Seraphina Jones, for shame. Luke and Walter Frothingale have been nothing but kind to you!
She blew out her breath. It was true.
In all honesty, the Frothingales' family history wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference in the way she would continue to regard them. Papa had raised her to love all of God's children like brothers and sisters (even though he, himself, had shown a pronounced intolerance toward adulterers, thespians, and witches.)
Still, she couldn't help but wonder how Collie had discovered Luke's secret—unless, of course, Collie had been snooping under windows again. The mayor and his son didn't exactly paint the news on their office shingles...
The hours dragged by.
Collie and Billy had become so bored that they were actually drawn to each other. Rather like kerosene meeting dynamite, Sera thought dryly. Billy spent a great deal of time ribbing Collie about being "backwoods backasswards," while Collie devoted his mental resources to inventing harrowing, new insults about the mighty state of Texas.
If Collie should happen to doze off—or better yet, make a trip to the privy—Billy would shower her with husky, homespun compliments. As wounded as her heart was, she couldn't help but be flattered. It was hard not to enjoy the way Billy's eyes followed her so worshipfully around the room. When she talked about Rafe or Michael, Billy would listen with rapt attention. When she read the Squatters book out loud, his eyes would focus dreamily on her lips. Sera was half convinced that the man was falling in love in her!
Of course, Collie—her ever faithful watch dog—did his level best to distract Billy from his flirtations. Sera knew it was silly to be annoyed with Collie for redirecting Billy's attention; after all, the boy was only trying to protect her virtue.
But she couldn't help but feel like the fifth wheel each time that Collie succeeded in making Billy's eyes light up like twin candles. Collie usually achieved this feat by demonstrating a shrewd insight into the workings of Billy's mind.
For instance, whenever Billy was getting too lovey-dovey, Collie would casually mention that the spider on his side of the room was spinning its web faster than the spider on Billy's side. Or Collie might challenge Billy to a contest to see who could toss the most clothespins into a pillow case at 20 paces. If all else failed, Collie would insult the "namby-pamby Rangers" who kept the peace in Texas.
These ploys were guaranteed to throw Billy into an uproar. He'd demand that Collie put his money where his mouth was. For the next half hour, betting, boasting, and boys' games would ensue. Sera would be all but forgotten.
That was what happened after dinner that night. While "the boys" were embroiled in a mouth-off (apparently Billy considered raccoons useful only when they were hats,) Sera slipped out the door to return Billy's dinner tray to the kitchen. On the way back to the sick ward, she was waylaid by toddlers, who begged her to tuck them in. And then to tell them a bedtime story. And then to sing them a lullaby.
Forty minutes later, when she finally tiptoed down the hall of the orphanage's medical wing, she heard rumbly whispers emanating from the half-open door. In the pool of firelight, she spied Collie perched on Billy's bed. She was shocked to see how grave Collie was. He looked like he'd aged ten years. She couldn't see Billy's face, since his back was to the hall, but she was surprised to see him lower his lips to Collie's ear. The two of them looked thicker than thieves.
Mystified by this newfound accord, Sera took a furtive step closer. Then another. The floorboards didn't creak. The door didn't swing wider. She honestly didn't know how Billy had sensed her. But he tensed like a fiddlestring, making an urgent cutting gesture across his throat.
As if on cue, Collie reared back and punched him in the shoulder.
"Ow! What'd you do that for?"
"'Cause you're a varmint and a rat fink."
"Them's War Words, boy."
"Oooh. See me shaking in my boots."
"Pee-yew! So that's the stink?"
Billy laughed. Collie lunged. The next thing she knew, the two of them were rolling in a grunting, cursing tangle of limbs that crashed to the floor.
"Stop it!" Sera shouted, running frantically into the room. "Stop it right now, or heaven help me, I'll dump the bed pan all over your heads!"
"He'd like that," Billy taunted, oomphing when Collie's knee collided with his groin.
Billy grew whiter than the sheets. Wheezing something that sounded suspiciously like, "Uncle," Billy rolled to his side, curled into a ball, and squeezed his thighs over his hands. He was panting something about never having babies.
