Emma and the Outlaw Page 12

  But Big John was nothing if not pragmatic, and he’d heard Fairfax express a yearning for Emma Chalmers last night at supper. If John Lenahan knew anything about people, and the years had taught him a good deal, that pretty little librarian had just better start herself a hope chest.

  Steven swore as he raised himself painfully into the saddle. The last damn thing he needed now was a two-week ride into the Washington Territory. For all he knew, he might come back and find Emma married to that piss-ant banker she seemed to think of so highly.

  Riding after one of the groups of men he’d sent to round up stray cattle, Steven wondered if he shouldn’t have told Emma about seeing Fulton upstairs at Chloe’s. Even before the thought was completed, he ew he’d done the right thing by keeping quiet. There were some things a woman had to learn about a man all on her own, instead of hearing about them from somebody else.

  Steven’s mind shifted to Macon; his brother was a tireless, inflexible bastard, and he was undoubtedly closing in by now. Still, he might not stop in Whitneyville at all.

  Steven spurred the gelding lightly, and it shot forward across the grassy ground. There were snowcapped mountains visible in the distance, and stands of good timber in the foothills. He was going to miss this part of the country when he had to leave it.

  But everything would be all right if Emma was with him when he left.

  The week had passed much too rapidly for Emma’s comfort, but her dress was finished and hanging on the front of her wardrobe, a thing of splendor with its lace trim and yards of glossy silk. Daisy was in the kitchen, filling a basket with picnic foods, when Emma came down the stairs in a crisp white cambric dress embroidered with small pink roses.

  “Fasten my buttons, please,” she said, turning her back to Daisy.

  “I’ll fasten your buttons, all right,” Daisy muttered, but she couldn’t hide her amusement at Emma’s good mood. “You just see that young cowboy don’t unfasten ’em again.”

  Emma stiffened. “Daisy! How could you say such a thing?”

  “I wasn’t always old an’ fat,” Daisy chortled. “No, siree, I was young once, just like you. Now, you mind your manners and behave like a lady, or I’ll paddle your bottom.”

  “Fiddlefaddle,” Emma said, but she was smiling when she whirled around to face Daisy, her skirts swishing as she moved. “How do I look?”

  “Like a tiger lily,” Daisy answered fondly, gathering her apron into her hands. “Lord, but you’re a beauty, chile—no wonder some young fella’s always tryin’ to lead you down the primrose path!”

  Emma’s smile faded as she wondered how on earth she would resist Steven Fairfax if he got her alone and kissed her.

  But Daisy laughed at her expression and patted her briskly on the cheek. “Don’t look so fretted up, now—the fella what succeeds, I reckon he’ll be the right one.”

  To distract herself, Emma went to the table and peered into the large wicker picnic basket. She could see a pie, an entire chicken—fried up crisp—cold potato salad, and some of Daisy’s special wheat-flour rolls. She looked at the cook in amazement. “Daisy, we’re just going on a picnic, not spending two weeks in the wilderness.”

  Daisy frowned and shook her finger at Emma. “Nobody’s gonna say my chile didn’t get enough to eat,” she vowed, and that was the end of the subject. She took a pitcher of cold lemonade from the icebox and filled a jar with a tight-fitting lid, then added that to the basket, too. “What you gonna do when Mr. Fulton Whitney hears about this debilment?”

  “It isn’t devilment,” Emma protested, bending close to the little mirror beside the door and pinching her cheeks to make them pink. “It’s a picnic and nothing more—the whole thing is perfectly innocent.”

  Daisy chortled, her great bulk quivering with amusement. “I declare that’s what Eve said to Adam. ‘The whole thing is perfectly innocent.’”

  Before Emma could offer a reply to that, there was a knock at the front door. Emma raced through the house to the entryway, where she stopped with a lurch and smoothed her hair, which was braided into its customary plait. After that, she pinched her cheeks again, but when she opened the door the expression on her face was purposefully dignified and remote.

  Steven grinned as though he could see right through her. He was finely dressed, but she could see the bulge of his .45 beneath his suitcoat. “Hello, Miss Emma,” he said, taking off his new beaver hat.

