Читать книгу Beckett's Birthright - Bronwyn Williams, Bronwyn Williams - Страница 9

Eli dismissed the men with orders to hitch up a cart and haul a load of locust fence posts out to the south pasture. Only then did he turn back to the woman who stood boldly in the open doorway, hands firmly planted on her generous hips.

“Demon? What about one of the geldings?” he suggested. Demon was a stallion some sixteen hands high, reported to be part Barb. On his best behavior, he was no ladies’ mount.

Delilah Jackson continued to look at him as if she were trying to determine his breeding. It was nothing particularly impressive, he could have told her. Run-of-the-range stock.

Eli had been accused a time or two of lacking judgment, something he’d never denied. One thing no one could accuse him of, however, was backing down from a challenge. Which, come to think of it, might have something to do with his questionable judgment. The gauntlet had been flung. It was tan kid and smelled faintly of roses.

Nodding to Streak, who had just come inside, he spoke quietly. “Saddle Demon for Miss Jackson, please.” He expected an argument, but the lanky cattleman turned to the woman and smiled, setting his prominent Adam’s apple to bobbing.

“Glad to have you home, Miss Lilah.”

“Thank you, Streak. This time I’m home to stay.”

Streak left to saddle her horse, and Eli shrugged. If she got into trouble, it wouldn’t be his responsibility.

The lady was large, but obviously not too bright. About half a foot under his own six foot three and hatless, she wore her rust-red hair swept up in a mound on top of her head. Her features, he had to admit, were in perfect proportion to her body, from the proud nose to the wide mouth and the big whiskey-colored eyes.

His exploration lingered momentarily on a small dark mole just above the right corner of her lips, then moved on to the generous bosom fighting to break through the small covered buttons on her pin-tucked white blouse.

“Would you care to examine my teeth, too?” Her voice was as lush as her body, but dry.

“Sorry. Nothing personal.” The hell it wasn’t personal. He couldn’t recall ever having been so acutely aware of a woman before.

Well…maybe once, but that was different.

What the devil was Jackson thinking of, letting his daughter parade around in front of the men wearing pants? Did he have any idea of the way they talked about her? Didn’t the damn fool even care? Whatever else she was, she was his daughter—his own flesh and blood, for God’s sake!

Streak brought the saddled stallion around, and the lady turned to smile at him. “Oh, Streak, thank you. You didn’t have to do that, I could have saddled him.”

Then why hadn’t she, Eli wondered. Because it might spoil her imperial princess act?

The big bay snorted and tried to bite the hand that led him. The Jackson woman calmly reached for the reins, murmuring softly to the fractious animal. She swung up with no effort at all, and both men stood in the open doorway, watching as she set off down the back lane.

Lilah, barely managing to cool her seething anger, rode farther and faster then she’d planned. It had been months since she’d been on a horse. No suitable mounts were available at school. Or rather, no suitable saddles. The first time she’d tried to position herself properly on a sidesaddle she had slid off, landing on her hands and knees in front of a group of smirking classmates. That had also been the last time she’d tried to sit on one of the miserable things. She’d been riding astride all her life. Her father knew it. He didn’t approve, but then, Burke Jackson had never approved of a single thing she had ever done.

Lilah had tried for years to understand why he couldn’t love her. True, her mother had died giving birth to her, and everyone said he’d worshipped the ground Achsah Jackson had walked on. People said he’d cried for five days after she died, then he’d cursed for five more days. Since then he’d been a changed man.

Lilah wouldn’t know about that. For as long as she could remember her father had ignored her, leaving Shem and Pearly May to look after her. It had been Shem who had arranged for her to go to the school in the nearby town of Hillsborough once she was old enough. Her father had never showed any interest in whether or not she could read or write.

Shem had even given her a name. He’d asked if Burke Jackson wanted her named after her mother, and Burke had fired him on the spot. Naturally, Shem hadn’t left. By then he was used to being fired. Neither man ever took it seriously. Even Lilah had come to realize that her father didn’t always mean what he said.

So Shem had picked out her name and registered it with the same deliberation he would have given the offspring of one of their prize bulls, although with a different set of authorities.

Delilah Burke Jackson. She’d been named for her father, even though he’d shown no more interest in her than he did the least of his seasonal hires. By the time she’d cut her first permanent tooth, she had accepted the fact that if a father couldn’t love his only child, there was no point in hoping anyone else could. Since the day she’d first reached that conclusion, she had made her own rules.

“And to hell with everyone else,” she muttered now as she jumped Demon over a low fence. “To hell with you, too, Elias Chandler,” she added for good measure.

