The Renegades: Nick (10 page)

The older man in the group ahead of Callie in line called to Baxter.

“You’re a fool, man! He ain’t no Indian; his eyes is as gray as mine.”

“You never seen a blue-eyed Indian?” Baxter shot back, and marched indignantly on down the street.

Callie resumed her place in line, Nickajack right behind her. Her heart was beating a hundred times too fast and the same number of emotions pulled her heart in every direction.

“I told you,” he muttered, in a low tone to the top of her head, “not to let anyone else know my name.”

She whirled and glared up at him.

“You were about to be knocked senseless. How could I think?”

His gray eyes held hers. He was truly angry!

“Well, it’s your own fault!” she cried defensively. “What are you doing following me around, anyhow?”

His scowl grew terrible.

“I have every right to come to town,” he said, in a still quieter tone as if trying to make her lower hers.

A man’s voice interrupted from behind her.

“This little lady’s a hero,” he said. “Ma’am, may I be so bold as to introduce myself? I’m Roger Timmons, your sincere admirer.”

Callie turned to see the young man who’d been teaching about raising corn bow to her, sweeping off his hat.

“May I commend you for your quick action,”
he said with a reproving glance at Nick, whose look grew even blacker.

Callie couldn’t suppress a sudden grin.

“Why, thank you, Mr. Timmons. My name is Callie Sloane.”

Then she added mischievously, “This gentleman is Mr. Smith, my neighbor.”

Somehow, she still didn’t trust herself not to say “Nickajack.” That name seemed the right one for him.

“We’re the Fletchers,” the man who had called out to Baxter said, as Mr. Timmons’ former audience moved up to join in the socializing. “And these are our neighbors, the Sumners.”

Nick shook hands with the men.

“Whereabouts is your claim, Miss Sloane?” Mrs. Sumner asked.

“Over in the Chikaskia Creek country.”

“Oh! And ours, too!”

“We’re all neighbors, then!”

“What great fortune that we’re all here on the same day!”

When the excitement had died down, Mr. Fletcher looked down his long nose and fixed his blue eyes on Callie as if she were a possibly naughty child.

“You’re a woman alone? To prove out a claim?”

Callie decided that Mrs. Fletcher’s questioning
look must be caused by her years of marriage to an overly inquisitive man.

And Timmons was another one.

“Miss Sloane, are you aimin’ to farm?” he said.

She made her tone very firm and confident.

“No, I’m proving out a claim and building a house on it, but I plan to be a teacher.”

And if that were to come about, she’d better make one thing very clear.

“Also, it’s
Mrs
. Sloane. I’m a widow.”

“Sorry for your loss,” Mr. Fletcher said briskly, “but I reckon a widow can be a teacher same as an unmarried lady, ‘specially out here, where we’d feared there’d be no teachers at all.”

A great flurry of talk rose all at once, since all of them except Mr. Timmons had children—three in the Sumner household and nine in the Fletchers’—and were eager for a school.

“But ma’am, you’re no bigger than a cricket,” Mr. Fletcher said. “Can you make the big boys behave?”

“Yes. I raised seven brothers while my mother and Granny cooked and kept house, and I’ve already taught school a year back home in Kentucky.”

That pleased them even more, and a few more minutes of conversation had Callie feeling that all she had to do to be a teacher was drive straight out to her claim and ring the
bell. Mrs. Sumner began counting all the children she knew would be living on the nearby claims.

“Do you have any children, Mr. Smith?”

Nick, who had been silent throughout the discussion, waited a long moment.

“No, ma’am,” he said finally. “I’m a bachelor.”

He spoke absently, glancing at a man in a white shirt with gartered sleeves who was working his way down the line with a handful of papers. Callie looked at the man in horror. Obviously he was an official of some kind. Had he been out here all the time? Had he heard Baxter call Nickajack a Cherokee?

“That’s the clerk,” Mrs. Sumner said. “He comes out every so often to hand out the numbers that mark our place in line.”

“I’m sure the officials will be happy to see us all registered at the end of the day,” Callie said.

“Oh, they won’t register us today,” Mr. Sumner said. “All your number will get you inside is another paper telling you when to come back. They’re trying to scatter us out some.”

“Too many of us here at once,” Mr. Timmons announced pompously. “We can’t all register on the same day.”

Callie stared at them in disbelief.

“You mean I’ll have to make another trip? I won’t be done today?”

