The Invitation (34 page)

“And I've told you that I don't want charity. I want to learn a trade.” About as much as he wanted bubonic plague. He could not see himself as a shopkeeper, even if the shop sold beer to drunks. “With you I see the chance of learning something that will help me in my later years. For the first time I see a way out of my life of degradation and death. I see the possibility of attaining respectability. I see a way to better myself and begin to live as others do. It is the first time I have been offered such a chance, and contrary to your opinion of me, I am not a fool. Miss Latham, I want to take that opportunity.”

Cole thought perhaps he'd missed his calling in life. Maybe he should have been a preacher or a snake oil salesman. Or maybe a senator. Hell, he was so full of hot air he was good enough to be president.

Before she could say a word, he continued, unwilling to stop when he was winning. “I want to ask you something. How many men have you kissed?”

She blinked at him. “J…just you.”

“Just as I thought. You seem to think there was something special between us, something different. Let me assure you that there was not. That feeling we experienced between us is the same with every kiss between a man and a woman. If you kissed your Mr. Pepper, you'd feel the same thing.” She tried to conceal her disappointment, but he could see it in her face, and her look almost made him retract his lie. But he didn't.

“The problem seems to be that you think that if we spend any time together I will not be able to control myself and will die if I do not get you into bed with me. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

He kept on, not allowing her to say a word. “Miss Latham, I offer you a business proposition: Marry me for six months and let me run your town during that time. At the end of the six months if I have done a satisfactory job, I want you to give me five thousand dollars. That will be my stake in whatever I want to do in life.”

“Wouldn't it be much simpler just to hire you as a manager for collecting the rent?”

Damn, but the woman had a disconcerting way of seeing straight to the truth! He gave her a little smile. “Unless I'm more than a manager, your sister will have her way.” He raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps I'll be invited to your wedding with Alfred. Will his children attend? By the way, how old are his children?”

“His sons are twenty-five, twenty-three, and twenty,” she said.

Cole was so startled by this information that he couldn't speak for a moment. “Not exactly in their nappies, are they?” he said softly, thinking that this small woman wasn't at all what she had at first seemed. At their first meeting he had thought she needed no one, seemed able to take care of herself and half the world, but now he was beginning to get a clearer picture of what had driven her to ask a gunslinger to marry her.

Part of him knew it was the “hero” in him—he was beginning to hate that word—but he was starting to feel protective toward her. Her sister was trying to marry her off to a lazy man with three grown sons. All four of them would no doubt move into her house, take over her town, and spend her money.

He was tired of talking, tired of arguing. Quite suddenly he had a great deal of sympathy for Rowena. No wonder she was afraid to leave her defenseless sister alone in a large house at the mercy of every gold digger in the country. No wonder she was trying to force her to marry a man who could protect her. Rowena's mistake was in thinking this old man with grown sons was the one for the job.

“You're going to marry me, do you understand? You can bribe a judge to annul the marriage later if you want, but right now we need each other. You need protection from your well-meaning sister, and I need a place to hang my hat until I heal.” By the time he had finished this speech, he had gripped her upper arms with his hands and lifted her half off the floor. His nose was close to hers. “And don't you say a word about kids or my killing people or anything else. I'll straighten out that town of yours. It sounds as if the tenants are taking advantage of you with their reluctance to pay rent.”

“You're going to shoot them?” she asked breathlessly.

He released his grip on her so suddenly she almost fell. Did she work at making him angry or did she do it without thought? “Here,” he said, his voice filled with anger as he began to unbuckle the gun belt at his waist. It hurt him more than a little. In fact, pain shot up his arm and he could feel his wound beginning to bleed as he tore it open, but he would have died before giving up his valiant gesture. He was dizzy with pain when he held the belt out to her like some primitive offering, but force of will kept him on his feet. “I am giving you my gun,” he said. “I won't use it to collect the rent in your town, and if I try to touch you in any way, you have my permission to shoot me. Now do we have a deal?”

