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Daniel looked over to where Anna sat on the blanket, her back to him. He supposed that was deliberate as if to tell him she could not care less about him. But the way she sat with her knees pulled up and her arms wrapped around her legs made him think that he’d wounded her. Again.
Blackness gnawed at his insides. He swung the hoe at the ground, burying the blade in the stem of a grapevine. Damn, now he was killing his plants.
He threw the hoe, disgusted with himself and the whole situation. If he’d been watching what he was doing instead of watching Anna, he wouldn’t be in danger of mortally wounding a plant that took three years to bear fruit, five to produce well.
He washed his hands in the water running through the nearest sluice gate and retrieved the food and bottle of wine he’d brought. Lunch was bound to be awkward because he’d kissed her.
He could think of nothing but kissing her again.
The best thing to do was pretend nothing had happened. He walked up to the edge of the blanket. “Hungry?”
“I suppose I could eat.” She sounded normal.
He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Sinking down on the opposite corner of the blanket, he set the sack with their lunch in between them.
“You must have built up an appetite working so hard.”
That was it, polite talk about nothing. He shrugged and planted his thumbs on the cork in the wine bottle. “We can see if the fruits of last year’s labor turned into vinegar or wine.”
She reached up and unpinned her hat and set it on the blanket beside her. He couldn’t help following her every move. In the dappled sunlight, the molten copper of her hair was like new pennies mixed with the gold flakes that came out of the streams up north.
“What?” she asked, patting her head as if expecting to discover a strand had slipped free.
His throat felt thick. He’d forgo lunch in a heartbeat just to kiss her again. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen hair quite that color.”
“’Tis fairly common where I’m from.”
“Connecticut?” He felt a little slow.
“Actually, Ireland. We came over when I was ten. My family lives in New York, but I answered an advertisement for mill girls in Connecticut. Are you going to tell Rafael what happened?”
There she went again, diving straight into the problem. Did anything frighten her?
The last thing he should do was tell Rafael, unless he wanted to claim her as his own bride. His heart gave an odd jolt. The thought was loco.
He wasn’t ready to settle down. At twenty-seven, Rafe was barely ready, and he was five years older. And other than wanting to kiss her, she was annoying as heck. He didn’t want to marry her. He swallowed hard. “I’ll tell him if you want me to.”
She blinked. Her eyes were unusual, too, a clear light green, not merely some indeterminate shade between gray and brown. “Why would I want you to?”
Everything inside him sagged. She would only want him to if she wanted him to marry her instead of Rafael. “You don’t seem to like letting sleeping dogs lie.”
Nope, she poked them with a stick, which was why it was hard trying to keep the truth of the stagecoach holdup from her.
She wrapped her arms around her legs again and leaned her chin on her knees. “I never know what you’re going to tell him. Won’t he be angry?”
Daniel looked down at the cork he was working free. He had no idea what Rafael would think. His brother might be glad to be free of the woman who had shot him. On the other hand, he might care a great deal once he was well enough to marry Anna. “I imagine he’d be a bit put out.”
Still, once Rafe was well, he’d likely make Anna trip all over herself to please him, the same way Madre and Juanita did. Even the Indian girl he’d grown up with had fallen for Rafael. She’d been the daughter of the mission-raised Indian woman who cleaned for them most of the years he was growing up. And just as he was working up his courage to steal a kiss from her, he’d discovered her sneaking into Rafael’s bedroom at night. She’d been his age, his playmate, his companion—how she must have laughed at his pathetic attempts to hold her hand.
Anna stared off into the distance. “I’m not good at hiding things. I’m not much of a lady.”
She dropped an arm and traced a triangular pattern in the blanket with her fingertip.
He imagined that finger on him, learning the angles of his body. His blood grew thick. “I doubt if he cares all that much about you being a lady.”
Her eyes jerked to his. “But you said—”
“I lied. I was trying to keep you from discovering that Rafe thought he knew who the robbers were.” Somehow that lie seemed to be falling in on itself faster than the others were. “And he was looking for them day and night.”
Her eyes narrowed as he stumbled through his explanation. His lies were wrapped in lies, and it was only a matter of time before he tripped over one or tangled them so badly even he couldn’t figure out how to unwind them.
He finally freed the cork of the wine bottle. “You want to try this first or do you want me to?”
“I’ll try it,” she said. “Did you bring glasses?”
“No, sorry. We’re sharing the bottle. It isn’t as if we haven’t...” He stopped. He couldn’t just refer to their kiss. “Here.” He thrust the bottle in her direction.
She took the wine, and he got busy getting out the napkins and food. He unlatched the wires holding the crock lids with the leftover eggs and the seasoned beans. Then he unwrapped the corn bread and the tortillas.
Anna lifted the bottle and took a sip. Then another. “That’s actually pretty good.”
He hoped she wasn’t just saying that as a way to pass the awkwardness. He held out his hand. She gave him the bottle, and he brought it to his lips, trying not to think that he was putting his lips where hers had just been.
The wine was sweet, and perhaps a bit more potent than he’d expected, but not bad.
Anna frowned at the array of food. “Just how are we supposed to eat that?”
“We roll it in the tortilla to make a burrito. Here, I’ll make one for you.”
As he rolled the burrito for her, she tightened her grip around her knees. “I still don’t understand why Rafael didn’t greet me the first night I arrived. It wasn’t as if he could have known about the stagecoach robbery at that point, and he couldn’t have been awake overlong.”
Hell! The hole in his lies was as wide and deep as Death Valley and just as treacherous. “Actually, he did know.”
She scowled. “How could he have known?”
“I didn’t know he knew anything until I got back with you, or until the next morning when he told me why he was going out again.” Daniel’s heart pounded. He had to make this story work. She wouldn’t believe anything he said if he tried another. No, she’d dig the house apart until she uncovered everything. And then she’d turn them in. He held out her burrito.
“He knew my stagecoach was held up before we got here?” she asked, her voice tight with skepticism.
When she didn’t take her food, he put it on the napkin in front of her. “He surmised that was what happened. While he was out tracking the horse thieves, he heard the gunfire. By the time he got to a point high enough to see, the stage was headed toward Stockton, and he couldn’t see anyone else.”
Why on earth had Rafael returned fire? He should have just taken off, and nothing would have happened.
“But wasn’t he concerned knowing I was on that stage?” Anna demanded.
“He was, but he thought if he tracked the horse thieves the other way—how they came to the ranch—he’d have a better shot at finding where they came from. So he went back and did that until he lost the trail in the dark. The waiting to learn if you were all right drove him to drinking.” A trickle of sweat slid down his spine. She would find out the truth. He rolled his own burrito with fingers turned clumsy. He had to distract her.
“I would have thought he’d be worried enough about me to follow the stage to Stockton.”
“I don’t know. Maybe he thought the thieves might have taken you and he wanted to try and run them down.”
Her lips flattened.
“Anna, you don’t have to marry him if you don’t want to.” Why in the hell had he said that?
Her eyebrows flicked. “That’s just it. I want to be married.”
But did she want to be married so much she didn’t care who her husband was? Or only cared so long as her husband owned the ranch? He should suggest she might want to wait until she made up her mind. He stared at the burrito he was making, trying to form the right words without making an offer himself.
“I really fell in love with the man who wrote me all those letters. Some days I would get a packet of five or six, and it was like Christmas. It made me believe I had a future with a man who so loved his home and his family. I have to find out if Rafael is the man I thought he was.”
