Lucky Penny (47 page)

He didn’t believe in making Daphne’s study hours at night boring, so instead he tried to turn everything into a game. Tonight she was studying the presidents of the United States. Tomorrow for her test, she would have to recite their names in the order of their terms of office. To David it seemed a hard assignment for first grade, and he was thankful she wasn’t required to spell them.

“So who is our president right now?” he asked.

“Benjamin Harrison,” Daphne replied.

“No, sir!” David protested. “What happened to Grover Cleverhand?”

Daphne giggled. “Cleveland, Papa, not Cleverhand.”

“I
know
his name was Cleverhand. I voted for him. He came into office right after Arthur Chester.”

“No, you have it backward. His name was Chester A. Arthur!”

David turned to Brianna. “Tell her I’ve got it right.”

Brianna smiled slightly. “You know very well you have it wrong. Why must every study session be a bunch of tomfoolery?”

David wanted to reply that she
never
engaged in tomfoolery, which was even worse. Brianna always held herself apart, watching and seeming to take pleasure in her daughter’s laughter, but never departing from her ladylike behavior to join in. Why? The question bothered David continuously. He sensed in Brianna a great capacity for laughter and silliness, so why did she keep herself stifled and under strict control?

By evening’s end, Daphne knew all the presidents’ names and years in office. David tucked her in with a tale he made up about a big old tomcat that was terrified of mice. Toward the end of the story, Daphne fell asleep, clutching their lucky penny in her small hand.

When David returned to the kitchen, Brianna was still hunched over her sewing. He wanted so badly to jerk the gown from her hands, draw her into his arms, and kiss her senseless. Instead he bade her good night and went to bed on his lonely cot. Sleep evaded him. Being around Brianna so much had his manly urges in a constant stir.

An hour later when she entered the room, she closed the door and drew down the blind, plunging the room into total darkness, apparently thinking it would give her privacy as she undressed. Soon moonlight penetrated the shade, though, enabling David to see far more clearly than she realized. The pale glow of a slender arm, the roundness of a hip, the plumpness of her bottom. He squeezed his eyes closed, unable to watch for fear he’d leap from the cot and take her into his arms.

After she drew on a nightdress and got into bed, he waited to hear her breathing change. He waited—and waited. Finally he realized that she had the wide-awakes, too. Was she feeling the same deep yearnings for a physical relationship between them?
Yeah, right.
Sometimes when they bumped against each other in the kitchen, she gasped softly and jerked away as if his touched burned her.

On weekends, Daphne loved staying at the ranch with her father, and Brianna didn’t have the heart to say the child couldn’t go. They usually returned home early enough Sunday evening for Daphne to do her homework, bathe, and get to bed for a good night’s sleep, but occasionally David packed Daphne a fresh change of clothes, toiletries, and her schoolbooks so they could come back Monday morning, just in time for the child’s first class of the day.

Either way, the time alone seemed like an eternity to Brianna. She’d never been apart from her daughter, and the child’s absences left her feeling empty and cast adrift. David always invited Brianna to go, of course, but she normally declined. David’s family was almost as easy to love as he was, and Brianna saw no point in condemning herself or them to heartbreak. The truth was bound to rear its ugly head, and then Brianna and Daphne would no longer be considered a part of the Paxton clan.

Brianna worried about the outcome for Daphne. She had adored David from the start, and now she was becoming deeply fond of everyone else. Sadly, Brianna was powerless to prevent her child from opening herself up to future pain. Daphne returned from each visit with countless tales of Ace, Joseph, Esa, Grandma Dory, Rachel, Caitlin,
and her little cousins. There were family suppers, cookie bakes, games in the yard, and horseback rides. She’d fallen so madly in love with David’s dog, Sam, that David spoke of getting himself a new puppy.

On town nights, Brianna remained tense with David in the house. The most innocent of touches made her heart race. Was it longing she felt? Sometimes she caught him watching her with a speculative expression. More and more often, she found herself wishing that he would make the first move and put her out of her misery. Maybe, she reasoned, she’d find pleasure in his arms. Was she foolish to resist what was surely the only practical outcome?

