The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback) (12 page)

Where her homestead was tumble-down, raw, and new, with the unweathered lumber shining white and green on earth that was still studded with clumps of upturned roots, Jared’s little farmyard looked as clean and trim as if it had been standing there for a hundred years. The cabin, though only one room, was a comfortable aged gray, and so was the gabled little barn and the fence posts around the neat square pasture that stood just beyond. The yard was scythed grass; the pathway to the barn was a slim brown track of beaten earth cutting through the nodding blades of grass. The roan horse put his head over the fence and whinnied; on the sloping pasture behind him, a little herd of red cattle were clustered, heads to the ground as they worked seriously at the business of grazing.

“Why, this is lovely!” she exclaimed, more than a little jealous, and her pique over the tea was quite forgotten. “I would give anything to have a farm like this.”

“Yours’ll look like this someday,” Jared said, coming up to stand beside her. She felt a quiver at his nearness; he was so close she could feel his warmth. “Takes time. I put this up two year ago, bit by bit, and the sun and the wind and the rain done the rest.”

“You are too kind,” she said derisively, shaking her head. “My shanty threatens to fall over in every stiff wind. It may end up the same color as your cabin, but in every other way it is inferior.”

“We all start somewhere.”

“That’s true.” Her starting point was so far behind that it wasn’t particularly comforting, though. She changed the subject. “If you’ve been here two years already, you are nearly halfway to proving up your claim.”

Jared rubbed at the stubble on his chin. “That’s true,” he said thoughtfully, and she thought he sounded regretful. How odd.

“You’re not pleased about that?” she prodded gently. “I would that I were two years closer to proving up.”

He shook his head. “Oh, I dunno… I guess I just don’t like farming that much. I thought I could use the change, but now… I dunno,” he said again, and shrugged.

Cherry rolled her eyes. Indecisiveness was really a most irritating bad habit, she had always thought. Better make your mind up and stick to it. “You’ve come this far. What did you used to do?”

“Cattle,” he said, still thoughtful, absent, as if he were picturing the past in his mind. “Cattle drives.”

She imagined it, as she had seen the practice depicted in paintings: demonic-looking longhorn cattle, dusty trails, thin horses. Of course. She had always thought of him as a “the cowboy,” with his leather chaps and his Stetson. “You’d give up this lovely farm for
that?”

He laughed. “What do you know about it?”

“I know a little.” An overstatement. “I would not think it so wonderful.”

“I can’t say as following cattle around all day is something
wonderful
, but it’s better than sitting still in one place.”

Cherry nodded slowly. She could understand that. Edward had been a nomad. He had never been happy to stay at home and run the estate. She was of two minds about that, herself. Part of her had longed to see the world with him, and to a certain extent she supposed that she was fulfilling his dream —
 
here she was on the other side of the world, as far from England in situation and in company as she might have been in the Orient!
 

But a big part of her, also, ached with longing for Beechfields, the home sod that she had loved as dearly as a family member. It was that part of her that sought to build up a home for Little Edward that could be as beautiful and strong as Beechfields had been. She pictured it as she hoped it might be someday, nothing grand, a little mixture of Jared’s tidy homestead and the settled, old country seclusion of the Jorgenson’s farm.

“What do you want?”

“What?” She was started out of her thoughts.

“What do you want? To be a farmer, and stay in one place forever?”

She looked up and met his eyes for the first time. They were blue, not blue as the sky as foolish Hetty had rhapsodized. They were a darker, stormier blue, like the ocean she had crossed. But men had blue eyes. It was not uncommon. So why did she feel such a tremor in her limbs, such a racing in her heart, when Jared’s blue eyes were studying her like that? She drew a shuddering breath and tried to regain her composure, but something about Jared’s appraising gaze was simply too much for her. He overpowered her in every way, and she could not deny that she
liked
it. That she
wanted
it.

“I don’t know,” she admitted at last, composing herself, and he nodded, sharply, as if it was the answer he’d been waiting for. “There was a time… I had thought I should like having adventures, seeing the world, though I knew I should miss my home. Then things changed; all I have thought of lately is making a safe place for Little Edward.”

“There’s safer things than land,” he said gently.

“There’s nothing safer than land,” she argued.
 

“Maybe there are things more important than being safe, then.” He leaned forward a little, and his closeness sent her pulse racing again. She thought her face must be flushed; she felt so hot. She thought it would look beastly clashing with her light hair. She thought she shouldn’t care what she looked like.

What was more important than being safe?

She wouldn’t ask him. She wouldn’t ask him.
 

She asked him.

“Like what?” she whispered.
 

He put a hand on her neck and bent his head. Cherry closed her eyes against the intensity of his burning gaze and lifted her face to his without thinking, an instinctive gesture. She steeled herself for a harsh kiss, something rough and untamed from this sunburned cowboy, but his lips, when they touched hers at last, were gentle, teasing, and he pulled back before she had had quite enough of them. His hand around the back of her neck, beneath her unruly knot of golden hair, was rough and hard, but she leaned back into it, savoring the strength of him. She moaned without quite meaning to, sighing into him, and let her body curve up against his, fitting her softness to his hardness. She thought she would catch fire, her senses were so aflame.

He pulled her gently around the corner of the cabin, out of sight of the baby, and slid a possessive hand down her waist and over her derriere, giving her curves a frank squeeze. She laughed a little into his mouth and put her own hand around his back, slipping it down until her fingers hit the belt of his denim trousers. She opened her mouth, seizing his in a fierce kiss that made him moan, and then daringly waggled her fingers down the back of his trousers. She felt his knees weaken at the unexpected touch, and then her own balance wobbled as he reached both hands down, cupped her behind, and pulled her pelvis up against him.
 

