Have Honeymoon, Need Husband

by Robin Wells

  “What are your plans for after the first of the year?”

  Josie looked away, struggling to play it cool. “I…I haven’t really made any plans.”

  “Well, you must have some idea where you want to go from here.”

  Directly to bed, by way of the nearest marriage license bureau. Do not pass go. She opened her mouth, then closed it. This was a moment she knew she’d remember all her life, and she was old-fashioned enough to want him to do the asking. She dropped her eyes, suddenly shy. “Well, I…I thought I’d wait and see what opportunities present themselves.”

  Luke stared at her, feeling like he’d been dowsed by a bucket of cold water. His joints stiffened and his heart seemed to freeze in his chest.

  It was just as he’d feared—she was only marking time at the ranch until she landed another job. As soon as she did, she’d be gone. And from the sound of her conversation with that Atkins jerk tonight, it wouldn’t be much longer.

  His jaw tensed, and a muscle flexed in it. “I see.”

  “See what?” she asked, her eyes wide and confused.

  It was what he’d figured would happen from the very beginning, he told himself, his fingers knotting into tight, white-knuckled fists at his side. Seeing her in her natural element tonight should have confirmed it. So why did he feel like he’d just been sucker punched in the gut?

  He stalked stiffly to the door. “It’s late. I’d better go.” He twisted the knob and strode out.

  She called his name as he climbed into the truck, but he pretended not to hear her—just as he pretended not to see her standing in the doorway as he started the engine, jerked the gearshift and drove off in a spray of gravel.

  There was no point in dragging things out There was no possibility of a future between them. Never had been, never could be. He clenched his teeth so hard his jaw hurt. He’d been a fool to ever think otherwise. It had been a sure bet she would leave from the moment she arrived.

  Well, thank heavens he’d kept his distance, he told himself. It was a damned good thing he hadn’t gotten all emotionally involved with her.

  But his hollow, aching heart didn’t buy it, and the vacuum in his chest mocked him all the way home and all through the night.

  Chapter Ten

  Josie stormed off in search of Luke first thing the next morning. She’d spent a long, sleepless night replaying their conversation in her mind, and she’d finally figured out why he’d departed so abruptly.

  Everyone he’d ever cared about had left him in one way or another, and he expected her to do the same. He was withdrawing because he thought she was going to leave.

  Just when she’d realized she loved him, he was trying to shut her out.

  Well, she wouldn’t let him get away with it. Thanks in part to his confidence in her, she’d finally started trusting her heart, and her heart told her to track him down and set things straight.

  She found a note taped to his front door saying he’d gone to Kansas to inspect a horse and wouldn’t be back until Monday morning. Adding insult to injury, the note was addressed to Manuel instead of her.

  She stopped by the Perez house on the far side of the ranch to give Manuel the message. It was Consuela’s day off, and Josie found her preparing a big Sunday breakfast for Manuel. “Strikes me as mighty odd that he didn’t mention these plans last night,” she huffed to the older woman.

  Consuela looked up from the pan of grits she was stirring on the stove. “Did you two have a love-your-squirrel?”

  “A what?”

  “A love-your-squirrel. You know—a fight.”

  Even Consuela’s comically mangled English couldn’t make Josie muster a smile this morning. “You mean lovers’ quarrel. And no, we didn’t have one.” She heaved a sigh. “I wish it were that simple.”

  With a quarrel, at least they’d have a topic out in the open, something concrete to discuss and resolve. Instead, she was grappling with the ghosts of Luke’s past. Luke had misinterpreted her remarks because he expected her to leave. In his mind, involvement equaled abandonment. He was avoiding her to avoid getting hurt.

  She should be flattered, she told herself; the fact he’d gone to such lengths to stay away from her indicated how much he cared. But it also indicated how unwilling he was to trust her, and the realization left her hurt and angry and frustrated.

  She tried to overcome it by spending the rest of the weekend in optimistic action. She worked feverishly on the quilt, hoping with each stitch that Luke could learn to trust her as he’d helped her learn to trust herself.

