by Jodi Thomas
As soon as they finished the midday meal, Tess saddled two horses—one for her and one for Josh—and announced that they would ride into town for a talk with lawyer Bartlett. She was good and married, and had been for a week. The time had come for Bartlett to cough up the deed to her ranch.
“Look convincing,” she advised her husband. “When I get that deed in my hand, you get your three hundred dollars.”
“Four hundred,” he reminded her. “Remember Nitro.”
Oh yes. That foolish offer she’d made. Who would have thought the man would make good on his boast? “It’s a good thing you’re not staying longer,” she grumbled. “I can’t afford you.”
Still, riding beside him on the way to town felt strangely pleasant. Tess had gotten used to his presence beside her in bed, and after the strangeness had worn off, his warm bulk on the other side of the rolled-up quilt had made the nights less lonely. Before this last week, Tess hadn’t realized her nights were lonely. She did now.
And the men liked having him around. After just this short time, they trusted him. Even Miguel liked him. Rosie had hinted that Tess having a husband might not be such a bad thing after all, as long as that husband was a “damned solid cowboy” like Josh.
The very fact that Tess entertained such a thought just pointed up the dire need to have the fellow gone. Some built-in weakness in the female constitution must turn a girl’s brain to mush the minute she started keeping company with a half-decent man. Yes, Josh Ransom—she wouldn’t be forgetting that name again—did qualify as a half-decent sort of fellow. He had guts. He had a way with horses. He knew cattle almost as well as she did. Okay, just as well as she did. He had all his teeth, didn’t stink more than any other man who worked hard and wore the sweat to prove it, and he knew enough to take off his mucky boots before coming into the house. Someone had brought him up to manners. What’s more, in spite of Tess finding him in such a sorry state at the Bird Cage, he hadn’t touched a drop of liquor since coming to the Diamond T.
Quite a catch, all in all, if a girl were fishing for a husband. Which Tess wasn’t. Definitely wasn’t. Didn’t need one, didn’t want one, and for sure she would get used to sleeping alone in the blink of an eye. The sooner she sent Josh Ransom on his way, the happier she would be.
Therefore, Tess got very unhappy when lawyer Bartlett refused to cough up her deed.
“Now, then, Tess. Don’t be so impatient,” he advised. “You know your daddy wanted to see you settled like a woman should be settled. That’s why he wrote his will the way he did.”
“I am settled,” Tess gritted from between her teeth. She took Josh by the arm and pulled him forward for inspection. “I’m married, dadgummit. A whole week. Just ask Preacher Malone.”
Bartlett gave Josh a passing glance, as if he were an offering that failed to measure up. “I believe the will’s exact words were ‘settled into marriage.’ Your brother, Sean, came by my office earlier this morning and expressed grave doubts as to the nature and commitment of your marriage, Tess.”
“What do you mean nature and commitment?” she cried. Only a lawyer would use words such as those. Her fists balled at her sides, nails digging into her palms.
Then Josh took one of those hands, uncurled it, and interweaved their fingers, just as a real husband might have done. In a reasonable, man-to-man voice, he brought the conversation back to a civilized level. “Mr. Bartlett, I think Sean McCabe’s motive is pretty obvious, and I’m surprised you’re lending him an ear.”
The warmth of that masculine hand supporting hers eased the knot in Tess’s stomach. In fact, she felt amazingly light, as if she could have floated toward the pressed-tin ceiling of Bartlett’s office.
“The way I understand it,” Josh said calmly, “Tess has fulfilled the terms of her father’s will, and now she wants the deed to the Diamond T in her name and in her safekeeping. That seems both legal and reasonable to me.”
Bless the man. Bless him, bless him, bless him.
Bartlett looked him up and down, as if just now recognizing he was part of this. “Mr. . . . uh . . .”
“Ransom.”
“Mr. Ransom. Do you have a sister?”
“Yes sir, I do.”
“Then you should understand that a brother’s instinct is to take care of his sister. I don’t know if Tess told you this, but Sean McCabe proposed shortly after their father’s death that the ranch be sold and the proceeds split between them, because he knew that Tess wasn’t inclined to marry, and half the proceeds from the Diamond T would set her up in modest circumstances where she could live securely without having to waste her life on backbreaking ranch work that is difficult even for a man. That is not the proposal of a greedy, unprincipled man, as you seem to imply Sean is.”