No. David still believed Daphne was his daughter, but one day, he would realize she wasn’t and might want out. As much as Brianna appreciated the life he had given her and Daphne—and as much as she might wish that it could go on this way forever—going to bed with David would be underhanded of her. She’d come to care too deeply about the man to entrap him.

Even so, when she lay awake at night, filled with yearnings both new and frightening to her, she knew they couldn’t possibly go on like this. No man and woman could live under the same roof for any period of time, pretending to be married, without one or both of them developing physical yearnings.

Each night when she dressed for bed under cloak of darkness, she leaped if a floorboard creaked, thinking David had risen from his cot and was crossing the room. When she was finally able to sleep, she jerked awake if David so much as rolled over. Was he awake, too? Did he ache deep inside like she did? Sometimes she could have sworn she smelled his cologne and the musky, male scent of his skin. If he came to her, what would she do? Brianna greatly feared that one gentle touch of his hand would obliterate her good sense.

Some mornings David got up feeling as if he hadn’t slept a wink. But not even exhaustion could dampen his mounting desire for Brianna. Nights became a torture for him, with his manhood as erect as a flagpole, the throbbing in his loins so pronounced that he ached in his lower abdomen.
This is madness!
He’d been crazy to think he could live this way. He wanted Brianna more than he’d ever wanted another woman. But how would he ever manage to convince her of that? She believed that his every show of affection toward her was born out of obligation.
Horseshit.

Oh, how he wished he’d met her under other circumstances—that he could court her the way she needed to be courted.
Damn.
He felt like a kitten trapped in a burlap bag. And yet, when he looked at Daphne, he couldn’t bring himself to wish she didn’t exist. She’d become a joy in his life he’d never expected, and he loved her like the dickens. He just had to find a way to convince her mother that he’d come to love her as well.

Love. For years, it had been a mystery to David how grown men could act like fools over women. Now he finally understood it. When he looked into Brianna’s beautiful green eyes, his heart actually hurt. He yearned to cup her chin in his hand and taste that delectable mouth again. He wanted to hold her in his arms and hear her whimper with pleasure. He wished she would open up to him and share her innermost thoughts, her dreams, and her secrets. And he wanted to make more babies with her, too.

Despite the sexual tension between her and David, Brianna’s favorite time of day was in the evening when David came home from the marshal’s office. When she wasn’t in a rush to finish something for a customer, she’d taken to working after hours to update her own wardrobe. At the community social, she wanted to make a grand entrance in a fabulous gown to lure more customers into her shop. She sat in the rocker and did her fine stitchery by the light of the lantern.

“I can lend you the money to get this upstairs wired for electricity, you know,” David offered more than once.

Brianna’s answer was always the same. “I’m already in debt to you up to my eyebrows, David, and I don’t want to borrow anything more.”

“You’re my
wife
,” he would say.

Ah, but she wasn’t, not really. She was only his
pretend
wife. “I will wire the upstairs as soon as I can afford it,” she
would reply. “I grew up with lanterns. I love the smell of the kerosene and the warm, cozy glow.”

The poor lighting strained her eyes, but in truth, half the time, instead of stitching, she watched David and Daphne at the table, playing games or doing homework. David managed to make everything fun and had Daphne giggling even as she labored to perfect her cursive and learn her arithmetic. Oh, how the child detested doing her numbers, a trait Brianna knew came from her. Moira had loved math, but Brianna had always detested it. The nuns professed that it was Moira’s thoughtful nature coming into play that made mathematics easy for her. Brianna was just the opposite, skipping steps in a problem, determined to do things her way. She’d been a dreamer, more proficient at art, languages, and sewing.

“Four plus four is—” David broke off and nibbled his pencil. “Hmm, seven?”

Daphne squealed and pushed at her father’s shoulder. “Nuh-uh, it’s
eight
.”

Somehow the laughter and nonsense never prevented Daphne from learning her lessons, and soon they’d moved on to her spelling test. David, of course, misspelled words, right and left, keeping Daphne in stitches.

“Money,” he said. “I know for a fact it’s spelled m-u-n-n-y.”