  He continued to avoid her on Monday. He didn’t return the messages she left on his answering machine, he stayed away from the lodge, and he completely altered his routine, making it impossible for her to catch up with him.

  Josie’s irritation grew with each passing hour. When he failed to show up for a meeting to review layouts for the new advertising campaign, her temper blew a fuse.

  It was one thing to avoid her personally, and quite another to prevent her from doing her job. With profuse apologies to the ad agency’s account executive who’d driven all the way from Tulsa for the meeting, Josie yanked on her jacket and stalked out of the lodge. She’d find Luke if it took all day, and she’d get things settled if it took all night.

  She finally located him in the stables, taking inventory of the tack. He looked up as she approached, and his eyes took on a shuttered, wary look that nearly broke her heart.

  Darn him, she thought channeling her pain into anger. He didn’t even want to give her a chance.

  She jammed her hands in her pockets to hide the fact that they were shaking. “Care to tell me what’s going on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know darn good and well what I mean.” She managed a tight smile. “But on the one in ten million chance that you don’t, let’s start with why you didn’t show up for the ad agency meeting this afternoon.”

  Luke picked up another set of reins and turned them in his hands, examining the leather for signs of wear. “Maybe I forgot.”

  Right. And maybe aliens airlifted you to Mars for a quick game of ticktacktoe. Josie bit back the sarcastic retort, forcing herself to sound calmer than she felt. “So what’s the explanation for your disappearing act the other night?”

  Luke shrugged. “We agreed to keep our relationship professional. Things seemed to be getting out of hand, so I left. No big deal.”

  No big deal? Was he really so callous he didn’t know how she felt? Did he really feel nothing himself? She swallowed back a sense of outrage along with a painful lump in her throat.

  It was a big deal, all right—as big a deal to him as it was to her. He wouldn’t have gone to such pains to stay away from her if it weren’t.

  All the same, it was hard to rebut the logic of his words or the offhanded, impersonal tone of his voice. Her confidence wavered. Could she be wrong? Was it possible he didn’t share her feelings? Maybe she was nothing more than a small, insignificant part of his life—just one of many women he might be attracted to, one who also happened to be an employee.

  She rejected the thought as soon as it formed. No. Regardless of how casually he acted, she knew his feelings for her weren’t casual at all. She’d started to trust her heart in the past few weeks, to have faith in her own judgment, and she wouldn’t stop now. Both her heart and her head told her he was bluffing.

  Well, two could play at this game, she thought determinedly. She forced what she hoped was a collected expression on her face. “I see. Well, since you’re so dedicated to professionalism, I’m sure you’ll want to look at the ad layouts as soon as possible.”

  Luke looped the rein over a hook on the wall and pulled off another. “I changed my mind. I don’t want to advertise the lodge.”

  Josie felt like the bottom had just dropped out of her heart All pretense of composure dropped with it. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I can. And am.”

  “But why?”

  He
avoided her eyes. “I just don’t want to do it.”

  “You don’t want the lodge to be profitable?” she pressed.

  He lifted a shoulder. “Cattle prices are picking up. This time next year the ranch might be doing well enough to shut the lodge down. I don’t want it all booked up with a bunch of tourists.”

  Josie stared at him, stunned. “You’re going to close the lodge?”

  His hands jerked over the leather, his voice terse. “I’ve made no secret of how I feel about it.”

  “But that was before you knew why your father built it!” Didn’t the knowledge that his father had loved him count for anything? She’d thought it had. He’d opened up, stopped isolating himself. He’d become more accessible. She’d thought his feelings of rejection had eased, along with his resentment of the lodge.

  Luke shrugged again and turned back to studying the tack. “It’s my ranch, and I’ll do as I damn well please.”

  Hurt and anger roiled through Josie. He wasn’t even bothering to break it to her gently. He evidently didn’t care about all of the hard work she’d put into the lodge—all the late nights and early mornings and weekends, all of the plans and programs and projections.

