She was beautiful. Strange, Jake thought, that it seemed like years since he’d noticed a woman. Of course, never before had a woman demanded his attention in such a way. But he liked that about her, too. Cecilia Summertree was the most tenacious, forthright woman he’d ever met. He had no doubt that if she set her mind to do something, she’d do it.
Like run him out of town on a rail.
Jake frowned. That woman could mean trouble. Big trouble.
* * *
Cecilia barreled toward Dolly Hudspeth’s boardinghouse as fast as the heat would allow. But it wasn’t only the temperature that caused her to flush red. She couldn’t wait to ensconce herself in the privacy of her spacious room and start plotting her revenge. That slimy hand-kissing Alabama Yankee wasn’t going to get the best of her.
“Cecilia, wait up!”
At the sound of Buck’s voice Cecilia stopped and turned, her arms akimbo. “Buck, why are you following me?”
He came up short a few feet away, his face a mask of confusion. “You told me to.”
That’s right, she did—but then, she hadn’t been thinking clearly at the time. With a limp wave, she attempted to shoo him away. “Well, never mind. Go home. And don’t you dare whisper a word of this to my father!”
A wide smile broke across Buck’s face. It was a handsome face, bronzed from the sun. His hair was colored a light brown and his blue eyes were open and friendly. Too friendly, Cecilia thought. The man hadn’t stopped pestering her since she’d come home from New Orleans in disgrace.
“Don’t you think it’s time you came back to the ranch, Cici?” he asked. “Not much keeping you in town now.”
Not much, Cecilia agreed, except the thinnest thread of civilization, which incidentally meant everything to her, although she couldn’t expect the heathens she was surrounded by to understand. There was no way she was going back to that ranch. She’d go out of her mind with boredom, and the tension there between her and her father was thick enough to cut with a knife. No, thank you. That house had seen too much sadness.
Cecilia had watched her poor delicate mother languish for years on that blasted ranch, fretful and depressed. Not that her father had cared. He’d allowed his wife to return to her people in Memphis for visits to her family, but she’d inevitably come back ahead of schedule, unable to stay away from that mournful place. When she’d finally died of scarlet fever, her parting words to Cecilia had been instructions on where not to live, and Cecilia had taken the advice to heart.
Even so, before Evelyn Summertree’s eyes had closed that last time, she’d been watching out the window, waiting, her eyes scanning the hated barren landscape.
“I’m staying in town,” Cecilia said firmly, fighting against a familiar ache in her heart that came with thoughts of her mother.
Buck ambled closer, one thumb looped at his belt. “Aw, c’mon, Cici. You don’t really believe the man’s not a schoolteacher, do you?”
“Didn’t you hear him call me a beautiful flower? What kind of snake-oil salesman talks like that?”
“But you are,” Buck responded with a grin that made Cecilia puff in exasperation. “Besides, he looked just like a regular fella to me.”
“That’s just the trouble, Buck. Everyone looks nice to you.”
“Especially you, sweetheart.”
She ignored the flirtatious comment. “Besides, he looked too much like a regular fellow—not a teacher. He was staring around the place as if he hadn’t been in a classroom before!”
“Maybe it looked different than the ones up North.”
Cecilia bit her lip thoughtfully. No, there was something else....
Before she could finish her thought, Buck took another troubling step forward and then pulled her to his chest. Cecilia freed herself with one firm shove.
“Buck, go home,” she repeated. “I’m staying here.”
He crossed his arms, growing petulant. “How are you going to pay for your room?” he asked. “Your father won’t give you money for that.”
“Leave my father out of this. As far as you’re concerned, the new schoolteacher still hasn’t arrived. I’ll figure out a way to pay Dolly.”
“Your father’s going to find out sooner or later, you know,” Buck warned sensibly, “and he’s going to be madder than a hornet when he finds out you didn’t come back to the ranch first thing.”
“I know, I know.” First she was kicked out of Miss Brubeck’s, now this little deception. When he found out, her father would probably lock her in her room till the turn of the century. Well, she’d cross that tedious little bridge when she came to it. At least locked in her room she wouldn’t have to deal with randy ranch hands.
“Let me worry about my father,” she said with finality. “If nothing else I’ll tell him that I still have work at the school. You heard what Beasley said about helping Pendergast get settled.” As if anyone would need help running that ragtag little school—and as if she would actually do it!
Buck looked away, trying to think of an argument to dissuade her. Not surprisingly, nothing came to him. “It’s your funeral,” he said at last. Smashing his hat more firmly on his head, he turned and ambled away. Toward Grady’s saloon, no doubt.
Freed from that appendage, if not from her worries, Cecilia continued full steam toward Dolly’s. Oh, she had known it would be hard to give up her teaching job—though during the past week, when the man failed to show up, she was beginning to hold out hope that he would never arrive. Now his breezing into town late made losing her position all the more agonizing.
Eugene Pendergast! She didn’t know why he struck such a chord in her, but something about the man wasn’t right. He didn’t look right. He didn’t talk right. His clothes fit funny.
Damnation! This temporary teaching job had been such a godsend. After being sent home from New Orleans in disgrace, she’d desperately needed a way to get out from under her father’s disapproving glare. She and her father had clashed ever since she’d been old enough to wear long skirts. He thought her only purpose in life was to get married, preferably to a rich rancher, and since her mother had died when she was twelve, there was no one to take her side.
No, it was always Cecilia against the world. Convincing her father to send her to New Orleans had seemed such a coup, so freeing. Then, due to her own stupidity, she’d been sent home for “rowdy behavior.” Just because she sneaked out one night—just that once! But what was the point of being in New Orleans, she’d insisted, if you could only see a tiny, well-manicured portion of it, and then only during the daytime with a fussy old chaperone?
Her father had been livid. She’d jumped at the opportunity to move into town and serve as schoolteacher until the real one came along. A room of her own in Dolly Hudspeth’s boardinghouse wasn’t like living in New Orleans, but it was as close to it as she was going to get in the foreseeable future. Now the schoolteacher had arrived—supposedly—disrupting her life yet again....
But she wasn’t willing to admit defeat yet.
Cecilia marched up the dirt path to Dolly’s, the only two-story house in town. Dolly’s husband, Jubal, had been the first blacksmith in the area, so they had been prosperous before his untimely death. Now Dolly made do by renting out the extra rooms in the generous house her husband had built for her.
Grateful to finally have some privacy to think through her troubles, Cecilia headed