Marriage By Necessity

by Christine Rimmer

  Sonny looked at Nate for a long, hard time. Then he shrugged. “I can do what I have to do, sure.”

  “All right, then,” Nate said.

  Sonny echoed, “All right.” He looked at Meggie. “Thanks for the fine dinner. I’ll be going home now.”

  Meggie murmured good-night and Sonny went out the same way Farrah had, through the house to the front door.

  “Don’t make excuses for me,” Nate said into the silence Sonny left behind. “I don’t need them or want them.”

  “I was only trying to make him see—”

  “People see what they want to see.”

  “But Sonny is a reasonable man. I think if he really understood all you’ve done for me, he would—”

  “Drop it.”

  Meggie mentally counted to ten. “Fine.” She pushed herself to her feet and went about the task of cleaning up after the meal.

  “Where’s the dish towel?” Nate asked belligerently a few moments later.

  She snared the towel from the towel rack and tossed it to him. He set to work drying the pots and pans while she finished wiping up the counters. When the pots were all put away and the counters gleamed, Meggie went into the living room to watch a little television before she turned in.

  Nate went straight upstairs to the front bedroom without even bothering to say good-night.

  Chapter Thirteen

  In the days that followed, Nate discovered that Sonny Kane was a man of his word. He’d agreed to work with Nate, and he put his personal disapproval aside to do what had to be done. Before long, Nate even started to wonder if Sonny and his wife had decided that maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.

  It was Meggie who drove Nate crazy. Even with her huge belly leading the way everywhere she went, she drew him just as she always had. And the attraction went far deeper than physical desire. She seemed so peaceful within herself, so content with the burden she carried around. He’d always admired her. And now he admired her more than ever. He not only wanted her—he wanted some of that peace she had.

  Sometimes, when he looked at Meggie now, a question would come sneaking into his mind. He would wonder why the hell he was doing this: to her and to himself. Why did he continue to refuse her? Why did he continue to push her away?

  He would look at her and think, She is my wife. And there seemed to be such rightness, such completeness, in that thought.

  He would remember all the years he had stayed away from her. And he would see his future, remote from her and their child. And his solitary life would start to look more like a sentence than a choice; the emptiness inside him would seem all at once aching and vast.

  But then, at night, when sleep finally found him, he would dream old dreams, of a dark place. Of the smell of musty wool. Of a vow he had made to himself long, long ago.

  Someday I will be free....

  He’d wake in the morning certain once again that all he wanted was to get through calving time and be on his way.

  At first, Meggie hesitantly attempted to bridge the gap between them. At breakfast, she would ask him things like how he’d slept and did he need anything from town. He answered her questions curtly—“I slept fine and I don’t need a damn thing from town”—trying not to be drawn in by her. There were, after all, a thousand and one ways she could get to him—from a bright smile to a gentle word, to a tender look across a room. He tried to keep his heart armed against her.

  And she caught on quickly, as she always had. Within forty-eight hours of his arrival, she began beating him at his own game, looking away before he did. Asking no questions that didn’t absolutely require answers. Staying clear of him whenever possible. Marking time. Until calving time passed. And he would be gone.

  And, though he knew it was unfair, he resented her for giving him just what he’d been asking for. He wanted to grab her and shake her. He wanted to break through that wall she’d put up around herself as armor against his own indifference.

  He wanted her to reach for him. So that, at least for a little while, he could allow himself to be touched.

  But she didn’t reach for him.

  The tension between them seemed to grow by the hour. Sometimes, he felt as if he might explode. Yet, through a pure effort of will, he reined in his temper most of the time—except when she took stupid chances with her health. Then, he felt justified in letting his temper get loose.

  After all, he’d come to help out so that she could take it easy. But she refused to take it easy. She would not stop working. Even though Farrah stayed home more now and offered to take on Meggie’s work with the animals, Meggie wouldn’t hear of that. She insisted on treating the sick and weak stock herself.

