The Bad Luck Wedding Dress (18 page)

And I’ll have to watch her parade around town as Mrs. Thomas Edmund Wharton III.
The thought made him sick to his stomach. “Is business all that matters to you?”

Jenny didn’t respond to the question. Instead she asked one of her own. “Doesn’t anything matter to you, Trace?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I’m getting married this afternoon, and you stop by in the middle of the night to tell me you’ve found a more appropriate groom than the one I already have.”

“Hey now,” Trace protested. “Your mother found Wharton, which by the way, is something I’ll never understand. He’s totally wrong for you. Why shouldn’t I try to help?”

Frustration filled her voice. “
You
try to help? Be serious, McBride. We both know you’re no help at all.”

“Why the hell do you say that?” He’d been a lot of help to her. He’d protected her from the Baileys for one thing.

“I say it because you’re being pigheaded, McBride.”

“Pigheaded!”

“Yes, pigheaded.”

His spine stiffened, but instead of drawing away from him, Jenny burrowed closer. “I don’t know what your reasoning is, but the fact that you’re doing this to your daughters purely drives me crazy.”

“Doing
what
to my daughters?” he demanded roughly.

“Don’t you ever listen to them? Do you have any idea how upset they are? They visit me every day, begging me not to marry Edmund. That’s what was behind this train business today, you mark my words. They have some scheme up their sleeves. They don’t want me to marry Edmund or any other man. They want me to marry you!”

His muscles tensed. For a breathless second, he didn’t respond. When he finally spoke, ice coated his words. “A woman who uses children is lower than silt.”

“Oh!” While she pulled out of his arms he was shoving her away. “How dare you accuse me of such a thing.” She struck out blindly, the thwack of her hand against his face sounding like a gunshot in the dark.

“Goddammit, you hit my nose.”

“I hope I broke it.”

“Bloodthirsty wench.”

“Don’t call me that!”

“It’s kinder than what I’d like to call you,” Trace shot back, his voice dripping with disgust. “Trying to use my daughters. You should be ashamed.”

“I’m ashamed of nothing!” she said, scrambling off the swing. “You know I haven’t tried to manipulate your daughters.
You’re
the one who is using them—using them to hide behind. You don’t want me? Fine. Just go, then. Go home.” She drew a deep, shuddering breath. “Go home. Now. Just go and leave me alone. Why did you have to come here anyway!” With that, she marched inside, slamming the door behind her.

Trace stood on the porch, his chest heaving with his anger. But it was more than anger. It was pain and heartache and jealousy and lust all rolled into one.

She was marrying Edmund Wharton.

The idea made him furious. He crossed to her front door and shoved it open. Then he followed the light to the back of the house and her bedroom. She’d slipped off her robe and was climbing into bed. Tears spilled down her cheeks.

The sight made him livid. Guilt and defensiveness put the words on his tongue. “You think I hide behind my children?” he asked, his manner making the question a threat. “Maybe you’re right. But I stayed away from you for their sake, even when that was the last thing I wanted to do. So, maybe I have been using my girls.”

She stiffened. “Get out of my bedroom, McBride,” she said, swiping the tears from her cheeks. “Go away. You shouldn’t be here.”

He gave a bitter laugh. “You think you’re telling me something I don’t already know?”

“Trace, please—”

“You asked me why I came here tonight. Do you really want to know? You think I don’t want you?” He gave a gravelly laugh. “Well, Miss Fortune, think again. I came here because I do want you.”

He stepped forward. She looked as if she wanted to flee, but she didn’t move her feet. The air between them crackled, and as he advanced another step, he saw the shudder sweep over her. He recognized it for what it was. “And you want me, too.”

She met his gaze, and he saw a thousand agonies shimmering in her eyes. Her mouth opened, then closed, as she stared at him. The seconds dragged by until finally, she softly cried, “But you don’t want to marry me.”

“It’s better this way, Jenny.”

She gave him a contemptuous look.

“It’s true. There are things you don’t know about me. Things I haven’t told you. As much as I hate the idea of you marrying that skunk, the fact remains you’re better off with him than me.”

The words lay between them like a corpse.

Trace drew a deep breath. He was faintly aware of his fists clenching at his sides.
Do it, tell her the rest of it. Not just for her sake, but for yours too.

Trace summoned his courage to speak. He tried—God, how he tried—but he couldn’t make his mouth form the words. Now he was a coward on top of everything else.

“Lock the door behind me, Jenny. And for God’s sake, get that gun off the porch and put it safely away.” He turned to leave.

