Chapter 5

 

Lacey hummed softly as she stemmed dark blue elderberries for a pie. The fragrance of the tart juice permeated the air, adding to the delicious aroma of pie crust baking in the big oven. A small, dreamy smile curved her mouth. Inside her head, she wasn't in the kitchen of the Sagebrush Princess. She inhabited a snug home of her own, with a husband who resembled Buck Maddux seated across from her, telling her how much he loved her.

"Ya about done, honey?" Big Red's soft Southern voice burst the bubble of Lacey's vision, yanking her back to reality.

Glancing up, she watched Red plunge a blunt needle threaded with jade green yarn into the fine-meshed needlepoint canvas on her lap. "Oh, Red, that pillow's going to be beautiful. I can't believe what you can do with a few bits of yarn. Wish I had some sort of talent."

"Don't ya be putting yourself down, Lacey. Ya can cook, and cooking's everythin’ to a man, ya know. Ah caint even boil water."

"Well, cooking's not enough to get me out of this hellhole." Lacey sighed. "Wish these berries weren't so dang small, but I'm about done. Finally.”

"Good." Red turned her needlework over and secured the tail of her yarn beneath the backs of the finished stitches. "Smell's making me hungrier’n a pregnant possum in a pear tree."

Lacey giggled. "There aren’t any possums in Utah, Red."

"Don't ah know it. Just thinking ‘bout 'em makes me feel closer to Georgia, though."

"You miss home that much?"

"Not home," Red said with a snort. "Just Georgia. Ah surely don't miss that hovel ah came from. Or my pa, and his razor strap."

Bitterness salted the slightly older girl's voice. Lacey's eyes widened. "He beat you?"

"With a vengeance."

"Was that . . . all he did?"

Red looked up. "Why, Lacey, ya got fear in your eyes. Your pa beat you, too, didn't he?"

She turned away, shame heating up her cheeks. "No. Not . . . not unless he had to."

"Whaddya mean, less’n he had to?"

The words were too ugly to speak aloud. Lacey covered her face with juice-stained hands and tried to blink away the tears. Wood scraped against wood as Red left her chair and moved to stand beside her.

"Ya mean, less’n ya refused to give him what he wanted? Aw, Lacey, honey. What’d that awful old man do to ya?"

The sincerity of Red's empathy and the gentleness of her hand lightly squeezing Lacey's shoulder was the girl's undoing. She sobbed as she hadn't since that first terrible night her pa crawled in her bed when she was five. At last Lacey managed to quit crying. Red gave her one last squeeze, went to the stove and poured coffee for them. Lacey dabbed her eyes with the hem of her apron and began stemming berries again. To her relief, nothing more was said about her pa.

Whoops of laughter from the saloon penetrated the walls, demolishing the women's peace. Someone belched loudly and fists banged on the bar. Until that moment the kitchen had been an island of calm in the sea of revelry going on in the saloon. Now not even the thick oak of the door kept out the noise.

"Gawd," Big Red muttered. "Listen to ‘em out there, like a swarm of flies on a fresh carcass.”

"Can't blame them. Jonas getting left at the altar is funnier than the night Doc got caught with you and told his wife it was his job to make sure he'd healed up that Cupid's itch you got off a sheepherder."

"Ah fail to see how you kin call that funny. She shot the poor old swillpot right there in my bed."

"I know. Lucky his ass was so well padded or the bullet might’ve gone clean through and nailed you too."

Red stood abruptly, went to the sink and tossed out her coffee with a vengeance. The cup flew from her hand and shattered. “How am ah gonna stand it, Lacey? Ah thought ah was free of him, thanks to that little widow. Now . . ."

The door swung open and Stud Wiley stuck his head around the corner. "Lacey, you're wanted out here."

"Who?" she asked.

"Hitch."

Lacey squeezed her eyes shut and groaned. Of all the men who came to her, Hitch Conners was the most difficult to bear. "Be there in a minute."

