“It’s different with Caleb and me.”
“I’m sure it is,” Sloan admitted. “I’m not sure what’s going on. I don’t think I need to know. I just want to remind you that you’ve looked all your life for a man to love you the way he does. I’m sorry it couldn’t have been me, but that’s behind us. No one knows the two of you better than I do and I’m telling you that you and Caleb belong together. So whatever this trouble is, fix it.”
“Fix it? That’s you’re great advice?”
“It’ll do. Fix it, kiss and make up, get married. You’ll never regret it, Mel. You won’t find a man better than him and you know it.”
“Dammit, I’m not looking for a man better than him.”
“That’s a relief to know.”
At the sound of Caleb’s voice behind her, Melanie gasped and whirled. “Where did you come from?”
“I was in the tack room. I thought I heard someone drive up.”
He looked so good to her in the early-morning light. In any light. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Caleb cocked his head to one side. “For what?”
He wasn’t going to make this easy. Fair enough. She didn’t deserve easy. “I’m sorry…” She peered out the corner of her eye. “I’m sorry that we don’t seem to have any privacy.”
Sloan tossed his hands in the air. “All right, all right. Sheesh. I’m going.”
“Let’s walk,” Caleb said. He turned and headed toward the creek beyond the house.
Melanie followed, not sure what to make of the lack of emotion in his voice and on his face. Then again, she’d known facing him wouldn’t be easy.
Beside an old cottonwood at the edge of the creek, Caleb stopped and turned toward her. “I admit I’m surprised to see you.”
“I guess you would be, after last night. Caleb, I hurt you last night, and that’s the last thing I ever want to do. I’m so sorry.”
“I asked for honesty, you gave it to me. You’re afraid I’m going to hurt you, so you’re keeping me at arm’s length.”
Melanie crossed her arms and glanced back toward the barn and corrals. “That’s pretty much what I said. Dumb, huh?”
“Not to you it isn’t.”
“Dammit, Caleb, stop it,” she cried.
“Stop what?”
“Stop being so damn nice, so understanding. What, are you bucking for sainthood? Saint Caleb, so understanding. Or maybe it’s martyrdom. Maybe that’s what you’re after. Just let me walk all over you. Stand by your woman no matter how much of a bitch she turns in to.”
“Pardon?” This, Caleb thought with a tingling along his spine, did not sound like a woman afraid of being hurt.
“Pardon,” she mimicked. “Don’t go all sarcastic on me. I didn’t mean to hurt you last night. I haven’t meant to hurt you however many times I’ve hurt you in the past couple of weeks. I’d rather cut off my right arm than hurt you.”
When he didn’t say anything, she started pacing back and forth in front of him, waving her arms wildly in the air.
“I’ve been a basket case, all right? Out of my mind trying to figure out if this marriage thing can possibly work. Not for me,” she added with a wave of her arm. “Hell, all I have to do is get within ten feet of you and I’m happy. But I figure you might want a little something more than that from me, and I’m not sure I know what that is.”
“Okay, hold it.” Caleb held a hand up to stop her. “You think I want something you can’t give, and that scares you. You think I’m going to hurt you, and that scares you. Have I got this much right?”
Wary of his dark tone, she nodded. “That’s right.”
“Then what,” he asked tightly, “are you doing here? Why are we even having this conversation? Why haven’t we just gone our separate ways?”
“Is that what you want? For us to go our separate ways?”
“Of course it’s not,” he offered earnestly. “But if you think I’m going to stand around and be the cause of you tearing yourself to pieces out of fear of what might or might not happen, then guess again.”
“Would you listen to the two of us?” Melanie scrubbed both hands up and down her face, then dropped her arms to her sides and faced him. “We’re both out of our minds. When we were friends we never even argued. No strife, no stress, no tension. Just friendship. Somebody to count on.”
“You don’t think you can count on me anymore?”
Her small smile nearly broke his heart. “Of course I can count on you. Always. You told me so, and I believed you.”
“Do you want to go back to being friends again?”
“You mean just friends?”
“Yes.” If she agreed, it would kill him.
She shook her head. “It’s way too late for that, Caleb. I do want us to be friends, but we can’t be just friends when we love each other this much.”
Caleb felt his heart simply stop. Then it started again with a hard thud against his ribs. “Then what is it you do want?”
“I want to feel like a sane person again, and the only way I can do that is if you help me. I love you, Caleb. Right now I’m a little bit wacky. I’m hoping that’ll pass, but if it doesn’t, then you’re stuck with a crazy woman. If you think you can’t handle that, then just say so.”
Caleb placed his hands on the balls of her shoulders. “If I knew what to do so you wouldn’t be afraid, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”
“Then marry me.”
“What?” He stared, dumbfounded.
“A week from Saturday. If the church isn’t available, we’ll try the VFW hall, or the rec center, or the barn for all I care. Just marry me.”
A slow smile spread across Caleb’s mouth as the weight of the past two weeks drifted away. “How come I had to get down on one knee and you don’t?”
In that instant, Melanie felt the icy fear that had been lodged in her gut for two weeks melt away. She felt like herself again. She was in love with Caleb Chisholm, and he was going to marry her. Just as soon as he got his pound of flesh.
