Willow: A Novel (No Series)

by Linda Lael Miller

Suddenly, he was bone tired, even though it was only midafternoon. He still had to write a letter to Daphne; certainly, some sort of explanation was in order, since he was supposed to marry the woman the first week in September.

  Gideon went to the coat tree just inside the study doors and took down his dusty, travel-rumpled jacket. Under the circumstances, he couldn’t very well stay under this roof. “I’ll be at the Union Hotel,” he told the still and thoughtful figure of Judge Devlin Gallagher.

  “Your mother will be furious,” replied the judge. He spoke wearily.

  Gideon shrugged and opened one of the double doors. “Your Honor?”

  Gallagher rose from his chair and turned to face Gideon. “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The look in the judge’s eyes was incredibly patient. “I know,” he answered.

  Gideon went out into the rain, raising his collar against the wind.

  2

  The storm pounding at the single window in his hotel room, Gideon opened the packet of writing paper he had purchased at the mercantile next door and took up a pen. “Dear Daphne,” he wrote. “I’m in the Montana Territory . . .”

  He crumpled that page and began again: “Dear Daphne, you will never guess where I am.” Oh, and by the way, I’m already married . . . it was a joke, you see.

  Gideon took yet another fresh sheet of paper and scrawled, “Dear Daphne, I may not be back in time for the wedding—”

  He stopped. It went against his grain, lying to Daphne, but how could he tell her the truth? Before their wedding could take place, he’d have to have his marriage to Willow Gallagher annulled. That shouldn’t be too difficult, he reasoned, given that they’d never consummated the union.

  But still.

  Resolute, Gideon dipped his pen in the ink bottle and forged on, explaining that railroad business might keep him away from home longer than expected.

  Even after appropriate pleasantries had been added, the letter to Daphne was very short. It seemed to Gideon that there should be more to say.

  With a sigh, he signed the missive and set it aside so that the ink could dry. He didn’t love Daphne Roberts and he was certain that she did not love him; his reasons for becoming engaged to her were far more practical than that. By aligning himself with Daphne’s father, also a major stockholder in the Central Pacific, he would create a financial empire.

  Until he had walked into the rustic church that afternoon and seen Willow Gallagher, Gideon’s plans to marry for power and position, not to mention a vast increase in his personal fortune, had not bothered him in the least. Now, however, they weighed heavily on his mind and spirit. He couldn’t help considering the fact that this topaz-eyed hellcat was his wife, legally if not morally. He could bed her and be well within his rights.

  The thought roused an unfortunate anatomical response, and Gideon rose out of his chair, stretched his arms high above his head, and muttered a swearword. It was bad enough that he planned to use Willow Gallagher to locate her outlaw brother, Steven, bad enough that he had probably ruined her reputation forever. To seduce her in the bargain would be reprehensible.

  And yet Gideon wanted her as he had never wanted Daphne or any of the dozens of more adventurous women he had enjoyed over the years of his manhood. Willow was beautiful, with her lush figure and that head of golden hair that seemed to invite his fingers to stray within it.

  Gideon brought himself up short. The world was full of beautiful women; there was no need to let this crazy attraction to the lovely Miss Gallagher disrupt his well-laid plans.

  Methodically, he folded the letter he’d written to Daphne, tucked it into an envelope, and penned a San Francisco address. Then, telling himself that Daphne Roberts was indeed the right woman for him, he put on his coat and left the room.

  * * *

  Willow rose very early the next morning, glad to see that the rainstorm had passed. She dressed quickly in trousers and a shirt. After brushing and braiding her hair into a single waist-length plait, she hurried into the hallway and down the back stairs that led to the kitchen.

  Maria was there, as usual, preparing breakfast, and she inspected Willow’s clothing with disapproving eyes. “Mrs. Gallagher and the judge will expect you to remain at home today, Miss Willow,” she said. “It is the only proper thing to do, after yesterday.”

  Willow helped herself to a warm cinnamon bun and smiled reassuringly. “Just tell them you didn’t see me,” she suggested, wriggling into the lightweight jacket she would shed later, when the chill had gone off the morning.

