Mackinnons #02 For All the Right Reasons (2 page)

He had been thinking about Karin a lot lately. Maybe that was because of the war being over. Perhaps that was why he’d been so restless in Brownsville, why he’d been so difficult for Adrian to get along with. It had been over three years since he’d seen Karin Simon. He’d been no more than a peach-faced kid of sixteen back then, but he knew what he felt for her was real even then, and that it would last. In spite of what Adrian had said about him forgetting her.

“Honey, you sure are acting troubled. You got something you want to talk about? I’m a good listener. No charge for that either.”

Alex looked her over with interest and curiosity, then shook his head. He was tempted. He couldn’t remember the last time he wanted to spend some time with a woman just to talk. But there wasn’t time for that now. There were things he had to do, pieces of his life he had to put back together, and the desire to get started was strong. Sometimes it was so strong he wasn’t sure if he was being pulled or pushed.

“You sure you don’t want to talk a spell? I ain’t got nothing to do particularly.”

“No troubles,” he said, “and no time for talking. I’m anxious to get home.” And that was the truth. He was getting as anxious as Adrian.
Maybe that’s what’s wrong with me.
He was restless and reflective and those two combined always made him just a little moody. He looked at Lily’s concerned face. Whores were a sympathetic lot, usually too good-hearted for their own benefit. He gave her a slap on the rump and rolled from the bed. Going to his money, he handed her five dollars. She took it, then noticing how much it was, said, “This is five dollars.”

“I thought you said you could get five dollars without even trying.”

“I did, but there ain’t no war goin’ on now.”

His look turned reflective. “There’s always a war of some kind going on,” he said, “and we’ve all got our prices.”

Lily started to say something else, but Alex had his customary look; the look of a man who has moved on somewhere else. She studied him—the handsome face, the long lines of his fine naked body. Like a lot of men, he was neither modest nor proud about his body. She felt her secret places throb as she remembered the way he had peeled out of his clothes and stood over her, naked and sleek and hard. Her eyes dropped lower—he sure had something to be proud of. His body told her a lot about him, about his extraordinary vitality, his correctness, how he accepted himself and made no excuses. A man’s body could tell as much as his eyes, if a person knew how to read it. Her eyes went over him again. Yes, this one was fine looking, and young, tall, and slim, with a head of the thickest black hair she’d ever seen on a man. And Lord have mercy, but those eyes of his were enough to set a woman trembling. The palest blue she’d ever seen, and so direct, yet touched with something she could only call sadness. Against that tanned face it gave him a certain haunting quality, and women were always drawn to men who possessed that haunting quality. Not that it was to their betterment, for if Lily had learned anything during her twenty years of whoring, it was how to judge a man. A man with that haunting quality was difficult to move off center. Once he got himself locked in on something he was as hard to pull away as a bulldog with a mouthful of leg. Some men were content to play the cards they’d been dealt, while others like this one went through life like a swiftly flowing river that stays true to the course. No matter how many obstacles were put in a river’s way, it always managed to go around or batter its way through until it reached the place it was supposed to go. This young man had his course pretty well charted out unless she missed her guess. Lord help anyone who tried to stand in his way.

Her eyes traveled over him once more. “Why don’t you come back to bed?”

Alex glanced back at the bed. She was lying on her back. Her lips were wet and parted. So were her legs. He gave the area between her legs a frank look. She saw his body react and smiled. “Come on, sugar. You don’t want to go just yet.”

For a second he considered doing just that, but he knew the real ache wouldn’t be satisfied any more than it had been the first time. He gave her a reluctant smile and shook his head, watching the warm glow fade from her eyes.

After Lily left, Alex was still feeling odd, a combination of restlessness and dread. As far as he could remember he’d never felt those two emotions at the same time. The piano from the saloon across the street was loud and out of tune, but it drew him to the window just the same. His body was bathed in sweat, and the breeze that billowed the curtain felt good on his heated skin. He stood before the window, as naked as a scraped hog and wondered if anyone could see him. Probably not. It was dark outside and there was no light in his room. It really didn’t matter anyway, for he didn’t really care. There were only two kinds of women down there on the streets: the ones who had seen a man naked and the ones who hadn’t. If they’d seen a naked man before then the sight of one more wasn’t apt to shock them any. If they hadn’t seen one, it was probably high time they did.

