Beautiful Bad Man (26 page)

“I’d been playing stick ball with the boys in the neighborhood, and the stick was there leaning by the bed. I broke Tina’s nose with the first swing, and took out some of Rosie’s teeth with the second. I think I broke Tina’s arm before I was done from the way she was holding it. I remember being covered with blood, and none of it was mine.”

“But the man.”

“He ran at the first scream. It was Tinker who stopped me. He was a big man, and he knocked me silly, carried me downstairs, and locked me in the basement. You want to know something funny? The next morning before he took me to Uncle Henry, he looked right at me and said, ‘Good for you, boy, but I can’t keep you around.’ You know the rest.”

“They deserved it,” Norah said.

“I always thought so.”

“Did you learn — the things you know at that place?”

He looked puzzled for a minute, then took her meaning. “The basics of what goes where maybe. Most of what I learned there I’d rather forget.”

He tugged at a strand of wet hair that hung over her shoulder. “You aren’t the first widow I ever met, you know. The first one didn’t charge money. She wanted payment different ways.”

“How did you meet her?”

“Ah, that’s another secret, and it’s your turn. Did you fall in love with Hawkins right at the start?”

She looked down. He’d been right about the clothes she’d left on not hiding anything. Wet, the thin fabric of her chemise clung to her breasts like a second skin, and the darkness and erect state of her nipples showed right through, making her feel vulnerable. It had to be that. It couldn’t be the question.

“No. I never loved him. In the beginning I thought I would. It’s hard to get to know someone when you’re courting, at least it was for me. I liked him, and he didn’t take my father’s warning to heart like the others, and I thought I’d come to love him.”

“But you.... If you weren’t grieving over him when I first saw you, what had you acting like that?”

His brows were drawn. He looked surprised and disturbed and like he really wanted to know, but she wasn’t ready for that yet.

“I can’t tell you.”

“That’s cheating. You’re at least two secrets ahead.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“You spend too much time being sorry. You cheated, fair and square. Let’s get out of here for now. You’re starting to look more cold than cool.”

He rose and pulled her up with him. Golden, tanned, and white, she wanted him to drive every thought of Joe from her mind. She wanted him to make her forget another man had ever touched her. Maybe telling secrets affected him the way not telling affected her, for his kiss was full of the same need building in every part of her.

He peeled off her clinging chemise and drawers and carried her to the blanket she’d fussed to arrange. Wool scratched at her bare skin. Like the sun and the deep blue sky stretching forever above and the sounds of the creek and scent of the earth, it only intensified the desire burning away every shred of shyness.

She traced the lines of his face. He had shaved this morning. The beard that often roughened his cheeks was only a hint under her fingertips.

The times they’d coupled by early morning light or with a lamp still burning, his face stayed a handsome shadow. In bright sunshine she saw every detail — the way the water had made dark spikes of his lashes, the way those lashes were half-lowered over eyes turning liquid with passion. She had not drowned in the shallow creek. She would lose herself forever in his eyes.

When she outlined his lips with a forefinger, he drew the tip into his mouth, nibbled gently. “You’re beautiful.”

“Don’t spoil it by lying,” she begged. “We both know pretty is the best I can do.”

He shook his head. “Pretty is when your hair is pinned up, and your collar is buttoned up. Pretty is for those times. Beautiful is for times like this, good times, wild times, sharing secrets times.”

Her throat closed. If she could still cry, tears would escape now. He traced her face as she had his, wove his hands into her wet hair, cupped her skull, and touched each part of her face again with his lips. She felt fragile and female — and beautiful.

He kissed ever inch of her, his tongue tickling and tasting, including places she had believed barely touchable. The instinct to stop him died in the mists of pleasure. “Caleb, I need.... I need.”

“Me too.”

She expected his weight, the familiar. He turned her on her side to face him, draped her leg over his, and entered her, his eyes locked on hers. She shut her eyes, invaded in some impossible way beyond the physical.

He moved inside her slowly. She moved with him, giving herself to the pleasure. One arm held her close, one hand rubbed a nipple.

