The Bridegroom (9 page)

The warmth and steely hardness of Gideon’s body were hard to ignore, pressed against her like that, but Lydia was determined to notice as little about her husband’s anatomy as she could. She shifted onto her back, thinking it was a good thing neither of them were any bigger than they were.

She’d almost convinced herself that she could close her eyes and sleep lying next to a naked man, when Gideon stretched across her, his arm brushing her suddenly sensitive nipples as he reached to turn the lamp key.

Lydia felt like a patch of tinder-dry sagebrush in the path of a wildfire.

Gideon was almost on top of her, and if he so much as kissed her or stroked her hair, she knew she would ignite and be consumed. The wanton hussy, barely under control even now, would surely assert herself.

But Gideon did not kiss her.

After passing over her again, having plunged the room into darkness by turning the lamp, he lay down, and within a few moments, Lydia knew by his breathing that he’d gone to sleep.

She felt both relief and disappointment—she’d expected him to at least
try
to seduce her. After all, agreement or no agreement, it was their
wedding night,
and given the incendiary nature of the kiss they’d shared the day before—had it really been only yesterday?—she’d thought he might succumb to temptation.

Not that she’d
tried
to tempt him in any way, of course.

She’d been the very soul of modesty.

Maybe she should have, though, she reflected fitfully,
feeling hot and achy and oddly moist in the private place between her legs. As sheltered as she’d been, she knew that men were by nature lusty creatures and could not be expected to control their impulses in certain situations—the aunts had warned her about this on numerous occasions, usually after they’d had too much sherry.

Lydia knew Gideon wanted her—they were in such close proximity in that narrow bed that no amount of naïveté would have allowed her to delude herself in the matter—but it seemed he was
quite
able to control his masculine appetites, because he was most certainly asleep.

A deep and sudden stab of loneliness struck Lydia then, and that was indeed strange, given that Gideon was lying not just beside her but
against
her.

Tears stung her eyes; she blinked them back.

Although she’d dreaded having relations with Jacob Fitch, she imagined the worst would have been over by now if she’d gone through with the
first
wedding of the day. Having sated himself, Mr. Fitch would probably have lapsed into near-unconsciousness long since, leaving Lydia free to creep out of bed, wash herself thoroughly, and find a private place to cry.

As much as she abhorred the idea of submitting her body to Mr. Fitch night after night, she knew she would have gotten used to it eventually, learned to endure what happened in the marriage bed by thinking of other things until it was over. Millions of women did just that, didn’t they? According to Helga—who had been unhappily married at one time, before her husband had had the good grace to run off with a dance-hall girl, never to be seen again—the first experience was painful, the next few merely uncomfortable. After that, though, it was something one simply waited out, and invariably quick to end.

Yes, it was true that Mr. Fitch had made her feel revulsion and not much else, and Gideon inspired desire instead. But at least if she’d stayed and married Mr. Fitch, she and the aunts and Helga would still have their home and their own things around them—the books in the library, the garden full of hardy flowers they’d worked so hard to coax from the earth, the dour but blessedly familiar portraits dominating virtually every wall.

What would happen to the flowers now, with no one to carry water to them? The thought of them waiting in vain and then wilting deepened Lydia’s sorrow, made it nearly unbearable.

Now, suddenly, she was a guest in another woman’s house, sleeping in a man’s shirt because she didn’t own a nightgown and didn’t want to traipse through dark rooms to recover the one she’d borrowed. She had a husband who did not want to be married to her.

The tears came again, and this time, Lydia couldn’t hold them back.

Some inner sense must have alerted Gideon; he shifted behind her, rested his arm across her waist, though not heavily.

Lydia bit her lip to keep from sobbing aloud.

She felt the backs of Gideon’s fingers brush her wet cheek.

He drew her closer, if that was possible, so they lay tucked together like spoons in a drawer, and that comforted her a little. At the same time, it made her want him more.

“Don’t be afraid, Lydia,” Gideon murmured. “Don’t be afraid.”

“I’m n-not,” Lydia lied.

Gideon drew her around to face him, wrapped her in a loose embrace. He was hard
everywhere,
his chest, his shoulders, his arms and thighs—and, of course,
there.

“We’ll find a house of our own tomorrow,” he said. “Then you can have a room all to yourself.”

A room to herself.

