Cherish (30 page)

“Yes,” she said faintly.

Most times, Race felt that way of thinking was damned near as stupid as turning the other cheek. But he had no qualms about using it to his advantage in this instance. If she was too skittish to gentle break, he would at least be able to hold her, which was bound to make her feel safer. That way, maybe she would get some rest.

“Well, then, I’ve decided to marry you the way an Apache man would in an urgent situation.”

“Wh-what does that entail?”

He touched the tip of her nose and winked at her. “Rebecca Ann Morgan, from this moment and until I’m dust in the wind, you’re my woman, my life, my heart. I have spoken it.”

“And that’s all there would be to it?” At his nod, she looked slightly appalled. “And what words would I say?”

“You don’t get to say nothin’.”

“Why? Surely both people must make a vow.”

“Nope. It ain’t necessary for the woman to make a vow. Just the man. And it’s more like statin’ his feelin’s, actually.”

“Oh.” She frowned. “What if the feeling isn’t reciprocated?”

“Isn’t what?”

“Returned. What if the girl isn’t so inclined? Doesn’t wish to marry him?”

“Well, a smart man usually tests the water first, I reckon. If he ain’t so smart and he takes a girl who don’t want him, she accepts it. Ain’t a whole lot else she can do once she gets took. An Apache man is kinda bent on keepin’ what’s his when it comes to his woman.”

“That seems rather barbaric.”

Race smiled. “It ain’t a whole lot different than the way your folks do things, from the sound of it, gettin’ your husband picked for you instead of pickin’ him yourself.”

She wrinkled her nose, much as she had moments before. “Would you mind waiting until tomorrow, at least?”

“I can’t see the point.” He rose to his knees and reached to smooth her hair, smiling at the way the curls immediately popped back up and wondering how she might look with it down. His gut knotted at the thought of her coming to him, as if in a dream, wearing nothing but waves of gold falling over her shoulders. “Sweetheart, don’t look so worried. I ain’t gonna bite. Not hard, anyhow. You trust me, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You wantin’ to do somethin’ havin’ to do with your religion to make it seem more right to you?”

She shook her head. “No. I just don’t feel comfortable with that barbaric custom of being ‘took,’ is all. Just the thought gives me the shudders.”

Race leaned down to look her in the eye, his nose scant inches from hers. “I didn’t notice you shudderin’.”

“When?”

“When you got took. Honey, I done did it.”

“You done did what?” she asked, looking mildly alarmed.

“Took you.”

She glanced around as if she’d missed something. “I didn’t get ‘took.’”

“You sure as hell did. I said the words, clear as rain.”

She blinked. “I thought you were simply informing me of the way it was done.”

“It was more showin’ you, actually.” Race noticed her eyes going dark. He knew from experience that wasn’t a good sign. “Sweetheart, don’t get all het up. I ain’t gonna be all over you like dogs fightin’ over a bone.”

She fixed a frightened gaze on him. “Dogs fighting over a bone?”

“Bad choice of words. I got a talent for it.” He settled a hand over her nape, his fingertips feathering through silken curls. “You gotta know I ain’t gonna force you to do nothin’ you’re afraid to do, or that you feel real nervous about. Not straightaway, anyhow.”

“Of course.”

“Well, then? Think of the Apache thing as a handshake marriage. We’ll get married again when the time is right, all fancy and proper to your way of thinkin’. Until then, we’re married all fancy and proper to my way of thinkin’. What real difference does it make how we done it, as long as we’re married?”

She hugged her waist. “None I guess.” As her voice trailed away, the alarmed expression came back over her face. She pressed closer and whispered, “Does that mean this is our
wedding
night?”

Race wasn’t sure why she was whispering, but given the fact that he’d just married the girl, he figured this was just one of the hundreds of times he’d probably do things that didn’t make sense to him, simply to please her. Pitching his own voice to a whisper, he replied, “I reckon so. Why?”

“Oh, lands!” she cried, loud enough to scare snakes in six counties.

It was obvious to Race the instant he touched his new
bride that theirs had no chance of being the most satisfying wedding night on record. She knelt next to the pallet, gazing at the quilts. He touched his palm to the small of her back.
Her trembling back
. He wasn’t sure if she was shaking from fear or from cold.

