“Where are we going?” Edrina called, from the back.
“We’re having supper at the hotel tonight,” Clay said, with a sidelong glance at Dara Rose. “Call it a celebration,” he added dryly.
“Don’t be silly,” Dara Rose muttered in protest, but the girls were cheering by then, causing Chester to bark, and all of those noises combined to drown her out.
What with all the planks and doors in the road, Clay had to weave the team and wagon in and out half the length of Main Street, but he finally reined in, in front of the Texas Arms Hotel and Dining Room, and set the brake.
“This is extravagant,” Dara Rose whispered to Clay, when everybody except Chester was standing on the board sidewalk. “We have food at home….”
“Tonight is special,” Clay replied, before shifting his attention to Chester. “You stay put, dog, and I’ll bring you out some supper.”
Chester seemed to understand; he settled down next to the Christmas tree, resting his muzzle on his out stretched front legs, sighed once and closed his eyes.
Edrina and Harriet raced, giggling, toward the main entrance to the hotel.
Dara Rose hesitated, though, and took a light but firm hold on Clay’s arm. “You mustn’t spoil my children,” she said. “I don’t want Edrina and Harriet getting used to luxuries I cannot hope to provide for them myself.”
Clay suppressed a sigh. “Food,” he said reasonably, “is not a luxury.”
“It is when it’s paid for, and someone else cooked and served it,” Dara Rose insisted.
Clay smiled down at his bride. “Try to enjoy it just the same,” he advised, taking her elbow and gently steering her across the sidewalk.
Chapter 8
The small rustic dining establishment serving the Texas Arms Hotel was full of savory smells, causing Dara Rose’s stomach to rumble.
Someone had hung a wreath made of holly sprigs behind the cash register, and limp tinsel garlands drooped from the edges of a long counter lined with stools.
Only one of the six tables was in use. A man, a woman and a little girl, probably a year or two older than Edrina, dined in companionable silence, their clothes exceedingly fine, their manners impeccable. Since Dara Rose had never laid eyes on them before, she knew they must have arrived on the afternoon train.
She wondered if they were just passing through, or if they’d come to Blue River to spend Christmas with friends or family.
Clay nodded a taciturn greeting to the man and the man nodded back.
Edrina and Harriet, stealing glances at the little girl, scrambled onto chairs at a table in front of the window, sitting side by side and swinging their feet. It had been an exciting day for them—first, the wedding, then the expedition to find a Christmas tree, and now a restaurant meal.
By the time they tumbled into bed that night, Dara Rose thought fondly, her daughters would be so deliciously exhausted, so saturated with fresh air, that they’d sleep like stones settling deep into the silt of a quiet pond.
Clay was just pulling back a chair for Dara Rose when the cook-waiter appeared, smiling a welcome. “I hear this is a wedding supper!” the man thundered. “Congratulations, Marshal.”
It wouldn’t have been proper to congratulate Dara Rose, since there would inevitably be an implication that she’d somehow captured her new husband, rounded him up like a rogue steer, and not by pure feminine allure. While she appreciated the courtesy, she did wish the man hadn’t spoken so loudly, because the woman at the other table turned in their direction, her expression impassive, her gaze flickering briefly over Dara Rose’s faded cloak, with its frayed, mud-splattered hem.
“Thanks, Roy,” Clay responded, addressing the cook, with whom he was obviously acquainted, and the two men shook hands.
Dara Rose was not a person to compare herself to others, but as Clay pulled back a chair for her and she sat down, she couldn’t help thinking how shabby she and the children must seem, in the eyes of that elegantly dressed woman and her little girl.
“What’s it going to be, ladies?” Clay asked the children, while Dara Rose perused the menu, nearly overwhelmed by all the choices. “I can definitely recommend the fried chicken dinner, and the meat loaf is good, too.”
“What’s meat loaf?” Harriet wanted to know.
“You’ll have the chicken dinner,” Dara Rose said, without looking away from the menu. “One will be plenty for both of you.”
