MARRIAGE, OUTLAW STYLE

by Cindy Gerard

  "Look. A hinge is missing. I'm betting the other one is back in the cabin."

  Clay only grunted and fussed with the rusty lock.

  "What about you? Wanna bet on whether or not this fits?" Brimming with smiles, she produced the key from her pocket and held it out to him.

  He leaned back on his haunches. "You made the find. You do the honors."

  Biting her lower lip, she inched closer to the locked box. Her fingers trembled with excitement as she inserted the key into the padlock.

  "It fits." Her breathless exclamation gave away that she'd had her reservations, too. "It actually fits."

  With her breath caught in anticipation, she turned the key, then frowned when it wouldn't budge and tried again.

  "It's rusted tight," Clay said after he'd tried the lock, too. "We'll have to break into it."

  Maddie was too excited to do anything but watch as Clay picked up a stone about the size of his fist. Using it like a hammerhead, he gave the lock a good rap. After two more solid hits, and a skinned knuckle, it gave way.

  "This is it," he said after letting out a deep breath. "Open it up, Maddie. Let's have a look."

  Eyes wide with excitement, cheeks flushed with anticipation, she slowly lifted the lid—then stared in fascinated silence at what she found inside.

  After sharing a puzzled look with Clay, she reached first for the single gold coin lying on top of a boxful of coarse river sand.

  "I don't understand." She looked from the coin to the sand-filled box.

  Clay reached for a flat leather pouch wedged under the metal braces in the lid of the box. "Maybe this will explain something."

  He opened the small packet and pulled out a sheet of age-yellowed paper that wore the unmistakable scent of mold.

  The inked letters were smudged but readable: "A fool's treasure is gold. A wise man's treasure is sweeter. It starts and ends with home. J. James."

  He handed the note to Maddie, not entirely surprised when she smiled through her initial disappointment, then got all misty-eyed.

  "How beautiful. And how poetic. What do you suppose it means?"

  He shook his head. "You got me."

  He watched her face while she reread the note, still clutching the coin in her hand. "Disappointed?"

  She shrugged. "Not really," she said and he could see that she meant it. "Intrigued," she allowed. "Mystified," she added and frowned down at the strongbox. "And while I can't help but wonder about where the rest of the gold went, it was the hunt that was exciting. The find that was the real reward."

  She squinted against the sun, then looked into his eyes. "We made a pretty good team, didn't we?"

  "Yeah," he said, his voice rusty with regret that she didn't feel they could team up in any other aspect of their lives.

  He looked from her beautiful, battered face and checked the sky. "It's getting late. We'd better take our treasure," he nodded toward the coin with a grin, "and head for the cabin before dark sets in."

  "This is rightfully yours." She offered him the gold.

  He folded his hand around hers, closing her fingers into a small, delicate fist. "You found it. You keep it. It was never mine, anyway."

  Just like she would never be his.

  In a pensive silence, edged with any number of regrets, they made the hike back to the cabin.

  * * *

  Garrett would come for them tomorrow. Garrett would come, they would return to Jackson and everything would return to the status quo.

  So Maddie told herself as she sat before the fire and ordered herself to go to bed. Alone. Soon.

  It would have to be soon or she was going to fold like a tent in a high wind and beg Clay to make love to her again.

  It was the oldest cliché in the world. And the loneliest. Unrequited love. No … she didn't have his love, but she still had some remnants of her pride. It was that pride that finally had her rising from the sofa without a word and heading toward the loft stairs.

  She sensed Clay's gaze on her from where he sat in an overstuffed chair, broodily engrossed in the fire. Sensed that he wanted to say something. Something appropriate to end their seven-day exile. Something like, Thank God it'll be over tomorrow. Something like, It's been an experience. It's been a drag. It's been a long time coming to an end.

  But he said nothing and neither did she. Only the creak of the loft stairs beneath her feet accompanied her leaving him there. Only the wind, rustling through the pine outside the loft bedroom window acknowledged her presence as she slipped out of her clothes, into a nightshirt and slid between the covers.

  And only the moon, shining like a spotlight, witnessed the silent tears she shed, then angrily wiped away.