Silently, with great seriousness, she took the heavy gun belt from him. It seemed to take her a long time to make up her mind, but at last she said yes, and that was all.

Cole wasn't sure whether he should be happy or terrified, but he allowed neither emotion to show. “All right, then, shall we go? Your sister is waiting.”

He bent his good arm for her to take. After only a second's hesitation she slipped her small hand onto his forearm and they started toward the door, Dorie carrying Cole's gun belt in her left hand, one end of it dragging the floor.

D
orie tried not to sit on the edge of her seat, but such control was difficult. Self-control had been her main concern over the last few days, but now it was almost impossible. She was sitting in the bedroom of Rowena's private railroad car—borrowed from some hopelessly besotted admirer—across a table from the stranger who was now her husband.

When she'd concocted this plan of pretending to be married to a gunslinger, it had seemed like a brilliant idea. She would at last shock everyone. She'd shock her sister who thought she knew everything about Dorie; she'd shock all of the people of Latham, who laughed at her for being an old maid. She almost wished her father were still alive so she could shock him too. But then she doubted if anything could shock Charles Latham. If Dorie had said she was going to marry a caterpillar, he wouldn't have been shocked; he just would have said no. If the president of the United States had wanted to marry Dorie, her father would have said no. He said he'd allowed one daughter to leave and he wasn't letting the other one go while he was alive.

So Dorie had grown up inside a house with a cold totalitarian, an overlord more than a father, a man who allowed only his opinion inside the house and outside in his private town. The only thing in the world that could soften him was Rowena's beauty.

Purposely, Charles Latham had married a plain-faced woman, saying he wanted a wife who would be faithful to him. Rowena always wondered if he'd said this to their mother, but then, Rowena lived in a cloud of daydreams and romance. Of course Charles Latham had told his frightened little wife that he'd married her because she could produce children and no other man would want her. Dorie wondered if her mother had willed herself to die after the birth of her second daughter. No doubt she had heard in detail how disappointed her husband was that she had given him only another daughter and not a son to carry on his name, so she'd decided to get out.

Her mother wasn't the only one whose life was ruled by Charles Latham's iron will. After her father died, Dorie found that she didn't actually know what to do with freedom. All her life she'd had her father telling her when to go to bed, when to get up, what to eat. Her life was planned and scheduled by him.

Of course she realized that her isolated life, spent almost totally in the company of her father, had made her a little…different. Rowena's incredible beauty had given her a life that was more like other people's. A woman who looked like Rowena didn't have to leave the house to meet people: people came to her. In spite of her father's attempts to isolate her, Rowena involved herself with other people, until at last Jonathan Westlake came and took her away forever.

But no one had sought Dorie out. No handsome young men had risked her father's wrath to knock on the front door and ask to see her. And if they had and her father had refused them, Dorie wasn't beautiful enough to make him change his mind.

So Rowena had left Latham six years ago; she had gotten away from their father, but Dorie had stayed. Dorie had stayed in that big, dark house, working as her father's housekeeper and secretary. In the evenings she had sat in the same room with him, never speaking, never seeking companionship, just sitting there. He said that two women had left him, and by damn the third one wasn't going to, so he rarely allowed Dorie out of his sight.

When he died, Dorie had difficulty feeling anything except relief. Perhaps she had loved him, but then, he had never allowed anything into his house that was as soft as love. Charles Latham believed in discipline in all things. Rowena once said that their father had probably kissed their mother only twice in her life—and that was back in the days when they still believed that kissing made babies.

During all those years with her father, suppressing every emotion, living in fear of him and his wrath, Dorie had thought of what she would do when she was free—she equated his death with her own freedom. She imagined wild things such as travel to foreign lands. She imagined suddenly having beauty like Rowena's and causing grown men to tremble at the lifting of her eyelashes.

What she did not imagine was being left with the burden of managing an entire town. People she had seen, if not known, all her life, seemed overnight to become nothing but an enormous open hand that asked her to fill it. She had to find the money to repair roofs, fix porches, clean drains. There seemed to be no end to the work that needed to be done.

