Marianne's Marriage of Convenience

by Lynna Banning

  All afternoon Marianne couldn’t help wondering which business establishment it was that Uncle Matty had willed to her. It wouldn’t be Sarah Cloudman’s boardinghouse. Or the barbershop. Or the Smoke River Hotel or the restaurant. And she prayed again that it wasn’t the Golden Partridge saloon next to the hotel.

  Lance shook so many hands and downed so many shots of Rooney Cloudman’s whiskey that by suppertime he was struggling to focus his thoughts. Marianne had long since disappeared into a chattering circle of women well-wishers. He wondered if she felt half as dizzy as he did. Probably not, unless she was lacing her lemonade with shots of Rooney Cloudman’s whiskey.

  What a day! He couldn’t wait for it to be over so he could enjoy a quiet supper with Marianne at the restaurant. He caught her eye across the dining room where she was cutting more slices of Uncle Charlie’s applesauce spice wedding cake, but as he watched she was quickly drawn into another conversation with more chattering ladies.

  He escaped to the veranda and sank on to the porch swing to rest a while. After some minutes, Rooney Cloudman joined him.

  “Had enough?”

  “Of what?” Lance said tiredly.

  “Enough of all this fuss and folderol,” the older man said with a grin. “All a man really wants is to get the I-do over with and start the honeymoon.”

  Lance suddenly jerked upright. Honeymoon! Oh, God, there was that double bed in Marianne’s hotel room, but he hadn’t really thought about it until this moment. Now he had to seriously consider what a honeymoon would mean.

  For the first time he wondered if Marianne was planning to have a marriage of convenience.

  Was she?

  Well, he sure as hell wasn’t!

  “What’s the matter, son? You look like you just swallowed a fishhook the size of a pick-ax.”

  “Rooney, how long have you been married?”

  The older man laughed. “Not near long enough.”

  “You recall how you, uh, ended up gettin’ married in the first place?”

  Rooney leaned back and pushed the swing into motion with his foot. “Yeah, I sure do. I was married before, see. ’Cept it wasn’t in a church or anything ’cuz I’m half Cherokee. My wife, she was full-blooded Cherokee. Anyway, she died before I came to Smoke River, and when I met my Sarah I was mighty leery about gettin’ hitched up again.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “Well, hell, I went and fell in love. Sarah, now, she didn’t feel that way about me fer a lotta years. So…I waited.”

  Lance nodded. “What do you think changed her mind?”

  Rooney slapped a gnarled hand on his knee. “Son, if I knew the answer to that, I’d be a rich man.”

  Lance could think of nothing to say to that.

  Rooney stuck an elbow into his ribs. “Chances are you’re not gonna understand a whole lotta things about yer wife, even if you both live to a ripe old age. But that’s not what’s important, see? Understandin’ her, I mean. What’s important is real simple. Just keep on lovin’ her.”

  “That’s it? That’s all?”

  “Yep, that’s pretty much it. And,” Rooney added with a chuckle, “don’t ask too many questions.”

  Lance nodded his head. “Thanks, Rooney. I’ll remember that.”

  “And remember them real smart words ‘for better or worse.’”

  At that moment Lance made himself a solemn promise. For better or worse, no matter what came, he would do everything in his power to be a good husband to Marianne.

  Chapter Seven

  By the time Lance and Marianne made their way back to the hotel, the entire day seemed like a dream. A good dream, Lance thought. Unexpectedly satisfying, even sweet, a word he never thought he’d use in regard to Marianne.

  “You hungry?” Lance asked when they reached the foyer.

  Marianne looked up at him. “After all that wedding cake and lemonade?”

  “And whiskey,” he reminded her.

  “Actually,” she said with a soft laugh, “I am starving. I hope Rita hasn’t taken steak off the menu tonight.”

  They walked to the restaurant, and the beaming waitress headed across the dining room toward them, waving her order pad. “Coffee?” she inquired. She sent a surreptitious look at Lance.

  “Oh, yes, please,” Marianne murmured. “I need lots of—”

  “Sure,” Rita quipped. “Comin’ right up.”