  She would spend hours with a calf that wouldn’t suck. About a week after Nate’s return, Sonny brought in a spindly black Angus calf that must have been premature; it simply refused to eat. The mother cow came with it, her bags swollen with unsucked milk; she wore that bewildered look a cow gets when something’s not right with her calf.

  Since the cow was tractable, Meggie started out each feeding session trying to coax the calf to feed from the source. She’d get herself into a backbreaking, half-bentover stance, her own belly an obstacle to be both protected and worked around. Holding the calf’s head steady, pressing her own cheek up against the side of the cow, she’d stick the fingers of one hand in the calf s mouth while she tried to pump milk into it with the other hand.

  Finally, when her arms were running with milk to the elbow, she’d give up on the direct approach. She’d milk the cow into a bucket, stick a rubber teat in the calf’s mouth and force milk into it that way. Through the whole procedure she’d whisper soothing, gentle things. And then four or five hours later, she’d do it all again.

  One night, when she came in from the shed with milk drying on her arms and down the front of her shirt, Nate told her he wanted her to let Farrah do the feeding from now on. “Or let me,” he added, “if Farrah’s got something else to do.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “You should mind. It’s too much for you right now.”

  “I know what’s too much for me. I can handle feeding a few calves.”

  “I mean it, Meggie. You’re through feeding calves. As of tonight.”

  She gave him one of those looks of hers. A look no woman that big eyed and pretty ought to be able to manage. “I know what I can handle, Nate. Don’t you try to tell me I don’t.”

  He reminded her about Abby, who had insisted on finishing a semester at the University of Colorado last year when she’d been pregnant with Tyler Ross. Abby had pushed herself to the brink, and ended up with something called eclampsia that had put her in a coma and almost caused her death.

  “Eclampsia is extremely rare, Nate, and there’s no proof that it’s caused by stress,” Meggie told him.

  “Oh, so you’re an expert on the subject, huh?”

  “I know what it is. And I’m not going to get it.”

  “You’re pushing yourself.”

  - “I am not. And I’m through discussing this.”

  “The hell you are.”

  “Please don’t swear at me.”

  He started shouting then. “Dammit, you have to take care of yourself!”

  She remained maddeningly calm. “I am taking care of myself.”

  “You’re taking chances...but not anymore.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean, no more feeding calves.”

  She looked him up and down, a slow, dismissing kind of look. “Don’t try to make my decisions for me. You won’t succeed.” Then she turned around and headed for the stairs.

  “Meggie, get back here!”

  She didn’t stop; she didn’t even glance back. She just left him there in the kitchen, wanting to chase after her, wanting to shout at her some more, wanting to do a lot of things to her that he didn’t dare even think about.

  That happened about a week after he came back. And every day after that, he found something
she needed to be lectured about.

  One morning in the barn, when he’d brought in a half-frozen calf for her to warm up with one of the propane heaters, he warned her that she’d better stop driving the pickup.

  “I know you drove Katie out to the bus stop today,” he accused, as she was making the calf comfortable on a bed of straw.

  “It was freezing. And it’s a half mile out to the stop.”

  “If Katie needs driving, Farrah will have to do it.”

  “Farrah went out with you and Sonny at the crack of dawn.”

  “Meggie. Hear me. Do not drive the pickup. If you need to go somewhere, I’ll drive you. Or Farrah or Sonny will. Understand?”

  Meggie rose, with some effort, from her kneeling position in the straw. Panting, she glared at him. “Fine. Whatever you say.” Then she turned around and lumbered out the barn door.

  Nate shrugged. She could stomp off all she wanted. She wouldn’t drive that pickup again if she knew what was good for her.

  He looked down at the calf, a little black-baldy. It was a miracle, really, how fast heat could work on them. When he’d found the little critter, he’d looked half dead. And yet now, already, he was lurching around trying to get up.

  Farrah came in and stood by Nate. “How’s the little feller doing?”

  “Take a look. Meggie went to get some milk for him—I think.”

  “You think?”

