One Bright Morning (24 page)

If, however, it turned out that the man was
Jubal Green, Maggie didn’t know what to do.

On the one hand, she very nearly pined to be
in his company, a fact that caused her no end of guilty stirrings.
On the other hand, when she was in his company, she felt nervous
and twitchy and never quite knew what to say. Although, she had to
own to herself, except when he was making her go all warm and
fluttery or she was aggravating him, they seemed to get along
pretty well now that he was no longer a fussy invalid. In fact, the
only serious problem with their being together was the compulsion
that occasionally overtook her to fling herself into his arms.

“
Oh, bother,” she finally
muttered to herself. Shoving her feet into her heavy shoes, she
threw a blanket over her shoulders and then clambered down out of
the wagon.

When Jubal caught Maggie’s movement out of
the corner of his eye, he was up onto his feet and had his rifle
cocked and lifted to his sore shoulder faster than a normal person
could blink. When he realized it was Maggie, he lowered the gun and
let out a soft groan that even he couldn’t identify the source
of.

It had taken damned near forever for his
erection to go away after she’d rubbed his shoulder wound, and it
had been bouncing back on and off ever since when he’d think about
the sensuous way she had massaged him. When he’d soothed balm into
his wounded thigh later on, he was hard as a rock the whole time,
thinking about how nice it would be to have Maggie massaging him in
such an intimate spot.

Dan was sleeping a few paces away from the
fire and Four Toes was out, scouting around on a mounted patrol.
None of the men really expected trouble, but they all knew better
than to lower their guard. Jubal was, in effect, alone, and now
Maggie Bright was coming over to torment him some more.

He watched with a glowering frown as she
made her way toward him. She had her blanket clutched to her breast
with fingers that looked snowy white by the light of the stars. Her
hair was braided for the night and the braids were falling down
over her shoulders.

Jubal had an unaccountable urge to yank on
the ribbons tied around those braids, loosen them, and let her hair
fall down her back in wild waves of honey. He took a deep breath,
squinched his eyes up against the image that thought evoked, and
tried to keep his face impassive as she approached.

When Maggie realized that the man at the
fire was Jubal Green, she stopped in her tracks, suddenly shy. Then
she decided it would be more embarrassing to turn around and get
back into the wagon now that she was out of it than it would be to
join him by the fire and try to chat.

Jubal noted her hesitation
with a grump in his heart.
It’s as though
she doesn’t want it to be me
, he thought
sourly.

“
I can’t sleep,” Maggie said
with a bashful grin when she drew up to Jubal.

He didn’t know what to say to that. She
looked all tousled and relaxed and he felt incredibly awkward. He
gestured toward the log that he had been sitting on.

“
Well, why don’t you sit
down by the fire for a while, then,” he finally managed to choke
out.

With a shy smile, Maggie peered up at him.
The fire was low and it flared up every now and then when it caught
some fresh pitch. One of those pitchy eruptions occurred as Jubal
gazed at Maggie, and her face looked pixyish and sweet in the
sudden gleam of light.

Jubal didn’t know whether he uttered his
grunt of dismay out loud or not, but he realized with something
akin to defeat that the rest of this trip was going to be awfully
uncomfortable for him. Every blessed time he even looked at Maggie
now, he reacted in a very embarrassing way.

“
Thank you,” Maggie said
softly.

She sat on the log and sighed with
contentment. For some reason, she felt very good. Part of her happy
feeling, she knew, was from excitement. She was doing something
new. She hadn’t done anything new for such a long time—except
things she didn’t want to do, like run the farm single-handed,
holler at Ozzie Plumb, and nursemaid Kenny or Jubal Green.

Jubal put another log on the fire and sat
down beside Maggie. They both stared into the flames for several
minutes. Silence, broken only by the friendly crackling of burning
logs, enveloped the two of them like a fragrant, cozy cloak.

“
Wouldn’t Mr. Blue Gully be
warmer if he slept closer to the fire?” Maggie asked at
last.

“
He’d be a better target
there, too,” said Jubal somewhat gruffly.

