Two Brothers (32 page)

“You’ll be sleeping in the barn again?” she asked, when he didn’t speak right away.

He thrust out a hard sigh. “Yup,” he said, and finished his whiskey in one gulp.

Chapter 6

T
HE WEDDING BAND GLEAMED IN THE LAMPLIGHT
of the barn, a small golden circle in the palm of his hand. Tristan closed his fingers around it for an instant, as though it were a talisman, and then shoved it back into the pocket of his pants. Trying to calculate how long it would take, after the wedding on Sunday, to have his way with Emily, he put out the light, lay down in the hayloft and made up his mind to sleep.

Instead, he imagined Emily giving birth to their child, sometime in the not-too-distant future. He knew she’d be brave, as Aislinn had been, but he expected his own reaction would be similar to Shay’s. Stoic as he might appear on the surface, inside, he’d be in a frenzy.

Mentally, he worked his way backward from that momentous day, and inevitably came to the time of conception. The pictures were so vivid that he groaned. He was in a bad way, and feared he would not soon see an improvement in his situation. The hell of it was that his personal code would not allow him to find his ease elsewhere; from the moment Emily had promised herself to him, he’d been committed.

He spent the next hour or so tossing and turning, but the day had been a long and difficult one, and he was tired, so
presently he lapsed into a shallow, fitful sleep. The sound of the dog whining at the base of the ladder awakened him, some time later, and he raised himself onto one elbow.

“What?” he snapped, and started down the ladder.

Spud whimpered, and there was an all-too-familiar coppery smell, mingling with the usual ones of hay and horse manure and sweaty animal hide. Blood.

Tristan felt his way to the lamp that hung from one of the low beams, struck a match, and lit the wick. The dog looked up at him with doleful eyes, and whined again, apologetically. Squatting in the straw, Tristan examined the animal and found he’d been torn up pretty badly in a fight of some sort. Probably, he’d tangled with a raccoon or a badger, maybe even a bobcat, prowling around waiting to make a swipe at the sheep, but one thing was definite: he’d come up the loser.

As gently as possible, Tristan lifted the dog in both arms and headed for the house. The Indians keeping watch were shadowy forms in the darkness, and their campfire blazed a bright warning to all intruders, whether they had two legs or four. Spud must have wandered a fair distance from the flock, a strange thing in and of itself.

Inside, he set the dog in the center of the kitchen table and started lighting lamps. Spud made sorrowful complaint, and the sound must have awakened Emily, for she appeared while Tristan was filling a basin from the hot water reservoir. Not that he’d tried to be all that quiet.

Seeing the dog’s blood-matted fur, she gasped and went white. She was wearing one of his shirts for a nightgown, and he tried not to notice that her legs were showing. And fine legs they were, too.

“What happened?” she cried, rushing over to stroke the animal’s head with a loving hand. For all that something had practically shredded the poor creature’s hide, Tristan envied him a little, just then, wanting that tenderness for himself.

He got liniment and a clean cloth from the shelf where he
kept such supplies, accidents being a fairly common occurrence on a ranch. In the past, though, he’d only had himself for a patient. He dampened the cloth with pungent medicine and began to clean the worst of the dog’s wounds, a six-inch gash on his left flank.

Spud showed his teeth and growled, no doubt prompted by the pain, but Emily spoke to him with a sort of stern compassion, and he quieted down a little. Tristan figured he might have been short a finger or two by then, if it hadn’t been for her.

“Will he die?” she asked, when the job was nearly finished, and Tristan realized that she’d been working up her courage to pose the question all along.

“Probably not,” he answered. “He won’t be much use with the sheep for a while, though. These wounds are sure to get infected if he doesn’t stay clean until they’ve closed up.”

Emily shut her eyes and rested her forehead against the crown of the dog’s head for a moment, and Spud made a low sound in his throat, reveling in her sympathy. Tristan was moved by the depth of the bond between the two of them and, once again, he felt a mild twinge of envy. When at last she turned to face him, he was stricken to see tears in her thick lashes.

