Cash blinked. He wasn't capable of words.
"Of course I suppose we could have got married and I could have stayed here…" Her voice drifted off, and this time she did look at him, as if expecting him to have an answer.
He opened his mouth again, but the words still wouldn't come.
Milly smiled a little ruefully. "But it probably isn't the best way to start a marriage."
"Um … no." At least he managed that.
"Well, I can't really leave him yet. He's only working a couple of hours a day. But in a few months … you don't mind waiting a few months, do you? I mean, we've waited this long! It'll be hard, but I guess I can wait." She gave him an impish, conspiratorial smile, one that said she was totally unaware that she had just rocked the foundations of his world.
And that was when Cash realized that if he told her he hadn't any intention of getting married anytime soon—hadn't so much as given it a thought—he'd positively shatter hers.
He wasn't sure he actually wasn't going to marry Milly—sometime. Someday. Just not now.
The very thought damn near gave him hives. It made the skin prickle on the back of his neck. It made him break out in a cold sweat. Get married? No sir. No way!
He just knew he wasn't ready for it. Heck, he'd barely turned twenty-eight. Milly was just twenty-three. They had their whole lives ahead of them! If they started now they could be married sixty years, for heaven's sake!
They didn't need to think about anything so permanent, so solid, so unrelenting—so damn terrifying—as marriage. But he couldn't say so.
Not the way Milly was looking at him, her heart in her eyes.
He cleared his throat. He raked his fingers through his hair. He shifted from one foot to the other. His leg throbbed and he rubbed it instinctively. "Cripes, Milly, we don't have time to talk about things like that now." He glanced at his watch in desperation. "I gotta go."
"You haven't even eaten," she protested.
"Well, I don't have time to eat." He got the one boot on and reached for the other.
"It's ready, Cash. You need to eat."
"I'll grab somethin' on the road."
"But—"
"Don't worry. I won't starve." He jammed his heel down hard, wincing as he did so. But he had to go. He felt like the trap was closing. Grabbing Milly, he hauled her close and kissed her hard one last time. "Bye."
She hung on, hugged him. "Bye," she said against his lips. Her tongue touched his.
God, she was so-o-o-o tempting!
But she expected him to marry her.
"Oregon's callin', sweetheart." He untangled himself and backed rapidly toward the door, snagging his hat off the chair as he went.
Milly followed him out onto the porch. "I love you, Cash," she said as he clattered down the steps.
At the bottom he turned back and looked up at her smiling down at him. His heart did a funny sort of somersault. He swallowed. "Love you, too, Mil."
It was, after all, probably the truth.
Just not the whole truth—which was that the very thought of marrying her scared him to death.
She was a woman in love. A woman committed.
She had given herself without reservation to Cash Callahan—mind and body, heart and soul. She loved him. He loved her.
She knew it. Not just because of his words. Not because of the need in him that night—or the desire or the passion. Most important, there had been reverence, too.
Cash Callahan loved her. Milly knew it.
It was just a matter of her father getting better and taking his place back at work. Then they could get married. She knew that, too.
She didn't see Cash again for a month. She knew he needed to go hard if he was going to make enough money to live on this year, now that there was no hope for him making the finals. She didn't mind. She'd waited without knowing he loved her, hadn't she?
This wait was easier by far.
And she didn't mind being the one to call him now. She didn't feel awkward using his pager number. They were in love, after all.
Besides, whenever she paged him, he called her right back. He told her about the horses he'd drawn, the rides he'd made. He talked fast and furious, hardly let her get a word in edgewise. When she did, she told him she loved him, and was pleased when he said he loved her, too. And then, of course, he always asked about her dad.
She guessed he was as eager as she was for them to tie the knot.
Her father's progress wasn't as fast as she'd hoped. "He tires so easily. I don't know when he'll be ready to come back full-time."
And because he was the kind, infinitely patient man he was, "Don't hurry him," Cash always said.
Milly loved him.
She said so often enough. But more than the words, there was the way she smiled at him, the way she touched him, the way she showed him her love whenever her body welcomed his.
He was the only man she'd ever made love with. He knew that, too. It made him feel warm and content and strong and kind of deep-down happy. It also scared him to death.
This love she was showing him and talking about was capital letter LOVE. No-holds-barred LOVE. The kind that had marriage written all over it. It fairly shouted the word—just as she did.
He knew she wanted it, expected it, had a right to it.
And still he couldn't bring himself to say it out loud.
He thought he would get better at it if he practiced. He and his new traveling partners, Denny and Walt, drove thousands of miles over hundreds of hours. And a lot of the time that they were driving, Cash said the word marriage over and over in his head.
It didn't help.
