The Bad Luck Wedding Dress (17 page)

But she couldn’t do it. Not here and now. She didn’t want to do it. Not when Trace McBride had looked at her with such naked desire. Not when her own body echoed his need.

The air seemed thick and heavy, as if the forces of nature were gathering for a storm. In that moment, Jenny wanted nothing more than to be caught up in it, to lose herself in the fundamental energy pulsing around her, within her.

What was stopping her?

The question trailed like a velvet ribbon through the sensual haze in her mind. What was stopping her? Wasn’t she her mother’s daughter? Hadn’t she poured her talents and treasure into Fortune’s Design just so she could make her own decisions? What good did independence do her if she never used it?

Independence is the freedom to do what I want
.

And here, on the wildflower-dotted prairie beneath the unending Texas sky, Jenny Fortune knew how she wanted to exercise her freedom.

She wanted Trace McBride.

TRACE WAS riding a wild mustang and doing his level best to hang on.

He smelled her scent, a whisper of roses, on the air. He shut his eyes, but still he saw her, imagined her, naked and wanting beneath him. His hands, though fisted at his sides, reached for her. Every fiber of his being hungered for her.

He flinched when she touched his arm.

“Trace?”

Her fingers burned a path from his wrist toward his elbow and he had to think to breathe. He spoke through his teeth. “Leave it alone, Jenny. Leave me alone.”

“I can’t.” Her voice rippled across his senses. “You make me…ache.”

The mustang bucked and Trace lost his grip.

He yanked her against his body and kissed her. He took her mouth roughly, savagely. He kissed her like a man too long without a woman, like a man who hated himself for succumbing to temptation.

It was his most honest action in years.

His legs spread, widening his stance, as his hand slipped down her body to cup her rump, lift her and pull her closer. The groan rumbled from deep inside him and was answered with a breathless sigh against his lips—a breathless, responsive, desire-laden
ah
. He’d never heard a more erotic sound.

He trailed wet kisses up along her jawline, nipping gently at her ear. So long. It’d been so damned long since he’d felt anything like this for a woman. Not since the early days with Constance. “Damn you, Jenny Fortune. Why this? Why now?”

She leaned away from him then, her blue eyes soft with passion and another emotion he refused to recognize.

“I’ve waited so long,” she said, her voice beckoning.

The words melted past his driving hunger to steal into his soul. She’d waited. Ice cold water couldn’t have cooled his ardor any faster.

I’m five buttons and a couple of petticoats away from taking a bride the day before her damned wedding
.

He put his hands on her shoulders and firmly pushed her aside. “Haven’t you forgotten something? Like your fiancé?”

She froze, her eyes rounded, her lips forming a silent “oh.” By the looks of it, the dressmaker had forgotten all about her fiancé.

Which was just like a woman. Jenny Fortune was no different from all the others. “Get in the buggy, Miss Fortune. We’re going back to town. If we ride hard we should make it back by dark.”

She didn’t reply, just climbed silently into the rig, her cheeks stained pink like a Parker County peach.

Trace rode his horse rather than join her. They rode west, into the afternoon sun, and he tried to force his thoughts in any direction but toward her.

He managed, for the most part. Except for the niggling truth that returned time and time again. The thought that he’d accused her wrongly. Jenny Fortune wasn’t like all the others.

And that, he feared, was the biggest problem of all.

IT WAS Friday night in Hell’s Half Acre, and dives, dance halls, and dens of iniquity seethed with violence and vice. Cowboys in herds of twelve to fifteen rode from area ranches to drink and gamble and whore away their wages. Railroad workers in from the westward camps shared card games with no-goods who had hitched rides on inbound freight wagons. By eight o’clock all four policemen on Marshal Courtright’s force had been summoned into service, and the jail was filled near to bursting.

In the midst of it all at the ever-popular End of the Line Saloon, Trace McBride sat sipping from a bottle of the house’s best whiskey. It was Friday night in Hell’s Half Acre. Tomorrow afternoon in First Methodist Church, Jenny Fortune would stand before God and Fort Worth, Texas, and marry Thomas Edmund Wharton III.

