The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback) (15 page)

She had never expected that it would take a resolution to stay faithful to her memory of Edward.
 

The truth was, Cherry did not like to admit to herself that she was beginning to forget his face.

She smoothed her dress; the wine-colored calico with its little sprigs of ivory was plain, but pretty. The ivory lace around her throat was rescued from a much older, much finer gown that had not survived homestead life, and the colors set off her golden hair beautifully. She touched the knot at the back of her head, making certain all her hair was in place; it had been windy on the ride in and her bonnet had been shaking violently atop her head. But no, she thought, peering into the dim little mirror atop the bureau, she looked fine.

Little Edward was chortling in the parlor; she could hear him making himself adorable to Patty, and Patty laughing back at him. Patty would make a lovely mother, Cherry thought absently. She had a heart of gold, and she would do anything for her friends. And Matt would be a sweet, if not particularly clever, father. She imagined the little house overflowing with children in a few short years, necessitating additions, extra bedrooms, the ever-present scent of pine and the curls of shavings tracked in on boots, and felt a squeeze of jealousy tighten her chest. But it was no use feeling jealous; she had had her Edward, and now she did not, and that was the end of that discussion, wasn’t it?

Then she heard deep voices alongside Little Edward’s and Patty’s, and her heart stopped altogether. Her heart that had been buried deep in England, that treacherous organ, made its presence known when she heard Jared’s voice.
 

With numb fingers, she turned the brass door-handle and went down the hall, towards the sounds of the tea party.

***

Jared had known what he was getting himself into when he agreed to Patty’s invitation. But that didn’t stop him from reeling at the sight of her like a man drunk, tripping backwards slightly as his heart leapt and his head spun. She was so beautiful,
so
damned beautiful. She stood uncertainly in the doorway like a mirage in the desert, tremulous and nervous, one hand still poised upon the door handle as if she was still trying to decide if she should enter or turn and seek her escape, and all he knew then was that she couldn’t go. He went across the room, crossing the snug little parlor in three leaping strides, and put a hand upon her wrist, where he should not have trespassed.

“Mrs. Beacham,” he rasped, voice husky, throat dry. “It must have been a chilly ride in. Come sit by the fire.” And he drew her into the room, his hand burning on her skin, and she followed meekly, her footsteps light on the bare boards, so light compared to the heavy tread of his boots clapping upon their fresh surface! She let him show her to a chair by the fire and only then, when she was seated comfortably, did he relinquish her slim wrist and and stand by the chair, gazing down at her, feeling utterly foolish and flummoxed and without any idea what to say or do.
 

He realized, after a moment, that Matt, Patty, and Little Edward were all watching this performance with absorption, and that he had made a spectacle of both himself and Cherry. Oh dear Lord, the things they must be thinking right now. He cleared his throat, anxious to say something, anything, that might get a conversation going, help them forget how very oddly he had behaved towards the still-silent and white-faced Cherry, but he couldn’t think of a damn thing. A log broke in a shower of golden-red sparks in the fireplace; the noise seemed deafening. Everyone jumped.
 

Matt was the first to break the silence. “Well now, Jared, and here I am, a married man! All the fun is over now! I guess you’ll have to go Galveston alone this winter after all. Sorry about that.”

Either Matt realized nearly immediately that he’d said the wrong thing, else Patty pinched him viciously in order to explain to him that he’d said the wrong thing: both would have explained the sudden look of pain that twisted his face and then disappeared. But it was Cherry’s look of shock that twisted Jared’s gut. Why had he ever said he was going to leave for the winter? He’d just been talking crazy talk. He wasn’t going to leave, not now.
 

Not with Cherry here, turning his world upside-down.

Jared tried to laugh it off. “Oh, all that hot air. I’m just pining for some warm air when I think of all the snow and blizzards comin’ after us in just a month or two.”

“Blizzards so soon?” Cherry’s voice was reed-thin. “But it is only September. Surely winter is not going to set in next month.”

