The Enchantment (15 page)

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She shook her head in disbelief. He took it as an answer and nodded. "I did. Only problem was, I couldn't settle on one religion. Each one is unique and has so much to offer. Why, the Buddhists ..."

She stopped listening—all he ever did was give her a headache, anyway. With one quick, indrawn breath, she grabbed hold of Tashee's mane and hauled herself to her feet. After what felt like hours, the strength returned to her legs. Cautiously she let go of Tashee's mane and took one experimental step backward.

Pain shot up her shins. Her teeth came together with a click. An ache twisted her inner thighs and flared in her lower back. She clenched her jaw and took another hesitant step.

A dry twig snapped beneath her heel. The noise startled Tashee, and the little burro jerked her head up and crow-hopped to the right. Her hoof came down hard on Emma's toe.

"Ouch!" Emma jerked away and grabbed her foot, but she was too unsteady to stand. She tottered, flailing for balance for a heartbeat, and then crashed to the ground.

Larence was beside her in an instant. "You okay?"

She sputtered, waving a hand through the dust cloud to keep it from settling in her nose and mouth.

"Great. Just great."

A hand punctured the dust. "Here, take hold."

The urge to smack it was strong—but not as strong as the need for help. Swallowing her pride—and apparently half of New Mexico—she clutched his hand and let him drag her to her feet.

"Better?" he said.

She stumbled out of his grasp and hobbled to a big

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rock beneath a tree, plopping onto its hot, flat surface with a groan of pure relief.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

She leaned against the tree's scratchy trunk and closed her eyes. "Dying. Show some respect."

Larence laughed—that same soft, joyful sound she'd heard all day. Her teeth ground together, and the urge to smack him came again. She lifted her lids just far enough to glare at him, but it was a wasted act.

He wasn't even looking at her. He was standing alongside Diablo, petting the tired old beast's sweaty neck and flipping through those stupid drawings in his notebook. And he was smiling.

She groaned. He was always smiling.

The longer she looked at him, the angrier she got. How could he look so ... so cool and collected and happy? There wasn't a drop of sweat on his face or threaded through his hair. And he was clean. How could he be so damn clean? He'd fallen at least fifteen times today, and yet he looked . . . perfect.

Even his teeth made her angry. How could they be so white? Hers, she knew by running her tongue across them, were mottled with dirt and as gray-brown as everything else in this godforsaken desert.

She hooked one sweaty finger inside her collar and pulled the sticky cotton away from her skin. Maybe it was the clothes.

She studied his bizarre attire. Brand-new navy blue jeans hugged his long legs and disappeared into ornately stitched brown cowboy boots. A big yellow and white striped serape spread over his broad shoulders and hung to the top of his thighs, completely covering the pale blue shirt he wore underneath.

Around his neck he wore a bright red bandanna. And that hat! Lord help THE ENCHANTMENT

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her. He had a high-crowned black Stetson pulled low over his eyes.

Obviously he'd never gotten to play cowboys and Indians as a child.

She realized suddenly that he was watching her watch him. Beneath the brim of his black Stetson, his eyes glowed like those of an exotic cat, green and glittering. She stiffened in shock, preparing for one of his idiotic and yet strangely perceptive comments. Something definitely masculine, like Seen enough!

"We should make camp before you sit down."

"In case you haven't noticed, I'm already sitting down."

"I mean, before you sit down for good. Come on, get up and we'll get started."

She sighed heavily, feeling an ache in every joint and muscle and bone of her body. They'd only been traveling since dawn, and yet it felt like months since she'd mounted up this morning. She reclined against the tree and let her eyes slide shut. "Pretend we've made it. You're good at that—just tell me what it looks like."

"Shall we pretend to eat, too?"

Eat. Food. Emma's stomach growled on cue. She hadn't eaten anything since that hideous scrap of seasoned leather he'd given her at noon. She cracked one eye open. "More jerky?"

"Nope. Real food."

That did it. Emma staggered to her feet. "Okay, where is it?"

"Where's what?"

She had a brief but strong urge to slug him. Instead, she pasted a thin-lipped smile on her face. ' 'The food."