  “Madre de Dios, that would be a lie!”

  “Sí,” teased Willow, already on her way to the back door.

  “What about Señor Pickering and his people? What will we say to them?” Maria cried anxiously.

  Willow shrugged, opened the door, and hurried out, consuming the cinnamon bun as she walked toward the stables on the far side of her father’s property. She was going to have to face Norville again, sooner or later, but today was not the day. Today she would find Steven and tell him how Lancelot had saved her from a tragic marriage.

  Maria’s two young cousins, Juan and Pablito, were already working inside the stables; Juan was milking the family cow and Pablito, the older of the two, was feeding the horses.

  Willow greeted them both, ignoring their curious looks as best she could. Was there no one who had not heard of her disastrous near-wedding the day before?

  Probably not.

  “You will ride Banjo, señorita?” asked Pablito, resting on the handle of his pitchfork.

  “Yes,” said Willow, taking her bridle from its peg on the stable wall.

  Pablito’s grin was wide and startlingly white. “You do not marry Señor Nose Pickering?” he asked, dropping the pitchfork to lead Banjo, Willow’s pinto gelding, from his stall.

  Willow laughed at the name that Steven had given Norville. “I do not,” she answered.

  Pablito stood back as Willow found Banjo’s blanket and saddle and put them deftly into place on the animal’s back. “You will tell Señor Steven what has happened?”

  Willow tightened the cinch around Banjo’s belly, tugged at one stirrup, then swung deftly into the saddle. She didn’t remember a time when she hadn’t known how to ride. “Yes,” she answered.

  “He will be angry.”

  A lump rose in Willow’s throat and she nodded. Steven would be furious, but not because she hadn’t been able to go through with the marriage. No, he would be outraged that she had ever intended to marry Norville in the first place.

  Willow prodded Banjo into motion with a gentle touch of her booted heels. The manner in which she had come to be married to Gideon Marshall would not sit well with her brother, either.

  “Be careful, señorita,” enjoined Pablito, as she rode out. “Mind that you are not followed.”

  Willow nodded again and rode away, but she was not thinking about Pablito’s well-founded warning. Her mind was full of Gideon Marshall—her husband.

  As she traveled toward the foothills that rose beyond the growing town of Virginia City, Willow turned Gideon’s image in her mind. She knew much about him, partly garnered from things that Evadne had said about her son over the years, partly discerned from the portrait and the brief time she had spent with him in San Francisco.

  Gideon’s hair, now a dark gold, would turn a crisp, toasty color in winter. He was clean-shaven in summer, but when the weather grew cold, he would wear a beard and mustache . . .

  Blushing at her own daring, Willow wondered—and not for the first time—how it would feel to lie with him, as a woman lies with a man. Would Gideon’s touch be gentle or rough? Would there be pain when he entered her?

  Maria had warned that there would be some discomfort the first time but pleasure afterward if the man was gentle and caring. At the time of this discussion, however, Willow had been on the verge of marrying Norville, and the idea of marital intimacies had held no appeal at all.

  Indeed, she’d been
terrified. For all that folks seemed to see her wanton mother when they looked at her, Willow was untouched.

  Sighing, Willow rode on, enjoying the bright, freshly washed glimmer of the June day. How long would it be until Gideon divorced her, or simply had the marriage declared null and void? When that day came, she would again be vulnerable to Norville’s persuasion.

  A full hour had passed before Willow became aware of the rider behind her. Norville?

  Doing her best not to reveal that she knew she was being followed, Willow did not look back. Certainly Norville had trailed her before—that was how he’d learned of the signals she and Steven used to communicate with each other—but some instinct told her that the rider tracking her now was someone else.

  Veering off the course she would otherwise have taken, Willow nudged Banjo into a gallop and then a run. She had been raised in these hills, taught from an early age to lose herself in them at will. It would be easy enough to double back and see who was behind her.

  A cold shiver trickled down her spine when the rider followed without apparent difficulty. Good heavens, what if that was Vancel Tudd? Steven was within a few miles of this place. What if Tudd found him?

