His head swam with visions of doing exactly that. Lustily Everett pictured himself holding Nellie closer, bringing his mouth to hers, making her open herself to him, so sweet and hot and ready to share herself with him as he kissed her and kissed her, both of them shedding their clothes and losing their minds. Their coming together would be sensual, of course, but also—
“Excellent!” Nellie blinked at him, innocent and pure.
Innocent. And pure. Recognizing those qualities in her, Everett tardily remembered where he was and what he was doing—which was not, he reminded himself strictly, taking advantage of a woman who might or might not aspire to great heights of journalistic excellence…but who definitely trusted him to help her carry off the mission that had brought her to Morrow Creek.
He would earn her trust, Everett promised himself then. He would help Nellie research that investigative story of hers, he would pretend to be her fiancé, and he would convince anyone who looked at them that he was boots over hat in love with her.
Not that doing so would be much of a stretch. He felt half spoony already, and that was only the effect of meeting her. Who knew how much more besotted he’d become if given a few days?
No, the difficult part would be doing all of those things sophisticatedly, Everett knew. The difficult part would be impressing Nellie with his intellect, style and essential refinement without accidentally letting slip his too-manly ways—the aspects of him that had already cost him love once before.
With Nellie, things would be different, Everett swore. With Nellie, he would be different. For her. And if he was lucky, he thought as they rounded the next turn and his hacienda and its pastures and outbuildings came into view, maybe she would even agree to stay after her story for the Weekly Leader was written.
Chapter Four
“…The tricky thing about it,” Edina said as she puttered around the kitchen of Everett’s ranch house on the morning after Nellie’s arrival, “is that the bride doesn’t know beforehand that it’s her groom who’s kidnapping her. All she knows is that she has to make a choice—and if she chooses wrong, the glorious wedding she’s been dreaming about will go up in smoke. Poof!”
The jolly, apron-wearing cook threw up her floury hands in demonstration, making sure that Nellie understood the significance of the prewedding tradition she’d been describing. It was only one of many head-spinning old-world customs that Edina had insisted everyone in the territory—especially the vaqueros—held very close at heart. According to Edina, the ranch hands were hoping Nellie and Everett would include several of their most beloved traditions in their upcoming nuptials.
“It’s a test, really,” Edina went on, going back to her stoneware bowl of biscuit dough. “You probably ken that much. But it’s certainly not fair to the poor bride! She hasn’t even had a chance to sew that last lucky stitch on her wedding dress.”
“Zut alors!” Marybelle, the housekeeper, shook her head. “The bride must not sew her own wedding dress! It is bad luck.”
“No, it is bad luck to wear a green wedding dress.”
“Or a red dress.” Marybelle shuddered. “That is almost as bad as seeing a nun on the way to the church and being struck barren. Non, Nellie must let us sew her wedding dress for her.”
“Oh! That would be lovely!” Feeling almost as though the dress in question would truly be hers—and not just a footnote in her story for the Weekly Leader—Nellie took an enlivening sip of coffee. “Honestly I hadn’t given much thought to what I might wear. I’m not good with fashion. I’m a truly awful seamstress.”
Edina and Marybelle stared at her in patent disbelief.
Oh. Fashion and sewing skills were essential for ladies, Nellie recalled too late. “I mean, I don’t enjoy sewing.”
The two women blinked, still seeming not to comprehend her.
Perhaps some diversion would be best. “What about the wedding itself?” Nellie asked brightly. “You’ve told me about several prewedding traditions, but what about the wedding?”
“At the last wedding I went to, I got a daisy pin for a favor,” Edina shared. “The unmarried ladies wear theirs upside down, you know. I lost mine before the end of the night!”
Mystified by the significance of that, Nellie raised her brows in confusion. Seeing her, Marybelle rushed to explain.
“She thinks that means she’s next to be married,” Marybelle said in her enchanting French-accented speech. “But I put more stock in catching the bouquet, myself. At the last wedding I attended, I did that. So I believe I’m the next to be married.”
