The Traveling Kind (4 page)

Her statement had turned out to be more of a speech. When she finished, his expression had become sober and withdrawn, his gaze never leaving her. He lifted his cup in a toasting acknowledgment, his mouth twisting into a rueful line.

“The message is received and understood,” he said, letting his gaze fall to the black depths of the liquid in his cup. “I don’t think you could have made it any plainer, Charley.” Then a reckless smile edged the corners of his mouth. “Maybe that’s the key. If I keep calling you Charley long enough, I’ll start forgetting about the body that goes with the name.” He looked up in time to see the flush of heat warm her face. His glance lingered for a stimulating second on the jutting swell of her breasts beneath the thin cotton robe. “Sorry if it embarrasses you, Charley, but you don’t have a brick out of place.”

“It doesn’t embarrass me,” she insisted, but his observation was unnerving. She wasn’t sure that she wanted him to find her physically attractive. There was too much potential for danger in that. At the same moment, she realized that she was asking for trouble by staying in the same room with him when she was wearing only a nightgown and robe. She set the untouched cup of coffee on the counter. “Excuse me. It’s time I was dressed.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Shad murmured against the rim of his coffee cup, thus hiding the smile Charley suspected was lurking at the corners of his mouth.

Twenty minutes later she came downstairs dressed in her work clothes for the day, worn Levi’s and a rust-colored blouse with its long tails knotted at the front waistband. The aroma of bacon permeated the air and Charley faltered in mid stride, then continued toward the kitchen where the smell was stronger.

Shad was standing at the stove when she walked in. He glanced at her over his shoulder. “How do you like your eggs? Scrambled? Over easy?”

“Over easy,” she responded without thinking, the frown of surprised disbelief not leaving her face. “You didn’t have to fix your own breakfast. I was coming down to do it,” she insisted defensively.

“Some women take longer than others to dress. I wasn’t sure which category you belonged in.” Shad spoke with the certainty of experience. “I wanted to get an early start today so I decided against waiting for you. Do you object to someone else cooking in your kitchen?” he asked as an afterthought.

“No,” she replied with a shake of her tawny hair, watching him deftly flip an egg in the hot bacon grease of the skillet without damaging the yolk. It was obvious he was no stranger to a kitchen.

“Is something wrong?”

“No. I guess I’m just amazed that you know how to cook. Most men don’t bother to learn— my brother, for instance. Why did you?” There seemed to be any number of things about this man that separated him from the crowd.

“It was a case of necessity,” he replied with an indifferent lift of his shoulder as he scooped the fried egg out of the grease with a metal turner, then slid it onto the plate warming on the stove. Using a pair of tongs, he added a rasher of bacon and handed the plate to Charley. “The way I live, I have to be self-reliant. There is toast on the table.”

The table had been set for two and Charley sat down in front of one of the place settings to eat this breakfast prepared by someone else. It was a novel experience, a definitely pleasant change of pace. She was spreading dewberry jam on her toast when Shad joined her at the table. Her glance ran over this apparently multi-talented man. Strength and raw vitality were a part of his smoothly hewn features, a smiling knowledge of life always lurking in his eyes. He had aroused her interest in him as a man, and also her curiosity about him as a person.

“Where are you from originally, Shad?” She wondered about his background and what had prompted his restless life-style—never staying anywhere too long, always passing through to some other place.

“I was raised mostly in Colorado.” He cut into his fried egg, not showing any reluctance to talk about his past.

“Do you still have family there?” Charley tried to picture his parents and guess at their concern for their footloose son.

Shad paused for the briefest of seconds then shook his head. “No.” His glance lifted from his plate to her, a frown of curious interest in his expression. “How long have you and your brother been running this place alone?”

“Since we lost dad two years ago to a massive heart attack.” The passing of time had allowed her to speak of her father’s death with only a minor twinge of grief. “Our mother died five years before that, from pneumonia. Dad was never quite the same after she was gone.”

