laughed. “I guess it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?” She sobered. “I can’t talk for the others, but just about everyone here has some reason for wanting to get away from men. Some just wanted their freedom. Others wanted peace. I wanted…” She hesitated. “I think you know what I used to be, Mr. Constantine. I see it in your eyes. Well, I’d had enough of that life, and it seemed to me that the best way to start fresh was to go somewhere and do something that had nothing to do with whoring.”
“Why do you trust me, Bonnie?”
“I’m a pretty good judge of men. I think you’re honest.” She hesitated. “I see something else in your eyes, too. You want to know about Serenity. But I can’t tell you. If she decides to trust you, maybe she’ll tell you herself.”
Jacob wasn’t used to being so easy to read, or to being so firmly put in his place.
By unspoken agreement, he and Bonnie let the conversation lapse, and she went in search of the sewing things. She returned with a tape measure and set about recording the length and breadth of his chest, shoulders and arms.
Jacob felt nothing when she touched him. Bonnie’s movements were as efficient and impersonal as they could be. For some reason he couldn’t fathom, his thoughts turned back to Serenity.
She’d touched him less than a half-dozen times, usually as if he were a side of beef or a sack of flour, but even those brief contacts had stirred him in a way he didn’t like. It was wrong, and he knew it. Just as it was wrong to wonder what had made her what she was.
There was no reason to give it any thought at all. In a few weeks he would be gone.
CHAPTER FOUR
IT WAS A MATCH made in hell.
If there had been any other way, Serenity wouldn’t be riding beside Jacob Constantine, constantly aware of his presence, of the smell of him, of the easy way he sat on his horse. If she hadn’t been so bent on protecting the other women from him—even Bonnie, who was far too trusting, and Caridad, who might shoot him and have to live with the remorse—she would gladly have sent him out with someone else.
But he was her responsibility. So she rode out with him in silence to the southwest quarter of the range, beginning the search for calves in need of branding. No words passed between them; she didn’t offer conversation, and he seemed content to concentrate on the work.
He doesn’t want to know me any more than I want to know him, she thought. And yet, in spite of herself, she began to notice little intriguing things about him that broke her concentration and awakened a far from easy curiosity.
First, there was the way he worked the cattle. She had to admit that Constantine was worth several men in terms of skill and efficiency. He was just as good as he’d implied, guiding his horse with his knees and hardly a touch on the reins, handling the beeves as if they were harmless little lambs.
Ordinarily, branding required a minimum of three riders for each quarter of the range, and weeks of grueling work. But Jacob didn’t need any help at all getting the calves down, holding and tying them while she wielded the branding iron. In fact, he seemed to put very little effort into the work at all, and yet he achieved results that almost aroused her admiration.
Then there was the way he treated her. Though they seldom spoke, he was invariably courteous when he addressed her, never attempting the slightest intimacy or asking a single personal question. If he saw her as anything but a working partner, he showed no evidence of it.
She, however, could never be less than keenly aware of his lean, broad-shouldered frame, or the face she had been forced to concede was handsome in its own rough way. Nor could she pretend she wasn’t aware of her own body, even though she had long ago made it a habit to forget it was anything but a living machine to be fed and cared for as one would any valuable animal.
The first night they made camp beside the well at the far west border of the property—one of several that, along with a natural spring, made Avalon so valuable. There was enough of the branding fire left to cook the brace of cottontails Constantine had provided, a welcome addition to the coffee, beans and biscuit makings Serenity had brought.
When he’d left camp to go hunting, Serenity had been half-convinced that he’d gone for good. Maybe he thought his debt had been paid with a day’s hard work. The fact that he hadn’t taken his horse didn’t convince her otherwise; it just meant he wasn’t a horse thief.
But when he’d come back he’d had the rabbits in hand and had laid them on one of the nearby rocks without comment. She had thanked him briefly, brushed aside his offer to cook the rabbits and set up the spit herself. While the first one cooked, the two of them shared not so much as a single word. Jacob sat very still, listening to the night sounds, alert but relaxed. Serenity only wished she could feel the same.
When the first rabbit was ready, Serenity found herself offering it to him just to break the silence.
“No, ma’am,” he said, meeting her gaze. “I reckon you’re entitled to it.”
His easy refusal angered her out of all proportion to his words. “Because I’m a woman?” she snapped.
“You’ve worked as hard as any two men combined. You need to keep up your strength.”
And why should he care about her strength? Why bother with such compliments when she had never shown the slightest indication that she had any use for them?
“You’re the one who’s been hurt,” she said.
“I can wait.”
He wasn’t going to back down, and she was too exhausted to argue. She hung the other rabbit on the spit and began to eat. She was far too hungry to be dainty about it, but Constantine didn’t pay the least attention.
He accepted the second rabbit and ate with remarkable tidiness. When he’d finished, he picked up the battered tin plates.
“We don’t want any coyotes bothering us,” he said with a slight, wry smile and walked out into the dark to wipe them clean in the sand. His words and that smile made it seem almost as if he was keeping some secret joke she wasn’t meant to understand.
Her temper flared again, and she was forced to acknowledge that her emotions were out of control. All the feelings she had tried to master over the past six years were bubbling to the surface, and Jacob Constantine was the one who’d set them to boiling.
But blaming him for her upset wouldn’t help her. She knew that her anger was a sign of her own weakness, a dangerous vulnerability, a painful reminder that she had yet to erase the brand Lafe Renier and his gang had left on her soul. As long as she carried that brand, she would be a prisoner to her past. And her pain.
She had always known there was only one way to conquer that pain squarely: stare it in the face and spit in its eye. Unfortunately, she hadn’t yet found the means to put that plan into action.
But there was something else she could do, here and now: refuse to give Jacob Constantine the satisfaction of knowing just how thoroughly he disturbed her. And she could learn as much about him as possible. If she understood him even a little bit, she would know how to deal with him, how to react, how to ignore him when it suited her. She would be able to defend herself.
From what?