Edina disagreed. Their conversation had the tenor of a longstanding rivalry—leavened with affection, to be sure, but a rivalry, all the same. Propping her booted feet on the rungs of the nearest ladder-back chair, Nellie listened with interest.
Idly she reached down to pet the tabby cat that had padded into the kitchen and taken up residence underneath her seat. Nellie didn’t know its name, but like everything and everyone else in Everett’s home, the cat had welcomed her unstintingly.
“I will have a traditional ceremony, the way we do in Brittany,” Marybelle was saying. “Children will block the road with wedding ribbons, and I will cut them with fancy shears. To reach me, my groom will have to remove briars from the road—”
Edina snorted. “Likely they’ll be tumbleweeds, you mean.”
“—and I will toss my garter and have a chiverie!”
“Oh, I do love me a good shivaree!” Edina agreed with
Marybelle readily for once. “Staying up till all hours, having a wee nip of whiskey, crowding around the hapless married couple while they try to have it off in their wedding-night bed—”
Appalled at the very notion, Nellie gawked at her. She couldn’t help picturing herself and Everett, clad in nightwear with blankets pulled up to their chins, surrounded by boisterous Westerners wielding cowbells and hard liquor at midnight.
While the idea of Everett in bed with her held a certain undeniable…intrigue—making her wonder exactly what he did wear to sleep—the rest of that scenario left Nellie feeling aghast.
Catching her horrified expression, Edina placidly went back to patting out her biscuit dough. “Not that we’ll do anything like that to you and Everett, dearie,” she promised.
“Oh, non,” Marybelle agreed coolly—and not entirely convincingly. “We and the vaqueros will leave you alone for your wedding night’s l’amour. All we ask is that you indulge us with a few harmless les traditions in the days before the wedding.”
“And during the wedding ceremony itself,” Edina put in.
“Bien sûr.” Marybelle nodded. “During the wedding, too. You will have your maids of honor, to confuse the evil spirits. You’ll need to distract them from making mischief for the true bride.”
“I could think of no one nicer than the two of you,” Nellie opined, beginning to feel guilty that she couldn’t promise the positions of honor to Marybelle and Edina, “to stand with me.”
At that, both women gave girlish smiles. Their pleasure only added to Nellie’s burgeoning sense that she was unavoidably hoodwinking these kind people. Everyone at Everett’s ranch had greeted her with open arms. And she was repaying them by being only half truthful about the real reason she’d come there.
But she couldn’t write an accurate story for the Leader if she didn’t experience an authentic mail-order marriage—at least in part—could she? That meant Nellie had to carry on as she was.
“You’ll need hearty groomsmen, too,” Edina added, filling her pan with several more biscuits. She’d already made at least three dozen of them. “To be sure you’re not stolen away by rival cowboys.”
“Rival cowboys?” Nellie laughed. “I don’t think that will be a problem. For one thing, they won’t want me. For another—”
“Won’t want you?” Her two new
friends regarded her owlishly. “Why not?”
“Well, because I’m not strictly marriageable,” Nellie said. “I never have been.” That’s what had made her ideally suited for her story on the mail-order marriage bureaus. That’s what had finally convinced her editor, in fact, to let her write it.
When Nellie had come to him with her “groom’s” written request for her, via the mail-order marriage bureau, he’d taken one look at “Everett’s” letter and offered a blunt reply.
Well, if those people at the marriage bureau have found someone who wants to marry you, Miss Trent, then I guess they are a bunch of shysters, just like you said they might be, he’d told her, applauding her instincts. Go ahead and prove it!
Thus emboldened, Nellie had set out to do exactly that.
Marybelle gave a musical laugh. “Monsieur Bannon would disagree with you about that. He seems to find you eminently marriageable. We all noticed it yesterday, when you arrived.”
“Well, he’s…contracted to marry me. That’s different.”
