The Marriage Bargain

by Victoria Pade

  A full head of steam that she hoped would carry her right back into Adam’s arms.

  The hammer wasn’t on the cabin roof anymore when Victoria arrived at Adam’s ranch later that afternoon and she wasn’t moving too swiftly as she got out of Crystal’s car.

  “Good luck!” Crystal said enthusiastically.

  “Check your messages as soon as you get back. You may be making a return trip right away.”

  Crystal laughed as if she knew better, waved Victoria on, and called, “Look past the surface, that’s my advice to you.”

  But even as Victoria headed for the house, she wasn’t sure about the wisdom in this venture. Especially when the drive alone had taken so much out of her and left her with very little strength to face what she feared she was about to face. Merely walking up the porch steps was an exercise in agony that required her standing at the top of the porch for a moment before she could go any further. But, she decided, she’d come this far, she had to go through with it.

  On the positive side, she thought, she already felt so bad maybe a rejection added to it would have less impact.

  But she didn’t actually believe it.

  Once she reached the front door, she also didn’t know whether to knock and wait to be invited in or to just go in unannounced.

  It seemed odd to knock, but in the end that’s what she did, opting for courtesy over surprise.

  It felt like forever before the inside door opened. So long that Victoria began to wonder if Adam was out on horseback or in the barn.

  Then there he was, standing on the other side of the screen in nothing but a pair of jeans. His feet and glorious chest were bare and his hair was damp, as if he’d come straight from the shower.

  The shock of seeing her registered on his face. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Not a greeting that encouraged her.

  “Crystal brought me,” she said dimly, wondering if she could flag down her new friend for a ride back to Whitehorn right then and there. But before she could do that Adam pushed open the screen door and scooped her up into his arms.

  Apparently this time she really did look as bad as she felt, Victoria thought, assuming one glimpse of her was all it took for him to see how weak and worn out she was and to get her off her feet before she crumpled.

  Inside, he set her gently on the couch, her back against one of the arms so her feet could be up on the seat cushions. Then he sat on the coffee table, facing her, and said, “You should still be in the hospital, not out gallivanting around. I don’t know what those doctors were thinking to let you go or what you were thinking to come all the way out here.”

  Again, the chastisement was not encouraging.

  “I needed to…” She almost told him the truth—that she needed to talk to him—but at the last second she changed her mind and instead said, “I needed to get my things.”

  “I could have sent them to you,” he said, refuting her reasoning, all the while giving her a hard stare.

  “And I wanted to give you back your shirt,” she added as if that lent more weight to the errand.

  His glance dropped momentarily to the shirt, to her breasts, before he seemed to force his eyes to her face again.

  “Keep it,” he clipped.

  Victoria was feeling less and less sure about coming here. If Adam had anything but contempt for her it was hidden beneath the surface.

  There she was, alone with him, without an immediate ride back to town and Crystal’s urgings playing over and over in her mind.

  What do you have to lose? What do you have to lose?

  So goodbye, dignity, she thought, and plunged in.

  “I wanted to talk to you, too,” she finally admitted.

  Adam frowned at her much the way he had the previous day, and even then he was so phenomenally handsome it nearly took her breath away.

  But more than just being enamored of his good looks, she recognized her feelings for him welling up inside her and she knew all over again that she had to do this.

  “Okay, well, I guess if making love to me was the crowning glory of your revenge, I’m going to give you the diamonds for that crown,” she said more to herself than to him. Then she blurted, “I don’t want my freedom.”

  His brows pulled so close together they almost became one.

  But this time it was Victoria who rushed on before he could speak, mimicking Crystal’s words to her.

  “I’m in love with you and I think you’re in love with me and I want to work things out in this marriage and stick with it.”

  That said, she felt as if she’d gone out onto the middle of a tightrope fastened with two frayed ends that could break at any moment.

  Adam didn’t put her at ease in any kind of hurry. He just went on staring at her, delving into her eyes with his.

  Victoria was so afraid that he was trying to find the words to tell her that he wanted her out of his life forever that she didn’t even draw a breath.

  When he finally spoke it was in that quiet, solemn voice again. “You’re in love with me after all I did to you this past week?”

  Slowly she let herself breathe again.

  “A little hard work never hurt anyone.”

  He looked at her pointedly. “It hurt you.”

  “Hard work didn’t hurt me. Being dumb enough to get on a frosty roof hurt me.”

  “I hurt you,” he said so softly she barely heard him.

  What she also heard was the undeniable evidence that he truly did feel guilty. Deeply guilty.

  “Not as bad as I hurt you twenty years ago,” she admitted the same way, all bluster gone and only the most sincere regret sounding in her tone.

  For another long moment Adam held her eyes with his and Victoria wondered if he was thinking that too much hurt had passed between them for anything to conquer it.

  But then she saw the lines in his face relax and the tiniest of smiles tempt the corners of his mouth.

  “So you love me?” he asked.

  Victoria had the impression that despite the light tone he used, he wasn’t joking. And that now wasn’t a time for her to joke back. That he needed to hear it as much as she did.

  “Yes, I love you,” she confirmed.

  “Even after everything?”

  “Even after everything.”

  “And you want to stay married to me?”

  “Until the day I die,” she said, hoping—praying—he wasn’t making her bare her soul just to knock her down again.

  But this was the risk she had to take, the last hurdle she had to cross, just the way Crystal had said. Now that she’d taken that risk and crossed that last hurdle, she was willing to do whatever she needed to do.

  Adam didn’t speak for what seemed like centuries, and Victoria felt suspended in midair on that frayed tightrope.

  But then he closed his eyes and sighed as if an enormous weight had been lifted from his shoulders. When he opened his eyes again, he moved from the coffee table to sit beside her on the sofa, taking her hands in both of his.