"You big faker!" Collie yelled. He leaped to his feet, waving his arms like a windmill. "Get up! Get up you scrawny bag of pus, before I kick you there for real!"
Sera was horrified.
"Collier Donovan MacAffee, that is enough! What is the matter with you? This is a sick ward! I want you to leave this room immediately. Immediately, do you hear me? You are not allowed to come back until Billy is well enough to ride. Do I make myself clear?"
Collie shifted from foot to foot. He looked sheepish. "Aw, Miss Sera, I didn't even hit him that hard—"
Billy groaned pathetically.
"Out!" Sera bellowed, making the windows quake.
Collie scowled. Grabbing his whittling knife and his half-carved alligator, he slinked from the room.
Anxiously, Sera dropped to her knees at Billy's side. She smoothed a star-white lock of hair from his brow. The bruise on his temple was fading, and the cut on his chin would heal without a scar. Sera was glad for his sake, although she couldn't help but think that a scar might make Billy more... well, earthy. Billy's face was almost too angelic, and if it hadn't been for his homespun humor and his all-too-apparent libido, she might have thought him completely out of the reach of an average, small town belle like her.
As much as she didn't want to think about Jesse—how he'd kissed her, how those big, callused hands had pleasured her, how he'd dropped her like a hot potato after he'd amused himself to his fill—she couldn't rid her memory of him. She couldn't stop loving him overnight.
That's why it was so hard not to compare Jesse's rugged features and jungle-cat allure to Billy's angelic beauty and boyish charm. Privately, she preferred Jesse. She would always prefer Jesse.
And that was the problem. Jesse had made it painfully clear that he would never prefer her.
Billy groaned. His beautiful face was scrunched up, and his vivid blue eyes were squeezed tight.
"Billy?" she whispered anxiously.
Only after rocking three more, anguished times did he finally stop grinding his teeth. He let his white-gold lashes flutter higher.
"Is he gone?" he wheezed.
Sera frowned. Was that the glint of merriment in the rapscallion's gaze?
"Yes," she answered warily.
As if sensing the dawn of her skepticism, Billy twisted his features into the perfect picture of martyrdom. "Now Miss Sera, you shouldn't have been so hard on the—"
He yelped, grimacing some more as he reached for his knee. "I think the brat broke it," he rasped.
Sera couldn't help but worry. "Can you climb back into bed?"
"I'll be brave, if you help me..."
After a great deal of clutching and hugging—and some very suspicious hand-placements on her bottom—Billy finally lay wheezing on his backside in bed. Sera slid a pillow under his bandaged leg once more. It didn't feel broken. In fact, it looked and felt almost completely normal.
Then again, she wasn't living inside his body. And Michael had duly admitted that some men had a higher tolerance for pain than others. Who was she to say that Billy was faking an injury to milk her nursemaid's attention?
"You're an angel," he whispered, distracting her from her suspicions.
Billy's timing was uncanny that way. Whenever she started to think dubious thoughts about him, he would blurt out the most charming of compliments. Or he'd paste on some adorable, puppy-dog expression. Billy had missed his calling. He should have joine
d Rafe in the theater.
"I was only named after an angel, Billy."
"You're my angel," he insisted fervently. "You saved my life! I'd be pushing up daises if you hadn't come along and found me lying on the side of the road!" His eyes were bluer-than-blue in their wide, worshipful state.
Sera fidgeted, hating the heat that crawled up her cheeks. "I'm not so unusual. Any decent Christian would have helped you."
"The boy wanted to make me crow bait."
Sera couldn't deny that argument. She decided to change the subject. "You took a bad fall off that bed," she said in her best nursemaid's voice. "Maybe I should fetch Mrs. Witherspoon. To check on your knee—"
"Don't leave me," he whispered, grabbing her hand and dragging it to his cheek. "All I want is you."
Pain lanced her fragile heart. Why couldn't Jesse have said such a thing?
Suddenly, she was aware of the lamplight and the shadows, crowding in around her. For the first time since she'd met Billy, they were utterly alone. No toddlers begged for a story. No youthful watchdog bandied an insult.
