by Lola White
As he climbed up next to her and braced her boneless body with his shoulder, he cast a glance back at the starving dog in the wagon bed. Big brown eyes stared back at him, the beast’s stumpy tail wagging furiously.
Offer shook his head and set off down the road again.
Chapter Four
Hyacinth couldn’t remember a single time that Jonathan had even come close to making her feel the way Offer did. Within moments, she’d gone from feeling like she was drowning in an icy river of panic—ready to throw herself out of the wagon with her heart thumping and her lungs seizing—to being awash on a hot tide of pleasure.
Her heart had still pounded and she had still struggled to breathe, but the ice in her veins had been thoroughly melted under the heat of Offer’s wicked mouth. Never had a man kissed her naked breast, let alone sucked her nipple until her entire chest burned with the need for more while fiery tendrils licked down through her body.
And she’d known what was coming next. She’d have rather not been on the side of the road the first time she surrendered to Offer, but he’d taken the choice out of her hands with the deceptively simple method of stealing her wits. He’d pressed close, licked her nipple and thrust his fingers between her legs. With all the new sensations flying through her, Hyacinth had known she didn’t stand a chance of rational thought.
She was still gathering all the splintered pieces of her mind when Offer turned the wagon off the road, traveled down a short path and pulled to a stop under a wooden sign that read Double O, complete with a little metal design that looked like two letter Os hooked together. The sign was obviously new and painstakingly created.
The rest of his place was not.
Hyacinth struggled to put some steel in her melted spine as she looked around the dilapidated homestead. The house was tiny—two rooms at best, in her admittedly uneducated opinion—with a raised porch fronting the structure and a sagging roof covering it. The two outbuildings beyond were in slightly better condition.
As far as the eye could see, dirt was the dominant theme. Except for the small building farthest from the main house, where a split-log fence enclosed a meager patch of greenery, the entire space seemed as barren as a desert. There was not even a blade of grass in the front yard, and only a scraggly bush next to the nearest outbuilding. She had no idea how the small flock of chickens pecking in the dirt found enough sustenance for survival.
As Offer jumped out of the wagon and announced his arrival in a yell that echoed over the land, a pack of dogs careened around the corner of the nearest outbuilding. In a show of half-feral unwelcome, they sprinted straight at the wagon, lips all lifted as their snarls and barks rose in a frenzy of sound that set Hyacinth’s heart to pounding again.
“Stay away from the dogs, darlin’. They’re meaner than the hounds of hell. They’ll bite your face off.”
Hyacinth cast a quick glance at Offer, but it didn’t appear that was he teasing. She clung to his hand as he plucked her out of the wagon and set her on her feet in the middle of the pack of dogs. They surged forward, but Hyacinth held her ground—though she pressed hard into Offer’s side—and several of the barks and snarls turned to whines as they caught her scent.
Offer snickered in a wholly offensive way. “You smell like me.”
Hyacinth put her nose in the air. “I would appreciate a bath.”
“Mmm, bet you’re sticky.” Without dislodging Hyacinth from his side, he turned to face his newest stray. “C’mon, girl. Welcome home.”
The skinny dog popped to her feet and wagged her tail. She didn’t need any more encouragement than Offer’s voice to hop from the back of the wagon and meet her new pack. At once, the other dogs sent up a howl and lifted their lips, crouching low and advancing on the newcomer. Hyacinth’s heart surged up into her throat at the thought of the carnage she was about to witness.
Offer did not try to stop it.
Without a sound—not a bark, a snarl or woof—the skinny dog bared her teeth and flew at the pack. Clearly taken by surprise, the other dogs retreated. The new canine queen parked herself at Hyacinth’s feet and wagged her tail.
Offer rubbed his chin. “Huh. Don’t have much use for a dog that don’t bark. On the other hand, she’s meaner than the rest combined, so I suppose she’ll do.”
