Her breath shuddered out of her on a sigh as he turned. And a face that would make a woman beg, she added to the list of his good qualities, unable to tear her gaze away. The Roman nose, the chiseled features, those dark, almost black eyes.
Furious with herself for even noticing his features, much less finding them attractive, she dropped her hand from the blind and let it fall back into place.
Looks weren’t everything, she told herself as she climbed back on the bed. She’d had her pick of the best-looking men the state of Texas had to offer and, after no longer than a week or two, she’d discovered flaws in them all. Clay Martin had his faults, too, she reminded herself.
And skinflint topped the list.
Five
By morning Fiona had come up with a plan.
She’d persuade Clay to convince her father that his fears about her inability to take care of herself were unfounded. Why she hadn’t thought to enlist his aid before was beyond her.
It was brilliant!
And if Clay didn’t see things her way? Well, she knew how to sway him. She might not understand the basics of establishing and maintaining a budget, but she definitely knew how to get what she wanted from a man. She’d honed her skills to a razor-sharp edge over the years, wrapping man after man around her little finger until she’d gotten what she wanted from each.
And she’d wrap Clay, too, she thought smugly. It was just a matter of setting her mind to the task.
Pleased with herself, she pushed herself up to her elbows—and had to lock her arms to keep from throwing the covers back over her head.
Oh, God, she thought, squeezing her eyes shut to block out the sight of the depressing beige walls. Until she was able to persuade Clay to help her put an end to this stupid marriage, this was the view she’d wake to every morning.
She opened her eyes, then narrowed them at the wall. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t do something to pump up the ambiance a little.
And she was starting right now.
Fiona pushed open the front door to her family home and stopped, clasping her hands together as she drank in the familiar sights and scents that rushed out to greet her. Home, she thought, blinking back a sudden swell of emotion. It was all she could do to keep from dropping to her knees and kissing the marble floor.
“Fiona?”
She whirled. “Anita!” she cried, and ran to throw herself into the housekeeper’s arms. “Oh, my gosh, but I’ve missed you,” she said, hugging the woman tightly.
Anita twisted free to wag a scolding finger in front of Fiona’s nose. “You run away and get married without telling Anita, then dare to say you miss me? Ha!”
Fiona wrinkled her nose. “Who told you? Daddy?”
“The señor?” Anita humphed. “The señor, he tells me nothing. No one tells Anita anything. She must hear everything from strangers.”
“Strangers?” Fiona repeated, wondering who could possibly know about her marriage.
“Sí. Strangers. At the market this morning, I hear two women talking about this marriage of yours.”
“Ginger,” Fiona said with a groan, having forgotten that she had mentioned the marriage to her.
“I do not know the women’s names who gossip, only what I overhear them say, and that is that my niña married without telling her Anita.”
Fiona gave the housekeeper another quick hug. Though Anita hadn’t been working long for the Carsons, the two had become close. “I’m sorry. You should have heard it from me first.”
“Sí,” Anita agreed, nodding, then planted her hands on her ample hips. “And what do you think your madre is going to say when she returns from her visit with your sister, Cara, and discovers that her daughter has eloped while she was away?”
Fiona winced, then shrugged off the guilt before it could settle on her. “Daddy can handle that one, since this silly marriage was his idea.”
Seeing Anita’s confused look, Fiona smiled and looped her arm through the housekeeper’s. “Never mind. I need a favor,” she said as she drew the woman with her toward her private suite of rooms in the Carson home. “I want you to show me how to make a bed.”
The housekeeper stopped short to gape at Fiona. “Make a bed?” she repeated. “You?”
Fiona laughed at the housekeeper’s shocked expression. “Yes, me. Will you teach me?”
“Sí,” Anita said. “But will you learn? That is the question.”
“I’ll learn,” Fiona promised. She looped her arm through Anita’s again and walked with her into the suite of rooms. Once inside she stopped, emotion filling her throat again as she gazed around her sitting room, with its creamy-yellow walls and blue toile draperies. “Anita?”
Already busy stripping the comforter from the bed for the first lesson, Anita said, “Sí, Fiona?”
“Are any of the cowboys around today?”
“Sí. A few, maybe. Why you ask?”
“I may need their help later.”
Anita turned to look at her in puzzlement, a pillow caught between her hands. “For what?”
Fiona crossed the room, catching her lower lip between her teeth to hide her smile. “Oh, nothing too major.”
There were days when Clay wondered if the entire population of the world had been stripped of its moral and ethical values or if it was just the company he kept. Everywhere he turned it seemed he was faced with one atrocity after another, the details surrounding each more sordid and depraved than the ones before.
His current caseload consisted of a murder, in which a pedophile had kidnapped and brutally killed a child, a teenager strung out on drugs who’d bludgeoned his parents to death with a dull ax, a string of convenience-store robberies that covered half the state, stolen Mayan artifacts smuggled into the United States across the Texas/Mexico border. The list went on and on.
