Wolf Creek Widow

Chapter Four

Meg was awakened by the rooster before sunrise the next morning. Groggy with sleep, it took her a moment to realize where she was. A rash of memories assaulted her. Expecting to find Elton passed out in a drunken stupor next to her, she whipped her head to the side. She was alone in her feather-tick bed. There was no snoring Elton, no reason to be afraid ever again.

A soft September breeze blew through the screen tacked to the outside of the window frame. The days were already growing shorter and the mornings would soon become crisp and cool. She’d always liked autumn, though she couldn’t say the same about winter.

Thinking of winter brought a new problem to mind. How would she manage to get the laundry back and forth with two children in tow? Arkansas winters were known for their fickleness. The weather might be as warm as spring one day and rainy and cold or snowy a few days later. The previous winter, Meg had dropped the children off at Widow Hankins’s house on the way to town and picked them up again on her way home. The widow had watched them while Meg did the laundry. According to Rachel, Mrs. Hankins wasn’t doing so well, and Meg figured the last thing the older woman needed was to chase after two little ones.

One more problem to work out, she thought, getting to her feet. Well, at least she had plenty of time to do so. What else could a person do while they were mending and ironing but think?

As she was stripping off the worn cotton gown she’d donned soon after the Allens left, she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the wavy, splotched mirror leaning against the wall. Even in the room’s dim light, she gasped at what she saw. There were no visible scars on her body; they were all inside, but the ordeal had taken its toll, nonetheless.

Never one to carry any extra pounds, she’d lost so much weight that she looked as if she were recovering from a long illness, which she supposed she was. There were dark smudges beneath her eyes as well as tiny lines at their corners, and her mouth tilted downward at the sides. Her tangled hair looked as dull and lifeless as she felt.

It was enough to bring her to tears. Almost. But she’d learned the hard way that crying changed nothing, except to sometimes make things worse. No, she would shed no tears over how she looked, just as she’d shed no tears since Elton’s last assault. Things were what they were and all the crying in the world would not change them. Aunt Serena would tell Meg that she was still pretty and that inner beauty was the important thing—not that she was doing too well in that department, either. Rachel would tell her that the weight would return and that her body would soon regain its glow of health. She would tell Meg to be thankful she’d been spared to bring up her children.

Done with self-pity, Meg drew in a shallow breath and donned the clothes she’d worn the previous day. When she and Nita finished the laundry, she’d heat some water for a bath and make herself presentable. A good scrub always made her feel better.

She thought of Ace plucking the twig from her hair and wondered in dismay what he’d thought about her appearance. Her body flooded with sudden shame. For all her faults, maybe because of her excess vanity, her mother would be the first to tell her that there was no excuse for not taking care of your appearance. Aunt Serena would second that, but for entirely different reasons.

Filled with a new purpose, Meg went into the kitchen, coaxed the coals into a small fire and put on some coffee. Oh, how she’d love to have one of those pretty white granite stoves Gabe Gentry sold at the mercantile!

She’d no more than thought it when she pushed the ridiculous notion from her mind. In the scheme of things, a new stove was the last thing she should be thinking about. She went back to her room, picked up her brush and began to work the tangles from her hair. By the time she’d finished and plaited it into a long braid, the coffee was ready and the early-morning sun was streaming through the clean windows.

After a breakfast of coffee and leftover corn bread fried in a little butter and drizzled with sorghum molasses, Meg took the remainder of the mending and a second cup of coffee to the front porch. She sat in the warmth of the morning sun while she plied her needle. She was finishing her third cup when she saw Nita coming down the lane on her horse. She was alone.

“Good morning!” the older woman called as she neared the house.

“Morning,” Meg replied, wondering why Ace wasn’t with Nita.

“Ace went on into town to pick up the laundry in our rig,” she explained without Meg asking. “He thought it would save a little time. He has my ironing board with him.”

Meg nodded. She still found it hard to believe that a man as blatantly masculine as Ace Allen would willingly do wash. “So we should have the water hot enough to start by ten or so,” Meg said, calculating how much time the trip both ways would take.