“So now it’s just you and Gary.”

“Yes.” She snapped a strip of crisp bacon in two and began munching on the smaller half.

“And neither of you have plans to enlarge the family circle.” His chiseled mouth crooked in a doubting line. “I still find it difficult to believe you don’t have a boyfriend somewhere in the fringes of your life. It doesn’t seem natural.”

Charley shrugged, aware of the flurry of her pulse as the conversation began to focus on her love life. “I’m sorry, but I’m not seriously interested in anyone.”

“Ah.” It was a smooth, knowing sound and his eyes danced with it. “That’s the key to the puzzle, isn’t it? You may not be ‘seriously interested’ in any man, but there undoubtedly is someone who is interested in you.”

She considered denying it, but to what purpose?

“All right, yes,” she admitted with a vaguely challenging look. “So far I haven’t been able to convince him that I only care about him as a good friend and neighbor. . . . He thinks I’m one of those silly females who doesn’t know her own mind. As long as he’s patient and persistent, he figures that sooner or later I’ll come to my senses.”

“He’s your neighbor?” The rising inflection of his voice made it a question.

Her nod was affirmative. “Chuck Weatherby. He owns the adjoining ranch.”

In her mind’s eye she pictured her would-be suitor. Pushing forty, he was of average height, his stocky build developing a paunch. Unlike Shad, hours in the sun had not given Chuck Weatherby a dark tan; rather, the fair complexion that went with his auburn hair had given him a perpetual sunburn. He was a good, solid man with unwavering loyalty and unquestionable devotion. There were many qualities about the man that Charley could admire, but he didn’t spark any romantic interest. His kiss didn’t stir her senses the way Shad’s had a little while ago.

“Chuck Weatherby,” Shad repeated the name and followed it with a throaty chuckle. “Chuck and Charley?”

An amused smile broke across her expression, laughing, too, at the combination of their similar names. “It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

“I think a person could safely say it’s unusual,” he agreed with a quirking smile. “What is your given name? Charlotte or Charlene?”

“Charlotte, but practically no one ever calls me that. It’s always Charley.” She gave a little shrug that showed she had no objections to it and took a sip of her coffee.

“That’s because it suits you.” His gaze traveled over her in a way that seemed to take some of her breath. “A masculine-sounding name always makes a woman seem more feminine. The reverse isn’t true, however. It would never work if your brother, Gary, was called Mary.”

“Not hardly,” she agreed dryly.

“I’m surprised your brother isn’t married by now. A young, good-looking rancher should be a likely candidate for the single girls in the area,” Shad commented, eyeing her with silent question.

“I suppose he is,” Charley conceded. “A year ago he was almost out of circulation but the engagement was broken. Since then he’s sworn off women.”

“That’s a noble vow, but it won’t last.” He seemed to speak from experience as he pushed his empty plate back and set his coffee cup in front of him. “What went wrong? Do you know?”

She shook her head, the mass of caramel-colored hair brushing her shoulders. “Gary doesn’t like to talk about it.” She wasn’t sure if she should have even told Shad about it. He was virtually a stranger and here she was spilling the family secrets. Of course, Gary’s broken engagement wasn’t exactly a secret. It was the discovery that she was talking more freely to Shad than she did with most people that she found disconcerting. “How about you?” Charley switched the subject. “Have you ever been close to the marriage altar?”

“No, I haven’t even been close enough to catch the scent of orange blossoms.” Shad smiled at the question and took a swig of his coffee.

Charley realized she had been subconsciously wondering if a woman had started him out on his wandering path. It had seemed logical to assume he was running from something, but apparently that wasn’t the case.

Silence stretched for a span of several seconds, broken by the scrape of a chair leg on the tiled kitchen floor as Shad came to his feet with lithe ease. Her upraised glance encountered the smiling light in his blue eyes.

“It’s time I started earning my keep.”

“Thanks for fixing breakfast. It was good.”

