Marry Me (8 page)

She was close enough that he could smell her. Lord, was there ever such a good-smelling thing in the world as a clean woman? Not flowers, not baking bread, not perfume.
Her.

He grabbed her wrists. So fragile; he could snap them with a squeeze.

“It’s all right,” she told him in a soothing voice that made him want to snarl. “If you’ll just let me—”

“I’m not a horse,” he snarled at her.

His tone would have warned off a thug in the meanest saloon. She didn’t even flinch. “I’m even better with people than horses,” she told him, coolly confident.

“I’m all right.”

“You didn’t look all right. You looked like you hurt, and goodness knows I’ve seen enough people in pain to recognize the signs. You’ve no fever, I grant you, but—”

“Stop.” He was still holding her wrists, he realized; why hadn’t he put her away from him yet? He was sure that he’d meant to. He could feel her pulse beat against his thumbs. He stayed like that for a moment, dragging air into lungs that suddenly seemed like they couldn’t get enough before he jerked her hands away from him and released her. “Don’t touch me again.”

“I won’t promise,” she told him. “If I can help you, I’ll do so. You’re not the first who’s begun by telling me to stop. But I’ve yet to have one who wasn’t grateful to be healed, when it came right down to it.”

He swore, a profane suggestion that should have horrified any true lady should she even recognize it.

“No thank you,” she said calmly, and rose to her feet, whacking dust off her skirts with complete nonchalance.

Damn it. He would
not
smile at her. He would not.

But it was hard. Oh, it was hard.

“Now then.” Having beaten up a satisfactory cloud, she folded her hands before her. “Are you ready to begin negotiations?”

“Negotiations?”

He shouldn’t have taken the chair when she’d offered it. It was a weak position from which to bargain. It mitigated the advantage of his height. Not to mention that no man’s wits were sharp when his nose was breast-high.

He sprawled back in his chair and contrived to look relaxed. “Negotiate away.”

“Kate said she was coming as soon as possible. It’d be different if she’d given me some time to get things together, but patience has never been one of Kate’s finer qualities. And the truth is, as fond as I am of this place, if she sees this”—she gestured toward the claim shack—“she’ll never let me stay here alone.”

“Sounds good to me.”

She made a face at him. “I’m aware of that. Not, however, to me. But she won’t rest easy until I’m well settled, and so I decided to beat her to the punch. I told her I was married.”

She said it calmly, as if her words were entirely rational. “Let me see if I understand this. You wanted your sister to stop worrying about you so you lied to her.”

“It sounds bad when you say it like that.”

“This is a habit of yours?”

She lifted her chin. “We’ve always all been willing to do whatever’s necessary in order to protect each other.”

“Uh-huh.” Her hands had left their imprint, warm and soft, against his face, and he had the most absurd and sudden need to find out how his own would feel on her. “And you thought that telling her you were married—to someone you’ve known, what, a couple of weeks at the outside?—would ease her mind?”

“We have a long and successful history of precipitous marriages in our family,” Emily informed him.

He stared at her, face carefully wiped clean of expression. And then he laughed, great, rusty whoops of it that bent him over at the waist and nearly toppled him out of his chair.

Emily knew she should have been insulted. He was laughing
at
her; there was no way to dress it up and pretend he was laughing
with
her. But she couldn’t deny that, stated baldly, it sounded a bit…outlandish.

And there was his laughter. Such a sight he was, the corners of his eyes crinkling, his thin, sculpted cheeks rounding up above his beard, the sound gusting out of him as if it’d been dammed up for half his life and was just now erupting in one great rush.

She was tempted to embellish the story. See if she could amuse him some more. She doubted there’d ever been a man on earth who needed it more than he did, and being the one who gave it to him made the region of her heart go soft and warm. Oh, there was nothing she liked so much as being able to make someone feel better!

He finally quieted. Two last, small hiccups before he swiped at his eyes with the flat of his hands.

“Are you finished?” she asked.

“Maybe. Yeah, I think so.” He braced his hands on his knees and leaned toward her. “Unless you want to tell me we’ve got three kids already, too.”

“Oh heavens, no.” She pretended to look appalled. “How silly do you think I am? There’s only the one on the way.”

“Good God!” he exploded, but then caught sight of her smile. “Oh. You’re teasing.”

He looked put out at that, his brow knit in confusion.

“Forgive me, Miss Bright, but I still find it hard to credit that you marrying someone you scarcely know would ease your sister’s concern.”

