Renegade's Kiss

by Barbara Ankrum

  With a frown, she took an edge of the sheet back from Etta and helped her fold it. The wind caught the fabric, making it unfurl like a ship's sail.

  "Prove him right about what?" Etta asked.

  She shrugged. "He already thinks I'm crazy to try to hang onto this place on my own."

  "Just like a man..." Etta mumbled.

  "Exactly," Andrea agreed, dropping the sheet into the basket and reaching for the next one.

  "Besides, you aren't all alone," Etta pointed out. "You've got Mr. Mayfield." Her dark-eyed gaze swept the cornfield for a glimpse of him.

  Andrea flicked a curious look up at Etta. Her coffee-colored skin shone golden in the midmorning sun. "Silas? I think he's sweet on you Etta."

  Flustered, Etta snapped up the edge of the new sheet. "Me? Oh, Lordy! That man likes anything walks in skirts, that's what I think. Any fool who can flirt like that ought to be locked up for the safety of all womankind."

  Andrea plucked another clothespin off the line. "Yesterday, before you came, I saw him watching the road from the cornfields all morning until Gus dropped you off." She picked a speck off the clean white cotton. "He spent the rest of the morning singing so loud I could hear him from the porch."

  A pleased grin crept to Etta's mouth, despite her attempts to hide it. She slapped a handful of clothespins into the bag clipped to the line. "Mmmm-mm," she sighed, gazing at the chin-high corn. "That man sure can sing, can't he?"

  "Why, Etta," Andrea gasped in feigned surprise. "I didn't think you noticed such things."

  "That man's hard to miss, isn't he? 'Sides, can't hurt to listen, can it?" The woman sighed wistfully. "It's been a long time since I heard a man sing like that. Not since my Marcus..."

  Andrea folded the sheet and tucked it in the basket. "Have you thought of remarrying, Etta?"

  "I suppose I would. If the right man came along." She lifted the full wicker hamper and moved it down the line. It creaked from its load.

  "How would you know him if you found him?"

  Etta regarded her seriously. "You've been married, child. I suppose you just... know when you know. That's all. There's no figuring to it."

  She'd once thought it that easy.

  "Now, take a man like your Mr. Jesse—"

  "He's not mine, Etta. Not even close."

  Etta smiled. "That's not what his eyes say when he looks at you."

  Andrea ducked under the sheet to reach the second line. "You're imagining things Etta," Andrea scoffed, pulling the clothespins off Jesse's union suit hanging there. "The only thing Jesse sees when he looks at me is a ball and chain. He's not the marrying kind. If he were, he would have—"

  Andrea faltered at the sight of a folded slip of paper tucked under the pin of her camisole. What in the world...?

  She slipped the pin off the line, and unfolded the paper. Four words were written neatly in black ink:

  I've missed you, Andrea.

  Her blood froze. For a moment, she forgot to breathe. She stared at the paper in her hand without really seeing it. I've missed you. Dear God, it couldn't be. Instinctively, she whirled around, half-expecting to see him standing behind her grinning.

  Vaguely, she realized Etta had spoken to her, more than once. She stuffed the paper into the oversized pocket of her apron just as Etta popped her head between the hanging laundry.

  "Child," Etta asked with real concern, "are you all right? You look like you saw a ghost."

  She snatched her hand from her pocket guiltily. "What? I—oh, I'm fine," she lied, plucking loose another pin. "It must be the heat."

  Etta frowned. "Folks get red in the heat, not white. You sure you're all right?"

  "Yes," she answered in a small voice. Through the fabric of her apron, her hand curled around the note in her pocket.

  "Hm-mph..." Etta muttered. "You go on in the house now, put your feet up. You leave this laundry to Etta, now." She took the long johns and camisole from Andrea's arm and gave her a gentle nudge toward the house. "Go on."

  "Etta—"

  Just then, little Zachary let out a waking cry from inside the house.

  "You see?" Etta asked, bracing her fists on her hips.

  Andrea nodded. "All right, I... I'll feed Zachary, then I think I'll... walk some dinner out to those two stubborn men in the field. I don't believe they're going to stop for sustenance."

  "I can take it to them," Etta offered.

  Andrea shook her head. "I feel like a walk. Zachary could use some air, too. But thanks."

