Texas Trio Pt. 02 - Becky's Debt Ch. 03-04

REMINDER: I write long stories. Many chapters don't have naughty bits, but those that do will be way more fun if you read the others, too! Also, TT2 is a sequel: it has spoilers for Texas Trio, so go read that one first! -Stefanie

-:-:-:-:-:-:- Chapter 3 -:-:-:-:-:-:-

Brody leaned on a paddock gate, watching the sun sink toward the western hills as he reflected on the journey he'd taken to get here. Not to this paddock in particular, but to the point in his life where he thought working at a brothel was as good as anything else.

He could have been safely back in San Francisco by now, instead of leaning on a fence in Liberty Falls, hoping he didn't keel over before the range boss got here to tell him whether or not there was a job to be had. If the answer was no, Brody would be compelled to ask if he could bunk down in the barn or stable for the night, regardless, because there was just no way he'd make it back into town. Hell, Brody doubted he'd make it back into the saddle, he was so damn tired.

Not that he wanted to get back on the bad-tempered, broke-down nag he'd been forced to ride after his horse was stolen. All he wanted was food, rest, and the genuine, grade-A, heavenly blessing of a train ticket home, where he'd be now if it weren't for his partner sending him on a wild-goose chase to Godforsaken, Texas.

Brody had been traveling for almost a year and a half by the time his ship docked in Philadelphia a month ago, and he was tired of sleeping in strange beds, even if most of them had been gilded, padded with goose down, and wrapped in satin and velvet, but when the hotel manager gave him Graham's telegram, he'd changed his plans immediately. Graham Almsted was the closest thing to family he had, and if Graham wanted him to go to Texas and check out a potential investment, Brody had no reservations about accommodating his partner's request.

So here he was, asking for employment on a ranch which revolved around the next best thing to a whorehouse, according to the pair of cowhands who'd sent him out here.

"The women are whores, but the KCW's got a couple thousand head of cattle plus hogs, oxen, corn and alfalfa, so they can always use a hand. And hell, an easy roll in the hay at the end of a long day ain't nothin' to complain about. Ranch hands get a half-price break."

He'd ignored the crude laughter and a jovial elbow to his ribs as he asked for directions to the ranch. Brody didn't care what anyone on the KCW did, as long as they fed him, gave him a bed and some way to earn enough for a railway ticket out of here, because he'd damn sure had enough Texas to last a lifetime. In the two weeks he'd been here, he'd been lied to, beaten, arrested, nearly drowned in a flash flood, bashed in the head, and robbed, all to find out Graham's prospective partner was a scam artist of the first water.

Sour memories scrolled darkly through Brody's mind as he leaned on the fence waiting for the range boss to arrive.

The boss . . . what the hell had that cowhand called him? James? Jameson? No, that wasn't it, either.

Brody shook his head, attempting to clear the fog from his head, but found the move, unsurprisingly, unsuccessful. He hadn't eaten in twenty hours and he hadn't slept in thirty. He went back to staring dumbly at the wispy clouds on the horizon. In the evening light, the ranch wasn't what he'd expected. The KCW looked much like any of the other large ranches he'd seen since arriving in Texas. The fences and outbuildings were well cared for, and the few animals he'd seen looked groomed, well-fed, or both.

He settled his elbows on the top rail of a neatly painted corral to watch the hills turn lavender. The thud-and-scrape of his cane announced the return of the short russet-haired man with the wooden leg, whose name Brody had also forgotten.

"Boss'll be out in a minute, he's just talkin' to the stable-man." He took a spot at the rail, too, which was closer to his bushy red mustache than his chest, where it fell on Brody. The man leaned on his cane instead, and together they watched in silence as the shadows merged and the hills beyond the river became a single curvy silhouette across the horizon.

Footsteps from the barn made both men turn, but instead of the range boss, a woman appeared, with a large basket looped over her arm. Brody tipped his hat as her polite smile slid from him to Clancy. No need to be rude, just because she wasn't what some people called respectable.

"You've been up to the house already?" she asked Clancy.

"Yes, ma'am." He nodded as she passed, headed toward the big white farmhouse topping the rise a hundred yards from where they stood.

The men went back to leaning on the fence. Brody wondered how many of the cowhands took advantage of the women available here. It was an unusual situation- usually comfort-women lived quietly on the outskirts of the main buildings, not right in the center of things- but he'd been on one frontier or another long enough to know that behavior which might be called insanity in a civilized locale often drew nothing but the twitch of an eyebrow on the edge of the wilderness.