At the sink Lacey cleared out the broken crockery and scrubbed berry juice from her hands with lye soap. She dried off on a piece of toweling and turned to Red. Without a word, they hugged.

Lacey had barely entered the bar when the front door opened. The wind wrenched it out of Jonas Creedy's hand and slammed it against the wall, letting in a cloud of dust. Every head at the bar swiveled to see who had come in, and a silence more profound than a minister's pause descended on the saloon. Jonas slapped his hat against his leg to knock off the dirt and glowered at the solemn crowd. "What’re you staring at, ya whiskey-soaked jackasses?"

At once, men pivoted back to the bar and picked up their glasses. They coughed into their hands, cleared their throats, and gulped their drinks. Stud Wiley polished glasses. "Well, gentlemen, who can tell us the latest on the boxing circuit?"

"Saw a good match in Salt Lake City last week," said John Bennet, "between a big black soldier from Fort Union and a runt no taller than Swede's kneecaps. Little no-account proved slipperier than a greased eel. Before the black landed a single punch, the runt laid him out cold. Never saw the like of it anywhere."

Jonas stalked over to Lacey. "Red got a customer upstairs?"

The girl studied her small hands. "No, she's in the kitchen."

"Dammit, is she sewing again?"

"It-it's called needlepoint, Jonas."

"I don't give a pig's pink ass what it's called." Jonas headed for the kitchen. "She's supposed to be upstairs taking care of customers, not sitting on her rear in the kitchen. 'Bout time she learned her place once and for all."

He closed the door behind him, but everyone at the bar heard him yelling. He came back out, dragging Red by the arm. For a few minutes after the door to Big Red's room banged shut upstairs the only sounds were the slurps of men guzzling liquor, an awkward cough, shoe leather scuffing the brass rail, and the metallic splatter of tobacco juice in spittoons.

"Hot today, for September," Stud said after a while.

Moose Hoffstetter nodded. "Too hot."

"Wind'll cool it off." John Bennet set his empty beer glass down with a clunk. "Got critters to feed."

"Yeah, I got work to do too."

Bennet and Hoffstetter headed for the door. It was like opening the floodgate on an irrigation ditch. Within five minutes the saloon was empty except for Stud, Rueben, Lacey, and a few no-goods who were reluctant to miss the show the others wanted to avoid. Everyone knew what was happening upstairs and how it would end—same way it always ended when Jonas went to Red's room full of anger. She would wear bruises when she came back down. The tension was thick as axle grease, the silence ominous. Lacey wished with all her heart she could escape like Bennet, Moose Hoffstetter and the others.

Hitch left his place at the bar and sidled up to her. He ran a dirty finger up her bare arm to the cap sleeve of her dress, underneath the fabric and down toward her breast. "Why'nt we go up to your room fer a spell, Lacey, see what comes up, eh?" He laughed at his joke, expecting the others to join in.

Lacey averted her gaze from the puckered scar that pulled his mouth down on one side, deforming his smile. She had given up hoping she would stop feeling repulsed every time a man asked her to lift her skirts for him. With Hitch, it wasn't the scar that repelled her, but was his smell, his crudeness, and the fact that his lank, greasy hair housed more lice than a hound's belly.

"Sorry, Hitch,” she said. "Scotty Carmichael fell asleep up there and hasn't come down yet."

"Well, hell, you jest prance up there and wake him, girlie. He got what he paid for. Now it's my turn."

"He isn't feeling well. He's old, you know, and he was really upset about his daughter . . ." Her words faded.

Pain lanced Lacey. Buck hadn't been honest with her. Maddux wasn't even his name. It was Skeet Whitney, and he was married to Scotty's daughter. He was the finest man who’d ever come into her life, and he had lied to her. Or had he? He hadn’t acted like a man who had a wife nearby. He hadn’t acted like a married man at all. But if he wasn’t Skeet Whitney, why had he said he was? The whole affair confused Lacey. Whether he was married or not, she was a fool to have hoped he would take her away with him. Course, the world was full of fools.

