by Tanya Hanson
“I refuse to believe she refused you.” Cordy’s nose rose. “No well-bred young lady with an orangery declines an earl’s handsome son.”
His heart trilled a bit at her last words, but he needed to be clear. “Cordy, we parted friends. I promise you. Davina didn’t want to come to America. We’d had champagne. She flirted. I responded. One brief evening, is all. It meant nothing.”
Her eyes brimmed, and her feet shuffled against the rug with surprising noise. “To her, I promise that it did. Mean something. It did, to me. I gave my heart once, my kiss. Only to…” She interrupted herself with a gulp.
Anger burbled. So there had been a cad. Hawk knelt in front of her for comfort. Her revulsion rolled into him, but he needed her. He might as well repulse her all the way with his explanation, and then start the begging. Grabbing her hands, he held them against his throbbing heart.
“Davina was in line as a possible bride for my brother.” Hawk forced his eyes on Cordy during his shameful confession. Hoped her disgust did not end his reason to live.
Cordy merely blinked. Hawk went on, “I wanted to see if she might prefer me. That I might be better than Burton. Just once. Just for an instant. It was hard as the younger son with an elder brother so perfect.” The foolishness of youth flamed across Hawk’s skin but did not compare to the heat for Cordy. “I repented my shameful vanity. And Davina forgave me.”
He touched Cordy’s cheek.
Beneath her white face, Cordy’s teeth ground beneath his fingertips. The eyes raised to his told many sad stories with just one blink. “I know this situation well, Hawk. I lived it with Clancy. Over and over. What I got, he wanted. Where I succeeded, he ruined everything he touched. And yet, I always forgave him.” She looked away as she grasped her skirts with tight fingers.
Hawk hissed quick between his teeth, then ran a gentle finger over her mouth. The softness twitched the toes inside his fancy boots. “I’m not Clancy. And Davina laughed when I confessed. Please, do understand.”
“Oh, I do understand.” Cordy cleared her throat, hard, tossed her head with a dash to rid his hand. “It seems you proposed to Davina and didn’t mean it. And you propose something just as meaningless to me now.”
His heart stilled. “Cordy, I’ve never been more serious in my life.”
She looked away so he was unable to drown in her gaze. “Hawk, I, this is ridiculous. I can’t marry you. Today or ever.”
“Ever?” Somehow the word hurt. He rather understood why she was hesitant now, but ever? “Why not?”
She took a deep breath and looked him straight on. “First off, I’m convenient—the only woman you can ask for a thousand miles. Secondly, I believe marriage involves falling in love.”
Cordy’s lips trembled over the last three words, and his heart flipped a few times. “After a man and woman know everything about each other. The wonderful, the warts. Everything. When you interrupted me at the mercantile, I was having this very same serious conversation with Katie.”
Cordy briefly brushed his chin with her fingers, but his pulse stopped for nearly forever. “Hawk, you and I, we’re undiscovered countries.”
The idea tantalized him to his toes. “We could discover.” Was he pleading? He held his breath.
“Yes, perhaps friendship. Courtship, even. But not marriage. At least, not today! We aren’t even friends. We’re barely business partners.” Cordy looked away and stared at an awful puce-colored wall. “I won’t deny you stole my breath when I fell into your arms. And I haven’t caught it yet. But I have no choice but to refuse you. You make no sense at all.”
He’d stolen her breath! Despite the puce, a warm masculine satisfaction rushed across him, and he brushed his fingers across her face. She didn’t pull away. That was something.
“I need you, Cordy.” Beneath his touch, her cheek heated deliciously. “And I’m perfectly sensible. If I already have a wife, Muybridge can’t expect me to take on another.” Hawk meant every word.
She raised a hand to knot her fingers with his. And he liked it. Liked that she didn’t pull away. “Why would your indiscretion with Davina matter now? Didn’t she marry your brother?”
The touch of her hand reached very pore of Hawk’s skin. “He selected another heiress.” Hawk tried to chuckle, but could hardly talk. “Her sister. So I know Davina is still unwed. Muybridge must think she yet languishes for me.”