  Mahkwi was trotting along beside her before she realized it, ignoring her for all intents and purposes, but beside her just the same.

  "Wanna go for a walk, girl? Well, then, come on."

  * * *

  Gripping the wooden handles of the shiny new Walking Cultivator, Jesse guided the team of horses carefully between the corn rows. The tassels combed their underbellies as they trudged through the green corn. The smell of freshly turned soil lay thick in the sweltering air.

  Step, step, lift. Step step, lift.

  "Gee, Polly!" he called as the animals veered left. The lead mare automatically corrected her course. "Ho," Jesse intoned to straighten her.

  Four steel blades straddled the corn rows, turning the soil over on either side, following the course of two iron wheels. The newfangled machine accomplished double the cultivation possible with a single horse hoe which Silas was using a few rows away. Despite his misgivings, he had to admit the new cultivator made the job easier. Together, they'd averaged eight acres a day for the past three weeks. Far more than could have been cultivated in the days he'd been working the land for the old man.

  Even so, a man had to pay close attention to his work or the sharp shares would dig into the precious corn root, destroying it. Which was exactly what happened as Jesse's mind wandered and he forgot to lift.

  He swore under his breath.

  Step, step, lift.

  Jesse ran a damp shoulder over his brow and looked behind him. Acre-long rows of fresh-cultivated corn lay behind him. Today they would finish. Then they would start shocking the wheat.

  As long as the weather held.

  He'd walked through the wheat yesterday and tested it. No longer green, the kernels had passed the doughy stage Joe Fergeson—the miller down the road—tended to prefer. It was ripening to a golden brown and had a firm pasty consistency. The old man had always insisted that despite his preferences, Fergeson would pay the same dollar for ripe wheat as green, and the crop would yield far more that way. That was lucky, because he couldn't have gotten to it any sooner.

  It was hard, thankless work, but each acre, Jesse reasoned, put him that much closer to his goal: to return to Montana.

  "Giddup, Polly, giddup, Pete," he called falling into the rhythm of the movement.

  He longed for the mountains and the wind singing through the pines, and the sharp, variant land. He missed the stinging aroma of a campfire, wading hip-deep in glacial streams, and sleeping beneath the canopy of stars that seeded the black dome of sky above him. He missed not knowing what tomorrow would bring. He'd forgotten how endlessly the same Ohio seemed—rolling, flat, static... acre upon acre of sameness... and all this damned grain.

  The tension between him and Andi had grown with the passing days. More times than one he'd regretted that kiss he'd given her that afternoon in her room. But neither had he forgotten the strange rush of pleasure it had given him. Andi had kept her distance from him, as aware as he of what potential lay between them. So he'd kept their conversations intentionally light, their touches—when they shared one—impersonal.

  His thoughts strayed to little Zachary. The boy was a charmer, with his father's smile and his mother's eyes. Jesse felt a growing attachment to the child, despite his own warnings against it. He actually missed the kid when he spent the daylight hours in the field and found himself looking forward to the feel of Zachary's tiny hand closing around his finger at the end of the day.

  Jesse frowned and concentrated on
the motion of the cultivator and the jolting it gave his upper body.

  The smooth hardwood handles burned the still-tender palms of his hands. He no longer got blisters. His hands were beginning to callous again. Years of trapping had softened him in some ways, hardened him in others, but hadn't lessened his distaste for this place one bit.

  Beside him, two rows over, Silas worked too, wearing the new boots and pants Jesse had purchased for him in town. The two men who'd been hunting him had disappeared and were probably in Illinois by now. Jesse hoped, for Silas' sake, that once they'd lost his trail, they'd moved on and forgotten him.

  Beside him, Silas sang to himself as if he were actually enjoying his work.

  "Chicken crow at midnight, It be almost day. Go an' get your Georgia Lover, 'Cause it be almost day. Go an' get your Georgia Lover, We'll dance the night away."

  Jesse gritted his teeth.

  Step, step...

  Silas went into the second verse humming wordlessly. Flicking the sweat off his brow, Jesse tried to shut out the sound.

  Step, step, step, lift.

  How, on God's green earth, could a man concentrate with that humming going on four feet away?

  Step, step—clank.

