Authors: Primrose
“Oh-ho?” He chuckled, enjoying this side of her. “If that’s true, you must have practiced a lot yourself.”
Her courage deserted her. “No. Not me.” She looked past him and seized the diversion outside. “Some of the boys are back. Excuse me.” She started past him, but he stopped her.
“I said something wrong?”
“No, I just want to speak to Perkins.” She tried valiantly to look at him with complete aplomb, but his lowered brows told her she’d failed. Nevertheless, he released her and she hurried outside into the foggy moonlight.
“At night we’d tie up at the shore—quarter those potatoes and cut up the carrots—and the music would play on until nearly dawn.”
“What kind of music? Banjo? Piano? Guitar?”
“Yes, all those, but the—wash the vegetables before you put them in the pot—the showpiece was the calliope.”
“Calliope?” Zanna dropped a mound of vegetables in
a pan of water. “How romantic! And there’s a show every night on the riverboats?”
“Every night,” Grandy assured her. “There!” He stood back to admire the hill of rabbit meat cut into small pieces. “Now it all goes into the big soup pot. Mmmmmm. Rabbit stew. This is going to make your toes curl, girl.”
“I used to think Butch was the best cook in Texas, but you’ve showed him up,” Zanna said, standing back to watch Grandy spoon the meat and vegetables into the simmering broth on the stove. “You learned all these recipes when you were the cook on cattle drives?”
“That’s right. Wagon trains, too. I was a jack-of-all-trades for a long spell. Don’t worry, Zanna, you’ll be cooking all by yourself soon. You’re getting the hang of it.”
“I’m not,” she protested.
“Oh, no? You haven’t burned anything in weeks.”
“Well, that’s true,” she allowed. “But it’s only because I haven’t tried to cook anything without you helping me.” She sat in the chair to watch him roll out biscuit dough. The past two weeks had been comfortable, she mused. Ever since Theo’s visit, Zanna’s life had taken on a normalcy that had granted her peaceful nights and productive days. She had grown to enjoy her evenings with Grandy when he would share his cooking and storytelling skills with her. “Tell me more about the riverboats. Did you ever get sick on the water? I hear the movement makes one queasy.”
“Naw! At night it’s like being rocked in a cradle.”
“How lovely,” she said. “How do the women dress?”
“In the latest fashions. Frills and lace and bustles. Silk, satin, taffy—No, what’s that stuff?”
“Taffeta,” she said, smiling, then laughed lightly at his mistake. “What’s wrong?” she asked when he stopped rolling dough and stared at her with a mixture of awe and
delight. She covered her rosy cheeks with her hands. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You laughed.”
“I laughed?” She shrugged, unsure of his meaning. “Is that why you’ve turned to stone?”
“I was beginning to think you didn’t know how to laugh,” he said, one part of his mind playing a memory of a dream. “And what a beautiful laugh! Like music. Like bells ringing on Sunday morning.”
“Please, Grandville.” She lowered her gaze, her skin warm against her palms. “You embarrass me.”
“I don’t mean to. Laugh again.”
“I can’t,” she said, laughing and blushing against her will. “Stop making such a fuss over such a simple thing.”
“I’ve known you … what? How long has it been?”
“Six weeks come Wednesday,” she answered, revealing that she’d been counting the days.
“Six weeks,” he said. “I’ve known you longer than a month and this is the first time I’ve heard you laugh. You should do it more often. You’re so pretty when you laugh, Zanna.”
“Maybe I had nothing to laugh about until lately,” she said, lacing her fingers in her lap. “After all, I’m recently widowed. Life hasn’t been a party for me. I guess I’m getting back to normal—finally.”
He tore his gaze from her pearly pink face and put his energy into rolling out the dough to the correct thickness. “I noticed there aren’t any pictures of Fayne around here.”
“That’s right.”
“What kind of man was he? And don’t tell me he was a fine, upstanding fellow. I’ve heard that, but it tells me nothing.”
“There’s nothing to tell.” She strained forward. “May I cut out the biscuits? I want to learn.”
“Okay.” He held out the cutter to her. “You can change the subject, too.”
She sliced through the dough, making perfect circles
which she placed in the baking tin. “Theo thought your biscuits were excellent.”
“How long have you known Booker?”
“For years. I suppose I met him a couple of years before I married Fayne.”
“And when was that? How old were you when you married?”
