Czytaj książkę: «Instant Husband»

One

What if he didn’t come? Ann Lennon’s nervous gaze swept over the fast-emptying waiting area for the tenth time in as many minutes. Her flight had been on time. What could have kept him? Surely Cheyenne, Wyoming, wasn’t big enough to have traffic jams. Not at eight o’clock at night. Suppose he’d changed his mind? Suppose…

Stop it! Ann made a valiant attempt to stem her rising sense of panic. This was not the time to begin second-guessing her painful decision. Not two thousand miles from home. No, from her former home, she grimly reminded herself. The stately old brownstone where she’d grown up was gone. Gone along with everything else. Ann swallowed against the bitter taste of defeat that had dogged her for months.

Taking a deep breath, she focused on a dark stain on the gray tile near her left foot and slowly exhaled to the count of ten. New York City and Bill are the past. Wyoming and Nick St. Hilarion are the future.

At least he would be if he ever arrived. Ann watched with a growing sense of numbness as the last passenger off her flight was met, leaving her sitting alone. So alone. She shivered as the silence reached oppressive proportions. Everyone seemed to be elsewhere.

Which was where she wished she was. Elsewhere. Anywhere else than sitting on a hard, gray plastic chair waiting to see if the man she’d flown across the country to marry had decided to reject his mail-order bride sight unseen.

Or maybe he had seen her? The appalling thought suddenly occurred to her. Maybe he’d been waiting in the crowd when she’d arrived Maybe he’d taken one look at her and decided she’d never make a good ranch wife. Ann tucked a wayward strand of her golden-brown hair behind her right ear with fingers that shook. Maybe he’d instantly realized that she was a sham as a woman. Something it had taken her exhusband over a year to figure out. An icy chill feathered over her, tightening her skin and blurring her vision.

Ann hastily swallowed the hysterical giggle that bubbled up in her throat as visions of herself growing old and decrepit as she sat waiting for a groom who never came filled her mind.

Think. Don’t react, think. She repeated the word like a mantra. She had the phone number of his ranch. She latched onto that solid fact. She would wait another fifteen minutes, then call and leave a message that she’d checked into a motel. Just fifteen minutes more. Her slight body sagged against the hard chair.

Nick St. Hilarion shot into the closest parking space to the airport terminal he could find, cut the engine of his pickup truck and jumped out. He shoved his fingers through his short blond hair in frustration as he headed toward the nearest entrance at a brisk walk. Of all the times to be held up by an accident on the interstate!

He hurriedly located a flight-arrival screen to find the gate for her flight, then headed toward Gate F, his long legs quickly covering the distance. She was probably furious at not having been met. Bitter experience had taught him that women expected to have their every whim catered to. And being left stranded in an airport in a strange city would undoubtedly infuriate her. Suppose she hadn’t waited for him? Suppose she’d caught the first flight out?

Nick felt a curious blend of fear and hope surge through him. He wasn’t sure if that was what he wanted or not. But he was positive about one thing—that his cousin Maggie was right. He definitely needed a wife to help him deal with the unexpected arrival of his thirteen-year-old daughter into his life. But was Maggie also right when she claimed that her friend, Ann Lennon, was just the wife he needed?

Nick grimaced. He didn’t know, but if he turned down Maggie’s choice of bride for him, he held very little hope of finding a substitute on his own. He didn’t even know where to start looking. The area around his ranch wasn’t exactly teeming with matrimonial prospects.

In fact, other than a few giggly teenagers who made him feel ninety years old, the only unmarried woman that he personally knew was the sixty-year-old widowed sister-in-law of Clem who ran the feed store. He either accepted Maggie’s mail-order bride or he coped with his daughter on his own.

A shudder coursed through him at the thought of all the pitfalls lying in wait for the parents of adolescents these days. According to what he’d read, he was going to have to deal with sexual promiscuity, drug experimentation, rebellion against authority and a host of other problems. And while he hoped that it wouldn’t be that bad, in the back of his mind was the corroding fear that his daughter had taken after his ex-wife. If that were true…

Unconsciously Nick squared his shoulders. It didn’t matter what Ginny’s problems were. She was his daughter, too, and now that Mona had so suddenly decided that she didn’t want a living reminder of a former marriage cluttering up her new marriage, he wasn’t about to abandon the child to a boarding school the way his own mother had done to him. He’d do whatever it took to provide a home for Ginny, and common sense told him that the first step was to acquire a wife to help him.