  Still hoping to elude the one who stalked her, Willow took evasive tactics. She rode hard for the shack hidden away in a dense stand of birch and cottonwood trees, a few hundred yards away.

  And the rider followed.

  She led Banjo inside the shack and they cowered there in the darkness. Please God, Willow prayed, don’t let Steven get wind of this. Don’t let him come here.

  Outside, a horse nickered, and Banjo answered companionably. Willow swore aloud, and then a burst of masculine laughter erupted beyond the shack’s hanging door. A moment later, Gideon Marshall appeared in the opening.

  “Who do you think you are?” demanded Willow sharply, acting on pure bravado as she stormed toward him, pulling Banjo behind her, hoping that the man would step back out of her way when she reached him.

  He did, but his lips were curved into an obnoxious grin. “By all accounts, I’m your husband,” he replied.

  Willow let Banjo’s reins drop into the deep grass and sank to the ground, angrily plucking a wild tiger lily and turning it in her fingers. Ever since she’d seen that portrait for the first time, she’d dreamed of marrying Gideon Marshall. Now, however, she felt a deep and contradictory need to plague him. “A simple annulment will fix that,” she snapped. “After all, Mr. Marshall, our marriage has not been—well, it isn’t real.”

  Gideon lifted his hands to his hips, letting his own bay gelding wander free, as Banjo did. The horses nibbled companionably at the sweet, breeze-bent grass. “That little oversight could be remedied easily enough—Mrs. Marshall.”

  Willow flushed and looked away. Damnit, she’d walked right into that one. “My brothers would kill you if you touched me,” she said, somewhat lamely and after a long time.

  Gideon arched one eyebrow and came to crouch before her, on his haunches, only a few feet away. He, too, picked a tiger lily and twirled it in his fingers. “Your brothers, plural? I understood that you had only one sibling.”

  “I have three—Coy and Reilly are my half brothers. Their father was Jay Forbes, but we all had the same mother.”

  “And they ride with Steven?”

  Willow felt uneasy. She’d said too much already. There was something about this man that made her tend toward all sorts of excesses. “Are you a bounty hunter, Mr. Marshall?”

  Gideon, along with his brother, Zachary, had inherited sizable interests in a number of railroad companies, founded by their paternal grandfather. While Zachary seemed to prefer to travel, among other indulgences, Gideon had always been more interested in business.

  While it was unlikely that Gideon had joined Vancel Tudd’s profession, he might well have a stake in putting Steven, the inveterate train robber, out of commission.

  Steven loved plaguing the railroads and the stagecoach lines but, as far as Willow knew, he concentrated on stealing from the judge, who had a great many fingers in a great many financial pies.

  Her father was rich.

  Gideon was probably richer.

  “No,” he answered, at some length, but so easily and smoothly that Willow found herself believing him. Almost.

  “Why did you follow me?” she asked.

  One of Gideon’s powerful shoulders lifted in an idle shrug. The weather was warm, though it wasn’t any later than seven o’clock in the morning, and Gideon had already shed his coat, if he’d worn one in the first place, and rolled up his shirtsleeves. Light brown hair shimmered on his muscled forearms. “I wanted to talk to you, without my mother and the judge and your spurned lover listening in.”

  Willow reddened again and dropped the bright orange tiger lily into the grass. “My ‘lover’?” she snapped.

  Gideon laughed and held up both hands in a plea for peace, the wildflower still caught between his fingers. “I didn’t mean to insult you, Willow. And I wasn’t implying that you and Norbert had been intimate.”

  “Norville. His name is Norville.”

  Gideon sat down gracefully, flush on the ground, Indian style. “Norville,” he repeated wryly. And then his wicked eyes sliced to Willow’s face. “What on earth did you ever see in him?” he asked. He seemed honestly confounded, as well as amused.

  The temptation to tell this man everything was great, but Willow resisted. She searched her mind for one true virtue to ascribe to Norville Pickering and came up dry. “I’m nearly twenty years old,” she said, for that was the closest she could come to an explanation.

  Gideon sighed. “That old?” he mocked.

