Chapter Twelve
IT DIDN’T SURPRISE NORA that Cal was anxious to get away Friday afternoon, on his mysterious business about which he told her nothing. She didn’t bother him with her minor aches and pains or the cold, much less what the doctor had said. He had become remote and almost unapproachable, and looked as if he had a great deal on his mind. She told herself to remember that at first he had been kind, overlooking her burned vegetables and meat and the disastrous biscuits she had continued to produce until he left to live in the bunkhouse.
He came into the cabin late Friday in a suddenly cold humor, staying just long enough to pack his bag. He made no comment about his neatly folded shirts, at which she had achieved at least some level of proficiency by ironing gunny and flour sacks until she could do it without scorching or burning them, and only then putting the iron to his shirts. In fact, the sight of them made him feel guilty all over again, because he could imagine how much time she’d spent learning to iron so well.
“Thank you,” he said stiffly.
She shrugged. Conversation was difficult enough, and she felt unwell. She stifled a cough but gave in to a sneeze.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Dust,” she explained, and pulled a handkerchief from her apron pocket to dab at her red nose. “It is only dust.”
He looked around him sadly at the thickness of it on the furniture. “Yes.”
She glared at him. “I have enough to do without wasting time on the furniture. The dust only comes right back.”
“As you say.” He wasn’t disposed to argue. She looked thinner than ever. “Are you eating?” he asked. “You must try. Are you certain that the doctor said you were all right?”
“He said that I was fine,” she lied. “I do nothing really strenuous.”
Blissfully unaware of what she had to do around the house, because he was out all day, he only nodded, placated. “Take care of yourself. I should be back Monday afternoon.”
Her eyes were on the suitcase. “You packed your gun,” she said.
He looked surprised. “I always pack my gun,” he said. “We are not as civilized as we like to believe. Men are robbed all the time.”
She frowned. “What do you have that a robber would want?” she said without thinking.
His eyes were suddenly cool. “I beg your pardon?”
She flushed. “I mean…”
“You still feel that you have married beneath you, don’t you?” he asked coolly. “I am a man of no means and not worth robbing, is that it?”
She bit her lip. “Cal, you twist my words,” she said, her eyes pleading for understanding. “I am your wife. This is my lot, too, now, to live as ordinary people do. I am trying to adjust. Truly I am.”
“But you hate it,” he said suddenly. “I have seen your eyes fall when we go to town, as if you are ashamed to have anyone see you with me. You go about doing chores here with the look of a martyred saint, because you were raised to believe that decent women did not work in the home. You are ashamed of your position here and ashamed to have me for a husband.”
She ground her teeth together. “Please…!”
“Imagine—Miss Marlowe of Richmond, married to a poor working cowboy with dirty boots,” he continued, his voice like a whip as he put all his stifled resentments into words. “To cap it all, your aunt stopped me on my way here and asked me if I couldn’t afford just a little daily help for you. Because, she said, a lady was hardly suited to such tedious physical labor, and you are having to depend on Melly for food that you can eat,” he added deliberately.
She went red. “But I said nothing to her!” She protested her innocence. “Yes, Melly was kind enough to bring me a few things…. You moved out! Why should I cook only for myself! And I did not ask my aunt for a daily maid!”
He let out an exasperated sigh. “You certainly asked me, and I refused. If you did not ask your aunt to speak to me, perhaps she reads minds,” he said irritably. “You profess to love me, Nora, but both of us know that you will never be happy here. You have no household skills whatsoever. You haven’t the patience to accomplish anything in the kitchen. You want silk dresses and linen tablecloths, silver and crystal and servants and all the right people to invite to Sunday dinner. You will never be satisfied with what I have to offer you here.”
“I will be!” she said angrily.
“Really?” His eyes narrowed on her face. “Then why did you ask your aunt to write your people a letter of apology?” he said finally, voicing the thing that had upset him the most.
She gasped. “I did not!” she said, aghast at being accused of bowing down to her parents, after their cruel treatment of her. Whatever had her aunt been thinking, to tell Cal such a thing? If she thought to make him change his coolness toward Nora with such a prod, it had certainly misfired.
“They are wealthy and you are their only child,” he continued with an unpleasant smile. “Well, let me tell you something. If you make it up with them, that’s all right, but don’t expect to ask them for anything—not for dresses or fripperies or cash. Because as long as you remain my wife, I won’t allow you to take one penny from your family!”
She glared at him. Defending the charge was forgotten in the heat of renewed anger. “I’ll do what I please! I may be your wife, but you don’t own me! I can take care of myself perfectly well, and I was doing so until you seduced me into this…this…life of abject poverty! At least a man of my own station would not have expected me to cook and clean and work like a scullery maid!” she burst out in a feverish rush. She felt terribly warm. It was probably a little fever with her cold, she thought, but she felt so ill that she hardly knew what she was saying.
