Sweet Sarah Ross

She was in her black threads now and began to place the beak. “Just like yesterday, then?”

He grunted his assent “The terrain in these parts doesn’t provide enough cover for us to travel during the day. I’ll do what I can to sniff out the trail of the wagons over the next few hours, but I’m limited in my movements because of that prairie wolf and my lack of a knife. Not to mention the Sioux.”

“I’ve got a bit of work left to do on your shirt,” she said, “and could probably spend the day embroidering, if I had enough thread.” She held his shirt away from her and regarded it critically. She turned the shirt toward him, then finally looked up. “You see—” she began, and got no further.

He was squatting down before the fire and balanced on his heels just as he had when she had last seen him, but there the resemblance between the Mr. Powell of last night and the Mr. Powell of this morning ended, and she wouldn’t have known him for the same man if she had not already heard his voice. When she looked up, he met her regard, and her overall impression of him now was that he was much younger than she had guessed, although she had not previously considered him old. She was frankly astounded to discover how thoroughly a shave could transform a man. His face wasn’t handsome—she wouldn’t go so far as to say that—but it was…compelling, in a masculine sort of way, all flat planes and clean angles.

His eyes were blue. She had noticed that right away, along with the fact that he was unusually sharp-sighted. But now that his blue, sharp-sighted eyes were focused on her in inquiry and no longer bloodshot, they had a quite distinctive effect. His hair was different, too. She wouldn’t call it precisely tamed, but he had evidently washed it, and it was still slicked back from his face and only just beginning to curl as it dried. Then there were his broad shoulders and his muscular chest, which tapered down to a washboard stomach. She had already discovered how strong he was, but she couldn’t quite understand why she hadn’t made a connection between that strength and the physique that matched it This lack of connection was all the more curious given the fact that when she had first laid eyes on him he had been naked.

At that she blushed and had the presence of mind to hold the shirt in her hands up in front of her face. She cleared her throat. “You see what I’ve been doing,” she tried again. “What do you think so far?”

He did not immediately respond. In fact, the silence was prolonged enough to give her time to recover her complexion and to peek around the side of the shirt.

He was staring open mouthed in amazement, but his expression was not that of pleasant surprise, nor did he seem particularly impressed with her unexpected skill with a needle.

“I asked you what you think, Mr. Powell.”

He closed his mouth, then opened it to say, “It’s a bird.”

“An oriole, yes. I told you so last night.”

“I didn’t think you were serious about putting it on the shirt.”

Any trace of embarrassment vanished. This was the Mr. Powell she knew. “It’s a rather fine start I’ve made, if I do say so myself,” she said sweetly, and fixed him with a well-practiced gaze that blended mild puzzlement with entreaty. “Do I take it that you have some objection to the improvement that I’m making?”

Chapter Five (#ulink_3f1c7184-d078-504b-aebf-85d3ed639280)

He might have predicted that the beautiful idiot would end up doing something idiotic while he was gone from the campsite. She was an irritating woman, no doubt about it. A tricky one, too, and he didn’t want even to begin to respond to the look in her big brown eyes, no sir, or imagine how many men had fallen victim to it. And although he was able to recognize the not-so-subtle manipulative intention of that look, its effect on him was in no way lessened. It reminded him that a year in the field was a long time—

He shook his head to clear it. “I object to wearing a shirt with a bird that belongs on a sewing sampler.”

“I think you should know, sir, that this pattern represents a skill level well beyond that of the sampler. It is found on parlor pillows in the best houses and on napkins, linen napkins.”

“Especially a bird that’s surrounded by all those curlicues.”

“Those are to become mimosa flowers,” she informed him. “I have hardly had time to finish the entire pattern, so perhaps it’s premature of you to judge it at this stage. The pink of the flowers will nicely complement the golden orange of the bird’s body, while the brown of the branch balances out the white and black of its head and wing feathers.”

“Does it have to be so big?”

“Well, this is about the size of the design as it figures on parlor pillows.”

“Ah, but I suppose that on napkins, it would be—” He broke off.

There it was again, that look. “You were saying, sir?” That voice, too. Sweet enough to melt a foolish man. “Something about napkins?”

This was a ridiculous conversation, and he wasn’t going to pursue it. He needed a shirt, and it looked as if he was going to have one with an orange bird, surrounded by pink flowers, poised to chirp its silent song across several square inches of his upper left breast. He exhaled gustily, slipped the suspenders hanging down at his sides over his shoulders and rose to his tender bare feet.

“Let me know when the shirt’s ready,” he said. “You can eat whenever you want.”

He retrieved his moccasins and was at the edge of the campsite when she stopped him with the words, precisely enunciated, “Do you mind telling me where you are going, sir?”

Yes, I do mind. “Is there a specific reason why you need to know, ma’am?”

“Since I wish to bathe at the spring, I would like to be assured that we do not get in each other’s way.”

He should have guessed. “I’m going to check out possible wagon tracks and trails. Since I can’t move out in the open for any considerable length of time, I’ll be gone several hours at least, but won’t be able to cover much more than a mile or so.”

“And if the prairie wolf comes, should I chip stones again?”

He nodded. “Keep the fire going, too, or start another one for practice. Remember never to make two fires in one place. That will make it easier to cover our tracks before we move on out of here later today.”

As he was leaving the campsite in a direction away from the spring, he heard her say, “If you’re worried about not quite striking the right fashion note with a beautiful oriole on your shirt, I might remind you that your present outfit is far more stylish than the one you were wearing when I first saw you.”