And that was without taking into consideration the cases he worked on unofficially. He continued to assist in the search for the parents of the baby left on the Lone Star Country Club’s ninth tee, worked in an advisory capacity on the rescue of a man held in a Central American prison by terrorists, plus offered his expertise on a number of other cases centered in and around Mission Creek.
More often than not, the minute he hit the front door at the end of a day, he headed straight for the shower, desperate to wash off the evil he was sure had rubbed off on him from the lowlifes he was forced to deal with all day.
Today was no different.
But when he entered his house, he only made it as far as the hallway before he was stopped cold. He turned slowly back around. That wasn’t his chair, he thought in confusion, staring at the tobacco-colored leather club chair he’d just passed. And those weren’t his pictures, he thought, his gaze going to the framed oil paintings hanging on the wall between the front windows. Hell, he didn’t even own any art!
There was only one explanation.
“Fiona!”
“Back here!” she called.
The cheerfulness in her voice had his eyes narrowing to slits. He stalked down the hall toward her room. “Where the hell did all that crap in the den come from?”
“What crap?” came her muffled reply.
He stepped into her room and stopped, shocked by the room’s altered state. Drapes flanked the once bare windows and pooled into soft gauzy puddles on the floor. The old double-bed frame and mattress that had been there had been replaced with a queen-size canopy bed covered with a thick, down-filled comforter and a mountain of decorative pillows of verifying shapes and textures. A sky-blue velvet chaise sat in front of the window, arranged to take advantage of the view. Against the opposite wall stood a massive mahogany armoire, its heavily carved doors thrown wide. Fiona sat in front of it, pulling clothes from a suitcase and tucking them into a drawer.
She glanced over her shoulder and beamed at him. “Hi. What crap?”
She’d gone shopping, was all he could think. She’d spent a fortune—probably charged a fortune—to buy all this stuff. And since her
father had cut her off, he could only assume that she’d charged the purchases to him.
“It’s going back,” he said, barely able to control the rage that boiled inside him. “Do you understand? Every damn bit of this crap is going back where it came from.”
Her forehead wrinkling in puzzlement, she tucked the sweater she held into the drawer, then stood. “But why?”
“Because we don’t need it!” he shouted. “And I sure as hell can’t afford it. I can barely make the notes on this place as it is.”
Fiona stared at him, her plan to charm him into helping her forgotten. Setting her jaw, she took a step toward him. “I didn’t buy this ‘crap,’ as you referred to it. It’s mine. Every last bit of it.”
He could only stare. “Yours?”
She jutted her chin. “Yes, mine. And I’m not hauling it all back home. I may have to live in this…this…” She fluttered her hands at the room, searching for the right word to describe it. It didn’t take her long to come up with one. “This hovel,” she said, with a shudder. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t have a few of my personal possessions around to make my stay here more pleasant, not to mention more comfortable.”
Hovel? Clay thought, her description stabbing like a knife to the heart. Is that what she thought of the house he’d grown up in? The place he was struggling desperately to hold on to?
“Fine,” he growled, then leveled a finger at her nose. “But you better make damn sure you don’t throw out any of my stuff to make room for yours. If you do…”
Letting the threat dangle unfinished in the air between them, he turned and stalked from her room.
Clay stepped under the shower, letting the icy needles of water cool his temper. After five minutes beneath the punishing spray, he braced his hands on the tiled wall and dropped his chin to his chest with a weary sigh.
He shouldn’t have yelled at her, he told himself. He should have asked questions before assuming the worst and jumping down her throat. Even if her reasons for doing so were insulting, she had every right to bring some of her own things into his home.
She deserved an apology, he told himself, though the thought of offering her one left a bitter taste in his mouth. But if nothing else, Clay was fair. When he was wrong, he owned up to his mistakes and was quick to set things right.
Twisting off the faucet, he dragged a towel from over the shower door and stepped out onto the worn linoleum floor. After drying off, he pulled on a pair of clean jeans, tugged a T-shirt over his head and headed for the hall.
At the doorway to Fiona’s room, he paused and peeked inside. He found her sitting on the floor in front of the armoire, her head bent, her shoulders drooped, while she plucked at a nubby sweater she held on her lap. She looked miserable, beaten. The fact that Clay was responsible for her current depressed mood only added to his guilt. She wasn’t any happier about this marriage than he was, he reminded himself. They were both helpless pawns in a game of chess her father had devised.
Promising himself to be more understanding, more patient, he took a step into the room. “Fiona?”
She snapped her shoulders back at the sound of his voice and quickly stuffed the sweater into a drawer. “Unless you’re here to offer an apology,” she said tersely, “you can leave.”
“I’m sorry.”
She whipped her head around to stare at him, obviously not having expected him to offer her one.
With a wry smile, he crossed to her. “When I’m out of line, I usually realize it sooner or later.”
She pressed her lips together and reached to snatch another article of clothing from the suitcase, avoiding his gaze. “You were definitely out of line in this instance.”
He hunkered down beside her, bracing an arm on his thigh. “Forgive me?”
She gave her chin a haughty lift and yanked open a drawer, refusing to look at him. “I might.”
He bit back a smile at her stubbornness. “Should I expect it in this lifetime?”
