Trilby (5 page)

“It’s not my way,” he agreed.

“Look at her,” she muttered, glaring at Trilby. “So cultured and citified and elegant. She’s nothing to look at, though. All bones and a face that no man could call pretty. I’m much better to look at than she is!”

“Now, Lou,” he said gently.

She stumbled and had to regain her balance. “I’m being spiteful, I know. Why don’t her people control her? If she’d been raised right, she wouldn’t be carousing around with my husband!”

The question made Thorn thoughtful. Mary and Jack Lang were moral people. They hadn’t raised Trilby to be licentious. Surely if they knew she was seeing Curt they’d stop her. Of course, he rationalized, they might not know about it.

Minutes later he approached her where she stood with Curt and slid his hand down to capture hers.

“Excuse us, won’t you?” he told Curt, and he didn’t smile. His cousin’s eyebrows arched in surprise.

Thorn led her onto the floor, where several people were doing a lazy waltz to the music of the live band he’d hired.

“I think it’s time Curt spent just a little time with his wife,” he said icily.

Trilby flushed with anger. She smiled coolly. “How kind of you to sacrifice yourself on her behalf.”

He shifted his eyes to where Lou was coaxing a reluctant Curt to dance with her. The whole situation made him angry.

His arms contracted around Trilby, and she stiffened. “I might as well dance with a slab of lumber,” he remarked as they went around the floor for the second time. His hand gripped her slender waist hard and he shook her gently. “Will you
relax?
”

She was stiff in his arms, because she was angry at the remarks he’d made and frightened of how he made her feel. Her hand in his was cold and nervous, more so when his fingers began sliding in and out between her own, making her knees wobbly. He’d been so antagonistic, and now he was acting as if—as if he wanted to seduce her!

“Please stop doing that,” she said irritably, tugging at her hand.

“Doing what, Miss Lang?” he asked, with every evidence of innocence.

She glared up into his dancing dark eyes and then down again. “You know what.”

“You relax and I’ll stop doing…that.”

Her teeth clenched. “Have you no knowledge of civilized behavior at all?” she asked haughtily.

His dark eyes glittered at her. “I’m a man,” he said quietly. “Perhaps you aren’t used to the breed?”

Her gray eyes flashed at him. “I do most certainly know a few men!”

“Pretty city boys,” he shot back. “With nice manners and manicured nails and slicked-back hair.”

“There’s nothing wrong with manners, Mr. Vance,” she told him. “In fact, they rate rather high on my list of priorities.”

“You sound very indignant. I’ve seen a setting hen less ruffled than you look right now,” he said mockingly. “All feathers and fury because I’ve insulted your background.” The smile faded as he looked at her. “I buried my parents with my own two hands,” he said, shocking her into lifting her eyes. “They were killed by Mexican bandits raiding up into Arizona. I have no love for outlaws, and less for Eastern tenderfeet who think a man is measured by his vocabulary. Out here, Miss Lang, a man is measured by his ability to hold on to what’s his, by his ability to protect his loved ones and insure their survival. Pretty talk doesn’t stop bullets or build empires.”

“You sound very critical of city folk,” she began.

“I am critical of them. We had two Washington big shots out here after my parents were gunned down. We tried to explain the situation brewing in Mexico and the need for some protection for settlers here, and we got nothing but promises of ‘looking into the situation.’”

“Washington is quite far away,” she reminded him.

“Not far enough away for me,” he said shortly. “I
couldn’t get any cooperation from Washington or the army, so I handled the problem myself.”

“The problem?”

“I tracked my parents’ murderers down across the border,” he explained.

“Did you find them?”

“Yes.” He glanced toward the band and motioned to them. They’d been winding down, but they began the song again.

She didn’t pursue the question. The look in his dark eyes had been fairly explicit. She had a terrible vision of men being gunned down.

He felt the quiver against his hand at her back and he nodded. “You’re going to have to get a little tougher if you want to live in this country.”

“Did I ever say that I wanted to live here, Mr. Vance?” she asked with soft hauteur. “I came because I had no choice.”

“You seem to like some things about it,” he continued, with faint sarcasm.

“That’s right, I do love the dust! I’m thinking of starting an export business so that I can share it with the world.” She couldn’t face another argument. “Can we stop dancing?”

“Why?” Her attitude put his back up. She was making his desert sound like some alien and unwanted land. She made him feel like some uncivilized savage. Well, perhaps he was, but he didn’t like her so superior attitude. She was hardly fit to judge him, considering her behavior with his married cousin.

His hand contracted, bringing her close against him so that she could feel his chest warm and hard against her breasts, even through several layers of cloth. “Don’t
you like being held close to my body like this, Trilby?” he asked, with deliberate mockery, holding her shocked eyes.

