§ CHAPTER SEVEN §
All that morning, Duke straddled the barn’s rafters, replacing sagging and missing beams. As an olive branch – well, more like a bribe – to appease him, Romy took his lunch to him, slightly singed hamburger patties. Well, maybe, overly cooked patties. All right, she conceded charred patties.
Gazing up at his shirtless body, browned over the years by both South Texas and South Seas suns, she could only gape. So much, he reminded her of the brawny Gypsy males with all their attendant high voltage machismo.
“I, uh, have yuir lunch,” she shouted up at him, her hand tented over her eyes against the autumn sunlight drilling through the gaping portion of the barn’s roof.
His hands braced on the beam between his legs, he called down, “You can leave it there by the ladder. Now that you have burnt my lunch, you might as well clean out the kitchen stove.”
Bedamn the bloody smoke that had billowed yet once again from the stove. Its wee bit of vapor that, granted, was her fault was paltry when compared to his ill-tempered manners.
His ill temper had not improved by late afternoon either.
She was standing in front of the stove, dicing the goulash’s onions into the cast iron Dutch oven. With the radio blaring, she did not hear the jingle of his spurs until they were directly behind her on the flagstone, and even then it was more like she sensed him. Startled, she spun, knife pointed up at his blue chambray shirt’s midsection.
Instantly, his had hand snagged her wrist. With what could only be surprise, he stared down at her. Beneath the brim of his hat, his brows rose and lowered in a velocity of perplexion. “You’re a little slow on the draw, aren’t you?”
He was so close, she could smell the sun heat lingering on him and his healthy male sweat. “I . . . my mind was elsewhere.”
He pried her fingers from the haft and tossed the knife on the counter. “Uhh, speaking of elsewhere . . . ” he hooked his thumbs in his worn chaps’ belt, “ . . . look, I have a standing Friday night game of checkers here. Do you think you can, uh, hang out elsewhere after dinner for a while? The cowhands usually have a poker game going in the bunkhouse.”
Checkers? Why wasn’t he playing poker? But, of course. Her face lighting up, she charged, “Why, Duke McClellan, ye have yuirself a girlfriend coming over tonight.” Opportunity was presenting itself.
Palms upraised, he scowled. “Whoa, right there. Sally Kirtley is just a long-time friend. The daughter of a neighboring horse rancher.”
“Then, you may be overlooking a four-leaf clover. You will most definitely need my advice about her.”
“No.” His molasses-slow voice contained an inflexible note. “I don’t need your advice. Or you. Here.” He rotated on clinking, spiked spurs and headed for the bathroom to wash up at the end of the day, as was his habit.
Still, she called futilely after his departing broad back, “The cards say ye do – ye need me here, Big Guy.”
§ § §
At dinner, Arturo asked “Que es esto?”and poked his spoon in the direction of the goulash in his bowl.
“Think stew,” Romy told him. “Think guisado quemado, burnt stew.”
The young Mexican’s mouth turned down. He was not his usual lively self. It couldn’t just be her questionable cuisine that put him in a slump.
The other five cowpunchers sitting around the long plank table glanced cautiously from the stew to her to Duke. He sighed and shook his shaggy head.
She fisted her hands on her hips. “Are ye hungry or not?”
At once, they all dug in. She slid into the wobbly chair remaining at one end of the table, the one nearest the stove, and watched their leery expressions. They weren’t exactly dancing on sunshine about her presence there. After a week, she knew, of course, the ranch hands’ names. She knew even better their mannerisms.
Among them were the dour old Jock, a spare man with spare hair. On her first day at the S&S, he had grumbled that the hands’ horses were no bloomin’ Rolls Royces. But he did not dare grumble about her cooking, and he was always there to help out. He also was inclined to scratch his overhanging belly when stumped.
Naturally, the swaggering Arturo reminded her of Giorgio. At the kitchen table, when the Mexican was antsy or nervous, he pumped one leg.