She had known who he was before she’d gone out to the barn. Shem had already told her about the man who’d been hired as his replacement now that he was so crippled up with rheumatism. Chandler was from Oklahoma Territory, for heaven’s sake. What the devil was he doing here in the East, hiding out from the law?

He looked dangerous enough. All tawny, like one of the big cats she’d seen once in a traveling zoo, with the same watchfulness. Same color hair from what she could see under that battered black hat. She didn’t know about his eyes, but she did know his hips were about half the size of her own.

Not his shoulders, though. Those were massive. She always sized up a man’s strength, as men were always the ones in positions of authority. Some of those men from the western territories were said to be barely civilized. She’d read all about the Wild West in the books she’d made a policy of reading once she’d learned that they were frowned upon for young ladies.

At least he didn’t carry a gun. Not where anyone could see it. It was easy, though, to picture him riding the range, a pair of six-shooters strapped on his sides.

Most of the men who worked on the Bar J wore straw hats in the summer, hunting caps in the winter. Chandler wore a broad-brimmed hat that looked as if he’d been using it as a feedbag, or at least to polish his boots. It was black. Everyone knew which men wore the black hats and which ones wore white.

Leaning forward, she stroked the big bay stallion and murmured soft endearments. “We don’t like him, do we, love? We don’t like his looks, don’t like his ways, don’t like…”

Listen to you, woman! You don’t like the man’s looks? Why? Because he’s bigger than you are? Because he’s so blasted good-looking?

Or because he hadn’t tried to hide the fact that he disapproved of her? Even worse, that he found her amusing?

By the time she returned to the paddock, Elias Chandler was nowhere around. She was both relieved and disappointed. She knew from experience that men found both her size and her attitude unattractive—which only served to make her attitude worse.

Well, that was just too damned bad, because she fully intended to take over the running of the Bar J now that her father’s health was failing. Sooner or later she was going to have to deal with all of her father’s employees. They would either work with her or she would pay them off and send them on their way.

Shem, no matter that she loved him dearly and owed him more than she could ever repay, was no longer up to the job. If he approved of Chandler, then she would just have to try and get along with the man until she was ready to take over.

Eli, watching from the window of the office when she rode in a few hours later, couldn’t help but notice the easy way Jackson’s daughter handled the high-strung stallion. Both the lady and her mount looked as if they’d been ridden hard. The horse was lathered, the lady flushed, her hair flying loose behind her.

She slid down and walked him into the yard. When one of the older hands offered to rub him down, she shook her head. Good for her, he thought. It was a mark in her favor that she took care of her own horse.

He turned back to the books spread across the scarred oak desk. They were going to need a few more temporary hands once the fields dried out enough to plow. The Bar J was considerably smaller than some of the ranches he’d worked on out west, but here in the east, the land was so rich it didn’t take thousands of acres to feed a decent-size herd. They could grow all they needed to winter the stock and still have plenty of land left for summer pasture.

If Jackson would pay decent wages, he might get better quality help. Trouble was, you couldn’t argue with him without setting him to coughing and wheezing. Eli didn’t like the man, but he didn’t want to be responsible for his death.

By the time he finished the payroll, lined up the week’s work and tracked down the receipt for the repeat bill, his hand was cramped, his shoulders stiff, and his eyes hurt. He rarely stayed this long in any job, especially one that entailed so damn much bookkeeping. But until he knew what his next move was going to be, his best bet was to stand pat. No point in haring off on a dead-end trail. Besides, he liked the place. The land was rich, water was plentiful and the buildings sufficient. The stock was damned fine, too—as good as any he’d been privileged to work with, and he’d worked with some of the best.

He figured he could give it another month. Meanwhile, he’d keep his eyes open for a man he could begin training to take his place. Streak wasn’t interested. Reading wasn’t his strong suit, and in these modern times, especially in the East, reading was a requirement.

He’d about made up his mind that if by midsummer he still hadn’t picked up any new leads, he would move on anyway. Try some other venue. Might even ride down Charleston way, to see how his namesake was getting on. Who was to say he wouldn’t find what he was looking for down in that neck of the woods? Charleston had its share of gamblers.

Funny thing, now that he thought about it—the description of the man who had kidnapped Rosemary and another man, one who had come to his rescue in a knife fight nearly five years ago, weren’t all that far apart. Both men were slim, about five foot eight with a liking for fancy clothes. Lance didn’t have a streak of white hair—at least, he hadn’t the last time Eli had seen him, but that could have changed.

Tilting back his chair, Eli stared out the dusty window and considered the first time he had met Lance Beckett. Eli had been two months shy of his twenty-fourth birthday and had just inherited roughly five thousand acres of barren land, a big, two-story house and all the money his grandfather had accumulated selling land to the railroads.