Hyacinth had no choice but to follow Offer as he dragged her toward the nearest outbuilding. All the dogs came too, in a vague line that clearly showed the hierarchy they’d just fallen into. The outbuilding didn’t have a porch, so it was just a matter of Offer throwing open the door and hauling Hyacinth inside for her to be out of the swirl of dirt that clouded around their ankles as they walked.
She blinked against the gloom. Two men sat at a small table eating something she couldn’t identify by the light of a single oil lantern. One man was very old, the other was very young. The old man stroked his long, white beard as he chewed and swallowed. The young man didn’t look up as his jaw worked furiously.
Offer’s eyebrows shot up his forehead. “What the hell are you eating?”
“Shoe leather,” the young man said.
Offer pinched the bridge of his nose. “Old man, I told you I can’t afford shoe leather.”
Hyacinth was unsure whether or not Offer was teasing.
The old man tugged his beard and gave all of them a narrowed-eyed glare. “You don’t like my cooking, find someone who can do it better.”
Offer pushed Hyacinth slightly in front of him. “Meet Hyacinth.”
“Can you cook?” The young man finally looked up, and Hyacinth realized he was even younger than she’d first thought. The boy should probably still be in school.
“Some things,” she hedged. “Not a lot. We had a girl to do that for us, back home.”
The old man turned his steely gaze directly on her. “We?”
“My parents and I.”
“How ‘bout biscuits?” The boy’s expression melted into one of intense longing. “Can you cook biscuits?”
Hyacinth nodded. “Yes. And stew.”
The boy poked his shoe leather meal with a fork missing two tines. “I could live off biscuits. Better than breaking any more teeth on Bill’s cooking.”
Offer snorted as if in agreement. “Darlin’, this is Bill Means, who swore to God he could cook, but what he’d meant was that he figured it wasn’t too hard, based on the fact that he was a trail hand for most of his miserable life and watched other men cook. We’ve been slowly starving to death around here, trying to eat what he puts in front of us.”
Hyacinth gave the old man a small smile. “How do you do?”
Bushy white eyebrows traveled north in an expression identical to the one Offer had worn only a moment ago. “Fancy, huh? I’m fine, honey, and how do you do?”
“Very well, thank you.” Hyacinth ignored the old man’s laughter and looked at Offer.
He grinned. “Bill found me and pretended to raise me after my father died. The boy is Jack, and I’m starting to fear his growth has been stunted from starvation.”
Hyacinth nodded at the kid. “You’re all family?”
Offer answered. “No, they just stay here.”
She plastered a polite smile on her face. “Well, it was a pleasure to meet you both. Offer? Could I have a bath?”
Offer pointed to a door at the far end of the room, just beyond two narrow bunks that Hyacinth had to squint to see in the gloom. Her strange savior didn’t even have the grace to look apologetic when he said, “Through there.”
“I have to bathe in the bunkhouse?” Hyacinth threw a worried smile at the other two men. “With them here?”
“It’s all I got right now.”
“I’ve got to put some water on,” Bill said. “It’ll be a little bit of a wait.”
Offer nodded. “Do that while I put Zeus in the corral and show Hyacinth where she’ll be sleeping.”
The old man’s eyebrows went up again. “And where is that?”
“In my bed.” Offer’s eye
s traveled down Hyacinth’s body, sparking heat in her belly—both because of her embarrassment and because now she knew what he could do to her. He only made it worse by adding, “Where’s it most convenient for her primary duties.”
The sound of the old man’s raucous laughter trailed after them as Offer pulled her back out to the yard. He pushed her in the general direction of the house before jogging toward the wagon and collecting her bag.
“Go on in,” he ordered as he put her luggage on the porch. “I’ll be back in a little while.”
Dazed and vaguely disoriented, Hyacinth reminded herself that Offer had made no promises beyond room and board. He certainly never gave her the impression that her welcome to the Double O would be any less rough than her initial meeting with him in town. She filled her lungs with air that was slightly gritty from the dusty yard and faintly flavored with the stench of a nearby outhouse and opened the door.