And both Skinny Henry and Glen could have been the comic strip’s tall Mutt and short Jeff. Where Skinny Henry tended to tug on his longish ear lobe when ill at ease, Glen’s prominent Adam’s apple worked overtime.
There was the runaway Bud, who pulled low the bill of his flat, newsboy cap when anxious.
And Micah, the reticent Negro, who curled his thumbs under his overalls’ shoulder straps and stared at his brogans with the holes in their soles or anywhere but at the person talking.
At the moment, Jock was talking. “Yup, Lucy’s calf ‘s taken to that there teat bottle like a duck to water.”
Lucy’s carcass had provided meals that week and leftovers for the night’s goulash. Duke had been none too happy about the loss of Lucy – and now was none too happy about Sally Kirtley showing up after dinner.
At least, he was none too happy about her showing up while Romy was there.
The men were devouring her goulash, so her culinary skills were apparently not a zilch. Of course, after working all day, they would eat carrion if that was all that was being served up.
At the knock at the front door, Duke raised a commanding brow, signaling it was time to evacuate the ranch house. The men hastily scraped their plates.
She gave him the stink eye, but stood, saying, “I’ll clear the table first.”
While he went to answer the door, the ranch hands vacated the kitchen through its back door, and she collected the plates, putting them into the deep sink to soak. But before she made her exit, she peeked into the parlor.
Duke was helping a young woman out of her denim jacket. Tall, lean, she possessed the same in-charge set to her jaw as Duke’s.
With a wide smile, Romy asked, “Is there anything ye be needing afore I leave?”
Her sponsor glared, but the horsewoman directed an inquisitive glance over her shoulder at him. “This is the homeless child you mentioned? Rumi?”
“Romy.” Her smile amplified one-hundred watts. “As in roam, roaming wherever me heart calls.”
“Romy,” Duke warned, his thick brows lowering like storm clouds.
The sound of her given name on his lips took her by surprise. He had yet to use it. She knew she could be much worse off, assigned to some depraved lout who took advantage of the situation and her. Yet here she was in service to a good-looking man who could barely tolerate her.
Leaning over the apple crate that served as an end table, Sally flicked on the dusty, fringe-shade lamp, and her brown hair, clasped at her nape by a rawhide string, cascaded over one shoulder. The lamp’s ruby glass cast a forgiving light on her face, which was very pretty but already beginning to look weathered.
Next, she flicked on the radio. Neither its melodic “Stardust” nor the lamp’s glow over the stark parlor softened the tension. “Well, nice to meet you, Rumi.”
“And nice it is to meet ye, Silly.” At Duke’s glower, she amended, “Sally.” She backed toward the kitchen. “Well, I will leave ye two to yuir tame little checker game.”
In the bunkhouse, duel-to-the-death poker was already afoot
Her huaraches, from the box of donated clothing, she kicked off under the makeshift table. It was a cable spool topped by a rescued portion of a horse stall door. Sitting in on the next round, she pretended not to notice the sly looks exchanged between the ranch hands.
Of the fifty marks Gideon had tossed her as a salve for his guilty conscience, she had little left, but she nudged the requisite two bits out to the center as ante. “I’m in, but I warn ye gents I know more than a wee bit about poker.”
Smirks behind held cards passed around the table.
The guys were easy pickings. When she won three times straight and on the fourth hand laid down three Queens and a pair of Three’s, Glen’s Adam’s apple bobbed. He and Skinny Henry both tossed in their hands.
Arturo’s glossy brown stare jumped from her spread to her. With a stub of a cigarette between his lips, he mumbled, “Eet ees not posseeblee.”
“First lesson, Arturo.” She dragged the few tattered one-dollar bills and pile of coins in the table’s center toward her already sizeable heap. “Anything is possible. And, second, a card game is like war. Ye choose yuir battles.”
