The Temptress

by Jude Deveraux

  Asher didn’t answer her but started dressing—behind the wardrobe door. Chris wasn’t sure if he was modest or he was saving her delicate sensibilities. She chastised herself for criticizing every move he made. When he was dressed, he left the room.

  Downstairs at breakfast, she began to see another Owen. Until now, he’d been the epitome of cordiality, but now he was giving instructions to Chris and Asher with the authority of a general.

  “I want the north acre reseeded,” Owen was saying. “And I want all two hundred of those bulbs I ordered set by the end of the day. And, Whit, I’ll give you a list of what I want from town. You’re to take the wagon directly to the saw mill. You can do it all in a day if you don’t dawdle. Lionel, eat those eggs. Unity, have you shown the new housemaid what to do? I want the ceilings upstairs washed.”

  No one else at the table said much. Later, Asher escorted Chris outside. “You don’t have to do this. Remember who you are and that we can go home any time you want. I don’t want you working as a field hand.”

  “How kind of you, but I don’t mind working at all.”

  Suddenly, Ash moved away from her. “Diana, even you aren’t too stupid to do a little work. Now get over there and act like the woman you aren’t.”

  Chris turned to see Owen approaching with Tynan, both men seemingly unaware of what Asher was saying but she knew that, just as Asher had planned, they’d heard.

  Owen said a few more words to Tynan, which she couldn’t hear, then gave Ash an appraising look. “Come with me,” he said and Asher followed, leaving Chris with Tynan.

  “I don’t guess you could have volunteered to help with the washing, could you?” Ty said. “Or the horses? It had to be with the garden.”

  She turned on her heel to glare at him. “If I’d known you were to be in charge of the garden, I would have shoveled coal first. Shall we get started and stop wasting time? I have more to do with my life than spend it listening to you insult me.”

  “It seems to me that the man you claim as your husband was insulting you worse than I ever could.”

  “It’s part of the charade. Diana Eskridge was a woman who allowed her husband to bully her, so Ash and I are acting out a part.”

  “You’d better work on it then, because you don’t look like the type to take bullying from anybody. Every time he speaks to you in that tone, you look like you’re about to set his hair on fire. Here, take this,” he said, handing her a box of bulbs. “You know how to plant?”

  “You’d think he’d hire more than one gardener to do this. My father’s garden isn’t half this size and, when it was kept, he had four men taking care of it.”

  “Ah, but he paid them a salary, they lived on his ranch and he fed them. Hamilton only has to give his poor grateful relatives a roof and food.”

  “But he seems like such a nice man.”

  “People aren’t what they seem,” Ty said with a cold voice.

  “Is that supposed to refer to anyone I know?” she asked, setting down the box of bulbs.

  “Not unless you claim it. I thought I’d met a good girl who was different, but she wasn’t. You’re just like all the rest of them. You’re excited by the reputation of a man with a gun, and you’ll use him however you want, but in the end, when the chips are down, you’ll side against him. No more good girls for me. You and Prescott were made for each other.”

  “I didn’t side with anyone else against you. You betrayed me! I trusted you and then at the picnic you shot a man. Do you know how I felt with all those people against me? They were looking at me as if I were a piece of vermin. A man on the street spit at my feet.”

  Tynan looked at her for a long moment. “Yeah, I know how it feels. I’ve known all my life. Wait until a man spits in your face and then draws a gun on you.”

  “Is that what Rory Sayers did?” Chris whispered.

  “I twisted his arm to keep him from shooting me and the gun went off.”

  “But why did the deputy take you to jail if it was all Rory’s fault?”

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “For the same reason you condemned me without any facts. By reputation. Because I’m not one of the ‘good’ people like they are—like you are.”

  Chris took a bulb planter from a tool box by Tynan’s feet and began to dig in the soft earth to set the first bulb. “I think I was wrong.”

