Southern Charms

by Trana Mae Simmons

  “And,” Elvina continued, “he feels we need to leave at some ungodly hour, like eight a.m., so I have to have my things ready. I guess, given Ellie’s headache, I’ll tape a note on her door, informing her to be ready to accompany us tomorrow morning. If I let her get out of here earlier, we’ll never find her all day.”

  “Rockford’s coming for lunch, remember.”

  “I wouldn’t forget that, my dear. We’ll be back in plenty of time. How long can it take to show Mr. Morgan some grass and a bunch of cows?”

  Turning over with a jerk, the book falling to the floor, Ellie grabbed a pillow and covered her head. She wasn’t going to do it, that was all there was to it. She wasn’t going to ride over the ranch with Elvina and Shane to point out all the attributes of the Leaning G, which would make it a profitable investment for Shane. Let Elvina get Shorty to accompany them!

  * * * *

  At eight a.m., Ellie sat on Cinder in the ranch yard, waiting for Elvina and Shane. She had tried to avoid the breakfast Fatima prepared, grumping around in the barn and attempting to work up the courage to let Elvina think she hadn’t seen the note fluttering on her door before sunrise that morning. But Elvina herself came out to the barn and called Ellie to breakfast at seven thirty. She must want to sell the ranch desperately, Ellie had thought as she obeyed and trudged behind Elvina back to the house.

  Ellie ignored Fatima’s concerned look. And one from Withers, too, who helped Fatima serve a sumptuous breakfast of hotcakes, eggs, bacon, sausage, biscuits and gravy.

  Just then, Shane led Blackjack and one of the gentler mares out of the barn and joined Ellie in front of the porch. As though on signal, Elvina came out of the house, thankfully making it unnecessary for Ellie to carry on any polite conversation with Shane while they waited. Shane bounded up the steps—darn, those jeans were scandalous—and extended Elvina his arm. Ellie could visibly imagine what Elvina felt when she slipped her hand into the crook of Shane’s elbow. Those muscles in his arm invaded her dreams over and over again every night—and in reality during the day, also.

  She stared pointedly off into the distance while the two of them mounted.

  “Ellie, dear,” Elvina said from beside her. “Please get over this pouting attitude you have.”

  “I’m not pouting!” Ellie told her, a sulk in her voice.

  “Of course you are,” Elvina refuted. “You haven’t been yourself for several days now. I do hope your headache isn’t lingering on. If so, I guess we could ask Shorty—”

  “No!” Shane interrupted.

  Elvina’s inquiring gaze settled on Shane’s face. “I mean, Shorty’s only the foreman,” he said. “I really want Ellie with us this morning. She’ll have a much more overall, broader view of things.”

  “As you wish, Mr. Morgan,” Elvina agreed. “I promised you every cooperation while you considered your purchase of our ranch.” She picked up the reins and nudged her horse, leading the way out of the ranch yard.

  Elvina rode well, Ellie mused to have something besides the big horse and rider extremely close beside her to concentrate on. She always had ridden easily, the few times Ellie saw her on horseback instead of in a buggy. Ellie vaguely recalled the scant number of times she, Darlene, George and Elvina had ridden out as a family, usually during bluebonnet season in the spring, before it got too hot to enjoy the days. Even then, as today, Elvina wore full, ankle length skirts and a fitted-bodice riding outfit, with a bonnet perched on her head instead of the wide hats the cowboys preferred. To counteract the sun, she always carried a parasol.

  Shane must not have been paying attention to his stallion, because suddenly his leg nudged Ellie’s, their stirrups catching.

  “Whoops,” Shane said, pulling Blackjack immediately to a halt, as she did Cinder. He bent down to untangle the stirrups, taking an inordinately long time, at least in Ellie’s opinion. Then the back of his hand brushed up her boot, not withdrawing until it encountered her bare skin beneath the hem of her riding skirt.

  Ellie’s eyes flew to his face.

  “Whatever I’ve done to make you angry with me,” he said in a low voice, “I humbly apologize. Please tell me what I can do to make you smile again.”

  Kiss me again, Ellie’s heart cried. She had sense enough to not to trust that her tongue wouldn’t say the words, and she tore her gaze from his lips and kicked Cinder up beside Elvina’s mare.