“Well, perhaps she does.” Cordy’s eyebrows tied together like a brown ribbon. “Or maybe Muybridge wanted the marriage to Burton and feels you got in the way?”
Hawk choked. Every sinew tightened with dread at her words, at the horrible thoughts he’d never had before she spoke them. “Well, then, I’m doubly dead.”
“How do you even know he’s on his way here?” Cordy loosened their hands to smack at the telegram. “There’s nothing about travel plans. You don’t even know for sure the wire is from him.”
“I can’t take the chance should I be wrong. He is a very determined person, hence his success with motion pictures.”
“All of this is impossible to accept.”
“Cordy, it’s real.” Hawk raised her wrist to his lips, and he trembled. Hope surged when her pulse raced beneath his mouth. “I’d say, discuss all of this with Harry Larkins. The other man Eadweard Muybridge believes compromised a woman he loved—but the major is moldering in a grave.” Hawk’s voice hardened. Could she feel his fear? He prayed so. The blackness was as deep as the tin mine closing around him…yet something like love burgeoned, too. “Please trust me.”
Cordy rolled her eyes. At least she didn’t seem terrified of him any longer. “You’re being melodramatic. There’s bound to be a completely innocent meaning to the telegram.”
Hawk stuck to his guns. “No. I know Muybridge. Nothing is more permanent than a cemetery.”
“I need time to think.” She got up and paced the room and turned to him from the doorway. “I’ve already trusted you with the exhibition. I’ve put my reputation on display, too. But marriage? It’s impossible.”
“It must be legal, irrefutable, but need be only temporary. We can annul should you prefer. Later on.” The words hurt to say.
Cordy stormed back in front of him. “That makes the whole idea even worse. Marriage isn’t something you cast off when it isn’t convenient for you anymore.” Her words disappeared into a choke, and she turned away. “And I won’t be something you cast off when you don’t need me anymore.”
Hawk could barely hear her words, but her pain rang loud and clear in his head. “Cordy?” He stared into her eyes, and reached out his hand. Her cheek softened under his touch. For a strange second, he recognized he’d never leave her behind. “I never said I wanted it only temporary. But that it’s a possibility to ease your mind. Should you prefer. Oh, Miss Cordelia Meeker, marry me.”
After one more beautiful second, Cordy knocked his hand away. Then her arms crossed her chest like an angry governess.
“No. Hawk, I have my own goals and dreams. They may not be important to anybody but me, but they are important. To me.”
Oh, he ached to hold her. “I know that. Cordy, I can help you get your start in Colorado. We could do so together. And I know you’re not indifferent to me.”
“Indifferent? What a cold and awful word. And I don’t need anybody’s help.” Now she stuck out her elbows, fingers tight at her hipbones.
His insides roiled with heat. Something, something more than rage blazed in her eyes. Not desire?
He gathered her close, and she let him. Once again, his fingers drifted across her cheek, soft as rain. Then he dropped to his knee. “Cordy, marry me. Please?” he asked with his whole heart.
Chapter Seven
An hour later, Cordy tamped down her nerves by attacking the miles of cloth spread over the dining room table. She should have been sewing up a bridal gown. Not a foolish screen of only estimated dimensions.
Yet she was about to marry the man of her dreams. Had she lost her own mind
? Her heart ground to a halt before turning into a hurricane.
Why had she done it? Why on earth had she agreed? Not the exhibition; she was desperate and had no choice. But marriage?
She stuck her finger again, with a needle as long as a snake.
Well, it was simple. Clancy had never said the word please ever. Never. Hawk said it one time and she landed in his arms like she belonged there.
And it felt right. She couldn’t miss the chance that she did belong there. That it was true love brewing in her heart.
Oh, Hawk. Her heart sang. The soft touch of his hand. Her heart melted anew. The caring caress in his tone. She put down the needle to touch her lips and imagined his fingers there. His Stetson. Closing her eyes, she relived every dream she’d done. And at the scent of cloud and sky and man, her blood streaked up and down her body just at the thought of him. How his fingers might feel drifting over her in the dark. She coughed away the racy thought.