"Oh, we can't eat yet," he answered, pulling another book from his saddlebag and flipping through the worn,

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yellowed pages. She limped toward him on her mashed-up toe, ready to grab the little book and throw it in the river, when the title caught her eye. The Everyman's Guide To Survival in the American Desertlands.

She came to a halt. Lord knew she didn't want to get in the way of survival.

After a second, Larence thumped his forefinger on one of the pages. "Here it is. How to make camp."

His gaze flicked down the page. "The first thing to do is dismount."

She cocked a brow at him. "Another eight-thousand-dollar book?"

He didn't bother to look up. "Next, we need to unpack the mule, unsaddle the mounts, and water the animals."

"You can do all that later. For now, just unpack the food and fix me something to eat. I'm starving."

He glanced at her sharply. "/ can do it later?"

"Good. Now that that's settled, why don't you start a fire? A cup of coffee sounds good."

She crossed back to the shady grove of cottonwood and sat on a big, flat rock, carefully fanning her dirt-smudged skirts out around her. Lord, she was hungry. Closing her eyes, she conjured up an image of the last meal she'd had on the train: thin-sliced roast beef, mashed potatoes smothered in rich, creamy gravy, succotash, flaky rolls . . .

She heard the uneven shuffle of his walk, and groaned. God, she didn't want to listen to him, or, worse yet, see some stupid chicken scratch of a drawing. All she wanted to do was get something to eat and then crawl into her sleeping bag and sleep for a month.

The crunching stopped. "Emmaline?"

His quiet voice held a hint of suppressed laughter,

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and something else, something new: a core of steel that made Emma open her eyes in spite of herself.

"What?"

He hunkered down beside her. "Who did you think was going to cook on this trip?"

"You, of course."

His lips twitched. "Do I look like a cook?"

"No, but you don't look like much of an adventurer, either, and here we are."

The twitch became a full-blown grin. "Looks are deceiving, I guess. I am an adventurer. What I'm not is a cook."

"Good thing you brought all those books to help you out. That's the one good thing about professors.

They learn quickly."

"I didn't bring a cookbook."

A small frown puckered her eyebrows. "How will you make dinner, then?"

"I won't."

Emma felt the first stirring of uneasiness. "When you planned this expedition, you didn't know I was coming. You couldn't have expected me to cook."

"Nope. I sure didn't."

Her breath rushed out in a relieved sigh. "Who, then?"

He leaned back on his heels and studied her. Barely contained laughter glittered in his eyes. "The Indians were supposed to cook. But seeing as how they're not here ..."

The Indians. Emma's mouth dropped open in shock. The Indians she'd fired had been their cooks'? She shook her head in denial.

"Yep," he said with another dazzling grin. "Henry hired them to help us find the city and to take care of us along the way. Now ..." He shrugged, and there

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was a wealth of silent meaning in the action. "Now we're on our own. So do you want to cook or take care of the stock?"

"Don't tease me," she snapped. "I'm good with stock. But I wouldn't touch that mangy pack mule with a ten-foot pole."

"So you'll cook."

Emma shuddered. The thought of her cooking was enough to bring on another headache. She was too hungry to eat her own cooking. But someone had to feed them.

"Emmaline?"

"You win. I'll cook."

He touched her shoulder. "It's not a win-or-lose proposition, Emmaline. Life isn't—"

She wrenched away from him. "Don't you tell me what life's about, Doctor. While you've been hiding from it in your ivory tower, I've been living it. And believe me, it's always about winning and losing—and about winning a lot more than you lose. Now, where's the damn stove?"

Emma winced as the box came flying her way. It landed with a thud and a rattle at her feet. She eyed the wooden rectangle disbelievingly. It couldn't be the stove, she told herself. She had hat boxes that were bigger.

The longer she looked at the box, the sicker she felt. She pressed a trembling hand to her roiling midriff.

Anxiety unfurled like a river of ice inside her.

If only she could be angry—maybe even furious. Anger was an emotion that had always suited her well, had always spurred her to accept greater and greater chal-THE ENCHANTMENT

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lenges. It had gotten her out of the slums and kept her out.

