Bound for Temptation

by Tess LeSue

  “What if someone were to come along?” Sister Calla said anxiously. “These ain’t quick to put back on.”

  “Then I guess you’d get shot right along with me.” He poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot that Sister Emma kept warm by the fire.

  “Probably best if we don’t,” Sister Emma said regretfully, turning back to her sewing.

  Sister Calla nodded in agreement, looking despondent.

  “Shame,” Tom said, running a hand through his hair. “It feels mighty nice. Much cooler.”

  Emma threw a reel of cotton at him.

  He caught it and grinned.

  “It will be so nice to get to a town,” Sister Calla sighed. “I would love a cool bath.”

  So would he, he thought as the devil winds picked up again, sending dust swirling. The gusts soughed through the junipers, making eerie sounds. Ghosts are walking tonight, Luke used to tease on windy nights like these when they were kids. It had always sent a shiver through Tom, the very thought of it. Maybe it’s Mamá, Tom had thought after her death, even though he was old enough to know better by then. But he still thought it, even when he was the size of a man and responsible for his little brother, Matt. His father didn’t believe in ghosts, and neither did Luke. It was just a joke. But when the devil winds blew, singing at the doors and windows, part of him wondered if she was out there, trying to come back, trying to talk to them, to come in from the wind. Because they’d left her to the winds, hadn’t they? Buried in the hard ground next to the adobe hut on the edge of the desert, where their father had been foolish enough to claim land. Land where no rain fell and no crops grew, and where Mamá would stay forever, alone, blown by the devil winds.

  “That’s it for me,” Sister Calla said abruptly, after a particularly wicked blast. She startled Tom back to the present as she gathered up her sewing and said her good nights. “It’s just about done anyway; I’ll finish it tomorrow. I’m going under the wagon. It’s too nasty out here.” She waited for Emma to join her, but the good sister showed no sign of budging. “Please tell me you’re not planning to sleep out here?” she said disapprovingly. “There’s no hot tent, so you got no call not to come sleep with us.” She’d dropped her voice, but Tom could still hear her clearly. He didn’t think he was supposed to be able to.

  Emma didn’t say anything.

  “Sister?” Calla sounded more disapproving by the minute.

  “You told me not to tell you, so I’m not telling you.”

  Calla made a humphing noise and headed for the wagon. Emma kept on sewing. Tom took up his whittling again, painfully aware that they were alone. He couldn’t see his whittling very well now that the fire was dying down for the night, but he kept whittling anyway. It calmed his nerves.

  “Ain’t it a fine night?” she asked. She’d stopped sewing and was staring across the fire, straight at him.

  “It’s dark,” he grunted. Just keep whittling, he told himself firmly.

  “Of course it’s dark, you idiot, it’s nighttime. If it weren’t dark, you wouldn’t be able to see all the stars.” She tilted her head back to admire the sky, which glittered with a vast swirl of stars. He followed her gaze. Curls of dust blew in patterns across the mica-glitter of the galaxy.

  “There are a lot of them.” It seemed a thing to say.

  But apparently it wasn’t the right thing to say, because she made a great show of rolling her eyes at him. “Where did all your poetry go?” she complained. “You were quite happy to wax lyrical about the sea.”

  “I did no such thing.” He was irked by that. “I just told you the truth of things. You asked. I wouldn’t have said anything about the sea if you hadn’t asked.”

  She shot him a look. “And now I’m asking you to tell me the truth of things about the stars. What do those stars put you in mind of?”

  He squinted up at them. “Honestly? It looks like someone’s scattered a bunch of chicken feed up there.” She got the giggles at that, which offended him. “You asked,” he said, miffed.

  “Chicken feed?”

  “Well, it does,” he grumbled.

  “Maybe it does,” she admitted, still laughing, “but there’s no romance in it.”

  “Depends how much you like chickens.”

  “Hopefully not that much.” She popped a pin in her mouth as she adjusted the armpit of the dress, and he thought he might be spared, but the pin came out soon enough. “You romance the girls back home with talk of chicken scratch stars when you go courting?” she teased.