“I’d say that’s about right,” Nita agreed, sliding from the gelding’s back and hitching him to the post.

“I was wondering if we could heat some water for a bath when we finish,” Meg asked in a hesitant voice. “I...I’m a mess.”

“Of course we can,” Nita said readily. “I should have thought of that yesterday. Why don’t we heat your bathwater along with the laundry water and have that behind us before Ace gets back? That way we can throw in your clothes at the end. We have plenty of time.”

“That sounds wonderful. Thank you.”

“Have you had breakfast?”

Meg nodded. “I fried up some corn bread and had it with butter and molasses.”

“One of my favorites,” Nita said with a smile. “I see you’re working on the mending Ace brought yesterday.”

“Yes. I didn’t quite get finished last night.” She blushed. “I fell asleep in the rocker.”

“Well,” Nita said, “that’s not so surprising. You’ve had a busy couple of days, and you’re still recovering. You’ll be back to your old self soon.”

Her old self. Meg didn’t think she wanted to be her old self. That woman was spineless and took what was dished out to her, whether she deserved it or not.

“Why on earth not?”

“What?” Meg looked at Nita sharply. What had she asked?

“I was asking why you said you weren’t sure you wanted to be your old self,” Nita explained.

Meg couldn’t believe she’d spoken her thoughts aloud, but since she must have, she felt obligated to provide an answer. “The old me put up with a lot of things I shouldn’t have.”

“Did you have a choice?”

“Not much of one,” she conceded.

“I suppose I’m being nosy, but I’ve been wondering if you knew how your husband was when you married him.”

Meg’s burst of bitter laughter had no place in the sweet tranquillity of the morning. She gave a negative shake of her head and kept her eyes glued to the shirt in her hands. “I didn’t have a clue. All I knew was that he was handsome, and he told me I was beautiful and I believed him. He bought me presents and said he’d love me forever.”

Seeing the sympathy on Nita’s face, Meg gave a helpless shrug. “I knew he drank a little, but before we married I never once saw him lose his temper. He was always so sweet and gentle.”

“So you fell in love with him.”

“Love?” A sigh trickled from Meg’s lips. “I’m not even sure what love is. I thought what I felt was love. Maybe it was. Or maybe I just liked the notion of loving someone. Whatever I felt, it didn’t last long after we said our ‘I dos.’” She shot Nita a quick embarrassed look. “I’m sure you’ve heard around town that I was expecting Teddy when Elton and I married.”

“There are always those who like to gossip,” Nita said. “I don’t pay much attention to it.”

“In this case it was true.”

Nita offered her another of those kind smiles. “At least he had the decency to do the right thing and give the child his name.”

“Yes, well, we’d all have been better off if he hadn’t,” Meg said in an acerbic tone.

Nita Allen might be shocked by the bold confession, but Meg didn’t care, and she made no offer to explain. How could she tell this giving woman who’d come through so many trials herself about her fears for her children? How could she explain that she was afraid that her sweet Teddy would grow up to be like his father, or that somehow the inability to see a man’s true colors had been passed down from Georgie to her and on to her precious Lucy at the moment of her conception?

She couldn’t. Nita Allen might be easy to talk to, and she might be as good as gold, but there was no way Meg could share her deepest fears with someone who was little more than a stranger.

Fearful that Nita would comment on the rash statement, Meg took a final stitch in Danny Gentry’s shirt, bit off the thread and scooped up her sewing basket. “We’d better see to those fires.”

By the time Ace returned with a wagonload of dirty linen, fires were burning hotly beneath both of Meg’s cast-iron kettles. She’d shaved a cake of lye soap into the boiling water while Nita carried more from the well to fill two galvanized rinse tubs.

As if they’d worked together before, the two women set about sorting the clothes as Ace brought the baskets to them. Nita allowed Meg to help as they rubbed the cake of soap into the stains and scrubbed them on the washboard before punching them down into the boiling, sudsy water.

Overriding Nita’s protests, Meg insisted on tending one of the kettles. It didn’t take but a few moments to realize that though her ribs had more or less healed, she was not up to the work. Weeks of inactivity had left her as weak as a kitten. She might not like relying on strangers, but there was no doubt that she couldn’t do things on her own just yet.

