Lorraine Heath by Parting Gifts

this time. You tell me how bath salts are going to make Charles happy.”
    “A man likes for his woman to smell sweet.” He picked up a bottle and held it up to the window. “When he curls up next to her in bed, it’s nice if she doesn’t smell like the wood he’s been chopping all day or the sweating horses he’s been caring for.” He set the bottle down. “Hell, do what you want.” He started to walk off.
    “Wait.” He stopped, and Maddie cautiously approached the shelf. “There’s so many. Which one would Charles like?”
    “Hell, I don’t know. Buy whatever you usually buy.”
    “I’ve never had bath salts.”
    “Never?” Jesse asked as he moved in behind her.
    “Never. If we were fortunate, we had lye soap.”
    “Lye? It gets the dirt off, but no man wants to lie next to a woman who smells like him. Take the tops off the bottles and find one that smells like you should.”
    Self-consciously, Maddie reached for a bottle, pulled out the stopper, and sniffed. “I don’t know what I should smell like. Like this?” She held the bottle out to Jesse.
    “No, rose is too common. You need something different.” He studied the bottles while Maddie continued to remove the stoppers and sniff.
    “I never knew there were so many different smells.”
    “Scents. They’re called scents,” he informed her.
    “So what should I scent like?”
    Jesse stopped his hand halfway to its destination and glanced back over his shoulder. She had that challenging glint in her eyes, the one she’d worn that morning when she’d questioned him about his avoidance of coffee since her arrival. What should she smell like, this woman who the more he came to know was nothing at all what he’d expected? “Unusual, something unusual.” He picked up a small bottle. “Here, try this.”
    She removed the stopper, and a soft, delicate fragrance wafted out of the bottle.
    “Forget-me-not,” Jesse said, “you should smell like forget-me-not.”
    “Do you think Charles will like it?”
    “He’ll like it.”
    “I wish there was some way I could surprise him.”
    “I could set up the bathtub in the Princess room.”
    “The Princess room?”
    “Yeah, the one with the brass bed and all the frills. The one that looks like a fairy princess ought to be sleeping in it. You could bathe in there just before bedtime, and he wouldn’t know until you got into bed.”
    “You’d do that for me?”
    He looked away. “I want Charles to be happy, too.”
    She clutched the small bottle to her breast. “I guess I did need something after all.”
    They walked back to the front of the store, and she set the bottle on the counter beside the box of nails. Then she studied the jars of candy arranged on the counter.
    “Do you want some?” Jesse asked.
    “I was thinking of the children. Could we take them some cinnamon balls?”
    “1 don’t see why not.” He watched her pick up a small sack and carefully place six cinnamon balls inside. He suddenly wished she did want something. “You sure there’s nothing you want?”
    “I’m sure.” She set the sack on the counter as McGuire came out of the back.
    “I’ll have my boy load your wagon,” McGuire said.
    “Fine,” Jesse said. “Add these items in, and I might as well pick up the mail while I’m here. We’ll have a stage coming through in a day or so. Save you a trip.”
    He followed McGuire to a little cubicle area with iron bars in the window. McGuire began gathering the pieces of mail and dumping them in a bag.
    With nothing else to do, Maddie trailed behind Jesse. She glanced at the wall. Her knees wobbled, her lungs refused to draw in air, and she feared at any moment she’d hear the ricochet of bullets echoing around her.
    “You all right?”
    She jumped back, her hand to her throat, her gaze falling on Jesse. “I’m just fine.” But her high-pitched voice sounded too nervous even to her own ears.
    Jesse cast his glance to the reward posters covering the wall, and a