That was what he thought she wanted.

And she didn’t know how to tell him how wrong he was, because she wasn’t at all sure what she
did
want, beyond release from the physical need he’d aroused in her.

What such a release would be like she couldn’t say precisely, but she knew instinctively that it was part of the reason Lark glowed the way she did, especially when Rowdy was around.

Lydia cried all the harder.

Gideon sighed. He’d told her he had to work in the morning; he was growing impatient because she was keeping him awake. “What is it?” he asked, very quietly.

She hadn’t meant to say what she did next, it simply came out. “The way Lark is—”

“Pregnant?” Gideon prompted, with a tinge of amusement in his voice.

In for a penny, Lydia thought, in for a pound. The darkness gave her courage—or just made her reckless. “The way she is with Rowdy—”

“Ah,” Gideon said. “That.”

“That?”

“If I show you what makes Lark shine like she swallowed every streetlight in town, will you go to sleep?”

A thrill of sweet terror went through Lydia. “That depends,” she said, suddenly breathless.

Gideon rested his hand on her lower belly, began easing the shirt upward, baring her thighs and then more of her, and still more. With a low, sleepy groan, he nibbled at her earlobe, sending fire racing under every inch of her skin, making her quiver.

“Depends on what?” he asked lazily.

“I’m—I’m not sure,” Lydia admitted.

He chuckled at that. “I’m going to hate myself for this,” he said.

Lydia squirmed as the unnamed need intensified with every featherlight pass of his fingers over her bare skin. Gave a little gasp when Gideon suddenly parted the nest of curls between her legs and began to caress her in earnest, though very slowly.

“Oh,” she whimpered, stunned by the delicious sensations launching themselves from that tiny nubbin of flesh to race skyward like Chinese rockets.
“Oh.”

“Umm-hmm,” Gideon affirmed, his fingers making circles, going around and around. Moist before, Lydia was wet now, and the slickness of her skin increased the rising, panicked pleasure with every movement of his hand, however slight.

“Ooooh,” Lydia gasped.

“Shh,” Gideon said, teasing her now, plucking at her, drawing a strange, silent music from the very core of her body, leading her, note by note, toward some shattering crescendo.

Lydia’s hips began to move, with no prompting from her mind, causing the bedsprings to squeak slightly.

Gideon chuckled into her hair and worked her harder, and yet with a tenderness that opened new places inside Lydia, revealed a world of fierce desire she’d never dreamed was there. “Easy,” he mumbled. “You don’t want to get there too soon.”

Lydia had no idea where “there” was—all she knew was that she wanted more of what Gideon was doing to her—much more. That she would surely die if he stopped caressing her.

“Oh—Gideon—” she pleaded “—
Gideon
—”

He slowed his fingers, nibbled at her neck and the edges of her ear, sighed again.

“Faster—
oh
—Gideon,
faster
—”

“Shh,” he said again.

She tried to part her legs farther, but there was no way to do that, in such a confined space, and Gideon seemed to find the dilemma amusing, because another hoarse chuckle escaped him. Finally, he left off stroking her toward madness to run his hand along the quivering flesh of her thigh to her knee. He grasped it, though gently, and lifted and, again by instinct alone, Lydia caught her foot behind Gideon’s calf.

When he went back to plying her with his fingers, she couldn’t keep quiet anymore. She turned her face into the pillow, to muffle the ragged, involuntary cries of ecstatic desperation.

Gideon continued to pleasure her with his hand, groaned again as he brushed his lips across her nape.

Lydia was feverish by then, mad with need—and with curiosity. “What is—oh, dear God—what is happening to me—?”

“You’re about to find out,” Gideon drawled, increasing the pace.

Lydia’s hips wanted to fly now, but Gideon had somehow pinned her against him, making it impossible to move. When a low, steady moan poured from her, one even the pillow couldn’t stifle, he shifted her to lie flat beside him and covered her mouth with his.

When his tongue passed her lips, all of Creation splintered into a blinding light, full of color and fire.

Lydia bucked wildly under Gideon’s hand, and he contained her cries by deepening the kiss. And even as she came apart in his arms, he didn’t stop making those slow, fiery circles with his fingers.

That first release was so calamitous in scale that it nearly
consumed Lydia and yet, as she descended from the heights, Gideon continued his leisurely pleasuring. Every few seconds, she’d catch on another, softer peak, and then soar helplessly, and then fall again.

