Outlaw’s Bride (11 page)

“Grandpa Corwin …” Patch hesitated, waiting to see if he would object to the familiarity of the address. When he didn’t, she continued, “Grandpa Corwin, I thought you might like to be my grandfather for real. I mean, now that I’m going to be living in Oakville, we could see each other often.”

The old man harrumphed. “What is it you want from me?”

“I don’t really know,” Patch said. “I’ve never
had a grandfather before.” She gave him a gamine smile and said, “I thought you might have some ideas.”

“Grandpas usually dandle the young’uns on their knee.” He gave her a look and said, “That’d be a bit of a chore now.”

Patch laughed. “I promise you can dandle your great-grandchildren on your knee. I’d like us to be friends. Is that all right with you?”

He stared out the window and puffed on his pipe, creating a cloud of cherry-scented smoke. “All right,” he said through teeth clenched on the pipe stem. “Friends.”

“Thank you, Grandpa Corwin!” Patch was around the table and on her knees beside her grandfather before she thought about what she was doing. She put her arms around his waist and hugged him tight. His shirt smelled of cherry tobacco.

When his hands folded around her shoulders, she felt a band tighten in her chest. “There’s one more thing,” she said, her voice muffled against his shirt.

He reached out with a shaking hand and gently smoothed her hair. “What’s that, girl?”

She leaned her head back and met his eyes, which looked rheumy now with age. “Nell said you had a picture of my mother. May I see it?”

He dropped his hands and sat back, staring out the window. “It’s on the dry sink.”

She rose and crossed the room. She picked up the daguerreotype in its brass frame. “Oh,” she said in a trembly voice, “she does look like me.”

Patch turned to her grandfather and saw through a blur of tears that he had set down his pipe. His eyes were closed tightly, and he was pinching the bridge of his nose as though he were in pain.

“You must miss her terribly,” she whispered.

“Every day,” the old man grated in a hoarse voice.

A moment later she was on her knees again at his feet with her arms wrapped tightly around his waist.

She said nothing.

Neither did he.

Patch made a silent vow to get her grandfather out of this lonely place. She wasn’t sure how she was going to accomplish that goal, but she knew she had to try.

“Will you come visit me sometime at the Double Diamond?” she asked.

“I don’t know …”

“I won’t leave until you promise.”

“All right,” he said with a sigh of resignation. “I’ll come.”

Patch took leave of her grandfather shortly thereafter and headed for the hotel. She sat down at the desk in the lobby and wrote a quick letter to her parents, letting them know she had met her grandfather and chastising her father for not telling her about him sooner.

Meanwhile, Gilley hauled her trunks from the room where she had left them when she arrived in Oakville and put them in the wagon she had brought to town for that purpose.

Patch realized she had spent more time with her grandfather than she had intended, and that she would have to hurry if she didn’t want to worry Ethan by a too-long absence. He had given her strict orders not to dally in town. “There’s no telling how Trahern will react to the news you’re staying at the Double Diamond,” he had warned. “So finish your business and get back here as quick as you can.”

It wasn’t that Patch had ignored his counsel on purpose. But once she had started talking to her grandfather, the time had simply gotten away from her. She still had one more stop to make before she was ready to head back to the ranch. Actually, two stops. First the post office to mail her letter and then the sheriff’s office.

She folded her letter and addressed the envelope, then stood and adjusted her hat. “Everything all set, Gilley?” she asked the clerk, who was once again manning his post behind the hotel desk.

“All finished, Miss Kendrick,” the clerk answered. “Two trunks, three carpetbags, and five hatboxes all loaded into the wagon.”

Patch remembered how much trouble it had been to keep secret from Molly the things she was packing in the bottom of her trunks that had nothing to do with her trip to Boston. She hadn’t planned on coming back to Montana, so she had brought a few mementos of her past, as well as some items from her hope chest to start her new life with Ethan. In those trunks, under all the fashionable clothes Molly had insisted she would need for her social life in Boston, were the treasures she
had collected for the home she planned to make with her new husband.

Some of the things she could use right away, the linens and such. There were other things—Patch blushed at the thought of the lacy nightgown she had bought in St. Louis—that would have to wait until she was married. Because she had packed so much extra, there hadn’t been room to hide boots and trousers. Thus, her necessary stop at the mercantile her first day in town.

Patch crossed to the desk to give Gilley something for his trouble. “Thank you, Gilley. By the way,” she said, “where will I find the sheriff this time of day?”

“Careless? Probably be in his office. He usually eats at his desk, mostly ’cause the town pays for his meal if he’s working at noontime.”

Patch smiled. “Thanks, Gilley.”

The jail was across the street from the mercantile. It was made of rock and surrounded by three huge live oaks, one of which, Ethan had told her, had actually been used for hangings in the past. Patch wasn’t superstitious, but she just knew there had to be ghosts that haunted the place at night.

Patch decided to post her letter before she paid her visit to Careless Lachlan. As far as she knew, Ethan hadn’t been in to see him yet, and it couldn’t hurt to let the sheriff know that the investigation of that long-ago incident was being reopened.

Patch had stepped off the boardwalk where it ended to allow access to an alley when a hand reached out and grabbed her by the wrist. She
was yanked into the cool, murky shadows and slammed up against the wall. A hard male body pressed up against her and a callused hand stifled the scream on her lips. The abrupt change from sunlight to darkness momentarily blinded her. She was terrified until she heard a familiar male voice.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Patch?”

“
Mmmmp
,” Patch replied. The hand came away and she snapped, “I was walking down the street! Or at least I was until you yanked me into this alley. What’s got into you, Ethan? What’s wrong?”

“I told you to get your bags and get back to the ranch. You left right after breakfast. It’s practically noon. What the hell have you been doing all day?”

