Marry Me (25 page)

She looked so pleased with herself that this time he did grin. “That’s about the size of it.”

Her expression grew wicked, and she inspected the length of him. “Not that I recall.”

He laughed. “Just wait. If you keep looking at me like that I can guarantee it.”

“So I see.” Eyes alight with mischief, drunk on her new power, she reached out and swept her hand down his belly. “Do you think,” she asked, teasing him by circling lower, and lower, but never
quite
—“that you could resist me better now? Now that you’re prepared for my—”

“Armored against your charms, you mean?” He grabbed her hand, because if she went one inch further he’d forget everything he had to say. “Not a chance.” He drew her hand to his mouth, closed his eyes while he kissed it. “I’ve never been armored against you, Emily, and that, at least, must be obvious. But I need to talk you.”

“Oh, don’t look like that. Don’t be serious now. You can be as serious as an undertaker later, I promise. But not now.”

It tempted him.
She
tempted him, in every way and sense of the word. But if he’d learned nothing else well, he’d finally taken as truth that putting off a problem never solved anything.

Still holding her hand, he dropped them to his…No, not his lap, bad plan. He yanked it up higher.

“Emily,” he began seriously. And then, “Stop that!” When her fingers began to wander, he flattened her hand against his chest and held it there. And then the words got all tangled up in his tongue. “Emily…”

Her smile softened. It must be nearly dusk; the light went rosy, and her skin glowed with it, pink and pretty, and he had to stop for a while and admire it, a lovely naked woman in his bed. A man who’d take such a sight for granted, he thought, was a man who deserved whatever misery he got.

“I didn’t mean to brush you aside,” she said quietly. “I just didn’t want to—it was so lovely, Jake. I didn’t want it to be anything else, not yet.”

“Whether this is something else or not I’ll leave for you to decide.” He squeezed his eyes shut, then decided it was easier looking at her after all.
Just say it, Jake,
he ordered himself, while his heart knocked so hard against his ribs that it seemed in danger of knocking itself out.

He let go of her hands because his were cold, going slick with sweat.

“Jake.” Gentle, she traced a finger down his jaw, a touch that had little to do with the passion that had come before and everything to do with the friendship that they’d had for far longer. “Tell me.”

It came out in a rush.
“Weshouldgetmarried.”

“What?” she asked, wary, confused. “I’m not sure—”

“You heard me.”

“Heard, maybe. Believed, that’s something else.” There was a part of her that wanted to leap and shout with happiness, rush headlong into the future. Except that he was pale, wearing the dazed expression of a man about to face a firing squad. “Just why,” she asked carefully, “do you think we should…do that?”

He gestured wide, encompassing the bed they’d left in a tumble of sheets and quilts. “That’s obvious.”

“Not to me.”

His gaze drifted over her head. She wanted to tell him to look at her,
see
her. He was right beside her, naked, in the bed in which they’d just loved, and he was a hundred miles away.

Or perhaps, she thought, only a year or two away.

“I can’t do it again, Emily.” The words came out in a whisper, burning all the way. “I can’t wait around to see if there’s a child, and then rush into a wedding. I…I just can’t.”

She opened her mouth to tell him it was different,
she
was different, but realized there was no point in it. Logic had no sway against the kind of emotion that grabbed you by the throat and hung on. “Jake, you do know…it was only once. The odds are not that great. More than likely…”

His fierce gaze flew to her. “You want to take that chance?”

She was crossing unknown territory in the dark, gaping pits yawning in every direction, and she scarcely knew where to step. She was terrified of hurting him, and every choice seemed to hold the probability of doing just that. “
Want
to, no, I wouldn’t say I want to.” It was too hard to talk about this, about sex and babies and weddings, without touching him. She edged closer, until her hip was hard against his side, and put her hand on his chest, holding her breath until he reached up and linked his fingers with hers. Yes, she thought, this is something that, one way or the other, should be done together. “But I will, Jake.”

