An Unwilling Husband (23 page)

A treacherous tear slid down her cheek and she swiped it off with a gloved hand. She turned her back to him, unable to let him see her raw emotions. What good would it do? He would only use them against her.

She removed her gloves and slid out of her dress, leaving only her cotton shift covering her. The entire time she busied herself with putting away the dress and taking the pins from her hair, in the corner of the room, Garret was quiet. If he had fallen asleep, insult would only be added to injury.

At the light shuffling of his boots, she faced him. He sat with his head in his hands.

“What do you need from me?” he asked in a muffled and exhausted voice, as she washed her still stinging arms with care at the washbasin.

“Something. Anything. You give me nothing. What am I to do with that? A man who gives nothing will break a woman. You will break me, Garret.” She placed the candle on the crude bedside table and turned down the covers, blew out the quivering flame and settled into her bed.

Garret could stay or go. She didn’t care anymore, but she was finished talking to him. Conversation always turned out to be so fruitless with that confounding man.

At the subtle sound of fabric against fabric, Maggie turned to fix a glance in Garret’s direction. Her eyes took a moment to adjust, but the moon was close to full, and its light pouring in through her small window proved to be enough. He undressed slowly. And when clad only in his trousers, he did something that shocked her to her very bones. He crawled into bed beside her.

With his back to her, he said, “I don’t want to break you, Maggie. And I don’t care for Anna. I danced with her because her father was watching. I didn’t want to cause a scene by hurting his daughter. Again.”

“You didn’t seem to want to dance with me, but you danced with her.”

“I would’ve got the nerve sooner or later to ask you. It’s been a long time for me, and I never went to one of those shindigs with a woman. I handled it wrong, and I’m sorry.”

Maggie was quiet for a time as her anger simmered and cooled. “I’m sorry for dancing with Wyatt too. Oh boy, am I sorry.”

“Why did you, anyway?”

“He wouldn’t leave it alone. I made him give his word to stop talking to me if I danced with him once. Apparently the beastly man thinks I should be married to someone like him instead of you.”

Garret was quiet for a long time. Had he gone to sleep? Perhaps so. His breathing sounded steady. Measured.

Her eyelids closed, and her limbs relaxed.

“You aren’t plain,” he said low.

“What?” She thought she had dreamed him talking.

“I knew when we were little you would grow up to be beautiful, and you didn’t disappoint.”

“I do believe that is the very nicest thing you have ever said to me. I think it is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me, for that matter.”

Garret chuckled. “I know I’m not where you want me to be, and I know you probably can’t tell, but I look at you differently than I did when you first showed up again. I like you. You’re just going to have to be patient with me, woman.”

She sighed. “Patient, I can do.”

* * * *

Maggie woke the next morning with a smile on her lips. True, they hadn’t done more than sleep beside each other, but drawing the warmth from Garret’s sleeping frame all night and falling under the protection of his arm over her hips had been more intimate than any other moment in her life. She was a new woman. A soft knock echoed off the door. She rolled over to find Garret’s side of the bed empty. The knock sounded again. “Who is it?”

Garret had an apparent aversion to knocking, so surely, not him.

Lenny opened the door and came in with the borrowed dress and accessories. “Garret’s out with the boys rounding up the cattle. He said to let you sleep in today.”

She blinked sleepily at the window. Full, undiluted sunlight streamed through it. Slept in she had. “Whoops!” she exclaimed, giving her friend a grin.

Lenny snickered and went to put the dress in the chest with the others. Maggie stretched and poured ungracefully out of the bed to get ready. If the boys were out in the pasture, she was going to relieve her bladder in her shift. When she returned, she dressed and washed her face. Lenny waited in the chair Garret had occupied the night before.

“What needs to be done today, then?” Maggie asked.

“I was going to wash the men’s clothes, and mine, if you want me to show you how.”

“Yes and yes.”

“And Cookie brought back a deer this morning so we’ll need to take care of the meat since the boys are busy all day. I thought we could make a stew and then smoke the rest for later.”

In the night she’d awakened, and Garret’s solid arm had been around her. The feeling of safety it brought to her slumber had made her wish he’d hold her forever. She would surely imagine such a moment a hundred times that day. “Huh? Oh right. You skin the deer and I’ll make the stew.”

“Nice try,” Lenny said, smiling.

Hands on her waist, Maggie mumbled, “I wonder where Garret keeps his dirty clothing.”

In his room, she retrieved a dusty pair of thick cotton pants and two button up shirts that smelled like her pillow had this morning. With one of the shirts clenched in her hands, she inhaled. Laundering them was almost a shame. The smell of his skin would be washed away until he wore it again.

She hauled them into the room with the tub in it. Then she went to the hands’ cabin with Lenny, helped her pile the men’s soiled clothes into a double-handled tub and brought it back to the house. After gathering her own garments, the women set to the task of filling the tub and laundering.

Lesson learned after the first scorching of a good dress, so no washing the garments over the fire this time around. The process involved washboards, and lye soap so raw, it made her skin tingle and itch. By the time the clothes were pinned on a line in the breeze, hours had passed, her hands were red with irritation and the hair around her face damp from exertion. Aunt Margaret’s paid launderer back in Boston didn’t know it, but the burly woman had her full respect.

Her hands were dry and itchy after scrubbing with the crude soap for so long, but Lenny seemed unaffected. Like the Indian girl, hopefully she would grow used to it over time.

