Marry Me (6 page)

And then, in the blink of an eye, it all disappeared when she smiled. “Thank you.”

“Thanks?” he asked, effectively blindsided.

“Yes, thank you. For if I ever had any doubts about this venture,” she told him, “any question about whether I’d succeed or not, you, Mr. Sullivan, just gave me so much incentive as to absolutely ensure that I will.”

The sun rose early and bright, bathing the inside of Jake’s white canvas tent in clean light. Jake awoke late, aroused, painfully hard, and thinking of her.

He groaned and squeezed his eyes shut while his head pounded; for a moment he forgot that he didn’t drink anymore, it felt so much like he was coming off a three-day binge.

And then he remembered.
Good going, Jake old boy
. He didn’t know why he ever presumed he could deal with women. His most considered plans always went awry, and last night’s had hardly been considered.

He’d wanted her furious. So furious she wouldn’t be tempted to trot over to visit him with sweet brown biscuits and a sweeter smile. Oh, she was mad all right, good and mad. But she wasn’t going anywhere.

And the worst part was, the very first thought in his head when he’d swum up out of a restless, dark-dreamed sleep, was that he wanted her.

That was bad. Really bad. Extremely bad. Especially when added to that potent, blinding burst of need when he’d touched her.

It wasn’t right. Over the past year he’d come to the conclusion that that part of himself had died with Julia. There’d been women sometimes, in the saloons he’d practically lived in, who’d made it perfectly clear that they’d be happy to help him drown his sorrows in other ways than draining a bottle—though they were right fond of that method themselves. He’d never been one bit tempted, felt nothing but vague, woozy revulsion.

It’d been right, he figured, to lose that part of himself. He deserved it. Why should he ever experience pleasure again, when Julia wouldn’t? She was his wife, his heart, his love. It was only fitting that so much of him remained hers, always.

But now, unexpectedly, his physical needs had stirred. Stirred? Hell.
Erupted
. It was wrong, so damn wrong. And far too likely to happen again.

So he couldn’t wait any longer. He’d do what he should have done the first day and get rid of her. Then, it had appeared easier and cheaper to wait her out. He had time.

But not any longer. For as long as she was so nearby, sleeping in the bed he’d made, the bed that he’d shared with his wife, he was in danger of doing something he’d never forgive himself for.

And he had a plenty long list of those things already.

“Here.”

Emily focused blurrily on the hand Mr. Sullivan had shoved in her direction the instant she’d stumbled out of bed to open the door.

“Is that money?”

“Yeah. Take it and go.”

“Come back in an hour.” Maybe then she’d be wide enough awake to make at least vague sense out of whatever nonsense had seized Mr. Sullivan.

“No.” His hand slapped flat against the door, stopping it six inches before she slammed it shut. “We have to do this now.”

Emily sighed in longing for the sleep that was obviously not to be hers. One more mark on the negative side of Mr. Sullivan’s tally sheet, which was listing pretty heavily to port as it was. “Excuse me for not immediately understanding your intent—it’s a problem I continue to have where you’re concerned—but what, exactly, is this about?”

“I want to buy you out.”

“Oh no.”

“Yes.” His tone was unequivocal, as if it had never occurred to him she would not agree to his terms. “There’s enough here to pay the fees on a new claim. Plus more, for supplies to get you started.”

He’d scarcely glanced at her. When she made no response, his gaze swung around, touching briefly on her face, then dropping further. Immediately he jerked it back up, focusing over her shoulder, staring into the shaded gloom of her shack as if there were something compelling there.

Reflexively her hands went to her throat. She’d been too tired to undress the night before, but she’d thumbed open the tight band of lace that constricted her neck. Emily forced her hands back down to her sides, leaving her collar unbuttoned. She would not allow him to embarrass her. She was not improperly dressed, and if her sleep-mussed state was too brazen for him, well, that was simply too bad. He was far from unimpeachable in sartorial matters.

“I don’t want your money,” she told him flatly. If he had made this offer in the beginning, she might have considered it. When she’d been so foolishly concerned about what had happened to the people who’d abandoned this claim for her benefit.

But not now. Not after his accusations of the previous night.

“By God, you will.” He grabbed her hand and stuffed it full, forcibly bending her fingers around bills that crumpled in her hands. “You have to.”

“I have to do no such thing.” She yanked her hand away, and the skin burned where it had touched his. She opened her fingers and watched the money flutter to the ground, a few bills catching on spiky strands of prairie grass that sprouted at the base of the shack. “I don’t have to do anything. Especially not at your ever-so-polite request.”