  “No you weren’t,” he said, kneeling beside her. “You were right. People like you and me don’t mix. You deserve somebody like Prescott, not a nameless nobody like me.”

  “I don’t think I deserve anyone at all after betraying a friend,” she whispered, mostly to herself. “Tynan, do you think you could ever forgive me for not trusting you?”

  He looked at her. “No,” he said simply. “It may take me a while to learn a lesson, but I do eventually learn it. I think that from now on I’ll stay even farther away from girls like you.”

  He moved away from her, leaving her to do the planting on that side of the plowed field by herself. The sun came out, making her perspire and the soil that was getting on her made her itch, but she didn’t notice as she went over the events of the past few weeks. Since Tynan had popped out of the cabinet and held her nude body in his arms, she’d not been the same. She’d changed from a sensible young woman interested only in a story to an Amazon who pursued a man without shame. She’d thrown herself at him in the rain forest; she’d sworn to a woman who trusted her, Red, that she’d not betray him—yet at the first opportunity, that’s what she’d done. She was acting like a spoiled little girl: one minute she hated him and the next minute she loved him.

  Sitting back on her heels for a moment, she wiped her forehead and looked across at Tynan as he used a scythe to clear some underbrush. His shirt was drenched with sweat and she could see his muscles working under the thin cloth. He looked as if he’d gained some weight in the last few weeks. Against her will, she remembered the raw stripes on his back where he’d been whipped.

  She thought of the way the townspeople had turned against her after she’d made one error of trying to help a man who looked as if he were guilty. How people everywhere must have treated a man who was always being accused of wrongdoing! How impossible all the “good” people made it for a man to stop doing wrong.

  She turned back to the planting with a vengeance. And she’d been just like them. One time she’d been doing a story on women who worked under the hideous conditions of the sweatshops and she was being very sympathetic when one woman said, “But you can afford to give sympathy because you’ve never had to be where we are.” It hadn’t made much of an impression on her at the time, but now she was beginning to understand what the woman meant. It was easy to judge, to say what you’d do in a situation if you weren’t faced with that situation.

  She had wanted to be Tynan’s friend, even his lover, when the only person she had to stand up against was a man who admitted he’d wanted to marry her even before he’d met her. But when she had to face the ridicule of an entire town and risk the reputation of Nola Dallas, she didn’t stand up so well. She’d walked away from him at the first sign of trouble.

  Chris was sure that she’d never felt so rotten in her life. She had almost earned the trust of a man who didn’t give his trust very often and then she’d betrayed him. She was no better than that girl who’d been willing to see Ty hang rather than tell the truth.

  And now she’d lost him. He was gone from her as if the few days they’d spent together had never been. The fragile beginnings were broken forever.

  Standing, easing her back against her hand, she went to the pump and filled the water bucket. She took a drink from the dipper, shaded her eyes against the sun and looked for Tynan. He was still chopping weeds, clearing the brush away for a new area of garden.

  She put the dipper into the bucket and carried it to him. “Thirsty?” she asked.

  He turned, smiling at her before he caught himself and the smile disappeared. He didn’t speak as he took the dipper from her. />
  “You look awfully hot. Why don’t you sit a while?”

  “No thanks, and this is nothing compared to what I’ve been doing the last few years of my life.”

  “In prison?”

  “Where they put all bad men like me. Move back so I don’t hit you.”

  Chris stepped back and as she did so, she could see the sweat rolling off his face and dripping into his soaked shirt collar. On impulse, she picked up the bucket of water, cold from the underground well, and threw the contents on the back of his head.

  Tynan gasped at the shock of the water, then turned on her in anger.

  Chris backed away from him with a little giggle. “I thought you needed cooling off.”

  “Not from you I don’t. I don’t need anything from you.” He began to advance on her.

  Chris put her hands behind her back, a big smile on her face and started moving away from him into the trees. “I didn’t mean anything, Ty. Truly I didn’t.”

  “You never mean anything, do you? You didn’t mean anything in the forest either, did you, when you nearly drove me crazy?”

