by Natalie Dean
“Oh, you will see a lot of them, and no, they don’t usually flock together like that.”
His hands, on the reins, were long and strong and she had to look away from them as a sudden thrill shot through her body, confusing her. His shoulder bumped against her arm, and another thrill went through her, but so did a huge bolt of fear.
She had just married this man! What would that mean, really mean, after they arrived at his ranch?
She’d never even been kissed before!
That thought made her face go red and her body heated up too. What was she going to do? Oh, of course, he would expect a chaste wife but what if he was inexperienced as well? One quick look at him gave her pause. He surely didn’t look inexperienced, but that might just be because he looked like he’d seen a whole lot of life at what was clearly not that advanced of an age.
She said, “So have you always lived here?”
“No. I grew up in Texas.”
She studied the vistas of hills covered with grass and swaying wildflowers, but few trees. The horses were following a barely visible beaten track now, and she was scared, so she kept talking. “What brought you here?”
“The chance to have my own ranch. Texas is filled with folks, all the way to the brim in some places and rustlers are the biggest and most serious threat to ranchers. Here it’s the weather and greenhorns.”
“Oh.” She swallowed hard. “I shall do my absolute best not to act like a greenhorn.”
His laughter was rich and warm, deep like his voice. “No, do. Not acting like one is how most get themselves all mixed up. If you don’t know something or how to do something you have to say so. I don’t mind showing or teaching you anything, and I’d rather do that than have you get hurt, or hurt something.”
She took a deep breath. “That’s very kind of you.”
He shrugged. “Just being practical.”
“I like practical. Oh, how did I ever…” She drew a deep breath. She had a confession to make. “Normally I am the most practical woman, but I will admit the the…the letters from my formerly intended sort of, well he quoted poetry. Not him, whoever he had write it…oh what a mess.”
His hand grazed her shoulder. More little tingles shot all through her body. “I understand. Men out here get lonely. They will do about anything, but I must say you dodged a real bullet with that one.”
“And thank you for that.” She drew air into her lungs. “You didn’t have to do that.”
He blurted out, “My wife died. A few years back. I…well I’m not sure what to do next. I mean now that we’re married. It’s pretty sudden I reckon, and I also reckon you’re just as…well taken by the suddenness of it. There are two bedrooms, and…well if you like we can sleep in separate ones until…well, if...I er…well.”
Relief swarmed in. “We could try to get to know each other I suppose. I suppose we shall have to in fact. And…and I…well I will admit that I’d prefer to know you before…” It was her turn to go scarlet.
Luckily, they arrived at the ranch, so the subject could be easily changed. “Here we are.”
They turned into a set of tall gates. She sat forward, eager now despite all of her misgivings. The house was well put together, all new wood and glass windows shining out from the sun hitting them.
He said, “Those are my cattle. The sheep are up higher, there on the hills. See them?”
She looked, and a sense of wonder hit. “I do!”
He chuckled. “I get a lot of wool from those sheep. I don’t like to shear them too close, and I let them grow in good before winter, they need their coats. Wool’s a good thing to have, and when they get too old, I tend to use them for food.”
Ugh. Jeanne’s stomach turned a bit as she considered that she had never actually seen an animal slaughtered, and she was pretty sure she didn’t want to either. But that was one small sour note in the grand beauty of the place. The house perched below a high shelf of hills all glowing with gorgeous colors and the fences were neat and straight and tall. The smell of the air was so clean too, and the flowers sent up an incredible fragrance to her nose. As they pulled up to the barn, he said, “Let me get these horses taken care of, and then I’ll take that trunk in and those other things in.”
She gave the barn, neat and tidy, a quick glance. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“You could carry some of the smaller parcels in.”
She nodded and set to gathering as many things as she could carry, but when she walked up onto the long front porch with its overhanging eave, she found herself at a loss. Jack called out, “It’s not locked.”
Her heart beat triple time against her ribs, and she opened the door and stepped inside into a small foyer that became a long and thin hallway. She went down it slowly. To the right was a parlor. There was a small wood-burning stove, a couch that looked like it was made of horsehair, and a rocking chair. To the left, the hallway widened and became a kitchen.
She saw two doors further along the hall and would have liked to peek into them, but she took the parcels to the kitchen instead. It was clear a bachelor lived here. The stove needed cleaning and blacking. The floor needed to be swept. There was a skillet with something burned into it on the table and dirty dishes that needed to be done.
“I know it’s not…well, I’m not good at the house chores.”
She turned to find him right behind her. He was so close that when she turned their bodies collided just a bit, just enough to steal her breath away and send her senses reeling. Confusion churned along her nerve endings. She must be coming down with a cold or something! Half the people on the train had been coughing or sneezing, and there was so many children with runny noses that she must have picked something up from one of them!
She took a small and hasty step back. “It’s nothing that can’t be put to rights any time soon.”
A new thought came up. Jack had been married once already. He had said they didn’t have to sleep in the same bed. Perhaps he didn’t really want a wife, not in the realest sense of the world, and just wanted a woman about the place to ease his labors.
