The Invitation (32 page)

Miss Latham looked up at him, blinking in puzzlement, having no idea what he was talking about.

“The world is going to know soon enough. You can't keep it a secret forever,” he said to her, his voice full of coaxing softness, the voice of a lover. He looked back up at Rowena and gave her his own sweet smile, the one that had made more than a few women's hearts flutter. “Your sister and I are engaged to be married.”

Dorie sat up straighter on the sofa. “No, please, you don't have to do this.”

Rowena looked from one to the other, at Cole's I-dare-you expression and at Dorie's face, now red with embarrassment. Rowena's lovely laugh filled the room. “Dorie darling, I'd been told he was a hero, but I had no idea how much of one. He is as chivalrous as a knight of old. He rescued you, and now he feels responsible for you.”

She turned back to Cole. “But, really, Mr. Hunter, your concern for my sister need go no further. Just because you saved her life doesn't mean you have to be responsible for her forever. Now Dorie is my responsibility, just as she was our father's.”

Maybe there
was
some chivalry in him because the hair on the back of his neck stood up at Rowena's words. She made Miss Latham sound like a broken-down old pet, beloved but useless. The truth was that Miss Latham was far from useless. She was as smart as a college girl. There wasn't a woman in a thousand who could have understood what he meant during that bank holdup when he used the word “roll.” She had not only understood but had kept her head and figured out a way to distract the man, then moved as quickly as a darter fish. Now here was her sister speaking as though Miss Latham were something useless that needed to be gotten rid of as fast as possible.

“Please don't do—” Dorie began, but stopped when Cole came to his feet and in an instant was across the room to stand beside her.

He put his uninjured hand on her shoulder. “The truth is, Mrs. Westlake, your sister and I are in love, and we plan to get married. She's marrying
me
and no one else.”

Dorie looked up at him with pleading eyes. “No, you can't do this. I was wrong to ask you.” She turned to her sister. “Rowena, he's lying. Has any man ever fallen madly in love with me?”

She turned back to look up at Cole. “You don't have to do this. I shouldn't have said what I did. It was something I should have known couldn't have worked. Rowena, let me tell you what I did. I—”

Cole didn't know how to shut her up, but he
had
to make her stop talking. He couldn't bear to see her humiliate herself in front of her beautiful sister, whose expression said that she didn't believe for one minute that Cole had fallen for her plain little sister. Something about that look bothered Cole.

“I asked Mr. Hunter to—” Dorie began, her voice heavy, like a child admitting a lie, knowing that punishment was going to follow.

Without thought of what he was doing, Cole slipped his good arm under Miss Latham's shoulders and pulled her up to him. She was a tiny thing, small and fragile, weighing nothing. His objective was to stop her words, and short of putting his hand over her mouth, he didn't know how else to do that, so he kissed her. It wasn't a kiss of passion, not even a kiss he wanted; it was a kiss of expediency: hard, closed-mouthed, without affection.

Within seconds he broke from the kiss and turned to Rowena in defiance. “There, now, does that look like—”

Suddenly his face filled with wonder, and he broke off and turned to look down at the woman pressed to his side. She was still pulled against him, her feet off the floor, her body as limp as a doll's, and she was looking up at him, her huge eyes filled with surprise.

For a moment time didn't exist for Cole. He had no idea what had happened, but the kiss he had shared with this woman—if he could call that hard thing a kiss—was different from any other kiss he'd experienced. He had kissed hundreds of women in his life. In fact, he rather liked kissing and had never turned down an opportunity when offered to him, whether it was in a saloon or behind the church. But this kiss had been different.

As though Rowena weren't there, as though he and this woman he held were the only two people in the world, he turned back to her and kissed her for real.

He pulled her close to him and instantly found that she wasn't as scrawny as he'd thought, but nicely rounded, and he liked her small size. She was so tiny he thought he could wrap himself around her; she could dissolve inside him.

He kissed her gently at first, just tasting of her, of her freshness, of the purity of her. There was no doubt in his mind that he was the first man who had ever touched her, ever held her, ever put his lips on hers. Some part of his brain remembered that when he first met her she had been hostile and prickly, but he couldn't reconcile that woman with the soft one in his arms. She opened up to him in a way that no woman ever had before. And in her kiss was something he couldn't identify, something that he had never tasted before. If he didn't know better, he'd think it was love. But that wasn't possible. There was nothing between them.

There was pain in his arm in its sling, but he didn't feel it when he wrapped both arms around her, then used his good left hand to turn her head so he could taste her lips more deeply. He sucked on her bottom lip, gently drawing it into his own mouth, and he was sure he'd never tasted anything sweeter.

It was some minutes before he heard Rowena's voice. Judging by her tone, she had been trying to get his attention for some time.

Reluctantly, with difficulty, he turned to look at Rowena, seeing her in a haze, as though she were far away. He still held Dorie firmly in his arms, not willing to release her soft, pliant body. Besides, she was so limp she would have fallen if he'd released her.

“My goodness gracious,” Rowena said, her voice full of astonishment. “I thought I was going to have to throw a bucket of cold water on you two.” She was trying to make a joke, but it fell flat because she was facing two very confused people.

“Yes, well, I…” Cole began, stammering like a schoolboy. The body in his arms began to have some substance, and he knew he should release her, but he didn't want to. It was some minutes before he realized that Miss Latham had her hands on his shoulders and was pushing against him rather hard.

“Mr. Hunter,” she was saying, “please release me.”

