“My book?”
“The one in your writing box.”
She nodded. She didn’t like him touching her things. “It’s too bad you didn’t think to do that before you dragged me off the train.” Then she glanced at her valise and the writing box on the table. She looked at Buck again. “When will you take me back?”
He wished she would stop staring at him with such accusation in her eyes. It was beginning to wear on his nerves. She was holding her hands together in front of her, clutching her fingers against her waist as if to keep them from trembling.
He was no good at this and he knew it.
“We’ll head back to Cheyenne as soon as the snow lets up,” he said.
“Good.”
“Your brother really is the Kase Storm?”
A look of smug satisfaction lit her face the minute his words were out. Vastly relieved, she said, “Yes, indeed he is, Mr. Scott, and I’m sure you’ll live to regret what you’ve done.”
“Ma’am, I already do, believe me.”
She took a step forward, her fear forgotten for the moment. He was glad of that at least, but he was certain, too, that it meant she was about to return to her outspoken ways.
“Don’t think you can just apologize and I’ll be willing to forget what you have put me through.”
“Don’t think I’m going to apologize,” he warned,” ‘cause I’m not.”
She took another step in his direction. “No?”
“Nope.”
“Perhaps you’ll apologize when you are looking down the barrel of my brother’s gun.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
She turned red. “Just wait and see.”
“You always go running to your brother to fight your battles for you?”
“I’ve never had to before, but then I’ve never been abducted before.”
“That what you call it?” He stepped closer to her until they were nearly toe to toe.
“What do you call it?”
“Mistaken identity.”
“Hal” She practically shouted the word, “I was never mistaken. I knew exactly who I was. You wouldn’t listen.”
Compelled to touch her shining hair, he reached out to lift a lock of it off her shoulder.
She swatted his hand away.
“How can Storm really be your brother when he’s a half-breed?”
She stiffened as soon as the word was out. “He’s half Sioux. And he’s my half brother. I look like my mother. She’s Dutch.”
Buck sighed. There was no reason for her to lie when there was her name in her journal to back her up. It wouldn’t do any good to take her to Cheyenne and dump her there. By now Storm had his description from the other passengers and would ride him down. He suddenly remembered the well-dressed half-breed he’d seen waiting on the platform for the noon train. A sinking feeling in his gut told him that man must have been Kase Storm.
Baby mumbled in her sleep and both of them immediately looked in her direction. Then Annika looked at Buck.
“Ted’s gone. What will you do with her when you take me back?”
He shrugged. “I’ll take her along. She’s used to riding with me.”
He watched her frown. “But it’s freezing outside,” she said.
“She’s used to it.”
They were silent for a moment. He waited while Annikalooked around. She was certainly a beauty. Tall, too. Tall enough not to make him feel like an awkward giant the way most women did. Her stubbornness he could do without, but he liked her courage. The only time she’d lost it was when he’d grabbed her, and Buck had to admit to himself there weren’t many men who wouldn’t have backed down under the circumstances. He couldn’t help but admire the way her body filled out the unflattering suit she was wearing. He wondered what she’d look like in a real dress, a soft one that clung to her like a second skin.
“You married?” He wanted to bite off his tongue the minute the words were out.
She looked startled, then masked her surprise with a haughty glare. “That’s none of your concern.”
He reached out and grabbed her left hand before she could react, took a look at it, then let her go. “No ring.”
“Don’t even think about it, Mr. Scott. I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on earth.”
“No, I expect not. Not that I’d even ask you.” He turned away from her and strode over to a big half barrel in the middle of the floor. Straining, he picked it up and carried it as far as the door, set it down, and then opened the portal. Without looking back at Annika, he hefted the barrel, stepped out into the cold, and heaved the dirty bathwater out into the snow.
When he turned around she was standing right behind him.
“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” she said, wondering why she was even half apologizing.
He paused and let the cold air wash over him as he stared down at her, wondering what she was getting at. “I think it was pretty clear.”
“I mean, there’s someone out there who’s perfectly suited to you, I’m sure.” She twisted her hands again, not really able to imagine anyone who would marry such an intimidating hulk of a man.
He closed the door behind him and set the makeshift tub aside. The smell of liquor still rode so heavily on the air that he could almost taste it. Wishing he had a swig right now, he contented himself with picking up the remains of the whiskey jug and wiping up the mess with a dishrag.
“Did this woman, this ... Alice, mean a lot to you?”
Buck looked up from where he knelt on one knee, carefully stacking pottery shards in his hand. “I never even met her. Only wrote her a few times,” he admitted. “I answered an advertisement she put in a Boston newspaper.”
She pulled out a barrel stool and sat down, then leaned her elbows on the table. “Yet you wanted to marry her.”
“I needed someone to watch over Baby while I’m out hunting.”
“Your child needs a mother, you mean?”
He stood up and stacked the shards on the workbench. “She’s not mine.”
“There’s no point denying it, Mr. Scott. She looks exactly like you.”
He thought Annika Storm looked far too smug as she sat waiting for him to deny it again. “She’s my sister’s,” he informed her.
“Where is your sister?”
