Chapter 13
CHAPTER 13
The next morning, after breakfast, Max, dressed in his butler uniform, drove Miss Calliope in Mrs. James’s elegant gray-roofed buggy down to the big meadow at the foot of the bluff the ranch house was built on—the Long Meadow, she told him, which ran south for three miles. Miss Calliope was perfectly able to drive herself, or ride her horse down from the bluff, or even walk, but her mother had insisted, and Max had been only too happy to comply.
The morning was already hot, though it couldn’t be past nine or nine-thirty. Pine scent wafted down from the line of steep ridges that edged each side of the long, wide, rolling meadow, which was more like a small valley than anything else. The Summer River ran along the east side, after dropping in a spectacular, thundering waterfall from the bluff.
Long, green grass covered the ground—buffalo grass, Miss Calliope told him, grass mixed with patches of sweet-scented wildflowers, her own rose scent a nearer, even sweeter one.
Ranged in a line near the buggy at the foot of the bluff, the six suitors were astride their magnificent horses, dressed in expensive riding outfits, all except Finn, who looked like—and probably was—an authentic cowboy. Showing off their manliness, they took off at the drop of her white lace handkerchief to race to the other end of the meadow and back, leaving Max in the buggy with Miss Calliope in the shade of a cottonwood tree.
“Which one should I pick, prince?” she said, her beautiful blue eyes shining with vitality and mischief, her demure persona set aside for the moment. Dressed in another of those full-length, cover-her-up outfits, this one green with tiny white and yellow flowers, its skirt draped around her in an elegant way her mother must have taught her, she looked as authentically American West, circa the nineteenth-century, as Finn.
“Do you have a favorite, Miss Calico?” he said, careful to keep his distance on the padded buggy seat—Livia had been explicit last night on the subject of a lady’s reputation in this century.
Miss Calliope’s beautiful eyes lit with pleasure at the nickname. “I would like your opinion,” she said, her voice at the moment more of a young lady than a tomboy.
“I’d pick Finn,” he said, remembering the taste of the blueberry pies. “His mother is a great cook.”
“’Ceptin’ he’d expect me to cook for him, too,” she said, dropping into her tomboy ways, “and that’s somethin’ I’m not interested in doing.”
“Well, what’s your criteria for a husband?”
She moved her gaze to the six horsemen galloping away from the buggy, giving them a thoughtful look. “Someone who ain’t a snake or a skunk.”
Max grinned. “Okay.”
She grinned back, making his heart beat faster. “Ma says husbands are like most folks. Some are good husbands. Some are snakes and skunks.” She turned back toward the riders, who were disappearing down the far side of one of the low rises in the meadow. “Ma says to not marry a snake or a skunk.”
“Sound advice.”
“The problem,” she said, “is figurin’ out which is which.”
“You mean, you’re seeing what they” —Max nodded toward the suitors— “want you to see?”
“That’s right. Most fellers can put on a good act for a while.”
“More points in favor of Finn, then. Surely you know him well by now.”
“Yes, but I ain’t feeling the kinds of feelings I should have for a man I’m going to marry. Livie says?—”
“I’ll stop you right there, Miss Calico. Something tells me what Livia said about that subject is not one she intended for you to share with me.”
She blushed. It was an adorable blush, a hit of pink spreading across her pretty cheeks. It was the first blush he’d seen from her. For anyone.
“Seems to me,” he said, the suitors visible again as they rode up another low rise, looking smaller and smaller the farther away they went, “you’d rather be with those fellers on horseback than sitting in a stationary buggy. Or any buggy at all.”
“Ma says it wouldn’t be ladylike to race the men courtin’ me.”
“What do you think about that? You, Miss Calico, not Miss Calliope.”
She took in a deep breath and slowly let it out. “I’d rather be racin’ with them. If a man can’t keep up with me on a horse, I don’t know I’d want him as a husband.”
Max laughed. “Depends, I suppose, on the horse. That Apollo of yours would be tough to beat, or even keep pace with.”
She grinned, the look in her eyes acknowledging the truth of that.
“Are you saying, Miss Calico, that this batch of suitors doesn’t suit you?”
The quiet of the meadow washed over Cally as she stayed silent, not answering Max’s question. The sound of the bees buzzing around the wildflowers growing among the long grass filled her ears, that and the distant thud of the racers’ horses.
That and the thud of her heart. She had a mighty strong feelin’ none of the suitors did suit her.
She’d been trying real hard to get to know them. She’d listened to their stories of their families, their friends, their horses, their dogs, the things they considered their accomplishments. She’d talked to them of the Sky Top. She’d tried to overlook what she was beginning to think were their faults. But the only man she was interested in—in a way that was anythin’ near what Bart had with Livie, or Kit with his wife Sally—was the one man she knew she couldn’t count on staying—Max.