“Call it desperate measures.” She sighed. “First off, convincing her not to worry is an impossibility. She’ll worry. I’ll be eighty years old and tottering around on a cane and she’ll still be worrying. I only hoped to delay her arrival long enough to give me a chance to prove that
she
doesn’t need to marry someone she doesn’t wish to in order to provide me with a home.”

“So you think she’s going to arrive, take one look at me, figure you’re in good hands, and go trotting back to Philadelphia? I’m flattered.”

“As I said, desperate measures.”

He blew out a breath and scrubbed a hand through the thick, unruly mass of his hair. “Up until meeting you, Miss Bright, I’d considered myself a relatively logical and intelligent man. What, exactly, do you expect to happen when your sister arrives and finds you married to me?”

“Once she sees me taken care of, she’ll go back home, and she won’t have to marry Mr. Ruckman. Then I’ll have until spring to get things in order—there’s no way she’ll venture out here again until it warms up. She hardly sticks her nose out of the house when it’s cold. By spring, when I’m still okay, she’ll have to admit I can take reasonable care of myself and we’ll both go forward from there.”

“Female plotting.” He shook his head while she bristled. “I assume we’re not really going to be married.”

“Of course not!”

“Then how—supposing you get to spring in one piece—are you going to explain what happened to your husband?”

“Oh, there are lots of possibilities. You could die tragically—at which point, of course, it would be impossible for me to remain on the claim; I’d be too heartbroken, explaining why I’ve had to move to another.” She pressed the back of her hand to her head as if preparing to swoon.

“Yeah,
that’d
put her mind at ease about your welfare.”

She frowned at him; the man had no talent for banter. “All right. We’ve divorced; I misjudged you, and you ran off with the local bar dancer, you heartless wretch.” She tucked her tongue in her cheek. “Or maybe even with the handsome bartender. Such a shock.”

He narrowed his eyes at her warningly.

She struggled not to smile. “Honestly, by then I’ll probably be able to tell her the truth. Likely Mr. Ruckman will have found himself some other interest by then. And, considering I’d survived that long, even Kate will have to acknowledge that I don’t require her to mother me anymore. At least not to the same degree.”

“Or she’ll commit you to the nearest asylum, where you clearly belong.”

“You have no imagination.”

“Thank God, if this is where it leads one.”

“Do you know, you have the most remarkable ability to strain my sympathy?”

“And whatever gave you the idea that I wanted it?”

There was clearly no help for the man. She would do far better, she reflected, if she could ignore her natural instincts and just let him wallow in his gloom.

“So? Will you do it?”

Sound rumbled in his chest. “Why me?”

Despite her resolution, that was simply too good to pass up. “Why, your charm and sunny nature, of course. Whyever else?”

She smiled sunnily into his glower.

“Leverage, then,” she admitted.

“Leverage?”

“I’ve something you want. I’m confident we can come to a reasonable and simple agreement.”

“I’m pretty sure you got somethin’ Longnecker wants, too. I’m sure he’d be rock-damn delighted to play house with you for a couple of days.”

Now, that was uncalled for. “That would be…complicated. I’d much prefer to keep this simple.”

“You’ll have to give up the land, though.”

“I know.” She shot a longing gaze at the little shack she’d grown surprisingly fond of. “Some things can’t be helped. And I’ll find another.”

“If you’d have handed it over when you should have, you’d have been settled by now, and all this wouldn’t be necessary.”

“And if you don’t stop hammering about such things, I’m going to go ask Imbert after all and you can just sit over here and sulk until winter comes and you freeze in your chair.”

“Aw, but that wouldn’t be fair to him, remember?”

“I imagine I could make it up to him,” she said in a silky voice, which earned her a quick, hard glare. “So? Will you do it?”

“Why not?” he said, with surprising good cheer.

“Oh, and not that I would ever suspect you of such designs, of course, but I think it’s best that we’re clear on all the details, don’t you? Such as, if you should happen to, oh, get cold feet at the last minute and back out
just
as Kate arrives, I won’t be leaving with her, no matter what she says. She’ll hate it, but she’ll stay, and we’ll both be digging in for the winter.”

“It never occurred to me,” he said, too quickly to be convincing.

“You do ease my mind.”

“Happy to be of service.”

“So we’re agreed?”

“The instant she gets on the train home, you’re gone, too.”

“Fine.” She’d been completely reasonable about the entire thing. Friendly, even. And yet he had to go and make it clear that he didn’t want her there one second longer than necessary.

And so she felt no compunction to make this easy on him.

She stepped back, put her hands on her hips, and eyed him as critically as Dr. Goodale had ever evaluated his prized horseflesh.

“What?”