  “Did I?” she asked innocently. “But last night you didn’t seem too upset when you saw me with another man.”

  “That weakling? I’ll worry when I see you with a man.” There was a hint of a smile on his lips as he moved toward her, deeper into the shadowy forest.

  Chris found herself up against a tree and she made no effort to move as Tynan came nearer her, but she had a look of mock fearfulness.

  He caught her about the waist and began to rub his sweaty face against hers. He hadn’t shaved that morning and the sharp whiskers were scratching her skin. She squealed for him to stop, tried to get away from him, but he held her tight. Still struggling, she managed to get out from between him and the tree and start running. She took only a few steps before he caught her, pushing her down on the ground and continuing to rub his face about her neck and cheeks.

  Chris was squealing with delight when he suddenly stopped.

  She looked up at him, smiling, as he got off of her, his face solemn. “Get up,” he said.

  She held up her hand for him to help her and, reluctantly, he did so. She tried to stand close to him for a moment but he didn’t allow that. Silently, she turned her back to him so he could button her dress.

  “Stay away from me, Chris,” he said. “You’re playing with my life and I don’t like it.”

  She turned to face him so that his hands were on her shoulders. “I was wrong to go off and leave you. I should have stayed by you at the picnic. I was wrong and I want you to please forgive me.”

  He stepped back from her. “It’s better that we stay apart. In fact, I think it’s better that we call off this entire masquerade. I thought it might be all right since you’ve done this sort of thing before, but I don’t like it. Tomorrow I want to take you back to your father. After I deliver you to him, you can come back if you want. It won’t matter to me because you’ll no longer be my responsibility, but I can see right now that this won’t work. Go back to the house now and get cleaned up and pack. I’ll do what has to be done here.” With that he turned and went back into the sun to slash at the weeds.

  Silently, Chris started walking back to the house.

  Chapter Fourteen

  As Chris neared the house, she saw Owen getting into a carriage and driving away. Lionel was attacking a young tree with a dull axe, Unity and the luscious Pilar were hanging clothes on the line and, with Asher away for the day, Chris was alone in the house.

  She washed and changed her dirty dress and began to think about the fact that tomorrow she’d be going home. She wasn’t even going to argue with Tynan about staying at the Hamilton house. Perhaps it wasn’t any of her business to try to find out what Owen was doing to his nephew—if he was doing anything at all.

  As she struggled with the buttons on her dress, she remembered that she was alone in the house and it occurred to her that now she had the chance to look into Owen’s office.

  She went up the stairs outside her bedroom and opened three doors before she found Owen’s office. It was packed with papers, and there was a big oak filing cabinet in the corner. She had no idea what she was looking for but perhaps she could find it in there, or maybe she could at least find out what Owen knew about the Eskridges.

  She had just opened the filling cabinet and seen a fat folder with the name of Diana Eskridge on it when she heard voices on the stairs—and one of them was the voice of Owen Hamilton.

  Chris’s heart began pounding as she looked for an escape route. There was only one window in the office and it was open. Without even looking outside, she stuck her leg over the casement and climbed out. The door to the office opened just as she pulled her skirt out of view.

  She was standing on the smallest of ledges, about the width of a drain pipe, and below her was nothing for three stories.

  She flattened her back against the wall of the dormer that contained the window to Owen’s study and held on with her hands behind her.

  “That trip was particularly foul,” a voice Chris didn’t recognize, coming from inside the office, was saying. “Are you sure you have all the information? It’s him?”

  “Without a doubt. When I tell you all the trouble I had getting this, you’ll believe me. Samuel Dysan is the name, isn’t it?”

  Chris leaned toward the window. There was something about the way they were talking that made her want to hear what they were saying.

  “What about Lionel?” the stranger asked. “Did you get the little bastard’s name on the papers?”

  “Wait a minute, let me close this window. There are too many people living in this house for me to keep up with the whereabouts of all of them.”

