“Did you get to the part where the justice of the peace inquires as to whether or not anybody has reason to object to this marriage?” Maddox ranted. “Because that’s when I mean to say my piece.”
“Let’s hear it,” Clay said, in an affable drawl. He hoped the situation wouldn’t disintegrate into a howling brawl in the mud, with him and Maddox rolling back and forth with their hands on each other’s throats, because he didn’t want that to be what Dara Rose, Edrina and Harriet remembered when they looked back on this day.
Another part of him relished the idea of a knockdown-drag-out fisticuff.
Maddox straightened, swayed again and spoke with alacrity. “I have already offered for you, Dara Rose Nolan, and you belong to me,” he said, as she stepped up beside Clay and put her hand on his arm.
A thrill of something rushed through Clay, though he’d hoped Dara Rose would stay inside, out of harm’s way, until he and Maddox had settled their differences.
“You belong to me,” Maddox reiterated.
“I belong to myself,” Dara Rose informed him. “And no one else, except for my children. I want nothing to do with you, Mr. Maddox, and I’ll count it as a favor if you leave, right now.”
“All right,” Maddox erupted, flinging his beefy arms out from his sides with such force that he nearly fell over sideways, “you can bring the girls along, and I’ll marry you straight off—today, if that’s what you want.”
“You are too late, Mr. Maddox,” Dara Rose said, in a clear and steady voice. “Please be on your way so we can get on with the wedding.”
Clay wondered distractedly if Dara Rose had ever seriously considered taking up with a lug like Maddox. He couldn’t imagine her parting with her children.
Maddox just stood there, evidently weighing his options, which were few, and broke the ensuing silence by spitting violently and barking out, “This feller might have a badge, Dara Rose, but he ain’t Parnell come back to life.”
He turned partially, as if to walk away, but he jabbed a finger in Dara Rose’s direction and went right on running off at the mouth. “I’ll tell you what he is, this man you’re so dead set on marryin’—he’s a stranger, a lying drifter, for all you know—and when he moves on, leavin’ you with another babe in your belly and no way to feed your brood, don’t you come cryin’ to me!”
Clay’s restraint snapped then, but before he could take more than a single step in Maddox’s direction, Dara Rose tightened her grip on his arm and stopped him.
Maddox spat again, but then he whirled around and headed for the gate and the waiting mule, every step he took making a sucking sound because of the mud.
Dara Rose let go of Clay’s arm and walked, with high-chinned dignity, back into the house, leaving Clay and Mayor Ponder standing on the porch.
Ponder’s gaze followed Maddox as he mounted the mule to ride away. “I’d watch my back if I were you, Marshal,” he said thoughtfully. “Ezra’s the kind to hold a grudge, and he’s got a sneaky side to him.”
INSIDE, DARA ROSE was shaken, but she made sure it didn’t show.
Mayor Ponder’s wife, Heliotrope, was a scandalmonger with nothing better to do than spread gossip, heavily laced with her own interpretation of any given person or situation, of course, and thanks to Ezra Maddox’s unexpected visit, she’d have plenty of fodder as it was.
Dara Rose wasn’t about to give her more to work with.
Besides, the children were watching her, and they’d follow whatever example she set. She wanted them to see strength in their mother, and courage, and dignity.
So she straightened her spine, lifted her chin and once again took her place at Clay McKettrick’s side.
Mayor Ponder opened his book again and began to read out the words that would bind her to this tall man standing next to her.
The mayor’s voice turned to a drone, and the very atmosphere seemed to pulse and buzz around Dara Rose, making her light-headed.
She spoke when spoken to, answered by rote.
After three weddings, she could have gotten married in her sleep.
Questions plagued her, swooped down on her like raucous birds. What if Ezra had been right? Suppose Clay was a liar and a drifter—or worse? Was she marrying him because some deluded part of her had him confused with Parnell?
“I now pronounce you man and wife,” Mayor Ponder said, slamming the book closed between his pawlike hands. “Mr. McKettrick, you may kiss the bride.”
Clay looked down at her, one eyebrow slightly raised, and a grin crooked at a corner of his mouth.