“And what then? What if there is a child?” She deserved better, Jake thought. Deserved a man who could love her right, a man on his knees with flowers and jewelry. But it was too late for that. For both of them. “Rush into a wedding because a baby’s on the way? I’ve
done
that, Em.” And it damn near destroyed him. “I won’t do it again.”

“So we won’t.”

He frowned at her, fierce and angry. “So what then? Have the baby by
yourself?
”

“If I have to.”

“No, you won’t.” He let go of her hand and grabbed her shoulders, gripping hard as if he wanted to shake her but instead he just held on, his fingers denting her flesh. “You will not.”

“Okay, Jake,” she said softly, knowing she’d dared too much. “Okay.”

He yanked his hands back and saw the bright red ovals his fingers had pressed into her pale skin, and he had to look away and swallow hard before he could continue. “We can do it any way you want. If it turns out that you’re…if it turns out that there’s no baby, I’ll do whatever you say. A divorce, you can blame it all on me. An annulment, even, if that’s what you want. You can tell them anything necessary and I’ll agree. But I have to marry you. Now, before it’s too late.”

This was the moment. Emily felt it in her bones, every deep and secret corner of her body, that this was when her life changed, became one or the other. She wondered if people usually knew, if the instant where your future was set on course usually came and went unnoticed, recognized only in retrospect. But this was hers.

She could follow her mind. She could follow her heart. She could follow, perhaps, the advice of her sisters—here or not, she’d no doubt what their counsel would be.

She looked at this man. Glowering, fiercely wounded. Terrified. And realized that she could think about this till she lost breath, but there’d never really been a choice. The choice had been made the day she met him and she just hadn’t realized it until now.

“No, Jake, I—”

“No.” It burst out of him. “Emily, there’s no
no
here. That’s not one of the possibilities. I—”

“That’s not what I meant.” She shook her head, a gesture so sharp her chin sliced an arc through the air. “I’ll marry you, Jake”—relief flooded him, evaporated just as quickly when she continued—“but if I do, you have to be clear on this. There’ll be no divorce, no annulment, no maybes. It’ll be a marriage. Beds and babies and forever after. Everything. No option, no choices. That’s it. This is your only chance to decide.”

“I can’t be the kind of husband you want, Em. I—”

“Did you hear me asking for declarations of everlasting love?” she said briskly. “Let me worry about what I deserve, okay?”

“I—” Ice speared along his nerve endings. His stomach twisted upon itself a half dozen times. His mouth was full of sawdust. “Let’s go.” He bounded out of the bed, grabbed her by the wrist, and hauled her after him. He was driven to hurry, unsure whether he was afraid he might change his mind…or she might.

“Now?”

“Yes, now.” He looked wildly around him for clothes, located her petticoats beneath the table, and tossed them at her.

“But…but…” Shouldn’t they sleep on it? Give him a chance to change his mind? “It must be past eight o’clock.”

He shot an impatient glance out the window. “Almost nine.”

“Shouldn’t we…I don’t know, go to bed, maybe?”

“We already did that.”

“I meant sleep.”

“You think there’s a chance in hell either one of us is going to sleep now?”

She had to concede that point. “But—” He had his shirt on by now, his pants halfway up one naked leg. “Are you going to get married without your drawers on?”

“If you don’t get moving, Em, you’re going to get married
naked
.”

D
espite Jake’s best efforts, it took three days before they returned to the claim a married couple. First, Emily insisted on hovering over Mr. Biskup for another day and night, much to his vocal dismay. And then there were the various details to attend to, so that by the time they stood in front of a judge and mouthed a few words, a most unceremonious ceremony that took no more than five minutes, it hardly registered. How could it be that easy? For something that was supposed to be so important?

When they finally walked back through the front door, Emily’s head was spinning and she was beginning to wonder if it would ever stop or just stay that way and she’d go through the rest of her days with her mind whirling like a child’s kaleido-scope.