She thought she might have felt Clay stiffen beside her, but then, as though she hadn’t spoken at all, he simply answered Harriet’s inquiry about the nature of meat loaf.
“I want that,” Harriet said, when he’d finished. “Please.”
“And I’ll have stew with dumplings,” Edrina added, sounding like a small adult, “if I may, please.”
“You may,” Clay said, without looking at Dara Rose, though she did see his mouth quirk briefly at one corner. “This is a very special occasion,” he added, after clearing his throat quietly. “And, anyhow, Chester will be pleased to accept any leftovers. He’s still building up his strength, you know.”
Dara Rose’s cheeks flamed. She loved animals. Her rooster and hens all had names, and she went out of her way to take good care of them. But she’d been so poor for so long—since she’d “married” Luke Nolan, a few months before Edrina was born—that the idea of giving a dog restaurant food just wouldn’t fit into any of the compartments in her mind.
“There are people in this town who could put anything extra to good use,” she said, sounding way more prim than she’d intended.
“Like the O’Reillys,” Edrina said, with a sigh.
“Among others,” Dara Rose agreed.
Clay was watching her so directly, and with such intensity, that she was forced to meet his gaze. “Shall we just scrape it all into a pan,” he began, “and set it on the floor of their shanty, the way we’d do with Chester?”
Dara Rose blushed even harder. If they hadn’t been in a public place, and if she’d been given to violence, she’d have slapped him across the face.
Before she could speak, Clay summoned Roy, the cook, back to their table with a polite gesture of one hand.
The man hurried over, eager to please.
Clay placed everyone’s order—except for Dara Rose’s—and then asked the cook to pack up enough fried chicken, meat loaf and trimmings to feed four people. He’d pay for and collect the extra food at the end of the meal, he said, and then looked pointedly at Dara Rose.
Confounded, and a little stung, she asked for chicken.
Edrina and Harriet were watching Clay raptly—they might have expected a laurel wreath or a winged helmet to appear on his head, from their expressions—and, not surprisingly, it was Edrina who broke the pulsing silence.
“Are we taking supper to the O’Reillys?” she asked.
“Yes,” Clay said.
“Harriet and I are planning to visit Addie tomorrow,” Edrina said. She turned a vaguely challenging glance in Dara Rose’s direction. “Mama said we could.”
Dara Rose, still feeling as though she’d been put smartly in her place and none too happy about it, thank you very much, returned Edrina’s look in spades. “I said you could visit,” she reminded her child, “since you’d already promised. I did not give permission for Harriet to accompany you.”
“What’s the harm?” Clay asked mildly, though his eyes contained a challenge, just as Edrina’s had before. “That little girl looked to me as though she could use some company. Especially somebody close to her own age.”
“She has romantic fever,” Edrina said solemnly.
“That’s not catching,” Clay replied, and though his tone was serious, there was a twinkle in his eyes now. “In fact, I’d say your mother is immune to it.”
“Other things are catching,” Dara Rose felt compelled to say, though she knew there was some kind of battle being waged here, and she was losing ground. Fast.
“It’s probably too cold for lice and fleas at this
time of year,” Clay said.
Dara Rose didn’t get a chance to respond. The food arrived, heaped on steaming plates, the children’s first, and then Clay’s and Dara Rose’s.
The family of strangers, meanwhile, had finished their meal, and the man was settling the bill. The mother and the child rose from their chairs, and then the little girl walked right over to Edrina and Harriet and put out one tiny, porcelain-white hand.
“My name is Madeline Howard,” she said. With her long, shining brown hair, deep green eyes and fitted emerald velvet dress, she bore a striking resemblance to the doll in the mercantile window. “What’s yours?”
“I’m Edrina,” answered Dara Rose’s elder daughter, barely able to see over the mountain of food before her. “And this is my sister, Harriet.”
“We’re going to live in Blue River from now on,” Madeline said. “Mama and Papa and me, I mean. Papa’s going to build an office, and we’ll have rooms upstairs.”
