by Hill, April
Amelia was fine with kissing—with much of the kissing going well beyond friendly. There had even been occasions—rare but memorable—when she’d permitted him to undo the top buttons of her demure bodice and press his mouth to the soft, warm swell of her breasts that peeked over the top of her corset.
But that was as far as Amelia could be enticed to go—something Griff had excellent reason to know, since he’d already tried every enticement he could think of. Amelia was the embodiment of that much heard modern phrase, “straight laced.”
The first time she remained at the house overnight, she asked Griff to spend the night in the bunkhouse—because of “the way things might look to the employees.” He reluctantly agreed, and then had to endure an evening of grins, and winks from the employees themselves.
The second time, it was Amelia who conceded that it might be all right for him to sleep on the back porch, or in case of a heavy rain, on the parlor sofa—as long as he turned the sofa so that the back of it was facing the bedroom.
Amelia was beautiful, intelligent, well-read, and a pleasure to talk to. She was an excellent cook, who seemed to enjoy preparing his favorite meals. For a man who worked hard every day, immersed in dirt and dust and grime, Griff had always made a point of keeping a neat house, but each time Amelia came to the ranch, she came prepared to clean the place again, from top to bottom. When she went home late on Sunday afternoon, the simple pine-plank floors were always freshly scrubbed, and the newly waxed tabletops gleamed in the lamplight. Beauty, good cooking, and a spotless house to come home to seemed to be the method Amelia had chosen to get what she wanted.
On a recent visit, she had arrived with two bolts of calico—one blue with tiny red flowers, and the second red, with tiny blue flowers. By the time Griff took her back to town, he had calico curtains in the kitchen and parlor, and a promise of solid blue ones in his bedroom on her very next visit.
There was no question that Amelia Pomeroy would make some lucky man a wonderful wife. At this point, Griff just wasn’t entirely sure that he was ready to be that lucky man.
* * *
One Sunday morning a few weeks later, Griff was working behind the barn, pounding a new fence post into the ground, when he heard someone call his name. The unwelcome interruption was especially annoying, since the split rail holding pen he was trying to repair had to be back in place as quickly as possible. It had been trampled into firewood the night before by Sultan, the young Hereford bull he’d bought only three days earlier, and who was now wandering around loose, somewhere, looking for a few attractive bovine ladies to add to his harem. Exactly the job a lusty young bull was supposed to do, of course, but after the exorbitant price he’d paid for the animal, solely because of his excellent blood lines, Griff had hoped to be the one to choose which lucky ladies would be receiving the only body fluid of Sultan’s worth its weight in gold.
Griff swore under his breath, dropped the hammer, and turned around, expecting to see Amelia standing there, which would have been unusual, since she rarely ventured out of the house and the fenced yard. Unless she wanted something done, that is, and when none of his “employees” was around to do it. She had explained to him that she was frightened being around too many horses and cattle all at one time, but Griff knew the real reason. Despite her story about being from “back east,” he had learned that Amelia had started life just twelve miles away, on a small ranch similar to his own—a situation she hated and managed to escape when her widowed mother married a Mr. Harold Pomeroy, of Galveston, Texas.
For someone born and raised in cattle country, though, Amelia was surprisingly squeamish about the indelicate possibility of “stepping in something”— more or less a daily certainty on a cattle ranch.
The fact was, Griff’s hard-working and usually reliable cowhands usually did their best to not be around during Amelia’s weekend visits. Helping to hang curtains wasn’t the sort of work they’d been hired to do, and the lady’s standards for whatever she wanted done were often unreasonably high—especially for the kind of men who spent twelve to sixteen hours a day in sweat-stained shirts and muddy boots that had been “stepping in something” pretty much all day.
So, when he stopped what he was doing and turned to ask what she needed, he was surprised to find that it wasn’t Amelia who’d called him after all, but a very pretty young woman in a pale green dress.
“You need some help with that?” she asked, pointing to the wrecked fence. “I’m kind of little, but I work cheap.”