When Cole's brain began to function again, all he could feel was embarrassment. “Yes, of course,” he said, then dropped Miss Latham as though she were forbidden, causing her to fall back against the sofa with a thud. But he didn't reach down to help her. In fact he would have done most anything to keep from touching her again.

“I see that you two are in love,” Rowena said. “I had no idea that was the case. Dorie, how could you keep such a thing from me? Why didn't you tell me? You let me believe that Mr. Hunter had no reason to save you from the robbers except that he was a man of great conscience, a man who cared about others, a man who—”

“A fool,” Cole said, beginning to recover himself. Running his hand over his eyes, he surreptitiously looked at Miss Latham and saw that she was as stunned as he was. If nothing like this had happened to a man of his experience, he was sure nothing like this had happened to her.

“You know what I think you two should do?” Rowena said in the voice of one who had never faced an obstacle in her life. “I think you should get married right now. This minute.”

Dorie was beginning to recover herself. “Rowena, that's ridiculous. Mr. Hunter—”

“Yes,” Cole heard himself saying. “That would be fine.”

Rowena took this statement in stride, not seeing the least problem with anything. “We shall go to the church this minute and—”

“No!”
Dorie half shouted, and they both turned to look at her as she stood up, her fists at her sides.

“Dorie, your ankle!”

“Rowena, there is nothing wrong with my ankle except a bruise. One does not have to remain in bed for a bruise.” She turned to Cole. “I apologize, Mr. Hunter, for my sister. She loves to manage other people's lives, and with her children and husband not here, she has only me and now you.” She straightened her back and looked at him. “I know that you and I talked about…about certain things, but that was days ago. Now things are different.”

“What is different?” he asked dryly.

Of course there was nothing different. In fact, everything was too real, and much too much the same. Rowena had come to Texas to get her boring little sister married, and she meant to do what needed to be done. Whether she married Dorie to a middle-aged bald man or to a gunslinger didn't seem to make much difference to her.

“Rowena,” Dorie said softly, “could you leave us for a while? Mr. Hunter and I need to talk.”

Rowena laughed in what Cole thought was a vulgar way. “I'm not sure I should leave you two lovebirds alone. At least not until after the wedding.”

Cole was much too old to put up with a woman acting as though he were still in knee britches and needed a chaperon. He gave her the look that had made a few men decide not to draw on him.

“I…ah, I think I'll wait just outside,” Rowena said, and skedaddled out the door.

Dorie spoke the minute her sister was out of the room. “Mr. Hunter, when you and I spoke several days ago, I made a fool of myself. When I was alone in Latham and I received a letter from my sister saying she was going to travel to America and then all the way to Texas to ‘sort me out,' as she said, I'm afraid I panicked. When Rowena gets something in her head, she sees nothing else. She said she was sure that after Father died I'd stay in that house with my books and never get out to meet anyone, much less marry someone. Rowena also thinks that whatever makes her happy is what makes everyone happy. She loves being married, so she thinks I would, too.”

“Marriage is the only acceptable way to get those six kids you want.”

“Yes, well, at my age—nearly thirty—I'm a little old to start a family.”

“So your sister was right and you do plan to bury yourself.” As he was talking, he continued to look at her. It was hard to reconcile what he saw with what he had felt. She looked wooden, but she hadn't felt that way. Maybe he was getting senile. Maybe he should visit Nina more often. But right now, Nina's knowledge, her boredom, the way she talked at the wrong time—all that seemed dirty when compared to the freshness of Miss Latham.

“It isn't your business or my sister's what I do with my life!” Dorie snapped.

Cole knew she was right. He also knew he should walk out the door and never look back. But when had he ever done what he
should
do? He shouldn't have left home at twelve years old. He shouldn't have strapped on his first gun. If he hadn't tried to save this scrawny woman from the bank robbers he wouldn't be here now, wouldn't have kissed her, wouldn't have felt this way.

Also, there was something about this woman that intrigued him. Maybe he'd spent too much of his life around women of the wrong sort. Maybe all “good” women were like her, if you got to know them, but he doubted it.

Maybe his problem was that she offered him a challenge, and a challenge was something he'd never been able to turn down. All anyone had to say to him was “Cole, you'll never be able to do that,” and the hair on the back of his neck would stand up, and he would know that he
had
to do whatever his challenger had said he couldn't accomplish.

Miss Latham seemed to be reading his mind. She seemed to understand that he was beginning to think this was something he wanted to do. She took a deep breath, and when she released it, she gave him a look of great softness, a look that made Cole realize she was prettier than he'd first thought. “This is very kind of you, but now I must ask you to be reasonable. In light of what just happened, you must see that you and I cannot even pretend to be engaged. It is not possible.”

Sometimes this woman made him feel downright dumb. He had no idea what she was talking about. All he knew was that he very much wanted to kiss her again. Had what happened between them been a fluke? Something that happened only once? “What is not possible? Why?”

“Our attraction to each other has changed everything. I had no idea there would be any magnetism between us. Men who are almost criminals are not men I find attractive. I can assure you that what I…we…felt was as much of a shock to me as it was to you. Considering this attraction, we could not possibly consider spending any time together for any reason. The probable results are too dreadful to contemplate.”

Cole looked with longing toward the glass of whiskey on the table, but it was empty. At the moment he desperately needed a drink. What in the world was the woman talking about? “What results?”

She looked at him with great patience. “Mr. Hunter, I have admitted that all of this was a mistake. My mistake. I have told you that I panicked at the news of my sister's impending visit, and I tried to implement what I see now was a very naive scheme. I am sorry I ever started this, and I would like to end it.”