The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback) (16 page)

She felt a growing shame for the kisses she had given to Jared, shame that she hadn’t felt even when she’d been caught by Patty in the hallway that wedding day. Shame for breaking the promises made to Edward, dead and gone. Shame that she had dared to think she could love another, and forget her one true beloved.
 

The guilt sat heavily upon her heart, and she felt as if its weight would smother her. She looked at Jared, his hat bobbing in the moonlight as he rode beside her, and thought that he was leading her astray. However right this felt, it was certainly wrong.
 

She should really end it before it started. She would put a stop to this foolish romance with this taciturn cowboy. Why, what would Edward have thought, if she should marry such a man and let him father Little Edward! What sort of role model would he be for the son of a nobleman, a peer of England?

But, no, she thought confusedly, but Jared
was
a farmer now, after all. And that was all she wanted for Little Edward, to teach him to become a good steward to the land, a trustworthy lord of his people, even if his people were only hired help or share-croppers, and not many generations of tenants who had lived upon his land and relied upon his family’s protection for hundreds of years.

He wouldn’t be the worst of fathers, in that regard. Especially when one considered that Edward’s own parents had denied her as unworthy of their son. Being a nobleman was not necessarily an absolute harbinger of a good role-model. Not even remotely. Her temper eased slightly. Her shoulders lost their rigidness, and Galahad stepped out more eagerly as her body relaxed. Perhaps marrying Jared wouldn’t be the worst…
 

But he hasn’t asked you to marry him,
a little voice said mockingly.
He has only stolen kisses. How many times have you walked out together, or gone on a drive? What do you think he wants from you?

And by the time he had pulled up his horse in a little moonlit bowl of prairie, and was leaning towards her with naked lust gleaming in his eyes, she had firmly made up her mind against him.

Why, for all she knew, he wasn’t interested in making her his wife at all! He was merely taking his pleasure with her!

The
rake!

It was
infuriating
, that’s what it was. Cherry let her grief and passion be washed away by her quick temper, always ready for an airing, and a relief after the anguish of finding herself falling in love with another man. It was so much easier to be angry! Who was he, to think of taking kisses from the daughter of Beechfields? Why, she was a gentleman’s daughter, and he was nothing more than a farmer on borrowed land! And he wasn’t even that, to be sure! He might be
playing
at being a farmer, but the lazy scoundrel had said himself that he wasn’t even sure he’d prove up on his land! Cherry heaved a gusty huff
of a sigh that was a sure sign of her pent-up outrage. She’d really worked herself up now. She angled her horse away from Jared’s before he could get too close to her.
 

She glanced over and saw that he was looking at her with a nervous expression.

“Cherry?” he ventured.

“My name,” she replied icily, “is
Mrs
. Beacham.” She emphasized the
Mrs.,
although the title was not true. Would never be true, indeed; she would always be a
miss
in secret. A spinster. A spinster with a baby.

“Is it now!” Jared sounded angry. She didn’t care. She didn’t! He was
using
her. He thought she was some loose woman, some… some… merry widow! “Well,
Mrs. Beacham,
you were Cherry not too long ago, at least you were to your friends. Has somethin’ happened that’s made us not quite friendly anymore? Because I got to tell you, you are not the easiest woman to get along with.”

“Oh! How dare you!” She reined back Galahad and he did the same to the roan, turning the horse so that he was facing her. She bit back her temper as best she could, but her words were clipped and furious. “I have allowed you liberties in my weakness, but you are
no gentleman
for taking advantage of them! You have behaved outrageously! And I… I have allowed them, I will grant you that, but no more. We are neighbors, sir. We are nothing more than that. You must cease treating me with such familiarity.”

She thought she spoke very reasonably, for all her outrage. He was, after all, just a simple common sort of a man. He was probably used to all sorts of loose women, and not gentlewomen at all. Cowboys were always going into houses of ill repute and consorting with prostitutes. She was probably the most respectable person he had ever come into contact with.