She’d been wrong about the house having two rooms. Still on the threshold, she gave herself the grand tour—the main building being one large room housing two chairs by a fireplace and a rickety bed. A layer of dust on everything but the bed told her Offer didn’t spend much time there, but at least the large, unadorned windows let in more of the evening’s light than the small panes in the outbuilding had.
Hyacinth lugged her bag over toward the foot of the bed and took another look around. Doing what she could to bolster her flagging spirits, she began to make lists. She could clean—how hard could it be to wet a cloth and wipe everything down? She was a decent seamstress too, having learned over the past year when her clothing had begun deteriorating at the same rate as her bank account. She would make curtains for the windows and perhaps knit a new blanket to replace the ragged, tired thing covering Offer’s mattress.
She could have cried, but she bit her lip hard and pretended everything would be okay.
She was shuffling Offer’s few articles of clothing to one side of the trunk set against the wall to make room for her own things when Bill knocked on the open door. She looked over to see him holding a smoking plate of cut-up shoe leather above the heads of the leaping dogs.
Electing to take her chances with the dogs rather than invite the man into the house without Offer present, Hyacinth took the plate and shooed the pack off the porch. As she perched on the edge, the dogs immediately lined up in front of her. A single, tentative bite of the overcooked steak told her she wasn’t that hungry.
She fed a piece of meat to the skinny dog Offer had picked up in town with an apologetic smile at the old man. He laughed. “It’s only fit for dogs, anyhow. I’ll be right glad to taste your biscuits, I tell you truly.”
“I really don’t know how to cook much.”
“Whatever you can do has got to be better than what I can do. There are days I’m grateful for how dark the bunkhouse is. Then the others can’t see what I’m putting before them.”
Hyacinth shook her head, wondering if the confusion that had found her that day would ever stop growing. “Why did you tell Offer you could cook?”
The old man spat out a stream of brown juice that had Hyacinth recoiling before he answered. “After his daddy died, Offer took a job on the trail. Didn’t know a thing about it and I tried to teach him. Offer’s hard-headed though.”
“I noticed,” Hyacinth murmured.
Bill grinned and spat another stream. “Well, we worked together for a while, then he headed out for a different opportunity. Saw him around a few times as the years passed, and boy did the years pass.” The old man’s grin faded and the sparkle in his eyes died. “I’m old now, and no use on the trail. Can’t hardly sit my horse for more than an hour or two either, what with the way my back and legs start seizing up.”
The words of the General Store owner in town came back to haunt Hyacinth. “Offer took you in…like a stray?”
“Noticed that too, did you?” Bill waved toward the dogs Hyacinth was still hand-feeding. “He took all them in, also. And Jack. Came from a bad situation, and Offer found him in a worse situation. The boy’s got nowhere to go.”
“He found me in town, after the man I was supposed to marry rejected me.”
Bill grunted and spat. Once again, Hyacinth made a face and leaned away from the stream. To her surprise, Offer scolded the man from across the yard. “Dammit, Bill! Don’t spit near her. Get a damned can or swallow that mess.”
Hyacinth watched Offer hurry across the yard and wondered. About him, the Double O and all the occupants Offer was gathering on the ranch. She’d started the day with a set of expectations and found her world turned upside down before nightfall. Yet, there was little else she could do but accept Offer’s hospitality and, in truth, he’d already given her a very tempting, physically pleasant reason to stay and see how her future unfolded.
If only it didn’t seem so bleak in every other aspect.
His expression turned wary as he examined her face. Coming to a stop next to the dogs, he snapped, “What?”
Unwilling to tell him the truth, she blurted out the first thing that popped into her head. “How come the town was muddy but your yard is drier than a desert?”
Bill groaned. Offer’s lips thinned, leaving just enough room for a vile curse to escape. Hyacinth assumed it was a sore subject when her host refused to answer her question but asked one of his own. “How come the dogs aren’t tearing the flesh from your bones?”