In fact, the more often he thought about it, the worse he felt.
He had nothing to offer a woman in marriage. He had no home, no steady income, no prospects beyond the next eight-second ride. He hadn't won the world. He wasn't even going to make it to the finals this year. He'd be lucky if he didn't have to take a construction job to get through the winter.
"Reckon you're washed up?" his old man asked when Cash called home to wish them a merry Christmas. Len Callahan felt about the word tact what Cash did about marriage.
"No," Cash said through his teeth.
Len grunted. "Better be checkin' out a real job."
Not on your life, Cash thought. That was one more step down the road to being exactly what his old man was. "Merry Christmas to you, too," he said, and hung up.
He went back to bed with Milly.
"It'll be better next year," she told him.
"Gotta be," he said, wrapping her in his arms.
"You'll make it. It will be your lucky year."
"Mmm." Kissing her made it feel better already.
"Dad's so much stronger. I think by summer I can leave him. Just think," she snuggled closer. "By this time next year we'll be married!"
Cash swallowed and covered her mouth with his. He didn't want to talk about that.
Milly did.
As time went by, Cash thought she had weddings on the brain.
All her friends were making plans. Why weren't they?
"We could get married in the summer," she told him when he came through in March. They were lying in bed, wrapped in each other's arms.
Cash shook his head. "Summer's my busiest time."
"It doesn't take long. One afternoon."
"Plannin' takes long." He'd heard nothing but wedding plans every time he'd seen her in the past two months.
"I'll do it. You don't have to do anything but show up."
He sat up and reached for his shorts. "We aren't in any hurry, you know." He glanced back over his shoulder at her.
Milly blinked. "We aren't?"
"Well, I'm not," he admitted finally, standing up and pulling on his jeans.
Milly sat up. Her eyes widened. "You're not?"
He shrugged awkwardly and slipped into his shirt. "Well, it's not a real big deal, is it? I mean, what's marriage really? What would we have that we don't have now?" He gave her his best
cowboy grin.
Milly didn't grin back. "We'd have commitment," she told him. "Vows."
Exactly what he was afraid of. Cash buttoned his shirt, then scratched the back of his head. "Commitment," he said. Another one of those foreign terms. "Um, well—" he glanced at his watch "—oops. Gotta go."
He kissed her quickly and left while she was still getting dressed.
He stayed away a month this time. He had a slew of rodeos to go to down south. They paid better than the ones up north, he told her on the phone. He needed time—and space—and so did she—enough to get the whole marriage bug out of her system.
He didn't get back until a Friday afternoon in May. He went to the store, hoping he would find Dori there with her so Dori could be backup while he spirited Milly away for a little quick loving.
Instead he found John there by himself. "She's at home," Milly's father said.
Cash's eyes widened. "You're back full-time?"
John lifted his shoulders a fraction of an inch. "Gettin' there."
"Great." Which it was—unless it gave Milly ideas.
And he could see it had when he used the key she'd given him to let himself into her apartment ten minutes later. She was pirouetting around the room in a wedding dress!
He almost dropped dead.
Milly did, too, but from astonishment, not sheer terror. "Isn't it gorgeous?" she said when she recovered. "It's Lizzie Thomas's. I told her I'd hem it for her."
Cash felt as if his tongue was welded to the roof of his mouth. The vision of Milly in yards and yards of white satin did nothing to loosen it.
"I'm hemming my dress, too," Milly said. "See?" She held up the deep blue bridesmaid's dress lying on the table.
Cash nodded mutely.
"I think I'd like blue at our wedding, too. What do you think?" Milly asked.
"I haven't thought about it." Didn't want to think about it.
Cash had other, far more pleasurable things to think about—Milly naked beneath him, Milly eager to love him, Milly asleep in his arms.
He reached for her.
She slipped out of his grasp. "Careful of the dress. Maybe not such a vivid blue, though."
"Whatever. Turn around." He meant to dispose of the dress as quickly as he could. "I've missed you."
"I missed you, too," Milly said. She turned and bent her head and he set to work on the top button. His fingers fumbled. He cursed.
Milly giggled. "I'll have to remember not to have buttons on mine."
Cash didn't answer. He unzipped her and eased the dress off her shoulders. Carefully Milly stepped out of it, then hung it up and stood for just a moment, looking at it wistfully.
"Come here," Cash said, catching her hand and drawing her toward him and away from the wedding dress.
Milly came willingly then. She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him, then took him into the bedroom and loved him—and the subject of marriage didn't come up again.
Until the next morning.
"Dad's doing much better," she said from the bedroom, while Cash stood in the bathroom shaving. "He's working full days three times a week. Between him and Dori they can pretty much cover things now."
