Texas Lucky (12 page)

Jake gulped, swallowed, and, with shaking fingers, managed to work the lock until the door finally squeaked open.

Curt gave him a hard shove that sent him reeling inside to fall on his knees. “Stay there,” he warned, then called to Tess, “Get in here and count out ten thousand dollars.” There were several bags of money stashed about, along with rough ore. He knew she would find enough.

Jake glared at her but kept silent.

She snatched up an empty bag and began to fill it with money, counting out loud.

When she was finished, she looked Jake straight in the eyes and said, “I am not a thief. I have a right to Saul’s money, and you know it—just as you know you had him murdered, only I can’t prove it. But I can take what’s mine.”

Curt took the bag from her and hoisted it over his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

As they were walking out of the safe, Jake dared to threaten, “You won’t get away with this. I’ll see you both hang, goddamn you—”

Curt slammed the safe’s door.

He gave the dial a spin. “He won’t be found for a while. Let’s get out of here.”

He held out his hand to Tess, but she had spotted her trunk in a corner and cried, “Look. He didn’t get it to his niece in Tucson yet. Skelly said Jake had a niece who could wear my clothes and was taking them to her, but he didn’t.” She ran to it and dropped to her knees.

Curt was right behind to protest, “We can’t take it with us. We’ve just got the one horse.”

“I know that. But there’s one thing I have to take.”

She opened the trunk and began rummaging through it.

“Tess, we don’t have time for this.”

“I have it.”

Curt stared, dumbfounded, as she took out what looked like a wedding gown. He could understand why she had packed it, since she had come to Arizona to get married—but what did she want it for now?

A warning bell jangled in his head.

Surely she didn’t think because they had made love he intended to marry her.

Just a short while ago she had been talking about buying her own ranch and hadn’t even hinted that he figured in her future in any way—unless she was playing coy, which some women were real good at.

But he hadn’t promised a damn thing, hadn’t mentioned anything at all about marriage, and—

“It belonged to my mother,” Tess said fondly as she rolled the gown and tucked it under her arm. “It’s all I have left to remember her by.”

Curt felt relief but knew his guard would be up from now on.

After all, she had made it clear she did not want to go home to live with the aunt she detested, and since she had nobody but him for the moment, nowhere else to go, he found himself wondering what he had gotten himself into.

Chapter Ten

Two hours out of Devil’s Eye, the rain stopped and the map led Curt and Tess down a sandy wash beneath a crystal-blue sky that made it hard to envision the earlier downpour.

Mesquite trees, small and scattered, were beautiful in their fresh green spring leafery, the scent of the blooms reminding Tess of apples.

Her wedding gown in a roll behind her, Tess was not clinging to Curt as tightly as she had when it was raining. She thought him strangely quiet and attempted to draw him out of his shell by asking about the landscape.

He knew it well, pointing out locoweed, sand verbena, and coyote gourds.

He could identify the myriad tracks in the sand: of rats, mice, lizards, birds, snakes, and beetles, but when he mentioned butterflies, Tess laughed.

“Why not?” he said, acting surprised. “Butterflies have feet just like you and me.”

His mood lightened, and he began to talk freely. Pointing to the mesquite, he told her how there were whole forests of the valuable little trees. “They produce a kind of bean that makes food for both animals and men, and the wood is good for firewood and fence posts.”

He talked about the saguaro cactus and how it grew very slowly, taking ten years or so to reach a height of only six inches. The very tall ones, some as high as fifty feet, had endured for two hundred years, according to folklore.

When Tess asked how he knew so much about the country, he explained, “Same reason I learned to be good with a gun so I wouldn’t get killed. I knew if I didn’t learn the land, I’d get lost.”

A shadow fell over them briefly, and Tess looked up to see two pairs of black wings soaring casually between them and the sun.

Curt followed her gaze. “Vultures. Patient and hungry. They’ll follow us for a spell, hoping we’ll fall off the horse so they can have a big feast.”

Tess’s stomach gave a lurch. “How much farther?”

Curt reined in the horse. Taking the map from his pocket, he propped it against the horse’s neck while he peeled out of his shirt. “Hard to remember we had to hover in front of a fire to stay warm, isn’t it?” he asked absently, unaware of how Tess had taken a quick, shaky breath at the sight of his bare back, muscles taut, sinewy.

“According to this”—he pointed at the lines—“we should be near a canyon, and the cabin is supposed to be at the other end.”

“Do you think his silver mine is nearby?”

Curt tried not to smile. He did not want to make fun of her guilelessness. “He didn’t have a mine, Tess. Eventually he might’ve, but what he had was a rich vein or two, and he dug his ore out of that. He wouldn’t have staked a claim, because he knew once he did, the area would be swarming with prospectors trying to find what’s called the ‘mother lode.’ Maybe Saul knew where it was and was biding his time till he did get around to having a full-scale mining operation, like we talked about before. Or maybe he never found it.”

“So his discovery is gone forever…all that silver.”

“It might not have been that rich a vein, anyway.”

Still, Tess knew she would always wonder whether Saul Beckwith carried the secret of a rich strike to his grave.

They rode through the canyon, the creek bed dry and brittle as old bone, for the rains had not come that far. Rocks and brush and trees were all pale and dust-colored in the hot, hazy light.

Curt identified a sycamore tree, and a willow and a cottonwood, their roots clutching the stone as though searching for the last of the winter moisture.

And then they rounded a bend and saw it, the tiny little shack made of stones and sticks. It was shelter from the elements and nothing more.

There was a mattress made of what Curt said was dried cottonwood hulls, a rabbit-fur blanket, a table fashioned from laced-together mesquite branches, and a few dishes and staples—salt, fatback, flour, coffee, and beans.

