A Hard Ride Home (3 page)

Jesse walked home in a foul mood just after sunset. The day's heat had kicked up thunderheads and they pulsed on the horizon like big gray slabs of flesh. The wind on the storm front made the dust sting against his face as he trudged in the dark down the hill and back to the Willow.

He was good at fucking. Half the shit-forsaken town of Silver Creek knew it. Probably more than half. And he'd have shown Warren, like he always did, that he could make him feel good and help him calm down if Warren had just given him a chance to explain that this time he hadn't been late out of absent-mindedness or willfulness.

But Warren was as stubborn as stone and couldn't stand being crossed. And ever since his equally bullheaded son had arrived to take over as lawman, Warren had been in a nasty, black mood.

It started to pelt ice-cold rain as Jesse soothed himself with thoughts of pushing Emmett off a cliff or puncturing Warren's round belly in the night while he snored.

He must have looked awfully mad when he got to the front porch at the Willow, because the seamstress Sara, easily the calmest of all the girls, spotted him and made a shrieking sound. She went running off for Miss Devaux.

"I didn't kill nobody!" he yelled after her.

It was freezing out on the porch, and he started undressing while he waited for the clucking hens to return. It didn't take them long. They had dry towels and blankets and dragged him up to a soft bed.

"He shouldn't take his hand to you like that," Sara said, her dark eyes big and sad as she made a big fuss out of combing his short hair like he was a girl. She was only happy when her fingers were busy, mending or knitting or giving the whores fancy hair-dos when business was slow.

Delia curled up at his hip and sniffled at his belly, hugging onto him the way she always did when he came back from the big house. She was just a mousey waif of a thing, and no one was certain how old she was. The girls said Delia didn't know exactly what went on between Jesse and the mayor, but Jesse knew she did. She had a sharp gaze, and working as a serving girl in a whorehouse ought to have opened her young eyes to more than a few bitter realities by now. Besides, she'd probably resigned herself to the ugliness of the world when bandits had burned out her homestead and killed everyone she'd had.

Rose and her twin sister Josephine sat at the foot of the bed, pressed up close together and chattering quietly, as if they were oblivious to the other goings-on in the room. But Rose had her hand on Jesse's bare ankle, her fingers making small circles.

Jesse saw Evelyn watching him through the cloud of lace and curls and bare shoulders and agitated breasts.

"I was real late," he shrugged.

Her pale eyes narrowed into the tight-jawed squint she got when she was fit to shoot a man in the kneecap for roughing up one of her girls.

"Then you best take better care next time," she said.

Because she couldn't shoot Warren Grady. They couldn't change a thing. And any man who thought he could was a damn fool.

After the big rainstorm, Emmett spent the morning out on the closest homesteads, checking on the farmers and their families. By mid-day, steam rose from the mud and the sky was clear on out to forever and it was hard to imagine the mess of hail and thunder and sideways rain that had pummeled them through the night.

He rode back into town hungry and figured he might as well check on the Weeping Willow, since it housed a fair number of women and girls who didn't have but one man to look after them, more or less.

Jesse was up on the roof of the Willow's small barn when Emmett tied his mare to the post out back. He was shirtless and busy patching wind-blown thatching with handfuls of muddy straw.

"Hey there," Emmett called out. "Did you girls weather out the storm all right?"

"It blew my tits off, but other than that, we made it," Jesse yelled back. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes with the back of his wrist as he sat back on his heels to shoot Emmett an impatient, questioning look.

Emmett's stomach twisted like a wet rag when he saw that Jesse had one eye near swollen shut with an angry, dark bruise.

"Someone hit you."

"Nah, I had to run out here when the door blew open on Miss Devaux's chicken coop," Jesse said, pointing to the muddy pen where several chickens looked fairly distressed.

"So, a chicken hit you?" Emmett asked, fairly certain he knew what the strike of a man's hand looked like.

Jesse laughed and shimmied down from the roof, dragging his discarded, muddy shirt with him. "You should see the chicken."

"And this?" Emmett asked, crowding close to graze his fingertips at Jesse's throat, where blood-dark fingerprints mingled with the mud on his skin.

"I told you." Jesse's throat shifted and bobbed under Emmett's fingers as he swallowed. "It was the storm."