  “We’re quite a pair, aren’t we? We do our worst to each other and fall in love, anyway.”

  “Then you do love me?” she couldn’t help asking on a gust of relief of her own.

  Adam smiled at her, tenderly, sweetly. “I do love you. So damn much I didn’t know how I was going to go on living without you.”

  “Then why set me free?” she demanded.

  He chuckled a little. “I thought it was the least I could do after putting you in the hospital.”

  “You didn’t put me in the hospital. I did that to myself.”

  “Because you were no doubt scared silly that I’d go ballistic over a forgotten hammer.”

  Okay, so he had her on that one. She wasn’t even sure how he knew what she’d been doing up on that roof, but at that moment it didn’t matter to her.

  She was curious about whether or not she’d been right, though.

  “Would you have gone ballistic over it?” she asked.r />
  “No, I told you I put that bear into hibernation. And what was that stuff about my making love to you as the crowning glory of my revenge?”

  Victoria shrugged—and winced at the pain the shrug caused her. “I couldn’t be sure after you dumped me yesterday if that had been the plan all along—weaken my knees with lovemaking and then pull the rug out from under me.”

  He frowned at her again but this time it was only a mock frown. “I beg your pardon. What kind of a creep do you take me for?”

  “No kind. Not anymore,” she said easily, meaning it.

  “I am a little peeved at one thing, though,” he said then.

  “What’s that?”

  “That now that we’re going to have a real marriage I can’t whisk you into bed to consummate it.”

  Victoria laughed. “No, I don’t think I could live through that. Unfortunately.”

  “Maybe we could just whisk you into bed,” he said, standing then to lift her into his arms once more.

  He carried her into his bedroom and carefully set her on her feet.

  “Clothes must be uncomfortable for you,” he decreed, shedding his own pants to stand gloriously, magnificently naked before her.

  Victoria feasted on the sight even as she laughed again. “My clothes didn’t stop being uncomfortable for me by you taking your clothes off,” she said as if he didn’t know that and hadn’t been teasing her.

  Those words seemed to give him just the excuse he needed to bend over and remove her shoes, then slip her sweatpants down and unsnap the shirt in one fast tear, sliding the shirt off her shoulders and letting it fall to the floor with everything else.

  He again swooped her up into his arms and laid her on his unmade bed where he joined her, pulling her oh-so-tenderly to lie naked body to naked body.

  Victoria thought this was the best therapy because suddenly all her aches and pains eased. She snuggled against him.

  He kissed her then. Finally! A deep, soul-searching, soul-uniting kiss that washed away every lingering doubt, every lingering fear, every lingering insecurity, and claimed her as his. This kiss was different somehow, more intimate, more open and uninhibited even though they both held passion at bay since she wasn’t well enough to do more than that.

  But that kiss, at that moment, in that way, was almost enough because nothing had ever felt as wonderful, as fulfilling, as satisfying, to Victoria.

  Adam ended it and looked into her eyes once again, so intensely that she thought she could actually feel heat coming from them.

  “I love you, Tori,” he said as if he knew how much she was longing to hear it again.

  “That was part of how I convinced myself to come here today,” she confessed.

  “You were that sure I loved you?” he teased.

  She looked up into his chiseled, exquisitely handsome features and smiled a smug smile. “No. But you called me Tori yesterday, instead of Victoria.” She parroted the stern way he’d used her name before. “It was like an endearment and when I remembered it, it seemed to soften all the harsh things you’d said.”

  “I gave myself away, huh?”

  “Afraid so.”

  He gently hugged her closer. “Good thing.”

  Before too much time passed in their reunion Victoria felt the need to tell him one more thing.

  “I’m going to make sure my parents know what really happened in the barn twenty years ago, that I was at fault for the whole thing. I know it won’t make up for anything but—”

  Adam stopped her words with another kiss.

  Then he said, “It’s all behind us. Yes, tell your folks so they won’t hate their son-in-law, but then let’s never talk about it again. Or about this past week, either. Let’s just start over again from right here.”

  Victoria smiled at him again. “I think I’d rather start from Saturday night. That was just too good to pretend it never happened.”

  He smiled, too, with a hint of ego to it. “Liked that, did you?” he asked, running a feather-light hand down her side and up to barely tease her breast and the nipple that had hardened all by itself.

  “Didn’t you?” she challenged with a slight flex of her hips against his.

  He groaned in a mixture of agony and ecstasy and flexed back. “Oh, yeah, I liked it all right. A whole lot.”

  Then he kissed the top of her head and said, “But quit torturing me down there when you can’t do anything about it.”

  This time it was Victoria who groaned, wishing they could do something about it.

  “Maybe if I have a little nap,” she suggested.

  “A little nap. A long nap. Whatever it takes,” he answered her. “I can be patient when I know we’ll have the rest of our lives.”

  “Promise?”

  “Cross my heart.”

  Once more he kissed her, a blissfully sweet kiss, before he settled back onto the pillow and pressed her head to his chest to stroke her hair.

  “Sleep,” he ordered.

  It wasn’t a command Victoria could refuse because now that she honestly could rest, she really needed to.

  And as she drifted into the first peaceful sleep she’d had since they’d made love Saturday night, she did it with the knowledge that this marriage would be more than one of convenience or retribution or comeuppance.

  She knew it would be the real thing. Forever and ever. Until death did they part.

  And that was the best bargain she’d ever struck.

  Special thanks and acknowledgment to Victoria Pade for her contribution to the Montana Mavericks series.

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-6087-4

  THE MARRIAGE BARGAIN

  Copyright © 2000 by Harlequin Books S.A.

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