She swallowed. The breathless silence between them was charged with some shivery tension—a tension that warmed her belly and shot tingles to her toes. She knew what those sensations meant now.
Jesse had schooled her well.
If she'd had her wits about her, she might have laughed off her body's unbidden responses, finding something amusing about the storm to distract her and Billy. But that gold-fringed stare was doing something to her insides. Something that she wasn't sure she had the power to resist.
A frisson of panic galloped down her spine.
But Billy's uncanny sense of timing came to the fore—again—making her doubt the alarm bells of her intuition. With a demonstration of true, southern chivalry, he carried her knuckles to his lips and planted a kiss.
"Your voice is so soothing," he murmured wistfully. "And this leg hurts so much. Would you mind reading a few more pages of the honeymoon story before you retire?"
Relief flooded through her.
'You see?' she scolded herself. 'You're the only person in this room with libidinous thoughts! You let yourself get seduced, and then spurned, and now you're suspecting every man of caddish behavior!
She gulped a steadying breath. She pasted on a smile.
"Of course I don't mind," she said briskly.
As Sera retrieved the travel memoirs of Robert Louis Stevenson from the dowdy green cushion of her chair, Cass settled back in his pillows. The Silverado Squatters didn't interest him in the least. He'd ridden through Monterey. He'd seen Napa Valley. He could write a travel memoir of his own—one a sight more lively than Stephenson's.
But how the wedding-bell chasers doted on the romance of that Squatters book! Sickly Stephenson hadn't been able to afford the $10 to pay for a hotel, so he'd honeymooned with his wife for two months in an abandoned bunkhouse, located in some derelict mining camp.
Cass always recommended The Silverado Squatters to the blushing maids whom he'd singled out for conquest. It made them so much more pliable when the time came to steal a kiss.
Chapter 14
Jesse didn't sleep well on the cold, wood floor of his unfurnished marshal's apartment. Lightning had flashed through the unadorned windows, turning night into day. Wind had whistled through the cracks of the poorly sealed panes, making a sound like a freight train speeding through the wall.
But the storm hadn't been the real thief of his sleep. Nightmares had plagued him, each more disturbing than the last: Coyote snake-charmers tethering eagles. Coyote warriors battling bobcats. Coyote gunslingers getting their brash, laughing heads blown off.
Shortly before dawn, Jesse had jerked awake in a cold sweat. He'd had the sick feeling that something terrible was going to happen—to Sera. To Cass. Maybe even to himself.
He didn't devote much time to his Go-To-Water Ritual that morning. He simply shoved his palm under the rainspout and splashed chilly water over his hair, face, and chest. If he remembered to mutter the usual prayer, he did it by rote. His sense of foreboding was too strong to summon a genuine glimmer of gratitude.
Grimly, he strapped on his holster and rode out to the riverbank.
Even in the feeble rays of a drizzly dawn, Sammy's arrows weren't hard to spot. The kid had shown foresight, striking two tree trunks about six feet above the ground. That height was close to eye-level for Luke and Jesse, too.
He jumped off Kavi to retrieve the first arrow that he found. It jutted from a hemlock on the tree's eastern side, making its rain-coated shaft shine like a burning brand against the first ruddy rays of dawn.
But when Jesse ripped off the red twine and unrolled the inked hide, he muttered an oath. He couldn't read Sammy's letters. The symbols were alien to him.
Kavi snorted. Jesse's gun was in his fist before the intruder could take another breath.
"Merciful God, are you always so trigger happy?" Luke called, directing his Morgan around a treacherous-looking stretch of mud.
Jesse scowled, sliding his Colt back into its holster. He had no patience for jocularity this morning.
"Found Sammy's arrows," he shouted back.
"And?" Luke dismounted, splattering mud all over his yellow slicker.
"Hell, I can't make heads or tails of this chicken scratch."
Luke chuckled, tugging off his gauntlets and tucking them into the belt under his slicker. "That's 'cause it's Chickasaw, son. You mind your manners, and I might teach you the Mother Language."
Luke plucked the hide from Jesse's hand.