***

Jared thought that Cherry was the most insane person he had ever come into contact with. And that included Bull’s Balls Bill, who had actually tried to set up a medicine show hawking the health benefits of eating bull testicles three meals a day. He’d been arrested at the very first town he’d made his claims to, but not before three ladies fainted and the town preacher arrived to declare him a misguided tool of the devil and had him marched out of town by an angry mob. “Texas,” Bill had remarked to Jared on a subsequent drive, “is just not ready for bull’s balls, whatever else they’ll tell you.”

“Mrs. Beacham,” he said in an exasperated tone, “You are going to drive me to drink.” And he turned around the roan with one flick of the reins and started on down the path without her.

He wasn’t too concerned about abandoning Cherry in the dark on the prairie. For one thing, the moon was bright and the path was clear, a dark strip of prairie sod running through the silver grass. For another, Galahad wouldn’t let the roan get too far from him. Horses were a sight more clever about self-preservation than any human. Sure enough, within a few moments he heard the clip-clop of little hooves: Galahad trotting after them. The roan tilted back his ears to listen and walked on, his head low and unconcerned. The roan was a sensible horse. He didn’t waste time on crazy fillies who couldn’t make up their own minds. He didn’t worry about being
sweet.
Jared supposed he could probably learn a lot from the roan.

Cherry kept her horse behind Jared’s, so that they weren’t riding side-by-side any longer; he figured she was pretending that they were just two people on the same track at the same time, and he wasn’t escorting her home or anything. He figured right; when they had splashed through the creek and the faint little trail back to Cherry’s homestead came up, he heard Galahad’s feet turn off into the rustling grasses, heard the horse’s protesting snort as he was turned away from his trail-mate, and knew that she was choosing to go home alone, rather than riding on to his homestead and then taking the shorter cross-fields approach to her cabin. The path that Jared could have watched out for her if she’d taken it, at least for a little ways. He wished she wasn’t so damn stubborn. But it shouldn’t matter. There wasn’t much could happen to her on a calm autumn night out here, on their two properties.

And then he felt a cool breeze on his left cheek, and looked west for the first time. He’d been looking at the ground in front of the roan’s hooves for so long, mulling over the trouble on a piebald horse behind him, that he hadn’t looked up at the sky for at least a mile. And what he saw there now frightened him, frightened him very much.

A great wall of cloud, white in the moonlight, with low, dangling fingers of cloud grasping towards the land, was racing across the prairie from the west. The prairie grasses were already rippling and bending with the sudden cold wind gusting out from the cloud, and even as he looked, a great shattering flash of lightning momentarily blinded him, and outlined from behind that ghostly rim of white that was the leading edge of the storm. It was still far away, the long pause before a low growl of thunder told him that much. But it was moving at a break-neck pace, faster, he’d guess, than a galloping horse. And that curtain of lightning falling from the white face of the cloud betrayed the storm for what it was. This was no ordinary thunderstorm. This was a cyclone waiting to happen.

Cherry had been nursing her pique for the better part of half an hour, and she was getting less and less pleasure out of it as the silent ride went on. Watching the roan’s hindquarters sashay a few feet ahead, watching Jared’s wide-brimmed hat bobble along before her, she couldn’t help but start to wish he’d turn that hat around and look at her, that he’d swing that horse’s haunches around and ride next to her again. But Jared Reese was a stubborn, stubborn man; Cherry knew that to her very core. He wasn’t going to be the one who turned around.

And she was never, ever going to be the one to ask him to.

That was fine, then. That was just as it should be. Perhaps she was a little over-the-top back there, telling him that he had disrespected her and that he was no gentleman. He
had
disrespected her, a little, and of course he was no gentleman, the very thought was laughable. But he hadn’t done anything that she hadn’t wanted him to do, and, after all, she wasn’t a feather-brained debutante. Even back in London, a widow would be expected to know the score.

And perhaps, too, she was taking things a little too far by deciding to let her heart remain buried forever with Edward. But that was the vow she had made when he had died, and she had never thought of breaking it. Until now.

