Texas Moon TH4 (10 page)

Walking down the street beside Miss Janice Harrison, schoolmarm, Peter gradually felt the collar around his neck tighten. Everyone in town turned to greet her as they entered town. All the women looked at him with knowing glances. The men restrained themselves to soft snickers and quickly hidden grins.

They thought he was courting her. Peter saw his error immediately. He gave the schoolteacher's composed face a hasty glance. He couldn't tell what she was thinking.

But he knew—as certainly as the sun rose in the morning—that this woman could not be had for anything less than a ring around her finger.

And a noose around his neck.

Chapter 8

"Miss Harrison, I understand you've been entertaining our resident convict." The good-looking cowboy bowed ostentatiously over Janice's hand, sending Peter a mischievous look that would have better suited a twelve-year-old boy than a grown man.

Janice primly removed her gloved hand from his. "Kyle, I'll tell Carmen you're misbehaving again. Mr. Mulloney hasn't been convicted of anything."

The cowboy didn't look a bit abashed as he tilted his ten-gallon hat back on his head and grinned. "Now you do know he's Daniel's brother, Jenny? You and Evie being close, you got to know about Daniel."

The sudden silence that ensued didn't precisely answer his question, but Kyle drew his own conclusions and gave a soft whistle. "Well, now. It seems the two of you have got a lot to talk about. See you later." With a broad grin and a swaggering stride, Kyle headed for the church doors.

Peter broke the silence first. "Who was that?" he demanded, watching the cowboy swagger away, wondering if it would do any good to shoot him. The man had been all too familiar with the schoolteacher, and certainly more than conversant with his own connections.

"Kyle Harding, Jason's younger brother," Janice answered as she walked toward the church.

"How do you know Evie and Daniel?" Peter didn't think he wanted to hear the answer to this. Evie was his brother Daniel's adopted sister and alter ego. The pair had been inseparable as children and were still close as adults.

He'd been doing fine thinking of the schoolteacher as just another stranger who'd crossed his path, one for whom he held little or no responsibility. He could have taken a stranger to bed and headed off for New Mexico as soon as the loan was in his pocket without a qualm. It began to dawn on him that he may have underestimated the situation.

"That's a long story." She stepped inside the church and found her pew without explaining further.

He was afraid to sit by her. He didn't want the entire town writing Daniel and telling him he was seeing schoolteacher, particularly if that schoolteacher happened to be a friend of Daniel's and Evie's. Why hadn't it occurred to him earlier that Daniel and Evie had once lived in this town, that they had friends here?

Probably because it hadn't mattered before. All he'd expected to do was ride in, obtain a loan from one of those friends of Daniel's, and ride out again. Now he was in the company of a respectable spinster the entire town had probably been trying to marry off for years, and the whole damned town knew who he was. Hell, he couldn't have walked into the trap more surely if he'd planned on it.

He couldn't do much about it now. He couldn't marry anybody until he had that loan and the gold mine in his hands. He'd been looking for a wife. The schoolteacher might do, but she might take exception to living in the wildness of a New Mexico mining camp. He would just have to unravel himself from this knot as quickly as he could, get the school built, get his loan, and hightail it out of here. If the Hardings actually owned the bank, he shouldn't have any difficulty obtaining the loan here rather than Natchez. Maybe when he came back to pay it off he could take another look at the teacher.

When the service ended, Peter was anxious to return to work, but the townspeople seemed more interested in gathering to gossip. He cornered a couple of the men supposed to be volunteering their labors, and they gave him vague answers as to when they would get up to the schoolhouse. Frustrated, he looked around for Janice and found her talking to the pregnant girl from the mercantile.

Their conversation seemed intense, but he wandered up to them anyway. He caught the girl saying, "No, Bobby was with me all evening. He doesn't do those kind of things anymore," but something in her face told Peter she was covering up for her drunken husband. Remembering Janice's calm statement that Bobby Fairweather tended to take out his hostilities on her, Peter understood the reason for the lie.

"Good morning, Mrs. Fairweather. You're looking in fine fettle today." He doffed his hat and bowed at the flustered young girl.

She gave him a beaming smile. "Mr. Mulloney, you do look a sight in that fancy cravat. Is Miss Harrison seeing to your Sunday dinner?"

He lifted an eyebrow in the teacher's direction and she gave a curt nod. "It seems there is no rest for the wicked, Mrs. Fairweather. It doesn't seem quite fair that Miss Harrison should be punished for my sins, but there it is. Where is your husband this fine morning? I need to have a word with him."

"Fine" wasn't exactly the word for the morning after a storm. The street was a sea of mud, and horses splashing through puddles threw up a constant wave of wet and dirt to be dodged. Janice glared at this blatant falsehood, but he ignored it.

"I was just telling Miss Harrison, Bobby is a bit under the weather this morning. Could I give him a message?" The anxiety was back in the girl's eyes again.

"Tell him I need some help in repairing Miss Harrison's windows, and the sheriff promised Bobby knew how to do it. I'll be up at the schoolhouse this afternoon, he can come by to get me."

The girl flushed and nodded and soon hurried away. Janice sent him a discouraging look.

"That wasn't necessary, you know." She marched away from the church crowd.

"If he's going to shoot them out, he's going to learn to put them back." Peter fell into step with her.

"There were others involved. Mr. Powell will see that they make reparations."