“Of all the insufferable things to say!” She stiffened and stopped dancing. No man had ever talked to her like this. She stared at him as if she wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly.

“You do that so well,” he remarked cynically. “You almost convince me that I’ve shocked you.”

She was out of her depth, and disturbed. He made her feel things she didn’t want to feel. “
Shock
is hardly the right word. Please let me go,” she said tersely.

“Very well,” he replied, loosening his hold. “But don’t think you’ll escape me completely,” he added mockingly. “I don’t give up when something, or someone, interests me.”

The words had an ominous ring.

“I should prefer to become an object of interest to a fat sidewinder!” she returned.

Her analogy amused him. He smiled, which made it even worse. Trilby turned away and muttered to herself all the way back to her parents and Teddy.

It was one thing to be faced with a head-on accusation and reply to it. But Thorn Vance was only making nebulous innuendos, and she didn’t know how to handle them. She couldn’t imagine why he thought so badly of her.

If it had mattered, she might have pressed him for an answer. As it was, she told herself, Richard was the only man in her life. That being the case, what did Mr. Vance’s opinion matter?

A
FTER
T
HORN’S CONTEMPT
the night before, it was doubly shocking to Trilby when he suddenly appeared at the ranch the next morning and invited her to go for a ride in the desert.

He looked as if he expected her to refuse, and his smile was mocking. “Not on a horse, Trilby,” he drawled. “I’ve brought the touring car, as you can see.”

She glanced doubtfully at the big, open car. “I don’t like automobiles,” Trilby said. “We had one back in Louisiana and our chauffeur was forever snapping bands, and having flat tires, and skidding into the ditch on muddy roads. Even the one we have now is too fast,” she added, with an accusing glance at her grinning father.

“The buckboard would be less comfortable, I assure you.”

“Do go, Trilby,” her mother said gently. “It will do you good.”

“Indeed,” Jack Lang agreed.

Trilby could hardly tell them what Thorn had said to her the night before, or accuse him publicly of treating her like a loose woman. Her pride wouldn’t let her advertise his opinion of her.

“What about Dr. McCollum? Aren’t you neglecting him?” she asked, grasping at straws.

“Craig left on the El Paso train,” he said simply. Then he simply stared at her, his mocking smile daring her to produce another excuse.

She was no coward. “All right,” she said composedly. “I’ll go with you, Mr. Vance.”

She dressed in a long blue dress with lace-up shoes and a frilly hat. Then she wrapped a shawl around her shoulders—just in case the weather changed—and went out to Thorn.

He’d certainly impressed her parents with his apparent pursuit of Trilby. And the dignified gray suit he was wearing only added to the image he was projecting of a pillar of the community. Jack and Mary were beaming at him, their approval so obvious that it was embarrassing. Only Trilby knew that whatever Thornton Vance’s intentions were, they certainly weren’t as respectable as he looked.

“I’ll have her back before dark,” he assured them. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of her.”

“Why, of course you will, dear boy,” Jack Lang replied, as if it were a foregone conclusion and needed no emphasis.

Trilby sat quietly while Thorn cranked the car and came back to sit beside her. Naturally, she thought bitterly, it wouldn’t take him a half hour of sweat and muttered swear words to get it running, as it had Richard when he’d taken her and Teddy out riding. She held that competence against Thorn. It was just one more thing that set him apart from most men.

She waved as they sped off down the wide dirt road that led toward the mountains. She held her hat on, glad of the windscreen that kept the thick dust out of her face.
The car her father drove was missing its windscreen. Teddy had accidentally knocked a baseball through it.

“Too fast?” Thorn asked, glancing ruefully at Trilby. “I’ll slow down a bit.”

He did, lifting his booted foot from the accelerator pedal. The car chugged along, so loud that conversation was next to impossible even if he’d been a talkative sort. He glanced out at the brownish hue of the land, where the grasses were dormant in autumn. The paloverde trees that dotted the landscape were glorious. He glanced at Trilby, wondering if she knew what they were. He pulled off the main road onto a smaller dirt one that led back to a secluded box canyon. As they drove, Trilby noticed that trees became more plentiful and the mountains loomed large and ghostly.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, delighted with the wooded canyon.

He pulled over, onto the side of the road, and cut off the engine. “Do you like it?”

“Why, it’s lovely,” she exclaimed. Her wide eyes were expressive. “I had no idea there were places like this in Arizona. I thought it was all cactus and sand.”

“You’d have known sooner if you’d ever agreed to come out with your father and brother,” he chided.

