“I’ll pay them a visit one of these days,” he said. “There aren’t any hard feelings on my side.”
“Nor theirs, either.” Sawyer shoved a hand through his unruly dark-gold hair, which was always a little too long. “You’re lucky, Clay,” he said, his gaze moving to the window next to their table. “Pa and Granddad can’t seem to make up their minds whether to kill the fatted calf in my honor or take a horsewhip to me.” He frowned, squinted at the foggy glass. “I think somebody’s trying to get your attention,” he observed.
Clay looked, and there, on the other side of that steamed-up window, was Edrina, practically pressing her nose to the glass. She waved one unmittened hand and retreated a step.
“I’ll be damned,” Clay muttered, gesturing for the child to come inside.
“Who’s the kid?” Sawyer wanted to know.
“Friend of mine,” Clay answered, as Edrina scampered toward the entrance to the dining room.
She hurried over to the table, face flushed with cold and purpose, and stood there like a little soldier.
“Mama’s crying,” she said. “Mama never cries.”
Clay scraped back his chair, took Edrina’s small hands into his own, trying to chafe some warmth into them. “Where’s your bonnet?” he fussed, trying to process the idea of Dara Rose in tears. “You aren’t wearing any mittens, and your coat is unbuttoned—”
“I was in a hurry,” Edrina told him, with a little sigh of impatience. She spared Sawyer the briefest glance, then looked back at Clay with a proud plea in her eyes. “You’ll come home with me, won’t you? Right now? Because Mama is crying and Mama never, ever cries.”
“Go on,” Sawyer said to Clay. “I’ll settle up for your breakfast.”
Clay got up, retrieved his duster from the back of the chair beside his and his hat from the seat and put them on. “What’s the matter with her?” he asked, more worried than he could ever remember being before. “Is she sick?”
Gravely, Edrina took his hand, tugged him in the direction of the door. “I don’t know,” she said fretfully. “Maybe. But she was fine while we were having our oatmeal. Then Mr. Ponder stopped by, and they talked, and when Harriet asked Mama if we could please get a dog, Mama commenced to blubbering and ran right out of the room.”
Outside, the snow was melting under a steadily warming sky, but it was still deep. Clay curved an arm around Edrina’s waist, much as he had done with Chester the night before, and set off for Dara Rose’s place with long strides.
DARA ROSE MARCHED herself out into the kitchen, pumped cold water into the basin she kept on hand and splashed her face repeatedly while Harriet watched her solemnly from the doorway.
“Are you through crying, Mama?” the child asked, very softly.
Dara Rose felt ashamed. Now she’d upset Edrina and Harriet, and for what? A few moments of self-pity?
“I’m quite through,” she said, drying her still-puffy face with a dish towel. “And I haven’t the slightest idea what came over me.” She hugged Harriet, then frowned, looking around. “Where is Edrina?”
Harriet bit her lower lip, clearly reluctant to answer.
“Harriet?” Dara Rose said, taking her little girl gently but firmly by the shoulders. “Where is your sister?”
Harriet’s eyes were huge and luminous. “She went to fetch Mr. McKettrick,” she finally replied.
Alarm rushed through Dara Rose, and not just because a glance at the row of hooks beside the back door revealed that Edrina had gone off through the deep snow without her bonnet or her mittens. She was just reaching for her own cloak when she heard footsteps on the front porch—boots, stomping off snow.
Clay knocked, but then he came right in, carrying Edrina. His gaze locked with Dara Rose’s as he set the little girl down and pulled the door closed behind him.
She’d never seen a man look so worried before, not even when Parnell came to that settlement house in Bangor, Maine, to claim her and the children. They’d been mere babies then, Edrina and Harriet, and memories of their real father, Parnell’s younger brother, Luke, soon faded.
“Are you sick?” Clay demanded, in the same tone he might have employed to confront a drunk with disorderly conduct.