Emmett drew his fingers away, startled by the way Jesse's skin felt when it moved.

"Listen, kid… Jesse. I'm the law around here, and if someone's mistreating you, I'll—"

Jesse barked out a sound that was likely meant to be a laugh. It came out hoarse and twisted. "That's right, Sheriff. You're gonna run all the bad blood right out of Silver Creek. Clean up this town? First the outlaws, and then the gamblers and the whores? How about you march over to your—"

"Jesse!" Evelyn's voice cut through the air like gunshot, startling Jesse's mouth shut tightly.

He shouldered into Emmett hard as he hurried out across the lot and scrambled up the back stairs of the whorehouse, his back rigid and pale.

*~*~*

Jesse threw on a clean shirt and went back downstairs to sulk like a man, with Roscoe, the Willow's bartender. Roscoe was an ex-gambler or an ex-preacher or an ex-professor, depending on who he was telling the story to and how deep he was in his whiskey. He wore his mud-brown hair long and shaggy, and he smiled like he loved being alive.

"Done with the patching already?" Roscoe asked, leaving the bottle of whiskey on the table. "I told you I'd come help in a while when this place cleared out. Miss Josephine can pour."

"Just about," Jesse shrugged, drinking too fast. The best way to achieve a proper sulk was to down the whiskey in a burning hurry, let it settle on an empty stomach, and flirt with Roscoe. Because Roscoe was the only person he knew who wouldn't do anything about it but shake his head and grin.

Sometimes he took a black mood over to Evelyn, and she got him riled up and they fell into her big bed and she pinned him down with her squirrelly, pale hips and rode him 'til they were both sore. He'd do that now, and half-considered it, but Evelyn was a Grady by blood, if not by name, and right now he didn't want a damned thing to do with any of them.

"You're in a snit." Roscoe poured a drink for himself.

"Am not. Just sick of the sheriff sniffing around my business. Can't go walking, can't go the store, can't go riding, and can't even climb up on the roof without him showing up thinking he's got some place here. He's been gone for six years. I don't need his damn help fixing a roof or touching on me or acting like he knows anything—which he don't."

"Like I said."

Jesse switched tactics to good, old-fashioned gossip. "He hasn't even been to see Warren."

"Who's sniffing in someone else's business now?"

"I'm only sayin'." Jesse emptied the glass, throat closing in a cough around the sharp bite of the whiskey.

"The girls like him."

"They like making a fairytale husband out of him, you mean."

"No harm in that."

"The girls look after themselves well enough. You look after them well enough."

"So you don't like him," Roscoe said, producing a wedge of cheese and some of Elsie's flat bread. He pushed it to Jesse and refilled his glass.

When Jesse tried to make a real argument out of it, it was hard to come up with much else to complain about. Emmett Grady was young and green, but he'd been doing well enough. The rougher customers had been avoiding the Weeping Willow and more of the homesteaders had come around to the General Store and the doctor's shop lately. Nobody'd even been shot in the street this month.

Jesse gnawed on a piece of cheese and talked with his mouth full. "I didn't say that."

"Think he'll take after the mayor?"

"I didn't say that neither," Jesse said, washing the cheese down with more whiskey. The tastes mingled like sour vomit and he scowled, wishing he hadn't chosen Roscoe to sulk to. Roscoe was in a reasonable mood and Jesse didn't want to be reasonable at all. He should have gone to try and fuck Evelyn.

"Slow down," Roscoe tapped on Jesse's glass. "Miss Devaux finds you drunk before that leak's patched, she'll skin you."

"She's already in a mood 'cause I sassed her brother," Jesse said, feeling the full effects of the sulk and the whiskey coming on. It built like clouds behind his eyes, heavy and dark.

Roscoe watched him and didn't say anything.

"What?" Jesse asked crossly.

"Go find Jo and I'll come out and help you get that finished. I could use the fresh air." Roscoe sounded a lot more like he was saying Jesse could use the fresh air. Which was true, as long as the fresh air out in the back wasn't full of Emmett Grady anymore.

