Nora. Diana Palmer
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Having given up on removing the foul stench from her hand, she fanned herself with a colorful cardboard fan obtained from the porter on the train. It was the last week in August and unbearably hot. It must be from the gulf breezes that danced up from the nearby coast, she thought, wondering at the smothering intensity of it. Back East, one would expect furious storms when confronted with this sort of heat. Just the year before, there had been a hurricane on the eastern coast, one that had taken the life of a cousin. She had nightmares about high water that remained with her even now.
She was almost overcome by the smothering humidity. The corset she was wearing under her long skirt and long-sleeved jacket was robbing her of breath.
Not that her companion looked much cooler, she had to admit. His thin shirt was soaked in front, and she was surprised that her eyes were drawn to the vividly outlined hard muscles of his arms and his hair-roughened chest. She had seen men of other races without shirts, but she had never seen any gentleman in a similar condition. This man was no gentleman, though. It was incomprehensible that a common laborer should stir senses that she had always kept impervious to any sort of physical attraction. Why, he made her nervous! And the slender hands holding the wooden handle of the neat fan, with its colorful representation of the Last Supper on one side and an advertisement for a funeral home on the other, were actually trembling.
“You work for my uncle Chester, do you not?” she asked, trying to make conversation.
“Yep.”
She waited, but the one word was all the response he gave.
“What do you do?” she added, thinking that he might work in some more skilled job than just punching cattle.
His head turned slowly. Under the shadow of the wide-brimmed hat, his silver eyes glittered like diamonds. “I’m a cowboy, of course. I work cattle. You might have noticed that my boots are full of…” He enunciated the slang word that described the caked substance on his boots. He said it with deliberate intent. To add insult to the word, he grinned.
The reply made her face red. She should hit him, but she wouldn’t. She wasn’t going to do what he obviously expected her to do and rage at his lack of decency and delicacy. She only gave him her most vacant look and then made a slight movement of her shoulders in dismissal and turned her attention to the fall landscape as if nothing had been said at all.
Having traveled through West Texas once, even without stopping, she was aware of the differences in climate and vegetation from one side of Texas to the other. There were no cacti and desert here. The trees were magnolias and dogwoods and pines; the grass was still green despite the lateness of the year, and high where cattle grazed behind long white fences and gray-posted barbed-wire fences. The horizon seemed to sit right on the ground in the distance, as there were no hills or mountains at all. The haze of heat could be seen rising from the ponds, or tanks, where cattle drank. There were two rivers that ran parallel to the Tremayne ranch, her aunt had written, which might explain that lush landscape.
“It is very beautiful here,” she remarked absently. “So much more beautiful than the other side of the state.”
He gave her a sharp glance. “You easterners,” he scoffed. “You think a thing has to be green to be pretty.”
“Of course it does,” she replied simply, staring at his profile. “How can a desert be pretty?”
His head turned and he studied her with narrow eyes. “Well, a hothouse petunia like you might find it hard going, for sure.”
She gave him a hard stare. “I am not a hothouse plant. I have hunted lions and tigers in Africa,” she embroidered on her one-day safari, “and—”
“And one night on the Texas desert would be your undoing,” he interrupted pleasantly. “A rattler would crawl into your bedroll with you, and that’s the last you’d be seen until winter.”
She shuddered at just the thought of a rattlesnake. She had read about the vile creatures in Mr. Beadle’s novel series.
He saw her reaction, although she belatedly tried to hide it. He threw back his head and roared. “And you hunted lions?” he asked outrageously, laughing harder.
She made a harsh sound under her breath. “You nasty-smelling brute!”
“Well, while we’re on the subject of smells,” he said, leaning toward her to take a breath and then making a terrible face, “you smell like sunned polecat yourself.”
“Only because you refused to help me into the seat and I fell on your foul-smelling…” She gestured helplessly toward the wide leather chaps. “Those things!” She pointed at them, flustered.
He leaned a little toward her, his eyes sparkling with humor. “Legs, darlin’,” he contributed. “They’re called legs.”
“Those leather things!” she raged. “And I am not your darling!” she burst out, her poise deserting her as she flew off the seat.
He chuckled. “Oh, you might wish you were, one day. I have some admirable qualities,” he added.
“Let me out of this buggy! I’ll walk!” she raged.
He shook his head. “Now, now, you’d get sore feet and I’d get fired, and we wouldn’t want that, now would we?”
“Yes, we would!”
He grinned at her red face and wide, furious eyes. They were like blue flames, and she had a pretty, soft mouth. He had to force his attention back to the road. “Your uncle couldn’t manage without me right now. Now, you sit easy, there, Miss Marlowe, and just let your blood cool. I’m a fine fellow once you get to know me.”
“I have no intention of getting to know you!”
“My, my, you do get riled easy, don’t you? And here I thought you rich ladies from back East were even-tempered.” He flipped the reins, increasing the horse’s speed gently.
“The ones who were probably hadn’t met you yet!” she exploded.
His head turned, and something twinkled in his silver-gray eyes before he glanced back toward the road with a tiny smile on his hard mouth.
Nora didn’t see that smile, although she had the feeling that he was laughing at her under the enormously wide brim of his hat. He’d knocked her legs right out from under her, until she couldn’t even find a comeback. It was a new experience for her, and not one she enjoyed. No man had ever made her mad enough to yell like a fishwife. She was ashamed of her outburst. She settled into her seat and ignored him, pointedly, for the rest of the drive.
THE RANCH HOUSE was long and flat, but it was white as sand and had a long, elegant front porch and a white picket fence around Aunt Helen’s beautiful mixed flower gardens. Aunt Helen was standing on the porch when the wagon pulled up at the walkway, looking so much like her mother that Nora felt immediately homesick.
“Aunt Helen!” she exclaimed, laughing as she stepped onto the hub of the wagon wheel and stepped gingerly down out of the wagon unassisted, before the man beside her could display more of his bad manners by showing her aunt how he ignored common courtesy.
She ran to the older woman and was hugged warmly. “Oh, it is good to see you again!” she enthused, her face animated and lovely as she pushed back the veil to reveal her exquisite complexion and bright, deep blue eyes.
“Mr. Barton, it would have been courteous to have helped Nora from the wagon,” Aunt Helen told the man who bore her luggage to the porch.
“Yes, ma’am, I meant to, but she lit out of it like a scalded chicken,” he said with outrageous courtesy, even tipping his hat to Helen, and he smiled charmingly as he waited for her to open the front door and direct him to the bedroom Nora would occupy. Beast! Nora thought. The word was in her eyes as he passed her, and his silver eyes registered it and twinkled with pure hellish amusement. She jerked her head around angrily.
When he was out of sight, Helen grimaced. “He