“Do you?” he asked again.
She put her arms around his waist. “I don’t know,” she answered.
The man was driving her to distraction. His mouth was open and hot against the side of her neck. She tilted her head to the side so he’d have better access.
“You smell nice. Like flowers.”
Soap, she wanted to say. It was scented. She couldn’t get that explanation out of her mouth either.
Mr. Ross was turning her mind into mush.
“Farmers name their cows Belle.”
He smiled against her neck. He acted as though he hadn’t heard her comment. She felt compelled to repeat it. “I read it in Mrs. Livingston’s journal, and since it was published, it has to be true. They definitely name their cows Belle.” Think about that while you’re wooing your friend.
He kissed her forehead. “You’d like me to keep on kissing you, wouldn’t you, Taylor?”
Lord, he was arrogant. And right. She was honest enough to admit the truth. “Yes,” she said.
“You know what I think?”
The way he asked the question made her want to sigh again. His voice was deep and husky and how she loved his slow drawl.
“What do you think?” she asked breathlessly.
“You’ve got a few urges of your own. Do you understand what that means?”
He wanted her to admit that women had the same lustful cravings as men and that he’d been right all along.
“Yes, I understand what it means.”
Her shoulders slumped. She pushed away from him and tried to walk away. He grabbed her from behind, wrapped his arms around her waist to hold her still, then leaned down and demanded she explain.
“Tell me what you just learned,” he ordered, impatiently waiting for her answer so he could do a fair amount of male gloating.
“I’m a trollop. There, are you happy now? Belle’s going to get weary of waiting for you.”
“She’ll keep on drinking until I get there.”
“She sounds delightful.”
“She is,” he replied. “You aren’t a trollop.”
She pushed away from him and then turned around to confront him. Her hands settled on her hips. “I’m usually not,” she corrected. “But you make me want to do things I normally wouldn’t think about doing. When you touch me, I . . . well, I’m only a trollop around you. I therefore suggest we stay away from each other. Please leave now before I disgrace myself again.”
She looked like she wanted to cry. He felt guilty because he’d teased her. He was also feeling inordinately pleased with her. The compliment she’d given him, deliberate or not, made him want to smile. She got rattled when he touched her. A man couldn’t ask for more than that.
He felt he should say something to calm her. He was her husband, after all, and it was the least he could do. Husbands should try to soothe their wives when they were upset, shouldn’t they? What difference did it make that they were only going to be married for a little while?
“You’re my wife. It’s all right to be a trollop with me.”
She caught herself before she snorted. Her expression showed her vexation, however. “But you’d rather be hanged than married, remember?”
Lord, she was a sight when she was riled up. Her eyes blazed with anger and the look on her face would have made a weak man immediately contrite. He wasn’t weak, he reminded himself. “You’ve got that right,” he replied.
She threaded her fingers through her hair in obvious agitation. “Do leave, sir.”
He thought that was a fine idea. He walked over to the door, reached for the knob, then stopped. His right hand went to his vest pocket to make certain he had his key, then to the other pocket when the first was empty.
He turned around again and walked over to his wardrobe. Taylor watched his every move. She was trying to get her emotions under control. Honest to heaven, she didn’t understand her own mind anymore, she decided. Mr. Ross hadn’t done anything to cause her to get this upset. Yet she still wanted to weep.
He found the key in the pocket of the jacket he’d worn earlier in the day. Lucas closed the wardrobe, then turned to look at Taylor.
“Belle fed me when I was a boy . . . after my mother died. They were close friends.”
He wasn’t certain why he offered the explanation. He guessed it was because he didn’t want her to worry. He also didn’t want her to think he was an ogre.
Taylor was fairly overcome with relief. Belle wasn’t a cow. She was a friend of the family.
He’d been honest with her, and so she decided it was now her turn. “I was jealous,” she blurted out. “You were right about that.”
He was pleased by her confession. From the strain he heard in her voice, he knew the admission had been difficult for her. Because she looked so solemn, he didn’t smile. He gave her an abrupt nod before he turned away.
She didn’t want him to leave on a sour note. Perhaps, she considered, if she engaged him in a pleasant conversation, even if it only lasted a minute or two, his mood would improve. She didn’t want her husband to greet his mother’s friend with a scowl on his face. Belle might jump to the conclusion Lucas wasn’t a happily married man.
Oh, God, she really was losing her mind. It didn’t seem to matter much to her at the moment. Lucas was going to leave smiling, even if it killed her. Taylor hunted for a topic to talk about, and just as he was pulling the door open, she settled on one she knew he was sure to like.
“I can’t make up my mind if I should petition for an annulment or a divorce.”
“You already mentioned getting an annulment,” he reminded her.
“I did? I don’t remember. I believe a divorce is probably easier to obtain.”
“Why?”
“There seem to be more reasons acceptable to the court,” she explained. She was pleased he was listening. “I considered most of them, too,” she boasted. “I’ve memorized them all, you see, but I couldn’t settle on a specific . . .”
He smiled. “You memorized the reasons you could give for a divorce?”