Knowing, or at least suspecting, that there was more to life than could be found in Crow Fly, Oklahoma Territory, he’d headed east to do some sight-seeing before settling down.

He’d gotten as far as Fort Smith, Arkansas—with a few educational stops along the way, such as a whorehouse boasting a cement bathtub that held half a dozen people—when he stopped at a saloon to wash the trail dust from his throat. He’d barely taken a sip of his watered-down whiskey when the fight broke out. Before he knew what was happening, he and a city dude dressed like an undertaker were backed up against a wall, taking on a mob of angry hog farmers.

At six foot three, Eli weighed right around two hundred pounds, depending on whether or not he’d been eating regularly. The undertaker was considerably smaller. Eli remembered seeing him at one point standing on the bar hurling pickled eggs and kicking at the ham-size hands that tried to grab his fancy high-top shoes.

Even as tough as he was, Eli hadn’t thought too much of their chances—two men against more than a dozen—especially after some little weasel jumped up onto his back with a knife in his fist, trying to slice off his nose. He’d managed to knock the knife aside, but the little weasel had got him in the side, just above the belt and below the bottom of his leather vest. Before he could react, he’d been hit over the head with what felt like a crosstie, but had probably been only a chair.

When he regained his senses, he was in a small unfamiliar room that smelled of carbolic acid. Turned out to be a doctor’s office. Seems he’d been left there by a stranger who hadn’t bothered to leave his name.

A week later, once he’d recovered enough to ride, Eli had set out to track down the dandy and thank him. He’d had nothing better to do at the time. The Chandler men might not be able to hang on to their women—both Eli’s mother and grandmother had walked out on their husbands—but no one had ever accused a Chandler of welching on a debt.

The trail had come to an end in Charleston, South Carolina. War-scarred and dirt-poor, the city had struck him as exotic and beautiful. To this day he could still remember his reaction to the first palm tree he’d ever seen.

But even the handsome, colorful houses and the lush vegetation paled in comparison to the Charleston women with their delicate complexions and their elegant gowns.

And he’d thought all those whores in that big cement bathtub were something. It just went to show how ignorant a big old country boy could be and still stay alive.

Once he’d located a boardinghouse, bathed the trail dust off and eaten his fill of fried fish, fried okra and corn bread, it had taken him less than a day to locate the man who had dragged his bleeding body out of that Arkansas saloon and delivered him to the sawbones. Having worked off and on as a lawman, Eli was skilled at tracking and the Becketts were a prominent banking family around those parts.

Leastwise, they had been before the war that had ended some thirty years earlier. Here in the south, he learned, the effects still lingered like the scar of a near-mortal wound.

He’d already learned that while Lance Beckett might look the part of a dandy, he was a damned good brawler. Now he learned that the Beckett family had lost a fortune during the war years and that Lance, the last of the Becketts, his father having died in a Yankee prison, was still struggling to recoup.

Eli would willingly have paid him any amount for hauling his carcass out of that saloon and saving him from bleeding to death, but it didn’t take long to discover that Southern gentlemen were big on pride.

Well, hell—who wasn’t?

Once the greetings were over and the two men had shared a few drinks, Lance had invited Eli to move into what had once been an overseer’s house on the Beckett plantation before everything else had been burned to the ground. In the days that followed, while Lance had shown him the sights, the two men, as different as night and day, had become fast friends. That friendship was cemented by respect.

Eli had to respect a man who would go to such lengths to save a stranger’s life against great odds, and Lance respected a man who would take the time and trouble to track him down and thank him.

It hadn’t taken long to learn that even though the Becketts, once well-known in financial circles, had lost their fortune, the Beckett name was still well-known. Lance had already reestablished contact with a few men who were influential in investment circles. What he lacked to get back on his feet was seed money.

While Eli was hardly uneducated—his grandfather had seen to that—he was a man of action rather than intellect. In his years of traveling since leaving Oklahoma Territory, he had earned his way, leaving the fortune he’d inherited from his grandfather intact while he tried to figure out what to do with it. He could shoot, break horses, even stay on a bull long enough to earn a prize. He knew cattle. Having been a lawman, he could do a right fair job of keeping the peace. It had once been said about him that he could track smoke on a windy day to bring to justice any man who broke the law, a talent that had helped in tracking the man who had saved his life.

Only when it came to women was he out of his depth. One of his earliest memories was hearing his grandmother accuse his grandfather of being mean as a snake. A young Eli had silently agreed. What’s more, she’d added, she wasn’t going to stay there and take it any longer. She had left that very day.