He put both hands on the table and leaned down so that he could look her right in the eye when he told her. “She’s insane.”
He almost smiled. Annika Storm was finally speechless.
But not for long.
“Insane?” She eyed him warily.
“That’s right. She’s living with an old Scotswoman on a ranch outside Cheyenne.”
6
ANNIKA glanced up at Buck Scott and realized he was not the type of man who would tease. She doubted he even knew how. She rested her head in her hands and began to rub her temples with her fingertips.
“Let’s see if I have this straight,” she said, thinking out loud as she stared down at the worn surface of the table. “I’ve been abducted by a man who claims he mistook me for his mail-order bride—a woman he only wanted to marry so that she could care for his sister’s child. His sister can’t care for the child herself because she’s insane.” Lifting her head, she stared up at Buck and asked, “Have I forgotten anything?”
“Ted’s dog bit your shoe.”
“Ah, yes. How silly of me.” She fought back a smile. So, he had a sense of humor after all. She studied him carefully, wondering what to say next.
It was suddenly all too clear why he had become so furious earlier. In her anger and frustration she had called him insane and now that he had quietly admitted that his sister was indeed mad, Annika realized what her unthinking words had meant to him. Her first reaction was to apologize, but again pride stopped her. It was not her way to apologize when she didn’t really feel she was at fault. How was she to know that someone in his family was insane? Thank goodness that Buck, like Mr. Rochester in
Jane Eyre, did not have his sister locked up somewhere in the house.
He turned away to light another lamp and set it in the center of the table, then proceeded to clear away his packs. Shewatched him as he worked in silence, ignoring her. Somehow learning about his sister made the big man seem more vulnerable. Until now she had thought of him only as an unthinking brute who had kidnapped her and hauled her across country. Suddenly he had become a man with a tragic secret, a man who had proposed to a stranger so that he would have someone to care for his niece. Now it was easy to understand the necessity behind their breakneck journey before the storm hit. He had to get back to the child.
“Are you hungry?”
His soft-spoken question startled her. She started to say no, then realized that she was famished. But would he ask her to cook again?
“A little,” she admitted.
Buck wasn’t sure when his own appetite had returned, but now he was ravenous. Annika Storm looked far too tired to do anything more than sit, so he proceeded to put together some simple fare on his own.
She watched him as he moved about the room. It gave her a chance to study Buck Scott in his home. He reached up to take a stone crock off a wide shelf lined with similar containers near the table. He set it down and then lifted the lid of a barrel on the floor beneath the shelf. A long, low bench made up the rest of the makeshift kitchen area he had set aside directly behind the table.
Reaching for the knife sheathed at his thigh, he opened the lid of the barrel and then cut off two hunks of the meat that was soaking in brine. He threw them in a frying pan and covered them with water, then set a grate over the coals.
From a dishpan on the low bench, he took a rag and moistened it with water from a bucket nearby. Then, with painstaking care, he wiped off the table. He took two plates from a set of chipped dishes on the bench and set one before her. The utensils stood in a small pitcher on the shelf where Baby could not get to them. Buck gave Annika a knife and fork.
Finally, he spoke. “It won’t be much. Probably not what you’re used to at all.”
Annika tried to smile. “I’m really hungry.” When he didn’t meet her eyes she knew he was embarrassed, ashamed of his home, his meager possessions. She looked around the place, wanting to say something, anything to make him feel better. Someone had partially papered the wall above the fireplace with illustrated newspaper advertisements in a crude attempt to decorate the dismal surroundings. The futility of the effort was heart wrenching. The pictures had been arranged in a wild collage, the edges ragged and uneven, one overlapping the other. There were advertisements for stoves, shoes, ready-made clothes, and fabric. The lamplight barely illuminated them all.
Had her mother’s sod house been so crudely furnished and designed? All these years Annika had glorified the image of her mother living alone in her soddie in Iowa, but somehow in her flights of fancy she never pictured the place with such stark reality. How had her mother survived? Suddenly she realized how very little she knew about her mother’s life during those years.
Annika realized that if she were left to fend for herself here in Buck Scott’s rustic cabin she would have no idea how to see to even her most basic needs.
She was staring up at the newspaper on the wall when he said, “What were you doing on the train?”
Annika shrugged. It all seemed so long ago now. “I was on my way to visit Kase and his wife.” She was thankful for the opportunity to say something, anything, to try to ease the situation, but she decided against mentioning her broken engagement. It was none of his business.
Hunkering down before the fire, he turned the simmering meat with his long, deadly-looking knife. It was a lethal thing; she wouldn’t soon forget the feel of it against her throat. She glanced over at the bed where Baby slept peacefully and wondered where Buck Scott intended her to sleep.
“Does Baby have a real name?” She blurted out the question, then fidgeted with her hair.
“That is her real name.”
“That’s it? Baby?”
“What’s wrong with it?”
Unwilling to anger him now that things seemed to be going more smoothly she said, “I just wondered how she’ll like being called Baby when she grows up.”
“I never thought about it. We just kept calling her Baby and the name stuck.”