A floorboard creaked as she followed him from the bedroom. When he reached for the handle on the front door, she stopped him with one softly spoken word. “Why?”

His throat closed and sweat formed on his upper lip.

“Tell me
why
, damn you. Tell me why so I can forget you!”

For a long moment, the only sound to be heard was the rhythmic tick of the clock. The anguish in her voice gave him the strength he needed, because he found he could no longer bear the thought of her pain.

Trace’s mind flashed back to another time, another place, before betrayal had stolen his world. He swallowed hard. “You want to know why won’t I marry you? Because I can’t, Jenny, I can’t.”

“Is your wife still alive? Have you lied about being a widower?”

Trace unleashed a bitter laugh. Turning around, he faced her and said, “Oh, no, Miss Fortune. Constance is very dead. I’m certain of it, and that is why I won’t marry you.”

He burned her image into his mind. Gowned in white, her golden hair mussed. Achingly beautiful. Wanting him. Caring about him. He’d remember her like this, before she knew. Before she hated him.

“You see, my dear, I’m the one who killed her. I murdered my wife.”

If you put on a garment wrong side out,

you will have bad luck unless you let a left-handed person change it for you.

CHAPTER 11

HE KILLED HIS WIFE.

Jenny sucked in a breath as the horror of it washed over her.

But on the heels of horror immediately came doubt. This was a man who to her knowledge never carried a gun. This was a man who made his daughter eat her peas. This was Mr. Throw-Fish.

This was no murderer.

While Jenny worked her way to this conclusion, Trace left the cottage. The front door banged shut, and she was staring at the empty room. A tide of frustration rose within her. The man was always running from something.

He’d marched halfway down the front walk before she caught up with him. Cold stung her bare skin as she tugged at his jacket. “Don’t you dare leave like that! You can’t make such a claim, then walk away.”

He shrugged off her touch and kept on going.

Jenny blew an exasperated sigh, picked up the hem of her nightgown, and ran after him. “Trace McBride, you wait right there.”

He kept on walking, his long strides eating up the ground. Her foot came down hard on a rough-edged pebble and she winced in pain as she stopped to brush the offending stone away. “Darn you, McBride,” she called after him, “I’m in my nightgown and it’s cold out here!”

“Go home, then.”

He had reached the street corner before she caught up with him again. “Trace, please! I’ll follow you home if I have to, and I’m barefooted. If I catch pneumonia it’ll be on your conscience.”

He stopped abruptly. “Goddammit, Jenny. I tell you I murdered my wife and you still think I have a conscience?”

Somber now, she placed her hand against his arm. “I know you do.”

He stood stiffly for a moment, then swore a snarling oath and whisked her up into his arms. Toting her back toward her house, he muttered, “Barefoot and in your nightgown. Stupid. I never would have guessed it of you, but time and again today you’ve proved me wrong. Didn’t you get the hint, lady? I’m dangerous. I killed my wife! You should not be chasing after me!”

She rested her head against his chest, soaking up his warmth. He was right about one thing. She shouldn’t have chased after him without grabbing her robe first. “I want to know how it happened. I want to know why.”

He didn’t speak again until he’d carried her back inside her house, to her bedroom, where he deposited her on the bed. “Get some sleep, Jenny. You want to look good for the wedding.”

“It was an accident, wasn’t it? You loved her so much and you accidently killed her, and the guilt you feel is crushing.”

At the doorway to her bedroom he paused. His hands reached out and clutched the doorjamb. “One more time, Miss Fortune. I hated my wife. I shot her.”

Jenny studied him closely and repeated his words in her mind. What he
hadn’t
said provided her an answer. Smiling sadly, she told him, “I knew it was an accident. You may have killed, but you are no killer, Trace McBride. What you are is a coward. You’re afraid of something—yourself, me, the phases of the moon, for all I know. And you’ve allowed that fear to dictate your life.”

His eyes closed, and for the briefest of seconds she saw a world full of pain in his expression. When he looked at her again, his deep green eyes were shuttered.

“Good-bye, Miss Fortune.”

As he took a step away from her, Jenny was compelled to add, “I believe in you, Trace, and I wish you could have believed in me, too. I’d have been a good wife to you. I could have loved you.”

Trace stiffened, but didn’t respond. This time, the door closed with a whisper.

MONIQUE DAY glanced at the wall clock inside the small room off the vestibule of Fort Worth’s First Methodist Church and frowned. Where was that girl? Jenny had agreed to meet her here at noon to supervise the decorating. Now almost three o’clock, Monique was more than a little worried.