He thought about that for a minute, thinking that sounded a little detached even for him. And the more he thought about it, the more he felt that was a good description of the way he felt: detached. When had he become so indifferent to things around him? Had he seen so much killing, witnessed so many lives being snuffed out in a twinkling that he no longer held ordinary things in very high regard? Maybe this was true. He had no way of knowing the answer right now. It was something only time could tell.

His body cooled, the whiskey having done its work at soothing his brain, Alex moved away from the window and went back to bed. He sat down and poured himself another whiskey and downed it as quickly as he had the other three, then lay down, watching the shadow of the fluttering curtain as it moved on the opposite wall. The old need filled him, possessing his thoughts. Sex was only a temporary stand-in, he knew that. Women. Fighting. Getting drunk. They all had their way of working on him, but none of them helped for long. He sighed and leaned back, his arm across his eyes, but no matter how he lay or how much whiskey he consumed, the old feeling was still with him. But it wouldn’t plague him for much longer.
Soon
, he thought.
Soon I will see her again. How many more days before we reach our old place? Does Karin still live across the creek? Is she sweet on anyone? Is she married?
He closed his eyes and called up memory after memory, wondering if Karin thought of him as often as he thought of her.

“Alexander Mackinnon?” Karin’s heart pounded at the sound of his name. “Stars above! Whatever made you think of him like that—right out of the blue?” Karin looked across the kitchen table at her sister. Sometimes she didn’t understand Katherine at all. One minute she could be laughing her head off, astounding everyone around her with her funny side, only to turn us gloomy and dark as a moonless night when the mist rolled up from the creek. Karin was thinking her sister had been showing a lot of this gloomy side of late, poking around in her mental cobwebs, dragging out old ghosts, stirring up dead memories. It was enough to make a body shudder, like someone was walking on your grave. Take tonight for instance. Why would she dredge up Alexander Mackinnon’s name all of a sudden? He’d been gone from these parts so long that Karin had grown tired of waiting. Alex was a looker, for sure, but she wasn’t the kind to wait for a man forever—no matter how good he looked. Besides, she wasn’t about to take her ducks to a market that poor. Oh, his name still made her heart turn flips, but she had decided her heart could learn to turn flips for a rich man as easily as a poor one. “What made you think of Alexander Mackinnon all of a sudden?” she asked again.

Katherine got that far-off look in her eyes. “Mr. Carpenter stopped by on his way back from town. He said three of his kids are down with the chicken pox.”

By this time, Karin was looking completely dumbfounded. “And
that
reminded you of the Mackinnons?”

“Well, of course it did,” Katherine said, giving Karin a direct look. “Don’t you remember how we all had the chicken pox at the same time…you, Alex, Adrian, and I?”

“Saints preserve us! How can you remember things like that? I don’t even remember having the chicken pox, much less who had them with us.” Karin looked reflective, and just a little irritated. How on earth did Katherine manage to remember all the nonsense she had salted away in the back of her mind? It was all she could do to remember what dress she planned to wear tomorrow. Sometimes when Katherine got like this and started dumping all these questions and bits of poppycock in her lap, Karin felt like someone had just handed her a shovelful of hot coals and she couldn’t decide if she should drop it or light out running. “The chicken pox,” Karin repeated slowly, her voice trailing off in reflection. “I think I do remember something about that, but stars above! That was seven or eight years ago.” Karin stood up and began poking her sewing into her basket. “We’ve got enough to worry about right now without dragging our past along with it, especially when it’s of no value whatsoever. Like hauling garbage, if you ask me. Now, why would a body want to haul a bunch of worthless garbage around when he didn’t have to?”

Katherine didn’t have an answer for that one. “I don’t know, but sometimes I just can’t help thinking about the way things were back then, back when mama was alive.”