“Sweetheart?” On his knees and slightly behind her, he leaned around to see her face. “You gonna jump on in? You’re gettin’ chilled.”

Judging by her less than enthusiastic expression, he might have just asked her to leap in a rattlesnake pit. He tossed the quilts back, then grasped her arm to guide her forward. With halting movements, she took it from there, twisting to sit and scooting to the far side of the makeshift bed. Race removed his guns, folded the gun belt around the holsters, and placed them carefully on the floor at the head of the pallet.

Acutely aware of Rebecca’s gaze on him, he smiled slightly as he took off his shirt. She shot him one startled look, then immediately squeezed her eyes closed. He decided the old saying, “just keep your pants on,” might be damned good advice for him to heed, at least until she settled down some and became more comfortable around him. He tossed the shirt near his guns, then sat at the edge of the pallet to pull off his boots and remove his thick leather belt.

Finally ready to join her in bed, Race drew up his knees
slightly to rest his arms and study her. There was something peculiar about the way she lay there, flat on her back, eyes squeezed closed, fine-boned hands folded beneath her breasts.
Christ
. She looked like a corpse laid out for burial.

“Rebecca, darlin’, are you scared?” he asked softly.

A disgruntled frown passed over her delicate features. She cracked open one eye. “Mr. Spencer, if you…if it’s your intention to consummate, I’d truly prefer to maintain a degree of separateness, which is difficult to do while conversing.” Her mouth softened a hair. “As for your question, never having done my wifely duty before, I’m quite tense, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say I feel afraid. My mother assured me it will be quick and involve only a tolerable amount of pain. I can’t imagine why she would have lied to me about it.”

Race reached up to stroke his chin, more to hide his grin than to check for stubble. He had a feeling he could go to bed tonight with a beard rough enough to sand wood and it wouldn’t matter one hell of a lot. “I wish I could put your mind at ease, honey, but the honest truth is, I don’t know no more about it than you probably do.”

She opened both eyes and one of the sweetest smiles he’d ever seen curved her mouth. “Oh, I’m so pleased,” she said softly. Then she wrinkled her nose and giggled. “I feared perhaps you had firsthand knowledge, and I was rather hesitant to come straight out and ask you.” She took a deep breath and sighed. “To be honest, Mr. Spencer, I sorely misjudged you. I had you pegged as a—well, please don’t be offended—but I rather suspected you were no stranger to fornication.”

“Fornication?” Race had no idea in hell what that was.

“You have that look about you,” she informed him apologetically. “To someone of my persuasions, a rather dangerous look. Very worldly and—well, earthy. But if you’re as ignorant as I about bedroom matters I was obviously wrong.”

Race drew his hand from his chin to hold up a staying finger. “Whoa, there, darlin’. Don’t go barkin’ up that rope.”

“What rope?”

“The ignorant rope.” He turned, lifted the quilts, and slipped in beside her. “I’m a dumb jackass about a lot of things, but makin’ love ain’t one of ’em.” He propped his head on the heel of his hand to gaze down at her. “I was talkin’ about the virgin pain and your ma sayin’ it was tolerable. I don’t know nothin’ about that because I ain’t never been with a first-time gal. The ladies I been with, and there’s been a number of ’em, was all well broke to the saddle, if you know what I mean.”

The puzzlement in her luminous eyes told him she didn’t. “Well broke, Mr. Spencer?”

He traced the fragile line of her cheekbone with the back of a knuckle. “Never you mind. It ain’t important.”

Her expression grew troubled. “So you have considerable experience with…fornication?”

Race was beginning to glean the meaning of the word. Yet another highfalutin tongue waggler, compliments of his golden-haired angel. “I reckon I do.”

He smiled slightly, noting the rapid pulse beat at her temple when he pressed the backs of his fingers over the spot. The girl hadn’t lied. She wasn’t scared; she was plumb terrified. He decided then and there that he needed to hold off on staking his claim.
Consummate
, she’d called it. She had big words for damned near everything, even screwing. Fornicating? Jesus H. Christ.