If it hadn’t been for the shining red hair, Griff might not have immediately recognized the woman smiling at him from her perch on the only remaining undamaged section of fence. In the four years since he’d last seen her, Elyn had changed, and the change was another surprise—an astonishing one. The skinny kid with freckles and an unkempt tangle of copper-colored hair had turned into a beautiful young woman, with all the necessary attributes.
“It’s good to see you again, Eileen a ‘Roon. Or do you still want to be called Elyn?”
“Elyn’s good, for now, I like my old name better than I used to, but I’m kind of used to Elyn now, so… You’ve got a pretty place, here,” she observed—a bit sadly, it seemed to Griff. “And it looks like you’ve made a it a real home—like you always wanted.”
Griff nodded. “All the modern improvements a little cash and a whole lot of credit can get you. A genuine copper tub in the bathroom, a cast iron stove with an oven big enough for whatever you want to put in it, and a brand new red cast iron hand pump in the kitchen. Works just like the catalogue said it would—as long as you keep the cistern filled. Come spring, I’ll have it connected to the well.”
“Abner told me he didn’t know where you were living now. Around here, somewhere?”
She shook her head, but didn’t elaborate.
“What about a husband? Abner said you might have found someone you wanted to marry.”
“That was a while ago,” she said simply, then changed the subject—as well as her tone. “I asked up at the house, and there was a woman there who told me where to find you. Abner wrote that you were seeing a woman, so, I naturally assumed that she was your wife, but when I didn’t see a ring on her finger, I figured she’d taken it off—while she was scrubbing the outhouse or slopping the hogs—something wifely like that.”
Griff smiled. He learned a long time ago that you didn’t necessarily have to be female to recognize a catty remark when you heard it. For some reason, Elyn O’Malley had arrived here with her claws out, and ready to use them.
“Her name’s Amelia Pomeroy. She’s not my wife, and I doubt that she’s ever scrubbed an outhouse or slopped hogs in her life.”
Elyn smiled. “Yeah, I figured as much. So, what is she? An older cousin, maybe? Visiting from someplace where they don’t have outhouses? Or hogs?”
“She’s a year younger than I am, and she’s not a cousin. She’s just a very nice woman I know, from town. A good friend.”
“That’s funny,” she said with a puzzled look. “She didn’t seem all that friendly. Of course, I’m not a man, so all that powder and lip rouge was kind of wasted on me. Some people say that it does a good job of covering up the wrinkles women get when they’re getting close to fifty, though.”
Griff grinned. “Amelia will be thirty-three on her next birthday.”
Elyn gave him a doubtful look. “Really? I can hardly believe that you’re the same fella who once paddled my behind, just for telling a few little white lies like that one.”
“Did I do that?” he asked cheerfully. “For nothing but a few little white lies?”
“Well, I may have done a couple of other things to get your feathers ruffled. I can’t remember.”
He shook his head. “Damn! And after I tried my best to be sure you remembered every smack.”
Elyn sighed. “I suppose I cussed too much, didn’t I?”
“Like a Shanghai sailor. When you get to know her, you’ll find that Amelia’s not just nice,
she’s a lady, and not the kind to lie—or to swear.”
She smiled. “That boring, huh?”
Griff ignored the remark. “Last time I was at Rainbow Water, Abner told me you were out on your own now, and probably not coming back? True?”
“I couldn’t let Abner and Martha go on feeding me for the rest of my life, and have me sleeping in their loft. I figured it was time to see what I could do for myself, for a change.”
“It shouldn’t be too hard for a pretty young lady to find herself a husband to take care of things like that.”
She shrugged. “Not if she’s willing to take the first husband that comes along.”
“I’m guessing you didn’t find the pickings down in Kansas too good,” he observed.
“Most of them smelled like sheep.”
Griff smiled. “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you stay here a while—and look over the local inventory? There’re even a couple of good looking young fellas down at the bunkhouse you might like to meet. How do you feel about cowboys?”
