourage them to come up with dollars. Bring out the little dears, Mrs. Burton.”
Maintaining her stony front, Mrs. Burton beckoned to the cracked door and the girls, penned up against their wishes, poured out, their eyes quickly adjusting to the afternoon sun as they tried to pick out the young men they hoped would bid for their company. Melissa Burton immediately planted herself at her father’s elbow, almost forcing him to auction her basket first. She waited with an air of self satisfaction while her father raised a basket fully as large as her mother’s and commanded the crowd to “loosen up your wallets. Who’ll start the bidding at five dollars? Come on, Joe,” he called to the son of the livery stable owner. “You’ve got five dollars.”
“Not anymore,” the boy whispered angrily. In this manner the bidding was relentlessly pushed forward until the luckless Joe, forced to bid fifteen dollars by a glare that threatened his father’s credit at the bank, committed himself to Melissa for the afternoon.
But Melissa didn’t seem any more pleased than her escort. She had discovered Cord Stedman at the back of the crowd and her young woman’s fancy had shed any lingering interest in boys. When a discreet whisper from a friend informed her he was rich as well as notorious, her infatuation was complete.
“Now where’s the little lady who’s responsible for our school?” Eliza was pushed forward.
“That’s Belle Sage,” exclaimed one cowboy who didn’t know of Eliza’s double identity. Quite a few others must not have known either, for at the mention of her name, the circle became thronged with eager faces crowding closer to the porch. Mr. Burton had never heard Eliza sing, but he seized on the chance to exploit her reputation.
“Ain’t she the prettiest little songbird you’ve ever seen?”
“And she can cook and keep house,” Ella whispered loud enough for Cord to hear. He had steadily elbowed his way to the front but didn’t show any sign he had heard Ella. Several around him did, though, and the excitement continued to grow.
“Who will open the bidding at five dollars?” An overeager cowboy opened at ten, but before the ripple of laughter had faded the bid had reached twenty-five dollars with no sign of stopping. It paused at fifty, but Mr. Burton was cut short in the midst of a flowery tribute by an arctic glare from his wife.
“Who’ll give me sixty?” coaxed Mr. Burton. “We can’t let a pretty girl go for such a paltry sum.”
“Sixty dollars ain’t paltry,” shouted one incensed cowboy. “That’s nearly two months’ wages.”
“Sixty dollars.” Cord’s entry into the bidding caused a ripple of excitement. He’d never been known to seek the company of any female, or to spend a nickel on anything except his ranch, yet here he was breaking both rules at once.
“Sixty-one,” yelled Ira, enraged Cord would dare seize on a civic occasion such as this to appropriate Eliza’s company.
“Sixty-five,” responded Cord without hesitation.
“Sixty-six,” Ira countered defiantly.
“Seventy.”
“Seventy-one.”
“Seventy-five.”
“Eighty.”
“Eighty-one.”
“Eighty-five.”
“Ninety.”
“Ninety-one,” Ira answered growing hot under the collar.
“One hundred dollars,” responded Cord, holding Ira’s eye with an unflinching gaze. The bids had come too fast for Mr. Burton, and the crowd fell silent. The protagonists watched each other, one with ironic coolness and the other poised between anger and stinginess.
“One hundred and one,” Ira bid, but the words nearly stuck in his throat.
“A hundred and five,” Cord countered immediately.
Every eye turned to Ira; every ear waited for his next bid. He had turned this into a personal duel and now he was being forced to continue or back down publicly. Several times he made up his mind to bid, but the rational part of his brain balked at what it saw as a waste of money.
“Come on, Mr. Smallwood,” coaxed Burton. “You don’t want to see your niece carried off by a rancher. Think of what the cowboys and homesteaders will say. Come on, just a little more.” Ira glanced up at Eliza standing ramrod still and then at the crowd.
“One hundred and six,” he shouted, but the word
s came out in a strangled whisper.
“One hundred and ten dollars. Cord enunciated each word carefully, and the slump of Ira’s body told the crowd he could bid no more.