On impulse, and to get it over with, Dara Rose stood on tiptoe and kissed that mouth, very lightly, very quickly and very briefly.
“There,” she said. “It’s done.”
Clay merely chuckled.
She could still back out, Dara Rose reminded herself fitfully. She could refuse to sign the marriage certificate, ask Mayor Ponder to reverse the declaration that they were now man and wife.
Was that legal?
For a moment, Dara Rose thought she might swoon, just faint dead away right there in her own front parlor. But Clay slipped a strong arm around her waist, effectively holding her up until she signaled, with a furtive glance his way, that she could stand without help.
Thoughts still clamored through her mind, though, and her hand shook slightly when she signed “Dara Rose McKettrick” on the line reserved for the bride.
What had she done?
Suppose Clay was really a rascal and a drunk, instead of the solid man he seemed to be? Suppose he already had a wife tucked away somewhere, and he’d just made them both bigamists? And what if this stranger had spoken falsely when he promised not to exercise his rights as a husband unless and until she declared herself ready and willing?
The room felt hot, even with a chinook breeze sweeping in through the open door.
Edrina tugged at Dara Rose’s hand, bringing her back into the present moment. “Now you’re Mrs. McKettrick,” the little girl crowed. “Can Harriet and I be McKettricks, too?”
Dara Rose had no idea how to answer.
Clay, who had clearly overheard, judging by that little smile resting on his mouth as he bent to scrawl his name on the marriage certificate, said nothing. He waited while Mayor Ponder and both witnesses added their signatures where appropriate. Then money changed hands, and the ordeal was over.
The official part of it, at least.
Mayor Ponder and his companions took their leave, and Dara Rose was alone with her new husband and her delighted children.
“We want to be McKettricks, too,” Edrina insisted.
“You’re Nolans,” Dara Rose reasoned. “What would your papa think if you changed your names?”
“You changed yours,” Edrina pointed out. “And, any how, Papa’s dead.”
Harriet’s eyes rounded. “Papa’s dead?”
“Of course he is, dolt,” Edrina snapped. “Why do you suppose we put flowers on a grave with his name on it?”
“Edrina,” Dara Rose reprimanded. “Stop it.”
“I can’t read,” Harriet lamented, looking up at Dara Rose now, with tears welling in her eyes. “You said Papa was gone—”
Dara Rose exchanged glances with a somber-faced Clay and then bent her knees so she was crouching before her daughter, in the dress she’d worn to marry Luke, and then Parnell, and now Clay.
“Sweetheart,” she said softly, “that’s what ‘gone’ means sometimes. I know it’s hard for you to understand, but you have to try.”
Harriet turned, much to Dara Rose’s surprise, and buried her face in one side of Clay’s fancy suit coat, wailing in despair. This was unusual behavior, especially for even-tempered Harriet, but Dara Rose put it down to all the excitement of a front-room wedding.
“There, now,” Clay said gruffly, as Dara Rose straightened, hoisting Harriet up into his arms. “You go right ahead and cry ’til you feel like stopping.”
Dara Rose sank onto the settee, close to tears herself.
She was married, and there was so much she didn’t know about Clay.
So much he didn’t know about her.
Harriet bawled like a banshee—Dara Rose realized the child was going for effect now—her face hidden in Clay’s shoulder.
“Here’s what I think we ought to do,” Clay said, to all of them. “We ought to go out to my ranch—I’ll rent a buckboard and a couple of stout mules—and find ourselves a Christmas tree.”
Harriet immediately stopped wailing.
Edrina lit up like a lightbulb wired to a power pole.
“A Christmas tree?” Dara Rose repeated, confounded.
“The roads are pretty muddy,” Edrina speculated, but she was obviously warming to the idea, and so was Harriet, who had reared back to look at Clay in wet-eyed wonder.
“That’s why we need mules,” Clay replied.
“Do you believe in St. Nicholas?” Harriet asked him, in a hushed voice.
Clay looked directly at Dara Rose, silently dared her to say otherwise and replied, “I do indeed. One Christmas Eve, when my cousin Sawyer and I were about your age, we caught a glimpse of him flying over the roof of our granddad’s barn in that sleigh of his, with eight reindeer harnessed to the rig.”