His pace instinctively quickened as he saw the gate he was looking for halfway down the corridor.

Ann leaned forward slightly as she caught sight of someone moving toward her. She squinted, trying to get a better look. It was a man! Could this be her intended groom at last? She frowned uncertainly. Maggie hadn’t been able to find a current picture of her cousin, but she had mentioned that his father was Greek. Which probably meant that Nick was short and dark.

Which this man most definitely wasn’t, Ann realized as he got close enough for her to get a good look at him. He was at least three inches over six feet and built to match. Her eyes measured the breadth of his shoulders encased in his brown leather flight jacket. Impressive. Very impressive. He looked like a Hollywood representation of a cowboy hero. Emphatically masculine, sexy as the devil and totally outside her league, she instinctively rejected the brief flair of interest she’d felt.

Ann froze as his gaze swept the deserted area and came to rest on her. His brilliant blue eyes narrowed as he studied her. Unconsciously, she smoothed the jacket of her impeccably tailored brown tweed suit. To her surprise, he walked over to her.

“Ann Lennon?” The sound of his deep voice rolled through her mind and landed in the pit of her churning stomach.

Doubtfully, Ann stared at him. How did this stranger know her name? He couldn’t be Maggie’s cousin. He didn’t look like any Greek she’d ever seen. Nor could she see any family resemblance to Maggie. Maybe he worked for Nick. Maybe Nick had been unable to get away and had sent someone to pick her up—like a stray package.

Ann firmly squelched her irritation and got to her feet. This wasn’t the time to be hypersensitive, she told herself. If she were going to make a success of this unconventional marriage, she would have to develop a thick skin.

“Yes. I’m Ann Lennon.” She held out her hand, using the social amenities as a shield in this unreal situation. “And you are?”

Ann watched in fascination as the corners of his firm mouth lifted in what was either a pained smile or a grimace.

“I’m your intended, Nick St. Hilarion.”

Ann’s hazel eyes widened incredulously as his unexpected words echoed through her disbelieving mind. This was Maggie’s cousin! He couldn’t be. This had to be some kind of weird joke. Men who looked like this man didn’t have to resort to having their cousins find them wives. They’d be beating prospective candidates off with a stick.

But…Maggie had gone into great detail about his disastrous first marriage. Maybe Nick didn’t trust his own judgment anymore, either. It was possible. She noticed the rigid cast of his features for the first time. Maybe he felt as embarrassed and uncertain as she did.

She glanced down at her hand, which she was still holding out. Nick followed her gaze and muttered something that she didn’t quite catch before he grabbed it.

Ann’s breath caught in her lungs as she felt his warm fingers close around hers. Heat seemed to pour off him, seeping into her chilled flesh, making it tingle. She swallowed uneasily at her reaction. It was the weirdness of the situation, she assured herself. After all, it wasn’t every day that she flew across the country to marry a stranger. She was certainly allowed a few aberrations from her normal behavior.

“I…” Ann winced at the uncertain note in her voice. Firming it, she forged ahead, trying desperately to sound more assured than she felt. “I’m glad to meet you,” she muttered, feeling like a gauche fool. “Very glad,” she amended, and her words were sucked up into the oppressive silence that seemed to enclose them in their own little world.

Now what? Ann scrambled for something to say. Should she suggest that they leave for the ranch or would that sound pushy? Could his silence mean that he was having second thoughts about marrying her now that he’d met her? The devastating thought shook her fragile self-confidence. Maybe his taste in women ran along the lines of her exhusband. And Bill had most definitely found her lacking in feminine charms.

But Nick wasn’t marrying her for love, she told herself to stem her escalating fears. Nick was marrying her to obtain a mother for his daughter and to keep house for him.

Ann turned to pick up her brown leather purse from the seat beside her. Unfortunately, she forgot she’d set her suitcase at her feet. She tripped over it and pitched forward.

Straight into Nick’s arms. It was like landing against a warm rock wall, she thought in confusion. There was no give to him anywhere. Ann shivered as the faint tang of his cologne drifted into her nostrils, further muddling her thoughts. Instinctively, she jerked back, hit the backs of her legs on the hard edge of the chair and plopped into the seat.