“Maybe.”
He chuckled and sat down cross-legged beside her. “I guess that’ll have to do.”
“I guess it will,” she replied with a sniff, “since that’s the best you’re getting from me.”
While she continued to fuss with her clothes and ignore him, he looked around, noting the furniture and accessories she’d moved into the room, wondering how she’d managed to handle it all. That armoire alone had to weigh a good three or four hundred pounds. “How did you get all this stuff over here?” he asked.
“I didn’t pay someone to move it, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Sure that he deserved the snide remark, he caught her hand and pulled her around to face him.
“I said I was sorry,” he said quietly. “The question was an honest one and asked out of simple curiosity.” He tipped his head, indicating the armoire. “That thing must weigh a ton.”
Grimacing, she dropped her chin. “Trust me, it does.”
“So who moved it? I know you couldn’t have done it alone.”
“Some of the cowboys from the ranch. And I didn’t pay them,” she was quick to inform him.
He arched a warning brow. “I think we’ve already established that no money changed hands. What I’d like to know is how you talked them into moving all this stuff for you.”
She shrugged. “I just asked.”
“You just asked,” he repeated, then dropped back his head and laughed. From a woman like Fiona, he knew a simple request was all it would take to have a man tying himself in knots to fulfill it.
She pursed her lips. “What’s so funny?”
He shook his head, still chuckling. “Nothing. I was just picturing all those cowboys sweating and straining, while you stood by filing your nails and issuing orders.”
She snatched her hand from his, and he immediately regretted the thoughtless remark. His hand felt empty now, cold, without the softness and warmth of hers filling it.
“You make me sound like some kind of prima donna.”
Anxious to avoid another shouting match, he caught her hand again and rose, pulling her to her feet, as well. “No. You’re a woman who knows how to get what she wants.”
She eyed him, as if unsure whether he’d meant that as a compliment or an insult.
Chuckling, he slung an arm around her shoulders and urged her toward the door. “What’s for dinner? I’m starving.”
“Dinner?” she repeated, peering up at him in alarm. “You expect me to cook?”
“Well, yeah,” he said in surprise. “What else have you got to do all day?”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he knew they were the wrong ones. He quickly hauled her back against his side, before she could start pecking at him again, and aimed them both for the kitchen. “I’ve got sandwich makings in the refrigerator,” he said, hoping to smooth her ruffled feathers. “We’ll make do with a cold meal tonight.”
Clay learned quickly that Fiona was a stranger to a kitchen. After watching her stare blankly into the refrigerator for a good five minutes, he guided her to a chair and made the sandwiches himself. While he was building them, he remembered that the day before he’d never gotten around to discussing with her what details of their marriage they would make public. Unsure how best to broach the subject without setting off another argument, he placed their plates on the table, then sat down opposite her.
He took a bite of his sandwich, then glanced over at her. “I saw your dad yesterday at the country club.”
She stiffened at the mention of her father, then lifted an indifferent shoulder. “Lucky you.”
He bit back a smile. The woman definitely knew how to hang on to a grudge. “Yeah, I thought it was rather a fortunate encounter myself. Probably saved me hours trying to track him down.”
Poised for the first bite, she snapped her gaze to his. “What did you want to see my father about?”
“Wanted to straighten out a few things. I saw Ginger at the spa,” he explained further. “She
made a comment about our marriage being rather sudden, and I wasn’t sure how to respond. I thought it might be wise to ask your father how much of our arrangement he wants to be made public before I find myself caught in that situation again.”
Fiona laid down her sandwich, her appetite gone, as she imagined the townspeople’s reaction when word got around that her father had paid Clay Martin to marry her. She’d be the laughingstock of Mission Creek!
“And what did he say?” she asked uneasily.
He lifted a shoulder. “He said he’d go along with whatever story we concocted.”
Fiona found that only mildly reassuring, since she wasn’t at all sure how far a man as honorable as Clay would be willing to stretch the truth. “So what explanation do you suggest we offer?”
He lifted a shoulder again. “Doesn’t matter to me. I just think it’s important that we’re all reading from the same script.”
“Good idea,” she said, picking up her sandwich and trying her best to appear as unconcerned as he.
Frowning, she nibbled at the sandwich while she tried to think of a plausible explanation for their rushed marriage—one in which she didn’t wind up looking like some hopeless spinster her father was desperate to pawn off on the first available man.
“We’ve been friends since we were children,” she began, but stopped when Clay gave her a dubious look.
“Okay,” she said irritably. “So maybe we weren’t friends, but we at least knew each other.” She took a sip of her milk, then stared off into space as she let the story build in her mind.
“You’ve been gone for years,” she said, picking up the tale again. “So no one can question what kind of relationship we might have had while you were away. For all they know, we could’ve been corresponding by mail the whole time you were in the army.”
“It’s possible,” he allowed.
“And through our correspondence, you fell hopelessly in love with me.”
When he choked on his milk, she gave him a sour look. “Well, you could’ve.”
Trying not to laugh, he waved a hand, urging her to go on with her story.
An Arranged Marriage Page 7