But what good did it do to be mad at yourself? As much as she'd like to yell and scream and beat her fists into the dirt, it would be a waste of time and energy. This predicament was her fault and hers alone.

She'd fired the Indians, and now she had to learn to do their jobs.

She glanced at her sunburnt, scratched hands and groaned aloud. Larence expected these hands to cook dinner—these hands, which only knew how to make money, were supposed to cook.

"Emmaline, are you going to start dinner?"

She jumped at the unexpected sound of his voice. "Uh ... yes .. ."

"Good. My stomach's rumblin' something fierce."

She rolled her eyes. More cowboy talk. Scooting forward on the flat rock, she flicked the box open. The first thing she saw was the silver-hued dome of a coffee pot lying on its side.

Coffee. Hunger surged through her, made her mouth water in anticipation. As she reached for the pot, she heard the quiet grinding of Larence's boot heels on the hard-packed dirt. He stopped beside the stove and dropped a load of flat, brown chunks at her feet.

She looked up suddenly, surprised. "What—"

"Cow chips," he said, squatting down beside her to start a fire. "Henry packed enough to get us to the forested part of the trip, and I found a few over by the river."

Emma eyed the compact circles with disgust, but didn't ask the obvious question. If they were cooking their food over cow . . . dung, she didn't want to know.

Food. Cook. Her panic lurched up a wrung. What

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could she make for dinner? As if to punctuate her silent question, her stomach rumbled loudly.

"Guess you're as hungry as I am," Larence said as he dropped a burning match onto the pile of cow chips and grama grass. Flames zipped along the fuel's hard surface.

Emma's nerves flared as brightly as the flame.

Calm down. You're an intelligent woman. You can do this. She simply needed to set her razor-sharp mind to the problem.

She frowned in thought. First things first: What foods were prepared over an open fire?

Oysters on the half shell.

She brightened. Yes. Jean-Claude, the chef at Del-monico's, had once told her that oysters tasted best when cooked right over an open flame.

Her spirits deflated a second later. Right, Em. Henry packed fresh oysters for a trail ride across the desert.

She shot a quick look at the small pile of boxes and bags and tins that were their foodstuff's. There probably wasn't a single thing in those supplies she liked to eat. No bluefish in cream sauce, no cold boiled tongue, no thinly sliced lemon-flavored veal loaf, no fresh strawberries or—

Stop it.

She had to concentrate, to think of something she could make that would be edible. She tried to remember the things her mother had cooked in the old days. The good days. But the memories were either gone or locked away too tightly to grasp. All she could remember were the dark days after her mother had died and her father had committed suicide. In those days she'd been forced to feed herself, but even then, she hadn't

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cooked. There'd been nothing to cook. An old crust of bread, a bruised apple, a discarded tin of sardines . . .

Warm, comforting fingers curled around her shoulders and squeezed. "How about canned beans?" came Larence's steady, even voice from somewhere above her. "I think you just heat them up."

A river of relief gushed through Emma. For once, she was thankful for his perceptiveness. "If that's what you want ..." She winced at the tremulousness in her voice.

"Sounds good. You go ahead and get started while I take care of the stock."

"Okay." Emma scooted closer to the box and started unpacking it. In a few moments she was sitting amid six sets of silverware, six white enamel cups and plates, a coffeepot, four lengths of pipe, a baking pan, a frying pan, a washbowl, and three camp kettles. Finally she pulled out the heavy Russia sheet-iron stove and carefully placed the iron grate over the cheerful fire.

Within moments the beans were in the pot and sending a plume of mouth-watering steam into the evening air. She shot a quick glance at Larence, to see if he'd noticed how efficiently she'd unpacked the utensils and set up the stove. He hadn't, and for some odd reason, she was disappointed.

He was standing by Diablo, trying to figure out how to halter the beast—and without much success. Just as he was about to toss the contraption away, Diablo shoved his nose through the opening.

"Hey, Emmaline! Did you see that?"

Emma found herself smiling. "It's just a suggestion, Larence, but I wouldn't call attention to the fact that you're dumber than a horse."