Deborah Camp (17 page)

“There’s some medicine and bandages in that cabinet,” she said, tipping her head in the general direction. “Medicine would be better than kerosene and stove soot, wouldn’t it?”

“No, not really.” He returned from the cabinet with a roll of white bandage which he wrapped around her hand with notable expertise.

“I’m once again astounded by your knowledge,” she admitted, her voice still shaky as her insides continued to flinch and tremble. “Where did you learn doctoring?”

“During the war. The last few months I worked alongside a physician in the battlefields. I was a soldier, but the doctor needed an assistant. He drafted me after watching me stitch up my own wound.” He touched a knuckle to his shoulder, then drew aside his shirt to display a scar
zigzagging across his collarbone. “Bayonet grazed me here. The doctor said that if I could sew myself up then I had a strong stomach.”

Zanna stared at the white scar, noting the vertical marks where the sutures had been, and shuddered. “Yes, I should think so.”

He shrugged aside the admiration implicit in her tone and jerked his shirt back into place. “The South had run out of everything essential by that time—no bottled medicine, few instruments, makeshift bandages—so the doctor improvised and I watched and learned.” His lips thinned into a line of regret. “I was happy to see the end of it all, even though we lost. I was sick of death and decay.” He laid her hand in her lap and returned the roll of bandage to the cabinet. “I decided to go home after the war, but the house had burned to the ground with my mother and sisters in it. Later on, I learned that my father and brothers had been killed on the battlefields.”

He came back to her and impulsively stroked her hair before he dropped to his knees in front of her. “How’s the hand feeling?” He held it with gentle, healing fingers, his touch calming her and sending a current of warmth through her veins. Was this what the animals felt when he touched them? No wonder they responded to him. His gentle administrations acted like a sedative. Her eyelids grew heavy. Tension seeped from her body, leaving her limp. The pain became tolerable.

“Stay here a few minutes and rest.”

His voice came to her as if from a great distance. She closed her eyes, suddenly as weak as a kitten. She tipped her head back and let her body relax completely.

Visions of Grandy seeing to the wretched wounded flashed through her lazy mind, weaving in and out and occasionally triggering an answering twinge in the region of her heart. He’d been through so much! At first she had seen him as a shallow, unfeeling gambler, but she had been wrong. Other scenes—these of dance halls and noisy
saloons—flirted with her. A smile raced across her dry lips.

“Do the women really expose their ankles and knees?” she asked, her voice hoarse.

“What women?” He still sounded far, far away.

“The fallen angels in those thirst palaces.”

His chuckle floated to her, slipping into her ear to stroke and seduce. “Where do you hear such talk?” He laughed again. “Yes, they expose their legs and a good part of their breasts.”

“Oh, my!” Her lashes tickled her cheeks in a shiver of ignominy. “And you approved of
such
attire?”

“I didn’t pass judgment.”

His pointed rebuff silenced her, but the visions kept wandering through her mind, each of them focused on Grandy. He as a gambler, a soldier, a young farmer, a riverboat rake. Oh, he’d led such a diverse life! He’d seen so much, experienced so many things, and faced any number of life-threatening situations. She felt pale and insignificant in comparison. In a way, her life had been sheltered. When all was said and done, she’d traveled little and known few. But in her cloistered world, she’d felt the hot lick of hell’s flames.

She stood up, looking to escape, but the room spun before her eyes and her knees gave way. Grandy was there to catch her. His arms came around her, lifted her.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she murmured, but she did know. Ever since Fayne’s death, she’d been living on the run. Fleeing from shadows and fears and the uncertain future. Tonight she had slowed down long enough to take a good, close look and she’d realized now she could rest, if only for a little while. Things were working out as she’d hoped. The man she’d married was measuring up to her fondest dreams, her most desperate prayers. She could lean on him and catch her breath. Temporarily, yes, but she was ever so grateful for the respite.

When she’d cut her hand, more than her blood had
poured out. Her tension and the residue of her black fears had escaped too, leaving her exhausted.

She wound her arms limply around Grandy’s neck. Her head fell forward. Zanna nestled her face against his throat and felt him swallow convulsively.

“I’ll take you to bed.”