When he’d coaxed her body through the last spasm of surrender, never letting the devastating kiss end, he somehow knew she was finished, and slid his hand to her lower belly, let it rest there.

“That,” he said, “is why Lark lights up when she’s around Rowdy.”

Lydia’s face burned in the darkness. It was a long time before she could breathe well enough to answer. “But there’s more—isn’t there?”

“Yes,” Gideon answered. “There’s more. But that isn’t going to happen—not tonight—so go to sleep.”

“But what—what about you?”

“I’ll survive,” Gideon ground out in response. “I think.”

“Gideon?”

“What?”

“It was—wonderful. I never—I never guessed—”

“Neither did I,” Gideon said. “Neither did I.”

I
T WAS A DREARY RELIEF
to Gideon when the first pinkish-gold light of dawn finally crawled over the eastern hills to seep into the darkness and slowly diffuse it. Ahead of him lay a ten-hour shift spent sweating and straining in the belly of the earth, loading copper ore into carts on iron rails, keeping his eyes and ears open the whole time. By comparison to the night just past, it would be easy.

After he’d introduced Lydia to that most innocent of pleasures, she’d sunk into a blissful sleep, just the whisper of a contented little smile resting on her mouth.
He,
on the other hand, still ached with the need of her.

Resigned, he eased out of bed without waking Lydia—no small feat, given that he had to span her to do it, using complicated motions of his elbows and knees—pulled plain trousers and a shirt from the wardrobe where he kept a minimal supply of clothing for visits to Stone Creek, dressed himself.

Down the hall, in the fancy bathing room, he splashed his face a few times at the sink, scrubbed his teeth with baking soda and a brush, ran his fingers through his rumpled hair. There was no time for a bath—he could have used a very cold one—nor did he take time to shave. He needed to look like a miner, not a dandy, and he’d lingered too long in his bed, wanting Lydia and silently reciting all the reasons why he shouldn’t take her.

It was crazy, but in the daylight he thought of her as a child—the ailing little girl whose father had frozen to death in a buggy, on a lonely winter-buried road. Lydia had certainly been all woman the previous night, though, responding to his every touch with soft moans, small, rippling quivers he felt through the silken warmth of her flesh. That first lusty climax that would have roused the household if he hadn’t covered her mouth with his, but there hadn’t been much he could do about the complaining bedsprings.

Carrying his boots in one hand, Gideon descended the back stairway, found Rowdy in the gaslit kitchen, with coffee brewing on the stove.

“Mornin’,” Rowdy said, and when he turned to nod at Gideon, there was a little smirk quirking the corner of his mouth and his blue eyes were dancing.

So his brother had heard enough to guess that something had happened, Gideon concluded glumly, despite his efforts to keep Lydia quiet. Lark probably had, too—and that possibility added significantly to his embarrassment.

“Mornin’,” Gideon responded, without smiling.

Rowdy poured a second mug of coffee, set it on the table in front of Gideon when he sat down to pull on his boots. “Lark fixed you a lunch,” Rowdy said. “It’s over there on the sideboard, in that lard bucket.” With a glance at the clock, ticking loudly on a shelf, he added, “Reckon you didn’t leave yourself enough time for breakfast, though.”

“I’ll be all right,” Gideon said, wondering if he would. He supposed it was a good thing that the house was full of people, because if it hadn’t been, he’d probably have said to hell with his lucrative assignment at the Copper Crown, gone back up those stairs and shown Lydia Fairmont Yarbro every trick he knew, and a few he’d only heard about.

“You want to tell me what you’re really up to?” Rowdy
asked easily, after pulling back a chair of his own and sitting down. Pardner came over and rested his muzzle on Rowdy’s thigh, for an ear-ruffling.

For a moment, the question didn’t fully register with Gideon, given the distractions going through his mind. He shook off the mental seduction of his nubile wife, reminded himself that he couldn’t afford to let his thoughts wander, not if he wanted to live into old age.

He looked at Rowdy over the rim of his coffee mug, took a sip, savored it and swallowed before replying—and even then, he hedged. “Up to?” he echoed, raising one eyebrow in feigned puzzlement.

