Page 32 of The Promise of Jenny Jones

Swallowing images as hot as the scorching air, he joined her beneath the shade she had created and gave her the canteen.

“We take them at night,” he said. Her throat arched when she tilted her head back to drink, offering a long clean line that he wanted to explore with his fingertips.

Jenny nodded and wiped a hand across her lips. “Has to be tonight. They’ll reach the railroad tracks tomorrow.”

“Are you thinking dead? Or are you thinking incapacitated?”

She scowled then whipped out her dictionary. A minute later she said, “I’m thinking incapacitate, like in tied-up and their horses run off. Unless they give us no choice, then we kill them.” Slapping shut the dictionary, she pushed it into her back pocket. “Incapacitate. That’s a good word.”

“So far we agree.” Ty jerked open his collar.

The air hung hot and motionless at the bottom of the arroyo.

Nothing stirred. Sitting this close to her, he could feel the heat rolling off of her, could smell the pork rinds drawing out any infection beneath the bandage on her arm.

He mopped his face and throat. “Want me to take a look at your wound?”

“I checked it this morning. It’s coming along.” She shifted, brushed some small rocks out from under her, leaned against the saddle at her back. “Don’t worry, I’ll hold my own tonight.”

“I’m not worried.” But of course he was. Two against four weren’t the preferred odds, especially as one of the two was one-handed.

As if she’d read his mind, she slipped out of the sling. Grinding her teeth, she extended her arm, winced, folded it back near her breasts, then extended it again.

“Stop looking at my chest, damn it.”

“I’m looking at your arm.”

“No, you aren’t.”

“All right, I’m not.”

“So stop it.”

She stared until he lifted his gaze to her eyes, then she extended her arm again, working out the stiffness. It had to hurt like hell.

Since he’d grasped how she thought by now, Ty knew they wouldn’t risk leaving the arroyo until after midnight. A long sweaty afternoon stretched before them and most of the night.

“We aren’t going to sleep tonight, so you should try to catch some shut-eye now,” she said, working her arm.

“Can’t. Too damned hot.” He considered kicking off his boots, then decided the effort required more energy than he was willing to waste.

But he stretched out, propped his head against his saddle, and lit a cigar.

When he noticed Jenny inhaling the smoke, he offered it to her, not really surprised when she took the cigar with a sigh of pleasure. He lit another for himself.

“How come you’re so dead set against satisfying a hankering?” he asked when she paused to rest her arm against her thigh and enjoy the cigar.

“I told you. I gave it a try, and I didn’t like it.

More important, I sure as hell don’t want to get pregnant.

” She exhaled a perfect smoke ring, watched it widen and slowly dissipate.

“Who’s going to hire on a pregnant woman or one with an infant hanging around her neck?

I figure the worst thing that could happen to me would be to get myself knocked up. ”

“There are ways to make sure a woman doesn’t get pregnant.” He released his own smoke ring and sent it wobbling into the still air.

“Yeah, and if those ways were always successful, there would be a whole lot less people in this world.” She tossed him a look of contempt.

“You said you aren’t the marrying kind, Sanders.

You’re the walking-away kind. You use women to ease your hankering and then it’s adiós.

Well thanks for offering to use me, I’m fricking flattered, but I’m plain not in the mood to be used and abandoned.

Too damned bad we didn’t hitch up during one of those times when I was yearning to be used and kicked away.

” Leaning to one side, she spit in the dirt, cutting her eyes toward him to make sure he hadn’t missed the gesture.

Ty stared at the horse blanket over his head, searching for a defense. “That’s one way of looking at it,” he said finally.

“That’s the only way I’m ever going to look at it. I’m never going to throw myself on some son of a bitch and beg him to use me, get me pregnant, and then walk away. No hankering is worth the consequences.”

“My brother didn’t abandon Marguarita after he got her pregnant,” he said, studying the faded pattern zigzagging across the horse blanket.

“You aren’t your brother,” she snapped, working her arm again. “And he’s nothing to hold up as an example if you ask me. He married Marguarita but he was never a husband to her or a father to the kid. He let his wife be sent away in disgrace rather than give up his precious inheritance.”