  “You, too?” Lance whispered.

  “My temples feel like squashed biscuits,” she confessed as they sat down.

  “I’d laugh,” he said, “but it would make my head hurt too much.”

  “Oh, Lance, this entire day seems unreal.”

  “Yeah, that’s what it feels like to me, too. Guess it’s because neither one of us has gotten married before.”

  “Imagine,” she said with a giggle, “getting pie-eyed on your wedding day!”

  “Your wedding day, too,” he reminded her.

  “Are we really married?” she whispered. “It feels like I’m having a dream.”

  “Yeah, we’re really married. Since three o’clock this afternoon. Unless we’re still dreaming,” he added.

  Rita brought two steaming cups of coffee and discreetly melted away. Marianne raised her cup to him. “Happy Anniversary.”

  “It’s too soon for that, don’t you think?”

  “Not at all,” she murmured. “We’re old married folks now. We’ve been married for a whole three hours.”

  “Four hours,” Lance corrected.

  Rita popped up again. “Steak?”

  They both nodded.

  “Fried potatoes?”

  Another nod.

  “Peach pie?”

  “Oh, yes,” Marianne murmured.

  “My stars,” Rita blurted out, “you two are predictable as blackberries in the summertime. Oughtta have a long and happy life together.” Humming, she headed toward the kitchen.

  Marianne downed a gulp of her coffee. “Lance, I—”

  “You don’t need to say anything, Marianne. I understand.”

  “Say anything about what?”

  Lance wished his head would stop spinning. “About…well, about tonight.”

  Marianne looked blank. “Tonight? I wasn’t going to say anything about tonight, Lance. I was going to thank you again for my wedding ring. It truly is lovely.”

  Now his heart was pounding right along with his head. That ring really meant something to her. Not in a month of Sundays would he have thought Marianne Collingwood would be sentimental about anything except an oven full of baking apple pies and a full wood box. Women were sure surprising.

  Correction, Marianne was surprising.

  They ate in almost total silence because Lance couldn’t think of a single sensible thing to say to his bride. Once, she requested that he pass the salt, and later he asked if she wanted chocolate ice cream on her peach pie. Then they lingered over coffee until her eyelids began to droop, and by the time she had drained her cup down to the shiny bottom, he was about ready to jump out of his skin.

  He kept remembering Rooney’s question about a honeymoon, and whether he and Marianne would be having one. Now the big fat question that kept bumbling around in his brain was different. Would he and Marianne be having a wedding night? In the same hotel room? In the same—he gulped—bed?

  He’d bet a stack of shiny gold bars she didn’t remember that tonight he would be moving into her hotel room. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became she wasn’t thinking about tonight. The next problem was how to get from here, in the dining room, to there, her hotel room.

  Just ask her, I guess.

  “Marianne, if you’ve finished your coffee, shall we, um, go back to the hotel?”

  She glanced across the table at him. “Yes, let’s,” she said, her voice drowsy.

  All the way across the hotel foyer to retrieve the key from the desk clerk his nerves felt jumpy as a roomful of grasshoppers.

  “We moved y
our luggage from your old room to Miss Collingwood’s room, Mr. Burnside,” the clerk said.

  “It’s Mrs. Burnside now,” he corrected. “We were married this afternoon.”

  “Oh, I know, sir. Everybody in town’s been talking about the big doings over at Rose Cottage. Congratulations!”

  “Thanks, Hal. And thanks for moving my luggage to her room.”

  Now Marianne was wide awake. “What did you say?”

  “Excuse me, ma’am. I understand you two got married this afternoon.”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice unsteady. “We did.”

  The clerk reached over and dropped the room key into Lance’s open palm. “Mr. Burnside, Mrs. Burnside. Congratulations again. And sleep well,” he added with a smile.

  Marianne looked up. Oh, my Lord, we are married, she thought. And tonight we will be sleeping in the same room together.

  Of course “together,” you goose.