Rowdy thrust out an irritated sigh. “Spare me the theatrics, Gideon. You were a Pinkerton agent before you signed on with Wells Fargo, and before that, you plied your trade with one of the biggest railroad companies in the country. Now, suddenly, you’ve decided you want to be a miner instead. Half the pay, if that, and ten times the work. So I’ll ask you again—what are you up to?”

Gideon wished he could tell Rowdy the truth—there wasn’t a man on earth he trusted more—but he’d given his word to the mine owners when he’d accepted the job and a sizable initial payment for his services, and that was that.

So he managed a shrug as he stood to leave, and he lied. An irony, he knew, given the lengths he’d go to keep his promise to his new employers. “Maybe I just want to know I can do a day’s labor,” he said, finding the lard tin, picking it up by the handle, and silently blessing Lark for her generous foresight. “Like any other man.”

“And maybe you’re full of shit,” Rowdy countered, and though he was grinning a little, his eyes had turned solemn and a mite too watchful for Gideon’s comfort. Most men were easy enough to fool—but Rowdy wasn’t most men,
and neither was Wyatt. “There’s been a lot of rumbling in the camps about a strike,” he went on, after a long pause. “Especially since the cartel keeps cutting wages and increasing hours—they’re down to one shift these days, but they expect the output of three. Does your new job have anything to do with that,
Agent
Yarbro?”

Gideon did not dare meet Rowdy’s gaze; his brother had struck way too close to the bone, and he’d know it for sure if he got so much as a glimpse of Gideon’s face. “No,” he said, heading for the door. The mine was less than a mile outside of town—he’d walk there instead of borrowing a horse.

It was a rare thing for a miner to own a horse.

“Gideon?”

Something in Rowdy’s tone stopped him on the threshold, with the cool of a northern Arizona dawn easing him a little. Lying next to Lydia all night had left his flesh feeling as though it had been seared raw.

“Watch yourself,” Rowdy told him, after a brief silence. “Folks around Stone Creek know you’ve been to college and worn white shirts and ties to work. They’re going to wonder why you’d suddenly give all that up to break your back down in some hole in the ground, with a shovel and a pickax.”

Gideon closed his eyes for a moment. Lying was a way of life for him, vital in his profession, but this was Rowdy, and he looked up to him, same as he looked up to Wyatt. So the story he’d rehearsed so many times snagged in his throat, tearing like rusty wire when he forced it out. “There was a—problem,” he said, without turning around. “On the job, I mean.”
Careful,
he thought.
Parcel it out in small doses.
“Wells Fargo showed me the road and put out the word that I wasn’t to be trusted, so you might say I’m running a little short on employment opportunities these days.”

Rowdy didn’t reply to that—maybe he believed the yarn, maybe he was just sifting and weighing and measuring, the way he did most everything—and Gideon used that delay to make his escape.

Rowdy was a lawman, Gideon reminded himself, as he strode through still-quiet streets in the direction of the mine, and he might go so far as to wire Wells Fargo to inquire about the “problem” that had allegedly caused his younger brother’s dismissal.

What he was told would depend on who was on the receiving end of the telegram. Gideon hadn’t been fired from Wells Fargo, nor had he resigned—he was on voluntary leave—and he’d asked his friend, Christian Hardy, the company’s head telegrapher, to field any inquiries concerning his departure from the ranks and say only what he’d been told to say. Everything would be fine if Hardy was the one Rowdy got hold of, but if it was one of the men who worked under him, the whole ruse might go up in smoke in short order.

Rowdy wasn’t one to spread tales; insofar as keeping the secret went, there was no danger in his finding out the truth. But he’d worry the subject like an old hound dog worries a soup bone, and if Gideon admitted his real reason for being in Stone Creek, Rowdy would be furious and raise every kind of hell.

Clearly, Rowdy’s sympathies lay with the miners, not the rich cigar-smoking men who held the claim to one of the biggest copper deposits ever discovered west of the Mississippi.

Striding through the first faint glimmers of morning, the shadows of oak and cottonwood leaves flickering in his path as he passed through a copse of trees along the western bank of the creek for which the town was named, Gideon
told himself what he always did when he started a new assignment:
Nothing is too small to be important, so listen and watch. And don’t let your mind go woolgathering, because that’ll be when they get you. Pay attention, or next thing you know, you’ll be laid out on the undertaker’s table with pennies on your eyes.

The speech usually worked.

