Daniel's Bride, page 4
Jolie’s heart leapfrogged into her throat. She was afraid to look at Daniel, so she kept her eyes averted even after he’d blown out the lamp. When she climbed back into bed, she was still wearing her dress, and she lay on the very edge of the mattress, a hair’s breadth from toppling onto the rag rug below.
Daniel’s weight made the bed sag slightly, tilting her toward him, and she clung to the side with one hand, as though she were on the brink of a high cliff. And for all her efforts, every pore of her skin pulsed with the awareness of Daniel’s heat and substance. When his big hand came to rest lightly on her hip, a sweet shudder went through Jolie, and she squeezed her eyes shut, needing all her wits to battle the riot of feelings the simple gesture had unchained within her.
“Your wife,” she whispered, when she dared to speak. “What was her name?”
Daniel withdrew his hand, and Jolie was both relieved and sorry. “Ilse,” he said, after a very long time.
“She was very pretty,” Jolie offered, sensing his lingering pain and wanting somehow to lend comfort. She owed this man every sunrise she would ever see, though she had no real idea how to pay up. “I saw her picture in the parlor.”
There was another silence, and then Daniel said, “I’ll be wanting children.”
Jolie felt tears squeeze past her lashes, and she couldn’t help smiling a little. More than anything, she longed for a baby of her own. She forgot her fear and rolled over to look at Daniel, but she couldn’t see his face in the darkness. “By me?” she whispered, amazed.
“You are my wife,” he reminded her, and she heard amusement in the low tone of his voice.
“But I’m—they were going to hang me.”
He fitted her close to him, and she drank in the warm solidity of his body even though she was afraid. Her cheek rested against his hairy chest, but she didn’t dare let her mind reach any lower than that. “You didn’t kill anybody,” he said, with a certainty that was balm to Jolie’s bruised spirit. And then, remarkably, he drifted off to sleep.
Jolie lay nestled against this husband she hadn’t known before today, burning with a strange invisible fire while she listened to his deep, even breathing. And oddly enough, for the first time since before her pa had dragged her away from Aunt Nissa and Uncle Franklin’s farm, when she was fourteen and he’d just married Garnet, Jolie felt safe.
It seemed only a short time later that Daniel nudged her lightly and rolled out of bed. Somewhere beyond the dark glass at the window, a rooster was crowing.
Remembering where she was, Jolie came awake instantly and pulled the covers up over her head so she wouldn’t see Daniel getting dressed.
“We’ll be going into town later in the day,” he said, moments later, pulling the quilt down far enough to look into her face. She couldn’t be absolutely sure, but she thought his eyes were dancing with some pleasure he wanted to keep to himself. “Have breakfast on the table in half an hour.”
With that, he turned and left the room. Jolie bolted out of bed, hastily donned her shoes, and rushed downstairs to get the fire in the cookstove going. She was outside at the pump when the sun burst over the timbered foothills in the east, pouring pools of copper and crimson over the wheat, and the beauty of it made her throat catch.
Thank You, God, she thought, only too aware that she could easily have spent the night in a coffin instead of Daniel Beckham’s bed. It was only by pure grace that she was breathing fresh morning air, with cornflowers swaying at her feet, pumping icy well water into a bucket and watching a new day begin.
Deuter came out of the little shed next to the barn and waved his hat in good-natured greeting. At his heels trotted the ugliest cat Jolie had ever seen, an enormous speckled tom, with a chunk of one ear and big patches of fur missing. His right eye was nothing more than a jagged slit in his face, and his left was like an amber marble, glistening and hard.
“Well,” she said, feeling charitable, as she carried the water bucket toward the house, “who’s this?”
“This here’s Leviticus,” Deuter replied, pleased at her interest. “Dan’l named him that because he knew me and this cat was gonna be friends.” Jolie hoisted the water bucket over the threshold and was about to climb up after it when Deuter stopped her. “Here, Mrs. Beckham,” he said, producing an apple crate from the tall grass and setting it down in front of the door. “Dan’l and me, we’d smash this if either of us was to step on it, but you’re a lady and you can’t be hauling your skirts up like that.”
