The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback) (6 page)

“I see you are leaving our house,” Mrs. Braithwhite had intoned, empress-like, and Cherry reminded herself that her cousin had been disappointed in marriage, having been passed over by a duke, a Russian prince, and two earls before she had settled, gracelessly and obviously, for an American millionaire. It was a pleasant remembrance.

“I am going west,” Cherry had declared, unapologetic, mindful that Mrs. Braithwhite hadn’t been able to catch a title and
she, Cherry,
had, even if the title had died before he could make the thing official. “I am going to file a claim, and start a farm.”

“A farmer!” Mrs. Braithwhite sniffed. “And how, pray, does a hothouse flower like yourself propose to run a
farm?
Have you ever gotten your hands dirty, girl? Of course you have not; your father would never have countenanced his princess grubbing in the soil. Even over here in New York, girl, I know how you were spoiled. The princesses royal could not have been treated more like china dolls than you. I have friends in London! I have gotten reports! The finest gowns of the Season, they have said. Better dressed than a duchess.” Mrs. Braithwhite ran her fingers down the rich brocade of her skirts, momentarily silenced, as if searching for further insults. “You have not been at all realistic about your reduced circumstances,” she continued at last. “I have offered you a place here, and you might have been comfortable if you were not too proud to accept it.”

“I am no servant,” Cherry snapped, needled into a temper at last. “Certainly not in my own cousin’s house!”

“A farmer is no better than a servant, and you shall regret this foolish decision. It will bring you nothing but grief, and you might have had a warm room and three meals a day here, like all of my staff.”

“I shall own my own land! I shall not pay rents to any man! How is that like a servant?” Cherry balled her hands into fists; she felt quite ready to do battle with her hateful cousin. “Why do you care where I go when I leave your house? You have made it quite clear that I am not welcome here, that myself and Little Edward are an imposition upon your hospitality and your household. You should be pleased that I am withdrawing at last.”

Mrs. Braithwhite considered. “You are right,” she said at last. “I shall be pleased to see you go, and take your disgrace from this house. And I do not wish to see you upon this doorstep again, unless you are willing to accept your place. I cannot keep girls of no virtue as honored guests in my home. If you cannot understand
that,
I cannot think how you were raised a Beacham.”

Cherry only turned and dragged the trunk out the great front doors and bumped it down the steps of the mansion to the street-level, reaching the sidewalk before the hansom-cab driver, struck dumb with shock at the sight of the young lady struggling with her own baggage while a butler watched impassively from the doorway, leapt to help her.
 

He had carried down the chair and the cradle, and then the pram, too, Cherry remembered, and been so careful to not jostle it and wake Little Edward, who had been such a wee thing then, from his sleep! What a lovely man. She wished she knew his name. She would have sent him a Christmas hamper after their first harvest, with a note thanking him for his kindness in her time of need. But he had just been another black-coated driver perched atop a black-painted cab, in the end, and the stevedore who had taken her trunk to the waiting baggage car at the train station was doing no more than was his job.
 

There had been so few instances of true kindness, since Edward’s death, that the little moments, like the assistance of the hansom-cab driver, returned to Cherry again and again. Everything had been such a slog, just as Cousin Anne had predicted it would be, had
hoped
it would be, Cherry was sure. The few people she had dealt with in Bradshaw; the land agent, Mr. Harrison; the lumber-yard owner, Mr. Morrison; the general store proprietor, Mr. Mayfield; had been uninterested enough in her. They did their jobs, and she paid her coin, and that was all there was to it. But Patty Mayfield, the daughter of Mr. Mayfield, had shown such genuine, ferocious interest in her name and her accent and her history that Cherry felt actual fright. She had been alone for so long, keeping her own counsel with her son and her silent helper and nurse, and all she could remember of society was vicious whispering, closed doors, cold shoulders. It was better alone, so. It was better to keep her distance.

