The Horseman's Bride

by Marilyn Pappano

  The run-in left her feeling dirty and creepy the rest of the afternoon. After closing, when she drove out to Easy’s with the samples, she told him about it.

  “Why don’t you get your daddy and Guthrie and some of their friends to take him out back and teach him a lesson?” he asked dryly as they polished off the leftovers from the daily special at his kitchen table.

  “They can’t do that.”

  “A hundred years ago they would have.”

  “A hundred years ago nobody would have cared how he treated his daughter. Jeez, the man calls his daughter by the same name he calls his dog. ‘Girl.’” She shuddered with distaste. “He probably doesn’t treat her any better than he treats the dog, either.”

  “I hate to break this to you, Shay, but...it’s none of your business. She’s an adult. If she doesn’t like the way he treats her, she can quit her job and move out.”

  “No, she can’t,” she said quietly, sadly. “You haven’t seen her, Easy. She’s scared of her own shadow. Twentyfive years of living with that man has probably ruined her forever.”

  For a moment he sat in silence, watching her. Then he smiled the slightest of gentle smiles. “I’d forgotten you were so kindhearted. Lucky for me, you are.”

  “Lucky? You?” She feigned amazement. “Better watch it, cowboy. You say that too often, you might begin to believe it.”

  “Don’t get smart.”

  “Too late. I was born smart.” She stood up and began gathering their dishes. When he caught hold of her wrist, she froze. Little chills danced up her arm and down her spine, followed immediately by tiny waves of heat.

  There was something so incredibly sweet about touching—about him willingly, voluntarily reaching out and laying his hand on her. He hadn’t touched her in more than six years, and she’d missed it every single day—missed the simple contact. The calluses on his hands. The strength in his fingers. Their incredible skill at turning simple touches into erotic ones. She felt as if she’d been in the desert all those years, given only the bare minimum of water needed to survive, and now found herself standing at the edge of a vast ocean. She felt parched. Greedy. Blessed.

  His fingers flexed, the tips pressing against her skin, then his thumb moved fractionally, rubbing the inside of her wrist. She felt her heart rate accelerate and wondered if he felt it, too—felt her chest tighten and her knees go weak.

  Under the gentle pressure of his hand, she released her hold on the plate, letting it settle back on the table with a thump. His fingers slid down to her palm, then made a slow journey up her arm to her shoulder as he got to his feet. In deference to the chilly weather, her T-shirt had long sleeves. More’s the pity.

  “Sit,” he said, pressing down on her shoulder. His voice was husky, turning the single word into a hoarse command. “You wait on people all day at the café. You don’t need to do it here.”

  “I don’t mind—”

  “I do.” For an instant his hand remained on her shoulder, then he removed it to pick up his cane.

  Sinking into the chair, she caught her breath, then twisted to watch him. He took the dishes to the counter in three trips, filled the sink with soapy water, washed each piece. “I like a man—” who can make touching my wrist more erotic than the most intimate caresses any other man might offer “—who knows his way around a kitchen.”

  “Considering how you cook, I bet you do.”

  “I could learn to cook if I wanted.” She tossed her head with a haughty sniff and succeeded only in ruffling her short hair. “I never thought culinary skills came high on your list of my attributes.”

  “For me, they didn’t. But frankly, I was a little worried about the kids.”

  “What kids?”

  He glanced over his shoulder. “The ones we were going to have.”

  The mention was enough to send a pang of hurt through her. For a time she’d been happy, so much in love, with a bright future ahead of her. For almost as long, she’d been miserable, with both her heart and her arms equally empty.

  Rising from the table, she went to lean against the counter near the sink, her back to the cabinets. “Now that I own the café,” she said, carefully tempering her tone to sound as if it wasn’t of utmost importance, “you wouldn’t have to worry about that anymore.”

  He looked at her a long time before quietly agreeing, “No, I wouldn’t.”

