The Bridal Arrangement

by Cindy Gerard

  He didn’t want to add more damage by hammering her with questions. He decided instead to let her set the pace, but he had to know one thing first. “How are you feeling…really?”

  “Fine. Better,” she amended when he slanted her a doubting look. “Really.”

  There was little he could do but take her at her word. “Are you hungry?”

  She gave a little shrug that told him nothing and everything about her ambivalence. It also managed to expose one creamy white and very bare shoulder.

  Sometime in the night she’d started fidgeting with her bra straps and he’d helped her out of it. The scrap of white lace, along with the pins that had held her hair in place, lay scattered on the floor by his feet. Both stirred his memory of a tantalizing glimpse of pale, perfect breasts, the alluring tips of berry-pink nipples bathed in moonlight.

  He blocked the picture from his mind. “I think you should try to eat something.” He cleared his throat and, dragging his gaze to her face, tried again. “There’s enough food in the kitchen to feed threshers. Did you do all that? For me?”

  She’d snaked an arm out from under the covers and, looking anywhere but at him, pinched the fabric of the comforter between her thumb and finger, pleating and repleating it. He covered her hand with his, stilling her nervous motions.

  “Ellie, it’s all right. I want you to stop feeling so self-conscious. When you’re ready, we need to talk. But only when you’re ready, okay?”

  When she closed her eyes and swallowed hard, he turned her palm to his and linked their fingers together. “I’ll take care of you.”

  She stared at their clasped hands. “I’m your wife. I’m supposed to take care of you.”

  He’d been taking care of himself for more years than she’d been alive, so the thought of a little slip like her looking out for him made him smile. He didn’t think she’d want to hear that, though, so he suggested something he thought they could both live with. “How about we take care of each other?”

  That finally earned him a small smile. He let out a breath that seemed to have been bottled up since he’d walked into the room and found her staring so forlornly at the rain. He squeezed her hand, then nodded toward the tray.

  “Those wouldn’t happen to be peach muffins?” he asked, even though he knew the answer.

  Her smile blossomed and grew. He couldn’t shake the ridiculous notion that he felt as if the sun had come out.

  “You baked them for me? Because they’re my favorite?”

  She nodded. “I remembered.”

  “There, see? You’re already taking care of me. Nobody’s made me peach muffins in…” He let the words trail off. The last time had been before Clare died. The thought turned the promise of a lighter mood back toward darkness. He could see in Ellie’s eyes that her thoughts echoed his. “Well, let’s just say that it’s been a long time…. Now, how about you help me polish off a few?” he suggested, forcing a lightness back to his tone that brought her gaze to his. “I brought coffee, and I found some tea. Do you drink tea, Ellie?”

  She smiled again, shyly this time. “We don’t know much about each other, do we?”

  Again he touched a hand to her hair. “We’ve got a lifetime to learn.”

  Everything in her expression told him that she liked the sound of that. Almost everything. The shadows in her eyes hid secrets that gave her pain and shut him out.

  “Tea, please,” she said, looking away. Clutching the comforter to her breasts, she concentrated on sitting up.

  He quickly moved to help her. Gathering a trio of pillows, he propped them behind her back. She leaned into him, her weakness still obvious.

  Her nakedness was also very evident as he reached around her and settled a pillow at the small of her back. The first touch was accidental, a brief brush of his fingers along the sleek line of her spine. The second touch was not. He shouldn’t have done it. And yet, he couldn’t stop himself. The temptation was too great. The indulgence too sweet.

  His hand lingered there on the resilient warmth of her skin where the slight round of her hip met the indentation of her waist. It was like silk, that skin. It heated beneath his hand. Nothing short of her flinching could have stopped him from caressing that tender flesh, tracing the small ridges of her backbone as his hand slowly ascended.

