Miss Murray on the Cattle Trail(22)
“I’m not one of your hands,” she retorted. “So I ate your apple pie.” And then she grinned up at him.
Zach walked over and leaned down to her level. “In that case, Miss Murray,” he said with a chuckle, “you owe me one.”
Jase laughed out loud. “What’re you gonna ask for, boss? Maybe she’ll bake you another pie, huh?”
“I don’t want a pie.”
“Oh?” she asked, her voice wary. “Then what do you want?”
He bent even lower and placed his mouth near her ear. “I want to ask you a bunch of questions, like you asked me the other night,” he breathed. “In private.”
* * *
Hours after Roberto had washed and dried the tin supper plates and forks and scoured out the Dutch oven, Zach assigned night-herding duties, rolled out his blankets and crawled under the chuck wagon. The cook was snoring away just outside the rear wheel, and Dusty was asleep. Or pretending to be.
He touched her shoulder. “Dusty?”
“Mmmff.”
“Dusty, wake up.”
“I’m awake,” she said in a sleep-fogged voice.
He propped himself up on one elbow and spoke to the lump under the blue blanket. “You ate my pie, remember? So tonight it’s my turn to ask questions.”
She struggled into a half-upright position. “Now? It’s the middle of the night!”
“Now.”
“But—but I’m half asleep. I don’t think well when I’m half asleep.”
“Good. I don’t want you to think well. I want you to talk.”
She flopped back onto her bedroll and closed her eyes. “Very well, Mr. Strickland. What do you want to know?”
Everything. “Tell me about yourself, Dusty. Where were you born, for instance?”
“Chicago,” she murmured.
He should have guessed that. He’d bet she had been rich as Croesus as a kid. “What about your parents?”
No answer. But he could hear her breathing, and it wasn’t as even as it had been before. He knew she was awake, so he waited.
“My...my father never wanted me. He wanted a son, and he never let me forget it. When I was born, Mama told me he took one look at me and slapped her across the face. Then he said, ‘She’s a damn girl and I don’t want her.’”
“Ouch,” Zach said.
“Papa didn’t care if I lived or died. All my life I worked hard to get him to notice me, to approve of me...but he never did.”
“What about your momma?”
She huffed out a long breath. “I don’t like to think about Mama very much. She hadn’t wanted a child at all,” she said, her voice muffled. “Mama was...well, vague, I guess you could call it. She was very beautiful, but she couldn’t really do anything. She had servants, so she never had to do anything.”
“You grew up rich, huh?”
“In some ways. In other ways I was as impoverished as the beggars in the park. I wanted to be nothing like my mother, nothing at all.”
“And? What did you do instead?”
“I did things Mama couldn’t have done. I went to college. I was just sixteen, and I finished in two years. And then when I was almost nineteen, I got a job. That absolutely scandalized Mama, but I did it anyway. Working at the newspaper made me feel worthwhile. Foolishly, I thought that having a career, excelling at a major newspaper like the Chicago Times, would earn me Papa’s acceptance.”
“But it didn’t,” he hazarded.
“No, it didn’t. It was quite the opposite. I wasn’t a boy, you see, and—” Her voice broke.
In a way Zach regretted asking. But in another way he felt a warm knot deep inside, an understanding of this young woman he wouldn’t have thought possible a month ago. He’d seen what Dusty was like on the outside, and he’d had some hints about what made her tick. Now he was beginning to know who she was on the inside.
He reached over and laid the back of his hand against her cheek. “Go back to sleep, Dusty. And thanks.”
* * *
The next morning, after a breakfast of bacon and beans, the men slipped off to the small lake. Alex listened to the splashing sounds and raucous shouts of their obvious enjoyment and let out a deep sigh. She felt sticky and dirty and a little saddle sore, and she needed a cool bath as much as the men. But she would wait until after supper when it grew dark and she could bathe without attracting attention.
She thought about it all through Roberto’s excellent roast rabbit and spicy chili beans. She also thought about the fact that Cassidy’s eyes still followed her every move. Something about the man made her more than uneasy. He frightened her.
After supper, Zach walked over to the wash bucket to dunk his tin plate and coffee mug, and Alex rose and followed him. “Zach,” she said quietly, “I’d like to go for a swim in the lake.”