Theirs had not been a happy household.

But all that had paled beside what had happened to the Becketts, and so Eli hadn’t mentioned it. He had, however, told Lance about the money he had inherited, and together they had made arrangements to invest it.

“We should be able to triple it and then build from there, but it won’t happen overnight,” he remembered being warned. “This company I’m planning to invest in is going to grow like wildfire now that things are finally opening up.” According to Lance, even after the war had ended, recovery had been delayed by eleven years of devastating “reconstruction.”

“I’m in no hurry,” Eli had replied. He’d been in no hurry because he’d just met the most beautiful woman God had ever created. His nebulous plans to build and stock a ranch could wait.

Abigail Pindacross. Eyes the color of those blue flowers that bloomed out on the prairie, a mop of hair the color of yellow feed corn, and a waist he could have spanned with his hands if he’d dared to touch her.

Hell, he’d even learned how to dance after a fashion, he remembered now with a twist of longing.

His fingers were doing a two-step on the ledger when Streak poked his head through the doorway. “You coming to supper?”

Eli’s feet hit the floor with a solid thud. He’d been so lost in the past he hadn’t even noticed when the lowering sun had turned the dust on the window glass opaque. “Yeah, sure—be there in a few minutes.”

The talk over the long rough table was all about Miss Jackson. Eli hadn’t forgotten his own reaction to her. It was a little like being out on the prairie alone and seeing a big, colorful sunset all streaked with gold and red and purple reflected across a sea of wild grasses. Logic said it was just one more in an endless succession of sunsets that had been happening ever since the world began, and with luck, would go right on happening long after he was six feet under. Still, a man couldn’t help but be impressed.

All the same, Lilah Jackson was just another woman. The world was full of women, women of all shapes and sizes, all dispositions. Always had been; always would be. He had to admit, though, that like sunsets, some made more of an impression than others, if for entirely different reasons.

After hearing a particularly irreverent remark, Shem glared around the table and muttered a few threats. The men ignored him.

“Wouldn’t mind seeing all that spread out on my bunk, nosiree, that I wouldn’t.” That from scrawny little Mickey Lane, who would have been fired on the spot except that he was the best brush roper Eli had ever seen, east or west.

“Cover the whole damn mattress, I reckon,” piped up one of the men he’d hired only a few days ago.

His voice dangerously soft, Eli said, “You’re expendable, Pete. Might want to think about that before you do too much speculating.”

Shem nodded in approval, and Eli applied himself to his roast pork and sweet potatoes, determined not to get into a brangle over the boss’s daughter. He had trouble enough getting decent workers and keeping them on the job without that.

Trouble was, it was May. Windows remained open, allowing the warm air to circulate, and in the still of an evening, with the humid air laden with the scent of manure and wildflowers, voices carried too easily.

They were carrying now. When Lilah’s voice rang out clear as a bell, every man looked toward the main house. Not another sound was heard.

“I damn well will not go back to school! I don’t need any damn diploma to run this farm, I can do a better job of it than that—”

The next sound they heard was a string of curses that ended up in a fit of hacking. Then, “Oh, dammit, Papa, that’s not fair! Pearly May, bring Papa his medicine!”

Every man in the cookshack was still turned toward the house, forks suspended between plate and mouth. Pete was smirking. Shem closed his eyes and assumed a prayerful attitude.

“She telling it straight?” Eli asked quietly. “She’s actually planning on taking over?”

“Over Burke’s dead body,” the old man replied.

“I ain’t working for no woman,” one of the other men declared, stuffing his mouth with potatoes.

Streak told him quietly to shut up. “They been having this, uh—discussion ever since I come to work here,” he said to Eli. “Reckon they’ll go on till one or the other of them gives in.”

Cookie brought in the dessert, a pie heaped high with meringue that was as good as anything Eli had tasted in all his months in Charleston. Talk turned to the condition of the experimental alfalfa fields, with Shem declaring alfalfa wouldn’t thrive. “We’d do better to stick with corn, soybeans and hay, but you can’t tell Jackson nothing.”

“Don’t hurt to try,” said Streak, who tended to be a peacemaker.

“What, to grow alfalfa or to talk sense to Burke Jackson?”

There was general laughter, and then the talk turned to the condition of the herd. Depending on the time of year, the Bar J ran roughly a thousand head, mostly Herefords, the bulk of which would be headed for market by the end of the season.

After tucking away two slices of lemon pie, Eli excused himself and headed for the cramped manager’s quarters he shared with Shem. Passing under the cook-shack windows, he heard one of the men say, “She ain’t really going to run this place, is she?”