"Yeah, but will Powell see that it won't happen again? You could have been hurt."

"I told you, I know better than to go into the front room on Saturday night. You can't lasso every cowboy in town. You embarrassed poor Ellen. She has enough on her hands right now."

Peter couldn't believe they were arguing right here in full view of all of Main Street. Where he came from women didn't do that. He reached to untie his cravat. "How do you know Daniel and Evie?"

"My brother is working on Daniel's newspaper. Evie's family lives here. Kyle's wife is her cousin. She visits frequently."

"You should have told me you knew Daniel." That was an idiotic thing to say. He knew it as soon as he said it The look she threw him confirmed it.

"Then you should have told me you were his brother." She gathered up her long skirt and stalked ahead of him.

There didn't seem to be any answer to this impasse. Peter shoved his tie in his pocket and threw his coat over the porch railing when they reached the house. He headed up the hill to the schoolhouse when he heard Janice enter the kitchen and slam the door. It didn't make sense to argue over a man living a thousand miles away—especially a man neither one of them knew very well. He'd obviously been working in the hot sun too long. He didn't know what the schoolteacher's excuse was.

She fixed chicken and dumplings and spring peas and corn pudding for dinner. By the time he finished eating Peter was ready to bury the hatchet, but there were men outside already arguing over the best way to repair the front window and others were heading up the hill to the schoolhouse. Peter shoved back his chair from the table and gave Janice a look of apology.

"I hate to eat and run, but it looks like duty calls. I don't want any harsh feelings between us. Why don't you come up and help supervise this afternoon, get out in the sun a little instead of working so hard in here?"

A faint smile crossed her lips. Her lips were naturally pale, like her complexion. She really couldn't be called pretty, but he didn't know what else to call her. Her gray, piercing eyes turned her fair features into something more arresting. Her smile made his heart quake. He couldn't remember a woman's smile ever doing that.

"You want me to fry my brains as you have yours? No, thank you. I think I'll just stay in here and see that the windows are replaced properly. I'll have a cold collation when you're ready to eat."

He liked that thought. Slamming his hat on his head, Peter wandered off to the work site, enjoying the idea of a woman sitting at home, looking after the house, preparing a meal just for him. Now if he could just imagine her lying in bed, waiting for him...

But that would mean marriage. He could see that now. He had been so desperate for a woman he had almost tricked himself into thinking an old-maid schoolteacher might be willing to fool around a little. But she wasn't as old as he had first thought, and she was a good deal more innocent than he wanted. Warning sirens screeched in his head.

When Bobby Fairweather finally showed up later that afternoon, he was already halfway drunk. Peter gave him a look of disgust. "You'd better get a hold of yourself, Fairweather. You've got a wife and kid to look after now. You can't be drinking like you're a free man."

The cowboy shot him a belligerent look and belched. "What the hell do you know about it? She was the one that got pregnant. If Holy Harding hadn't held a gun to my head, I'd still be a free man today." He cackled slyly. "You start fooling around with that schoolteacher, and he'll have a gun to your head too. Only he's likely to shoot it instead of waiting for the preacher."

Peter had already got that impression from the sheriff. He didn't like it being reinforced now by this two-bit banty rooster. "Fetch a hammer and start nailing that frame up there. They've already fixed the windows."

Fairweather frowned. "I don't like the way you said that. I didn't have nothin' to do with them windows. It wasn't me the sheriff arrested out there."

Peter walked off to yell at a man about to nail a board to another man's foot. With the danger averted, he stopped to give the ropy cowboy a look of disgust. "You want me to talk to the men the sheriff arrested? What kind of story do you think they'll tell? Just keep away from the schoolteacher, understand? You go raise hell anywhere else you want to, but keep away from her."

Bobby growled something obscene and walked away without offering to join the others. Peter was just as happy that he was gone. He didn't need a drunk falling off the roof and putting a kink in his schedule.

The frame was up and the roof half done by the time Peter called a halt for the day. He gave the partially constructed building a look of satisfaction before he started back to the house. A few more days with this many men at his disposal and he could finish up and be out of here before the week ended. He hoped Jason Harding was on his way back from Houston by now.

Peter walked in to find Janice bent over a sewing machine, humming happily to herself. The late afternoon sun highlighted the soft blond tendrils escaping from her chignon, and he was struck by the exquisite portrait of vulnerability posed by her slender neck. When she looked up with happiness dancing in her eyes, he was struck by something a good deal more earthy. His loins strained against the fabric of his pants, and he had to walk to the window to keep his back to her.

"You keep, this up, and you'll have the school better than new before the week's up," she chirruped.

Peter gritted his teeth at her cheerfulness. "You'll need to help us with the interior, tell us where to put the stove and what all you need in there."

"Shelves. I would dearly love some shelves for books. Not that we have any books, mind you, but someday..."

"Harding said he was bringing back books. Why don't you write Daniel for the ones you don't have? He's got a complete library at his disposal."

He sensed the stiffening of her posture even as the cheer went out of her voice. "I don't ask for charity, Mr. Mulloney. When the townspeople are ready to raise the funds to buy books, they'll raise the funds."

What put the starch in her, took it out of him. Peter swung around to meet her gaze. "That's a fool way of thinking, Miss Harrison. Daniel has enough money at his disposal to furnish an entire library and not miss it. Why should he keep it when he doesn't need it and you do?"