The Temptress Read online

  Asher didn’t answer her but started dressing—behind the wardrobe door. Chris wasn’t sure if he was modest or he was saving her delicate sensibilities. She chastised herself for criticizing every move he made. When he was dressed, he left the room.

  Downstairs at breakfast, she began to see another Owen. Until now, he’d been the epitome of cordiality, but now he was giving instructions to Chris and Asher with the authority of a general.

  “I want the north acre reseeded,” Owen was saying. “And I want all two hundred of those bulbs I ordered set by the end of the day. And, Whit, I’ll give you a list of what I want from town. You’re to take the wagon directly to the saw mill. You can do it all in a day if you don’t dawdle. Lionel, eat those eggs. Unity, have you shown the new housemaid what to do? I want the ceilings upstairs washed.”

  No one else at the table said much. Later, Asher escorted Chris outside. “You don’t have to do this. Remember who you are and that we can go home any time you want. I don’t want you working as a field hand.”

  “How kind of you, but I don’t mind working at all.”

  Suddenly, Ash moved away from her. “Diana, even you aren’t too stupid to do a little work. Now get over there and act like the woman you aren’t.”

  Chris turned to see Owen approaching with Tynan, both men seemingly unaware of what Asher was saying but she knew that, just as Asher had planned, they’d heard.

  Owen said a few more words to Tynan, which she couldn’t hear, then gave Ash an appraising look. “Come with me,” he said and Asher followed, leaving Chris with Tynan.

  “I don’t guess you could have volunteered to help with the washing, could you?” Ty said. “Or the horses? It had to be with the garden.”

  She turned on her heel to glare at him. “If I’d known you were to be in charge of the garden, I would have shoveled coal first. Shall we get started and stop wasting time? I have more to do with my life than spend it listening to you insult me.”

  “It seems to me that the man you claim as your husband was insulting you worse than I ever could.”

  “It’s part of the charade. Diana Eskridge was a woman who allowed her husband to bully her, so Ash and I are acting out a part.”

  “You’d better work on it then, because you don’t look like the type to take bullying from anybody. Every time he speaks to you in that tone, you look like you’re about to set his hair on fire. Here, take this,” he said, handing her a box of bulbs. “You know how to plant?”

  “You’d think he’d hire more than one gardener to do this. My father’s garden isn’t half this size and, when it was kept, he had four men taking care of it.”

  “Ah, but he paid them a salary, they lived on his ranch and he fed them. Hamilton only has to give his poor grateful relatives a roof and food.”

  “But he seems like such a nice man.”

  “People aren’t what they seem,” Ty said with a cold voice.

  “Is that supposed to refer to anyone I know?” she asked, setting down the box of bulbs.

  “Not unless you claim it. I thought I’d met a good girl who was different, but she wasn’t. You’re just like all the rest of them. You’re excited by the reputation of a man with a gun, and you’ll use him however you want, but in the end, when the chips are down, you’ll side against him. No more good girls for me. You and Prescott were made for each other.”

  “I didn’t side with anyone else against you. You betrayed me! I trusted you and then at the picnic you shot a man. Do you know how I felt with all those people against me? They were looking at me as if I were a piece of vermin. A man on the street spit at my feet.”

  Tynan looked at her for a long moment. “Yeah, I know how it feels. I’ve known all my life. Wait until a man spits in your face and then draws a gun on you.”

  “Is that what Rory Sayers did?” Chris whispered.

  “I twisted his arm to keep him from shooting me and the gun went off.”

  “But why did the deputy take you to jail if it was all Rory’s fault?”

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “For the same reason you condemned me without any facts. By reputation. Because I’m not one of the ‘good’ people like they are—like you are.”

  Chris took a bulb planter from a tool box by Tynan’s feet and began to dig in the soft earth to set the first bulb. “I think I was wrong.”

  “No you weren’t,” he said, kneeling beside her. “You were right. People like you and me don’t mix. You deserve somebody like Prescott, not a nameless nobody like me.”

  “I don’t think I deserve anyone at all after betraying a friend,” she whispered, mostly to herself. “Tynan, do you think you could ever forgive me for not trusting you?”

  He looked at her. “No,” he said simply. “It may take me a while to learn a lesson, but I do eventually learn it. I think that from now on I’ll stay even farther away from girls like you.”

  He moved away from her, leaving her to do the planting on that side of the plowed field by herself. The sun came out, making her perspire and the soil that was getting on her made her itch, but she didn’t notice as she went over the events of the past few weeks. Since Tynan had popped out of the cabinet and held her nude body in his arms, she’d not been the same. She’d changed from a sensible young woman interested only in a story to an Amazon who pursued a man without shame. She’d thrown herself at him in the rain forest; she’d sworn to a woman who trusted her, Red, that she’d not betray him—yet at the first opportunity, that’s what she’d done. She was acting like a spoiled little girl: one minute she hated him and the next minute she loved him.

  Sitting back on her heels for a moment, she wiped her forehead and looked across at Tynan as he used a scythe to clear some underbrush. His shirt was drenched with sweat and she could see his muscles working under the thin cloth. He looked as if he’d gained some weight in the last few weeks. Against her will, she remembered the raw stripes on his back where he’d been whipped.

  She thought of the way the townspeople had turned against her after she’d made one error of trying to help a man who looked as if he were guilty. How people everywhere must have treated a man who was always being accused of wrongdoing! How impossible all the “good” people made it for a man to stop doing wrong.

  She turned back to the planting with a vengeance. And she’d been just like them. One time she’d been doing a story on women who worked under the hideous conditions of the sweatshops and she was being very sympathetic when one woman said, “But you can afford to give sympathy because you’ve never had to be where we are.” It hadn’t made much of an impression on her at the time, but now she was beginning to understand what the woman meant. It was easy to judge, to say what you’d do in a situation if you weren’t faced with that situation.

  She had wanted to be Tynan’s friend, even his lover, when the only person she had to stand up against was a man who admitted he’d wanted to marry her even before he’d met her. But when she had to face the ridicule of an entire town and risk the reputation of Nola Dallas, she didn’t stand up so well. She’d walked away from him at the first sign of trouble.

  Chris was sure that she’d never felt so rotten in her life. She had almost earned the trust of a man who didn’t give his trust very often and then she’d betrayed him. She was no better than that girl who’d been willing to see Ty hang rather than tell the truth.

  And now she’d lost him. He was gone from her as if the few days they’d spent together had never been. The fragile beginnings were broken forever.

  Standing, easing her back against her hand, she went to the pump and filled the water bucket. She took a drink from the dipper, shaded her eyes against the sun and looked for Tynan. He was still chopping weeds, clearing the brush away for a new area of garden.

  She put the dipper into the bucket and carried it to him. “Thirsty?” she asked.

  He turned, smiling at her before he caught himself and the smile disappeared. He didn’t speak as he took the dipper from her.