Wild West Christmas

by Jenna Kernan

  Chapter Sixteen

  Gale

  “Aw, hell, Gale, it’s Saturday night!”

  I turned my back on Jase. “So?”

  “So…” Across the dining table, Skip managed to look exasperated and curious at the same time. “Ya gotta cut loose and have some fun now that we’ve got most of those horses broke. Even the boss says you need lightenin’ up.”

  That made me laugh. Charlie Kingman worked me hard and I’d never once heard him use the phrase lighten up. Alice, maybe, but not Charlie.

  “You’re a lying son of a… All you and Jase want is a poker game. Ask Juan to go into town with you.”

  “Juan plays poker like a fish learnin’ to square dance.”

  “Ask Ernesto, then.”

  “Huh!” Skip worked the crease of his hat between his thumb and forefinger. “Ernesto plays poker as if he invented the game, and I ain’t got that much money. That man always wins. Always.”

  “Gonna be dancin’ at the Golden Partridge,” Jase said, dropping his voice to a wheedle.

  “Sorry, boys. Don’t have time.”

  Skip raised his sandy eyebrows. “Gonna be some of Selma’s girls there, too, if you’ve got the inclination.”

  “Don’t have the inclination.”

  Both men looked at each other, then back at me. “You funnin’, Gale?” Skip said. “’Cause you always had time for—”

  “No, I’m not funnin’. Go on, get out of here before I think up something for you to do.”

  Within two minutes I was left in peace, and Consuelo approached with what I’d asked her for earlier. With a puzzled look in her dark eyes she plopped it into my hand; it was satisfyingly heavy and wrapped in a clean huck towel.

  I trailed Skip and Jase into town, and every mile I wondered what the hell I thought I was doing. But the minute I spied that orange picket fence, I knew exactly what it was.

  A light burned upstairs. She was home. Was she hanging more wallpaper? Painting her dining room? I tied Randy to a maple tree around back and stomped up onto the front porch, purposely making a bunch of noise so she’d know someone was there.

  I knocked. Knocked again. A plaintive little cry came from a wicker basket at my feet, and I scooped up a tiny orange cat and snuggled it against my chest. Right away it started to purr, and at that instant the front door swung open.

  “Oh,” she said. She didn’t look paint speckled, which was a good sign. Her gaze left my face and traveled to the cat at my chest.

  “Whatever are you doing here?”

  “Hello, Miss Cornwell. Lilah.”

  “With my cat,” she added.

  “Well, it mewed, and I—”

  “I see.”

  She didn’t sound mad, so I went on, “Have you had supper yet?”

  She frowned. “No, not yet. I was working and quite forgot about eating supper.”

  “In that case, Miss Cornwell, Lilah, would you consider having supper with me?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Lilah

  He just stood there waiting, with Mollie cuddled against his crisp blue shirt. “I often eat only cheese and a few crackers for supper,” I said. I reached out to take the cat and he trapped my hand in his.

  “Lilah. I brought supper fixings. I was hoping maybe you would—”

  I cut him off. “I don’t cook.”

  “But I do.” He said it with such assurance I almost laughed. I extricated my hand, and Mollie, from his grasp and stood wondering what I should do about Mr. Gale McBurney standing here on my front porch. He answered the question with his next words.

  “I brought two prime-beef steaks.”

  My mouth watered.

  “And two potatoes.”

  “Potatoes?”

  “For baking. You’ve got an oven, haven’t you?”

  Yes, I had an oven, and an appetite, so I invited him in. Before he stepped through the door I slipped Mollie back into her basket and picked it up by the handle. As I led the way to the kitchen I could still hear her purring.

  Gale set something wrapped up in a towel on my polished wood kitchen counter and folded back the top. A potato rolled out. He caught it in one hand and tipped his head toward my shiny nickel-plated stove.

  “Pretty fancy,” he said. “Got a wood box?”

  I pointed. He opened the firebox, stirred up the coals left from my afternoon tea and chunked in three pieces of wood one of the neighbor boys, Billy Rowell, had split for me.