The idea of selling the ranch that had been in her family three generations made Tess want to spit, but Josh tightened his hand around hers.
“Mr. Bartlett,” Josh said in that reasonable voice of his, “do you have a legal right to withhold the deed?”
“I believe the wording of the will demands it.”
Tess thought the lawyer’s smile looked like a rattlesnake’s snide grin.
“Don’t worry, Tess.” Bartlett gave her arm a condescending pat. If Josh hadn’t been restraining her, the lawyer might have lost a hand. “What difference does it make whether the deed is in my desk for a bit more? As you say, you’re married. Soon it will be obvious to everyone that your marriage wasn’t an impulsive act meant only to secure the Diamond T.”
Tess couldn’t think of a reply that didn’t involve cussing. Fortunately, Ransom had more presence of mind. He said something stiff about retaining their own lawyer while tugging Tess toward the door. She scarcely heard what he said, distracted as she was picturing her daddy, his lawyer, and her brother all staked out on an anthill.
“I’ll see you at the barn dance tomorrow tonight, won’t I?” Bartlett said as they went out the door.
Tess got out the “Fat” of “Fat chance!” before Josh firmly shushed her.
“Maybe,” he replied.
“Dadgummit!” Tess growled once they reached the safety of the street. “That snake! He’s never liked me. Always told my daddy that he’d raised me to be a heathen. He can’t do this!”
Josh put a finger to her lips to shut her up. “Tess, you need to get a lawyer to handle this for you.”
“Bartlett’s the only lawyer in town.”
“There are other towns.”
“Lawyers and their fancy words and sneaky ways. If it hadn’t been for a lawyer, my daddy would never have thought of that stupid will. Just give me a few days. I’ll think of something. I will.”
The twitch of muscle at the hinge of Josh’s jaw told Tess he had run out of patience.
“Ransom, honest! Just a few more days.”
His mouth a tight line, he held up two fingers. “Two days. Then I’m leaving, Tess. You can make up any story you want to explain why I’m gone, and you can honor your deal or not. Two days, and I’m gone.”
Chapter Four
TESS LOOKED AT herself in Rosie’s full-length mirror and made a face. “Two days,” she said in a mockery of Josh’s voice. “Two days and I’m gone. You can take that news and stick it up your—”
“Tess!” Rosie scolded. “When you’re dressed like a lady, you should talk like a lady.”
Tess snorted. “These sleeves are cutting off my arms.”
“I can let out the seams,” Rosie offered. “Most ladies don’t have so much muscle in their shoulders and arms.”
“Well, pardon me for working every day to make a living.”
Tess couldn’t believe the woman who looked from the mirror was her. She felt like a little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes. Actually, this dress had never belonged to her mother. Her mother had been an aristocrat from Mexico—small, refined, and delicate. Whenever Tess looked at her mother’s wedding portrait, she felt like a gorilla. No, this dress was one of Rosie�
�s best, decked out with flounces, lace, and ribbon. It was tight in the waist, loose in the bust, and inches too short.
Tess thought she looked dadgummed silly dressed in bows and flounces with her hair not sensibly braided, but tortured into curls that kept falling in her face. But Rosie surveyed her with warm, approving eyes. “I haven’t worn that dress since I was your age and just married. That was before my bones got the padding they have today. It may be out of style, but it makes you look like a princess. I’ll just add a flounce to the hem, let out the waist. . . .” She gave Tess’s chest a dubious frown. “Maybe we can stuff a couple of kerchiefs up there. We don’t want you to look like you’re lacking.”
“Dadgummit, Rosie! You aren’t getting anywhere near me with any kerchiefs. Not unless they’re going around my neck or on my head!”
“Don’t be so testy, dear. I know this feels strange to you, but we agreed, you, me, and Miguel, that the best way to make your husband stick around longer is for you to get him a little bit interested. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, sweetie. Women have been doing this since Eve. It’s tradition.”