What a time for her to turn klutzy, she thought in despair. If he had been harboring doubts about her as a wife, her behavior certainly wasn’t going to reassure him.

To her relief, Nick ignored her clumsiness. Reaching down, he picked up her heavy suitcase with an ease that she could only envy.

“Do you have any other luggage?”

Ann shook her head. “I expressed the rest of it out last week.”

“I know. It arrived yesterday. We’ve got a two-hour drive to the ranch. We’d better get started.”

Ann trotted along beside him, telling herself that the relief she felt at not being sent home was because she was too tired to face another plane trip so soon. Furtively, she studied him out of the corner of her eye as they made their way out of the terminal and into the icy spring air, wondering what he was thinking.

She hadn’t really thought of him as a distinct personality before. Not really. She’d been so busy trying to pick up the pieces of her own shattered life after her acrimonious divorce that she’d only seen Nick St. Hilarion as a means to an end. As a solution to her problem of how to parlay her love of homemaking into a viable career that could support her in her near-penniless state.

But now that she’d actually met him, the fact was suddenly driven home to her that Nick had thoughts and hopes and fears just like she did. But what were they? Her eyes lingered on the bunched muscles of his jaw. And did she have the right to try to find out? A sudden doubt shook her. They had a deal, she and this totally unexpected man. And it didn’t include delving into each other’s secrets.

She shivered as a particularly nasty gust of wind slithered down her neck as if in warning. She most assuredly didn’t want Nick poking into the ruins of her first marriage.

But there was a lot of ground between prying into his past and getting to know him in the here and now, she rationalized, feeling the first real spark of anticipation she’d felt in almost six months. The future that had seemed so dreary just hours before suddenly held a glimmer of hope. Who knew what might come of this unorthodox marriage of theirs? Mail-order brides were a part of Western tradition and most of the marriages had turned out just fine. There was no reason to assume that hers wouldn’t fare as well.

Holding on to that encouraging thought, Ann climbed into the cab of the pickup Nick unlocked and looked around curiously. Utilitarian, she categorized its barren interior. Nick certainly didn’t believe in pampering himself with luxury. Or couldn’t afford to, it occurred to her as she pulled her seat belt out of the crack in the seat.

Ann absently fastened it as Nick backed the truck out of the parking space. Maggie had said that his first wife had married him for his money and then proceeded to spend it like water. Could her extravagances have left him broke? Or at best, land rich but cash poor? It was certainly possible. She of all people knew what could happen when an unscrupulous spouse was given uncontrolled access to funds.

The familiar sense of defeat pressed down on her, but she made a valiant effort to shake it. It didn’t matter what kind of fool she’d been in the past, she told herself. She’d learned her lesson. She was no longer a young, impressionable woman who was expecting hearts, flowers and wild flights of passion from marriage. Now she was a mature thirty-three-year-old who had learned that it took a whole lot more to make a success of marriage than being in love. In fact, from what she’d seen, being in love was a distinct disadvantage. She’d been madly in love with Bill, and what had happened? She’d viewed him through rose-colored glasses, seeing him as she wanted him to be and not as he was. While she’d been dreaming about the future, he’d been busily running through her inheritance.

Ann shifted restlessly. In retrospect, she couldn’t believe that she had been so stupidly trusting. But never again. She’d paid a high price, but at least she’d learned. This time she was using her head. This time she intended to build a comfortable relationship with Nick based on mutual need and shared interests. And if there were no soaring heights of passion in this marriage, at least there wouldn’t be any depths of despair, either.

She glanced at Nick, who was little more than a shadow in the dim light reflected off the dashboard. Far more than the distance of a few feet seemed to separate them. Nervously, Ann chewed on her lip. He seemed so remote. So unreachable. But she didn’t need to reach him, she reminded herself. Nick was marrying her to get a mother for his daughter and a housekeeper for himself. Nothing had been said about his wanting a sexual partner. Surely if that aspect of marriage had been important to him, he would have at least alluded to it before this. But he hadn’t. Sex obviously wasn’t that important to Nick. So it wouldn’t matter to him that she was a total flop in that area.

“Is your daughter at the ranch?” Ann asked, using words to try to bridge the gulf between them.

“No, Ginny won’t be arriving for another six weeks. She’s going to finish the semester at her old school first.”

