Three Weddings And A Kiss (7 page)

6

T
he Rafferty ranch was nestled among a stand of tall pines in a grassy valley completely surrounded by forested mountains. As soon as she got close enough to see it clearly, Rachel found it breathtaking.

As Clint steered his stallion down to the house, she couldn’t shake the feeling of rightness that came over her. It was as if she’d been waiting all her life for this moment, and possibly for this man.
Crazy, so crazy.
She was making absolutely no sense. This marriage was a mockery and doomed to be dissolved. To entertain the notion that it might be otherwise was absolute madness.

As Clint drew the horse up at the edge of the porch, she saw a blur of white next to an odd-looking stump. Peering more intently, she realized she was seeing a chopping block, with chicken feathers strewn at the base. Instantly queasy, she jerked her gaze to the house itself. Anything to keep from imagining the blood and gore that must have accompanied the recent slaughter.

The house was simplicity itself, a sprawling structure of rough-hewn logs and a cedar shake roof. It wasn’t pretty by any stretch of the imagination, though it could have been charming if any attempt at all had been made to pretty it up.

To say that hadn’t happened struck her as a gross understatement. In fact, by the looks of things, just the opposite had occurred. Even without her glasses, she could make out a rusted old washtub on one side of the front porch with a weathered scrub board standing on end inside it and a pair of dirt-encrusted gray socks draped over its rim. Next to the tub lay a discarded flour sack, out of which had spilled some flour gone wet and gooey in the rain, then turned rock hard in the sun. Behind the flour sack, a partially used sack of spuds had been propped against the house within easy reach of the front door. All in all, the place looked as if a band of none-too-tidy squatters had taken up residence.

“Things could use some cleanin’ up,” Clint said apologetically.

“Oh, it’s lovely.
Really.
I like log houses. Don’t you?” In actuality, Rachel preferred clapboard, but she would never risk hurting his feelings by saying so.

Glancing back at him over her shoulder, her gaze caught on his firm mouth. She couldn’t help but recall how it had felt to be in his arms last night, how dizzily she had succumbed to his kisses. Thinking back on it, she wondered how it might feel to be kissed by him again. In the light of day, would she find his embrace boring and unexciting, as she had Lawson’s? Or as had happened last night, would the first touch of his lips on hers steal her breath away? It would probably be just as well if she never found out, she decided. Her sister Molly wasn’t the only young girl who’d ever gotten her heart broken. Rachel had as well, and if she’d learned anything from the experience, it was that handsome men didn’t find women like her attractive.

As he shifted forward to drape the horse’s reins over the saddle and get a grip on the saddle horn, she felt the powerful play of muscles in his chest and arms. A shiver of awareness went down her spine as he swung from the saddle and reached up to lift her down.

“I can manage by myself,” she said.

The protest came too late. Before she could
so
much as blink, he seized hold of her waist. Placing her hands on his shoulders, she kept her gaze locked with his as he lifted her easily from the saddle.

“I don’t want you managing by yourself,” he said huskily. “Not with eight of us here to help you. Just you remember that.”

She was glad to note that his solemn, almost stern expression was belied by a slight smile flirting at the corners of his mouth. She wondered if he was smiling because he’d somehow sensed she’d been wondering how it might feel if he kissed her again. At the thought, a flush began creeping up her neck.

He was standing with his back to the sun, and his Stetson cast a shadow over his burnished features. Even with the lack of light, however, his smoky eyes had a lustrous glow. As he drew his gaze over her, she felt powerless to move and wasn’t certain she wanted to. As she’d noted last night, there was something about Clint that captivated her. What or why was a true puzzle, but the moment he looked at her with those warm, gray-blue eyes of his, she felt sort of, well, boneless. But that was just plain silly.

Grasping her elbow in a large, capable hand, he helped her step up onto the porch. “We would’ve cleaned up if we’d’ve known company was comin’.” As though to emphasize the point, he gave the flour sack a kick. “With the ranch demandin’ so much of our time, things here at the house get sort of neglected.” He led her to the door,
then
leaned around her to boot it open. “Not that I’m sayin’ you should think of yourself as company, Rachel. Consider this to be your home.”