* * *

Catching the look of concern in his mother’s eyes, Ace made fast work of adding more wood to the fires. Then he went to take Meg’s place. Their gazes clashed, headstrong green to cool, determined blue. He held out his hand for the stick she was using to transfer the clean tablecloths from the hot water to the rinse tubs. To his surprise, she relinquished the cut-off broom handle with no argument.

“Go sit on the porch,” he said. “Your clean hair will get all smoky if you stay out here. Mother and I have this.”

Self-consciously, she raised a hand to her hair with a look of surprise. “Oh, I hadn’t thought about that.”

The first thing he’d noticed when he pulled into the yard was that Meg was wearing a different skirt and blouse. She’d obviously bathed and washed her hair. The straight blond mass was still damp and hung more than halfway down her back, glistening like spun gold in the sunlight. Ace couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to bury his face in the silken strands and breathe in its clean scent. Would it smell like lavender? Jessamine? Some other sweet-smelling flower?

“I suppose I could go and make the starch.”

“That would be good,” he said, pleased that she hadn’t cringed away from him. “We’ll need a lot.”

“I know.”

Mesmerized by the slight sway of her hips, Ace watched her walk toward the back of the house. He blew out a frustrated breath and glanced over at his mother. Nita’s face wore an expression of contemplation.

He suppressed a sigh. Like most mothers, his didn’t miss much. As always, she was in tune to every nuance of his emotions, and from what she’d said the evening before, she knew exactly how he felt about Elton Thomerson’s young widow.

* * *

Meg went inside and mixed up the flour and cool water that would be used for starch. When she was reasonably certain it was lump-free, she added boiling water to thin and smooth the mixture.

She was about to go and tell Ace that she was ready for him to carry it outside when she felt a prickling of awareness on her neck. Placing a hand over her heart and whirling around, she saw him standing in the doorway, a hand braced on either side of the aperture.

It was a pose often adopted by Elton, one where he regarded her coolly or mockingly...even appreciatively, depending on his mood. For a few painful heartbeats, it was Elton who stood there. Her eyes closed to shut out the sight. The room dipped and her knees gave way. Strangely, her only thought was that when she hit the floor she would reinjure her newly healed ribs.

It never happened. One second she was falling like a one-egg pudding; the next she was being held against something hard and warm and realized that she hadn’t fallen after all. She was in a safe place. Then she seemed to be floating through space, perhaps through time. Something soft gave beneath her, and the warmth and safety started to move away. With a cry of protest, she reached out blindly, pulling it close once more. The scent of pine and wood smoke enveloped her.

Something rough brushed her cheek. The harsh abrasiveness had no place in the velvety shadows and security of her shelter. With a murmur of denial, she forced her heavy eyelids upward. She didn’t expect to see a bronze face shadowed with a day’s growth of beard so near hers. She could see the slightly darker blue that fanned out in a starburst shape from the pupils of his eyes and smell the sweetness of mint-scented breath against her face.

She realized that her arms were looped around his neck. A flash of unease flickered through her, triggering the instinct to shove him aside and flee his overwhelming maleness. The feeling vanished as quickly as it appeared. This man meant her no harm. Instead, she heard herself say, “You smell like peppermint.”

Tiny lines appeared at the corners of his light blue eyes. Their customary coolness was warmed by the same smile that claimed his mouth for the space of a heartbeat. The brief upward curve did miraculous things to his austere features. He looked less threatening. More approachable. Handsome in a severe sort of way. Another flutter of alarm scampered through her, but this was different somehow and frightening for reasons that had nothing to do with the fact that he was a big, powerful man.

“And you smell like sunshine,” he told her before she could make sense of her emotions.

The oddly poetic words sounded strange coming from a man who looked as if he’d been hewn from a bold outcropping of Arkansas rock. It wasn’t the sort of thing she expected to hear from a man like Ace Allen.

And why not? What do you really know about him?

Nothing but what she’d heard around Wolf Creek, and that wasn’t much. She’d been too busy keeping body and soul together to pay much attention to talk—good or bad.