He waited for Shem’s reply. “Yep, I reckon she is. You want to argue it out with her?”

“No, sir, not me, that I don’t. Woman like that, she could hurt a man real bad.”

“And don’t you forget it,” Eli muttered a few minutes later as he kicked the mud off his boots and went inside. Might be interesting to see how she’d fight, though. Of course, a man would have to grab hold of her and hang on tight. No hitting—he didn’t hold with striking a woman, no matter how aggravating she was.

On the other hand, he wouldn’t mind holding her while she squawked and wiggled. He always had enjoyed a challenge.

The men ate breakfast early so as to make the most of daylight. All but Shem and Eli had headed out on the day’s assignment by the time Delilah strode across the clearing toward the barn the next morning.

It occurred to Eli, watching her from the big opening in the hayloft where he’d been working on a balky block and tackle, that she neither minced nor strolled. What she did was move like a woman who knew precisely where she was going. Not since that first day had she asked anyone to fetch her horse. She had led Demon out and saddled him herself. Eli tried and failed to picture either Abigail or Rosemary slinging a heavy saddle up onto the back of a horse that stood sixteen hands high.

“Need some help?” he’d offered the second morning, more out of devilry than any chivalrous impulse.

If looks could kill, he’d have been halfway to hell by now.

“Just thought I’d ask,” he’d said, hiding a smile. Damn, she was something, all right—that fetching little mole and all. Bold as brass and twice as tough. If any woman could manage a spread this size, she just might be the one to do it, as long as she handled things the way Burke did, from a distance. Working through a manager, which would definitely not be Elias M. Chandler. By the time she took over—if she ever did—he’d have long since moved on.

For that matter, Jackson could sell out and leave her the money. With that much money behind her, she might even find herself a husband, he mused as he tested the double pulley.

About that time she came into his line of sight, headed down the back lane. Pausing in the task of clearing the gear, Eli watched her, noticing the straightness of her back, the proud angle of her head under all that red hair, and the surprising narrowness of her waist above the lush spread of her behind.

He felt a stirring in his loins he hadn’t felt in a long time.

You need to ride into town more often, man, he told himself. Might not find a cement bathtub full of naked ladies, but there was bound to be an accommodating widow looking for a way to pick up a few extra dollars.

He watched until she moved out of sight when the lane curved around a grove of field pines, then turned back to his work. Shem needed to remind her to wear a hat. Skin like hers, pale as cream and twice as smooth, couldn’t take too much sun without blistering.

For the rest of the day Eli made a conscious effort not to think about Delilah Jackson. It worked…after a fashion.

The next morning when Lilah came down to the barn, Eli made a point of stepping out of the office to meet her. The men had already been given their orders for the day and had ridden out, some singly, some in pairs, depending on the task. “Good morning, Miss Jackson.”

“Where’s Jenny? Is she available?”

“The sorrel mare? Yeah, she’s around.” Curious, he asked, “Why, is Demon lame? I didn’t notice any problem yesterday.”

“Demon’s fine, I just feel like riding a different horse today.”

Ignoring the impatient tapping of her booted foot, Eli reached for a lead rope and nodded toward the paddock at the far end of the barn. “Want me to get her for you?”

She glared and snatched the lead from his hand. “Get on with whatever you’re doing, I can manage just fine.”

It was only as she strode toward the side door that he noticed the way she was dressed. He’d been so caught up in wondering how the devil she managed to keep all that hair anchored on top of her head with only a handful of tortoiseshell pins that he hadn’t realized she was wearing a dress.

Or rather, a divided skirt. Black twill, with a wide belt and another cotton shirtwaist. Blue, this time. No frills and ruffles for Miss Jackson, he thought, amused. Good thing she knew her style. Some women could carry off fancy frills and lacy ruffles—others were better off not even trying.

The truth was that he’d never thought much about women’s clothes before. Admired them, oh, hell, yes. The shorter the skirt and the lower the bodice, the better he liked it.

But not on real ladies. Ladies like Rosemary and Abigail were in a different category. He could admire them, and he surely did, without wanting to plow through acres of satin and lace to find out what was underneath. Which made it hard to understand why just looking at Lilah Jackson in her divided skirt and her cotton shirtwaist could give rise to the kind of stirrings no man had any business feeling around a lady.

Without taking time to reason it out, he saddled up a big gray gelding and ambled off down the lane. Not that he was following her, because he wasn’t. He sure as hell was not.

Not that he thought she might be meeting anyone, either. She could meet an entire regiment for all he cared. It was a good day for a ride, that was all. From time to time a man needed a change of scenery.