Bittner, Rosanne (16 page)

She
could not forget the way Abel had cowered under the bed. All feelings for him
had gone out of her then, and when Chino raped her, she'd seen that vision
again, and she'd actually hated her own husband as much as she'd hated Chino.

"God
forgive me," she groaned. She used the board for support as she bent down
beside her father's grave and reached out to gently touch the rocks. "I'm
so sorry you had to die such a terrible death, Daddy," she said.
"Everything has been hell for you ever since the war and Mama's and
Terence's deaths. I tried to give you all the love I could, tried to take good
care of you. I know you were never really happy."

It
was only over the loss of her father that the tears finally came. She had no
choice now but to let the sobs come forth again, only the second time she had
truly cried since her abduction. It was so hard to let go like this, but
sometimes it just had to be done. Her father was gone. She had no one, nothing
but memories. She realized then that she had never really been able to enjoy a
normal life as a child. The war, her mother's death, had forced her to grow up
overnight. She had spent the next few years devoting all her attention to her
father, the last three helping him build this farm, such as it was. She'd had
little chance to meet other young women of her age. In fact, for the first two
years since coming here, there had been no other women of her age in the area.
She had known nothing but work and her father. In her whole life she had never
even been to a dance. She had lived out such things through reading wonderful
stories about other young women, pretending she was the heroines in the books.
Now she could not even do that. The books were gone.

She'd
gone from seven to twenty-two hardly noticing there was a difference. She was a
widow, homeless, and for the moment had no means of support. Now others would
brand her as "that woman who had been abducted by Comancheros."
Everyone would probably think they had all raped her, that she was somehow
soiled.

And
she was. Much as she pretended it did not bother her, she wanted to scream and
pull out her hair. She wanted to dig inside herself and scrape out anything
that had to do with the horrifying Chino. She wanted desperately to wipe away
everything that had happened, but it had, and that was the hell of it. The only
one who under- stood how she felt, strange as it might seem, was John Hawkins.

Why
did all thoughts keep coming back to John? It seemed ridiculous. And for the
moment she should be thinking only of her father. She lay across his grave,
hardly aware of the stones poking at her. If only she could hug him once more.
If only there had never been a war, they would all still be back in Georgia,
enjoying the rich earth, mother, father, brother, sister. Life would have been
so different. She would not be alone in west Texas lying across her father's
grave, a man who'd been viciously and senselessly murdered. She would not be a
"soiled" woman, a widow, a—

"Stop
it!" she whispered. She was Henry McDowell's daughter, and the McDowells
were a proud people not easily broken. That was what her father always said. He
would hate seeing her this way, wanting to give up, to let someone like Chino
take away her pride. Men like Chino were
nothing,
and now he was dead.
She was glad John Hawkins had plunged his knife into the man's heart! She hoped
Chino had suffered some before he died.

She
sat up, using the skirt of her dress to wipe at her nose and eyes. It was then
she realized just how dusty and sweaty she was, how dirty her dress was, how
awful she must look in a dress too big for her, one shoe on, one shoe off, her
hair a nightmarish mess, her face probably dirty. If she was going to convince
others she had not been raped, she couldn't be seen like this. But she had no
clothes to change into. How on earth...?

She
wiped at her face more, then used the board to get back to her feet. She drew
in several deep breaths for self-control. The crying was done. She had to get
control of herself, had to go on from here, like any proud McDowell. She had to
face her situation and do something about it. "Mr. Hawkins," she
called out. She could see John and Ken talking in the distance. John turned at
his name, then said something to Ken and mounted Sundance, riding over to her.

"You
ready to go into town now?"

She
held her chin proudly. "Yes. But I have a request."

John's
heart ached at the sight of her, such a small thing acting so brave, standing
there in that dirty dress that was too big for her, that red hair tumbled
around her face like a broken bird's nest, those blue eyes showing such pride
and fire yet swollen and bloodshot from crying. "Whatever you want."

"I
must clean up and put on decent clothes before I face anyone. The problem, of
course, is that I don't
have
any clean clothes to put on. The second
problem is that if you take me to the home of any decent woman, she might help
me with clothing, but she won't know how to keep a secret. Most women love
gossip, and if I am presented to any respectable woman looking like this,
heaven only knows how I will be described to someone else."

John
frowned in confusion. "I'm not sure what you're getting at."

Tess
closed her eyes for a moment, hating to ask. It was like giving in to what he
had already suggested and admitting defeat "What I am getting at, Mr.
Hawkins, is..." She put one hand on her hip authoritatively, while still
clinging to the board. "I want to know if your Jenny Simms is a woman who
would keep quiet if I asked her, or I should say if
you
asked her."

John
forced back a grin, knowing it would only irritate her. At last she was
beginning to see why Jenny was the one she should go to first. "Let's get
one thing straight. She's not
my
Jenny Simms. She's just a friend, like
she is to a lot of people. And yes, women like Jenny understand a lot better
than others would. If you want her to keep her mouth shut, she'll do it What
I'll do is send Ken into town first. He can go straight to Jenny and describe
you and have Jenny bring out some clothes in her carriage. You still have a
water pump here that works. Jenny can bring a washtub and soap and creams,
anything you need. We'll build a fire while we're waiting and heat some water.
I'm sure we can at least find a bucket or something around here. Ken and I can
hold up some blankets and you can take a bath and change right here, then ride
into town."

