Molly and Mary Beth and Emily. They were all mixed up in his head together.
And Mary Beth had kissed him.
No, not Mary Beth. He opened his eyes. Emily was sitting in a chair looking at him.
“You still . . . still here?” Though his tongue didn’t want to work right, his head was almost clear.
“I just came in,” she said. “Luke, who did this to you?”
“Bart’s men. How’d I get here?”
“Someone tied you on Bugle and sent you back. Scully and the men brought you in.”
Luke shut his eyes and tried to concentrate. They’d meant to kill him. The boss wanted him dead, Clete had said. What made them change their minds? He had to warn the others.
He struggled to sit up, every muscle in his body screaming in protest. The room started into a slow, lazy spin. The stitches in the cut over his eyebrow stung like fire. Shakily, he raised a hand to his face. Dried blood, like coffee grounds, was caked in the webs of his fingers.
Emily’s eyes widened in alarm as he propped himself up on an elbow, close to passing out again. At once, she was over him, fussing at him. Her hands grasped his bare shoulders.
“Lie down. You’ve got two black eyes. Your cheek is broken and so is your nose. You’re bruised all over. Doc Maxwell just left. He’s been here for two days – says it’s a wonder you’re alive. He says you’re not to get out of bed for one solid week.”
Luke steadied himself with both hands spread by his hips, waiting for the room to stop rocking. He tried to put on a frown, but it pulled the stitches again and made them hurt. “I have to talk to Molly – ”
“I’ll go get her. You lie down.”
“And Scully – ”
“I’ll get him, too. He’s downstairs. Please, please lie down,” she begged.
“The men. I need to talk to all of them.”
“They’re downstairs. They take turns, waiting.”
“Wha’ for?” His tongue was thick.
He almost couldn’t hear her answer because she turned her face away. “They’re worried about you,” she’d said.
He let out a shaky sigh. All those people – they’d been waiting for him to die. For the first time, he noticed the open Bible on the table beside her chair. She’d also been waiting, but not downstairs. Up here with him, holding his hand. Silently, Luke looked at her, the meaning of what she’d done sinking into him like raindrops on sand.
“Well, I’m not going to die yet,” he said.
She gave him a shaky little smile. “I know that now.”
Her eyes were red rimmed, as if she’d been crying. Women don’t cry for a man unless they care. Maybe she didn’t hate him after all. The tiny ray of cheer didn’t last long.
Embarrassment took its place.
All those people downstairs – he was supposed to take care of them. Instead, he’d let every one of them down.
“I have to go see them,” he said, and pushed himself up on one elbow.
Vivid green eyes blazed. “Do you, now?” She sounded Irish.
Firmly, he nodded.
Emily shrugged and swept an arm toward the door. “Go ahead, get up! You’ll just pass out again. And when you do, I’m going to call every female in this house up here to watch us put you back in bed.”
Which made no sense. It wasn’t like her to give in so easily. He slid one long leg across the cool sheet toward the side of the bed. And froze. Raising the edge of the covers, he peeked underneath and looked at himself. His jaw dropped. He’d been wearing long johns before. Now he had on summer drawers, close-fitting cotton underwear that ended above his knees.
“Where are my clothes?” he asked.
“We had to cut them off.”
“You undressed me?” Heat crawled up his neck.
“Doc Maxwell said to keep clothes off you until the sutures heal.” She stepped back and frowned down at him. “I don’t believe it. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were blushing.”
“Get me some clothes,” Luke ordered.
“Lie back down. When he comes today, I’ll ask him if you can wear a nightshirt.”
“I wouldn’t be caught dead in one of those things!”
Unwavering green eyes locked his. “It’s either a nightshirt or you stay like you are. Doc Maxwell says cuts heal faster if they stay uncovered for a week.”
“We’ll just see about that. Emily McCarthy, get me my clothes, I said. I’m going downstairs – now.”
“Then you go down bare chested and in your cute little drawers.”
He wouldn’t and she knew it. There were women and little girls down there. She hated him. She definitely still hated him.