“Winter is a long time here,” Patty said sympathetically. She jounced Little Edward on her knee thoughtlessly as she spoke; the toddler grinned maniacally as he bounced up and down. “I do wish you’d get your homestead packed up and come stay here for the winter. We’ve got plenty of room for you and Little Edward and your animals, besides. No one from the land office is going to say anything about that, not with you right here in town. And I’m just going to go crazy with worry if I have to think of you out there on that homestead alone when the big snows set in.”

“Patty’s right,” Jared broke in suddenly. Cherry looked up at him with hurt eyes, but he plowed on. The thought of her trapped in that damn shanty, with snow piled up over the doors and windows, was too much. Even with him the nearest neighbor, there’d be plenty of snows too deep for him to ride or drive over to check on her. Or rescue her. “You need to move into town where you and Little Edward will be safe.”

“Oh, is it really so dangerous?” Cherry burst out, her voice slightly annoyed. “I have known snow before. It does snow in England, you know. Sometimes quite a lot.”

“You’ve never known anything like the snow up here in these parts,” Matt told her gently. “Take our word for it, Mrs. Beacham.”

“We’re only thinking of your safety,” Patty continued. “We care about you, Cherry… and Little Edward! What if something happened to Little Edward? You know you have to put him first.” She pressed a kiss to his silky pale hair. “He would love it here with us; we will have a wonderful time. Why, every day can be a party! Just think what fun we would all have together, while outside it’s snowing and icy and inside it’s warm and we’re all by the fire, just like now!”

Cherry sighed, and Jared could hear something like desperation in her voice when she spoke again. “Oh, you are all set to convince me!”

Jared leaned forward then, face set and tense. “Cherry,” he said softly, startling them all with the intimate nickname. “We are not going to give you up. You can’t stay out there alone, and that’s all there is to it.”

***

Cherry’s breath caught at the caress of her name in his voice. It was the way he murmured her name, that secret, forbidden name that only her very dearest friends had ever called her, which struck her, even more than his words, to her very core. And that wasn’t what she had wanted: this toe-curling, spine-tingling, stomach-twisting
need.
She had wanted to be alone, alone with her memories, alone with her remnants of Edward… and Jared was not going to let her.
 

She felt a strange mixture of anger and thanksgiving.
 

She looked up at him, at his intense blue eyes, and saw the firelight in his pupils, flecks of gold in the irises, and the lines on his forehead that showed he was deeply, truly concerned and invested in her safety.
He cares for me,
she thought,
this is more than passion between two lonely people,
and it was nearly with a sense of relief to admit to herself that she cared for him, too. This was more than desire.
 

A sense of relief, yes, but tinged with anguish; she had buried her heart; she did not want to dig it up again.

But hearts rarely pay wishes any mind.

For all of that revelation, the relationship between Cherry and Jared still rested on a knife’s edge. Their story nearly ended. They were neither of them looking for company, after all. If Jared was lonely, he was still half-turned against all women thanks to the way Hope had treated him. If Cherry was lonely, she was still half-determined to stay in love with Edward’s memory. They were neither of them ready to turn their backs on old hurts and old loves.

They were stubborn, they had that much in common. They were attracted to one another, but that wasn’t reason enough to give up all of their old prejudices and set aside all their old intentions.

It
would
have ended after that tea at Patty’s pine-scented little house, as they sat around the laden table and ate the fresh biscuits with the knife balanced in the boughten jam jar and the spoon still tilted into the bowl of white sugar, the fresh lumber around them gleaming yellow in the lamplight, silently weeping their amber beads of resin. They would have gone to their separate homes, perhaps riding together, perhaps not, but ultimately their paths would diverge and they would go home alone to their memories. It might have happened that way. It almost did. But little pebbles create great ripples, and so it did not.
 