  “I ain’t never been courting.” He pulled a face. Why had he told her that? She didn’t need to know about him and his history with girls. Or his lack of history with girls.

  “I don’t believe you, Mr. Slater. A handsome man like you.” She darted a sideways glance at him, and his stomach did a slow somersault. “I’m sure the girls are all over you back home.”

  She thought he was handsome? Tom’s knife slipped and nicked his finger. He sucked the bead of blood off his skin. “I’ve got two brothers better looking than me,” he admitted. “The girls barely notice I exist.”

  She gave him a dubious look.

  He was glad it was dark, because he was turning red. He wished they could go back to talking about the stars. He cast around for another topic of conversation. “Have you got brothers?” he asked, a trifle desperately.

  “I do,” she said, giving him a cheeky smile, “but none of them are better looking than me.”

  He bet. She was pretty good-looking. Especially when she smiled. She had one of those smiles that lit up her whole face; she was pretty without it, but when she smiled, she was breathtaking. And she smiled a lot. “Are they older or younger?” Look at your whittling, he told himself sternly. Or the stars. Look anywhere but at her, or you’ll forget to blink, and she’ll know you’re staring, and she’s a nun . . .

  “Younger. There are three of them,” she told him. She seemed perfectly relaxed. He doubted she knew the effect she had on him—after all, she was a nun, and nuns were about as innocent as they came. Even if they did have sly tawny eyes.

  “And where are they?” He cleared his throat. “Are they out here in California too, or back in . . . ?” He was fishing. He knew he was doing it, but he couldn’t help himself. He wanted to know where that accent came from, the one that sent shivers through him.

  She laughed, but it was laughter with an edge. “No, they ain’t out here. All of them are back in Duck Creek with our daddy. I ain’t seen any of them since I was fourteen.”

  There was something in her manner that stopped him asking more about her family. There was a shadow there, and he didn’t know her well enough to chase after it. “Where’s Duck Creek?” he asked instead.

  “Tennessee.”

  Tennessee, huh? Maybe one day he’d go and see if there were any other tawny-eyed, sexy-voiced women in Tennessee . . . ones who weren’t nuns.

  She didn’t elaborate further on her birthplace, and he didn’t push her. This tawny-eyed, sexy-voiced Tennessean clearly had a history, and not a very pleasant one, judging by her expression, which was cast into stark relief by the lantern. All her sunshine had faded, replaced by clouds. He wondered if the cause of the clouds was also the reason she’d become a nun. Had there been a man back in Tennessee, someone who’d broken her heart? Someone who’d come between her and her family? Although she said she hadn’t seen them since she was fourteen, which was a bit young for a man to be the cause.

  “How about you, Mr. Slater?” She shook off her clouds as she tried to smile at him again.

  “How about me what?”

  “You’re from Mexico originally?”

  He nodded. “We left when I was eight.”

  “That’s when you moved to Oregon?”

  “No. We went to El Paso first. Then when I was thirteen, we moved to California.” He went back to whi
ttling. He didn’t like to think of that time. “A few years later we went to Oregon.”

  “I hear Oregon is beautiful,” she said gently.

  “It is. But no more beautiful than other places. It’s just different.” His knife flicked, sending shavings curling to the ground. “Utopia, where we live, is in the woods at the foothills of the mountains. It’s thick with all the kinds of trees you can imagine. In fall, it’s like the whole place has caught fire with color; the woods go amber and yellow and red so bright the color might as well be painted on. But it’s no more beautiful than out here; it’s only beautiful in a different way. The sight of the sun rising, glimmering through the sage, turning the dusty air golden . . . the mountains snowcapped in the distance . . . Mexico has its charm too: the long blue skies over the terra-cotta-tiled villages . . .” He stared into the coals, imagining the villages. And one village in particular. Arizpe. His old home.

  But not anymore.

  “Ah, there’s my poet.”

