The True Love Wedding Dress

by Barbara Metzger, Connie Brockway, Casey Claybourne; Catherine Anderson

  His daughter’s name was poised on his lips as he crossed the attic threshold—

  And then he went still.

  Silhouetted before the garret’s lone window stood a woman. A woman half clothed.

  Her thin white chemise, backlit by the summer sunshine, appeared nearly transparent, displaying firm legs and bountiful curves in agonizing detail. Agonizing to Josh, that is, since he’d not had a woman in more than three months, and his body’s swift response to such a vision bordered on painful.

  She was in the process of removing a gown, and thus was slightly bent forward, revealing more creamy flesh than any sane man dared dream about while living alone on the trail as long as Josh had done. A handful of bright coppery-red curls teased her neck, and her expression was soft and dreamy.

  Soft and dreamy, however, proved to be all too short-lived. In the next instant, a piercing shriek nearly shredded his eardrums, causing Josh to rear back in surprise and smack the back of his head on an exposed rafter.

  As he cussed richly and soundly, he reached for the knot already swelling on his skull, noticing how the woman’s green eyes grew wide. For less than a second, a hint of guilt came over him as he worried that he’d frightened her, but then the trespassing miss boldly ordered, “Out!”

  Out?

  Frantically, she set about dragging the dress over her pale limbs, as Josh felt an annoyed scowl dig into his forehead. Goddammit, what was going on here? Who was this woman who thought she could order him out of his own home? And what in the name of Moses was she doing practically naked in his garret?

  “Shoo!” she yelled again, waving him off as one would a stray dog.

  That disdainful “shoo”—coupled with his throbbing scalp, shoulder, and groin—pushed Josh from being merely annoyed to feeling full-blown anger.

  “Just who the hell are you?” he growled, perhaps more loudly than he had intended.

  To his astonishment, the woman straightened to her full height, which wasn’t all that impressive, and shoved her fists onto her hips. The gown, a pretty white frothy thing, clung to every inch of her.

  “And just who the hell are you?” she retorted, challenging him with a defiant thrust of her chin. Her accent, an odd blend of the deep South and something vaguely Irish, surprised Josh almost as much as the ease with which she swore at him.

  “I,” he replied slowly, each word clipped, “am the owner of this house.”

  Uncertainty flickered across her face—a lovely face, Josh decided—as she looked him over from the top of his aching head to the tips of his stockinged feet.

  “You’re Eliza’s pa?”

  Josh would have sworn that her nose actually wrinkled and, while he realized that he probably wasn’t looking his best, he didn’t much appreciate the way she was studying him as if he were a slug on her dinner plate.

  Before he could answer, however, or demand the name of the nose-wrinkling intruder, Eliza’s high-pitched voice drifted up from the staircase, calling out, “Hello? Penny, are you up here?”

  The woman started.

  “I thought,” Eliza continued to call out as she rounded the landing, “we could begin Midsummer Night’s—”

  In ordinary circumstances, Josh might have laughed at the comical sequence of emotions that played across his daughter’s face. Initially, her eyes lit with delight to see him, and she made a movement to rush into his arms. But just as quickly that light faded to visible trepidation, and she pulled up short, her gaze darting to the woman Josh now assumed to be “Penny.”

  “Papa.”>

  “Eliza.”

  He could almost see the wheels spinning in that brain of hers. Her tongue darted nervously to the corner of her mouth as she tugged at a stray leaf caught in her hair. But in typical Eliza-like fashion, she did not long remain at a loss for words, recovering her composure with a forced smile.

  “I see you’ve met Penny.” The smile grew yet brighter.

  Josh did not answer. Although his anger still bubbled just below the surface, years of experience had taught him to proceed with caution where his daughter was concerned. From the day she had uttered her first word at the precocious age of six months, the child had thoroughly befuddled him. She had a gift whereby she could talk anyone into anything, and by the time she had reached her second birthday Josh had known himself to be completely outwitted. More than once Macgorrie had claimed that Eliza must be a descendent of the fairy folk, a theory that Josh dismissed as superstitious nonsense. Nonetheless, there was no denying that there was something different about the child. Something that caused one to question whether a young person should be so clever.