She stood just inside, her small handbag clutched in her hands, and scanned the interior. It looked exactly the same. The kitchen, neat and clean, tin plates stacked on the end of the table because there was no place else for them. She’d put a few sun-flowers in a glass on the table and they’d withered in her absence, brown and drooping in a sorry curve.

They hadn’t made the bed. The quilts piled at the foot, leaving the sheets white and bare and accusing.

“Okay, I got Reg put away,” Jake said as he came through the door. “I think he was glad to be home.”

She turned and faced him squarely. “How about you?”

“Huh?”

“Are you glad to be home?”

“Well, sure, I—” He caught her expression and winced. “Oh damn, I was supposed to carry you over the threshold, wasn’t I? I forgot, I’m sorry—here, let’s go outside, I’ll do it now—”

“No.” She shook her head. “It’s not the threshold.” Spinning slowly, she took in the rest—her dresses on their hooks, his collection of books high on the shelf. “It doesn’t feel any different.” She faced him directly. “We’re married now. Shouldn’t it feel different?”

Shrugging, he stepped closer. “We pretended to be married so long, I suppose it doesn’t seem like much has changed.”

Her husband, she thought, and waited for it to feel true. It was good to call him
hers
. But, she realized, she’d named him that for a very long time, anyway. Still…husband?

Maybe, she decided,
husband
wasn’t a term that took hold suddenly, simply by echoing a few words and signing your names next to each other’s on a license. Maybe
husband
was something that settled in, day by day, as you lived together, laughed together, building the name as you built a life.

Might as well get started.

“There’s one difference,” she said, and looped her arms around his neck, “from when we were pretending.”

“Oh?” he said, arching his brow, trying to hide a grin. “And what would that be?”

“Forget the threshold.” She jumped up and he caught her, just as she knew he would. “Carry me to bed.”

Autumn did not come gently. At the end of August a violent thunderstorm rolled in from the northwest and battered everything in its path, stripping the cottonwoods, plastering grass to the earth. Strips of tar paper and shingles flew off shacks and went streaking over the land as if they weighed no more than dead leaves. Shallow washes boiled with temporary rivers.

When the storm moved on, it left cool air in its wake, and oceans of grass turned gold. The season seemed neither here nor there, a slice of time between summer and winter that was scarcely a season of its own. The waiting time, Emily mentally dubbed it. Waiting for the frost.

As she waited. Her marriage was…it still did not seem real to her. She wondered if it did for Jake but didn’t dare ask. They got along well, she thought. Certainly they didn’t argue. Which was precisely the problem, now that she considered the matter. It was artificial. They tiptoed around each other, neither one sure, both unwilling to make a misstep. As if their marriage, too, held its breath and waited to see which way the wind blew.

The second week in September, Emily sat at the table, hemming a tiny gown, when Jake entered.

His eyes dropped to the small mound of yellow flannel and he stopped cold, wearing an expression of blind panic. “Em?”

She threaded the needle into the soft cloth and set it aside. “It’s for May.”

“Oh.” He dropped into the chair across from her. Just in time, she thought; he’d have been on the floor otherwise.

“I’m not, you know,” she said.

“You’re sure?”

“As of this morning.” She pursed her lips and studied him. “I guess I don’t have to ask how you feel about it.”

“Emily.” He said her name to delay his answer, trying to sort through the mix of emotion. A little disappointment, way down deep, completely buried by a tidal wave of fierce relief. “I’m not opposed to the idea of children,” he said, and realized it was the truth. “Not at all. It’s just that whole process of you
having
them terrifies me.”

Her expression softened. “I know.” She reached across the table and seized his hand. “I’m willing to wait awhile, Jake. Until you’re easier with the idea. But I’m going to want them. You knew that going in.”

“Yeah, I did. But I wasn’t thinking that far down the road at the time,” he said. “I was too busy trying to convince you to marry me.”

