“I’m not going to do anything to keep her here,” Gabe said from between clenched teeth. “Dana never intended to give up her career.”
“She can’t live here and in New York. She’ll have to choose.”
Gabe didn’t need Josie to tell him that.
“Will you move to New York with her?” Josie asked.
“I expect to continue working here.”
“Then you’ll never keep her,” Josie stated. “You make beautiful furniture, but there nothing exciting about furniture. It’s dull. Some slick operator will snap her up right from under your nose. You ought to get her pregnant as soon as you can. Having a baby changes women. If you give her two or three kids, you just might be able to keep her.”
In other words, he wasn’t enough man for Dana. He needed children to keep her.
Josie was probably right. He’d dated several women in college. Furniture didn’t excite any of them. Ellen had married him—he assumed she had loved him—but it hadn’t been enough to make her stick with a man who lived on the edge of nowhere and spent his days cutting trees into little pieces of wood.
How on earth did he think he could hold a woman like Dana?
He couldn’t. Only a fool would think he could. What did he have to offer? Nothing but Danny. And he didn’t have him yet. He couldn’t afford to forget she had married him only to keep Danny from Lucius. Maybe she didn’t really love him, just thought she did. She’d never had a normal life, a husband, a child, a home, a community, a place where she felt she belonged. After growing up on that merry-go-round her parents called a life, she just loved being valued and appreciated for herself rather than how many antiques she could sell this week or how much money she made.
People in Iron Springs were more interested in whether Danny had had his two-year-old inoculations, how a new cake recipe turned out, how your husband’s lumbago was doing, if your daughter’s pregnancy was going well, if your boy was happy working in Texas. People things. Not opening nights, not charity balls attended by hundreds of millionaires. Definitely not apartments in Paris or vacation homes in Switzerland. Nothing Dana was used to.
He forced himself to concentrate on Liz Dennis’s desk. She wanted it for Matt’s birthday. If he didn’t keep his mind on his work, it wouldn’t be ready, and Liz would have his hide.
But he couldn’t get Dana out of his thoughts. He didn’t understand how he could be so infatuated with a woman with whom he had virtually nothing in common. He was acting like a child after a piece of candy. He ought to know better. Experience had taught him a mistake like this would be extremely painful. It would be stupid to let his heart overrule his head. He should be concentrating on Danny. The child would soon be totally dependent on him.
He’d always wanted children. Watching Danny grow up would give him the feeling of love and belonging he missed. He, his mother and Danny. That was all that was left of his family.
Surely he didn’t need anything else.
“Everyone says this is the best fair we’ve ever had,” Gabe’s mother told him. “It’s all Dana’s doing.”
Gabe had seen very little of Dana during the past week. The phone rang from the moment they got up until they went to bed. It had been so bad one night he’d unplugged it. He’d hardly seen her at all during the past three days.
“I’ve never seen so many people,” Mrs. Purvis said as they walked around the booths. “Marshall said the cars were parked all over the fields and down the road for miles. I don’t know where Dana found them all.”
He didn’t know, either. Apparently she had a magical ability to empty the countryside for miles around.
“Lots of people have come over from Charlottesville.”
The people from Charlottesville didn’t concern Gabe as much as a certain buyer from New York. The man had latched on to Dana the minute he arrived on Friday. He’d introduced himself as an old family friend, much too old to stand on ceremony. He kissed and hugged Dana in a far-more-than-friendly manner. Gabe was about ready to remove him by the shirt collar when Dana pushed him away with a reminder she was a married woman.
Kyle—that was his name, Kyle Estabrook—had laughed and said that was no reason to keep them from having fun. He had promptly staked his claim to Dana as his personal guide. Gabe had been strongly tempted to deliver a hard right to the jaw and put him on a plane back to New York before he regained consciousness. When he muttered just that to Dana, she laughed and said several of the buyers were here at her personal invitation. She intended to make sure they enjoyed themselves enough to want to come back next year. By the time the third buyer fawned over Dana like his own private property, Gabe had to leave before he embarrassed everybody by punching them all out.
He should have been more concerned about the buyers who came by his shop. In one day he got more offers than he could satisfy in a year. By the end of the second, he had stopped accepting business cards. The amounts of money offered still made his head spin.
Sam and Billy were so excited they could hardly contain themselves long enough to talk to the buyers. Sam had already picked out his truck. Billy had made Dana promise to buy him a plane ticket the minute one of their pieces went on display. Both kept pestering Gabe, wanting to know if he had ordered his lathe.
Gabe hadn’t given any thought to his lathe. He couldn’t stop thinking about Dana, wondering what might be happening behind his back. The fact that Dana managed to keep her friends’ behavior within bounds didn’t help much. Having other men interested in his wife—and not being able to turn them away because she really wasn’t his wife—had nearly driven him crazy. His mother, with the help of Elton, had volunteered to take care of Danny for the weekend. She had intended it to leave Gabe free to concentrate on his furniture. Instead it left him free to worry about Dana. Never in his life had he been prey to the demon of jealousy. During the weekend he’d made up for a decade of lost time.
