Marry Me Page 13

  Chapter 10

  Emily put out the lamp because she thought it would be easier in the dark. But they’d left the window open, and the moonlight that shot through seemed aimed directly at the bed. She could see it all too clearly: flat, covered in white, and small. Horribly, embarrassingly small.

  In Philadelphia she’d had a bed as big as a train car. Ridiculous, so much space for one little girl. She’d even wished it smaller, so she wouldn’t feel swallowed up, so alone in that vast, unnecessary space.

  But oh how she longed for that bed. Jake could jump up and down on his side of it and she’d never feel it on hers. On this one, however, she suspected she would feel every twitch of his toe, every turn of his head.

  She sneaked a peek at him. Face turned toward the moonlight, he carefully avoided looking either at her or at the bed, the light harsh on his features. Shadows angled deep beneath his newly revealed cheekbones, cutting sharp lines where his jaw met his neck. How could she share a bed with him? She didn’t even know him! The hulking, unkempt Jake who lurked in his chair in his makeshift camp she might have managed; she’d become accustomed to him, his constant, waiting presence. But this one—if she’d conjured up the image of a dream husband, he would have appeared like this. Only not so sad, so gloweringly fierce.

  She heard a rustling from Kate’s blankets, followed by a delicate cough. They couldn’t stand by the side of the bed like sentries any longer. Kate would wonder what was the matter with them.

  But she didn’t even know which side of the bed he preferred. It suddenly seemed terribly important that she didn’t take his side; she’d sucked him into this, far more than he’d bargained for. And as she’d never slept with someone, except a few nights as a child with one of her sisters, she shouldn’t have developed a distinct preference for one side or another. But he undoubtedly had one. She’d heard that men were picky about such things.

  She couldn’t just ask him. Kate would hear and wonder why they’d not worked out such matters by now.

  Tentatively she touched his arm. The muscles leaped and she yanked her hand back. But it got his attention. She gestured toward the bed, arching her eyebrows in question. But he just frowned. So she pantomimed as best she could, pointing to first one side, then the other.

  He bowed, waving her in, a mocking twist to his mouth that might have been cruel if his eyes weren’t so sad.

  How insensitive she’d been. She could hardly believe it of herself. Her perceptions of others’ emotions were usually so strong that she had to prepare herself before entering Dr. Goodale’s waiting room. But she’d been so preoccupied with her own pressing concerns that she’d forgotten how difficult this must be for him.

  This was his bed. Where he’d lain with his wife. And to lie here with another woman—even one with whom he shared nothing but a brief and practical agreement—must be almost unbearable.

  “I’m sorry,” she mouthed at him. Inadequate words. They usually were, all those times she’d murmured them to the grieving relatives of patients they’d been unable to help. She’d never meant them more. Wished there was more that she could do. In other circumstances, with any other man, she’d have reached out, laid a soothing palm on a shoulder, rubbed comforting circles between his shoulder blades. But he’d already made it clear he didn’t want her hands on him.

  Then the world lurched abruptly as he scooped her up and she gave a shriek of surprise. The rope frame creaked as he leaned over and deposited her, not very gently, on the far side of the bed.

  And then he was beside her, arm looped over her, a heavy, unfamiliar weight, mouth close to her ear—very close; she could feel the moist, hot wash of his breath, the stirring of fine hairs at her nape with each exhalation. Her heart did something entirely new, a heavy beat, one in which she felt each rush and pump of blood, conscious of its working in a way she never was.

  “It seemed,” he whispered in her ear, intimate and stirring, “the only way to get you to move.”

  She rolled her head to look at him but misjudged the distance. His mouth brushed against her as she turned, a searing burn over her cheek.

  He was so close. She’d never been that close to a man. How odd that it would be him. She’d never imagined it, never imagined him. But it felt right. How could it be anyone else?

  For an instant she was certain he was going to kiss her. Please, yes. Yes, yes. He hadn’t pulled away, just remained in place, his mouth inches, fractions of inches, from hers. She could look straight into his eyes, deep and dark as nightfall, lashes denser than she’d ever realized.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered again.

