“Then you have to put some work into it. Besides…” Rosie’s eye warmed in a way that made Tess nervous. “Maybe it’s not such a good idea to toss the man out. Maybe you should try to make this a real marriage, Tessie.”
“Hell no!”
“Why not?” Rosie sat on her bed-formerly the bed she had shared with Colin McCabe-and started ripping the seam of the dress’s waist. “At ?rst I thought this Josh Ransom was bad news. But from what I’ve seen, he has more good points than bad ones. A woman is always better off with a man by her side, if he’s a good man.”
Tess knew Rosie spoke from her own experience. Married young, abandoned only two years after her marriage, Rosie had been left on her own to sink or swim. With no money and few skills, she had sunk-at least in the eyes of the world-and ended up plying womankind’s oldest trade along with Glory at the Bird Cage. Glory thrived in such a place. Rosie had not.
When Colin McCabe had come along and taken a fancy to her, Rosie hadn’t hesitated to move out to the Diamond T, put up with Colin’s two motherless children, and cope with the hard life on an isolated ranch. They had never married, because Rosie still had a husband wandering the country somewhere, but she had given Tess’s father all of her devotion and loyalty.
“Did you love my father, Rosie?”
Rosie smiled. “There are as many kinds of love as there are men and women on this earth, Tessie. Your father was a good man, a strong man. He was kind to me, and I loved him for that, even though he had some peculiar ways about him. But now that he’s gone, I could love another man, with a different kind of love.” She glanced toward her bedroom’s closed door, her lips pursing. “If the man wasn’t such a rockheaded idiot.”
Tess smiled, wondering if Miguel would ever catch on that Rosie’s sharp tongue hid a willing heart.
By midafternoon, the dress ?t-sort of. Tess sported more frills and bows than a porcupine had quills.
“Won’t Josh be surprised?” Rosie gushed cheerfully.
Surprised might not quite be the word for it. Seeing Tess gussied up like some fancy porcelain ?gurine might just make the man laugh himself silly. Not that she would blame him.
WHEN Josh drove the McCabe buckboard around to the front of the adobe house, he found Miguel lounging in the shade of the covered front porch. The foreman grinned at him.
“The women are inside, fussin’ with clothes or something.”
“Figures.”
Josh had gotten a new shirt and jeans in town. Rosie had burned the ones he’d worn on that daylong, or was it a twodaylong, binge in the Bird Cage. She’d said with a smirk that the fumes had near lit themselves. During the last week he had worn Colin McCabe’s duds. But McCabe’s clothes, too tight in the shoulders, too loose around the middle, weren’t exactly ?t for social calling. Though Josh didn’t look forward to the prospect of sashaying around the Hoffsteaders’ new barn showing off his “bride,” he’d be damned if he would go to this hoopla looking like someone who couldn’t dress himself.
Besides, Tess wanted them to look like a respectable married couple, and Tess, in spite of her unwomanly ways and touchy independence, didn’t deserve to be shamed by the man on her arm. She was an honest woman with a good soul, and over the past week, Josh had come to respect her. How could he not respect someone, man or woman, who feared neither hard work, wild cattle, illnatured horses, or equally illnatured men.
Since the women were taking their own sweet time, Josh set the wagon brake and climbed down to sit in the shade of the porch. The foreman gave him an appraising look. After a moment of silence, he nodded. “Tonight will be a good time. Rosie can dance a barn down, and Tess…” He hesitated and gave Josh a meaningful look. “It’s time Tess learned that she’s a woman.”
Josh snorted. “Don’t look at me for that, amigo. I’m temporary here.”
“A man could do worse than to settle on the Diamond T.”
“A man could get killed settling on the Diamond T unless Tess McCabe wanted him here.”
Miguel smiled. “Tess Ransom, now. She is Tess Ransom.”
Josh chuckled, trying to picture Tess as any man’s wife. Tess Ransom indeed!