  “Eliza, I’d like to speak to you in the parlor.”

  Josh had endeavored to sound calm, yet even to his own ears, he’d failed.

  Eliza opened her mouth to argue, but he stopped her with a brusque, upraised palm.

  “Now,” he added, before she could set off on one of her long-winded explanations.

  Without looking back at the woman, Josh headed for the stairs, his jaw clenched with an unsettling combination of irritation and desire. In his mind’s eye, he was still reluctantly savoring the picture the redhead had made when first he’d entered the attic. God help him, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d run into anything so tempting. Worse yet, he couldn’t decide at which point she had looked more appealing to him. Clad only in a flimsy chemise, she had presented a mouthwatering eyeful by any man’s standards. But then in that ivory dress. . . . He couldn’t quite explain it, but just as he was thinking how pretty she was, she had pulled on the gown and had suddenly gone from pretty to out-and-out beautiful. Of course, it must have been the sun at her back, but he had felt as if there had been a glow about her.

  “Fercrissake,” he muttered. “A glow?” He really had been out on the trail too long. He gave himself a shake, then immediately regretted the sharp movement, for his head had begun a steady pounding.

  Marching into the parlor, he decided to settle this business with haste, since he’d not yet achieved even the first of his homecoming goals: bed, bath, or bawd. And he was itching to get to at least one of them.

  Eliza scurried in right behind him, her manner lacking its customary confidence. Josh folded his arms over his chest, leaned back against the fireplace mantel, and took a deep, calming breath.

  “Papa, I—”

  “In ten words or less.”

  “But—”

  “Ten words, Eliza.”

  She rolled her right foot onto its side. “Penny is my new governess.”

  Josh hid his reaction behind a scratch of a sideburn.

  “New governess?” he questioned dryly. “Has there been a previous one?”

  “Oh, no.” Blond curls flew upward as if taking flight. “Penny is the first. The only one.”

  “I see. And just how long has she been serving as your governess?”

  “Three weeks. She lives with us.”

  Josh nodded, convinced that his daughter had to be some heavenly retribution for his youthful days of drinking, womanizing, and general carousing.

  “She’s wonderful, Papa,” Eliza rushed to assure him. “You’re simply going to adore her.”

  Wonderful, indeed, Josh thought to himself, picturing the woman unclothed in front of the attic window. With a deliberate effort, he pushed the distracting vision from his mind.

  “Eliza, I doubt that I will have an opportunity to ‘adore’ her, since, as of today, her employment is terminated.”

  Eliza answered with a gasp. “But, Papa, you can’t!”

  “What I cannot do, Eliza, is have a young woman living here in my house. It’s not—” He struggled to find the appropriate words. “It’s not . . . proper.”

  “But she will have nowhere to go.”

  “She can go back to where she came from.”

  “All the way back to Massachusetts?”

  Josh clutched the top of his head, his voice rising, “What in the name—”

&
nbsp; He saw a telltale glistening on the tips of Eliza’s lashes.

  “She came from Massachusetts?” he managed to say.

  “That’s right.” She fought back her tears with a sudden show of bravado. “From Boston. I had her shipped here!”

  Dear God. The Big Man Above was definitely getting even.

  “Look here, Eliza Jane.” He tried to adopt a tone of reason. “You can’t go ordering up a governess like you order books or a winter coat. And what do you need a governess for in the first place?”

  Eliza’s lips pushed out into a small, quivery pout. “I need a governess. I do.”

  “Why? For Pete’s sake, you’re probably more educated than anybody teaching up at the university.” He thrust a finger in the general direction of the hill. “Are you trying to tell me that this Penny is more qualified than any of them?

  “I don’t know. But I needed her.”

  Josh studied her for a long moment. “Needed her for what?”