  When he turned his gaze back to the task at hand, she drew a breath, then walked to the back door. It was utterly dark outside. The light that had always shone outside the barn was off, the bulb probably burned out years ago. Though there’d been both moon and stars in the sky when she’d driven out, now they were hidden by clouds too heavy with rain to let light pass through.

  “Easy?” She continued to stare out as if the darkness out there made the conversation easier in here. “Why didn’t you ever want to marry me?”

  He had promised her marriage when he’d asked her to run away with him. Of course, he’d promised her a lot of things—that he would love her forever, that she would never be sorry she’d chosen him, that he would never leave her.

  At least he’d been right about one. She’d never been sorry.

  He was motionless behind her. She knew the question had taken him by surprise. She could feel it. Then, after a moment, he finished rinsing the last dish, put it in the drainer and shut off the water. “I wanted to.”

  “But you never asked me. And when I asked you, you always said—”

  “Later.”

  Yes, later. When he was through with the rodeo. When he’d earned enough money to give them a new start. When he’d be able to give her a home. He’d never understood—never wanted to understand, she’d sometimes thought—that those things weren’t important to her. She’d wanted him, with his ring on her finger and his name for her own. She’d wanted to believe she meant enough to him to make it legal and binding. She’d wanted him to be that committed to her.

  “Why?” she asked wistfully. “Why wouldn’t you marry me?”

  “Truth?” He came to the end of the counter nearest her, leaned against it and waited for her nod. “I wanted an easy out. Even from the beginning, I didn’t believe it would last. I wanted you so much, but our being together was wrong. I didn’t think we could ever escape that. When the end came, I wanted to it to be easy. No lawyers, no divorce, no hassle. I wanted you to be able to walk away, free and clear.”

  “Instead, it was you who walked away, with two last insults.”

  “What insults?”

  She risked a quick look at him. His forehead was wrinkled in a frown, and he looked and sounded as if he didn’t know what she was talking about. Smiling bitterly at the memory, she gazed out again. “Leaving that money on the night stand—payment for services—and replacing me with Clarissa.”

  “That money was to help you get back here. It wasn’t meant as an insult. I was leaving you in Nowhere, Montana. The least I owed you was a way home. Would you have thought more kindly of me if I’d left you there broke?” He came a few steps closer, sending a shiver of badly needed warmth through her. “Who told you I replaced you with Clarissa?”

  She raised one hand to pinch the bridge of her nose, then spread her fingers to rub the outer corners of her eyes. It’d been a long day and an emotional one. She was bone tired. Soul tired. “When I woke up that morning and found you’d left, I went to the restaurant there at the motel, hoping that maybe you’d just gone over for breakfast.”

  In truth, she’d just been delaying facing the truth. His clothes were gone. Her belongings that she’d left in the truck had been neatly stacked inside the door. Her toiletries had been sorted out from his. And the money... She’d known he was gone for good. Oh, but she had hoped!

  “Hank and Tracy were in there, and Tom and Mickey and some of the others. Tracy said she’d seen you and Clarissa come out of her room, get in the truck and drive off. Hank backed her up.”

  “Hank,” Easy repeated flatly. “Who’d been
trying for how long to get you into bed?”

  Swallowing hard, she faced him. In those eight years, men had come on to her, but she’d paid them little attention. She’d loved Easy. What use could she possibly have had for any other man? But Hank had been one of the more persistent, which had led to bad blood between him and Easy.

  And Tracy. Tracy the tramp, the wives had called her. She’d based her own worth on how many cowboys finishing in the money she could bed, and had done everything but dance naked on the tabletops to get Easy’s attention.

  Two losers with grudges against them both, and she had believed them on something so important. Groaning, she gave a dismayed shake of her head. “God, how could I be so stupid?”

  “Because I made it easy for you. It’s not your fault. It’s mine.”

  Her smile came with difficulty, but felt good. “Well, that explains why Hank volunteered to drive me all the way back to Heartbreak.”

  “You didn’t let him, did you?”