With that, he swung the door open on a kitchen so cluttered and disorganized it defied description. An unusually long plank table, the surface of which was buried under piles of mercifully blurred clutter, dominated the center of the room. If it hadn’t been for the occasional dirty dish mixed in, Rachel wouldn’t have believed anyone actually used the table for eating. “Oh, my…”

Clint’s hand tightened on her arm. “The boys and I will help you get things cleaned up,” he assured her. “And on down the road, maybe I can put up some planed wooden walls. I know ladies are fond of hangin’ wallpaper and pictures and such.”

Rachel squinted to see. The interior of the house seemed unusually dim, probably because the log walls had darkened with age. The kitchen, one half of which was partitioned off from the back of the house by a wall, opened into a parlor area at the unpartitioned end, creating an L-shaped living area over which a large loft loomed.

If Clint’s brothers were going to help her clean up, Rachel hoped they came bearing broad-blade shovels. On second thought, even shovels might not do it. In every corner, as far back into the house as she could see, there were piles of junk. Old newspapers, empty food tins, dirty laundry, school books, slates…It looked as if someone had tossed all the contents of the house onto the floor, given them a stir, and then kicked the mixture out of the way to create traffic paths. Never, not in all her born days, had she seen such a horrendous mess.

From out of the rubble, an ebony-haired little boy suddenly appeared. Rubbing one eye with his fist, he surveyed Rachel from his other.

“Who’re you?”

As he drew close enough for her to see him clearly, Rachel thought she’d never clapped eyes on a cuter little fellow. She guessed him to be about six, and he looked exactly how she imagined Clint must have at that age, compact and wiry, with burnished skin and an unruly shock of pitch-black hair.

“Well, hello,” she said, crouching to greet him at his eye level. “My name’s Rachel. What’s yours?”

“Cody.” When he drew his fist from his eye, he had to blink to get his sooty eyelashes untangled. She noticed that a streak of dirt angled across one of his cheeks. He regarded her for several moments, his expression more serious than a child’s his age should have been. With a pronounced lisp that distorted all his S’s, he added, “I’m almost seven.”

“Not for nine more months,” Clint corrected. “And what are you doin’, sleepin’ in the parlor, tyke? Not to mention it’s nigh onto noon.”

“Nobody woke me to go upstairs last night.” Cody dragged a suspender strap up over his shoulder. “And don’t call me ‘tyke,’ Clint. I’m too old for little kid names.”

Rachel couldn’t suppress a smile. “I thought you were at least eight,” she fibbed. “You must be very tall for your age.”

Cody rewarded her with a pleased grin that revealed large gaps where he was missing front teeth. “Clint says I’m only knee high.”

“Yes, well, considering how high his knees are, that’s rather tall for someone your age,” Rachel observed diplomatically. “I think lofty stature runs in your family.” She glanced up at Clint. “You didn’t mention having a brother so—” She nearly said “little” but stopped herself.

“Grown up?” he inserted quickly.

Rachel smiled and pushed to her feet.
“Exactly.”

He flashed
her a
meaningful look. “Like I said, I have my reasons for wantin’s a wife.”

Now that Rachel had met Cody, she could understand Clint’s willingness to do nearly anything to ensure the little boy’s happiness, even playing groom to her bride in a shotgun wedding. The problem was
,
his feelings were bound to change, if not when he learned she was half blind, then when he saw her in spectacles. Given the severity of her eye problem, her glasses had unusually thick lenses that would have detracted from her looks even if she’d been the most beautiful woman in the world. Rachel had learned the hard way that handsome men wanted to be with equally handsome women, which she definitely was not when she had spectacles perched on the end of her nose.

Before Rachel could stand back up, an older boy came tearing down the loft ladder into the kitchen. In the process of buttoning his blue jeans, he froze when he spotted Rachel. “Well, dammit, Clint!” The youth hurried to get his pants fastened. “You could’ve hollered out that we had us some company.”