And darkness reached for her with an ugly hand. Part of her despised giving in to it all again—a man asking for something only to get something. Just like Clancy. Then she remembered, too. The heart wanted what the heart needed. What if she hadn’t run into Katie Haynes today to hear those very words? Did she need Hawk as well as want him?
And now, Hawk as her husband?
Every cell of her body shimmied at the thought.
At the reality. Yet they hadn’t even kissed. Maybe he wanted merely another business arrangement after all.
Men!
She heard the front door, and the wondrous outdoor fragrance of him landed on her shoulders. Her ire fled. She’d long since drawn the front window curtains to prevent being the brunt of rampant curiosity. The exhibition certainly, for here she was building the foolish screen. But mostly, her sudden betrothal. Maybe, with the privacy, he’d kiss her now.
He didn’t. But before her heart fell too far, his strong fingers started to ease the tension from her shoulders. Air left her lungs at the mere heat of his hands.
“Good afternoon, Cordy. Fifty-three entrants so far, and contracts duly notarized,” he said, somehow shy. “Does no one in town have one of Mr. Singer’s machines?”
Of course, but she couldn’t confess she’d never used one. “Hawk, I’m doing all right,” she said although every inch of her life was stretching beyond imagination.
He sat next to her. “How I wish you were at work on a bridal gown.” The warm words landed on her hair, and his arm rested strong yet gentle across her shoulders. For a delicious second, she cuddled into him. Pretended it was real.
Her heart jumped into her throat, and she stabbed her finger for the thousandth time. “Um, I doubt you do.” Nervous laughter bubbled. “This isn’t a real wedding, anyway.”
His face softened. “I mean my vows, Cordy.”
For a flash, she drowned in his gaze, but the weight of the vow she was about to take shook her core. Nor did he lean to kiss her. “Tiny bloodspots dot this thing like ants after a chicken bone.” She tried to keep her tone light, but hurt at his non-kiss raged anew. She made a face at him. “You didn’t need to invite the whole town. The top citizens would have been sufficient as witnesses.”
The warm hands again. “I had little choice but to include everyone. Your announcement that you once had feelings for me ‘back home’ is the talk of the town.”
“Well, I had to say something. No one marries a man she’s known for a single day.” Except her. And deep down, Cordy wanted to. Hadn’t she found her cowboy, a man bound for the west and its endless skies? And if he needed help owning land, didn’t she have the citizenship he needed?
Hawk tsked with his teeth. “At any rate, the wedding must be public and widely known for the marriage to be realistic.”
“But it isn’t real. I’m just convenient.” She swallowed a sob of doubt. “And everyone watching…thinking something is true that isn’t true one single bit.” For the thousandth time, Lambert Truefitt and his nasty friends stood around her in the Bronckton Quadrangle, jeering and pointing. Tears she couldn’t stop dripped to her nose.
Hawk moved to hold her within the circle of his arms, as close and wonderful as he had on the boardwalk outside when proposing his, well, proposal. “I do wish…” His tone turned warm, almost loving. “Chicken bone or not, I do wish you had time for a lovely wedding gown and veil. Every man wishes to gaze upon his bride’s rapture as she strides up the aisle to him.”
His eyes softened as his gaze brushed her. It almost felt real, so she crushed her rapture. Every bride wished the same. But it wasn’t real anyway.
“My Sunday best will have to do.” Her heart skipped a sad beat. Last she recalled, she’d spilled coffee across her Sunday best and hurriedly hid the splotch with a brooch. She forced a shrug beneath his caressing fingers. “That’s all my mother did. Mrs. Hackett doesn’t stock bridal gowns at the mercantile.”
“She might have another lovely dress,” he murmured close to her hair.
His scent of pine and ocean and forever drifted up her nose and would linger until she died. “Well, we need the money for other things.” True but her heart hurt, and the mercantile’s lacy hat flashed in her head. “As it is, Miss Geraldine is helping Lisa Pelton bake the wedding cake.”
Hawk tightened his arms, and though desperate for his kiss, Cordy found her senses. After all, he considered the act meaningless. That cooled her quick but also put her in mind of a bridal night, and she pushed him away. If a kiss meant nothing, she wasn’t about to become victim to a bridegroom’s insincere lust. She trembled anyway.