She
raised her eyebrows. "You two will hold up blankets while I take a bath?
Facing which way?"

Now
he had no choice but to grin. "Whichever way you say."

Tess
could not help a smile of her own then. "You will keep your backs to me at
all times, or I will have you hanged when we get to El Paso." A look came
into his eyes that made her want to hit him as those dark eyes moved over her.

"Yes,
ma'am," he answered. God, he suddenly realized he wanted her. He wanted to
remind her how good making love could be, take away the ugliness for her.
Surely she had some good memories of things like that with her husband. But
then if he'd been a man who would cower under a bed while Indians made off with
his wife, what kind of man had he been
in
that bed?

Good
God, he had to get rid of these thoughts. Not only was making love probably the
last thing Tess Carey would want to do for a long time, but even when she was
ready, she sure wouldn't settle for a man like himself. "I'll go talk to
Ken. I'll tell him to go up to Jenny's the back way so no one knows he sent for
her."

He
rode off, and Tess watched him talking to Ken and she wondered how many times
John Hawkins had gone up the "back way" to see Jenny Simms himself.
She hated having to do this, but there seemed to be no other choice.

Tess
hated admitting it, even to herself, but she liked Jenny. She felt a little
guilty for having prejudged the woman and having joined other
"decent" women in the area in having no association with her at all.
She could not begin to imagine running a saloon for a living, and whether Jenny
slept with men for money or not, everyone knew that's what the woman did. It
made Tess shiver to think of it... of being with any man anytime soon, even if
she loved him. There were so many things about Jenny Simms to make her someone
no proper woman should associate with, and yet she was one of the friendliest
women she'd ever met. Jenny couldn't be more than a few years older than Tess,
yet she treated her almost like a daughter.

"I
can't believe how wonderful this soap smells," she told Jenny.

The
woman helped her wash her hair. "Honey, I get my soaps and lotions from
only the best places back East, have them shipped out here to me. Every lady
ought to pamper herself the best she can, and Lord knows out here a woman needs
to put on plenty of cream and wear nice, big hats, keep the damn sun off her
face. 'Course my face looks a lot older than I really am on account of kind of
hard living, if you know what I mean. I think it's all the smoke inside the
saloon that does something to a person's skin. I don't know."

The
woman rattled on, as though she knew Tess needed to hear lots of nonsense talk,
things to keep her mind off the fact that she wanted this hot bath in order to
wash away more of the filth of the man called Chino. Tess was glad the woman
seemed to realize she wouldn't want to talk about what had happened in front of
John Hawkins or Ken Randall, who both stood holding the blankets out, their
backs to her, just as they had promised.

"How
much longer do we have to stand here goin' crazy knowin' a pretty woman is
takin' a bath right behind our backs?" Ken teased.

"Either
one of you looks, I'll find a way to make you pay," Jenny told them.
"You both know I can do it."

"You
can be meaner than any outlaw or renegade I ever went after," John told
her.

"Ha!
No one meaner than John Hawkins ever walked the face of the earth," she
shot back at him.

"You've
got ways of being mean that are worse than anything I've done."

Jenny
laughed, and Tess struggled with the same strange emotion she'd felt when Jenny
first arrived and greeted John Hawkins with a quick hug. Why did the man's
friendship with a woman like Jenny disturb her? She had no desire to think of
any man sexually now, and yet it bothered her to think of John Hawkins sharing
such things with someone like Jenny.

She
tried to let the thought rinse away with the clean water Jenny poured over her
head. She decided she was having these silly little feelings of affection and
even jealousy over Hawkins because he had literally rescued her from hell. Now
she felt somewhat obligated to the man, and perhaps because he had come for her
when she was so vulnerable and hurting and shamed, it had made her feel
dependent on him.

She
stood up, and Jenny wrapped a towel around her. "Give me one of those
blankets, then you two can go have a smoke or something," Jenny ordered
John.

"Can
I turn around?"

"Soon
as you hand me the blanket."

Tess
studied the woman's face, trying to guess her age. She was right about her
skin. It was showing some wrinkles, and her makeup was too heavy and looked
caked from perspiration. She thought the woman would actually look younger and
prettier without so much powder and rouge. She thought about suggesting it, but
she did not want to seem insulting or to embarrass her. Jenny was plump but not
fat, and she had a pretty smile. Her hair was a sandy color, her eyes green,
and she looked like she might have been quite pretty as a girl. Her bosom was
no larger than average, but the cut of her dress revealed a great deal of
flesh, and she suspected the woman wore some kind of special undergarment that
pushed her breasts higher.

John
let go of the blanket, and Jenny wrapped it around Tess as she stepped out of
the washtub. Ken dropped the blanket he was holding.

"My
arms was gettin' tired," he said, glancing at Tess. "Say, that hair
looks even redder now that it's clean," he told her. "You feelin'
better now, ma'am?"

Tess
held the blanket tightly around her. "A little."

Jenny
turned to John, and she raised her eyebrows in surprise at the way he was
looking at Tess Carey. One thing she knew well was men, and this one had an
ache for the woman he was looking at. "You go occupy your time someplace
else. This lady has some dresses to try on," she told him with a scolding
look.