She fluffed his pillow and patted it. Small, strong fingers gripped his shoulders and eased him back down.
“A whole week in this bed and I’ll go out of my mind,” he muttered. Or maybe I won’t.
He closed his eyes and smiled.
Emily fumed. For one whole week he ran her ragged. Hand and foot, he made her wait on him. He had her read to him and then corrected her pronunciation.
She snapped at him. “I said it exactly right. You speak with a cowboy twang. I don’t.”
He sent her chasing up and down two flights of stairs to get him something from the kitchen he forgot – and conveniently remembered only after she left the room.
One afternoon he wrinkled his nose and pushed the bowl of slippery tapioca pudding away. “Looks like fish eyes and glue,” he said.
Emily snatched the dish away. The beef tea she’d made for him was also untouched. She put the tea on the tray next to the tapioca. It had taken her all of yesterday to fix that tea, soaking the meat overnight, simmering it for hours, and then drying it and grinding it to a powder. Mixed with the soaking water and served in a thin china cup, it was nourishing and good for him. It most certainly was not sticky and clotted and nasty tasting, she fumed.
“And that makes me gag!” he said, turning his head away, refusing the scalded toast she’d brought him for breakfast. “Hot, soggy bread and milk – what kind of meal is that for a man?”
“It’s good for you. And it’s not necessary to shout.” She took a deep breath and silently counted to ten.
“That’s not shouting. I’ll show you real shouting, you keep feeding me this slop.” His jaw jutted. “I want ham and eggs.”
“You can’t have it. That’s too heavy. You’re sick.”
Hot tears welled in her eyes. She sniffed. Everything she tried to do for him was wrong. Blinking hard, she spooned up a bite of the damp white bread swimming in milk, wondering what she could do to make him like it. She looked at the spoon and then at him. Like a huge baby bird, Luke opened his mouth. Quickly, she popped it into his mouth.
“I am not sick,” he said, milk dribbling down his chin. “I never get sick. I’m hurt. There’s a difference.”
“Oh, it’s unmanly to get sick, is it?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You implied it. Big stubborn cowboy.”
The spoon flew in a silver arc while she argued with him, distracting him, all the while scooping food into him. As long as she fed him, it appeared he’d eat anything. She held the cup and the back of his head. With a shudder he closed his eyes and swallowed down the tea.
But nothing else she did was right. If she made him biscuits, he pouted until she went downstairs and baked corn bread. He carped at her when she was there and sulked if she left him alone.
He wasn’t sleeping well. Each night, hour after hour, he mumbled and tossed from one side to the other.
“You should be sleeping better by now,” she said, worried after he’d had a particularly bad night.
“Witch hazel rubs might make me relax. It might help if you rubbed my back.” His lips twitched.
“Might help if you put a shirt on, too.”
“I’ll think about it . . . after the back rub.”
Emily flounced out of the room and slammed the door. The witch haze
l was downstairs in the kitchen, which he knew.
When Emily came back with the witch hazel, she brought along a set of gray winter underwear, a long-sleeved shirt, and pants that reached his ankles. Luke smiled to himself as she shook the legs loose, warming them in front of the fire. He had news for her. He wasn’t about to put them on. Bossing him around, was she? He’d give her a dose of her own medicine.
Emily laid the freshly laundered underwear across the footboard of the bed and left the room discreetly. She came back a few minutes later to find the underwear still draped right where she’d left it and Luke Sullivan propped up against the pillows, long hairy legs crossed on top of the sheet. He wore his cotton drawers, an insolent smile, and nothing else.
“Have you lost your mind? Cover yourself up,” she sputtered, hands on her hips.
“Why should I?”
“You’re sitting around in your underwear, that’s why.”
Folding his arms across his chest, he raised his eyebrows at her. “How you gonna rub my back if I’m wearing a shirt?”
Emily backed out of the room and stamped downstairs again.
“I’m so embarrassed, I could just die!” she ranted to Molly, waving her arms in the air. “He’s gross. What is wrong with him?”