  Sighing, Eliza closed her eyes and rubbed them hard with the heels of her palms. “I don’t know,” she said, her words slow. “I guess it seemed to me that everything was working out so well for the ladies that Mr. Mercer had brought that I thought maybe . . .”

  Josh snapped to attention. The Mercer girls? Asa Mercer claimed those women came to Seattle to be schoolteachers, but everyone from San Francisco to the Yukon knew they’d been brought here to marry the local bachelors.

  Then the realization hit him head-on with the force of a falling sequoia.

  “Good God, Eliza, you brought that woman here to marry me?”

  “Marry?”

  Penny, who’d been eavesdropping just outside the doorway, did not bother to conceal herself or her alarm. She stepped into the parlor, mouth agape.

  “Is your pa speakin’ the truth?”

  Eliza’s woeful expression revealed her guilt in no uncertain terms, and for a split second, Penny came close to feeling sorry for the child, especially when she read the silent pleading in her gaze. Then Penny caught a whiff of Joshua Cooper, and any sympathy she had been feeling evaporated like smoke.

  “No. Uh-uh.”

  Penny shook her head back and forth, all the while keeping a cautious eye on the man on the other side of the parlor. Heaven knew she had run across plenty of rough-and-tumble men in her day—men so down on their luck that they’d been living in the Boston alleys for months without the benefit of clean clothes or a decent bath. Men who’d suffered the ravages of war so deeply that comfort could only be found in a bottle or in the arms of a stranger.

  But never had Penny seen any man as frightening as this one. Not only was his dark brown hair matted with dirt and long enough to reach his shoulders, but he was also twice the height and girth of an ordinary person. He wore a filthy buckskin coat that Penny would have sworn he’d used to mop up mud puddles, and his right cheek was crusted with dried blood. Why, when she’d first seen him in the attic she’d genuinely feared that a bear or some other forest creature had wandered into the house.

  “I’m sorry, Eliza,” she said, still shaking her head, “but I ain’t looking to get married.”

  Josh Cooper released a short, sarcastic laugh. “You don’t have to worry, ’cause I ain’t asking!”

  Although Eliza had taught her that “ain’t” wasn’t correct English—and Penny was trying her best not to use it—the word still slipped out from time to time, but that didn’t give him, Penny told herself, the right to poke fun.

  “Well, it wouldn’t do you any good to ask,” Penny retorted, stung by his mockery. “I didn’t come all this way to get tied to a fellow who smells like he’s got somethin’ dead in his pockets.”

  “No?” He leaned forward as though to get a better look at her, or to bring his stench closer, and Penny noticed that his eyes were the color of Elliott Bay, a dark, flinty gray blue. “What did you come for, then?”

  “Now, Papa.” Eliza tried to jump between them, but he moved her to his side with one large hand. Standing together, the father and daughter did not look as if they could be even remotely related, Penny thought. Eliza was so pale and delicate, while he was all burly and dark and gruff. And hairy.

  Penny met his taunting gaze, and wondered how much he already knew. What had Eliza told him while she’d been upstairs hurriedly buttoning herself back into her old brown linsey? She concluded the safest course was to answer with as much honesty as she could.

  “I came west probably for the same reason most folks do: I wanted a fresh start.”

  Something flickered at the back of his eyes. Could it have been understanding?

  “That’s all well and good.” He cleared his throat and stepped back a pace. “But I don’t need a wife and Eliza doesn’t need a governess.”

  “But Pa—”

  Joshua silenced his daughter with a single stony glance. “Eliza, I am not going to discuss it, nor am I going to stand here and listen to your arguments. You’ve gone too far this time, and you damn well know it. You’re lucky I don’t tan your hide.”

  Eliza’s chin dropped to her chest, and Penny thought his expression softened a smidge as he looked down on the tiny bent head. Then he turned back to Penny, and his jaw hardened beneath his thick beard.

  “I’ll pay for your passage back to Boston, and since you’re not to blame for my daughter’s folly, you’ll have two months’ salary as severance pay. I should be able to get you on the Mary Woodruff next week.”