  She did not flinch. She sort of melted into him, her lips pressed to the hollow of his throat, her breath fluttering along his skin, heating his blood as her warmth filled his palm and her hair trailed like heavy lace along the backs of his fingers. He closed his eyes, savored it all, the scent of her, the supple resilience that was his virgin bride, before easing away.

  Her eyes were huge and round, full of questions and wonder as they met and held his.

  Are you going to kiss me?

  Well. He really had no choice then. He cupped her jaw in his palm, tunneled his fingers into the hair at her nape and touched his lips to the petal softness of hers.

  It was supposed to be a brush of a kiss, a hello, an invitation to trust. A promise that he would be here for her.

  It turned into something more.

  Her lips were warm, like her skin. Her response was instant. She opened for him, moist heat, incredibly soft and giving.

  A spear of desire shot through him like fire.

  He knew about practiced seduction, understood the art of guile. Neither was a part of Ellie’s response. It was instinct, not practice that invited him inside. Honesty, not guile that sent lightning-swift pleasure singing through his blood.

  No, she knew nothing of seduction. Yet he was being totally and thoroughly seduced. With an artless touch of her tongue, a breathless little shiver that filled his head with images and urges and hunger. The thought that she could take him to that edge so quickly only made him realize the care he had to take with her.

  He was the one with the experience here.

  He was the one with the control.

  “I wonder…” he said, forcing himself to back away, to smile into her eyes and cater to her innocence and her needs instead of giving in to his own. “I wonder if your muffins taste as good as you do.”

  He’d never seen a woman blush before—at least not this prettily. It painted her cheeks a rosy-pink, then spread in a rush to color the flesh above the bedcovers, which her fisted fingers had let slip to reveal a tantalizing glimpse of high, round breasts, faintly marbled with a delicate network of translucent blue veins.

  It took more than he’d thought he had in him to resist the urge to tumble her back on her pillows, slowly drag those covers to her waist and feast on the sight and then the taste of her. To take her sweet, pink nipple in his mouth, tongue it, graze it with his teeth and feel her body arch and yearn, ache and burn, slowly awaken to the woman she would become.

  He gathered a necessary breath, a mandatory presence of mind.

  He was way off the mark. This was not the time. This was not the direction he needed to go with her. Not today. Maybe not for a very long time if he didn’t get a handle on her illness and on her limitations.

  And then there were his limits and the way she seemed to stretch them every time he was around her. He had to get a handle on that, too.

  “Ellie, sweetheart, it would probably be a very fine idea if I got your robe.”

  Ellie blinked once, slowly, then wet her lips, trying to capture the taste of his mouth, searching to read the dark look in his eyes, longing to know him as a bride should know her husband on the morning after her wedding.

  Questions. She had so many questions about what they would do together. In this bed. How he would touch her. Where he would kiss her. She had so many fantasies. Many of them were nurtured by the book she’d ordered by mail so she would know how to be a wife to him. Many more were fostered by just looking at him and knowing he could probably teach her more than she could ever learn from that book.

  “In the closet,” she said, instead of telling him what she wanted. Another kiss. The touch of his hand. On her bare skin
. On her naked breast.

  She didn’t know how to tell him those things. At least, that’s what she told herself. The way he’d reacted when he’d kissed her—oh, my. It seemed they’d been communicating just fine. The truth was that she was a coward. She was his wife now, but the part of her that kept her from being so many things still kept her from being his woman. Not just the physical part of her illness, but the part that affected how she felt about herself, how she felt about who she was and what she was. The part that made her different. The part that made her vulnerable to the whim of misfiring brain waves and shook her confidence.

  She watched him rise and walk across the room. Watched the perfectly strong, long length of him, the breadth of his shoulders, the dark satin of his hair, the deep-blue of his eyes when he turned back with her robe, and felt a throbbing ache low and deep inside her.

  In the wake of what she recognized as wanting rode a stark reminder of reality and regret. She quickly looked away. She should have told him everything. She should have prepared him. It hadn’t been fair.

