Vows (26 page)

 
"No, I … I worked on the barn." It was an obvious lie.

 
"After dark?"

 
"I used a lantern."

 
"Oh."

 
At that moment someone bumped Emily, throwing her against Tom. Her breasts hit his chest and his arms tightened for the briefest moment. But it took no longer for their hearts to race out of control. She jumped back and began prattling to cover her discomposure. "I never did care much for dancing, I mean some girls were born to ride horses and some were born to dance but I don't think many of them were born to do both but just put me on a saddle and watch—"

 
"Emily!" Tom caught her hand and squeezed it mercilessly. "Enough! Charles is watching."

 
Her inane chatter stopped mid-word.

 
They stood before one another feeling helpless beneath the grip of a growing attraction neither of them had sought or wanted. When she had regained some semblance of poise he said sensibly, "Thank you for the dance," then turned her by an arm and delivered her back to Charles.

Chapter 9

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L
ater that night, Emily lay beside a sleeping Fannie, recreating Tom Jeffcoat in thought—gestures and expressions that became disconcertingly attractive in the deep of night. His blue, teasing eyes. His disarming sense of humor. His lips, crooking up to make light of something that felt heavy and treacherous within her. She wrapped herself in both arms and coiled into a ball facing away from Fanny.

 
I scarcely know him.
But it didn't matter.

 
He's Papa's competition.
But noble about it.

 
He's Tarsy beau.
It carried little weight.

 
He's Charles' friend.

 
Ah, that one stopped her every time.

 
What kind of woman would drive a wedge between friends?

 
Stay away from me, Tom Jeffcoat. Just stay away!

 
He did. Religiously. For two full weeks while his livery stable opened up for business. And while the framework of his house went up. And while word came back to Emily that he was seeing Tarsy with growing regularity. And while Emily thought, good, be with Tarsy—it's best that way. And while Jerome Berryman hosted a party which Tom again avoided. And while Charles grew more randy and began pressuring Emily to advance the date of their wedding. And while full summer stole over the valley and parched it to a sere yellow, bringing daytime temperatures in the high eighties. The heat made work in a livery barn less enjoyable than at any other time of year. Flies abounded, skin itched from the slightest contact with chaff, and the horses tended to get collar galls from sweating beneath their harnesses.

 
One morning Edwin took Sergeant across the street to have him shod and in the late afternoon asked Emily to go get him.

 
Her head snapped up and her heart leapt to her throat. She blurted out the first excuse that came to mind. "I'm busy."

 
"Busy? Doing what, scratching that cat?"

 
"Well, I … I was studying." His impatient glance fell to her hip where a book rested, facedown.

 
It was a beastly hot day and her father was fractious, not only from the heat. Mother was worse again, someone had returned a landau with a rip in the seat, and he'd had a set-to with Frankie over cleaning the corral. When Emily balked at collecting Sergeant, Edwin displayed a rare fit of temper.

 
"All right!" He threw down a bucket with a clang. "I'll go get the damn horse myself!"

 
He stomped out of the office and Emily shot after him, calling, "Papa, wait!"

 
He brought himself up short, heaved a deep sigh, and turned to her, the picture of forced patience. "It's been a long day, Emily."

 
"I know. I'm sorry. Of course I'll go get Sergeant."

 
"Thanks, honey." He kissed her forehead and left her standing in the great south doorway with doubts amassing as she pondered Jeffcoat's place of business a half block away. In all the time it was going up, and since it had been open for business, she had never been in it alone with him, and now she knew why. She stepped outside and hesitated, telling her pulse to calm, concentrating on the newly painted sign above his door: JEFFCOAT'S LIVERY STABLE—HORSES BOARDED & SHOD, RIGS FOR RENT. A new pair of hitching rails stood out front, their posts of freshly peeled pine shining white in the sun. The line of windows along the west side of his building reflected the blue sky, and in one the afternoon sun formed a blinding golden blaze. In a corral on the near side of the building his new string of horses stood dozing with their tails twitching desultorily at flies.

 
So, go get Sergeant. Two minutes and you can be in and out.

 
She drew a deep breath, blew it out slowly, and headed down the street, unconsciously stepping to the rhythmic beat of a hammer on steel.

 
At his open door she stopped. The sound came from inside: pang-pang-pang. Sergeant stood at the opposite end of the building, cross-tied near the smithy door. She walked toward the stallion, skirting the wooden turntable in the center of the wide corridor without removing her eyes from the far doorway.

 
Pang-pang-pang!
It rang through the building, shimmered off the beams overhead and skimmed along the brick floor, as if repeating the rhythm of her heart.

 
Pang-pang-pang!

 
She approached Sergeant silently and gave him an affectionate if distracted scratch, whispering, "Hi, boy, how y' doin'?" The hammering stopped. She waited for Jeffcoat to appear, but when he didn't she stepped to the smithy door and peered inside.

 
The room was hot as hell itself, and very dark, but for the ruddy glow from the forge, which was set in the opposite wall: a waist-high fireplace of brick, with an arched top and deep, deep hearth, ringed with tools—hammers, tongs, chisels, and Punches—hung neatly on the surrounding brick skirt. To the right stood a crude wooden table scattered with more tools, to the left a slake trough, and in the center of the room a scarred steel anvil, mounted on a pyramid of thick wooden slabs. Above the forge hung a double-chambered bellows with its tube feeding the fire. Working the bellows, with his back to the door, stood Jeffcoat.

