She chanced another direct glance at the handsome, unsmiling face and all her self-protective instincts converged to shield her from yet another disappointment. From habit, the headmistress supplanted the lover—unimpeachably correct, starchily aloof. “Which makes me wonder, Morgan, why you’re here now. Have you decided to give up the law and be what you once led me to believe you were—a simple rancher with no hidden agenda?”
He paced to the window and stared out. “I’ve thought about it,” he said, his smoky, sexy voice playing sonatas down her spine. “I’ve indulged in endless games of ‘what if’ over the last few months.”
He swung around to face her and she marveled that she somehow managed to stop herself from rushing to him and flinging herself into his arms. But she dared not, not until she knew for sure....
“I wondered if we could handle a long-distance marriage, with you here and me someplace else—the ranch, or private practice, perhaps. Such marriages sometimes work,” he said, at her small exclamation of protest.
“Not for me,” she said firmly.
He drummed his fingertips on the window ledge. “I see.”
“Really?” She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “And what is it that you see, Morgan?”
“You’ve done what I haven’t been able to do. You’ve put the past—our past—behind you.”
“And how,” she inquired, the headmistress still refusing to bow out and let the woman who loved him speak from her heart, “do you arrive at that conclusion?”
“Well, hell,” he said, his voice raw with misery, “I think I just proposed. And I know damn well you shot me down before I barely got the words out.”
The warmth that was melting her heart stole into her face, softening her features and thawing the tears damming her eyes. She blinked them away. “I didn’t mean to do that. What else did you wish to say?”
He heaved a great sigh. “That I was wrong to let you go, wrong to think time or distance would solve anything. That neither of those things has anything to do with love.”
He flexed his shoulders and loosened the knot in his tie. “That the few days we shared, Jessica, have overshadowed every waking minute of the last three and a half months for me. That I tried to forget you—for your sake, for mine—”
He stopped again and raked his fingers through his hair, disheveling its tidy perfection. “Hell, I don’t know! And what does it matter anyway, if you don’t feel—?”
She couldn’t bear it a minute longer, not the pain they’d both suffered, not the time they’d wasted, and most especially not the stretch of carpet separating them that neither dared to cross. They were both so tentative, so cautious, so protective—of each other, of themselves.
One of them had to be brave and he’d already laid himself on the line for her. It was her turn to take a chance.
“I won’t settle for a long-distance marriage,” she said, at last finding the strength to do what she’d wanted to do from the moment she’d seen him standing in her office doorway. Pushing herself out of her chair, she went to him and put her arms around his waist. “If I love a man enough to marry him, I want to be with him all the time.”
“Do you still love me, Jessica?”
“Oh, yes,” she whispered, leaning her head against his chest. “I thought the feelings might die, especially when I didn’t hear from you, but they didn’t. I’ve missed you so much, Morgan.”
“Me too,” he said, wrapping his arms around her. “Me too, sweetheart.”
“If being a rancher full-time will make you happy...?”
“it won’t,” he said. “That’s Clancy’s idyll, not mine. Speaking of whom, there’s one man who’ll happily dance at our wedding. I think he’d marry you himself if he had the chance. But about that other ‘what if’ I mentioned—the one about going into private practice—”
“Is that what you really want, Morgan?”
“No.” She felt the shuddered intake of his breath, sensed the battle he was waging within himself. He tightened his arms around her. “You’re a remarkable human being, and I love you for who you are, for the way you think. But more than that I need you. Don’t make me go the distance alone, Jessica. My work—it’s not always pretty, it’s seldom polite and it’s almost...” he drew a deep, despairing breath “...almost never clean. But it’s who I am, what I believe in, and if I’m to go on making a difference—trying to make things better—I have to have someone to come home to who believes in me. I have to have you.”
“You already do,” she said. “I’ve been yours for the taking for months.”
“But I don’t have the right.” He gestured at the elegant office with its white-painted classical fireplace and high coved ceiling. “How can I ask you to give up the ordered, exclusive life you’ve carved out for yourself here? Because that’s what it really boils down to, sweetheart. I can’t be effective as a crown prosecutor living on Springhill Island.”
“But I can be a wife anywhere.”
“You’d do that? You’d give up your job just to be with me?”
