Waltz with the Lady Read online

  Without even raising a brow, India turned and walked down the veranda steps. She comfortably secured the baby in the saddlebag and climbed up on her horse.

  Gat, paper in hand, was still standing on the porch looking at her. India looked back, straight faced. “Well, do you think that was a proper description of my attributes?”

  “Well, I…” Gat stuttered, trying hard to lend the proper gravity to his answer.

  India bit the inside of her lip to keep her own manner serious. “Well, what?”

  “Well, I don’t know much about gingersnaps.”

  India burst into giggles. “You don’t know much about gingersnaps! I could see you were about ready to split wide open with laughter when I came out.”

  He tossed the paper aside and climbed up on his own horse. “You’re the damnedest woman to put a man on the hot seat!”

  Still laughing she said, “Until you give us the vote, that’s where all of you belong!” With a jaunty tilt of the head she gave him a flashing red-lipped smile and nudged Bluestocking down the street.

  With each setting sun it became more difficult for India not to lay out her blanket beside Gat and spend the night in his arms, but to her mind propriety must be observed, boundaries of intimacy drawn. She’d put a halt to his love making more than once until he began referring to her as the vestal virgin of suffrage, and when they traveled during the days, her thoughts were not necessarily on crusading for the vote, but more frequently on the feel of Gat’s arms around her and the taste of his lips.

  While her feelings for Gat heightened, her puritan upbringing would not allow her to sink into the much-touted arrangement of “free love.” Though Gat seemed to perceive her dilemma, he was not altogether sympathetic, and was at times, particularly in the evenings, downright testy.

  Being a woman, India tried to smooth out his moodiness, but that only compounded the problem between them. One evening, he gave a casual tug on her hand and called her into his arms with the slightest of protest from her. Once he took her into his arms it always happened that her strength of will dissolved and she found herself flowering to his touch. She felt like a hypocrite.

  “India,” he whispered her name against her cheek. “India,” he kissed into the soft hollow of her throat, nuzzling past the lacings of her doeskin dress, to press soft kisses down the warm furrow between her breasts. Each place his moist lips touched left India inwardly shaking as if she’d been burned. But oh, what a sweet burning!

  All was pure sensation for India. She felt herself standing on the edge of a wondrously exquisite pool and Gat was calling her to dive in. She wanted to—by heaven, how she wanted to! His hands massaged her hips, moving slowly, then slipping beneath the doeskin dress and under her pantalettes to the silkiness of her thighs.

  Suddenly, his roving hand was halted by India’s own. It was probably the single greatest act of self-control of her life, but she knew she was on the brink of no return where passion was concerned, and she remembered what Eugenie had said: You can stop it anytime you want.

  Gat swore under his breath and broke their embrace, surprising her with a reaction that wasn’t very understanding. She reached for his hand, but he stood up and moved opposite the campfire.

  “I think you are trying to sit two horses with one fanny.”

  “What do you mean?” asked India, offended that he had so abruptly left her.

  His face was shadowed, but the smoldering fire seemed to reflect the tenor of his mood. “A man can only take so much come-hither, Miss Simms.”

  “Miss, Simms, is it?” echoed India, on the defense for a change. The air, earlier sparked with desire, now sparked with irritability.

  “Yep, Miss Simms it is! I think we’ve stretched the tether about as far as it will go and if you aren’t willing to let hold, we better just cut it off.”

  “Cut it off? But I—”

  “—Enjoy it?” he supplied. “Don’t we all, and I’d like to enjoy it more. Kissing isn’t exactly the best part.”

  India frowned. In the past weeks she’d felt some pretty cataclysmic things while Gat held her close. “But…but our philosophies are different on the matter.”

  Gat shifted his long legs and perched a foot on a stone by the fire. “I’d say so. You’re against matrimony and your high-tone morality keeps you just out of reach. I think we better cut it off until you decide which horse you’re going to ride.” His manner had relaxed and his voice loosened into thoughtfulness.