Dara Rose wasn’t sick, except with mortification. “I’m quite all right,” she said, but she didn’t sound very convincing, even to herself. She shifted her attention to her elder daughter, letting her know with a look that she was in big trouble. “I apologize for any inconvenience—”
Clay’s neck reddened, and his eyes narrowed. “I’d be obliged if you girls would wait in the kitchen,” he said, though he never looked away from Dara Rose’s face.
Edrina and Harriet, always ready with a protest when she made such a request, fled the room like rabbits with a fox on their trail.
“That little girl,” Clay said, in a furious whisper, one index finger jabbing in the general direction of the kitchen a few times, “was so worried about you that she braved all that snow to find me and bring me here. So don’t think for one minute that you’re going to put me off with an apology for any inconvenience.”
Dara Rose stared at him. “Why are you so angry?” she finally asked. And why does it thrill me to see you like this?
“I’m not angry,” Clay rasped out, wrenching off his Wyatt Earp–style hat and flinging it so that it landed on the settee, teetered there and dropped to the floor. “Damn it, Dara Rose, whatever went on here this morning scared your daughter half to death, and since Edrina is the most courageous kid I’ve ever come across, I got scared, too.”
The thrill didn’t subside, and Dara Rose prayed her feelings didn’t show. “I lost my composure for a moment,” she confessed, as stiffly proud as a Puritan even as her heart raced and her breath threatened to catch in the back of her throat and never come loose. “Believe me, I regret it. I certainly didn’t mean to frighten the children—”
“Well,” Clay said, in earnest, “you did. And I’m not leaving here until you tell me what Ponder said to you that made you go to pieces the way you did.”
Dara Rose swallowed, looked down at the floor. Right or wrong, Clay meant what he said—that much was obvious from his tone and his countenance. He wouldn’t be going anywhere until she answered him.
“Dara Rose?” He was standing close to her now, his hands resting lightly on her shoulders. He smelled of fresh air, snow and something woodsy. “Tell me.”
She knew she ought to pull away from him, ought to look anywhere but up into his face, but she couldn’t manage either response. “Mayor Ponder stopped by to tell me that, since you don’t want this house, the town council plans to sell it to Ezra Maddox for two hundred and fifty dollars,” she said. It was remarkable how calm she sounded, she thought, when her insides were buzzing like a swarm of bees smoked out of their hive. “We have to be out by the first of the year.”
“That son of a—” Clay ground out, before catching himself.
Dara Rose felt tears burning behind her eyes again, and she was determined not to disgrace herself by shedding them. “I have ten dollars,” she said, like someone talking in their sleep. “And I’ve saved some of the egg money. It won’t take us far, but it’s enough to leave town.”
“Where would you go?” Clay immediately asked.
“I don’t know,” Dara Rose replied honestly. “Somewhere.”
“The town isn’t going to sell this house,” Clay said.
“Of course they are,” Dara Rose argued, though not with any spirit.
“I’m the marshal,” Clay told her, “and under the terms of our agreement, I’m entitled to living quarters. It just so happens that I’ve decided I’d rather live here than in the jailhouse.”
Dara Rose’s jaw dropped, and it took her a moment to recover. A long moment. “But, we couldn’t… Where would the children and I—?”
Clay hooked a finger under her chin. “Right here,” he said. “You and Edrina and Harriet could live right here, with me—if you and I w
ere married.”
Dara Rose nearly choked. “Married?”
“It wouldn’t do for us to live under the same roof other wise,” Clay said reasonably.
“But, we’re nearly total strangers—”
“For now,” Clay went on, when her words fell away, “it would be a private arrangement. All business. I won’t press you to bed down with me, Dara Rose. This place is too small for such shenanigans, anyhow, with the girls around.”
Dara Rose couldn’t believe what she was hearing. It was Parnell, all over again. Clay was offering a marriage that wasn’t a marriage, offering shelter and safety and respectability. But unless she wanted to send her children away and move in with Ezra Maddox, she couldn’t afford to refuse.
“Why?” she asked, barely breathing the word. “Why would you want to do this, Clay McKettrick?”