Mrs. Jorgenson cast the first pebble. Perhaps Mrs. Jorgenson and her girl’s stopping by on their way home from a trip to the store, and offering to take Little Edward home for the night in halting words of English that they were slowly learning,
was
simply a friendly gesture and not an incredibly fortuitous development.
 

But what it meant was that both Jared and Cherry stayed much later at Patty’s than they had planned, right through dinner, and into the cool dusk of the early fall evening. They finally left after Matt’s persistent reminders that it was certainly going to rain that night — Matt fancied himself an amateur weatherman — and they made the walk out to the stables where Galahad and the roan were in the extra loose boxes (for the barn had been built in anticipation of many more horses, thanks to Matt’s thoughtless comment one evening, in the earshot of the hopeful Mr. Mayfield, that he might like to own a livery) munching at the golden stems of prairie hay, beneath a benevolent silver moon.

And one thing after another happened. She stumbled on a hillock of grass in the dim glow of moonlight, and he took her elbow to steady her, and she fell into him before she could regain her balance, and he peered down at her in concern, and she looked back up at him, her face nearly in the crook of his elbow, and she laughed, delighted, like a child, and he thought he had never known anyone as changeable and contrary and unpredictable as this little Englishwoman, with her rages and her laughter on one another’s heels like the rainbows after summer storms, and that he had been stark staring mad to ever think of riding south and going away from her, and he leaned down and kissed her lingeringly on her rosy lips. 

And afterwards she pressed her fingers to her lips with surprise and pleasure, as if it had been their very first kiss, and her silken cheeks colored daintily, and she thought that
she
would be mad to give up this hard-looking, sweet-tempered cowboy, and that holding a candle for Edward would never feel like Jared’s hand on her cheek nor his lips upon hers, however beloved her memories were. They both made wild decisions then, in that treacherous moonlight, that dangerous luminosity flooding the great open spaces around them, so that they might have been alone in a tiny ship at sea or, indeed, upon the laughing face of the moon itself.
 

Slowly, with many meaningful glances and brushing of fingers, the almost-lovers went into the stables and lit a lamp so that they could see to saddle their horses. Jared tacked the roan swiftly so that he could help Cherry with her mount, but when he had finished cinching up the girth, with much complaining and head tossing from the roan, who preferred his valet to dress him at a more leisurely pace, he saw that she had already put the little spotted horse into his sidesaddle and bridle, and was leading him out of the barn in search of a mounting block. Independence was not lacking in his little noblewoman. 

“Surely,” she was observing as he came out of the barn, the roan dragging behind him like a stubborn dog on a leash, “Matt has put in a mounting block for Patty.”

“Patty mightn’t need one.” Jared replied absently, his mind on other things than Matt and Patty. “She rides astride, and is real tall, to boot. With those little Morgans of her father’s it’s real easy to get up. Probably just puts her toe in the stirrup and swings up, like a man.”

“I can’t do that with this sort of saddle, I’m afraid,” she hedged, trying to make the saddle the scapegoat. A good horseman never blames the horse; a clever one will blame the equipment.  

“I’ll give you a leg-up,” Jared said, dropping the roan’s reins; the horse immediately dipped his head to the dry grass at his feet. And so Cherry was treated to his closeness again that night, and they both came away from one another’s warmth with regret and a soul-deep longing for more.

***

But she had plenty of time for regrets, on that road home. As they rode side-by-side through the silvery expanse of grasslands, with the roan and Galahad occasionally taking little nips at one another and squealing in that silly rite of equine companionship, the play-fight, with his right boot occasionally bumping into her left one like some sort of erotic gesture beneath a dining table, she had plenty of time to think about the errors in her judgement. About the promises she had made Edward. How she would love him forever. How there would be no others in her affections. And the words she had felt jerked from her, sobbing on her knees in the chapel of Beechfields, swearing to God above,
I shall never love another, for You have taken him from me, and I shall be in mourning for him for the rest of my life.