  She knew that tone—that darkly jealous, possessive voice men managed so well. It warmed her that it still came so naturally to him after all these years. “Of course not. I didn’t like sitting at a table with him when you were between us. I certainly wasn’t going to set off halfway across the country alone in a pickup with him. Whatever happened to him?”

  “Last time I saw him, he had a broken jaw, a black eye and a broken arm, among other injuries. He’d gotten caught in bed with his girlfriend by the girlfriend’s husband. He knew she was married, but she’d forgotten to mention that the guy was a body builder and was insanely jealous.”

  “Too bad,” she said with a wince.

  “It’s no more than I would have done to him if you’d taken him up on his offer to bring you home.”

  Though she wasn’t a proponent of physical violence most of the time, it was kind of nice to know that, even though he’d left her, he’d still thought of her as his.

  But it would have been a whole lot nicer if he hadn’t left her.

  For a moment they remained silent. She listened to the old house, the long slow drip at the sink, the wind that had picked up outside. Easy seemed to be listening, too, his gaze on the wooden floor, his manner distant. The windowpanes rattled with a sudden gust of wind, jarring her out of her silence. “Shall we look at paint samples?”

  The diversion jarred him from his thoughts, as well. He walked away, his limp more pronounced than usual—be—cause he was tired or because of the dampness in the air? “Pick whatever you want. Except for this room. Make it yellow and white.”

  She thought of her own yellow-and-white kitchen and hid a smile. It was nice to know that something she’d done had impressed him. “Okay. With the bedrooms and the living room having been papered, it would probably be best to stick with paper again. If we chose to paint them, we’d have to strip off the old paper, then repair all the imperfections in the wallboard, which is a nasty job. Take my word for it. I did it in my bathroom.”

  “Is that why you painted it shocking blue? So no one can bear to look at the walls long enough to see if they’re perfect?”

  “Hey, I like bright blue. It helps get me going in the morning.” They picked up their drinks from the table, then as they started slowly toward the living room, she returned to the subject. “If you really want paint, they make this textured wallpaper that, once it’s painted, looks like a textured wall. Since we’d be both papering and painting, I assume it’s a little more expensive, though I haven’t priced it.”

  “Do whatever you want. I won’t complain.”

  She circled the coffee table to sit at one end of the sofa while he eased onto the near end. “How do you know you won’t hate what I do? It could be pink and ruffly or lime-green and fluorescent.”

  “You’re not a pink or lime-green sort of person. And I know I’ll like it because I like your house. It’s comfortable. It feels like a home. That’s what I want here. Do this house as if it were—” Flushing, he broke off and looked away. “I’m sorry. That was...”

  As if it were your own. As it would have been, if only he’d been able to stop blaming himself for hurting Guthrie. As she’d been thinking of it off and on all afternoon. “It’s okay,” she said with a careless shrug that was all pretend. “But let me warn you—if you bring somebody like Clarissa here to live, I’m coming back and ripping it all out.”

  “You don’t have to worry,” he said with a dark scowl. “I won’t ever be bringing anyone here to live.”

  Not even her.

  The wind shook the old house on its foundation, drawing their attention outside once again. In the dim light that spilled through the windows, she could see leaves swirling in the air before settling to the ground once again.

  “You’d better head home,” Easy said quietly. “It’s late, and there’s a storm blowing in.”

  Her hands were suddenly clammy as she turned to look at him, as she prepared to make a suggestion that he was far likelier to turn down than agree to. She debated making it at all, then, with a deep breath and a measure of his old brashness, she went ahead. After all, nothing ventured, nothing gained. “Or I could just stay here,” she said, her voice equally quiet, and more sultry than she’d intended. “After all, it’s late, and there’s a storm blowing in.”

  The first emotion to cross his face was desire. It was fleeting, there and gone almost too quickly to identify, but having seen it there thousands of times before, she recognized it easily. The second was embarrassment. Because she’d invited herself to spend the night when he didn’t want her? Or because spending the night with her was an intimacy he wasn’t yet ready for? The part of her that remembered too clearly being left in Montana hoped for the second, but feared the first.