  “Got a broiler?”

  I must have looked blank because he began checking the contents of the warming oven. “Ah,” he said, extricating a round mesh-looking thing I’d never seen before. “Your broiler.”

  He laid it on the stove, then unloaded the contents of his towel-swathed bundle. Another potato, a small ceramic crock of butter and two of the thickest steaks I had ever seen.

  “Those will never cook through,” I warned.

  “Don’t want ’em to.” He stabbed both potatoes with a fork, popped them into the oven and turned to me. “A steak’s no good if it’s cooked till it’s as tough as leather. My daddy used to say a good steak should be served bleedin’ and bawlin’.”

  “Ugh.” I couldn’t help the shudder that ran through me.

  “My daddy,” he explained, “was from Texas. Now, what’re we gonna do for an hour while those potatoes bake?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Gale

  “We could…talk,” Lilah suggested. “In the parlor.”

  “What else?”

  “We could…play chess?”

  “I used to play chess with my dad,” I said. “But that’s so long ago I probably couldn’t give you a good match. What else?”

  She thought for a moment, then hitched herself up onto a tall kitchen stool. Oh, Lord, her feet were bare. And her toes…well, they peeked out from under her petticoat, and it plumb took my mind off the conversation.

  “We could read aloud to each other,” she suggested. “Dickens? Sir Walter Scott?”

  “Got any poetry?”

  I could see that surprised her because her eyebrows went up. “Poetry?” she echoed. She didn’t for one minute believe I liked poetry.

  “Yeah. You know, Tennyson? Byron?”

  She stared at me as if I had green onions growing out of my ears.

  “Or,” she said after a long minute, “we could play, well, poker.” She sounded pretty doubtful, but I kept quiet.

  She bit her lower lip and I had to look away. “That’s what people out here in the West play, isn’t it? I bet I could learn quite rapidly.”

  All kinds of things started going through my mind. Playing for…kisses, maybe?

  “Sure you wouldn’t rather read some poetry?”

  She shook her head. The bun at her neck shook loose, and a couple of long shiny curls slipped free. Goddamn, her hair was beautiful, like polished mahogany. Between her hair and her bare toes, I was having a tough time hiding my arousal.

  “Uh, since I’m cooking supper tonight, would you have an apron I could wear?”

  That made her laugh. It sounded soft and kinda drowsy, and I gritted my teeth against the picture that climbed into my brain. Wish I hadn’t hung my hat on the peg near the door, but I’d better hurry up with the apron.

  Without a word she lifted a ruffly pink gingham apron off a hook and handed it over. She watched me tie it around my waist and I prayed she wouldn’t notice the bulge in the front.

  “Would you like to see the new wallpaper I finished upstairs?”

  That came out of nowhere, and it was a few seconds before I could talk. “Sure.”

  She led the way. All I could think about was that no man wearing a pink apron could seduce a woman, no matter how bare her toes were or how her hips swayed in front of him while she climbed up a staircase.

  The first door we came to was closed. Must be her bedroom. I wanted to know what it looked like in the worst way. Were the walls yellow? Blue? What color was the quilt on the bed? How big w
as the bed? And on and on until I thought I’d choke.

  “This,” she said, pausing in the second doorway, “is my office. It’s where I work.” She gestured at a huge walnut desk facing the windows. A black typing machine sat on top and notebooks were scattered around like lily pads on a pond. A vase of pencils perched next to the typewriter. The wastebasket beside the desk overflowed with crumpled-up balls of paper.

  “You work? What do you work at?”

  She hesitated half a second, and I figured she’d had some hassle over what she worked at.

  “I…um…I am a writer.”

  That knocked my socks clean off. I’m sure my jaw dropped because she gave me an odd, shy little glance and blushed a pretty rose color.

  She caught me looking at her, and she said, “Close your mouth, Gale.”

  “A writer?”

  “Does that shock you?”

  “Yes. No! Hell, I don’t know. I never met a lady writer before. What do you write?”