  "Self-pity is for the pitiful," she recited in a firm whisper. They were words from her mother, words from her childhood, and they echoed like her beating heart through the night.

  It was a night that never seemed to end as she lay awake, listening to the sound of her own breathing, the keen edge of loneliness and the hollow prospect of a future without the man she loved sighing into the darkness.

  She knew it was over. She knew it had never really started. Somehow, though, she had expected that whatever it was that hadn't really happened between them wouldn't have ended in silence. She'd expected a bang. An explosion of sound and emotion. A battle royal that said it wasn't easy to give up on the possibility of there being something more.

  But the truth was it was something less. Something that was as easy for him to let go of as daylight. As easy as passing from midnight to morning.

  * * *

  Below, in the silent cabin. Clay stared into the dark. Somewhere around midnight, he rose and went to bed.

  He didn't sleep. Arms folded beneath his head, he, too, stared into the darkness. He, too, felt the sting of loneliness like a slap to his peace and his hopes and his dreams.

  Dreams. Funny. He'd never thought of himself as a dreamer. Not until he'd fallen in love with one. Not until he'd experienced the unpleasant prospect of losing what he'd never known he needed most in his life.

  * * *

  Morning brought sunshine and surliness.

  Exhausted from lack of sleep and cranky from a sadness that had settled bone deep, Maddie threw things into her duffel, her mood as foul as any storm had ever thought about being.

  Outside, grumpy as a grizzly separated from its meal, burned out from a sleepless night, Clay stalked around pulling the water line, draining the pump and winterizing the generator.

  Maddie didn't want to go outside and run into him.

  Clay didn't want to go back inside and face her.

  She tidied up the cabin and looked toward the ridge, telling herself Garrett couldn't get here soon enough.

  He locked up the toolshed, glared toward the ridge and wondered what in the hell was taking Garrett so long.

  Neither wasted any time gathering their gear. They were waiting on the porch in dead silence when two riders with two packhorses and two riding horses in tow cleared the small gully between river and cabin. By the time Garrett and Jesse reined up in front of the porch, Maddie and Clay were both feeling meaner than a twenty-four-hour bug and just as toxic.

  Garrett stared at the two of them, then at Jesse with grim-mouthed wonder. Jesse just tugged his hat low over his eyes and braced his hands on the pommel of his saddle.

  Garrett wasn't sure what he'd expected. He only knew what he'd hoped. He'd hoped to see two people silly and sappy in love.

  He saw soured and stone faces instead. And blood.

  Oh, Lord. He actually saw blood.

  What he could see through the bruising and swelling, showed that the white of his brother's left eye was lost in a sea of red. The fingers of his left hand wore a white bandage dotted with seeping blood.

  Garrett swallowed hard, dragged his gaze from Clay to Maddie and felt his stomach drop to his knees. Her temple was black and blue, her face was scratched, and—he gulped and let out a devastated breath—she limped when she
carefully maneuvered the porch steps.

  That's when he saw the pieces of a broken chair stacked with the firewood on the porch.

  What had they done to each other?

  And what, in heaven's name, had he done when he'd left them here alone?

  * * *

  The trip back to Jackson Hole was eventful only because of the lack of events.

  They rode in absolute silence. Garrett and Jesse were afraid to break what might have been the only buffer between peace and full-out war. Clay and Maddie simply didn't have anything to say. Nothing that could change things, at any rate.

  When they finally reached town and Maddie's apartment, Garrett and Jesse quickly jumped down, grabbed her gear and hustled it inside and up the stairs.

  Only then, when they were alone outside, with the sun just settling in for another night beyond the Tetons, did Maddie acknowledge that Clay had something to say.

  "Spit it out," she said as he stood in an uneasy silence beside her. "It's just going to eat at you if you don't."

  His one good eye was kind, almost wary, as he finally met hers. "No regrets, right?"

  There in the twilight she felt herself sway slightly toward him and made herself look away. "No regrets."

  Another heavy moment passed and he touched a hand to her shoulder. "And you're sure—" he paused, tipped back his head, let out a deep breath "—you're sure there's no chance you could have gotten pregnant?"