“Not with me, it isn’t.” Tess extricated herself from the dress and managed to escape with only two pricks from Rosie’s pins.
“Do you want the man to stay or not?”
Tess sighed. “Just long enough to convince Sean and Bartlett.”
“Then you have to put some work into it. Besides . . .” Rosie’s eye warmed in a way that made Tess nervous. “Maybe it’s not such a good idea to toss the man out. Maybe you should try to make this a real marriage, Tessie.”
“Hell no!”
“Why not?” Rosie sat on her bed—formerly the bed she had shared with Colin McCabe—and started ripping the seam of the dress’s waist. “At first I thought this Josh Ransom was bad news. But from what I’ve seen, he has more good points than bad ones. A woman is always better off with a man by her side, if he’s a good man.”
Tess knew Rosie spoke from her own experience. Married young, abandoned only two years after her marriage, Rosie had been left on her own to sink or swim. With no money and few skills, she had sunk—at least in the eyes of the world—and ended up plying womankind’s oldest trade along with Glory at the Bird Cage. Glory thrived in such a place. Rosie had not.
When Colin McCabe had come along and taken a fancy to her, Rosie hadn’t hesitated to move out to the Diamond T, put up with Colin’s two motherless children, and cope with the hard life on an isolated ranch. They had never married, because Rosie still had a husband wandering the country somewhere, but she had given Tess’s father all of her devotion and loyalty.
“Did you love my father, Rosie?”
Rosie smiled. “There are as many kinds of love as there are men and women on this earth, Tessie. Your father was a good man, a strong man. He was kind to me, and I loved him for that, even though he had some peculiar ways about him. But now that he’s gone, I could love another man, with a different kind of love.” She glanced toward her bedroom’s closed door, her lips pursing. “If the man wasn’t such a rock-headed idiot.”
Tess smiled, wondering if Miguel would ever catch on that Rosie’s sharp tongue hid a willing heart.
By midafternoon, the dress fit—sort of. Tess sported more frills and bows than a porcupine had quills.
“Won’t Josh be surprised?” Rosie gushed cheerfully.
Surprised might not quite be the word for it. Seeing Tess gussied up like some fancy porcelain figurine might just make the man laugh himself silly. Not that she would blame him.
WHEN Josh drove the McCabe buckboard around to the front of the adobe house, he found Miguel lounging in the shade of the covered front porch. The foreman grinned at him.
“The women are inside, fussin’ with clothes or something.”
“Figures.”
Josh had gotten a new shirt and jeans in town. Rosie had burned the ones he’d worn on that day-long, or was it a two-day-long, binge in the Bird Cage. She’d said with a smirk that the fumes had near lit themselves. During the last week he had worn Colin McCabe’s duds. But McCabe’s clothes, too tight in the shoulders, too loose around the middle, weren’t exactly fit for social calling. Though Josh didn’t look forward to the prospect of sashaying around the Hoffsteaders’ new barn showing off his “bride,” he’d be damned if he would go to this hoopla looking like someone who couldn’t dress himself.
Besides, Tess wanted them to look like a respectable married couple, and Tess, in spite of her unwomanly ways and touchy independence, didn’t deserve to be shamed by the man on her arm. She was an honest woman with a good soul, and over the past week, Josh had come to respect her. How could he not respect someone, man or woman, who feared neither hard work, wild cattle, ill-natured horses, or equally ill-natured men.
Since the women were taking their own sweet time, Josh set the wagon brake and climbed down to sit in the shade of the porch. The foreman gave him an appraising look. After a moment of silence, he nodded. “Tonight will be a good time. Rosie can dance a barn down, and Tess . . .” He hesitated and gave Josh a meaningful look. “It’s time Tess learned that she’s a woman.”
Josh snorted. “Don’t look at me for that, amigo. I’m temporary here.”
“A man could do worse than to settle on the Diamond T.”
“A man could get killed settling on the Diamond T unless Tess McCabe wanted him here.”
Miguel smiled. “Tess Ransom, now. She is Tess Ransom.”
Josh chuckled, trying to picture Tess as any man’s wife. Tess Ransom indeed!
