Clay gave her a wry look and lifted out a second box. “Chester and I,” he said, with a twinkle, “don’t believe in freeloading. We always pay our own way.”
Dara Rose opened her mouth, closed it again. “But all those packages, and the tea, and that enormous ham—”
“You like tea, don’t you?” Clay teased, starting toward the house.
Dara Rose scurried to keep up with his long strides.
“Of course I like tea,” she said, flustered, “but it’s a luxury, and we don’t need it—”
“Sure you do,” Clay replied, climbing the porch steps now. “What do you plan on serving all the ladies of Blue River when they start dropping by to see for themselves just what kind of mischief we’re up to over here?”
Harriet and Edrina, huddled in the doorway, scattered to let them through.
Mr. Bickham was coming from the other direction, and Clay sidestepped him.
“Mr. McKettrick,” Dara Rose persisted, when the two of them were alone in the kitchen, “I do have my pride.”
“Yes, Mrs. McKettrick,” Clay agreed. “I have taken note of that fact.” He took a large tin from the box he’d carried in. “Would you mind putting some coffee on to brew while Bickham and I finish unloading that wagon? I’ve got a hankering for the stuff, and I like it strong and black.”
Dara Rose couldn’t seem to untangle her tongue.
“You do own a coffeepot, don’t you?” Clay asked offhandedly.
“Yes,” she managed, blushing. “Parnell drank coffee every morning.”
Clay merely nodded, as though she’d confirmed something he already knew, and went out again.
Dara Rose got out Parnell’s coffeepot, rinsed it at the sink and pumped fresh water into it. Then she had to ferret out the grinder, with its black wrought-iron handle.
She was wiping the dust out of the contraption with one corner of a flour-sack dish towel when Clay and Mr. Bickham came in again, both of them carrying boxes.
Edrina and Harriet were, of course, consumed with curiosity.
Harriet, though puffy-eyed, had long since stopped crying.
“Sugar,” Edrina cataloged, joyfully examining each item. “And flour. And lard. And raisins. Mama, you could bake a pie.”
“Perhaps,” Dara Rose agreed, afraid to say too much because she wasn’t sure she could control all the contradictory emotions welling up inside her. Her pride stung like a snakebite, but in some ways, she was as jubilant as the children.
Tea. Sugar. Flour.
A whole ham, big enough to feed half the town of Blue River.
They’d been doing without such things for so long that it was impossible not to rejoice, at least inwardly.
Firmly, Dara Rose brought herself up short. She squared her shoulders and poured coffee beans into the grinder and began turning the handle, enjoying the rich aroma. “Mr. McKettrick has been very generous,” she said, not looking at Edrina and Harriet. “But we mustn’t come to expect such things—”
“Why not?” The voice was Clay’s.
Dara Rose kept her back to him, spooning freshly ground coffee beans into the well of her dented pot, setting it on to boil. “Because we mustn’t, that’s all,” she said. She bent and opened the stove door and pitched in more wood. Jabbed at the embers with the poker.
“There’s some stuff for the Christmas tree in the box I left on the settee,” Clay said quietly, sending the girls scampering with chimelike hurrahs into the front room.
Dara Rose, thinking Mr. Bickham must be within earshot, taking it all in, turned to look for him. He was as big a gossip as Heliotrope Ponder and, running the only general store in town, he got plenty of chances to tell everything he knew and then some.
But there was only Clay, filling the doorway, watching her. Philo Bickham must have been outside, fetching another box from the buckboard.
“It’s almost Christmas,” Clay said gruffly. “Just this once, Dara Rose, let yourself be happy. Let your daughters be happy.”
Her face burned, and she couldn’t help remembering all the times Parnell had splurged on some little treat for the girls, running up an account at the mercantile that had taken her months to pay off.
“Did you go into debt for all this?” she asked, keeping her voice down so the girls and Mr. Bickham wouldn’t hear. Nobody knew better than she did how little the marshal of Blue River actually earned.
