by Diana Palmer
Behind him, wedding guests filed out into the sunlight, having missed the most exciting part of the wedding. The carriage, and Jared, were out of sight by the time they left their pews, talking excitedly about the bridegroom’s exquisitely tender kiss for the bride. No one saw Noelle go home alone in the carriage.
Mrs. Dunn received all the congratulations, beaming, and went home in a carriage by herself. She smiled with delight. Now the tongues would stop wagging and she could stop being the object of attention everywhere she went in town.
She went on to her dressmaker’s house for a fitting, confident that Noelle and Jared were probably making up. They would work things out now that they were married. Surely they would, if the way Jared had kissed Noelle was any indication.
But when she arrived, much later, and went into the house, she met a morose Mrs. Pate.
“Why, what’s wrong with you? That’s no face to wear after a wedding!”
Mrs. Pate glowered at her. “No? The bride came home alone, in tears, and the bridegroom hasn’t set foot in the house all afternoon. I believe that he is at his office, working as usual.”
Mrs. Dunn’s eyes widened. “They left the church together. They’ve just married—” she began.
“Unwillingly,” Mrs. Pate said, cutting in. “He thinks that she has been intimate with his stepbrother.”
“Oh, dear. I do wonder…” Mrs. Dunn began uncomfortably.
“I wash all the sheets and all the clothes,” Mrs. Pate said bluntly. “And I can tell you quite frankly that nothing of that sort has been going on in this house!”
Mrs. Dunn went red and gasped.
“Thought you should know,” Mrs. Pate said, with a jerk of her head, and walked away, leaving the older lady to compose herself.
* * *
NOELLE TOOK OFF her wedding gown and her lovely veil and repacked them in the box they’d occupied since their arrival. She was married. She wore a gold band that Jared had placed on her finger. But nothing had changed. Nothing at all. Jared didn’t want her, and he’d just made it crystal clear.
Well, to be fair, she’d called him a foul name and thrown things at the door. But he’d deserved it, the rake! She hoped that he would lock his door against her tonight, she mused wickedly, and that everyone heard him do it. Perhaps she could put on some shocking nightgown, stand outside his door, and beg to be let in, with everyone watching and laughing because he locked her out.
It might have been funny, but she loved him. He would never love her or want her, and there would never be a child. That was the saddest thing of all. She loved children. She’d loved her young brothers. Caring for them had never been a chore. She’d often thought that she would have her own children one day, and when she first came to Fort Worth, she’d pictured handsome Andrew as their father. But that picture had rapidly faded. Now, she saw little dark-haired boys with pale blue eyes instead, but they were hopeless fantasies. Jared didn’t want her for his wife. He might even leave Fort Worth and go back to New York to escape her.
She sat down heavily on the bed, in her chemise and corset and bloomers, as she considered the terrible thought. All she would be left with was the protection of his name and an income about which she knew nothing.
There was this trial, of course. He couldn’t leave until it was over. And remembering what Mrs. Dunn had said, she grew worried for Jared. Tempers ran hot during such trials. Suppose someone tried to shoot him? He was an elegant city attorney. Although he had been a Texas Ranger, and apparently a cavalry soldier, in his youth, he was older now. And he had that gimpy leg, although she had noticed that he limped hardly at all anymore and didn’t use the cane.
She fingered the ruffle on the legs of her bloomers with a grimace. They were muslin. She’d put away the pretty silk things Mrs. Pate had helped her buy because she wanted nothing Jared had paid for. Anyway, she thought brazenly, it wasn’t as if he’d ever see them.
She dressed in her usual dark skirt and white blouse, buttoned it up at the throat, put on her thick hose and garters, and laced up her shoes. Then she put her hair up and went downstairs. It was just another day, she told herself. Getting married was incidental, and no grand occasion. If Jared could treat it so lightly as to go back to work, so could she! He need not think she would sit in her room weeping because of his rejection.