“You won’t get more,” he warned her.

“I assure you, Mr. Sullivan, I am not holding out for a better deal.” She was famous for controlling her temper in the most trying of circumstances. When poor Mr. Eberle, suffering greatly from a growth in his abdomen, had hurled his bowl of pea soup at her head rather than eat the spoonful she’d urged upon him, she’d merely smiled and fetched warm towels for both of them. She’d continued gently lancing frail Mrs. Kawcak’s boils when the woman had rained vile invectives on her.

But Emily was finding that Mr. Sullivan shattered her cheerful serenity with unprecedented effectiveness.

“I want you gone.”

“We don’t always get what we want, do we?” she said through a beautifully—if she did say so herself—faked smile.

And finally he looked at her fully, messy waves of hair falling over his forehead, his eyes bleak and fierce. “I am aware of that, Miss Bright. Acutely so.”

She would not sympathize with the wretch, darn it.

“I am not going anywhere, and you would do well to accustom yourself to it. Given that you
do
have the financial means to settle on another claim—something you led me to believe you lacked, by the way—you may do well to hurry up and do so. There will be no benefit in waiting for me to fail, Mr. Sullivan, and perhaps a fair amount in getting on with your future,” she said, and despite herself, her voice softened at the last.

He went rigid. It was almost imperceptible, but she had trained herself to be observant of any flinch of pain in her patients. His eyes narrowed, the skin over his cheekbones drew tight, his nostrils flared.

“I offered you a fair deal. You chose not to take it.” He nudged one of the dollar bills with his toe. “You remember that when you end up with nothing.”

“I won’t,” she said, and hoped it wasn’t a lie.

“Remember, or end up with nothing?”

“End up with nothing.”

“Oh, but you will,” he told her. And then, so quietly she almost didn’t catch it, and oh, she wished she hadn’t: “Everyone does, sooner or later.”

E
mily opened the door right after breakfast to discover that the money, which they’d both stubbornly let lie in the grass, had disappeared. She wondered when Mr. Sullivan had snuck over and gathered the bills up. She had no doubt he’d done so; while he might have enjoyed the symbolism of leaving it in the dust, he wasn’t stupid. Obstinate, closeminded, and short-tempered, and more complicated than he appeared on first glance, but not stupid.

However, her musings were interrupted when Mr. Biskup shuffled up on his old mare. “I’ve brought you a letter!” He grinned, pleased with his surprise. “I know how much newcomers always anticipate any word from home. It took some doing for me to convince the postmaster that I should be allowed to fetch it for you—no tampering with the U.S. mail, you understand—but I persevered. There are few that can hold out against my determined efforts, you know.”

“Oh, I’m quite well aware of that,” she assured him, even as nerves sent her stomach a-shimmying. The letter must be from Kate; no one else knew she was there. “For didn’t you charm me out of a jar of my favorite apple jelly the evening we met?”

“That I did.” He lurched off the back of his mount, skinny arms encased in fine but threadbare blue wool wheeling until he found his balance.

Mr. Biskup had been in Montana longer than any of them, since before the Indians had been pushed back to the reservation, when he’d come to paint a vanishing way of life and stayed to chronicle the arrival of a new one. But though his hair had grown long and gray, his garments worn, he’d never surrendered his impeccably correct dress or speech. He’d explained it that first day, when he’d ambled over and presented her with a clever little sketch of her new home that somehow made it look charming and snug without being inaccurate. Some things, he’d said, you must cling to, or risk forgetting what you are.

He bowed, deep and formally, before he finally steadied himself. Emily tried to hover close without seeming to, just in case he kept dipping down and toppled right over.

The letter he presented with a flourish.

“Thank you,” she murmured. “You’re too kind to me.” And she’d miss him terribly, she realized suddenly, if Kate came and hauled her back to Philadelphia, for he’d never evidenced a moment’s disbelief at her ability to succeed, and in that instant had won a corner of her heart. “Would you like to stay for tea?”

He studied her face thoughtfully. “Are you expecting bad news, my dear?”

“No. No, of course not.”

He nodded gravely. “It has always been my policy not to pry in other’s business. It is one of the reasons Montana has always suited me so well. However, that does not mean that I would not welcome the chance to assist, were I asked.”

“Thank you.” Impulsively she squeezed his hand, his fingers ink-stained, callused where he’d clutched a pen for so many years. “But no, there’s nothing. It is simply the first I’ve heard from home. It makes it suddenly seem very far away.”