  “Mr. Fairfax,” Emma replied, stepping back to admit him.

  There in the shadowed light of the entryway, he brought a very small box from the pocket of his vest and held it out. “This is for you.”

  Emma fairly lunged for the package, before remembering it wasn’t polite to go grasping at things in other people’s hands. “You shouldn’t have,” she said.

  Steven’s eyes glittered with silent laughter. “But I did,” he reasoned.

  “That’s true,” Emma replied, snatching it from his fingers and ripping off the paper.

  The package contained a tiny bottle of real French perfume, and Emma’s eyes went round at the sight of it. Uncorking the little crystal lid, she held the splendid stuff to her nose and sniffed.

  Surely heaven didn’t smell any better. “Thank you,” she breathed, amazed that a cowboy could give such an elegant, costly gift. Even Fulton, with all his money, had never presented her with anything so dazzlingly extravagant.

  Steven smiled. “You’re welcome, Miss Emma. Now, are we going on that picnic or not?”

  Emma led the way back through the house. “Daisy’s fixed us a grand basket.”

  “We’ll have plenty to eat then, darlin’, because I just picked up a full meal from the hotel.”

  Emma turned and looked at him in surprise. “But the lady always provides the food,” she said.

  “That doesn’t seem quite fair, since it was the gentleman who did the asking,” Steven replied in a mischievous whisper.

  Daisy was still lingering in the kitchen when they arrived, and when she saw Steven she shook a wooden spoon at him. “I raised this chile to be a good girl,” she warned. “Don’t you go messin’ with her, hear?”

  The beginnings of a grin quirked Steven’s lips, but he didn’t quite give in to it. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  Emma reached for the basket, but Steven’s hand caught hers and forestalled the motion.

  “We won’t be needing that,” he declared politely. Then for Daisy’s benefit he ad, “I had a basket made up at the hotel.”

  To Emma’s surprise, a broad smile spread across Daisy’s smooth mahogany-colored face. “I’ll just give this here food to the Reverend Hess. That boy’s always hungry.”

  Emma didn’t protest. Food was the last thing on her mind that sunny day in early May, and she wouldn’t have begrudged the pastor anything. She took up the creamcolored shawl she’d crocheted two winters back and draped it nervously around her shoulders. “I guess we’d better get this over with,” she said.

  Steven laughed softly at that and put his hand on the small of her back to guide her toward the front door. His smile, however, was for Daisy. “Mind you don’t flirt too much with the reverend, now,” he warned.

  The cook gave a rich chortle at that and called out, “You just get out o’ my house right now, Johnny Reb.”

  Steven was grinning as he closed the front door and shepherded Emma across the porch, down the steps and the walk to the gate. A horse and buggy, no doubt rented at the livery stable or borrowed from Big John Lenahan, waited in the sun-dappled shade of Chloe’s towering maple trees.

  Emma gave him a sour sidelong look as he opened the gate for her. “It’s plain that Daisy never learned not to trust a flattering rogue,” she remarked.

  Steven closed his hands around Emma’s waist and lifted her none-too-gently onto the leather seat of the rig. “If that’s what you think of me,” he demanded, pushing his hat to the back of his head to look up at her, “what are you doing going on a picnic with me?”

  Emma took grea
t delight in prickling his overblown pride. “You know very well what I’m doing,” she answered in the same haughty tone she’d used on the school grounds as a girl, when the other children had tormented her about Chloe’s method of earning a livelihood. “I’m honoring my end of our agreement. I’ll still detest you when this picnic is over, and you’ll ride out of this town forever, just as you promised.”

  His grin was downright maddening. “Or,” he retorted, “you’ll end up asking me to stay. In fact, I expect you’ll ask real nice, Miss Emma.” He took a few moments to watch the color flood her face, laughed again, and rounded the buggy to climb up in the seat beside her and take the reins.

  “Just where are we going for this picnic?” Emma asked stiffly, pulling her shawl still more closely around her, until she suspected there were little imprints of its design appearing on her upper arms. “The churchyard? There’s a good place down on Cold Creek, too.”