“Non. You don’t understand,” Marybelle insisted. “You have made Monsieur Bannon a changed man! He was so gloomy in the days following Miss O’Neill’s traitorous departure, but now—”
At her mention of the mysterious Miss O’Neill, Edina slapped down a biscuit with extra vigor. She muttered a curse.
“—now he is like himself again,” Marybelle said happily, “only better! And that is only because you are here at last.”
Nellie sincerely doubted that. Although…”He did have the vitality to argue with me on the drive here yesterday.”
“You see?” Edina gave a nod. “He is restored! By you!”
“And he did have the vitality to tell me,” Nellie went on, troubled anew by the recollection, “that he wanted a ‘compliant, trusting, wishy-washy, swooning female straight from Godey’s magazine’ to call his own.” Worriedly she clenched her coffee cup. Miserably she stared into it. “I’ll never measure up.”
Marybelle and Edina laughed. “He said what?”
Too mortified to repeat it, Nellie adjusted her boys’ boots instead. She should have cleaned them last night; they still bore a layer of caked-on mud, earned when she’d sojourned along the railway track during the train’s stops, exploring things.
“Never mind.” Nellie sipped more coffee, feeling herself growing a tiny bit…jealous? Casually she poked at her boot heels, striving to seem nonchalant. “Who is Miss O’Neill?”
At that, both women began talking to beat the band. It was as though they’d been dying to tell the story of their beloved hacendado and the duplicitous woman who’d cruelly wronged him.
In short order, Nellie learned all she cared to know about Abbey O’Neill. She learned how Miss O’Neill had “pretended” to care about Everett, how she had strung him along (“And several other men, too!” a scandalized Edina confided) all through their courtship, and how she had heartlessly abandoned Everett to elope with a man who she’d decided offered better prospects.
Hearing the name of Miss O’Neill’s paramour, Nellie gasped. She knew of Astair Prestell; everyone did! His writings were legendary and varied. His speaking engagements were said to be even more memorable. Astair Prestell was witty, sophisticated…
Well, he was altogether dissimilar to Everett Bannon, that was for certain. Astair Prestell was a person of importance in society. Everett was…a man of good character in Morrow Creek.
“Our patrón was devastated by Miss O’Neill’s betrayal,” Edina said in an outraged tone. “She made a laughingstock of him, running off like that!”
Marybelle shook her head. “He is better off without her. In time, his heart will heal. I believe that.” She gave Nellie a warm look. “Especially now that you are here to love him.”
“Yes.” Swamped with empathy for what Everett must have gone through, Nellie nodded unthinkingly. “Poor Everett.”
Edina and Marybelle traded meaningful glances, as though Nellie’s gesture signified her intentions to save their patrón from heartbreak. But as much as she wanted to, Nellie wasn’t sure she could carry it through.
After all, her own editor at the Weekly Leader—a man who knew her thoroughly, had hired her himself, and often professed his esteem of her writing talent—had believed she would not find herself a single potential groom from among the entire catalog offered by the mail-order marriage bureau. He’d believed she was simply that lacking in feminine appeal and suitability to become a bride. Worse, this man—whom she trusted—had believed that her apparently glaring deficiency would even come through on paper!
Nellie knew she was a good person. She didn’t believe she needed to be silly, superficial, or overly concerned with petticoats to be a “real woman.” When it came down to it, she didn’t believe any woman needed to behave in a particular way.
She’d always been happy breaking down barriers, proving herself the equal of men in her workday life, and forging her own way with things. She’d always been happy…period.
But she’d never before been smitten with a man the way she was with Everett Bannon: instantly, giddily and overwhelmingly. And she’d never before been filled with such longing to impress anyone—not the way she yearned to impress Everett right now.
Without a doubt, Nellie was out of her depth. What if Everett truly did want a swooning, simpering, idiotic girl, like the “ideal woman” personified by Godey’s Lady’s Book?
Nellie couldn’t possibly manage that.
Unfortunately the only alternative was revealing her true self to Everett now, then trying to bear his inevitable disdain.