The woman approached, laid a hand on Madeline’s shoulder, offered a pained smile to everyone in general and no one in particular. “You mustn’t bother people when they’re eating, darling,” she said.
Clay stood, put out his hand, and the woman shook it, after the briefest hesitation. “Clay McKettrick,” he said. “This is my wife, Dara Rose.”
This is my wife, Dara Rose.
No words could have sounded stranger to Dara Rose, and she had to swallow a ridiculous urge to explain, all in a rush, that theirs was a marriage of convenience, not a real one.
She merely nodded, though, and the woman nodded back. Like her daughter, she wore velvet, though her gown and short cape were a rich shade of brown instead of green. Not only that, but the pile on that fabric was plush, not worn away in places like most of the velvet one saw in Blue River, Texas.
The man had reached the table by then, and smiled as he and Clay shook hands. “Glad to meet you, Marshal,” he said. “I’m Jim Howard, and my wife is Eloise.”
Another stiff smile from Eloise. “My husband is a dentist,” she said. “Most people address him as ‘Dr. Howard,’ of course.”
Dara Rose, who had been trying to decide whether or not good manners required that she stand, like Clay, decided to stay seated.
“We could use a dentist around here,” Clay said, with a grin dancing in his eyes but not quite reaching his mouth.
Madeline smiled broadly at Edrina and Harriet. “You both have very good teeth,” she said admiringly. Her own were like small, square pearls, perfectly strung. Jim Howard—Dr. Howard—chuckled at that. “We’ll let you finish your meal in peace,” he said, steering his womenfolk gently away, toward the hotel’s modest lobby and then the stairs beyond.
Clay sat down. “Nice people,” he said.
Madeline, Dara Rose noticed, kept looking back, her expression one of friendly longing, as though she would have liked to stay and chat with Edrina and Harriet.
“The lady is snooty,” Edrina announced, holding a dinner roll daintily between a thumb and index finger. “But I like Madeline, and her papa, too.”
Dara Rose was keenly aware, in that moment, that Edrina was following her lead. Hadn’t she disliked Mrs. Howard almost immediately, and returned coolness for coolness instead of making an effort to be neighborly, offer a welcome to the newcomers?
It was tremendously difficult sometimes, she thought glumly, to be the sort of person she wanted her daughters to be, when they grew up. And she’d fallen far short of that standard tonight.
Unexpectedly, Clay reached over and gently squeezed her hand, just once and very briefly, but the gesture raised Dara Rose’s flagging spirits.
It also sent something sharp and hot racing through her, a fiery ache she had to work very hard to ignore.
“Perhaps when we get to know Mrs. Howard better,” she told Edrina, somehow managing a normal tone of voice, “we’ll discover that she’s a very nice person.”
“Perhaps,” Edrina agreed doubtfully.
The girls were practically nodding off in their chairs by the time the meal ended.
Clay took the leftovers out to Chester on a borrowed plate, while Roy packed the O’Reillys’ supper into a large wooden crate, carefully covered with a dish towel. The bill was paid—the cost of it would have kept Dara Rose and the girls in groceries for the better part of a month—and Clay carried the crate out to the wagon, stowed it under the seat, where Chester couldn’t get at it, and returned with the empty plate.
By then, Dara Rose had put on her cloak, Edrina was wearing her outdoor garb and, together, they maneuvered a sleepy Harriet into her coat and bonnet. Clay whisked the child up into his arms and carried her to the wagon.
A light snowfall was just beginning, and the wind was picking up, so Clay took Dara Rose, the children and Chester back to the house first, saw them inside, and announced quietly that he’d return as soon as he’d dropped off the food at the O’Reilly place and turned in the mules and wagon at the livery.
Dara Rose moved by rote, helping the girls prepare for bed, tucking them in, hearing their prayers.
Harriet asked for the doll again.
Edrina said she was glad to have a new papa, then promised not to forget the old one.
Dara Rose was glad she’d turned down the wick in the kerosene lantern, leaving the room mostly in shadow, because there were tears in her eyes as she told her children good-night and kissed their foreheads.