Jesse didn't bother to point out that the Cherokees had developed a formal, written language long before the Chickasaws had ever thought about inventing one. In fact, Cherokees were more literate in their own written language than most White men were in theirs.
Impatiently, Jesse peered over Luke's arm as lightning flickers danced across the message. "Well? What's it say? Is Sera at the orphanage?"
"Yeah, she's there. Collie too. They're safe with Mister Somebody."
"Mister Somebody?"
"That's what it says."
"Who the hell is that?"
Luke cocked his head, studying the squares and slashes. "The best I can figure from these two symbols here, is that Collie and Sera found a snake-bit fella in the woods. So they took him to the orphanage."
That knot of foreboding coiled tighter in Jesse's gut.
"Did Sammy say anything else?"
Luke grunted, squinting. He was holding the hide up to the sunrise, doing his best to protect the inked letters from getting wet and running together.
"Looks like Mister Somebody is a Texican."
* * *
Tuesday afternoon, in an official ceremony during lunch, Lydia Witherspoon solemnly hailed Sammy Hubbard, Jr., as a hero for finding a way to communicate to Luke Frothingale that the orphanage was in desperate need of flour, potatoes, corn, and quinine. The shy, slender youth—whose Chickasaw mama had married a black-skinned boot maker—proudly showed his "medal of honor" to Sera.
Humoring the boy, Sera hugged him. Little did Sammy realize that she'd suggested the ceremony. In fact, Sera had been part of the secret medal-making committee. Mamie, the cook, had begun the process by shearing the bottom off a can of beans. Collie had filed down the sharp edges and punched a hole in the top for a strip of rawhide. Lydia had produced tubes of red and blue oil paint from her private collection, and Sera had been the "artist" to brush an appropriate hero's message onto the tin.
Somehow, Billy had managed to sleep through the entire event.
But Sera couldn't blame him. Although Billy had stopped complaining, she suspected that pain had kept him tossing through the last two nights. Curiously, his restlessness only seemed to mount as the river quelled and the flood showed signs of receding. He'd grown especially tense when he overheard the orphans prattling about "Mr. Luke, the new Sheriff" and Luke's promise to send "a rescue ferry" across the river, loaded with Doc Jones, food, and toys.
About that same time, Sera had first noticed the shadows ringing Billy's ever-watchful eyes. Even Collie had barked at the Texican to get some sleep, or else he'd hit Billy over the head with a pistol butt.
"I'll have plenty of time for sleep when I'm dead," Billy told Collie.
"You ain't any use to me dead."
Billy waved away this rationale. "Bring me java. I'll be right as a trivet in no time."
Collie snorted. "See here, donkey brain. You ain't as stubborn as I am. Don't think for a minute you're walking outta here without sleep. If trouble comes to call, I got a shotgun. And your Winchester. I know how to use them."
"Is that what you call the target practice I watched yesterday through the window?"
Collie pumped his shotgun in a menacing manner. "That swelled head of yours needs a couple of extra holes to let the air out."
"Brat."
"Fogey."
Boys, Sera had added silently, rolling her eyes to heaven.
In the end, Collie had won. She wasn't sure how, exactly. But some deeper, secret urgency seemed to underlie all their communications.
Now it was a quarter past seven in the evening. At this late hour, Sera had expected Billy to have a whopping appetite, so she'd prepared a tray of roast venison, along with one of Lydia's precious few potatoes, a smattering of peas, freshly baked bread, and rice pudding for dessert. The beverage she toted to the sick ward was coffee.
But when she arrived, she found Billy fast asleep, his gun hand twitching on his Colt.
She shook her head.
She remembered her father's theory that guilt robbed men of sleep as surely as pain. She saddened at the thought. Billy was so young—even younger than Jesse.
What did you do, Billy? Why are you so reluctant to meet our new sheriff?
Sighing, she turned toward the hall with the tray.
"I smell coffee," a sleepy voice mumbled.
"You need your rest," she whispered back.
"Bring me my coffee, woman."
Her lips quirked. She obeyed.
Seduced by an Angel (Velvet Lies, Book 3) Page 20