“It’s just—” She tilted her head, pursed her lips as if considering. “I described you to Kate. Or rather, I described my husband to Kate. In some detail.”

“So?”

“Well…I took a few liberties there as well. Since I didn’t think she’d ever actually meet you.”

He looked toward heaven for help. “Now why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“Because you’re so perceptive?”

“That must be it,” he added dryly. “So what’d you say about me?”

“Oh, let me see if I can remember.” She pressed her forefinger to her pursed lips. “Educated, cultured, well-spoken, and well-dressed. Attentive to my every desire, of course.”

He slumped back, face glum. “What else?”

“Besotted with me—that goes without saying. Prone to break into praise of my beauty regularly,” she went on as he slid further down in his chair, until his head was level with the top rung of the back. “A poet. A—”

“Good God, Em!” he burst out.

“I had to make it believable that you swept me off my feet, didn’t I?” she asked reasonably.
Em.
Nobody called her Em. She’d always assumed she’d hate it. But she didn’t, not one bit. Odd.

“Anything else?” he asked glumly.

She looked at him, at the thick fringe of his hair drooping low, shielding his right eye, and his beard swallowing up his mouth, and she couldn’t resist. “Oh, just one more thing.”

His sigh of relief only got halfway out.

“You’re clean-shaven, of course.”

K
ate was to arrive tomorrow. Emily and Jake had managed to avoid each other completely for the last two days, a careful orchestration that allowed them to pretend to forget that they’d agreed to play at husband and wife. Only for a few days, Emily reminded herself frequently, and without a shred of real legal or moral ties.

But it didn’t help. The idea that he was to be her husband had lodged itself under her skin, leaving her nervous, unsettled, and decidedly
not
herself.

She hoped that Kate would not recognize her tension instantly and suspect the truth. Still, a new bride could be expected to suffer a few nerves, couldn’t she?

The time had come that she could no longer ignore her impending “marriage.” Details must be settled between them before they could carry off this charade with any authority. And so she collected what she must, bundling it in a sheet, as well as all the courage she could muster, and headed for the squat little camp she’d done her best to ignore.

Mr. Sullivan—Jake, she amended; they’d have to get accustomed to calling each other by their given names, wouldn’t they?—sat cross-legged on the ground, sorting through a pile of nuts and bolts, and didn’t look up when she approached. Considering that until now he’d never failed to watch her when she stepped out her door, his inattention had to be deliberate. Perhaps this whole idea made him as uncomfortable as she. For however false it was, even pretending a marriage seemed more intimate than she’d imagined. They’d joined this charade together; it made them partners, gave them a common goal, and bound her to consider his wishes in the days ahead.

The day was warm and then some. He wore only a light shirt as he worked, and it clung damply to his back. She could see the play and swell of thick muscle as he reached for a bolt. He was powerfully built, wide shoulders, solid bone.

Dr. Goodale had been old; their patients often wasted to nothing. And the carefully chosen young men she’d sometimes flirted with were just that: young. She’d no idea of Jake’s actual age, whether three years older than she or thirteen, but there was no doubt he was a man, not a boy. If she ever married in truth, she’d like a man with shoulders like Jake’s; a woman could lean on them if she had to and be assured they’d bear up just fine. Not to mention that there was a certain amount of appeal in watching those muscles bunch and shift. Fascinating.

Kate would be appalled to find her so interested in a man’s shoulders. And surprised. She’d only tolerated Emily’s working with Dr. Goodale because she’d been convinced that there was nothing prurient whatsoever in Emily’s interest. Who could be concerned with shriveled old shoulders or shrunken chests when there was a fascinating pathology to examine?

Nevertheless, she was to treat him as her husband for the next few days. A besotted young wife would be perfectly
enthralled
with her new husband’s shoulders.

The sun brought up tiny glints of gold in his dark hair, the color of the rich mink Dr. Goodale had bought Kate shortly after their marriage. It had fascinated Emily; only six then, she’d buried her fingers in it, ran her hands through it over and over until Dr. Goodale had caught her at it. She’d never felt anything so soft; she wondered if his hair would feel the same. It didn’t seem as if there could be anything soft on Jake Sullivan.

“What do you want?” He didn’t look up, just hurled the question at her without a hint of graciousness while he squinted at the threads of another bolt.

“I thought that—” Her carefully constructed speech scrambled. “I don’t know what color your eyes are.” Dark, she knew. But blue, or green, or…

That brought his head up. “What the hell?”