Hitch opened his twisted mouth to argue with her, and at that instant a scream ripped through the building.

Big Red's panicked voice came down to the men and the young whore listening below. "No, Jonas. Please . . . Oh God, oh God. No!"

Lacey clapped her hands over her ears as that last frantic, pain-filled cry died away.

Hitch giggled and elbowed his friend in the ribs. "That ol' boy's getting him some good stuff, jest like I tole you he would. Shit, but I'd love to be a fly on the wall up there. That'd be some gawddamn sight to see, wouldn't it?"

Stud whirled toward the cowhand, his mouth carved in a snarl. "You got more filth in your brain than on your boots, you know that, Hitch? You've drunk your fill here. You want anything else, go across the street to the Swede's place. More your style anyway."

The cowpuncher had no chance to reply. A gunshot, exploding overhead, cut his words off short.

* * *

"Your bath's waiting, Angel." Tempest scooped up Ethan and herded her small daughter toward the bedroom. "You can play with Buck tomorrow."

"Need any help?" Buck asked.

"No thanks."

Tempest sat down in the rocker and began to undress her son, ignoring Buck when he came and leaned against the wall, his eyes sweeping the crowded room. She hated that the kerosene lamp exposed inadequacies he might have missed in his first viewing. The wooden wash tub stood on a scraped hide just inside the curtained doorway where the heat could reach it from the cook stove. A stool held flour-sack towels and a bar of lye soap on a cracked saucer. Tempest knew it wouldn’t look like much to a man who had "been most everywhere" and "done most everything." It wasn’t the nicest place she'd ever lived either.

Angel struggled to pull off her dress. The skirt covered her head and her arms tangled in the sleeves. Before Tempest could finish with Ethan and help her, Buck walked over and freed the girl. Underneath, Angel wore a pair of flour-sack drawers. Buck hesitated, as though reluctant to touch such personal garments, even on a child. Unaware, and totally uninhibited, the four-year-old stripped herself naked. The tender amusement in Buck's smile as he watched Angel skip over to the tub and climb inside brought a lump to Tempest's throat. A natural, everyday family scene. Yet nothing could have been further from the truth.

She dropped Ethan's diaper to the floor and set him in the tub beside his sister. The boy laughed up at his mother as she scrubbed him down. When she finished, she handed him to Buck. "Here, dry him off."

"Me?"

His horror answered a question she’d been afraid to voice; he had no children of his own. “It won’t hurt you to make yourself useful.”

Awkward as a pig in satin slippers, Buck took the dripping boy and wrapped him in a towel.

"I want Mithter Buck to wath me, Mama," Angel said.

"Forget it. You're not climbing in my bed until every layer of dirt is gone."

"She could sleep out front," Buck suggested with a leer. "That way there'd be room in here for me."

Tempest almost smiled. He didn’t act like a man who had a wife either. At least she could deal with his libidinous suggestions easier than his sporadic moments of gentleness. She shafted him a look that would have scalded the hide off a buffalo at twenty paces. "You know how to put a diaper on?" she asked. Buck cast the boy a nervous glance as though wondering when Ethan had last wet. "Never mind," she told him. "I'll diaper him while you dry Angel."

Angel's drying session turned into a tickling session. The devil had her laughing so hard she got hiccups. Melancholy tinged Tempest's smile. Skeet had always been too busy to play with his daughter. It hurt to know the man responsible for the new joy in Angel's eyes would soon be gone, leaving Tempest to deal with her daughter's sorrow and confusion. Suddenly irritated, she said, "That's enough. You'll have her sick, or so wound up she'll never go to sleep."

Ethan, on the other hand, was already asleep in the big bed. Tempest helped Angel into her gown and tucked her under the covers. Ethan was making soft noises midway between a hum and a coo. Buck walked over and looked down at the boy in the dim light, a frown marring his brow.