“If there’re no more bids, the pleasure of Miss Smallwood’s company goes to Mr. Cord Stedman” Burton stated, not expecting anyone to top such an absurd figure. “You can pay the town treasurer.” Before the crowd’s open-mouthed gaze, Cord unbuttoned his shirt pocket and took the necessary bills from a thick fold as casually as if they had been ten dollars instead of a hundred and ten. Then he took the picnic basket handed to him by Mrs. Burton and turned to Eliza.
Eliza had dreaded the possibility her basket would be bought by a total stranger, and had been relieved when Cord made his first offer, but she was mortified by the angry desperation with which her uncle had pursued the bidding. It was bad enough to be at the center of attention because she was the school teacher, but to have her participation turned into food for gossip was dreadful. As the bids had risen and she’d seen the crowd’s excitement building, she’d shrunk from the ordeal of publicly sharing her dinner with Cord.
One of the girls, momentarily falling victim to her demon of jealousy, gave Eliza a little push when Cord held out his hand, and Eliza reached out to keep from falling. To the crowd, it must have looked as if she was so anxious she’d run toward him, and Eliza turned crimson with shame and anger. She knew there was no hope of passing it off lightly. As one woman sapiently observed, “No woman can blush like that and have a clean conscience.”
Cord led Eliza to a position a little behind the ring of active bidders, and they stood without exchanging a word while the remaining baskets were auctioned off. Though there were a couple of spirited contests, only one of them exceeded twenty dollars. There was nothing to compare to the contest over Eliza.
“Where would you like to eat?” Cord asked, taking advantage of the general confusion to shield her answer from the ears of the curious. Eliza shook her head, unable to reply.
“Maybe the Baylises would allow us to join them,” Cord suggested, pointing to where Ella was busily setting up a small table. Eliza cast him a look of profound thankfulness and tried hard not to run to Ella’s comforting presence.
“I don’t blame you for not wanting to sit on the dirt, even if you did bring a blanket,” Ella said, giving them an understanding welcome. “I wonder more people didn’t think to bring a table.” Mrs. Burton had, but as no one else seemed to have possessed as much foresight, the hillside was soon covered with blankets or families eating standing up at the back of a wagon or buckboard.
“You sure set everyone in a bustle, Cord Stedman” chuckled Ella, getting to the heart of things right away.
“No need. I was just buying my supper like everybody else.”
“Don’t play the simpleton with me, young man,” admonished Ella. “I’m up to your tricks.”
“Not all of them, I hope.”
“Respectable women don’t concern themselves with all he shenanigans a man gets up to,” Ella informed him with devastating directness, “but I know enough. Now don’t you worry about a thing, dear,” she said to Eliza. “It caused a stir at the time, but before dinner’s over everybody’ll be too interested in their own partners to pay you any mind. By tomorrow they’ll have forgotten all about it.”
Ella’s prediction proved only partly true. As soon as the picnickers had time to settle into the business of eating, the stares became fewer and the whispering and nudging almost stopped. Seeing Eliza and Cord sharing their supper with one of the town’s most respected couples divested the incident of much of its excitement.
Eliza expected she would soon relax, but every time she looked at Cord she sensed the presence of a submerged heat, volcanic in its power, and it left her tense and shaken. To all outward appearances, Cord seemed to be talking quietly with Mr. Baylis and paying no more than the usual attention to Eliza, but a blazingly intense energy escaped through eyes more hooded and withdrawn than usual, and she felt the temperature of the afternoon climb. By the time they were through eating, she felt terribly hot even though the cool evening air was making her shiver; the presence of others was no protection from the broiling emotional heat that enveloped her, and the ease she had always enjoyed with Cord had vanished.
“Why don’t you two take a walk and get the kinks out of your legs. I’ll clean up. And I don’t need any help,” Ella said before Eliza could offer. “Cord hasn’t left me much to clear away?
Eliza felt so weak she wasn’t sure she could get to her feet.
“You can show me how you plan to use the money you raised,” Cord said, extending his hand to help her rise. Eliza expected to be scalded by his touch, but his grip was firm and cool, and it enabled her to command her own reluctant muscles.
“Since you gave so much of it, I feel I owe you an explanation.”
“You don’t owe me anything. I wasn’t thinking of the school when I bid that money.”