“Or hardly anything else about you. I thought that we should—” Brown, she thought hazily. Deep, dark brown. She’d always thought of that as a nice warm, fuzzy sort of color. Chocolate, fur. This was darker, colder, water over dark rocks. And infinitely more intriguing. “Kate is bound to ask questions. A lot of questions. It’d be odd, don’t you think, if we don’t know the answers?”

He shrugged, completely unconcerned. “It’s not like we’ve had months of courting to fill up with chatter.”

“Yes, but don’t you think that we’d have talked about a few things? I mean—”

“If we’ve only been married for such a short time and haven’t had better things to do than
talk
, well, there’d be no reason for us to be rushing into marriage so fast, would there?”

“But…ooh!” Against her best efforts, she felt her cheeks heat, knew they must be glowing like a hurricane lamp. “But surely there’d be some opportunity. I think we should exchange the basics.” Not bad, she thought. Barely a quaver in her voice; they could have been discussing the price of lumber.

“I should hope not.” He sounded very sure.
Very
sure. “You don’t want her thinking I just married you for the land, do you? Better I married you for your body.”

She gaped; she couldn’t help it. She’d thought her medical experiences had made her far more worldly than most. But it was extremely different, she’d just discovered, when it was one’s own intimacies one was pondering. Even if those intimacies were imagined. And they were imagined, suddenly, in the kind of fuzzy detail that was all that her not exactly limited, but certainly impersonal, knowledge could summon. Even that was enough to soften her knees.

His beard twitched. Was he smiling at her, beneath that thicket? Laughing at her? She didn’t know whether to be provoked or pleased.

“Just in case you didn’t note it earlier,” she began, deciding it was best to simply ignore him, “my other sister’s name is Anthea. Her husband is Gabriel. Their children are Will, James, and—”

“Cripes. You’re set on this, aren’t you? Write down whatever you figure I need to know. I’ll study like a good little boy.”

“Kate’ll ask questions,” she warned him again.

“Afraid I won’t hold up my end of the bargain?”

“I didn’t mean to impugn your honorability. I simply prefer to have the bases covered, if at all possible.”

“Yeah, like you did when you ran away to Montana?” he said, with just enough sneer to make her bristle. And then, “All your bases? You like baseball?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “Not terribly ladylike, is it? I told everyone that I must have
some
topic to discuss with our male patients, but truly, I’d rather go to a ball game than the opera any day. You enjoy it?”

“Yeah,” he said, voice warmer and less guarded than she’d ever heard it. “Used to sneak into games every chance I got when I was a kid in Chicago. Even paid a few times after they moved to the West Side Grounds. Not quite as big a thrill as sneaking in, though.”

“A Colts fan?”

“You bet.”

“Did you play?”

“Sure. When I was a kid. Third base, mostly, sometimes first. Always wanted to pitch, but had a tendency to find batters’ heads more often than the plate.”

“There, you see!” She beamed at him. “
This
is what I meant! It’s exactly the sort of detail I need about you to keep Kate from getting suspicious.”

“Yeah. Wouldn’t want to give old Kate suspicions.”

There was just enough surly edge in his voice to make Emily go back over her words to see how she’d offended him. Heavens, but men were a touchy species. “I wasn’t listening
just
to glean details for Kate. I was interested, too. In fact—”

“Make me a list,” he told her once again. “Just the high points. I imagine you’ve got all kinds of high points.”

Her arms tightened around her bundle, and it gave softly. Talking to him was like walking through a marshland, never knowing when you put your foot down if it would hit safe, solid ground or sink into the morass. “I’d really prefer to discuss it. That way you can ask questions if something occurs to you.”

“The list,” he said, making it clear it would do her no good to argue. “I won’t be asking any questions.”

Oh, just write the darn list!
she scolded herself. Why did she keep expending time and energy wrangling with him?

“Fine. On yours, however, I’d really like as much detail as you can manage. Kate’s not the sort to take things at face value.”

He gave her a hard, long look. “Tell her whatever you want. I’ll go along with it.”

“You want me to invent your past? Your likes, your dislikes?”

“What do I care? Make up whatever you want. You’re good at that.”

It stung. She tried not to let it, but it did just the same, a quick needle prick to a tender area of her pride. “I just don’t want to get caught unaware, that’s all. If you tell Kate something, I don’t want to contradict it through my ignorance.”

“Why the hell would I tell your sister any damn thing at all?”

“Kate’s curious. And very good at prying things out of men that they never intended to tell her. She’s bound to be extraordinarily curious about you.”

“And I’m very good at keeping my mouth shut.”

Yes, she knew that well. She wondered at her need to keep prodding at this topic. Oh yes, Kate must believe in her marriage. But she was afraid that there was more to it than that neatly allowable reason.