  “She’s mad because I told her not to drive herself around anymore.”

  Farrah made a noise in her throat. “Don’t see why she’s mad. Doc Pruitt already warned her about driving, now she’s so big.”

  “He did?”

  Farrah met Nate’s eyes and then shook her head. “Now, why do I want to go and get myself between the two of you? Forget I said that.”

  But he didn’t forget.

  That night, Farrah made dinner for everybody. During the meal, Meggie asked Farrah to drive her to her appointment with Doc Pruitt. “It’s tomorrow. At ten-thirty. Do you think you can take me?”

  “I’ll take you,” Nate said. He wanted to have a few words with Pruitt, find out if there was anything else Meggie shouldn’t be doing that she hadn’t bothered to mention to him.

  Meggie blinked. Clearly, she’d only intended to rub it in to him that she wouldn’t be driving herself. The last thing she’d expected was for Nate to volunteer to do the job. She knew how he tried to avoid being alone with her, even in a vehicle. “Farrah can take me.”

  “I said, I’ll take you.”

  “Farrah—”

  Farrah exchanged a quick, grim glance with Sonny. “Leave me out of it. Please.”

  The next day, Nate made sure to be there waiting, with the GMC running and all warmed up, when Meggie came out to leave for town. She gave him a sour look through the driver’s side window, but she didn’t say a word, just waddled on over and lugged her weight up into the passenger seat.

  They rode the whole way to town in silence.

  At the clinic, Meggie signed herself in. The receptionist gave her a little cup and asked her for a urine sample.

  When Meggie returned from the bathroom and took a seat in the waiting room, she didn’t even glance his way. She buried her nose in a tattered magazine with a picture of Cher on the cover. Nate looked around for something he could read. But women’s magazines and kids’ books were all he could find.

  After about a century, Trudy Peltier stuck her head out the inner door. Trudy was Pruitt’s assistant, and an old classmate of both Meggie’s and Nate’s. “Meggie, come on in,” Trudy said.

  Meggie put down her magazine and got to her feet. Nate rose and followed right along behind her. When she realized he planned to go in with her, Meggie turned around and gave him another of her sullen looks. But she had sense enough not to try to tell him to keep out.

  “Well, Nate Bravo,” Trudy said in that too-sweet way of hers, “isn’t it nice to see you here with Meggie for a change?”

  “Think so, huh?” He gave her a long, cold look.

  She pursed up her lips. “Now, now. No need to get snippy.”

  Nate just went on looking at her. The black eye he’d brought back from Boca Raton had faded almost to nothing by then. But still, he was sure Trudy could see it and that she was making judgments about him because of it. She had never been a big fan of his. She flashed him a wide, fake smile and then asked Meggie to step on the scale. “My, my,” she clucked. “You’re gaining nicely.”

  “Too nicely,” Meggie murmured when Trudy finally stopped nudging the counterweight down the bar.

  “This way.” Trudy led them to an examining room. “The doctor will be with you in a few minutes.”

  When Trudy closed the door and left them in the small space, Meggie wiggled up onto the examining table and Nate took the visitor’s chair in the corner. They sat and waited, both trying, as they usually did lately, not to make extended eye contact.

  But the room was too small. Nate had to look somewhere. Once he had studied the color poster of the human heart and read the nutrition chart with its cartoon renderings of happy fruits and vegetables, his gaze just naturally turned Meggie’s way.

  She had more fortitude; she steadfastly refused to look at him. She sat awkwardly on the end of the examining table, her hands resting in what was left of her lap, her gaze cast down.

  Nate studied her bent head, and couldn’t help noting the way her shoulders drooped and the sad curve of her mouth. She looked tired and a little dejected. He often saw her rub at the base of her spine, as if it troubled her. He wondered if it ached now.

  He stood. “You want this chair? Until Pruitt comes?”

  She looked up and blinked. His tone had been gentle, for once. It must have surprised her. “Oh. No. I’m fine.” She put her hand at her back and sat up straighter for a minute, stretching her spine a little.