  The rock hidden beneath the soil delivered a painful jolt that traveled up his arms to his shoulders. With a curse, Jesse stopped the team and worked at the rock with the tip of his shoe, but the stone didn't budge. He got down on his knees and dug his fingers into the earth surrounding it.

  What's the matter, Boy? came a voice from the dark recesses of his mind. You ain't gonna let a little rock best you, are you?

  Jesse stiffened and looked up into the glare of the sun at the shadowy figure looming over him. A cold clamminess chased through him.

  No, Papa, I can get it. I can, came another voice... his own. But he couldn't do it. He was eight years old and the rock was stronger. Defeat had made his young eyes sting.

  Weakness will never make you a farmer, Boy. I guess I'll have to teach you a lesson.

  Heart thudding in his ears, Jesse blotted out his father's image and tore the rock from the stubborn ground. He stood and threw it as far as his bitterness would carry it. The heavy stone crashed into several stalks in its wake.

  His chest heaved, dark spots of memory swam before his eyes. It must be the withering heat, or the oppressive smell of the corn, making his brain go soft. He hadn't thought of that incident for years. He thought he'd put all that behind him.

  "You hear me, boss?" Silas was saying, looking at him with concern.

  Jesse blinked, realizing he hadn't. "What?"

  "I said you all right? You don't look so good."

  "I'm fine," he replied, gathering up the reins again.

  Silas narrowed a look at him, unconvinced. "You take a dislikin' to that partic'lar rock you just chucked, or is it my singin' botherin' you?" He grinned. "You can tell me."

  "It beats me," Jesse grumbled, "how you could find anything to sing about out here."

  "Singin' just comes natural," Silas told him, wiping his face on the new blue bandanna wrapped around his neck. "Hoe an' sing. Hoe an' sing. Makes it go fast an' easy. Ya'll ought'a try it."

  "Nothin' would make this work go faster for me," he replied cynically, digging into the soil again, feeling Silas' stare on his back. A pair of crows circled above them cawing loudly. All around them, the cicadas chirred in the mid-day heat.

  "You ain't partic'lar fond o' this here land, is you?"

  They had never spoken of it, yet Jesse supposed his feelings had become fairly transparent. "No."

  Silas looked truly perplexed by that. "How come? It's your land, ain't it?"

  "It was my family's farm. I left it years ago with no intention of coming back."

  Silas shook his head, backing down the row, coaxing the soil with the blade of his hoe. "You's here now."

  "True." The prodigal son.

  They worked in silence for a few minutes before Jesse broke it. "You've got more right to hate farming than I do, after all you've been through."

  "Hate it?" Silas tossed him an incredulous look. "You mean the land?" He shook his head. "I ain't got no quarrel with dirt."

  Jesse frowned and slowed his step.

  "Now, folks..." Silas went on, "you can have a quarrel with folks. They can tell you to go one way or t' other. Sometime, it ain't the way you wants to go. But the land? It be a part of me... who I am, what I knows."

  He spread his arms and gaze to encompass the sea of green around them. "An look—no whip-holdin' overseer lookin' over my shoulder; no massah tellin' me I gots to work sunup to sundown with no break from the blisterin' sun. An' when I's done, I can lie down in a sweet mow o' hay and think on tomorrow an' what I's gonna do. No suh," he said, carrying his hoe to the next row, "I ain't got no quarrel with dirt."

  Jesse plunged his hoe into the soil. Step, step, lift. Who was his own quarrel with? he wondered. A dead man? Or the legacy of pain he left behind?

  "Hello, in the field!"

  Jesse turned at the sound of Andi's voice drifting across the corn. Making her way through the corn rows, she carried a canteen and canvas bag on one shoulder, the baby—wearing a little knitted cap—slung across the other in some kind of contraption she'd made up with a lacy shawl. In her free hand she held two tin cups. Beside her, Mahkwi trotted along, tail wagging.

  Andi looked small, slight against the solid green backdrop, the sturdy shocks of corn. If he hadn't heard her voice, he might have thought her an apparition, a trick of the eyes, like the wavy heat rising off the corn. The sight of her took him back years, when she used to cut across his father's cornfields to meet him at the creek—waving her arm above the shoulder-high corn, calling his name....

