“How is he?” asked another voice. Ricky. With Matty rushing right on his tail, looking concerned. Seb and Chester must’ve relieved them in the night, just like they were supposed to do.
“About as cranky as a bear,” came her quick answer. But she didn’t let go of his elbow until he was all the way upright.
“So back to normal, then?” Matty said.
And Edgar’s wife beamed a smile at the other man.
It rubbed him the wrong way. “I’m right here,” he growled.
And that set the three of them laughing.
He started to stomp off—more like limp off—but Matty stopped him. “Let’s have a look at the hand, you old grizzly.”
Edgar reluctantly held up his mitt for inspection. It was colorful and grotesque, swollen yellow and purple. The skin around the bite was pink and puffy, but there were no red streaks going up his arm that might indicate poison.
“Looks like I ain’t gonna make you a widow yet,” Edgar said.
She frowned at him, and he remembered her worrying over him in the darkest part of the night.
“You wanna ride back to town and see the doc?” Ricky asked grudgingly.
“I want to go visit the woods and then get saddled up.” He limped off because he couldn’t stomp the way he wanted.
And by the time he’d done his private business in the woods, he knew he wasn’t riding anywhere that day. Except in the front of the wagon.
His legs were trembling, his equilibrium was off and he only had the use of one hand. He was sweaty and weak, a feeling he hated.
It made him cranky when he walked back to camp and saw one of the cowhands bent close and saying something to Fran.
“Make sure the cook fire’s out,” he barked. “Don’t need a prairie fire chasing our flank.”
She glared at him but went back to the smoking ashes.
Ricky waited near his saddled horse. It was obvious Edgar’s brother had something to say. He tried to beat him to it. “You look exhausted.”
“Bet I look better’n you do. Guess you’re in the wagon today, huh?” But the lines around his brother’s mouth didn’t lift in a smile.
“Trouble sleeping in your bedroll after the snake incident?”
“Somethin’ like that.” But the shadows in Ricky’s eyes remained.
Edgar needed to get these cattle to sale. He knew there was something eatin’ his brother, but if the other man wasn’t offering it up, what was he to do? They weren’t women, who could share gossip and hurt feelings. If Ricky wanted help, he’d ask for it.
“Go easy on her,” Ricky said. “Seems she and the sister have had a rough time of it.”
Edgar’s temper flared. But before he could get into it with Ricky, the other man swung up into his saddle and spurred his horse.
Finally, Edgar approached the chuck wagon. Wary, like a man should be when facing an unknown predator.
She met him with a cup of coffee. He took it.
“Thanks.” His ma would skin him if he didn’t practice basic politeness.
“You’re welcome,” she said a little too sweetly. She brushed a hank of hair out of her face. The sleeves and skirt of her dress were soaked as though she’d carried several pails of water up to douse the fire.
“This the cup from the bottom of the creek?” After the hullabaloo with the snake, their moment of closeness the night before seemed a long way off.
“Mmm-hmm.” She loaded up a last crate in the back of the wagon.
He choked on the first sip of the sludge. “Tastes like you didn’t wash the sediment out of it.”
She looked at him with wide, innocent eyes. “Might serve you right after the way you’ve been barking at me all morning.”
Then she laughed, a tinkling, full sound with her head thrown back and the pale skin of her throat exposed.
And if it didn’t beat all, he found a smile wanting to curl up the edges of his mouth.
He turned away and climbed into the wagon instead.
He knew she hadn’t put anything in the coffee—it was just awful on its own, probably the last of the pot. But that was just the kind of prank his old self would have pulled. Right now he was too worried about getting the cattle sold and untangling the mess she’d made for him to do something like that.
And why did she have him thinking about pranks anyway? They had a job to do.
He gritted his teeth as she climbed onto the bench beside him.
* * *
Fran had a brother. And though Daniel was much older, she knew that when men were injured or sick, they tended to be a mite grumpy.
But her husband took the cake.
He’d allowed her to drive the wagon. Probably because his right hand was pretty worthless.
Riding on the bench seat beside him, she barely had room to move.
And he hadn’t spoken all morning, except to grunt one-syllable responses.
She was getting tired of it.
Emma had elected to walk, and was trailing the wagon, but not by much. Fran knew, because she couldn’t quell the urge to keep looking back and checking on her sister.
After only a couple hours behind the reins, her shoulders protested all the driving she’d done the day before. She tried to shift her shoulders unobtrusively, but she caught her husband’s sideways glance.
He still didn’t talk.
“Are you ever going to say anything?” she blurted.
Now he gave her a long look with those blue eyes. “You want to talk?” he asked. And his wolfish smile had her shifting uncomfortably on the hard bench seat. “Seems you do owe me some answers after interrogating me last night.”
Heat scorched her cheeks. So he had remembered her impertinent questions. But if he thought she would be embarrassed, he was wrong. “I suppose it’s only fair,” she offered.
Their eyes held, his challenging, hers steady.
