Never Love a Lawman (15 page)

“Between eight and fourteen inches, according to Sid’s shoulder and his left knee.”

“Goodness. What if his right knee joins the band?”

“Blizzard.”

Rachel laughed at Wyatt’s wry tone. “I suppose we’d better hope that he doesn’t cripple up any more.”

Wyatt thrust his hands into his trousers. “That’s a fact.” Since they’d turned the corner, the wind had been whipping the sleeves of his shirt and beating against his vest. He put his head into the wind to keep his hat on as they approached Rachel’s flagstone walk. Aware that her steps were slowing and that she was preparing to bid him good night, Wyatt interceded on his own behalf.

“I’ll walk you to your door,” he said.

“It’s not—” She stopped because she was already talking to his back, and she had to hurry to keep up with him. He wasn’t so much escorting her as leading the advance. She caught up to him just as they reached the porch.

“I wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee.” He insinuated himself between Rachel and the door and managed to get his hand on the knob first. “And maybe a bite to eat. I didn’t have dinner this evening.”

She was prepared to argue the lateness of the hour when her own empty stomach betrayed her by rumbling loudly. Sighing heavily, she offered a reluctant invitation. “I have some chicken soup I could heat, and there’s three-quarters of a loaf of Mrs. Easter’s brown bread in the larder.”

“That sounds just about perfect,” he said, and began opening the door.

Rachel couldn’t resist asking, “What would make it perfect?”

“Hot water gingerbread.”

That stopped Rachel in her tracks. She turned on him, hands on her hips. “How could you possibly know that I have—”

Wyatt didn’t give himself a moment to think about it, or a moment to think better of it. He simply reacted to the wide doelike eyes and generously shaped mouth tilted in his direction and backed her up against the wall in her foyer, where he kissed her until survival dictated he come up for air.

Rachel’s hands were no longer on her hips; her palms lay flat against the wall behind her. Beneath her fingertips she could feel the velvet flocking of the paper. She stared at Wyatt, more wide-eyed than she had been before. Her lips felt vaguely swollen, and her breath came through their narrow parting.

“You won’t do that again,” she said, though she wasn’t clear if she was asking or telling him.

Wyatt removed his hat and laid it on the entry table. “We’ll see.” He looked over her flushed features, gauged the likelihood that she was going to slap him as small, then wandered off to the kitchen in search of sustenance for the other part of him that needed it.

Rachel followed at a slower pace and gave him a wide berth in her own kitchen. She let him fire up the stove while she retrieved the crock of soup and the bread from the larder. She also set out squares of gingerbread and topped them with a dollop of applesauce.

“You’re not spending the night,” she said.

“Can’t. I have to ride out tomorrow.” He glanced over at her, lifting an eyebrow. “Thursday,” he reminded her.

“You’re not invited anyway.”

“I understand.”

“Good.” She nodded once for emphasis and pushed the crock across the table so it was within his reach. She wrapped the bread in a moist towel and set it down for him to place in the warming pan. With studied casualness, she asked, “Should you be going anywhere if there’s a storm coming?”

“It’s my job.”

“But you could be riding into it.”

“Oh, I expect it’ll be here by morning. It could hold me up from getting an early start, so you shouldn’t worry if I’m late coming to collect my biscuits.”

“I won’t be worrying. I’ll be sleeping. It’s every
other
Thursday, remember? I gave them to you last week.”

“So I’ll have to wait until Sunday?”

“That’s right.”

“You’re a hard woman, Rachel Bailey,” he said, stirring the soup. “But I’ll be damned if you don’t have the softest lips.”

Rachel almost dropped the bowls that she was carrying to the table. “Don’t do that,” she said softly, recovering her composure. “It’s not fair. Not fair to either one of us.”

He turned away from the stove and saw that Rachel’s expressive features were set gravely, the line of her mouth no longer curved but grim. “I don’t necessarily share your opinion.”

“It’s not what we agreed to,” she said.

“I don’t remember that we discussed it.” He tapped the large wooden spoon he was holding against the pot, then set it down in the spoon stand. He folded his arms across his chest and mirrored her humorless mien. “Sharing the same dwelling. Coital relations. Raising children together. Those were what you said defined a marriage. We never talked about what defined our partnership.”