  “Sure?”

  “Positive.”

  He stood there for a moment, then dropped into the chair again, feeling like a fool. She took to watching her knees once more. And he looked at her. He studied the soft curve of her cheek and wondered at the thickness of her dark hair, remembering in spite of himself just what the silky strands felt like when he ran his hands through them or pressed them against his mouth.

  Finally, Pruitt came in. He greeted Meggie, then nodded at Nate. “Good to see you.”

  “Same to you, Doc.”

  Over the years, Nate had been in to see Doc Pruitt more than once—for everything from a persistent case of strep throat to a bone or two he’d broken riding bulls in the local rodeos.

  Nate watched the doctor take Meggie’s blood pressure and perform a thorough examination. As he tapped and poked and prodded, the old guy murmured things like, “Um, yes. I see. Fine.”

  When Pruitt stepped back and told Meggie she could button up, Nate saw his chance. “Doc?”

  “Hm, yes?”

  “Are there any...special precautions Meggie should be taking right now, for the baby’s sake?”

  Doc Pruitt frowned. “Did she stop driving her pickup on those rutted roads out at the Double-K?”

  Meggie shot Nate an indignant glance and jumped to her own defense. “I did. I stopped.”

  “Well, then, I’d have to say that what we have here is a very healthy, very pregnant woman who appears to be taking dandy care of herself. Just take it easy, Meggie and—”

  Nate leaned forward in his chair. “That’s it, Doc. That’s my point. She won’t take it easy. She’s got to hand-feed every damned orphaned calf herself.”

  Meggie glowered at him. “That’s not true. I’m careful. I do take care of myself. And the baby.”

  “Tell her, Doc. Tell her she’s got to ease up.”

  Doc Pruitt looked at Nate, then at Meggie, then back at Nate again. “Hmm. I think the last thing I want to do right now is to get in the middle of a private discussion between a man and his wife.”

  Nate snorted. “What the hell are you saying? This is a medical questi
on. A question of Meggie’s health. And the baby’s, too.”

  The doc patted Meggie’s hand. “It’s real sweet that he’s so concerned. Tell him to get more rest and to eat right. He’ll need his strength for when the baby comes.”

  Meggie grinned. “Right, Doc.”

  Nate wanted to throttle them both. “I fail to see the damn humor here.”

  “You take care of yourself, Nate,” Doc Pruitt said. “And, Meggie, from here on in, you come see me once a week.”

  “I’ll make an appointment before I go.”

  “Hmm, yes. Sounds good.”

  “Hey, wait...” Nate began, but the doctor had already opened the door and stepped out into the hall.

  Before she went home, Meggie wanted to buy groceries. Nate went into the market with her and then wheeled the cart out to the parking lot and loaded the shopping bags into the big lockbox in the back of the pickup for her, so she wouldn’t strain herself.

  “Oh, and I want to stop off at Cotes’s,” she said just before they headed for home. “I ordered a few things for the baby and I want to see if they came in yet.”

  Cotes’s Clothing and Gifts took up half of a huge old brick building on Main. Nate dropped her off in front of the store and then told her he’d keep the motor running for her, since all the spaces along the street were taken. But then, just after she disappeared inside, a Bronco pulled out of a space right in front of the store. Nate turned the GMC into the empty spot.

  A few minutes passed. Nate began drumming his hands on the steering wheel, wishing to hell she’d hurry up.

  Then he started wondering if Barnaby Cotes could be in there with her. Since his father had died a few years before, Cotes had take over the store. And he’d always been after Meggie. Nate could just see the little weasel now, leaning across the counter at Meggie, smiling that slimy smile of his, stalling on telling her the status of her order just so he could keep her there a few more minutes and drool over her. It wouldn’t mean a damn thing to Cotes that Meggie was married and eight months pregnant. Nate had seen the way Cotes looked at Meggie. The smarmy little twit would take Meggie May any damn way he could get her.