“What happened to your parents? How did you end up—”
“At the orphanage?” she finished for him.
He had the grace to look slightly abashed at the probing question. She answered anyway.
“My parents were affluent.” She said it simply. “There were several farms passed down through the generations—cotton and corn, mostly. Tennessee is very fertile. But we lived in the city. I was sent to a finishing school when I was fourteen, just like my mother before me. I got to see my family on holidays. I remember our last Christmas together. We had a roast goose, and my brother gave me the most beautiful calligraphy set....”
She shook herself out of the happy memory. “But that isn’t what you asked.”
He pointed to a depression in the prairie, and she did her best to guide the horses around it.
“Emma joined me at the school when she was fourteen. Shortly after her arrival, we were pulled into the headmistress’s parlor, where we received the news in a letter from our brother, Daniel. Our parents had died. A fever of some kind.”
She took a moment to steady her breathing, blink back the tears. It had happened two years before, but it still hit her hard.
“Daniel is ten years my senior. He was an attorney in Nashville. He wanted Emma and I to continue our schooling until he could settle things with our parents’ probate. Things were all right for a month or so, but our tuition came due. I had my eighteenth birthday, but couldn’t reach Dan, though both the headmistress and myself sent several letters. The headmistress allowed me to stay on and work in exchange for board, but Emma’s tuition remained unpaid. Finally, the headmistress was notified that no one by the name of Daniel Morris resided at the boardinghouse where he had previously stayed. He was gone. Disappeared.”
She stared out over the gently flowing grasses to the cattle well ahead of them, small black-and-red specks in the dist
ance. Ah, there was a rider, kicking up a plume of dust.
“He just left you there?” Edgar prompted. “Abandoned you?”
Her eyes stung and she sniffed, squinting in the sunlight. She shrugged. “I don’t know what happened to him. I can’t countenance that he would’ve just left us without any correspondence. We weren’t close, but...he wouldn’t have just forgotten his responsibility to us.”
“So you think something happened to him?”
“I don’t know. Our grandparents were already gone, and there was no other family to contact. I tried contacting my papa’s business associates, tried writing our old neighbors. Someone told me there had been loans taken against our family home—that they defaulted with my papa’s death. The house and its contents were sold at auction by the bank.”
Tears burned behind her eyes at the remembrance. Not only had Daniel disappeared, but the house she’d grown up in had been lost to her. There had been no money, no support, nothing.
She’d lost everything.
She looked over her shoulder again, through the back flap of the wagon, ostensibly to check on Emma again, but really to try to escape the painful conversation. Emma dawdled behind the wagon with the white dog. With the wide prairie behind her, Fran should be able to see any approaching threat. But the relative security of the prairie didn’t remove her unease, her sense that something—someone—was still coming for them.
“Emma!” she called. “Come into the wagon for a while. You’ll burn under the sun.”
Emma waved. Whether that meant she was coming, Fran couldn’t tell.
“You coddle her,” Edgar said.
“Don’t you spoil your younger sister?” she asked.
She felt his gaze on her as she focused on navigating what must’ve once been a dry creek bed.
“Breanna has chores like the rest of us.” He paused a moment, as if considering. “She does have an independent spirit.”
“And seven older brothers.”
That won a smile. It was a small smile, but she counted it as a victory.
“All young women should be spoiled and pampered by those who love them,” she said. She turned once more to see Emma approaching the wagon.
“And you?” he asked.
She purposely misunderstood him. With Daniel gone, she was not likely to be spoiled or pampered. And she had Emma’s safety to think of.
“I’m all she has left,” she murmured.
Chapter Six
Moments after her emotional disclosure, Edgar waited as Fran pulled up the horses. The wagon rolled to a stop, and she allowed time for her sister to hop into the back.
How’d he get here anyway? Stuck in a wagon with two females while his brothers drove the cattle. Doing his job for him.
They’d barely gotten moving again when the dark head so like his wife’s popped behind them in the back.
“Will we stop for lunch?” Emma asked softly.
She was as quiet as a mouse. Her knees were tucked up against her chest, making herself as small as possible. Fran’s comment about Breanna had hit him particularly hard. He couldn’t help comparing the two. Breanna was brash and independent, free-spirited. Emma was quiet, withdrawn. What had happened to her?
“We didn’t yesterday,” Fran reminded her sister gently. “There were a couple of biscuits left over from breakfast. I wrapped them in a cloth—there on top of the crate—”
Twisting next to him, his wife’s dark hair brushed his jaw and sent sparks flying through him, just like the campfire the night before.
“You mind?” he asked as mildly as he could.
“Sorry.” She straightened, shoulders up around her ears now.
His sorry stomach rumbled.
Emma’s hand appeared between him and Fran, a biscuit proffered on the small palm.
He nodded his thanks and chomped into it. “Good, huh?” he said through a mouthful.
Fran looked at him with mild horror written on her features, but his wink earned a soft “mmm-hmm” of agreement from Emma—also through a mouthful.