  “But…” India somehow felt they had been through this before. Oddly, the image of Tommy Cahoon and his scalped head came to mind. Gat was up to something. He had a way of herding cattle going in one direction into another without even a flick of his lasso and he was doing that to her now. If she only knew which direction he favored she would go the other, just to show him he couldn’t manipulate her. “Well, maybe you are right,” she raised an arrogant brow. “We’ll keep the arrangement platonic.”

  Gat frowned, giving her a hard, contemptuous look. The baby chose that moment to cry and Gat moved to pick her up. Nothing more was said between them.

  The next day the only one contented was baby Hope. Not touching Gat or being touched by him, yet being so close, became another great exercise in self-denial for India. What rankled her was Gat’s stoicism in the matter, besides his being extraordinarily surly. She felt like Lucifer cut off from heaven. Worst of all, the end of her speaking tour was in sight and she would sorely miss the fire-lit nights of close companionship and endearing conversation.

  Later in the afternoon a great opportunity came for reconciliation when Bluestocking threw a shoe and they had to ride double on Gat’s horse. India wrapped her arms snugly around his waist and reveled in his nearness, her pulse coursing the entire distance. But Gat seemed oblivious. Once again he was her escort and nothing more. Now, India felt spurned and wondered if he’d ever really cared for her in the first place.

  Chapter 21

  They rode into Laramie late in the evening, trail weary and spent. With Hope in her arms, India walked inside the livery stable, sat on a barrel and watched Gat shoe Bluestocking. The livery forge smoldered crimson in the evening light. Stripped to the waist, Gat’s muscled chest glistened with sweat. At first India had prudishly lowered her eyes, then realizing that he was intent on his work she looked at him without his knowing it. Soon her gaze began to devour the sleek contour of frame and form while she admired his strong powerful forearms, the shadowed curve of biceps, and the way his buttocks moved under his dust-coated pants. She wanted to touch him, run her hands through the dark hair on his chest, draw her fingertips across his shoulders. The hot night and the heat of the smithy fire flushed her face, and she felt droplets of perspiration trickle down her cleavage and sticky-wet dampness spread between her thighs. The ring of hammer against anvil shocked through her high-pitched senses until her own vulnerability to Gat’s virility could stand no more. She suddenly stood and left the stable.

  Later, she and Gat stepped into the sleeping room he’d arranged for her in a dingy railway hotel. It came with the usual bed, chair and vermin, while air smelling of soot and rubbish filtered through the open window.

  “If you need me, I’ll be sleeping out behind the livery stable.”

  It seemed to India he wanted to put as much distance between them as possible. How she yearned for the peaceful nights they’d shared on the prairie. It no longer mattered to her that they had to share the battered tin cup and eat strips of burned bacon stuffed into equally burned biscuits.

  “I’d rather sleep behind the stable than here,” she said.

  “Ladies don’t sleep outside in towns.” He tossed the saddlebags on the straw-mattress bed.

  She wanted to tell him that she didn’t care, that she just wanted to be with him, but by his surly manner it was clear he didn’t want to be with her.

  “This is a filthy hole,” she retaliated.

  “It’s the best I could find this time of night.” One eye narrowe
d and the muscles of his jaw began to flick.

  She regarded him with resentful eyes and snapped. “What, all the brothels full?”

  Anger tensed every line of his thick shoulders and the sudden thunderous look he gave her made her sorry she’d said it.

  “Ma’am, I hope not!” he shot back, striding across the wooden floor. Between one eyeblink and the next he was out the door.

  India winced as the door slammed and the ring of his spurs down the hallway became a dirge. Why had she been such a shrew? It was she who should be in his arms, not some woman down the street. Could he really sleep with another woman after all that had passed between them? But then who was she to pass judgment on him? She was an adventuress who had tossed off the conventions of society, a fanatic who demanded equality for women, and for some inexplicable reason her sins seemed to be the greater. The sting of tears burned her eyes and her heart crashed to her toes while in her arms the baby fussed to be fed.