  “Shhh.” He put his finger against her lips and inclined his head toward her sister. She hadn’t anticipated the gesture and so he’d caught her with her mouth half open, the moist inner curve of her lips caught against his work-roughened skin. “It’s all right.”

  And it was all right, Jake discovered in numb surprise. He’d stood there beside their bed—his and Julia’s bed—and the memories and the guilt had nearly drowned him, the urge to flee so strong that he’d known he had to get it over with fast or he’d never climb into the bed with her. And so he’d just tossed her in.

  But this wasn’t his bed. She’d restuffed the mattress, more grass than he’d used, making it firmer beneath his hip. Her sheets were different, a finer weave, a crisper rustle when he moved. The smells were new, a different soap on the linens and on her hair.

  His senses drank it in. They’d had few enough pleasant things to experience over the past years. Too many sour smells in rancid taverns, too many ugly, dirty sights at the wharves. He thought that he could stay there forever and just let himself enjoy it: the look and smell and feel of a clean and joyful woman.

  She felt new in his arms. Smaller, yes, her shoulders narrower, her hips slighter. But stronger, lean rather than wasted, with flesh over her ribs, easy control and energy in her motion. Even her temperature wasn’t the same; through the fabric of her nightdress—thin, soft, fuzzy-surfaced cotton—she felt warmer to him, as if she burned hotter, the same vibrant life that blazed in her eyes.

  “Jake?”

  And then his senses, which had been so busily gathering all those tidbits of information, finally sorted and recognized them all. Woman. His body reacted and he hardened so abruptly he was dizzy with it, dizzy enough that he would have dropped to the floor if he hadn’t been lying down.

  “Jake?” More worried this time, concern drawing her mouth into a pucker.

  “Jeez, it’s warm.” He let her go and rolled away so quickly he stirred up a draft. What had he been thinking, to be so close, to let his arm lie across her chest where it had fallen when he’d flopped down? Even now his arm retained the feel of her, pillowy imprints of breasts against the inside of his forearm.

  But thinking never really entered into it, did it? If there was one truism history had proved a thousand times over, it was the harder the cock, the softer the brain.

  “Here.” He yanked up the covers, threw them over her so they covered her shoulders and half her face. “My wife was always colder than I was.”

  My wife. He used it deliberately, reminding them both, as much a wedge between them as the thick roll of quilt. He lay back down on his side, his hip on top of the edge of the blankets, so that there was no danger of him working his way under it in sleep or her rolling her way out.

  For a moment he expected her to protest; she wasn’t the kind to let things be. More like the type to beat things to death, to talk them over and over until a man came around to her way of thinking out of pure exhaustion. He heard the rush of air as she sucked in a full breath.

  But all she said was “Good night, Jake.” Sweet tones; soft, intimate words, the last thing husbands all over the country heard as they dropped off to sleep. And they hit him as hard as the desire had, left him aching in his heart as well as his groin. He’d missed that, so much, someone to wish him a gentle and healthful rest.

  He closed his eyes, dri
fting in some floating, half-real place, the soft rhythm of her respiration in his ears, the scent of her soap in his nose. Even without those cues, he’d know there was someone in bed with him: a few degrees warmer, the mattress not dipping as deeply beneath him as when he lay alone.

  Sleep was impossible. Surrendering to slumber seemed like surrendering to her and the pull of her presence, the pleasure of having her beside him in bed. He couldn’t do it.

  He had only one hope: that Emily’s sister dragged her home soon, before he got used to it.

  Kate couldn’t believe it. She’d been so certain she’d snatch only a few moments of sleep, instead lying still and alert for any suspicious sound, especially from the bed. And that what meager rest she did catch would be restless, tainted with dreams of small, crunchy black creatures crawling up through the holes that studded the floor like Swiss cheese.