And right now, she was battling between keeping her mind on the poker game in the bunkhouse and the checker game in the main house.
Jock swigged his firewater whiskey and, frowning, skidded his cards onto the makeshift table’s discarded mound. “Well, lass, you sure enough know how to pitch a battle with the cards.”
“Tis not about the cards. Tis the about the people. Always about people. Take Bud, there.”
The kid shifted his glum gaze from her pile that contained his dollar and seventy-five cents to her. “What about me?”
She liked the lad. He seemed responsible and quick. Up early every morning that week in time for breakfast and uncomplaining when she burned the toast, that just before she had short-circuited the toaster. Learning the vagaries of an electric range after growing up with a wood burning stove was escalating her frustration about everything in her new life.
“Ye see, when ye’re about to play a risky card, Bud, ye tug on yuir cap. So, doff that cap next time ye play with these gents.”
She half turned in her chair, her arm slung over its back, to look at the Negro, who sat on one bunkbed. “Micah, ye could rob these galoots blind.”
The middle-aged man barely looked up from his nails that he was cleaning with his pocket knife. “Me? Auh never played poker, Miss Romy. It’s against the Baptist’s Word.”
“Sort of like Old Maid,” Jock joshed, his grey bushy brows wagging and his tobacco-varnished teeth flashing. “Nothing to it.:
She wrinkled her nose at the Scotsman. “Like ye know, Jock. Ye realize, I am the one with yuir money. But tell ye all what, I’m going to give ye laddies a chance to win back yuir losses.”
The five at the table perked up. She turned back to Micah. “With yuir deadpan expression, ye can lead these five a merry chase. Here, take me place, and I shall guide ye through a couple of hands.”
He looked away quickly. “Auh don’t think so, Miss Romy.”
“Come on, Micah. If ye willna give me a chance, at least, give yuirself a chance.”
That must have resonated with him. He stared over her head for a few seconds, then rose and shambled toward the table.
The eagerness of the other five subsided as Micah caught on. He was a natural, as she had predicted.
The ranch hands might not have taken to her but she had earned their respect, at least.
She patted Micah’s shoulder, and headed back across the sparse turf to the main house to finish up the dishes – well, that, and to check on that other game. The game of love.
In the kitchen, the bare and dangling overhead light bulb haloed Duke and Sally, sitting across from one another at the table with the checkerboard between them. From the living room, the radio was playing Benny Goodman’s ‘Swing, Swing, Swing.’
With a cigar clenched at one corner of his mouth, Duke was chuckling at something Sally had said. His stove-pipe legs were stretched out under the table at either side of her denim skirt-draped ones.
Romy made a noise in the back of her throat, and both looked up at her. “Just popped in to finish up the dishes. Hope I’m not disturbing ye two.”
“Two’s company, Romy,” Duke said. “Three’s – ”
“ – the Musketeers,” she dimpled. “Or the Three Blind Mice or the Three Wise Men.”
Discounting the muscle that briefly flickered in his clamped jaw, he appeared to ignore her, but Sally’s deeply sculpted lips fought back a grin. So, the young woman did possess a sense of humor.
He crowned his checker. “I’ve got you on the run now,” he told Sally.
“Err, Duke,” Romy said, “she has ye on the run.”
“What?” He transferred his scowl from her back to the board, of which he was clearly in control, then, questioningly to her again.
“Tis not the checker game I’m talking about.”
His eyes squinted, as if he had her in his gun sights. “Don’t start in with that gypsy fortune-telling shit, Romy.”
“You tell fortunes?” Sally asked, shifting in her chair to fully face Romy. The horsewoman’s expression changed from cool reservation to eager reception.
Scowling, he pushed back his chair and came to his feet.
“Aye, that I do,” she said ignoring his ominous expression. “Got me cards right here, atop the refrigerator.” She tiptoed to feel around atop it. “Or mayhap they be in me purse.”
“Sally is not interested.”