“Almost eighteen.”
“Young.”
“Yes. A young eighteen. I’d lived a sheltered life here and in boarding school.”
“What did your father do?”
“Why, he was Fayne’s foreman.” She blinked at his expression of surprise. “I thought you knew.”
“I don’t know much about you at all,” he reminded her pointedly. “You don’t offer information. I have to pry everything out of you.”
“My father was foreman here,” she repeated after making a funny face at him. “After he died I married Fayne.”
“And Fayne was, as old as your father.”
“A year older, actually.”
Grandy rolled his eyes and placed the tin of biscuits in the oven. He stoked the fire before turning to face her again. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you marry an old man like that?”
“I had several reasons.”
“I’m listening, or do I have to pry the reasons out of you?”
“I was alone with nowhere to go. My father had suggested that I marry Fayne. He thought Fayne would be a good husband for me. And I wanted to stay on Primrose. I couldn’t do that unless I had a reason to be here. Fayne wouldn’t hire me as a housekeeper or—”
“Cook,” Grandy supplied, grinning.
“Or cook,” she repeated. “And I’m not good enough on a horse to be a ranch hand. Of course, he wouldn’t ever
have hired a woman for something like that anyway. The only reasonable thing to do was to marry Fayne. So I did.”
“And?”
She looked around as if searching the kitchen for an answer. “And that’s that.” She sniffed the air. “The aroma of that stew is beginning to make my mouth water.”
“You were married quite a few years.”
“Yes.”
“No children.”
“Obviously.”
“Why not?”
“I wasn’t lucky enough to become a mother.” She stared at him, her eyes challenging him to call her a liar.
“Was your marriage bed a satisfying one?”
Zanna drew a sharp breath as if she’d been stabbed. “I’m not answering such an ill-favored question!” She found her feet, drawing herself up to her fullest height. “I can’t believe you’d ask such a thing! Have you no manners?”
“Have you something to hide?” he asked, smiling slyly. “You don’t have to answer that. You have so much to hide that it takes all your extra energy just to keep things covered up.”
Zanna turned aside, but Grandy reached out and caught her elbow. When he said nothing more, her gaze swept up to his. He was regarding her with tingling intensity.
“He was about as rowdy in bed as a desert snake at high noon, I’d wager. If he was anything like his younger brother, he wasn’t any prize.”
“I won’t speak of this.”
“You won’t have to.” He couldn’t resist the curve of her neck. He bent his head and pressed his lips against the pulse below her jawline, then skimmed down her neck and around to the base of her throat. She was very still, barely breathing. “Now you’re talking,” he whispered against her fragrant skin. “You’re feeling things you’ve never felt
before and that doesn’t speak very highly of old Fayne’s success in bed. He didn’t lift your skirts high enough, did he, Sooz?”
Sooz
. She smiled. No one had called her that except her father. She had thought she wouldn’t allow anyone to call her Sooz again, but she liked the sound of it on Grandy’s tongue. It was right somehow.
She laughed nervously and sidled away from him. “I’ll stir the stew,” she said, grabbing a spoon. She sent a sidelong glance at him and found pleasure in his smile and in the fire in his eyes. “You’re dangerous.”
“No. You are.”
“Me?” Her laughter fluttered from her like a startled bird. “Hardly.”
“Hardly,” he echoed, coming up behind her and slipping his arms around her waist. “I can
hardly
keep my hands off you lately.”
“That’s only because I’m the only female you’ve been keeping company with lately. I imagine you’d rather be teasing one of those saloon girls.”
“Those saloon girls don’t smell like you.” He nuzzled the side of her neck, making her tremble. “You smell like roses and dusting powder. After you’ve taken a bath in here and you’ve sprinkled that good smelling powder all over your—” He had to pause while a shiver raced down his spine. “Your body,” he continued. “I can’t come into this kitchen for at least an hour. I’ve got to wait until the sweet smell drifts out or I’ll go plumb crazy. Mmm, you do smell delicious.” He kissed her neck, and the tip of his tongue wet a spot. She quaked in his arms. “And none of those soiled doves has hair the color of dark fire or eyes as green as emeralds or skin as pale and soft as white satin.”
“Grandville, stop …” Her protest was shamefully weak. “The stew …”
He let go of her to lift the pot of stew off the stove. “There. It can cook later.”
“The biscuits.”