  “Are you waxing helpful all of a sudden?” Steven countered, feigning surprise and driving the horse and buggy straight toward the center of town. In another two minutes, if he didn’t turn to the right, they were going to pass directly in front of the First Territorial Bank.

  Emma clutched his upper arm and immediately withdrew when she felt the granite-hardness of his muscles beneath her fingers. “I don’t want Fulton to see us!” she protested in a somewhat frantic whisper, as though Fulton might have spies stationed in the branches of the elms and maples alogy sides of the street.

  “I’m afraid he probably will,” Steven lamented without any conviction at all, as he continued past the last turn that would have saved Emma from certain exposure. “Sorry, Miss Emma, but there was nothing in our agreement about avoiding the banker.”

  Emma looked down at the hard-packed dirt of the road and calculated that she’d probably turn an ankle if she jumped, not to mention ruining her favorite spring dress. She folded her arms. “You’re deliberately trying to compromise me.”

  “Oh, no, Miss Emma,” Steven assured her suavely, tilting the brim of that obnoxious hat just for a moment. “I haven’t even started on that yet.”

  Emma folded her arms across her bosom and glared straight ahead. “I will not miss you when you leave,” she said coldly. “In fact, I will celebrate.”

  They were passing the First Territorial Bank, and Steven waved at someone inside. Emma didn’t dare look to see who it was, but her cheeks went red and she stomped one foot against the floorboard of the buggy.

  To make bad matters worse, Steven headed straight toward the center of town, stopping only when they came to the base of the wharf where the mail boat tied up when it wasn’t making its rounds of the two other small communities situated on Crystal Lake. It was there, bobbing on the glistening blue waves, its steam engine chugging and chortling away.

  “What—?” Emma began lamely as Steven secured the brake lever, jumped down to the ground, and collected the picnic basket from underneath the seat.

  With a smile on his face, he extended a hand to Emma.

  She would just as soon have bitten him as let him help ner down, but she kept their bargain firmly in mind and laid her hand in his.

  They boarded the mail boat with half the town of Whitneyville looking on from windows and sidewalks; Emma could feel their gazes burning into her back. By the end of the day Fulton would be a raving maniac.

  The cumbersome little boat pulled slowly away from the wharf, bound across the lake to the little town of Onion Creek, which boasted three houses, a public privy, and a one-room schoolhouse.

  “Mornin’, Miss Emma,” said the captain of the small craft. Tom Fillmore was one of the few people in Whitneyville who had treated Emma with respect even before Fulton had taken a fierce and sudden fancy to her. “Fine day for a picnic.”

  Emma considered asking Tom to take her straight back to shore, but in the end she just turned her back on both him and Steven and stood morosely at the railing, staring at the island in the middle. It was an enchanted place to her; she and Chloe had often rowed over when she was a girl, to have picnics and fish for fat lake trout that melted on the tongue when Daisy fried them up.

  Surprise overtook Emma when the mail boat suddenly veered toward the middle of the lake. Since there were no houses on the island, she turned in consternation to see Tom inside the wheelhouse, swinging the vessel toward its shore.

  Steven had been leaning against the jamb of the wheelhouse door, talking with the skipper. Now he strolled to her side, grinnin as though he hadn’t just utterly ruined her reputation.

  “Scoundrel!” she accused through her teeth. “You deliberately let everyone see me with you—including Fulton!”

  Steven arched his eyebrows in a counterfeit expression of surprise. “Don’t tell me Mr. Whitney was slaving over his accounts on a fine day like this one!” He took off his hat and slapped it against one thigh, as if in selfadmonishment, but his smile was downright insolent. “I do apologize, Miss Emma. I keep forgetting these Yankee boys don’t know how to slow down and enjoy life.”

  Emma felt a pull deep inside. She wanted with all her heart and soul to slap him, but that would only have proved that his impudent comments had found their mark. In stiff silence, she turned her face away from him, toward the island that as a child she had whimsically called the Garden of Eden.

  And a portent of something that lay not only in the future, but in the ancient past, reverberated in her heart like the chime of a mystical bell.

  Joellen Lenahan stood with one hand resting on her hip, her plump lower lip jutting out. “Where is he?” she demanded.