She squeezed in reassurance. “I’m not going to die on you, Jake.”

“You can promise me that?”

“I’m tempted to say yes. But you know better.”

“Yeah,” he said bleakly. “I know.”

She told herself not to ask. How would she live with the answer, if it wasn’t what she hoped? But the words came out anyway. “Are you sorry? You wouldn’t have had to marry me.”

She couldn’t read him. His mouth was flat, his eyes shadowed. And then he smiled, lifted her hand to his mouth for a kiss. “Only,” he said lightly, “if the waiting means I have to go back to sleeping in the tent.”

Emily swallowed her sigh of disappointment.
Yes
would have been a hundred times worse. Instead he chose to keep it light, skating across the surface of the issue. She reminded herself she had to be patient. But she wondered if he would ever be willing to allow affection and companionship to deepen. And if it would be enough for her if he couldn’t.

You knew the bargain when you entered into it,
she reminded herself. There was no one else to blame.

“You won’t,” she said. “Kate has no idea—Dr. Goodale’s funeral would have been years earlier if she had—but he was not one to edit my education. I know of a few ways to…well, there are several possibilities.”

“Yeah?” he said, grinning so wide that she couldn’t help but laugh. “Hot damn.” He tried to look serious, but his eyes danced. “I’m quite certain, Em, that I’d get used to the idea of you conceiving a
lot
faster if we practice the actual conception part of it quite regularly. I’m willing to devote myself completely to the task.”

“How generous of you,” she said soberly, but the corners of her mouth twitched. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“You do that.” And then, suddenly serious, he leaned forward. “How about you? Are you sorry? You could have found someone who…”

Who wasn’t afraid. Who had a whole heart. Who would…love you
. She understood the words as clearly as if he’d spoken them aloud.

“Are you?”

The words were there, ready to pour out. Words that, true as they were, would only alarm him all the more. And so Emily held them back, chose the lighter way as well. “Of course not,” she told him. “Would
you
want to have to admit to Kate that you lied to her?” She gave a mock-shudder. “Having to marry you is a small price to pay to avoid that.”

The second week in October, Emily, elbow deep in biscuit dough, glanced out the window to see a few snowflakes spitting from steel-gray clouds that seemed to hover inches above the ground.

She flipped a clean dishtowel over the bowl, tugged off her apron, and dashed to the doorway of the lean-to.

Despite her hurry she had to pause a moment to appreciate. Jake was on his back beneath the malfunctioning press, which he claimed gave him even more trouble than she had when they first met. Grease streaked his forehead, his sleeves were rolled to his elbows—what nice, strong forearms the man had—and his jaw was set at a stubborn, this-machine-doesn’t-have-a-chance angle.

“Jake.” Wrench in one hand, he looked up, smiled, and her breath left in a whoosh. Funny, that she still hadn’t gotten accustomed to that smile.

“Come to rescue me, did you?”

“Oh no. I’ll do the printing, but keeping that monster in running order is
your
problem, Mr. Publisher.”

“A man can only hope.”

“Keep hoping,” she advised him. And then, as lightly as she could manage, “I’m going over to the Blevinses’.”

He shot a quick glance outside. “Be a good idea to wait, see if this develops into something. It’s looking like we might get a good whap of winter early.”

“That’s why I’m going.”

Carefully he crawled out and sat up, the hand holding the wrench falling against his thigh.

“Why?”

“If it gets worse…Jake, if May goes into labor and I can’t get there, I’ll have another patient, one in far worse shape than she, after Joe has a heart seizure.”

He set the wrench down with more care than the task deserved. “I thought she wasn’t due for a month.”

“She’s not.”

“Then why are you going now?”

“Babies have a habit of picking the worst possible time to arrive.” She watched him carefully. Maybe he’d paled a bit. Perhaps his mouth had tightened. She wondered if he’d tell her if this hurt him but even given how far they’d come, doubted that he would. “Let’s just say that I’ve got a hunch and would rather not take any chances.”