Patch relaxed. He was worried about her. She played with a button on his shirt with her gloved fingers. “I went to see my grandfather.”

Ethan had the oddest sensation he was being undressed, even though the buttons remained in place. It was a fantasy he had been fighting the past week, Patch undressing him. Here she was doing it—or rather, not doing it—in the middle of town. He forced his mind back to the subject at hand. “I thought Corwin Marshall was dead.”

“No, he just sold his ranch and moved into town. And guess what, Ethan?”

“I’m afraid to ask.”

“He’s going to come visit me at the ranch sometime.”

“Patch, there’s no sense getting any more people involved in my situation than already are.”

“He’s not involved. He’s just a lonely old man, Ethan, and I want to spend some time with him.”

“Patch—”

“Have you talked to the sheriff yet, Ethan?”

“No, but—”

Her gloved fingers walked up his shirt toward his collar. “Could I go with you?”

He grabbed her wrist. “No.”

Her lips pouted. “Why not?”

He smoothed them out with his thumb. “I told you, it isn’t safe.”

She stared up at him, her eyes pleading even though she wasn’t saying a word.

“Patch …”

Ethan hadn’t intended to kiss her. That had been the last thing on his mind when he dragged her into this alley. In fact, he had been ready to wring her neck. But he lowered his face and she lifted hers and, sure enough, their lips met.

It was just a touch of flesh to flesh, but it made his blood hum and his spirit soar. He rubbed his lips against hers, and her mouth came open. Lord, Lord! How could he resist that sort of temptation? His tongue slid along the crease of her mouth, and he felt her quiver.

He wasn’t aware of what his hands were doing until she froze. He had her breast cupped in his hand! He started to let go, but she hesitantly arched toward him. She made a low, animal sound in her throat that caused his groin to draw up tight.

Ethan brushed his thumb delicately across her nipple and heard her gasp as it tightened into a bud. He thrust his tongue into her mouth and groaned when she sucked on it.

It was the sound of two women talking that brought him to his senses. He jerked away from Patch, put a hand across her mouth to keep her from making any noise, and pulled her deeper into the alley.

“It’s shameless, that’s what it is, a lady like her staying in the same house with the likes of him,” one woman said.

“His mother is there, and his sister,” the other answered.

“A sick woman and a little girl,” the first woman retorted. “What’s to keep him from forcing himself on her the way he did that poor Trahern girl?” The woman
tsk
ed and continued speaking, but by then they were well past the alley, and their voices were no longer clear.

“See what you’re in for if you hang around me,” Ethan whispered in the darkness. “Misery and unhappiness, that’s what’s in store! You’ll be a source of gossip on the tongue of every old harpy in town. Get out of here, Patch. Now, while you can.”

Patch dropped her forehead against Ethan’s shoulder and rubbed her cheek against his chest. She liked the feel of him and wanted to be closer. Her fingers curled themselves into his shirt reflexively, like a kitten’s claws. “No, Ethan. Whatever happens, I want to stay here with you.”

Patch felt him shudder.

“Then heaven help you, little one. Because I can’t help myself.”

He tipped her chin up and kissed her, only this time he wasn’t gentle. The fervent kiss frightened her, but she reminded herself this was Ethan, that she loved him, and he would never do anything to hurt her. Sure enough, the pressure on her mouth eased, then gentled, then persuaded.

Patch found herself responding. Her arms slid up around Ethan’s neck, and her tongue slipped out tentatively to meet his. Ethan’s arms tightened around her, and he pressed his lower body against her. She could feel the hard length of his shaft.

She slowly arched her body into his and heard him groan.

His hands grasped her hips and held her still. “Don’t, Patch. Or I’ll end up having you right here, standing against an alley wall in the middle of town.”

Patch lowered her hands to his shoulders and leaned against him. All she heard for the next several moments was the sound of her own ragged breathing and the heavy beat of Ethan’s heart.

“Let’s get married now, Ethan. Let’s not wait.” Patch lifted her face to his. She could easily see his features now that her eyes had adjusted to the dark. “I don’t care what the old biddies say. I don’t care what the town thinks of you. I only know I love you. And you want me, Ethan. You can’t deny it.”

Ethan used his hold on her hips to lever her a good foot away from him. Maybe with distance he could keep his senses. “You’re only making this
harder for both of us, Patch. I won’t deny I want you.
But I don’t love you
. And I absolutely will
not
marry you with the whole town thinking I’m the kind of man who could beat up a woman and take her innocence and leave her bleeding on the ground.”

Patch turned her head away. “All right, Ethan,” she said. “I won’t mention marriage again.”

He caught her chin in his hand and forced her to face him. “You know I’m right, Patch.”

She avoided agreeing with him. Because she didn’t. “As long as you’re in town, wouldn’t this be a good opportunity to see the sheriff?”

Ethan gave in gracefully. “I suppose so.”

“Good,” Patch said. “Let’s go.”

“Whoa!” Ethan said. “I can’t just go marching into his office.”

“Why not?”

“Because …” Ethan realized that the threat of being bushwhacked was probably pretty slim in the sheriff’s office. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go. You let me do all the talking.”

“Of course, Ethan,” Patch replied. “You’re the boss.”

Ethan laughed at the totally un-Patchlike meekness of her reply. He hugged her quickly and just as quickly let her go. The temptation was too great to do more. “Come on, you shameless minx. Let’s go see what Careless has to say.”

Ever since Ethan had suggested that Frank talk to Merielle about the rape, he hadn’t been able to think about anything else. Every day for a week Frank had been trying to get up the courage to broach the subject. The truth was, he was terrified. What if she got hysterical? What if she stopped talking altogether? What if she went completely out of her mind?