Always a Lady (16 page)

"Don't do this, Lily," he growled. "Not after last night. You can't send a man to heaven with one hand and yank him to hell with the other."

His words hurt, but Lily knew he was justified. She remained silent and watched him turn away from her in disgust.

"I'll be out most of the day," he muttered, as he turned around, unwilling for her to see the pain on his face. "Just keep a pot of stew or beans on the stove. Nothing fancy. The men will come to eat in shifts. We'll be cleaning up most of the day."

The storm! Lily was shocked that she'd just remembered. So much had happened between them last night that she'd nearly forgotten the fierce winds and the rain and hail.

"Was there much damage?" she asked.

"Damage?" He shoved his hand angrily through his hair, shoving its inky black, shower-damp style completely out of order. "Hell, yes, there was damage! All kinds of things were torn up last night. All kinds of things."

He left her with a hard stare and the cryptic remark that Lily suspected had nothing at all to do with the damage resulting from the storm. She knew Case was referring to what had happened between them. And, with her reluctance to commit herself to a relationship, she'd just torn the first fragile bonds of trust that had been forming. In spite of her fears and her need to protect herself, she wasn't so certain that it had been the right thing to do.

She heard Case go up the stairs and before long,, come back down again, this time booted and ready. Lily started through the kitchen toward the front of the house, intent on catching him—for what reason, she hadn't decided—but it was too late. She got nothing but a backside view of his ramrod straight shoulders as he slapped his black Stetson on his head and slammed the door shut behind him.

Lily pressed shaky fingers to her lips, intent on stopping their tremble, but it was no use. Tears squeezed past her lashes anyway, running in guilty tracks down the sides of her face. She pressed her palms against her cheeks, bitterly swiping at the tears of regret and made her way back toward her room. She had to get dressed and get busy. It was going to be a long day.

Noon had come and gone and the day was growing warmer by the minute. She couldn't believe that the night before it had been cold enough to rain baseballsize chunks of frozen ice; less than twelve hours later it was warm enough for short sleeves. Oklahoma weather was one for the books.

Lily screwed the lid down on the large thermos she'd filled with iced tea, grabbed a big sack of freshly baked oatmeal cookies and started out the back door of the house. The farther she walked away from the house, the more evidence she saw of the storm's devastating aftermath.

She knew that they'd been lucky in one respect. There had been a tornado. That much had been confirmed by several of the men who'd seen it coming across the prairie, but at the last minute its tail had pulled back up into the clouds and passed over the ranch house with a checkerboard hop. It was the strong side winds and the hail that had done the most damage.

Anywhere Lily looked she could see missing shingles, panels of tin from the barn roof wrapped around fence posts, and broken tree branches and leaves. Several of the windows on one side of the house had been cracked or broken. Duff's blue pickup truck had a windshield shattered from blowing debris, and a long section of fence was down along the driveway. A wall from a small outbuilding had blown across it and been dragged far enough that it had snapped the top two strands of barbed wire.

Men were everywhere. For the moment, roundup was forgotten as they tried to put the Bar L back into working order.

Lily walked toward the barns where the largest number of men were working. Duff was the first one to see her coming and waved a hello and a happy grin as he spied her carrying refreshments.

"I hope it's wet and I hope it's cold," he said, as Lily handed him the thermos and a handful of paper cups.

Pete dug into the sack, grabbed a couple of the spicy cookies for himself and then passed the bag around as the men gratefully took a break and poured themselves a cup of the iced tea to go with their snack.

"Where's Case?" Lily finally asked. She suspected that he was purposefully ignoring her.

Duff frowned and swiped at his mouth with the back of his hand, removing cookie crumbs and tea droplets in one fell swoop.

"Aww, he's out back, burying calves," he answered. "Damn shame, too."

For a moment, Lily couldn't speak. She was dumb-founded. Burying calves? Surely the winds hadn't been that strong? How did storms such as the one last night cause animals to die? This was all out of her realm of expertise.