He removed the tin from the compartment. They were already brown. “There. All ready. We can warm them up later.”
Zanna glanced frantically around the kitchen. “I … I’m scared, Grandy. I don’t know if I should … You won’t like it.”
“Don’t be scared and I
will
like it.”
“Yes, I suppose. Men are easily pleased in bed.”
He laughed silently, his brows lifting in surprise. “Is that so? You’re an expert, are you? How many men have you easily pleased in bed, Zanna?”
She shook her head. “That’s not what … Women just know these things. Ask any wife and she’ll tell you.” She recalled Darnella’s and Lilimae’s shameful accounts. “Any
decent
wife, that is.”
“Tell me what?”
“You know.” She clasped her hands behind her back and stared at the floor. “That marriage rites are a man’s delight and a woman’s obligation.”
“That’s a pile of it.”
“Maybe to you.” She shrugged, her fear and dread overcoming those other pleasant feelings. She set the pot back on the stove. “I’m hungry. I’d rather have supper, if you don’t mind.”
He regarded her for a long minute, paying particular attention to her waning color. “I do mind, but I’ll back off this time.”
“Thank you,” she said, sighing with relief and turning shining eyes in his direction. “You’re a good man, Grandville.”
“Yes, I am, and a good man deserves a good woman. Frankly, Zanna, if I don’t get some kind of woman pretty soon, I’ll have to take a chance and break my contract.”
“I told you I’d allow that, but I have to make the arrangements. We must be discreet.”
He chuckled with difficulty. “You’d do that? You’d hire a woman for me?”
“Yes, of course. As you said, you deserve it.”
“Oh, Zanna.” He sounded wounded, disillusioned. “What happened to you to make you so afraid of pleasure that you’ll stoop to such dirty work as hiring a whore for me?”
Distaste unfurled in the pit of her stomach and she blamed Grandy for making her feel soiled. “It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
“It’s all you offered.” He plucked one of the biscuits from the tin and took a bite. “I’m going out to feed the livestock.”
“But you do that after supper.”
“I don’t want any supper.” His hard glance said the rest for him.
Moonlight poured through the window to where Grandville sat at the dining room table, slouched in one of the chairs, a dark scowl marring his features as he reflected on his tortured sexuality.
A man shouldn’t be put through such hell, he thought. His hands balled into large fists on top of the table. Day in and day out … night after night. Nothing to sate his appetite. Maybe hanging would have been better. At least it was quick. Being cooped up with a cold woman was a slow death, like being strangled a little at a time.
He hadn’t been feeding Zanna a line of bull when he’d told her about the way the smell of her dusting powder affected him. There was more: the delicious pleasure he took when she doctored the welts on his back, the seductive sway of her hips clad in breeches as she walked behind the mules in the field, the sparkle of her eyes when she was on the verge of a smile, the way her hair formed damp ringlets at her temples and the nape of her neck after a few hours in the field, the rise and fall of her breasts when she pitched hay in the barn. So many details. So
many tricks his mind could play on him to increase his pain.
Most of all there was the mystery of her. She was a woman who locked herself away from people.
Grandy leaned back, lacing his hands behind his head as he tried to remember the last time he’d been to bed with a woman. Three months or four? Had her name been Angela or Rosa? In Topeka, wasn’t it? Or St. Louis? All he knew for certain was that he’d enjoyed her and he wished she was standing before him that very minute. He smiled lazily, thinking that if Angela or Rosa stepped into the kitchen at that moment, he’d be on her as quick as a hen on a June bug.
The light in the room changed subtly. A new shadow merged with the others. Grandy stared at the window, thinking that a cloud was skirting the moon, then he smelled roses and scented powder.
He turned to find her silhouetted in the doorway. Moonglow backlit her, drawing a sapphire line from head to toe and shining through the thin material of the nightdress she’d made for herself. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. His gaze moved adoringly over the lush tumble of her hair, the narrowness of her shoulders, the thrust of her breasts, and the shadow of nipples against white muslin. His gaze moved to her nipped-in waist and to another shadow, this one more provocative, between her slim thighs.
A shudder thundered through him. His arousal came so suddenly that he grimaced in pain, then broke out in beads of sweat. It seemed that his whole body throbbed along with his erection and he was ashamed of himself for lusting so fiercely, so ferociously for her. He scooted closer to the table to conceal the evidence of his arousal. He wore a pair of work pants, but he felt naked.