“Too bad there’s not seven of them,” he said in his normal Zalgravian voice, with his normal facial expression, not the ones he used when he was being a butler, which always made her want to giggle. “We could call them the Seven Dwarves.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Sleepy, Sneezy, Smelly…”
Cally’s mouth dropped open. “Smelly is not one of the Seven Dwarves.”
“Skunk, right?” Max said. “Surely one of them is a skunk, or have you not gotten that far in classifying them yet?”
She laughed again. Max always made her laugh.
He gazed at her, then toward the suitors, who were out of sight again, his eyes narrowing in speculation. “Which, do you suppose, is the snake in the bunch?”
His masculine profile sent a wondrous feeling through her belly. His strong, tall body beside her was handsomer than any she’d ever seen. “I don’t know yet, prince,” she said, pulling her gaze from him. “But my ma says to be careful of them the most. Snakes get terrible jealous of a young lady when she talks to another man.”
“Your mother is right,” Max said, turning back to her. “Definitely avoid the jealous snakes.”
“You ever get jealous, prince?”
“Not until recently,” he told her. His voice and expression were neutral, but there was somethin’ in his handsome eyes that told her the true meaning of what he’d just said.
She felt her cheeks heat again, her gaze on his handsome blue eyes. “You jealous now?” she asked, feeling bold and daring.
He grinned that just-for-her grin that made her thudding heart beat faster. “Who is the most beautiful woman in this state?” he said. “And to whom is she speaking? Who on earth would I be jealous of?”
Her thudding, racing heart lost a beat. That wondrous feeling in her belly warmed. It was impossible to take him seriously, not with that mischief in his eyes, not with that grin on his mouth, but deep inside… “Are you flirtin’ with me, prince?”
“I am, Miss Calico.”
She laughed.
But back at the house, after Finn had won the horse race, to the other young men’s displeasure—‘home field advantage,’ Max had called it—and she was away from the prince, she was determined to give her suitors a fair chance. Snakes or skunks, dwarves or young men, they’d come a long way to spend time with her.
Lunch was still a ways off, the front porch shaded from the sun and as good a place as any to stay cool. Sitting down at the long table, on the bench along the porch wall, she smiled at Mr. Yardley, who was coming out of the house after a meeting with Bart—Bart was likely questioning him on his qualifications to be a part owner of an immense ranch like the Sky Top.
She nodded at the checkerboard on the tabletop, the board already set up for a game, likely by Max, who’d shown a fondness for the pastime. “A game of checkers, Mr. Yardley?” she said in her ladylike voice.
Mr. Yardley’s eyes lit up, not at the game, she thought, but at her singling him out. In Denver, he’d been on the formal side, always careful with his manners, but always with a hint of a smile behind his noncommittal expression. He was quieter than the others, except for Finn, who hardly said a word around the out-of-town suitors, but Mr. Yardley was a good rider, and handy with a pistol, and she wanted some time with him without the others crowdin’ in.
Dressed in one of his town coats he’d changed into for his meeting with Bart, he sent a doubtful glance at the checkerboard. “If you like, Miss Calliope,” he said, a bit of red in his square face, and she reckoned his skin had burned a bit in all the ridin’ he’d done that morning and yesterday on the way to the ranch. His breath was free of the smell of liquor—it had been free all morning—and she wondered if he’d drunk whiskey yesterday because of his seeming shyness. He’d certainly been sober the times she’d encountered him in Denver. “You’ll have to teach me how.”
She smiled at him, a genuine smile, because he’d admitted he didn’t know how to play. There wasn’t much these suitors admitted to not knowing. Seemed like they each took pride in being up-to-date on everything worth talking about. Livie said it was because they were competing against each other for her hand.
Cally had to admit, them suitors were mighty competitive, but though a part of her—a womanly part, Livie had said—got a secret thrill at all their attention, she didn’t like feeling as if she and the Sky Top were some kind of prize in a horse race.
Mr. Vann, who’d been striding up to the house from the direction of the guest cabin, and was still in his ridin’ clothes, stopped at the foot of the porch steps and gave a scornful laugh. “Did I hear you say checkers? That childish game?” He propped a new-looking, fancy-stitched cowboy boot on the first step as if he already owned the place. “Only ranch hands play that .” His words dripped with contempt. His ridicule of her cherished game made her heart wither for an instant, until she remembered that Prince Maximilian Alphonse Frederick George of the Kingdom of Zalgravia considered it a worthy game, and she raised her chin and fought the unladylike words she wanted to say.
“Well, Mr. Yardley,” she said in a demure voice, “will you give me a game?”
