Cinderfella

by Linda Winstead Jones

  “Ham,” Ash muttered as he sat up and wiped the worst of the mud from his face. “If you weren’t such a tough old bastard, that’s just what you’d be.” The boar was not insulted. Now that the excitement was over, the other pigs joined in the fun, wallowing in the mud to their hearts’ content.

  Ash shook his hands and arms vigorously as he left the pigsty, closing the gate securely behind him and reminding himself that this was another strike against Elmo. Was it possible that he’d done this on purpose? That he’d known exactly what would happen?

  No. That required thinking a few minutes into the future, a task Elmo was incapable of.

  He lifted his head and saw her coming toward him. Before he knew she was there, she was almost upon him. For a moment he thought she was a vision — a ghost or an angel. Her horse was creamy white, her dress the same. Her hair was gold, the color of wheat, and she had a small hat perched on top. A white feather danced there with each step of her horse.

  It seemed the sunlight was drawn to her, and everything around her paled. As she came closer he saw that her eyes were brilliant blue, her features so delicate and fine they were surely not real. A strand of pale, straight hair brushed one cheek, there where it had fallen from its bun; an imperfection that made her all the more perfect. This was not a ghost or an angel, but a woman. The most extraordinary woman he had ever seen.

  She leaned slightly forward. “Hello,” she said in a pure, sweet greeting. “I’m looking for Ash Coleman.” It was the voice that gave her away, some inflection still there even though she was a woman now and not a child.

  “Charmaine Haley,” he said, and when he tasted mud he brushed his face and his mouth again. Mud fell in clumps small and large.

  She straightened quickly, obviously a little frightened. “Do I know you, sir? Are you one of Ash’s stepbrothers? As I said, I’m looking for Ash.”

  “You found him.”

  It was impossible. This filthy, unshaven man was not Ash Coleman! Why, her Ash was beautiful. Smart and witty and handsome. He had to be. That was the way she had remembered him all these years. This man had done battle with a pig and lost, ending up face down in the mud. She’d seen a portion of the undignified contest as she’d approached the farm, but it hadn’t occurred to her, not once, that the man she watched might be Ash.

  Eight years was a very long time.

  “I can’t stay long,” she began cautiously, having no choice but to accept this man’s claim that he was, indeed, Ash Coleman. “I heard about your father, and I just wanted to pay my respects.”

  Ash nodded his head in acknowledgment, but his eyes never left her, didn’t drop to the ground or stray to the side.

  “Your father was,” she said softly, “a wonderful man.”

  He stepped forward. “Yes, he was.” There was a huskiness in his voice that hadn’t been there eight years ago, another reminder that Ash Coleman was a man, now, and not a boy. “He always liked you, Runt, better than those prissy sisters of yours. He said you had sand.”

  When he grinned, his smile was startlingly white against a mud-splattered face and heavy dark beard. Another step, and he stood beside her. He placed a soothing, muddy hand on the horse’s neck.

  “Did he really?”

  Ash lifted his arms to assist her from the saddle. Long, muddy, wet arms. Impossibly long, impossibly muddy. When she’d left Salley Creek he’d been lanky and perhaps a trifle awkward, but he’d grown into his height in the past eight years. Ash’s legs were long but not too long, and he seemed comfortable in his tall body, graceful in a way that was impossible for growing boys. He was lean still, but there was nothing skinny about him. The shoulders were wide, the arms muscular, and the legs filled those denim trousers almost obscenely. His hands were big and strong and dirty, a working man’s hands offered to her. Goodness, if she thought about this a moment longer she was going to blush and stammer like a silly girl, and that would never do.

  She hesitated, looking down critically. “You seem to have stepped into something.”

  He glanced down at the big battered boots that had recently been dragged through the mud and otherwise befouled.

  “Well,” he drawled. “This is a farm. It happens.”

  Charmaine had no intention of leaving her safe and relatively clean perch. Obviously Ash realized this, and he let his arms fall. The mare pranced anxiously, and Ash reached out to soothe her once again, this time with a few soft words as well as his muddy hand against the mare’s neck.