“Do you push your tongue in Sid Walker’s mouth?”

For a moment, Wyatt could only stare at her. “That’s a hell of a thing to say, Rachel.” He absently rubbed his chest where it felt as if she’d been jabbing him with her fingertip.

She didn’t back down. “It was a question, and you haven’t answered it.”

“For God’s sake, let it be.”

“Because it’s uncomfortable for you?”

He turned back to the stove and checked the bread in the warming pan. “What do you really want, Rachel? An apology?”

“An explanation.”

He shut the door on the oven again and glanced at her over his shoulder. “An explanation for what exactly? The kiss? The comment about your lips?”

“For the way you’re acting toward me. You never kissed me before, never hinted that you wanted to, and now you—”

“Never hinted?” His eyebrows lifted. “You didn’t want to see it.” Shaking his head, he stepped away from the stove and without a word left the kitchen entirely. When he returned a few minutes later, it was with a bottle of whiskey from the sideboard. He took out a glass from the cupboard, raised it slightly in Rachel’s direction to ask her if she wanted to join him. When she shook her head, he shrugged, and set the glass on the table.

Rachel watched him uncork the bottle and pour himself enough for a swallow. He let it sit there on the table while he gave the soup another stir and sip and judged it hot enough to serve. That’s when she realized it wasn’t his intent to get drunk. “I’ll get the bread,” she said as he began to ladle soup into their bowls.

He paused and tossed her a towel to keep her from burning her hands. “It looks good,” he said. “Is this Mrs. Longabach’s or did you make it yourself?”

“Mine, more or less. Molly helped. I was…well, I had a lot on my mind. I think she was afraid I was going to slice a finger when I was cutting the carrots, so she took over.” She set the warm bread on a small cutting board and carried it to the table. Wyatt had already pushed her bowl of soup in place, so she sat down and spread a napkin on her lap.

She waited for Wyatt to sit before she picked up her spoon and dipped it for her first taste. When she gasped and began waving a hand in front of her open mouth, he was on his feet immediately.

Rachel sucked in a breath and accepted the glass that Wyatt thrust in her hand. “Thank you,” she said when she could speak again. “I wasn’t expecting that. Not at all. It didn’t seem to have bothered you in the least.” It was exactly what she might have said about the kiss they’d shared. Realizing it, Rachel felt her cheeks grow warm, but she didn’t turn away from Wyatt’s frank study of her reaction.

“I want you to respect me,” she said quietly.

“And you don’t think I do?” He shook his head. “It was a kiss, Rachel. You were standing there with your hands on your hips, exasperated certainly, but amused, too, or at least I thought so, and I gave in to an impulse. It doesn’t mean I don’t respect you. It means I find you attractive.”

“Now,” she said.

“What?” He frowned and reached for his glass of whiskey. He held it in his hand, fingers curled around it, but he didn’t drink.

“Now,” she repeated. “You find me attractive now, but nothing’s changed except that we signed some documents. I’ve been living in Reidsville for almost a year and a half, and you barely said a hundred words to me until you brought me the message that Mr. Maddox had died. You never tried to kiss me before or thought you needed to offer a comment about my mouth. What am I supposed to believe except that you’ve decided I’m convenient?”

Wyatt was glad he hadn’t taken a drink because sputtering it across the table would have been a waste of good whiskey. “Convenient? I’d be hard pressed to name a single thing about you that makes you convenient, and if there was such a single thing, it definitely wouldn’t be your mouth.” He knew a moment’s satisfaction watching Rachel snap that particular body part closed. “I’ve been watching you glide up and down the sidewalk since you came to town, so I guess I know better than you how long I’ve found you a pleasure to look at. As for not talking to you much, it seemed to me it was mutual. You didn’t exactly go out of your way to be friendly to me, and I had to wonder why, when you sure as hell were friendly to Abe and Ned and Henry and Johnny and even that no-account Beatty boy.”

