Deborah Camp (9 page)

“Is he tweaking your tail feathers?”

She swiveled her head to glare at T-Bone. “What’s that mean?”

T-Bone shrugged and chewed on a hangnail. “I figured by the way you two are pecking at each other that he’s ruffling your feathers, that’s all.”

“Oh.” She pulled a hand down her face, trying to wipe away the prickly heat that crept over her skin like a fever. “Yeah, I guess so. He irritates me… like a damned rash.” Absently she scratched at her arm, then her neck.

“Hey, turn around here,” T-Bone said, grabbing her shoulder and spinning her to face him. He squinted at her. “You ain’t just talking, boss lady. You best go look in the mirror.”

“Why?” She pressed her hands to her hot cheeks.

“Cause you’re breaking out in red freckles!”

With a cry of alarm, Cassie raced to the house, while her memory returned her to a patch of vines and weeds she’d strode into to retrieve a lost calf earlier that day. Poison ivy! Just her rotten luck.

W
hen Drew entered the house at dusk, he could tell by Oleta’s frazzled appearance that things could not be much worse. The Mexican girl stood before the stove and jiggled a wailing Andy while she tried to pull a pan of biscuits from the oven.

“Here,” Drew said, drawing off his gloves and tossing them and his hat into the nearest chair. “Let me have him while you finish up supper.” He took the baby from her and examined Andy’s red, damp face. “What’s all this ruckus?” he asked both the baby and Oleta. He felt the babe’s diaper, but it was dry. “Is he hungry?”

“His teeth are coming,” Oleta said, backhanding a trailing black curl off her forehead. “He has the fever.”

“What about his mother? Does she have the fever, too?”

“She is trying to rest, but
sí
, she is sick. She itches and tries not to scratch.”

“If she scratches, she’ll make it worse.” He knew that much about poison ivy rashes but little else. Looking toward the closed bedroom door, he hesitated only a moment before rapping against it with the toe of his boot. “You decent? I’m coming in.”

“Don’t!” Cassie yelled.

But he was already filling the threshold. She sat bolt upright in bed, the covers thrown askew, her hair unbraided and falling like a veil over her shoulders. She wore a chemise and underpants that reached her knees. Her arms, chest, neck, and face were covered in bright pink spots. A rag doll sat next to her, propped up by pillows. The murderous glare Cassie delivered struck him funny, and he laughed. Andy stopped crying for a few moments and stared at him, startled by the happy sound.

“What are you doing with him?” Cassie demanded crossly, glancing from him to her red-faced son. “Where’s Oleta? Oleta!”

“She’s got her hands full,” Drew said, glancing sideways and shaking his head to ward off Oleta, who had moved to answer Cassie’s call. “Your baby is cutting his teeth and yowling like a cat in heat. What should I do for him?”

“Give him here.” She held out her hands, which he noted were covered with soft cotton gloves, probably to keep her nails from digging into the rash. Most of the time she wore gloves just to be wearing them. Hats, too. Like she wasn’t fully dressed unless she had them on.

“No. I asked you what
I
could do for him. You’ll rub that poison all over him if you aren’t careful.”

“No, I won’t. I washed.”

“I’ve heard of folks passing it to everyone they touched. You want to take that chance?” He noticed the bowl of white paste on the bed. “What’s that?”

“Something I stirred up to put on my rash. It should ease the fire and the itching.” She flexed her gloved fingers as if she wanted to claw at her skin but was
barely refraining. Andy sucked in a big breath and released a howl of frustrated agony. Tears welled in her eyes. “Poor baby. Wet a rag with cold water and bathe his gums with it. Let him chew and suck on it. Make sure the rag is clean and keep it soaked in as cold a water as you can find.”

He nodded and started to leave.

“Wait.” She hitched herself higher in the bed. “I’m not finished. Tell Oleta to boil some catnip seeds into a tea and give Andy three spoonfuls. Four if he’ll take it.”

“Catnip? What the hell will that do?”

“It will calm him.”

“Catnip will make him crazy. I’ve seen cats jump as high as jackrabbits when they get a whiff of it. Why, even a horse will get a little looney if he wades through a swath of that stuff.”

“It works different on people,” she said, beginning to spread the paste over her arms. “I give it to Andy when he’s colicky, too.” She flashed him a slicing glance. “I know what I’m doing.”