She wasn’t aware that her hands still rested on his shoulders until he circled her wrists with his fingers as he had the day before. Lowering her hands, he stood. She realized then that he’d been sitting on the side of the bed.

“You rest. You must have done too much this morning, or you wouldn’t have fainted.”

Meg sat up quickly and regretted the hasty action. “It wasn’t the work.” She didn’t want Ace and his mother thinking she was overdoing things. “It was you.”

Shock molded his features and he leaned toward her. “Me? What did I do?”

Too late, she realized that once again, she’d done or said the wrong thing. Hadn’t Elton told her time after time that she was the one who made him crazy and caused him to do the things he did?

“I’m sorry!” she cried, holding up her hands in a futile attempt to keep him away. To her surprise, Ace mimicked her action and took two steps backward, away from her. The simple, nonthreatening action slowed her racing heart.

She swallowed and forced herself to look up at him. “I’m sorry. It’s just that when I...when I saw you standing there with your hands on the door frame just...looking at me, I just... I saw...”

Ace didn’t say anything for several seconds. Then, to her surprise, he went to the doorway and stood in the same pose that had caused her such alarm.

“Look at me, Meg,” he said in that deep voice. “Who do you see?”

“What?” She frowned, unsure of what he was doing and wondering at the sorrow reflected in his eyes.

“Who do you see standing here?”

What did he want from her? she wondered in confusion. “I see you,” she said at last. “Ace Allen.”

“Exactly. You see the mixed-breed ex-convict who killed two men. I’ll always be sorry for that, but if you never believe anything else about me, you can believe that I would never deliberately harm a hair on your head.”

His statement was much the same as what he’d said the day before in the woods. It seemed he was determined that she knew he was no threat to her.

“You’re wrong,” she told him.

His dark eyebrows snapped together in a frown. “What?”

“What you said. I didn’t see th-that at all.” She hurried to explain. “Elton used to stand in the doorway like that a lot. For just a moment when I looked up I saw him, not you. I...I’m s-sorry.”

“I’m not Elton, Meg.”

His voice held an urgency she didn’t understand. “I know that.”

“Do you?” he persisted. “Look at me. Do I look like Elton?”

“No,” she murmured. Elton hadn’t been nearly as tall, and unlike Ace he’d been almost too good-looking to be masculine. She’d once heard him called pretty. No one would ever think of Ace Allen as pretty. Striking, surely. Magnificent, maybe. Pretty, never.

“No, and I don’t act like him. Can you see that? Do you believe it?”

Still confused, but knowing somehow that her answer was of utmost importance, she whispered, “Yes.”

He nodded, and the torment in his eyes faded. “You have nothing to be sorry for, Meg Thomerson. That’s something else you can be certain of, so never think it again.” With that, he turned and left her alone with her thoughts and a lot of questions.

* * *

After a lunch of cheese-and-tomato sandwiches that Meg fixed while Ace and Nita finished the laundry, they took up the sheets and tablecloths that had been drying on nearby bushes and replaced them with those they’d just starched. The tea towels were spread on the grass to dry, and the tablecloths and sheets were sprinkled with water and rolled up until it was time for them to be ironed.

With three people, they finished the laundry in less than half the time it would have taken Meg working alone. Ace used the soapy water to scrub the back porch, watered the thirsty plants with the rinse water and turned the tubs upside down until they were needed again.

As she dampened and rolled up the starched linens, Meg sneaked glances of him through the open window. He worked with an economy of movement and an easy grace that was unexpected in a man his size. She tried to imagine Elton offering to do the wash while she recuperated from an illness and almost laughed aloud.

When he finished, Ace took his rifle and ax and went to chop down a few more trees. Nita and Meg set up both ironing boards and started the ironing, even though they knew there was no way they would finish until the following day. Still, it felt good to do something productive, to know that she’d taken another step toward healing herself both physically and mentally. A rush of hope suffused her.

She’d never minded ironing. It had always been a time for her to think through her problems and make plans for the future. Nita, too, worked mostly in quiet, but with the older woman standing just a few feet from her, Meg felt compelled to make some conversation. At the same time, she was at a loss for something to say.