Edrina blinked, swallowed. “Really?” she breathed, wanting so much to believe, even at the advanced age of six, that she’d been wrong to think there was no magic in the world.
Dara Rose’s heart ached.
“Can’t think what else it could have been,” Clay answered, as serious in tone and expression as a man bearing witness in a court of law, under oath. “A sleigh pulled by eight reindeer is a fairly distinctive sight.”
“Thunderation,” Edrina exclaimed softly, while Harriet favored her older sister with a smug I-told-you-so look.
Dara Rose glared up at her bridegroom. “Mr. McKettrick,” she began, but he cut her off before she could go on.
“Call me Clay,” he said mildly. “I’m your husband now, remember?”
Dara Rose got to her feet. “Clay, then,” she said dangerously. “I will have you know—”
Again he interrupted, setting Harriet on her feet and saying, “You two go on and change your clothes. Get your bonnets and your coats, too.”
Edrina and Harriet rushed to obey.
Dara Rose stood there in her sorry-luck wedding dress, trembling with frustration. “How dare you get their hopes up like that?” she whispered furiously, flushed and near tears again. “How dare you encourage them to believe in things that aren’t even real?”
“Whoa,” Clay said, cupping her chin gently in one hand. “Are you saying that St. Nicholas isn’t real?”
“Of course that’s what I’m saying,” Dara Rose retorted, under her breath but with plenty of bluster. “He isn’t.”
Clay gave a long, low whistle of surprise, though his too-blue eyes danced with delighted mischief. “I got here just in time,” he said.
Dara Rose was brought up short. “What?” she managed, with more effort than a single word should have required.
Clay shook his head, as though he couldn’t believe another human being could be so deluded as Dara Rose clearly was. “They’re only going to be little girls once,” he said, “and for a very short time. If I hadn’t shown up when I did, you might have ruined one of the best things about being a kid—believing.”
Dara Rose’s mouth fell open. Clay closed it for her by levering up on her chin with that work-roughened and yet extraordinarily gentle hand of his.
“Now,” he went on decisively, “Edrina and Harriet and I are going out to find a Christmas tree. You can either come with us, Mrs. McKettrick, or you can stay right here with the chickens. Which is it going to be?”
Dara Rose wasn’t about to send her children out into the countryside in a mule-drawn buckboard with a stranger, but neither did she have the heart to insist that they forget the whole crazy plan.
“Edrina and Harriet are my children,” she said, hearing the girls laugh and scuffle in the small bedroom as they went about exchanging their wedding garb for warmer things, “and I will not have them misled.”
“Fair enough,” Clay said, letting his eyes drop. “Shouldn’t you get out of that fancy dress before we head out?”
THE MUD WAS DEEP, but the mules that came with the hired buckboard were strong and sure-footed. Once Clay had arranged the transaction, changed his clothes and collected Chester from the jailhouse, they made the short journey to the ranch with no trouble at all—in fact, it seemed to Clay that those mules knew how to avoid the worst of the muck and plant their hooves on solid ground.
He pulled back on the brake lever and simultaneously reined in the mules right where the kit-house would go up, come spring.
He jumped down, smiling as Edrina and Harriet piled eagerly out of the back of the buckboard, Chester leaping after them and barking fit to split a man’s eardrums, and went around to reach up a hand to Dara Rose.
She hadn’t said two words to him since they’d left town, and her color was high, but she let Clay lift her down.
Gasped when he made sure their bodies collided in the process.
He laughed, though she’d roused an ache inside him.
She blushed and straightened her bonnet with both hands, which made her bosom rise in that tantalizing way he so enjoyed.
“You gave your word,” she whispered, narrow-eyed.
“And I’ll keep it,” Clay assured her. This was what he got for putting his mouth in motion before his head was in gear, he figured. A wife to contradict everything he said and no wedding night to make up for the inevitable difficulties of an intimate alliance.
If Sawyer had been there, he’d surely have called Clay crazy, denying himself the pleasures of matrimony, especially when he was married to a woman like Dara Rose. And Clay would have had to admit his cousin was right.
