Easy on the Heart (Novella) (3 page)

Twisting suddenly from his grip, Mary backed away. Even in the shadows, he saw the fear in her eyes.

“I’m sorry, miss. I didn’t mean to slam into you.” Cooper felt as clumsy as a drunk staggering on the street. “I was looking up trying not to bump my head when you stopped.”

She watched him for a moment as if considering screaming for help. Then, slowly, she took a deep breath and seemed to force herself to relax. “It’s understandable. This room can be traitorous at times.”

No smile softened her words.

He found himself studying her closely, wishing he understood her. There were secrets behind her cautious eyes. Secrets he wasn’t sure he was brave enough to investigate. She’d been hurt by a man, sometime, someplace, and as the brother of three sisters, Cooper hated to think of any woman being harmed.

“Your sister’s purchase.” Mary pointed to a huge wooden rocker hanging from nails on the back wall. “I wasn’t strong enough to lift it down.”

Cooper evaluated the ugly chair. Too large, too old, too scarred to be of much use. “Are you sure Winnie bought this?” He felt like a fool for asking even before the words were out of his mouth.

Mary nodded. “She asked if we had a rocker and insisted on this one the minute she saw it. She said something about every woman should have a rocker sitting next to her hope chest.”

Groaning, he reached for the chair. When he’d been a kid, he remembered his sisters having hope chests filled with what they called “someday items.” Surely Winnie had given up on the idea of someday having her own home and family.

As he lifted the heavy oak from the wall, his hat tumbled. Cooper twisted trying to find a place on the floor to set the chair while he retrieved his hat. There was no room.

“I’ll get it,” Mary finally offered, squeezing past him and the chair.

When she leaned up and placed the hat back on his head, her body brushed against his arm. Cooper flinched like he’d been hit by a cannonball in the gut. Her nearness in the shadows was the most intimate feeling he had ever known. He wasn’t some schoolboy who had never been close to a woman, but every part of his being reacted to her.

For one moment, totally by accident, they had connected. He felt as if, with her slight movement, she’d somehow brushed against his beating heart.

He forced himself to move, to follow her back to the front of the store and out the door. He was being foolish. Nothing had happened between them. They had touched by accident, nothing more. He wasn’t even attracted to her. But for all his bravery, he couldn’t force himself to look at Mary Woodburn.

Maybe she hadn’t noticed a thing.

Maybe she was still as afraid of him as she had been earlier.

If he met her expressive eyes, he would know. She couldn’t hide the truth any more than she could hide her fear.

One thought kept his gaze on the ground. What if, when they touched, she’d felt the slight shift in the earth he had? By magic, or witchcraft, or pure fantasy, what if they both had felt it? What if the shy little woman truly had touched his heart?

 
MARY WOODBURN STOOD
at the window of her brother’s store and watched the tall cattleman maneuver his wagon down the muddy street. He seemed hard as leather, yet he’d worried about her when they bumped together. A kindness lay just beneath his weathered toughness; a kindness she’d guess might be there when she observed him moving about town.

“Best stop your dreaming, girl,” her brother said when he noticed her staring. “He wouldn’t give you the time of day, that one. Only reason he spoke to you now was because you were so nice to his sister.”

“You don’t know, Miles. Maybe he’s different.”

“If there’s one thing I do know it’s the men in these parts.” Miles blocked her view of Cooper Adams. “They’re a wild bunch, probably only half tame when the war called them and completely loco when they came home. The fellows out here are too wild to live in respectable towns. Murderers. Thieves. Rebels. And worse even than the Johnny
Rebs are the deserters who hid out in these parts refusing to fight.” He mumbled the same things he had said for years. “I might hate the Rebs, but at least I can respect them. For all you know that Adams was one of the worst.”

Mary didn’t want to hear any more of her brother’s never-ending lecture. “But Adams took good care of his sister just now. He was kind to her even though I could tell he was in a hurry.”

Miles nodded. “That he did. I’ll give him that much. A nice lady like that must be pained having such a mean brother.”

“You don’t know he’s worthless or mean. Winnie says he’s killing himself trying to run his ranch all alone without a wife to help him.”

Miles frowned at her as if he felt truly sorry for her. “Mary, don’t go making up some story in your head. There are no ‘happy-ever-afters’ out here. You know firsthand how mean these men can be.”

Mary felt her face redden. She quickly backed into the corner so her brother wouldn’t see how his words had hurt her.

“I’m sorry.” He cleared his throat.

“I don’t need reminding,” she whispered.

“I know. I just don’t want to see you hurt again.”