“All right.” He tossed the wrench aside and stood, wiping his hands on his thighs. “Just let me wash up before we go.”

“You don’t have to come.”

His eyes, flat and carefully unemotional, met hers. “I’m not letting you go out there alone.”

“It’s barely snowing now.”
And it’s too much to ask of you, to stand by a few feet from another woman laboring to bring forth a child. I would spare you
. “I’ll be there before it really starts—
if
it really starts.”

“And have me sitting home, wondering where you are, worrying if you’re okay?” He walked over to her and cupped her face in his palms, tilting it up. “No, thank you.”

The intensity in his eyes left her breathless. And hopeful. He had to feel something, didn’t he, to look at her like that? “You would worry?”

“Of course I would worry.”

“I—”

He stopped her with a kiss so sweet it made her eyes sting. “Shush,” he whispered. “I’m coming along.”

The moan died slowly, keening off into the night like a fading ghost. At the sound, the coffee cup slipped from Joe’s hand and shattered on the floor.

Emily poked her head out from behind the blanket Jake had rigged to shield the bed from the part of the room where he and Joe waited. “Anybody bleeding?” she asked, her hair long lost to its knot, hanging limp around her shoulders. Her sleeves were rolled up to her elbows, and somewhere along the way she’d thumbed open the button at her throat and her skin glistened in the heat of the room—she’d had him stoke the stove high. He focused on that tiny wedge of tempting neck because it was a far better thing to contemplate than most of the other thoughts hovering around.

Jake stood up from where he’d been gathering the broken pieces of cup. He curled his fingers, hiding the small drop of blood on his palm where the point of a shard had pierced him. “Nope.”

She studied him for a moment, and he did his best to appear unconcerned. “Everybody doing okay?”

“We’re doing just fine,” he said, and hoped it sounded better to her than to him. “No problems at all.”

She shot a skeptical glance at Joe, flopped limply in his chair, staring aimlessly with glazed eyes.

“You men have any supper? I’ve really no time to make anything, but—”

“Jeez, Em, you think we’re too helpless to throw together a sandwich?” The mere thought of food had his stomach roiling in protest. “Don’t worry. Everything’s under control out here.” He cleared his throat. “How about…ah…” He jammed a finger at the blanket. “Everything okay in there?”

Her smile was brilliant. “Perfect,” she said, the blanket flapping forlornly as she disappeared behind it again.

Perfect,
he thought, as a brief, short shriek, abruptly cut off on a rising note, had panic surging thickly at the base of his throat.

He gathered the rest of the debris, this time with more care, and looked around frantically for someplace to stick it. Finally he dumped the shards in a pot, sloshed the spilled coffee around with a rag he pulled off the back of a kitchen chair, and called it good enough.

They’d arrived at noon, wet and chilled, the sky shedding flakes more thickly by that time. May, obviously surprised to see them, invited them to join the lunch they were just sitting down to.

Stuffed with May’s excellent plum cobbler, Jake had just begun to relax when May stood up, squeaked, and looked down at the rush of fluid pouring from beneath her skirts.

Jake and Joe stood dumbly, useful as boats in the desert, while Emily efficiently mopped up the floor, tucked May into bed, and got water steaming, bustling around the men as if they were furniture.

And then time hit the wall and stuck. Oh, it must be passing; the sun had crept across the sky and slid down, but every time Jake glanced at the clock the hands hadn’t budged a bit since the last time he’d checked.

“Jake,” Joe finally said, his low voice filled with dread. “Is it supposed to take this long?”

How the hell should I know?
“Oh yeah, sure. Emily said sometimes it takes even longer than this.”

“Longer?”
Joe’s face bleached the color of his white shirt, crisp when they’d arrived but now limp and rumpled as if put on the moment it was pulled from the wash. “Did it…did it take so long with…”