Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(45)



Micah, Bud, and the others rushed to them.

“Oh, no!” Sally cried. “Poor girl!”

As abruptly as Romy and Duke’s interlocked bodies had collided with the fence post, his expression transmuted, as if he had been poleaxed by some revelation. From there that expression just as rapidly went livid.

He spat to one side a mouthful of dirt. “You don’t have the common sense that God gave a goose, Romy Sonnenschein.” His palms splayed to either side of her shoulders and bench pressed his weighty body into a push-up off her flattened one.

She floundered to a sitting position, at which he bent over her and ran short-circuiting, examining fingers across her collarbones, along both her arms, around her rib cage, and down her thighs and calves. Every particle of her splintered, as if lightning-struck.

Before, having being subjected to other impersonal examining hands, she should feel only numbness at this inspection. His impassive face was reminiscent of the indifferent one of the German doctors. She should have withered beneath his touch, yet, contradictorily, her body quivered like a strummed guitar string.

From behind, Sally asked. “Is she okay, Duke?”

“Yeah, she’ll pass muster,” he grunted. He retrieved his battered hat, giving it a brutal dusting against his thigh, and crushed it low on his head.

Romy stood shakily. Feeling ignominious, she focused on brushing the dirt from Bud’s old denims that she wore. She had learned to laugh things off, had learned that laughter was the best defense; but Duke’s countenance, as usual, quite ably decimated that normally reliable defense.

The brute. The bloody bugger.

Nevertheless, his actions – they spoke louder than his words. He had put himself in harm’s way for her this afternoon.

He stalked back to the corral chute, and on wobbling legs she walked back to the ranch house. Inside, she passed the scrubby mesquite Christmas tree that mocked the season with its expectations of good cheer.

The smell of the roasting turkey, the aroma of sage and rosemary and celery dressing, should have been a balm to her lacerated spirit and body. They weren’t. Still, she told herself she could do this. She could carry off this Christmas dinner and its attendant festivities.

Yet, she was not sure how much longer she could stave off this burgeoning awareness of desire her untutored body was feeling . . . stave off this unwarranted elemental lust she was feeling for her employer.

She was getting better at wielding the stove’s contrary knobs and gauges. She primed the kitchen pump to wash her hands and began dicing the garden’s onions . . . and sniffling.

Beer bottle in hand, Jock shuffled into the kitchen. She swiped the sleeve of Duke’s shirt across both cheeks and went back to dicing.

“That no-good saddle tramp Duke McClellan gotcha crying, Romy?”

She shook her head, not daring to look at the Scotsman. “Tis the onions. Do ye mind setting the table for me, Jock?”

She heard the cabinet door hinge’s groan, the clacking of the platters on the long table, and then his saying, “Aye, that Duke McClellan is a desperado trying desperately to make good.”

“Well, he has a stretch to go to get to good.” She kept her gaze and her attention on the cutting board.

Then came the clanging of the flatware. “After riding the high seas, instead of a bronco all these years, he’s used to things being ship-shape, ye understand.” Most assuredly, the robust whiff of beer was responsible for Jock’s slightly slurred brogue. “Yuir arrival at the S&S blew ship-shape all to hell and back.”

Her mouth compressed. She looked over her shoulder at the gray-haired, wiry man, now doling out glasses with a distinct clanging. “Listen, Jock, I know I am not the neatest per – ”

“Neat? Neat has nothing to do with it, lass. No need to borry trouble.”

She grimaced and said drily, “Tis sure I am that ye want to enlighten meself.”

“Organized has everything to do with it. After a life of wandering the Seven Seas, Duke came back to Texas to establish an organized life.”

“An organized life?” She rubbed a damp cheek once more with the back of her wrist. “What in God’s good name does that mean?”

“Ye’re the fortune teller, lass.”

She thrust the knife point into the cutting board and turned to face the old geezer. “Then, I’ll tell ye, Jock. Organized for Duke means the proper home, the proper wife, and two bairn – one of each sex, the male being first born – and the proper wife being someone like Charlotte or Sally.”

“Sally’s father might have it in his noodle that as a yoked pair his daughter and Duke could tame Texas. But Duke McClellan is not for the faint of heart, mind ye.”

“Nay, Duke McClellan is for the hard of heart – to match his.”

And while Sally would not be numbered among the faint of hearts, she would never be able to dominate him, which might make her drop out of the running.

The screen and front doors banged consecutively, and the interspersed clinks of spurs cut a path for the kitchen.

“Bud,” she told the first to show up, “bring in the pan of rolls I set to rising on the stoop.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, grinning and heading for the kitchen’s back door. The kid had taken to following her footsteps with adulation in his eyes. “And dunna eat any of the dough,” she called over her shoulder. “And the rest of ye lunkheads, wash up.”

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