Susan Johnson Read online

  He was a much better teacher than Hazard because he was a much better cook. “Learned from my ma,” he said when Blaze complimented him. He was stirring up a batch of biscuits and making it look like an effortless exercise. “Put some flour on the table there, and I’ll show you how to roll these out. Is the fire goin’ good?”

  He’d taught Blaze where to look now, and she reported back that it was indeed “goin’ good.” So in what seemed an incredibly short time, to someone who viewed bags of flour, sugar, and potatoes with as much familiarity as a foreign language, lunch was prepared. The biscuits had just been taken from the oven, while steaks simmered in butter-drenched onions in a large skillet and small new potatoes steamed in a milk sauce laced with wild chives.

  “You’re an absolute marvel,” Blaze conceded, awed by the young boy’s expertise. “How did you possibly manage to get everything done at the same time?”

  “Just have to know how to count, ma’am. It ain’t hard. The stuff that takes the longest, well, you start with that first.”

  “It seems so easy when you do it.” Blaze sighed.

  “You helped too, ma’am,” he politely acceded, avoiding mention of all the near-disasters Blaze’s attempts at helping had occasioned.

  When Hazard walked in five minutes later, Jimmy gave directions and the food was arranged on the table. Hazard was lavish with his praise, and sincerely so. His own cooking was of the most rudimentary sort, so Jimmy’s meal was deeply appreciated.

  “He’s really wonderful,” Blaze agreed, and was warmed by a smiling glance from Hazard. “Although I’m afraid I was more trouble than help. Who’d ever think cutting an onion would be so difficult?”

  “It weren’t your fault it rolled on the floor, Miss.” (Hazard had corrected his “ma’am.”) “Should have told you to cut off one end flat first. And it won’t take you long to catch on to rolling dough.”

  Blaze thought otherwise; the sticky dough had been as recalcitrant as Hazard of late, she reflected with a smile.

  “You rolled dough?” Hazard asked, a pleasant smile curving his fine mouth.

  “Mashed it ruinously, I’m afraid. First it stuck to the glass, then to the table, then to my hands.” She brushed a distracted hand through her hair in a sweetly winsome way that made Hazard think suddenly she should have something to wear besides the black slacks and linen shirt. As if the men’s clothes seemed out of place with the feminine gesture. If he’d thought much about it then, it was the very first provision he’d made to accommodate her. Making a mental note to see to her wardrobe, he gallantly said, “I’m sure Jimmy couldn’t have done it without you.”

  Blaze’s long-lashed eyes swept a flashing look at Hazard, the gallant remark reminding her of the exquisite man in evening dress at the Territorial Ball. It always disconcerted her—the civilized behavior, the cultured voice, the occasional lapses in chivalry. His image was so adamantly Indian here on the mountain, half clothed, dressed in beaded leather, all bronzed flesh and long black hair. But when she saw there was no mockery in the starkly handsome face, she responded in kind. “I’m sure he very well could, but thank you all the same. It never hurts to try some new accomplishment.”

  “Do you suppose, then, in a week or so, we can add biscuits to our hot chocolate and strawberry menu?” His grin was pure sunshine.

  “Perhaps with much prayer and dedication,” Blaze replied, her own mouth lifting in an answering smile.

  Her blithe emotional openness charmed him. Their eyes met over Jimmy’s towhead and a buoyant conviviality traversed the short distance.

  “Would a prayer ceremony in the kitchen help?” he teased.

  “Bite your tongue. My mother’s forebears would roll over in their Methodist graves.” Her blue eyes were alight with laughter.

  “I’d take my chances with distraught specters if my meals all tasted like this.”

  Jimmy didn’t understand all that was going on over his head, but he understood the smiles and reckoned that dishes mightn’t be smashed so much anymore. “I’ll help whenever I can get away from McTaggert’s and Ma,” he offered.

  He was rewarded with smiling thanks from both adults.

  “See, you needn’t waste any time with rites and rituals. Jimmy will see to my education.”

  “So amenable? What have I been doing wrong?”

  “Just about everything,” Blaze quipped, and added with decorum, “except for one thing, which you do very well.”