The laundering completed, Lenny taught her how to prepare venison and then took her out to a garden near the hands’ cabins. There they harvested a basket of vegetables and herbs for the stew they would be making. After a light lunch, they hung the venison to dry over a large fire they had contained in the back of the house. While Lenny strained the morning’s milk through a thin cloth to filter out debris and dirt, she chopped vegetables and prepared the meat. She added them to the large kettle over the fire.

In the deep of evening, she hauled the water for the washbasins so Garret would have one less chore when he finally came home. She was nearly to the front of the house, bucket in hand, when someone grabbed her from behind and spun her around. The water sloshed across the front of her dress. She gasped, both from shock and the feel of the cold water seeping through the fabric of her clothing.

Garret laughed in a way she’d never heard before. Not forced. Natural.

Open-mouthed, she glared at him. Then, “Garret Shaw, look what you have done to my dress!”

He looked completely unapologetic, so she tossed a handful of water toward him. It dribbled pathetically across the front of his shirt. His eyes filled with mischief, and she squeaked, tried her best to run away, the bucket of sloshing water in her hand. Laughing, he caught her easily and splashed another handful onto her dress, while giggling, she tried to do the same to him.

Soon the water was gone and the game at an end. Which seemed even funnier, somehow.

“Now I shall have to refill the bucket, and after I spent all that time and effort hauling it up here,” she chided, still smiling.

He shrugged. “I’ll do it.”

The way he peered at her with a hungry look in his eyes made her heartbeat pick up its pace. She grew quiet and still. Garret closed the small distance between them and gently took the bucket from her. The bucket made a muffled sound against the grass as he set it on the ground.

He put his hands around her waist and gently pushed her backward until her back was against the side of the house. His chest heaved with his breathing, and he stared down at her, holding her gaze with his. The look in his eyes seemed to ask her a question, and unable to answer it with words, she slid her hands up his wrists, then his arms, in a question of her own.

He leaned down and kissed her. It was tender, so very much like their first one the day they were married, and she melted into him as he moved closer. She took his hat off and tossed it on the ground beside them, brought her fingers up and sifted them through his hair and nibbled his bottom lip. A groan came from deep in his throat, a delicious sound that sent shivers through her. She stepped out from under him and headed for the front of the house, peering back once. A smirk played on his face as he watched her go.

“Dinner is on,” she said grinning, and tiptoed into the house.

It was high time the tables were turned.

* * * *

The metal ladle scraped the bottom of the sizable cauldron of simmering beef stew. She’d made plenty of food but had miscalculated exactly how much hardworking ranch hands could eat. Best to double the recipe next time everyone ate in the main house.

The bowl Garret placed in her palms was warm to the touch and steamed with the aroma of seasoned vegetables and thick, meaty broth.

“Thanks,” she told him before taking her place at the dinner table. The intensity of his gaze was enough of an answer and it warmed her long after he’d turned to fill his bowl.

“So, Maggie,” Burke said as he sopped a biscuit through his soup stock. “Since you’re the only one who knew old Garret over there as a child, I think you should dish some dirt on him.”

Garret took the seat beside her. “Sorry, ladies and gents. No dirt to tell.”

“That’s not entirely true,” she said. “Once upon a time—”

Garret shook his head and narrowed his eyes.

“He found a nest of snake eggs he swore up and down were just little grass snakes. Said he saw the mom near them and everything.”

A far-off look came over him. “I don’t remember this,” he said.

“You will. So he brings me this basket all done up in pink ribbons he stole from Mrs. Shaw’s yarn jar, and lo and behold, he’s brought me a gift of snake eggs. What really happened was, his ma caught him trying to sneak them into his room and she banned them from the house, so he decided to give them to me. Anyway, Roy cut him off at the pass and said, ‘There’s no way in hell you’re setting foot in this house with a dadburned nest of baby snakes!’” She turned to Garret. “Sound familiar yet?”

His brow was furrowed, and he looked at her like she’d lost her mind. “Not even a little.”

“So, with a shortage of places to store his little project, he snuck them into school before Mrs. Henshaw rang the bell and hid them inside his desk.”

“Ahhh,” he said. “It’s coming back to me now.”

“So then what happened?” Burke asked.

“Well, he was a right proper little daddy, checking on them and keeping them hidden, and they were the tamest pets you’ve ever seen. Until one morning, Mrs. Henshaw came barreling out of the schoolhouse like her skirts had been lit on fire. Apparently, Garret’s little nest of baby rattlesnakes had hatched in the night and the building was crawling with them.”

Even Lenny couldn’t seem to control her laughter, and Garret nodded slowly. “Mrs. Henshaw was madder than a hornet when she figured out it was me.”

“How’d she figure out it was you?” Cookie asked.

“Well, I thought I was safe because we couldn’t go back to the schoolhouse for a week until they had those little critters cleared out of there, but when we came back she was waiting for me. It seems I’d forgotten about the eggshells in my desk.”

“Yes,” Maggie chimed in. “She gave him three wraps against the knuckles with a ruler right there in front of everyone. Which would have been mortifying for him, if it didn’t out the culprit who got all the children a week off from school. He was hero of the yard as soon as the day let out.”

The cadence of their easy laughter was a song that touched her heart. What a relief, to have a night like this follow the ghastly one before.