“Norah.” His voice was hoarse and deep, his words in the rhythm of their movement. “Look at me. Let me know you know it’s me. You want it to be me.”

“I know. You’re the only one I ever wanted.” She opened her eyes and let him see the truth.

His hand slid lower between them. She lost the ability to speak or think, was still shuddering with aftershocks when he rolled her to her back, thrust harder, faster, and emptied himself into her.

Unnoticed before, as her heart slowed, the ground turned harder and more unyielding beneath her. At her first tentative squirm, Caleb rolled to his side still deep inside, holding her thigh, keeping her close and wrapped around his hips. As if he needed to.

How could something that seemed so ordinary with one man be cataclysmic with another? The way he touched her, kissed her, was part of it, but not all. Knowing the real answer and facing it in her heart, she drew breath to tell him, then let it out in silence. First she had to find the courage to tell him other things, all the secrets.

“If we don’t move soon, we’re both going to have very red rear ends.”

His words lifted her mood. She laughed. “Only on one side.”

Letting her go at last, he rose to his feet in one fluid move, and held out a hand. She sat up. Things previously felt but never seen close and clear hung inches from her face. Guiltily she jerked her gaze upward, only to see an open smile. “You can not only look. You can touch.”

How could her cheeks burn after what they’d just done? She bit her lip and looked away.

“Do you know when you blush like that it goes all over? You wouldn’t believe the places that can turn pink.”

“Caleb.”

“You can just say no.”

“Do you think any of the bushes near here provide enough shade we could move there?”

“If not, I’ll build some.”

A
FTER THE PASSION
of the previous day — and night — breakfast was a quiet affair. Norah’s mind turned back to worries.

“They’ll be back to arrest you soon. A lot more men will come, and they’ll surround us. Let’s leave. Let’s go somewhere far away from all this.”

“No one’s arresting me. The sheriff works for Van Cleve, and Van Cleve isn’t going to be ordering me or anyone else arrested.”

It took a moment for her to understand his meaning. “If you go after Mr. Van Cleve, others will come, federal marshals or....” She didn’t know exactly who but had visions of cavalry charging down on them.

“If it gets to that, then we’ll move on. I like it here, and I’ve done enough running in my life.”

“You’ve run from the law before?”

“Not exactly. I always figured leaving trouble far behind before the law showed up was better than waiting to see. It never mattered before.”

She’d been awake half the night worrying. He looked unperturbed by the same thoughts that plagued her. Memories had kept her awake the other half of the night.

“I want to show you something,” she said, making up her mind at last. “We need to walk a ways.”

She led the way a distance behind the house, picking sunflowers here and there as she went. She stopped at the top of a slight rise and knelt to replace dried out prairie roses on two small squares of cleared ground with the sunflowers.

“I’ve seen you here,” Caleb said. “You always looked like you wanted to be alone.”

“I always did.” She pulled a weed out here and there, smoothed the dirt, and got to her feet.

Caleb had the old wary look to him again. He gestured toward the long, narrow rectangle of grass that had been dug up recently and had already started to return to unmarked prairie.

“Why not put the flowers on his grave?”

“I don’t want to. You asked me why I never came to love him. My first baby, my daughter, was stillborn three years after we married. She should have been fine. She was perfect, but the cord was around her neck and killed her. Joe never seemed to care the way you’d expect — the way I expected — but I thought he hid his feelings until he forbid me to say her name. He said it was a sin to name a child that never lived. She lived. She lived inside me, and I loved her, and her name is Audrey.”

She looked at him finally and saw surprise and understanding and something else. “We got along all right after that, but I knew I’d never love him. The other grave is larger because our son Joey was three. Joe killed him.”

“Norah.”

She stepped away from his reaching hand. “It was an accident. Everyone says it was an accident, and I know it was, but it happened because Joe wouldn’t listen. He was so proud. A son. He took Joey everywhere and he boasted as if he created our little boy from clay himself. And when I told him it was dangerous to have a little boy outside with him when he worked, he wouldn’t listen. He said I molly-coddled Joey, and I’d ruin him, and he took him outside and expected a three-year-old to stay put where he told him to. And Joey followed him into the corral, and one of the horses....”