“Nope. You’ll have to come back on whatever day they assign you during the next three months.”

Furious disappointment bloomed inside her, taking up every inch of space inside her skin. Blast it all! She had driven those monster animals of hers all this way, only to have it to do over again!

The clerk reached her, silently handed her a square of paper with the number 144 written in wide pen strokes, passed on, and gave 145 to Nick. Instinctively she swung around to watch, and thought she saw the clerk give him a strange look—maybe an appraising look for Indian blood.

As soon as Nick had his number in hand, he strode toward the Land Office as if it were a ticket to get inside. Several people muttered their surprise, and all of them watched him. The sun beat down on Callie’s head like a hammer on a nail.

Where was he going? And what did she care? Hadn’t he just spurned her after she’d saved his life?

Yet the sight of his snug, weathered cabin and the sweet-smelling barn flashed across her mind. He had lived there with his parents. That was his old homeplace. He loved that piece of land like she loved the mountains.
What if she had caused him to lose it to that awful Baxter?

Nick took the three steps up to the Land Office porch in one leap and cut through the people at the head of the line like Moses parting the Red Sea. He disappeared through the door.

“Wonder what he’s up to?” Mr. Sumner said.

Everyone seemed to wait for Callie to answer, so she did.

“I have no idea.”

“Well, I have an idea,” Roger Timmons said, looking around the little circle of neighbors. “Why don’t we all drive home together? That way, we won’t have our single lady going alone.”

Callie tried to smile, in spite of the way his use of the word “our” grated on her nerves, but she had to bite her tongue to keep from making a sharp remark in front of her future scholars’ parents. What a pompous person he was! And she had thought Mr. Fletcher was nosy!

“Oh, thank you,” she said, as graciously as she could, “but I have some errands to do and don’t know when I’ll be returning.”

The other women began giving her advice about the best places to trade in town, for they had been there overnight and felt like experienced travelers. Callie tried to pay attention, although the thought of spending any more of
her meager amount of money made her stomach clutch in fear. She would have to buy food all winter, and from what her neighbors were saying, the prices here were worse than she had imagined.

“There he is,” Roger Timmons said.

They all turned to see Nick almost upon them.

“Mrs. Sloane, may I impose upon you to come with me for a moment? I would be much obliged for the use of your wagon to take home some supplies.”

She could only stare at him.

He actually flashed a thin version of his stunning smile at her, and then at the others.

“My packhorse turned up lame this morning and I couldn’t bring him,” he said smoothly. “You’d be saving me from starvation.”

Liar, liar, pants on fire
.

But she couldn’t say that with everyone watching, with Mrs. Fletcher making sympathetic noises and Mrs. Sumner, she now saw, gazing up raptly at Nickajack’s handsome face. Refusing to haul his suddenly urgently needed supplies would be a serious breach of rural etiquette—one serious enough to make these people think twice about entrusting their children to her as a teacher.

What in the world was he doing? For days
he had avoided her; now he was forcing himself into her company.

“You’ll have to wait until I’m ready to leave,” she said, “since I wrestled my obnoxious team all those miles to register my claim, not to start a freight service.”

He touched his folded number in the pocket of his shirt.

“The officials have assured me that these numbers are sufficient to hold our places in line,” he said. “We’ll be back in plenty of time.”

“How do you know that?” Roger Timmons demanded.

“They say it’ll be at least an hour until they reach number 100,” Nick replied.

He laid his hand possessively against her back, as he had done when she ran to warn him, and his huge palm and every finger set fire to her skin through her dress and her shift, as if she wore nothing at all.

Her treacherous body betrayed her will every time.

“Then come with me,” she said shortly, angry at herself as much as at him.

“It’s been nice visiting with all of you,” she said, forcing a smile for her new acquaintances.

They replied in kind and Nick escorted her out into the street. They waited for a wagon to pass in its cloud of dust.

“Now we can get home before it storms,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Leaving this town. Standing in line at the land office is no place to be when a storm blows through.”

“What storm are you talking about? And what about our registration assignments? I’m not leaving without one.”

“I got ‘em,” he said, moving on out between vehicles and horses, “for a week from today, the first day of actual registration.”

“Both of us? How?”

“A small bribe to a government official.”

She stopped in her tracks in the middle of the street until he pulled her forward.

“But that’s illegal!” she cried, feeling swept away by more forces beyond her control than his strong arm. “I resent it completely. You took it upon yourself to bribe someone on my behalf and without my permission!”