"He always sounds that way when he sleeps." Tempest hung up Angel's dress and took down her own nightgown.

Buck turned from the bed. "Want me to empty the tub?"

"No, I'll add some hot water and use it myself first."

He glanced again at the children sleeping in the bed and Tempest thought she saw a deep yearning in his eyes. One that had nothing to do with her, or with sex. A haunted sort of yearning full of pain, loneliness and loss. He blinked and the expression disappeared. His gaze circled back to her, his devil's smile firmly in place again. "Don’t suppose you want any help," he offered wolfishly. "I'm mighty good at scrubbing backs."

The tiny smile that curved her mouth came unbidden. Such an enigma, he was. Dark and haunted one moment, light and flippant the next. Every time she thought she had him figured out, he switched horses on her, until she didn't know what to expect. She suspected he used deviltry to conceal the goodness in him, as though he had some perverse need to be seen as nothing more than an aimless, womanizing drifter.

Taller than Skeet, Buck was more muscular, but no better looking. Skeet had been beautiful, with a classical face and golden blonde hair that curled when damp and fell into his eyes. He had been sunshine and summer grass. Buck Maddux was a moonless midnight with dark promises hidden in sultry shadows. Compared to Buck, Skeet had been a guileless boy, an innocent. Tempest thought of all she had suffered because of that artless boy and shuddered to think what a man like Buck could do to her. Her smile died. "I'll scrub my own back, thank you."

She shoved him through the doorway, devil’s smile and all, and yanked the curtain shut.

"I'll bed down outside," he said through the thin fabric. "I'm used to it and you'll be more comfortable with me out of the house."

There he went again, changing horses. Even so, she was relieved. "Thank you, Mr. Maddux."

"Call me Buck." He paused. "Don't reckon my 'wife' would consider giving her husband a goodnight kiss."

She couldn’t help laughing. Whatever else Buck Maddux might be he was entertaining. “No. Do you need any blankets?"

"No, my bedroll's in the barn, but thanks for asking."

His footsteps retreated across the room.

“Wait, Mr. Maddux.” She peeked out.

His hand was on the latch. “Buck.”

“Buck.” She hesitated. “Did Skeet tell you anything about where he hid the stolen payroll?” It wasn’t what she’d meant to ask, though she did want to know.

“A few words that made no sense,” he said. “The Army made a thorough search and found nothing, not the place, not the money. Don’t reckon we could find it, if they couldn’t.”

“I suppose not. Well, goodnight.”

“Goodnight.” He started to close the door, and stopped. “I have a question for you. Why Hearts-ease?”

Surprised, she explained, “It’s a flower, a viola. Some people call it Johnny-Jump-Up. Folks make it into a syrup to cure pleurisy, falling sickness, inflammation of the lungs and—” she blushed “—certain male afflictions.”

He grinned. One brow rose in challenge. “Such as?

She simply looked away.

“Cupid’s itch?” he persisted. “French gout? Ladies fever? Or—not quite so fancy—plain old pox?”

Scowling, she said, “There’s no need to be crude, Mr. Maddux.”

“Buck.” His smile faded and he looked chagrined. “You’re right. Afraid I’m no longer accustomed to company as . . . genteel as yours. I apologize.”

Mollified by the genuineness of his apology and the loneliness in his eyes, she regretted her grumpiness. “Buck?”

Turning, he waited.

“After years of being dragged from town to town while Skeet gambled, I was sorely in need of something . . . secure,” she said diffidently. “This land isn’t much, but it has eased my heart.”

Empathy softened his expression.

Taking courage, she said, “I hope staying here won’t cause you problems. I mean, if there’s someone waiting for you . . .”

“Like a wife?” His eyes darkened.

Tempest nodded, alarmed by his pain and anger.

“No,” he said curtly. “My wife’s dead.” The door closed and he was gone.