He smiled at her. Tucked a tendril of hair behind her right ear, where it had escaped its pins. “I want a wife,” he said, as though that explained everything, instead of raising dozens, if not hundreds, of new questions.
“But you said the marriage wouldn’t be real.”
“It won’t be, at first,” Clay told her. Where did he get all that certainty, all that confidence? All that audacity? “But maybe, with time…”
“What if nothing changes?” Dara Rose broke in, feeling almost as though she needed to shout to be heard over the thrumming of her heartbeat, though of course she didn’t shout, because the children would have heard.
“Then there’ll be no harm done,” Clay said. “We’ll have the marriage annulled, I’ll set you and the girls up in decent circumstances somewhere far from Blue River, and we’ll go our separate ways.”
No harm done? He spoke so blithely.
Was the man insane?
Possibly, Dara Rose decided. But he was also an infinitely better bet than Ezra Maddox.
Chapter 7
By the following morning, Sawyer was long gone and the snow had turned to mud so deep that folks had had to lay weathered boards and old doors in the street, just to get from one side to the other without sinking to their knees in the muck. Hardly anybody rode a horse or drove a wagon through town or along the side roads, either, but the sun shone like the herald of an early spring, and the breezes were almost balmy.
Clay considered all this as he stood in his small room at the jailhouse, stooping a little to peer at himself in the cracked shaving mirror fixed to the wall. He’d washed up and shaved, and then shaken out and put on the only suit he’d brought to Blue River—the getup consisted of a black woolen coat fitted at the waist, matching trousers, his best white shirt, starched and pressed for him at the Chinese laundry before he left Indian Rock, a brown brocade vest and a string tie.
He hated ties.
Hated starched shirts, too, for that matter.
He’d worn this suit exactly three times since he bought it—to one wedding and two funerals. Today, it was a wedding—his own—and even though it was his choice to get married, the occasion had its somber aspects, as well.
Up home, the ceremony would have been a community event, like a circus or a tent revival or the Independence Day fireworks, drawing crowds from miles around and working the womenfolk up into a frenzy of sewing and cooking and marking their calendars so they’d know how long the first baby took to show up. The men would complain about having to wear their Sunday duds, sip moonshine from a shared fruit jar out in the orchard behind the church after the “I do’s” had been said and lament that another unwitting member of their sex had been roped in and hog-tied.
Clay smiled to think of all that nuptial chaos and was glad he’d managed to escape it, though he felt a twinge of nostalgia, too. He and Dara Rose would be married quietly and sensibly, in a civil ceremony performed by Mayor Ponder at her place, with Edrina and Harriet the only guests. There would be no cake, no photographs, no rings and no wedding night, let alone a honeymoon, because this was an arrangement, a transaction—not a love match.
Which wasn’t to say that Clay didn’t fully expect to bed Dara Rose when the time came, and if they got a baby started right away, too, so much the better. He figured the actual consummation of their union would probably have to wait until spring, though, when the ranch house was finished and he and Dara Rose had a room to themselves.
Fine as the weather was, spring seemed a long way off when he thought of it in terms of making love to his wife.
Resigned, and leaving his hat behind because it didn’t look right with the suit, Clay bid his dog a temporary farewell—Chester had taken to curling up on the cot inside the jail’s one cell whenever he wanted to sleep, which was often—and set out for Dara Rose’s little house, following the sidewalk as far as he could and then crossing the street by way of the peculiar system of planks and discarded doors and the beds of old wagons.
Mayor Ponder arrived by the same means, followed single file by a thin woman in very prim garb and one of the town council members—they’d come along to serve as witnesses, Clay supposed. Clutching a copy of the Good Book and a rolled sheet of paper as he minced his way over the swamplike road, Ponder looked none too pleased at the prospect of joining the new marshal and the pretty widow in holy matrimony.
Clay disliked the mayor, mainly because of the remark Ponder had made about not minding if Dara Rose wound up working upstairs at the Bitter Gulch Saloon, but he could tolerate the man long enough to get hitched. The rest of the time, Wilson Ponder was fairly easy to ignore.