  Chris pulled back as he shut the window and locked it. Now she was stuck on the roof, with no way to get back inside.

  The men stayed in the room an hour—the longest hour of her life. Behind her, she could hear the muffled voices of Owen and the stranger but she couldn’t make out what they were saying. She heard drawers slammed, doors creaking open, then shut again, and all the while she could do nothing but stand there and try to keep her skirt from blowing across the window.

  When at last the men left the room, Chris immediately tried to open the window but it was firmly locked.

  “Now I’ve done it,” she murmured. Whatever excuse could she give for being outside this window? If Owen was stealing from his nephew, it could be quite dangerous to let him know that she was interested in what he was doing in his office.

  With a big sigh, she turned back around, and as she did so, she slipped. She managed to catch herself before she actually fell, but she could feel her hand being scraped. Wincing at the pain, she grabbed for the casement ledge and pulled herself up. She was breathing quite hard by the time she reached her perch again, and she stood there, clutching the wood behind her, and was glad for her safety.

  She stood there for quite some time, too fearful to move, when, below her, she began to hear sounds. Within minutes, she saw the top poles of a ladder appear, leaning against the roof line. Holding her breath, she watched to see who was coming to her rescue—or to her trial.

  The relief she felt when she saw Tynan was great. “How did you know?” she asked.

  He put a finger to his lips to silence her, then motioned for her to give him her hand. He led her down the roof of the second story, then guided her feet onto the ladder, his arms always surrounding her as he backed down first.

  When they were at last on the ground, she clung to him for a moment. “I was so frightened.”

  “You’ll be more frightened if Hamilton finds out you were spying on him,” he said, peeling her arms away from him. “Let’s get out of here before he sees us.”

  Chris turned away just in time to see a shadow disappear around the edge of the house. “Ty! Someone was there.”

  “It’s only Lionel. He told me where you were. Come on!”

  She ran behind him, down a
path she’d not seen before, to a small cottage hidden amid the trees. As Ty hooked the ladder beneath the eaves of the house, she saw blood on the back of his shirt.

  “Ty! You’re bleeding.”

  “No, you are,” he said, taking her wrist and turning her palm upward, looking at where the skin was scraped away. “Come inside and I’ll clean it and I want you to explain what you were doing on that roof.”

  “Listening,” she said as he pulled her inside. The cottage had only one room, half of it kitchen, the other half holding a big double bed. “Is this where you live with Pilar?” she asked quietly.

  “Yes,” he said as he held her hand over a basin of water and began to clean it.

  “Have you known her long?”

  “Years.”

  “And she doesn’t ever betray you?”

  “I’ve never found out. We’re on the same side. Hold still so I can see this.”

  “On the same side?” Chris’s eyes widened. “You mean she’s a lady outlaw?”

  “Sure. She can outdraw anybody.”

  “Oh. You’re teasing me, aren’t you?”

  He looked at her as his head was bowed over her hand. “Climbing out the window was pretty stupid of you. If Hamilton had found you—”

  “It was worth it. I heard Owen’s visitor asking about Lionel. He said—pardon me, but this is a quote—‘Has the little bastard signed the papers yet?’ Doesn’t that sound as if they’re into something dreadful?”

  Ty opened a tin box on a shelf by the fireplace and withdrew clean bandages. “No, it sounds like he’s met Lionel. The kid is a little bastard.”

  “Then why was he helping you? Ouch!”

  “If you’d hold still, I wouldn’t hurt you. Lionel and I have an understanding.”

  “He says he thinks you’re a bank robber.”

  “Now and then. Shrewd kid. Sit down and I’ll get you some milk and cookies. I need a drink.”

  “Did I scare you? Why didn’t Lionel give me away and why did he come to you? Who made the cookies?”

  “Pilar made the cookies,” he said, sitting down across from her at the rough table. “And Lionel has been the soul of helpfulness ever since I cracked a whip around his neck.”