He flashed her a crooked grin. He looked for all the world like a mischievous boy.

“How dare you do something that might cost me my claim!”

She jerked away from him and stood staring.

“Back home, we know better than to ever trust a federal official. You should know that, too!”

He watched her, obviously waiting for her to calm down.

“Why would you take such a chance, Nick, after what Baxter said?”

She lowered her voice.

“What if that clerk heard him?”

“Better to strike first,” he said, “and let somebody know I might make it worth his while not to listen to gossip.”

“But you didn’t have to risk my claim! You cannot make such a presumption as to speak for me! That’s unforgivable!”

“You should thank me,” he said, “instead of bawling me out.”

She glared up at him. “My sentiments exactly, when I kept you from being brained by a falling two-by-four.”

He didn’t even have the grace to look chagrined.

“I’m going right back to the Land Office this minute and tell them you had no right to speak for me!”

He didn’t turn a hair. “And wait in line for two hours to get a registration date three months from now? Giving Baxter time to file before you can?”

That stopped her.

For a long time, she couldn’t even speak. They stood staring at each other while people walked around them and moved up and down the street.

“You are without a doubt the most infuriating man I’ve ever met in my entire life.”

He smiled down into her eyes, and the heat of her anger flamed into desire.

“Maybe so,” he drawled. “But I’m the man you won’t forget for the
rest
of your life.”

C
allie still could not believe Nick had said such a thing. Not even an hour later, after they’d ordered his supplies, brought her wagon to the back of the mercantile to load them, and driven down the crowded street to leave Santa Fe behind. As they took the faint trail across the prairie, she sat beside him on the wagon seat and sneaked a glance at his finely chiseled profile.

He must have meant that she would never forget him for his take-over-her-business bossiness. It was true that no one could ever be his equal in that.

But the look he’d given her, with his gray eyes hot as smoke, had said he meant something
else entirely. Could he really have been feeling the same unbidden desire that she’d felt at that moment?

It was hard for her to believe. Men didn’t usually feel that way about her, for she was not the kind of woman who caught their attention with a willowy way of moving, or flowing black hair and porcelain skin, or quiet, thoughtful sayings. She was quick in her ways and her talk, and had freckles dotting her nose, which was too short for her ever to be called beautiful.

She sneaked another look at him, at his hands this time, wide and brown and strong as hickory on the lines. Joe and Judy were minding him like the most perfect team in the world.

Surely that kiss when she’d fallen off Judy into his arms had been a kiss of relief. It must have been an instinctive reaction to an escape from danger for both of them—something that any man and woman in the world would have done. It had not meant anything more.

The only explanation for his constant poking about in her life and trying to take it over, the only one that made a lick of sense, was that he liked to boss a woman and took it as his right. That scary thought made her heart beat so fast and loud that he surely could hear it.

What an irony! She had traveled over a thousand miles, vowing every step of the way
that no one would ever have the power over her that her daddy had had, only to fall in with Nick Smith the very first thing.

“Now, Callie, admit it,” he drawled, sending her a teasing, sideways glance, “isn’t this a lot more pleasant than standing in line in the sun with Roger Timmons babbling in your ear?”

She gave him a sharp look of surprise. He almost sounded a tad bit jealous of Mr. Timmons’ attentions to her.

“Maybe so,” she said, “but if you really did spirit me away from there because you think it’ll storm, you might’ve warned my scholars’ parents. If they all blow away, I won’t have enough children for a school.”

He chuckled.

“But if they don’t, you’ve got the job. They all seemed quite taken with you.”

“Until I shamelessly went running off with you at the snap of your fingers. And what are they going to think of me when I don’t come back in an hour?”

“Next time we see them, we’ll explain that we saw a cloud coming up and decided to worry about registering our claims another day.”

We. Our claims
.

Any other time, she would have challenged that in her usual blunt fashion. She would have told him how strange that sounded, coming
from a man who had sneaked into her camp so he wouldn’t have to see or speak to her only three days before.

But it had a companionable sound, too, and those three days had been the lonesomest time of all her eighteen years. Baxter’s sudden voice behind her and his beady eyes boring into hers had been downright scary. And every time she thought about the price of beans and meal and dried jerky in the mercantile and the precious baby she had to feed through the winter, she felt even more scared.