Molly sighed. “I don’t understand. He’s usually so modest and proper. This isn’t like him at all. I expect he’s getting even with you for taking his clothes away and making him stay in bed. He’s doing it for you – staying in bed like that. He wouldn’t do it for me. If it’d do any good, I’d go right up there and shake some sense into him, but I raised that boy. Wouldn’t work. You’ll see. He’ll win. One way or another, he always wins.”
“Not this time,” Emily snarled. Tight-lipped, she trudged upstairs. Outside the door to his room, she huffed in several deep breaths, pumping herself into the proper frame of mind to deal with one infuriating, bossy cowboy. Shoulders back, she threw the door to his room open.
“I’m ready,” Luke said, his back to her.
She poured witch hazel into her hand. The first time she put her hands on his back, Luke jumped as if she’d stuck him with a pin. After that, he lay dead still, his muscles so rigid it was like rubbing rock. He stared at the wall.
He managed to get her up to three of those rubs a day, until her hands had memorized every contour and curve of flesh and bone that made up the muscular torso of one Luke Sullivan. She went to bed at night thinking of them, and when she managed to fall asleep, she dreamed about them. In desperation one afternoon, she snatched up a can of rose-scented talcum on the dresser and shook a blizzard of the perfumed powder all over his skin. The curly dark hair on his chest went instantly gray.
She stroked the satiny, sweet-smelling talcum across his chest and back, smoothing the silky stuff up and down his arms – and Luke sneezed until his eyes watered.
“If this powder doesn’t agree with you, I’ll stop,” she said.
Shaking his head, Luke grabbed his bruised stomach with both hands. “Aaah-choo! No, it’s just fine. I feel – AAH -choo! – better already.”
“How nice,” she murmured, and socked the bottom of the can with her fist.
“AAAH -CHOO !”
Doc Maxwell shut the door to Luke’s room and stood still in the hall outside, his bushy brown eyebrows knitted together. Mentally, he ticked off the injuries Luke had sustained and wondered if he’d overlooked something. Outwardly, Sullivan showed no signs of skull injury, but something had certainly scrambled the man’s brains. Imagine, in there around Molly and Emily, wearing only his underwear bottoms.
Doc pulled out a kerchief and mopped his face and the back of his neck. He’d never been in a room so hot in all his life, yet Miss McCarthy kept pitching wood into the fireplace as if it were the boiler on the Robert E. Lee.
Luke refused to get dressed, she said sweetly, and she was concerned he’d catch cold, especially since he was red-eyed and sneezing. Then Sullivan, shiny and slick with perspiration, allowed – kinda smuglike – that he preferred a warm room. Miss McCarthy got all red in the face at that and threw a piece of wood as big as a wagon tongue into the fireplace.
Feeling positively light-headed from the heat, Doc had to leave. By that time, even his patient was panting like a lizard.
Doc picked up his bag and started downstairs, shaking his head. From his neck to his navel, Sullivan looked like a ghost. Funny. He’d never acted like one of them sissy city fellas who liked perfume and powder, but there he was, floured up like a chicken and smelling like a bride’s bouquet. Doc clucked his tongue. Never could tell about some people.
Shame. Big strapping man like that.
CHAPTER
9
“Sure did a job on you, didn’t they, boy?” Jupiter Jackson leaned forward and spit into the fireplace again.
Luke nodded, in no mood for company. Though he felt almost normal, he was still a little shaky on his feet. The swelling had gone down and the bruises faded from his face. Greenish yellow traces were all that remained of the black eyes.
He hadn’t seen Jupiter in nearly three years. Today the old man had just come by to say hello. The day Doc Maxwell allowed Luke downstairs, visitors started dropping in – men on their way to Repton or passing by, they said, or who flat-out admitted they came to see him because they didn’t like what had happened. Luke and Jupiter sat in the dining room, chairs pulled up to the fireplace.
Weathered and wrinkled, Jupiter’s face furrowed into a grin. No one knew how old he was. It seemed he’d always been there, as long as anyone could remember. In his seventy- or eighty- or ninety-odd years, Jupiter had hired on at one time or another at nearly every farm and ranch in the area.