Clay smiled, though his eyes remained solemn, and then he shook his head, not in reply, but in disbelief. “I paid cash money,” he said, turning to walk away.
By the time the coffee was ready, the kitchen and part of the front room were jammed with boxes and crates and brown parcels, tied shut with twine.
“Where’s Mr. Bickham?” Dara Rose asked, when Clay returned to the kitchen, squeezed past her to wash his hands at the sink pump. “I thought he’d stay for coffee.”
“He has a store to run,” Clay said quietly.
In the next room, the girls giggled and Chester barked and the noise was pleasant to hear, even though Dara Rose was uncommon jittery.
She put away the cup she’d set out for Mr. Bickham and filled the remaining one, returned the pot to the stove.
“Mr. McKettrick?”
“What, Mrs. McKettrick?” Clay countered wearily, as he drew back a chair, sat down and reached for the steaming cup of coffee.
Dara Rose brought out the sugar bowl, long unused, filled it from the newly purchased bag and set it on the table, along with a teaspoon.
“Thank you,” she said meekly, not looking at him. “For all these groceries, I mean—”
That was when he pulled her onto his lap. His thighs felt hard as a wagon seat under her backside, and that realization started all sorts of untoward things rioting inside her.
“You’re welcome,” he said, in a throaty drawl.
Dara Rose’s heart pounded, and she felt dizzy. “Clay—the children—”
He sighed. “They’re busy squeezing parcels,” he said.
Dara Rose sat very still, afraid to move.
Clay watched her mouth for a few moments, and managed to leave Dara Rose as breathless as if he’d actually kissed her, and soundly. Then he said, very quietly, “Just so we understand each other, Mrs. McKettrick, I do mean to bed you, right and proper, one day soon.”
Dara Rose gulped, knowing she ought to pull free and get back on her own two feet but strangely unable to do so. “But you said—”
He rested an index finger on her mouth, and a hot shiver went through her. “I know what I said, Dara Rose, and I’ll keep my word. But it’s only fair to tell you that I’m fixing to do everything I can to bring you around to my way of thinking.”
Dara Rose absolutely could not speak. She was full of indignation and longing and searing heat.
That was when he kissed her—softly at first, and then in a deep way that made everything inside her melt, including her very bones.
When their mouths finally parted, it was Clay’s doing, not Dara Rose’s.
She’d have been content to let that kiss go on forever, it felt so good.
“I believe I’m making progress,” he said, with a certain satisfaction.
He was indeed, Dara Rose thought. If Edrina and Harriet hadn’t been in the house, never mind the very next room, she might have taken Marshal Clay McKettrick by the hand and led him straight to her bed. She sighed wistfully.
It had been so long since she’d been held in a strong man’s arms, reveled in the sweet responses lovemaking roused in her.
She glanced at the doorway, but her children were still in the front room, playing some game with the dog, filling that little house with barks and giggles. “Parnell and I—we weren’t…we didn’t…”
Clay simply listened, looking thoughtful.
“What I mean is, we were never…intimate,” Dara Rose confessed. Even saying that much—telling such a small part of her story—was a tremendous relief. “He married me to give my children a name.”
> “Go on,” Clay said.
Dara Rose checked the doorway again. “I was married—or I thought I was married—to Parnell’s younger brother, Luke.” She swallowed hard. “Edrina was born, and then Harriet, and then—”
Clay didn’t prompt her. He was a patient man.
“And then Luke was thrown from a horse and killed, and I learned—I learned that he’d had another wife all along. A real wife, and several children. I’d been a—a kept woman from the first, without even knowing it, and our—my—children had been born out of wedlock.”
Something moved in Clay’s handsome face.
Pain? Fury? Pity, perhaps? She couldn’t tell.
Afraid she’d lose her courage if she didn’t finish the story right now, Dara Rose went on. “I had no money, and no place to go, and after his brother’s funeral, Parnell came to me and offered marriage. He was such a good man, Clay.” She realized she was crying. When had the tears begun? “When he died upstairs at the Bitter Gulch, everyone felt so sorry for the children and me, and there was this huge scandal, and I couldn’t—I couldn’t explain that I wasn’t a true wife to him. He must have been so lonely….”
