Luck Of The Draw

by Candace Schuler

  sumed her. How much did he really need to know, anyway? How much was he entitled to know? How much would satisfy him?

  “Just tell me the truth,” he said, looking as if he’d read her mind. “All of it.”

  “I’m desperate,” Eve said baldly, deciding to give him exactly what he’d asked for. It was all she had. All she was capable of. She was down to her last reserves.

  “Desperate how?”

  “I’m an unwed mother with a sick baby to take care of. I know he doesn’t look sick,” she added, when Travis’s gaze flickered from her face to the child in her arms, “but Timothy was born with a heart defect. He has special needs that make day care an impossibility, even if I could afford it. Which I can’t. My savings are almost gone and I haven’t been able to find a suitable job in over five months of looking. The next step is welfare, and I don’t want that for myself or my son.”

  “What about his father?”

  “He left. I don’t know where he is.” Her chin came up proudly. “Nor do I care.”

  “Don’t you have any relatives who could help out until you get back on your feet?”

  Eve shook her head.

  “No parents? Brothers? Sisters?” he prodded. “A cousin?”

  “No,” she said flatly, in a tone that advised him to abandon that line of questioning; she hadn’t had to go into this in her letters and she resented being made to do it now.

  “So what you’re telling me here is that you haven’t got anyone you feel you can turn to?” he said, more thinking out loud than actually asking a question. “And because of that you drove halfway across Texas to marry a man you’ve never met before, a man who’s a complete stranger to you. Strictly for security?” He shook his head. “That’s a hard one to swallow.”

  “I don’t know why it should be,” she said, mystified by his attitude. “Women have been marrying for security since marriage was invented. And a good many of them have probably married strangers. Or as good as.”

  “Maybe other women,” he agreed. “But not a woman like you.”

  She stared at him, dumbfounded. “Why not a woman like me?”

  “Because it doesn’t make any kind of sense, is why not. You’re beautiful. And jaw-droppin’ sexy. Intelligent, too, or you wouldn’t be a nurse,” he said, remembering what Gus had told him. “It seems to me you could take your pick of men.”

  Eve shook her head at his naiveté. “Most men aren’t interested in a woman with a baby, especially a sick baby who takes most of her time and attention. And those who might be interested, well…” She shrugged. “Getting to know a man, letting him get to know you… It takes time. And I don’t have time. I need security now.”

  “What about love? What about…Oh, I don’t know—” he raked a hand through his hair “—trust and compatibility and companionship?” Travis said, thinking of his brother and Carolyn. Of his parents. Of the kind of marriage he’d always envisioned for himself, someday.

  Eve’s eyes flashed blue fire, but she managed to keep her voice even. “What about it?” she asked, letting him know exactly what she thought of the question. And of the emotion. “Or were you thinking of things like love and compatibility when you decided to follow through with what your friend Gus started? You are thinking of following through, aren’t you?” she said shrewdly. “That’s what you meant by ‘not necessarily,’ isn’t it?”

  “I need someone to be a mother to the girls,” he agreed.

  “And I need security for my son,” she stated flatly, knowing she’d made her point. “If there was any other way, believe me, I would have found it. But there isn’t any other way. So here I am, contemplating marriage to a man I don’t know for the sake of my baby. I don’t think that’s much different than what you’re thinking of doing, do you?”

  “No, you’re right,” he agreed. “You’re absolutely right. We’ve both got other people besides ourselves to think of here. You need to be able to take care of your son. I need someone to look after the girls. It’s a sorry situation all around but…Oh, hell, maybe I’m crazy, but I think there might be a way we can work this whole thing out to our mutual advantage,” he said.

  And then he smiled. It was a sweet smile. A charming smile. An utterly, effortlessly captivating smile that worked its way up from the corners of his well-shaped lips until it became an inviting little twinkle in his big brown eyes. If Gus had been in the room he would have recognized it as the smile Travis used to get what he wanted from the ladies.