  “Shay—” He swallowed hard and couldn’t meet her eyes as he bluntly, flatly answered, “No.”

  It was a simple answer that gave her no clue to the reason behind it, and it stirred her own embarrassment. “Then I guess I should go ” Setting her glass on the table, she stood up, claimed her purse and jacket from the rocker, then headed for the door while shrugging into the jacket “I’ll pick up the paint and get started on the kitchen as soon as I can. It shouldn’t take too much preparation since it’s not papered. And I’ll see if I can get a sprayer for the cabinets. It’s always easier than—”

  She was reaching for the screen door when he caught her arm and pulled her around. Before she could react, before she could even think, she was leaning with the door frame against her back, his body was so close that she could feel its heat, and he was kissing her. It wasn’t the wild, hot, passionate kisses she remembered best, but tentative, hungry little tastes, as if too much at once might be too much to bear. They were sweet kisses, and cruel, too, because for every need they satisfied, they awakened another. She wanted more. She wanted wild, hot, passionate. She wanted greedy demands, hungry promises, savage pleas. She wanted him, all of him, body and soul.

  And all she got were sweet, cruel kisses.

  When he pulled away, she touched him, her fingers twisting in the soft cotton of his shirt. “Please, Easy,” she whispered.

  “I can’t,” he whispered back. “Damn it, I can’t.”

  She was tempted to slide her hand lower, to prove to herself and to him that he most certainly could—that the body was willing. He just needed to work on the mind.

  She didn’t, though. Seduce him, Reese and Olivia had advised, but seducing him against his will wouldn’t prove a thing, except that he was human. They both already knew that. He was human enough to fall in love, to make mistakes, to hurt others. Now he had to learn to be human enough to forgive himself.

  With a sorry, sorry sigh, she slipped out of the small space the jamb and his body had left her and out the door. With the screen door safely closed between them, she looked back long enough to see him leaning his forehead against the door frame, his eyes closed, his expression exquisitely troubled. Then she hurried to her car.

  Nothing ventured, nothin
g gained, she thought scornfully as she drove away. Well, she’d ventured something, and what had she gained? Nothing.

  Just his too-sweet, too-brief kisses.

  Which were more than she’d hoped for when she’d come here.

  More than she’d had for six years.

  In fact, right now they were damn near everything.

  Chapter 7

  Wednesday night’s storm had amounted to nothing—a flash or two of lightning, a few sprinkles of rain and a lot of wind that had blown in, rattled things around, then blown out again. Thursday was bright, sunny and hot. Easy watched TV, took a nap, read a book, fixed both breakfast and lunch and cleaned up each time, and still had endless hours to go before Shay might return. He wanted her here—and was glad she was gone. He wanted to kiss her again and wished he never had.

  He wanted to make love to her but didn’t know if he could. If he should.

  No, that wasn’t true. He knew for damn sure he shouldn’t. He’d never deserved her, had never been good enough for her, but that was even more true now. She needed someone to love, to share her life, to give her a family. Not someone trapped way out here by his own fears. She needed someone who would take her out, dance with her, spend time with her family and friends, help her in the café when necessary.

  She needed someone who could lead a normal life, and that put him out of the running.

  Impossibly bored, he shut off the TV and went onto the porch. He’d been up ten hours, and only one car, the mailman, had passed by on the road out front. Neighbors were scarce out here, which made the chances for company even scarcer. Not that he was looking for any—at least, none besides Shay.

  She hadn’t said she would come back this evening. If she didn’t, he would drive into town, which would probably be better for her anyway. He didn’t like her driving home alone at night, while he was most comfortable in the night. Plus, she had to get up early for work, while he was free to sleep until noon. Hell, for all the demands on his time, he could sleep around the clock.

  For the first time in years, he’d had enough sleep.