"That's Miz Connor," the man with the cane told him.

Brody watched her shapely form disappearing into the shadows beside the house. Neither the woman nor the building were what he'd expected. She was pretty, but not flashy, her gown of silk rather than satin, and the house was quiet in the night, no music or loud voices drifting down the hill, though lights on the porch and in the windows glowed a golden welcome. Brody watched her out of sight, stifling a yawn. The evening was nearly silent now.

Fighting fatigue, he commented idly, "Hnh . . . you'd never know."

"Know what?"

Brody nodded in the direction the woman had gone, not noticing Clancy's sudden stillness or the warning in his tone. He went back to staring at the horizon. "You'd never know from looking at her that . . . well . . . you know . . . ."

"No, I don't. What're ya talkin' about, tenderfoot?"

Ten years past tenderfoot, Brody should have heard the threat inherent in that slow, quiet question, but fatigue and an empty belly had slowed his brain to a dangerously sluggish pace. Brody didn't know Clancy, either.

He answered, "You know . . . that she's a light-"

He never saw it coming.

Clancy's elbow hit Brody square in the nose, knocking him into the dirt. Deciding not to dull his pleasure by beating the ignorant cuss with his cane, Clancy tossed it aside and dove on top of the larger man, ignoring the difference in their sizes. Brody hadn't even pried his eyes open yet when Clancy's meaty fists began to follow up on the blow to his nose. He lost the fight before he had a chance to be in it. The rapid approach of hooves penetrated Brody's daze, but he didn't hear the shouts as he went under.

"What the hell?" Colt thundered, beating Jeremiah to Clancy by half a step and hauling him off the man laying prone and silent in the dust of their front yard.

Clancy sputtered, "That-"

He followed it up with a stream of cuss words so creative that Jem paused on his way to the stranger, impressed.

Colt, a fistful of Clancy's shirtfront in his hand, had an urge to lift Clancy off the ground and give him a hard shake, or at least a kick in the seat, but he knew better. If Cat saw him, he'd never hear the end of it. And he kind of liked the sputtering Irish ass, anyway. Instead he hauled him a foot closer and bent to bellow directly in his face, "SHUT IT, Clancy!"

That worked, and Clancy calmed down enough for Colt to release him. He joined his partner, who was holding a lantern above the big lump in the dust.

"Whadaya think?" Colt asked. "Is he dead?"

"Don't know," Jem replied, looking up. "Clancy, without yelling, could you possibly tell me what the fellow did to deserve-" He gestured. "-this?"

Clancy screwed his face up and spat. "He said something."

"Anything in particular?"

"He said something-" His jaw worked around a bit. "-'bout Miz Connor."

Colt and Jem went back to studying the man on the ground, their casual expressions replaced by something harder.

Although neither man was surprised that someone had insulted Catherine- even out here on the borderland between desolation and domesticity, their unconventional three-way marriage often set tongues wagging- they were surprised someone had insulted her on their own territory. Other than the occasional cowhand tempted to over-observe Becky's form, things like that simply didn't happen here. A man muttering a slanderous remark on the KCW risked a beating that would put him in bed for a month. Enough men had attempted it over the years that Catherine's husbands hadn't been forced to reinforce the lesson in a quite some time.

Maybe the stranger on the ground needed more educating.

Like she'd heard their thoughts, the screen door slammed and the three men turned to see Catherine flying down the stairs.

Colt, seriously considering a kick to the bastard's head, grimaced. If Clancy had only dragged the drifter into the shadow of the barn to beat him, or waited fifteen minutes, there wouldn't have been enough light for Cat to see, but blackness hadn't yet overtaken the purple twilight, and his wife had eyes like a hawk when trouble was brewing.

Jem, thinking along the same lines as Colt, murmured, "Well, it hardly seems fair to kick him when he's half dead anyway."

They stared down, motionless except for Colt, who nudged the unconscious man with the toe of one big boot.

"For goodness' sake! What is going on out here?" Catherine fell to her knees at Brody's side.

"Catherine, why don't you let-"

Catherine darted a sharp eye up at him, and Jem stopped talking.

Colt rolled his eyes. "Here we go again."