  Instead she’d fallen dead asleep practically the moment she lay down. She hadn’t realized how much the last few days—the last few weeks, for that matter—had sapped from her. How much being able to see with her own two eyes that Emily was alive and relatively well had released her from that horrible tension and fear.

  It took a moment upon awakening to register where she was. The moment she did, she bolted upright, ignoring the protests of bones and muscles that had not appreciated her chosen bed.

  It had to be early. Pale, gray light misted in, giving the small room a softer quality it sorely needed.

  Emily and Jake dozed on, and Kate squelched her immediate impulse to grab the man’s arm and haul him away from her sister.

  They looked comfortable together in sleep in a way they did not awake, with Emily turned on her side, Jake curled protectively around her. Her sister appeared tiny in his embrace, completely sheltered, in the tender curve to his body that Kate suspected he would never display voluntarily. He didn’t strike her as a tender sort of man.

  Sometimes, when she was much younger, Kate had let Emily sleep with her when the doctor was away and a storm howled. Kate pretended she allowed it for Emily’s sake but knew it was as much for her own. She’d enjoyed watching her sister sleep, treasured knowing she was safe and well cared for through Kate’s efforts.

  She appeared scarcely older now. Oddly, while sleep softened her husband’s features, made him more open, younger, easing the harsh lines of worry and care, it did the opposite to Emily. While awake she was always bright, happy, her eyes so full of life it seemed as if she was smiling even when she wasn’t, in sleep the corners of her mouth often turned down, her brow furrowed. It had always been that way, as if her dreams were harsher than her reality. Or as if that was the only time she allowed darker thoughts to touch her.

  Kate frowned, troubled. She’d worked so hard to ensure that Emily had never had to worry. Believed that, mostly, she’d succeeded. She’d never understood why Emily, asleep, always appeared unhappy.

  And then she shrugged it off. No doubt she was reading far too much into it.

  Jake shifted restlessly, dragging the quilt down around Emily’s waist. He groaned, burying his face at the nape of her neck, and his hand settled, firm and unerring, on her sister’s breast, as if returning to its customary preferred spot.

  Kate saw red. Managed to wait a beat, certain that, even in her sleep, her sister’s good instincts would take over and knock the intruding hand away.

  Damn.

  Well then. Kate hurried to start the morning coffee with as much clattering and clanging as she could create.

  Softness. Soft and sweet, birds twittering, clouds of good-smelling silk in his face, cushiony pillows beneath his head, nice warm flesh in his hands.

  Oh, his dreams were getting better. Fabulous, even. After months of dreams that were dark and bloody and raw, this was as close to heaven as he’d never expected to get. So much so that he battled to remain there, ignoring the persistent clanging in the back of his brain.

  He liked it there. Blessed his brain for finally taking pity on him and giving him pretty dreams. If he’d had these dreams before, he’d have never woken up.

  Because it had to be a dream. Fuzzy edges, drifts of sunny, flowery images, did not exist in his waking world. His waking world was full of sharp edges and cold winds and bitter memories.

  But the damn banging wouldn’t stop.

  He swore, tried to make it go away, which only made the sound hammer more energetically.

  And then—damn it, he’d tried to avoid it—he woke up. He sat bolt upright and swung bleary eyes to the source of the brutal sound and found Emily’s sister, gleefully slinging tin plates onto the table.

  “Oh sorry, did I wake you?” she asked brightly.

  Well, shit. Though he couldn’t have said whether the oath was for the night before or being rudely jerked out of it. Emily blinked awake beside him, a slow, sleepy, utterly seductive stretch of her arms over her head, her back arching and hips shifting. “Oh,” she said when she saw him. She stopped stretching—a shame, that—but then smiled up at him, which went straight to his gut and his blood as powerfully as the sight of her twisting upon his bed had. “Good morning.”

  Now here was a delicate situation. Somehow in the night he’d ended up wrapped around her. The scent of her still clouded his nostrils, and if he tried for a moment he could still feel her in his arms.