She smiled, knowing he hadn’t meant that the way it sounded. Feeling as if she were floating, she enjoyed the journey from kitchen to bedroom, the rubbing of their bodies as he took long strides, the musky aroma of him (far more pleasant than she’d ever experienced!), the stirring of his breath in her hair, and the splay of his hands at her back and under her knees. When he bent over to let her fall like a leaf onto her bed, she met the feather mattress with a long sigh. Curling onto her side, she closed her eyes and felt sleep ride toward her at a thundering gallop.

“ ’Night, Grandy,” she murmured. “Thanks for the ride.”

“Is your hand okay?” he whispered, bending close to see the white oval of her face in the darkness. “Zanna?”

She was already asleep. Grandy pulled a thin patchwork quilt over her and left her alone with her dreams.

Knowing it would be impossible for him to sleep in his present condition, he went outside to stare moodily at the starry firmament. He wished for a cigarette or a cigar, anything to blow smoke at his foolish notions of making love to his wife.

His wife.

The words had a false ring to them, circling in his head with no place to go.

“Smoke?”

Grandy sucked in his breath and his hand slapped against his thigh in a reflex action that didn’t go unnoticed by Perkins, who stood in the shadows at the end of the porch.

“Damn, Perkins. You shouldn’t sneak up on a man like that.”

“Guess I should be glad you didn’t have a gun strapped to your hip or I’d be carrying around some extra weight by now.” Perkins stepped up on the porch and extended a tobacco pouch. “Have one. It’ll settle you down.”

“Thanks.” Grandy took the pouch from him. “Believe it or not, I was just wishing for one of these,” he said, selecting a paper and tapping some of the tobacco into the trough he’d fashioned.

“You used to wearing a sidearm, boy?”

“Yes. I got used to it during the war and it’s been a hard habit to break.”

Perkins nodded and leaned against a support post, took the tobacco pouch from Grandy, and rolled himself a cigarette. He lit both his and Grandy’s from the same matchstick.

Grandy pulled deeply, feeling the heat from the tip and hearing the crackle of burning paper. The aroma of smoking tobacco overpowered his senses and he held the hot breath in his lungs for a few moments before expelling it slowly.

“Ahhh,” he breathed, smiling. “It’s been a long time.” His loins twitched, reminding him of something else he’d gone without. He took another drag on the cigarette and stared up at the deep purple sky.

“Did the boss lady already turn in?”

“Yes.” Grandy exhaled. “She cut her hand and I put her to bed.”

“Cut bad?”

“Not too bad.” He remembered his earlier intentions and pinned Perkins with a sharp glance. “You know Duncan Hathaway well?”

Perkins’s grin was off-center and unamused. “Don’t think anybody knows that man well. Has he been bothering you?”

“He’s been trying. He acts as if this place is his.”

“He thinks it should be.” Perkins slid down the post to sit on the side of the porch, his bowed legs stretched out in front of him, the heels of his boots making potholes in the sandy soil. “Everybody was shocked all to hell when Fayne’s will was read and we learned he’d left this place to his missus.”

“Why should that be a surprise? Most men leave their homesteads to their wives.”

“Not Fayne Hathaway. Him and Duncan ran this place and the spread Duncan lives on as partners. It was pretty much understood that when one died, the other brother would inherit the whole ball of wax. That’s just how those Hathaways are. Men own land, not women.”

“So Duncan resents his brother for leaving this land to Zanna?”

Perkins toed a rock, overturning it and sending it skittering across the grassless yard. “Oh, I don’t reckon he resents his brother a’tall.”

“He resents Zanna?”

“It’s not my business,” Perkins said, shrugging his narrow shoulders. “I shouldn’t be talking.”

“But I want to know your thinking on this.”

“Do you? Well, okay. I think Duncan believes that somebody pulled a fast one and his prime suspect is Mrs. Suzanna. That’s how I’ve sized it up, boy.”

Grandy sat beside him, then leaned back on his elbows. He smoked the rest of the cigarette while he recalled Duncan’s veiled threats and blatant accusations. He tossed aside the last inch of paper and tobacco.

“Duncan thinks Zanna killed Fayne to get this land,” he said, carefully examining Perkins’s face and seeing no surprise there. “What do you think?”

Perkins stood up slowly, joints popping in his elbows and knees. “I think you should smoke one more before going back inside.” He handed over the tobacco pouch.

Grandy grinned and rolled another cigarette, then let Perkins touch a match to the tip. “Obliged,” he said
around the stiff paper. He wet it with his tongue and spit out a few shreds of tobacco. “What about Fayne? What kind of man was he?”

