Stolen Little Thing (Little Thing Series Book 1) (2 page)

Standing on the front steps of the Morgan Hotel, Esme waited surrounded by trunks she had hastily packed. They contained all she possessed. A few dresses, several books, and amongst her more intimate items, a bundle of letters: her monthly missives from her late Uncle Simon, letters from students, three from Luke offering to buy the ranch, and a few from the headmistress of St. Adelaide’s. The trunks held the entirety of her life up to this point.

She was anxious to get to the ranch but the last person Esme wanted to travel with was Luke Crosby. The desire to return to Simon’s home burned within her. It had been six years since she’d last stepped foot in the house. Six years almost to the day. It was also the last time she’d seen Luke.

Luke rode towards her on his horse, a massive bay. Several riders trailed behind him. She kept her gaze fixed on him. The boy she’d known and loved had grown into a man, one who over the years had rarely left her thoughts. The passing time wrought changes in Luke Crosby, so many that she doubted she would have recognized him in a crowd. As a teenager, he was tall and gangly as a yearling colt. In the intervening years, he had added bulk and breadth to that frame, muscles and sinew. His face was different. His eyes, the feature most changed, were no longer full of belligerence, but instead held a quiet certainty, as though he no longer needed to prove anything to anyone.

When her father had told her that he’d married, it had broken something inside of her. The wound had never healed, but a part of her was happy that life had treated him well. His wife, Esme assumed, could claim credit for the changes in Luke.

It wasn’t her choice to let him take her to Simon’s ranch. Seeing Luke had been a torment, and she had no desire to spend any time with him, but the ends justified the means. Once she was ensconced in the shelter of Simon’s home, she wouldn’t have to see him again.

As the riders drew nearer, Esme saw that two of them were mere boys, ten to fourteen or thereabouts, too old to be his children. Ranch hands she reasoned. The other companion, a man driving a wagon, was an older gentleman. When they reached her, he introduced himself as Nolan, and the boys, he went on to tell her, were David and Joseph.

Nolan’s buckboard was loaded with supplies: labeled sacks of coffee, flour, corn meal. The man, older and grizzled but spry, jumped down, and strode to the wagon bed where he shoved the sacks and packages toward the front. David and Joseph, still sitting on their horses, looked suspiciously at Esme.

“Come on boys,” Nolan bellowed. “This ain’t parade day. Quit staring and help load the lady’s trunks.”

Luke ignored the group and rode his bay to the square where the sheriff’s men were building a scaffold, hammering and sawing wood for some gruesome contraption. Luke hadn’t heard there was going to be a hanging, but the idea that a spectacle like that was going to unfold sometime soon made him doubly glad he was taking Esme out of town. He turned to see her watching too. Her face grew taut as she realized what they were building. Their eyes met. She bit her lip and turned away.

Luke wheeled his horse around, trotted back to her, and slid from the saddle. “Shall we get you out of this den of iniquity, Miss Duval? May I help you up? Just like old times.”

Esme stepped away from his outstretched hands. “I don’t think so. I happen to be accustomed to doing this on my own.” With a swift motion, she climbed up to the wagon’s seat.

Luke locked eyes with her for a moment while Nolan and the boys hoisted her trunks in the back of the buckboard.

“You still mad because I ran off your admirer?” he asked.

“No.” She sat primly. “I simply do not need your help. I’m sure there are other ladies in need of your assistance.”
Like your wife, to name one
. She’d die before she uttered those words, but shot him an angered look for good measure.

Luke laughed, his tan skin contrasting with his even, white teeth. “Esme, you have no idea how lucky you are that I’m here offering my help.” He nodded toward the scaffolding being built just a few paces away. “There are men around here that would like nothing better than to take advantage of you seven ways to Sunday. You need my help, and I’ll help you in spite of your sass and stubbornness.”

Before she could respond to him, he strolled back to his horse and mounted in one fluid movement.