She went to the kitchen to offer Mrs. Pate some help with the evening meal and found her missing. But Henry was out in the garden, with a bottle of whiskey. He was drinking and hoeing up her prize tomato plants, which now had little tomatoes on them, and he was laughing at his butchery!
It was the last straw, in a day liberally filled with them. She jerked open the door and marched outside. She didn’t care if Mrs. Hardy and the entire block of neighbors saw her.
She picked up a bucket and threw it with all her might in Henry’s direction.
It landed on his foot. He stopped what he was doing and gaped at her with eyes so round they looked like saucers. The half-empty bottle of whiskey dangled in his hand at his side, against his overalls.
“You drunken idiot!” she raged, moving in for the kill. “Dig up my tomato plants just as they begin to bear, will you? You snake in the grass!”
Her hand whipped out and dragged the whiskey bottle from his hand. She upended it, brandishing it at him as she spilled its contents all over the ground.
“If you want this, sir, then have it!” And she waded in, holding the bottle over her head like a bat.
He screamed at the top of his lungs. Then he turned and lit out across the yard as if a pack of rabid dogs was chasing him. He ran with his arms over his head across two yards, including Mrs. Hardy’s, with Noelle hot on his trail, running as fast as she could, shouting threats and waving the empty bottle over her head.
Noelle ran out of breath at the corner and stopped, breathing heavily, just off the dirt road. Two carriages had stopped dead at the sight of the middle-aged man in a beaten hat and overalls running away from a slender woman brandishing a whiskey bottle. He ran right into the road, threatening the horses and his own person, jumped a hedge, and kept going.
“You’re fired!” Noelle raged after him. “If you come back, I shall shoot you—and no gardener in Fort Worth will convict me!”
There was a shout of laughter from one of the carriages. She turned, embarrassed now that her anger had diminished, flushed, and tucked the bottle against her skirt so that it was less obvious. It had been an upsetting day.
She walked angrily back across the yards, pausing to glare at Mrs. Hardy, whose mouth had fallen open.
“Now you have something else to gossip about, you poisonous old biddy,” she told the elderly woman. “Go and see if you can’t find some more lives to ruin with your wagging tongue, and then see how long it takes before God catches up with you! Sitting in church, so smug and self-righteous, when you’re the biggest hypocrite in the city! Shame on you!” she added, shaking a furious finger at the woman.
Mrs. Hardy looked as if she might swoon. Her hand was at her throat, clutching.
Noelle ignored her and kept on walking. She fancied that she left a trail of fire wherever her feet touched, all the way home.
It was unfortunate that Jared should be standing on the back porch, watching, when she came up to the yard.
She threw the whiskey bottle at his feet, where it landed with a hollow thud in the dirt.
“He killed my tomato plants!” she raged, red-faced and disheveled. “You said that you would speak to him, and look how much good it did!”
He was staring at her. “Where did you get this whiskey bottle?” he asked.
“From Henry. He’d already consumed half of it. I took it away from him and chased him to the street.” She stared at him indignantly. “I only regret that I couldn’t get close enough to hit him with it! Mrs. Hardy was on her porch, and
I told her what I thought of her as well.” She put her hands on her hips and blew a wisp of auburn hair away from her mouth. “Now, I’m going to tell you what I think of you.”
He leaned against the porch with his arms folded and the oddest faint smile on his lips. He made a gesture of invitation with one hand.
“I’m not a loose woman,” she began, uncaring if the whole world should hear. “You may think whatever you like, and you may lock your bedroom door at night if you feel I’m a threat to you. I did nothing that I’m ashamed of, and I won’t apologize. Furthermore,” she added, “if I feel like working in this garden, in overalls, I’ll do it, regardless of how many neighbors find it scandalous.” She had raised her voice, looking pointedly toward Mrs. Hardy’s back porch, where a shadow moved. She glared at her husband. “And how dare you leave me at the church to find my own way home on my wedding day?”