That should have relieved her mind.
Instead, she was left feeling disappointed and sad, though she had no idea why.
Chapter 3
“That’s it! Now you’ve got the right of it!” Jack put his hands on his hips and let a wide smile play out on his lips as he watched Jeanne, dressed in an old shirtwaist and skirt she’d hiked up to her ankles, wade out into the water a little further. Her bare feet were very pale, and this was the first time since she’d arrived two weeks ago that she’d taken off her shoes in his presence. That alone was remarkable. Most went without shoes, saving them for church and winter. He always wore his boots due to the conditions and dangers out on the ranges, most notably the snakes, but women and children generally didn’t. Shoes were dear and had to be ordered for the most part. They kept them as long as possible as a result.
His eyes went back to her shoes. They were made of velvet, of all things, and starting to show some real wear. She had two pairs of those velvet slippers and a good sturdy pair of boots, but those boots had a high heel and a fancy row of buttons down one side, so he had only ever seen her wear them on the day she had arrived and at church.
The sun beamed down on her bare head, highlighting the rich hue of her hair and the intense expression on her beautiful face. His heart twisted a bit as he stared at her. She was a lovely woman and she had good manners, could read and write even better than he could, was a good cook and housekeeper, and she had a sense of humor. Sometimes that humor took the form of a biting wit. For some reason, those were the times that he found the most humorous. He’d figured out that her wit might be quick as a snake and just as deadly, but her tongue truly wasn’t. He also figured out that her tartness that day at the station had been due to fear.
She called, “I think this pole’s about to snap!”
He eyed the fishing pole, bent nearly double and quivering hard, in
her hands. She was probably right. Whatever she had on the other end of that line, it was large. He yanked his boots and socks off, rolled up his pants legs, and waded in. The water flowed cool and cold around his ankles, and the sound of her laughter came again, echoing through the sunny blue-sky day.
He said, “Better let me help you.”
It was an instinctive thing. Jack went behind her and his arms came around her waist. His hands went to the pole. Her body, warm and light, and smelling of that stuff she put in her wash water, and sunshine and flowers, met his and his heart gave a tremendous lurch and his lower body went all white-hot.
He snapped his mind back to the task at hand. His fingers rested on hers, and little jolts of sensation traveled up along his skin and nerve endings, making his heart take a fast leap in pace and beat.
She cried out, “The pole!”
She was just the right height. He could see right over her shoulder and what he saw was a pole bent nearly all the way to the water now, and a line stretched too thin to hold. They’d lose that fish for sure, but he still couldn’t let go. The feel of her in his arms was heady and enticing, and he could scarcely draw a breath for that feeling he had gotten the second he had taken her into those arms of his.
The line broke. The fish that Jeanne had been reeling in swam off with a splash of its tail. She cried out, “Oh no! I’ve lost it!”
Jack knew that he should let her go. He managed to drop his arms to his side and step back. His pulse raced, and his thoughts went in so many different directions that he couldn’t catch a single one of them.
Jeanne turned to face him. “I’m sorry about the line.”
He shook his head. “Don’t be. It happens all the time. Some fish are just too determined.”
His body was equally determined at that moment. It was determined to make it quite obvious that he desired her. That desire for her confused him. During the last two weeks of their marriage they had gotten to know each other very well but not in that sort of way. She had never come to the door of his bedchamber, and he had not dared to go to the door of hers. It was not because he did not want to. It was because he was afraid that she would reject him. He had tried telling himself, probably a hundred times, that this marriage was one of simple convenience and that he needed to remember that.
It wasn’t just the desire for her that was causing him so much trouble though. The memories of Lillian kept crowding in every time he found himself wondering if he could have an actual and real marriage with Jeanne.
Could he?
Lillian’s face used to be so sharp and clear in his mind. That image had been fading for a while, and he knew it, but lately, he had been having trouble recalling her face and laugh, the sound of her voice, and that both scared him and made him wonder if he was ready, finally, to have a new marriage.
He said, “We’ve got enough fish anyway.”
She walked out of the water, and her smile was still just as dazzling and white as it had been when that monster of fish had hit her line. She peeked down into the little basket that he had set the already cleaned fish into. “Do you know I have never enjoyed something so much as I just enjoyed this?”
He reached down and hefted the basket. “I take it you didn’t do much fishing back in Philadelphia.”
She began to gather the other things there on the bank. She tucked her feet into her shoes after drying those feet on the grass. “No. Not at all.”
They set off back toward the house. The grass by the creek was still long and lush. He had not yet turned the cattle over into that section of land. Once they got to it, they would munch the grass down to a much lower height.
He said, “I can’t imagine living in a big city.”
Jeanne sighed. That little exhale of breath struck worry into his heart and mind. There were quite a few women who came west to marry and then found themselves besieged by loneliness. They found themselves unable to deal with the harsh realities of living life in the wilderness. Would she be one of them? He was beginning to develop some serious feelings for her, and that might prove to be the most foolish thing he had ever done. If she were not willing to stay then there was no sense in trying to have a real marriage with her, now was there?