She would have laughed if she hadn’t been so close to tears. “Just to be with you? Morgan, my dearest love, I left here at Christmas believing I was a whole woman but I knew, by the time I came back, that I’d brought only half of me home.”
She touched his face, tracing loving fingers over his cheek, his jaw, his mouth. “Teaching, running this school—I made them my life because they were all I had and for a long time they were enough. But then there was you, and everything changed. With you, finer dreams didn’t seem so impossible any more.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? We’ve wasted so much time.”
“I wasn’t willing to risk having you turn away from me. I thought, on Christmas night when you left me outside that service station, that I’d never felt such heartache, and I made a vow I’d never leave myself open to that sort of pain again. But I’ve learned there are worse things.”
“Are there?” he said tenderly, lowering himself to the chair she’d recently vacated. “Such as what?”
“Such as being a prisoner of one’s pride. Such as being afraid to live. Would you believe,” she said, allowing him to draw her down onto his lap, “that I decided this afternoon that it was time I stopped being such a coward? I was going to come to you and refuse to go away unless you could tell me you were happier without me. Because you can’t turn off love, no matter how ill advised it might seem, no matter how inconvenient.”
“There could be other Gabriel Parrishes, sweetheart.”
“If there are, we’ll face them together. It’s time to close old doors, Morgan, especially with so many new ones waiting to be opened. I’m not Daphne; you’re not Stuart.”
He took her face between his two hands. “I don’t know how I lived without you, my lovely Jessica, but I do know I can’t go on that way. Will you marry me, despite everything?”
“No,” she sighed as his mouth inched toward hers. “I’ll marry you because of everything.”
EPILOGUE
“HELLO, gal. Sorry I haven’t been up to chat the last few days but I’ve been away to the coast, to a weddin’. Morgan’s weddin’, Agnes, and you ain’t seen nothin’ like it. More fancy folks in fancy clothes than you could shake a stick at. An’ queer food like you wouldn’t believe. Weren’t at all sure a man were meant to put it in his mouth, let alone swallow the dad-blamed stuff. Nothin’ like your good home cookin’, gal. And the drink—hah! Fizzed up a man’s nose worse’n that mornin’ brew you used to concoct to keep me regular through the winter.
“But it were worth the trip, just to see Morgan so happy. And that Jessica! Why, Agnes, she looked darn near as beautiful as you did the day you married me. All in white, she were, with the rear end of her dress trailin’ behind her for half a mile. You’d’ve loved all the flowers, gal. Roses and sweet-smellin’ foreign things, and little white misty bits of stuff like the wild baby’s breath you used to grow, ’cept this were bigger and come from a
greenhouse.
“As for Morgan, well, he’d’ve looked just fine if he could’ve kept the sappy grin off his face. Embarrassing, it were, watchin’ him. Good thing he got himself a sensible wife this time. She’ll do, Agnes. She’s a good woman—could’ve been your daughter if God had seen fit to send us one. Feet planted on the ground and goodhearted, that’s the new Mrs. Kincaid. She’ll not be runnin’ for the hills at the first sign of trouble. She’ll deal with it, just the way you would’ve.
“Reckon there’ll be young’uns before long, gal. Jessica turned all red in the face when I asked and Morgan told me to hush my mouth. Said it weren’t something he wanted broadcast just yet, as though a little foal were already bakin’ in the oven. Wouldn’t surprise me a bit, Agnes, the way he carried on at Christmas, sniffin’ around her all the time. Thought I was goin’ to have to hog-tie him to the stable door a couple of times.
“He and his new missus is comin’ up to the ranch in September. I’ll introduce you then and, come next spring, I’ll bet my last dollar there’ll be a baby to show off.
“Anyway, gal, there it is, all the news that’s fit to print. I missed you. I always do when I’m away from you. Reckon I can understand how Morgan feels. When the right woman comes along, she makes a man feel whole.
“Best be gettin’ back to work now. The wild flowers is bloomin’ all around you, all red and orange and purple, just the way you always wanted. You rest easy and I’ll stop by again tomorrow, same as always. I’ve loved you for nearly fifty years, darlin’. I ain’t about to stop now.”
ISBN : 978-1-4592-6952-1
CHRISTMAS WITH A STRANGER
First North American Publication 1997.
Copyright © 1997 by Catherine Spencer.
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