“Yes, I am,” the young woman countered
With devilish pleasure, Romy watched him take her hand and firmly draw her away from the table. “Then you can call and discuss it over the telephone, sweetheart,” he said, propelling Sally into the parlor, where he collected her jacket.
“I canna read cards over a telephone,” Romy called out, goading him.
“See,” Romy heard Sally say, “you heard her, Duke McClellan. The two of us need to be – ”
The front door shut on the rest of her protest. Out on the screened-in porch, was he holding Sally, kissing her strident voice into silence?
Romy’s mind darted back to that morning earlier in the week, when she had groggily stumbled in on an irate Duke, shaving in the bathroom – and espied the hairy armpit he had presented her with, as well as, the vaulting of his ribs above his towel and, below it, his long muscled thighs textured with dark hair.
She probably knew her horses as well as Sally, and men even better. She could read them like she could read the lines in her palm. But Duke . . . cynical, virile, a man of few words . . . well, that much was apparent to anyone. Yet she also sensed beneath that surface coursed a current that could sweep away the faint of heart.
She was drying the dishes, when he stalked back into the kitchen. He jammed his thumbs into his Levi’s pockets. “I think we have a language barrier problem here. Do you understand the difference between cook and cards? I agreed to take you on to cook, not to read cards.”
The contention in the kitchen was hot enough to melt a birthday candle. Not that her twenty-first birthday was of any import. Well, the SS had been interested in her birthday – or, more to the point, the fact it was shared by a twin, her brother. How was Luca celebrating tonight . . . if he was even alive?
Drying her hands on the damp dish towel slung over her shoulder, she held her ground. “She’ll try to ride ye, Duke. Ye may want to see what the cards have to say. She may not be for the likes of yuirself.”
“And you are?”
Head tilted, she considered this. “Well, as a matter of fact, aye, that may be. Not that I want to be a candidate, mind ye now.”
He stared down at her incredulously. That look hurt but not as much as his next words. “I may be a lot of dastardly things, but one thing I am not is desperate. At least, not that desperate.”
She bridled. “Well, I am desperate. Teach me to read those books ye read at night in yuir office – and how to fashion me letters better, and I’ll tend the kitchen garden for ye. Overgrown with weeds, it is.”
His slow smile told her he knew he had the upper hand. “Pitch in doing the weekly laundry, and you have yourself a deal, Sunshine. Not that you could learn very much in the two months or so you have left till Christmas rolls around.”
§ § §
Flashbacks, nightmares, yanked Romy from her sleep. Unbelievably in October, even though the Hill Country’s sparkling nights were cooler, her pillow, Duke’s pillow, was overly warm for her liking.
Aye, its pillowcase smelled of soap, sunlight, and the clothes line’s fresh air, yet it still retained the redolence of his particular scent. Male. Invigorating. Arousing. Evocative of feelings she might have encountered in the mist of time long past.
She flipped the pillow over to its cooler side and flipped her body onto her back. To no avail. She guessed it had to be close to three in the morning.
Sleepy she was not. Tired, yes. Exhausted by the long, physically demanding days, starting at sunup, something to which her unconventional life had been unaccustomed. Gypsies did not like to be bound by the set hours or rules of a master and for that reason preferred the roving life.
She shoved aside the confining covers and slid her feet into the huaraches. Among the donated apparel was a tatty nightdress, but she much preferred sleeping in Duke’s soft muslin shirt she had purloined from his closet.
In the hallway outside his office door, she had to tiptoe around a jutting, creaking floorboard in order not to wake him. The house was a rambling wreck, with only the kitchen updated, modernized beyond her medieval culinary skills. Granted, however, the six ranch hands were doing their best to adapt to her cooking.
The parlor’s fireplace was still alit with embers, illuminating her navigation between the stool she had resorted to using in order to pull on the overhead light’s chain, a spatula she had resorted to in swatting a horse fly, and the empty milk crock she had appropriated as a door stop.