But with that wide-hatted cowboy riding into her yard right this moment, doubtless on Patty Mayfield’s business, how was she to keep clear of the Bradshaw gossips? Her mule brayed a welcome, and his horse neighed in response, and she knew that in a moment he’d be knocking at her door, peering in her window again perhaps, trying to peep through the gauzy white curtains to see whether or not she was lying dead atop her bed sheets as he’d claimed to be doing that first meeting.

He only knocked this time. Little Edward, sitting upon the floor battering two smooth sticks together, looked up with wide-eyed interest. The door did not receive knocks, as a general rule, unless his soft-spoken, pale-haired playmate had arrived. He hoped very much that it was her. She had different names for things than his mother. It was so interesting to him.
 

His mother flung open the door, which creaked in protest on poorly-hung hinges, and he saw the man in the sand-colored hat who had caused so much excitement a few weeks before. Little Edward clapped with appreciation.

“I see you are back again,” Cherry said resignedly, instead of greeting him, and the cowboy lifted his eyebrows and twisted his mouth in a sort of grimace which she supposed was meant to be a smile.
 

“Patty Mayfield sent me up to make sure you hadn’t died of snakebite and forgot to come to her party,” he said gruffly. “She’s mighty worried about you. Said she knew you wouldn’t just skip a party bein’ held in your honor and all. Says you English have got too much
honor
for that.” He eyed her frankly, noticing the fabric of her dress was fresh and clean, and the crooked collar was cut square and rather low, giving him a glimpse of more bosom than these upright prairie wives tended to show. “I reckon she was right, and you was just gettin’ ready to come on down, but she thought I better check on you anyways. So here I am.”

“Here you are,” Cherry agreed. She ran her hands along the wide lace collar of her new dress. It was too low, she could tell by his expression. Too high for Paris, too low for Bradshaw, too out-of-fashion to matter, she supposed. “How nice of you to agree to check on me,” she said suddenly, making up her mind. She would have to go, or the whispers would be worse than if she had simply shown up and told every man, woman, and child that she was a disgraced unwed mother who had been cast out of her last living relative’s home. She wondered that she hadn’t realized that before. She had been simply courting rumors, keeping to herself like this. The cowboy’s presence, seeming as dark and strong and large as a horse looming there in her doorway, was a reminder of the real world that was out there beyond her bitter memories and her lost love. There were people out there that she would have to deal with, do business with, exchange idle conversation on the street with, for the rest of her life, if she was truly going to make Bradshaw her home, and her son’s home. And that was her plan, after all. “Will you escort me to the party, then?” She forced herself to smile. “Mr.—?”

“Just call me Jared,” he said. “Everyone’d think it was queer if you didn’t.”

“Jared,” she murmured, uncertainly, and as his storm-blue eyes seemed to darken and fasten upon her own, she had to resist the urge to step back from his suddenly predatory gaze. More than ever, she was aware of his looming size in the crooked little doorway of her shanty, of how much larger and stronger he was compared to her dainty lines. She felt her heart quicken, a little stirring of what could only be named lust.
Just looking for someone to take the reins for you,
she told herself chidingly.
Those days are long gone.
She had to manage for herself now. Edward was gone, and how could she ever love another? She forced herself to swallow, look away, find her tongue. “I’ll saddle my mule,” she said, and slipped past him, careful to touch neither the doorframe or the cloth of his plaid shirt, towards the lean-to.

He felt her eyes on his back all the way down to Bradshaw, but he never turned around. She had explained that she did not wish to take the baby into town, for her own inscrutable reasons, and so she insisted on a slight detour as the little boy had been deposited at the Jorgenson’s, taken into the smiling youngest daughter’s adoring hands. Without the baby, the trip was silent, even the footfalls of the animals muffled by the deep sod they trod upon. Jared had grown into a silent man, and so he shouldn’t have felt discomfited by the lack of conversation… but he did.