Had she made a mistake by not staying at her daughter’s home for the duration of the wedding festivities? Monique liked her privacy, and she had wanted Jenny to have hers—just in case Mr. McBride decided to do something to stop this wedding. She paused, tapping her finger against her cheek. Maybe that was it. Maybe Trace McBride had finally made his move.

In that case, this would be a beautiful wedding after all.

A faint grin hovered on Monique’s lips as she surveyed the interior of the church. White roses and English ivy twined around the arch that stood at one end of the long center aisle, white and blue ribbons cascading down the sides. A white cloth runner stretched toward the second, identical arch at the altar. There, more roses and ivy, dozens of potted plants and ferns, filled every available space and barely left enough room for the minister, bride, and groom.

“Excess,” Monique murmured with a wrinkle of her nose. Excess almost to the degree of gaudy. Not at all her daughter’s style.

Fort Worth would love it.

Doubts came back to plague her. If Fort Worth saw a wedding performed here today, that is. Jenny’s delay might well have nothing to do with McBride. Knowing her daughter, she might have decided not to go through with the marriage to Edmund. The girl had enough of her mother in her not to be entirely predictable, and Monique found that worrisome. Would she bail out on the plan entirely? Monique simply couldn’t say.

At first she was surprised by Jenny’s apathy toward the idea of making arrangements for her wedding to Edmund. But after Trace McBride’s stirring defense of Jenny the night of their dinner at the Cosmopolitan Hotel, Monique had begun to suspect the reason. The snooping she had done since then had proved her suspicions correct.

Her daughter had developed a tendresse for the saloonkeeper, and Monique suspected Mr. McBride wasn’t immune to her, either. The events of yesterday had proved it. First Jenny went tearing off after those girls, regardless of her expected attendance at the prewedding festivities. Then Mr. McBride hightailed it after her, even though all his chicks were safely in their nest. Even Edmund, as apathetic as he was about this marriage of convenience, had looked askance at that.

Monique had kept her fingers crossed all afternoon and had felt real disappointment when Jenny rode back into town, her status unchanged. Still, Monique wouldn’t give up hope until the vows were said. She still had her secret weapon to fire.

Maybe it wouldn’t come to that. Perhaps the reason Jenny hadn’t arrived at the church on time was because she was being detained by Trace McBride. “I can only hope,” Monique said, rearranging a crooked blue satin ribbon bow.

Such hopes were also the reason she’d decided to indulge her penchant for troublemaking and do everything within her power to insure this wedding reached its preferred conclusion. So was born her secret weapon. She’d concocted a sly, yet extreme, last-ditch effort to force her

daughter and the man she fancied to confront the future they might forfeit due to their stubbornness.

She’d invited the McBride Menaces to serve as bridesmaids at Jenny’s wedding.

Unable to appreciate the subtlety of her plan, the girls had at first objected. But Monique, being Monique, had refused to accept their protests. Forging ahead, and with silent apologies to her daughter, she had commissioned a Dallas seamstress, a dill pickle of a woman named Baum-gardner, to create three attendants’ gowns. Twice during the past three weeks she’d arranged for the girls to be excused from school for a pair of clandestine dress fittings. The secrecy had appealed to the McBride children and finally garnered their cooperation.

While she wouldn’t go so far as to say the girls looked forward to the wedding, they did admit their presence at the ceremony would guarantee their father’s attendance.

Monique planned to take it from there.

Assured that all was in readiness at the church, Monique left to make the short journey to Jenny’s house. A cool wind stung her cheeks while she walked, and Monique tried to tell herself the tears collecting in her eyes resulted from the chill.

It wasn’t true, of course. Monique was feeling emotional for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the message she shortly must convey to her daughter. “Maybe Jenny and Mr. McBride have eloped,” she said, her hopes lifting. It would be a miracle, she knew, but it would save her from having to share a piece of news she desperately wished to keep to herself.

Richard hadn’t made his train. Jenny’s father wouldn’t be here to escort his daughter down the aisle. She’d be brokenhearted.

Monique wanted to strangle the man. He must have lost himself in his work one more time. Richard and his foolish experiments—she had half a notion to divorce him again over this one. No matter who the groom turned out to be, Jenny could have used her father’s support today of all days. But once again, Richard Fortune wouldn’t been there for her when she needed him.

Monique hoped Trace McBride wasn’t a similar type of man.

Reaching the waist-high picket fence that surrounded her daughter’s yard, Monique’s steps slowed. She took a deep, bracing breath, then flipped the gate’s metal latch. The hinges squeaked as the door swung wide, and Monique stepped toward the front porch.