“All right then. Thank you for the offer, but Smithie will be expecting tea himself, and I don’t wish to see what he does to my place if left to his own devices too long.” He pulled a paper bag from his breast pocket and popped a dried apricot in his mouth.

She waited until he rode out of sight before she carefully worked her nail under the flap. And then she dashed a glance toward Mr. Sullivan’s encampment.

Some time when she wasn’t watching, he’d dragged in…something. She couldn’t decide what sort of machinery the haphazard pile of rusted metal had originally been—admittedly she wasn’t all that conversant with agricultural equipment, but still. It looked like it could crush something, but animal, vegetable, or mineral, she’d no clue.

He was sitting on his rump, wrench clutched in one grease-smeared hand, peering into its metallic guts. Making sure he had all his gear ready for duty when she gave up, she thought resentfully. If she weren’t already doing this for her sake, and Kate’s, she’d do it just to prove him wrong.

And then he looked up, and she wondered that the first sight of him beside her bed hadn’t sent her screaming into the night. Perhaps it was lucky she’d been groggy with sleep, for if there was a more disreputable-looking man in existence, she’d never seen him. He appeared born for the back rooms of scandalous saloons, for dangerously dark alleys and business best not spoken of. Funny how she’d gotten accustomed to his threatening looks.

But she couldn’t read her letter with him staring at her, and so she retreated into the dimness of the shack.

My dearest sister,

Yes, you still rate a “dearest,” although you shouldn’t. What on God’s green earth were you thinking? Although clearly you weren’t. Thinking, that is.

And that, for the moment, is all I shall say on the topic. I’m sure it will be ever so much more satisfying to speak my piece in person! And perhaps by then I will no longer be so tempted to administer all those beatings you did not receive as a child. Oh, such a delightful and obedient one you were! I should have known; nothing is ever that simple, and you must have been merely storing up all your rebelliousness for one great, grand mutiny.

But I promised, didn’t I? And I shall be there soon enough, never fear. If fate is cooperative—ah, as if that would ever happen!—and the mails are unreliable—far more likely—I might have beat this letter there, and we are halfway back to Philadelphia by now. However, I do suspect that the settlement of Dr. Goodale’s estate will take another two weeks, and I have promised to see it through. What a high mess those children are! And they are children, for all that Loren is two years older than I. It would have been nigh impossible to get this far without Mr. Ruckman’s kind assistance, but he assures me we are nearing the end.

But never fear, I’ll be there soon, and I shall fix everything. And you can begin the fall semester at Bryn Mawr just as we planned.

I am relieved that you have managed to keep yourself well enough that you were still capable of writing me a letter. Take care that you continue to do so until I arrive or what you fear hearing from me will be nothing compared to what you will.

And for God’s sake, DON’T MOVE. Sit right down on the nearest chair, in the safest corner you can find, and keep yourself planted until my arrival. Not a twitch, you understand! If not, I will find you, never mind if I have to search under every rock and ford every stream in that godforsaken place. (And whyever did you have to run off to the middle of nowhere? Could you not have run off to Paris or Madrid like any sensible young girl? I am quite certain there is no one there who can trim a hat properly, never mind my hair.) But I will find you, be assured, and if you make me wander over hill and vale, ruining my boots, to do so you will never again leave my side until you’re safely wed. And perhaps I will listen after all to Leola Seldomridge’s endless ravings about her exceedingly responsible nephew and why he’d be perfect for you.

With endless love and frustration,
Kate

Emily filled her cheeks and blew out a resigned breath. Well, what had she expected? Kate had spent twenty years of her life putting Emily’s needs first—Kate’s evaluation of Emily’s needs, in any case. It would take more than a letter to change her.

But she’d been cocooned long enough. Sooner or later every butterfly got to fly on its own, didn’t it? And Kate
had
to want a chance to stretch her own wings, too; how could she not? She’d kept them deliberately furled for a very long time. Emily was determined to give them both that freedom.

She let her gaze trace her home.
Her home
. How quickly it had become that. Bright curtains swung at the windows, looped over the open crates she used as cupboards; she’d sacrificed a skirt for those, and they’d been worth every stitch. Purple wildflowers bloomed in a cracked cup on the table, and the wedding ring quilt Kate had made was folded neatly, a bright splash of color at the foot of her bed. Her clothes hung on the wall. The dough she’d set to rise puffed up the cloth she’d laid over the bowl on the cold stove.

It looked like home to her. Cozy, simple, sufficient for her needs. She liked it that way, she’d discovered. Less to worry about. Less to scrub, less to take her attention away from things that mattered. She wondered whatever had possessed Dr. Goodale’s first wife to believe that a house the size of a hospital was desirable.