Mr. Yardley’s expression wavered, his glance going from her to Mr. Vann, and she wondered whose opinion he would settle on, hers or another man’s, since he disappointingly seemed to not have one of his own. His finger ran along the inside of his high collar, rubbing against his sunburned throat. “I…perhaps a game of chess, Miss Calliope?”
A rush of disappointment went through her. He, of all her suitors but Mr. Anderson and Finn, had been the most promising of someone who might accept her for herself. What kind of man was he, to be led by an arrogant know-nothing like Mr. Vann?
Disgusted, she gave each of them the brilliant smile she’d been told was charming. “Oh, dear,” she said, “I hear my mother calling me,” and she hurried inside the house.
Mr. Yardley and Mr. Vann were still on the front porch when Cally came back outside twenty minutes later, the two seated in the rocking chairs, talkin’ about the gold mines popping up in Colorado.
Both men stood up fast, the chairs rocking wildly at their quick movement.
“Pardon me,” she said with the charming smile that seemed so useful, helping her get away with almost anything she wanted, her words cutting off something Mr. Vann had opened his mouth to say. Dressed in her favorite suede riding skirt with a sturdy striped cotton blouse and suede vest, she hurried down the porch steps. If she didn’t get away for a gallop on Apollo soon, she was goin’ to burst. It had been easier in Denver and Cheyenne to be the lady her ma had wanted her to be. Here at the Sky Top, it felt pert near impossible to maintain it all the time. “I have an engagement.”
With my horse.
Crossing the drive, she pulled on her leather riding gloves and made a beeline for the barn, going through the line of juniper trees that edged the far side of the sweep. The long buffalo grass on the other side swished against her dark-brown cowgirl boots that matched her cowgirl hat, her steps as close to a run as she could make them without actually running.
She was still two hundred feet from the barn when Mr. Perth, the suitor from Cheyenne who’d had the arrogance yesterday to vouch for her family to the Evil Prince, led a nervous, saddled Apollo from the barn.
Right on Mr. Perth’s heels, Cally’s friend Nick, one of the ranch hands, was tellin’ Mr. Perth to give him the reins to Apollo so’s he could take him back into the barn, Nick’s voice, low and insistent, carrying real clear on the hot air to Cally, an angry look on his face.
Ignoring Nick, Mr. Perth, dressed in the buff riding breeches and fancy brown tweed riding coat he’d worn earlier—stopped beside the large corral attached to the barn. Liftin’ the reins over Apollo’s tossing head, he put his foot in the stirrup to mount the horse, being none too gentle with the bridle’s bit as Apollo sidled and fretted.
Rage burned through Cally’s shocked heart. Her boots started running, Cally wishing she carried a riding crop so that she could whip Mr. Perth to pieces. “ Stop ,” she yelled, the command ringing out, seeming to echo between the barn and bunkhouse, seeming to bounce off the river beyond the corral.
Barely glancing at her, Mr. Perth swung his leg over Apollo and settled himself in the saddle. Mr. Perth’s own fancy, English saddle—the one he’d ridden on from town—as if he owned her horse.
He didn’t stay there long. By the time Cally had reached Apollo, the stallion had bucked Mr. Perth off into the dirt, tossing him first high in the air.
She caught the reins, soothing her horse with soft sounds, Apollo all a-tremble, the scent of his fearful sweat making her want to beat Mr. Perth into the dirt.
Mr. Perth, his face flushed an angry red, his good-looking features contorted by his rage, climbed to his feet, brushing dirt from his buff breeches. “That damned horse.” He grabbed for the reins.
Cally struck his hand away. Stepping between him and Apollo, she pierced him with her furious gaze. “You, sir” —her voice dripped contempt on the ‘sir’— “are trespassing. In these parts” —her voice shook with her own rage— “you could be shot for taking someone else’s horse.”
His face hardened, his anger at Apollo shifting to her. “Your brother said to make myself at home.”
“My brother expected you to behave with the courtesy and manners of a guest.”
“When we marry, I’ll ride your damned horse whenever I choose.”
Cally felt a coldness drop over her fury. “I will never marry you. Nor are you welcome here at the Sky Top. Pack your bags, Mr. Perth. Our ranch hands will escort you back to town.” Feeling her hands tremble, she stroked one palm down Apollo’s sleek neck, then unbuckled the girth of Mr. Perth’s saddle and tossed saddle and saddle blanket down into the dirt at the man ‘s feet. “Nick,” she said, the ranch hand giving her a boost onto Apollo’s bare back, “keep Mr. Perth out of the barn until it is time for him to retrieve his horse and depart the Sky Top. Shoot him if you must,” and she urged Apollo forward and onto the drive, and rode away from anything to do with husbands.