Authors: Primrose
“Got to make this tight or it won’t do any good.” Finished with his work, the doctor ambled over to a closet. “I think I’ve got a pair of overalls in here and an old shirt. I wore them when I painted this room a couple of years ago. Yes, here they are.” He pitched the clothes at Grandy. “Put them on. They’ll do until Zanna can round up some more clothes for you.”
The old doctor stood back to watch the young man ease gingerly into the clothes he’d provided. He shook his head in confusion, catching the younger man’s interest.
“You don’t approve of me,” Grandy said, attempting
to read the doctor’s mind. “I know, I know. I’m not fit to wipe her boots.”
“Somebody’s already told you that, huh?”
“Nobody had to tell me. It’s been written on every face I’ve seen since I got out of jail.”
“You just remember,” the doctor said, approaching the man with a stealthy tread. “Lay one hand on her and I’ll—”
“Right, right,” Grandy agreed with a heavy sigh. “I’ve got the message, loud and clear.” He eyed the other man before adding, “Besides, I didn’t go looking for her.
She
hunted
me
down. Maybe it’s her you should be threatening.”
“Go on with you.” The doctor made a shooing motion toward the door. “I don’t pretend to understand this farce. Get along while I’ve still got a measure of patience left in me.”
“Yes, sir.” Grandy gave a jaunty salute, then performed a sharp pivot and opened the door. His new bride and her lawyer were in the parlor having tea and Grandy joined them without invitation. “The doctor says I’ll live until I’m at least seventy.” He sniffed at the aroma of hot tea and cookies. “Mmm-mmm. Smells delicious. If you don’t mind, I’ll have—”
“We must be going,” Zanna cut in as she rose regally from the wing chair. “It’s creeping toward noon and I’ve a ranch to run.”
“When we get there, can I eat?” Grandy asked, then growled with impatient sarcasm.
“Yes, of course.” Zanna put on her gloves and smoothed them over her tapered fingers. “Thank you both for being so kind,” she said, addressing her lawyer and the doctor. “What do I owe you, Doc?”
“Nothing, Zanna. I didn’t do all that much. You just watch yourself.” The doctor moved closer and lowered his voice to a gruff whisper. “Keep a gun close by at all times.”
“I will.” She patted his sleeve affectionately, then bussed the attorney on his flushed cheek. “Come visit when you get a chance.” Her glance toward Grandy was cold and impersonal. “My buggy is in front of the jail. Wait outside and I’ll pick you up.” She didn’t pause for his agreement, but swept out into the sunlight, her widow’s clothing moving people out of her path.
Grandy waited outside the doctor’s office for her. He leaned against a young tree and peered down the dusty street in the direction of the jail. The jail. He shuddered to think of that place where even the sunshine seemed cold and dirty.
You came mighty close to buying the farm this time, he reminded himself, lest he forget that an hour ago he was scheduled to swing from the end of a rope. Better keep your nose clean until your name is cleaned up in these parts, then you can hit the road and get a decent head start. Hell, by that time the little lady might even be glad to see you go and not send a posse after you.
A buggy jostled into view, pulled by a big white mare with blue eyes. Zanna Hathaway sat stiffly on the narrow seat, reins in hand, chin tipped way up so that she looked down her nose at most everybody and everything. A breeze blew the veil against her face, showing off her perky profile. Grandy was beginning to despise that concealing veil. It lent a mysterious air to the woman and he had always been a sucker for a good mystery.
He climbed up into the buggy, ever mindful of his injuries and weakened state. His head began to swim with the minor exertion, then the buggy set off and his stomach began to quake and shiver with emptiness. His head fell back against the taut cloth behind him and he closed his eyes to keep from seeing double. He felt her looking at him from time to time, but he hadn’t the energy to stare back.
Zanna examined the man beside her minutely and decided he wasn’t a bad sort to look upon. Once he was
shaved and thoroughly washed, he might be passable. She doubted that Fayne’s clothes would fit him, but she had a few other articles of clothing left by a ranch hand two years ago that might fit the man’s lanky frame. Later, she’d take him into town and outfit him properly.
She laughed silently at her thoughts. He wasn’t a doll she’d made from a broomstick, for heaven’s sake! He was a man and she was thinking of him as her property to dress as she saw fit. He’s not a slave, she repeated over and over in her mind, recalling the sheriff’s censure. He’s your … She shook aside the thought, finding it impossible to think of him in intimate terms. He was nothing to her except a man she’d snatched from the gallows. She expected nothing from him except hard work and his company when she required it. Not much to ask of a man whose life she’d saved.