“I eat enough dust in the house, thank you, without going out in search of more during roundup,” she replied.

“Dust won’t melt you, sugar plum,” he said, with faint sarcasm.

“I hardly expected that it would, and please, could you refrain from calling me pet names?”

He turned in the seat to face her, idly rolling a cigarette while he stared at her. There were only the two of
them in the world, in this beautiful wild place. Trilby was intensely aware of him as a man and was fighting not to respond to him. It was very easy to remember how it had been when he’d kissed her the night before. She was much too vulnerable to him, and he had a bad opinion of her. She must remember that, somehow. Her posture straightened as she fought not to betray the tingling excitement he engendered in her.

But he saw her discomfort and understood it very well. “You’re very stiff and formal with me, Trilby. Why?”

She met his searching gaze bravely. “It isn’t me that you’re interested in, Mr. Vance,” she said shortly. “I’m not completely stupid.”

She surprised him. That didn’t often happen with women. Sally had been pretty, but not particularly intelligent. Trilby was. “Then if I’m not interested in you, what am I interested in?”

“The water on my father’s property,” she said, without backing down.

He smiled appreciatively. “Well, well. And what makes you think that?”

“You need water. You don’t have enough, and we do, and my father won’t sell or lease any to you. That’s why,” she replied. “My father doesn’t even suspect that you might be playing up to me for ulterior motives. He thinks the sun rises and sets on you. So does the rest of my family.” She glared at him. “For myself, Mr. Vance, I think you’re a shipless pirate.”

He chuckled softly. “Well, that’s honest, at least.” He stuck the rolled cigarette in his thin mouth and produced a match to light it. Pungent smoke filled the air.

“I don’t really blame you,” she said after a minute.
She fumbled with her cloth drawstring purse. “I suppose water is life itself out here.”

“Indeed it is.” He took another draw from the cigarette. “Are you up to a little walking?”

“Of course,” she said, glad to escape the confined space.

He came around and opened her door, carefully helping her out. The touch of his fingers made her heart jump. She moved quickly away from him and began to walk down the road. It was so peaceful. The wind blew noisily and there was a smell, a crisp, earthy smell, in the air. Her eyes found rock formations in the hills beyond. The trees were golden and magnificent against the faint reddish yellow of the maple leaves.

“What sort of trees are those?” she asked curiously.

“The golden ones? They’re paloverde trees. They have long strands of golden blossoms in the spring, and in the autumn they go glorious. I like them better than the maples.”

“Those others are oaks, aren’t they?”

“Some of them. That—” he indicated an enormous tree with a bent trunk “—is a cottonwood. A few decades ago, people used to strip off the bark and scrape the tree for sap. It’s sweet, you see, like a confection.”

“Oh,” she cried delightedly, “how clever!”

“And those are willows,” he added, gesturing toward a stand of sapling-type trees along the banks of the stream.

She looked around suddenly. “Is it safe here?” she asked quickly. “I mean, are there Indians near here?”

He smiled. “Plenty of them. Mostly Mescalero and Mimbrenos Apaches. There used to be a wealth of Chiricahuas, but when Geronimo was captured, the govern
ment shipped his whole band back East to Florida and kept them in a fort on the bay at St. Augustine for a long time. They finally moved them back out to New Mexico. Geronimo killed a lot of white people, but then, the white people killed a lot of Apaches, too. Gen. George Crook finally got him to surrender. Quite a fellow, old
Nantan Lupan.
”

“What?”

“Grey Wolf. It’s what the Apaches called Crook. They respected him. When he gave his word, he kept it. Odd for a white man. He did all he could to help the Apaches for the rest of his life, after Geronimo’s surrender. Geronimo died February of last year.”

“I didn’t know that.”

He glanced at her. “You Easterners don’t know much about Indians, do you? Apaches are interesting. They called the old Chiricahua chief Cochise, but his Apache name was
Cheis.
It means oak. God only knows how it got altered to Cochise. He was a wily old devil, smart as a fox. He led the U.S. Cavalry on a merry chase until the peace came. But Geronimo refused to give up and live at the white man’s mercy on a reservation. There were times, not so long ago, when just the name Apache could make a grown man tremble out here.”

She kept quiet, waiting for him to go on. She was fascinated with his knowledge of the Indians.

He smiled, sensing her interest. That pleased him. “Indians are not ignorant. I have two Apache men who work for me. One of them is Chiricahua. And he is,” he added dryly, “hardly the Eastern image of an Indian. You’ll see what I mean when you meet him. His name is Naki.”

“What does it mean?” she asked curiously.

