The Marriage Bargain

by Victoria Pade

  “Bee stings. There’s a hive in the apple tree.”

  Victoria had her hair pulled loosely at the base of her neck and tied with a scarf to keep it behind her ears so it didn’t irritate the bites. She reached gingerly to rub the welt on her left lobe that almost gave the appearance of an earring.

  But if there was a positive side to this it was that the revelation of her beehive encounter to Adam seemed to have knocked him slightly for a loop. Because unless she was misreading the change in his expression, he hadn’t purposely sent her to be stung and, in fact, was as surprised as she’d been that the hive was out there. She thought she might even be looking at the evidence of some feelings of guilt for having sent her anywhere near it.

  “What did you do?” he asked in the first civil tone of voice he’d used.

  “I got down as fast as I could and ran.”

  He actually cracked a small smile, apparently at the thought of her retreat. Which, now that she thought about it, had had some comical elements to it.

  “Looks like you didn’t run fast enough.”

  “I don’t know. I ran pretty fast. Most of them got me before I actually realized what was happening.”

  “You look awful.”

  “Gee, thanks. Just the look I was going for.”

  “I meant that you look like it feels awful,” he amended as she carefully scratched a sting on her jaw. “Did you get all the stingers out?”

  “Was I supposed to? I’ve never been stung before.”

  He rolled his eyes. “That figures. I forgot you were a hothouse flower.”

  Victoria did not welcome the return of his facetiousness so she didn’t respond to it.

  Adam sighed then, as if giving in to something. “You’d better let me take a look at them and see if there are stingers to get rid of. If you leave them in they’re apt to get infected. Besides, if you get the stingers out, those bumps will be gone by tomorrow.”

  “I’d appreciate it, then,” she said formally. Not because she was putting on airs but because the thought of him close to her, touching her made her stomach suddenly jittery.

  “Why don’t you eat your pie and I’ll get the supper mess cleared. Then we can do it.”

  That last part had sounded more suggestive than she’d intended. She could feel herself blushing.

  “What I mean is—”

  He stopped her mid-explanation. “I know what you mean.”

  While he took the initial forkful of his pie she used the opportunity to clear the table. Truth was she wanted some distance from him and her own embarrassment.

  “Pretty good pie,” he commented from behind her about the time she reached the sink.

  First a smile and a nicer tone, and now a compliment? She’d never known her meat loaf to be the cure-all for contrariness but maybe she should reassess it, she thought.

  “Don’t sound so amazed,” she countered a bit more flirtatiously than she’d meant to.

  “That Victoria Rutherford can bake? I am amazed.”

  He said her name as if even that was a burr under his saddle, and she hated the sound of it. “These days some people call me Tori.”

  But his only answer was a flat, “Do they.” And she could tell he had no intention of using the shorter, warmer version of her name.

  So much for that, she thought, slightly embarrassed once again at having her overture rejected.

  As she rinsed the dishes and put them in the dishwasher that came with the small but fully equipped kitchen, Adam brought his pie with him to eat standing beside her.

  He leaned his jeans-clad rear against the counter, his long legs stretched out and crossed nonchalantly at the ankles, and Victoria wished she wasn’t so aware of the pure potency of his masculinity.

  But no amount of trying to ignore it made her any less aware. Or any less affected by it. Every sense seemed to stand up and take notice of him.

  He finished his pie and put his plate in the dishwasher. “I’ll see if I can round up what I need and we’ll get started,” he said, pushing off the counter and leaving on long strides that made his heels click against the wooden floor until he reached the rug that covered it in the living room section of the space. Then the clicks resumed as he went into the hall that led to the bathroom.

  Victoria couldn’t have been more attuned to those steps if she’d been watching him take them. So much so that she felt something inside her grow with each one.

  Anticipation? she wondered.

  Possibly.

  Anticipation and something else.

  Eagerness? Maybe even some light shade of excitement?

  But that was crazy.

  Poking around with a needle and tweezers in welts that were already sore was hardly something to be excited about.

  It was the thought of Adam getting close to her. Touching her.

  Stop it! she ordered herself. He’s an ogre. An ogre. An ogre.

  Except that he didn’t look like an ogre when she turned to find him standing there, supplies in hand.

  There was nothing ogreish about his heart-stoppingly handsome face or his big man’s body or the impact it all had on her.

  “Why don’t you lie down on the couch?” he suggested. “That way I can have the lamplight shining right on you and you’ll be less likely to make any sudden movements.”

  Victoria’s mouth went dry at the idea of lying on the sofa with him above her. Close above her…

  No matter how reasonable his directions were, it didn’t help the thrumming of her pulse.

  “Do you want me to do this or not?” Adam asked at her hesitation.

  Maybe it was better to suffer and risk infection, Victoria thought.

  But she knew that wasn’t true.

  “I suppose it needs to be done,” she answered, hoping it sounded as if she was leery of the pain and not of being near him.

  “Get some ice. I won’t hurt you any more than I have to,” he said reassuringly.