But Kate wouldn’t see it that way. Kate would take one look, ask about the chickens that surely were meant to roost there, and start looking about for the real house. She’d note every crack in the walls, every splinter that poked from the floor, every rip in the blue insulating paper, and decide that Emily deserved better. Hadn’t she provided better, all these years?

Oh heavens
, Emily thought,
what am I going to do now
?

Now where the hell was she going? Jake watched as she—that was what she always was to him,
she
, as if no other females ever turned up in his thoughts, which was a lot more true than he preferred to dwell on—lit out of her shack like a sprinter from the starting line. For a moment he thought maybe she’d finally set the blamed thing on fire, but he saw no smoke, not even from the chimney pipe.

Maybe she’d finally faced reality and had turned what even he had to admit was her considerable energy into getting as far away as quickly as possible, but that was wishful thinking on his part and he knew it. She might not be the most practical female he’d ever run across, but not a one of them would flee without at least attempting to drag her dresses with her, not unless chased by the devil himself. And maybe not even then.

He watched her skittle across the top of a rise, heading southeast, getting smaller as she went though she wasn’t much on size to begin with. The plains dwarfed her, the vast sweep of them, as if the grass might swallow her whole and she wouldn’t leave a trace. It did that to people; he’d seen it, more than once. Hell, there wasn’t a trace left of the Indians who’d once roamed there, though the government had rooted them out barely five years earlier.

But she—she’d disappear into it as easily as a field mouse, and make no more difference to the land. Truthfully, the sooner he pried her off his claim the better for her. Though he wouldn’t count on her being all that grateful.

Suddenly she stopped and bent over, hand pressed to her side. He came half off the ground before he made himself plop his ass right back down. What’d he think he was going to do, play knight on a white charger? Surely he’d learned his lesson there, and then some.

Then she straightened. Even from that distance, sunlight glinted off her hair, a clean gleam like the beam had hit glass. It damn near took his breath away, and he hated it.

She squared those puny shoulders and took off again. Walking this time, head down, arms swinging, purpose in every step.

And he let himself hope to God—not pray, not anymore, but hope, and even that had been a long time—that she was heading off to make arrangements to leave Montana.

But then he pushed the thought firmly away. He couldn’t let what she was doing, what she chose, matter. One way or the other, he’d get what he wanted. Until then, there was the thick, gummy coating of old oil to strip, and he grabbed a cloth and bent to the task. For machines were so much easier to fix than lives.

On the long trek into town, Emily mentally rewrote and discarded thirty or forty wires before she settled on one. She filled out the form at the telegraph office, shoved it across the table to the clerk, disinterested at first, who scanned the brief message before his eyebrows shot up to his hairline and she nearly snatched it back.

She couldn’t let herself question her plan. If it all fell apart, and Kate showed up anyway, well, Emily could hardly be in more trouble than she was already. Kate was as mad as she was going to get.

“That’ll be a dollar,” the clerk told her. She sighed and dug the coins out of her tiny string bag. She really was going to have to figure out how to make some money.

It took less than a day for her to get a response. Imbert carried the wire out to her himself—no trouble, he told her, breathless and flushed, as if he’d dashed out the instant the wire arrived. She recognized the excuse for what it was, and vowed to step carefully; his heart was more than willing to latch on to the nearest available female, and she did not wish to hurt him, not after all the help he’d been.

She tossed tea at him, and a couple of balls of left-over dough she’d fried and sugared, and turned her back to rip open the message.

ARRIVING THURSDAY. STOP
.

Three words. Nothing more. Emily crushed the paper in a palm that had gone suddenly slick. She tried to convince herself that the uncommon brevity indicated Kate’s newly straitened circumstances and its accompanying frugality but couldn’t talk herself into even that much comfort. It was far more likely that she hadn’t managed to stop shaking long enough to dictate even one more word.

“Is there something wrong?” Imbert, mouth rimmed in sugar, looked up with concern from tucking away the last bits of sweet dough. “Bad news from home?”

“No. No, of course not.”

“All right, then.” Shrugging, he slurped down his tea.

Hmm, she thought, tilting her head to eye him critically. Perhaps…

At that point, most women would have simply surrendered to the inevitable. Emily much preferred to go down struggling to the last; if there was one lesson she’d learned from Dr. Goodale, more valuable than any other, it was that as long as there was life, there was a chance. More than once they’d continued to fight long after a patient’s condition seemed hopeless. Once in a great while it had paid off, and they’d saved someone all others might have let die. Even one made it worthwhile.