“Can’t much blame ’em ,” one man had commented.
There was a nodding of heads and a general agreement, then the bartender swiped a rag over the bar and said, “You gotta admit, though, some men jest don’t like to work for their money.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said a grizzled farmer as he downed the last of his beer and wiped the foam from his bushy mustache with his sleeve.
“It ain’t the piss-poor pay,” declared the man standing next to him, “It’s that daughter of his. They say she’d scare the gizzard out of a wild hog.”
Eli thought now about all he’d heard about Jackson’s legendary daughter, who was currently away at school. According to rumor, Lilah Jackson was big, tough, could outride and outshoot any man and would deck the first one who touched her.
Eli didn’t feel the least bit threatened. She could be pretty as a picture and dainty as a rosebud and he still wouldn’t be in any danger. After giving his heart to one woman, offering his name to another, and losing them both, he had nothing left to give.
When Abigail had married his best friend, he had cut his losses and headed west again. As for Rosemary, she had been stolen right out from under his nose. He’d had no choice but to go after her.
He’d been working as sheriff of Crow Fly the day she’d come riding into town on the stage, planning on moving in with an elderly cousin. Trouble was, the cousin was already dead, her house and whatever paltry assets she’d once owned, sold to repay her debts and the cost of her burial.
Broke, with no place to go and no means of getting there, Rosemary Smith had appealed to the sheriff. “What can I do?” she’d pleaded, tears streaming down her cheeks. “It took my last penny to come west to take care of my dear cousin—all in the world I have left is this.” She’d held out a gold chain from which dangled a big ugly pendant in the shape of a teardrop. “It belonged to my mother—see, her name’s engraved all around it?” She’d held it out for him to examine, but without shoving his face up to her bosom, he couldn’t make out the fine script.
“Yes, ma’am,” he’d said politely, wondering if he should offer her his dusty bandana to dry her eyes.
“Now Mama’s gone, and Cousin Carrie’s gone, and there’s no one left, and I—I—” She had blinked her enormous blue eyes, the lashes matted with tears. “I would rather starve to death than sell Mama’s necklace,” she’d declared dramatically. “Papa had it made especially for her b-before he—he died.”
More weeping. One thing had led to another, and Eli had ended up settling her into the big empty house his grandfather had left him, with a widow woman to look after her. Crow Fly didn’t run to a boardinghouse, much less a hotel.
He had offered to pay her passage back home, but she claimed she had no home to return to. In the end, he had offered to marry her. It was the only way he could think of for an honorable man to protect a respectable woman who had no one else to turn to.
About a month later, having spent three days tracking a band of rustlers, Eli had headed home, dog tired and feeling, though he’d hated to admit it, more like a coyote caught in a steel trap than a man about to be married to a pretty woman. Something told him Rosemary wasn’t going to be satisfied for long being the wife of a country sheriff, but at that point in his life, it had been about his only option. If he hadn’t already squandered his inheritance, he might have been further ahead in his plans to rebuild the barns and fences, invest in a small herd of short-horn Oregonians and gradually breed up to high-quality beef.
He’d started smelling smoke a few miles out that day. By the time he reached Crow Fly, three miles from home, he’d known. Known it in his bones, the way Shem always knew when a storm was coming, he thought now, picturing the scene that had confronted him that day.
The house had still been smoldering. The woman he’d left behind to look after Rosemary had been tied up in the barn, which was still standing. “Scary as the devil, he were,” the woman had sobbed. “Streak of white hair right here—” She’d pointed to the left side of her head. “He took Miss Rosemary up with him, and lit out o’ here, laughing like anything. It was the devil, I’m tellin’ you, Mr. Eli. The devil done stole your woman and rode away with her, and there weren’t one blessed thing I could do about it. It’s a wonder he didn’t steal me, too.”
Eli hadn’t blamed the widow. With a big purple knot just over one eye, probably from the butt of a pistol, she’d been trussed up and left with a handkerchief in her mouth. Likely would’ve died that way if Eli hadn’t heard the muffled sounds coming from the barn, because his first impulse had been to ride out immediately, before the trail had time to cool off.
That had been about eighteen months ago. For a man of less than thirty years, he felt older than all the mountains he’d crossed and then recrossed, all the rivers he’d forded heading east and then west, and then east again.
“You ain’t eatin’ tonight, boy.” Shem, his eyes wreathed in wrinkles, but still bright with interest and intelligence, finger-combed the corn-bread crumbs from his gray beard and reached for his tobacco pouch.
“I’m not hungry. Been doing book work all day.” What he needed was to saddle up and ride for a couple of days, sleeping on the ground, watching the stars wheel overhead. Trouble with that was it gave a man too much time to think.
And Eli had too much to think about, most of it painful.
“Rain comin’.”
“Yep. Noticed the clouds.”
“Miss Lilah, she’ll be coming home pretty soon for the summer.”
“Lord he’p us,” Streak said.
There was general laughter, and even Eli had to grin. Might be entertaining to watch the new hires—single men, all three of them—react to the ball-busting Miss Delilah Jackson. He wondered if any of them had signed on after hearing that Jackson had a marriageable daughter. Anticipating some pampered, petite female, they’d soon be splashing off at the horse trough, slapping on cologne and lining up to go courting.
Catching Shem’s eye, he could tell the old man was thinking the same thing he was. “How ’bout you, Eli, you bein’ the manager, you got first dibs. She’s a real sweet woman. I’ve knowed her since the day she was born. It was me that named her, did I ever tell you ’bout that?”
He had. Several times. Shem liked to talk, and Eli was in the habit of listening.
“You already told him,” Streak growled, to no effect.
“Well, the way it happened, see—Burke, he was so broke up over her ma’s dyin’, he didn’t pay no mind a’tall to the babe. It was me that found her a wet nurse and finally give her a name so she could be sprinkled in the church. It was me that set her on top of her first horse and taught her to ride. She growed up to be a fine woman, too, so don’t you listen to what nobody says. You could do a whole lot worse.”
Eli’s grin broadened. Considering his weakness for delicate ladies, he’d be safe enough from Jackson’s paragon. He liked women as much as the next man—liked their frailties, their femininity—truth was, he liked everything about them, even when their tears leaked all over the front of his shirt the way Rosemary’s had the first day she’d come tumbling out of the stagecoach, landing practically at his feet.
Oh, yeah, he was a sucker when it came to helpless females. Never had been able to resist them. But even if he’d been free, Miss Jackson wasn’t the kind of woman he would ever be drawn to.
Burke Jackson in skirts? No, sir, he sure as hell wouldn’t be tempted by that.
“I’m going home, I don’t care what Papa says,” Delilah Jackson declared as she slammed another layer of clothing into her trunk. She was barefooted, wearing