  He evidently didn’t care about her feelings.

  He evidently didn’t care about her.

  She was grateful for the anger pulsing through her veins, because it gave her the strength to do what she had to do.

  She stepped in front of him, forcing him to look at her. “You can do as you damn well please, all right, but you’ll do it alone. If you don’t want the lodge to succeed, it’s your business. But I won’t stay around and watch it fail.”

  A flicker of something—pain…relief…both?—flashed through his eyes before the carefully guarded expression returned. “I didn’t expect that you would.”

  Josie froze. So that was it. With icy clarity, she saw what he was doing. He was trying to drive her off. If he made her go now, she couldn’t leave him later.

  Pain ripped through her like buckshot. She’d wondered if he could love her back; well, here was her answer, she thought bitterly. No. Not because he didn’t, not because he couldn’t, but because he simply wouldn’t.

  He wouldn’t allow himself to. He was too afraid of being shut out, left alone or abandoned. The only proof she’d ever get that he loved her was that he was driving her away.

  She stared at him, her heart aching. She wanted to reach out to him, to help him, to somehow save him from his self-imposed sentence of loneliness. But deep in her soul she knew there was nothing she could do, nothing she could say that would make him trust her. And without trust, love didn’t have a chance.

  He shifted the reins to his other hand. “You don’t have to worry about your job reference. I’ll make sure you get a good one.” His eyes remained riveted on the leather in his hand. “And I won’t hold you to our agreement. You don’t have to stay till February.”

  She swallowed hard, struggling to keep the tears at bay, to retain some shred of dignity. “Good. Because I don’t want to stay where I’m not wanted.” She averted her face, but tears were already streaking down her cheeks. She didn’t want him to see her cry. She’d given him her heart; all she had left was her pride.

  “I’ll go and pack my things.” If she hurried, she could be on her way by dark.

  “Consuela.” Luke opened the door wider, surprised to find the housekeeper standing on his front porch. The woman had been coming and going by the side door for as long as he could remember. “Since when did you start knocking?”

  Consuela shook the rain off her umbrella and propped it beside the door, clutching a bulky plastic bag against her black raincoat. “Since you started acting like a stranger.”

  Luke’s hand tensed on the brass doorknob. “What do you mean?”

  “The Luke I know has more sense than to chase off the best thing to come to this ranch since his own mother.”

  Lightning streaked across the late-afternoon sky, and a gust of water blew onto the wide, covered porch. Luke scowled. Ever since the confrontation with Josie, he’d felt lower than a snail’s belly. He was in no mood for company, much less a lecture, but he couldn’t send Consuela away in this storm.

  “Come in before you drown, Consuela.”

  She handed him the bag as she stepped inside. Luke set it on a side table and helped her out of her coat. “For your information, I didn’t chase her away. She quit.”

  Consuela narrowed her eyes. “You’re rude and obnoxious, you won’t let her do her job, you tell her you want to close the lodge. I call that chasing her off.”

  Luke shrugged. “She wouldn’t have been here in a few months, anyway.”

  “Not now, she won’t.” Consuela snatched her coat away from Luke, picked up the bag and marched down the long hall toward the kitchen.

  With a sigh Luke followed her. “She’s been offered a job at a big new hotel in Tulsa. We can’t compete with that. The novelty of working on a ranch would have worn off by the time our agreement was over, anyway. She’d have gotten tired of being stuck out here in the middle of nowhere. Besides, by the first of the year, she probably would have decided we were nothing but a bunch of country hicks and hayseeds.”

  “Sounds like you’re describing Cheryl, not Josie. You under X-rate this girl.”

  “Estimate. The word is underestimate.”

  Consuela shot him a knowing look as she lifted the teakettle from the stove. Luke ran a hand down his face and watched her fill it with water at the sink. He’d swear she sometimes deliberately mispronounced words just to make him repeat them.