“He’s been a fine friend to me,” she said. “For so long, there was nobody to talk to but him. I don’t think I could bear it if he—if he died.”

Tristan would have touched her, if his hands hadn’t been dirty. More than anything in the world, he wanted to reassure her, and give her whatever comfort he could. “He’ll be all right,” he said hoarsely, and lifted Spud carefully off the table and set him on the floor. The animal retreated to the kitchen hearth, where he lay down on the hooked rug with a whimper of self-pity and closed his eyes.

When Tristan came back in from scrubbing off the liniment and blood at the wash bench, he found that Emily had scoured the table, added wood to the stove and set a
kettle of water on to heat. Now, she was merely measuring tea leaves into the chipped crockery pot that had come with the place, nothing more spectacular than that, but the sight of her in that shirt, with her braid dangling down her back, set him afire inside. Never, at any time in his life, had he wanted a woman as he wanted this one. He saw clearly that the secret feelings he’d cherished for Aislinn had been nothing more than shallow daydreams; this was something real and right. Something monumental.

And yet he barely knew her.

“I guess I’d best get back to the barn,” he said. The words seemed to scratch his throat raw.

She looked at him in shy surprise and, unless he was mistaken, hope. “Won’t you stay a few minutes?” she asked. “I don’t think I can go back to sleep right away.” She poured steaming water into the teapot. “Sometimes a cup of tea helps, though it’s said to be a stimulant—”

“Emily.”

She stopped, looked at him again, waiting.

“This is improper, my seeing your—your limbs and all.”

Incredibly, she laughed. “Day after tomorrow, we’ll be married. And it’s not as if we’re, well,
doing
anything.”

“It’s the prospect of
doing something
,” he retorted pointedly, “that I can’t stop thinking about. Seeing you like that doesn’t help, believe me.”

Her mirth faded, though a spark of it lingered in her eyes. “Oh,” she said, and the sound was small, hardly more than a breath.

He considered showing her the ring he’d bought earlier that day, at the general store, but if he did that, she might think he was trying to make her feel obliged. After all, he’d said, straight out, that he planned to seduce her. “I’d best go,” he reiterated, and when he’d passed over the threshold, he stood looking up at the stars and silently cursing himself for every kind of idiot.

He returned to the barn, climbed up into the hayloft, and stretched out again. After a few minutes, he realized that he
could still see the stars, the cracks in the roof were that wide. One good rain and the horses and all the hay would be drenched.

He went to sleep making a mental list of things he’d need to make the necessary repairs.

Emily took her time over her solitary cup of tea, convinced that she wouldn’t get a wink of sleep even if she went back to bed immediately. Her mind, her senses, her very soul it seemed, were all full of Tristan—Tristan’s mouth, Tristan’s hands, Tristan’s powerful shoulders and lean mid-section.

Sitting at the kitchen table, where he had so skillfully attended to Spud’s wounds only minutes before, she spread her fingers over her face and groaned. Then, peering through a space at the dog, she said in mock accusation, “How could you? I’m the one who feeds you and scratches you behind the ears and throws sticks for you to fetch. And what do you do when you get into trouble? You go to
him
for help!”

Spud gave another low whine, as if to make excuses for himself, but did not raise his muzzle from its position on his outstretched forelegs.

Emily finished the first cup of tea and poured herself a second one. There wasn’t a grain of sugar in the house; Tristan didn’t seem to use the stuff at all, but she hoped there would be a supply among the things the storekeeper had promised to deliver. Many of her best dishes required sweetening—rhubarb pie, for instance. She’d found a patch of the stuff growing in the deep grass out behind the barn, and wanted to put it to good use before the first hard frost.

Thinking about cooking calmed her nerves a little, and soon she put her cup in the sink, along with the teapot, put out all of the kitchen lamps but the one that would light her way upstairs, and retired to the room she would be sharing with Tristan after Sunday.