  This time she waited so long to answer I felt my equilibrium begin to tilt.

  “I write…stories,” she said.

  “For a newspaper back East?” I guessed.

  She shook her head. “For myself.”

  I was beginning to understand. In fact, I understood much, much more than she could ever know. I wasn’t about to ask what kind of stories.

  She led the way back downstairs in silence so thick you could have heard an ant cross the floor. In the kitchen she picked up a silver-plated clock. “We have forty minutes before supper. I want you to teach me how to play poker.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Lilah

  I discovered that I loved playing poker! It was a challenge to bluff when I had nothing but a pair of fours. Perhaps my flair for duplicity came from Aunt Carrie, but I surely hoped I would meet a better end than she had.

  We played for what Gale called “truths.” The winner could ask a question which the loser had to answer truthfully. Unlike Aunt Carrie, I answered all my forfeited truths honestly. Fortunately, I won the first hand I was dealt.

  “What is Texas like?” was my first question.

  “Big. Raw. Surprising,” he answered.

  He won the next hand, and I had to confess why I had never learned to ride.

  “Don’t they have horses in Philadelphia?”

  “Oh, yes. And riding clubs and hunts and equestrienne balls and…” And so much more I did not wish to remember.

  The man did not give up easily. “How come?” he pursued. “What’s wrong with clubs and hunts and balls?”

  With the loss of my next hand I knew I was trapped. I looked everywhere but at Gale, sitting across the kitchen table from me in that ridiculous pink apron, but he stared at me and waited as if he had nothing better to do than pry painful answers out of me.

  I could hear Aunt Carrie’s voice. Lie.

  “Lilah?” His green eyes held mine, and I knew I could not lie. There was something open and unstudied about Gale McBurney that made it impossible for me to deceive him.

  “I…I find it difficult to…talk to people. I am quite shy.”

  “You’re talkin’ to me,” he pointed out.

  “Yes, I am. Reluctantly.”

  He didn’t say a word, just smiled and shuffled the cards and dealt out another hand.

  Thank the Lord I won with two queens to his pair of eights. “My turn,” I gloated. “Tell me about your father.”

  “Big,” he said. Then he added, “Raw. Surprising.”

  “But that is exactly what you said about Texas,” I protested.

  “Yeah. They’re the same.”

  It was my turn to stare at him. “Your father is…surprising?”

  “Yeah. That’s why I left Texas.”

  A thousand more questions popped into my head, but Gale glanced away to the clock, folded his cards back into the deck and stood up. “Potatoes are about done.”

  I laughed. “I don’t believe that for one minute. You just don’t want to talk about your father.”

  “Damn right. You don’t get another question until you win another hand.” He snaked a potato out of the oven, squeezed it experimentally and slid it back onto the rack. Then he removed the iron rounds over the firebox and settled that broiler thing right over the coals.

  I watched him. Maybe cooking wasn’t so difficult. It had annoyed me that Mama’s cook had always shooed me out of the kitchen. I wanted to know how to do things. Even at eleven years old, I had wanted to be independent.

  Gale’s question startled me. “Got a couple of sharp knives?”

  “In the drawer. I’ll get them.”

  “Put the plates on, too,” he ordered. “And that little crock of butter.”

  Within five minutes the meat was sputtering as the grease dripped onto the hot coals, and the kitchen began to smell heavenly. Gale forked over the steaks and gestured for me to sit down at the table. He split the potatoes in two, slathered the halves with butter and slid them onto the plates, followed by the sizzling steaks.

  Then he untied the pink apron and sat down across from me. I was almost sorry about the apron. He looked so out of place in ruffled gingham it was somehow endearing.

  But he certainly wasn’t out of place in a kitchen. I had never eaten such a perfectly grilled piece of beef, not even at the fancy restaurant Mama favored in downtown Philadelphia.

  “Got any wine?” Gale asked after his first bite.

  I retrieved the bottle I’d purchased at the mercantile and kept in the bottom cabinet and set out two water glasses.