  Gathering her fortitude, she moved to the bed and took from the saddlebag a feeding bottle filled with goat’s milk. As she put the bottle to Hope’s lips, the innocence of her angelic face caused India to pause. Perhaps her philosophies were carried to the extreme, and maybe if the laws were changed marriage wouldn’t necessarily be all slavery and subjection. Babies needed both a father and mother and a family to grow up in. Sympathy filled her heart for the little child in her arms who was destined to grow up in a foundling home.

  If only she and Gat could…She cuddled the baby closer to her. But no, she could never be happy on the frontier and he would never leave it. Even if she could live life in settlements full of flies and dirt, coarse food and coarser speech, she wouldn’t make that sort of choice and betray the cause of equal rights.

  A black cricket wriggled out of the straw mattress, paused and then crawled across the worn muslin sheeting. Watching, India wondered how many more bugs were living inside the bedding, though she was almost beyond caring. She yawned and gazed out the open window into the night. Below the window, freight cars were being shunted, but the noise and bedbugs weren’t agitating her so much as the niggling image of Gat in the arms of a henna-haired harlot. Even so, as the poet might have written, she could not love him half so much, loved she not freedom more.

  Gat strode past three saloons before he entered one. Coyote and Square Deal sat down outside, waiting like dutiful chaperons while he bought a bottle of whiskey. He then walked back outside, uncorked the bottle, took a swig or two, and headed toward the outskirts of town. Tonight he preferred solitude. He sat down on a hogback ridge, leaned back, and stared heavenward, and slipped into a stupor of soul-searching.

  He was near the end of his rope where India was concerned. He didn’t like the arrangement, but since it was her idea in the first place he’d gone along with it in hopes she’d come around. One minute she was as ornery as a skittish mare, and the next she was so winsome he’d come close to taking her on the spot. But to his thinking she wasn’t playing by any rules and he wasn’t going to be strung along in a game he couldn’t win. A man had enough misfortunes. He stared into the night sky, seeing nothing, seeing everything.

  It appeared to him that she still intended to go back East and despite what had happened between them in the last month, no choices had been made, no understandings reached. He knew her aversion to frontier life and he wouldn’t ask her to stay where she felt she couldn’t be happy. Besides, what man would propose to a woman who protested the present laws of marriage as injurious to women? They were at a stalemate, and with each passing day the strain tore them apart.

  He took a long pull on the whiskey bottle and ruminated over India’s ideas of equality and independence. Sure women had it tough. Sure they ought to have rights. But why was he the one to bear the brunt of a thousand years of injustice? Like a fool jackrabbit he’d been snared in a trap and now he’d have to see it out, barbs and all. The bachelor’s life he’d grown accustomed to seemed as flat as the prairie now that he’d been with India and the baby. He wasn’t sure if he could settle back into the loneliness of the wrangler’s life. A man could take only so much lonesome.

  Towards midnight the moon slowly rose with virgin shyness, and while the whiskey had eased the pain in his gut, it hadn’t stopped the battle going on in his head, instead it just fired the confusion. Dejectedly, he nursed the whiskey bottle until it was empty and then tossed it down the hill. During the hours until sunrise he threw rocks at the bottle and joined Coyote in howling at the moon.

  The next afternoon, beneath the willow-woven roof of Laramie’s outdoor bowery, India listened sedately while her opponent in the debate made a clever speech. The lawyer’s wit occasionally evoked applause and laughter in a crowd that was an odd mixture of gentility and ignobility. Men in alligator boots with wild unkempt hair and beards stood next to well-tailored merchants. Tired-looking women, strangely dressed in gowns that must have been old on their grandmothers, sat beside finely frocked socialites.

  India smoothed her hair and straightened her own dress, all the while conscious of Gat’s insolent eyes on her from where he stood on the sidelines tending baby Hope, a task which, except for this afternoon, he’d always agreeably volunteered to do during India’s lectures. Around him women waved white handkerchiefs to keep away the buzzing insects, and men took furtive nips of liquor from secreted flasks. Minutes before when she handed the baby to him she had remained aloof, avoiding his dark eyes, but remarking distastefully that the air fairly reeked with whiskey.