“At least there’s enough food to keep us from starving,” he said. “When I get to Texas, I’m heading straight to a place south of Dallas called Gilley’s Gulch. Gilley has the best beefsteak and sourdough in the West, and…” He noticed she was not listening, having picked up some papers from the table to look at them with a woebegone expression.

“Something wrong?” He moved to stand beside her.

“It’s a letter to my father Saul never mailed,” she said quietly. “He said he was sending my tickets, as well as the final payment for me. He must have forgotten it and had to scribble another when he got to town.”

She put the letter back on the table. “How long do you think we’ll have to stay here?”

“Four or five days. Branson will get a posse together to try and track us, but they won’t go too far, because they don’t want us bad enough to risk running into Indians.”

Tess remembered evenings at way stations when Rooney and Sam would sit around the fire after supper and see who could tell the worst Indian story. Images of massacres and scalpings haunted her yet, and she had to swallow past a sudden lump of fear to ask, “Are we in danger here?”

“I don’t think so. Saul was obviously safe. But don’t worry,” he said lightly. “If we’re attacked, I won’t let them take you alive.”

Tess’s gasped, “And it’s supposed to make me feel better to know you’ll shoot me?”

“I’d have to. You can’t find the trigger on a gun, remember?” He gave her a playful cuff on her chin. “I’m going to see if I can find us some fresh meat for supper.”

He stepped outside, then turned to say, with a twinkle in his eye, “I guess there’s no point in asking if you know how to skin a rabbit.”

“I never had too many running around in my kitchen back home,” she said dryly.

Curt made a snare, set it close to a jackrabbit hole, then found a place to hide and watch.

Actually, he hated eating jackrabbits. They didn’t have much meat, and what they did have was tough as leather. But the day was dragging on, the heat was brutal, and he did not want to get too far from the shack, which he’d have to do to hunt deer or javelina.

He had found a flask of whiskey in Skelly’s saddlebag and took a long drink as he squatted in a patch of mesquite. It wasn’t good liquor, but it had been a while, and anything would do when he was thirsty.

His mind kept going back to Tess and the wedding dress.

Hell, it was only natural she’d be getting married sooner or later and would want to wear it when she did.

He just couldn’t help wondering if she had that sort of a notion about him.

He should have told her how it was, by damn.

He should have told her that it meant nothing beyond him being a man and her being a woman, and the two of them having a yen for each other.

Because the last thing he needed, or wanted, was a wife.

Wasn’t it?

He shook his head to cast aside the bewildered feelings that were starting to whirl around.

He wanted his own ranch, by damn. It was his dream. And eventually he would take a wife and have children.

But not now.

And not Tess.

She was too puny, too
citified
.

So why was it needling him?

He wasn’t sure, and not being sure bothered him all the more. He was glad that right then a jackrabbit stepped into the snare, because that way there was no time to dwell on it anymore.

He clubbed the rabbit and returned to the shack. Tess took one look at it hanging limp and dripping blood and turned away with a shudder. So he set out to clean it himself with a knife he found near Saul’s pitiful cache of supplies.

Tess did not have much to say as he made a fire and skewered the rabbit.

He caught a glimpse of his reflection as he dipped water from a nearby pond and decided no woman in her right mind would want anything to do with him the way he was looking.

Saul had a razor, so Curt shaved, then had a bath in the pond while the rabbit roasted.

He set about opening a can of beans and getting things ready, then realized Tess had also stolen away for a bath.

Her hair hung in wet ringlets about her face when she joined him, apologizing because she had no clean clothes. “I started to put on my wedding dress but decided that would be silly.”

“Yeah, it would’ve been,” he said, feeling needles start to prickle again. “Besides, I don’t have anything fancy. You’d have made me feel real out of place.”

They talked easily while they ate, and Tess laughed when he likened the tough rabbit to chewing boot leather.

“Well, I wouldn’t know.” She giggled. “I’ve never eaten a boot.”

He chuckled. “Neither have I, but I’ll bet it’d taste the same.”

The beans weren’t bad. She had seasoned them with fatback. But the coffee was bitter, and he couldn’t resist teasing. “Saul would’ve run you off. Men in these parts take their coffee serious.”

“Well,” she said airily, “he could have just learned to drink tea as we do in Pennsylvania. I make a wonderful pot of tea.”

Curt wrinkled his nose. “That’s for sissies.”

“Oh, what do you know?” She picked a bean from her plate and threw it at him.

He ducked, but she threw another, and then he dove for her, and they fell on the ground in gales of laughter. Then the mischief left her eyes, and she seemed to melt in his arms as he held her.

Curt kissed her, swept by a whirlpool of feelings without rhyme or reason.

Her body pressed into his, her mouth opening eagerly for him, and he felt tremors of pleasure coursing through his body as his tongue entered her mouth in a flood of heady sensations.

He plundered her mouth, exploring every tenderness, his tongue ruthless in his desire to taste everything within her.

It felt as though his loins had ignited into searing flames as she continued to stroke him, and when she finally unbuttoned his trousers, unleashing him raw and bold into her eagerly waiting hands, Curt ground his teeth and fought against release then and there.

Always, he realized with a start, he had been in complete control with a woman. Even as a boy, experimenting with older women who had known far more than he, there had always been the ability to hold back. Now, however, he did not trust himself and drew away from her as he maneuvered her dress up about her waist.

When she was naked, he rendered her vulnerable and helpless as he sweetly assaulted her womanhood, her sex, with his hand. She lay in his arms whimpering helplessly…sweetly…and begging him to take her then and there, wholly and completely.