Deborah Camp (3 page)

When he had been younger and more foolish, he’d swiped a bottle of moonshine from his uncle’s stash and had tried to mend his broken heart by pickling it. The next morning, when he’d been sure he was about to die, he’d sworn that he would never indulge in too much liquor again. Here he was, six years later, having broken that vow over the same female who had broken his heart.

Dellie
.

Surveying the room again, he smiled and relaxed. He was in Dellie’s room. A picture of her mother sat in a silver frame on her dressing table. Another framed photograph, this one of his late cousin Winston and Win’s widow, Sally, decked out in their wedding finery, perched on a tallboy. The room overflowed with femininity. Tiny yellow flowers filled a green glass vase on the bedside table, where it shared space with the water pitcher, two leather-bound
books, and a crystal-shaded oil lamp.

He gathered in a breath and let the scents of lavender and roses seduce him.

“Dellie,” he whispered, his voice emerging from some deep and hollow place. Clearing his throat, he reached for the water pitcher again and drank another glass of the cold, bracing liquid. His head pounded, but his stomach’s rebellion was milder this time.

Shouldn’t have started on that second bottle of whiskey
, he thought, finding his wisdom too late to ease his splitting head. But he had been forced to get stinking drunk to go through with this crazy notion. The further that train had chugged toward Whistle Stop, the tighter his nerves had stretched. Answering Dellie’s advertisement had been a moment’s surrender to temptation, but answering her summons to join him in holy matrimony—well, that was a good enough excuse for any man to get bow-legged drunk.

It had all started off as a laugh, his answering Dellie’s ridiculous request and receiving her reply. Remembering his innocent, youthful times with her, he’d longed to see her again. She’d been his first brush with love and impossible to forget. He groaned, thinking of his drunken arrival on the train. Right about now he figured she wanted to forget she ever knew him.

When she’d sent him the money for a train ticket, he hadn’t wanted to hurt her feelings by refusing. Besides, he wanted to strut. Maybe once she saw that he wasn’t a failure, she’d have a change of heart. They could renew their friendship and share a laugh or two.

He scowled at his wavy reflection in the full-length
mirror across the room. His hair stood on end, spiky and sleep-tousled, and whiskers darkened the lower half of his face. His clothes were wrinkled, and he smelled as if he’d slept in a whiskey keg. Nope, she wouldn’t want him on a bet. Not the way he looked—and the way he’d acted. He couldn’t quite recall, but he must have passed out right after he’d left the train.

Running a hand through his hair, he scolded himself for being such a fool.
Shouldn’t have started thinking so hard on the train
, he decided. That’s when things had started falling apart, when he’d realized he couldn’t face Dellie and tell her he was joshing her about being her husband.

Damn, damn, and double damn!
He had to find her and explain himself, redeem himself, and then buy a ticket on the next train out of here.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed, and the world slipped out from under him. Somehow he ended up on his rump in the middle of the floor. Looking down, he saw one of the throw rugs wadded up underneath him. Slippery little devils. After a couple of awkward tries, he found his feet and stood swaying in the center of the room while demons applied hammers to the back of his eyes. Clapping a hand to his forehead, he struggled to defeat the morning after, but gave up.

With a groan, a twist, and a letting go of every muscle, he fell back onto the bed and passed out again.

When he next awoke, the sun had set, draping the room in purple and indigo. Reno patted down his hair, drank two more glasses of water, located the outhouse
in back of the restaurant, then he went to find Dellie.

With the eating establishment closed for the evening, the place was quiet and peaceful. Reno examined the outside of the structure. Lights were shining upstairs, but only one lamp glowed downstairs. He figured the lower level was where he’d find Dellie. Following the light, he located her in a room off the parlor. She sat at a desk, her back straight as a board, her mouth set in an unrelenting line of disapproval. Her ebony hair lay in soft curls across her shoulders, framing her oval face and complementing her ivory complexion.

The years had been good to her, filling her out, giving her skin a healthy glow, adding touches of character to her face. As he’d known she would, she had become a beautiful woman, so beautiful that he felt like a sack of manure in her presence, and he was not a man void of conceit. When he looked into a mirror, he didn’t wince—except when he’d sucked down a bottle of whiskey and managed to live through it to the next morning.