“Meet Daniel,” Clin said by way of introduction, glancing first at Rachel,
then
inclining his head at the boy.
“Fourteen, goin’ on eighty.
Excuse his language, but I ran low on soap.”

Since soap was clearly a commodity in short supply, Rachel had no difficulty believing that. Daniel’s undershirt, which had once been gray, was now more of a brown. Still hunkered in front of Cody, she bestowed a friendly smile on him. “Hello, Daniel. I’m pleased to meet you.”

He inclined his head.
“Same here.”

Good manners, it seemed, were another area Clint had neglected. She stood and surveyed the kitchen, feeling overwhelmed. Clint had gone along with marrying her because he needed a woman around the house; he’d made no secret of that. He was, in short, offering her a life here in exchange for her skills as a housekeeper and cook. It was just that simple.

Most women, Rachel knew, would be insulted. They wanted a man to be attracted to them for their looks, to love them for their personalities, to marry them for reasons of the heart. But Rachel had learned long ago not to expect any of those things. She wasn’t insulted by Clint’s offer. To the contrary, she was titillated, not to mention sorely tempted to take him up on it.

There was just one problem.
A rather big problem.
Since the death of Rachel’s mother when Rachel was four, Mrs. Radcliff, the housekeeper her father had hired, had seen to the running of the Constantine household. A woman who resented any interference whatsoever, she had not encouraged Rachel or Molly to assist her with any of the chores. Consequently, Rachel’s knowledge of homemaking was limited. By closely following a recipe, she could cook simple dishes, and she figured common sense would see her through most of the housecleaning chores.
But laundry?
She’d rinsed out her ribbed cotton hose a few times, but other than that she’d never washed, starched, or ironed a single garment. As tempting as she found Clint’s proposition, she wasn’t at all sure she was equal to the challenge.

On the other hand, this was her chance—probably her one and only chance—to have the thing other girls took for granted, namely a handsome young husband who made her pulse race and her skin tingle. For so long now, Rachel had been resigned to settling for second or third best.
Marrying Lawson.
Playing, the role of a minister’s wife.
Pretending she didn’t want or need any excitement in her life. Now, through a quirk of fate, she had a chance for more.
So much more.
Every time she remembered the kiss she and Clint had shared, she fairly shivered with anticipation.

Madness! She should know better than to get her hopes up like this. Hadn’t she learned anything the last time she’d gotten her heart broken? Was she really so foolish that she was willing to risk that kind of pain again? It wasn’t as if she could keep her poor eyesight a secret from Clint and all his brothers permanently or even for any length of time at all. Sooner or later, one of them would catch her wearing her spectacles, and Clint would discover the truth—that she was half blind and, to rectify the problem, had to wear horribly ugly glasses. Once that happened, there’d be no more spine-tingling kisses. He would probably make up any excuse he could think of to get rid of her.

Unless…maybe…oh, God, it was crazy to even consider it. But she’d heard tell of other marriages that had started shaky and ended up just fine. Why, even her own father had admitted once that her mother hadn’t been all that crazy about marrying him at first.

Of course, Mama hadn’t been blind as a bat, either. Still—what if she could keep her eyeglasses a secret? The only time she absolutely had to wear them was to read, and she could try to avoid doing that in front of anyone. If she was careful, really careful, it might be months before Clint learned the truth, and maybe by then he would like her so much for herself he’d on longer care if she wore spectacles.

As crazy a plan as it was, one glance at Clint cemented it in Rachel’s heart. He was, without question, one of the handsomest men she’d ever met. To a girl like her, who’d long since given up on dreaming, his offer was irresistible. She had to take a chance. If she got her heart broken again, so be it. At least she wouldn’t go to her grave wanting to kick herself for never trying at all.

Her decision made, Rachel quickly assessed the mess that surrounded her. Everywhere she looked, there seemed to be stacks of dirty dishes. She had an awful feeling that her ability to balance a book on her head while climbing a flight of stairs might not come in very handy around the Rafferty place.