Jodi Thomas (3 page)

Looking into the eyes of the stranger at her side, Anna spoke bluntly. “You’re so young. A boy.”

Chance didn’t seem bothered by her frankness. The hard lines were gone from his face now, and he looked younger than when he’d spoken to Schmitz. “There’s nothing I can do about that, ma’am. I figure I’m not more than a year younger than you.”

Although she nodded in agreement, Anna realized she thought of herself as older because she’d been married since she was fifteen to a man twenty years her senior. Somehow she had passed from a child to a married woman without ever being young. Last month when she’d torn the lace from her black dress to make her widow’s weeds, all thoughts of herself as being young were ripped away.

Chance took her hand gently and placed it in the crook of his arm. “I heard what was being said. You have to marry or lose your homestead, don’t you?”

Anna looked up, aware that his fingers still rested on her hand. How could he now appear gentle, even shy, when only moments before she’d seen a fire in his eyes that left no doubt he’d kill any man who questioned his word?

“I think I understand, ma’am. I’d like to say something from the first. You had a lot of guts doing what you did back there at the campsite. Some of those men would have killed you if they’d known you had a hundred dollars in your pocket.”

His warm blue eyes darkened and the southern drawl was barely a whisper. “I’ve been on my own for some time, and I can take care of you for the year. You don’t need to worry about being safe. No man, including your yellow-eyed friend, is going to touch you.”

Anna’s eyes widened. “You don’t know Mr. Schmitz.”

“No, but I’ve met his kind. I could see his lust as plain as a spot on a diamondback rattler’s head.”

“But he’s a respected member of our society. Everyone looks up to him.”

“Do you?”

Anna had never lied, and she wasn’t about to start now. His dark eyes would see right through her anyway. “No. He was my husband’s best friend, but I’ve always hated the way he looked at me.”

Chance stepped toward the door, pulling her to his side. “Well, ma’am, I’m going to be your husband now.”

Anna smiled for the first time in days. “I think you’d best stop calling me ma’am then.”

His fingers slid over hers where they rested on his arm, and he lifted her hand to shake on the agreement. He turned her palm over in his hand, and a frown pulled his dark eyebrows together, wrinkling his tan forehead. “Those blisters need doctoring.”

“I’ve had no time. We had to drag our trunks from the shoreline yesterday. The wagons won’t be here until tomorrow morning, and I was afraid the sea would wash my one trunk away. The ground was so muddy we had to cut poles and drag our belongings along them.”

“There are men—”

Anna pulled her hand from his. “I had to do my share. You must realize that there are many in the group who don’t think I should be allowed to claim my husband’s land.” Anna couldn’t bring herself to tell him why. How could she explain the hatred she’d always felt for the man she’d married, or that the others had resented her coldness toward him? How could she tell this stranger that her child had been conceived when her husband raped her on board the ship, and that she’d been afraid to cry out for fear the others might hear and hate her more. She’d feared too that he’d beat her as he had when he’d raped her once before. William had been a member of the society and she had always been the outsider. And now she was about to marry another outsider, a man she knew nothing about.

Anna’s fingers tightened around his strong arm. “No one is to learn of our arrangement. As far as anyone is to know, we are husband and wife in every way.”

Chance nodded. She felt his dark eyes studying her closely. “Anna.” Her name sounded foreign in his warm, southern drawl. “You don’t have to be afraid of me.”

Her green eyes searched his blue ones. Had he read her mind so easily, or was he only guessing? “You’re asking me to trust you?”

“Yes. Trust me or don’t marry me. I don’t want to see fear in your eyes when you look at me every day for a year.”

Anna knew he was right. If she lived in fear of him, she might as well be living with Schmitz. “I will trust you. Is there anything else?”

A slight smile lifted the corner of his mouth. “Yes. Don’t ever call me a boy. I’m man enough to hold up my half of this bargain. One year from tonight I’ll leave silently, with no words of regret and no looking back, but until then I’ll protect you as though the Almighty had truly granted you to me as a mate.”