He was so hard and so hot, grinding against her, and she was aching, lost in desire, moaning in need, and she could feel the wetness between her legs, and his hardness pressing against her was driving her
mad —

And then, abruptly, it ended.

He let go, he stepped back, he wasn’t touching her anymore. Cherry was left aching with need and touched by nothing but air.

She opened her eyes and sought his again, her gaze frantically questioning.
 

He was looking at her with frank dismay.
 

Well.
If that was the way he was going to behave! Cherry’s desire turned to temper faster than a match turned to flame.
 

“That was ungentlemanly of you,” she declared, as severely as she could muster, and she wasn’t talking about the kiss. She began to march away, unable to go on looking at him, and then paused a few steps away.

Behind her, Jared remained silent. She looked over her shoulder and saw that he was looking at the ground. Like a child, she thought. A little boy who doesn’t want to admit he has been naughty. He deserved a scolding. But she didn’t want to be the one who gave it to him. And why should she have to? She wasn’t his mother. She forced her gaze out over the prairie and she waited, looking towards the horizon, the blue sky folding down to meet the nodding eternal grasses.

“I’m sorry,” he said eventually. “I shouldn’t have been so familiar.”

She considered what to reply. He was sorry for their kiss? Well, she’d done worse. Little Edward was sitting there in the grass as evidence. Perhaps she
shouldn’t
have leaned into his kiss. Perhaps he was some sort of devoutly religious man, and her surrender to temptation made her as vile as a devil to him. She supposed there were religious cowboys. Cowboy monks? It could happen. And that rushing, soaring desire raging within her — where had that
come
from, anyway? What of Edward? Just who was she, to feel desire toward another man?
 

She had been so certain that her heart had been buried with Edward, back in England.
 

She had been so certain that she would never love again. There was no other man who could make her skin burn, could make her spirit sing, could make her feel as if she was coming apart at the very seams. This had all been decided a very long time ago.
 

She looked back at Jared and her heart jumped again at the sight of him, glowering at her in the sunlight, more handsome than any so clearly annoyed man had any right to be. She hoped, rather desperately, that he
wasn’t
a religious man.

Cherry thought, with a stirring of wonder and fear, that perhaps her heart was not buried so deep.

By some stroke of tremendous luck, Cherry didn’t see Jared again until Patty Mayfield’s wedding. Luck, because her life was so full of worry and heartache in the weeks after that morning that she did not think she would have been able to bear the emotional upset seeing those blue eyes and those sensuous lips would have caused. It was best to bury any thoughts of romance. Those times had passed, and she had too much else to think about.
 

The green prairie had faded beneath the sun during that hot summer, and she had not accomplished nearly as much as she had wanted to, although the ground was broken and the future wheat fields were gleaming black, the sod turned up to the sky, and there was a new mule
and
a little spotted pony in the lean-to against the shanty. Little Edward was toddling everywhere, and saying the word “dog” with a worrying frequency, so that even the Jorgenson girl was smiling and laughing at it. Every time he said “dog” Cherry was reminded of the morning they had woken at Jared’s, and how the boy had played with Jared’s spotted hound in the grass while she and Jared had — and then she put it out of her head. There was no time for such nonsense.

And then that letter came!

She had put the letter aside and resolved that she would not think of it, but it was always on her mind. Her vicious Cousin Anne had been throwing her weight around, playing up her role as the venerable Mrs. Braithwaite of Washington Square. To think that the letter had been a welcome sight last week, when she had called into the post office on her way to the store. She had not really expected anything; she never seemed to receive any mail outside of farming circulars and a once-monthly accounting from her father’s estate; a reckoning of the tiny allowance that had been set aside for her and was the only income left to her once her uncle Richard Beacham became head of the family.

How angry Uncle Richard had been! But he had been so distraught: her father dead so suddenly, her fiancé dead just a few weeks later, and when she had had to admit to him that she was… well, Cherry thought, he could have handled it better, by perhaps
not
turning her out and disowning her, for example. But poor Father, and poor Uncle Richard; such a horrible cluster of events would cause anyone to behave rashly.
 

And really, poor Cousin Anne as well, that disappointed woman who could never be content with her fortune and her Washington Square townhouse because it hadn’t come with a title and a country estate. Poor
everyone
, and most of all, she supposed, poor her, but then again, she tried not to think of things that way. She was getting ready to go to a dear, sweet friend’s wedding, and her father was in the ground, and her uncle was far away in England presiding over Beechfields, and Cousin Anne was writing angry, interfering letters because she was an angry, interfering woman. Of the entire quartet, only Cousin Anne could truly be pitied, and she would never have countenanced pity from fallen Charlotte Beacham or anyone else.
 

But the things she had written made it very hard for Cherry to pity her at first.

The letter had been alarming at first, of course, but the more Cherry read it — and she read it many, many times, straining her eyes to decipher the graceful script by the fading summer twilight after Little Edward had been put to bed — the more she doubted any power in her cousin’s New York lawyers to actually coerce her to give up Little Edward. And she never thought for a second that, as Cousin Anne wrote, “Little Edward would suffer his entire life for want of the comforts and advantages that his mother seemed so determined to deny him, and which his relations are so anxious to offer to him, despite the ignominy of his birth and the low character of his mother.”

The low character of his mother! That part, at least, was laughable. Cherry nearly laughed aloud, thinking of the insult, as she bent to button her boots. Such
low character
, if low character was to love and cherish a man and his child, if low character was to seize one’s own fate instead of being forced into a stifling life of servitude by one’s own relations, if low character was to build a house and a barn with one’s own hands and feed the animals and people who dwelt within them with one’s own hard work.