-:-:-:-:-:-:-

In Brody's mind, no time at all passed between falling in the barnyard and waking in the house, and he sat up swinging. By the time his head caught up with the change of location, he'd flailed a pan of water out of the hands of the woman he'd seen earlier, soaking the front of her dress. Before he could blink, a fist knotted in his shirt-front lifted him into the path of one from out of the darkness.

"Colt!" The admonition was the last thing he heard for another hour.

The next time Brody regained consciousness, he was alone, and he had some idea of where he was- lying in a dark room on the softest surface he'd felt in a month. Straining to open his swollen eyes, he succeeded in gaining an impression of plastered walls and velvet draperies before letting his lids fall. At that moment he wanted nothing more than to stay on whatever heavenly piece of upholstery supported him and go right back to sleep, but muffled voices penetrated the gloom in his head. A man's rough voice and a shot of sudden panic brought Brody back to full consciousness, remembering the fist descending on him.

His eyes snapped open as his mind registered the feel of moisture on his face. Was that blood?

His fumbling hand found a folded cloth resting on his forehead. Someone must have cleaned him up. He remembered the woman and the pan of water.

His fingers explored his face, waking nerves he soon decided he'd rather leave sleeping. Puffy eyes, nose, lips- everything, basically. He ran his tongue around the perimeter of his mouth, tasting blood and something else. He tried sniffing instead. More blood and . . . ointment? His nose was broken, no doubt about that, and his tongue found his top lip split and swollen, but his teeth were all exactly where they should be.

The deep voice grew in volume, so Brody heard the man's complaint clearly. "It's bad enough we're stuck with Clancy."

A soft feminine murmur cut him off, but the woman's words were swallowed by a scratchy cackling laugh. Clancy- that was his name. Brody wasn't sure, but he thought the cackle belonged to the same insane midget who'd tried to kill him.

He turned his head carefully and found he had an audience.

A blond boy stared at him from the hallway. Standing next to him was the biggest dog Brody had ever seen. More correctly, the dog stood over the child, who was oblivious to the strand of drool dangling an inch above his head. No one moved for a minute, then boy and dog walked forward as one, decreasing the distance between them and Brody.

Brody, awake enough to be alarmed, blinked and tried to sit up, but as soon as he moved, the dog growled, a low rumble from the depths of hell, where Brody had a feeling he was headed. He collapsed onto the velvety cushions, and the pair stopped three feet away.

Voices from the room behind Brody continued. It sounded as though there were at least two women and two men in there, but he'd stopped trying to decipher their softly spoken sentences.

The blond boy studied him solemnly for a minute before announcing, "My daddies are going to kill you."

Whether it was the blows to his head or the anticipation of yet another beating, a wave of nausea swept over Brody. He groaned- he couldn't help it. When he opened his eyes again, the room was full.

Two men towered above him, one of them- a half-breed Indian- holding the boy on his hip while the other lit the lamp near Brody's feet. The dog looked almost normal-sized with the two men nearby for comparison.

Before anyone had a chance to speak, the woman he'd seen earlier arrived, nudging the colossal beast aside with her hip. "Quiet, Topper."

Extending a glass of water, she greeted Brody for the second time that day, "Please pardon my husbands, Mr. Easton, they don't socialize often enough to remember their manners."

He was still woozy, still tired and hungry, and if he hadn't just heard the boy say "daddies," Brody probably wouldn't have noticed that she'd used the plural form. He took the glass but didn't take his eyes from the glowering men. He'd rather see it coming.

"Thank you, Mrs. Connor."

She bent and lifted the cloth from his face, refolding it inside-out and placing the cooler side on his forehead. "I'm afraid your nose is broken, but it doesn't seem to be displaced, so it should heal fairly quickly."

Brody wondered which of them was responsible for that.

Neither smiled, but the fairer of the two men elbowed his partner. "Ease up, Colt, you know she won't let you kill him."

Colt's frown didn't waver.

"Will you hit him again, Daddy?"

Every eye turned to the tow-headed child on the dark man's hip.

The breed's brow smoothed out as he stuck his face in the boy's neck, making him giggle.

"Naaahhh. Uncle Clancy gave him a good talkin'-to." The startling cobalt eyes turned on Brody. "I think he mighta learned that lesson."

The boy gazed at the stranger on the couch, resting his head on the giant's shoulder and highlighting the contrast between his curly locks and the breed's straight, black hair.