  “What did you have in mind seeing first, Elvina?” she asked,

  “Oh, whatever. My, it is a nice morning, isn’t it? Remember when we used to take Sundays off and ride out with George? Pick bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes?”

  “I remember.”

  On those outings Ellie had almost felt like a true member of the family. George treated her that way, anyway, as did Darlene as they got older. But in more than one of their sibling rivalries in their early, just-out-of-toddler stages, Darlene had yelled that Ellie was “only ‘dopted, not borned like I was to Mommie!”

  Only once had George overheard a squabble and followed Ellie into the barn, where she sobbed into a tiny colt’s mane. He took her small shoulders and turned her to him, saying in a soft voice that the next time Darlene made that remark, remind her that Ellie had been chosen, not adopted.

  Funny, though, her sister had been right behind George, sobbing out her sorrow at hurting Ellie’s feelings.

  “...at least, in my opinion,” she became aware of Elvina saying. “Don’t you think that would be best, Ellie?”

  “Ummmm...sorry, Elvina. My thoughts were wandering. What did you say?”

  Elvina frowned at Ellie, then reached over and patted her arm. “I know you are very unhappy at my considering selling the ranch, Ellie. But I’m afraid you’re going to have to get used to the idea. Wouldn’t you much rather spend your days not working so hard?”

  Ellie knew better than to argue with her stepmother. Had Shane not been a witness to the confrontation, she might have tried, but she stilled her tongue. Shrugging, she stared around her to get her bearings.

  “I guess we should start at the lower end of the ranch and head north,” she said.

  “That’s what I just said,” Elvina said in exasperation. “So, shall we continue?”

  Ellie led off, but given the dry soil, within moments Shane and Elvina both rode up beside her to keep from eating her dust. Assuming Shane was more interested in the property today than the workings of the ranch, as he had been when he rode out the other times with her and her men, she showed him the pastures and cross fences at the southern end, which they used for grazing in either summer or winter. Spring and fall, she explained as they headed northward, the cattle were slowly moved pasture-by-pasture closer to ungrazed areas of the main ranch. It made roundup easier for the men if they could ride back to their bunkhouse each night to eat and bathe, instead of camping on the range.

  “When you read about roundups,” Shane mused at one point, “you always think of chuck wagons and days on end camping on isolated ranges.”

  “Even Texas, as big as it is, is becoming civilized today,” Ellie told him. “Back in the times you’re thinking of, there weren’t any fences to keep the cattle separated. Why, that’s how Texas began to grow and recover after the Civil War. Most of our men went off to fight. And the men who did return found thousands and thousands of cattle roaming wild and unclaimed, since there weren’t that many men left to take care of them. More than one well-off rancher today got his start by rounding up a herd of longhorns and driving it up to Kansas to sell. The market was strong, and one herd could bring enough money to start a ranch.”

  “Interesting,” Shane said. “Still, it’s a hard life.”

  “It’s a good life,” Ellie told him staunchly. “A satisfying one.”

  “Thank goodness other people have different ideas of what makes a satisfying life,” Elvina interrupted. “Look. Isn’t that a creek up there? The one where we used to eat our lunch on Sundays?”

  Ellie heaved a sigh of resignation.
“Yes. We can cool off there. But be careful. The brindle’s hanging around here still.”

  “One of the cows?” Elvina asked.

  “One of the meanest cows I’ve ever seen in my life,” Shane told Elvina with a mock shiver. “Did Ellie tell you what happened that day?”

  When Elvina denied knowing, Shane launched into the story with plenty of flourishes and expansions of the tale, even stretching the height of his fright. By the time they got to the creek bed, the sandy part where they had nearly made love, not the red-clay-mud portion, Elvina was laughing in delight. He continued the tale as he helped Elvina dismount and turned to Ellie, but she was already on the ground.

  Ellie turned her back to keep the wide smile threatening to split her face from Shane. That man could truly tell a tale, but she would be diddly darned if she let him see he had finally made her smile.

  After Shane finished his story, Elvina bent down and delicately wet her handkerchief in the creek. She patted her neck and face just as delicately, staring around at the trees and rippling water.