“
Oh.” Maggie’s soft
exclamation elicited a surly grunt from Jubal.

Silence stretched and grew around them once
more, like moss on a tree.

Jubal couldn’t stop himself
from peering at Maggie from time to time. He noticed that she had
an almost angelic smile on her face after she stopped thinking
about Dan’s sleeping arrangements. Her expression was soft and
sweet and bright.
Maggie
Bright
, he thought.
It fits
.

Maggie’s eyes left the fire and moseyed up
to survey the stars over her head. She was used to the woods, but
they were out of the forest now, and there was so much sky up there
that Maggie found it almost impossible to comprehend such
vastness.

Jubal finally couldn’t stand it. He had to
either grab and kiss her or talk to her.

“
It’s pretty out tonight.”
His experimental statement brought Maggie’s lustrous eyes to his
face, and he had to inhale quickly.

“
It is, isn’t it, Mr.
Green,” she said. Her eyes went back to scan the sky.

Jubal cleared his throat. “Is this anything
like Indiana?” he asked her. He knew the answer and felt like a
fool for asking, but he couldn’t think of anything better to
say.

Maggie laughed softly, delightedly.

“
Oh, no, Mr. Green. It’s
nothing like Indiana. Indiana—where I’m from, anyway—is sort
of—sort of—” Maggie’s words trailed to a halt as she thought about
what Indiana was like. “It was sort of more settled, if you know
what I mean.”

That soft statement earned a chuckle from
Jubal. “I guess most places are more settled than New Mexico
Territory, Mrs. Bright.”

“
I guess so,” she agreed
with a grin.

Jubal continued to watch her watch the
stars. He wondered what a young girl who had grown up in Indiana,
who had bad eyes and terrible headaches and a little girl and no
man, thought about her life, but he didn’t dare ask that, bold and
straight-out. He knew her life was harder than most, but she seemed
remarkably free from bitterness even if she did have a tendency to
get all weepy every now and then. He admired that, as he admired
her grit. He fumbled around in his brain for something to ask her
that might give him at least a little of the answer to what he
wanted to know.

“
Do you like it here, Mrs.
Bright? I mean, on your little farm and all?”

Maggie sighed and hugged her knees under the
blanket she still wore over her shoulders. Jubal noticed her
expression turn even softer and her eyes get even brighter, and his
heart began to do such crazy things in his chest that he wondered
momentarily if he was suffering a spasm.

“
Oh, yes, Mr. Green,” she
said in a voice that was almost a whisper. “I think this is the
first place I was ever happy.”

Her answer surprised Jubal. He knew she
possessed, as Dan Blue Gully would phrase it, a strong spirit. But
Maggie’s life had been so hard that it was difficult for him to
imagine her being as happy in it as she acted.

“
You like it here better
than in Indiana?” He tried to keep the incredulity out of his voice
when he asked the question.

Maggie’s face was a study in sincerity when
she turned it toward him.

“
Oh, my, yes, Mr. Green.
Indiana’s pretty and all, but nobody cared about me there. In New
Mexico, life is kind of rough, but I have friends here.”

For some reason, Jubal’s heart was still
clutching up painfully and he wondered if Dan Blue Gully might be
able to give him a tonic for it later. “You didn’t have friends in
Indiana?” he asked in a low voice.

Maggie studied the fire for a few minutes
before she answered him. “Well, you see, I didn’t get out much. My
aunt and uncle ran a chop house there, and I pretty nearly worked
the whole time I was awake.”

Jubal’s jaw tensed and he made a sweep of
the campsite with narrowed eyes. There she was again: that damned
aunt of hers.

“
That’s where I met Kenny,”
Maggie continued in a sweet, reminiscent voice. “He came into the
chop house for supper one night on his way back to New Mexico, and
we got to talking. We talked until my aunt came out to shoo me back
into the kitchen.”

“
You loved him a lot, didn’t
you, Mrs. Bright?” Jubal asked. He hadn’t meant to ask that. It
just snuck between his defenses and burst out of his mouth without
his consent.

