The Devil You Know (24 page)

“I hadn't forgotten,” she said primly.

“And again, I am damned with faint praise.”

“Will you let me finish?”

There were a number of ways he could have responded to that, but he let them all pass and merely nodded instead.

“So I was thinking that it must have placed a great burden on you to behave with such restraint the first time you, um, you—”

“Had a woman under me?”

“Hmm, yes.” She pressed her lips together, musing. “So I don't think you should be so troubled about losing yourself like that the second time.”

“And that's what you think I did? Lost myself?”

“It seemed so.”

“What if I told you that I lost myself in you?”

“Well, if it's true, then you will have reason to regret that you convinced me you are a liar, because I wouldn't believe you.”

“Huh.”

She nodded, repeated the word softly, “Huh.”

Israel observed her shiver as a ripple in the blankets. “Do you want me to make a bigger fire?” he asked.

“Only if you intend to burn down the house. I want you to move closer. You're a furnace. I'm not.”

He obliged her, inching toward her until she took him by the hand and pulled his arm across her waist. Accepting the invitation, he fit himself neatly against the contour of her slender frame, and when he thought he could not get any closer, she did. “You
are
cold. Maybe some more clothes?”

“No. My shirt's enough now that you're here. Anyway, you'd probably just take them off again.”

“Probably,” he said with a wry smile, “being as it's been so long since I—”

She stopped him with three fingers placed over his lips. “I know it amuses you to say it again, but restrain yourself or find other words.”

“Oh, there are plenty of other ways of saying it. I didn't figure you for wanting to say or hear them.”

“You're right. Just restrain yourself, then.”

“There's consummation, which has come and gone, so I
don't think we can properly use it again to describe continuing acts of carnal knowledge in the context of our marriage.”

Willa gave him a reproving look. “Since you cannot help yourself, let me be clear that there will be no acts of carnal knowledge
outside
the context of our marriage. We took a vow on it. At least I think we did.”

“Oh, we did. Forsaking all others was the agreement. I'm clear on that.”

“Good.”

“Sex outside of marriage is a sin against your own body. I'm paraphrasing, of course. First Corinthians, chapter six, verses eighteen to twenty. My father had a number of sermons on the theme of fornication.”

Willa stared at him. “Sometimes I simply don't know what to say.”

He grinned. “I know. Now about those other words . . .” He tapped them out on his fingers, every tap against the curve of Willa's hip. “There are five that come to mind immediately.”

“I felt six,” she said. “I'm sure I felt six.”

“One of them I won't say.”

“All right. I know that one. Tell me the five you will.”

“Besides carnal knowledge and now, fornication, there's coupling, covering, mating, intercourse, and making love.”

“Good Lord.”

“Do you have a preference?”

“Hmm. Well, covering is what our studs do to the mares, so I'm not sure I like that. Coupling makes me think of trains.”

Israel made a strangled sound but still managed to say, “That might not be entirely bad.”

She gave him a withering look. “Mm-hmm.” She turned thoughtful. “Mating makes me think of rabbits.”

As quickly as he'd come the last time, Israel was not in favor of it either.

She said, “Intercourse is what we are doing now.”

“Well, yes, but—”

“And to call it making love seems presumptuous at this juncture.”

“When you put it like that . . .”

“Until something else occurs, I suppose we are left with fucking.”

Now it was Israel's turn to stare at her. A sly shadow of a smile touched her lips while her black coffee eyes regarded him with such innocence that it could only be feigned. He released her hand and reached above him for the tray he had carried in earlier. Without looking, he groped among the plates for the little crock he wanted. When he had it in hand, he held it between them for her to see, and then said exactly what was on his mind, “It is fortunate for you that I don't have soap, but a blessing to me that I have honey.”

Eden Ranch

Temptation, Colorado

Quill McKenna carefully reread the letter from his father before he placed it on the table, smoothed the creases, and slid it sideways to his wife.

“Do I want to read it?” Calico asked. “Your father has a way of riling me that makes me want to reach for my gun. How he manages it the whole way from Chicago, I will never understand.”

“Well, it's a mixed blessing that he and Mother have no plans to leave. The trade-off is that it's up to me to do something.”

Calico ran her finger across the Reverend McKenna's salutation. His handwriting made her think he favored using spiders dipped in ink over a fountain pen. She did not pick up the letter, preferring to study her husband instead.

There was no question that he was troubled. There were furrows in his sun-licked hair where he had plowed it with his fingers, and his smile, the one that still dazzled her with its brilliance, was notably absent. She did not think she could tease a smile out of him now if she tried, and that made her sad and then angry, and the person who most angered her wasn't the reverend, it was his firstborn son.

She reached for Quill's hand and put hers in its curve. He didn't respond to the overture until she lightly squeezed his fingers, and then he looked at her with his very fine blue-gray eyes and somehow managed to assure her that he would be all right, that everything would be all right.