  “George and I used to come out here alone sometimes,” she mused. “You children never knew that, did you?”

  “No,” Ellie said in astonishment.

  “A long time ago. I hated those trips, but I never let him know that.” Elvina shook her head slightly, then pulled her lady’s watch from her skirt pocket. “Oh, my. I promised Darlene I’d be back in time to lunch with her and Rockford. I’ve barely got time to make it back to the ranch and bathe first.”

  Shane got to his feet from the limb he was sitting on, but Elvina waved a hand at him.

  “No, no. I want you and Ellie to go ahead and finish touring the ranch. I—”

  “We’ve already seen most of the north part,” Ellie put in hastily. “When Shane was out with the men and me before.”

  “But not all of it.” Elvina’s look apprised Ellie in an enigmatic manner. “So please proceed, Ellie.”

  With a dismissive nod, Elvina moved to her mare. Shane went with her and helped her into the saddle, and she thanked him politely. For a long few seconds, she stared at Ellie with that contemplative look, then murmured a goodbye to both of them and turned her mare.

  The silence, broken only by the mare’s retreating hoofbeats, actually seemed heavy to Ellie. It weighed on her shoulders, pressing down so intensely she found it hard to breathe. She took an inordinate interest in a school of tiny minnows flashing around in the creek, waiting for Shane to make a move. But after the mare’s hoofbeats faded, she only heard some grass tearing as Cinder and Blackjack grazed, and now and then the jingle of a bridle part.

  From experience, she knew he moved very silently for such a huge man. More like a panther than the lion he reminded her of. But surely she would sense him if he came up behind her? Smell that masculine Shane smell of sandlewood soap and aftershave, mixed with the odors of a day on the ranch, such as a tang of sweat and saddle leather.

  Perhaps he went up the bank to check on the horses.

  Perhaps he sat back down on the dead limb.

  But she hadn’t heard the distinctive creak the limb made when weight descended on it.

  Shootfire darn! This was silly!

  She turned—

  Chapter 14

  —right into his chest, nose jammed into the broadness. She jerked, and her boot slipped in the sand.

  Shane grabbed her before she fell, murmuring an apology for startling her. To steady herself, Ellie had no choice but to accept his muscular arms—the one Elvina touched.

  But she held on only long enough to steady herself. Sneaking out of his grasp—darn, he could have tried to stop her, but he didn’t—she scrambled up the creek bank.

  “We better get going if we want to see the rest of the ranch,” she said, heading for Cinder.

  “Ellie.”

  If he had shouted angrily, she could have ignored him. But his soft, entreating voice stopped her dead in her tracks. Very slowly, she turned to face him.

  His hat hung in his fingertips, hiding one blue-clad thigh, his tawny hair creased and damp with sweat. The cottonwood leaves danced overhead in a sudden breeze, mottling his face with light and shadow, but his gold-dust eyes stared unflinchingly at her. The deep hurt in them cut her to the quick.

  “I very humbly apologize to you for pawing you the other day,” he said in a husky voice. “That’s the only thing I can think of that I’ve done to turn you so rigidly against me. I’m sure it wasn’t pleasant for you to be mauled by a disfigured man.”

  She gasped in shock, then her eyes narrowed. “What the diddly darn...what the hell are you talking about?”

  He shrugged and stuck his thumbs into his front pockets this time, the stance rounding his shoulders forward, as though he were ashamed. She hurried to him with no hesitation, not stopping until she was nearly jammed into his chest again.

  “I asked you a question, Shane Morgan. Answer me!”

  He shrugged again. “You know what I mean. Don’t make me spell it out, because it’s not easy for me to talk about.”

  “Why—why—you—you—!”

  She took a breath and snorted it out at him like the old brindle cow had done two days before. Sticking her finger out like a schoolteacher’s pointer, she hit him in the chest, once with each word she said.

  “You...did...not...maul...me! I...cooperated...fully...with ...that...mauling! If...anyone’s...embarrassed...I...should... be!”

  He plopped down onto the dead limb, his eyes now on a level with her face. “You? Why?”