  His face relayed both his concern and how uncomfortable he was, asking. She supposed she should have felt grateful. Instead she felt a cutting pain, a desolate loss. He was concerned, yes. Concerned for his neat and tidy little life and how an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy could mess it up.

  It hurt to think that the possibility of a baby was so repugnant to him. But life hurt sometimes, and there was nothing she could do to avoid it. She could, however, keep what was left of her pride from eroding.

  "No," she assured him and prayed the heartache didn't show in her eyes or her voice. "There is absolutely no chance that I'm pregnant."

  * * *

  Chapter 10

  « ^ »

  She was pregnant.

  At first she hadn't known whether to laugh or cry or rail at poor Maxwell who sat in the corner of her studio, his tail snapping in concert with Maddie's frantically spinning potter's wheel.

  That was at first. That was when she was scared and stunned and had finally accepted that three separate brands of home pregnancy tests couldn't be wrong. That was also in October, one and a half months ago. Since then she'd had it confirmed by her GP who had referred her on to an OB clinic.

  It hadn't taken all seventy-five days for her to embrace the idea that she was having a baby. It had taken all of one. One emotionally draining, soul-searching, grinning-like-a-goon day to realize that nothing, absolutely nothing could make her happier than the prospect of having a child of her own.

  Well, nothing short of having a child with a man who loved her.

  "But, hey … you can't have everything, right Max?"

  Disgruntled by the noise of her spinning wheel, Max leaped up to his bed in the sunny window and turned his back on her.

  "Men," she mumbled with a halfhearted grin and set about convincing herself how lucky she was.

  It was two weeks until Christmas. There was snow on the ground and a fire in her hearth. Her new gallery was beautiful and more successful than ever. Her studio was state-of-the-art, and her loft apartment above the gallery was spacious and airy. She was already making plans to turn one of her two spare bedrooms into a nursery.

  "It'll be fun when I can share my plans with someone," she said aloud as she critically studied the piece she'd just crafted. "No offense, Max, but you're just not that good with wallpaper and fabric swatches."

  Rising slowly, she stretched, washed her hands, then rubbed at the dull ache in her lower back.

  "Nothing to be concerned about," Dr. Moyer had assured her. "But I don't want to see you bending over that wheel for half a day then spending another four to six hours on your feet in the gallery. You've got to slow down the pace."

  He hadn't had to tell her twice. The first month had taken a toll on her stamina. Once she was past that, the morning sickness had hit. She'd never been good at being sick, and she was glad that particular little element of gestation was, for the most part, behind her. Now the leg cramps were giving her fits at night.

  "But we're handling it, right Max?"

  Yeah. She was handling it so well, she was reduced to rambling to her cat.

  When the bell over the gallery door rang, she tugged off her smock and smoothed her hands over her tummy, which was just hinting at producing a little bulge. Thankful for her penchant for loose sweaters, she headed toward the sound.

  "Anybody home?" Emma's voice rang through the gallery to the studio.

  "Em," she cried, breaking into a huge grin.

  She zipped through the studio door and rushed headlong into Emma's arms for a long, clinging hug.

  When she pulled away, she was smiling through tears, and Emma was clearly wondering what the devil was going on.

  "Are you okay?" she asked carefully.

  Realizing belatedly that her emotional display was a bit overblown when she'd just seen Emma the day before, she backpedaled with a nervous laugh. "I'm fine. Geez. It's almost Christmas. I guess I've caught the spirit."

  "I guess," Emma said, smiling now, too, but with guarded concern. "Are you sure you're okay? You've seemed sort of … I don't know. Emotionally fragile the past few weeks."

  Maddie forced a laugh. "Oh, for heaven's sake. I haven't been fragile—emotionally or physically—since I found out there wasn't a Tooth Fairy."

  Then, without warning, the tears—a whole bucket of them—gushed through the hole she'd been patching with determination and stubborn pride. "And there isn't, you know," she sobbed as a totally perplexed Emma James placed a consoling arm over her shaking shoulders.