“Having trouble filling his shoes?” Perkins asked, his eyes sparkling. “Well, I don’t doubt it. He was a fine man. A good boss. Generous to us men.”

“That’s what I hear from everyone,” Grandy said. “Fayne was a fine man. A good man. An honorable man.”

“Well, he was those things.”

“Did he love his wife?”

The light went out in Perkins’s eyes. “You’d best ask his wife that. I just work here. I don’t know what goes on in that house and I don’t want to know. It’s none of—”

“—your business,” Grandy finished for him. He rolled to his feet and stretched until his fingertips brushed the porch ceiling. “Thanks for the smokes, partner.”

“Sure thing.” Perkins shoved off the porch and took a few steps toward the bunkhouse. “I will tell you one thing,” he said, stopping and turning to Grandy. “She’s a lady, that one. A fragile flower—like them primroses she prides. Maybe she ain’t been exactly charitable with you, but she don’t mean to be stingy. She’s just scared, I think.”

“Of what?”

Perkins’s brows shot up. “Why, of you, boy. She’s scared of you.”

Grandy watched until Perkins melted into the night shadows, then he took a final pull on the cigarette before sending it sailing, an amber ship sinking under a purple sea. He went inside to his bedroom and closed the door, thinking of her and what Perkins had said. He undressed and slipped under the covers. After a while, he turned onto his side and snuggled into a place where sleep could find him.

She’s not scared of me, he thought as his conscious mind began to dissolve into dreams. She’s scared of something, but not of me. Not anymore, anyway.

He knew he was right. Tonight she had surrendered the
last vestiges of fear she’d harbored for him. He had sensed ft in the way she’d pressed her face against the hollow of his throat and trusted him to put her to bed.

Dreams embraced him and he saw her in a fancy dress and himself in his best finery. He danced with her, whirling her around and around under a sky full of stars. She laughed and he was swept under her spell.

“I didn’t know you could laugh,” he told her and her face seemed to shimmer in his dream.

“I didn’t know I could until there was you,” she said and her eyes filled with tears that made his heart ache.

“Don’t cry,” he begged. “You’ve done enough of that.”

“You must protect me.”

“I will. But from what?”

“From him.” She pointed to someone behind him. He turned and saw shadows moving toward them.

“Which one?”

“Him! That one!”

Grandy strained against the darkness. One figure broke from the others and came forward with pounding footsteps.

“Who is it?” Grandy yelled, then his breath rattled down his throat as a shaft of starlight illuminated his father’s gaunt face.

“No!” Grandy sat up, jerked from his dream by the hand of horror. He blinked into the night, sweat beaded on his skin, his heart labored. “Oh, God.” He ran a hand through his hair and over his sweaty face. He lay back, trying to think rationally about the dream. What had it meant?

His hammering heart froze, then sputtered to life again as a thought chilled him. Had it been her father? he wondered. Had her father been a beast just as his had been? Did they share that tragedy?

Her father. His father. Hatred formed a fist in his heart and made him hurt all over.

Grandy pulled on his shirt and buttoned it. “How do they look?” he asked Zanna.

She capped the bottle of medicine she’d applied to his back and nodded. “Much better. Almost completely healed.”

“Good.” He captured her bandaged hand, holding it gently even as he felt her startled resistance. “And your hand is much better today. Keep the bandage on during the day, but remove it at night so the air can get to the wound. It’ll heal faster that way.”

“Very well.” She pulled her hand from his. “I can change the bandages from now on.”

“If you wish.” He shrugged, sensing her uneasiness and not wanting to press. Boisterous shouts and laughter coming from outside drew him to the window. “What’s going on?”

“It’s Saturday. The boys are going into town.” Zanna gazed at the fresh bandage Grandy had wrapped around her hand. He wants to go with the other men, she thought, wondering if she would be crazy to consider allowing him that freedom. Something was working under his skin, something she could sense in the tense set of his jaw and the way he kept flexing his fingers and gathering them into fists at his sides. He wants to jump some fences, she thought. He’s aching to stretch out and run. The sleek power in his body reminded her of a young stallion and
released a trembling in the pit of her stomach. She pressed her hand there and closed her eyes, wondering if she should surrender to her growing desire to please him.