  The look passing between them this time could have scorched a prairie landscape in need of rain.

  “Mind your manners,” Hazard said very softly, after he’d recaptured the breath in his lungs.

  “I’ve never minded manners much. So tedious,” Blaze cheerfully replied, pleased by his reaction.

  “And I don’t suppose this is the time or place to change your mind.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she airily said, her smile lushly captivating. “I might be willing to change my mind about something if you wanted to change your mind about some things.” The last word was a low murmur.

  Resolutely steeling himself to resist the rich sensuality, Hazard blandly observed, “Not likely, with what’s at stake. Although,” he went on, all gentlemanly courtesy, “I assure you, it’s not from lack of wanting.”

  “How reassuring.”

  “My pleasure. And now,” Hazard said, rising, “back to work. Thank you both.” He bowed in a slow, relaxed motion, the muscles across his chest flexing with the movement. Pausing halfway to the door, he addressed Jimmy. “Stop at the mine before you leave. I’ll send some gold back with you for supplies.”

  “Sure thing, Hazard. Soon as Miss and me does the dishes.”

  “Again?” Blaze blurted out, astonished that everything seemed to be beginning all over again.

  “Maybe Papa will arrive soon,” Hazard suggested, his eyes amused, “and save you from the drudgery.”

  Blaze grimaced slightly. “Either that, or may a full complement of staff appear while my hands are still lily-white.”

  She amazed him quite regularly. No timid woman here. She was sure of herself, devoid of fear. And splendid. A pity he couldn’t enjoy her without all the restrictions. In different circumstances … But then, he reminded himself harshly, two more different people, and circumstances, and cultures couldn’t possibly be imagined.

  Blaze would have liked to walk over to him, standing there in the middle of the room, and kiss him lightly on the cheek. He could make her smile so easily, could warm her with his own smile; he made her feel curiously content for the first time in her life when he turned the full power of his dark glance on her. And the tall, lean, broad-shouldered body was beautiful, too. A pity, she thought, he felt so strongly about duty. Having been raised in an utterly selfish world, she found the virtue in duty intellectually valid, but emotionally unsatisfying.

  “I’ll see what I can do about it,” Hazard said, interrupting her musing.

  She looked startled.

  “The lily-white hands,” he explained.

  “She can wipe,” Jimmy interjected, at last finding something he understood in this adult conversation.

  “Good. It’s settled then.” Hazard smiled and left.

  WHEN Jimmy went down mountain an hour later, the list he carried in his head was extensive and his instructions were explicit: he was to say nothing to anyone about the woman in the cabin. As though the whole town weren’t buzzing with the story already. But he knew even at his very young age how to be discreet, his loyalty to Hazard being second only to his family. So he was careful making his purchases; one of the young stockboys at Klein’s General Store, happy for a twenty-dollar gold piece to sell him a large crated item after the store closed for the night. And if anyone asked, Jimmy knew he wouldn’t mention who’d bought it.

  The stockboy and Jimmy loaded Hazard’s horses early the following morning—the horses Hazard kept in Pernell’s pasture for a monthly boarding fee. And long before Diamond City was awake, Jimmy wa
s halfway up the trail to Hazard’s cabin, rechecking his list mentally to make sure he’d forgotten nothing.

  Chapter 12

  “I tell you, Millicent”—Yancy had taken to addressing his employer’s wife by her Christian name since the Colonel had disappeared into the mountains—with her tacit consent, he had noted—“there’s no sense in waiting for the Colonel to return. One damn Injun. It’s ridiculous to wait. Hell, we can blow him out of there in a minute.”

  Millicent Braddock reflected. Her husband had left precise orders—ones which left no doubt of what he wanted done in his absence—nothing. He knew Yancy had a reputation for violence not always in proportion to need.

  “The Colonel won’t allow any chances taken with his precious daughter,” she reminded him. “It’s all well and good to talk about blowing him up, but the Colonel would have both our heads if our actions endangered his darling.”

