number of families like their nursemaids to be on the older side. Even the Meekers, but they were willing to hire me permanently considering their last nursemaid, though she’d been a woman well into her thirties, had chosen to get married and end her employment.”
“Had she become a mail-order bride, too?”
Marie chomped down on her lip, preventing a startled no. How had she talked herself into this corner? Not seeing a direct escape route, she took the only one she could fathom. “My letter to Mr. Wagner explained everything.”
He was frowning deeply and holding those gray eyes on her. “Mr. Wagner isn’t here right now.”
“I know that,” she snapped, unable to stop herself.
He lifted an eyebrow as his gaze roamed up and down her for a moment, and then he turned and stared at the road ahead of them.
The pressure was enormous, but Marie held in her sigh. They’d talked enough. Silence would be a good thing for a few miles. No longer thinking about her past, the future and its dilemmas were clamoring for her attention.
“He’s not at the ranch, either,” Mr. Burleson said then.
“Mr. Wagner?” she asked, even though she knew that was exactly who Stafford Burleson meant.
“Yes.”
“Where is he?”
He shrugged. “Texas. Mexico.”
Marie couldn’t deny a quick flash of relief washed over her. Maybe she wouldn’t have to face the marriage issue right away. She and the children could get settled in and... “For how long?” she asked.
His gaze never left the road. “Can’t rightly say. Could be next spring before he gets back.”
“Next spring?” Panic overtook any sense of relief. Her funds were almost gone. The children would starve to death by then, unless... She shivered at the thought, but unfortunately, Stafford was her only hope.
Something in his eyes, the way they shimmered, had her mouth going dry, her nerves tingling as though a storm was approaching. Maybe there was another option. “Who lives at Mr. Wagner’s ranch in his absence?”
“Me.”
She swallowed. “You?”
Nodding, he said, “Yep. I told you I was his partner.”
An icy chill raced up her spine. “So the children and I will be living with...”
“Me.”
Good heavens, what had she done? Not thought her plan out clearly, that’s for sure. Living with this man had to be worse than marrying Mick Wagner.
Stafford told himself a hundred times over that he shouldn’t get pleasure out of someone else’s fear, but he just couldn’t help it. When he’d said she’d be living with him, it had scared her into next week, but he was enjoying how it had knocked some of the haughtiness out of her.
She was still uppity, and continued to use that insufferable tone with him—when she had to speak to him—but she was wary. That’s the part he liked. She needed to be wary. Very. A nursemaid hauling someone else’s kids across the country as a mail-order bride? What kind of tale was that? There was more to it. The way she wouldn’t look him in the eye when she talked said that. If he didn’t know better, he’d wonder if she’d kidnapped those kids. She’d left too clear a trail, though. Anyone could have followed her, if that was the case.
He had a lot to learn, and with all that was going on, Stafford was discovering one thing about himself. Flipping the cards, so to speak, on a woman, was rather exciting. That opportunity had never come up in his life before now. Being raised in a family of seven children with only one brother had given him plenty of experience with women. He’d been born in the middle of five sisters. His brother, Sterling, was the oldest, and had already been working alongside their father by the time Stafford had come along. That meant he’d been told what to do and when to do it by women since the day he was born. Not to mention Francine Weatherford. She, too, had thought a man was little more than a dog that needed to be trained. He’d grown and changed a lot since leaving Mississippi ten years ago, on his eighteenth birthday, shortly after Francine broke their engagement and announced she was marrying Sterling.
Out of duty, and at his mother’s insistence, he’d stuck around for the wedding, and he’d even been back a half dozen times over the years to check in on everyone, but there wasn’t a day that went by when he wasn’t thankful he’d made his escape when he had. Sterling had a load of kids now, too, almost as many as their parents’ house had held. And Francine, well, last time he’d seen her, she hadn’t been nearly as pretty as she’d looked to him all those years ago.
A ferocious round of barking had Stafford lifting his head from where he was harnessing the team. The little dog, dubbed Polly by one of the kids, was kicking up a dirt storm near a thick patch of bushes several yards away. Stafford made a quick head count. All six kids were piling things in the back of the wagon as Marie had instructed. It was she, he noted, who was missing from the campsite. He’d quit thinking of her as Miss Hall sometime yesterday. Using her given name seemed to irritate her, and he liked that, too.
“Jackson,” he shouted toward the teamster readying the freight wagon. “You know where Marie is?”
The man, a big blond Swede with a voice that came from his ankles, shook his head. “Nope.”
They’d caught up with the freight wagon before sunset the night before, where Jackson had chosen a good spot to call it a day and had a pot of rabbit stew ready to be devoured by six hungry children. Never unprepared, Stafford had had a bag of jerky and apples they’d all consumed as they’d traveled, but still, once they’d hit camp, those kids had all but licked their plates clean. Actually, the two little ones had licked their plates. Marie had scolded them while he and Jackson shared a grin. They weren’t so bad—those kids—once they’d figured out that they couldn’t run roughshod over him the way they did over Marie.
Polly was still going wild, and Stafford settled a harness over one horse’s neck. “Finish this up, will you?” he asked Jackson, already moving toward the dog. If the crazy thing had a skunk cornered they’d all pay for it.
Stafford was almost to the edge of the thick bush when a noise caught his attention above the barking. It was faint, and subtle, but the kind of sound that a man never forgets once he hears it. Drawing his gun, Stafford scanned the ground cautiously, meticulously. Rattlers were shady and had the ability to blend in to their surroundings like no other creature.
“Get out of here, Polly,” he hissed, kicking dirt to scare the dog aside. It didn’t help. She started barking faster, louder. A movement near the roots of the bush proved it was a snake, shaking the buttons on its tail. The head was hidden and Stafford eased his way around the bush. He saw it then, arched up and drawn back, ready to strike.
Stafford fired.
The bullet hit its mark. The snake flew backward into the bush. At the same time, a scream sounded and Stafford saw little more than a flash of white out of the corner of his eye. He took a step, rounded the bush