When she didn’t go on, Clay set her on her feet, and try though she did, Dara Rose couldn’t read his expression.
He got up from his chair, his coffee forgotten on the table, and whistled for his dog.
Chester came to him eagerly, without hesitation, as Clay was putting on his duster and his distinctive round-brimmed hat.
“This calls for some thinking about, Dara Rose,” he said. “And I need to get Outlaw back to the livery stable, see that he’s put up proper for the night.”
With that, Clay opened the back door, and he and Chester went out.
Edrina and Harriet appeared in the inside doorway the instant he’d closed the door behind him.
“Aren’t we going to decorate the Christmas tree?” Edrina asked plaintively.
Dara Rose didn’t answer. She hurried across the kitchen and through the front room to watch through the window as Clay rounded a corner of the house, passed through the gate, gathered his horse’s reins and mounted up.
“What about the Christmas tree?” Harriet trilled, from somewhere behind Dara Rose.
“After supper,” she heard herself say, as her heart climbed into her throat. “We’ll tend to it after supper.”
And Clay McKettrick rode away, Chester following, leaving Dara Rose to wonder if he meant to come back.
WHEN HE REACHED the jailhouse, Clay let himself in, started a fire in the potbellied stove and nearly fell over the large crate waiting by his desk.
He approached the box, apparently delivered while he was away, peering down at the return address: The Triple M. Indian Rock, Arizona Territory.
He felt a twinge of homesickness, but it passed quickly.
Much as he loved the ranch, and his family, the Triple M wasn’t home anymore. Home, for better or for worse, was wherever Dara Rose happened to be.
When had he fallen in love with her?
He wasn’t sure. It might have been today, when she sat on his lap in her tiny kitchen and poured out her heart to him.
Or it might have been when he first laid eyes on her, just a few days before.
All he could say for sure was that it felt a lot like being kicked in the belly by a mule, this falling in love.
He was exultant.
He was crushed.
Dara Rose had loved another man, and that man had betrayed her, and if Luke Nolan hadn’t already been dead, Clay would have cheerfully killed him.
His deepest regret? That he hadn’t been there to step in and make things right for her and for the kids, as illogical as that was. Parnell had been the one to rescue her, give his two-timing brother’s family a legal right to the Nolan name.
Clay McKettrick was jealous of a dead man and, at the same time, he knew he could never have settled for the kind of empty marriage Dara Rose and Parnell had had together. He was a young man, and red-blooded, and he needed more.
He wanted everything—wanted Dara Rose’s heart, as well as her body. Wanted to adopt Edrina and Harriet, change their last name for good, raise them as McKettricks.
And he surely wanted to make more babies with Dara Rose.
Oh, yes, he wanted it all.
He drew in a deep breath. Slow down, cowboy, he thought. Get a grip.
There was no telling what Dara Rose thought when he’d walked out on her that way, but he needed to sort things through, needed to think.
That was the kind of man he was.
He fetched a knife, pried up the lid on the crate his mother had sent from the Triple M. She must have paid a hefty freight charge to get it there before Christmas, even by train.
Inside, carefully nestled in straw, he found a dozen succulent oranges, a tin full of exotic nuts and a number of his favorite books, some of which he’d owned since he first learned to read. There was more, but Clay’s eyes were so blurred by then that he was lucky to be able to read his mother’s letter and, even then, he only got this word and that.
“Sawyer wired that you’re married…two stepdaughters…bring them home when you can…we’re all so anxious to welcome your wife and your children to the family—”
Clay closed his eyes, drew a deep breath. That was Chloe McKettrick for you. If he loved a woman, and that woman’s children, then his mother was ready to enfold them in the warmth of her heart, receive them as her own.
It was the McKettrick way. Babies were born into the family, or they arrived by marriage, and it made no difference either way. Once a McKettrick, always a McKettrick.