Given the fact that it didn’t appear he’d be fornicating any time soon, Race decided he could send her off to sleep with something else that might comfort her in her dreams. “You disappointed in me, knowin’ I been fornicatin’ before I met you?”

She nibbled at her bottom lip as she considered the question. “Well, it is a sin, you know.”

For a young woman who said she was flat done with God and all that Bible-thumping stuff, she sure had strong leanings in that direction. Doing his best to sound surprised, Race said, “Fornicatin’ is a sin?”

Her eyes widened slightly. “Surely you know that.”

“Well, I know you ain’t supposed to do it outside marriage. Cookie explained that to me. But I can’t see how
much of anything, no matter how wrong, is a
sin
. What’re you sayin’? That it’s my fault I fornicated?”

“Well, of course, Mr. Spencer. If not your fault, whose might it be?”

“God’s.”

That brought her to a sitting position. She whipped around to fix an incredulous gaze on him. “God’s? Where in heaven’s name did you get that idea? The wrongs you commit are
your
doing, and they are therefore
your
fault. How on earth can you lay the blame at God’s door?”

Race kept his expression carefully solemn. Looking stupid wasn’t a problem. He seemed to have a talent for that. “Well, because, darlin’. He’s my Maker, ain’t He? Accordin’ to how you believe, anyhow. I’ll tell you straightaway that I ain’t real up on the Bible. Not bein’ able to read, I just have to go by things I’ve heard, here and there.”

“God is your Maker, yes. But that doesn’t make Him responsible for your actions.”

Race settled in for a long wait while she launched into an explanation of how things worked, telling him the story of Creation and about God’s making man in His own image, but giving him free will and then a whole bunch of warnings about all kinds of things he shouldn’t do. “So you see, how you choose to live your life, and the things you decide to do while you’re living it are entirely up to you,” she concluded. “If not for free will, man would have no choices. As it is, he does. Therefore if he elects to do something wrong or terrible, he alone is held accountable, not God.”

Race assumed a bewildered frown. “Hm. That’s purely amazin’. All this time I had me the idea that when people done really terrible, horrible things that it was all God’s fault. And now you’re tellin’ me He don’t got nothin’ to do with it? That the folks who commit the act bear the whole blame? And I got black marks on my soul for all the wrong things I done?”

“Absolutely. We alone are responsible for our actions.”

Race gave her his best “gotcha” look. “Then explain
me this one thing, darlin’. How come is it you’re blamin’ God for what them heartless bastards done to your people in the arroyo?”

Her face drained completely of color, and she stared at him for so long with a shocked, blank expression on her face that he almost wished he’d kept his mouth shut. He kept waiting for her to say something. Instead, little muscles in her face started to twitch, and it seemed to him her skin grew taut over the bones, making her look almost skeletal.

Then, before Race could anticipate what she meant to do, she leaped up, ran to the wagon gate, and jerked aside the flap. “Rebecca, come back here!”

In a blur of white, she vanished into the darkness. Cursing, Race strapped on his guns, grabbed his wool blanket from the floor, and rushed after her, half-afraid she’d venture a dangerous distance from camp and encounter the ruffians, whom he knew were following them. He was relieved when he found her kneeling beneath a tree just beyond the edge of camp. Upset the girl might be, but stupid, she wasn’t.

Tender of foot, he gimped his way to her over stickery evergreen needles, sharp stones, and twigs. As he drew up behind her, he heard her sobbing and saying in a broken voice, “Oh, God…oh, God…oh, God…”

He went down on one knee behind her, draped the blanket over her shoulders, and then folded his arms around her. She was shaking so horribly that he wanted nothing more than to beg her forgiveness for hazing her into a trap like that, but truthfully he wasn’t and never would be sorry. His little angel needed her God back, and if Race had to hurt her some to see that she found Him, he figured the end justified the means.

So he said nothing. Offered no apology or words of comfort. He just held her so she wouldn’t get cold and felt his heart breaking a little more with each one of the sobs that racked her slender body. When she had cried herself nearly out, she began to lean more heavily into him, turning slightly to press a damp cheek against his bare chest.
Silence
. Rubbing her arm through the blanket,
Race gazed up through the pine boughs at the moon-silvery sky and the clouds that drifted overhead, like wispy layers of gauze between him and the twinkling stars.