  “We’re having a big party in two weeks,” she blurted out, deciding to proceed with the other purpose of her visit. “A masked ball, actually,” she sighed. “I know it’s ridiculous, but my father is bound and determined to prove to me that there’s nothing I can have in Boston that I can’t have here.”

  “Stuart Haley always was a stubborn man,” Ash said softly.

  Charmaine didn’t attempt to defend her father against the all-too-true charge. “You’re invited, of course,” she said brightly. Perhaps too brightly. “It should be fun. Everyone will be there.”

  “I’m not much for parties,” Ash said. His eyes were no longer locked on her, they were on the horse’s fine, creamy neck. “But I appreciate the invitation.”

  It was a very nice refusal, and Charmaine found she was ungraciously relieved. Perhaps some things from childhood shouldn’t be revisited. They didn’t always stand up to expectations. “Well, if you change your mind. . . . ”

  “Now, my stepmother and my stepbrothers, I’m sure they’d enjoy a masked ball,” he said with a hint of amusement.

  “By all means, I’d love for them to come, also. I look forward to meeting them.”

  Was that a laugh? She couldn’t be sure. Either that, or Ash had very quickly cleared his throat. “I’ll pass the invitation along. Verna will be pleased.”

  He was staring at her again, silent and a bit too attentive, those mossy green eyes locked boldly to hers. It was quite unnerving.

  “Is she here? I could meet her and deliver the invitation personally.”

  Ash shook his head. “They’ve all gone to town. You probably passed them on the road.” His voice was gritty and soft. “A wagon pulled by two grays, with an older woman and two men.”

  “I took a short cut.” She smiled in spite of her unease. “Through the pasture and the trees that line your property. There’s a small break in the fence, by the way.” She shifted in her seat to look over her shoulder. “Right about there.” She lifted a hand and pointed in the direction she’d come from.

  Ash shook his head. “I had Oswald check that section of fence just two days ago.”

  “Oswald. That’s one of your stepbrothers, I assume.”

  Ash lifted his eyes to her again. Good heavens, how very brazenly he stared at her. She ignored her consternation and gave Ash an audacious stare of her own. He looked as if he had something to say. His chest rose and fell, his fingers twitched. Finally, he answered with a simple and inadequate “Yes.”

  “Well, I really should be getting back,” she said cheerfully, trying not to show her desire for escape. What had she expected, that she’d arrive and find Ash Coleman waiting anxiously for her? Dressed in a fine suit, unchanged by the time that had passed, a gentleman farmer who would make her feel like a happy child again?

  “I guess you should,” he agreed.

  “Please reconsider coming to the party,” she said, the new invitation an impulse she couldn’t contain. Why, she wasn’t quite sure. It was the polite thing to say, and so was most likely her mother’s influence coming to the surface. “There will be so many strangers there, a few friendly faces would be a comfort to me.”

  She thought he might actually smile again. The muscles at the corners of his mouth twitched, and there was a pleasant softening of his features. “A masked ball. Well, if I’m going to step foot in the Haley house I reckon it had better be in disguise.”

  Charmaine found herself smiling down at the muddy, dirty, hairy man who had di
sappointed her by not being a beautiful seventeen-year-old boy. How silly she was! Time had passed for Ash just as it had for her, and he was no more a child than she was. “Surely you don’t think my father holds a grudge?”

  “He mutters and grumbles and spits whenever I happen to see him in town, and the only words I can ever make out are ‘barbed wire.’ ”

  “That was an awfully long time ago,” Charmaine said. “I’m sure you misunderstood.”

  She expected a smile and a shrug of those broad shoulders, but Ash’s eyes were perfectly serious, and he didn’t smile. “I don’t think so, Runt. He wouldn’t like you being here.”

  Charmaine didn’t agree or disagree, but it was the truth. Her father had been furious with John Coleman for putting up that barbed wire, and Stuart Haley was not what anyone would call a forgiving man.

  “Think about the party, would you?” Charmaine asked as she turned her horse about to head for home. “And don’t forget to extend the invitation to your family.”