He arched his brows. “He’s your baby.” He backed out of the room and shut the door. “Oleta, you know anything about brewing up catnip tea?”

“Ah,
sí!”
Her dark eyes lit up. “I forget. That will help the little one.” She reached up into a cupboard and drew down a metal container.

“You see to that first, and then we’ll worry about supper. I’ll take the tray out to Gabe and Tee and eat out there with them.”

Oleta smiled shyly.
“Gracias, señor
. With the
señora
ill and the baby having his teeth fever, I am not working so good.”

“You’re working fine.” He smiled fleetingly, then
jostled Andy against his shoulder, trying to appease the bawling bundle, while he found a clean rag and dunked it into a bucket of fresh well water. The liquid was bracing and cold. He wedged the soaked cloth into the baby’s mouth. Andy spit and coughed and complained, but then the cold met the fire of his gums and his cries diminished. His eyes rounded, and he grunted and let Drew slide the cloth across his beet-red gums.

“There, there, little man,” Drew whispered to him, smiling at the babe’s blissful expression. He could feel the bumps of emerging teeth under the baby’s gums. “That must hurt like a son of a bitch, but you’ll live. Pretty soon you’ll be biting the hell out of your mama, and she’ll be taking you off the breast.”

Mentioning Cassie’s breasts sent a shiver of awareness sluicing through him. He steeled himself against the reaction and told himself that as soon as everyone was on the mend, he had to get into Abilene and bed himself a lusty female.

After midnight Cassie left her bed to check on Andy. Since Oleta hadn’t placed him in his cradle, Cassie assumed the girl was letting Andy sleep with her so that he wouldn’t bother Cassie.

Stepping into the main room, Cassie saw immediately that she was wrong.

Seated in one of the rockers in front of the empty fireplace was Drew Dalton. Sleeping in his arms was her son. Cassie tiptoed forward and realized that Drew, also, was sleeping soundly, his breathing regular and deep, near to snoring but not quite. She stopped to appreciate this sight. Two Daltons. Half brothers. Her gaze moved over the elder Dalton’s face in repose. He was undoubtedly
a handsome man with his wavy russet hair and tanned skin. Rugged, she thought. Rugged and rangy. Her gaze slid down his long body to the length of his muscled legs. He still wore his dusty work pants, but his belt was unbuckled and his wrinkled shirttail spilled out. Unbuttoned, his shirt hung open, revealing his gleaming chest. Auburn hair grew in an inverted pyramid, the point disappearing under his leather belt with its big, silver buckle glinting in the moonlight.

Cassie tore her gaze from him and was about to take her baby from his arms, but then thought better of it. They were both sleeping peacefully, so what was the harm in allowing them to continue?

She returned on tiptoe to her room and lay awake for several hours, her fevered skin in perfect unison with the feverish thoughts flitting through her tired brain. What was a woman to do when she had such thoughts and no suitable man around to vanquish them?

Turning onto her side, she bowed her back and made her body into a ball, and for the first time since she’d arrived at the Dalton ranch, she thought about getting drunk. But that wouldn’t help. After the liquor finally left her bloodstream, the wanting would still be there and the wild, carnal thoughts of Drew Dalton’s gleaming chest and how it would feel to run her palms across it and down, down past that shiny buckle to where a woman’s delight awaited. Moaning, she reached for her rag doll and clutched it to her breasts.

The next day she continued to cover herself with the paste she’d made from aloe vera plant juice, oatmeal, and soda. The poultice was doing the trick, drying up the rash and cooling her skin.

Drew went out with the other men, leaving her at the house with Oleta and Andy. Standing at the door and looking at her land. Cassie cursed her bad luck. If only she’d noticed the poison ivy, she could have located its antidote—either jewelweed, plantain, or gumweed—which usually grew nearby, and rubbed it over her exposed skin. That would have stopped the rash, and she wouldn’t be marooned in the house like somebody’s wife. She wasn’t a wife anymore, she was a rancher, the boss lady, and she should be out there with her men.

There was work to be done. Real work. Not dusting and mopping and kneading dough. She’d had as much of that as she wanted. Waiting on an ungrateful man who lorded it over her was not her idea of a useful life. It was one thing to
offer
to wait on a man, to
want
to see to his needs, but it was quite another to be
expected
to jump when he bellowed and hurry to him whenever he crooked his finger.