  Jesse blinked, shaking off the memory that left his heart beating faster. An oversized man's hat shaded her face. His gaze took in her ankle-length blue skirt, which was topped by a simple, calico blouse and cinched at the waist with a belt.

  His gaze tarried there for a minute. In the three weeks since she'd given birth, she'd lost the look of pregnancy. Her stomach and hips were nearly back to normal. He didn't have to guess about that. His hand had accidentally brushed her around the waist the other day. He remembered that out of bounds touch even now. His fingers drew into a fist.

  As Andrea hurried toward the men, she let out a sigh of relief. She was safe here beside Jesse, she assured herself, thinking of the note crumpled in her pocket. Drawing closer, she found herself unable to tear her gaze from Jesse's naked upper torso. A sheen of sweat coated his bronzed chest and arms. A dusting of darker hair covered his chest, thinning to a V past his washboard-like stomach and into the waistband of his trousers. He's beautiful, she thought, as beautiful as she remembered. His body had been sculpted by years of hard work in a place so different from this she could hardly imagine it.

  "What are you doing all the way out here, Andi?" he asked with a welcoming smile.

  "It's past dinnertime, or didn't you notice?" she asked. "I thought you two might be thirsty and hungry. I made you some sandwiches."

  Jesse reached for the canteen and relieved her of the cups. Andrea slipped her arms around the baby, who cooed happily at her.

  "You were right," he told her, unscrewing the top of the canteen and sniffing at it. "What's in here?"

  Andrea jerked her gaze from Jesse's chest. "Lemonade with, um, chipped ice from the spring house. I brought out some sandwiches too, if you're hungry."

  Jesse nodded and poured a cup for Silas, who'd joined them at the promise of a cool drink.

  "Lemonade—" Silas moaned. "I purely do love lemonade. My mammy used to make it for the folks up at the big house and slip us chillun some on the sly through the kitchen door." He took a long sip. "Mmm-mm, thaz fine, Miss Andi. Jus' the right amount o' sweet."

  Andrea smiled. Jesse had Silas calling her Andi now too. She couldn't complain. She kind of liked the name. It was the only nickname anyone had ever given her. And Jesse had given it.
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br />   She smiled at Mahkwi, who rooted under the loosened soil, searching the sweet scented earth with her nose, unearthing grubs or gophers or an occasional corn snake.

  Andi watched Jesse fill his own cup and slug the liquid back in four long gulps. Her eyes unwillingly followed the up and down movement of his Adam's apple and the rivulets of liquid that spilled past the corners of his mouth. "Ahhh-hhh," he sighed. His azure gaze met hers as he backhanded the moisture as it slid into his beard. She bit her lip to hide her grin of pleasure and amusement. "What?" he asked.

  "Nothing."

  "What?"

  "Isn't that hot?"

  "The lemonade?"

  "No, the beard."

  He reached up and scratched it. "I'm used to it. Why? You don't like it?"

  Lifting her shoulders in a shrug that was neither approving or disapproving, she said, "No, it's fine. I mean, most men wear them. I just wondered. My hair gets hot if I don't get it off my neck. I could cut yours for you if you want." She stroked the baby's bonneted head.

  Watching her, Jesse grunted noncommittally, refilled his cup, and drained it again.

  Silas looked on, amused. He goo-gooed at the baby and made him smile before handing back the cup. He took the napkin-wrapped sandwich from her. "Much obliged, ma'am." He waggled his fingers at the baby.

  "Jesse, Etta needs a ride back home," Andrea said. "Can you spare Silas for a few minutes? Missus Rafferty needs her help with some canning this afternoon. If you think it's safe, that is, to be on the road?"

  Silas had laid low on the farm since his arrival. But it was a mere mile between farms and the road, little used between them.

  Jesse glanced at Silas. "It's up to you, Silas."

  Silas wiped his brow with the back of his arm. "I 'spect as how if them two wuz still in these here parts, they'd a found me by now. You reckon?"

  "I figure their mouths are too loud to keep quiet this long without us hearing. But I can go, just the same."

  "No. I'll go. I be fine. You wantin' me to go now?"

  "I can finish up here," Jesse said. "You go on ahead. You'll have to hitch Jacksaw to the buggy, though." He indicated the mule hitched to Silas' plow.