“They’re all right—as long as they take a bath once in a while. I’d like one who can read and write, though. And one who can recite the presidents in order, and spell all the states and continents.” She grinned. “That’s what happens when you make a girl go back to school. She starts to want things she never wanted before. If I did decide to stick around for a while, you sure I won’t be in the way?”
“You won’t be in the way.”
“You want to ask your woman friend first? The one who already lives here with you?”
With a weary sigh, Griff repeated what he’d said earlier. “Amelia doesn’t live here. She’s just visiting for a few days.”
Elyn wrinkled her nose. “My grandma used to say that visitors are like fish. They both start to smell bad after a couple of days.”
He nodded. “That’s funny. My grandmother always said the same thing. “I guess we’ll just have to give it a try, and see what happens.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The meeting inside the house got off to a better start than Griff had expected. Amelia was relentlessly polite and pleasant, and Elyn said very little and smiled a lot. They had tea from the dainty china tea service Amelia had given him—with the little yellow roses she had hand-painted on each piece. The trouble began when Amelia asked where Ellen and Griff had first met, and when Elyn explained with a charming smile that he had found her in a tree “half-naked, with my dress over my head and my damned drawers flapping in the breeze.” Afterward, she went on, he had spent money on her like there was no tomorrow, and that they had spent “their first night together” in a hotel room in Brewer’s Creek.
“One room?” Amelia inquired stiffly.
Elyn giggled girlishly. “Well, naturally, we didn’t need two rooms for what Griff had in mind, but I suppose, being a gentleman and all, he was worried that the desk clerk would spread it around town that I was a… well, you probably know what I mean. Which was just silly, of course, because Griff never paid me one single penny, and I wouldn’t have taken money even if he’d offered it. He was a real sweetheart about money. He took me to an absolutely wonderful dinner at the finest restaurant in Brewer’s Creek and bought me simply scads of the loveliest gifts you can imagine—dresses and shoes, perfume, some ornaments for my hair, and the most charming pair of drawers he picked out by himself—with these tiny little embroidered rosebuds and pink bows in some of the most scandalous places! Oh, and I almost forgot. He bought me a beautiful green velvet valise that I needed for the trip we were taking together.
“He was wonderfully gentle with me, the whole time. I was terribly young, you see—barely sixteen, and…”
Amelia was staring. “Sixteen?”
“Barely, and until that night, I had no experience at all with men.” At this point in the story, Elyn blushed, also charmingly. “Griff was the first man I’d ever been with, you see. Of course, he did snore, but then, what man doesn’t?”
Finally, with Amelia beginning to turn pale, Griff decided it was time to step in and correct a few of Elyn’s little white exaggerations. But one moment before he could open his mouth and say what needed to be said, Elyn seized the moment, and offered an olive branch—of sorts.
“When I arrived in Mill City, there was a sign posted at the stage office. About a dance,” she announced breathlessly. “Tomorrow night, at the Cattlemen’s Association Hall, in town. I thought it might be nice if we all went, together, so I bought two pairs of tickets, in case Amelia wants to invite her beau—if she has one.”
Later, of course, when it was too late, Griff recognized the peril to be faced in escorting two women who detested one another to a dance where breakable objects were going to be in abundance.
* * *
The pleasant side of escorting two beautiful women to one dance was the envious glances he got when the three of them walked in together. Single women of any age or description were in short supply in Mill City, which meant that most of the town’s social events were crowded with gossiping farm and ranch wives, grateful for an evening away from a hot stove and squalling children. The woman were usually outfitted in their Sunday best, which ranged from frumpy to almost—but not quite—what had been in fashion two or three years earlier.
Amelia, as Griff had expected, had outdone herself, to the point of drawing hostile stares from some of the ranch and farm ladies, and openly lascivious sidelong looks from most of the male attendees, married or not.