Luke shook his head and gathered the reins. He urged his horse forward. He realized she was angry with him, probably because he hadn’t written pretty things to her in his letters, asking how she’d been, or telling her that he missed her and thought of her. Her letters she’d sent in response were written with such coolness and distance, addressing him as Mr. Crosby and acting as though they were merely passing acquaintances. It made his anger rise even now.

Esme watched him ride away, and tried to remember how long the trip to the ranch would take them. Astride a horse, it took her and Simon three hours, but with a large group of riders and a wagon, it would be a great deal longer.

When her final case was loaded onto the back of the wagon, the group set off at a slow pace passing saloons, banks, mercantiles, and the barbershop. The town had grown, Esme realized, probably because of the new stockyard. Ranchers were coming from long distances to sell their cattle in town. It gave her a strange feeling to think she would be doing the very same thing someday, bringing her cattle to auction. If Uncle Simon, an aging and frail scholar, could turn a profit as a rancher, then there was no reason a robust and energetic woman couldn’t do the same. She would show Luke his help was unnecessary. Wouldn’t it be satisfying to throw that back in his face after he’d carried on in his letters that she couldn’t possibly manage?

“You comfy on this wagon, Miss?” Nolan asked.

“Fine thanks. I’d rather be on a horse by the way. If I had a mount, I’d be on it.”

Nolan glanced at Luke who rode ahead of them. “Don’t know why the boss was so bothered that you were coming. You seem like a fine girl.”

“That’s kind of you to say. I’m not sure why Luke feels that way. In his letters, he offered me a great deal of money for the ranch. I had the impression he was trying to pay me to stay away.”

Esme glanced at him hoping he might offer a snippet of information about Luke, but Nolan merely smiled. He seemed kind and had a demeanor suggesting he was wise without being domineering. Maybe she could hire
him
to be foreman of Simon’s ranch. She bit back a smile. Wouldn’t Luke be fit to be tied if she stole his foreman?

Once it became public knowledge that she’d inherited the ranch, Luke had written to her telling her of the travails that awaited her if she should come to Honey Creek. A single woman with no ranching experience would be an accident waiting to happen. Not only did ranching present risks, but men would line up to exploit her vulnerability, and he wasn’t going to live next door to her and watch it happen. Luke couldn’t have known how hard she’d fought for her inheritance and how her own flesh and blood tried to strong-arm her into relinquishing it. She’d been fighting for Simon’s ranch long before leaving San Antonio, and there was no way on God’s green earth she would sell to Luke or anybody else.

The road led up a hill, and the team lowered their heads and strained against the harnesses until they climbed to the highest point. The top of the ridge held the breathtaking Hill Country views that Esme adored. Recent rains had turned the hillsides to oceans of sage velvet. The grasses waved as the wind flowed over them.

By Esme’s calculations they would be at Luke’s ranch by early afternoon. The short trip to Simon’s wouldn’t take more than forty or so minutes more. She smoothed her hands over her skirt as a pang of nervousness hit. She wondered if Luke’s wife would come out to meet her. Would she be obligated to be friendly to the woman? The idea galled her.

She heaved a sigh. Just a few hours more, she told herself.

The road trailed along a ridge. Nolan did his best to steer the team around the muddier patches. The draft horses plodded, docile as lambs, completely unlike the finer boned horses pulling buggies or wagons in the city. When Esme commented on the fine horses, Nolan took the opportunity to expound upon their nature. Draft horses could be dangerous, Nolan warned. If they’re startled, or get it into their minds to take off, they would be impossible for the inexperienced driver to contain. As the morning wore on, Nolan told her about teams that bolted, upsetting wagons, injuring or killing passengers and pedestrians. Her look of consternation prompted him to venture into more unpredictable dangers of ranch life, such as poisonous snakes, spiders, hailstorms, flash floods, tornadoes, as well as some sort of mythical, menacing creature called a
chupacabra
.

The boys rode ahead of the wagon with Luke. By the time Nolan finished telling her stories about water moccasins chasing people swimming in streams and man-eating catfish the size of rowboats, Esme was certain that Luke had put him up to this spinning of tall tales. Exaggeration must be the special welcome they reserved for newcomers, she thought.