How was it possible for eyes to gaze at her with such blistering intensity and not turn her to smoldering ash? “What were you thinking of?” Eliza’s heart was pounding so hard she feared she might not hear his answer.
“You,” he answered, and the afternoon became even hotter.
“Me? But that’s absurd. No supper is worth that much.”
“I didn’t say food, I said you.”
“Mrs. Baylis tells me I have something else to thank you for,” Eliza stammered. She headed toward the schoolhouse wondering if it would be safer ground.
“Oh?” He didn’t sound interested.
“The schoolhouse itself.”
“Why?”
“Because you talked her into getting the town to build it. That is true, isn’t it?”
“We did talk over a few ideas,” he admitted evasively, his thoughts seemingly elsewhere.
“In other words, you did talk her into it. It seems you’re always coming to my rescue.” Cord closed the door behind them. She raised her hand to protest.
“The glare,” he said, smiling in such a way she didn’t care about his lame excuse. “Show me what you do here.”
“You won’t think it’s very exciting.”
“I promise not to say so.”
“I know you wouldn’t. You’ve always been tremendously kind to me,” she said, smiling, thinking the door should probably be open. “We don’t have enough desks, so some of the children have to sit on the floor. And these are all the books we have.” She showed him a rough-hewn bookcase half full of tattered and dog-eared volumes. “There aren’t enough to go around, and some are missing so many pages they aren’t much use.”
“Do you use only schoolbooks, or do you use the regular kind? The kind everybody reads,” he clarified.
“We use regular schoolbooks for spelling and sums, but we can use any kind of book for reading, even a novel.”
“Then why not have the children take one day and go to every house in town and collect old books they don’t use any more. You’ll get a lot of trash, but you ought to end up with some good books too.”
“Now there’s something else I have to be grateful to you for.”
“All this gratitude can be wearing. Have you ever considered paying your debts?”
“How can I?”
“I know a way.” He was now so close she could feel the heat of his body.
“What?” She was almost afraid of the answer.
“This.” His arms encircled her and he kissed her gently.
“Was that for saving my books?” she asked mindlessly. Everything about her felt disembodied. Only her lips, burning with his kiss, retained any feeling.
“If you like,” he said with a smile which imperfectly masked the building intensity. “And this is for the cow.” He kissed her again.
“And the saloon and getting Ella to let me dress at her house?” asked Eliza. He kissed her twice more, and it felt so wonderful she kept trying to think of reasons for him to continue.
“The
schoolhouse and the books,” he said with a husky croak, “and another one for just being you.”
Eliza didn’t know how it happened that her arms were around his neck, but she was so weak she had to cling to him or fall. But that’s foolish, her disordered wits reasoned. It would be impossible to slip from the hold he had around her waist.
The sound of footsteps on the porch and voices outside the door penetrated the fog surrounding Eliza, but she was unable to summon the energy to break Cord’s fierce embrace. She knew any moment Melissa and Joe, for it was their voices she heard, would enter the schoolhouse, but she still couldn’t move. She was in the arms of the man she realized in one thundering crash she loved, and she didn’t ever want to let go again. She looked up at Cord, totally breathless and unable to hide the truth that she loved him as much as he must love her. The expression on her face caused him to crush her in another embrace.
But the noise of someone trying to open the door forced her to wrench her mind at least partly away from Cord’s kisses. Why wouldn’t the door open? She hadn’t locked it. She pushed him away and pointed to the door, which was now clattering loudly from the energetic pushes against it. Cord motioned for her to remain silent and pointed to the floor. A battered book was firmly wedged underneath the door.
“It’s stuck. Careful, or you’ll break it,” she called out. Cord tried to keep her in his arms. “I can’t,” she whispered, breaking away. She crossed the room quickly and wrenched the book from the door, throwing it quickly to Cord, who had the good sense to catch it. He was in the process of restoring it to its place on the shelf when Melissa and Joe entered.
Melissa was angry and more than a little suspicious. She looked around, but found nothing unusual. Cord showed not the slightest trace of embarrassment, and Miss Smallwood was no more upset than she ever was around strangers.
Wicked Wyoming Nights Page 10