Cactus Flower (Gone-to-Texas Trilogy) (11 page)

      
The fact that Mutt was so calmly presiding over her trophies indicated to him that she was in no imminent danger; but he pushed that small consolation aside, feeling hot, prickly, and irritated. Just as he was about to yell out her name, a trill of female laughter and a splash drew his attention toward the pond.

      
Slade silently drew nearer to the sounds of splashing and singing. A sweet, clear soprano voice was rendering a bawdy popular ballad, “Come to the Bower,” with surprising innocence. The song triggered memories for Slade. It was the unlikely piece to which the men at San Jacinto had marched against Santa Anna's guns. On Charlee's lips it sounded strangely enticing. Still silent, he drew closer, finally brushing the tall grass aside to see an enchanting and startling picture.

      
Charlee stood on a large rock overhanging the pool, preparing to dive into the inviting water. If she looked cool, Jim felt distinctly the opposite. That couldn't be Charlee, the grimy, foul-mouthed, homely little urchin he had come to know and be exasperated with so often. The nymph on the rock was delicately curved, slim, and sleek, obviously a woman, not a scrawny girl child. Her breasts were surprisingly full, firm, and high as she raised her supple arms in preparation to dive. Her waist was tiny, and the subtle flare of her hips tapered to long, delicately formed legs and trim ankles.

      
He stood frozen to the ground, staring incredulously at the vision, a guilty trespasser unable to take his eyes from her lovely young body. Her face was partially obscured by her hair, now freed to flow in a mass of rippling silk down her back and over one shoulder. It glinted bronze, gold, even a strange silvery tan in the sunlight, the pale honey-brown changing colors with each gentle whisper of the breeze that caressed it. How had so much glorious hair been concealed in one miserable little knot? It fell well below her waist. He felt an unreasoning urge to grab great handfuls of it and bury his face in the gleaming coils.

      
Before diving, Charlee had carefully waded the perimeter of the creek to check for those supposed rocks beneath the surface. Finding none, she had climbed to this warm boulder to plunge into the inviting depths of the pool below. The sun felt glorious on her naked body, beating its insistent summer tattoo on her pale flesh. She stretched her arms up as if worshiping the azure heavens, wondering how it might feel to have the honey kiss of suntan all over her flesh instead of only her face and hands.

      
Such an unseemly pagan idea,
she thought with a laugh, breaking forth in another raucous verse of “Come to the Bower.” Papa's drinking companions used to sing it in the tavern in St. Genevieve and she had often sneaked to town, sitting outside and absorbing all sorts of information that would have turned a lady's face aflame. But Charlee McAllister was no lady.

      
Slade watched her sleek little body slice cleanly into the still blue-green depths, half afraid she might fall victim to the same sickening accident as her brother. But before he could take three steps, she broke the surface and began to backstroke artlessly across the pond with her hair fanned out like a glossy bronze skein, floating around her shoulders. Two pointed young breasts sunned themselves impudently as she floated in silence.

      
Slade swore virulently to himself, trapped now in a hell of his own creation. Why, oh why, hadn't he stayed clear once he had heard her voice and the splashing? He might have known she'd swim mother naked, damn her perverse little soul. Of course, he never would have dreamed she looked like this. Fully aroused and hard, he clenched his fists in a misery of frustration and anger. He had been much too long without a woman, that was the problem. Rosalie was gone, and Sina only tantalized him with what was forbidden. Such trials would make a man succumb to the charms of any female in proximity. The rationalization sounded hollow even to his own ears. No, his little waif was a woman and an amazingly well-made one at that. The fact that she slept next door to him each night took on a completely new significance now as he forced himself to slink back to Polvo.

Chapter Five

      
When he went to the kitchen for a bite of food and a cool drink, Jim overheard Weevils grousing about his diminishing woodpile. He immediately seized the ax and set to chopping wood with a vengeance. Weevils stood agape, watching the boss, who had not performed such a boy's chore in years. For Godsake, what had come over him?