She watched Miles limp toward the back of the store. He didn’t mean to be cruel, he’d just hardened a long time ago.

Mary shoved a tear from her cheek. She was slowly mirroring him. Before long they’d be made of rock. The first two petrified humans to still be breathing.

Maybe Cooper Adams wasn’t mean or even worthless, but she knew he was not for her. She didn’t want to marry a rancher and look like she was fifty by the time she turned thirty. She had seen the settlers’ women come in the mercantile with children hanging all over them while they traded their last family heirloom for a month’s worth of groceries.

She’d been told there were only two kinds of women out here, wives and whores, but as long as she had her brother to live with she would be neither. She’d stay here hiding. Invisible.

 “
SHE’S SURE NOT
the girl for me,” Cooper mumbled as he rode along the north border of his ranch toward the breaks. He had tried not to think of Mary Woodburn when he drove back from town with Winnie chatting at his side or while he’d unloaded the lumber. He tried, but he hadn’t succeeded. He must have relived their short time together a hundred times during the night.

The memory of her touch was a way to help him through the night, nothing more. Anything was better than remembering the battles.

Now, this morning, no matter how many times he told himself he had more important things to think about, thoughts of her wormed their way into his mind. Blue-gray eyes lingered.

“She’s as plain as this land. A mouse of a woman who probably fears every man who walks into that shamble of a store,” he continued to argue, muttering to his horse. “The odd tingling I got when she brushed against me was probably
more like that feeling folks get when they say someone just walked over their grave. More eerie than intimate. So what if she smells all clean and fresh? For all I know she just finished taking her monthly bath.”

Cooper kicked his horse into a gallop. If he didn’t stop talking to himself he would be as crazy as Winnie, buying furniture for a house she would never have. How did she figure to get that old rocker home on the stage?

All afternoon he pushed himself harder than usual as he helped his men move cattle away from the arroyo where flash flooding might happen this time of year. Most of the day he didn’t think of anything but work. By midafternoon, the rain rolled in at full gale as the heavy clouds had promised. Now there was no
if
to trouble’s calling, but only
when
.

Just after dark he returned to the house. His only comfort lay in the fact that he wouldn’t have to face his sisters. They were like chickens, getting up and going to bed with the sun.

He climbed down from his horse in the stillness of the dry barn and smiled, knowing Winnie would have left his supper on the stove warming. After being cold all day, he’d end with a hot meal. He hoped he could stay awake long enough to enjoy it.

The feel of a barn always made him relax. When he’d been a boy with older sisters and a mother forever watching him, the barn had been his hideout. He loved the smell of hay and the way rain tinked against the roof. Air always drifted through the cracks in the walls letting him know he wasn’t yet inside and completely safe. The low noises of the animals whispered a welcome. The creaking sounds of the walls made him think the barn itself was an aging giant stretching around him.

The side door thumped against the barn wall. Footsteps, muffled by yards of material, shuffled through the hay toward him.

“Cooper Adams!” Johanna’s sharp voice sliced through his peace. “It is about time you got home.”

He removed his hat, letting a spray of water circle him as he turned. “Evening, Johanna. What’s wrong?” He’d been
able to read her moods in the tone of her voice for twenty years. “Surely you weren’t worried about me.”

“Of course not.” Johanna’s features hardened. He’d insulted her by even asking. “You can take care of yourself. It’s Winnie. She has disappeared completely. Doesn’t have the sense God gave a goat, it seems.”

Cooper’s muscles tightened. “What do you mean, disappeared?”

Johanna looked like she was trying to communicate with the cow. “She has simply vanished off the face of this earth. Emma and I have been beside ourselves all afternoon. Lord help us through this trial.”

“Slow down, Johanna.” To his oldest sister everything fell into the category of “trial” or “blessing.” “Just tell me what happened.”

“When last we saw her Winnie was polishing that horrible chair she bought. When we called her an hour later for lunch, she wasn’t there.”

Cooper stormed toward the house. Maybe Emma could tell the facts. Johanna, for once, was making no sense. Winnie wasn’t a child. She wouldn’t just walk off.

“Did she take the wagon?” he said without slowing.

“No,” Johanna shouted over the rain as she matched his stride. “I had your bunkhouse cook, Duly, check. No horse or wagon is missing. If she rode out of here she did so on a pig. Not that she isn’t dumb enough to try it. I swear, the older she gets, the more absentminded she becomes. I only pray I live long enough to take care of her. It is my cross to bear in this life.”

Cooper reached the porch, running across the wood without caring that his spurs might be scarring it.