In a dangerously low-cut emerald satin gown with a bodice studded with tiny pearls, she looked a lot like visiting royalty might, while being entertained at the White House by President and Mrs. Grant. Not content with that, she had draped herself in gold and emerald jewelry, which Griff knew was nothing but paste and plate, but when she walked through a pool of gaslight, it all still sparkled like the real thing.
Fifteen minutes after they arrived, the trouble he’d been expecting began—when Elyn sidled up to him with a cup of punch in one hand, and a dainty fistful of stings and barbs in the other. The first barb compared Amelia to Marie Antoinette—except for the missing wig.
“In the history book we had in school, it said that a bunch of townspeople got together and chopped off Marie Antoinette’s head—just because she was so vain,” Elyn confided. “They had to bury the poor woman in two pieces—one really big box for her head in that wig, and… ”
Griff groaned. “Would you please shut up and go get something to eat? It doesn’t look like we’ll be staying long. Coming to this damned circus was your idea, so you might just as well get something out of it.”
“Aren’t you going to at least dance with me, before we leave?” she pouted, pulling a tiny white folder from her skirt pocket. “They gave me this dance card at the door, and there’s not a single gentleman’s name on it. I suppose you’ll have to dance every dance with me.”
“And what about Amelia?”
Elyn smiled. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much about her,” she said sweetly. “That’s one honey of a dress she’s wearing. She’ll be drawing flies all night. And I helped out just a bit by making out a dance card for her.”
Two hours later, while Griff was dancing the last of three waltzes with Elyn, Amelia was sharing the same three waltzes with three different men—all of whom were several inches shorter than she was, one of whom was hugely overweight and sweating heavily, and one of them the balding, eighty-four year old minister of the Mill City Methodist Church. She sat out the evening’s lone polka in the company of a skinny cowhand with a broken foot named Floyd Muckle, whose missing front teeth made chatting difficult for him, and incomprehensible for Amelia.
“It’s amazing, isn’t it, what they can do with hair dye, these days,” Elyn remarked, as Amelia swirled by once again, in the arms of another of her new “beaus.”
Griff groaned. “All right, what’s wrong with her hair? And don’t try telling me it’s a wig, because I know damned well it’s not.”
“Well, I have
no way of knowing about the poor woman’s hair,” Elyn conceded. “Although the curls do seem awfully rigid to be natural, but I understand that the color—twenty-five cents a bottle at the drugstore—can cause blindness, not to mention making a person bald as a billiard ball. She does have quite a nice, plump figure, of course, and I understand that broad hips and heavy thighs can actually be a blessing in bearing children. Still, I suppose there are many other women, like Amelia, who get down on their knees every night, and thank heaven for corsets and full skirts.”
“Amelia isn’t fat,” he said sharply.
“I don’t believe I said fat. Maybe… Yes, I believe the word I was looking for is buxom—like those women that famous artist… Rembrandt, yes, that’s it—the women Mr. Rembrandt painted, with just a bit too much bosom, and all those rolls of pink flesh. Still, your lady does have the loveliest little eyes. Very dark, almost black—like a snake.”
In spite of how annoyed he was, Griff grinned. “And here I was, thinking you wouldn’t like the woman.”
* * *
Before leaving town that night, Amelia asked to be dropped off at her house instead of returning to the ranch with them, and Griff complied—not happily, but hoping to avoid the trouble he knew was on the way.
As he lifted Amelia from the wagon, with his hands circling her waist, Elyn made a small noise that sounded like a grunt. When Griff shot her a warning look, she turned her head, and pretended not to have seen it.
Inside the house, Amelia finally voiced a complaint. “I understand that she’s young, Griffin, but that certainly doesn’t excuse her behavior, tonight. At her age, I knew better than to…”
“She does know better,” he said wearily. “She was trying to get your goat, and she obviously did. What you should have done, since you’re too much of a lady to just kick her in the butt—was to just walk away, and ignore her.”
“Are you actually trying to blame me for what happened, tonight? And that childish episode at the ranch, for that matter?”