  Yancy and Millicent understood each other perfectly. Both had been obliged, due to the declining fortunes of their old Virginia families, to look afield for ways to mend their dynasties. But they’d never fully accepted this necessity. At least not with any graciousness. A burning resentment always smoldered under the surface, for neither of them had ever expected to have to work for a living. In Millicent’s case, being married to the Braddock money certainly was work. For Yancy the humiliation was more overt. He’d actually had to find a job after the Civil War had dispossessed him of even the family’s heavily mortgaged plantation.

  “And you?” Yancy inquired with the barest suggestion of irony.

  Millicent had spent a lifetime cultivating the nuances of a southern lady’s conduct. “Why, Mr. Strahan,” she admonished, just the proper degree of affront in her voice, “I am her mother. Need I remind you?”

  “Begging your pardon, ma’am,” Yancy replied, his eyes as devoid of feeling as hers, “I’m only concerned with the Colonel’s property. It made me forget myself for a moment.” His tone was as properly contrite as hers was properly affronted. They were like two actors playing excessively polite roles while their minds went over the evening’s social engagements. It came as second nature to them both—the intricate set of insincere behavioral formulas. Each knew how the other felt about the Colonel, his daughter, and his money, but the game required certain politic rules.

  Eventually they’d come to an agreement. It was simply a matter of the negotiations being couched in accepted propriety. The unacknowledged accomplices went in to dinner, something the Braddock servants were finding an increasing, if distasteful, occurrence.

  Chapter 13

  After a second restless night, Hazard woke on his bed of buffalo robes and forced his tired body up. He stretched lazily, every muscle responding a millisecond late. Today, he thought, would not be a good day to face a crisis, with his brain and body sluggish from fatigue and Blaze’s presence filling his thoughts with an exclusivity detrimental to concise thinking.

  Quietly, he slipped from the cabin without waking Blaze and strolled down to the pool. The morning reminded him of so many from his youth: fresh, sunny, a whisper of a breeze rippling through the aspen. And he wished, in a fleeting moment, for that innocence again. A time of only his tribe on these lands, only the anticipation of some childhood pleasure—a horse race or a game of hoop and pole, nothing more pressing in the course of a day than the normal competition between boyish companions.

  Standing on the mossy stream bank, he sighed and the nostalgia dissipated. The sun still came up vivid and limitless over the same rugged crest of mountain landscape, but nothing else was the same. His people had moved north of these mountains, where white men hadn’t come looking for gold yet or tried their plows in the mountain valleys. His innocence had vanished even before the yellow eyes had come into his life. And now he labored like the slave Blaze accused him of making her, labored inside the dim earth day after day, in hopes of saving his people from the fate of other tribes dispossessed by the white man’s expansion. Gold was the answer. The ultimate answer for every problem. Well, almost every problem, he ironically noted. Gold wasn’t going to solve this overpowering need he felt for his willful companion. He knew, of course, what would solve the problem.… Abruptly, he dove into the pool, hoping the chill water would briefly assuage the carnal direction of his thoughts.

  WHEN Blaze woke an hour later, the cabin was still, trilling birdsong outside the only sound. Tossing aside the covers, she sat up, her glance sweeping the small room. He was gone already, his wet footprints, a reminder of his daily bath, still visible on the cool plank floor, the butter crock and remnants of sandwich-making left out on the table. It warmed her suddenly—the vestiges of his presence—and it unnerved her briefly that she should feel such tenderness for him. Until now, she’d considered her feelings for Jon Hazard Black blatantly and uncomplicatedly sensual. As one would enjoy a new bauble or toy or pleasurable taste—wholeheartedly and openly, but without the peripheral complexities that rushed in on her thoughts now. Brushing aside the unruly intricacies, she reminded herself that he was using her and she was using him, a fair exchange in her mind—hostage for teacher—until her father ransomed her. These days were an adventure she’d remember with a spiking rush of excitement all her life, for Hazard had given her her first exquisite sensual pleasure and she impatiently wanted more. Undaunted that her teacher had withdrawn his services, Blaze now contemplated some more amenable form of bribery, since her first forays had failed. Undeterred and motivated by an assumed prerogative, Miss Venetia Braddock of Beacon Hill set her mind on finding the key to overcoming Hazard’s exceptional discipline.