He was crazy.
But a promise was a promise.
“Let’s go,” he said, reaching into the wagon-bed for the short-handled ax he’d borrowed when he rented the team and buckboard over at the livery stable. “It’ll be dark in a few hours, and there’s no telling when the snow will start up again, so we’d better get started.”
Edrina and Harriet were practically beside themselves with excitement, and Chester trotted around them all in big, swoopy circles, livelier than Clay had yet seen him.
The “tree” they finally settled upon looked more like a tumbleweed to Clay, who was used to the lush, fragrant firs that grew in the northern Arizona Territory, but Edrina and Harriet were enchanted. So Clay chopped down that waist-high scrub pine and carried it in one hand back to the wagon.
Dara Rose bore silent witness to all this, cautiously enjoying her daughters’ delight.
Edrina had noticed the stone markers Clay had set in place the last time he was there, and she squatted on her haunches to peer at one of them. Harriet and Chester stood nearby.
“What is this?” Edrina asked.
Clay smiled, tossed the tree into the bed of the wagon and walked back to stand over the little girl. He was aware of Dara Rose on the periphery of things, but he didn’t look in her direction.
“This is where I plan to put up my—our—house, once it arrives, that is.”
Edrina looked up at him, brow crinkling a little. “Houses don’t arrive,” she said.
“This one will,” Clay replied, enjoying the exchange. “It’s coming by rail, from Sears, Roebuck and Company, all the way out in Chicago, Illinois.”
“A house can’t ride on a train!” Harriet proclaimed gleefully. “Houses are too big to fit!”
Clay laughed, crouched between the two girls, to put himself at eye level with them. Chester nuzzled his arm and then, quick as can be, licked Clay’s face.
“I guess you’d say this house is kind of like a jigsaw puzzle,” Clay told the children. “It’s broken down into parts and packed in crates. When it gets here, I’ll have to put it together.”
Edrina fro
wned, absorbing his words. Then she whistled, through her teeth, and said, “Thunderation and spit.”
“Speak in a ladylike fashion, Edrina Nolan,” Dara Rose interceded coolly, “or do not speak at all.”
Clay tossed a look in his wife’s direction and stood tall again, resting one hand on each bonneted head. “I reckon we’ll head back to town now,” he said. “I don’t like the looks of that cloud bank over there on the horizon.”
The wind was beginning to pick up a little, too.
Dara Rose shooed the girls toward the hired buckboard, but they didn’t need anybody’s help to climb inside. They shinnied up the rear wheels, agile as a pair of monkeys, and planted themselves on either side of the scrub pine.
Clay hoisted Chester aboard and fastened the tailgate, but before he could get to Dara Rose and offer her a hand up, she was already in the front of the wagon, perched on the seat and looking straight ahead.
“Will there be room for us in your new house?” Harriet asked, just as Clay settled in to take the reins.
Clay looked down at Dara Rose, who didn’t acknowledge him in any visible way. “Yes,” he said. “You and Edrina will have to share a room at first, most likely, but after a year or two, I’ll be building on, and you’ll each have one of your own.”
“Then where will Mama be?” Harriet wanted to know. “In my room, or in Edrina’s?”
“Neither,” Clay said.
A flush bloomed into Dara Rose’s cheeks and, even though she hastened to adjust her bonnet, Clay had already seen. “Harriet,” Dara Rose said, “please sit down immediately.”
Harriet sat.
Clay bit the inside of his lip, so he wouldn’t smile, turned the team and wagon in a wide semicircle and headed toward town.
The girls chattered behind him and Dara Rose, in the bed of the buckboard, Chester no doubt hanging on every word. The wagon wheels, in need of greasing, squealed as the mules pulled the rig overland, puffing clouds of white fog from their nostrils, and the harnesses creaked.
For all that, Clay would remember that trip home as a silent one, because, once again, Dara Rose didn’t say a word.
When they drove on along Main Street, passing the road that fronted the house without turning in, Dara Rose nudged him lightly with one elbow but still didn’t speak.
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