  Eve eyed him with suspicion, instinctively mistrust ing that easy-going, aw-shucks, sure-you-can-trust-me smile. It didn’t go with anything that had gone before.

  “Why don’t you sit down?” he suggested, unaware of the adverse effect his slow smile had on her. “Let me get you a fresh cup of coffee and grab one for myself, and we can discuss this like two rational adults.”

  “I, uh, I need to change Timothy,” she said, ignoring his invitation to sit. Holding the baby to her with one arm, she stooped and picked up the diaper bag off the kitchen floor. “Is there a bedroom I can use?”

  “Sure,” Travis said, a little surprised at her nonreaction. Any number of women had led him to believe that his smile was lethal—and irresistible. “The master bedroom is back down the hall at the front of the house. It’s the door on the right.”

  “Thank you,” she said and fled. She didn’t actually break into a run, but it was flight all the same. Panicked flight. He had suddenly decided to charm her and, dammit, she didn’t want to be charmed! She preferred his open cynicism and suspicion. At least that way she knew what to expect. Men who set out to be charming were up to no good.

  According to her mother, her father had been a charmer. And so had Craig. At first. She didn’t trust a charming man as far as she could throw him.

  “We prefer to know where we stand, don’t we, sweetie?” she said to the baby as, one-handed, she fished a waterproof changing pad out of the diaper bag and spread it on top of the wedding ring quilt that covered the antique four-poster. Normally, it only took her a few minutes to change him, but she lingered over the task, drawing it out, tickling and nuzzling him as she worked in an attempt to calm and center herself for the coming confrontation. Because confrontation was what it would be. Travis Holt was up to something, and that something surely boded ill for her and Timothy. A man didn’t smile like that unless he was trying to pull the wool over some woman’s eyes.

  Eve picked up her son, cradling him against her shoulder, and walked back into the kitchen, determined to face Travis Holt and his sudden display of charm head-on. If he wanted to go through with it, to get married for the sake of the children, that was fine. It was what she had come here to do. If he didn’t…If he didn’t, well…she’d just have to find another solution, that’s all. She’d swallow what was left of her pride and apply for welfare if she had to.

  She only hoped to God she wouldn’t have to.

  “I’ve got a proposition for you,” he said after she had settled the baby into his carrier and given him a rubber teething ring to gnaw on.

  Proposition, Eve thought despairingly. Not proposal.

  She sat down and wrapped her hands around the cup of coffee on the table in front of her to hide their trembling. “What kind of proposition?”

  “Not the kind you’re imagining,” he said, flashing another of his patented woman-melting, trust-me smiles.

  She stared back at him, as unaffected as a stone, and waited for him to get to the point.

  Travis took the hint. His smile faded. “I don’t know how much Gus told you about the situation here, but I’ve had three housekeepers since my brother and sister-in-law died,” he said. “Three housekeepers in a little less than five months.”

  “Yes.” Eve nodded. “He told me that in his first letter.”

  “Did he also tell you that I’ve got a woman from the child protection agency breathing down my neck about the way the girls are being raised? Or not being raised,” he amended with a gri
mace. “I don’t know if it’s just me, or men in general she has a problem with, but she’s got a real bee in her bonnet about the fact that there’s no stable feminine influence, as she calls it, around here.” His jaw was tight with frustration and impotent anger. “The damned woman has been doing her level best to convince her superiors that the girls are going to come to harm under my care.”

  “Gus mentioned that he—that you,” she corrected herself, “had been having some problems with someone from child welfare.”

  “At first, she wasn’t much more than a damned nuisance, going around, poking her nose into every little thing, but lately…” He hesitated, unwilling to bring up Louise Gillespie’s latest insinuations. They were too ugly to be aired in his sister-in-law’s bright, comfortable kitchen, too frightening to put into words. “She’s managed to dig up a couple of distant relatives from Carolyn’s side of the family, second cousins or something, who she says have offered to take the girls in and bring them up proper—” He nearly snarled the word. “But only if they’re split up. Which is completely out of the question, even if it’s true. Those girls aren’t going anywhere, and they sure as hell aren’t going to be split up,” he said, his eyes steely with determination. “Josh and Carolyn made it clear they wanted me to raise them, and I aim to do exactly that.”