“Agreed, Mr. Wyatt.” Anna pulled Selma’s scarf over her hair, remembering the lace veil she’d worn at her first wedding five years before. This time she knew the ways of men and she was determined to protect herself.

This time it was her decision.

An hour later they were husband and wife. They walked away from the campfire without a word between them other than those the minister had asked them to repeat. Chance tied his horse behind her tent while she undressed and crawled under her blankets. Anna tried to lay perfectly still as he entered the tent and spread his bedroll not a foot away from her own. He was only a shadowy outline again, as he’d been when they’d met, but now he was her husband.

The sound of him rummaging through his saddlebag broke the quiet. In the blackness, she felt him kneel beside her. “Anna, are you asleep?”

Anna considered staying silent. Whatever he wanted could surely wait until morning. “No,” she answered, determined not to lie to this man. There had been enough lies in her first marriage to last a lifetime.

“Good.” He moved closer. “Give me your hands. I need to put some salve on them.”

“It can wait until morning.” Anna wasn’t sure she wanted him to touch her. She knew firsthand that men were not always the same in the darkness as they were in the light.

“No.” His answer was as firm as hers. “By morning you might have blood poisoning.”

There was no arguing with the truth; her skin was already red and sensitive around the broken blisters. Slowly she pulled her hands from under the blanket and held them out to him. After finding her fingers in the blackness, he gently held them in his hands and rubbed warm sticky salve over the blisters. Her flesh was tender, but she did not move or cry out as he continued to lightly apply the medicine to her palm. Laying one of her hands on his leg, he began to wrap the other. When she tried to slide her freed hand away, he grasped it firmly and placed it back on his leg.

“Hold still,” he ordered. “I can’t see much of what I’m doing. I don’t need you moving around.”

The warm feel of his leg beneath her hand made her nervous. She didn’t need light to be aware of his nearness. The clean smell of soap and leather seemed to fill the small tent and she heard his every breath. The way his thumb slowly traced the palm of her hand blocked her awareness of everyone in the world except the man at her side.

“Thank you,” Anna whispered, and she closed her eyes as Chance wrapped her other palm in cloth.

He moved away without a word, and she heard his breathing slow slightly, telling her he’d been aware of her nearness also. The outline of his body shadowed the wall of the tent. When he spoke, his voice was low. “I have to leave for a few hours, but I’ll be back before daybreak.”

Questions jumped into her mind, but she didn’t ask where he was going. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. As he silently left the tent, she wondered why his absence didn’t bring her the relief William’s leaving always had. For hours afterward she lay awake, waiting, wondering if he would ever return. What if she was to be swindled now after he’d won a small portion of her confidence? Yet she thought over the few words he’d said and how he’d made her feel proud in front of the others. She thought of how gentle his touch had been when he’d doctored her hands. She thought of how little she knew of him.

An hour before dawn, Chance slid back into the tent and sank onto his bedroll with a sigh of exhaustion. After unbuckling his belt, he laid his gun in the space between their bedrolls. Within minutes his breathing grew regular and slow. He’d made no effort to touch her. Perhaps he truly was a man of his word.

Anna turned her back to him, and just before she crossed the bridge into dreams, she heard him mumble in his sleep.

“Maggie,” he whispered. “Maggie, don’t cry.”

L
eaning on one elbow, Chance studied Anna’s sleeping form in the early dawn light. She was so close that if he had moved his arm six inches, he could have touched her cheek. But she might as well have been a hundred miles away.

She looked so beautiful with her auburn hair fanning around her face; its rich red-brown color reminded him of newly turned earth in the spring when the soil was still damp with winter. Some might not think of that as much of a compliment, but Chance loved the earth as only a boy born on river-bottom farmland could.