And then, as if she didn't have enough trouble, Rowena sent a telegram saying she was arriving in a matter of days. And Rowena, dear sweet Rowena who couldn't keep her mouth shut about anything, had announced in her message that while she was there she intended to find a husband for her sister.

Of course the man in the telegraph office had shared this information with all of Latham and at least half of the people who came through town on the train. Dorie wouldn't be surprised if by now the entire population of San Francisco knew that her meddlesome sister planned to find her a husband.

Dorie loved her sister, but sometimes Rowena had no common sense. Did she think that Dorie was going to be thrilled when she read the telegram and say, “Oh, wonderful, my sister is going to marry me off to a man I don't even know”?

While Dorie was recovering from this shock and daily listening to the snickers and laughter of her tenants, young and old alike, her well-meaning sister sent another telegram asking her to please not marry Alfred before she got there.

So maybe her mention of Alfred was Dorie's fault. About two years ago, before their father's death, Rowena had written from her beautiful house in England that she was worried about her little sister, so she was going to return to America and find her a husband. This had horrified Dorie because she knew that if her father thought there was any possibility of losing his remaining daughter, he would make Dorie's life even more difficult than it was. After Rowena's defection—that was how Dorie thought of her marriage—their father had kept his younger daughter as nearly a prisoner as possible, but over the years his hold over her had lessened. Slowly Dorie had been allowed to walk in the fields behind the house and to sit by the river with a book in the afternoon. Her father had taken her along with him in his carriage when he went to collect the rent. In fact, with each month that passed after Rowena left, Dorie and her father had become more and more companionable. Not that they talked, but they were less like prisoner and guard than they had been.

But if Rowena had her way and returned to try to force their father to allow Dorie to marry, she knew her life would become a living hell. If she'd thought Rowena could have pulled it off and found a wonderful man for her to marry, Dorie would have been happy to allow her to do so. But Rowena's taste in men ran toward poets who wore ruffled shirts and said asinine things like “Life is a road few may travel.” Things that made no sense to Dorie but made Rowena weak-kneed. Dorie had pointed out to Rowena a thousand times that she didn't have the wisdom to choose someone as strong and intelligent as Jonathan, that Jonathan had chosen her and then pursued her and followed her; in truth, he had besieged her until Rowena gave in to him out of weariness.

To protect herself, to keep from finding herself married to a man who drank sherry and wore a pinky ring, Dorie had begun writing letters to her sister saying she was planning to marry a man in Latham. Unfortunately she hadn't thought far enough ahead to make up a man. A fictional man could have been killed off in some romantic tragedy and Dorie could now be wearing black in mourning. Instead, she had written about a man she and Rowena had known all their lives: Alfred Smythe. At the time Dorie started the letters, Alfred's second wife had just died and as she and her father had driven by in the carriage, Alfred—whom Dorie considered to be as old as her father—had looked up at Dorie as though wondering if she could be number three.

Somehow everything had snowballed from there. To her great surprise, Dorie found that she had a talent for fiction, maybe because she wasn't actually living in life, so she could live on paper. She began to formulate a grand romance with Alfred. And the more she wrote, the more enthusiastic Rowena's responses became, so the more flamboyant Dorie's descriptions became. She began to glorify Alfred, to talk of his swaggering walk, of the danger of him. She told Rowena that Alfred appeared to be a mere shopkeeper, but the truth was that he was involved in something hazardous and daring. Since Dorie's knowledge of daring was limited to escaping her father's eye for one whole hour, she never really explained what Alfred was doing. Besides, hints were so much more exciting than reality.

But then Rowena got tired of waiting for a marriage announcement from Dorie, so she sent a letter saying she was coming to America to arrange the marriage. Dorie fired back a letter saying she and Alfred had parted company, so there was no need for Rowena to come. Rowena sent a telegram, which all of Latham saw, that said she was coming to find another husband for her brokenhearted sister.