  Eliza muttered something unintelligible into the front of her pinafore, but her father ignored her.

  “Now I am going to find Macgorrie, have myself a bath, and get some sleep.” He tugged at the bottom of his leather coat, as if to signal the conclusion of their business, then headed for the parlor door.

  “Oh, Papa.”

  He paused, but did not turn around. Penny saw his massive shoulders rise and fall in what might have been a silent sigh.

  “I, uh . . .” Eliza scrunched up her face in that funny way she did when she had something unpleasant to say. “I put Penny in your room.”

  Oh, golly. She should have figured as much when she found the men’s clothes in the armoire. “I’ll move my things,” she hastily offered.

  “No.”

  “Truly, I—”

  “No,” he repeated, half turning to spear her with his gaze. “I’ll bed down in the study until you leave.”

  Penny would have protested, but she had seen something in his regard that she dared not provoke. “Thank you,” she said quietly.

  With a curt nod, he left the room.

  Before Penny could take another breath, Eliza’s thin arms were wrapped around her waist, and she was talking as fast as it was humanly possible to speak.

  “Oh, Penny, I’m sorry. Please don’t be angry with me. I’m sure he doesn’t mean it, because once he comes to know you, he’ll love you the way I do, and then you’ll stay and everything will be perfect, and we’ll become a family exactly as I had imagined.”

  Become a family. Penny’s heart twisted at the words because, like Eliza, she understood what it was like to be an orphan hungering for family. But she also knew the dangers of clinging to false hope. Her touch gentle, she loosened Eliza’s hold, drawing her backward so that she could see her face.

  “Eliza, did you honestly think that your father and I would agree to get married?”

  The child’s smile was sweetly desperate. “He will grow to like you. He will. I mean, you are so very kind and so very fun.”

  Penny wanted to reply, “And he is so very cranky and so very hairy,” but she refrained.

  Instead she said, “Sweetheart, I think you could keep ordering governesses ’til there wasn’t a single woman left in all of Boston, but I don’t think you’re going to get what you’re looking for. Your pa doesn’t seem keen on the idea of marriage.”

  “But that’s only because he’s never been in love.”

  Penny frowned. “Oh, now don’t say that. I’m sure he loved your mother
very much.”

  “No, he didn’t.” Eliza’s eyes drew wide with conviction. “Mrs. Murphy told me the whole story. He married my mother because it was my grandfather’s last wish and he couldn’t say ‘No’ to his dying friend. You see, Papa barely knew my mother, but he knew my grandfather, and when my grandfather suddenly fell ill, he begged Papa to take care of his daughter, Madeline. So Papa did as my grandfather asked and married her.” Eliza’s voice fell to a near whisper as if she were sharing a secret. “But the widow Murphy said that they were never happy together. Never. Because they didn’t love each other.”

  Penny smoothed a curl on the child’s forehead. “Come now, you don’t know if that’s true.” Even though many children weren’t conceived in loving marriages, for some reason Penny didn’t want Eliza to believe that about her own birth.

  “It is,” Eliza insisted. “Mrs. Murphy says that back then it was hard enough for anyone to make a life in the West, much less someone as sickly as my mother. So Papa had no choice but to marry her.”

  “Hmm.” Penny found it difficult to believe that the crusty mountain of a man she had just met would wed a woman as a favor to a friend.

  “Well, from what I can tell, your pa isn’t someone who’s right now looking to fall in love or get married. And neither am I.”

  Although as the words left her mouth, she remembered the girlish dreams she had entertained as she’d danced around the attic in that breathtaking gown. An odd pang shot through her as she wondered whether she had been wearing Madeline Cooper’s wedding dress.

  “Eliza.” She hesitated, almost embarrassed to ask. But at the same time, she needed to know. Crazy as it was, Penny felt as if that gown had been made for her and her alone, and she couldn’t bear the thought that it may have been worn by Eliza’s mother. “I happened to be in the attic, and I, um, stumbled onto an old trunk with a pretty dress—”

  “You found it?” Eliza’s expression brightened.