 
The man she'd been avoiding.

 
His left hand pumped rhythmically, sending up a steady hiss and a soft thump from the accordion-pleated leather; his right held a long bar of iron, black at one end, glowing at the other, nearly as red as the coals themselves. He worked bare-handed, bare-armed, wearing the familiar blue shirt, shorn of sleeves, and over it a soot-smudged leather apron.

 
He stood foursquare to the forge, his silhouette framed dead-center in the glowing arch, limned by the scarlet radiance of the coals, which brightened as the current of forced air hit them. A roar lifted up the chimney. The sound buffeted Emily's ears, and as the fireglow intensified it seemed to expand Jeffcoat's periphery. Sparks flew from the coals and landed at his feet, unheeded. The acrid odor of smoke mingled with that of heated iron—a singeing, bitter perfume.

 
Seeing him at his labor for the first time, her perception of him again changed. He became permanent; he was here to stay. Tens and tens of times in her life she would step to this door and find him standing just so, working. Would the sight make her breath catch every time?

 
She watched him move—each motion enlarged by his hovering vermilion halo. He flipped the iron bar over—it chimed like a brass bell against the brick hearth—and watched it heat. When it glowed a yellowish-white he reached out for a chisel, cut it, and picked it up with a pair of heavy tongs.

 
He turned to the anvil.

 
And found her watching from the doorway.

 
They stood as still as shadows, remaining motionless for so long that the perfect yellow-whiteness of the hot iron began to fade to ochre. He came to his senses first and said, "Well, hello."

 
"I came to get Sergeant," she announced uneasily.

 
"He's not quite ready." Jeffcoat lifted the hot iron in explanation. "One more shoe."

 
"Oh."

 
Silence again while the bar cooled even more.

 
"You can wait if you want. It shouldn't take long."

 
"Do you mind?"

 
"Not at all."

 
He turned back to the forge to reheat the bar and she moved farther inside, across a crunching layer of cinders that covered the floor, stopping with the tool table between herself and Jeffcoat. She studied his profile keenly, somehow feeling safe doing so in the darkness of the room. He wore a red bandana tied around his brow. Above it, his hair fell onto his forehead in damp tangles; below it, sweat painted gleaming tracks down his temples. Radiant red light lit the hair on his arms, and that which showed above the bib of his apron. She studied him until it became necessary to invent a distraction. Lifting her eyes to the dark thick-beamed ceiling and shadowed walls, she scanned them as a hunter might the sky.

 
"Did you run out of windows?" she inquired.

 
He glanced at her and grinned, then returned his attention to the forge. "Did you come to give me a hard time again?"

 
"No. I'm curious, that's all."

 
He turned the bar over and made more music. "You know as well as I do why blacksmiths work in the dark. It helps them gauge how hot the metal is." He brandished the bar, which was brightening to white again. "Color, you see?"

 
"Oh." And after a moment's silence: "Shouldn't you wear gloves?"

 
"I caught a cinder down one one time, so now I work without them."

 
Glancing down, she scuffed a boot against the cinders. "Your floor could use sweeping."

 
"You
did
come to pester me."

 
"No. I only came to get Sergeant, honest.
Papa sent me."

 
He considered her askance for a long stretch, then shifted his gaze to his work and decided to enlighten her further. "The cinders keep the floor cool in the summer and warm in the winter."

 
"This is cool?" She spread her hands in the torpid air.

 
"As cool as it gets. You can wait outside if you want."

 
But she waited where she was, watching another bead of sweat trail down Tom Jeffcoat's jaw. He shrugged and caught it with a shoulder. His face held absolutely no shadow, and his eyes looked like two red coals themselves, so intense was the heat from the forge. Yet he pumped the bellows regularly and stood in the blast of heat as if it were little more than a warm chinook wind drifting over the Big Horns.

 
Time and again she glanced away, but her eyes had a will of their own. She didn't want to find him handsome, but there was no arguing the fact. Or masculine, but he was. Or any of the thousand indefinable things that drew her to him, but she was drawn just the same, against her will.

 
"It's ready now," he informed her.

 
The iron bar glowed once more the nearwhite hue of a full moon. He picked it up with tongs and swung about, selecting a hammer and setting to work at the anvil, battering the metal with singing, ringing blows.

 
She loved the sound—to the farmer it meant shares being mended; to the wheelwright, rims being formed; but to her it meant horses being cared for. It filled the room, it filled her head—smith's music in the steady repeating note she'd been hearing in the distance all her life.

 
Pang-pang-pang!

 
She watched him make it; a maestro in his own right, this man who raised her pulsebeat each time she saw him.

 
His muscles stood out as he wielded the hammer, changing the shape of the iron, wrapping it beat by beat around the pointed end of the anvil. The music paused. With the tongs he lifted the horseshoe, assessed it, returned it to the anvil and began again the measured staccato strikes. Each blow resounded in the pit of her stomach and fragmented to her extremities.

 
"I'm using a three-quarter shoe," he shouted above the ringing. "And a copper plate, too, on that off fore. It should keep that sand crack from coming back."

 
She was reminded of the first day she'd first seen him and how angry he'd made her. If only she could recapture some of that anger now. Instead, she watched his skin gleam in the fireglow and thought how warm it must be. She watched sweat bead in the corner of his eye and thought how salty it must be. She watched his chest flex and thought how hard it must be.