“Emma!” Fran gasped, obviously embarrassed. “Manners!”
He laughed. “Who’s out here to see?” he asked through the next bite, crumbs flying.
Emma giggled very softly, but it definitely was a sound of happiness.
Fran looked at him askance. One corner of her mouth lifted and she didn’t correct him.
A few minutes later, Emma asked another soft-spoken question. “We don’t have time to stop.... We’ll drive until it gets dark. What’s the big rush to get to where we’re going?”
“Tuck’s Station.”
“Yes, there. Why the hurry?”
“Because my pa made a deal with the buyer for delivery, and the train’s not running. We’ve got to get the cattle there on time.”
“So you always fulfill your obligations perfectly?” Fran broke in.
She made him sound just like his brothers did. Boring.
“I have fun.” And that didn’t sound petulant at all.
“What kind of things do you like to do?” the pixie behind him asked.
“I...” He couldn’t think of one thing offhand. “Well, I...”
Now he sensed Fran’s eyes on him, too, but he kept his narrowed eyes on the horizon. “I like riding,” he said finally. “Breaking horses.”
“Doesn’t count,” Fran said. “It’s part of the work you do, isn’t it?”
“I enjoy the work.” Most of the time.
“Hmm.” Fran’s little noise indicated she didn’t really believe him.
Emma was silent. Until, after a delayed moment, she asked, “What are your other brothers like?”
Relieved to have the attention off himself, he went with the topic he could talk about.
“My two older brothers are married. Oscar’s wife is Sarah. They’ve got three adopted girls and a son of their own. And another on the way.
“Maxwell’s a doctor in Denver. His wife, Hattie, is finishing her medical degree and then they intend to move back to Bear Creek.”
“His wife is a doctor, too? How incredible.” Fran seemed genuinely impressed, not shocked like some of the other people who knew Hattie’s intentions.
“And...what do you think of their wives?”
He tipped his Stetson back on his forehead, thrown by her question. “They’re fine, why?”
“I just wondered if you disliked their wives, or if it was only me that you dislike.”
Emma had gone silent, wide-eyed in the back of the wagon.
The tips of his ears got hot. But he wasn’t going to apologize for not trusting her, not after what he’d been through as a child and how she came into his life.
He couldn’t imagine any other woman of his acquaintance making such an outrageous statement.
“I didn’t meet their wives under false pretenses.”
She went silent, and he had a moment of regret for his harsh words. Before he could decide whether or not he should apologize, a shadow in the tall prairie grasses next to them caught his attention.
“Pull left,” he commanded her, his uninjured hand covering hers and attempting to direct the horses away from the danger.
But it was too late. The right-side wagon wheels dipped into a wash hidden by the tall grasses. With both wheels on that side losing traction, it tipped the wagon at a dangerous angle.
“Whoa!” he shouted to the horses.
Fran fell into him. He heard Emma scrambling, a soft shriek and a rip of fabric—probably the canvas wagon cover. Had Emma fallen through the canvas beneath the wagon? If so, and if they tipped any farther, she could be crushed.
He used his legs to brace, but with Fran leaning into him, he had to throw his bad hand out to the side of th
e wagon seat to stop their momentum and keep them tumbling down the wash.
He cried out, the pain fierce and fiery up his arm.
But they’d stopped.
The dog barked wildly, still on solid ground and somewhat above them.
“Quiet,” he growled, afraid it might spook the horses.
The horses were old hands and hadn’t panicked when everything behind them had gone off-kilter. They stood placidly while the wagon listed to one side, in danger of falling completely into the depression.
His wife hadn’t panicked, either.
But it sounded like her sister was crying.
“Be still,” he told the girl in the back. “You in the wagon?”
A soft sound of assent came.
Fran scrambled to get over the side of the seat—now angled down. When she had her feet on solid ground again, she reached back for him.
“Emma? You hurt?” she called, even as she hooked both arms around his upper arm on the bad side, leaving his good hand for leverage. She might be a tiny thing, but she helped him maintain his balance as he struggled over the wagon seat.
Shuffling and soft sobbing came from behind the canvas. No answer.
“Be still,” he commanded again, loudly this time.
Fran wrinkled her entire face up and he saw her protest coming in her slightly opened lips, so he countered it before she could speak. “If things shift again and she moves wrong, the wagon could still topple.”
She glanced at the horses. They couldn’t see Emma, but they seemed to wordlessly understand the disaster that would be.
He glanced over her head in the direction they’d been going. The herd and the boys had kept moving; they were too far out of yelling distance. One of his brothers would notice their absence, but it might be a while. And Emma might not have that long.
She followed his gaze. “Will they hear us if we yell?”
“Probably not. We need to get her outta there.”
The crease above her eyes deepened, showing her worry, but she followed him around to the back of the wagon.
“Shouldn’t we unhitch the horses?”
He shook his head, attempting to loosen the ties holding the canvas closed, forgetting about his swollen hand momentarily. He pulled back with a hiss.
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