Right now, with the far-off dark clouds beginning to roll on the horizon,
we
was a pleasant word to hear. She was a strong woman or she wouldn’t be in the Cherokee Strip in the first place. She was strong enough to hold her own with Nick Smith.

Who had inexplicably bribed an official to get her out of that crowded, dusty town and out here into the rising breeze.

The thought struck her like lightning.

“Blast it! There’s another debt. Nick, how much do I owe you for the bribe?”

He gave her a look that reminded her, she couldn’t say how, of his kiss.

“You’re paying it,” he said. “Hauling my supplies.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” she cried. “You never intended to buy supplies until you’d already paid …”

She stopped.

“Nick, you bought these supplies and asked me to haul them just so you could say that it’s payment for the bribe! You can’t do that—it doesn’t count. I’m determined to pay my way.”

“But
you
didn’t bribe anyone. So you’re right, it doesn’t count.”

She drew a long, deep breath and prepared to argue.

Nick gave her a quick, sideways smile that stayed her tongue.

He had a beautiful mouth. Gorgeous. It was strong and proud and generous all at once. And it tasted sweeter than berries and cream.

She wanted to taste it again.

Heat rose in her cheeks. If the Fletchers and the Sumners knew that she’d already shamelessly kissed her bachelor neighbor once, and was longing to do so again, they would never let her be their children’s teacher. When schools hired a woman, they preferred an innocent, never-married one who didn’t know any more about such doings than the children, so she couldn’t corrupt them.

Panic assailed her. What had her love for Vance been, a travesty? He’d been gone such a short time, and here she was, feeling this way about another man!

To make it worse, he turned to look full at her and his gaze slowly left her eyes and
drifted down to her lips. She felt the heat of it all the way down to her toes.

Never had there lived a more aggravating, arrogant man—and she actually felt this way about him!

“You needn’t sit so close,” she snapped, and scooted even more toward her end of the seat. “There’s plenty of room here.”

“Pretty soon there will be,” he drawled, “because you’ll be off in the dirt if you run away from me any more.” The chuckle in his voice made her face even hotter.

“I am not running away from you!”

To prove it, she slid toward him again and accidentally overdid it, ending up with her thigh pressed to his for a moment. Just that brief touch set her blood on fire. His muscles were like living iron, incredibly unyielding and powerful. Like the compelling look in his eyes.

It gave her a craving to taste his wide, sensual mouth again—which was all his fault. That kiss had been the sneakiest thing he’d ever done—including creeping into her camp to return the wheel without one word.

“I want you to take me seriously,” she said, primly sitting away from him again. “How much do I owe you for the bribe?”

He slanted a long, slow look at her.

“Let’s wait and see if it works,” he said.

His eyelids grew heavier and at last he let
his gaze drift to her mouth, where it lingered.

“I do take you seriously, Callie.”

His voice held the slightest edge of teasing, which irritated her.

“Is that why you followed me to town today? Do you take me so seriously that you watch my camp all the time, so you can sneak in and out when I’m not there and trail me if I go someplace?”

He grinned.

“Right. And in between I ride six or seven head of horses and do all my chores.”

“Why are you riding so many every day?”

“To get them started on a useful life. To fit them to sell.”

“Do you think you can sell enough to make your living?”

He nodded and glanced back at his big black horse, tied to the wagon.

“That’s the plan. The Shifter and I don’t want to be hitched to a plow.”

“So the settlers you call intruders and always want to send to perdition will be your customers,” she said. “You’ll make your livelihood off them.”

“Maybe,” he said wryly. “But if they weren’t here I could sell to the cattlemen who’d still be leasing the Strip.”

“But then you wouldn’t have anybody to follow around.”

Anger sent a dark flush across his high cheekbones.

“I told you before, I don’t want to ride up on your dead body one of these days on my way to town. That mare of yours is wild as a buck, and I didn’t know whether you could keep her from running away with the wagon the way she did with you on her back.”

“I told you before, I came out here to prove up a claim alone, and I can do it.”

But her silly heart was beating out of her chest because he really did care if she lived or died.

He cocked his head and regarded her studiously from beneath the brim of his hat.

“You’ve got the try,” he said, and she heard admiration in his resigned tone.

Well. Caring and admiration both in the same day.

“
You’ve
got the mystery,” she said. “You don’t speak to me for days, not even when you bring back my wheel, but then you worry about me enough to follow me.”