All right, then, she thought. After what she had put him through lately, he’d earned it. She lowered herself to one knee. “Caleb Chisholm, will you marry me?”
“Say yes!” came a shout from the back of the house.
“Say yes!” came another from the corral.
“Say yes,” Melanie nearly growled, “so I can get up and go kill your brothers.”
He didn’t say yes. Instead, he pulled her up into his arms with a fierce “Come here to me.”
Melanie had feared many times in recent hours that she might never know again the feel of his arms around her. The sensation of warmth, of welcome and safety, overwhelmed her. “Is this a yes?” she whispered.
“This is definitely a yes.” He squeezed her tightly against him.
Melanie thought she had cried herself dry during the night, but suddenly she was wracked with deep, hard sobs.
“Oh, Mel, don’t cry. Please don’t cry. You’re tearing me up.”
“I’m sorry,” she sniffed. “I’m so sorry for all of this, Caleb. I love you so m-much, and I almost ran you away.”
“You couldn’t run me away at gunpoint,” he assured her.
She sniffed again. “Honest?”
Caleb kissed the tip of her tear-reddened nose. “Honest.” He kissed her cheek. “A week from Saturday, huh?”
“Is that a problem?”
“Not for me,” he swore. “But I guess we better go tell our families so they can make a big fuss. Oh, and I’ve been told to inform you that if we need any flower girls for the ceremony, I have a couple of new nieces who have experience in that area and who would be more than willing to help us out.”
Melanie laughed and hugged him. “This ought to set a few tongues wagging.”
“Why’s that?”
“Me, marrying you, with Sloan’s daughters as my flower girls. The gossips are going to love it.”
With his arms around her, he clasped his hands together at the small
of her back and studied her face. “How is that gossip going to sit with you?”
“I could care less,” she said airily. “I know which Chisholm brother is the right one, and I’ve got him all to myself.”
“That you do.” He lowered his lips toward hers and kissed her. “That, you do.”
Epilogue
They were married a week from that next Saturday, in the late afternoon at the same Baptist church where only last summer Sloan and Emily had wed.
There was no large crowd this time. Melanie and Caleb hadn’t wanted one, and there hadn’t been time to plan for many guests anyway.
There was some gossip, as Melanie had predicted, about her not being able to make up her mind between one brother and the next. About her moving down the ladder to brother number two when brother number one was taken.
But mostly the gossip came from Alyshia Campbell.
Having become, by the virtue of saying “I do,” a mature married woman, Melanie decided to be magnanimous and ignore the barracuda instead of gouging her eyes out. After all, if it hadn’t been for Alyshia, Melanie might never have kissed Caleb that night at the party.
If she hadn’t kissed him, how would they have known that their worlds were not complete without each other?
* * * * *
The Cowboy on Her Trail
Prologue
Somewhere, sometime in his life, Justin Chisholm figured he must have done something incredibly right, and this night was his reward. He couldn’t fathom any other reason why he should be so lucky as to finally end up with Blaire Harding in his bed.
He knew she was in his bed because they had just made sweet, hot love together, and he was just now drifting down from a peak higher than he’d ever known.
The fact that it was the motel’s bed rather than his own didn’t faze him a bit. He was paying for the bed, so that made it his, right?
When a man lived in his family home with his grandmother, his brother, sister-in-law and two young nieces, not to mention the housekeeper, her husband, and their baby, he didn’t take a woman home to his own personal bed. Not if he expected any privacy. Not if he had any respect for his family and the woman, and this was a woman for whom he had plenty of respect.
He didn’t need to open his eyes to see the shape of her, sleek and curved in all the right places, lean where she should be, round where it counted. Behind his closed lids he could still see her dark blond hair, her golden brown eyes. The cute way the tip of her nose turned slightly upward, which she thought made her look like a Pekingese and he thought made her look adorably kissable.
He couldn’t remember a time in the past several months since she’d moved back to town when he hadn’t wanted her. She’d made him wait, she’d put him off, she’d kept him at arm’s length all that time.
But gradually she had let him get closer. A conversation or two. A developing friendship. Eventually, a ride to get her car fixed. A lunch with a bunch of their mutual friends. A dance or two at the local watering hole. Then another dance, and another, until finally she had agreed to go out to dinner with him. Then dinner and a movie.
No woman before her had ever made him work so hard to please her. But he wanted to please her, in every way he could.
Tonight she’d finally agreed to let them please each other.
With a low moan, he inhaled the fragrance of wildflowers in her hair. “You smell so good.”
Curled up warmly against his chest, Blaire Harding smiled and sighed. “Glad you approve.”
“Oh, I do.” He nuzzled his face against her hair. Then, when she expected something deeply romantic, or maybe a sweet word or two, or even a comfortable silence, he snorted in her ear.
Blaire burst out laughing and rolled away from him with a shriek. “Where’d he go? Where’d he go?”
“Where’d who go?” He sat up in bed and looked quickly around the room.
“Justin Chisholm,” she cried. “He was here just a minute ago, then all of a sudden there was a pig snorting in my ear.”
