The Promise of Jenny Jones (21 page)

Without Favre, she was at the mercy of Tito and Jorje. Sooner or later they would kill her. She sensed this. She knew this .

Deeply frightened, she scanned the empty land baking in themiddayheat Jenny had promised, she told herself, and Jenny never broke a promise. Jenny would come and save her. She had to believe this. Jenny must be out there. Somewhere.

When she turned dragging footsteps back to the campsite, Jorje and Tito were hacking shallow graves out of the hard desert floor. She clung to thoughts of Jenny whenever she noticed Tito or Jorje studying her with hooded, speculative eyes.

She prayed that Jenny would arrive while she was still alive.

* * *

"There!"

Ty followed Jenny's pointing finger, nodded, and they both urged their horses forward and down into the next dry gulch. Jumping to the ground, they crawled up the far side of the arroyo, and Ty wrestled a spyglass out of its case.

He spotted them at once, resting in the thin shade of some stunted scrub oaks. Silently, he handed over the glass. "She's unharmed."

"So far," Jenny muttered. Stretching out on her stomach, she propped one elbow in the dirt and steadied the glass. A minute later her forehead dropped against her arm. "Thank God!" Lifting the spyglass again, she peered intently. "I only see two men." She returned the glass to Ty.

"But four horses," he said. "The other two are somewhere nearby."

Ty slid down the incline and lifted a canteen from his saddle. After a long swallow, he wet his throat and face. The temperature must be near one hundred degrees. His shirt was soaked with sweat. Not speaking, he watched Jenny break twigs from the scrub oak andconstruct a shaded area by draping her saddle blanket over the twigs, which she had driven into the ground.

Sensing that an offer to assist would offend her, he waited and watched her try and fail until the shelter was constructed. The view wasn't unpleasant. Sweat molded her trousers around shapely buttocks, and her wet shirt outlined two handfuls of breast.

Swallowing images as hot as the scorching air, he joined her beneath the shade she had created and gave her the canteen.

"We take them at night," he said. Her throat arched when she tilted her head back to drink, offering a long clean line that he wanted to explore with his fingertips.

Jenny nodded and wiped a hand across her lips. "Has to be tonight. They'll reach the railroad tracks tomorrow."

"Are you thinking dead? Or are you thinking incapacitated?"

She scowled then whipped out her dictionary. A minute later she said, "I'm thinking incapacitate, like in tied-up and their horses run off. Unless they give us no choice, then we kill them." Slapping shut thedictionary, she pushed it into her back pocket. "Incapacitate. That's a good word."

"So far we agree." Ty jerked open his collar. The air hung hot and motionless at the bottom of the arroyo. Nothing stirred. Sitting this close to her, he could feel the heat rolling off of her, could smell the pork rinds drawing out any infection beneath the bandage on her arm. He mopped his face and throat. "Want me to take a look at your wound?"

"I checked it this morning. It's coming along." She shifted, brushed some small rocks out from under her,leaned against the saddle at her back. "Don'tworry, I'll hold my own tonight."

"I'm not worried." But of course he was. Two against four weren't the preferred odds, especially as one of the two was one-handed.

As if she'd read his mind, she slipped out of the sling. Grinding her teeth, she extended her arm, winced, folded it back near her breasts,then extended it again.

"Stop looking at my chest, damn it."

"I'm looking at your arm."

"No, you aren't."

"All right, I'm not."

"So stop it."

She stared until he lifted his gaze to her eyes, then she extended her arm again, working out the stiffness. It had to hurt like hell.

Since he'd grasped how she thought by now, Ty knew they wouldn't risk leaving the arroyo until aftermidnight. A long sweaty afternoon stretched before them and most of the night.

"We aren't going to sleep tonight, so you should try to catch some shut-eye now," she said, working her arm.

"Can't. Too damned hot." He considered kicking off his boots, then decided the effort required more energy than he was willing to waste. But he stretched out, propped his head against his saddle, and lit a cigar. When he noticed Jenny inhaling the smoke, he offered it to her, not really surprised when she took the cigar with a sigh of pleasure. He lit another for himself.

"How come you're so dead set against satisfying a hankering?" he asked when she paused to rest her arm against her thigh and enjoy the cigar.

