The Genuine Lady (Heroines on Horseback) Read Free Page B

the more luscious? Jared tried not to think so. But he couldn’t help but look at the scene with another kind of longing, removed from a young man’s hot sexual desire: he was no young pup, out to sew his wild oats; he was a man feeling himself aging without children, a man who had once dreamed of a family and a ranch and a riot of sons and daughters pouring out of his front door to meet him of an evening, a man who had once seen a belly rounding and thought it was of his own seed and his own love and his own desire, and found himself sadly mistaken. The sleeping baby pressed against this woman’s chest only served to tighten the constriction in his chest, the hard knot of desire and longing in his throat. We’ll call him Andrew, for your father, he’d said, and she’d laughed and said “You’re his father, you can choose his name.”
    The memory hammered away his desire; he scarcely saw the slumbering woman and child anymore, consumed instead with the woman who had laughed and turned away from him. He squared his jaw, creased his forehead, clenched his eyebrows, looked generally like a person in a fit of rage, perhaps inclined to go insane with an ax, and then that damned roan whinnied, like a fool, and the mule in the lean-to brayed back.  
    Her eyes flew open, and when she saw the shadow in the shanty window, she screamed.  

    ***

    Red Indians. That was her first thought, once she got over the initial moment of shrieking terror, hands clutching Little Edward against her chest, heart nearly bursting with rapid-fire thuds. The Red Indians had come to scalp her.
    Then the face moved, jumped away from the window, and she saw the wide tan brim of the Stetson, that funny hat cowboys liked to swagger about in. Red Indians didn’t wear Stetsons. She was certain of that. She had never seen one in person, thank heavens, but all the magazine illustrations assured her that Red Indians wore eagle-feather headdresses. 
    This was a white man. A cowboy? Another homesteader? A claim-jumper? The last thought gave her pause. A claim-jumper was surely just as dangerous as a Red Indian. There had been stories… she had heard them during her few trips into Bradshaw, buying beans and pickles at the general store, lurking behind the shelves of dusty iron tools while she listened to the gossip at the counter. Women alone were the most at risk from these thieving murderers, and there were some men who sent their wives back east, or into Bradshaw to stay together in a house, huddled together for safety in numbers, while the men labored alone on the claims.  
    But there was no one more alone than Cherry, with no husband at all.
    Her hands tightened on Edward, and the baby, awakened and alarmed by his mother’s trembling body and the braying mule a few feet from their heads, raised his own voice and began to weep with the frustration of good sleep lost. The hat moved furtively away from the window, and through the howling cries Cherry distinctly heard a man’s voice call: “Sorry ma’am.”
    Oh, really! Sorry, was he? And was the Stetson-wearer really just some nosey neighbor, snooping around her homestead, waking her baby, and scaring her nearly to death? What outrageous behavior! Cherry’s jaw took on a forbidding tilt, demonstrating the same tight ferocity she had displayed when Lady Walsall had forbidden her to attend Edward’s funeral, when the doors of society were barred against her, when her cousin Mrs. George Braithwhite told her that she had no longer had a guest room to accommodate her but offered the kitchen chamber and a place in the staff of her Washington Square mansion. It was an altogether formidable look, and greater men than Jared Reese had felt a cold shiver run down their spine when it was turned upon them.
    She was up and out of her rocking chair before the Stetson could escape her view, and still buttoning up her bodice with nimble fingers, her left arm clutching Little Edward to her side. Of the trio, Little