She nodded. She was pleased to see his frown was completely gone. “There’s desertion, but of course I couldn’t use that as a reason. We haven’t lived together long enough,” she added. She was warming to her topic now. Her voice echoed with enthusiasm when she continued. “Then I thought about drunkenness, and I immediately discarded the reason. I’ve never seen you take a drink while we’ve been together. I even thought about charging you with extreme and repeated cruelty, but that would be a complete lie and it didn’t sit well with me at all. You have your reputation to consider, and while mine isn’t the least important to me, I do have my pride. I would never be married to a man who beat me and I therefore wouldn’t like to lie and say I was.”
“Men don’t waste time on something as foolish as pride the way women do,” he remarked.
“Many do,” she argued.
“I don’t.”
Perhaps if he hadn’t sounded so arrogant, she would have told him the true reason she was going to give. But that male ego of his was really getting out of hand. It had become a red flag in front of her eyes.
So he didn’t have a problem with pride. We’ll see about that, she thought to herself.
“You don’t like to lie?”
“No, I don’t,” she replied. “You sound surprised.”
“I am. An honest woman,” he explained with a grin. “That is a surprise.”
She refused to be insulted. “You haven’t known many good women, have you, sir?”
He shrugged. “Finish what you started,” he ordered. “Don’t waste my time with what you might have done. Tell me what reason you’ll give for the annulment.”
“Yes, of course,” she replied. She added what she hoped was a sweet smile and walked over to the door. She gently nudged him on his way, all the while explaining the intricate differences between petitioning the court for an annulment and a divorce. When she was finished, she bid him good nigh
t and leaned against the doorway. She watched him walk down the hallway. She wondered how long it would take for his curiosity to get the better of him.
Lucas was halfway down the corridor before he realized she still hadn’t told him what reason she was going to use for the annulment. He turned around, walked half the distance back to the door so he wouldn’t have to raise his voice, and then said, “If I’m not a drunk or a deserter or a lout who beats his wife, what am I?” he asked her with a good deal of exasperation in his voice.
Taylor sweetened her smile and started to shut the door. In a voice filled with cheerfulness, she told him. “You’re impotent.”
8
Fortune brings in some boats that are not steer’d.
—William Shakespeare, Cymbeline
She ruined his evening.
All Lucas could think about was Taylor’s outrageous remark. The hell he was impotent. By God he’d go to his grave laughing before he let her put that foul reason down on a petition for everyone in the court to read.
He must have fumed for over an hour before he settled down and thought the matter through. He replayed the conversation in his mind at least a dozen times, all the while picturing the sparkle that had come into her eyes, and when he was finished with his analysis, he came to the conclusion she’d been bluffing. Pride. The word popped into his head all at once. The boast he’d made came next. Men weren’t plagued with worries about pride the way women were. Hadn’t he said that or something similar? And hadn’t the glint come into her eyes then? Oh, yes, she’d been bluffing all right. She’d been teaching him a lesson, too.
Lucas started smiling. Taylor, he decided, was one clever lady.
“It’s about time you quit frowning and started to enjoy yourself.”
His friend Belle made the comment. Lucas immediately shook himself out of his preoccupation and gave his mother’s friend his full attention.
Belle had changed considerably over the past ten years. She looked frail to him now. She used to be a big, strapping woman. She was still just as tall, his size actually, but her skin and posture showed her age. She’d been through difficult years. The frontier was hard on women, made them old before their time. Belle wasn’t any different. She’d lived in the wilderness for thirty years before moving back east to Boston. The harsh weather had leathered her skin, and the daily workload every woman was expected to carry had made her shoulders stooped and her back curved.
He remembered she used to have dark brown hair. It was white now. Her eyes hadn’t changed, however. They were still warm, inviting, kind. Men were still drawn to her, as evidenced by her companion seated next to her, a Mr. Winston Champhill. The elderly man was half her size, but Lucas noticed the look of adoration in his eyes whenever he looked up at her.
Belle had already buried three husbands. Lucas thought Winston might very well become the fourth.
The couple had already taken seats inside the gentlemen’s lounge, an area strictly forbidden to women, but Belle hadn’t paid any attention to the rule. The attendants didn’t want to make a scene. They sent for the hotel manager. Lucas had only just taken his seat across from the couple when the manager appeared at Belle’s side. He leaned down and whispered something to her, she said something back, and the man went hurrying out of the lounge with a blush on his face.
Lucas didn’t think he wanted to know what she’d said. After he put the matter of his wife out of his mind, he was able to concentrate on listening to all the news from his hometown. Kerrington was the settlement where he’d been born and eventually abandoned. Once Lucas was old enough and strong enough to leave, he did just that. He hadn’t been back since. According to Belle, the town hadn’t grown much in the past twenty years. She’d returned to Kerrington several times for weddings and family reunions. With so many husbands, there was of course an extremely large extended family. And with her loving heart, she embraced every one of her relatives.
It was well after one in the morning before she finished with what she called her catch-up news. Mr. Champhill had nodded off a good hour before. Belle was vastly amused by her escort’s behavior. She motioned to the gentleman, then grinned at Lucas.
