Colorado Bride (18 page)

“I can’t. I’ve got two stages coming through.”

“Then how about tonight?”

“If I have time.”

“I’ll have none of that. Agree right now, or I’ll kidnap you and drag you off into the hills.”

“You probably would,” Carrie said, aware of the pleasurable feelings creating havoc inside her, “but I wouldn’t like that.”

“I promise you would.”

“Lucas Barrow, you’re the most brazen man.”

“No, I’m not. I can’t believe how tame I’ve been acting. If my uncle could see me now, he’d swear I had a wasting fever and send for the doctor. I’ve never taken so much time to court a female in my life.”

“Is that what you’re doing, courting me?”

“I’m not just aiming to pass the time of day. I’ve got other work needing to be done.”

“Then go do it,” Carrie replied smartly. “I wouldn’t want to hold up your schedule.”

“Hold up my schedule, hell! You’ve already ruined it. Will you walk with me tonight?”

“Okay, but you’re going to have to behave yourself. Katie is keeping a sharp eye on us.”

“We could go up to my cabin. She couldn’t see us there.”

“No we won’t.”

“You can’t blame a man for trying.”

“I can and I will.”

“Shrew,” he said, but it sounded like an endearment.

The battle resumed at lunch. Jake washed before be entered the station, but he was unshaven and his hair was uncombed.

“I would appreciate it if you would shave each morning,” Carrie said after they sat down. “I don’t care whether you do it before or after breakfast, but it will give the passengers a much better impression if everyone is neat and well groomed.”

“Then you’d best do something about that mop of his hair,” Katie pointed out. “It won’t make much difference if you clean up only half his head and let the other half go to seed.”

“It just needs to be cut.”

“There’s a barber in town,” Jake said, hopeful of being allowed into town for at least a few hours.

“There’s no need to go into town,” Lucas said. “I’m sure one of these ladies can trim it for you.” Jake looked as if he’d rather have surrendered his head to a bobcat, but he brightened when neither woman was quick to volunteer.

“I’ve no doubt I could do it,” Katie finally offered. “I cut me brothers’ hair often enough.”

“I ain’t letting no damned female loose on my head with a pair of scissors,” Jake protested. “I’m liable to end up bald.”

“Jake Bemis, I won’t have you cussing or blaspheming in me presence.” Katie warned him, a martial light in her eyes.

“Lord help us. First Mrs. Simpson takes away my whiskey and my clothes. Now you’re trying to take away my words and my hair. Pretty soon there won’t be nothing left of me.”

“Good,” Katie state uncompromisingly. “Then maybe the good Lord can start over afresh.
Somebody
sure made a mess out of you the first time.”

After they finished eating, Katie directed Jake to carry a chair out into the back yard. She draped one of the smaller tablecloths over him and prepared to begin work.

“You remember that you’re cutting a man’s hair, woman. I take some pride in my looks.”

“I’ve no doubt, but the rest of us take fright,” Katie retorted.

“I wonder how long before one of them murders the odier?” Lucas wondered as he and Carrie lingered over their coffee.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Carrie said, looking suddenly as if she had thought of something that was about to make her break out with laughter. “I think Katie likes him a little.”

“Likes him! Are you crazy? She hasn’t stopped digging at him since he set foot in the door.”

“A woman doesn’t pay all that attention to a man she’s not interested in. Watch what she does, and pay no attention to anything she says.” Lucas looked as though he thought the idea was lunacy, but as he listened to the exchange between the two in a new light, he wasn’t quite so sure. It certainly wasn’t the way he would have courted a woman, or wanted one to court him, but then he wasn’t a woman. Men were predictable. You could nearly always plan on them behaving according to pattern, but you never could tell what a woman was going to do, especially a woman in love.

It wasn’t too long before Jake emerged from under the tablecloth with a thoroughly competent haircut and a totally difference appearance.

“He’s not so bad looking now,” Carrie remarked rather surprised. “And he looks at least ten years younger.”

“You keep your eyes on me, Carrie Simpson,” Lucas ordered, his voice not entirely free from anxiety. “I won’t stand for competition from the likes of Jake Bemis.”

“You’ve got to be in the running before you can be said to have competition,” Carrie retorted.

“You just make sure I’m the only one running.”

Carrie got up with a toss of her head and took their coffee cups to the sink, but she decided it was wiser not to answer him until she was more certain of her own feelings.

* * *

“That you, Jake?” Bap Turner asked when Jake brought out the team for the afternoon stage.

“Who the hell do you think it is?” demanded Jake. “I ain’t got no twin brother.” Suddenly apprehensive, he looked over his shoulder to see if Katie was anywhere within hearing distance then donned a satisfied smile when he saw she was nowhere around.

“You just don’t look right.”

“You’d look peculiar too if you had two females fussing over you all the time, trying to change everything about you until your mother couldn’t recognize her own son. I damned near ruined my britches when I looked in the mirror and saw a stranger staring back at me. Felt like I was shaving somebody else’s face.”

“You better watch that cussing,” Bap warned. “Mrs. Simpson don’t like it.”

“It makes that Irish gal powerful mad, too” Jake said with a wink as he jerked his head toward the station to indicate Katie. “Does my soul good every time I get out a good one.” Bap grinned in sympathy.

“You just watch it. Mrs. Simpson is a nice lady, but she don’t put up with any stuff from nobody.”

The evening air was rapidly turning cool as Carrie and Lucas wandered out to a bench under a tree in the station yard after dinner. The dark velvet of the night sky was illuminated by thousands of glittering stars suspended by invisible threads. A brilliant full moon bathed the landscape in a silvery sheen, making everything as clear as day, but an eerie quiet and an unnatural stillness made it all seem remote and unreal. More light poured from the station windows and filtered from the barn, but the dark shadows under the tree enveloped the two in its cloak.