Calico removed her hand, picked up the letter, and read. The gist of the request was more or less what she thought it would be. It had now been almost three months since Israel had been released from the Cook County Jail, and no one in the family had heard from him. His parents had seen him the morning of his release, given him funds for new clothes, incidentals, a train ticket, and a modest amount of pocket money for him to buy food on his journey. He had no choice but to accept what they gave him, but the reverend made a point to write that Israel had taken it most reluctantly, and here was proof, then, that his son had changed. Israel had been humbled by his incarceration, and too humiliated to permit them to escort him around to the shops while he made his purchases. They had wished him well there, prayed for him in front of the police sergeant's desk, and stood as guardian angels might as he walked away.

It was all very affecting . . . and calculating. It was supposed to move Quill into action, which was the exact thing he was opposing.

Calico set the letter down and idly ran her fingers through her hair where a thick length of it had fallen over her shoulder like a rope of fire. Feeling Quill's eyes on her, she looked up and smiled ruefully.

“I don't know what to say,” she told him. “Except, perhaps, to apologize for asking you to give him a chance.” She thought about that. “
Another
chance, I should have said.”

“I didn't need convincing,” he said. “You have nothing to apologize for. It was hardly generous to offer him a job here when he got out. He would have had to work hard, harder for that matter, than he ever has. Israel had always gotten by on the strength of his wits, not on the strength of his back.” Quill took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I wonder if I should have tried to get him a job in Stonechurch, in the mines. Ramsey would have hired him as a favor to me . . . and you.”

“That's not a favor you want to abuse, and anyway, it would have been cruel to your brother.”

“I was thinking it might have been crueler to Ramsey.
Israel would have organized the men into a union inside of six months and then made off with their dues.”

Calico had to laugh. From everything she knew about Quill's brother, it sounded perfectly plausible. “Well, you didn't put that job on the table, and he accepted your offer to come here, where he knew you'd be keeping an eye on him. I think he wanted that.”

Quill snorted.

“I mean it. I saw the letter he wrote to you. He was grateful. Sincerely. I believe that.”

“Then you would be one more among the hundreds of people Israel gulled because he made them believe he was sincere.”

Calico did not like that. “I am not an easy mark, Quill. You know I am not.”

“And Israel would see that and use it against you. It's what he does. It's what all confidence men do, and he's very good at it.”

“He just spent a year behind bars.”

“He should have had three and all of it in prison. Instead he served only eight months there and spent the last four months in a county jail close enough to my parents that they could make sure he had decent meals and clean clothes. His incarceration was just one long con.”

“You don't believe that.”

“I do.” He paused. “Mostly.”

“Maybe you're right,” she said. “Maybe it was a con, but does that matter now? He's missing—”

“He's gone underground.”

Calico ignored the interruption. “And no one knows where he is. He should have arrived in Temptation a few days after he left Chicago and—”

“
If
he left Chicago.”

Again, Calico pretended he had not spoken. “He had instructions on how to reach us. I know you were worried when we didn't hear from him.”

“I felt foolish, not worried. If anyone can land on his feet, it's my brother.”

Calico did not let that pass. She said quietly, “I know you. You felt betrayed, not foolish, and you
were
worried in spite of what you felt. You didn't send any of the hands into town to ask after him. You went yourself.”

“I haven't made any inquiries since,” he said. “And I waited more than a month before I broke the news to my parents.”

“That's hardly surprising when you had to know that would put the burden of finding him back on you. Haven't they always applied to you for help when he got into trouble?”

“No. Not always. Only when he got into trouble with the law.”

Calico nodded. “I'm sorry. I overstated it.”

Quill shrugged.

“I mean it,” she said. “I'm sorry. I know what you and Israel are to each other, and what both of you are to your parents is more complicated than I stated. But don't you see, Quill? What you just said about them only asking you for help when Israel's in trouble with the law, they must suspect something of that nature.”

“It's hard not to, wouldn't you say?” he asked, his tone dry as dust. “Calico, you realize, don't you, that he could be calling himself anything now? He could be anywhere.”

Calico set her hands flat on the table and braced herself as she rose to her feet. It momentarily gave her the advantage of height and she made good use of it. “Mr. McKenna,” she said firmly, “did you or did you not marry Calico Nash, a bounty hunter of some repute?”

A glimmer of a smile touched his features. “I did.”

Calico blinked. The mere flicker of Quill's smile could make her stop and take notice. In spite of the momentary drift in her attention, she persevered. “And did your wife, not above four months ago, track Grant Hollis Daily and his two cronies to a hotel in Goliath, Nebraska, after their pictures were posted in the local sheriff's office because they foolishly shot up a bank in Cedar Falls, Colorado?”

“I seem to recollect she had some help.”

Calico huffed a little. “I was getting to that.”

“Then yes. She was instrumental in running the miscreants to ground.”

Mollified, she said somewhat wistfully, “And she recalls it was a very nice hotel there in Goliath.”

Quill's blue-gray eyes danced. “Her grateful assistant recalls the same.”

She did not flush easily, but she did so now. To recover, she put starch in her voice. “And did she not also uncover a plot to kill Ramsey Stonechurch in the not so distant past and end Nick Whitfield's reign of terror?” Before he answered that, she quickly added, “With help.”

“Hmm. She did.”

