Higgs called Larabee and Willie Munday to move Drum upstairs. Cullen followed.
“I don’t see why he can’t stay on the sofa,” Mrs. Bennett muttered to their retreating backs.
“Hard to keep that arm right,” Graver said, intending to elaborate from his own experience until she caught him in a gaze that would freeze a man on a hot stove. She was definitely Drum Bennett’s equal, and certainly more than Graver could handle.
“And who are you?” She stopped behind the rocker, her hands gripping the black lacquer. He noticed they were the kind of hands that had seen work, the nails short and irregular despite the small thin fingers. On her left hand, she still wore her wedding band. Well, Graver thought, that was something.
“Sir?” She tapped her fingers against the back of the chair. She was like an overbred mare, likely to bolt at any moment, not reliable enough to work except maybe as a fancy horse some lazy owner could step out for show. She opened her mouth to address him again, but he interrupted with a wave of his hat.
“Ryland Graver, ma’am, Ry.” She closed her eyes and nodded.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. Shall I fetch you a glass of water?” He moved toward her with the intention to catch her if she fainted, but she waved him away.
“Please. Get yourself some water.” She opened her eyes and tried to smile. It came out a tired grimace. “I just need to know who my employees are and what jobs they perform.” She inspected him, dressed in J.B.’s clothes, from the tall boots to the black shirt to the new black hat that Graver worked hard to keep the dust from settling into. “Judging from your attire, I’d say you have some elevation above the other men. So I repeat my request, what do you do here, on J.B.’s, our, ranch?”
He picked a piece of cottonwood lint from the brim of the hat, wondered what to tell her. He didn’t want to shock or offend her with the fact that he was wearing her dead husband’s clothes, but he didn’t have any others to wear. He was in a quagmire. From upstairs groans and then a shouted string of curses commenced when Drum apparently awoke as they set his arm.
Frank Higgs hollered from the top of the stairs, “Graver, bring that bottle of brandy from the office.”
Graver lifted his hat. “This is what I do here, Mrs. Bennett, whatever they tell me.” As he edged past her to the office tucked off the parlor, he smelled the musk of a woman’s body unwashed from travel beneath the sweeter scent of her perfume and felt, for the first time in more months than he cared to think, a surge in his own body that made him pause for the briefest moment behind her, her back inches from his chest. His breath caught in his throat, and he swallowed hard. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw a tremor pass through her.
“I’ll keep your accommodating nature in mind, Mr. Graver.” Her voice had a rich deepness that ran itself up and down his spine before settling in his legs, made it just a bit more difficult to walk with the assurance of a man who carried his own water in the world. Hell, it made a person want to carry his and hers and anybody else’s she had a mind to invite along. He smiled and shook his head as he moved inside the office and spied the brandy on the desk.
“That’s our wedding brandy,” she said when she saw the bottle in his hand. “That man never even bothered to come over when we got married.” She reached for the bottle, but Graver lifted it away.
“They need this upstairs, ma’am.”
She stamped her foot, but her arms collapsed to her sides. “This really is the last straw. I am going to march up there and make them take him home. He’s never going to leave at this rate!” When she started to push past, he stood in her way and reached to take her arm. A surprisingly strong and muscled arm it was, he had time to consider before she shook herself free.
She pulled herself to her full height, all five and a half feet, and seemed able to look down her nose at him despite his advantage in size. A schoolteacher look, definitely, he thought. “Give me that bottle.”
He was about to give it to her when Higgs thundered down the stairs, startled when he saw the two of them, grabbed the bottle, and rushed back up. Graver suppressed a smile, focused on his own battered hands while she took a few deep, restorative breaths. When he peeked up, her cheeks were aflame and she rubbed tears from her eyes with her knuckles like a child, a look his own daughters had worn on occasion. The thought stung his nose and throat like vinegar.
He wouldn’t offer her the pieties she would hear from others. He knew how grief poured out your life like so much night soil and left you empty as a piss pot, the stink and rancor bubbling your skin to open sores that only you saw and felt. No one who truly grieved wanted to be touched, held, rubbed on . . . it was like being boiled alive. He didn’t know how anyone survived. Getting shot was hardly a scratch compared to what happened after his wife and children passed. Maybe a part of him deserved it. Maybe she felt like that now.
He glanced at her tilted head, listening to the cursing and voices upstairs, the creaking of the bed as they struggled with Drum. There was a faint dew of sweat under her eyes now, across the pink sunburn and freckles on her cheeks, on the bridge of a nose that had a bump in the middle, which some might consider a mar on its beauty, but he did not, and the lips, though she’d seemed angry or pensive since he’d met her, had corners that curved upward despite her mood. He could see how a young J.B. would want to court and win her, as Graver had his own wife. Always there was that one feature, that one small detail that seemed to bring a person to another person, something private and endearing. With his wife, it had been the peculiar points of her ears, which made her seem fawn-like, like some benign creature he should protect, but despite his fierceness, he had failed, as J.B. had failed. There was nothing a man could do, apparently. He sighed. She shook herself and glanced at him, then back toward the stairs. It had grown quiet.
“I’m sorry. I, it’s just—” She opened her palms and looked at him as if he could do something to fill her empty hands. “Have you met my other son, Hayward?” She held him briefly with those light brown eyes rimmed with violet, then shook her head and peered out the window.
Graver nodded cautiously.
“What’s your judgment of him?” She looked at him again, her face solemn, the suggestion of a smile on her lips, hoping for a good report. It broke his heart.
He hesitated, glanced up the stairs, then back out the door at the men drifting down to the bunkhouse until supper call. Vera’s stew was ready, cornbread sitting under flour sacking, butter softening on the plate. “The boys, well, they pretty much have the run of things here.” He took a deep breath. “They sit a horse pretty good, rope decent, sometimes they even put in a day’s work you stay on them, but they’re youngsters yet.”
She waved her hands at the description. “Never mind all that. Soon as they go away to school, they’ll learn other skills.” She hesitated, and then in a rush, “I need your help with something.”