He didn’t speak. His face closed up and his eyes narrowed. “Honest labor is no disgrace,” he said with cold pride. “I work with my hands and feel no dishonor for it, and my mother never complained about having to work in the house or cook and clean for her husband and three sons. In fact, she took pride in it. But if your family name and social position mean so much to you, then make it up with your father and go back to Richmond. God forbid that you should have to live like a scullery maid, Eleanor. Not for all the world would I demean you further.”
She couldn’t find words. Was he asking her to leave? Throwing her out?
“I have to go,” he said tersely. “If you are not here when I return, nothing more need be said between us. Consider me a temporary aberration in your life, if it pleases you. God knows, I never wanted this marriage in the first place,” he added cuttingly, and untruthfully. “I only wanted to sleep with you.” It was a lie, but it did serve to salvage a little of his wounded pride. He picked up his bag, turning away from her stricken face quickly. Her aunt had made him feel terrible about Nora’s lot, and that remark about Nora going begging to her parents to change her poor status made him sick.
Nora felt stiff all over as she stared at him with fever-bright eyes. “You never spoke of your family to me, or of taking me to meet them…”
He lifted cold eyes to hers. “It would never occur to me! Do you think I would take you to my mother, and allow you to shame her for doing her own housework and cooking—let you look down your haughty nose at her? Our marriage was the worst mistake of my life. I have no desire to advertise it to my people!”
She was so taken aback that she couldn’t speak. He was…ashamed of her! The blood drained out of her face. He was so ashamed of her that he couldn’t bear to introduce her to his family. It was the worst blow of all.
He didn’t look at her again. He left her on the porch of the cabin to get into the carriage with the man who was driving him to the station. Nora watched them down the road and wondered without much interest if the man had overheard the argument.
With a cry of distress, she went inside and threw herself across the freshly made bed to sob her heart out. If only she felt a little better, if only her face and throat did not burn so. She turned her face in to the cool pillow and thought how very nice it felt. Later, when she got up, she could worry about the ruin of her marriage and what she could do. She closed her eyes just for a minute and lapsed into a feverish sleep.
BRUCE LANGHORN WAS THE LAST student left in Melly’s small art class in Tyler Junction that evening. She held the class in the school, with special permission of the school board, and usually the children’s parents were right on time to pick them up. But Bruce was still waiting for his father, and it was almost dark. If she didn’t take Bruce home to his father now, she would be caught on the road in the dark—a particularly undesirable situation for a lone young woman. Her father would be furious. He might even make her give up the class. Not for all the world would she admit that one of her greatest joys was the glimpse she got of Mr. Langhorn when he came to get Bruce each evening.
She took Bruce out to his father’s ranch, watching the darkening sky with worried eyes.
“I don’t know where my dad could be,” Bruce said worriedly. “He’s just never late.”
“I know, dear,” Melly said with a smile. “It’s all right. Really. I don’t mind dropping you by your home.”
He grimaced. “I hope she’s not there.”
“Mrs. Terrell?”
The expression in her voice ticked him. “She doesn’t come alone,” he said with a sidelong glance. “She comes with her aunt. It’s all proper.”
“That’s none of my business,” she said with pretended calm.
“Sure.”
There was a light on in the house when Melly pulled the buggy up at the front porch. It was getting dark and she was worried about the long ride home. Not for all the world would she admit to herself that she was also concerned about the absent Mr. Langhorn, who was, as Bruce said, never late. Could he be ill?
“Hurry inside, now,” she said, “and wave if your father is there and everything is all right. I won’t get down.”
“All right. Thanks for the ride, Miss Tremayne!”
“Of course.”
She held the reins tightly, waiting the eternity it took for Bruce to go inside and finally reappear. He ran to the gate. “It’s okay, he fell asleep in his chair,” Bruce said, chuckling. “They’re fixing fences and repairing outbuildings. He worked until he dropped, I reckon.”
She relaxed. “Good night, then, dear,” she said brightly, sensing movement in the house out of the corner of her eye. Not for worlds did she want to get into a discussion of any sort with his detestable father. She was still wounded from what Mr. Langhorn had said to her at the dance. She flipped the reins at the horse’s flank and set him into motion.
The darkness swallowed her up. There was a crescent moon, but it shone very little light on the road. Thank God the road went right by the ranch, and the horse knew the way very well. She should be all right if there were no desperados lurking….
The sudden sound of a horse’s hooves on the road behind her was loud enough to be heard above the sound of her own horse’s measured trot. The horse behind was galloping. It would catch her.
Her heart raced as she thought about a rash of recent assaults on lone women, and she snapped the reins again, harder, pushing the horse faster.