  “So you’ve decided you need a wife.”

  “No, Gus decided I need a wife,” he corrected her. “But I’m beginning to think maybe he’s right. In a way. Which leads me to that proposition I mentioned.”

  Eve took a careful sip of her coffee. Without think ing, she reached out with her free hand to cup her fingers over Timothy’s dimpled little knee for comfort and strength. “I’m listening.”

  “Marriage is a big step. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Yes.” She nodded, wondering what he was leading up to. “It’s a very big step.”

  “Not something a person should rush into without a lot of serious thought.”

  “I’ve given it a lot of serious thought,” Eve assured him. “I assume you have, too, or we wouldn’t be sitting here discussing it.”

  “Yeah, well, the thing is—and I don’t mean to be disparaging or to hurt your feelings or anything, but—” He paused and ran a hand through his hair before blurting out the truth. “You’re not exactly the type of woman I had in mind to marry.”

  She was the type he wouldn’t mind having sex with, certainly. Lush and exotic with go-to-hell eyes and kissme lips, she was exactly the type he’d have tried his damnedest to charm into bed, back in his wild and woolly days on the rodeo circuit. But marriage was a whole different kettle of fish and it required an entirely different kind of woman than the one sitting across the table from him. He was a rancher now, with duties and responsibilities, not a free-living, good-time cowboy with nothing on his mind but the next go ‘round and the next willing woman. He needed a helpmate, not a playmate.

  Most importantly, he had the girls to think of. They needed a woman to fill the empty place Carolyn had left in their lives. They needed a role model and a mother and, despite the infant lying in his carrier on the table between them, he’d never seen a woman who looked less like mother in his life. Still, she was a mother. There was no getting around that. So maybe there was more to her than met the eye.

  “You wouldn’t be my first choice as a husband,” Eve said bluntly, matching him truth for truth, since that’s what he’d said he wanted. “But then, I didn’t have much choice. That’s why I’m here.”

  “I don’t seem to have much choice at the moment, either,” Travis reminded her. “But I want to take full advantage of the limited choices I—we,” he amended with another smile, “do have.”

  “Which leads us to your proposition,” Eve prompted, bracing herself for what was coming.

  “Which leads us to my proposition,” Travis agreed. He captured her gaze across the width of the table, over the baby between them, and held it. “What I’m suggesting is a six-month trial period to see how it goes. If it works out, we can see about getting married. Maybe.”

  Eve didn’t even blink. She didn’t even think. “No,” she said flatly in a voice that brooked no argument.

  Travis argued it anyway. “Why ‘no’? It’d give us a chance to get to know each other. Find out if we’re compatible. See if we can live together without driving each other crazy.”

  “I’ve been that route before. It’s what got me where I am today. You want the milk, you buy the cow,” she said, using a blunt old country saying. “No free samples. No trial periods.”

  “I’m not suggesting that sex be part of the deal.”

  She gave him a level look from under her brows. “Aren’t you?”

  “No, of course no—” he began indignantly, then paused and shrugged, giving her a sheepish, okay-youcaught-me grin. “All right. I admit it. The thought of getting you into bed did cross my mind. You’re a hell of a sexy woman. I’m a normal red-blooded man.” He shrugged again, causing the fabric of his blue chambray work shirt to strain across his shoulders. “Thoughts of sex are inevitable. And natural,” he added, “but-”

  “Which is exactly why there isn’t going to be a trial marriage,” Eve snapped.