Maggie didn’t notice the strain in the
question. “Oh, yes, Mr. Green,” she said in a quiet, thoughtful
voice. “Kenny took me away from all that misery in Indiana. He
brought me here and gave me a home of my own and Annie. And he
loved me.”

“
I’m sure he did,” Jubal
muttered. He hadn’t meant to say that, either.

“
Even though I didn’t know
the first thing about anything. He was so sweet to me.”

Her companion cast her an angry, puzzled
frown, then glared at the fire. Didn’t know the first thing about
anything? What was that supposed to mean?

The heat from Maggie’s soft chuckle seeped
into Jubal’s body like the warmth of a goose-down quilt; he was
melty warm before he even knew it. He didn’t dare look at her.

“
I’ve never been much good
at anything, really, Mr. Green, but Kenny didn’t seem to mind. He
was so sweet.”

“
Not much good at anything?”
Jubal did look at her then. He couldn’t help it.

His brows were raised into such a high,
looping arch over his green eyes that it struck Maggie as comical,
and she giggled. Her giggle was almost more than Jubal could stand
without touching her, so his fingers tightened around the barrel of
his rifle and he tore his gaze away from her.

“
I’m sorry, Mr. Green. You
just looked so surprised.”

“
I was. ‘Pears to me you can
do damned near anything, Mrs. Bright. You saved my life, and you’ve
been keeping yourself and your daughter right well all by yourself
with no help from anybody. I’d like to know what you consider
something, if those two things don’t count.”

Maggie’s mouth opened up to protest, but she
couldn’t think of anything to say, so she shut it again and just
stared at Jubal with surprise.

Oh, my
, she thought. She’d never thought about her life in exactly
those terms. She’d always just sort of used her Aunt Lucy’s
standards by which to judge herself.
I’ll
have to think about it later
, she decided.
Some time when she could make her brain work properly. Away from
the disturbing presence of Jubal Green.

Jubal continued to scan the campsite, more
to keep himself from staring at Maggie than anything else, and
Maggie gazed into the fire. He saw, faint and far off, barely
illuminated under the stars, Four Toes Smith riding back toward
camp.

“
Kenny was a sweet man, Mr.
Green,” Maggie said all of a sudden. Her thoughts had veered off
down another unexplored turning, and her voice was low,
musing.

Jubal grunted. He really, really didn’t want
to hear about how wonderful Kenny Bright had been.

But Maggie didn’t know how little he wanted
to listen to Kenny’s praises being sung. She had never spoken about
her late husband to anybody before, and it felt sort of good to say
these things out loud to another person, especially to somebody who
hadn’t known Kenny and who couldn’t contradict the conclusions
Maggie had come to about him. She loved Kenny. She knew she loved
Kenny. Yet, there were some things . . . .

“
He wasn’t real bright,” she
said, and then she giggled. “In spite of his name.”

Jubal’s eyes, which had gone hard, lost some
of their granite-like intensity when he again turned them upon
Maggie.

“
He wasn’t?”

Maggie shook her head and smiled. “No. He
was a real sweet man, though. About the sweetest man in the world.
He could build things real well, too. He made Annie’s high chair
and the wardrobe and all sorts of things. And he was so good to us.
He was such a wonderful carpenter. I guess he wasn’t much of a
farmer, though. And he was lousy with horses.”

“
It sounds like he might
have had a hard time making a go of that farm,” Jubal ventured,
unsure of his ground, afraid he’d make her mad.

But Maggie only sighed. “I’m afraid that’s
so, Mr. Green. I used to worry about that some, although we always
had enough food because of my garden.” She stopped speaking and
hugged her knees harder.

“
But I never had flowers,”
she said with a deep sigh. “I really wanted flowers. Mr. Smith was
going to help me plant some, but I guess—well, I guess I won’t be
having flowers for a while.” She shook her head sadly. She didn’t
want to make Jubal feel guilty by saying that she knew she’d never
have flowers now. Not without Dan and Four Toes to help her tend
the farm.

Jubal decided they were going to pick up
some flower seeds on their way through El Paso to his ranch. And
just maybe some spectacles.