  She stared into Lance’s oddly tense face. For some reason it was hard to adjust to being married. She glanced down at her left hand. With a wedding ring and everything.

  Lance took her elbow and guided her up the stairs to the second floor. When they reached the landing he laid a hand on her arm and brought her to a stop. “Marianne?”

  “Y-yes, Lance?”

  “You didn’t really think about…this part of being married, did you?”

  She pivoted to face him. “N-no, I didn’t.”

  “You wanted me to marry you, remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “So I did.”

  “Yes,” she said in a small voice. “You did.”

  He drew in a careful breath. “Well, you didn’t think much beyond the wedding, I guess. About what would happen afterward, did you?”

  She bit her lip. “I—I thought I would go to the bank and claim my inheritance.”

  He studied her for a long minute and then bent toward her. “I mean what did you think would happen tonight?”

  Right before his eyes Marianne Jane Collingwood changed from an efficient, hardworking boardinghouse taskmaster into a shy, unsure-of-herself girl.

  “I didn’t think about tonight,” she said slowly. “I suppose I just thought it would be a marriage of convenience until…”

  “Until what?”

  She looked everywhere but at him, at the patterned carpet runner on the floor, the blue-flowered wallpaper on the ceiling overhead, at the hotel room key in his hand. Finally she looked up into his eyes.

  “Until…until you kissed me.” Her eyes darkened to an unforgettable shade of green, like a dew-misted meadow.

  “Yeah?”

  “Something changed when you kissed me,” she confessed.

  A zing of recognition buzzed into his brain. “Something changed for me, too, Marianne.” He took her hand, turned her toward the door of Number Six and, without a word, unlocked it and pushed it open.

  Her room was larger than his, with two big windows overlooking the street and a tall, double-width wardrobe against one wall. And, he remembered with a catch in his throat, the big double bed.

  He lit the kerosene lamp on the nightstand, and all at once he didn’t know what to do next. He hesitated for a moment, then paced to the window and stood looking out on to the street below to think things over while his pulse did a crazy dance and he tried to get some moisture into his mouth.

  It was plain as pancakes Marianne hadn’t thought through what actually marrying him would mean. Well, neither had he. He hadn’t expected to like her as much as he did. And she was obviously feeling off balance at finding herself sharing her room with him.

  She had surprised him today. All these years he’d known her as the stern-faced single-minded housekeeper who kept him hopping every hour of the day, a woman who rarely smiled and never thanked him for anything. He would never have guessed that beneath her businesslike exterior lurked a girl who felt joy and fear and uncertainty just like other people did.

  With a jolt he realized again that Marianne was as much a stranger to him as he was to her.

  He turned away from the window to find her perched stiff as a department store mannequin on the bed’s blue-patterned quilt. “Marianne, can I sit down beside you?”

  Without a word she edged over to make room, and he lowered himself onto the bed. A full minute passed in complete silence.

  “I don’t know what to do next,” she said softly.

  “Yeah, I figured that.”

  “It isn’t that I don’t like you, Lance. I do like you. I just feel…overwhelmed, I guess. And a little, well, uncertain.”

  “I figured that, too. So here’s what we’re gonna do. This bed is plenty big enough for both of us. We’ll each take half of it and get some sleep tonight. And tomorrow we’ll go to the bank and find this Mr. Waldrip and move into the house your uncle left for you. It’s probably got more than one bedroom, so we won’t be…crowded.”

  He almost said “sleeping together,” but he thought that might scare her. She looked real lost sitting there so straight and stiff with her backbone all rigid. His chest tightened into an ache.

  He shot a quick look at her face. Her cheeks were pink, but her shoulders were drawn up tight so he knew she’d heard him. The honest truth was he wouldn’t mind at all making love with Marianne, but it sure wasn’t going to be tonight. He leaned over and puffed out the kerosene lamp, leaving the room illuminated only by the faint light from the street below.

  “I’m gonna get my duds off now,” he said in as matter-of-fact a voice as he could manage. “Then I’m gonna lie down on my side of the bed. I’ll stay on top of the quilt, so you could just…uh…take off your dress and crawl between the sheets. All right?”