But with the knife edge of jealousy came understanding. He loved Dana. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t sensible, wasn’t rational, that it was dangerous. He loved her, anyway. If he didn’t do something quickly, he could lose her. He left the house and headed toward the center of town and the fair.
Things usually had thinned out by 3:00 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, but not this year. It took Gabe several minutes to realize Dana was nowhere to be found.
“You looking for Dana?” Josie Woodhouse asked.
“Yes,” Gabe replied. “Have you seen her?”
“Sure did. She went off with that Kyle fella, the one that’s been hanging around her closer than a necklace ever since he got here.” She had a look on her face that pretty much said I told you so you stupid jackass.
“He’s a friend of the family.”
“He wants to be part of the family.”
“Since Dana’s already married to me, that’s impossible.”
“Not according to him.”
“What do you mean?” Gabe had an uneasy feeling he knew.
“He seems to think your marriage will be over in a couple of weeks.”
Dana’s parents must have told him about the marriage. That’s why he acted as if he owned her. He knew Dana would be back in New York anytime now.
“He’s a real talkative fella,” Josie said.
“His kind usually is.”
“He said Dana’s doctor is the one who made her stay in Iron Springs. Said she needed to get away from the pressure of business.”
He looked at the crowd, the hundreds of new buyers and sellers. The fair was at least three times as big as ever before. Dana couldn’t help but do things in a big way, even when she was on vacation.
“He said he had the answer to that, and he took Dana away to give her the good news.”
“She went with him?”
“Does a newborn colt go with its mother? That smooth talker just snatched her right from under your nose.” Josie looked pleased and angry to have been right.
“Nobody’s snatching Dana from anywhere.�
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“That’s not what she said.”
Something inside Gabe clamped down hard and fast. “What do you mean?”
“I heard her tell him not to worry, she’d be back in New York soon. She’d turn the whole thing over to her father’s lawyers, it would be over in a few days. She said she’d been trying to catch him for five years. She said if she’d known leaving town and getting married would have worked so easily, she’d have done it years ago. Then she kissed him, laughed as if she hadn’t a care in the world, and kissed him again. Then she said, ‘Now let’s run away and hide.’”
“That could mean anything,” he repeated.
“Don’t be a bigger fool than you already are,” Josie snapped. “She’s getting ready to leave you, Gabe Purvis. Unless you do something about it, you’re going to be raising that kid by yourself.”
But he couldn’t do anything about it. He’d promised her a divorce when she’d agreed to the marriage. If she wanted one, he would have to give it to her.
He cursed himself for being a fool for waiting so long to ask Dana to stay with him, but it looked as if Fate had been on his side for a change. Apparently she’d realized she didn’t love him after all. Seeing her friends from New York made her realize Iron Springs had been a mirage that vanished as soon as an old flame came on the horizon. He couldn’t blame Dana for making such a mistake. He’d done it twice. He was just lucky he’d found out before he gave her his heart.
Then why did it feel broken?
Dana picked up the picture of Danny from the bedside table. It had been taken three months earlier when she and Mattie had spent a weekend at her parents’s cabin in the Adirondacks. Danny had insisted on helping Mattie gather wood for the fire. He held three small sticks clutched to his chest, a proud grin on his face. Dana looked at the picture for a moment then hugged it to her chest.
She couldn’t believe that in a few hours she would be leaving Iron Springs, leaving Danny behind. He had become such an integral part of her life she didn’t know how she could go back to living without seeing his face light up when she came into a room, without his throwing his arms around her neck and squeezing as hard as he could, without his saying I love you, Danie. She’d miss his soft warmth when she kissed him good night. She’d miss so many little things that had seemed small and inconsequential at the time but seemed monumental now that she faced losing them. Watching him steal sausage from Gabe’s plate and stuff it into his mouth before Gabe could steal it back. Finding him in the bathroom with his face covered with shaving cream trying to shave like Gabe. She had known this day would come. She’d tried to prepare for it, but nothing could fortify her against the stark, cold, numbing reality of leaving Danny.
And Gabe.
Dana looked around her at their bedroom. Gabe’s bedroom. The judge had awarded him custody of Danny the day before. Several friends had come over that evening, and they’d had a celebration. After everyone left, they’d made love. It had been better than ever.
But he didn’t ask her to stay.
They’d gotten up early that morning and had breakfast together. He’d talked of Danny’s future, all the things he wanted them to do together year by year until the boy got married.
But he didn’t ask her to stay.
She and Danny had had lunch with Gabe at the shop as usual. Sam’s wife had sent cake and Billy’s mother had tied balloons to the bushes by the front door. Several people had dropped in to congratulate Gabe and Dana on winning custody. Gabe hadn’t complained when the celebrating went on so long Danny fell asleep in Dana’s arms.
But he didn’t ask her to say.
She had to face the obvious. He didn’t intend to ask her to stay. He might love her. He clearly enjoyed making love to her, but he didn’t love her enough to be able to conquer his fear of failing again. Maybe it wasn’t that simple. Even if he did love her, maybe he didn’t think she could be the kind of wife he wanted. After Ellen, maybe he didn’t want a wife. Maybe he had all the family he wanted in Danny.