No matter what happened between him and Dara Rose, Edrina and Harriet were part of the fold, now and forever. If he died tomorrow, or Dara Rose did, his pa and ma, his aunts and uncles and sisters and brothers and cousins—even old Angus and his wife, Concepcion—would take them in and love them like their own flesh and blood.
The knowledge made Clay’s throat tighten and his eyes scald.
He wanted to go back to Dara Rose right then, wanted that more than anything, but he didn’t give in to the desire.
Yes, she was his wife.
And yes, it was a safe bet that she wanted him as much as he wanted her, after that episode in her kitchen.
But what mattered now was the children.
And that was why Clay McKettrick decided to spend his second night as a married man in the spare room behind the jailhouse. If he’d gone back to Dara Rose’s place, he wasn’t at all sure he could have resisted her.
He needed her.
He loved her.
And that was precisely why he couldn’t go home to that little house, with its tiny rooms and its thin walls.
Clay McKettrick knew his limits.
And, where Dara Rose was concerned, he’d reached them.
DARA ROSE LISTENED for Clay’s footstep on the back porch as she peeled potatoes to fry up for supper with some of the salt pork he’d bought at the store. When the meal was over and the dishes had been washed and put away and he still wasn’t back, she declared that it was time to decorate the Christmas tree.
“We’d rather wait for Mr. McKettrick,” Edrina said, looking glum.
“Where did he go?” Harriet asked.
Dara Rose sighed. She’d been a fool to go against her own better judgment and marry Clay McKettrick. Men couldn’t be depended upon to stick around. They lied and cheated and got themselves thrown from horses and killed, they died in the arms of prostitutes above some saloon or, like Mr. O’Reilly, they simply decided they’d rather be elsewhere and took to their heels.
Devil take the hindmost.
“To the livery stable, I think,” Dara Rose finally replied.
“He left a long time ago,” Edrina reasoned. “It’s getting dark outside.”
Harriet’s lower lip wobbled. “Maybe he’s not coming back,” she said.
Dara Rose pretended not to hear. “I’ll fetch the Christmas box from the cedar
chest,” she told the children, marching into the front room. “And then we’ll see what we can do with this tree.”
The girls didn’t speak, so she turned her head to look at them.
They stood side by side, arms folded, expressions recalcitrant.
“That wouldn’t be right,” Edrina said staunchly. “Mr. McKettrick cut that tree down himself. We wouldn’t even have it if it weren’t for him.”
Harriet nodded in grim agreement.
Dara Rose thought fast. “Wouldn’t it be a nice surprise, though, if he came home to find it all sparkling and merry?”
Edrina, self-appointed spokeswoman for her little sister as well as for herself, stood her ground. “We’d rather wait,” she reiterated.
Dara Rose shook her head, proceeded into the bedroom to give the children a chance to change their minds and lifted the lid of the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. She kept the few simple ornaments they owned, most of them homemade, tucked away there, inside an old boot box of Parnell’s.
There was a shining paper chain, made of salvaged foils of all sorts.
There were stars, cut from tin, with the sharp edges hammered down to a child-safe smoothness, and ribbons, and Parnell’s broken pocket watch.
And there were two tiny angels, sewn up from scraps of calico and embroidered with Edrina’s and Harriet’s names, their wings improvised out of layers of old newspapers, cut out and pasted together.
Dara Rose had always treasured these humble decorations, as had the girls, but now, in the dim light of the rising moon, falling softly through the window, they looked humble indeed. Nearly pitiful, in fact.
She swallowed, straightened her spine, and returned to the front room with the dog-eared carton, only to find Edrina and Harriet busy with the one Clay had spoken of earlier.
There’s some stuff for the Christmas tree in the box I left on the settee, he’d said.
The children looked wonder-struck as they lifted one glistening item after another out of the box—a porcelain angel, with feathers for wings and a golden halo fashioned of thin wire; shimmering baubles of blown glass, in bright shades of red and blue and gold and silver; a package of glittering tinsel that flashed in the lamplight like a tiny waterfall.
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