Outlaw Hearts(23)

She looked away again. “Out on the porch.”

Jake left, and Miranda breathed deeply to keep her composure. His bellowing voice and smoldering eyes when he had leaned close and lit into her had left her shaken, but she was not about to let him see it. His quick apology had set her more at ease again, but her mind whirled with wonder at the things he had told her. And she still wondered who Santana was. His mother? After all, it was a Mexican name, and Jake Harkner most certainly had some kind of Spanish or Indian blood in him. Still, he surely wouldn’t call his mother by her first name. Was she a woman he had loved? Was Jake Harkner capable of caring for someone that much?

My father taught me how not to trust, how not to care about anyone. Were the marks on his back from beatings administered by his own father? She wondered if he realized that all the while he was yelling at her, she could see the little boy behind those blazing dark eyes. She wished he would smile more often. When he smiled, he was a changed man. He was devilishly handsome whether smiling or not, but when he did smile, there was no trace of the outlaw, or the hurt little boy or the angry man. There were only those straight, white teeth and those full lips. He looked like any decent man one might meet in town, except that few were built quite so big. Fewer still were that good-looking.

She rolled her eyes at the thought, feeling foolish and sinful. Jake Harkner had nothing to offer a woman but trouble. Besides that, he was not a man who bothered offering a woman anything, except maybe a little money for a roll in bed. It was not likely he had known any decent women.

She hung the kettle on the pothook and stoked up the fire. Why was that womanly side of her she had ignored since her husband’s death suddenly stirred, even after he had lit into her with his harsh words? Part of her looked forward to his being well enough to leave, and another part of her didn’t want him to go.

She filled a second kettle with water and hung it on another hook to heat it for washing his hair. She knew deep inside what was really happening to her. She had a man in her house again, not a father, but a man who looked at her as a woman, the way Mack had looked at her when they’d first met. It felt good to take care of a man, cook for a man, shave him. She missed those things, perhaps because she had had Mack for such a short time and had just begun to get used to being a wife when he left for the war. She had always helped her father, cooked for him, kept house and such; but doing it for a husband had been different. She and Mack had had big plans to build up the farm, build their own bigger and better house once the war was over, have children; but those dreams had died when he had.

She cut some dumplings from the dough she had rolled out on her pastry board earlier that afternoon. She began dropping them into the pot of heated water, realizing that since she was fourteen she had been taking care of men, first her father and brother, then her father and Mack, then just her father. She had missed having someone to fuss over, and she reasoned maybe that was why she hadn’t really minded having Jake around.

She heard him come back inside then, and she took out a wash pan and set it on a shelf her father had built onto the side of the wall for a countertop, and beneath which she stored pots and pans. She glanced at Jake, watched him set her rifle against the wall. “Bring a chair over here and lean back. I’ll wash your hair,” she told him.

“You don’t have to if you don’t want.”

“I do want. It’s the only part of you that still needs washing.”

She turned away at the words, hoping he didn’t notice the flush in her cheeks. Yes, she had bathed him when he was sick, mostly to keep him cooled down. She had noticed his flat, muscled stomach; his powerful thighs. She had tried to forget about seeing the parts of him that normally only wives and whores saw. In spite of his reputation and usually sour personality, Jake Harkner was a beautiful man physically. She wondered if he even realized it. His father had told him all his life that he was no good, a worthless bastard, in Jake’s words. Did he even see himself as physically ugly too? That would take a pretty amazing imagination. Perhaps he wanted to be ugly, thought it was fitting. Maybe that was why he left himself unbathed and unshaved and let his hair grow every which way.

“Can you get the chair all right, or do you want me to do it?” she asked.

“I can do it. By the way, where are my pants? Feels kind of strange walking around in bare feet and long johns.”

Her eyes widened, and without thinking she walked up to him and touched his upper arms, realizing how cold they were. “My goodness! It’s so cool out this evening. I didn’t even think!” She rushed past him and took his blue denim shirt, his denim pants, and a pair of socks from where they lay neatly folded on her cot. “Put these on. You should never have gone out there half-dressed! You’ll take sick in your condition.” She handed him the clothes. “Wait a minute. I’ll get the top half of your underwear. It’s in the bedroom.” She went into the other room and called to him. “I burned the one-piece long johns you were wearing the day I found you. They were too bloodstained to wear again. I found these in your gear.”