Practically reared, halted thoughts of a honeymoon. “Hawk, you ought to alert Sheriff Pelton that your life is in danger.”
Hawk, obviously distressed that she shirked him, stared at her for a while. “No. Eadweard is ever a gentleman.” He rubbed the top of her hand. “He will not lie in wait or perform a secret attack. At best, it would be an affair of honor.”
Cordy snorted. Her needle jabbed again. “Oh. A duel. A practice outlawed in at least eighteen American states.” She couldn’t recall if Nebraska was one of them. “You’re likely to land yourself in jail if not a coffin.”
Hawk in a coffin? Why had the words left her mouth? No!
“I shall be fine. I promise you that, Cordy.” He stuck his finger inside a long curly lock of her hair. Her breath hitched without a sound. “You will not be wife and widow the same day.”
Widow. Wife. Nerves clawed across her back. Clancy, dead from a gun. “I warn you, Hawk.” Her voice turned abnormally harsh. “I couldn’t bear the man I lo—, I mean, another man in my life dying on the ground in his own blood.”
His tender gaze warmed her through. “Cordy, don’t trouble your thoughts. I, I’ve been a second. In a duel. I know what transpires.”
Dropping the needle, she rose, hands on hips in her governess way, and sniffed, loud. “Davina again?”
“No. No.” His cheekbones turned the color of fine wine. “No. There was a beastly cretin at college, a few actually, who humiliated my housemate’s cousin, a most virtuous young lady. My mate and I finally had enough and called out the ringleader.”
She stiffened, yet rather pleased at Hawk’s reaction this time. Apparently scum like Lambert existed everywhere, and Hawk had stood up in a righteous cause for innocence. “Did you…he…they?”
He burst into laughter. “No. They ran off like rats escaping a sinking ship.”
“I can’t see how that comforts me.” She sat back down close to his warmth and tangled her fingers in the cloth. Instead of his hair. “Not that I want you to have shot someone, honorably or otherwise. It means you are inexperienced, and Mr. Muybridge obviously is not.”
“We shouldn’t worry. It won’t come to that. Not if I’m respectably married. That’s the reason for everything.”
Yes, when the reason should be love. Sparkles. Her heart tumbled even though she told it not to, and she grabbed the edge of the old mahogany table. Cordy could not explain her feelings, b
ut the confusion thrilled her. Something in the last twenty fours had tied her and Hawk together. She felt it, and he knew it. His confidence comforted, not irked her.
And she’d given him her word. That meant something. Her very own parents had made a loveless marriage work. So she wondered why the walls around her started to close in. Hers wasn’t loveless. Not on her part, at least.
Cordy tossed away the screen. Her world was changing so awfully fast. “Listen, Hawk, I need some air. Can we perhaps wander over to see the, the progress of the exhibition?”
“Of course. I thought you’d never ask. I’d love to show you off.” His lips slowed over the words, and his face glowed. “Some of the riders are already practicing.”
“How? I’m still working on the screen. And the framework can’t possibly be finished.” Sudden fear roiled through her. “No. I changed my mind. You need to stay inside. We won’t be married for hours, and Mr. Muybridge might already be in Paradise.”
Hawk’s lips once again twisted deliciously to one side of his mouth. “Well, the wire did say tomorrow. But truth to tell, Gunnar has been on the lookout for a stranger in town.”
“Well, thanks to our Help Wanted, and your busy posse, there are many strangers here. All of my rooms are booked.” For a brief flash, delight at an improved financial status cooled the heat of terror, and she smiled.
Hawk smiled back and her heart jabbed a rib. “Muybridge has a very distinct appearance, Cordy. I’ve described him perfectly. My—posse as you refer to them, will spot him right off. And besides, I already told you, he will pursue the path of honor.”
Him, lying in a pool of blood? She shook her head to rid the dreadful thought. “Honor? It’s a strange honor, shooting someone. And don’t get me started on war. Or hunting.” She picked up the needle from the ground and plunged it into a pincushion shaped like a strawberry.
He touched her cheek, and her heart hitched. She was about to be this man’s bride. She gulped behind the ruffle of her collar. What would tonight be like, snug in his arms? Learning the power of his body?