She snickered again at the remembered expressions on the faces of Theo Booker and Doc Pepperidge. It was true that Theo endorsed her plan, but reluctantly so. Doc Pepperidge probably had an inkling about what she was up to, although he’d kept his own counsel. Just as well, Zanna told herself. She didn’t want to dredge up the past. It was over. An occasional pang of guilt remained, but that, too, would pass.
The gently undulating countryside flattened. The broad road narrowed. Scyene slipped away. Keeping the reins held lightly in one hand, Zanna removed her veiled hat with the other and tucked it between her feet on the floorboards. She ran a hand up her neck, tucking stray curls into her chignon.
Her memories drifted to the first time she’d traveled this road to Primrose. She’d been a child of ten, sitting beside her father in a rough-riding buckboard. Her father had hummed an Irish ditty that lifted her spirits and made her smile and hug her rag dolly closer to her beating heart. She’d been scared, having no clear idea of what to expect. With her mother’s death a few months earlier, she’d been
left entirely in her father’s care. He’d quit his ranching job in Wyoming and had headed for Texas where the work was plentiful and the winters less severe. It hadn’t been long before he’d been hired by Fayne Hathaway to work as foreman on the Primrose.
Zanna had liked the name right off and one look at the rolling countryside and spacious house had laid waste to her fears. She’d taken to Primrose like a duck takes to water. No home had ever felt so right, so fitting.
Fayne had taken a shine to her, which had become more than that by the time she’d reached her sixteenth birthday. She hadn’t been the least bit surprised when her father began dropping hints that she should consider marrying his boss.
“You can’t do better, lass,” Jerry Sullivan had insisted. “I’d rest easy knowing you’d married a good man who would do right by you. You’d never want for anything here, girl. You’d be well situated.”
“But what of love, Papa? What of love?”
“It’ll follow, lassie. It always does.”
Her father’s voice faded in her inner ear as the fork in the road appeared ahead. The great white horse needed no direction, but automatically headed to the right.
“That’s right, Milkmaid,” Zanna crooned to her most gentle mare. “Home we go.”
The man beside her stirred fretfully and inched up higher in his seat. He looked around him at the fields awash with wildflowers and then at the noisy formation of crows overhead. It all made him think of his boyhood home, the one he’d escaped when he was just shy of fourteen. He’d vowed then that he’d never live in the country again, but he hadn’t figured on it being an issue of life or death.
A wooden arch up ahead supported the name of the land they were entering.
“Primrose,” Grandy read aloud, then groaned softly. “Did you name it that?”
“No. It’s been named that for three generations. But I like it,” she added quickly. “I wouldn’t dream of changing the name. See all the primrose blooming along the trail?”
He nodded, glancing at the spiky flowers. “So it comes by its name honestly.”
“Is that how you came by yours? Honestly, or is it an alias?”
“Honestly.” He glanced at her taciturn expression. “I haven’t been in the outlaw business long enough to come up with a decent alias.” If he hadn’t been so tired, he would have laughed at such a notion. Alias, my ass, he thought with a disgruntled frown. What did she take him for, some rootin’, tootin’ desperado? “Do you know what happened to my other possessions?” he asked.
“What other …?” She shook her head, clearly in the dark.
“I had a silver cigarette case and gold nugget cuff links that were taken, along with a pearl stickpin and some forty dollars.”
“You’re joking,” she said flatly.
“No, I’m not.” He squared his shoulders, incensed that she would dismiss his claim so swiftly. Her gaze slid to his and her eyes widened at what she saw.
“You’re not joking?” She cleared her throat nervously and flicked the reins across the white mare’s broad back. “I don’t know what happened to your belongings, but I’ll make inquiries when I’m in town again.” She glanced sideways at him again, wondering how he’d accumulated such a list of fancy personals. “Of course, stolen property won’t be returned to you.”
“Those things are mine. I’m not a thief.”
“You took a horse, didn’t you?”
“It was my horse to take,” he argued.
“The judge didn’t believe that story, I guess.”
“I don’t give a good goddamn what the judge believed.”
“Watch your mouth, mister.” Her eyes flashed a warning. “I’ll not have you talking like that in my presence.”