  He had no doubt that Kate, glowering from the kitchen, was going to start pitching some of those dishes at his head if he didn’t get away from her sister’s side. It was unsettling, being in a woman’s bed with one of her relatives looking on, a situation so far out of his experience he couldn’t fathom the appropriate response.

  And yet he could hardly just get up. Not without presenting Kate with too-visible proof of how much Emily’s nearness appealed to his baser instincts. And for some reason he didn’t think Kate would be too well-mannered to ensure her eyes never strayed close to that region.

  “If you’ll hurry and wash up,” she told him, the brightness in her voice at sharp odds with the lethal warning in her narrowed eyes, “breakfast will be ready in a moment.” She pointed with her spatula. “I found a few towels that survived that creature’s spree. I hope you don’t mind my searching. I thought it would be more convenient, put them right there by the bed—”

  He snatched the towels with the alacrity of a starving man presented with a cinnamon bun. Holding the towel clutched—not too obviously, he devoutly hoped—in front of him, he mumbled something about needing to go out back and dashed for safety.

  Spatula in hand, Kate stood frowning after him. “Does he always growl like that?”

  “He’s not a morning person.”

  Kate suspected that he was not an afternoon or night person, either.

  “He’s not around much, is he?”

  “Huh?” Emily asked, purposely delaying.

  “That husband of yours. Hard to tell you’re married, considering how little time he spends hovering around.”

  “He’s a hardworking man.”

  “So he seems.” Since Kate couldn’t figure out what he was doing half the time, she wasn’t quite ready to concede it was work. All right, so he’d disappeared right after breakfast with a shotgun, turned up a few hours later and dropped a couple of mutilated grouse at Emily’s feet, and promptly disappeared again. It could have taken him all of five minutes to shoot the poor birds for all she knew. He could have been just strolling around, whistling, and avoiding her very justified interest.

  Emily leaned back on her heels, surveying her handiwork, and chose to ignore Kate’s topic of conversation. “It looks good, doesn’t it?”

  One unanticipated benefit of her new arrangement with Jake was that Emily no longer felt compelled to spend her days trying to peel sod off a fraction of an acre of land. Clearing it was now Jake’s problem. She was a tad concerned that he didn’t seem in any hurry to get the ground broken, either—she would be most unhappy with him if she surrendered the land to him and he failed to prove up—but she told herself it was
really not her business.

  And so she felt able to indulge herself and spend her time fixing up the shack. She’d taken a stab at it in spare moments but she’d never felt able to turn her full attention to the matter before.

  Kate surveyed the newly stained floorboards, which Emily had spent half the day sloshing with a mixture of water and old coffee grounds. “What was the point of this again?”

  “It’ll look richer with this dark color. Hide any stains. Once I buff it with a little hot linseed oil, it’ll shine as pretty as the parquet in Goodale House’s foyer.”

  “Where’d you learn to do this?”

  “May Blevins told me about it. Been dying to try it ever since.”

  “I can’t imagine how you’ve resisted this long.”

  Emily dunked her rag and dabbed carefully at a penny-sized spot that hadn’t taken the stain evenly. “Sure you don’t want to help me?”

  “No.” From her perch on the one chair Emily hadn’t dragged from the room, Kate smoothed a stray wrinkle out of her blue serge skirt. “It’s not that I object to hard labor, you understand.”

  “Oh really?”

  “I simply object to messy labor. Truth to tell, I really hadn’t realized you’d a talent for such tasks. Not that working in the clinic was exactly clean and neat, but you’ve never really struck me as the domestic type, either.”

  Emily had never suspected she’d enjoy it, either. The pleasure she took in the task had surprised her. She’d told herself that she’d needed to present a happy front for Kate; appearing a woman bent on furnishing a pleasant home for her husband only bolstered their charade. But she had to admit the idea of leaving Jake a more comfortable home pleased her. When had that happened? A week ago she would have torn the place down before turning it over to him.

  “You’ve no idea the hidden talents I’ve discovered since I came to Montana,” she said.

  “Please! Spare me the gory details. I haven’t recovered from the sight of you plucking those grouse yet.”