  But at that moment, under those circumstances, she almost wished for his sarcasm and hostility instead. At least when he was off-putting it was easier to resist the other things going on inside her.

  Now, being nice, his appeal was lethal.

  “Just let me get a drink of water,” she said, buying herself time and hoping it would stave off the dryness in her mouth and somehow help her regain her equilibrium.

  But filling a glass with tap water and drinking it took only a few seconds. And the water didn’t help. Her mouth still felt like the Sahara desert and as for regaining her equilibrium, water just wasn’t strong enough to accomplish that.

  She had no choice then but to make an ice pack and return to where Adam sat on the coffee table, waiting for her.

  “I burned the needle with a match and then cleaned it with some alcohol,” he told her.

  For a moment she stood in front of the couch, looking at it, at Adam sitting right there, barely a foot away from where he expected her to lie down.

  But she didn’t want to make him mad so she tried to ignore the jitters in her stomach and the race of her pulse, and forced herself to sit first and then slowly stretch out on the cushions in front of him.

  “Should we start at the top and work down?” he asked.

  Visions of things that were a whole lot more sensual than taking stingers out of bee bites flashed through Victoria’s mind.

  But all she said was, “Sure. Whatever you want. I mean, think. Whatever you think.”

  He took the makeshift ice pack from her and placed it on the welt at her right temple, leaning to study more closely what he’d be tending.

  “You know, I wouldn’t have sent you out there to pick those apples if I’d have known about the hive. I didn’t mean for you to get stung.”

  Was that an apology? From Adam Benson?

  Victoria could hardly believe what she was hearing.

  “It’s okay,” she said, keeping to her decision to not try engaging him in too much conversation and leaving the talking to him.<
br />
  “It’s a good thing you weren’t allergic like one of my half brothers,” he continued. “He ended up in the hospital.”

  So he was suffering some guilt. Good. She was glad to know he had at least that much of a conscience.

  “I’m lucky,” she agreed. Although at that moment lucky was not how she felt.

  Hot was more like it.

  Not that the room was excessively warm. In fact, the front door was ajar the way it had been the previous night and the evening air was very cool. But Adam seemed to give off heat on his own.

  Or maybe it was just her own body’s reaction to him.

  But either way, even the ice pack on her head wasn’t cooling her off.

  “Why don’t you hold that on your ear next, and I’ll get going here,” he suggested, bending so far over her his nose couldn’t have been more than two inches from her face.

  She could smell the clean, citrusy scent of his after-shave and it suddenly made her head go so light she felt dizzy.

  How was she going to lie there perfectly still and pretend he didn’t have a physical effect on her when she was reeling with physical effects?

  “So what kind of life did I steal you away from?” he asked then, interrupting her thoughts just as he wielded the tweezers.

  She wondered if he was only trying to distract her, or if he gave a tinker’s damn what kind of life he’d taken her from.

  “I went to Boston University after graduating high school, got my bachelor’s degree and then my master’s there.”

  “And stuck around to work there, too?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “As a professor?”

  “I’m not a full professor yet. But I teach philosophy, yes.”

  “Philosophy?”

  “Mainly women’s studies.”

  “You’re a feminist,” he said as if it amused him.

  “I believe in equal rights and privileges for everyone, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Really?” he said facetiously again, and she knew she’d touched a nerve once more.

  “All right, look, I admit that I was a snob as a kid. Does that make you happy?”

  “But now you aren’t, is that what you expect me to believe?”

  “I’m definitely not a snob now, but you can believe it or not, I don’t care.”

  That was a lie. She did care. Once she’d gotten out into the world she’d realized just how elitist she’d been. And it wasn’t something she was proud of. She’d worked hard to shed that old sense of superiority and opened her eyes to the way things should be between people.

  She wished Adam could see that. Could see that she was different than that obnoxious young girl who had turned her nose up at the ranch hand’s son in public all the while she’d been secretly lusting after him in private.

  She hazarded a glance up at Adam and discovered him smiling slightly again, as if he was enjoying taunting her and her reaction to it.

  “Got it!” he said then, pulling out something with the tweezers that was too small for her to see.

  He wiped them on a tissue and then took her hand and the ice pack with it away from her ear to focus on the sting on her cheekbone.

  Victoria wished he hadn’t done that.

  The touch of his hand on hers sent wild things bolting up her whole arm and all through her like an electrical shock. And worse than that, she felt her nipples harden in response—something that she knew was all too visible in the shirt pulled tight across her breasts.

  She prayed Adam wouldn’t look down and notice.

  But her prayers weren’t answered.

  As he reached for the needle again she saw him catch sight of her chest and she wanted to crawl in a hole.

  Instead she pretended her arm was tired and switched hands to hold the ice pack with her right hand so she could cross her arm over her breasts.

  It was hardly a subtle move and it brought a soft chuckle from Adam, as if he saw right through it.

  “Maybe we should shut the door. It’s getting a little chilly in here,” she said, again lying, but hoping to fool him.