She spoke around the cigar gripped between her teeth, looking down at her arm. Sweat trickled along her hairline. Ty watched her and decided he liked a woman who appreciated a good cigar. Occasionally his mother smoked, on her birthday and after the annual branding.

It surprised him to suddenly realize that Ellen Sanders would take to Jenny like shine on a nickel.

Like Jenny, his mother defied convention by wearing men’s trousers around the ranch, she enjoyed a drop now and then, and she didn’t put on female airs.

She, too, would have said “pregnant” rather than search for a polite or vague euphemism.

“Would you walk away from three thousand acres of prime California land?” he asked, half-wishing she’d stop moving her arm. Sweat stood on her brow, and she’d bitten into the cigar.

“The point is not what I would do,” she said, stopping to exhale a stream of smoke into the motionless air. “The point is, Robert chose his inheritance instead of Marguarita and the kid.”

Ty laughed without amusement. “You’d understand if you’d known my father.”

“What about your father?”

“Three things. No one said no to Cal Sanders. Second, he didn’t want me to inherit his ranch.

And he would have done whatever he had to do to keep Robert from running after a Mexican wife.

It wasn’t only the threat of disinheritance.

He would have destroyed Robert, and Robert knew it.

No one crossed Cal Sanders without paying a heavy price. ”

She wiped a sleeve over her forehead and started working her arm again. “How come your father didn’t want you to inherit the main ranch?”

“Maybe because I told him I didn’t want it.

” That was the only way he’d known to hit back at Cal Sanders, by rejecting the one thing his father cared about.

“Seems to me that we’ve strayed a far piece from the subject at hand.

Which is, what are we going to do about this mutual hankering?

” Raising a hand, he touched his fingertips lightly to her cheek.

“We’re going to forget about it,” she said, jerking her head away from his touch. “We’re going to incapacitate it.” A grim smile touched her lips. “I like to use new words.”

“I noticed.”

She frowned at her arm, then slipped the sling back on.

“Don’t want to overdo.” Leaning back, she rested against her saddle.

“There was a woman in El Paso who let me borrow her books. When I had a steady team, I could read while I was hauling. If you can read, you don’t ever have to be lonely, and I can read,” she finished proudly, watching him.

“Very admirable.” Ty settled his head against his saddle and tilted his hat brim over his eyes so he wasn’t tempted to stare at her breasts.

“The thing is,” he said, speaking around his cigar, “ my hankering isn’t incapacitated.” Looking down, he could see the spot where her thighs met. A damp stain outlined a V at her crotch like an arrow pointing to heaven. A stirring occurred in his own trousers, and he closed his eyes.

She sat up abruptly and lifted his hat brim so she could stare down at him.

“Is there something wrong with your ears? How many times do I have to say this? You and me can hanker till the moon falls out of the sky, but nothing is going to come of it. Now, that’s how it fricking is, Sanders, so you just make up your mind to it.

I might have to raise one kid, and I don’t know how in the hell I’m going to do that.

I sure don’t want two kids dragging me down.

So you just forget any hankering thoughts. ”

She slammed his hat down on his face hard enough to knock the cigar out of his mouth. Sitting up, he slapped at the sparks on his shirt, found the cigar, and flipped it out from under their makeshift lean-to.

“You’re starting to irritate me,” he said, fighting to hold his voice level. “I keep telling you that Robert is going to raise Graciela himself. But you keep hearing that it’s your job and yours alone. I’m telling you for the tenth time, Robert is alive and well and he wants his damned daughter.”

She had a way of leaning into him to make a point, thrusting her face forward until their noses almost touched.

At the moment, being so close made him want to grab her and cover her mouth with punishing kisses until he felt the fight drain out of her stubborn bones, until he felt her slip trembling into surrender.

“The kid is half-Barrancas.”

“You think that’s going to surprise Robert? Robert’s been in love with Marguarita Barrancas since we were all children. I’m the brother with the Barrancas problem, not him.” His mouth twisted in disgust. “Right now, he’s trying to put an end to the animosity between our two families.”