“Marry me.”
“Huh?” His voice was so full of disbelief she almost laughed.
She swallowed. “Yes, that is correct. I want you to marry me.”
He combed his fingers through his unruly dark hair while the frown between his eyebrows grew deeper. Finally he licked his lips and opened his mouth.
“What the hell for?”
Deflated, she plopped down on the back step. “What do you mean, what for? I am making you a perfectly good offer of marriage. I should think ‘what for’ would be, well, obvious.”
He rocked back on his heels. “You mean married as in…husband and wife?”
“Yes.”
“As in…uh…living together under the same roof?”
“Yes.”
He hesitated. “As in…” he cleared his throat “…sleeping in the same bed?”
“Um…well, yes, I suppose so.” She hadn’t thought that far ahead, but no matter. She would work out the details later.
He gave her a long, skeptical look and advanced two steps closer to where she sat. “To be honest, Marianne, I never thought you liked me very much.”
Marianne blinked. “Why, whatever made you think that?”
“Maybe because you’re always ordering me around. Because you never say please or thank-you. Because in all the years I’ve been working for you, you never once even smiled at me.”
She shifted her gaze to the henhouse in the back corner of the yard. “I guess I was too busy cooking and ironing and polishing furniture to smile at anyone.”
Actually, it’s more than being too busy. I was too…well, unhappy to smile at anybody.
He was staring at her with the strangest expression on his face. And he hadn’t spoken a single word.
“Well?” she queried.
His lips pressed into a thin line. “Well, what?”
“Lance, I have inherited a business out in Oregon,” she said rapidly. “But I have to be married in order to claim it. So I need to know if you will marry me.”
The frown deepened. “What kind of business?”
“I don’t know what kind yet, but it doesn’t matter. It will be mine. All mine.”
He gave her a long look. “And mine,” he pointed out, “if we get married.”
“Oh. Yes, I suppose so.”
He pinned her with penetrating blue eyes. “You really want to go to Oregon? I hear it’s a pretty wild frontier out there.”
“Yes, I most certainly do want to go to Oregon. And,” she added quickly before she lost her nerve, “as I said, I must be married to claim my great-uncle’s business.”
He planted himself in front of her and stuffed both hands in the back pockets of his jeans. She waited, holding her breath until she thought she would pop.
Finally, finally, his lips opened. “The answer is no.”
Her breath whooshed out. “But—”
He moved a step closer and gave her a look that was definitely not friendly. “Why,” he asked in a strained voice, “would I want to marry a bad-tempered, bossy woman who hasn’t appreciated one damn thing I’ve done around here for the last four years?”
“But—”
“Marianne, I guess you didn’t hear me. I said no.”
She stared up at him for a full minute. “Well,” she said, her voice quiet. “In that case I have something to show you that may change your mind.”
“Oh, yeah? What is it?”
She reached into her apron pocket and unfolded the poster she’d kept hidden in her bureau drawer. “This.” She thrust it under his nose.
Lawrence Burnside Wanted For
Wells Fargo Stagecoach Robbery
There was a picture of him at the top.
He took one look at the yellowed sheet of paper, and his skin turned pasty under his tan. “Where’d you get this?”
“From the Wells Fargo office. I’ve kept it hidden since soon after you came to work here.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t want Mrs. Schneiderman to see it. And because I didn’t really believe you were a stagecoach robber.”
He frowned again. “Why not?”
She sent him a long, level look. “Because you have never shown the slightest interest in all the money the boardinghouse residents leave lying around. If you were a thief, you would have taken it, but you never did. Instead, you’ve worked hard and kept your head down.”
His eyes narrowed into hard blue slits. “Why are you showing me this Wanted poster now?”
She laughed. “I should think that is obvious. How else can I get you to marry me so I can go to Oregon and claim my inheritance?”
His mouth tightened. “That, Miss Marianne, is blackmail.”
Her cheeks grew warm. “Well, yes, I suppose it is.”
“Blackmail!” he repeated firmly.
