The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback) (20 page)

“You, respectable? The homesteading Englishwoman? I wouldn’t dare.” And he pinned her to the mattress at last, his chest atop her quivering breasts, his lips bare inches from hers. Her lips parted and her pulse fluttered in her throat. Suddenly the games had ended.

“You are looking at me as if you wish to eat me up,” she said at last, her voice barely a whisper now.
 

“I do,” he whispered. He leaned down to lick at her earlobe, his tongue hot and teasing. “I wish to taste you…” his tongue lingered upon her neck, and she shivered. “… All over…” and he was suddenly slipping away from her seeking mouth, down, down, his tongue darting over her nipples, her navel, and lower still, until he pressed it against that aching, throbbing heart of her, and when she could bear no more she arched up against him, fists full of bedclothes, throat full of a scream that she could not let out.

“Cherry,” he whispered into the tortured silence.

“Yes, Jared.” Her breath came fast and ragged.

“I’m still dressed.”

She burst into laughter and then bit her lip, hand over her mouth, but her shoulders went on shaking with mirth. He chuckled. “Help me with this stuff, would ya?”

With shaking fingers she flew down the buttons of his plaid shirt and flung it open. Beneath the flannel his chest was hard and muscular, and she drew her fingers through the tight little curls of his dark chest hair while he was working at his trousers. Finally he was as naked as she was, and with a little sigh he fitted his curves to hers. He propped his elbows on the bed and smiled down at her. “So here we are,” he whispered cheerfully, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. “What can I do for you now?”
 

She ran her fingernails down her back and pressed them lightly against his buttocks. She smiled innocently as his body tensed. “You can stop playing games and get inside of me,” she murmured wickedly, and his eyes widened.

“Why, Cherry Beacham, you dirty little —” She leaned up and kissed him, blocking his mocking words, and with a groan he shifted his weight and slipped a hand down to feel her wetness. All at once he was inside of her, a huge hard heat deep within in her, and she cried out with the pleasure of it. She shifted her legs up over his hips to take him in further and she heard him swallow hard, choking back a moan against her lips, and he began to plunge in and out of her with a fierce intensity that she could barely hold back her own moans. He drove into her fiercely, feeling her flutter and tighten around him, and she could not help crying out while Jared groaned with his own release.

They lay together in quiet afterwards, Jared stroking her blonde hair as it streamed over his chest, eyes open to the dark ceiling, mind wide awake as his newly betrothed slowly sank into sleep. His genuine lady, he thought, was a little wildcat in bed.

And in the bedroom down the hall, Patty Barnsley pulled her pillow over head head and giggled.
 

The letters arrived in unison, in the same mailbag, from the same train. What were the chances of such an unfortunate coincidence? A slim envelope from New York City, a slim envelope from Texas: they never should have met. And yet here they were, two unlikely compatriots. Had they been sorted by the same clerk, in some cattle-and-wheat city to the south? Had they brushed together on their rustling trip out to Bradshaw, stowed in a canvas bag in the mail car of a train packed full of hopeful émigrés and sharp-eyed land agents?
 

Marlena Elkins, the sharp-nosed postmistress, straightened the gold-rimmed glasses which hovered perpetually near the cliff’s edge of that perilous appendage, and sorted the weekly mail without apparent opinion nor judgement upon its contents. She might have harbored thoughts about the thin letters Mark Heyward received every week from an imposingly titled bank back in New York, or the perfumed pink envelopes, addressed in a slanted hand, to Sanders Kane, the inveterate bachelor who raised sheep in a badlands claim northwest of town and hated women by all accounts. She
might
have thought — oh yes! — but that would never do. It wasn’t
her
place to judge her fellow man on their foibles. She was The Postmistress, a bastion of unwavering impartiality and discreetness.
 

Although she was oft inclined to suggest to Mr. Mayfield that he stop being so generous with Mark Heyward’s credit. 