The fact was, he was finding himself far too interested in this little hellion from England, this
genuine lady
with her confused accent and her foolish sidesaddle and her quick temper and her astonishing eyes. She didn’t even look like the women he was used to. Her dress was simple but in a pattern that he had not seen before, with too much skirt and not enough bodice, and the curving seams somehow accentuated her beautiful bosom. When he saw the train of it flowing down from the sidesaddle after he had assisted her in mounting the mule — she had put her hands to the saddle and lifted one leg with the clear expectation that he would hoist her up, with an imperiousness that he found galling and titillating all at once — he understood the cleverness of the cut: the plain dresses of the homesteader’s wives here could never have produced that sensual fall of fabric which exaggerated her every curve. And damn, the woman had curves! Hope had been slim, even with the baby on the way she had been a very thin slip of a girl; Jared used to handle her delicately, for fear he’d bruise her, or break her plumb in half. The English lady, though dainty enough, was endowed with luscious swells in all the right places. He reckoned he could handle her roughly and she’d ask for more… he swallowed, and tried to think of something else. Sitting in a saddle was no place for having thoughts like that.

But he couldn’t think of anything else. The English lady… Jared suddenly realized that neither he nor anyone else seemed to know her name. This seemed like an awkwardness that was going to come to a head very quickly. He wondered if she had purposely withheld the information, and how on earth it was going to be handled when he presented her to Patty Mayfield at last. Patty would want to introduce her to everyone, all of Bradshaw, as the guest of honor, and how could she do things properly if the woman didn’t have a
name,
for gosh sakes? Patty was going to be embarrassed, but Jared was more worried over how she’d fret at
him
for not finding out the lady’s name on the ride back.

He supposed he could just ask her.

Why not? He could rein back a little and ride next to her. The track was wide enough for a hay wagon; there was no reason why he was still riding ahead of her mule, after all.

He was being downright unfriendly by not riding beside her, in fact, name dilemma or no name dilemma.

Ungentlemanly, really. And these high-class ladies, they set such store by men being gentlemanly. Wouldn’t want her to be disappointed in his behavior. She might think he disliked her.

And… he didn’t dislike her. After all. The thought surprised him, because he had been nurturing a very particular and satisfying dislike of that woman, following what had been, of course, a complete over-reaction on her part after he had done the only reasonable thing a frontiersman could do, in checking to make sure that she hadn’t died alone, far from help or friend, and it wasn’t at all
his
fault that he’d seen her breast, she should have covered it up, that breast of hers, that round, lovely, perfectly-sized breast, that his hand could cup and fit perfectly into his grasp, so that he could make her gasp with surprise and pleasure when he gently, gently squeezed…
 

Jared shook his head, rapidly, like the roan shaking a fly from a shaggy ear, and let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding with a great
huff.
From behind him, her voice spoke up, gently mocking. “Is being my escort such a task to you?”

That was it, then. A fair excuse. He couldn’t simply
ignore
her after she’d spoken to him, and he’d
have
to ride next to her in order to reply to her. Jared reined back suddenly and pushed his right leg against the roan’s ribs; the horse moved to the left to make way for the lady’s mule to come up beside him.

She smiled at him as they were at last abreast of one another. Her smile was beautiful, he thought, dazzled. It made her entire face so bright and open and charming, quite the opposite of her tightly controlled words and her previous tendency to fly into a rage and hit him. He smiled back, although he hadn’t meant to, and afterwards puzzled over the un-asked-for reaction. He wasn’t a demonstrative man.
 

“You’re no task,” he said, and was surprised by the husky rasp in his voice. He looked away, fixing his gaze on the prairie horizon. Bradshaw would appear over the next rise, he knew, and then disappear again, on and on for another mile until, very suddenly, they were amidst the color and revelry of Patty Mayfield’s party, a rainbow on the prairie. “My pleasure to escort such a fine lady to her own party.”

“You are too kind,” she replied formally, and he was disappointed that her tone had not remained light. A distance seemed to open between them, although their horses continued abreast. “It has been a very long time since I have been to a party,” she went on. “I must admit, it would have felt odd to arrive on my own. Where I come from, such a thing would look very odd. I would have had to cry off.”