After an awkward silence she glanced up at him. “Oh, all right, I admit it’s blackmail,” she said quietly. “Is it working?” She sucked in her breath and held it.
For a long, long moment he just looked at her. Then he lifted his hands out of his pockets and leaned toward her.
“Yeah,” he murmured. “It sure as hell is.”
Chapter Three
The train rounded a curve and picked up speed, and the passenger car began to sway from side to side. Marianne watched grassland flash by outside the window, admired the drifts of red and yellow wildflowers and studied placid-looking cows dotting the meadows. This was Oregon. It seemed the territory had no people, only cows and wildflowers.
She caught her lower lip between her teeth and tried to tame the cadre of butterflies in her stomach. Am I doing the right thing? Giving up my safe, secure life at Mrs. Schneiderman’s and haring off into the unknown? And am I crazy to do it with Lance Burnside by my side?
With fingers that were slick with perspiration, she folded new creases in her green bombazine travel skirt, smoothed them flat and then carefully re-creased them again. What would the Oregon frontier be like? Were there bears? Wolves? Outlaws?
What would it be like living in a small town after the hustle and bustle of St. Louis?
Her heart gave a little skip. An even more unnerving question was what would it be like to marry Lance Burnside, a man she didn’t really know anything about other than that he was a hardworking, reliable, entirely predictable man who may or may not have been a stagecoach robber. At least he had been predictable and honest at Mrs. Schneiderman’s. How he would be in Oregon she couldn’t begin to guess.
She clenched her hands together in her lap and breathed in the stale, cigar-smoky air of the coach. There was only one thing she knew for sure; for the rest of her life she would be grateful to Great Uncle Matty for naming her his heir. From what her father had said, Uncle Matty thought the Collingwood women were flighty and frivolous. That must be why his will stipulated she had to be over twenty-one and married in order to inherit.
She ran her hand over the maroon velvet upholstery she sat on and closed her fingers into a tight fist. She could scarcely believe what she was doing, traveling to a remote corner of Oregon with this man. With a twinge of guilt she thought about the blackmail she had resorted to. But when she recalled the desperation she’d felt for the last eleven years, she had to admit she wasn’t that sorry. She was willing to do anything to start a new life on her own, away from Mrs. Schneiderman’s boardinghouse. Anything, she thought with a gulp. Even join her life to Lance Burnside’s.
At odd hours of the night, when she tried to get comfortable in the train seat, she wondered at her audacity. But every morning when she woke up things were once again clear; she knew exactly what she wanted. Independence. She wouldn’t have done one single thing differently.
She cast a surreptitious glance at Lance in the seat next to her, calmly eating a sandwich. He was a good man. At least she hoped he was. When she took the time to look at him, really look at him, she had to admit he was quite attractive with dark, slightly wavy hair that usually flopped into his eyes.
And those eyes were such a dark, smoky blue they looked like ripe blueberries. Sometimes the expression in them gave her pause.
She knew he was not really a thief, no matter what any Wanted poster said. The sheriff in St. Louis said Wells Fargo was always printing up such posters. Every time they lost someone’s luggage they claimed it was a robbery.
But what else Lance Burnside was she hadn’t a clue. One thing she knew for certain; he was as anxious to leave Mrs. Schneiderman’s and St. Louis as she was. “I have no future here,” he admitted. “Might as well gamble that Oregon will be better.”
And, Marianne thought with a stab of conscience, he was gambling that marrying her would not turn out to be a disaster. They were both gambling. They might not like Oregon. They might discover Uncle Matty’s business was something awful, like laying railroad track or running a slaughterhouse. Worse, after they were married, they might find they didn’t really like each other, at least not in the married sense. She already liked what she knew of Lance, she acknowledged. But maybe that wouldn’t be enough.
He leaned toward her. “You want half my sandwich? It’s meat loaf.” He waved it beneath her nose. He had purchased it somewhere in Idaho, and while her stomach rumbled with hunger, and the smell of meat and mayonnaise was enticing, she knew she couldn’t eat a bite.
“No, thank you, Lance. I’m too nervous to eat anything.”