Brody didn't have time to wonder why the boy was calling the wrong man "Daddy." A thumping shuffle warned him what was coming, and he sat up fast, ignoring the dog's deep growl. Better to die upright.

"'Scuse me, 'scuse me." Clancy squeezed between the men.

Brody caught the tail end of the breed's eye-roll as he stepped aside to allow the small man passage.

The other man put a hand on Clancy's shoulder. "Clancy . . . ."

"Mister Wilson, I ain't doin' nuthin'. Like Mister Kendall said, I done had my say."

He glared at Brody, who might have grinned at the ridiculous proposition of a fight between them, if he hadn't just gotten his ass kicked. "You better mind your manners, though, boy- I might not be as gentle with you next time!"

"All right," the woman announced. "That's enough from the lot of you. Out! Introductions can wait until tomorrow."

At a single gesture from her graceful hand, the men turned as one and filed out of the parlor. The half-breed paused for a murmured exchange as Mrs. Connor kissed the little boy he held. Brody caught the last few words of her reply: "Daddy will say prayers with you, but I'll be there for story-time."

The boy leaned into her kiss from above. The man's face as he watched their exchange bore no resemblance to the man who'd been glaring at Brody only moments before.

The fairer man, taking up the rear, pointed at the floor in front of the beast. "Topper. Stay."

He shot another warning look at Brody for good measure before he, too, murmured a few words to Mrs. Connor, wearing the same look of devotion as the 'breed.

The dog sat, turning his black eyes to Brody, who groaned as another wave of nausea overtook him.

Soft footfalls announced Mrs. Connor's return. She took the empty glass from his hand. He didn't remember drinking the contents, and he'd forgotten he was holding it.

"Lie down, Mr. Easton, before you fall."

Brody complied, closing his eyes.

The clink of crystal, a soft gurgle from behind his head, and the cool glass touched his lower lip again. "Here, drink."

Too sick to argue, he did as she asked, draining his second glass in one go, too. Brody didn't open his eyes when she left, but he did when she came back. She put a light coverlet over him and went to adjust the lamp. He wondered vaguely where his boots had gone.

He might be woozy, half-dead from the extended lack of sleep and food, but he wasn't dense. He already knew he'd been led astray by the piss-poor reporting of those two idiots on the road. He didn't know what was going on with Mrs. Connor and the two men- neither of them bore the surname "Connor"- but she was hardly a madam, and the comfortable room around him was more suited for checkers than whores.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Connor." Brody opened his eyes as far as the swelling allowed and put all the feeling he could muster into his apology.

Hearing sincerity in the stranger's voice, Catherine turned her head, her surprise morphing into the most beautiful smile Brody had ever seen. "Thank you, Mr. Easton. And good-night."

The room plunged into darkness. Brody, feeling better already, was out before her footfalls died away.

In the kitchen, Becky giggled when the men returned. "Got kicked out, did you?"

All three smiled indulgently. No one tried to hide the fact that Catherine ruled this roost.

-:-:-:-:-:-:-

Brody slept right through breakfast, despite Colt, Jem, Clancy, both of the twins, and Topper marching in to have a look at him, separately and together, more than once. Catherine reminded them that if Topper couldn't handle one busted-up cowboy, Nanny was certainly willing to cleaver clean through anyone who got fresh.

Topper was in the parlor before anyone else that morning. The dog didn't like strangers, either. So far, it was the only thing they'd found which could tear him from Lily's side.

The house was quiet when Brody woke, save for a low voice singing in the room behind him, which Brody figured for a kitchen, considering the mixture of sounds emanating from within. He turned his head to find the hound of hell staring at him across the room. Suppressing an exclamation of pain, he wondered whether sitting up would be fatal. He didn't have much choice, he supposed. If he didn't find a water closet soon, his bladder would pop the button off his breeches.

Brody sat up. He did groan then, letting his forehead- the only part of his head that didn't hurt- fall forward to rest on his palms.

The dog kept up a low growl until a lyrical voice cut him off. "Shush, Topper."

"Mr. Easton?"

Thinking it was Mrs. Connor, Brody lifted his head- and this time caught a fist to his belly instead of his nose, knocking the breath right out of him.

When she'd smiled at him the night before, the thought had flickered through Brody's sleepy brain that Mrs. Connor might be the most beautiful woman in Texas, but even the dim light filtering through the parlor's lace curtains was enough to prove him wrong. The woman standing over him would easily take that title.