“I think you may be right about them,” Lucas said as he settled down beside Carrie. “She can’t seem to leave him alone for a minute.”

“And he’s sure to respond with something guaranteed to keep her at it. If Katie’s not careful, she’s going to find herself in love with that worthless scamp. That’s not my idea of love.”

“What is?”

“Do you really want to know? I don’t think you’ll like it.”

“Yes, I want to know, and why won’t I like it?”

“You’ll see.” Carrie settled herself on the bench and looked up at the stars. She couldn’t get over how clear the sky was, and how close the stars seemed. She wondered if her dreams were as deceptive as those stars.

“I want a husband who will love me for myself—hell have to, I won’t bring him an inheritance—and who will put me before anything else in his life. I’ve seen how men usually treat their wives, I was treated that way without even being married, and I’d rather be single for the rest of my life. I don’t want to be left home every time he goes anywhere, and I don’t want to be left out of what he does. I want him to be interested in the house and the children, and I expect him to listen to my ideas on all those things women aren’t supposed to know anything about.”

“Where do you expect to find someone like that?” Lucas asked, unable to hide his consternation.

“I don’t know, but I’m not going to get married if I don’t.”

“Was your husband like that?”

Not Robert again! When was she going to tell him that she’d never been married so she could drop this pretense? It had seemed harmless enough in the beginning, but now it was beginning to intrude into nearly every conversation, making her original deception, no matter how innocently entered into, seem like some kind of monstrous lie. There never seemed to be a time when something wasn’t hinging on her answer, a time when it didn’t seem as if she had used Robert to manipulate the conversation, or Lucas. And that made it even worse, that it would seem that she used Robert against Lucas. If he saw it that way, it would be very difficult to change his mind.

“I was only married to Robert for a few weeks,” Carrie began, yielding to the necessity of keeping up the pretense, “but he really wasn’t very different from my father and brothers. He was not a strong man, and I admit that’s part of the reason I agreed to marry him"—at least that part was true—"but I could see him deciding things that affected me without even telling me about them or shunting me off to a corner with the other women while the men talked over the important things.”

“I can tell you feel strongly about this.”

Lucas couldn’t keep the dismay out of his voice, and Carrie couldn’t miss hearing it. She experienced a sinking feeling in her heart, a sense of cold traveling from her extremities in the direction of her heart, but she would not stop. No matter how great the pain or disappointment, no matter how much she wanted to hang on to her slender hopes, she was determined that she could tell no new lies. She had come to Colorado expecting to be alone. If he left, she would have no less than she had expected.

“Yes, I’m afraid I do. You see, all my life everybody just assumed that I would cook and clean and care for them without ever asking if I wanted to, if there was anything else I wanted to do with my life. I was a prisoner and I wasn’t even married. That’s why I agreed to marry Robert, why I insisted we leave Virginia, and why I took the job at this station after he died. I won’t ever go back to being the nonspeaking, nonthinking partner ever again. I’d rather live and the an old maid than sell myself into that kind of bondage.”

Carrie realized she had allowed herself to get rather excited and her voice had scaled upward during her speech. She stopped, partially ashamed of voicing her views so stridently and partially surprised by her own words. She had always known she would fight before she would allow herself to be thrust back into the role her father and brothers expected of her, but she had never fully understood what it was she wanted for herself. Well, she still didn’t fully understand it, but she was a lot closer to achieving it than she’d been before.

“Is there room in that scenario for someone who falls a little short of the ideal?” Lucas asked. He wondered why his voice sounded so forlorn. He had been rather startled by Carrie’s views and, yes, disapproving, but he wasn’t giving up.

“I’m not sure, but I guess it would depend on how far short he fell. Most men are ready to swear on their mother’s grave they love their wife and children more than life itself. My brothers are like that, but they don’t mean it. Both of them courted my sisters-in-law with traditional Southern charm, giving them presents, hanging on their every word, and swearing they would give their last breath to spare them the slightest suffering. Yet the minute the honeymoon was over, they expected the house and everyone in it to revolve around them. No, I’ve had that, and I gave up my home so I would never have to tolerate it again.” Carrie paused to allow her heart to slow down. “I guess I sound a lot like a hysterical female, but I mean every word I’ve said.”

She wondered what it would be like not to see his silver-gray eyes following her every move, his lean body negligendy lounging nearby just in case she needed him, his lips never touching hers again. Oddly enough, she felt angry rather than sad, angry that her chance to come to know this man should be snatched from her grasp after a tantalizing few days. It was so unfair of life to dangle her ideal before her eyes and then take it away. “But I’ve talked too much about myself,” Carrie said abrupdy. “What are you looking for?”

Chapter 10

Lucas hardly knew where to begin. If Carrie had had too much family, he’d had too little. Whereas her father came home every night, he and his uncle were sometimes away from home for weeks at a time. But he enjoyed the stimulation of traveling to new places and meeting new people, and he also enjoyed the challenge of the West, pitting his intelligence and instincts against those of other men and the harsh conditions of this mountainous country.

He could no more envision himself as a banker who came home regularly every evening than he could see himself as a humble clerk who kept to his books and deferred to his wife in everything. Up to this point he hadn’t felt the need for family obligations, but that was changing, had probably already changed, or he and Carrie wouldn’t be having this discussion. Still, a family could never replace his need to succeed, to leave something behind that he had created out of his own wit, will, and strength. And it wasn’t something he was sure he could share. How could you look at some achievement and say half of it was yours? Wouldn’t you always wonder which half belonged to you, the strengths or the weaknesses, or if your half would have existed at all without the help of the other half?