"I told you. I gave it a try, and I didn't like it. More important, I sure as hell don't want to get pregnant." She exhaled a perfect smoke ring, watched it widen and slowly dissipate. "Who's going to hire on a pregnant woman or one with an infant hanging around her neck? I figure the worst thing that could happen to me would be to get myself knocked up."

"There are ways to make sure a woman doesn't get pregnant." He released his own smoke ring and sent it wobbling into the still air.

"Yeah, and if those ways were always successful, there would be a whole lot less people in this world." She tossed him a look of contempt. "You said you aren't the marrying kind, Sanders. You're the walking-away kind. You use women to ease your hankering and thenit's adiós. Well thanks for offering to use me, I'm fricking flattered, but I'm plain not in the mood to be used and abandoned. Too damned bad we didn't hitch up during one of those times when I was yearning to be used and kicked away." Leaning to one side, she spit in the dirt, cutting her eyes toward him to make sure he hadn't missed the gesture.

Ty stared at the horse blanket over his head, searching for a defense. "That's one way of looking atit," he said finally.

"That's the only way I'm ever going to look at it. I'm never going to throw myself on some son of a bitch and beg him to use me, get me pregnant, and then walk away. No hankering is worth the consequences."

"My brother didn't abandon Marguarita after he got her pregnant," he said, studying the faded pattern zigzagging across the horse blanket.

"You aren't your brother," she snapped, working her arm again. "And he's nothing to hold up as an example if you ask me. He married Marguarita but he was never a husband to her or a father to the kid. He let his wife be sent away in disgrace rather than give up his precious inheritance."

She spoke around the cigar gripped between her teeth, looking down at her arm. Sweat trickled along her hairline. Ty watched her and decided he liked a woman who appreciated a good cigar. Occasionally his mother smoked, on her birthday and after the annual branding.

It surprised him to suddenly realize that Ellen Sanders would take to Jenny like shine on a nickel. Like Jenny, his mother defied convention by wearing men's trousers around the ranch, she enjoyed a drop now and then, and she didn't put on female airs. She, too, would have said "pregnant" rather than search for a polite or vague euphemism.

"Would you walk away from three thousand acres of primeCalifornialand?" he asked, half-wishing she'd stop moving her arm. Sweat stood on her brow, and she'd bitten into the cigar.

"The point is not what I would do," she said, stopping to exhale a stream of smoke into the motionless air. "The point is,Robert chose his inheritance instead of Marguarita and the kid."

Ty laughed without amusement. "You'd understand if you'd known my father."

"What about your father?"

"Three things. No one said no to Cal Sanders. Second, he didn't want me to inherit his ranch. And he would have done whatever he had to do to keep Robert from running after a Mexican wife. It wasn't only the threat of disinheritance. He would have destroyed Robert, and Robert knew it. No one crossed Cal Sanders without paying a heavy price."

She wiped a sleeve over her forehead and started working her arm again. "How come your father didn't want you to inherit the main ranch?"

"Maybe because I told him I didn't want it." That was the only way he'd known to hit back at Cal Sanders, by rejecting the one thing his father cared about. "Seems to me that we've strayed a far piece from the subject at hand. Which is, what are we going to do about this mutual hankering?" Raising a hand, he touched his fingertips lightly to her cheek.

"We're going to forget aboutit," she said, jerking her head away from his touch. "We're going to incapacitate it." A grim smile touched her lips. "I like to use new words."

"I noticed."

She frowned at her arm,then slipped the sling back on. "Don't want to overdo." Leaning back, she rested against her saddle. "There was a woman inEl Pasowho let me borrow her books. When I had a steady team, I could read while I was hauling. If you can read, you don't ever have to be lonely, and I can read," she finished proudly, watching him.

"Very admirable." Ty settled his head against his saddle and tilted his hat brim over his eyes so he wasn't tempted to stare at her breasts.

"The thing is," he said, speaking around his cigar, "my hankering isn't incapacitated." Looking down, he could see the spot where her thighs met. A damp stain outlined a V at her crotch like an arrow pointing to heaven. A stirring occurred inhis own trousers, and he closed his eyes.