She said, “This is going to sound very odd. I miss it, of course. I miss things that I took for granted there. Like the butcher shop. Or being able to walk out the door of the home in which I lived and find stores just a few steps down. I miss hearing the sounds of people around me. But I don’t really miss Philadelphia.”
He cast a glance her way. He wasn’t sure what that meant at all. He asked, “I never asked if you actually enjoyed working in one of the factories there.”
“Oh no. I hated it. It’s just that… It’s just that for women there are not a lot of jobs, you know. I was on my own pretty much, and so I had to work and earn a living. I had enough education to become a teacher, but those positions were always filled. The factories though, they were always hiring.”
A shadow fell across her face, and he paused. A long tendril of hair also fell out of her neat hairdo at the same moment, drooping along the side of her face toward her chest and the sight of that distracted him from the shadow on her face. When he looked back, it had cleared. Had he imagined the dark look on her face?
They reached the house. She took the fish inside to make for dinner, and he went to go to deal with the livestock and other chores. As he went, he found himself wondering if it was possible that she might stay. That sooner or later she would find him to be a good man and want more from him. He hoped so, but he wasn’t holding his breath for it.
Chapter 4
The stove had been challenging to figure out. It had far more burners and nooks and crannies than any stove Jeanne had previously used. Not only that but its temperature seemed to range between hot enough to fry an egg from five feet away or too cold to cook anything at all. It was a coal stove, fortunately. She knew that wood stoves were a lot trickier to handle than that one. But as she stood there trying to keep from getting burned while trying to find the perfect spot upon which to cook their dinner, she found herself missing the much smaller and better-tempered stove that had been in her flat in Philadelphia.
Her eyes went around the kitchen. She cleaned it thoroughly and kept it clean. It had a wonderful, homey type of cheer that she had never had in a kitchen before. The cooler was through a small door and situated right next to the pantry which was wide and long enough to accommodate a great deal of things.
The thought that she would be the one to fill that pantry gave her some serious misgivings, however.
Several ladies in town had understood immediately that she was a mail-order bride and not equipped to do a lot of the farm work from sheer lack of experience. Quite a few of the girls and women on the little family compound a mile away had also offered to pitch in. They were going to teach her how to do the canning and help her get that year’s bounty done for a small portion of the produce that was growing so abundantly in the garden. She was grateful for that, but the idea of so much work was daunting.
Oh, but fishing had been so much fun! In truth, a lot of the things that she did there on the ranch were not only challenging and difficult, but also immensely enjoyable. She had known how to make cheese in theory, the same with butter, but actually doing it had taken a level of physicality that she had not imagined herself capable of. When she had brought that first lump of butter up out of the thinned down milk she had been so excited she nearly dropped it right on the floor!
It didn’t hurt that Jack was a well-read man who kept books about the house and who didn’t mind that his wife also read. In fact, they spent many an evening in the parlor, pleasantly passing the time by discussing books that they had already read but no longer had a copy of. Jack loved the serials that came in the paper, and he kept them in neat little stacks in a back room. They traded them off, he would read one section one evening, and she would read the following section the next night. They had begun to ha
ve a type of contest where they each did their best to act out the characters as they read.
It was enjoyable, and it was fun. He was a fascinating man and a good provider. Her stomach fluttered as she remembered the way his arms had felt wrapped around her body that day in the water. The strength of his body against hers. She had longed to lean back into that accidental embrace, to maybe turn around and turn her face to his to see if perhaps he would give her a kiss as well.
Her spirits sank. What was the use of wanting that? Jack made it very clear that he was still in mourning for his first wife. He had made no attempt to come to her bedchamber nor had he made any attempt to kiss her even.
She didn’t know a lot about the act itself, but she was pretty sure that kissing was supposed to come first.
With the skillet situated on a nice hot section of the stove, she began to roll the fish in cornmeal and egg before adding a lump of the hard, white lard to the skillet and letting it melt. Once it was smoking just a little, she picked the fish up with a fork and dumped it into the skillet piece by piece. It began to sizzle and pop and brown almost immediately, sending up a delicious fragrance that made her stomach rumble.
She heard the sound of the door opening and closing and her nerves ramped up, her belly quivering as she heard the sound of his boots walking across the hallway floor and toward the kitchen. His low and deep voice sent shivers racing all up and down her spine as he said, “My, something smells delicious.”
She babbled out, “Oh I’m just frying up the fish. I made a few loaves of bread earlier this morning, and I thought perhaps we could have some of those new tomatoes out of the garden and the pan of baked beans I’ve got going to go along with it.”
The thumping jangle of his spurs drew her attention. Her body tightened as he came a little bit closer, close enough to look down in the pan where the fish were cooking up nicely. “I don’t mind admitting that I’m fairly starved. I’ll just go wash up before we eat.”
