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Sacre bleu! Her throat burned as if she had eaten a red-hot coal! She couldn’t take a breath, couldn’t talk. Her eyes watered. And both Wash and Rooney were guffawing!
Manette stared at her with widening blue eyes.
She waved her hands in front of her, trying to draw in some air, but nothing helped. Finally Wash stopped laughing, leaned close and pounded her back with the flat of his hand.
She coughed, then choked. At last she could speak.
“Gentlemen,” she announced in a raspy voice. “I have now damned the match.” Both men stopped laughing.
“Is that not what one says?” she asked.
That set them off again. Jeanne ignored them, finished her bowl of bread and milk and waited for Wash and Rooney to stop chortling. Rooney exchanged a look with Wash, then solemnly poured another shot of liquor for each of them.
Both men raised their glasses in a salute to her. “Damn the match,” they said in unison.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Bathwater’s hot,” Mrs. Rose called from the kitchen. “Who’s first?”
Jeanne could not wait to escape the laughter around the dining table. She grabbed Manette and marched out to the back porch where the landlady had filled the tin bathtub. She had scented the water with a sprinkling of lavender leaves, and Jeanne smiled at the gesture.
She sponged off Manette and wrapped her sleepy daughter up in a towel Mrs. Rose had heated in the oven. Manette curled up on a wood bench beside a stack of wicker laundry baskets, pulled her head down inside the warm towel like a turtle and nodded off to sleep.
The door into the kitchen stood open, but the door leading to the dining room was closed; even so, Jeanne could hear Rooney and Wash talking in low tones. Quickly she unbuttoned her wet skirt and petticoat, dropped them onto the floor, and cocked her head to be sure the men were still occupied. Satisfied, she stripped off her chemise and pantalettes and stepped into the tub.
The water barely covered her nipples, but oh, how wonderful it felt, easing the ache in her thighs and soothing her frayed nerves. How, she wondered, did men manage to ride horses all day long, day after day?
Wash’s tall form loomed in the kitchen doorway, and with a squeak of surprise, Jeanne clasped her hands over her breasts. “I have not finished bathing!” She thought she shouted the words, but ever since that glass of spirits she’d downed, her head had felt funny and her mind kept circling in a dreamy haze. Perhaps she had only whispered.
“Got mighty quiet in here all of a sudden,” he said. “Wanted to be sure you hadn’t drowned.”
“I am not drowned,” she said, praying her voice sounded matter-of-fact. “I am dreaming of floating down the Garonne in a little boat on a warm summer afternoon, and the lavender fields—”
She gave a cry and jolted upright. “My lavender! The flood will sweep it away into the creek!” Suddenly frantic, she stood up in the tub, realized she was naked and sat back down with a sploosh.
“What are you looking at?”
Wash took his time in answering. He walked on into the kitchen, shut the door and returned to crouch beside the tub. “What I’m looking at,” he said with a hint of laughter in his voice, “is you, Jeanne. Not touching, just looking.”
“What right have you—?”
“None at all,” he said quietly. “Just feeling grateful for two good horses, and for two shots of good whiskey, and for Mrs. Rose and her milk cow. And…” He held her gaze. “I’m grateful for a woman who doesn’t scare easy.”
She gave him the oddest look, and his belly did a slow somersault.
“And…” He did not finish the thought because Jeanne was pressing her lips to his.
“Oh, Jeanne,” he said when their lips parted. “Could we…?”
“Non.” She said the word so decisively he knew he couldn’t push her. He wouldn’t anyway. Given the damage he’d already done to the bond between them, one more misstep and she’d likely shoot him with that derringer she carried.
But to his surprise what she said was, “And I am grateful for you.”
Wash tried not to grin.
The following morning dawned so clear and bright it was hard to look at the sky. When Wash rode out to Green Valley, the endless expanse of blue arched overhead all the way to the distant mountains. Yesterday’s rainwater had soaked into the parched ground so completely the layer of mud was already starting to dry up in a tracery of cracks.
Rooney had stayed behind this morning to repair the fence blown down by the storm winds. He’d volunteered his services at breakfast “as long as Little Miss and Sarah’s grandson Mark would be his helpers.” Wash had to smile at the thought of little Manette wielding a hammer.