      
By the dinner hour, the boss was soaking his exhausted muscles in a tub of rapidly cooling water, wondering what he would do when he saw Charlee later. He could not banish the image of her diving into the water. What would he say to her? By the time he had finished bathing he was no nearer to an answer than before.

      
The bureau drawer stuck. Slamming his palm against the side of it, Slade was rewarded with the cracking of wood and splinters. The broken drawer opened and he extracted a shirt. By the time he had tweezed the oak fragments from his aching hand—already blistered from chopping wood without benefit of gloves—he was in a superb humor. Tripping over Hellfire at the bottom of the stairs was the last straw. The spiteful feline gave a yowl that would have softened Weevils’ biscuits and stalked off toward the kitchen. Slade swore virulently, pounded his sore fist against the newel post, and swore once more. It was shaping up to be a terrific evening.

      
Jim could not have said exactly how he expected Charlee to look at supper that night—changed in some indefinable way, although he was not certain how. When she entered the dining room, carrying a tray laden with fried squirrel, biscuits, and gravy, she looked the way she always had, right down to the patched breeches and Lee's voluminous old shirt. Her hair was back in its grotesque braided bun, with only a few damp tendrils escaping around her temple to evoke the water nymph she had been that afternoon. The same old Charlee. But to Slade she was now paradoxically different. The scrawny urchin's clothes hid a most disturbingly feminine physique. No one but Jim was aware of it, and that made him even more uncomfortable.

      
All through dinner Charlee could sense his brooding perusal.
Damblasted moody sucker
, she thought. At first, she supposed it had to do with the screech from Hellfire and Jim's resultant oaths of pain, but when Lee made a jesting reference to the enormous pile of firewood Jim had chopped that afternoon, Charlee knew something more than a collision with a tomcat had provoked Slade's black humor.

      
She was relieved when she could finally clear the table and leave the men to their tobacco and brandy. As she filled a big granite dishpan with warm water and lathered up the rough bar of wash soap, Charlee could still feel the heat of Slade's burning golden gaze. She felt flushed, and swore as she dropped a dish. With clumsy fingers she picked up the broken pieces and assured herself, “It's just the damblasted heat, that's all. Wish I could go for another swim right now. That'd cool me off.”

      
But the next few days cooled neither the tension between Charlee and Jim nor the weather. Both were blisteringly uncomfortable. One morning when she had asked Weevils if he'd miss her for an hour while she took a quick swim, Slade inexplicably caught his thumb in the mechanism of the rifle he was cleaning and nearly smashed the expensive piece extricating himself. If he was short with Weevils, Lee, and Asa, he was downright hostile to Charlee. One minute he would upbraid her for her use of profanity, the next he would cuss a blue streak himself. He would make a derogatory remark about her lack of personal hygiene, then yell at her for wasting time when she went to the pond for a swim.

      
Even more disturbing than his sudden outbursts of temper were the silent, scowling moments when he would sit pensively and study her as she went about her familiar household chores.

      
Finally, one day after a particularly stormy episode at breakfast, Charlee stalked into the kitchen and slammed the tray on the table. “What in hellfire's got into that man!” she exploded at Lupe, who was busy polishing silver at the big wooden counter by the window.

      
The shrewd old Mexicana had been working at Bluebonnet for ten years, and she had a hunch about what was setting both the
patrón
and his young charge at one another's throats. Chuckling, she said, “I have watched you watching him ever since you came here. Now, he watches you back, and you do not like the taste of your own medicine, eh? Perhaps, he begins to view you as a woman, not a child. Although I do not know how he can see through your disguise,” she said, sniffing at the baggy boy's clothes Charlee wore.

      
When Charlee let out a gasp of indignation, Lupe only pressed her attack. “Why do you not wear the pretty things Lena gave you, or at the very least do something with your hair? You will never win him from Doña Tomasina if you continue to hide your charms.”

      
“What makes you even imagine I want Jim Slade? Let Tomasina Carver have him 'n welcome. Two spite-meaner people I never seen.”