  “Kinda big, aren’t they?” he said with a grin. “Never figured you for a drinkin’ woman.”

  “I drink wine only when I have a cough. I mix it with honey.”

  “Must be pretty healthy, then. This bottle’s never been opened.” He twisted the cork out and sloshed some into my glass. And his.

  “What’ll we drink to?” The corners of his eyes crinkled.

  I had not the foggiest notion. I couldn’t propose a toast to my not having to visit the Rocking K again, could I? I lifted my glass.

  “To not having to learn to ride.”

  Gale choked on his wine. When he stopped coughing and caught his breath, he gave me a long, puzzled look.

  Chapter Twenty

  Gale

  “How come you don’t want to ride? Is it the horse? Being out at the ranch? Me?”

  “Of course it’s not you.” She said that right away, so I felt better. A lot better. Matter of fact I felt so good I gulped down the rest of my glass without thinking. Then her tongue came out and licked a drop of wine off her upper lip.

  I forgot the other two reasons why she might not want to ride a horse. I thought about snagging that frilly apron and dropping it across my lap, but then I realized Lilah couldn’t see what was happening to me underneath the table.

  “It is difficult for me, being at the ranch,” she said at last. “Having to talk to people.”

  “You seemed to do okay when you came to dinner that time. With Alice and all.”

  “With Alice, yes. The ‘and all’ I could not really manage. Perhaps you didn’t notice how quiet I was.”

  “Yeah, I noticed. I thought it was me. You know, seeing me again after…”

  Hell, I couldn’t say that. The word kiss would flood the air between us with too much unspoken feeling. I wanted to eat supper with her, not send her off upstairs in a huff.

  She studied the butter crock. “Well, I admit it was awkward. After a while I began to wonder if—”

  I stopped her just in time. “Don’t go there, Lilah. Just let it be.”

  She licked her lips again and I thought I was gonna explode. “Gale, there is one thing I do want to say.”

  “Okay. I’m listenin’.”

  “If I do want to learn to ride, could it be just you who would teach me?”

  “Well, it could be, sure. But why?” I held my breath.

  “Because I would have to talk with Jason or Skip, or
even Mr. Kingman. With you, I don’t have to.”

  I just looked at her sitting there across from me with her cheeks flushed from the wine and her lips like ripe raspberries. She doesn’t have to talk to me? Hell yes, she has to talk to me!

  I didn’t want to startle her, or scare her, but I sure wanted her to know that. It wasn’t just the taste of her mouth under mine, or the ache in my groin when I admired her backside or spied her bare toes. It was more than that.

  As a matter of honest fact, it was so much more than that it kinda set me back on my heels. She didn’t know anything about me, really. What the hell would she do when she found out?

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Lilah

  Something was closing down inside Gale. I could see it as clearly as if he’d written it out on one of my parlor walls. But I had no idea what it was.

  He would not have invited himself to supper if he did not like me, would he? Or if my kiss had been so inept that he would never want another?

  Of course, there were things I was hiding, too. And all at once it struck me funny, the two of us dancing around each other like youngsters at our first ball, studiously trying not to look at each other. Trying hard not to like each other.

  I deduced that liking me was some sort of a threat to him. But why? Aunt Carrie would know. Aunt Carrie had understood men because she knew them so well, had dealt with them under difficult circumstances where they had to rely on each other. Trust each other.

  But, Lilah Marie Cornwell, you are not Aunt Carrie.

  I supposed when it came to men I would have to live and learn, as Mama always said. I only hoped I would survive. Aunt Carrie had not.

  I heated water to wash the plates and silverware while Gale cut up tiny morsels of leftover steak for Mollie and took them in his cupped palm out to the front porch, where I’d set her basket before supper. He did not come back.

  I washed the plates and dried them and put them away in the walnut hutch, then set the coffeepot on the stove. Even if Gale had slipped away, I wanted to sit in the lawn swing with Mollie on my lap and admire my garden in the moonlight.