He whistled softly, his eyes lingering on her livid face. “How dare I, indeed,” he agreed, which was as close as he could come to expressing the guilt that had brought him home so early in the day.
She pushed her loose hair away angrily. “I didn’t mean to call you such a vile name, Jared,” she muttered, lowering her eyes for the first time. “It was very wrong of me, and I’m ashamed for doing it.”
She had wound down. He left the porch and approached her, stopping an arm’s length away. “Do you know why it made me so mad?”
“Because I was so nasty,” she said.
He shook his head. His sigh was audible. “Because I am a bastard, Noelle, and everyone knew it when I was a boy. My mother was attacked by some unknown man in Dodge City. I was the result.”
“Jared!”
Her shock was expected, but not the sudden sympathy in her eyes, the compassion.
“I do beg your pardon most humbly,” she said, with regret in her green eyes. “I’d never have said such a thing, regardless of how angry I was, had I known.”
She made him feel small and ashamed. His eyes narrowed on her face. “There are a lot of things in my past that I can’t share with you. This one is known only to my grandmother and myself.”
She moved a little closer. “You’re very secretive,” she said. She looked up. “Have you other secrets that you’re willing to share?” she asked softly.
His breath caught in his throat. She was full of surprises. He found himself thinking about her at the damnedest times—like this morning, when he should have been working on the new case. A man’s freedom, if not his life, was at stake, and he’d paced his office remembering the stricken look on Noelle’s face when he walked away from her outside the church. It had driven him home—into an unfolding scene that he’d never forget. Henry’s hysterical retreat would be the talk of the town for weeks, if not years.
He touched her lower lip with his forefinger and watched it intently. It trembled. She looked more vulnerable than he’d seen her in a long time.
“Not at the moment,” he said, answering her question. “And you, Noelle? Have you dark secrets?”
“I put a rat snake in my oldest brother’s bed when he told my father that I broke the dasher handle on the new churn.”
His eyebrows lifted with a smile. “Did you? Aren’t you afraid of snakes?”
She shook her head. She studied him. “Are you?” she asked hopefully.
He chuckled. “No.”
“Another source of vengeance cut off. You’re a city man—shouldn’t you be perturbed by creepy, crawly things?”
He caught her by the waist and pulled her against his body lazily, looking down his nose at her. “I’m perturbed by very little,” he said. “You’ve run off my gardener.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Shall I hire someone else?”
It sounded as if he was offering not to. Her eyes brightened. “Mrs. Hardy’s tongue will waggle at both ends if I do it.”
“Probably. Do you want to?”
She smiled. “Yes. Will your grandmother mind?”
“I’ll speak to her. It’s a new age. She’ll have to accept many things that are strange to her.”
“That’s so.”
His hands tightened and his eyes narrowed. “I’ll permit you to work in the garden—”
“Permit?”
“Permit,” he said firmly. “It’s my garden.”
“Yours? I planted it!” she argued.
“It sits on my land. I say who works in it.”
She glowered up at him. The feel of his strong hands on her waist was disconcerting, but she didn’t want to let him know it. “Oh, very well.”
“As I was saying,” he continued, holding her gaze, “I’ll permit you to work in the garden until you’re with child. Afterward, a man will be employed to take over.”
Her eyes became fixed. She didn’t breathe. It was the last thing in the world she ever expected him to say.
Incoherent phrases tumbled from her lips. “You think…that I’m a loose woman, that any man will do. How can you want someone like that to be the mother of your children? And you said that you wouldn’t sleep with me anyway!”
His hands smoothed up to her rib cage and he looked at her mouth. “I want to sleep with you, Noelle,” he whispered softly. “I’ve always wanted to.”
Her hands were cold against his chest, trembling like the rest of her body with nervous excitement. “Oh.”
“I’ve thought of little else since the night I found you in the parlor with my whiskey bottle.”