She opened the suitcase on the bed and began to take her clothes from the drawers. Odd how things crept up on a person so slowly you didn’t realize anything was happening. She’d entered this house fully expecting to leave. She’d kept most of her clothes in her suitcase, everything else crammed into one drawer and one corner of the closet. Sometime over the past few weeks, all her clothes had gone into the drawers and her suitcase had been put away in the attic. Even more telling, bit by bit, Gabe’s clothes had started to reappear in the bedroom.
In the bathroom her stuff sat side by side with Gabe’s in the medicine closet, on the various trays and shelves, in the window. She washed their clothes together, dried them together, folded and put them away at the same time without giving it a second thought. Their robes lay on the bed side by side, their shoes intermingled in the closet. From outward appearances, anyone would think their lives were inextricably linked.
Yet they had always been kept separate.
She threw her underwear into the suitcase and walked over to the window. She could see the swings in the backyard where she often sat while Danny played in the shelter of the massive oak that shaded that corner of the yard. She could see the fence that separated Gabe’s yard from Mrs. Elderman’s. She worked in her garden in the morning and talked to Dana over the fence. Dana had been uncomfortable at first. Then she discovered that Mrs. Elderman’s grandmother had been a member of a Shaker community in Ohio. They spent long hours discussing the value of some of the furniture in Mrs. Elderman’s house. She didn’t want to sell it, but she liked knowing it was valuable.
Mr. and Mrs. Mawbray lived across the street. He worked down the mountain at the ski lodge. People with summer homes kept his store prosperous during the rest of the year. Mrs. Mawbray had a passion for English literature. Dana had minored in English literature. Dana was certain Mrs. Mawbray knew more than half her professors.
She moved down the street in her mind, checking off the families in each house, noting what she’d learned about them, what she would miss when she left. She wiped away a tear. Crying wouldn’t change anything. Besides, she had to finish her packing. She intended to be out of the house before noon.
She didn’t know what she’d tell Danny, but she couldn’t leave without saying goodbye. He had suffered too many unexplained losses already. She intended to lay lots of stress on her promise to come back. She wanted him to think she would be gone only for a short time, but right now she didn’t know how she could stand coming face-to-face with everything she’d ever wanted, knowing she couldn’t have it.
The other people in town—Mrs. Purvis, Salome, Naomi, all the others who’d gradually become part of her life—would have to do without an explanation. She would let Gabe tell his mother and she could tell everyone else. Just thinking about it caused the tears to start.
She wiped them away and started packing as quickly as she could. She didn’t know what she’d do when she came back. Maybe she’d have Gabe bring Danny out to the farmhouse so she wouldn’t have to face the people in town. No. He’d have to bring Danny to New York. She couldn’t come back to Iron Springs at all.
She was crying so hard by now she couldn’t see to pack her clothes. She just grabbed things and stuffed them into the suitcases. It didn’t matter if her clothes were ruined. Or if she fled the house and left them behind. She could buy more. Her life was a wreck. She couldn’t buy another one of those. She’d been given one chance, and she’d lost it.
“What are you doing?”
The sound of Gabe’s voice caused her heart to stop beating. She had meant to leave without seeing him. This was one goodbye she couldn’t handle.
Now she didn’t have a choice. He was here. He could see what she was doing.
“I’m packing,” she answered without turning around. She turned to the closet. She wiped her eyes at the same time she took down several dresses. Without looking up, she carried them to her suitcase and put them in.
“Do you ca
ll stuffing designer dresses into a suitcase like they were old rags packing?”
She looked at what she had done. She hadn’t even attempted to fold the dresses. She’d simply stuffed them in the suitcase like dirty clothes.
“I’ll get them pressed when I get home.” Home! Iron Springs was home. New York felt like exile.
“They’ll be ruined.”
“I’ll buy more.” It was cruel for him to be worried about her clothes when he didn’t care her heart was breaking.
He took the dresses out of the suitcase and hung them back in the closet. “They won’t get wrinkled if you leave them in the closet.”
If he thought she was going to come back every weekend like nothing had changed, he was an idiot. If he needed someone to keep pretending to be his wife, he would have to look elsewhere. She’d served her tour of duty. It had cost her more than she could ever have guessed.
She took the dresses and stuffed them back into the suitcase. “There’s no reason to leave them here. There’s not much chance they’ll fit your next girlfriend.”
He took the clothes and hung them back in the closet. “They fit the only girlfriend I ever want.”
And who the hell was that? “Tell her to get her own clothes.” Dana reached for the dresses once more, but Gabe grabbed her wrist. This whole scene was crazy, her taking clothes out of the closet and him putting them back. She felt like she was in a comedy sketch.
“I’m trying to tell you I want you to stay,” Gabe said. “Apparently I’m not doing it very well.”
“If you want a woman to stay, you say, Please stay. You don’t keep grabbing her clothes from her hands.” She tried to turn away, but he took her by the shoulders, turned her in his direction. When she wouldn’t look at him, he put a hand under her chin and tilted her face upward.
“Please stay.”
She couldn’t believe him. He’d had too many chances to ask her before now. “Why? You don’t love me.”
Married by High Noon Page 20