  “And my friends,” continued the lawyer relentlessly, “if women were given the right of franchise, they would correspondingly come under the obligation to bear arms. Do you want your sisters, your wives and your daughters going to war?”

  The crowd, which India had held in her sway only moments before, vacillated to the lawyer. “And if women vote at all, the right should not be exercised before the age of twenty-one. And when a woman marries, her vote should be merged with her husband’s. The vote of the husband must be regarded as the vote of the wife—bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh.” It particularly irritated India when her opponents quoted scripture to lend credibility to their arguments. The lawyer drew a lurid picture of women deserting husbands and children for lawyers’ offices and judges’ seats, leaving the deserted men to quiet the babies as best they could with rubber substitutes. Looking over at Gat, who held fussing baby Hope, and who was attempting to do that very thing, caused India to bite back a smile. Was it so horrible in the young lawyer’s estimation to tend a child?

  After entertaining the crowd with similar stock arguments for fifteen minutes longer, the lawyer folded his arms in dramatic fashion. “In conclusion, gentlemen, allow me to say that I have often known a hen to try to crow, but I’ve never known one to succeed!” He took his seat amidst a storm of laughter and applause, relinquishing the platform to India for rebuttal.

  In reply, India turned to him. “It is clear my worthy opponent is a bachelor. I hope one of the young ladies present would some day be kind enough to initiate him into the mysteries of matrimony and maternity, and cure him of his present fear that women would neglect their babies if enfranchised. I beg to inform him that women would never dare neglect their babies, for if they did, we’d never have any more bachelors.”

  The bachelor lawyer blushed, the audience tittered and baby Hope let out a colicky yowl. Ransom cast India an agitated glance as he patted and pillowed the infant on his broad shoulder. With each head-throbbing cry from the baby, Gat regretted his all-night drunk, but most of all he regretted falling in love with the beautiful, high-spirited woman standing at the podium.

  A man standing behind Gat, dressed in soldier blues and buckskin trousers, began to crow, mainly to entertain his far-from-sober companions. Gat’s eyes shifted warningly toward the men and then back to India. But apparently after what she had survived the past months, she seemed hardly ruffled.

  “Friends, the gentleman said he has often known a hen to try to
crow, but he has never known one to succeed. Well, I am free to admit he is right. I have found the same peculiarity in hens. But once in a poultry yard I saw a rooster try to set, and he made quite a success of it!” The bowery fairly vibrated with laughter, but instead of thwarting the heckler, Gat knew she had merely fueled his fire. Even so, he couldn’t help but admire her. By now, well schooled in the art of public speaking, India maintained calm in the face of insult, and parried the heckler’s increasing disturbances with humor.

  “It has been proposed that a woman and husband share one vote. Then I say, if a married man be entitled to one vote, the unmarried man should have one-half a vote.” Applause rippled the crowd. “If women had the right of franchise would they also be forced to bear arms? No, I say. There are large classes even among men in this land who are exempt from services in our armies because of physical incapacities and reasons of conscientious scruples.

  “Think of the woman who pays a large tax, and the man who drives her coach and the man who waits upon her table. They go to the polls and decide how much of her property goes to support the public good. She has no voice in the matter. She is taxed without representation.”

  The heckler let loose a loud holler.

  “Jeers and calls are not arguments, sir,” India retorted to him directly. “If you choose to bray like a mule, then please come up front and let the audience compare the better argument.”

  Her bold challenge settled him down momentarily, but it was apparent he had come, not out of public conscience, but to make nuisance of himself. India was nearing the conclusion of her rebuttal while Ransom was nearing the end of his patience with the fretful baby.

  Somehow the heckler had made a connection between the two and leaned toward Gat and snickered loudly, “Why don’t you give it yer titty. Seems yer wife is busy!” It was the wrong thing to say to Gat Ransom at that particular moment. Without even a hint of forethought, Gat swung a right fist at the man hitting him squarely in the jaw. The blow knocked him out cold.