  Your family. Ash suppressed an unnatural chill as he watched Charmaine Haley ride away from the farm. He never thought of the people he lived with as his family. They were strangers who had been forced upon him, his father’s responsibilities that had become his. When he thought of one day having a family of his own, Verna, Elmo, and Oswald were not included.

  Charmaine Haley had grown up nicely. More than nicely, he conceded, she had grown up beautifully. After she disappeared into the tree line, Ash’s eyes fell to his mud-encrusted hands and arms. What a fool he’d been to lift those arms to her, but for a moment he had forgotten about his fall in the mud, the manure on his boots. He had forgotten — for a moment — who he was.

  Oswald would probably suit Charmaine Haley just fine. She’d turned her nose up at his offered hands the same way Oswald turned his nose up a dozen times a day.

  He forgot about Charmaine Haley and headed for the barn and his tools. Apparently, there was a section of fence that needed to be repaired.

  Stuart enjoyed his last cigar of the day, savoring every puff. He’d had another long, hard day, but there was great satisfaction in ending it here, in his comfortable study in his fine house with his family around him. Part of his family, anyway.

  Maureen had gone to bed early, and Charmaine was sulking in her room about one thing or another, but they were here and that was enough.

  His youngest daughter was being more difficult than he’d imagined. She visited with her friends, she helped her mother with the plans for the ball, she rode that mare he’d bought just for her . . . but there was an air of defiance in everything she did. Where did she get that quality from? Not from her mother. Maureen had always been sweet and rational and forgiving.

  It was Howard, he was sure, who had influenced her.

  “Smells divine,” the daughter in question said sweetly as she waltzed into his study with a deceptive smile on her face. Just a couple of hours ago she’d been sullen and silent. “May I?”

  She reached for the cigars he kept handy, there on his desk.

  “You may not!” he said, and her hand stilled and hovered above the engraved mahogany box.

  “Are you being selfish, Daddy, or is this simply another of your double standards?”

  She was trying to get his goat, and doing a fine job of it. “Proper young ladies don’t smoke,” he said with relative calm.

  Charmaine turned to face him and leaned against the desk. She didn’t want a cigar and never had. She was just being ornery. Where did she get that trait from? “You’ll never guess who I saw today,” she said with a wicked gleam in her eye.

  “Then you’ll have to tell me.” He leaned back in his chair and took another long draw on the cigar.

  “Ash Coleman.”

  The name Coleman still brought a bubble of bad temper to the surface. “At the mercantile? You’ve been spending an awful lot of time there.”

  “Not at the mercantile. I rode out to the farm to say hello.” Her voice and her pose were nonchalant, but he was sure this was a trick to get a rise out of him.

  “That’s nice.”

  It was clear she was a little disappointed that he hadn’t bounded out of his chair with a demand that she stay away from the Coleman farm.

  “Yes, we had a very nice visit.” Her smile faded, and for a moment she didn’t look like his little girl at all. She looked like a woman who had an awful lot on her mind. “Why didn’t you tell me about Mr. Coleman passing on?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Didn’t think of it, I suppose.”

  “He was a good man,” she insisted.

  “For a sodbuster.”

  Charmaine sighed dramatically. “You’re such a snob, Daddy. Just because Mr. Coleman was a farmer and not a cattleman, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve just as much respect as any other man.”

  “I didn’t know you’d taken up defense of the common man as one of your crusades.”

  She pouted, actually puffing out her lower lip just a little bit. “He bought me lemon drops, just like you did, and told me riddles.”

  If she knew what a picture she made she would surely be devastated. Maureen was right. Charmaine was still a child, in many ways, spoiled and unreasonable and occasionally intolerant. For all her education and damned seminars, she still had so much to learn.

  “Then I apologize,” he conceded. “I should have passed the news along.”

  The apology seemed to appease her, as he’d hoped it would. Damnation, she was beautiful, so much like her mother, and while he couldn’t say he cared for this sort of fierce independence in a female of any age, there was something special about Charmaine. A spark, a brightness. When she turned her devotion in the right direction — her family, her home — she was going to be quite a woman.