“I reckon I was bound not to speak to you if you didn’t want me to,” he said. “I haven’t forgotten that silent ride taking you home from my place, which you wanted to leave so bad that you couldn’t even stay until your clothes got dry.”

Nick heard those words come out of his mouth, he knew it was his voice saying them,
but he still couldn’t believe he had spoken his feelings right out loud. What had come over him?

Callie gave him a sharp look.

“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” she said. “But I was … torn up by my memories that day.”

Great. Not only had he sounded like a whiny child, he had reminded her of her dead husband when she hadn’t been thinking about him at all.

“My feelings weren’t hurt,” he said quickly.

“Why not? I hardly said a word to you all the way to my place.”

“I didn’t wait to see you when I brought back your wheel because I was ashamed for letting you take that Judy home without me putting a few days on her,” he improvised.

“That’s not your responsibility,” she said. “But if you’re still willing to do that, when I get my school I’ll pay you to teach her to behave.”

That made him feel like a lazy skinflint.

“I’ll do it for free,” he said quickly.

“Why?”

That was Callie, always cutting to the quick.

“Because she’s a mighty challenge,” he said, and they both laughed.

Because I never knew anyone like you. Because I’d want to kill myself if that horse hurt you
.

“Then why did you let me bring her back?”

To keep from getting tied to you. To keep from seeing you and talking to you and wanting to hear your voice
.

To keep from wanting to kiss you again
.

“So you could go somewhere if you wanted to. Ol’ Joe probably couldn’t pull this wagon all by himself.”

Sudden darkness fell as a cloud blew across the sun.

Callie examined the sky. “You may be right,” she said. “I think it’ll storm.”

“You can bet I’m right. But if you listen to me and do what I say, you’ll be all right.”

She laughed and turned her face away from the rising wind.

“Oh, sure, and who saved
you
from a two-by-four slamming into your head?”

He chuckled. “You’ll never let me forget about it, will you?”

“Never.”

Now, why had he said that? It sounded as if they planned to be together for months—or years—when that could never be true.

He scanned the sky, noting the gray-blue cloud layers building a wall in the southwest, feeling the heaviness of the air and the new moisture it held. The wind rattled his hat on his head.

“We may have to hunt a hole,” he said. “It’s hot enough to brew up a big one.”

“Big what?”

“Dancing devil, my daddy called them. Cyclone, the white folks say.”

“Would your daddy ever have thrown you off your homeplace—for any reason?”

The question sliced at his heart because of the hurt she tried to hide in her carefully calm tone.

“Only if I
really
crossed the line in a big way,” he said. “If I hit my mother or set fire to the barn or ruined a horse on purpose.”

He held his breath, paralyzed by the sudden, sharp need to know more about her.

“Did your …”

The word came slow to his tongue. Because he hated to think of her with another man.

“… Husband’s people run him off, too, when you married?”

She opened her mouth, then hesitated. She laid her hand on her belly.

He waited.

Thunder sounded, way in the distance. Judy pricked her ears toward the sound, lifted her head and tossed it, then tried her best to bolt, kicking at Joe as an afterthought. Nick got her back in line and still Callie hadn’t answered.

Did you husband love you? Did he treat you right? What kind of a man was he, Callie?

“You know, Callie,” he said, trying for a light tone to get him out of this, “that’s what you need. A husband. Then you’d never have to drive this pair of knotheads again.”

The instant the words left his lips, he wished for them back. How idiotically cruel! She was
grieving
for her husband. Or was she?

“Well,
you
need a wife,” she said sharply. “So why don’t you worry about that before you start faunching around about my not having a husband?”

Thank God she got prickly instead of sad.

“There’s no comparison,” he said.

She whooped with laughter, grabbing at her bonnet as the wind grew even stronger.

“There most certainly is! You’re saying a wife isn’t as necessary as a husband?”

“I can cook enough not to starve and I can clean my own cabin.”

“And that’s all a wife is good for?”

Instantly she clamped her mouth shut, regretting the words.

He smiled, enjoying her discomfiture, turning full on to give her a look. She blushed deep pink.

“Well,” he drawled, one eyebrow raised, “I didn’t say that.”

She would be a little hellion of a wife, that was for sure. A man would never be bored.

He couldn’t resist teasing her some more.

“And I’m not saying a woman doesn’t need a husband for more than putting rims back on wagon wheels and driving a team.”

He let the words lie between them.