“Thank you, Deuter,” Jolie said, touched by the gesture and pleased because he’d addressed her as “Mrs. Beckham,” just as if she were a real wife. The apple crate did indeed make it easier to enter the kitchen and, while Deuter and Leviticus went off to the barn to help with the chores, Jolie put a pot of coffee on to brew and then quickly attended to a few simple ablutions.
The wheat was ablaze with sunshine and the sky was the same festive blue as Aunt Nissa’s favorite sugar bowl when she went out to the henhouse. She hummed as she filled her apron with brown eggs and hurried on to the well house for a slab of pork.
In the house, she sliced bread and put it into the oven to toast while she fried up the eggs and bacon. When Daniel and Deuter came in, skin glowing from washing up in the cold water from the pump, she set their plates in front of them with a proud flourish.
Daniel glowered at the single egg, two slices of bacon, and thick wedge of toasted bread she’d given him.
“This wouldn’t keep Verena Dailey’s lapdog alive,” he grumbled, and all of Jolie’s pleasure evaporated in an instant.
Jolie’s motions were brisk and angry as she silently fetched more pork and eggs from the larder and put them on the stove to cook. Maybe Daniel had saved her life, but that didn’t give him the right to treat her like a slave. After all, she hadn’t asked him for so much as the time of day.
“That dress looks like you slept in it,” Deuter commented cheerfully, when she refilled the platter and set it back on the table with a resounding thump. “Not only that, it’s too small for you. Maybe you’re getting fat, like Mrs. Anstruther over at the land office. You could hide a loaded hay wagon behind that woman.”
“Deuter,” Daniel interrupted gruffly, scraping more food onto his plate. “Just eat your breakfast and get on with your work.”
Deuter certainly wasn’t a judicious conversationalist, but he was obedient. He lowered his eyes and tucked into the eggs and bacon.
Jolie escaped to the side yard, where she’d hung her own clothes out to dry the night before, after washing them, and promptly forgotten their existence. Now, the garments were stiff and wrinkled and still damp with the morning dew, but they were clean.
Not wanting to pass Daniel again until she had to, Jolie changed in the well house, and when she came out, her husband was striding purposefully toward the barn. Deuter was nowhere in sight.
Jolie shoved the apple crate into place and hastened into the kitchen, where she quickly cleared the table. She was dipping hot water from the reservoir into the dishpan when Daniel came in.
Since she’d already seen the team and wagon waiting in the barnyard, all hitched up and ready to go, she knew it was time to leave for town.
“Leave that for later,” Daniel said.
Jolie bristled. Even though she would always be grateful to this man for what he’d done, she also resented his indisputable power over her. “It might serve you better to address me more politely in the future, Mr. Beckham,” she said.
“It might serve you,” Daniel replied, unruffled, “to do as you’re told and keep your mouth shut.”
Fiery humiliation swept through Jolie’s soul, and her cheeks felt as though they’d been doused in kerosene and set ablaze. With her chin high and her shoulders square, she dried her hands on a blue and white striped dish towel, set her hat on her head, and started toward the yawning door.
Daniel stepped down to the ground first and reached for her, and Jolie shut her eyes tightly as his big hands closed on her waist. There was that strange feeling again, starting in her most private places and bouncing wildly into every part of her, like a herd of tiny wire springs just released from narrow confines.
The moment she was standing before him, slightly breathless because of the odd effect the contact had had upon her, Daniel reached out and removed her derby. Passing the garden, which was neatly tended like the rest of the Beckham property, he set the hat on the scarecrow’s nodding cloth head and smiled slightly to himself.
Once again, Jolie was roundly insulted, but she refrained from comment. She didn’t know much about Daniel Beckham, but there was one thing she’d learned: once he’d made up his mind about something, there was just no sense in crossing him.
She climbed up into the wagon without waiting for help and settled herself primly on the hard seat, smoothing her frayed brown riding skirt the way a lady would do with rich velvet. All Jolie had left was her dignity, and she didn’t mean to give that up lightly.