She turned Galahad resolutely at the fork in the trail, riding away from Jared and any chance of reconciliation. She had insulted him, and probably hurt his feelings, if the man had any, which she suspected he did, somewhere deep beneath his whiskers and his Stetson and his thick, thick skin. He wasn’t going to be looking for her, on the claim or in Bradshaw, in a hurry. Which was going to make the next tea with Patty very awkward indeed. She wondered which of them ought to cry off, and decided it could be Jared. She was keeping Patty for herself.

She needed a friend, at the very least, even if she wasn’t about to take a lover.

Her thoughts went on wandering in this way, worse than useless, for another fifteen minutes or so. She was terribly tired, for one thing; the effort of rising in the chilly morning and taking care of the innumerable tasks around the homestead and
then
riding into Bradshaw and
then
all that emotion… well she was just very ready for her bed. She was cheered a little at the thought of sleeping the night through, without Little Edward to wake her in the night; bless the Jorgensons for being so generous, and fond of babies! It would be a rare treat to have her bed to herself.
 

She tried not to think that when they had left Bradshaw, she had been expecting to share a bed with Jared. Goosebumps rose up on her flesh at the very thought. She turned to the west, as if look across the prairie to his homestead… and she saw it.

She’d never seen anything like it, and she didn’t want to now. What was happening in the heavens, that this great white-and-black monster was swarming across the once-calm prairie? The sky was being swallowed up by a cloud more frightening than anything she could ever have imagined; a beast of darkness so glittering with lightning that she felt a terror in her breast not even the fast-moving summer storms had managed to conjure up. The cold wind slapped at her face with a startling suddenness, as if the storm had been crouching just to her west, waiting for her to turn and see it, waiting for her to acknowledge its presence, before setting in with a deadly earnest to take her as its prey.

She had heard of such storms, of course, from men leaning against the counter in Mayfield’s, from idle chatter in the post office. She knew that the prairie was capable of whipping up a cyclone that wiped away everything in its path. Lightning, and wind, and white lace of cloud hung all around a blackness that could not be pierced, the old men said. That was when you knew a cyclone was coming.

She hadn’t been able to picture it then. Now, watching the moonlit cloud swallow up the stars, she thought that she knew what they meant. She was looking at it.

Beneath her, her pony was dancing and snorting, tugging at the bit, longing to be allowed to gallop towards home and the safety of his stall. Galahad was proving himself worse than useless in a crisis. She felt terrible thinking such a thing, of course, but Lancelot’s steadiness and careful step would have been wonderfully useful right about now. Presence of mind in the face of utter terror was not something that the pony and the mule shared. The pony was feeling her dread and quivering with it himself.
 

Slipping into a panic of her own, Cherry found herself looking for Jared, sweeping her gaze across the prairie in confusion. She had surely only left him a few moments before. But the hills and swells were so confusing, and already, even though she hadn’t turned off the main track very long ago, she had traveled far enough along her own path that she couldn’t very well set off across the prairie and hope to intersect with Jared’s track again. She’d just be riding into uncertainty into the night. And she was afraid to go anywhere with
any
uncertainty with that… that
thing
in the sky up there.
 

The wind was raising goosebumps on her arms, despite her shawls, and whipping her quiet Galahad into a rapidly mounting panic. The pony was dancing around in circles, head high against the restraint of her hand upon his bit, desperate to be allowed to run away, as fast as possible, from the storm.

And she couldn’t blame him, dear God, for it was surely the most horrifying thing she’d ever come into contact with. She wasted a few valuable moments grieving for England and the soft, gentle rainfalls of her youth, but there now, she had known this could happen! She’d come to America with all the tales of ferocious weather falling upon deaf ears, and this was what she got for her troubles. Alone on the prairie with some sort of freak storm upon her. She cast an uncertain glance back towards the track towards her cabin. It was about a twenty-minute ride further, and she might just beat the storm if she galloped flat-out, but… she felt petrified at the thought of weathering whatever this cloud was bringing on her own. Alone. She could not bear it.