She didn’t want to be interested in him, his past, his dreams. But she wondered. He looked like a farmer, strong-muscled, rough-fingered. But sometimes he spoke like a professor, smooth-voiced, careful words—and then he’d turn around and swear like a sailor. He’d homesteaded, in that bare, simple place, like a man with little money and no future other than the one he’d wrest for himself. And yet there were those books, the wide-ranging collection of a man of thought and leisure.

He returned to his work, focusing on the metallic innards she’d seen before, gears and pulleys, his head bent and shoulders hunched, ending the conversation by closing himself off from her. He seemed to want nothing more than to be left utterly alone.

But he’d had a wife.

“Another thing—”

He growled something she was glad she couldn’t catch, sprang to his feet, and hurled a gear so hard it flew over his tent and disappeared on the other side of the rise.

“What
now
?” he shouted at her, loud enough to make her flinch.

“Well,
that
, for one thing. You should have risen the moment I came over. I’d never marry someone with such abysmal manners. It’d be a dead giveaway.” It was a low blow and Emily knew it, but he deserved it.

“Oh, I’ll mind my manners, don’t you worry your little head,” he said, low and dangerous.

She chose to ignore the warning. “You haven’t shaved yet.” She smiled into his glower. “Just a helpful suggestion. I know how committed you are to this venture. How much you’d hate it if something happened so the land doesn’t get handed over to you as we planned.”

“Emily…”

“Oh well, we’ll just have to go with the ‘love is blind thing.’” Then she sobered. “I brought you something.” She thrust out the bundle. “I thought that you could use your clothes.” She’d spent all day preparing them, washing and starching and pressing until she dared him to find a wrinkle. “I should have brought them sooner, I suppose. Everything’s been in such a rush that I really hadn’t thought of it until now.”

He lifted his shoulders as if to say,
What do I care about clothes?

“Anyway.” She cleared her throat. “They’re clean now.”

“Good enough for Kate?”

“Well, Kate has unusually high standards. Good enough for me. And you, I hope. Let me know if you don’t like them. If there’s too much—oh, I don’t know. Too much starch. Whatever.”

“Oh, I will. Don’t you worry, I will.”

“There’s—” It got harder, now. “Her…There are dresses. In the pile.” She peeled back the sheet and pushed aside a pair of blue pants, exposing a wedge of bright green silk. Oh heavens, where were the right words when she needed them.
Were
there right words for this? “I didn’t wash them. I didn’t know—I didn’t want to ask.”

His hands, which had been reaching for the clothes, stopped in mid-air. He pulled them back, rubbed them hard down the front of his pants. She thought she detected a small tremor as he reached forward again and took the stack of clothes. He brushed his fingers over the vivid fabric, once, lightly, before lifting his eyes to meet hers.

She couldn’t have said exactly how his expression had changed. Had his eyes narrowed, his mouth tightened, his brows lowered? Infinitesimal changes, certainly, that added up to grief, a deep dark welling of it, spilling up and over from that place inside him he’d contained until now. Oh, her heart hurt, just seeing it, an ache in her chest that made her rub her breastbone in a futile attempt to ease it.

“Thank you,” he said, though she could tell what it cost him to say it.

“Jake.” Inevitably drawn, she took a step toward him, unsure of what she meant to offer but comfort. And for that brief instant, she thought he would accept.

And then it was over. He turned away, big hands crushing the bundle of clothes she’d pressed so carefully, giving her nothing but the wall of his back.

“Tell me when your sister gets here.”

Montana had never seen the likes of Mrs. Kathryn Virginia Bright Goodale. She stepped off the stage in McGyre with the carriage of a queen descending from her royal carriage. Her head dipped briefly, to ensure the safe passage of the great, curving white plumes of ostrich feathers that frothed from her soft, silk-covered toque, the rhinestone buckle glittering like diamonds.

Two old cowboys, ambling out of the nearest saloon at their usual, decrepit shuffle, stopped dead in their tracks, rheumy eyes bulging from their sockets. Across the street, Wilber Bunku came bursting out of his store to get a better look, the chicken he’d been butchering still swinging from his fist. A wolf whistle split the air, and Kathryn acknowledged its source, bending a serene smile on the thin young ruffian who leaned against the post in front of the livery.

The instant her foot hit the platform, three men appeared to offer assistance. She declined them all in such delicately flattering terms that they blushed and went away as puffed up as if she’d given one her favor. She raised the fashionable little lorgnette that she would never admit was more than an accessory and scanned the street.