  Her voice startled him. He’d been lost in the picture he’d conjured for himself. He met her gaze across the fire. There was wistfulness in her shadowed eyes, reflecting back the wave of feeling inside of him. It was unsettling.

  “I wish I could see the world the way you do,” she sighed.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I do. I look around here and I see dust and toil, but when you describe it . . . it sounds magical.”

  “It’s not magical,” he sighed, putting down his whittling for the night. “It just is.”

  “Tom,” she said softly as he stretched out on his bedroll.

  He turned his head. She was holding out the black dress. “I finished it. It’s all yours.”

  He didn’t want it. But he took it. And then he lay back and looked up at the stars, which didn’t look like scattered chicken feed at all. They looked like constellations of freckles, just like the ones scattered across the nose of a certain nun from Tennessee. But he could hardly tell her that, could he?

  13

  TWO DAYS LATER, they stumbled into trouble, or rather more trouble, in the form of English George and Irish George. When they first saw the cloud of dust, they thought they had run into Don Rey’s vaqueros.

  “Tell them we’re fine,” Tom told the nuns, quickly tossing the black veil over his head. “We don’t need help. We just need to be granted safe passage through the ranch on our way to Magdalena. But make sure you stress that we don’t need an escort—we’re perfectly fine on our own. I won’t talk unless I have to.”

  “Or you could pretend to be mute, and let me handle this. Like we discussed.” As usual, Sister Emma wasn’t prone to following instructions.

  “I said I’d try.” How hard he’d try might depend on how things turned out, he thought as he watched the dust cloud approach. But she didn’t need to know that.

  “If you do speak, you’d better put on a high voice, or we’re done for,” Sister Emma muttered. “You don’t sound like a woman at all.”

  They watched the dust cloud anxiously. Tom kept his hand on his pistol, which was well hidden under the veil. And he was glad that he did, because the dust cloud soon resolved into two men leading a line of packhorses. He could see that they weren’t vaqueros after all. Tom swore under his breath. Bounty hunters, he guessed. Or pistoleros. They had the look. Flashy. Mean. Full of rat cunning.

  One was decked out in a dusty suit, complete with bowler hat. He had an enormous walrus mustache and a pair of small round spectacles. The suit was a couple of sizes too small, and he looked rather like an overstuffed sausage, but he carried himself proud in the saddle. He rode like an experienced horseman, despite his roly-poly appearance and fancy clothes, and behind the spectacles, his gaze was as sharp as a knife. This was a man who cultivated a deceptively benign look, Tom thought, his nerves increasing. What he was looking at was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

  Why couldn’t anything be simple? Didn’t they have enough to contend with, without adding wolves to the mix?

  The wolf’s companion was rangy and beak nosed, with spiky ginger eyebrows and a more overtly mean look. There was no suit for him; he was wrapped in a serape and wore a brown hat so battered it no longer had a shape. He was chewing tobacco, and as they slowed their horses to a walk, he spat a stream of brown juice, which hit the earth with a splatter.

  “Ladies!” the fellow in the suit exclaimed. His round face was sunburned, and he was slick with sweat. He pulled a kerchief from his pocket and mopped at his face, smiling at the “ladies.” His eyes didn’t match his smile, Tom noted. They glinted as they passed over the group, taking in the horseflesh and the wagon, lingering on the saddlebags. Tom’s fingers tightened on his pistol. He had a bad feeling about this.

  “Nuns,” the tobacco chewer in the shapeless hat grunted. He squinted at them and crammed the hunk of tobacco between his lower lip and his teeth. Somehow it made him look even meaner.

  “What a delightful surprise!” the fat one exclaimed, still mopping at himself. “To find ladies in the middle of nowhere like this!”

  “Nuns,” the tobacco chewer grunted again.

  “Not all nuns,” the fat one scolded, his gaze lingering on Tom’s veiled figure. He had an English accent. It wasn’t a fancy one, Tom observed, even though he was giving himself airs. “We have a señora and a lovely little one too.” His gaze slipped over Winnie quickly, before returning to Tom. He smiled. Tom thought he was trying to be charming. He had about as much charm as a warthog.