“He’s actually called Two Fists, but Apache has glottal stops and nasalizations and high tones… I can’t pronounce his second name. Naki means ‘two.’”

“Are you…do you have any Indian blood?”

He shook his head. “My grandmother was a pretty little Spanish lady. They had a little girl. My grandfather got tired of the responsibility and deserted her.” He let that slip. He’d never told anyone else.

“Didn’t he love her enough to stay?”

He grew stiff. “Apparently not. My grandmother starved to death. If it hadn’t been for my great-uncle, the one who owned Los Santos, my mother would have starved, too. She and my father inherited Los Santos when my great-uncle died. I was eighteen when Mexicans raided up here and killed them.”

“Did you have brothers or sisters?”

“I was one of three kids; I had two sisters,” he said. “They both died of cholera.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I was just a kid at the time. I don’t remember much about them.” He smoked his cigarette as they walked, his head high. He walked without stooping, his posture perfect, like his clothing. For a cowboy, he wore the suit very well.

“You said your grandmother was Spanish…”

“And you wonder why Mexicans attacked her daughter and son-in-law,” he guessed.

“Yes.”

“Don’t you know yet that most Mexicans hate the Spanish? It’s one of the reasons they’re fighting now. They’ve had Spanish domination since Cortés. They’ve had enough,” he replied simply. “But the people who
killed my parents weren’t revolutionaries. They were just bandits.”

“I’m sorry. About your parents, I mean.”

“So was I.”

There was a wealth of pain in the words, and she remembered reluctantly how his expression had told her he dealt with the murderers. She turned her attention to the ground, looking at the sandy soil. “Does much grow out here?” she asked idly.

“The Hohokam, the Indian people who once inhabited this land before the time of Christ, were an agricultural people. They learned to grow corn in clumps, and to irrigate the land. They had a system of government and a religion that was far ahead of their time. They may have existed as a culture for thousands of years.”

She stared at him with renewed respect. “How do you know all that?”

He chuckled. “McCollum,” he said simply. “It pays to have an anthropology professor for a friend. He’s very good at his job. He stays with me when he’s exploring ruins in the area. He comes several times a year when he’s teaching.”

“I like him. I didn’t realize he was an educator,” she said.

“Yes. He teaches anthropology and archaeology at one of the big colleges up North.”

“It must be interesting. Do you go with him when he looks for ruins?”

“When time allows.” He shoved one hand in the pocket of his slacks and slanted a look down at her from under the wide brim of his hat. “Do you like archaeology?”

“I know very little about it,” she admitted. “But it’s interesting, isn’t it?”

“Very.” He put out a lean, tanned hand suddenly and stopped her in her tracks. “Be still a minute. Don’t talk. Look there.” He pointed toward the bushes, and she felt her heart racing. Was it a rattlesnake? She wanted to run, but just as her feet got the message from her brain, a funny, long brown bird went scampering from under the bush to dart across the road.

She laughed. “What is it?” she exclaimed.

“A roadrunner,” he told her. “They hunt and kill snakes.”

“Well, bully for him.” She chuckled.

“Snakes are beneficial, you silly child,” he chided. “Bull snakes and rat snakes and black snakes don’t hurt anything. They eat rats and mice. And a king snake will kill and eat a rattler.”

“I don’t want to look at one long enough to identify it,” she informed him.

He shook his head. “Come on.”

He led her off the trail eventually, and into a shady area where a stream cut through the forest floor. Huge, smooth boulders ran up from the stream toward the mountains.

“This is an old Apache camp,” he told her. “It isn’t on the reservation, of course, but they still come here sometimes. Naki likes to camp here when he’s rounding up strays. He’s marvelous with horses.”

“Does he wear war paint and headdresses?” she asked innocently.

He glared at her. “He’s Apache,” he said. “Apaches don’t wear feathered headdresses like the Plains Indians. They wear a colored cloth band around their foreheads
and wear their hair shoulder length. They don’t live in tepees like the Plains Indians, either. They live in a sort of round or oblong lodge called a wickiup.”

“Do people out here hate the Indians?” she asked.

“Some do. There have been times when we were allies with them, and even with the Mexicans, to fight off the Comanches when they tried to come south and conquer us.”

“Oh, my!”

“And the Confederate flag flew over Tucson once, during the Civil War,” he said, chuckling at her. “A lot of Southerners settled out here in Arizona. You should feel right at home.”

“I wish I did,” she replied quietly, and meant it. She stared down at the soil. “There aren’t any cacti right here.”

“Plenty out on the desert, mostly saguaro,” he told her, “and organ pipe. Those saguaro are huge and heavy. They have a sort of woody skeleton inside. One can kill a man if it falls on him.”