“Oh,” Ann muttered, hoping her sense of relief wasn’t obvious. This way she’d have a chance to work out some kind of relationship with Nick before she had to deal with his daughter.

“What’s your ranch like?” Ann persisted when he made no attempt to introduce a subject for discussion.

“Big. And isolated.”

His words echoed through the cab like a challenge, but Ann didn’t know why. Maybe she was imagining things. She could be projecting her own doubts and fears onto him. He could simply be a taciturn man. She leaned her head back against the seat, trying to think of a conversational gambit that would fill a few miles, but instead promptly fell asleep.

Two hours later Nick looked over at her as he turned off the highway and onto the dirt road leading to his ranch. She was still sound asleep. Or pretending to be for reasons of her own, he thought cynically. Women were masters at deception.

He stopped in front of the rickety front porch of his house and cut the engine. Getting out, he walked around the cab and opened the door, giving Ann a tentative shake. She muttered something unintelligible but didn’t wake up.

“What’s the matter with her?”

Nick jumped as his hired hand suddenly rose up out of one of the chairs at the end of the porch.

“What are you doing sitting out here at this time of night, Snake?”

“Waitin’ ta see if’n ya really went through with it. It’s a sorry day when ya bring a female onto the place.” Snake shook his head mournfully. “Wimmin’s bad luck. Always has been, always will be.”

“But good cooks,” Nick said. “Look on the bright side. Maybe I’ll get a decent meal out of it.”

“Tain’t worth it. And if’n she ain’t damaged, why don’t she move?”

“She’s probably tired. And she’s not the only one. It’s been a long day. Open the front door, will you?”

Nick reached into the cab and picked Ann up in his arms. The sooner he got her into bed, the sooner he could seek his own.

Frowning, he adjusted her slight weight in his arms as he crossed the yard. She was too light. Far too light. And far too disconcerting, he admitted as a faint whiff of the perfume she was wearing drifted into his lungs. His frown deepened as he felt his body harden in response. He wanted to tighten his hold and pull her closer. To press his lips to hers. To…

“The sheriff called while ya was gone. Said fer ya ta call him when ya got back. Says it’s important. Says a couple calves has gone missin’ from Hector Menendez’s ranch.”

Nick paused in the open door and forced himself to concentrate on what Snake was saying, instead of on how Ann felt. “Wolves?”

Snake spit tobacco juice over the edge of the porch and said, “Two legged kind, more like.”

Damn! Nick thought. Just what he needed on top of everything else. Cattle rustlers. “Thanks, Snake. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Snake didn’t bother to answer. He merely stomped off to his own trailer behind the stables, muttering audibly about the cupidity of women and the gullibility of men.

He wasn’t gullible, Nick reflected, mentally refuting Snake’s words as he climbed the narrow stairway to the second floor. Not anymore. Now he knew all the pitfalls waiting to entrap an unwary man in a relationship. And knowing them, he could avoid them, he assured himself. Ann would not find him the easy mark Mona had. This time he would be the one calling the shots, and he would be able to do it because he wasn’t blinded by love.

He carefully shouldered open the door to the bedroom where he’d decided to put Ann. Gently lowering her onto the narrow bed, he stared down at her sleep-flushed face. For a moment he was filled with a desire to carry her downstairs to his own bed. To assert his masculinity in the most basic of ways. But he ruthlessly squelched the urge. He’d already decided that his best hope for remaining undamaged by this marriage would be to maintain an emotional and physical distance from her. But what he hadn’t counted on when he’d made his plans was that Ann Lennon would be quite so tempting a physical package. Although, maybe her appeal would fade upon closer acquaintance, he encouraged himself as he pulled a blanket around her and then hastily retreated to the safety of his own room.

* * *

“Ann? Ann!”

The irritating sound nibbled at the edge of her consciousness, and Ann rolled over, wincing slightly at the unyielding hardness of the lumpy mattress.

“Ann!” The voice demanded with all the persistence of a dentist’s drill.

She burrowed beneath her thin pillow in a vain attempt to shut out the hectoring sound.

“Are you awake?” the deep voice sounded closer.

Ann forced open her eyes and stared blankly at the door. Its dark green paint had peeled away in places to reveal the dingy brown color beneath. She frowned, trying to place it and failed. Where was she? Her gaze swung around the barren room, which was dimly lit by the sunlight filtering in through the ripped shade partially covering the window.