There was a curve in the road ahead and she had to slow down for it, which gave her pursuer time to catch up with the buggy. A pair of long, denim-clad legs in dark boots came into view beside the buggy and she cried out.
As she tried to urge the poor horse into speed again, a lean hand came out and caught its bridle, bringing it to a slow, steady halt.
She knew now who her pursuer was, and it didn’t help her heartbeat to decrease. He was bareheaded and angry; she could see it in the economy of movement as he swung his long leg over the saddle and dropped lithely to the ground beside the buggy.
He swept back his thick, straight hair and glared at her, one lean hand resting on the frame of the buggy.
“You know better than to run a horse at that speed!” he grated.
“Naturally your concern would be for the horse and not my safety alone in the dark, Mr. Langhorn!” she said hotly.
“Why didn’t you stop long enough to speak to me?” he asked.
“Because, obviously, I had no wish to speak to you,” she told him. “Bruce said that you had fallen asleep in your chair. All I needed to know was that it was safe to leave him before I came away. And it was.”
“I had a long day and I was up most of the night with a sick calf,” he said.
“Your advanced age must be catching up with you,” she said cattily.
“Damn you!”
She caught her breath. “Mr. Langhorn!”
His hand tightened on the buggy, and even in the darkness she could see the glitter of his dark eyes on her. “I have no manners, didn’t you know?” he taunted. “I am a divorced man, a disgrace in the eyes of the community. Of course, they neglect to mention that my wife was little more than a harlot, who ignored her own son and sold her body to buy opium. She gave herself to any man who would pay—”
“Please!”
“Is it too sordid for your sweet ears, little Miss Purity?” he drawled. “Don’t you want to know all about the man you harbor such a secret passion for? Or did you think I didn’t know how you worship me from afar?”
She wanted to dig a hole and crawl in it. He made her feel cheap. Not only was he deliberately insulting, there was a faintly slurred quality about his voice that made her nervous.
“I must go home,” she pleaded. “Please move away.”
“That isn’t what the widow asks me to do,” he drawled. “She would do anything I wanted.”
“Then do, please, go and permit her to. I wish to go home.”
“So do I, but I haven’t got a home,” he said wearily. “I’ve got a house that I break my back to keep up, a ranch that takes all my time, a son who gets no attention at all because I don’t even have time to be a father. He likes you,” he added angrily. “You’re all he talks about. Miss Tremayne, his patron saint!”
“Oh, Mr. Langhorn, you must…!”
“Come out of there,” he muttered, lifting his arms to drag her from the carriage and stand her beside him on the ground.
“The horse will run away,” she said quickly.
The horse had, in fact, no breath to run anywhere. He was still breathing heavily and had suddenly discovered some water standing in a track and some tall grass beside it.
Langhorn’s steely hands had her face in them, and he was trying to see it through the dimness. “You haunt me,” he said unsteadily, “with your big brown eyes and your virginal body and that long, beautiful dark hair that I want to wind around my chest….”
His mouth hit hers with the force of a thunderbolt. She gasped at its impact, shocked, because she had never been kissed in such a way. The shy pecks of boys her own age were suddenly forgotten in the heat and insistence of an adult man’s headlong passion.
His arms dragged her against the length of his lean body, making her aware of his steely strength as well as the growing desire that was blatant against her hips.
Frightened, she tried to pull away, but his head was spinning from the taste and feel of her mouth, and he wouldn’t let go.
She felt his hands in her hair, dragging out the pins to let the glorious length of it fall in heavy waves down to her waist. And all the while his demanding mouth never left hers for a second, never let up its fury.
“Stiff,” he murmured roughly against her lips while his hands twisted sensuously in her long hair. “Stiff as a board against me, like a piece of wood.” He bit her lower lip, making her gasp. “You’re no more than a child,” he said with disgust, pausing to catch his breath. “You don’t know how to kiss, you’re afraid of passion, you’re of no use whatsoever to a man!”
She swallowed and then swallowed again. Her knees were weak and her mouth trembled, sore where his teeth had bruised the lower lip. She put her fingertips to it. “I want to go home,” she choked.
“Sure, why not?” he asked angrily. “You cowering little girl! Now do you see what you were asking for? You can’t even pretend that you like it!”
She tried to move away again, but his arms enveloped her once more.
“And now you’re going to cry, aren’t you?” he taunted.
She rested her forehead against his broad chest, letting the hot tears wash down her cheeks. She didn’t make a sound, and her clenched fists stayed right at his shirt collar, not moving.
He felt her tremble. The whiskey he’d consumed had stolen his reason. He hadn’t meant to frighten her. A man could only stand so much, and she’d tormented him for months.