God
. Race had determined long ago that He had many different faces and as many different names, and that He showed Himself to people in different ways. Race believed—deeply. And he supposed that the God he did believe in was the same one Rebecca knew. But, by the same token, a lot of her ideas and convictions struck him as totally loco. He might be wrong, but it seemed to him there was little joy in her way of believing, that it was mostly trying to be impossibly good and following so many rules they were hard to keep track of.

Maybe it was the Indian in him, but Race wasn’t much on rules. To him, God was moonlight coming through pine boughs, the birth of a new fawn, the drift of a snowflake, the innocence in an angel’s blue eyes. His God was all beautiful. No hellfire and damnation. No lightning-bolt vengeance. Just love and goodness. To Race’s way of thinking, the only rule his God probably wanted him to follow, hard and fast, was to try his best to be a decent man. It made sense that if Race and everyone else would only work hard at being decent that all those other lists of rules would be unnecessary. Being decent sort of came with its own rule book.

“My parents, the others, they trusted in Him to protect them,” Rebecca whispered, her voice weighted with weariness. “They believed in free will, just as I explained it to you. Yet they also believed God was their shield. How is it that you can cut your way through all the intricacies of it, seeing so easily that it can’t be both ways, but well-educated Bible scholars like my papa and the other brethren could not?”

Race continued to massage her arm, his gaze fixed on the moonbeams. “Honey, I ain’t the one to answer religion questions for you. I ain’t got a lick of Christian learnin’ under my belt, and to tell ya the truth, the parts of the Bible I have heard tell of sound sorta farfetched.”

She followed his gaze to the silvery light coming down through the trees.

“I can tell you this, though, it bein’ somethin’ I’ve seen and noted.” He tightened his hand over her arm. “There’s men like me, who can’t read a word or write a lick, and we’re dumb jackasses, no arguin’ the point. But there’s also men that can read and write, who spend so damned much time doin’ both that they’re dumb jackasses in their own right.”

She stiffened and threw him an incredulous look. “Are you saying my papa was a dumb jackass?”

She sounded so indignant, Race chuckled. “Well, bein’s I call myself one, I reckon he’s in good company. I don’t mean dumb, I don’t guess. Ignorant, in my case. Confused, in his.”

“I’m amazed you know a word like ‘ignorant.’”

He sighed. “Now, see there? Start talkin’ religion, and you’re pissed off.”

“Your referring to my father as a ‘dumb jackass’ has nothing to do with religion. I would appreciate it if you would concede the point and retract the statement.”

Race met her gaze, which was fairly snapping. Her moods swung as violently as a sapling in a high wind. “Rebecca Ann, you wantin’ to fight with me?”

“If you’re going to besmirch my father’s memory, yes, indeed!”

“Then talk so’s I can understand you.”

Her small nose moved closer to his. “Say you’re sorry. Do you understand
that
?”

He chuckled. “I sure as hell do.” Then in a softer voice, he said, “I’m sorry. I only meant that it sounds to me like your papa read the whole damned Bible, and it’s a thick bugger. I don’t know what parts of the Good Book he found his beliefs in, but it stands to reason there was a helluva lot of readin’ betwixt one point and another. I think he plumb forgot readin’ about ‘free will’ by the time he read the part about God protectin’ him from all harm. The two don’t mix real good, and it’d be easy to get your facts muddled, takin’ them, one by one, from such a big book. You hear what I’m sayin’?”

“That my father didn’t have good sense.”

Race chuckled again. “That ain’t what I said. Your papa probably made great sense most of the time. He raised you, didn’t he? I gotta tell ya, that gives him a real high recommend in my books.”

She looked slightly mollified. “Thank you.”

“Ain’t nothin’ you gotta thank me for. I’m just statin’ the facts. As for your papa, I just believe he got his thinkin’ crossed on a couple of things and come up with some ideas that didn’t make much sense at all.

“I ain’t sayin’ all his thinkin’ was dumb. Take me, for instance. I think I’m a sensible man, most times. But here I am, kneelin’ under a tree with no shirt on and stickers in my big toe. That might make sense if I had me a lovin’ woman in my arms, but instead, I’m out here arguin’ with one.”