“Now?”
“Yes. But...” She cut her eyes to where Cassidy sat by the fire, watching her. “I need you to—”
“Stand guard,” he finished for her. He glanced over at Cassidy. “Is he botherin’ you?”
“N-no, not really. He just, well, he keeps looking at me.”
“Gather up your soap and stuff. I’ll walk you down to the lake.”
While he waited for her, he spoke again to Roberto. “Tuck a pistol under your pillow tonight. And don’t tell Miss Alex.”
“Something it is wrong?” the cook wanted to know.
“Not wrong, just iffy.”
“Que? What means ‘iffy,’ por favor?”
“It means keep your eyes open. You savvy?”
“Si, Señor Boss, I savvy.” He, too, shot a look at Cassidy.
Dusty didn’t say much on the short path through the cottonwoods to the lake. There was enough moonlight to see, and she moved a few yards ahead of him, walking at a quick march and singing under her breath. She must be thinking about her bath.
He was thinking about it, too. He was half worrying about Cassidy and half worrying about why he felt like humming at the thought of Dusty taking a bath.
When they reached the lake, he leaned his back against a sugar pine trunk, facing away from the lake, and took up his lookout post. Dusty disappeared, and in a few minutes he heard a soft splash and a happy-sounding laugh. Without thinking he turned around.
She was standing knee-deep in the water, just standing there with the moonlight shimmering on her naked body. He stopped breathing. He watched her unbraid her thick hair, lift it in both hands and spread the dark wavy mass about her shoulders. Then she clasped her hands over her head and stretched up, arching her bare back.
She was so beautiful she made him ache. Sweat prickled his neck. Oh, God, he wanted her. He wanted her.
Slowly she turned away from him, raised her arms again and dived into the water. He watched as the ripples spread and washed toward him in widening circles until his eyes burned, waiting for her to stand up and move toward him. She must not catch him watching, but he felt frozen in place, unable to turn away and break the spell.
No, not unable, Strickland. Unwilling.
His heart had flown outside his body somewhere. Part of him wanted to call it back; another part of him, a part that was feeling kinda shaky all of a sudden, wanted to toss it over the moon.
He waited, unable to turn away, and she finally waded to the shallow water at the edge of the lake, her wet hair fanning her shoulders in a dark waterfall. Then she began braiding up her hair again.
He was damn sorry when she put on all her clothes.
* * *
All the following day Alex felt Zach’s eyes on her. By ten o’clock it was beastly hot, the sun like a steaming copper pot over their heads and the air so heavy and still it was suffocating. How did the men stand this, hour after hour?
The horses were rotated every few hours, but there was no respite for the riders.
The shouting, yipping men drove the herd through wide, flat meadows that smelled of sage and narrow, steep-sided canyons where the earth beneath their feet was red gravel and the only thing to break the monotony were lumpy black rocks and an occasional stand of spindly pine trees.
She could not imagine a more desolate landscape. Nothing moved in the shimmering heat but cows and horses and clouds of stinging knats and men. And one woman, as hot and sweaty and miserable as she had ever been in her life. Even the hawks perched motionless on the tall pine branches.
Just as she thought she could not force her aching body to ride one more mile, she spotted Roberto’s chuck wagon far ahead, parked near a sprangly oak tree. Listlessly, she rode toward it.
Roberto looked up when she reined to a halt and dismounted. “Señorita Alex,” the cook said with a grin. “You want taste of my stew?”
She was hungry, but she was too hot and parched to even think about putting something warm in her mouth. “Thank you, Roberto, but I want to wash first.”
Cherry appeared and gathered the sorrel’s reins in his leathery hand. “You come with me, Miss Alex. I got a nice private horse trough you kin use to cool off. Just filled it, so the water’s clean.”
“Thanks, Cherry. I don’t even mind sharing it with your remuda.”
“No soap, though,” he cautioned. “That’d give all my horses the scours for sure.”
She laughed, snaked a dishtowel from the rack on the side of the chuck wagon and followed him to the rope corral. She knew Cherry’s thoughtful gesture wasn’t because she’d made a friend of him the night she’d interviewed the old wrangler. Patient, thoughtful Cherry was just being Cherry.