The front door’s hinges squeaked as if they had not been oiled in ages. The front porch’s screen door bellowed in protest, as well. And – shite! – her head collided with the porch’s dinner bell, setting up a clanging that her hands at once stilled. The noise would wake up the dead, including Duke . . . not that she cared.
Her footsteps left imprints in the light frost tipping the scant grass, but, at last, she reached the barn. Sliding aside the barn door, she tugged on the single lightbulb’s chain string.
Here were comforting memories of her youth – Irish cobs and self-sufficient Gypsy men, barbarous, mythical centaurs, who were as much a part of her as were her mum’s ridiculously fabled fortune telling.
Romy meandered from one stall to another, her eyes adjusting to the muted light. A piebald here, a chestnut there, and in another, a roan – all belonging to the ranch hands. And which one was Duke’s?
And there it was – the great bay. It had to be his.
At her approach, the horse stamped and pawed its fragrant hay-strewn stall. “Easy boy,” she murmured, opening the stall gate and slipping inside, just out of reach of its tap-dancing hooves. Tossing its head and snorting, its eyes and nostrils flared.
Using her Gypsy’s sing-song gentling whisper, she step-by-step moved forward. “Ahh, tis a beautiful horse, ye be.”
The thickly muscled stallion quieted somewhat. Watching her warily from those great bark-brown eyes, it stood still, as she laid her cheek up alongside its muzzle. Horses were intrinsically considered sacred animals in Gypsy mind. “Tis all right. I merely want to spend some time with ye.”
The smell of horseflesh, of stable, and hay and manure . . . all was well with the world.
Until, she heard the rumble of Duke McClellan’s voice. “Better your time be spent elsewhere.” Clad only in those low-slung Levi’s and barefooted, he closed the stall gate behind him and sauntered to the bay’s other side. His long hands stroked its mighty barrel chest.
After the ruckus she had raised, she wasn’t surprised to see him, yet she tensed, nevertheless. “Like where?” she asked, waiting to see if he was the kind of bloody bloke to come back with some suggestive remark, when instinct told her he wouldn’t.
“Like pickpocketing the honest in Austin.”
At that, her shoulder muscles relaxed. “Ahh, but tis here I’d rather be, watching ye flounder with yuir courting.”
His eyes fired blue salvos across the bay’s muzzle. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“Nay, but me cards do.” Not for this man a self-absorbed, materialistic, and snobby young woman with a nagging voice for a love interest. No,he was different, unique. “The cards whisper that the years of yuir youth stole away yuir heart’s power of speech.” A hunch, granted from what her ear detected, but a good one, if only because of how easily she picked up mannerisms and intonations.
“I could say you’re certifiably crazy, but I’m the one certifiably crazy, agreeing to take you on.”
“Tis only until I save me enough to get to Ireland.”
“Ireland? Not back to Germany?”
“Ye’ve head of the phrase, la querencia?”
He shook his head, and she could almost hear his exasperated sigh. “If it’s not Tex-Mex Spanish, no.”
“It means to desire. La querencia describes a place where ye feel safe, where ye feel at home – a place where yuir strength of character is drawn from.”
“A Gypsy has strength of character?”
She ignored his jibe. “For meself, la querencia would be Ireland.”
“Sounds like a damn fairy tale.”
“Do ye not believe in fairy tales?” she whispered, as if gentling a wild horse. “Believe in True Love, and Soul Mates? Ye know, Duke, me cards can help ye find yuir heart’s desire.”
“And you really do,” he asked, “you really do believe in all this hogwash?”
Avoiding his derisive stare, she caressed the bay’s mane. “Ye desire that happy ending so badly ye’d take on the world, Duke McClellan.”
It was as if she had landed a solid punch in his stomach. “Remember, your days here are numbered,” he said, and swung away, stalking toward the gate.
“Good night,” she called after him. “Sleep tight.”