From time to time, the old man rocked forward and spat. “Axel told the sheriff it was a personal quarrel, said you got smart with his men out on the range,” he said, in his high, reedy voice. Tobacco juice sizzled in the fire.
“That’s his story,” Luke said. “Mine’s a little different. I was hunting cows; they were hunting me.”
“Ain’t like the old days. Then, you’d a gone over there, shot ’em, and that would’ve been the end of it. Now there’s all this messing round with the law.”
Jupiter rocked back again, quiet for several few minutes, chewing and spitting. “You know, seems to me that range of yours has always been trouble. When I worked here back in the thirties, we had problems with trappers. Frenchies, they were. Wolfers. Came in here by the dozens every year, hunting and laying traps any old place, just like they owned it.”
Luke tipped back in his chair and stretched his arms wide. He got stiff if he sat too long. “Guess they figured they did, as much as anyone else.”
“They knew better,” Jupiter snorted. “Everything from White Dog River to Billings were New Hope’s. They knew, all right – just didn’t figure to get caught. We fixed ’em, though.” He cackled, the weathered face crinkling with humor. “Every spring, we busted their traps and let the critters go. After three years, they got the hint and stopped coming on New Hope land.”
“What did Molly do?”
Jupiter shook his head. “That was long before Molly. Preacher name of Sampson here then. Parted his hair in the middle. Molly’s twice the man he ever was.”
Luke stared at the fire, seeing a map of the area in his mind. Jupiter had his rivers mixed up. “You can’t mean all the way to the Yellowstone River. You mean White Dog to Pryor Creek, don’t you? The Yellowstone and Billings are ten miles west of the Pryor. Ten miles – you’re talking about one big piece of land.”
“I can figure. When I say the Yellowstone, I mean the Yellowstone. Close to thirty square miles altogether is what it is. I ought to know,” the old man said. “My backside stayed sore for weeks riding those lines. Main reason I quit.”
“Jupiter,” Luke said patiently, “everything from Pryor Creek to Billings and the Yellowstone is open range.”
“You ain’t listening, boy. That ain’t open range, never was.”
“Well, is that a fact?” Jupiter drawled. “Dunno as I believe him if he says it’s daylight and the sun’s out. Everybody wanted a piece of New Hope.”
Deciding to talk to Molly later about the rivers in question, Luke stifled a yawn and got to his feet, his back muscles knotting again. Putting both hands on his hips, he bent his torso backward until his spine gave a satisfactory crack. If the old man would leave, maybe he could talk Emily into a back rub.
Jupiter sniffed, ignoring Luke leaning against the mantel. “Something smells good.”
Luke hid a smile. The old man hadn’t changed a bit. It was close to suppertime, and Jupiter was known to hang around until someone had to ask him to stay. “I think I’ll just mosey out to the barn and see Scully,” he said, looking toward the kitchen. “You still look a little peaked, son. Maybe you ought to lie back down awhile.”
Jupiter climbed to his feet and shuffled straight for the kitchen.
Within minutes his voice floated back. “Why, that’s mighty nice of you, Miz Molly. I sure would like to stay, yes, indeedy, ma’am.”
Luke chuckled. Worked every time. He flexed his shoulders and called, “Emily, you busy?”
As he’d done every morning since he’d been allowed up, Luke hooked a boot heel over the fence rail and watched Scully exercising Bugle in the paddock. The big gray pranced and tossed his head, looking over at Luke. Molly had put her foot down, egged on, he was sure, by Emily McCarthy: no riding or roping for another two weeks.
“Ease up, Bugle. Be nice,” he called as Scully sawed on the reins to pull the horse around. Bugle flicked his ears at Luke, swung his head around, and blew his lips at Scully, who burst out laughing. Then, obediently, the horse dropped into a canter.
Lined up alongside the corral fence with Luke, five boys from the school watched impatiently. The youngest, a freckle-faced seven-year-old in patched knickers, fidgeted and scuffed his foot against the post.
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