“How come a man like you don’t have a real wife?” Miguel asked. “There are more women here now that the Apaches are not trying to kill everyone.”
“I could ask you the same question,” Josh replied gruffly.
Miguel snorted. “My mother was Papago, my father was Mexican. The respectable women of both my mother’s people and my father’s people look at me like I have a disease.”
Josh nodded. Every kind of people hereabouts looked down their noses at every other kind of people. The Mexicans hated the Indians. The Indians hated the Mexicans. And most whites despised them both. “Well, for my part, I think that no respectable woman belongs on a ranch in this country. It withers them up, wears them down. Pulls all the life out of them just like sap. I watched it happen to my mother and sister. No need to watch it happen to a wife.”
Miguel shrugged. “Rosie is respectable, though she didn’t used to be. She likes it here. And Tess blooms like a flower in the desert.” The foreman slid a meaningful look in Josh’s direction.
Josh chuckled. “Tess a flower?”
The image inspired an upward quirk of Miguel’s mouth. “Maybe she blooms like a weed. But nothing will suck the sap out of our Tess.”
That made Josh laugh. “I wouldn’t exactly call Tess a weed. But she isn’t a run-of-the-mill woman. She’s more like a—”
At that moment, out Tess walked, knocking all thoughts of flowers or weeds right out of Josh’s head. She looked like . . . well, certainly not like any man’s wife, but miles from being herself, either. He didn’t know what he had expected her to wear to a barn dance—a cleaned-up version of her usual work garb, maybe. He certainly hadn’t expected this!
Rosie presented her creation like an artist unveiling a master painting, and Miguel grinned from ear to ear.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” Rosie asked.
Tess squirmed uncomfortably in her frills. Josh tried to think of something creative to say that would be complimentary and not an out-and-out lie. Hell, he decided. This called for a lie.
“You do look beautiful, Tess. And so do you, Rosie.”
Clearly Rosie had learned women’s fashions from her time at the Bird Cage. Miguel had told Josh all about Rosie’s transformation from saloon girl to “respectable lady,” relating the story with shining pride and noticeable fondness. But the “respectable lady” still saw beauty through the eyes of the saloon girl. Rosie herself wore a dress that display
ed an interesting expanse of chest, but otherwise seemed plain beside the getup she had hung on Tess.
“You don’t think I look . . . uh . . .” Tess obviously searched for words that wouldn’t hurt Rosie’s feelings. Uncertainty brimmed in her eyes like tears. Josh wouldn’t have suspected that Tess McCabe could be uncertain about anything, and the revelation inspired an odd protectiveness inside him.
“You look stunning,” Josh supplied. It wasn’t exactly a lie. The first sight of her had certainly just about knocked him over.
Miguel liked Josh’s choice of words. “Sí. Stunning. You both look stunning.”
The mild day made the drive to the Hoffsteaders’ place a pleasure. Birds fluttered among the mesquite and juniper, scolding the travelers for disturbing the day’s peace. A bright sun ducked in and out of gathering clouds, painting the valley and surrounding mountains with constantly changing purple shadows. Tess stayed silent during the ride, but seated together with legs dangling from the rear of the wagon, Rosie and Miguel volleyed insults in the afternoon sunshine. The jibes flew with practiced ease. He complained that she made biscuits like rocks. She accused him of having the manners of an Indian. Since Miguel’s mother had been an Indian, he might have taken offense, but no. He just laughed and said that his Papago mother knew how to cook better than any American or Mexican woman he’d met.
Listening to them snipe at each other, Josh wondered why everyone on the Diamond T snickered behind their backs and took bets on how many months would pass before they set up housekeeping. God himself couldn’t explain the ways of women with men and men with women, Josh decided. So why should Josh Ransom understand?
Wagons and people crowded the Hoffsteaders’ place, which was situated in the foothills of the Dragoon Mountains among the piñon and juniper. The timber house was certainly bigger than the Diamond T’s little adobe compound, and the huge new barn made a perfect site for a neighborly get-together. Rosie hurried to greet friends and bring their offering of food to a heavily laden table. Miguel ambled off to join a knot of men gathered around a keg.