  “Why?” She waved her arms in the air in exasperation. “I crawled all over you like a mare in heat! I’ve never acted like that in my entire life. If what I was feeling hadn’t scared the bejesus out of me, you might have found yourself saddled with a wife, Shane Morgan.”

  Shane flinched as though someone had shot him, and Ellie’s eyes constricted to mere slits as something niggled at her mind. “Or was that the idea? Did you think you could only dally with me, and maybe keep me around to entertain you after you bought the ranch? Not as a legal wife, but as your mistress.”

  “Never,” he denied vehemently. “How can you even think such a—ah, hell.”

  He kissed her. With a quick movement, like before, he bent his head and captured her lips. And like before, that was all it took to capture Ellie’s entire body, her entire soul. She could no more have denied herself the pleasure of his kiss than run naked down the main street of Fort Worth.

  She closed her eyes and leaned into the kiss, such relief and joy at finally having his lips on her again filling her that she couldn’t decide which would win the dominance battle—relief or joy. Didn’t care. The important thing was Shane’s lips on hers in reality instead of in her dreams.

  He lingered over her mouth, continuing to kiss her as he slowly reached out and cupped her hips, drawing her into that spot between his knees with absolutely no resistance or hesitation on her part. Her arms settled around his neck, fingers tangling in his hair.

  Sensations cascaded over her, but Shane maintained uncompromising control this time. He slowly traced her lips with his tongue tip, but didn’t push inside as before—as she longed for him to do—as her body clamored for him to do. He held her as though she were something very precious, something revered beyond worth.

  Leaving her lips, he kissed a path to her ear, his breath spilling goose bumps in its path, and his whisper bringing tears to her eyes.

  “I’m so very damned scared you’re going to pull away from me again.”

  Somehow she controlled her desire for him to continue his caresses. Somehow she knew the next few moments held something a lot more important than physical pleasure. She pulled back far enough to see his face, and cupped one hand on his cheek.

  “Why?” she asked quietly. “Can’t you tell I want you holding me? Kissing me? Caressing me?”

  He evaded her gaze, staring toward the creek.

  “Who hurt you, Shane Morgan?” she asked with a wisdom far be
yond her experience with men.

  His gaze flew back to her. “Tell me who she was,” she insisted. “And tell me why.”

  “It’s not important any longer,” he denied. “I’ve accepted it.”

  “Oh?” She raised a brow in inquiry. “So you are just dallying with me?” But her tone came out far from teasing. A serious tinge of hurt settled in it.

  “No!” He tightened his arms around her, pulling her against his flat stomach, and against something that stirred at the contact. Shane groaned under his breath, but held in place with an almost fragile grasp.

  “Ellie, that’s part of the problem. You’re definitely not the sort of woman a man dallies with. You’re a forever kind of woman, Ellie, and the man who winds up with you is going to find a treasure worth more than he can put a measure on.”

  “But not you?”

  He shifted uncomfortably, shuttering his eyes for a moment. She took advantage of his inattention and balanced on her tiptoes to kiss him. Another groan rumbled in his chest, and he surrendered, pulling her tight. He greedily deepened the kiss and stroked her back. Her hips, her sides. Her breasts.

  Ah, her breasts.

  His thumbs stroked her nipples to rigid longing, and finally his mouth conceded to their need. Not taking time to disrobe her, he suckled through the blouse, and she cupped his head, whimpering an entreaty for him not to stop.

  Her other hand found his belt, his shirt tail. She pulled one side free and slipped her hand inside, running it up his side and finding a male counterpart to her own pleasure. Unable to contort herself enough to taste it, as she longed to do, she flicked her thumb across the much smaller nubbin. Startling her, it crinkled into a hard kernel.

  Abandoning her breast, Shane’s mouth renewed its quest of the soft skin on her neck, while his large hand settled over her small one on his breast.

  “Ellie,” he said around his groans of pleasure, “don’t. You can’t...Ellie, I—”

  She twisted her head and found his lips again, stilling whatever protest he was trying to voice. For one scant second, she thought he would resist her, but her thigh encountered the near-to-bursting buttons on the front of his jeans. Instinctively, she nudged against it, and he filled her mouth with his gasp of pleasure and his thrusting tongue.