“There’s still time to change your mind,” Ponder boomed out, as if he wanted the whole town to hear, when he and Clay met at Dara Rose’s front gate. “Charity is charity, but I think you might be taking it a little too far in this instance.”
Charity is charity.
The front door of the house was open, probably to admit as much fresh air as possible before the winter weather returned, and Clay had to unlock his jawbones by an act of will. What if Dara Rose had heard what Ponder said? Or the children?
He didn’t respond, but simply glowered at Ponder until the other man cleared his throat and muttered, “Well, let’s get on with it, then.”
Edrina and Harriet appeared in the doorway, beaming. They had ribbons in their hair, and they were wearing summer dresses, very nearly outgrown and obviously their best.
“Mama looks so pretty in her wedding dress!” Edrina enthused, as Clay moved ahead of the others, stepped onto the porch and immediately swept both children off their feet, one in the curve of each arm.
They giggled at that, and the sound heartened Clay. Reminded him that he’d put on that itchy suit because he was going to a wedding, not a funeral.
Behind him, the female witness made a sighlike sound, long-suffering and full of righteous indignation.
Once again, Clay tamped down his temper. He wanted to pin that old biddy’s ears back, verbally, anyhow—he’d never struck a woman, a child or an animal, and never intended to, though he’d landed plenty of punches in the faces of his boy cousins growing up—but today was neither the time nor the place to hold forth on what he thought of nasty-natured gossips.
For one thing, he didn’t want to spoil the day for Edrina and Harriet. They were clearly overjoyed at the prospect of a wedding, though with Edrina, it was partly about being allowed to miss a few hours of school.
“I’ll bet your mama does look pretty,” Clay agreed, in belated reply to Edrina’s statement. “Almost as pretty as the pair of you, maybe.”
That got them both giggling again, and Clay smiled as he set them on their feet.
And then nearly tripped over them when Dara Rose appeared, wearing an ivory silk gown with puffed-out sleeves and lace trim at the cuffs. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes bright with a combination of nervousness and hope, her hair done up in a soft knot at her nape and billowing cloudlike around her face.
The sight of her knocked the wind out of Clay as surely as if he’d been thrown from a horse and landed spread-eagle on hard ground.
Pon
der cleared his throat again, and the wedding party assembled itself, with surprising grace, in the middle of that cramped front room.
Dara Rose’s trim shoulder bumped Clay’s arm as she took her place beside him, and he felt a jolt of sweet fire at her touch.
Ponder opened the book, and then his mouth, but before he could get a word said, a ruckus erupted out in the road.
Looking down at Dara Rose, Clay saw her shut her eyes, felt her stiffen next to him.
Outside, a mule brayed, and a drunken voice bellowed.
Clay took Dara Rose’s hand and squeezed it lightly before turning to head for the doorway.
Edrina and Harriet were already there, staring out.
“Mama’s not going to marry you, Ezra Maddox!” Edrina shouted to the stumbling man trying to free his feet from the deep mud. “She’s taken, so you’d better just get your sorry self out of here before there’s trouble!”
Clay had to choke back a laugh. He rested one hand on the top of Edrina’s head and one on Harriet’s, and said quietly, “Go stand with your mama. I’ll handle this.”
Maddox was a big man, broad-shouldered and clad in work clothes, and his hair and beard were grizzled, wiry. Once he’d gotten loose from the mud, he practically tore the gate off its rusty hinges, getting it open, and stormed in Clay’s direction like a locomotive.
Clay stepped out onto the porch, waited.
Behind him, Ponder said, “Now, Ezra, don’t be a sore loser. You’re out of the running where Dara Rose is concerned, and making a damn fool of yourself won’t change that.”
Ezra came to a shambling stop in the middle of the path, not because he’d taken Mayor Ponder’s sage ad vice to heart, Clay reckoned, but because he was used to folks clearing the way between him and whatever it was he aimed to have.
Clay didn’t move.
The two men studied each other, at a distance of a dozen yards or so, and Maddox swayed slightly, ran the back of one arm across his mouth. His gaze narrowed.
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