Staring at the scuffed toes of his boots (had someone
dragged
him into this house?), he felt the awkward weight of shyness that he thought he’d shed years ago. He cleared his throat and hoped to God he wouldn’t stammer like a lovesick schoolboy.

“It’s g-good to see you, Dellie.”
Damn it to hell!
“I’m sorry about my conduct earlier. I seem to have indulged in a glass too many of whiskey. I was nervous seeing you again and … Dellie? Are you going to look at me or keep pretending you’ve been struck deaf?”

She turned to him, her gaze icy green, freezing his heart. “You seem to have completely forgotten the manners you were reared on, Reno Gold. A gentleman dresses appropriately before he seeks a lady’s company.” She gave a disdainful sniff and returned her attention to the open ledgers on the desk.

Reno glanced at his wrinkled pants, half-buttoned shirt, and unbuttoned vest. Anger built in him like a summer squall, and something else—disappointment. Disappointment that she would treat him so callously, so coldly, after all the years he’d spent wondering about her, daydreaming about her, wishing for this moment when he would be reunited with the girl who had branded his heart and made him believe in himself. He buttoned his shirt and vest, needing something to do until he could speak civilly to her.

She scratched something in a notebook and then closed it with a snap. Laying the pen beside its matching inkwell, she gave a little sigh. “I won’t marry a drunkard.”

He stiffened, her words cutting like a knife.

“I only meant to make a point to the townspeople anyway,” she went on. “The men here have a disgusting habit of ordering their wives and then treating them as chattel. I placed an order for a husband to make them see how wrong it is to purchase another human being.”

She ain’t gonna marry your sorry ass
. The words came back to him, jolting his hazy memory. Had the woman, the hag, who had said this to him been real or imagined? He could recall her stench, so he figured she must have been real. Apparitions rarely had foul breath. So where was the woman who had sneered at
him? Was she someone Dellie knew, someone who worked for her?

This sent another jolt through him. Dellie had not only brought him here to reject him, she’d also told other people of her intentions. Otherwise that hag wouldn’t have been jeering at his circumstances and so damned sure that Dellie had no intention of tying the knot with him.

What had happened to harden Dellie’s heart? Back when he’d known her, she’d been full of forgiveness and charity. That’s why he’d fallen in love with her. What had life dealt her to make her look at him as if he were dirt under her feet?

He had sought her out to apologize and to be truthful and explain to her that he wasn’t penniless, that he had made more money than he could spend in his lifetime, but her snippy attitude toward him choked off the confession. Damn her for believing the worst of him instead of hoping for the best! The Dellie he had known in Kansas would never have been so churlish, so unrelenting in her disapproval.

Chafing under his scathing regard, Adele chanced a glimpse of Reno through the cover of her thick lashes. His face was ruddy with suppressed anger, and his long-fingered hands were clenched at his sides. Was he still in the grip of demon rum? Had she been foolish to scold him, this tall, powerfully built man who could snap her bones like matchsticks if that were his will?

Eyeing him, she could see that he had not an ounce of spare fat on him. His body was whipcord lean and sculpted of muscle and sinew. Dusky hair fell upon his furrowed brow and a blaze of anger flickered in
his smoky blue eyes. But it was his expressive mouth that demanded her fullest attention. While his lips were pale with tautly controlled fury, she noted the downward tilt at the corners and the vulnerability there. Had she hurt his feelings? Did he still possess a sense of honor, a remnant of pride?

Suddenly remorse riddled her and she had to ball her hands in her lap to keep from reaching out to him, gathering him against her, and whispering to him that she understood him, just as she had when they were youngsters in Lawrence.

He was so handsome, even with his clothes wrinkled, his cheeks whiskered, and his hair disheveled. Why hadn’t he put down roots and made something of himself? With the right woman to love him, he could have achieved so much! He still could. She had an instinct about such things, inherited from her mother. Her instincts were telling her that a diamond in the rough stood before her and all he needed were skillful hands to give him polish, a loving heart to shine him up, make him gleam with self-esteem. She could offer him her resources.

Besides, those old feelings were stirring inside her, and she couldn’t very well blame them on her youth anymore. Warmth bloomed in her belly and sent tendrils of passion down between her legs. She shifted, unfamiliar with the burst of sensations, but knowing what they meant. Reno Gold was a wizard and he could still cast a spell over her. She could certainly care for this man, she thought, regarding him with tenderness.