  "There isn't what, sweetie?"

  "A Tooth Fairy," she wailed, through a hiccupping sob. "There's no To-oth Fairy, and there's n-no, Easter B-Bunny, and, and, there's no S-Santa Claus!"

  "Oh, Maddie, honey," Emma crooned as she folded her friend in her arms and wondered what in the world was going on.

  Worried and dumbfounded, she stood there rocking her, absorbing her tears on the collar of her coat and racking her brain for understanding.

  "Oh, my Lord," she murmured abruptly, when she put together Maddie's recurrent bouts of "stomach flu," the slight flush to her cheeks, the sense that she was always hovering on the brink of an emotional edge. And now this.

  "Maddie," she said, gently setting her at arm's length. "You're pregnant, aren't you?"

  Maddie blinked once, then sniffled through an outraged. "Who told you?"

  Emma couldn't help it. She laughed. Then she hugged her again. "You did, sweetie. Only I wasn't listening until the bad news about the Tooth Fairy broke your heart."

  All the tension suddenly eased from Maddie's shoulders, like the weight of the Tetons had just been lifted. She managed a teary little smile and then a self-derisive laugh.

  "Am I going to be like this all nine months?" She blew her nose on the tissue Emma offered.

  "On and off," Emma conceded and led her back toward the studio where she knew Maddie had taken to keeping a pot of herbal tea brewing. She poured them both a cup. "But you'll learn to read the signs and keep it under control."

  Behind the closed door of the studio, Emma regarded her with concern. "Do you want to tell me about it?"

  This was the part Maddie had been both hoping for and dreading.

  "Not much to tell," she said with a slight lift of her shoulders.

  "Let's start with When are you due? How are you feeling?"

  "I'm due in May and for the most part, I'm feeling fine." Her smile was bittersweet. "I remember asking you those same questions a couple of months ago."

  "I'm so happy for you, Maddie."

>   "Me, too." She pinched back another threat of tears. "Darn, I hate this. I blubber and bawl at the most stupid things."

  "Stupid things like worrying about how you're going to handle all this by yourself?" Emma suggested gently.

  When Maddie hung her head, Emma pressed on. "Have you told the baby's father?"

  Suddenly Maddie's cup of tea captured all of her attention.

  "I don't want to be judgmental," Emma said after a moment to digest that Maddie's silence was a negative answer, "but don't you think it's a little unfair to keep him in the dark?"

  "He doesn't want the baby," she stated uncategorically. "He doesn't want me."

  Emma's frown was probing. "So you have told him."

  Fidgety suddenly, Maddie rose and walked to the window. "No. No, I haven't told him. But I know what he'd say. I know what he'd do."

  "And what would that be?"

  "He'd insist we get married," she said as if that were the equivalent of being boiled in oil.

  "This would be bad?" Emma prodded in that same gentle tone.

  "It would be very bad. I'm not going to trap someone who doesn't love me into marrying me."

  "And why are you so sure he doesn't love you?"

  Her laugh was short and harsh. "You'll have to trust me on this one."

  "What about you? Do you love him?"

  Squaring her shoulders, Maddie stared at the snowcapped mountains in the distance and made her voice as cold as those jagged peaks. "How I feel about him doesn't matter much, does it? Besides, I wouldn't turn to him if he was the last lifeboat leaving a sinking ship."

  "Oh, Lord," Emma murmured as her second revelation of the day hit her right between the eyes. "It's Clay."

  * * *

  Emma James appeared the picture of gentile Southern-bred sugar, but she was as determined as a jackhammer when she was grounded in conviction. And she was convinced that Maddie owed it to herself and to the baby and to Clay to tell him.

  A week later, Emma finally wore Maddie down. She'd be showing soon, anyway, Maddie reasoned grudgingly. Clay may have been avoiding her like she was Typhoid Mary since they'd returned from Wind River in September, but she was bound to run into him in a town the size of Jackson. Even if their paths didn't cross, word would eventually get around. He wasn't stupid. He had ten fingers and a calendar. Sooner or later he'd figure it out. In the end she decided she'd rather he find out on her terms than by chance.