Lily walked around behind the barn and headed for a small rise where she saw Case climbing down from a tractor. The closer she came to Case, the faster she walked, until she was almost running. She met him coming around behind the piece of equipment.

The look on his face stopped whatever question she'd been about to utter. He stared at Lily with a look of surprise on his face, traces of drying tears on his cheeks still there for her to see.

She didn't know what had happened, and she didn't know what Case had been doing, but she knew what he needed. She opened her arms, and he walked into them like a lost child who's just found the front door to home.

"Damn hail," he muttered, as he dug his fists into the wild, honeyed tangle of her hair and buried his face in its sweetness.

She smelled of lemon and soap, cinnamon and spice, and he'd never felt so complete in his entire life.

"Hail?" Lily didn't follow his line of thought. But it didn't matter, just holding Case was enough for now.

"Yeah," he said, as he rested his chin on the top of her head and pulled her nose into the dip between his collar bone, letting his hands roam at will up and down her back as he stared sightlessly across the rolling hills of his ranch. "Hail was too big and some of the calves were too small. Got caught out in the open. I had to bury four. Damn shame, too," he muttered. "They were so little."

Lily caught her breath, knowing that another side of the man she'd come to love had just been revealed to her. He was a man of the land. He not only raised the animals, but cared for them in the true manner of a shepherd watching over his flock. And when one was lost, he grieved for it because he'd failed in his duty to care and protect.

"I'm so sorry, honey," she said, not realizing that she'd used an endearment.

Case didn't intend to remind her of her slip. He was too busy holding on for dear life. He was sorry as hell that he'd just lost four of his best calves, but he'd lose the whole damn herd if that's what it took to keep Lily Brownfield in his arms forever.

Lily hugged him gently and then stepped away, suddenly aware of how open and exposed they were, standing in each other's arms in plain sight of the ranch.

"Are you finished here?" she asked. "I brought some iced tea and cookies to the men. If you hurry, there might be a few left."

"Hop on," Case ordered, as he vaulted into the seat of the tractor and held out his hand for Lily to climb up beside him.

"Oh no!" she muttered, backing away from the big, green machine with an apprehensive look on her face. "I'll just walk."

"Scared?" Case asked, still holding out his hand.

Lily stared. First at the machine, then at the distance back to the barns, then back at the tractor, and up at Case's face. It was the latter that swayed her decision. There was more than just trust in his driving ability at stake here. It was a matter of trust in Case, the man.

"I'm not scared with you," she answered, and reached up, feeling the strong grip of his fingers wrap around her wrist and pull until she was sitting beside him in the tractor seat, her arms wrapped around his neck to keep from falling.

Her answer would be enough to get him through the rest of the day. With Lily he knew he'd have to take one step at a time. One very small step, at a time. Hell's fire, I'd crawl, he thought, if that's what it takes, I'll crawl. But I will have Lily. I have no other alternative.

They'd no more than parked the tractor beside the barn when a truck came down the driveway and pulled to a stop in front of the area where the men were working. A big, heavy set man with bulging muscles and a matching stomach that hung heavily over his pants slid out of the truck. He sauntered over to Case who was helping Lily down from the high tractor seat.

The smile she gave Case went a long way toward healing the hurt she'd dealt him earlier this morning. If he was patient, surely she'd know that she was more than just a pretty face to him. He almost forgot that the trucker had arrived until he spoke. Case turned at his announcement.

"Got your load of sheet metal and two by fours," the man said, pointing back over his shoulder with his thumb as he shifted a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other with his tongue. "Where ya want it unloaded?"

"I'll have Duff help you," Case said, and turned away to search for Duff's whereabouts, missing the look that passed between Lily and the man.

The man's eyes followed the path of her scar, from the corner of her eye to the tip of her mouth. He frowned, ran a thumb unconsciously down his own cheek, took the toothpick from his mouth and turned his head, spitting onto the muddy ground as if to remove the bad taste of looking at Lily's disfigured face from his memory.