“That was a perfectly good hat,” she said, without so much as looking at Daniel when he hoisted his muscular frame into the seat beside her. “It kept the sun off my face.”
“It’ll do to scare away crows,” he replied, and Jolie felt the motion of his arm as he gave the reins a flick. “You’ll be needing some proper bonnets and a Sunday hat.”
Jolie stiffened at the word Sunday and narrowed her eyes as she turned to study Daniel’s profile. “I’m not a churchgoing woman,” she said plainly.
Daniel was navigating the driveway that led down to the main gate and the road beyond, and even though this was clearly an easy task, he appeared to be concentrating hard on it. “Maybe you haven’t been, but you are now.”
Thinking of all the three-hour sermons she’d been forced to sit through—sending Jolie to church had apparently assuaged her father’s guilt over his own sins—she groaned. “You might just as well have left me to hang.”
Her husband’s laugh startled her, even though she should have been prepared, should have expected it to be big and daunting, like he was. “The Reverend Blackborrow will appreciate your enthusiasm, I’m sure.”
Jolie sighed. “I reckon he’s long-winded, like most preachers,” she lamented, with resignation. There was no point in pretending she didn’t have to obey Daniel; she knew she had no alternatives at the moment.
Daniel chuckled again and resettled his battered old hat on his head, but he didn’t meet Jolie’s gaze and he didn’t offer a comment on her remark.
On either side of the wagon, the wheat stood still in the heavy August air, and the team snuffled and nickered as they trotted along. Jolie’s thigh touched Daniel’s rock-hard one and she flinched as if he’d jabbed her with a pin. Perspiration beaded in the tender crevice between her breasts, on her nape, and along her upper lip.
“Sure is hot,” she said, finding the relative silence untenable.
“It’s August,” Daniel allowed.
In the distance, Jolie could just glimpse the raggly-straggly beginnings of the town of Prosperity. She focused her attention on that. “You don’t say much, do you, Mr. Beckham?” she ventured.
“Not much, no,” he conceded, taking off his hat long enough to drag one sleeve across his brow.
Had Jolie known the man better, she would have elbowed him hard in the ribs for being so blamed quiet. There were times when a woman just plain needed to hear talk, and plenty of it, and this was one of them. “Why do you suppose that is?” she proceeded. When the image of Daniel standing beside his first wife’s grave burst unexpectedly into her mind, she pushed it aside. “That you don’t care much for conversation, I mean?”
Daniel made a sound meant to hasten the horses a little and pondered the question in silence for a few moments. “Doesn’t matter,” he finally answered. “It’s clear enough that you’ll be doing enough jawing for the both of us.”
The words stung a little, but it wasn’t the first time Jolie had been accused of talking too much, and besides, she had plenty of other things on her mind. Like where she would go when she left the farm, and how she would support herself.
They reached Prosperity and Daniel drew the wagon to a stop in front of the bank. “I’ve got to write out that draft,” he said, and Jolie made sure she got herself down before he had a chance to help her. “You head on over to the mercantile and pick out a ready-made dress and some yard goods.” His blue eyes drifted critically over her tattered riding skirt and shirt, both hand-me-downs from her former employer. “Get a comb and brush, too, and some bonnets.”
Jolie gnawed at her lower lip to keep from answering him back—even though most folks would have said Daniel Beckham was being generous, there was something in his manner that made her temper jump like a lid over a pot of boiling water.
“And mind you stay out of trouble,” he added, as an afterthought, waggling a finger at her.
She turned on her heel and trooped across the dusty street, taking care not to put her feet down in the wrong places, and mounted the rough wooden steps leading up to the sidewalk. The inside of the mercantile smelled of tobacco and tea leaves, vanilla and sawdust, coffee beans and aging cheese.
Jolie walked along beside the long counter toward the back of the store without looking either to her left or to her right. Although she didn’t let on, she was painfully aware of the hush that had fallen over the other people in the mercantile when she’d entered.