That day, though, with every cell in his body aching for the release only Lydia could give him, he knew he’d have to be twice as vigilant as ever before.

“I
T’S BIGGER THAN
I
REMEMBER
,” Lydia said, sitting in the buggy beside Lark, who was at the reins, and gazing up the house she’d last visited as a frightened little girl. With Helga around to keep an eye on the aunts and the Yarbro children, Lark had suggested a ride and hitched up the horse herself.

Now, she smiled, nodded. “Everyone still calls it the Porter house,” she answered, tucking a lock of pale honey hair behind her right ear when the breeze set it dancing on her cheek. “Even though I bought it from Hon Sing and Mai Lei when they decided to go back to China. Folks are a little superstitious, and I guess they figure poor murdered Mr. Porter might rise up out of the cellar some dark night and scare them right into the Beyond.”

Lydia had left for Phoenix with her aunt Nell by the time Mr. Porter’s remains had been discovered, and she’d been too young to follow the no-doubt sensational story in the newspapers, but she recalled Hon Sing and Mai Lei well enough. The doctor and his wife, along with Lark, had tended to her when she came down with pneumonia. Without Hon Sing and the strange collection of thin, gleaming needles he’d pierced her with, she would surely have perished.

That morning, after Lydia, waking alone in her marriage bed, had finally worked up the courage to put on the calico dress the Yarbros’ eight-year-old daughter, Julia, had brought to the door of Gideon’s room, and march herself downstairs to breakfast, Lark had related most of the tale. Since the children had already eaten, and raced outside to play, and the aunts were still sleeping, only Helga had been privy to the exchange.

Lydia wondered about a great many things, sitting there in that buggy with her former teacher, not the least of which was why Lark would buy the Porter house and then leave it standing empty. If propriety had allowed, she would have asked straight-out how the Yarbros could afford it, on top of the huge place they lived in, and all this on a town marshal’s salary. But propriety did
not
allow, so Lydia held her tongue, and waited for Lark to say why she’d brought her here.

Memories clouded Lark’s eyes for a moment as she regarded the former boardinghouse where she’d lived when she taught at Stone Creek’s one-room schoolhouse. Then, with a sigh and a resolute smile, she set the brake lever, wrapped the reins around it and climbed carefully down.

“It’s fully furnished, and Sarah and Maddie will help us with the cleaning,” she said, putting both hands to the small of her back and stretching, making her baby-swollen midriff jut forward for a moment.

Lydia just sat there on the buggy seat, still confused.

“You and Gideon will need a place to live,” Lark pointed out, smiling. “There’s room for Helga and the aunts, too. Don’t you want to go inside and have a look around?”

“We’ll find a house of our own tomorrow,”
Lydia heard Gideon saying, the night before.
“Then you can have a room all to yourself.”

Lydia hesitated, biting her lower lip. At least at Rowdy and Lark’s, she got to share Gideon’s bed, and could hope he would—well,
touch
her again, the way he had the night before. Here, she would be sleeping alone.

“I know it isn’t as grand as the house in Phoenix,” Lark said gently, watching her from the wooden sidewalk, one hand resting on the gate latch, her brow creased with concern.

Lydia blushed and hastened to get down out of the buggy to stand facing Lark. “It isn’t that,” she rushed to say. “It’s—it’s just that you’ve already been so generous, and now—”

“You’re part of our family, Lydia,” Lark said, with affection shining in her eyes, “and this house—well—it’s Rowdy’s and my wedding gift to you and Gideon.”

Lydia’s mouth nearly dropped open; she caught it just in time. “It’s too much,” she protested.

Lark laughed and opened the gate. “Frankly,” she answered, starting up the walk, “I’ll be glad to have this place off my hands. I only bought it because Hon Sing and Mai Lei were so eager to go home.”

The yard looked well kept, and there were flowers blooming in beds on either side of the wide porch steps. A huge lilac bush nodded nearby, attended by several bees, its scent dizzyingly pungent.

“Surely you could have sold such a lovely house,” Lydia ventured, following Lark up onto the porch, waiting while the other woman thrust a brass key into the lock.

“Like I told you, practically everyone in Stone Creek believes it’s haunted,” Lark answered, with another smile and a shake of her head. Then, in a teasing tone, she asked, “You’re not afraid of ghosts, are you, Lydia?”