Lily smiled sarcastically and met his shocked expression with her head held high. She'd seen it all before.

"I'll see you later," Lily said, as she walked past Case, startling him with her short, clipped words and her angry stride. 

He swerved around and caught the stare of the big, beefy delivery man's face. He was watching Lily's slender hips sway from side to side as she hurried toward the ranch house.

"Damn shame about her face," he said and stuffed the toothpick back in his mouth, sucking on the soggy corner with studied expertise. "She'd be real good looking 'cept for that gash on her cheek."

Case flushed a dark, angry crimson and doubled his fists before he even knew he'd moved. He knew Lily had heard every word the man said as her back stiffened and the distance between her steps increased.

"Shut your damn mouth," he muttered, eyes blazing, and walked right up to stare pointedly at the man's face, "unless you want to wear one just like it."

The man turned a pasty white, nearly choked on his toothpick and looked around for the person who was going to help him unload. He had a feeling he'd just put his size twelve foot into his mouth and if he didn't get the hell out of here fast, might just get Case Longren's boot in there, too.

"So, where's this Duff fellow anyway?" he muttered. "I got plenty more loads to haul. You ain't the only one who had storm damage last night."

Case motioned for Duff and then, after a quick set of instructions to his foreman, walked away from the delivery man before he did something to him that he might later regret. He wanted to go to Lily and reassure her that what the man had said about her did not matter to him in the least, but he knew now was not the time to do it. He could tell that simply by the way Lily had walked away. If she hadn't been a lady, he suspected she would have let the man have it with both barrels. It was all Case could do not to do it himself.

When he went to the house with the men later in the day to eat an early supper, Lily was all business. She wouldn't look at him and answered only in monosyllables. He sighed, choked down his food, unaware of what she'd even served, and knew he was back to square one. He could tell by the way she was acting that she'd just appointed herself judge and jury of their relationship and decided to put it to an early but painful death.

Case shoved his chair back from the table, carried his plate to the sink and slammed it down on top of several others.

Lily blinked and whirled around, thinking that someone had dropped and broken a plate. The look Case sent her way made shivers go all the way up her back in nervous anticipation. He obviously wasn't buying her silent treatment and, from the way he was staring, he was furious that she'd even tried it.

"I'm not about to put up with this 'sorry for myself attitude,' Lily Catherine," he muttered as he walked past her toward the door. "You're not getting out of last night this easy."

Lily swallowed back a shaky retort and watched him walk away in the growing dusk of nightfall. She didn't want out of anything. But she couldn't face the possibility of seeing a similar look of disgust on Case's face . . . ever. And the only way she could prevent that was to stay away from him altogether.

Lily spent a nervous evening and a lonely night, but Case didn't come into the den as usual to watch a weekly television show that they both enjoyed. He didn't show, by word or deed, that he even knew she was in the same house. Instead, when he finally came inside, footsteps dragging wearily, he walked up the staircase and out of her sight as if nothing had ever passed between them.

Lily stifled a sob, turned around and stared mutinously toward the television screen, refusing to admit, even to herself, that she deserved every bit of Case's disgust.

Finally, weary and heartsick, Lily made her way toward her own room beyond the kitchen, showered and then crawled into her bed with the soft, comforting mattress and freshly laundered sheets and wished for the ancient bedstead and the musty pillow-ticked mattress that she'd lain on the night before. And she longed for the man who'd lain beside her and loved her with a patience and a passion that she'd never believed existed.

"Goin' to town. Need anything?"

Case's question was short but less than sweet as he stared pointedly, waiting for Lily's answer.

Lily shoved aside the mountain of pie dough she'd just mixed and wiped her hands on the front of her apron.

"A couple of things," she answered quietly. "Do you mind going to the grocery store or would you rather wait and have me pick them up with the other foodstuffs later in the week?"

"Just give me the list," he said.

Lily handed him the paper with the list that she'd begun earlier. He caught it, along with her hand, and pulled her sharply toward him until they were nearly nose to nose.