  “I think the delight is all ours,” Sister Emma told him, sounding earnest and grateful and like a green girl straight off the farm. She was beaming at them, all wide-eyed and fresh, naïve as all get-out: the perfect picture of a harmless young nun. You’d never know she was a crack shot with her Colt. Tom felt a blossoming admiration for her. The last thing you wanted to do with men like these was make them wary of you. A wary pistolero was on a hair trigger.

  “We’re lost, you see,” she continued. “You couldn’t point us in the direction of Don Rey’s hacienda, could you? We’re his guests.”

  Tom jerked. Wait. What? What was the damn fool woman doing? The last thing they wanted to do was to end up at the hacienda. They were supposed to be hiding from people, not running headlong into them. The plan was to tell people they were fine, goddamn it. To move along with the minimum of fuss. To get across Rey’s land as quickly as they damn well could. He cleared his throat, in warning, but she ignored him.

  “We’ve got ourselves turned around,” she was chattering, “and I hate to think of Don Rey being inconvenienced. He’s been so kind to accommodate us on our journey to our new mission. Although,” she said with a merry laugh, “I suppose he’ll send some men to find us now we haven’t arrived on time.”

  She was warning them off, he realized, his rage fizzling. And her instincts seemed to be good. The fat man and his friend went shifty at her words, glancing over their shoulders. Tom would bet they hadn’t known they were on Rey’s land, or that they were so close to the main house. The Englishman scanned the land around them for signs of approaching vaqueros. He didn’t seem keen to find any. When he didn’t see anything, he tilted his head, thinking for a moment. Then he smiled. “My good lady, we can do more than point you in the right direction. We can escort you!”

  Hell. They didn’t want a goddamn escort. And with these two as guides, they were likely to find themselves “escorted” somewhere and robbed blind. Or maybe worse. Tom wondered if he should just shoot them now. But he could hardly commit cold-blooded murder in front of nuns, could he? Although Anna was a fake nun, the other two weren’t. He didn’t think nuns would hold with murder, even if it was in self-defense. And then there was the child to think of.

  “Oh no, we couldn’t possibly inconvenience you,” Sister Emma said hastily. “We wouldn’t dream of taking you away from your business. Just point us in the right direction; I’m s
ure we’ll find Don Rey and his men in no time.”

  “Nonsense, it’s the least we can do.”

  No. The least they could do was just move right along and mind their own damn business.

  “After all, my dear,” the fat one continued expansively, “nothing is more important than helping those in need.”

  Tom saw Sister Emma’s nose wrinkle imperceptibly at the man’s heavy-handed attempt at Christian generosity. She shot Tom a quick look. She’d got them in a bind now. She could hardly claim they weren’t in need when she’d just asked them for help, could she?

  “It’s a simple enough matter,” their new friend insisted. “The hacienda should be this way.” He gestured westward.

  Tom had the luxury of rolling his eyes behind the veil. The hacienda wasn’t that way at all. Which was for the best too, as he didn’t particularly want to end up there. Playing the señora for a traveler or two was a very different matter from playing the señora to Don Rey, in his own home. Imagine it. Having to be the man’s guest, dressed like this. And while Don Rey might be preferable to Don Machado, that didn’t make him a pussycat. Playing the lady for a ranchero wasn’t a situation he planned to get himself in. But neither did he want to go riding off at the mercy of a couple of greedy-eyed pistoleros. Hell. How were they going to wriggle out of this?

  Sister Emma had the look of a bronco realizing it was corralled. But she wasn’t a woman to be easily penned. She had a few good kicks in her. “Oh no,” she said, keeping her eyes wide and guileless, “it’s definitely not that way.” She pointed southward. “I think it’s over there.”

  There was another splatter as the pistolero in the battered brown hat spat tobacco juice. He squinted at them, and Tom prepared to fight. Brown Hat knew something was up. They had good instincts, men like these. If they didn’t, they’d be dead by now.