The gentleness of her face hypnotized Chance, and the way her long, dark lashes rested against her pale cheek fascinated him. He could not remember ever seeing a woman so perfect. Memories of the pockmarked and snaggletoothed young saloon girls he’d talked with flashed through his mind. And the respectable women he’d seen in Texas had sun-worn, wrinkled skin or tough, square features that reminded him of oxen. Most wore bored expressions as if they were permanently imprinted on their faces; it seemed like they’d seen all there was to see in this world. They always stared at him with vacant, hollow eyes, never with the flash of the fire he’d seen in Anna’s forest-green depths.

How many times had he dreamed of meeting a woman like Anna? She walked with grace and her voice had a softness that made him wonder if she’d ever raised it at anyone in her life. And her cream-colored skin reminded him of a pearl. A man didn’t have to know much about fine china to realize when he was looking at a rare piece. And Chance didn’t have to see all the women in the world to know that Anna was a true lady. He could probably count on one hand the number of women he’d been this close to since his mother died. There’d been so many hard winters and lonely months spent in the saddle, that finally his memories of family and how they’d died had faded. Now Anna, with her proud stance and gentle movements, had touched him and rekindled a need he had thought long dead. She didn’t know this land and how cruel it could be for women.

Locking his hands behind his head, Chance lay back, forcing himself not to stare at her. He must have been crazy to have taken her up on her offer. The last thing he needed was a wife and a farm to worry about. There were other ways to get the money for Maggie. He’d supported his sister for the past eight years by paying cousins to keep her, and he could have continued to without tying himself to Anna. But, dear God, how grand she had seemed marching right into camp like a queen. After just one look at her he would have given much more than a year of his life for the heaven of touching such a woman.

Laughter rumbled from his chest. A year of his life was the price, only he’d spend it in hell because he’d agreed not to lay a hand on her.

“Chance?” Anna’s voice was a whisper in the shadowy light. “Are you awake?”

“I’m awake.” He wanted to say good morning or whatever people who sleep only inches apart say to one another, but he simply waited.

There was a hint of apprehension in her voice. “Have you seen the part of the country where my land is? I keep dreaming about it, but a picture won’t form in my mind. There’s a small settlement along the Guadalupe River called New Braunfels. A group of our people went there last year, but their letters have been few.”

Focusing on the dark creases of the tent, Chance tried to remember. “I was near there about three months ago, riding with a group of rangers. Don’t know much about the settlement, but I heard a fellow say that the town was like a little German village. He said they even had a hospital shed and were starting a town church. The land around is rich earth, best as I remember, but hilly and rocky in spots.” He suddenly wished he could tell her more, but they’d been riding hard and fast and he hadn’t taken the time to see much.

Holding fast to her dream, Anna sighed. “I have waited so long. In a few months I’ll have my own land.”

A frown wrinkled his forehead. He remembered hearing his mother say the same words when his family first settled in Texas. You’d have thought their farm was one step outside heaven’s door the way she talked about it. Her memory and the nightmare scene of her death had been the thing that had kept him going all these years. Every time he’d been about to give up, his mother’s memory had driven him to make it one more mile. Her life had given him values, but her death gave him one driving purpose.

He clenched his fist beneath the blanket. One of these days he’d find Storm’s Edge and he would leave that savage in a pool of his own blood the way the Indian had left Chance’s mother. That was another reason Anna’s offer had looked so good. Her people were heading right into the area where he’d heard Storm’s Edge and his band camped in the winter.

Anna’s soft breathing pulled him from his thoughts, reminding him of how other people live, of how others care about more than revenge. Somehow just thinking about Anna made him feel like he was betraying his family. His next words sounded sharper than he meant them to. “You people would be better off to wait a few months. Every teamster within a hundred miles has been conscripted to haul weapons and munitions for the army, and there aren’t enough wagons left to haul supplies, much less people, that far inland. The trouble with Mexico won’t last long; then you could go into the hill country better prepared.”

He heard Anna rummaging in the small carpetbag that had served as her pillow. “We have waited. We have a few carts and drivers. The society has talked it over and decided we can walk to our land. If we stay on the coast any longer, this place will become a mass German grave. Many of my people are already sick and more come down with fever every day.”