  “You wouldn’t have to worry,” he continued, smoothly overriding her interruption. “I wouldn’t force you to do anything you didn’t want to do.” He lowered his head slightly, giving her a sly, teasing look from under his brows. “It might reassure you to know that I’ve never had to resort to force to get a woman into my bed,” he added provocatively, his tone and the look in his eyes suggesting that force wouldn’t be necessary in her case, either.

  “I’m sure you haven’t,” Eve agreed, deliberately ignoring the seductive, teasing light in his eyes. “But there are many kinds of coercion that don’t require overt force. A person’s sense of obligation can be a very ef fective weapon in that regard. And I would be under a heavy obligation to you if I were living here under your roof, eating your food, depending on you for my support.” She shook her head. “That’s not an obligation I’d be willing to accept on a trial basis.” Not that she wouldn’t ultimately accept it if it were the only alternative. As she’d already told him, her choices were limited, but she’d try to make a better deal for herself first.

  “You’d be taking care of the girls and the house,” Travis said. “Doing the cooking. Tending the garden. That’s a big job. Surely that would take care of any obligation you might feel toward me.”

  Eve shook her head. “The only thing that would erase any sense of obligation on my part is a paycheck.” She crossed her fingers under the table and hoped. “If the arrangement was strictly business, employer to employee, then I might be able to consider it.”

  It was Travis’s turn to shake his head. “I’ve been that route. It doesn’t work and, frankly, I can’t afford to pay a housekeeper right now, anyway,” he added, thinking of the new bronc he’d just bought from Dale Meyer. “Ranching is a cash-hungry business that doesn’t leave much left over for extras.”

  “I’d be willing to work for less than the going rate,” Eve said. “It wouldn’t take much of a salary to dispel my sense of obligation, or your masculine sense of…” She struggled for a word. “Entitlement,” she declared, feeling it best described the situation she envisioned.

  “‘Entitlement’?”

  “If we did it your way I’d be living in your house, dependant on you, not a wife, but providing all the wifely services except one. You’d begin to feel entitled to that one, too. No, don’t shake your head at me,” she said when he started to deny it. “Grant me the same honesty you’ve demanded. If I agreed to this trial marriage-in-theory only, you’d eventually begin to feel entitled to sex. And then you’d feel resentful and misused when it wasn’t forthcoming. You’d begin to pressure me—charmingly, I’m sure,” she added. “But I’d refuse. Sooner or later, we’d end up fighting about it, and then I’d end up back in exactly the same situation I’m in now. In six months—if i
t lasted six months—I’d still be an unmarried woman with no job and a sick baby to support.” She looked him square in the eyes. “You can’t deny I’m right.”

  “Well…no,” he admitted reluctantly. “When you put it that way, I can’t deny it. Not completely. I mean, sure—” He shrugged. “I started fantasizing about getting you naked about two seconds after I walked into the kitchen and saw you standing there with the girls. But I’m not some green kid at the mercy of his hormones. I wouldn’t pressure you to have sex with me, no matter how much I might want you.” His brown eyes were dark with intensity and determination. A muscle in his jaw bulged. “And I won’t marry you just to get you into bed, either.”

  “No,” Eve said softly, sensing defeat. “I didn’t think you would. So I guess I’ll have to take what you—”

  “Uncle Travis?” said a hesitant little voice.

  “Miz Reardon and I aren’t finished talking yet, Amanda,” he said gently, without shifting his gaze from Eve’s face. “And the oatmeal isn’t burning.”

  “It’s not the oatmeal, it’s, uh, Uncle Travis?”

  “Not now, Aman—” he began, turning his head to issue a sterner reprimand to his niece. What he saw had him shooting up out of his chair. “What’s the matter, sweetheart? Are you sick?” He went down on one knee in front of her and reached out to cup her flushed cheek in his palm, turning it so he could look into her face. “Do you have a fever?”

  “No, I’m…it’s…” She ducked away from his hand, her face flaming. “I’m, uh, bleeding,” she said in an agonized whisper.

  “Bleeding?” He took her hands, turning them over in his as if they might be the source of her problem. “Where?”