For a long time Tempest stared at the door. Such a complex man. She doubted she would ever understand him, even if he stayed long enough to get to know. He had asked her for a kiss. It had been forever since anyone had kissed her, except for the children. She brushed her fingers over her lips, wondering what kissing him would be like. Heat swirled inside her body. Shaking away the forbidden image, she undressed.

* * *

Midnight found Buck tossing and turning on the bed he'd laid out under a cottonwood tree near the creek. He could hear the sluggish gurgle of the water and see the stars that dotted the sky like scattered grains of gleaming white sand. Sights and sounds he’d learned to treasure during the hell of the last two years. But tonight they did little to ease the restlessness in his soul.

It was just as well she didn’t invite him to her bed. Not only because he didn’t dare become involved with a woman like her, but because he feared he’d make a fool of himself. For two years he’d slept in a windowless cubicle barely big enough to house the two bunks. The stench of the open buckets that served as chamber pots and the soft night noises of scavenging rats defied a man's efforts to sleep. At Lacey’s he’d been able to leave the windows open so he could feel the breeze and see the stars. Unfortunately, Tempest’s bedroom had no windows. Hell, what hope did he have for a normal life when he couldn't even accustom himself to sleeping indoors?

Coyotes announced a kill up one of the draws, filling the night with eerie yips and howls. Closer by, an owl hooted. Buck sighed. The air was brisk, clean. No prison stink. High above, the dark silhouette of the canyon wall was like a jagged rip in the deep indigo sky.

The clopping of iron-shod hooves on the wooden bridge ended Buck’s musings. Tossing his blanket aside, he snatched up his six-shooter. He didn't bother with his boots. Keeping to the shadows of willows and greasewood, and hoping he wouldn’t stumble into any prickly pear cactus, he crept closer.

Ronan Carmichael rode a mule more grizzled than himself. A swaybacked nag so ugly Buck thought it might be a kindness to put a bullet in its head. A snail moved faster. Probably took the man two hours to travel the four miles from Harper.

The Scotsman halted in front of the dugout. Clumsily he dragged his leg over the mule's back and slid unsteadily to the ground. At least, one foot was on the ground; his left foot was hung up in the stirrup. Tempest's father was still trying to get his foot free when Buck walked up on the far side of the mule and rested his forearms on the animal's swayed back. The old Scotsman danced about, awkwardly trying to liberate himself and muttering what Buck supposed were Gaelic curses. When the foot finally came free, Carmichael lost his balance and would have fallen if he hadn't been hanging onto the saddle. He spotted Buck on the other side of the scrawny mule and peered blearily at him through bloodshot eyes.

"Who're you?" he slurred.

Remembering his new role, Buck replied, “Your son-in-law, Skeet Whitney."

“Ach.” Carmichael waved a hand at him. “Mon's dead, lemme alone." He swung about, wove dizzily, and fell. On hands and knees, he vomited into the weeds.

Buck cast heaven a disparaging glance.

When Carmichael quit retching, Buck helped him up and aimed him toward the house, following in case he fell again. It was a long journey. He had to help his "father-in-law" up twice more before they reached the front room where Carmichael curled up fully dressed on the floor near the stove and began to snore like a three-hundred pound hog rooting in slops.

Buck stared at the pathetic drunkard and wondered for the thousandth time what he had gotten himself into. A smart man would pack up and get the hell out. Christ only knew what sort of retaliation Jonas Creedy might attempt. Buck could find himself fighting for his life, as well the woman’s and her kids’. Hadn't he sacrificed enough for Skeet Whitney? Dammit, he had his own life to live, and he sure as Hades didn't intend to spend it here.

What would happen to Tempest if he left?

Quietly, he slipped into the back room. Her pale face barely showed in the flickering light of his candle, her unbound hair a dark shadow on the pristine pillowslip. She looked younger, the strain of providing for her family in this rough land gone, leaving only beauty and vulnerability behind.

Buck resisted the urge to stroke her satiny cheek and forced himself from the room. He would stay a while longer. Only, he told himself, because he had promised Skeet.