“Then armed with those facts, isn't it reasonable to suppose that she might make a fair job of tracking down an aimless brother-in-law before he invites trouble to his table? With assistance, of course.”

“Of course.”

When Calico sat again, this time it was on her husband's lap, not because she meant to unduly influence him to come around to her way of thinking, but because she liked it there. “Well?”

He did not answer immediately. His eyes fell on the letter from his father and then lifted to meet Calico's. “Israel protected me, too,” he told her. “Plenty of times when we were young.”

“I know,” she said softly.

“It took me longer than it should have to steer clear of trouble so he wouldn't take another punishment for me.”

“It was the kind of trouble that all boys get up to. Mischief really. You weren't a criminal, and back then when it was early days yet, neither was he.”

Quill's short laugh held no humor. “My parents did not think it mischief. Shoes not shined to my father's standards, dirt tracked in on the carpets, a bed made up but too wrinkled to pass inspection, a Bible verse misquoted, swinging our feet under the pew when we should have been listening, those are the things that brought out the strap, or the switch, or the wooden spoon. Sometimes the rug beater. And that was only disobedience at home or in church. School yard antics or a report of misconduct from someone in the community, well, those behaviors were given considerably more attention.”

“All in the name of doing right by you,” she said, shaking her head. She took one of his hands and laid it over her belly. There was no swelling to speak of yet, but there would be. He said he was looking forward to it. For herself, she was not so sure. Still, she kept his hand there, fingers splayed, just as if they both could feel the life beating inside her. “We will endeavor to do better.”

“Yes,” he said. “That is a promise I can keep.”

“And little Hephaestus here needs to know that his father is a good man and that is uncle is not a bad one.”

“Hephaestus? You're calling him Hephaestus?”

“Or her.”

“Still, Hephaestus? Isn't that the Greek god of—”

“Fire. Yes. I have heartburn all the time now.”

“Oh. Appropriate then.” He kissed her on the mouth when she smiled cheekily at him. “Now about our child's uncle . . .”

She knew him well enough to finish his thought when his voice faded away. “We are going to find him.”

“We are damn well going to try.”

*   *   *

Willa turned away from the stove with the coffeepot in her hand. She poured a cup for Israel and one for herself, and then replaced the pot. Instead of sitting down to drink, though, she remained at the stove pouring batter and flipping flapjacks.

“I've been thinking that maybe you're right,” she told him. Without looking back, she added, “I bet your ears just perked up.”

“And you'd win that bet. You keep denying that you have eyes in the back of your head, but Annalea and I think you are lying.” Leaning back in the wobbly chair, he sipped his coffee and watched her over the rim of his cup. Three weeks to the day since they were married, and he still made good on every opportunity he had to look at her in the quiet moments, the ones like now when there were only the two of them in the kitchen, or like last night when she was brushing out her hair in preparation of joining him in bed.

She moved with unconscious grace, whether she was stretching after sitting curled in a chair while she read, or
swinging down from the saddle after a long ride. And in bed . . . well, he would not think about that now. Turning his mind in that direction would likely lead to doing something about it, and doing something about it almost guaranteed burned flapjacks. Better not to tread too closely to that slippery slope. He was unusually hungry this morning.

“Tell me what I'm right about,” he said.

“Maybe right about. Maybe.” Willa slipped the turner under a flapjack that was browning at the edges and set it on top of one of the two stacks she was building. “I want to hire someone to cook for us and help Annalea with a few of her chores around the house. She rarely complains, but I think that's because she wants to make herself so necessary that I won't send her to school in the spring.”

“If that's true, it's clever. Annalea has a certain evil genius that I admire.”

Willa gave him a quick look over her shoulder. “You haven't told her that, have you?”

“No.” He set his lips against the cup and muttered, “Not in those words.” Israel thought he glimpsed a smile before she quickly turned her head. He took a swallow of hot, strong coffee and lowered the cup. “Will you want to hire a man or a woman?”

“I hadn't got to thinking that far. I suppose it could be either. Now that Happy's taken to staying in the bunkhouse until we can build on, there's an empty bed in Annalea's room. A woman could sleep there and live in the house. A man, though, could bunk with everyone else and wouldn't be underfoot in the evening. What do you suggest?”

“I say choose the one who can make the best fritters.”

“That's your standard? Fritters?”

“Everything else being equal, yes.”

Willa placed a short stack of flapjacks in front of him. “You must be hungry.”

“Hmm.” Israel set his cup aside and reached for the little pitcher that held the molasses. He drizzled thick brown syrup over the cakes and then cut into them, making a precise equilateral triangle. “Aren't you going to eat?” he asked, lifting a forkful to his mouth.

“You are not the only one I am feeding this morning,” she reminded him. Her concession to eating was to pick up her cup of coffee when she returned to the stove. “The rest of them will be marching in before you know it. You merely finished morning chores first.”

“I was motivated. I knew what you were going to make, and I didn't tell anyone else. Figured they could find out on their own.” She shot him a reproachful look, which only made him grin. He took another bite, savored it, and swallowed. “Before they all get here, there's something I want to talk about.”