She lifted the nearly empty plate. “They like shoe leather.”
Offer grunted and reached for Hyacinth’s hand, hauling her to her feet. “Bath time.”
Chapter Five
Hyacinth had a hard time fighting back her dismay when Offer pushed her into the bathing room at the bunkhouse. He followed her in and placed a lantern on a bench, the only piece of furniture in the small space. Still, she squinted into the corners just to be sure she hadn’t missed anything.
“You don’t have a bath tub?”
“Can’t afford it,” he told her. “Just use the dipper.”
Offer disappeared through the door and returned half a minute later with two brimming buckets of steaming water, a large cup hooked over the side of one. Hyacinth was forced to assume that was the dipper.
Taking a deep breath, she turned to eye the door and clutched her pile of clean clothes to her stomach. “There is no lock, Mr. O’Neal.”
“Nobody will come in.”
Hyacinth shook her head. “I’m not comfortable with this arrangement.”
Offer’s grunt was much more intolerant than the look in his eye suggested he was at the moment. No, Hyacinth had seen that spark in his dark irises previously—just before he’d run his hand down her leg in town, and again on the side of the road when he’d told her he would examine her chest. But he said nothing more as he left her, only to return with another bucket of water.
He kicked the door closed behind him. “Take your clothes off, darlin’.”
“I beg your pardon?” Reflex had Hyacinth gripping her coat as if to pull it tighter over her breasts. Laughable, as Offer had already seen them, but Hyacinth had never been nude in front of a man in her life. Jonathan had had the courtesy to leave her chemise in place when they’d been together.
Offer’s voice turned dark and dangerous. “Get naked, woman. I’m going to help you with your bath. Wash your back and all that.”
Hyacinth blinked, but knew her only other option was to forego having a bath altogether, and the stickiness between her legs wouldn’t allow her to do that. With a sigh of surrender, she untied her bonnet and looked around for a place to set it down.
“Put it on the bench, darlin’.”
Hyacinth tightened her grip on the brim. “The bench is too small for all of my things. They’ll get dirty.”
“Put the ones you’re holding on it and throw the rest in the corner. You can wash ‘em tomorrow.”
“Absolutely not.”
Offer rolled his eyes and left the room for a third time. He came back with a simple wooden cha
ir. “Happy?”
She wasn’t, but Hyacinth knew better than to push him further. “Thank you.”
She deposited her clean clothes on the bench and hung her bonnet from the top of the chair. Her dark curls were still secured in a bun high on her head, so she decided to leave off washing her hair until the morning. Her jacket quickly followed the bonnet in removal and placement, but then Hyacinth faltered.
“Naked, woman,” Offer growled.
Hyacinth turned her back on him and gathered her courage. Taking as much time as she could, she dispensed with her dress and arranged it on the chair neatly, removed her shoes and stockings as matter-of-factly as possible, and even managed to slip her drawers down her legs without revealing anything more than her chemise to the man watching her disrobe.
But her chemise was no barrier to his heat as he stepped close to her back and reached around her body. His words then proved her chemise had been no barrier to his sight, either.
“Lantern’s shining right through this,” he said as he tugged the fabric higher on her legs. “I can see it all, darlin’, from where your waist dips in to where your hips round out. I know exactly what your legs look like, and I’ve already seen your titties. Might as well let me see it all at once.”
Offer was relentless in raising her chemise, so Hyacinth gritted her teeth and let him pull it off over her head. His big hands retraced his path, smoothing over her skin as he tracked back down her body to catch her hips. Applying a little force, Offer turned her to face him, but then he stepped back.
He gave a low whistle that Hyacinth chose to consider a compliment to her form as his eyes roved over every inch of her exposed body in an unhurried, greedy perusal. Hyacinth clenched her fists and held herself still while embarrassment battled lust. Lust won out, however, when Offer stripped off his own clothes, carelessly tossing them into the corner.