“The worst time for snakes, Miss Esme, is right before a storm,” Nolan cautioned. “I think the lightening gets them riled.”

“Right before a storm? Do you suppose,” Esme mused, “that anyone has ever been snake bit and struck by lightning at the very same instant?”

Not surprisingly, Nolan knew a person who’d had that very thing happen.

Esme smiled as she listened to Nolan ramble about the trials of ranch life. She drank in the sights. The pecan trees were not yet budding, but would soon. After that, the mountain laurel blossoms would perfume the air. The wildflowers of the Texas Hill Country were just one aspect that made her heart happy. Her favorite flower by far was the bluebonnet.

There was a certain spot in Uncle Simon’s kitchen where, if she stood on her tiptoes or even hopped on to the counter, she could see a nearby hillside that he’d planted with bluebonnets, just for her.

The travelers stopped to eat lunch, sandwiches packed by the kitchen staff at the Hotel Morgan. There was a jug of lemonade and a sack of snicker doodle cookies that Luke chased the boys away from several times until, giving up, he simply handed them the sack.

After lunch, Nolan campaigned for a nap, but Luke refused. Dark clouds threatened to the south, and although rain didn’t usually come from that direction at that time of the year, Luke didn’t like their look.

“I don’t want to be caught in high water,” he said.

As the afternoon wore on, they came to a low point in the road, or rather where the road should have been. The Tres Pesos River overflowed its banks.

“We’ll have to go up to Devil’s Backbone to spend the night,” Nolan called. Luke studied the river with a scowl on his face.

The two boys groaned.

“Do you know someone with a house there?” Esme asked.

Nolan shook his head. “We’ll be camping.”

Esme’s mouth went dry. “At a place called Devil’s Backbone?” Images of all the evil things Nolan spent the morning telling her crept into her mind. Esme had never slept outdoors. The closest she’d come to camping was sleeping in a rustic cabin, and she was fairly certain that was not what they had in mind.

The next few hours were spent traveling across grazing pastures to get to a different road that would take them to Devil’s Backbone. The sun descended over the western hills by the time they stopped to make camp in a small meadow. Nolan unhitched the team, took them to the river’s edge to drink, and then hobbled them so they could graze.

The two boys built a fire and then Luke instructed them about setting up the tent so the wind wouldn’t knock it down when the storm hit. Esme regarded the tent with more than a flicker of trepidation. She considered asking if they might have another tent for her, but then thought of all the stories Nolan had told her. Perhaps it would be better to sleep near the men.

Nolan laid out provisions for dinner: leftover sandwiches, dried sausage, smoked cheese, and an apple pie from the bakery in town.

The breeze picked up and Luke brought Esme’s shawl from the wagon. She sat on a blanket near the fire. The ground was uncomfortably hard, especially after a day of riding on the wagon bench. With a sigh of exasperation she looked around at the campsite: an enormous tent, flaps snapping in the breeze, a crackling campfire sending soft puffs of smoke skyward, and menfolk finishing their tasks so they could wind down for the evening. By now, Esme had hoped to be sitting in Simon’s parlor with a cup of tea in one hand and a pen in the other. It would require a great deal of planning to procure and prepare for a new herd of cattle, and she was anxious to begin her new life in Honey Creek.

Esme watched Luke as he showed the boys how to sharpen the knife they used to cut the smoked sausage. He was both patient and kind with the youngsters, correcting their hold on the sharpening stone, and praising their efforts when, after several attempts, they produced a sharp blade.

Her father never had anything good to say about Luke Crosby. When he found out Esme cared for Luke, he’d dashed her hopes, tormenting her by calling him a grubby orphan, a ruffian, and a bruiser. She was forbidden to speak to him again. A year or so after the last time she’d seen Luke, he summoned her to the library telling her Luke had married a Honey Creek girl. Esme closed her eyes at the memory of the scorching humiliation she’d felt when her father gloated about unrequited love and casting pearls before swine.