He pulled up a chair across the table from her while they waited for the meat to finish cooking. Buck was staring at her again. He knew it wasn’t proper, but he couldn’t help it. She kept looking away from him, and he could almost see her mind working as she tried to come up with something else to say. It surprised him that she had not asked about Patsy again, and he guessed she was dying to know more but avoided questioning him.
Annika wished he would stop staring. She stood up just to escape his eyes. She crossed the room and paused beside her valise, which he had moved earlier. She opened it and took out her hairbrush and then sat down on the edge of the bed. She had no idea how long he intended to cook the meat, so she began to work the brush through her tangled hair while she waited. As she became intent on the task, she nearly forgot about Buck’s presence. The feel of the boar bristles working through her hair was soothing, so much so that she expressed her relief with a sigh.
Glancing up, she saw that Buck had not moved. Indeed, he seemed frozen in time as he stared at her in the flickering firelight. His gaze was so bold, so heated, that Annika had to force herself to look down. She wanted to be certain her clothing hadn’t just fallen off.
She jumped up abruptly, put her hairbrush back into her valise, and began to pace the small area between the bed and the table. “How old are you, Mr. Scott?” It seemed a safe enough topic.
“Thirty-two.”
She stopped her pacing momentarily. “I thought you were younger.”
“How old are you?” He found her presence irritated him more than he wanted to admit. He was thankful she had not turned out to be Alice Soams, because the last few hours made him glad his plan had not worked out. He’d lived alone too long to adjust to having someone underfoot. Baby was one thing—she was easy to handle. A talkative woman was another matter altogether.
She drew herself up proudly. “I’m twenty.”
“That old.”
Annika immediately turned on him. “How old is Alice Soams?”
“She said she was twenty-five.”
Annika sniffed.
Buck was hard-pressed to hide a smile.
“Do you think that meat’s done yet?” She folded her arms beneath her breasts, saw his eyes follow the movement, and suddenly dropped them to her sides.
“I expect it is.” He made no move to get up. If he was stuck with her until tomorrow he decided he might as well keep her on her toes.
She arched a brow and took on an icy tone. “Do you think we might eat before morning?”
“I thought maybe since I cooked it that you could dish it up.”
“Think again.”
“You used to servants waiting on you, Miss Storm?”
She wanted to snap that, as a matter of fact, she was, but the humble cabin was an all too real reminder of the differences between mem. She said nothing.
Buck picked up a cloth and wrapped it around the handle of the frying pan. “If you plan on eating you’d best sit.” He stabbed a slab of meat with his knife and dropped it on the plate on her side of the table. “Dig in.”
THE lights of Busted Heel shone like yellow beacons through the swirling snow. Kase Storm would rather they had been the lights of his home, but he was thankful enough to reach the outskirts of town before thickening darkness and the dense snowfall caused him to lose his way. He rode straight to the local livery, used the side door that he knew the blacksmith always left open for just such emergencies, and led his black stallion, Sinbad, inside. The warmth in the huge barn was comforting after the ride from Cheyenne, the sounds of the animals bedded down for the night familiar, soothing ones. He saw to his mount, hung the saddle over the side of
an empty stall, and let himself out of the barn.
The snow crunched beneath his boot heels as he made hisway down Main Street toward the jail, surprised at the amount of snow that had fallen in so few hours. Disappointment lay heavy on his mind because he knew he would have to spend another night away from his own ranch and Rose, but with the storm as bad as it was turning out to be, there was no way he could go on and chance getting lost in the dark.
He stepped up onto the wooden walk and scraped his boots against the planks before he crossed to the door of the jail and knocked. A lamp was shining in the darkness; he could see it just beyond the window, sitting in the middle of the desk that he once called his own. His short term as marshal of Busted Heel seemed to have been a lifetime ago, but in reality it had only been five years.
No one responded to his knock, so he tried again, louder this time. He heard a muffled curse and smiled to himself. Zach Elliot, his old friend, had taken on the position of marshal when Kase left the job to start his ranch. The only problem was that Zach was past seventy now, just how far past no one knew, and although everyone in town thought he was long past retirement, no one had the nerve to tell the cantankerous old man to quit. They compensated for his slight loss of hearing and occasional forgetfulness by covering up for his mistakes and extricating him from awkward situations.
Not long ago, Zach had misplaced the key to the jail cell—not that there was ever anyone occupying it—but when a drifter decided to shoot out the lights in Paddie O’Hallohan’s Ruffled Garter Saloon, everyone had to help look for the missing key before the prisoner could be locked up.
The saloon owner, Paddie, and Slick Knox, the local gambler-turned-barber, acted as deputies when and if they were needed, which was beginning to be more often ever since Wyoming had become a state.
The door opened a crack and Kase found himself staring down at Zach, who was still half asleep. The old man was as colorful in appearance as the life he had led. The former army scout had lived in Texas where he had married a Comanche woman, fathered a son, and then left the area when his loved ones were killed. He was missing one eye, but thatnever slowed him down. A long thin scar ran down the side of his face. Scar tissue had formed over the sunken hollow where his eye had once been.
Come Spring Page 9
