Cathleen Galitz - Wyoming Born and Bred

What Patricia actually found upon her return to the living room was enough to make her shake her head in disbelief. Cameron was dozing in the big chair while her daughter sat in the middle of the floor teething on what appeared to be a genuine solid gold pocket watch.

“Just who is putting whom to sleep?” she asked, coming down the last three creaky steps.

Cameron opened his eyes to regard her with a lazy, insolent gaze. He hadn’t been anywhere near asleep but didn’t dare say so for fear Patricia would have him running a day care for every toddler in the area tomorrow. Likely she’d claim it was written somewhere in small print in that fool contract he’d signed.

Besides, it had been his experience that women interpreted any attention toward their kids as an open invitation for them to start calling him Daddy. He shuddered at the thought.

The sentimentality that simply being back in this house evoked in him was disturbing to say the least. Why, he’d almost been tempted to pick the little dickens up and rock her to sleep! Cameron blamed this momentary lapse of sanity on the fact that he’d overheard his own name included in the prayers which had floated down the stairs like sweet perfume.

“God bless Cameron.”

“And make him stay...”

What a rotten trick, he thought to himself. Cameron wondered if they would still pray for him if they knew he’d come here with the express intention of buying their home out from under them.

Gathering her daughter into her arms, Patricia attempted to take the girl’s latest “toy” away from her. The toddler wailed and swatted at her mother’s hands, but the deft substitution of a more traditional teething ring quickly pacified her.

Patricia held the watch out to Cameron by its golden chain. It was covered in drool. Wiping it on the hem of her apron, she took the opportunity to study it more closely. Elaborately scrolled into the back were the initials S.W. and below them a date—1909.

“Your grandfather’s?” she asked, handing it over with due reverence. Amazingly it was still ticking. She had to bite her tongue to keep from asking if he was crazy. Would anyone but a man let a baby play with such a valuable keepsake?

Cameron nodded, noting that the antique was none the worse for wear. He figured if it could pull through gunfights and prairie fires, the old timepiece should be able to survive a teething little girl. Before putting it back in his pocket, he wound it once for good measure.

“If you’ll wait here, I’ll put Amy down for the night and be right back.”

The intimacy of Patricia’s promise wrapped itself around Cameron like sweet cotton candy. That voice of hers was pure magic.

Black magic, he’d wager.

Whatever magic this stranger had worked on her little fusspot, Patricia was grateful. When Amy was born, the nurses in the maternity ward had pronounced her colicky. As time passed and the baby refused to outgrow her demanding disposition, Patricia resigned herself to the fact that her daughter was simply going to be dif ficult to raise. Boys, she had heard, would wring a mother’s heart through the years. Girls, they said, would rip it out.

She pulled a blanket over Amy and kissed her softly on the cheek. Patricia couldn’t help thinking how different their evening routine had been just because of Cameron’s presence. How obvious it was that the boys needed a male role model in their lives. How nervous she was around his overt brand of sexuality....

Like a predatory cat feigning indifference, Cameron was waiting for her when she returned to the living room a moment later.

“Looks like you got everybody tucked in but me.”

The comment made the blood sing through Patricia’s veins.

As if unaware of the twin roses blooming on her cheeks, Cameron continued, “Just where do you want me to sleep?”

In my bed! was the unbidden thought that flashed through Patricia’s mind. As a steamy image of this man’s naked body stretched leisurely across her bed caused her to trip over her own tongue, an inner voice of reason yelled at her to get a grip. The last time she’d succumbed to such feminine weakness, she’d wound up a mother to three. Four, she silently amended, if you counted Hadley.

Patricia realized with a start that Cameron was looking at her strangely. It wasn’t as if he were leering at her; he was simply waiting for an answer to his question. The breath was locked in her lungs. Speak up! she ordered her brain.

“In the bunkhouse,” she managed at last to sputter. “You’ll have to sleep there. It isn’t much. Just an old cabin actually...”

Her apology trailed off. There was absolutely no reason that Cameron couldn’t stay in the more comfortable main house with them—other than the fact that people were sure to talk, and Patricia wasn’t about to subject her children to this small town’s rumor mill. The rest of America might be as fashionably liberal as television programming portrayed it, but Lander, Wyoming was still as staunchly conservative as Mayberry, U.S.A. Why, whispered gossip alone had been cause enough for more than one local official to lose his position.

If there was some other reason why Patricia was uncomfortable having Cameron sleeping under the same roof with her, she wasn’t ready to analyze it yet.

Little did she know that there was no need to explain about the Spartan living conditions of the bunkhouse. Cameron was familiar with every inch of the place. It had been his grandparents’ original homestead, and he had spent many happy childhood days playing in and around the old cabin. He neither expected nor wanted anything as fancy as a telephone or television set, but he did hope it had been updated with modern plumbing.

Ten minutes later Patricia was cutting a narrow swath through the darkness with a flashlight. Carefully, she and Cameroon picked their way along the overgrown path connecting the main house to the outbuilding. Once when Patricia stumbled, he reached out to steady her. It had quite the opposite effect.

Spinning, spinning, spinning out of control... Patricia felt like Alice in Wonderland as she fell against a sky sprinkled with diamonds, toppled into a whorl of emotions which she was trying desperately to suppress. And failed.

“Are you all right?” Cameron asked. Warm and soft in the darkness, his voice was black velvet to the ears.

“Yes,” she lied, shining the thin beam of light upon the bunkhouse door.

As it was never locked, Patricia grasped the knob and pushed the door open. She fumbled in the blackness for the string which activated the antiquated light bulb hanging from the ceiling. It was like searching for a single dangling spider’s thread. When at last it brushed her knuckles, she grabbed hold and gave a hard tug. Bathed in the harsh glow of the bare bulb, the cabin’s charm seemed questionable at best.

“Like I said, it isn’t much, but it’s clean.”

“It’ll be just fine,” Cameron assured her with a smile so genuine that it measurably reduced the guilt Patricia was feeling.

Cameron’s modest accommodations consisted of an old brass bed, a couple of high-backed chairs, a braided rag rug, a small table and a narrow bureau. A sink and toilet were sectioned off from the rest of the room by a tiny floral print sheet turned curtain by some handy seamstress.

“I’ll help you make the bed,” she said, walking over to the bureau where the sheets and blankets were kept.

“There’s no need,” he assured her. “I’m more than capable of taking care of myself, Patricia.”

Something about the way her name rolled off his tongue as mellifluous as a poem made her go quite soft inside. How often had she uttered those same self-assured platitudes about being able to fend for herself? So many times that her mother claimed she sounded like a broken record. Her father repeatedly assured her that she was wrong in her foolish assumptions. In that smug way of his, Roland D’Winter liked reminding her just how much she relied on him for the benevolence of a roof over her head and clothes on her back. From a young age, Patricia discerned that he would like nothing more than to keep his daughter pinned permanently under his control like one of the more exotic butterflies in his ghastly collection.