“Oh, ha-ha.” He pulled her back against his chest. “I don’t know how to coo like a turtledove, or whatever.”
“So you snorted?”
He reached over and turned on the bedside lamp. “Maybe that was an allergic reaction.”
“To what, me?”
“To wildflowers.”
Blaire squinted and tried to duck away from the glare. “Egad, that’s bright. What wildflowers?”
“The ones I smell in your hair.”
“You said it smelled good.”
“It does.”
“But it makes you snort?”
“Maybe.”
She laughed and wrapped her arms around his neck. “I think you were just trying to be funny. And it worked, I guess, because it made me laugh.”
They lay nestled together, still feeling the afterglow of two thorough rounds of intense lovemaking. After several minutes Justin shifted and groaned.
“Uh, Blaire,” he said, “believe me, this is the absolute last thing on earth I want to say to you right now…”
Blaire’s stomach tightened. After months of denying herself the pleasure of accepting any of his numerous invitations, she had finally given in and spent the most incredible night of her life with a man she’d had a secret crush on forever, and he was going to tell her he didn’t want to see her again. She just knew it.
But Blaire knew how to be practical. Better to get the bad news over with and get on with her life. She pulled her arms from around his neck. She moved to push away from him, but he held her close.
“But you’re going to say it anyway,” she said tensely.
“Only because of an overdeveloped sense of honesty, which I often wish my grandmother had never drummed into me.”
She couldn’t look him in the face. Not if he was going to tell her he didn’t want to see her again. “Honesty’s never a bad thing. Why don’t you just spit it out and get it over with?”
“Okay.” He lowered his forehead to rest against hers. “You said you wanted to be home by two. It’s one-thirty.”
A wave of relief swept through her and left her limp in his arms. “Oh,” she managed.
Justin sensed that something wasn’t quite right. He frowned. “What did you think I was going to say?”
She turned her face away and shook her head. “Nothing.”
“Blaire? What’s wrong?”
“Wrong?” She managed a smile and rolled over to sit on the side of the bed with her back to him. “What could be wrong?” Holding a corner of the sheet over her breasts, which was a ridiculous attempt at belated modesty considering what they’d been doing to and with each other for the past couple of hours, she smiled at him over her shoulder. “It feels silly to say I had a great time, but I did.”
He sat up behind her and kissed her bare shoulder.
A shiver of remembered passion raced through her.
“It doesn’t sound silly to me,” he said.
Blaire noted the time on the clock on the cheap dresser across the room, 1:35 a.m.
When they’d made their date the other day she’d told him she wanted to be home by 2:00 a.m. and made him promise he would not try to get her to change her mind. She was pleased that he was sticking to that.
She had no pressing reason for getting home by two, except she wouldn’t have the luxury of sleeping late in the morning. Her father always opened the feed store at seven every morning, Monday through Saturday, and tomorrow was Saturday. Her job was to man the office, so she had to be there during business hours.
Without thought she glanced down at her wristwatch— the only thing she was wearing.
How odd, she thought with irritation. Her watch had stopped at 11:30 p.m. It had lasted through their first round of lovemaking, but not the second.
The implications suddenly struck her. She bolted upright. It couldn’t be. This had to be a coincidence.
“What’s wrong?” Justin asked, his lips moving over the back of her
neck. “You’re all of a sudden stiff as a board.” He ran his hands up and down her arms. “I told you I’d get you home on time.”
“It’s not that. It’s nothing.” Her mind scrambled for something to say that would make sense and justify her sudden stiffness, which she could not deny. “Just a cramp in my foot.”
“Ouch. I hate it when that happens. Here.” He slid from behind her and knelt—naked—at her feet. “Which foot?”
He sure was pretty to look at, in all his naked glory. Flat stomach, hard, lean muscles, light bronze skin speaking of his Cherokee ancestry, with his face, neck and hands several shades darker from working outdoors all year on his ranch. Then there were those parts of him that declared he was a man. All man.
“Blaire?”
“Hmm? Oh. This one.” She lifted her right foot, ashamed of herself for lying, but what was a girl to do?
She glanced at her watch again. It hadn’t advanced a second. She noticed Justin’s watch lying on the nightstand. Desperate to prove to herself that her watch stopping at this particular time was merely a coincidence, she grabbed his and strapped it onto her wrist just above her watch. It was an old-fashioned watch with a face and a second hand, the kind of watch you had to wind. On the tightest notch of the brown leather strap it fit her like a large, loose bracelet.
“That’s a little big for you.”
“Mmm.”
She didn’t have a cramp in her foot, but his hands still felt like magic as they worked her instep. “Mmm.”
The smile he gave her, kneeling there at her feet without a stitch of clothing on, was pure devil. “Like that, do you?”
She smiled back. “What do you think?”
“I think if you keep looking at me like that, you’re gonna get mad at me for making you miss that two o’clock deadline you set for yourself.”
Blaire let out a sigh. “You just ruined the mood.”
He shook his head ruefully. “Damn my hide.”
The clock on the dresser said it was 1:45 a.m.
The Chisholm Brothers:Friends, Lovers... Husbands? Page 40