Miss Elkins dropped the letter to Mr. Jared Reese into its slot; the thin envelope to Ms Charlotte Beacham into its own, and she did not form any sort of curiosity about the use of “Ms” instead of “Mrs.” in the address. It could have been a slip of the pen that blotted out the missing character, after all. 

***

Jared strolled into the little wooden box that was the Bradshaw post office with entirely too much cheer, and he knew it. The night with Cherry had put a spring in his heavy step; he barely remembered that his left hip pained him on stairs, thanks to the very hard head of that bull who hadn’t wanted to accept his kind request to swim the Missouri River with the rest of its herd, or that his right knee pained him all the rest of the time, courtesy of a horseshoe with a large and unruly horse attached to it. This chilly fall morning, Jared was young and sprightly again, and the years had fallen away, and the hurts and heartbreaks of the years past had never happened at all. Cherry, his fiery little Englishwoman, had chosen him over her memories. He was certain he had done the same for her. What memory could compete with real, live Cherry in his arms? He felt a stirring in his groin just thinking about her.

With a chipper little whistle, he alerted the stern Miss Elkins to his presence in her office, and she came from the tiny storeroom with her lips pursed. 

Undeterred — for what could drag down his spirits on such a morning, the dawn after his accepted proposal? — Jared whistled again. “Miss Elkins, darlin’ girl, have I got any mail? And any for the Barnsleys? I’m breakfasting with them this morning.” And then, carried away with his own pleasure, he winked. 

Miss Elkins regarded him for a very long moment, as if trying to decide whether he was worth her time if he was going to behave so foolishly, and Jared began to regret the wink. He sighed in relief when she relented and turned back into the storeroom.

“This for Mr. Barnsley,” she said upon return, laying down a few letters and catalogs on the counter. “And this for you, and this for
Mrs
. Beacham. She is staying with the Barnsleys, is that right?”

Jared puzzled over the slight emphasis on the “Mrs.” in his still-secret-fianceé’s name, but decided, in the interest of not annoying Miss Elkins any more than he already had, to just let it pass unremarked upon. “She
is
staying with them,” he confirmed, and gathered up the mail. “Nice of you to remember. Have a nice morning, Miss Elkins.”

Jared went swinging out of the post office, still entirely too happy for his own good, and he could feel the postmistress’s eyes making daggers upon his back as he went tripping down the stairs and back into the dusty street. But he could ignore her, poor sour spinster! He had everything ahead of him now, everything —
 
and then he glanced at the letter on top of the pile in his arms and stopped in the middle of Bradshaw’s dusty bedraggled street, looking with burning eyes and a dry throat at Hope Townsend’s very expensive-looking handwriting. 

***

Missy Carter sang out a good morning when the swinging doors revealed Jared Reese coming into the saloon for breakfast. She hadn’t seen much of him since spring. Business was starting to pick up all around now that men were coming in from their claims to spend the winter in town. “Eggs, Jared? Coffee?” She gestured to an empty table.

He stomped past her, leaving her coffee pot hanging in the air over the cup she’d been prepared to fill, and took a seat at the bar instead of at one of the rough little tables where breakfast was usually served. She followed uncertainly and slipped behind the bar, glancing at the pile of mail and catalogs he’d flung on the counter-top. “You okay, Jared?”

Jared wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Fine. Just need a pick-me-up.”

Missy tilted an eyebrow. She was no stranger to day-drinking, but Jared didn’t usually imbibe first thing in the morning. Maybe things had changed since he’d been spending so much time out on that claim of his. Living alone could change a man, and not for the better. She put a glass on the table and dribbled amber liquid into it. “You sure?” she asked, but he was already reaching for the glass.

Missy wasn’t one to pry, so she went on about her business, wiping tables and spooning out eggs onto empty tin plates. Little Pete wandered in, looking dazed after a night of carousing and a nap behind someone’s barn, and she poured black coffee into a mug and told him not to say a word until after he’d finished every drop. Little Pete was always less of a bear with a sore head after he’d had a good black cup of coffee. She looked over her shoulder and saw Jared using a butter knife to slit open an envelope from the pile of mail beside him. If she wasn’t very mistaken, his hands were shaking.