He crunched his way through the trees, grumbling to himself. This was hardly the best start to a day that was sure to be as grueling as the one before. He was in better shape, though, much better shape. After the beautiful idiot had fallen asleep the night before, he had boiled some water and put some snakeweed in it. Then he had soaked his feet in the concoction and slept with his soles wrapped in sage leaves. This morning, although his feet were far from healed, they were no longer stabbing him with pain. Since he wouldn’t be doing much walking today, mostly waiting, he figured his feet would be even better by the time of the evening’s trek.

As a man from everywhere and nowhere, he liked to plot people and places in precise positions on the various mental maps he held in his head, and he knew just where to put Miss No-First-Name Harris with her postures and her pretenses and her embroidery scissors. He knew her type. Hell, he had been given birth by her type. The lack of physical resemblance between Miss No-Name and his mother wasn’t going to mislead him, and he’d have to remember his mother’s jet black hair and sapphire eyes every time he looked at Miss No-Name’s golden curls and twist-a-man-around-her-little-finger brown eyes. He indulged fellow feelings for the poor fool who had extended her the supposedly excellent offer of marriage she claimed to have turned down—and even dared to wonder if she had received such an offer. But why had a farm girl from the Chesapeake taken a trip to England with a chaperon?

He didn’t know, and he wasn’t going to spend the day thinking about her, especially not thinking of her bathing in the spring. Better to think of where he was and what he was doing, and that was surveying the one hundredth meridian. Better to find a place to hide in the occasional sprigs of vegetation where he could calculate the slant of the sun and plan his moves to coincide with the slow shifts of shadows. Better to wonder why white men wore black trousers, the kind that didn’t blend into any daytime landscape.

Now that his senses were returning, he was interested to find out what happened to his telescope and his chain and his level, not to mention what might have happened in the meantime to the rest of his team of three other surveyors. However, he wouldn’t be able to retrieve his instruments in the Sioux camp or restore himself to his team until he had returned the beautiful idiot to her family.

Full circle. Begin by thinking about a woman. End by thinking about a woman. Maybe it had something to do with having been stripped naked, made to face certain death, and then being reborn. But how long was he—were they—destined to survive with almost no resources in the middle of hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness? Make that several millions of acres. He didn’t know exactly how many, and it was the job of the surveying team to establish that number. The odds against him accomplishing his part of the mission now were high, and here he was a good hundred miles east of where he had last seen his team, with no equipment, no horse, and in the company of an irritating woman who seemed to think that their life-or-death circumstances made a good occasion to embroider.

He eventually found a miniature scarp in the seemingly smooth grassland in which he could nestle himself. Lying horizontally, he shared this patch of earth with creeping critters and stared at the sky, which was three hundred and sixty degrees of clouds, packaged like a drawing-room gift assortment of mare’s tails and cumulus and cirrus, with an occasional dark storm cloud resting on a silvery gray pedestal of rain afar off to the west. He brought his gaze down to the horizon and chose a fixed point in the middle distance upon which to base his estimates of the wide spaces yawning around him. He took his time and arrived at what he knew would be a remarkably accurate estimate of fifteen miles to the slight rise of land on the western horizon.

This neat trick of spatial approximations was one he had taught himself as a distraction during the regular beatings he brought upon himself at the military academy. Over time, he discovered that he was good not only at the small-scale calibrations he had performed in the confines of the Correctional Chamber but also at the mapping of larger spaces, where plane geometry no longer applied and the curvature of the earth came into play. When he had surpassed his cartography teachers in precision, the beatings stopped, and he was sent to the War Department and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C.

He calculated and waited, moved and calculated, waited some more and moved again. He spied what might have been fresh wagon tracks, but didn’t risk following them. Instead he simply calculated their direction and figured in the possible ground that had been covered in the past forty-eight hours. The possibility danced around the edges of his busy brain that Miss No-Name’s family had backtracked to find her. However, it seemed more logical, since she was the one who had been spared from attack, that her parents would do their best to arrive at the next meeting point and wait for her there.

That is, if they were still alive. And if they weren’t, he was stuck with her.

He had seen what there was to see, so he headed back to the campsite. This took enough time to imagine a variety of scenarios for how she had spent her day, which included her being foolishly preyed upon by the prairie wolf and bathing in the spring. The image of her bathing in the spring seized hold of his imagination but was instantly replaced, upon his return to the camp, by the combination of her with the prairie wolf.

He came upon the campsite from the direction he had left it, and the first thing he saw was Miss Harris standing in the center of the little clearing with her back to him. Her spine was rigid, and she was looking straight ahead of her. She was wearing her bonnet, and her clothes looked fresh but slightly rumpled in a way that suggested that she had washed them and dried them in the sun on rocks. Across from her and facing him was the prairie wolf, who had ventured right up to the edge of the opposite side of the campsite. He was a scruffy, pitiful excuse for a wolf, but he was more than a match for a human. His ears were cocked, his right foreleg was raised, and he had a wary look in his eye, as if he was waiting for his best moment to pounce. Or was he, incredibly, about to retreat?

In that first half second Powell realized that the beautiful, blessed idiot was trying to stare the damned prairie wolf down. In the next half second, he realized that she was winning the war of nerves.

The scene unfroze. Powell moved forward. The prairie wolf turned tail and ran. She whirled at the sound of his footfall behind her and clutched her heart.

“Oh, it’s you!” she exclaimed under her breath. “You scared me!”

“I scared you?”

“Sneaking up on me like that. I didn’t hear you.”

“A wise man doesn’t announce his arrival anywhere in these parts,” he replied, “but as for being scared, I would have thought our mangy friend did that for you.”

She let her hand fall to her side. “He was playing a game of hide-and-seek with me on the edges of the trees there for a good long while. I picked up my rocks, and I would have thrown them at him if I had had to.” She gestured to the rocks at her feet. “I decided not to go on the offensive, recalling what you said about your feeling, so I dropped them and figured that my best strategy was to stand my ground here in the center.”