When Rachel looked as if she wanted to speak, Wyatt set her back in her chair with a stony, no-quarter-given glance. “Besides that, there was the matter of my contract with Maddox. He was pretty clear that there could be no marriage until he was dead, so what would have been the point of putting myself in your path any more than I did? Hell, Rachel, you crossed the street two blocks before you ever got to my office. What was I supposed to make of that?”

Wyatt gave her a moment to digest all that he’d just fed her and then pointed to her soup, her spoon, and her mouth, which was slightly agape once more. “Your food’s getting cold. Eat up.”

He didn’t know which one of them was more surprised when she did.

The following day, Rachel alternated working on Mrs. Longabach’s moss-green skirt and jacket and cutting out a muslin pattern for Molly’s party dress. Several times she discovered herself standing at the window in her workroom, looking out at the curtain of falling snow, with no clear memory of having abandoned her needle and thread. She knew what had caused her mind to wander, but it was a new experience, and somewhat disconcerting, to find that the rest of her could follow so easily.

Rachel wished she’d sent Wyatt off with biscuits this morning. Really, what was the point that she’d been trying to make? That she could be firm? Not taken advantage of? It made her feel petty now that he’d ridden out without something warm from her kitchen. She was well aware that he’d been managing his regular Thursday rides for years with no assistance from her, but that knowledge didn’t particularly soothe her.

Sid Walker’s aching shoulder and swollen left knee had accurately predicted the accumulation. When Rachel woke, there were already four inches of snow on the ground and a drift upwards of a foot at her back door. She swept the path to the spring and brought another load of wood to the mudroom. She kept the kitchen stove fired up and started a fire in the parlor. The house was tolerably warm, but she was aware that outside the wind was becoming increasingly more forceful.

No doubt Wyatt would be startled to learn that she’d spent any part of her day worrying about him. She certainly hadn’t left him with the impression that she cared what happened when they parted company the night before. Not that she’d wished him ill, but without a word crossing her lips, she had communicated that she most definitely wished him gone.

He overwhelmed her. And frightened her.

Neither settled well. She’d spent years neatly sidestepping confrontation when she could, standing firm when she had to, and pushing back when she was pushed, but the lessons learned weren’t so easily applied when her opponent was Wyatt Cooper.

Rachel pressed her forehead to the window and closed her eyes. It occurred to her that it was her own thinking that she needed to challenge. How would things be different if she stopped thinking of Wyatt as an opponent? Life experience didn’t allow for her to treat him as other than an adversary from the moment of their introduction, but the view from where she stood now made her question if it had ever been truly necessary.

She liked him. Admitting that didn’t make her easy, and she forced herself to consider why that should be. She had no difficulty saying the same thing about Johnny Winslow or Mr. Showalter or even the persistent Abe Dishman, so what made it seem uncomfortably like a revelation when she applied those words to Wyatt Cooper?

Rachel’s insides twisted and a certain wariness for the direction of her thoughts made her turn away from the window. She told herself there was nothing she could do for him either through worry or reflection, and yet, some niggling voice at the back of her mind would not be quieted and called her coward.

It was Saturday afternoon before Rachel left her house for anything but water or wood. The cloud cover had vanished by daybreak and the sun was bright in a cerulean sky. There was eight inches of snow on the ground, but that was the least amount Sid had predicted and merely a minor accumulation compared to what she’d witnessed the year before. With clear skies overhead, it seemed possible that this first round of snow would disappear before they were visited by what she understood was real winter in the Rockies.

Shopkeepers had cleared the sidewalks in front of their businesses, which made walking easy once she reached the main street. The first thing she noticed was that Ned and Abe had moved their checkers game from the sidewalk to somewhere indoors. The second thing was the empty chair in front of the sheriff’s office.

She went straight to the telegraph office to check on the delivery of packages that she’d ordered weeks earlier and to show Artie Showalter the sketch of the dress she intended for Molly. She didn’t mention to him that she’d already measured Molly and cut the pattern.

“I’ll be honest with you, Miss Bailey,” Artie said. “I like it just fine, but my wife is the one who generally makes these decisions. She’s in the back right now. Why don’t I get her? She’ll be real pleased to see this.”

Rachel’s heart sank, not so much for herself, but for Molly. “Of course,” she said, revealing none of her trepidation. “How wonderful that she’s here.”