“Ann, wake up!”

Nick! Ann jackknifed up as memory suddenly poured through her.

“I’m awake,” she yelled, not wanting Nick to come in and see her all rumpled from having spent the night in her clothes. To her dismay, Nick pushed open the door, although he didn’t come inside. Instead, he gestured toward the other side of the room.

“Those are the boxes you sent,” he said.

“Thank you.” Uncertainly, Ann stared at him. If anything, he looked even more intensely masculine in broad daylight than he had last night. Well-worn jeans lovingly molded his muscular thighs, and a long-sleeve, dark green cotton shirt covered his broad chest. Her eyes met his, and her breath caught at the seething emotion she could see there. Probably not excitement at seeing her, she thought ruefully. Far more likely, it was impatience.

She swallowed an enormous yawn and pushed her tumbled hair out of her face.

“What time is it?” Her voice was husky with sleep.

“Six o’clock. I let you sleep late because you seemed so tired last night.”

“Late!” she repeated incredulously. As far as she was concerned, the day started at seven. Any time before that was merely an unsubstantiated rumor.

“We normally get up at five-thirty. There’s a lot of chores to do on a working ranch.”

Ann opened her mouth to tell him what she thought of working ranches and then promptly closed it, reminding herself that she’d agreed to this. Just because she’d never gotten up in the middle of the night before, it didn’t mean that she couldn’t become accustomed to it in time. Of course, in time she’d die of old age and it wouldn’t matter, she thought gloomily.

“Farm wives fix their husbands’ breakfast,” Nick added with what Ann thought was an appalling smugness.

“Lovely,” she mumbled.

“Although, because this is your first day, I’ll fix breakfast while you get ready. The judge said he’d be at home all morning, so after I take care of the stock, we’ll drive into town and get married.”

Ann gulped as his news hit her with the force of a blow. They were going to get married today? This morning? Blind panic churned through her. Panic that she tried hard to quell, knowing that it was irrational. She’d come out here to marry him, so what was the point of waiting?

“Is that going to be a problem?” Nick’s voice hardened.

Ann stared up into his narrowed eyes, wondering what he wanted her to say. His tone of voice was almost…hostile. Could he want her to say no? Say she’d changed her mind and didn’t want to marry him after all? Or could he be afraid that she had changed her mind and he wouldn’t have anyone to help him with his daughter? She didn’t know him well enough to even hazard a reasonable guess. And that being so, she’d be wise to respond to what he was saying and not what she thought he might mean, she told herself.

Ann took a deep breath and, feeling as if she were taking an irrevocable step into the unknown, said, “No, it’s not a problem. I’m just not awake yet. If you could tell me where the bathroom is?”

“First door to the right at the foot of the stairs. Breakfast will be ready in ten minutes.” He abruptly turned and left.

Ann listened to the sound of his footsteps receding on the bare wooden steps before she flung back the covers and climbed out of bed. She gasped as the room’s icy air pounced on her unsuspecting body and began to freeze her top layer of skin.

If it was this cold in April, what was it like in January? she wondered uneasily. Briskly rubbing her hands over her arms, she looked around for a furnace register to warm herself. She didn’t find one. In fact, she didn’t find much of anything. The only furniture the small room contained was the narrow bed she’d slept on and a huge, battered mahogany chest of drawers that was so ugly it was almost avant-garde. Almost.

The single narrow window was covered with a flyspecked green blind that was ripped along the bottom, while a truly hideous pink cabbage-rose-print wallpaper desecrated the walls. From the look of the water stains beneath the window, the paper had probably been there since the Depression. But the decorating coup de grace, as far as Ann was concerned, was the oversize picture hanging above the bed. It depicted a soul writhing in torment in the fires of Hell.

It had probably been painted by a farm wife who had gotten up at five-thirty one too many times, Ann thought tartly. Whoever had decorated this room had obviously been heavily into self-denial, if not outright masochism.

Although…Ann frowned. Why hadn’t Nick’s first wife redecorated? Because she hadn’t slept here? For that matter, where had Nick slept? Certainly not here. She felt a momentary frisson of regret that she quickly stifled. Where Nick slept was his own business. All she needed to know was that her original supposition about his lack of interest in sex was correct. He obviously didn’t intend to share his bed with her or he would have taken her there in the first place.