  She said nothing, but after a moment he felt her weight shift off the bed. He stood up in the dark, quickly stripped down to his drawers and stretched out on top of the quilt. He heard her skirt rustle as she moved about the room, but after a while the rustling stopped and he heard nothing at all. A minute later the space beside him dipped as she lay down next to him.

  He realized with surprise that she hadn’t bothered to peel back the quilt on her side of the bed and slip between the sheets as he’d suggested. She was lying right next to him, so close he could reach out and touch her.

  But he didn’t. He closed his eyes and tried not to smell the lemony scent of her hair or listen to her soft breathing. Then all at once her breathing wasn’t soft anymore; it was jerky and uneven, and he knew she was crying.

  “Marianne?”

  “Yes?” she said in an unsteady voice.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She snuffled, and then she gave a small kind of broken laugh. “Everything is wrong, Lance. I scarcely know where to begin.”

  “Well, just…you know, give it a try.”

  “I—I am just now realizing that I have been very, very selfish. And…and…”

  “Manipulative?” he suggested, his voice quiet.

  “Yes. And worse. In a very real way I am getting exactly what I deserve for being so…”

  “Dishonest?”

  “Yes.” She snuffled again. “Well, I wasn’t dishonest about everything.”

  “Yeah?” His voice came out louder than he’d intended. “What haven’t you been dishonest about?”

  She was quiet for a long minute. “I wasn’t being dishonest when I thanked you for my wedding ring. And I wasn’t being dishonest when…when I kissed you at the wedding.”

  His heartbeat kicked back into a gallop. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what to think, either. He knew what he had felt when their lips met, like Fourth of July fireworks were shooting off in his brain. He had no cotton-pickin’ idea what she felt.

  The snuffling sounds started again.

  “Look, Marianne, it’s been a real long day. We’re both tired and maybe we’ve done enough confessing for one night. I’m gonna get some sleep now, and I think you should do the same. We can talk more in the morning.”

  He clo
sed his eyes. If she’d just stop crying he might be able to get his heart to calm down. He waited, then waited some more. After a while he didn’t hear anything from her side of the bed, so he steepled his hands over his stomach and said the only prayer he could think of.

  Dear Lord, I guess Marianne and I are stuck together now, for better or worse. But if You have any sense of humor, Lord, don’t let it be too hard on her.

  Chapter Eight

  The Smoke River Bank sat on the corner of Main and Maple Street, across from Stockett’s Feed & Seed and five blocks from the Rose Cottage boardinghouse. The brick-and-wrought-iron entrance looked inviting enough, Marianne thought. It was what awaited her inside that had her stomach doing somersaults.

  Her eyes felt grainy from lack of sleep, and she knew they must look red and swollen from crying. Nevertheless, she had wakened before Lance and slipped quietly off the bed, donned her green bombazine travel dress and her feathered hat and forced down some toast and a cup of coffee diluted with half the pitcher of cream. Now she stood with Lance in front of the Smoke River Bank, ready to finally lay claim to Uncle Matty’s bequest. The butterflies dancing in her stomach at this moment were almost worse than the ones she felt yesterday when she had married Lance.

  The interior of the bank was cool and respectable-looking, with polished wood floors and large oil paintings of grim-faced gentlemen on the walls. She made her way to the teller’s window and waited while a large woman ahead of her wearing a flowered calico skirt chattered on and on with the sandy-haired clerk about the unseasonably hot weather. Finally Lance purposefully cleared his throat, and the woman glared at him, snapped her shopping bag shut and stepped aside.

  The young teller looked up with a smile. “Good morning, folks. What can I do for you today?”

  Marianne cleared her throat. “I would like to speak to Mr. Waldrip, please. Or Mr. Myers.”

  The clerk frowned. “I’m afraid Mr. Waldrip took the train to Philadelphia this morning. But Mr. Myers is here. He’s the president of the bank. I’ll see if he’s in his office. Who shall I say wants to see him?”