The Bride Wore Spurs (The Inconvenient Bride Series, Book 1) (17 page)

"Come, sit with me for a moment." She didn't even look to see if he followed. Lacey took the chair nearest the back door should she feel the urge to leap up and run away. After a very puzzled Hawke took the other, she laid both hands on the table, made a fist of the pair of them, and said, "I suppose 'tis better for you to know this one wee thing about me now than after we wed. I can not cook a lick."

"You... but what about the biscuits, the berry
pie
?"

"'Twas Kate's doings, all of it." Now that she'd admitted the one thing, the rest seemed almost easy. "Kate baked the biscuits the night before I was to come to Winterhawke, and I hid them in my basket. Same with the pie, but we didn't have to trouble ourselves by hiding it. I've ne'er tried to cook a thing in my life—well, except of course, for when I baked your buttermilk flapjacks."

The admission should have surprised Hawke, but he discovered that Lacey's revelations didn't shock him in the least. Hadn't he known there was something wrong with her from the start? "So you tricked me, and thought you could just keep on sneaking food over here from Three Elk indefinitely, is that it?"

"Oh, no. Kate is willing and working to teach me the ways of the kitchen. I've had lessons on how to make up your flapjacks and those fluffy biscuits you like, plus I even wrote down the recipes. I'm certain I can learn about pies and such, too, but maybe a little later."

"Uh, huh." He said it slowly, sarcastically. "Not that it matters to me, but what about sewing? Can you do that?"

Lacey hedged for just a moment, but then came clean there, too. "Not if you mean the actual construction of clothes, knitting, or quilting, but I can mend a button." At least, she
thought
she could. Then again, maybe not. "Truth is," she admitted with a sigh, "I can not sew either, but only because I've ne'er had the chance to learn. I'm willin... well, no." She took a deep breath. "Truth there is that I can not sew and I do not have the slightest inclination to want to learn how. But if you insist, I promise to give it a try."

Incredulous, Hawke pushed out of his chair and slowly circled her. Speaking behind Lacey's back, he said, "Let's see—you can't cook, can't sew, and seem to know nothing about keeping a man's home. Yes, ma'am, I'd say you fit all the requirements of a mail-order bride. What could I have been thinking of when I didn't jump at the chance to accept your proposal?"

Lacey twisted this way and that in her chair, trying to make eye contact with him, but he was always one step to the back of her. She threw her words in his general direction. "I-I know my lack of skills may seem a wee bit odd to you, but I meant—"

"Odd?" Hawke's voice was still coming from somewhere over her shoulder. "I demand more talents than you have in the horses I buy. Where were you raised, anyway—under a bush?"

Blushing violently, this time Lacey didn't seek his gaze. "Well, 'tis true that I do not come with the usual talents a man expects to find in a wife, but as I said before, I'm more than willing to learn."

"Servants, right? Isn't that it? You were raised in a house where servants did all the work so you never had to learn to do a thing."

That was close enough to the truth. Too close, in fact. Lacey nodded, but still kept her gaze averted.

"Just as I thought." Hawke was standing directly beside her now. "Maybe you figured a spoiled aristocrat could learn to cook, but what did you plan on doing about clothes? Even if I'd decided to keep you on—which I definitely haven't—I couldn't afford to buy you dresses in town. At least, not for a good long while, anyway."

"Oh, but those I have will do me fine." She finally glanced up at Hawke, beseeching him with her gaze. "They'll do for a good long while. I have two new white blouses and navy skirts—uniforms from the hospital." And they were that. They just didn't happen to be nursing uniforms.

"A very impressive wardrobe, I'm sure." Which didn't make a hell of a lot of sense to Hawke since he figured she was some kind of royalty who'd run away from home. Not that it mattered to him who she was or what she was running from. What mattered was that she'd tried to trick him—that and the fact that he had a mare to check. "Will you excuse me, please? I've got to get out to the barn and see how Queenie's doing. I'll be back shortly, and expect you to have your things ready by then. I'm taking you back to Three Elk just as soon as I get the horses hitched."

"Oh, well... of course."

He stomped out of the kitchen and into the living room. As soon as she was sure he couldn't hear her, Lacey snuck along behind Hawke and watched his progress from the kitchen door. After he crossed the room to the peg where his jacket hung, he reached inside the garment to the inner pocket and withdrew his horrid little ledger. After spending several moments jotting something inside it, he returned the thing to his jacket, then continued on out the front door.

Lacey, understandably distressed over having to admit her shortcomings to the man she was supposed to be impressing, wasn't about to admit defeat just yet. After retrieving her spurs from the canister along with the confidence they gave her, she donned them and marched fearlessly into the living room. Then, taking the ledger from Hawke's jacket, she settled into the chair near the fireplace and opened the book to the page marked
Lacey O'Carroll
. First she read the
Disadvantages
column:

1. Slothful
—How dare he suggest such a thing after getting her up before dawn each day?

2. Messy
—The grandest of lies. This man's home was never so clean as it'd been under her care.

3. Incompetent farm hand
—"Apprentice" farm hand, maybe, but eager to learn.

4. Too weak and frail to be a ranch wife
—Maybe, she wasn't sure but she figured she deserved credit for being strong at heart.