“I hate being indoors,” she complained.

“I like it,” Oleta said behind her. “The sun, he is so hot today, it’s good to stay inside. Andy is better,
si?
He loves sucking on the wet cloth.”

“Yes, it eases him,” Cassie said, her mind wandering to last night when she’d found Andy asleep in Drew’s arms. “What do you think of Drew, Oleta? Do you think he is the type to steal cattle?”

“No,
señora
. He wears honor like a coat.”

Cassie smiled at that image. “Like a coat, hmmm? Yes, I suppose he does. A heavy coat. I’ve rarely seen a more prideful man. He bristles with it. I can’t imagine a man like that bringing shame upon himself or his kin. Even if he hated that kin.”

“I don’t think he hated his papa.”

“He says different.”

“Sí
, but I don’t hate mine, and he was bad to me. It is not easy to hate one who fathered you. A piece of your heart keeps hoping that your papa really loved you and could not show it.”

Cassie thought of her own father, his head stuck so far into the clouds that he couldn’t see that his children needed him. Papa Little dragged them from place to place, from stake to stake. They lived in tents, in wagons, sometimes even out in the open. When her mother died, any sense of stability died with her, and the Little children were left to their own devices. Many nights they stole or begged for food. Other nights they went to bed with growling bellies and salty tears drying on their cheeks.

Fathers. Good ones were often in short supply.

Turning slowly, she looked at Andy where he played on a quilt on the floor. He lay on his back and rolled from side to side as he gummed the damp cloth. He made humming noises, then caught her eye and grinned around the cloth. Cassie’s heart constricted with intense love, and she dropped to her knees and gathered him close. She kissed his curly head and rocked him, swaying with the love shimmering through her.

Who would have figured she could love someone this much? she mused, and not for the first time. She liked people—her friends Doris McDonald, Adele and Reno Gold—and she felt connected to some—her own siblings, for instance, though she hadn’t seen any of them in years and years. But love. She’d never loved anybody, except her mother and father. But the love she’d felt for them was a speck compared to what she felt for Andy. The moment he’d kicked in her womb, she had been
seized with an overpowering devotion, which had grown with the child in her belly and had increased tenfold since his birth.

She wanted to give him everything. Did everything include a father to love him?

“Why are you crying?” Oleta asked, bending at the waist to peer into Cassie’s face.

“Crying? Am I?” She felt the tears on her cheeks and tried to laugh them off. “I’m being sentimental, like an old lady at the end of her years.” Laying the baby on his back, she began changing his diaper. “Oleta, do you ever wish you’d never had a father?” She cocked her head to look at the girl. “You ever wish that?”

Oleta considered the question, then shook her head. “No. I would not wish that,
señora
. Even when he was contrary, which was most of the time, I still would want to know him. Know what he looked like. What he sounded like. After my mama died, who would have kept me if not my papa?”

Cassie sighed. “Yes, it was the same with me. For all his faults, my father didn’t completely abandon us. We all left him as soon as we were big enough, but he never turned his back and left us.”

“I am glad to be here,” Oleta said quickly. “I would not want to go back to my papa’s house. But to never know him? To never have a papa? No.” She shook her head more vehemently now. “That I would never wish.”

Guilt weighed heavily on Cassie until she straightened her shoulders and shrugged it off. She had nothing to feel guilty about. After all, poor Andy’s father had up and died. She’d tried to doctor A.J., but he’d been too sick and too old for her meager medicine. Even the town
doctor had said there wasn’t anything anybody could do for A.J.

If he’d lived, he would have been a sorry father for her Andy. He’d sired the boy, but he wouldn’t have had a hand in raising him, other than trying to beat him into submission. It was a wonder Drew had a decent bone in his body or a tender spot in his heart, being raised by the likes of A.J. Dalton.

But Drew was decent, and although he couldn’t be called soft-hearted, he had a gentleness about him. With his horses. With her Andy.

“You thinking about
Señor
Drew?”

Cassie’s head came up and she narrowed her eyes. “No,” she fibbed. “Why’d you ask that?”

Oleta’s lips curved into a cunning grin. “No reason. I just saw you smiling a little and I thought…” She lifted one shoulder in a graceful gesture of dismissal.