Missy had only seen Jared so upset once before, and that was when he’d first come to Bradshaw, a few years ago. Back when Matt was still his inseparable twin, or no, his faithful hound dog, was more like it. He’d been a somber man, jumping at the sound of a woman’s laughter, haunting the post office after every train. Some woman had done something awful to Jared, Missy could tell, but she’d never asked and he’d never volunteered. Even when he’d sat at the saloon until late, he was a quiet drunk, not a talkative one. In that, he was unusual… a welcome change.
 

Missy had learned far more than she’d ever wanted to know about the secrets in the hearts of Bradshaw’s men, in her years working for the Professor. There were repentant murderers among them, and unrepentant thieves. There were tragedies that had yet to play out. Mark Heyward was in debt to his eyeballs and had just bought a new cultivator from back east on credit. Sanders Kane was trying to make enough money to win the approval of a New York heiress’s family, something Missy knew was never going to happen out here on the prairie. There might be gold in the black soil, but she doubted it would ever be enough gold for an heiress.

But Jared had never let her know, not once, what was eating at him. This past year, he’d lightened up, she’d thought. He’d let go of his old problems. But now, she could see as he hunched over whatever had been in that envelope, it looked like his problems had caught up with him.
 

She considered her next move for a long moment, then made up her mind. She slipped behind the bar and sidled up to Jared. “Another?” she asked when he didn’t lift his head.

“Another,” he grunted. He folded up the letter and looked at her with hard eyes. “And another.”

Missy poured the drinks and went about her business, hassling Cook for more eggs. It was ten minutes before she looked back at the bar, and when she did, all that was left was two empty glasses and a crumple of money. Whatever Jared was dealing with, she thought, he’d deal with it alone, like he always did. Man was a loner through and through.

***

Jared dropped the mail on the half-moon table in the Barnsley’s front hallway as casually as if nothing untoward had happened. But he excused himself from joining the Barnsleys at breakfast, giving Cherry a distracted kiss in the stable while he saddled the roan, explaining that he had to do some fence work that would take the better part of the day. “I’ll be back for dinner, darlin’,” he told her when she protested. “Tell Patty you have a feeling she ought to set another place. But let me go and get this work done. The days are getting so short and I want to be sure I have a little more sheltered pasture for the cattle before the snows set in.”

He was crafty, knowing that she couldn’t help but agree with a farmer’s request, and with downcast eyes she took her hands from the roan’s reins so that he could leave. He felt a stab of guilt, knowing that he was tricking her into letting him go without question, when all he wanted was to get away from her so that he could
think.
And if he’d turned back, as a man should have done, to wave good-bye, he would have seen her trembling hand raised in farewell, but his thoughts were utterly consumed by that elegant script on the envelope in his jacket pocket, and his guilt flushed up in his face even as he set his spurs to the roan and set off galloping across the prairie. He never turned around.

He didn’t know what he could solve by running away. But he did know that he couldn’t think clearly around Cherry. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to tell her what was in the letter in his pocket.
 

He had to find some way to keep this bombshell from blowing up his world around his ears.

***

Cherry watched him with dull eyes until he disappeared. So that was it, then, she thought. He must really and truly regret what had happened the night before, to just leave her like that. Extra fence work, huh! He had strung barbed wire across what seemed like miles and miles of green grass up there on the claim. He had plenty of pasture-land already. She doubted there was any more land to his name that
hadn’t
been fenced in. For a former roving cowboy, he had embraced the barbed wire that shut in the range with as surprising devotion. Before, she had thought that was a promising sign that he really did intend to settle down and stay put in Bradshaw, embrace the life of a farmer once and for all. But if he was going to be so changeable, one moment in love with her and vowing to never leave her, and the next giving her a half-hearted kiss while he tacked up his horse to get away from her as quickly as possible, then she didn’t really know what to think!