“Winnie’s missing.” Emma stated the obvious as he stepped inside. “Gone. Disappeared. Lost.” She paced like a toy wound too tightly, as she waved both arms, twin windmills blowing in circles accenting each word. “She’s been acting stranger than usual ever since we got here. Everyone knows she walks for her constitution every day, but never far, never long.”

Cooper tried to calm down his sisters. Johanna saw herself as a martyr and Emma followed suit as second in command. “She couldn’t have just evaporated,” he said. “Has she ever done this before?” The thought occurred to him that he didn’t see them all that often. Maybe this was something she did on a regular basis.

“No,” Emma answered. “She goes in her room sometimes and reads. And she goes for walks, but never long ones. I’ve told her fifteen minutes is all she needs of exercise each day to be regular as a clock. That’s very important at our age.”

Emma paced in front of the fireplace, putting pieces of an invisible puzzle together. “She must have been reading late last night because her eyes were red this morning. I’ve told her a hundred times not to read by lamplight or folks will think the color of her eyes is red and not blue.”

“What was the last thing either of you said to her?” Cooper could guess. They said the same things to Winnie and somehow she managed never to listen.

Emma wrinkled up her forehead. “I said she must have had to search long and hard to find a dress as ugly as the one she bought while she was in town with you. I can hardly believe the Debords bought such a pattern.”

“Did that upset her?” Cooper asked.

Emma shook her head. “I don’t see why it would. Someone had to tell her, after all. Did you see the thing? The lines were out of date and the material looked like it was faded along one side.”

Johanna stepped in front of Emma like a seasoned tag-teamer ready to take on the cause. “Did Winnie talk to anyone in town yesterday?”

“You think she’s been kidnapped?” Emma whispered her fear. “Oh, my. She was taken wearing that terrible dress.” Emma’s face paled. “Maybe the Apaches got her. I’ve heard of such things. They come into the house all silent like and snatch the first woman they see. Take her back to their camp and make her one of their wives.”

Cooper studied Emma carefully, trying to decide if she’d been dropped on her head once too often as a child. “First, there are no Apaches in these parts and, second, it would take two or maybe three strong braves to
snatch
Winnie. Something tells me she wouldn’t go quietly, so we can forget any possibility of her being taken against her will.”

As the women made other guesses, he thought of Woodburn back in town. Winnie
had
left the store saying she planned to say farewell to the man, but when Cooper brought the chair out, she was already sitting in the wagon. Woodburn was strange, always silent, always keeping to himself, but Cooper could not connect him with this trouble. He wasn’t even sure his sister had spoken to the man.

“The rain’s finally stopped,” Emma announced.

Cooper reached for a dry coat on the rack by the door. “Good, I’ll start searching. I’ll circle the house, then widen the search. Maybe she just went for a walk like you’re always suggesting, Emma, and then decided to hole up somewhere until the rain ended. If so, she’ll be home soon.”

“Where would she
hole up?
This land is so flat a grasshopper would have trouble finding a dry spot to hide.” Johanna stood so rigid her back might break if a breeze blew by. “Be logical, Cooper; we already have Winnie making no sense, we don’t need you falling prey to a weak mind.”

Cooper had no doubt her anger was directed toward him, for she’d obviously waited for him to come home with the answer and he had disappointed her. The one thing Johanna hated more than trouble was having to deal with it herself.

“Eat before you go.” Emma hurried to the kitchen and brought his meal. “Ten minutes won’t matter. You look dead on your feet. While you eat, Johanna and I will search the house and barn again. Maybe we’ll find a clue. If she’s been kidnapped, surely she won’t be deflowered in the few minutes it takes you to eat a bite.”

“Emma, don’t even think of such a thing,” Johanna snapped. “Talking about her constitution was bad enough and now this.”

“All right, sister. Maybe our Winnie just went for a walk and got caught up in one of those flash floods Cooper is
always worrying about. If it could wash away a cow, it could drown Winnie. She is probably floating down toward the Gulf by now.”

Cooper raised an eyebrow. “That’s right, Emma. Look on the bright side.”

He downed a few bites of his meal while the sisters tried to think of other dire fates that might have happened to “poor Winnie,” as she was now referred to.

When he finished, Cooper headed out to saddle a fresh horse. As he walked from the barn a few minutes later, he thought he heard a wagon.

Cooper waited in the shadows. If trouble was riding in, he would just as soon whoever approached not know he was watching.

The noise grew louder, drifting in the damp breeze. Mixed with the jingle of the harnesses was Winnie’s laughter.

Cooper let out a long breath and waited. The buggy pulled into the light shining from the windows. He smiled.

It appeared the Apaches were bringing Winnie back.