Page 24 of The Promise of Jenny Jones
His shoulders tensed. If she struck his niece, by God he would kill her.
When she was almost on top of his niece, the child stumbled forward and wrapped her arms around the now-black-haired woman’s waist and sank into her. The woman stopped and the descent of her arm halted. Her expression flickered from fury to surprise to confusion to exasperation. Ty read her emotions as easily as reading words on a page. For a desperado, she was amazingly transparent.
She waved both hands in the air as if she didn’t know what to do with them, all the while looking down at the child. Then she rolled her eyes toward heaven, heaved a massive sigh, and dropped to her knees on the cobble-stones. She gathered the child into her arms and awkwardly patted the child’s back while the child clung to her and sobbed on her neck.
She was a large woman, dressed as a man and wearing a sidearm. Ty didn’t doubt that she knew how to use it. But right now, the child-stealer wore an expression of helpless confusion that would have done credit to the smallest, most feminine of creatures.
Ty had no idea what had just happened here. Frowning, he watched the woman and the child holding each other and could not imagine why either of them was dressed the way she was or what their relationship might possibly be.
A cloud of grey-white smoke belched past the window, obscuring his view, and a whistle screamed overhead. The boards lurched beneath his feet. Slinging his saddlebags over his shoulder, he strode down the aisle and out the door at the end of the car, then jumped to the ground. When he looked up, the now-black-haired woman and his niece had disappeared. They couldn’t have gone far.
Before he set off to follow, he shot a glance toward the departing train. Damned if his horse wasn’t on its way to Mexico City. How many horses had he lost now? Three? Cursing, he rapidly crossed the square and peered into the lengthening shadows creeping down narrow streets.
He spotted them about a block ahead, the large woman and the small girl. The woman had a protective hand on the child’s shoulder. His niece rested her head against the woman’s side.
Ty followed, keeping well behind them, pausing when they did. At the corner, the woman bent and lifted his niece, slinging the child over her shoulder like a sack of grain. She carried the girl another six blocks, to the entrance of a hotel that Ty would have overlooked entirely if the woman hadn’t turned in at a door recessed from the street.
When he was certain that she wasn’t coming out again, he walked around the block, looking for the alley, pinning the location in his mind. A thick stench of roasting tobacco leaves burned his nostrils when he passed a factory on the north side of the hotel. To the west, a man wearing an apron hung lanterns in front of a cantina. In the street to the south, vendors packed away their wares for the night. When he had circled back to the hotel entrance, he stopped across the street and lit a cigar, frowning and considering his next move.
Who the hellwasshe? He kept seeing her face in his mind. Tanned, strong features, a chiseled, stubborn jaw, blue eyes, one of them still bruised from the fight in Verde Flores. And that magnificent figure. The poncho she’d worn at the depot was no shield against his memory. A man didn’t forget breasts like hers.
He almost laughed aloud. After a lifetime of chasing soft, dainty creatures no larger than dolls, it amused him to realize that no woman had riveted his interest as did the tall strange-haired woman with the wicked punch who had stolen his niece.
Shaking his head, he kicked at a horse-apple and waited for full darkness to settle.
Chapter Six
Jenny sat by the window, hoping for a cool breeze while she watched Graciela wolf down a plate of food the manager had sent to their room. Between bites, the kid told of a harrowing day, about a man who had stroked her bare legs, about being chased by adults and street children, about falling and skinning her knee, about a wild dog that had terrified her and snapped at her bare feet.
The horror of what might have been robbed Jenny of any appetite. Her own supper sat untouched beside the tub she had ordered up to the room.
She wanted to shout and scream, wanted to beat the kid senseless. She wanted to point out that Graciela deserved the scares she had received and was damned lucky that nothing worse had happened. Through Graciela’s bath, and throughout her recitation of the day’s frightening events, anger and accusations burned on Jenny’s tongue.
“Kid,” she said, when Graciela’s torrent of words shuddered to a halt, “I’ve got a lot to say, but first… you did fine out there. You handled yourself a lot better than I ever expected you would.”
The praise came hard, but Jenny figured it would soften the kid for the harder discussion to follow. Besides, she conceded grudgingly, the kid deserved a word of praise. Jenny knew how hard it was on the streets. Earlier today, she wouldn’t have given a centavo for the kid’s chances to end her escapade relatively unscathed.
“How’d you know to kick that bastard in the…” she paused and coughed into her hand. “How’d you know to bite and kick him?”
Graciela pushed a long strand of wet hair away from her face and her chin came up. “I thought about what my mama would do.” Her expression dared Jenny to scoff.
“Huh.” Jenny tried to imagine Marguarita kicking some son of a bitch in thecojones.Impossible. “Well,” she said finally, “your mother was a brave woman.” That much was true.
Graciela’s eyebrows lifted as if she hadn’t expected Jenny’s response. They studied each other. “How did you know I’d go to the train station?”
“That wasn’t difficult.” Jenny shrugged. “I guessed that you’d remember me saying your stinking cousins might show up on the seven o’clock.”
The kid frowned. “I forgot you would be there too.”
“It’s damned lucky for you that I was.”
“That’s true,” the kid admitted in a small voice. Sooty lashes came down on her cheeks as she closed her eyes and shivered. “I didn’t want you to cut my hair.”
“I figured.” Jenny pushed a hand through her own sticky, matted hair. She wondered how long it would take for the bootblack to wear off. “Look, kid, it’s good you got scared out there, because we can’t go through this again, you understand? You wrecked our plan. I didn’t find us a new hotel because I thought you might come back here. Now the clerk knows I’ve altered my appearance.” Which meant that she’d rubbed bootblack in her hair for fricking nothing.
“Plus, you can’t imagine what it was like when I didn’t know where you were or what was happening to you.” She looked out the window, up toward Marguarita’s star. “I gave your mother my word. I promised that I’d take you to your father in California.” She turned back to Graciela. “That’s what I’m going to do, so you just make up your mind to it. The thing is, I need your help. You can’t be fighting me every step of the way. That means we have to agree on a few rules. Such as, you don’t run away again.”
Graciela picked at the edge of the towel wrapped around her freshly washed body. “Why can’t you just take me home to Aunt Tete? You don’t want to take me to California, and I don’t want to go there. I want to go home.”