  He got up without commenting and closed the door.

  And Victoria did the dumbest thing: she watched him do it.

  Her gaze rode along on the back pockets of his jeans and the sight of that to-die-for derriere didn’t help matters. Not at all. In fact, it made them worse still as her nipples seemed to tighten up even more.

  And once again her mouth went dry and her brain tormented her with images of his hands on her breasts as hers reached around him and learned if his rear end felt as good as it looked.

  She closed her eyes and willed her body and mind to behave. But it was a struggle and when she opened her eyes again Adam was back, sitting on the coffee table, looking so incredibly handsome that her heart skipped a beat and she completely lost the battle.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  Ready for what—that was more the question.

  But Victoria said a feeble, “Sure,” hating that it came out on a squeak of a voice.

  He bent to his task and said, “A teacher’s salary can’t keep you living in the style you were accustomed to. Was Daddy supplementing your income before things tightened up for him?”

  That helped, because Victoria took offense. As it almost seemed she was meant to.

  “I’ve supported myself since graduating from college,” she announced tersely, feeling the pure sensuality he’d roused in her abate somewhat.

  “Not living on Beacon Hill, then, are you?”

  “I have a perfectly nice apartment near the school.”

  “Alone?”

  He seemed to be fishing with that question and if he was asking if she was involved with anyone she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction he was looking for. Instead she gave only a simple, “Yes, alone.”

  He extracted another stinger and reached for her hand to move the ice pack again.

  But this time Victoria pulled her hand away before he could touch her and said curtly, “Where do you want this?”

  Adam smiled, a full-out grin this time. “That sounded like a threat.”

  “I just meant—”

  “I know what you meant,” he repeated, making an elaborate point of aiming just one extended index finger at the spot where she should hold the ice.

  Victoria found it without more assistance from him, stared up at the ceiling as if nothing at all was going on with her, and hazarded a question of her own. “Where do you live?”

  He went back to work before he said, “I have a place in Manhattan and another one in Chicago and Denver and L.A. A condo in Aspen. A flat in London. This ranch. And now yours, too. At one time or another I live in all of them.”

  “And a share in the Kincaid spread if that goes through,” she reminded him, rather than taking the bait that seemed to have been in his tone when he’d included her family’s ranch in his list of holdings. “You get around,” she added then.

  “Out of necessity.”

  He moved on to another sting, again merely pointing to where she should hold the ice pack next.

  “And your mother?” she asked, referring to his aunt Gertrude who had raised him. “Where is she now?”

  “She passed away last year. Heart attack. She went quick.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I.”

  Again he finished with one of the bites, let her know where to move the ice, and studied the one she’d just numbed.

  “What about your work now?” he asked, changing the heavier tone they’d drifted into. “Did they expect you back today?”

  “I took the semester off to deal with selling the ranch and moving everything out so my mother wouldn’t have to leave Dad to do it.”

  “So you won’t be missed.”

  “What about you? Will you be missed at work?”

  She was fishing because she didn’t know exactly what he did for a living. She assumed it was business of some sort,
a business that obviously paid well and for which he traveled a great deal. But since he acted as if it was a given that she knew what his occupation was, she was afraid he would treat her like a dimwit if she asked outright.

  But the fishing didn’t help because all he said in answer to her question was, “I am work.”

  “Does that mean everything stops while you’re away?” She tried again.

  “It means that where I am is where the work is.”

  And that seemed to be that because when he’d finished with the welt on her jaw and moved on to the one on her neck he said, “I think this is the last,” as if the previous subject was played out. “And the worst.”

  “I know.”

  “It almost looks like there’s two stingers in it.”

  “A mutant bee?”

  He laughed. “Maybe. Turn your head a little, will you? The shadow of your jaw makes it hard to see.”

  She did as she was told, trying not to be as thrilled as she was by just the simple fact that he was being nice.

  “So what’s on my agenda for tomorrow?” she asked as she stared at the cushions of the sofa back, wanting to remind herself that he really was the tyrant in this piece.

  “One side of the barn is showing more weather damage than the rest. You get to scrape it and paint it,” he answered as if he was granting a favor.

  “Oh, good,” she said with a fair amount of facetiousness of her own.

  “Better check around for hornet or wasp nests in the eaves before you get started. I don’t want a repeat of this.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  Neither of them said anything else for a while. Victoria just stayed staring at the plaid pattern of the couch while Adam worked on her.

  It was a relief to know this whole thing was nearly over with, and yet there was a part of her that was almost sorry.

  Certainly it hadn’t been pleasant but she and Adam had actually had a normal conversation and that had been nice. Nicer than any of the rest of the time they’d spent together since they’d met up again.

  Maybe it was her long day’s work catching up with her and the fatigue it brought with it, but she suddenly found herself relaxing.

  She felt him pull out the stingers and expected him to pronounce her finished, to get up and away from her as soon as he could. But he was still sitting there, leaning over her.