Reno saw the tenderness glow briefly in her eyes even as the evening light spilled through the open
window beside the desk to bathe her in violet. Her beauty wrapped itself around Reno like a soft cloak, and he stepped closer, drawn by the kindness glinting in her eyes and tipping up the corners of her lush mouth. He yearned to touch her, to draw a lazy fingertip down the smoothness of her flushed cheek and along the firmness of her jawline. He smiled at her, and he saw a glimmer of pleasure in her eyes, but she refused to allow it to blossom on her lips. Why? What had happened to that sweet girl in Kansas? Why was she so determined to teach lessons, forgetting that the best lessons are ones the heart already knows?

She blinked rapidly and turned away from him, shifting so that her shoulder created a wall and her profile presented indifference. “I don’t suffer fools or drunks gladly, Reno Gold. I must say that I am disappointed in you. You were a very bright and ambitious boy. I had hoped that you would have made something of yourself as a man.”

Her words wounded him far more than they should have, and he realized that the boy in him was still trying to win her over, to secure a place in her heart. The man he’d become, however, rebelled and demanded a pound of flesh from this stern woman.

She ain’t gonna marry your sorry ass
.

The words smoked in his brain and burnished his heart. No, he couldn’t let her sit there and condemn him, treat him like a no-’count vagabond. She had summoned him, sent him a train ticket, and by God, she was going to honor her word!

“When did you reckon we’d marry, Dellie? Tomorrow morning? Or maybe you were planning evening
nuptials.” He found victory in the leaping fear in her eyes and in her soft gasp of dismay.

“M-marry? I … There will be no marriage, sir.” She tipped up her chin, all haughty and superior.

Reno ached to destroy her high-falutin’ air. “Now, listen here,
ma’am
.” He leaned forward from the waist to peer into her forest-green eyes. “You brought me here to marry you, so what’s the problem? Isn’t there a preacher in these parts?”

She pushed aside her ledgers with a flourish of agitation. “You arrive drunk as a honey-dipped bear and expect me to wed you?” Her laugh was brittle and grating. “I think not!”

“My part of the bargain was to get here on the 10:10 and I fulfilled it. I expect you to be as good as your word and make an honest man of me by marrying me.”

The words sent a sobering chill through him. Christ Almighty! He was actually asking Adele Bishop to marry him. No, not asking, demanding. Even in his dreams he’d never gone this far. Staring into her startled green eyes, he willed her to obey him.
Damn her!
Every time he’d seen a beautiful woman, he’d thought of Dellie, wished for Dellie, hated Dellie for haunting him. He had wondered if she ever thought of him, had even wondered what would have happened if she had allowed him to make love to her as he’d wanted to do back in Lawrence, when she’d been promised to his cousin Winston.

Hard to believe no man had claimed her for his wife. Maybe it was fate, her waiting for him and not even knowing she was waiting, and him seeing that advertisement in a newspaper he had never read before
that day, that fateful day on which she had placed a request for a husband.

Yes, strong forces were at work here, he decided, as his heart boomed in his chest and his blood thickened in his veins, coursing to his extremities, rushing to fire his loins with wanting. Yes, yes. He wanted her.

“There is no need of a marriage, don’t you see?” she implored. “I have made my point.”

“Good for you, but what about me? I dropped my life and boarded the train to begin a new life with you. I didn’t know anything about any ‘point’. You didn’t tell me I was part of a lesson in the letters you wrote me.”

Her eyes sparked with anger. “And you didn’t tell me that you lived out of a whiskey bottle in your letters.”

“I don’t.”

“You deny that you were stinking drunk and are standing before me this minute with whiskey on your breath?”

He arched a brow and straightened away from her. “No, I admit those things, but it’s not every day that I travel to Indian Territory to marry a woman I haven’t clapped eyes on for six years. I was nervous and I drank more than I intended. But I arrived, and now it’s up to you to honor your part of our deal.” He propped his hands at his waist and stared at her, unblinking, unflinching. “Have you become a liar and a cheat, Dellie?” Suddenly he remembered her Achilles’ heel. “Your sweet mama taught you better than that. She’d be ashamed of you for using another human being to paddle the evil-doers.”