The idea stopped her in midstride. He had sworn he wouldn’t force himself upon her, and she knew he would
keep his word, as much for his own sake as for hers. But she hadn’t asked if sleeping beside him was part of the bargain.

In the middle of the stairway, she laid her free hand to her bosom, fingers splayed, and tried to recover her composure by drawing and releasing slow, deep breaths. The thought of lying in Tristan’s bed, with him right there next to her, maybe
touching
her, either by accident or by design, sent a terrifying surge of pleasure rushing through her. Suppose she saw him naked? He hadn’t promised to behave modestly, after all….

Wide awake again, Emily went back downstairs to get her book. It was, she thought ruefully, going to be a very long night.

Emily was pleased, the next morning, to meet the storekeeper, Dorrie McQuillan. As she began unloading the wagon full of supplies, the woman explained cheerfully that she was Shay’s older sister. Her manner was so open and friendly that Emily felt completely accepted, and that was a new and delightful sensation.

Emily introduced herself and set to helping with the carrying. She was feeling guilty, staying inside the house that day, dressed in calico, while Mr. Polymarr and the Indians looked after her sheep. Tristan was on the roof of the barn with Fletcher, making repairs with a hammer and nails and scraps of wood he’d found in one of the sheds.

“It’s time he found himself a woman,” Dorrie said, with a nod toward the barn, where Tristan’s shirtless form was disturbingly visible. Emily hadn’t worked up the courage to ask him if he expected to share the master bedroom and walk around in a state of undress.

“It’s a business arrangement,” Emily felt compelled to say. There must have been a dozen boxes in the back of that wagon; Dorrie climbed up, agile as any man in her practical riding skirt, and began shoving them into reach.

“Sure it is,” Dorrie replied, without sarcasm. Still standing in the wagonbed, she looked Emily over critically. She was a plain soul, too tall and too slender by common
standards of beauty, but she radiated some inner quality that made Emily want to know her better. “I reckon those readymades Aislinn sent along will fit you just fine,” she said.

Emily was suddenly self-conscious, uncomfortably aware of her shabby dress, and though it chafed her pride sorely to accept charity, she could hardly wait to see what Dorrie had brought. “How is Aislinn? And the baby?”

“They’re both just fine,” Dorrie said, getting out of the wagon as nimbly as she’d gotten in. “Baby’s delicately made, like her mama, but she’s strong, too. There’s so much life in her, you can feel the heat of it, little scrap of a thing that she is.”

They took the last of the wooden boxes into the house.

“Will you stay for tea?” Emily asked. She would be frightfully let down if Dorrie refused, but she tried not to show it.

“I can’t be gone long,” Dorrie said, as she took a seat at the table, casting a curious glance at Spud, who was still languishing like an invalid on the hearth. “I’m running the store all by myself, with Aislinn in her confinement. Shay’s right; it’s time we hired on some help.”

“Confinement” seemed a strange term, to Emily, for such a wonderful experience as bringing a child into the world. Busily, she rummaged through the groceries until she found a good-sized sack of sugar, and set the tea to brewing. Later, she would bake the rhubarb pies, to serve with supper, but for the moment there was nothing to offer Dorrie but tea.

“Where’s home?” Dorrie asked. By then, Spud had crept over to rest his head on the bench beside her, and she was gently stroking his head, but her kindly gaze was fixed on Emily.

She didn’t know exactly how to answer the question. She’d never in her life had a real home, until now. “Here,” she said, at some length, and in such a quiet voice that Dorrie leaned forward a little to hear it. As far as she was concerned, the ranch was indeed hers, whether she became Tristan’s wife or not.

Dorrie seemed satisfied with the reply. “Looks like this dog met up with a bee-stung grizzly,” she observed. “Poor creature.”

Emily recalled how Tristan had taken care of Spud, touching him gently and murmuring soothing words, even when the animal growled and bared his teeth. “Tristan says he’ll be all right,” she ventured.