“No, it isn’t,” Daphne shouted. “It’s m-o-n-e-y!”

“That isn’t how you spelled it in your letters to me,” David argued. Leaning over the child’s shoulder, he said, “Hey, hold up, there. How come you’re spelling hour with an H?”

“Because that’s how it’s spelled.”

“In your letters, you spelled it o-u-r. How can you expect your papa to get his spelling right if you keep tricking me all the time?”

Working diligently on her scarlet gown for the social, sewing on one tiny seed pearl at a time, Brianna smothered a smile and shook her head.
The man is impossible.
It had become one of her most familiar mental refrains. But now she added a new one:
He is also the most wonderful father on earth.
When Brianna helped Daphne with her homework, she was all business, just as Sister Theresa had been. But David made it fun. He was a great tease who understood
how difficult it was for an energetic little girl to sit still and study.

The realization took Brianna back in time to when she’d been the flighty, adventurous twin, always searching for a spark of excitement and the first to laugh until her sides ached. What had happened to that girl? Then she remembered Moira’s white face as she lay dying, the weak, almost undetectable whisper of her voice as she pleaded with Brianna to raise her daughter as her own. Brianna remembered in detail that day when she’d walked across town to report Daphne’s birth. En route, she’d sworn to abandon her flighty ways and be more like her angelic sister.
I have a daughter now. The best legacy I can pass on to her is to teach her how wonderful her real mother was, a veritable saint on earth.
In a twinkling, life for Brianna had become a job, and each night, she graded her performance.

Now she was what she’d aimed to become, a replica of her perfect twin. Oh, but how she yearned to join David and her daughter at the table. To be silly and giggle again. To participate in their games of nonsense. Sometimes she wanted it so badly that her limbs twitched and her fingers went stiff on the needle. David was bad for her, she decided. He made her want things she’d long since sworn to abandon. And deep down, Brianna feared that she could no longer tell herself she was merely falling in love with him. She’d already taken the plunge. She was so afraid he might glimpse the truth in her eyes that she had grown fearful of meeting his gaze.

D

The days passed, and before David knew it, all of May was behind them. The month was a blur of happy memories for him, times with Daphne at his ranch or with his family, but his favorite ones were of long spring evenings with his wife and child in the apartment above the dress shop when a cozy intimacy filled the kitchen and only the sounds of their voices or his fiddle broke the silence. In the mornings, he usually cooked breakfast while Brianna prepared for work. Daphne’s favorite meal included flapjacks, which David made a show of flipping high into the air. One time, he even got a laugh out of Brianna when Sam took up sentry position near the stove to gobble up the pancakes David dropped. Life was good. It could have been even better if he and his wife had a real marriage, but even without physical closeness, he had never enjoyed a month so much.

He occasionally glimpsed Hazel Wright at a distance and marveled at what he’d ever seen in her. She was attractive enough, he supposed, but on her best day, she couldn’t hold a candle to Brianna. Though it went against his grain, David avoided encounters with the woman. She’d been unreasonable when he’d gone to her home and
tried to speak with her. She had even struck his dog. Since then, when he’d seen her at a distance, he had detected nothing in her expression or demeanor to indicate that she’d had a change of heart. Fiery glares, clenched fists, and a rigidity in her posture that suggested barely controlled anger. If David bumped into her in a public place, he had no idea how she might behave or what outlandish accusations she might make. Despite the gossip that had circulated around town after David’s return with a wife and child, Brianna and Daphne were settling in nicely. He couldn’t risk a nasty scene that might make tongues wag again. The way David saw it, he had tried to mend his fences with Hazel, she’d acted like a wild woman, and he owed her nothing more.

David’s birthday fell on a Tuesday during the final week of school. Even though Little Joe’s celebration would be on Saturday, Dory insisted that there had to be two separate parties. David’s took place in the evening at Ace and Caitlin’s place so Brianna could attend. David sensed that she was reluctant to go. But she put a bright face on it, engaged in the festivities, and even surprised him with a present—a blue shirt she’d made for him on the sly. It was a perfect fit and the color matched his eyes.