It was after Rowena's second message that Dorie panicked. What was she going to do? In her own way, Rowena was as big a bully as their father. After all the letters of passion Dorie had sent to her sister, Rowena truly believed that Dorie actually loved that awful little Alfred Smythe, so Rowena had no guilty conscience for pushing Dorie into marriage.

The only thing Dorie could think to do was to marry someone else. And it had to be someone who would satisfy Rowena's romantic spirit and make her believe that Dorie had fallen for him so soon after her grand passion with Alfred.

Dorie wasn't her father's daughter for nothing. When she set out to get a husband, her first thought was to buy one—rather like buying a new pair of shoes. After all, her father had bought his wife. He'd gone back east, read the notices of bankruptcy in the papers, and befriended the first man he found with a daughter who was unattractive enough to never make him worry about another man's attentions. Then he paid off her father's debts and married her.

So Dorie thought she'd hire some man who was in need of money, but it had to be a man who was romantic enough to make her sister leave her alone. It had taken her days to come up with a list of appropriate men, and then by luck she had found that the blacksmith in Latham knew one of them, a man others thought of as a killer. But the blacksmith had told Dorie that Cole Hunter had the softest heart he'd ever seen. Cole didn't know this, and he was such a fast draw that no man was about to tell him, but Cole's soft heart was a big joke among real killers.

“His blood's too warm,” the blacksmith said. “He really hates killing anybody.”

Since Dorie wanted to ask him to pretend to be married to her, this was good news.

She'd found the man in Abilene, and he had not been what she had expected. What was worse, he seemed to dislike her rather heartily. But that didn't surprise Dorie. She had never been successful with men. Not that she'd had any experience, but when Rowena still lived in Latham, Dorie had met a few of the boys-almost-men who came to visit her gorgeous sister. And each and every encounter had been a disaster.

Rowena would say, “Dorie, you are
not
to tell Charles Pembroke that he has the intelligence of a carrot and the grace of an elephant in ballet slippers.”

For a while Dorie had tried to keep her mouth shut and watch—and learn, but Rowena began to make her ill. Rowena oohed and aahed over each and every male creature she met, no matter how stupid or repulsive. It didn't seem honest to Dorie, and above all, Dorie loved honesty.

Eventually, of course, Rowena got married and had two beautiful children, and Dorie lived alone in a big, dark house and gave money to people. She still couldn't understand why men liked lies better than the truth, but they seemed to.

As for Mr. Hunter, she couldn't figure him out at all. He had made sense to her when she first went to him and told him the truth. Like all the other men, he seemed to hate her honesty. Dorie knew that Rowena would have lied to him and flattered him and he would have been eating out of her hand. But Dorie had told him the truth and he'd made it clear that he couldn't stand her.

Unfortunately this hurt Dorie, because much to her disbelief, she rather liked him. She had no idea why she liked him, but she did. Maybe it was that heroic aspect of him. The truth was that when he saved her from the bank robbers, she had felt, well, rather like the heroine in the type of novel her father refused to allow in the house.

But Mr. Hunter had not felt the same way she did. When she went to his room to apologize for whatever it was that she had said to make him so angry the first time, she had succeeded only in making him furious.

But then he had shown up at her hotel room and told her she was to marry him. Maybe he thought Rowena was part of marriage to Dorie. That was the only thing that made sense to her. He had disliked her rather heartily when she alone was involved, but he wanted to marry her after he saw Rowena.

Oh, well, what did it matter anyway? The arrangement was only temporary; in six months he'd be gone. He'd have his five thousand dollars, and Dorie would be back where she'd started. She wasn't fool enough to believe any of his talk about wanting to learn a trade; she knew all he wanted was the money—and maybe a chance at Rowena, but then, all men seemed to want that. It was a perfect arrangement.

Now, sitting across the tiny table from him, the big bed looming behind them, a wedding ring—courtesy of Rowena—weighing down her finger, Dorie pushed her food about on her plate. It was a moment before she was aware that Mr. Hunter was saying something.