His lean hands smoothed her long, silky hair with rapt appreciation, enjoying the feel of it through his fingers. “Hair like an angel,” he remarked quietly. “So soft. Like dark corn silk.”
“You are going to marry the widow Terrell,” she said gruffly. “You have no right—no right!—to lay hands on me!”
“I know,” he said heavily. His lips touched her dark hair, her forehead. “Don’t cry.”
She wiped at the tears with her fists. It should have been laughable, to stand by the dark, deserted road with the man she loved more than life and beg to be let go. But his opinion of her made his position clear. He hated her silent adoration. He hated her youth and innocence. He wanted nothing from her. So why, she wondered, shaken, would he not release her?
His hands were in her hair again, as if it fascinated him. He wrapped it around his fingers and took it to his lips.
“Mr. Langhorn,” she began stiffly.
His lips touched her eyes, closing them. His breath, whiskey-scented, was warm against the chill of the evening. “I have a first name.”
“Which I do not intend to use,” she said, choking on her pride. He was making her knees go weak again with that sorcerer’s touch. The silent tracing of his lips on her face made her feel funny all over, especially when his tongue came out and slid softly over her long eyelashes.
The hands tangling in her hair were moving, sliding down its length. They were over the ruffled bodice of her shirtwaist dress now, the knuckles accidentally brushing the taut rise of her body in a way that made her actually want to lean into them.
There was a swelling in her lower body, an odd ache that seemed to throb harder with every touch of his lips, every brush of his knuckles over her breasts. Their touch on her nipples produced a sudden hardness that she felt.
She should protest. She thought to, when his lips moved down to fit themselves softly to hers. Not quite touching, then touching, then lifting and brushing, then touching again, harder and harder…
And while they touched, his hand turned and his thumb and forefinger actually caught her nipple and pressed it between them. She felt fire shooting through her, saw blinding lights behind her closed eyelids. She made a sound—a sort of choked cry—and her lips opened under his.
He whispered something. His hand caught in the thick hair at her nape and pulled her head back just enough to give him total access to her mouth. His tongue worked at her lips and teeth until he teased his way into the sweet, trembling darkness past them. He stabbed into her mouth and she cried out against it; at the same time his lean hand went completely over her breast and swallowed it up.
Afterward, she could never remember who pulled away first. She felt swollen all over, and she could barely speak for the thickness of her tongue. Her whole body felt that way, thick and sluggish and throbbing with some need she didn’t understand.
His arms supported her, because she couldn’t quite stand up. She clutched at them, leaning her head against the rough thunder of his heart.
He was breathing like a wild thing and his fingers bit into her upper arm hard enough to hurt. He sucked in air like a man trying to breathe sanity.
“You should not have…done that,” she managed in a raw whisper.
His cheek nuzzled against her hair. “Shhhh.”
“Mr. Langhorn…”
He laughed shakily. “Are we not past that? My name is Jacob.”
“Jacob,” she whispered. Her eyes closed and she shivered with overwrought feelings.
He held her gently, without demands, his hands smoothing up and down her back until she began to calm.
She pulled against him finally and he let go, watching her move away so that an arm’s length stretched between them.
He pulled cigarette papers out of his shirt pocket, extracted one, replaced the pack and tugged out his Bull Durham tobacco pouch. He seemed in no hurry to leave while his horse and her buggy horse grazed in the semidarkness. He rolled himself a cigarette, produced a match and lit it.
He let out a long breath of smoke. One lean hand went into his jeans pocket and he stood and just looked at her. Her hair was down around her shoulders, a dark, wavy cloud against the dark pattern of her dress. It was a silky fabric. He remembered its softness when she had permitted him to caress her breast.
The memory made his body tauten. He laughed softly at his own folly. Two neat whiskeys and a wild ride through the darkness, to upset both their lives. Because that was what he had accomplished. Neither of them would ever be able to forget how it felt to kiss each other.
“I am going home now,” she said.
“A wise idea. There might be bad men on the road at night.”
“Worse than you?” she chided.
He chuckled. “Perhaps. Did I…bruise you?” he asked delicately, remembering the fervent caress of his hand on that softness. His eyes fell to her dress to punctuate the question.
She folded her arms across her breasts. “Sir!”
He sighed wistfully. “How did it feel, Melly?” he mused. “You’ve wanted me for years. How did it feel to have my mouth on yours, to feel my hands on that soft body?”
She turned away toward the buggy with dark, miserable eyes.
He stopped her at the wheel with a lean hand that snaked around her waist and brought her roughly back against his body.
“I’ll be along tomorrow,” he said at her ear. “Both of us need to have a long talk with your parents.”
“About what?” she asked, aghast. Surely he did not mean to tell them what had happened here!
“About us,” he said solemnly. “Do you really think either of us will be able to stop, now that we’ve had a taste of each other?”