“Nervous about what?”
“About what Uncle Matty’s business will turn out to be. Maybe it’s a house full of shady ladies or a coal mine or a rowdy saloon.”
And she was extremely apprehensive about marrying Lance, but she need not mention that.
He stretched out his long legs and bit into his sandwich. She glanced at his squashed-up-looking lunch and wrinkled her nose.
“Still not hungry?”
She sighed. “My stomach is too jumpy. Besides, we’ve eaten nothing but sandwiches for the past three days.”
“I’m tired of sandwiches, too,” he said. “Eat it anyway.”
At that moment her stomach gurgled, and when he grinned at her she reluctantly accepted it. “Thank you, Lance.”
His eyes widened. “You’re welcome.” He bit into his half and chewed quietly while she studied the gray-looking bread in her hand. “Never in all my years at Mrs. Schneiderman’s have I seen a sorrier-looking sandwich.”
Lance nodded and took another bite. Things sure did seem unreal. He could understand Marianne’s feelings of anxiety. The last thing he ever thought he’d do in life was get married. A man on the run, a member of the notorious Sackler gang robbing stagecoaches, had no time to think about marriage, let alone court a woman. And the last woman he’d ever think of marrying would be Marianne Collingwood. Marianne acted more like a drill sergeant than a flesh and blood woman, and that was on her good days!
But the prospect of starting a new life two thousand miles away from St. Louis and an incriminating Wells Fargo poster was worth a gamble.
Maybe they didn’t like each other much. He didn’t want to marry her any more than she truly wanted to marry him, but she had that Wanted poster folded up in her reticule, so he figured she had him over a barrel.
After his mother died, he’d run away from Pa and joined the gang when he was just fourteen, too young to know what he was doing. But the only time he’d really done anything for them, acting as a lookout, had dictated his life from then on because his face had appeared on that poster. He’d done nothing else in his life but sweat over being found out.
Maybe the chance to get away from St. Louis and make something of himself would be worth it. And getting married looked like the price of admission. Well, so be it.
He gave her a sidelong look. “We’ll be pulling into Smoke River sometime today. What’s the first thing we should do when we get there?”
She groaned. “After three days and nights on this train, all I want to do is take a long, hot bath and sleep for twenty-four hours. After that, I want to visit the mercantile and find a dressmaker.”
“What for?” He gave her green traveling outfit a quick once-over. “You look okay to me.”
Inexplicably, her cheeks turned pink. “Um, well, a woman only gets married once in her life. I want to have a real wedding dress.”
A real wedding dress, huh? He wondered if she’d thought through all the ramifications of getting married, spending all day in each other’s company. And all night. He felt his face heat up. Actually, he admitted, it was more than just his face that felt hot.
He took a long look at the woman beside him, now gazing out the train window at a herd of grazing horses. Everything in life was a gamble, he figured; but this was sure one of the biggest.
On the other hand, he pondered, finally feeling his face cool down somewhat, maybe getting married to Marianne wouldn’t be so bad.
Maybe.
Chapter Four
With a puff of billowy white steam the locomotive engine chugged past the Smoke River station house, and the single passenger car gradually rolled to a stop. The uniformed conductor clunked down an iron step, and the first person to descend was Marianne Collingwood. She set one foot on the wooden platform, then two, and immediately spun in a circle to take in the view of her new home.
“Green,” she murmured. “Everything is so green. And the trees are so tall.” She had never seen such towers of pine and sugar maple. And the smell! She inhaled deeply and shut her eyes. The air smelled like Christmas trees!
Behind her, two elderly women in matching navy blue travel suits stepped down, followed by a tall man with a tan, weathered face wearing a wide-brimmed gray hat. A shiny silver badge was pinned to his leather vest. Only when the sheriff strode off down the street toward town did Lance step off the train, and Marianne noticed he had tipped his black felt hat down to hide his face.
“For heaven’s sake,” she whispered, “no sheriff out here in this wilderness will be the slightest bit interested in you.”
“Yeah, how do you know that?”