She passed the black iron wheel of the coffee grinder, the glass jars filled with grainy peppermint sticks, the pickle barrel. The yard goods were displayed on a long table at the back of the room, behind the potbellied stove with its circle of rocking chairs. There were bonnets and bridles pegged to the walls, and spools of gaily colored ribbon and delicate lace trim lined a metal rod attached to the table.
“You’ll be needing something?” That was Mrs. Craybrook asking; Jolie remembered the small, gray-haired woman from the trial. And the hanging.
“Mr. Beckham wants me to have a dress and some bonnets and yardage,” Jolie said, forcing herself to meet Mrs. Craybrook’s marble-bright brown eyes. There was no telling how long she’d have to stay around this town, and she couldn’t go kowtowing to every old heifer who looked at her crossways.
The proprietress inspected Jolie thoroughly. “Do you sew?” she trilled. It would have been impossible to challenge the woman gracefully, but her tone indicated the most scathing censure.
After coming so close to dangling by the neck from the sturdiest branch of a maple tree, it took more than one little bantam hen with her feathers ruffed up to scare Jolie McKibben Beckham. “If you’d prefer not to take my husband’s money, Mrs. Craybrook, we can send away to the catalog company for what we need.”
For a long moment the two women just stood there, staring each other down like two gunfighters in a dusty street. It was Mrs. Craybrook who finally retreated. “Nonsense. You can never be sure those people will send what you ordered, or when they’ll send it, for that matter. Besides, you’re so tall that anything you buy ready-made is going to need altering to keep your ankles hidden.” She paused to purse her lips, after whispering the last few words, and flushed, momentarily undone, evidently, at being forced to speak of so specific an extremity aloud. “How many dresses did Daniel have in mind?”
“None at all,” Jolie couldn’t resist saying, a smile teasing at the corners of her generous mouth. “I don’t believe he’s at all given to wearing them. I, on the other hand, expect to need at least three.”
Two red patches glowed beneath the pale rice powder covering Mrs. Craybrook’s cheeks, and her lips went very thin across her teeth. But before she could render a reply, the little bell over the shop door jingled and Daniel walked in. He took off his hat and hung it from one of the pegs next to the door before ambling back to run his eyes critically over the array of poplins and calicos and ginghams offered for sale.
“See that you buy at least one ready-made dress, and make sure you get some stuff for nightgowns, too,” he said, and Jolie was amazed at how simply he could mortify her. He didn’t seem to put any effort into it at all. “Can’t have you sleeping in your clothes for the rest of your life.”
Mrs. Craybrook cleared her throat and pretended to straighten the spools of ribbon that glowed in the dim light like a rainbow.
Jolie’s face was flaming, and she turned her head to hide it. Swallowing, she reached out to lay one hand on a bolt of crisp yellow and white gingham, imagining herself in a pretty summer dress with ruffles. “I’d like this, please,” she said awkwardly. After that, she chose plain butter-colored muslin for drawers and petticoats and camisoles, and several links of finely woven white cotton for nightdresses. She would have stopped at that, being overwhelmed at such wealth as it was, but Daniel insisted that she select enough cloth for six other dresses, with bonnets to match. He also bought her shoes and black ribbed stockings and perfumed soap and a stick of green and white peppermint from one of the glass jars on the counter.
Soon, Mrs. Craybrook’s skinny, gap-toothed son was hefting an enormous brown paper parcel into the back of Daniel’s wagon, and the old woman herself was chattering away about the upcoming harvest. It seemed that virtually everyone in that part of the territory depended upon Daniel and his special machinery to bring in their crops.
When he deemed it time to leave, he splayed the fingers of one hand over the small of Jolie’s back and steered her toward the door. He said good-bye to Mrs. Craybrook by putting his hat back on and touching the brim, but Jolie was hardly aware of that. All she could think about was the weight of his palm against her skin and the way his fingertips seemed to shoot fire into the depths of her muscles.
Outside, the smells and noises of a small western farming town assailed her senses, but still Jolie barely noticed the wagons, horses, and people. She imagined how it would be if Daniel were to touch her bare flesh, and prayed he hadn’t felt the quiver that resulted.
He lifted her easily into the wagon, then climbed up after her.