THE SETTEE IN DARA Rose’s parlor was about a foot shorter than he was, by Clay’s estimation, but he’d slept in less comfortable places in his time, just the same. And Dara Rose had been considerate enough to set out a blanket and a pillow for him.
He smiled just imagining the joshing he’d get if Sawyer and the rest of his McKettrick cousins knew he was spending his wedding night alone, with his feet hanging over one end of a short sofa. He’d be lucky if he didn’t wake up with his spine in the shape of a horseshoe and his toes numb from lack of circulation.
Chester, who’d settled himself nearby on the blanket Clay had brought over from the jailhouse, watched as he sat down on the settee to kick off his boots.
“Believe it or not,” he told the dog, low-voiced, “I got married today.”
Chester offered no comment.
The tumbleweed Christmas tree stood undecorated in a corner of the room, stuck in a bucket of water and looking about as festive as Clay felt, but it had a nice pine scent that reminded him of home.
Because the house was small and he was mindful of the children, Clay decided to sleep in his clothes. He was about to extinguish the lantern and stretch out, as best he could, on that blasted settee, when Dara Rose stepped out of the bedroom.
Her hair was down, tumbling well past her waist, and she wore a long nightgown, covered with a plain flannel wrapper, cinched tight at her middle.
Clay’s heart skipped a couple of beats, though he knew full well she wasn’t there to render an annulment legally and morally impossible.
She stopped, glanced over at the hopeful tumbleweed and then stood a little straighter. This raised her to her full and unremarkable height, but whatever her errand, she sure enough looked like she meant business.
“Either you are an irresponsible man,” Dara Rose said, making it clear how Edrina came by her bold certainty about everything, “or you have more money than you let on. Which is it?”
Clay stood, though he suddenly felt bone-tired, because there was a lady in the room. “I never said I was broke, Mrs. McKettrick,” he replied dryly.
“Don’t call me ‘Mrs. McKettrick’!” Dara Rose immediately responded. “We made an agreement. This is a marriage in name only.”
“Oh, I’m well aware of that,” Clay responded, thinking he’d wait forever for this woman, if that was what he had to do. “But you are legally my wife, and that makes you Mrs. McKettrick.”
She pulled so tight on the cinches of her wrapper then that it was a wonder she didn’t split right in two, like one of those showgirls in a magicia
n’s act. “Why do you keep pointing out that we are married in the eyes of the law?”
Clay was enjoying her discomfort a lot more than was gentlemanly. “Aren’t we?” he asked, raising one eyebrow.
“Yes,” she retorted, setting her hands down hard on her hips now and jutting out her elbows, “but it was a matter of expediency on my part, and nothing more.”
“Gosh,” Clay said, playing the rube. “Thanks.”
“I would do anything for my daughters!” she blurted out. “Including marry a virtual stranger. I agreed to this arrangement because of them, not out of any desire to be your…your wife….” She stammered to a halt and turned a glorious shade of primrose-pink.
Clay waited a few moments before he spoke again. “That was quite a scene Maddox made today.”
Dara Rose hesitated, trembled once and hugged herself as if she thought she might suddenly scatter in every direction, and it was all Clay could do not to cross the room and take her into his arms. “I suppose he believed he had call to object to—to our getting married,” she continued, after a few moments of miserable struggle, “and it’s true enough that he proposed—sort of.”
“Sort of?” He’d known about the situation between Dara Rose and Maddox from Ponder and the others, but he wanted to hear it directly from her.
It was a long time before she answered. “I was supposed to work as his housekeeper for a year, so he could be sure I’d make a suitable wife. Then, if I passed muster, he’d put a ring on my finger.”
Clay felt a fresh surge of rage rise up within him, and he waited for it to subside before he said anything. “Where did Edrina and Harriet fit into all this?”
He knew the answer to that question, too, at least indirectly but, again, he wanted the first-hand truth from Dara Rose herself.
Her eyes welled, but she looked so proud and so vulnerable that Clay continued to keep his distance. He figured she might actually shatter into bits if he touched her.
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