Everett would try to hide it, of course. He was honorable that way. He was chivalrous and kind and engagingly down-to-earth. He wasn’t like the popinjays and braggarts who filled San Francisco society; he was real and true. Nellie had seen that in dozens of ways already, beginning with the way Everett had sat down to his usual shared evening meal with all his ranch hands, Marybelle, Edina and her last night, and continuing with the way he’d treated Nellie so far—respectfully and generously.
She couldn’t afford to lose his positive regard already…not when things between them felt so very new and captivating. Not when she’d only begun to daydream of kissing him—just a peck!—and finding out if his beard stubble felt soft or scratchy.
When she was around Everett, Nellie reflected dreamily, she felt…overwarm, all the time. With a single glance, he could pull August heat out of a springtime day and leave her sweltering.
“Regarde. Look!” Marybelle nudged Edina, pointing her chin at Nellie. “She is daydreaming about her wedding. Sweet, non?”
“Very sweet!” Both older women fairly cooed with delight.
Nellie only frowned, struck by a new thought. “Are you sure it was Astair Prestell whom Miss O’Neill ran away with?”
Marybelle gave a languorous Gallic shrug. “Oui. Bien sûr.”
Edina narrowed her eyes menacingly. “I will never forget his name. I will never buy one of his blasted books, either!”
“Of course not. Me, either.” Nellie soothed, stifling a smile. She liked these two women already. Under different circumstances, they might have become close friends. “It’s just that he is so very sophisticated and witty and well-mannered—”
“I suppose,” Marybelle allowed grudgingly. Edina only gave a dismissive wave of her floury hand, urging Nellie to go on.
“Well, that’s not quite the sort of person I’d expect to find here in the territory, that’s all,” Nellie said. “I’d—”
She broke off, startled by a noise around the corner.
She didn’t want to be caught gossiping by one of the
vaqueros. She didn’t want anyone to tell Everett that she knew about his ordeal with Miss O’Neill. It was bad enough it had happened; for Everett, having the whole imbroglio spoken about wo
uld undoubtedly only be worse. It would only be painful.
Contrary to her fears, a noticeably buoyant Everett sauntered in an instant later, all broad shoulders, neatly combed dark hair and clean-shaven jaw. The noise she’d heard, she realized, had been his boot heels ringing against the floorboards. Now, he offered up a bright morning smile.
It was, it occurred to her, exactly the “genuine smile” she’d sought from him—under threat of further teasing—at the train depot. She hadn’t expected it to be quite so…heartwarming, though. Everett was charming.
“Don’t listen to their bad-mouthing me, Nellie,” he said breezily, obviously having overheard part of what she’d said. He cast his housekeeper and cook a chiding glance. “Folks around here wouldn’t know sophistication if it plumb fell on them.”
“Youch! Maybe it already has!” Squinting at her precious patrón, Edina shielded her eyes with her hand. She guffawed. “Leastwise, something’s assaulting my poor eyeballs right now. My money’s on that hideous necktie of yours. But if you say it’s ‘sophistication,’ I reckon I’ll have to take your word for it.”
“Yes. You will,” Everett said with a satisfied grin. “Nellie already has. Maybe you should follow her lead, Edina.”
Still smiling, he gave Nellie a meaningful, solidarity-filled look. Belatedly she realized that he’d overheard her describing the “sophisticated, witty and well-mannered” Astair Prestell—and had mistakenly decided she’d been describing him.
Well, there was no sense disillusioning him now. Especially not since he appeared—endearingly—to have gussied himself up specifically for the occasion of spending the day with her.
“Mon Dieu!” Looking at Everett, Marybelle shied away, too. “You will spook the horses with that ensemble.”
Everett chuckled. “Very funny.” He strode confidently across the room, poured himself a cup of coffee from the speckled enamelware pot on the cooktop, then sipped. “I have it on good authority that a four-in-hand necktie is very stylish.”
Weddings Under a Western Sky: The Hand-Me-Down BrideThe Bride Wore BritchesSomething Borrowed, Something True Page 20