  Big John didn’t look up from the paperwork he was fussing over. He just sat there, behind that imposing desk of his, his head bent, his right hand gripping the stub of a pencil. “Who, darlin’?” he asked pleasantly enough.

  Joellen wanted his full attention. She stomped one expensively booted foot, and he raised his head. His blue eyes revealed good-natured bafflement. “Where is Mr. Fairfax?” she pressed, standing directly in front of her daddy’s desk now. “You sent him away, didn’t you? He’s going on that dratted cattle drive!”

  Big John sighed and laid down his pencil. “Sit down, Joellen,” he said, his voice a patient rumble.

  Joellen sank petulantly into the large leather chair and folded her arms across her shapely breasts. She glared at her father, her large green eyes brimming with crystal tears. She was dressed in a pristine white blouse artfully open at the throat and a green velvet skirt, divided so she could ride astride. Her greatest glory, the blonde hair that was the legacy of some Scandinavian ancestor, tumbled free around her shoulders, reaching all the way to her elbows. A green ribbon drew it softly back from her face. And all to impress a certain foreman.

  “You’re forgetting,” her father pointed out reluctantly, “that Steven Fairfax is spoken for. He’s got his eye on Miss Emma Chalmers.”

  Joellen was horrified. “That dowdy little snippet who runs the library? He’s just toying with her, that’s all.”

  Big John shrugged his powerful shoulders. “Miss Emma tries to conduct herself proper-like, and dress the way a lady should, but she’s not dowdy, Joellen, not by a far sight.”

  Miss Lenahan was in no mood to hear a recital of that dreadful woman’s virtues. She steered the conversation in a slightly different direction. “If Steven’s tn up with her, it’s only because he knows she’s loose, and he’s out for what he can get. When it comes time for marrying, he’ll want another sort of woman entirely.”

  Two patches of color appeared on Big John’s leathery cheeks, and his eyes snapped. In that instant, Joellen knew she’d gone too far. “I won’t hear another word against Emma,” he said tightly. “Now, you just run along and forget chasing after Fairfax—do you hear me?”

  Even Joellen didn’t dare cross Big John when he had that look in his eyes. She nodded glumly. “Is he going on the drive?”

  “Yes,” her daddy answered, bending his head over that infernal ledger book of
his. “Now, go on about your business, Joellen, and leave me to mine.”

  Joellen thrust herself from her chair and strode out through the gaping doorway of Big John’s study. She didn’t see why he had to send Steven away on a drive; after all, he was practically the newest man on the place.

  But if Steven had to go, well, there were ways of dealing with a problem like that. A smile brightening her face, Joellen marched confidently out of the house and over to the stables.

  Her new palomino mare trotted to the paddock fence to greet her, golden in the bright spring sunshine. The animal’s mane and tail were just the color of new cream. Climbing up onto the lowest rail of the fence, Joellen reached out to pat the horse’s velvety nose.

  “Hello, Songbird,” she said.

  Songbird whinnied a response, and Joellen forgot all about Steven and Emma Chalmers and the cattle drive—for the time being.

  The mail boat chugged up to the rotting wharf that reached way out over the sparkling blue waters, and Tom Fillmore throttled down the engine.

  Steven tossed the picnic basket over the railing, onto the creaking dock, and vaulted after it. There was an insolent grin in his eyes as he held a hand out to Emma.

  She drew a deep breath and let it out again. Catching the skirts of her white cambric dress in both hands, she eyed the railing with trepidation. If ever there was an idea born in perdition, it was this one. Her blue eyes locked with Steven’s, repaying his friendly mischief with pure sourness. “There’s no way I can climb out of this boat and still behave like a lady,” she said.

  Just when she was thinking she might have gotten herself out of this awful situation, that she might not have to spend the day picnicking with Steven Fairfax after all, Tom Fillmore went and produced a sturdylooking apple crate.

  He set it carefully on the deck, made sure it was steady, and grinned, squinting his eyes in the sunshine. “There you are, Miss Emma,” he said proudly, offering her a grubby hand to grip.

  Resigned, Emma took his hand and stepped up onto the crate. Steven immediately took her elbow, and she stepped down onto the creaky wharf.