  Even before she met his eyes again, she felt the loss a full disclosure would bring. His kiss had said he wanted her. But would he want everything that came with her?

  Guilt settled like a stone.

  I won’t ever leave you.

  That’s what he’d said last night. Even through the medicated haze, she remembered. That’s what she’d begged for. That’s what he’d promised. She wouldn’t hold him to it. She knew that now. Now that she realized she hadn’t really wanted him at any price. She’d wanted him at the price of love. At the price of forever. But after yesterday and last night, she realized she did not want him at the price of her pride.

  So she would tell him. Everything.

  But not now.

  Not naked.

  She couldn’t talk to him about it naked. She felt too vulnerable. And that vulnerability, like her faint but lingering headache, justified her decision to stall what was unavoidable for just a little while longer.

  Ellie had been worried about her chores, so Lee had left her with orders to please stay in bed while he took care of things for her. He’d needed the distance. He’d needed the physical labor to clear his head. So he’d fed the chickens, gathered the eggs, then checked on the handful of horses stabled in the barn. The rest of the herd grazed free on the open range.

  Going through the motions had been both grounding and disconcerting. It reminded him of years past, the satisfying simplicity of physical labor when it had been just him and Will and Clare. It reminded him of what his life no longer was—high tech and profit driven. Oddly, he felt equal measures of contentment and loss.

  Mainstay, the corporate cattle operation he’d managed for Curt outside of Houston, had been his life for the past ten years. He’d run the bulk of the operation from behind a desk with the assistance of the Web that kept him apprised minute by minute of the markets—the high-tech software that defined to a pencil-sharp point rate of gain, profit and loss, market trends. It had been a high-pressure position that he’d competed to get, worked like a dog to keep. And while it would never erase a starving street kid’s memories, it had given him what that kid had never had. Financial independence. Some shrewd investments and a knack for playing the markets had cemented his future.

  “I thought you liked it here,” Curt had protested in a last-ditch bid to convince him to stay.

  “I don’t just like it, I love it. I love the competitiveness of it. The orderliness, the cutting-edge technology. But I also hate it,” he’d confessed, trying to help Curt understand. “I hate the loss of hands-on management. I miss the physical labor—it’s cleansing and real…like the creak of saddle leather and the scent of horses.”

  He’d laughed when Curt had looked at him like he’d gone over the edge. “Okay, okay. I know it sounds sappy, but I miss the sense that I play a critical role in the day-to-day operations of a working ranch. Shiloh will give all that back to me.”

  And he could give to Shiloh what Will hadn’t been able—or had never wanted—to give. He could make it into something other than a hang-on-by-the-skin-of-your-teeth proposition. He could ease Shiloh into the twenty-first century. In the process, he could preserve a way of life that was becoming as obscure as a working horse in an SUV age.

  He looked around him at the outbuildings that hadn’t seen a coat of paint in four decades, the hulking giant of a house that had been built at the turn of the twentieth century and had benefited from very few updates since. He had the capital to invest in repairs, improvements and innovations. He had the desire to keep the ranch intact. And he had the will to say no to the pressure to sell out to the moneymen who’d been sniffing around. If they had their way, they would own Shiloh, then turn it into their personal game preserve or subdivide and make millions selling little pockets of paradise and populating the mountains with Hollywood types gone country. Well, that wasn’t going to happen. Not on his watch.

  He stepped onto the back porch, made a note to get to work on both the front and back porch floors and tried to understand why Will had never accepted his offers to help out.

  “Don’t need your money, boy,” he’d say in that soft, slow cadence that promoted trust and relayed pride. “We’re doin’ fine. Me and Mom and the girl. Sure would like to see your face, though. Know you’re a busy man, but when do you think you can get home for a spell?”

  He opened the kitchen door, set the bucket of eggs on the table and felt the guilt eat a little deeper. He hadn’t come home often enough. He’d known it then. He knew it even more keenly now. Now that it was too late to do anything but miss them.