  But for now, for the moment, she was still his little girl.

  Four

  Ash was headed in for the day when he was stopped by the sound of squeaking wheels and slow, tired hoofbeats on the road. The sun was setting, and it was the middle of the week. Who would be paying a call at this time?

  A friend of Verna’s, he imagined with a sigh. One of those high-hat women from town she occasionally invited for dinner. But on a Wednesday? He had a stray and unwanted thought that perhaps it was Charmaine Haley, come to torment him as she had just four days earlier. But of course if Charmaine were to come again it would be on a fast white horse by the bright light of day, not in a lumbering wagon at sunset.

  When the wagon came into view, Ash’s dismay disappeared.

  The conveyance that crept toward the barn with an occasional lurch was a boxy enclosed wagon with the words “Sweet’s Traveling Thespians” painted on the side in fading red paint. The wagon had seen better days. There were large sections of rotting wood on the side Ash could see, and a good-sized hole in the roof; and the entire conveyance canted oddly to one side. The nag that pulled the wagon, Pumpkin by name, was a red roan the unfortunate color of the vegetable she was named for. And the man driving the wagon looked as run-down as Pumpkin.

  “I’ll be damned,” Ash said as the lumbering wagon came to a halt. It had been three years since he’d seen his godfather, the eccentric actor Nathan Sweet, though they had corresponded by mail sporadically. There was more gray in Nathan’s hair, a little more meat on his tiny bones, but other than that he was unchanged. Five-foot-four standing ramrod straight, he’d always been given to expensive clothes that had no place on a farm. His traveling ensemble consisted of a bowler, fancy shoes, and a gray Easterner’s suit given a splash of color by a bright yellow scarf.

  The years had left their mark, but Nathan’s aristocratic features were the same, as was the drooping and well-groomed moustache.

  “After all this time,” Nathan said wearily as Ash assisted him to the ground, “that’s the greeting I get?”

  Ash gave his godfather a hearty hug that lifted the older man from the ground. “It’s good to see you.”

  When Ash stepped away, Nathan smiled
and smoothed back his mussed hair. “Much better.”

  There was no movement from the wagon, no sound but the labored breathing of Pumpkin.

  “You alone this time?” Ash asked, and Nathan nodded once.

  “It’s just Pumpkin and I, this visit,” he said. “Two weary travelers in search of solace and the occasional adventure. I hope you don’t mind if we stay for a while. I felt the need for the simplicity of the country — fresh air, wide skies, honest people.”

  “Mind? Of course I don’t mind. How often have I asked you to visit?”

  “I wanted to come earlier, really I did, but the troupe’s been busy,” Nathan said grandly. “San Francisco, Denver, St. Louis, and everywhere in between.” He gave a grandiose sweep of his hand. “Sold-out performances across the West, standing ovations, extensive newspaper coverage in every town.”

  Always the actor. “Then what are you doing here?”

  “I told you, fresh air, wide skies. . . . ” Nathan’s arm dropped heavily and his face fell. “My leading man quit, unfortunately taking my leading lady with him, the bastard. Shows were canceled, money refunded, and before the week was out the rest of my troupe deserted me like the seditious cowards they are.”

  “Broke again?” Ash asked, sure already of the answer.

  “Completely.”

  They unhitched Pumpkin, and Ash offered to see to the animal while Nathan sat and rested for a few minutes. There was no need to face Verna any sooner than was absolutely necessary.

  He led Pumpkin to the barn, and Nathan followed. “So,” the refined voice broke the rapidly chilling air. “How have you been?”

  “Fine,” Ash answered, the word a habitual response to almost any such question. How’s the wheat, Ash? Fine. How’s the family, Ash? Fine. How’s life treating you, Ash? Fine.

  “Well, that’s a barefaced lie,” Nathan said as he plopped his small body on a stool and leaned against the rough wall of the barn. “Fine. Hah! You’re tired and unhappy and there are circles under your eyes. You haven’t been sleeping, have you?”