“So was the company. Food always tastes better when you don’t have to eat alone. I know,” he said with a wry twist of his mouth.

That last comment of personal knowledge caused Charley to fall silent. As he turned away from the table she studied his lean, muscular form, the width of his shoulders tapering to a slim waist and hips, moving with the loose-limbed ease of a horseman. He paused at the back door to take his brown Stetson from the brass hook and push it onto the midnight black of his hair.

As he walked out the door without looking back she tried to imagine what the life of a drifter was like—traveling down so many lonely roads and meeting a lot of people, but never staying long enough to call any of them “friend.” To her it seemed depressing, yet Shad always had a trace of humor in his expression. He seemed to be a vital and vigorous man, embracing life and living it to the fullest.

Still Charley sensed he was searching for something. Perhaps it was a place to call home. The thought brought a vague stirring of hope, which she quickly squashed. It wasn’t wise to dream of such things. That led to a fast road to heartbreak with the drifting kind like Shad Russell.

While she nibbled on the last slice of toast, she cleared the table and stacked the dishes in the sink. The uneven thump of a pair of crutches heralded her brother’s approach to the kitchen. Charley glanced over her shoulder as he entered the room.

“You’re up early this morning.” Since he’d come home from the hospital, he’d been in the habit of sleeping until nearly eight.

“My leg was bothering me,” he explained and she could see the whiteness of discomfort in his tanned face. He paused inside the room, leaning his weight on the crutches. “I thought I smelled bacon. What did you do—eat without me?” His gaze centered on the dirty dishes in the sink where Charley was standing.

“Yes. Shad fixed breakfast this morning. For a change I got to eat somebody else’s cooking besides my own.” She moved away from the sink as Gary hobbled toward the table.

“Shad fixed breakfast?” he repeated with questioning surprise. While Charley held the chair steady, Gary lowered himself into it.

“Yes. You should take a lesson from him,” she chided and scooted a second chair closer so he could prop his broken leg on it.

“Maybe he has discovered that’s the way to a woman’s heart,” Gary suggested, surveying her with an inspecting look that Charley couldn’t quite meet.

“I doubt it.”

She laughed aside the suggestion, but the idea nagged her that Shad might have been trying to work his way into her good graces after she had tried to make it clear she wanted no physical involvement with him. “He was fixing his own breakfast so he could get an early start. When I came down he just threw another egg in the skillet for me.”

“Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to hire this drifter,” Gary murmured thoughtfully.

“What makes you say that?” As she started for the refrigerator to get his bacon and eggs she sent her brother a curious look.

“He’s a good-looking devil, and even though you know your way around, you haven’t had what could be described as an overabundance of male company lately. The two of you are going to be working together and living in the same house. You are not an unattractive woman, Charley. Sooner or later he’s going to make a pass at you. And I’ll lay you odds that he’s the kind that loves ‘em and leaves ‘em.”

She didn’t dismiss her brother’s words of caution. All she had to do was remember the sensations that had flowed through her when Shad had kissed her early this morning. There was a volatile chemistry between them, something she had to be on guard against. She chose not to mention the incident to Gary. Nor did she question his assessment of Shad’s character. It was too close to her own opinion.

“As you said, Gary—” she shrugged to fake a lack of concern “—I’m old enough to take care of myself.”

But Shad’s presence in the household and the experience of the first day did alter Charley’s routine. In the mornings she splashed cold water onto her face until she was fully awake before she went downstairs dressed for the day. And she was the one who fixed breakfast.

They were subtle precautions. Yet circumstances necessitated that she spend time in his company, working, sharing a meal, or spending the evening hours with him. The impact of his male vigor and ready smile didn’t lessen with repeated exposure to it. In fact there were times when Charley felt her resistance was gradually being worn away. When his gaze would light on her with a glimmer of appreciation in their depths, she would feel a surge of satisfaction. Any direct contact with him, however accidental, would start a curious curling sensation in her toes. Those were the times when she wondered if she was waging a losing battle.