Jesse considered being contrary on account of being bossed around by a bartender until Roscoe kept looking at him with his gentle, hound-dog eyes. It was the quiet expression he used to lure whores to his bed so they'd massage the muscles in his calf that had never quite healed from the knife fight he got in when he landed at the Willow and never left.

"Don't you give me that face," Jesse said, trying to look stern until a whiskey-warm grin spread across his features and his sulk retreated, just a little.

*~*~*

Laundry day meant more skin around the Weeping Willow than usual, but even that wasn't enough to draw the farmers and cowboys into town on a perfectly good day for working or sleeping. The saloon was empty and Roscoe napped behind the bar and the girls sat up on the front balcony hanging their lacy bits to dry despite the humidity.

Jesse sat at the far end of the balcony next to a basket full of grey and white hosiery, trying to figure out which sets matched. It ranked fairly high on his list of thoroughly dreaded tasks, and got even worse when the girls' chattering hit a pitch that made his teeth ache.

"Oh, it's the sheriff!" Rose said, bouncing up on her toes to wave a lacy handkerchief as Emmett Grady rode slowly down the middle of the road like he thought he invented horses and looking handsome.

"Careful. He might get the inclination to arrest you," Jesse grumbled, holding two flimsy tubes of hosiery out to see if they were the same general shape and length.

"I've seen his cock," Rose said cheerfully.

Josephine poked her in the ribs. "Sucked it, you mean."

Beatrice, the newest girl, wore her black hair short, like a boy's. She had a pretty olive-toned complexion and despite Rose and Josephine's well-practiced flouncing and swooning, men asked after her more often. "I wager he has a fine, fat cock," she said. She spent most of her free time talking about how she was going to find a husband to steal her away and build her a great big cottage by the sea. By the glint in her eye, she was sizing Emmett up for more than the potential between his legs.

"It's like this." Rose held up her hands to demonstrate, and Jesse glanced up furtively, trying his best to seem disinterested despite the considerable length between her palms.

The girls giggled as Delia went a little pale and touched her throat.

"You're lyin' like a rug," Sara said, mending lace as she swayed steadily on a rocking chair, her tight black curls whisked up in a flowery headscarf. There was something soothing about her husky voice. Jesse thought she could probably sing like an angel, but she was too shy to give it a go, and said the men in the saloon would get the wrong idea if she sang.

"Am not!" Rose tossed a rag at her. "Oh, I wish he'd wanted a tumble. He's as nervous as a jackrabbit, poor thing. I wonder if he's had a woman proper."

"Surely he has," Delia murmured, giving him a shy wave. "Look how he rides. I bet he's so brave."

Beatrice snorted. "Don't need to be brave to breed. I'd breed him. He'd give me strong sons."

"He'd give you a passel of ginger bastards," Jesse muttered.

"Quit your crowing, you girls, and take to bed for rest," Elsie called out from downstairs. She believed good health came with regular naps and hearty meals.

The girls filed back inside as their baskets of laundry emptied, leaving Jesse with his tangle of hose and Sara with her mending. When it was quiet and the damned sheriff wasn't parading by, Jesse could make better sense of the task.

"You've got your eye on him," Sara said, not looking up as her needle darted in and out.

"Do not." Jesse scowled.

*~*~*

Jesse saw more gunfights in the grassy field in front of Warren's big house than he did on the streets of Silver Creek. The townspeople were quiet, gentle people who settled disagreements with fistfights and hid behind shuttered windows when rascals rode in, firing at anything on two legs.

There'd only been one hanging in all the time he'd been in Silver Creek. A horse thief named Tom Sully'd made off with seven of Warren's horses, and Warren had him strung up the same night the old sheriff brought him back into town. After the deed was done, the widow Sully had come up to the big house raving like a madwoman and firing buckshot at everything that moved until Warren gunned her down where she stood.

Even during the long winter with no sheriff in town after the last turned up drowned in the river, no one had caused much trouble on the streets. But all it had taken was a few weeks with new law in town to bring young, aspiring outlaws to Silver Creek to try to make a name for themselves.

Emmett Grady might be city educated, and clean-shaven and awfully pretty for a lawman, but he was quick—and he shot to kill. Which was a damn good thing considering every yahoo riding into town full of piss and vinegar was shooting to kill, too.