He couldn’t get the damned wedding off his mind. All the way back to town he’d struggled against thinking about it. He’d endured verbal bombardment on the subject from the moment he hit his front door. The girls had yammered on about MissFortune’s wedding even while being disciplined. After banishing them to bed, he’d come to work only to be assaulted by the headline in the damned newspaper: “Dressmaker Vows to Put Bad Luck Wedding Dress to the Test.”

He lifted the glass to his mouth and gulped back the rest of his drink, but the whiskey failed to burn the taste of her from his mouth. Grasping the bottle to pour himself another hit, he eyed the newspaper lying beside it. The words printed on the page seemed to leap out at his eyes. “Wedding of the decade set for tomorrow afternoon.”

For the past couple of weeks the
Democrat
had been chock full of reports on the wedding preparations. Tonight’s edition even included an interview with both the bride and groom. The tone of the articles had provided a big step toward changing public opinion of the dress. Trace had even heard the gown referred to as the Not-So-Bad Luck Wedding Dress. “Looks like you’ll get your wish, Dressmaker,” he murmured softly.

One of her wishes, anyway.

You make me ache.

Well, hell
. Clamping down on his wayward thoughts, Trace pushed to his feet. He strode around the barroom scrutinizing his customers on the sly, hoping to find a cheat at one of the card tables or a fellow trying to stiff the house on his tab. He felt mean as hell with the hide off, and he was looking for a fight.

Not finding the relief he sought at the End of the Line, he left. Instinctively, his feet turned west, away from the Rankin Building.

Toward Jenny Fortune’s cottage.

EARLIER THAT evening while Trace was at work, an early season norther had swept into town with blustering winds and a spattering of rain. Temperatures dropped thirty degrees in an hour, sending people scurrying for blankets and winter coats.

Trace turned up the collar of his jacket, then stuck his hands in his pockets as he walked along the shadowed lanes beyond the boundaries of Hell’s Half Acre. Muted pools of light from gas lamps at street corners stabbed at the gloom but did nothing to banish the bitter chill.

Trace welcomed the cold. It helped clear his head and damper his nasty mood. That, of course, allowed an opportunity for fatigue to set in. He was bone tired—worn down, run over, and wrung out. It was damned foolish of him to be out this time of night in this kind of weather.

So why the hell did he feel compelled to walk by Jenny Fortune’s cottage at three o’clock in the morning on her wedding day?

Trace kicked a loose stone illuminated by a streetlight. He wanted to check on her, that’s all. He wanted to make sure no Baileys lurked in the shadows.

And that no Wharton prowls in her bedroom
.

He wanted to kick himself at that thought.
Let it go, McBride. Let her go. She’s not yours. You don’t want her.

“What a crock,” he muttered, turning the corner of Jenny’s street.

The white pickets of her fence shone with a pearly glow beneath the moonlight. Eyeing her darkened cottage, he noted that all appeared in order. Indulging the need to make certain, he quietly slipped the latch on the gate and stepped into the yard. He made his way along a path between the cottonwood and the front porch until the unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked stopped him in his tracks.

“Take another step and I’ll blow a hole through your heart.” Hidden by the shadows of the porch, Jenny’s voice sounded deceptively soft. “If you don’t tell me who you are and give me a good reason for being here, I just might do it anyway.”

Bloodthirsty little thing. And what was she doing awake and outside in the cold at this time of night?

Trace asked the question uppermost in his mind. “Are you alone, Jenny?”

“McBride!” The chain on a porch swing rattled. “You frightened me half to death. I thought you were a Bailey. What are you doing?”

“Are you alone?” he repeated.

She gave a frustrated groan. “And what business is it of yours, may I ask?”

It wasn’t his business. He knew that. Frustration ate at his soul. “That Wharton character is a skunk, lady, and I’m not certain you realize it.”

“A shark.”

“What?”

“He’s a shark, not a skunk, and no, he’s not here. I kicked him out of my parlor hours ago. By the way, he said to tell you to find someone else to chase after your Menaces once he and I are married.”

At least she hadn’t said her bedroom. “If he has something to say to me, he can say it to my face. Are you still holding a gun on me, Jenny?”

“No, I set it down,” she replied, sounding disgusted. “I probably shouldn’t have. You haven’t yet told me why you’re skulking around my house in the middle of the night.”

Trace ambled up the front steps. “I’m on my way home from work.”