“Because I’ve been reading the newspapers. With all the murders and barroom brawls law officers in the West have to keep up with, a five-year-old robbery back in Missouri isn’t important. You are perfectly safe.”
“Speak for yourself,” he grumbled. “I feel like there’s a big sign around my neck with thief printed in big black letters.”
She drew in a tired breath of the hot afternoon air and turned toward him. “Lance, go inside and arrange for my trunk to be delivered.”
He dropped both their travel bags at her feet, propped one hand on his hip and sent her a reproving look. “Marianne,” he said firmly, “it’s not too late for you to learn how to say ‘please.’”
Out of habit she opened her mouth to berate him, but after a moment she gave a quick nod. “Oh, all right, ‘please.’”
He flashed her a grin and disappeared into the station house. She began to pace up and down the wooden platform, studying the few one-story buildings close by. Dingy, she observed with a sniff. Badly in need of fresh paint.
It was so hot she thought her shoes would melt. And there was no shade. Even with all these trees, the sun was straight up overhead, blazing down like a big copper frying pan in the sky. Her head pounded, and she could feel perspiration soaking her camisole. She fervently hoped the worst thing about Smoke River was the heat and the run-down wooden structures with dilapidated false fronts. At the moment she felt perilously close to crying.
Lance emerged from the white-painted station house and smiled at her. “Fellow inside says he’s rustled up a wagon to take us into town.”
“A wagon? Not a carriage?”
“This is the frontier, Marianne. A town this small probably doesn’t have carriages for hire.” As he spoke a wooden wagon rattled up to the platform and the driver reined a huge gray horse to a stop. He seemed very young, olive-skinned and nice-looking, with a red bandana tied low on his forehead.
Marianne stared at him. “Is that… Is that boy an Indian?”
she murmured.
“Probably.” Lance hoisted her travel bag and his leather duffel in one hand and took her elbow. “Come on, Marianne. And don’t stare.”
The boy hopped off the driver’s bench and lifted both bags out of Lance’s hand. “Howdy, folks. My name’s Sammy Greywolf.” He swung the luggage up into the wagon bed. “Welcome to Smoke River.”
“How does he know we’re strangers in town?” Marianne whispered.
“Just common sense. He probably knows everybody in town by sight, and he’s never laid eyes on us before.”
The boy approached and offered her a hand. “Put your foot on the wheel hub right there, ma’am.” He guided Marianne up onto the wooden driver’s bench, then climbed up beside her. Her eyes widened. He wore moccasins that laced all the way up to his knees! He was most definitely an Indian.
The boy waited for Lance to scramble up beside her, released the brake and flapped the reins over the horse’s back. The wagon jolted forward.
Marianne clapped one hand on her feather-bedecked hat and peered at the dusty street. A barbershop. A newspaper office—no, two newspaper offices, one across the street from the other. Ness’s Mercantile, which sported a shocking fuchsia-pink storefront. Uncle Charlie’s Bakery. And, thank the Lord, right next door was a dressmaker’s shop. On the opposite side of the street she spied the sheriff’s office, a feed store, The Golden Partridge saloon, the Smoke River Hotel and a restaurant.
“You visitin’ somebody in town?” the boy inquired. “Or maybe you want to go to the hotel?”
“Hotel,” Lance said quickly. He averted his head as the wagon rolled past the sheriff’s office.
The hotel was only two blocks from the train station. My goodness, Marianne had never imagined that a town could be this small! She studied the restaurant next to the hotel with unconcealed interest. Could that be Uncle Matty’s business establishment? She caught her breath. Oh, Lordy, it couldn’t be the saloon next door, could it? What on earth would I do with a saloon?
The boy pulled the wagon to a halt in front of a white two-story building with wide steps up to the glass-paned entrance door. “Here y’are, folks.” He scrambled down, grabbed both bags and escorted them up the wooden steps into the hotel. “Got customers for you, Hal!” he called out. He gave Lance a grin and a two-fingered salute and disappeared.
Marianne's Marriage of Convenience Page 2