“Norah.”

“I cried all the tears a person gets for a lifetime, and he never cried at all. He never said he was sorry. He never said he was wrong. He said it was my fault. He said if I taught Joey properly instead of pampering him, it wouldn’t have happened. I hated him after that. I’d have left if I had a place to go. If my babies weren’t here.”

“Norah, sweetheart.”

She tried to back away from him again, but he was too quick for her and pulled her roughly into his arms and held her hard against his chest. She closed her eyes and sank into him, giving herself to his strength, breathing deep of his clean male scent. Oh, how good it felt to be held.

He didn’t argue with her as Mabel, Becky, and even Archie had done. He held her and made soft, soothing sounds deep in his throat. When she stopped trembling, he said, “I thought it was him you were grieving when I first saw you. I shouldn’t have been so hard on you. I thought it was him.”

“We lived together and slept in the same bed, but we hardly talked and never touched if we could help it. When he went to town, he’d stay for days, and I’m sure he visited those women, and I was glad. I didn’t want him to touch me ever again.”

Caleb not only held her the way she needed to be held, he didn’t tell her she had to forgive the unforgivable. He knew, she thought, he knew about that dark place in the heart where some things had to be hidden because that’s all that could be done with them.

C
RYING FOR HOURS
had never made Norah feel more washed out than telling Caleb the truth about Joe and her babies. To her relief, Caleb held her in the night, laid an occasional light caress on her in the day, and other than that left her alone.

She welcomed the sight of the Carburys’ wagon fording the creek. Becky hung on to Ethan’s shoulders and stood up long enough to wave her handkerchief wildly, hollering a greeting as they approached. If anyone could brighten a day, Becky could, and the young woman looked even more exuberant than usual.

Mabel and Archie had come with the young couple. Archie sat on one of the benches Caleb had built on each side of the ramada and knocked against the wooden seat with his fist.

“Good solid piece of lumber here. Must have cost you a pretty penny.”

“I pulled a lot of good lumber out of the burned out houses around here.”

Caleb was, of course, speaking the truth, just not addressing where the thick, wide boards he’d used for the benches came from.

Archie winked at him. Winked! “Yeah, I’m sure there were a lot of pieces like this under those ashes.”

Norah seated Mabel and Becky in the two chairs at the table.

“You stay here in the shade, and I’ll put coffee on.” She counted noses and decided if she and Caleb had their coffee in glasses or didn’t have any, she had enough cups.

“I’ll come with you and help,” Becky said, jumping up. “Ma and Pa have heard all my news, and Ethan’s sick to death of listening to me.”

Becky stood nervously near the stove while Norah ground beans, emptied the dregs of the morning’s coffee, and prepared more.

“We’re visiting Ma and Pa for a whole week,” she blurted finally. “Ethan has a promotion, and that’s good, but we have to move to Topeka, and that makes me so sad. I don’t know if I can stand leaving and not seeing family and friends like you ever again.”

Norah hugged her. “You’ll probably see us as often as you do now. Those trains your husband helps keep running can bring you here or your family there in a day. The farm won’t evaporate if your brothers take care of it for a few days while your ma and pa visit you, and the boys can visit on their own.

“Don’t you miss your family? Don’t you ever wish your ma was right there to talk to?”

“Sometimes.”

“What about your sisters? I wish I had sisters. Brothers are good, but sisters would be special.”

She ought to write to her sisters and George, Norah thought, with a flash of guilt. Until the rest of the family settled somewhere and let her know where, she couldn’t write to them, but she knew where her brother George and her sisters and their husbands were. She’d never felt close to any of them, but she ought to let them know about Joe and about Caleb. As soon as things were settled, she’d do that.

Becky stood unusually quiet, folding the material of her skirt into pleats, letting go, and doing it again. Norah examined her friend more carefully. Even in the subdued light inside the house, Becky’s skin glowed; a healthy flush highlighted her cheekbones.