“Then you’re obviously lost.”

“Walking helps me get to sleep. Some nights I need more help than others.”

“Hmm,” she replied, noncommittally.

Trace stared into the gloom and finally made out her form huddled at one end of the porch swing. “I thought I saw something in the shadows,” he lied. “I figured it best to make certain the Baileys weren’t causing any trouble.”

He crossed the porch and propped his hip on the railing opposite the swing. “Why are you sitting outside in the dark in the middle of the night? It’s freezing.”

But not too cold to mask the clean scent of roses that washed his way with every sway of the swing.

“I’m more chilly inside than out, I’m afraid,” she murmured softly. “I couldn’t sleep.”

She’d been damned hot this afternoon. Trace grimaced and gave the swing a push with the toe of his boot. The near complete absence of light lent an isolation to the scene, an intimacy that stripped away the layers of pretense between them. Trace was too tired, too soul weary, to fight it. “Jenny, you can’t marry Wharton.”

Cloth rustled as she shifted her position. “It’s not your concern, McBride.”

“Yes, it is.” He sighed heavily. “It’s like I said before, the man’s a skunk. Hell, Jenny, he may spend his days with you, but he spends his nights in the Acre.”

“Well now, Mr. Saloonkeeper,” she sarcastically drawled, “there’s a reason to think badly of a man.”

Damn but the woman had a mouth on her. “You’re a cold woman, Jenny Fortune.” Propelled by a need he didn’t stop to analyze, he pushed off the porch rail. His boots landed against the wooden floor planks with a thud. “It makes me realize I’m iced up myself. Scoot over and share some of that blanket with me, would you?” He moved as he spoke, so before she had the opportunity to refuse, he’d appropriated a spot on the swing. Then he tugged on the quilt.

“McBride!” she protested, yanking back.

He abandoned his efforts with the cover, instead reaching for her hand and pulling her against him. She struggled half-heartedly.

Trace said, “Come here, Miss Fortune, and tell me why you’re really awake in the middle of the night.”

“I’m not telling you anything. I’m angry with you. I don’t owe you anything.”

“I know.” She resisted for another moment, then the starch seeped out of her spine and she surrendered. Trace wrapped his arm around her. She rested her head against his chest and a peaceful sensation of contentment stole over him. It felt right, holding her close like this, and that scared the hell out of him.

He cleared his throat. “I’ve been thinking about your situation, and I’ve come up with an alternative solution for you.” Jenny’s limbs began to stiffen and he hurriedly explained, “There’s a man I know. Name of Wright. He’s an upstanding young man, and he cleans up nice—if you look past the size of his nose. He’d make you a much better husband than that skunk Wharton. Why don’t you have him stand up with you instead? He’d agree in a heartbeat. I’m certain of it.”

She held herself so very still that had he not known better, he’d have thought she’d drifted off to sleep. Finally, she said, “You have more audacity than any person I’ve ever met.”

“I appreciate the compliment.”

Her sniff radiated disdain.

They swung for a few minutes in silence. Then Jenny asked, “Samuel Wright, the boy who works at M and M Produce?”

“You know him?”

“I’ve met him. I recognized the description.”

Sam Wright’s nose was rather famous in town, Trace thought. “He’s a good fellow, Jenny.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “He’s kind and he’s gentle.” Jenny sighed. “He’s just like my father.”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it? You love your father. I’ve always heard a woman looks for a man like her father when she marries.”

“Poor Emma, Maribeth, and Katrina.”

“Witch.” Trace leaned his head back against the swing and shut his eyes, soaking in the impression of the night, the place, and the woman in his arms. Despite the cold, he felt warmer than he had in years.

She was silent for a long time. “My father is a very good man. His research may one day offer humanity a great advancement. However, I’ve never dreamed of having a husband like Richard Fortune.”

Trace waited, but she said nothing more. “Wharton’s a user, Jenny. He’s after something. I can tell it by looking at him. He’d hurt you.”

She shook her head. “No, Trace. I know what to expect from Edmund. I have no illusions where he is concerned, and he does have his appeal.”

“So he’s pretty,” Trace said with a snort.

She smiled against his chest. “Edmund is willing to give me what I want. Marrying Edmund will allow me to keep Fortune’s Design.”