It was galling to Karin, always being reminded of how much Katherine had loved their mother, or how much their mother had loved Katherine. Karin had loved her mother too, but never in the same way that Katherine had. Katherine was like that. She didn’t love, she cherished, and when she cherished someone, that person could do no wrong in her eyes. She was loyal to a fault and no matter how hard you tried to convince her of something lacking in someone she cherished, she would have no part of it. Because of that, Karin had, on more than one occasion said that Katherine had a stubborn streak a mile high and a mile wide. But that never did stop Katherine from cherishing. That kind of loving was bigger than Karin could swallow. She knew everyone had different ways of going about things, but if she were really and truly honest she would have to admit that it made her feel that in matters of the heart she always took a back seat to Katherine. She didn’t want to be relegated to any back seat right now, unless it was in Carter Turner’s new buggy. She was feeling too happy and in like with herself to be put in her place by anyone, let alone her dreamy-eyed sister. “Well, there are more important things than the old days to think about now,” she said.

Katherine snipped the last threat and looked sadly at her coarse brown skirt lying across her lap. There were now three lines where the hem had been. “I’m going to wear this skirt out hemming it,” she said wistfully, that far-off look in her eyes again. “I wish it would wear out completely.”

“You should be wishing for a new skirt, or at least that you stop getting taller. You’re already half a head taller than most of the men around, and men are scarce as hen’s teeth since the war. You keep shooting up tall as a bean pole and you’ll never get a man to marry.”

“I’m not that tall, and I’ve told you before I’m not going to marry anyway.”

“What do you want to do? Stay here and grow as hard and unforgiving as this measly piece of land?”

“I don’t feel the same way you do. This is our home. I love it here. I don’t find it any harder or any more unforgiving than life.”

As much as Katherine loved the land, Karin hated it. Once, when they were thirteen or fourteen and walking home from school after a rain, Katherine said in that enraptured way she had of speaking sometimes, “Oh, how I love to smell the earth and its wetness. Don’t you?” To which Karin had fervently replied:

“No, I don’t, and please don’t say that in front of anyone. They’ll think you’re as daft as old Mrs. Tribble. I can see it now. I’ll be the laughingstock of the countryside. Everyone will be telling stories of how you go around with your nose plowing the dirt like a pig.”

Karin eyed her sister across the table, feeling her irritation reach new heights just remembering something like that, and the way Katherine had just looked at her in a sympathetic way and said, “Then I’m sorry you don’t. You see the roses Karin, but you never smell their lovely scent.” Her tone of pity had been something Karin didn’t understand. But then, she had never understood Katherine. And their father hadn’t understood her either. Only their mother had.

Years ago, Katherine and Karin had hidden in the broom closet one evening, listening to their parents talk over a slice of pie at the kitchen table after supper.

“That Katherine,” their mother had said, “she is a sight for sore eyes.” But that hadn’t bothered Karin any, because their father had said, “I suppose she is—it’s a cinch she’s nothing like Karin. Karin is the picture of perfection.” Karin had looked smugly at Katherine, but Katherine didn’t look put out in the least. Karin didn’t understand that at all. Didn’t Katherine comprehend that it was much better to be called the “picture of perfection” than “a sight for sore eyes”?

All this remembering made her tired, so Karin gathered up her things, and dropped her sewing basket in its usual place beside the hutch in the kitchen and went outside for a walk. She was feeling left out again, just as she always did when Katherine got reflective and stirred up old memories in her own head. She couldn’t understand how her sister did it, how she managed to call up so much from the past. She walked toward the creek, hearing the bullfrogs in the distance.

Alex Mackinnon.

Lordy, Lordy, it had been a while since she’d thought of him. She tried to remember what he looked like, but aside from being way too thin and having a badly cropped shock of black hair and a face as handsome as the devil, she couldn’t conjure up much. And when she tried, the image of Jester Brewer’s face kept coming to the front of her mind. Jester was the banker’s son and quite the most eligible bachelor in Limestone County, and he had been paying quite a bit of attention to her lately. He wasn’t much to look at, but money did a whole lot to offset a homely face. A girl could do worse than Jester Brewer. Yes sirree, she most certainly could.