  The house was comfortably quiet as he washed his hands, then dried them on a towel that had been looped through the handle on the refrigerator door. It was the same refrigerator that had been sitting on the same worn gray-and-white linoleum flooring twenty-three years ago when he’d come to Shiloh.

  After pouring a mug of coffee, he leaned back against the counter and studied the room. It had never seemed shabby to him back then. Even though Ellie obviously worked to keep the house clean and welcoming, he couldn’t get over how sadly neglected it seemed now. How neglected everything seemed.

  When a floorboard creaked overhead, he realized that he’d been listening, hoping even, for some sign that Ellie was up so he’d have an excuse to go check on her. Harder to admit, despite his concentration on his chores and his plans, she hadn’t been out of his mind for a moment since he’d left her in her bed. All pretty and pink and kissable.

  With a disgusted breath he looked up, took another sip of coffee. Then he made an honest effort to tuck her neatly into a cubbyhole alongside the rest of duties on his list. Fix everything in sight—including both porch floors, paint the house, check the herd, take care of Ellie. Just take care of her. She was fragile, she was vulnerable, and that’s what she needed from him most. His care.

  He knew that. And yet, he hadn’t—not for a minute—stopped thinking about her lying in her bed, her expression open with wonder, inviting him to kiss her again. Inviting him with her velvet eyes to do all the things he’d been wanting to do and more.

  He didn’t like it much. He didn’t like it that he couldn’t get her out of his head but he could—and would—handle it. Starting right now. He would do what Will had asked him to do. He’d take care of her.

  Setting the mug aside, he walked slowly into the living room, determined to do just that. He hesitated for only a moment before gripping the worn oak banister and ascending the stairs.

  “Ellie?” he called out softly as he rounded the corner in the upstairs hallway and walked into her room. The bed was empty.

  He heard water running in the bathroom and followed the sound. It made sense that she would want to bathe. It would also make sense that if she weren’t feeling up to it, she wouldn’t tackle it on her own. Or would she? She would be shy about asking for his help. She would be modest. And if she’d known that he was picturing her sweet-scented and nake
d and wet, she’d have been running for her life.

  Disgusted with himself and determined not to shock her, he walked slowly toward the bathroom door at the end of the hall—and found it mostly open. He was about to knock, about to ask if she was doing okay, when he saw a shadow of movement and she walked into his field of view.

  Her back was to him. She was wrapped from neck to ankle in her pink robe when she stopped beside the deep, claw-foot tub that was slowly filling with hot water. With a grace and unconscious sensuality that made his pulse leap, she swept that riot of curling copper hair into a loose knot on top of her head and secured it with a gold clip. Then, still unaware that he was watching her, she undid the belt of her robe.

  He should have left her to her privacy then. At the very least he should have let her know he was there. But he couldn’t seem to move, was beyond speech as the soft chenille slid from her creamy white shoulders, slipped down her slender back, and caught low on her hips before pooling in a drift of pink at her feet.

  Four

  She was, in one very inadequate word, exquisite. Her skin was pale and flawless, her neck long and graceful. Her waist was small, like the rest of her—the flair of her hips woman soft, her legs sleek and supple. Twin dimples saucily winked at him from above her sweetly rounded bottom, drew his gaze, stirred his sex—as did a strawberry-shaped beauty mark riding a little left of center at the small of her back. He wanted to touch her there with his lips, stroke her there with his tongue.

  Mine, he thought again, unaccustomed to the hard, swift punch of possession that swamped him.

  He wasn’t conceited and he wasn’t blind. Women found him attractive. The women he’d taken as lovers had been sophisticated and beautiful—and they hadn’t looked at him with forever in their eyes and a trust that ran river deep.

  Just as none of them had never moved him as she did. None of them aroused him like she did. And none of them—not even for a moment—could make him forget who he was and who he wasn’t and what he wasn’t prepared to give.