She flushed as vivid memories came back to haunt her.
“Coward,” he taunted when she colored. “Don’t you like remembering how hungry we were for each other, then and the other night?”
She glowered at him, breathless. “No.”
He smiled gently. “You’d better lock your door tonight, my dear,” he said, aware of footsteps coming quickly toward the porch behind them. “Because nothing short of a bolt will keep me out. And I’m not even sure that a bolt will.”
She swallowed, searching for a reply, when the screen door opened and slammed and Mrs. Pate, followed by Mrs. Dunn, came outside.
“Noelle, what was all the commotion?” Mrs. Dunn asked. “A man just came to the front door and said that he saw our gardener tearing across the road with a woman brandishing a bottle right behind him. Do you—?” She paused when she saw Jared—and then the whiskey bottle on the ground. She hesitated. Her hand went to her face. “Oh, dear.”
“He killed my tomato plants,” Noelle said, defending herself. “Look.” She pointed at them and winced. “They’d just formed little tomatoes and he hoed them right out of the ground because he was so drunk.”
“He left two bushes,” Mrs. Pate said, joining them. “So he was drinking again, was he?”
“Excessively,” Noelle agreed. “I ran as fast as I could, but I couldn’t get close enough to hit him!”
Mrs. Dunn was chuckling. The sound was soft, but quite audible. Noelle looked up.
Mrs. Dunn shook her head. “I see myself in you.” She sighed. “I’d forgotten what I was like. Noelle, work in the garden in overalls if you want to,” she said surprisingly. “It’s a new world. My time is past. This is yours. There’s been so much gossip already that some more will not matter—and should not matter. Something so innocent will surely not offend God, even if it offends neighbors. And what, may I ask, does their opinion matter?”
“Now you sound more like the grandmother I remember,” Jared commented.
“I feel more like her.” She straightened her skirts. “When you finish tending your tomatoes, Noelle, I have a letter that I wish you to write for me. The rheumatism in my hands makes it very difficult to hold a pencil.”
“I’ll be delighted to help you,” she said.
“Unless Jared has other plans?” the older woman
added.
Jared stared at Noelle with eyes so wicked that she flushed.
“I must return to the office for a little while,” he said. “Noelle and I can talk further when I come home this evening.”
“Very well, then. Come, Mrs. Pate, and show me that new crochet pattern I like.”
Mrs. Pate shook her head, grinning, as she joined the older woman, leaving the newlyweds alone.
“How discreet of them,” he said. “If they could read my mind they’d have been much less anxious to leave.”
“It’s broad daylight,” she said demurely, “and in plain sight of the world.”
He sighed. “Yes,” he replied wistfully.
“And I have tomatoes to plant, and you a client to defend.” She searched his eyes. “Jared, no one has ever tried to shoot you over a case, have they?”
He looked at her amusedly. “A cowboy did, in New Mexico Territory,” he said finally. He gestured toward his healed leg. “That’s how I got this.”
“And…the cowboy who shot you? Was he arrested?” she asked, aghast.
“There was no need.” He started to turn away.
“Why?”
He glanced over his shoulder at her, smiling. “Because I shot him, my dear, and shattered his gun arm. He won’t be able to pull a gun again for a long time. And even if he can, he’ll think twice before he acts.”
Her eyes were like saucers. She stared—gaped—at this stranger to whom she was married.
“I did tell you that I had been a Texas Ranger,” he reminded her. “I know how to use a gun, Noelle. In fact, I know how to use one all too well.”
She stood in her own tracks, watching him, her eyes finding new things as she traced his face, his eyes, his hair, his hard, thin mouth. “And ride?” she asked.
He nodded.
“And when you were in the cavalry, you…fought?”
He nodded again.
She was barely breathing now. She forced her legs to move and went close to him, looking up. It was a long way. “Andrew was the phony,” she whispered. “And you are the genuine article. Is that not so?”