“He’s plain tuckered out,” she told him in a low whisper so she wouldn’t disturb her friend. “He’s a good ten years younger than me but he still can’t keep up. Don’t matter how young I pick them, Lucas. Don’t matter at all. I still wear them out.” She made the last remark with a boast in her voice.
Lucas smiled. “You going to marry him?”
“I suppose I will,” she replied. She let out a sigh. “I get cold at night, and he’s big enough to warm me. Maybe this one will last longer than the others. What about you, son? You ever going to find a woman and settle down?”
Lucas leaned back in his chair and reached for his glass. He’d been nursing the brandy all evening. He’d never been much of a drinker. He didn’t mind the taste. He minded the aftereffects. He was a man who always wanted to be in control and drink robbed him of that ability.
He wasn’t one to tell his business either, but he and Belle went way back. She’d been like a mother to him and had in fact taken over his care when his own mother died. She was the closest thing he had to family and the only tie to his Kentucky background.
“I got married, Belle.”
It took him several minutes to convince her he was telling the truth, then he had to wait another couple of minutes for her to recover from the surprise of his announcement. She was clearly astonished, especially when he told her the marriage was in name only, and she did a fair amount of laughing and shaking her head.
“If that don’t beat all,” she repeated again and again.
She wanted all the particulars. Lucas told her almost everything. He gave her his reason for returning to England, explained all about his youngest brother, Kelsey, and how Merritt had suddenly changed his mind and demanded Lucas pay a ransom for Kelsey’s release.
Belle was scowling like a hanging judge about to pass sentence by the time he’d finished that part of his explanation.
“Where’s the boy now?” she asked.
“On his way to the ranch with Jordan and Douglas. They’re stopping in Denver for a week or so. There’s a school there Jordan thinks would be good for Kelsey. If it checks out to his satisfaction, the boy will start next fall.”
“These older boys . . . they still working your ranch outside Redemption?” Belle asked.
Lucas nodded. “The ranch is a day’s ride from Redemption,” he said. “I’m going to deed it over to the three of them. They’ll probably split it in thirds, eventually get married, and . . .”
“Live happily ever after?”
Lucas smiled. “Perhaps. They’re fighting now. Douglas wants to farm the flat land and Jordan wants to add more cattle and use the land for grazing. They’ve worked hard, Belle. They’ll work even harder if the land belongs to them.”
“What about you and this new bride?”
“I’m going back to the mountains. She’s going to live in Boston. She could never live in the wilderness, Belle. She’s too tender.”
“She’ll toughen up.”
Lucas shook his head. “She’s very refined, a real lady,” he explained. “Taylor comes from an aristocratic family. She certainly has never had to do any common work, and I wouldn’t like to see her . . .”
He stopped himself before admitting he didn’t want to see her get old and tired before her time. “She deserves to live a good life.”
“She have money coming from this aristocratic family of hers?”
“Yes.”
“Refined ladies with money do just as well as common women without,” Belle said. “Fact of it is, son, with money, she can buy all the help she needs.”
“Not in the wilderness,” he contradicted. “Women are so scarce in Montana Territory they don’t have to work for anyone else.”
“There’s fourteen women living in Bozeman right this minute,” she argued. “And more wi
ll be settling in the area real soon.”
Lucas didn’t ask her where she’d gotten her information. For as long as he’d known her, Belle had always had an abundance of facts stored in her head. Most of them were true.
“I don’t live near Bozeman,” he reminded her.
“Makes no matter,” she argued. “You can hire some men to work . . . Now why are you shaking your head at me?”
“I’ll be damned if I’ll let another man work close to her.”
Belle’s smile was wide. “So you aren’t wanting any other men buzzing around her,” she remarked. “That’s mighty curious.”
Lucas didn’t know what to say in response to her remark. He shrugged to cover his sudden discomfort. He found the topic disturbing and wished now he hadn’t told her about his marriage.
“Are you hearing the contradictions I’m hearing?” Belle asked. “You just told me you’d be damned before you’d let another man work close to your bride in Montana Territory, but just five minutes ago you said you’re going to let her live in Boston all alone while you go riding back to your mountains.”
“I know it sounds . . .”
“Contradictory?”
He let out a sigh. She was right. It did sound contradictory. Belle shook her head at him. “You haven’t taken the time to think the matter through, have you?”
He wanted to argue with her. Hell, yes, he’d thought it through. It was supposed to be an easy, simple arrangement and only for a limited time. But Taylor made the arrangement complicated. He certainly hadn’t counted on becoming attracted to her or feeling the constant need to protect her or experiencing such raw possessiveness every single time he looked at her.
“Of course I can see why you’d agree to the marriage. You gave your protection for the money to buy the boy’s freedom. What was his name again?”
“Kelsey.”
She nodded. “You recall the youngun named MacCowan? I seem to recollect the time you killed yourself a pair of vermin to get the boy out of their clutches. Then there was that little Irish girl. Now what was her name?”