Please don’t be here. Please have eloped
. She entered the cottage without knocking. “Jenny? Oh, Jenny! Are you here?”

She walked straight to her daughter’s bedroom, where she breathed a sigh of disappointment. Jenny stood before her full-length mirror, the Bad Luck Wedding Dress fastened halfway up her back.

Well, we still have my secret weapon. And if McBride lets us down, at least she’ll still have Edmund. She’ll have Fortune’s Design, which she says is all that matters
.

Monique knew differently, of course. But Jenny was young yet. She’d learn. Being a loving mother, Monique hoped her daughter could avoid the pain of education.

She gazed at her offspring and smiled. “Oh, my. Don’t you make the most beautiful bride. We need to hurry, though. We’re almost out of time. The wedding is scheduled to begin in less than an hour.”

TRACE LAY flat on his stomach on the cold attic floor, one arm stretched beneath Maribeth’s bed as he searched the smooth wooden planks for her shoe. His gritty eyes slowly closed, and he seriously considered never moving again. He was tired enough to sleep on barbed wire. The few hours of fitful sleep he’d managed weren’t nearly enough to keep a man going.

“Is it there?”

He opened his eyes to see Katrina kneeling beside him, her white organdy skirt hiked high in the effort to keep it off the floor. How the hell had the Menaces slipped this one past him? Bridal attendants.

At a wedding he wanted no part of.

Dust brought on a sneeze that caused him to hit his head on the bed. A thought sneaked in with the pain, and he realized he’d rather the Menaces choose another train to rob than carry the rose chain for Jenny Fortune and Edmund Wharton. Trace groaned.

“Can’t you find it, Papa?”

He turned his head and eyed his youngest daughter. Anxious furrows dotted Katrina’s brow. In that moment she reminded him of his grandmother, and a bittersweet smile touched his face. Wouldn’t Grandmother love to see the girls today? All dressed up in ruffles and ribbons. So beautiful, so spirited. So ornery.

No wonder his Menaces held Jenny Fortune in such esteem. They were so much alike.

His hand brushed a lace. “Here it is, Katie-cat.” He pulled the white leather slipper from beneath the bed and gave it to his youngest daughter.

“Oh, Papa. You’re the bestest.” Clutching the shoe to her heart, her eyes shone as she added, “I looked and looked and looked and looked. I couldn’t wear my black boots in MissFortune’s wedding. You saved me, Papa. You’re my hero.”

Leave it to Kat to dramatize a lost shoe, he thought wryly. But damned if it didn’t feel good to be somebody’s hero.

Jenny Fortune needed a hero.

Trace shut his eyes. He wished like hell he could roll under Katrina’s bed and hide for a month or two or twelve. The woman had been right. He was afraid. He’d been afraid for six long years. Jenny only knew half of the story.

But you don’t want to marry me
.

Damn fool woman. Didn’t she have a lick of sense? Apparently not.

Trace wanted to hit something. He wasn’t up to watching Jenny Fortune take wedding vows, not today and probably not ever. And why was it happening? Because of that damned dress. She was tying herself to a no-good scoundrel in the hopes of saving her business.

Hell, she could have done that with me
.

The thought struck like a hailstone and left him reeling. He rubbed his temples with his fingertips as if he could massage away the notion. Good Lord, what had gotten into him?

“Papa?” Concern laced Maribeth’s voice.

He looked up. Emma and Mari stood at the top of the stairs gazing from him to Katrina and back to him again.

“What’s the matter, Papa?” Emma asked in a serious tone.

Maribeth added, “You were scowling something awful, and we haven’t done one thing bad yet today.”

“I’m sorry I losted my shoe.” Katrina patted his head comfortingly, right atop the knot where he’d bumped it a few minutes earlier. “I’ll try real hard not to do it again.”

A wave of love rolled through Trace at the sight of a trio of bright but worried faces. His mouth crooked upward in a smile as he stood. Brushing the dust from his trousers, he gave his daughters a wink and said, “I was thinking about how pretty you girls looked in these fancy dresses, and it made me start to worry about boys coming to call.”

Katrina giggled, Maribeth snorted with disgust, and Emma’s cheeks stained an appealing pink. Observing his eldest daughter’s reaction, Trace realized there had been a grain of truth in the excuse he’d given.

They were growing up so fast. In so many ways no longer girls, but young ladies.
I would have been a good mother to your children
.

Trace’s heart began to race. Sweat broke out on his brow. Katrina grabbed his hand and tugged him toward the stairs. “We’d better hurry, Papa. We don’t want to be late. MissFortune would never forgive us.”