He turned away from her. “Let’s not talk. I’ve nothing to say to you anyway.”
“Fine.” She tipped up her chin, angry at herself for feeling stung by his dismissal.
When he saw the house off to the east, his interest was immediately seized. It looked so much like that other one he’d run from so many years ago, brown lumber arranged in a boxy structure with two additions jutting out from both sides. A small railed porch gave access to two doors, one opening into the living quarters and the other into the main bedroom. A metal roof turned green with age was broken by three chimneys. A rail-splitter sat in the porch yard and hoes and rakes leaned against the outside walls. Between the house and a gigantic, slope-roofed barn stood a windmill. Beyond the barn were the stables and pigpen. A split-rail fence corralled the outbuildings. The outhouse squatted behind the house in the center of a semicircle of concealing saplings. Sagebrush grew in tufts and green stuff sprouted here and there.
On the other side of the dirt road leading to the house stood a long building that Grandy took to be a bunkhouse.
“How many men work for you?” he asked, glancing at her. She’d put her hat back on, but hadn’t draped the veil over it.
“Seven.”
He lifted his brows, impressed. “How many head do you run?”
“Three hundred, maybe more this year.”
“How many acres?”
“Four hundred and fifty.”
His brows inched up further. “So you just ranch. No farming.”
“Oh, no. I do a little farming. It only makes sense to grow your own hay and grain. I planted a little cotton last year, too.”
His brows lowered into a dark scowl. Farming. Should have known, he chided himself. You’ve escaped one hell only to jump right into another.
“You picked the wrong man, you know.” He turned to face front again. “I’m no good at farming or ranching. I’ve tried it and I don’t like it.”
“You’ll have to learn to like it,” she retorted saucily as she reined the mare to a prancing halt near the house. She lifted a hand to the bowlegged cowboy making tracks in their direction. “H’lo, Perkins. I want you to meet Grandville Adams.”
“Pleased to meetcha,” the middle-aged man said as he touched his brown hat with two dry-skinned fingers. “Cal Perkins, the Primrose foreman.”
Grandy nodded and looked to the woman for help in further introductions, but she had her back to him as she let her foreman ease her from the vehicle to the ground. Grandy held his breath and climbed gingerly down from the buggy, pressing one hand to his side where he could feel his ribs scraping together.
“I didn’t know you’d gone into town to meet someone,” Perkins said. “Stagecoach didn’t come in this morning, did it?”
“No.” Zanna looked at her new husband and motioned toward the house. “Go on in. I’ll be along in a minute.” She waited until he’d reached the front door before she turned back to her foreman. “Perkins, I’m going to tell you something and I want you to accept it and not ask me a bunch of questions.”
He screwed up one brown eye in overt curiosity. “I don’t like the sound of this already. What you been up to, missus?”
“I married Mr. Adams this morning.” Zanna held up a hand, stalling Perkins’s hot objections. “It’s over and done with. I claimed him from the jail and married him.”
“But why?” Perkins implored. “Why’d you go do a dadburned thing like that?”
“Because I needed a husband around this place.” Zanna shook her head and placed a hand on her foreman’s arm. “No questions, please. Just rest assured that I have no doubts about this. I’ve done the right thing. Please tell the other men, but make it clear that they are to take no orders from Mr. Adams. I’m the boss around here. My marriage doesn’t change that one bit.”
“So this isn’t a real marriage, huh?”
Zanna removed her hand from Perkins’s arm and stepped back with a stiffened carriage. “That is my business and no one else’s.”
Perkins face flushed bright red. “Yes, missus.” He stared at his boot tips. “I’ll tell the others.”
“Thank you, Perkins.” She peeled off her gloves and slapped them into the palm of one hand over and over again. “Has Duncan been out this morning?”
“No, missus.”
“Good. I want to be the one to tell him about my marriage.”
Perkins grunted and whirled on his heel. “I reckon dinner’s about ready to sit down to.” He looked back at her. “You want to join me and the others?”
“No. I’ll fix something for myself … er, I mean for us. Thanks.” She started for the house, thinking of all the pleasant meals she’d had lately with her hired hands. Any of them could cook better than she could, and she enjoyed sitting down to home cooking that wasn’t hers. But Grandville Adams was waiting and it would be rude to leave him alone while she dined with her hands. Besides, she certainly didn’t want him to meet the hands right this minute. She needed time to get used to the situation before she forced the stranger on everyone else at Primrose.