  She placed the kettle on a burner and turned toward him. “Josie’s not like that ex-wife of yours. She loves this place.” She stepped closer and peered up in his face, her eyes sharp and bright as razors. “And she loves you.”

  Luke’s muscles froze, but his insides churned. “Did she say so?”

  “She didn’t have to. Any fool could see it. And any fool could see you have feelings for her, too.”

  He didn’t try to deny it, just tried to divert her back to the topic of Josie. “If she feels anything for me, it’s because she’s on the rebound from her called-off marriage.”

  “Bah!” Consuela shook her head as well as her hands. “There was nothing for her to rebound from. You don’t believe that any more than I do.”

  She was right, he realized. He didn’t. He hadn’t in weeks. He shoved his hands into his pockets. “Well, there’s a big difference between attraction and love.”

  “Yes,” Consuela said, nodding her head sagely. “With attraction, the feeling is all about the person’s outsides. With love, you care about what’s in here.” She laid a plump hand against her ample chest. “Most people know in their hearts when it’s real. But some people won’t listen to their hearts. They’re too scared or stubborn or pea-headed.”

  “Pigheaded,” Luke corrected absently.

  Consuela nodded shrewdly.

  She’d done it again. “I don’t suppose you’re talking about anyone we know,” he said irritably.

  Consuela ignored his sarcasm. “You let that girl go, you’ll be making the worst mistake of your life. She loves you, and I can prove it.” She cocked her head toward the plastic sack she’d placed on the counter. “Go look in the bag.”

  Luke didn’t know why his heart was pounding like the pistons on his tractor or why his mouth felt like he’d just chewed a piece of chalk. Nothing that could fit in a piece of plastic would convince him that Josie wasn’t a heartache waiting to happen.

  He lifted the sack gingerly, as if it might explode. Annoyed at himself, he grabbed it with both hands and dumped the contents on the counter.

  It looked like half of his old quilt—the front half, without the stuffing. Had Josie or Consuela taken it apart? He stared at it, uncomprehending. “What’s this? What’s going on?”

  “Josie was making you a new quilt. She wanted to surprise you with it at Christmas.”

  He gazed back
at the material in his hands. Now that he looked at it, he could see the fabrics were different, the colors were brighter, the stitching less even than the original.

  “She’s leaving it behind,” Consuela said. “Said she had no use for it now.”

  Luke continued to stare at it, stunned. “You knew she was making it?”

  Consuela nodded. “I helped her take down the one in the lodge so she could copy it.”

  “But why? Why was she doing this?”

  Consuela gave an owlish grin. “Figure it out for yourself, Luke. But you’d better hurry. She was nearly packed when I left.”

  Luke fingered the half-finished quilt, his mind flashing back to the first time Josie had seen his mother’s handiwork. Her words echoed in his mind: A lot of love went into making that. I bet you could feel it when you wrapped it around you.

  Was Josie wanting to wrap him in her love, too? His heart jumped and contracted like a patient being resuscitated in a coronary ward. This was not an ordinary gift, not the sort of thing an employee usually gave the boss at Christmas or one casual friend gave another. This was personal. This was meaningful. This was a gift from the heart.

  He ran a callused finger across the embroidery at the edge, a knot forming in his throat as he recognized Josie’s handwriting. “Shoot for the stars.” Your mother wanted you to follow your dreams, Josie had said.

  When had he quit dreaming? About the same time he’d stopped trusting, he realized. He’d stopped looking for shooting stars when he’d ducked his head and crawled into his emotional bunker.

  A trace of Josie’s perfume drifted up from the quilt. He raised it to his face and inhaled deeply, absorbing a few hard truths along with her soft scent.

  For years he’d thought of himself as unlovable. Rejected by his father, deserted by his wife and plagued with guilt over his mother’s death, he’d erected walls to keep people from getting close. He’d thought he was protecting himself from getting hurt any further, but his fortress had turned out to be a cage. He’d managed to lock other people out, all right. But he’d ended up locked inside.