She sat up abruptly and lifted his hat brim so she could stare down at him. "Is there something wrong with your ears? How many times do I have to say this? You andme can hanker till the moon falls out of the sky, but nothing is going to come of it. Now, that's how it fricking is, Sanders, so you just make up your mind to it. I might have to raise one kid, and I don't know how in the hell I'm going to do that. I sure don't want two kids dragging me down. So you just forget any hankering thoughts."

She slammed his hat down on his face hard enough to knock the cigar out of his mouth. Sitting up, he slapped at the sparks on his shirt, found the cigar, and flipped it out from under their makeshift lean-to.

"You're starting to irritate me," he said, fighting to hold his voice level. "I keep telling you that Robert is going to raise Graciela himself. But you keep hearing that it's your job and yours alone. I'm telling you for the tenth time, Robert is alive and well and he wants his damned daughter."

She had a way of leaning into him to make apoint, thrusting her face forward until their noses almost touched. At the moment, being so close made him want to grab her and cover her mouth with punishing kisses until he felt the fight drain out of her stubborn bones, until he felt her slip trembling into surrender.

"The kid is half-Barrancas."

"You think that's going to surprise Robert? Robert's been in love with Marguarita Barrancas since we were all children. I'm the brother with the Barrancas problem, not him." His mouth twisted in disgust. "Right now, he's trying to put an end to the animosity between our two families."

They had argued about old man Barrancas before Ty left forMexico. Robert didn't want Marguarita caught between her husband and her father. He wanted to end hostilities that had existed for twenty-five years. Ty strongly disagreed. Too much water had flowed beneath this particular bridge. There were too many stolen cattle, too many property skirmishes, too many wounded men and harsh exchanges on both sides of an ongoing dispute. Ty wasn't willing to forgive and forget, and he didn't understand how Robert could even consider it.

Jenny drew back and her eyes narrowed. "You're really something. You must have been dancing in your boots when you learned that Marguarita Barrancas was dead."

"I wasn't happy to hear that she'd died," he said after a minute. "But I wasn't sorry either. She tore our family apart." Anger tightened his jaw. "My father was never the same after Robert marrieda Barrancas . From then on he treated Robert with the same contempt as he treated me. He started drinking, letting the land and the ranch go to hell. Robert spent the next six years hatinghimself for not having the guts to defy the old man. My mother was caught in the middle of it."

"It was Robert who caused the trouble in your family, not Marguarita." Jenny sneered. "If Robert had kept his parts in his pants, there wouldn't have been a problem." Leaning forward again, she jabbed a finger against his chest. "I'll bet there wasn't a night went by during the six years Marguarita waited that she didn't wish she'd said no when your brother mentioned he had a hankering. Huh! That's not going to happen to me."

Stretching out, she settled her head on the saddle,then flounced onto her side, presenting her back to him. "I'm through talking. I'm going to get some sleep."

If that wasn't just like a woman, Ty thought, angrily staring down at her. She had to have the last damned word. Lying back down, he crossed his arms on his chest and glared up at the horse blanket.

After a time, he concluded they had made some progress. The obstacle preventing a mutual hankering from ending satisfactorily had been defined. Now a solution could be considered. Meanwhile, he would begin the wooing process. That decision made him think of Mrs. McGowan, and he smiled.

Mrs. McGowan had taken him into her bed when he was sixteen and randy as a stallion. The farrier's wife had taught him wondrous things, things his feverish young imagination hadn't yet dared to dream. In retrospect, everything he knew about pleasing a woman had come from Alice McGowan, and she had given him some of the best advice he'd ever received.

"Treat all women like theywas fine ladies,"Alicehad advised before he dragged her down between the sheets. "Treat every woman like she was the last woman on earth and you was one of the million men trying to get her."

Considering the state he'd been in at the time, it was nothing short of miraculous that he remembered her advice. But he did, and he'd put it to good use over the years.

Yessir, Jenny Jones didn't know it yet, but she was going to surrender. Idly, he wondered if she knew the word capitulate .

* * *

All her life Jenny had wanted things she didn't or couldn't have. Usually she shrugged and got past the wanting. But this time fate was playing the trickster.