  JIMMY was there when Hazard came in for lunch, the food was prepared, the floor newly swept, and Blaze sported a spray of wild roses tucked becomingly in the top buttonhole of her blouse. It brought his mind instantly to the petal-soft feel of her breasts and, distracted by the memory, he didn’t hear Jimmy’s question until it was repeated.

  “Didya start drifting south today?”

  “Ah …” he said vaguely, as if waking from a nap. “Drifting. Yes. Made thirty feet this morning.”

  “Thirty feet!” Blaze remarked, amazed. She knew mining almost as well as her father did. “That must be some kind of a record.”

  He looked at her and thought roses suited her. “Black powder did most of it,” he modestly replied.

  “How do you haul it out?”

  “A small dump car. I put in a few rails when I started working this claim.”

  “You are expecting the mine to produce.”

  “I wouldn’t have invested so much time and effort if I didn’t.”

  “Hazard went to Columbia School of Mines and he knows everything about mining,” Jimmy interposed, pleased to illuminate yet another brilliant facet of his hero.

  “Thanks, Jimmy, for the compliment,” Hazard said with a smile at his small champion, “but I know far from everything. I took a couple of classes on gold mining, that’s all. It wasn’t so far from Boston.”

  Wide-eyed, Blaze accused, “You never said you’d lived in Boston.”

  “You never asked.”

  “What were you doing in Boston?” she asked, suspicion grievous in her tone.

  “Going to Harvard.” And then she recalled Turledge Taylor’s remark about talk he might have gone to Harvard.

  “I never saw you.”

  “I don’t think we frequented the same playrooms,” he replied, an ingenuous smile playing across his face.

  “I’m not that young.”

  “Young enough,” he tranquilly observed.

  “Meaning?” Her voice was verging on snappish and she was building herself into some kind of unwarranted temper.

  “Nothing provocative, I assure you, Miss Braddock,” Hazard temperately remarked, hoping to mollify whatever was goading her. “Only that, taking into account upper-class fixed notions of etiquette, my sojourn in Boston society preceded your debut, that’s all.”

  Jimmy, watching the adults like a spectator at a tenni
s match, suddenly knew without a doubt who had broken the crockery. The lady living here with Hazard tempered up faster than a fox pouncing on a plump chicken. “Food’s getting cold,” he intervened, loath to be in the middle of a full-scale fight, although, he decided, casting a sidelong glance at Hazard, there was more of a smile on his face than anything else.

  “Come, Miss Braddock, let’s eat,” Hazard invited. “It’s a shame to waste all this effort.” He seated himself at the small table. “Tell me,” he went on, in a sincere, generous tone, as though the recent exchange hadn’t occurred, “are these your muffins today?”

  Blaze colored as pink as the roses at her neckline. How, she thought, could he infuse so much warmth in his voice? It was like being stroked with velvet. She decided then that Boston society must have been rather interesting the years Hazard practiced his charm on the ladies.

  “She sure did,” Jimmy answered, anxious to please Hazard, knowing he was supposed to be teaching the Miss to cook.

  Smiling suddenly at the handsome face turned up to her, Blaze truthfully explained, “Jimmy allows me to stir. And I’m marvelous at throwing in the raisins. If Papa doesn’t intervene, I may graduate to more intricate details … in the kitchen.”

  Hazard, waving Jimmy and Blaze to their seats, had already begun buttering a muffin. “Maybe we could hire you to live in, Jimmy. I’ve forgotten how good food tastes.”

  “I’d like to, but I can’t,” Jimmy replied quickly, his mouth full of muffin.

  “Your mother needs you, I suppose,” Hazard replied, savoring the flavor of new young carrots boiled with a touch of sugar.

  Jimmy’s eyes dropped evasively. “Yeah.” He busily pushed his carrots into a pile.

  “You’ll be able to come up and help though, won’t you?”

  The fork stirred the carrot pile flat. Eyes downcast, Jimmy muttered, “Think so.”

  Noting the uncharacteristic nervousness in a normally ebullient young boy, Hazard put down his fork, swallowed the tender morsel of beef in his mouth, and softly inquired, “Think so?”