      
“
Have
seen,” corrected Lee from the kitchen door, a beatific grin spread across his dark, expressive face. He was as determined as his hero to instill the rudiments of proper grammar into Charlee’s speech.

      
“You're eavesdropping, Leandro Velasquez,” Charlee accused, the pink in her cheeks growing darker. “Why do you always have to take his part about schooling?” she questioned, changing the subject abruptly to distract him.

      
“Don Guillermo, Jim's father, came from an aristocratic family in Virginia. My own parents, like Jim's mother, were
criollo
, people who valued education. The difference between succeeding and failing, being happy or dissatisfied, the whole basis of a person's integrity is related to how much he understands. That's why I study. I don't want to be ignorant. I want to be worthy of the Velasquez name, and I'm very grateful to the Slade family for giving me a chance to learn about the Anglo culture as well as the Spanish. Some day, I'll enter politics and help the
Tejanos
gain full representation in Texas.”

      
“Well, I got all the education I want,” Charlee sniffed. “My mama was a schoolmarm before she married Papa. She learned—taught me all I need to know,” she added defensively.

      
“No one ever learns all he needs to know,
chica
” Lee said, tweaking her nose in brotherly affection and whistling his way toward the hall door. He paused with his hand on the knob. “You know, Lupe might be right about the clothes, but I'm right about the education.”

      
Later that night, Charlee tossed and turned in her bed, too agitated to sleep. Finally, she rolled over on Hellfire, eliciting a sharp whoosh as the breath was squeezed out of him. She threw the sheet off and sat up, regarding the baleful green eyes that stared at her with wounded reproach. “Sorry, ole buddy. I reckon I'm just a poor sleeping companion tonight.” The cat continued to glare as if to say,
tonight and every night for the last two weeks!

      
Charlee reached for her coarse cotton robe, then crept downstairs toward the study. It had been a while since she had read a book, and the Slade family library was quite extensive.

      
The room was comfortably masculine, she decided as she padded silently across the polished plank floor laid with soft buffalo-hide rugs. The bookshelves on the north and east walls stretched floor to ceiling, and an oak library ladder sat in one corner. A long, low sofa covered with slick cordovan leather beckoned the reader, and a tallow lamp's brass fixture gleamed in the moonlight streaming through the large south window.

      
Charlee lit the lamp and made a careful inventory of the library offerings on the walls. Lee was right. Everything was at her fingertips: Cervantes, deVega, Moliere and Goethe, Shakespeare, Emerson, and Thoreau. With a squeal of delight she even found her favorite, Robert Burns, and some scandalously wicked verse by Lord Byron. Mama had preferred that her daughter be edified by Edwards and Milton, but Charlee had always possessed a perverse streak of intellectual curiosity that had led her to pursue less moralistic modes of instruction.

      
As she browsed, she remembered Lillian McAllister's lessons to her and Richard Lee. Poor Richard Lee, always more like Papa than Mama, she thought. Charlee’s brother had an amazingly inventive aversion to book learning. He played hooky whenever he could, often tempting Charlee to go fishing or swimming with him. As she remembered the sunny days of childhood, tears blurred her vision; but she quickly dashed them away. Silently, she told herself, Your family's all gone, even Richard Lee, and you have to make a new life, Charlee.

      
Reading helped her cope with the loneliness. Over the next few weeks her late-night reading provided her a much-needed escape from the tensions of the day, as well as frequent topics of debate with Lee.

      
One afternoon Slade overheard a heated argument between the two of them concerning the relative merits of Locke and Rousseau on theories of government and human nature. Amazed, he stood in the shadow of the kitchen door listening to them talk. The damnable little minx had a brain after all! For some reason, her foul vocabulary and crude manners made him even angrier now that he knew she possessed the rudiments of a good education.

* * * *

      
Jim spent the end of June and first part of July breaking mustangs and training the pick of the tough, wiry little broncs to be cow ponies for the Bluebonnet remuda. A sleek little paint filly particularly caught his fancy, and he spent an additional amount of time gentling her.