“How come a man like you don’t have a real wife?” Miguel asked. “There are more women here now that the Apaches are not trying to kill everyone.”
“I could ask you the same question,” Josh replied gruf?y.
Miguel snorted. “My mother was Papago, my father was Mexican. The respectable women of both my mother’s people and my father’s people look at me like I have a disease.”
Josh nodded. Every kind of people hereabouts looked down their noses at every other kind of people. The Mexicans hated the Indians. The Indians hated the Mexicans. And most whites despised them both. “Well, for my part, I think that no respectable woman belongs on a ranch in this country. It withers them up, wears them down. Pulls all the life out of them just like sap. I watched it happen to my mother and sister. No need to watch it happen to a wife.”
Miguel shrugged. “Rosie is respectable, though she didn’t used to be. She likes it here. And Tess blooms like a ?ower in the desert.” The foreman slid a meaningful look in Josh’s direction.
Josh chuckled. “Tess a ?ower?”
The image inspired an upward quirk of Miguel’s mouth. “Maybe she blooms like a weed. But nothing will suck the sap out of our Tess.”
That made Josh laugh. “I wouldn’t exactly call Tess a weed. But she isn’t a runofthemill woman. She’s more like a-”
At that moment, out Tess walked, knocking all thoughts of ?owers or weeds right out of Josh’s head. She looked like…well, certainly not like any man’s wife, but miles from being herself, either. He didn’t know what he had expected her to wear to a barn dance-a cleanedup version of her usual work garb, maybe. He certainly hadn’t expected this!
Rosie presented her creation like an artist unveiling a master painting, and Miguel grinned from ear to ear.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” Rosie asked.
Tess squirmed uncomfortably in her frills. Josh tried to think of something creative to say that would be complimentary and not an outandout lie. Hell, he decided. This called for a lie.
“You do look beautiful, Tess. And so do you, Rosie.”
Clearly Rosie had learned women’s fashions from her time at the Bird Cage. Miguel had told Josh all about Rosie’s transformation from saloon girl to “respectable lady,” relating the story with shining pride and noticeable fondness. But the “respectable lady” still saw beauty through the eyes of the saloon girl. Rosie herself wore a dress that displayed an interesting expanse of chest, but otherwise seemed plain beside the getup she had hung on Tess.
“You don’t think I look…uh…” Tess obviously searched for words that wouldn’t hurt Rosie’s feelings. Uncertainty brimmed in her eyes like tears. Josh wouldn’t have suspected that Tess McCabe could be uncertain about anything, and the revelation inspired an odd protectiveness inside him.
“You look stunning,” Josh supplied. It wasn’t exactly a lie. The ?rst sight of her had certainly just about knocked him over.
Miguel liked Josh’s choice of words. “
The mild day made the drive to the Hoffsteaders’ place a pleasure. Birds ?uttered among the mesquite and juniper, scolding the travelers for disturbing the day’s peace. A bright sun ducked in and out of gathering clouds, painting the valley and surrounding mountains with constantly changing purple shadows. Tess stayed silent during the ride, but seated together with legs dangling from the rear of the wagon, Rosie and Miguel volleyed insults in the afternoon sunshine. The jibes ?ew with practiced ease. He complained that she made biscuits like rocks. She accused him of having the manners of an Indian. Since Miguel’s mother had been an Indian, he might have taken offense, but no. He just laughed and said that his Papago mother knew how to cook better than any American or Mexican woman he’d met.
Listening to them snipe at each other, Josh wondered why everyone on the Diamond T snickered behind their backs and took bets on how many months would pass before they set up housekeeping. God himself couldn’t explain the ways of women with men and men with women, Josh decided. So why should Josh Ransom understand?
Wagons and people crowded the Hoffsteaders’ place, which was situated in the foothills of the Dragoon Mountains among the pinon and juniper. The timber house was certainly bigger than the Diamond T’s little adobe