5. Believes in fairies
—Doesn't everyone?

6. Lousy cook
—He had her there—but only temporarily.

7. Bed partner
—This notation stumped Lacey. She'd get to the bottom of what he meant by that later.

8. Too damn nosy
—What had she done to elicit this—other than what she was doing now?

9. Can't sew
—Another area in which she could make no argument.

10. Lies/can't be trusted.

Crestfallen over number ten, for she couldn't even fake a fit of anger over the truth in that disadvantage, Lacey sighed and glanced to the right-hand side of the ledger. There under the
Advantages
column she found only three notations:

1. Good with horses
—Her mood brightened considerably.

2. Makes good pie
—That would have brightened her mood had he not drawn a thick, black line through it, voiding the entry.

3. Bed partner
—Now she was more confused than when it had been in the disadvantage column—and how could one attribute be listed in both places, anyway?

"Humm," Lacey murmured to herself as she thought about what she'd learned. Tapping a fingernail against the little book, she was sorely tempted to toss the thing into the fireplace, but she decided to consider other options first. The score as she read it, was ten to two, a lack of eight pluses on the advantage side of the ledger. How could she make up that number, or even exceed it in the little time she had left to win Hawke over?

It occurred to her that she might as well list a few of her qualities now, and worry about proving them to the man later. What could such a plan harm at this juncture? Hawke had already made note of the fact that she was nosy and not to be trusted. Pleased with her rationalization, Lacey lifted the pencil from its little slot, moistened the tip, and got busy balancing the scale in her favor. Adding a new entry in place of the one that had been scratched out, she started with the obvious.

2. Resourceful.

Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.

—George Bernard Shaw

Chapter 9

The circuit preacher had shown up a little earlier than expected, but Hawke thought it fitting in a perverse sort of way, that the man would be waiting at Caleb's when he and Lacey drove up to Three Elk that afternoon. That's how he looked at it anyway when the small black carriage and single horse tied to the hitching post did indeed turn out to belong to one Reverend Bob. Except for his white collar, the man was dressed in black from his flat-brimmed hat to his polished boots—an eerie twin to the imaginary hangman Hawke had felt chasing him ever since he'd first laid eyes on Miss Lacey O'Carroll. At the sight of the clergyman, it was all he could do not to bolt and run back out the door.

But Hawke didn't go meekly into the fray, mind you. He barreled his way into Caleb's home with Lacey hot on his heels, she intent on soliciting the council of her friend, Kate, he determined to get himself out of this predicament once and for all. The Irishwomen hugged and greeted one another, laughing and talking in their strange Gaelic brogues, but once Hawke got over the shock of meeting "the angel of death" in the guise of Reverend Bob, he got right down to business with Caleb.

"... and nothing you say is going to change my mind."

"Hold your horses a minute, friend." Caleb was lounging as usual on the couch in the front room. Righting himself, he propped his splinted leg up high on a milk stool. "What's all this about ledgers and lists? I thought we was discussing matrimony, not horse-trading."

"They're one and the same, as far as I'm concerned." Hawke dropped his ledger into Caleb's lap, then lowered his voice to a low roar. "Go ahead, flip it open to the page with her name on it and you'll see what I mean. She's just not proper wife material, and all the good intentions in the world aren't going make her that way. I thank you for the trouble you went to on my behalf, but we're just going to have to send Miss O'Carroll back where she came from."

His bushy gray brows bunched in contemplation, Caleb finally found the page with Lacey's name at the top, and began reading the columns, his lips silently mouthing each as he came to it.

As he waited for his friend to digest the entire list, Hawke embellished his complaints against the comely Irishwoman. "The way I have it figured, Miss O'Carroll comes from blue-blooded stock or something like that. For all we know, she might even be a runaway princess or whatever it is they call their royalty in Ireland."

Listening to his friend with one ear as he continued to read the ledger, Caleb said, "That don't make no sense. What would a princess be doing in Wyoming Territory of all places, and as a mail-order bride of all things? That don't make no sense a'tall."

"Hell, I don't know. I also don't know why she's here or what she's really up to." Aware the women had finally disappeared into the back bedroom and that the preacher was resting on Caleb's hammock out back, Hawke raised his voice. "I only know that
something
is wrong with her, and not just that she can't cook or sew. Something we're both missing somewhere."

"Humph. Not according to this here ledger of yours, there ain't. Why you've even got that gal scored one point higher on her advantages!" Caleb raised a squinty-eyed gaze to his friend. "Just how high does a woman have to rate to be good enough in your book, son?"

"I don't know what you're talking about." Hawke stuck out his hand. "Let me see that book. You're probably on the wrong page." But even before Caleb dropped it into his palm, he could see Lacey's name clearly inscribed at the top of the page. Hardly able to believe what his eyes told him after he'd studied the ledger a minute, Hawke sank down to the hearth in complete, mind-numbing shock.

"I—I didn't write all of this." Hawke's tongue felt curiously heavy, as if whittled out of wood. The neatly printed block letters did look a lot like his own handwriting, but there was no way he'd written what he was seeing. "Someone's been messing with my ledger."

"Now, Hawke, my boy," said Caleb in his most cajoling tone. "I don't know what you're up to, or why you're a writing one thing and saying another, but if you mean to—"

"It's the truth, Caleb. I swear it." Desperate to prove that he hadn't lost his mind or his ethics, Hawke dragged his fingernail along the advantage column, then jabbed it against one of the entries. "Does this sound like something I'd write?
Knows all manner of charms, riddles, and prayers from memory.
" Searching further, he stopped at entry number seven. "Or this?
Even-tempered for a red-haired person of Irish extraction
." Then up to the entry in place of 'makes good pies,' which Hawke himself had scratched out. "And I don't even know what
this
is supposed to mean—
resourceful
."