  She bit her lower lip.

  “You were marrying Pickering because you’re nearly twenty years old?” Gideon prompted when she remained silent.

  “Around here, if a woman isn’t married by the time she’s twenty, she’s considered a spinster,” Willow said. She heard her own voice, as if from a distance, and marveled at the things that came out of her mouth. Before Gideon’s questionable rescue, Willow had confided in Maria, in a weak moment, that she would have preferred being a nun to marrying Norville Pickering. “I don’t want to be an old maid!”

  Since when? Gideon’s gaze was direct, piercing. “Well, you’re in no danger of spinsterhood, now are you? After all, you’re married to me.”

  Willow still had that odd feeling that she’d been swept away, that she might say anything—anything at all—or, worse, do anything at all. “You can hardly call this a marriage,” she huffed.

  Gideon smiled. “No, I suppose not. Until I bed you, it’s more of an arrangement, regrettably legal.” He paused. “Were you planning to meet your brother today, Willow?”

  “No!”

  He obviously knew the lie for what it was, as he showed no sign of going away, damn him. That meant that Willow’s plans for the day were in ruins, for she certainly could not risk leading this man or anyone else to Steven.

  “Just out for a quiet Sunday morning ride?”

  She folded her arms, stiffened her spine, and hiked up her chin. “Yes.”

  Gideon grinned again and it seemed that he was a bit nearer, though Willow hadn’t been conscious of any movement on his part. “It isn’t safe to ride in these hills alone, Mrs. Marshall,” he said smoothly. “After all, there are Indians, miners, grizzly bears—”

  “Kindly do not refer to me as ‘Mrs. Marshall.’”

  He laughed and shifted his body in an easy motion that brought him so close to Willow that she could feel the warmth of his breath on her face. “Is that any way to talk to your husband of two years, dearest?” he teased.

  Willow had been caught in a spell of some kind, but in that moment it was broken. She doubled up her fists and aimed them both at Gideon’s smug and handsome face.

  He forestalled the attack easily, catching both of her wrists in his hands and then easing her backward until she found herself lying prone in the verdant summer grass, looking up at him
in amazement. The most surprising thing of all was that she felt no fear.

  She knew Gideon Marshall would never hurt her, not physically, anyway.

  Slowly, gently, Gideon brought her hands down to the soft and fragrant ground, but he did not release his hold on her wrists. He whispered her name and she felt his hard length stretch out upon her, though the crushing sensation she had expected did not come. His lips came to hers, tasting.

  Willow’s entire body quivered with the torrent of needs that had been unchained by this one action, and she moaned as Gideon’s kiss deepened, became demanding. His tongue prodded her lips to part and when they did, he explored her freely and fiercely and she found her own tongue fencing with his.

  When the kiss finally ended, she stared up at him, squinting against the sunshine that framed his head like a flaming crown. “Can that make me pregnant?” she demanded.

  Gideon gave a shout of laughter and rolled away to lie beside her, on his back, looking up at the china blue sky. “No, hellcat. It doesn’t happen that way.”

  Willow was wildly embarrassed. Raised around livestock, she understood the fundamentals of intercourse, but much of it was still a mystery.

  “I know how babies are conceived, Mr. Marshall!” she informed him. “I just thought there might possibly be an alternative method, that’s all.”

  Gideon was still amused. He lay there on his back, with his hands cupped behind his head, as relaxed as could be. “There is only one way to make babies,” he assured her.

  Willow sat up, but it was some moments before she could bring herself to look down into that handsome, amused face. “I suppose you’re thinking that I am very unsophisticated for a woman of nearly twenty.”

  He smiled. “Actually, my thoughts were considerably less honorable,” he admitted, and when he reached for Willow and enfolded her in his arms, it seemed natural to allow him to hold her close, right there on the ground.

  She let her head rest on his shoulder and hoped devoutly that he would kiss her again.

  Presently, Gideon shifted, as if he had heard her thoughts, and his mouth was within an inch of her own. “Willow,” he said, in a bemused and reluctant voice, and then his lips were claiming hers again.