"Good for him." Cash kept his eyes strictly on his own face in the mirror. He didn't glance to see if she was peering at him from the doorway.
"So we can set a date." Her voice drifted in to him.
Cash turned the water on, splashing it loudly, drowning her out. He hummed.
"Did you hear me, Cash?" Her voice came more loudly. "We can set a date."
"Date?" he mumbled into a mouthful of shaving soap.
Milly poked her head around the door and looked at him in the mirror. Their eyes met. His shifted quickly away.
For a moment Milly didn't speak. Then, "We can talk about it when you finish," she said quietly and left.
"You don't want to talk about the wedding at all, do you?"
He'd considered a dozen ways to avoid this conversation. He knew none of them would work. They stared at each other over the pancakes, and Cash knew they'd reached the moment of truth.
Cash shrugged. "Not 'specially." He tried to sound casually indifferent, not negative. He bent his head and concentrated on his breakfast. He wouldn't have to talk if his mouth was full.
Unfortunately Milly's mouth was not. And it was a subject she was determined to pursue. "Why not?"
Deliberately he finished chewing, then swallowed, hoping all the while she'd go on to say something else. She didn't. She waited. Finally he was forced to answer. "'Cause we got plenty of time to get married," he said irritably. "I told you that."
"Don't you want to get married?"
He stabbed a pancake. "Sure. Someday." He took another mouthful.
"Someday?"
He nodded. "Someday." He couldn't be any more definite than that.
"We're not getting any younger," Milly said finally.
"We're not that old! I'm twenty-eight! You're only twenty-three!"
That didn't seem to matter to Milly. "Someday we'll be glad we got married as young as we did. At least we'll be spry enough to ran after our kids."
Kids?
She thought he was old enough to be a father? Cash almost choked.
Milly didn't notice. "In fact, we're not all that young anymore, really," she went on reflectively. She wrapped her hands around her coffee mug and looked at him over the top.
"Lots of folks don't get married till they're past thirty," he told her stubbornly.
"Thirty?" Milly yelped. The coffee sloshed out of her mug as she jumped to her feet and glared down at him. "You think I want to watch you come and go like I've got a swinging door on my place until you're thirty?"
"I wasn't thinking of me," Cash protested. "I was thinking of you."
He thought later it might have been a mistake to be so honest.
She practically threw him out the door!
* * *
Nine
« ^ »
"Women," Cash told Dennis and Walt that night as they rolled down the highway toward Tucson, "are a pain in the neck."
Denny grinned and flexed his shoulders and stretched. "I'd have said they hit a damn sight lower myself. But yeah, I know what you mean."
"They're never satisfied," Cash went on. "They always want somethin' else."
"A new dress. A box of chocolates. Pretty flowers," Walt said. "A gold buckle with your name on it."
"A wedding ring," Cash said grimly.
Both men's eyes jerked wide. "Oh, hell. Like that, is it?" Denny said.
Cash sighed. "Like that."
"You didn't do it?" Walt asked fervently.
Cash shook his head. "'Course not. I'm not gettin' shackled. She's crazy if she thinks I'm ready to settle down and be some little lap dog."
"Damn right," Dennis agreed. They all stared at the white line stretching before them, in silent contemplation of matrimony. Cash thought Walt actually shuddered. He'd done some trembling himself, ever since his argument with Milly that morning.
It had been a stupid argument. They never should have had it. She should have known better than to push him. It wasn't like he'd ever asked her to marry him, was it?
No.
She was being presumptuous. Assuming things that he'd never said. Making plans based on fantasies, not reality. So she was wrong, right?
Right.
And Milly was reasonable. She would see that she was wrong. If he just waited a little while, gave her a chance to cool off, permitted her an opportunity to reflect on things, she'd come to see things his way. It wasn't as if he had said he was never going to marry her.
Of course he'd probably marry her—when he got ready to get married.
Someday.
"She'll get over it," he said to himself as much as to his buddies. "She'll be fine next time I stop."
"Give her some time," Denny counseled. "Don't go runnin' right back to make up with her."
"Hell, no."
He called her
on the phone once. She didn't think they had anything to talk about.
Fine, he thought. They'd sort it out in person. He gave her two months. He stopped by one night on his way from Nebraska to Alberta. It was out of his way. Denny and Walt had flown with some buddies, and Cash probably should have, too, but he'd been thinking about Milly a lot.
Missing her, if the truth were known, and he thought by now maybe she'd cooled off.
At least he hoped so. He climbed the steps to her apartment and stuck his key in the lock. It didn't turn.
"What the—?" He tried it again. He pulled it out and looked at it, certain that he had the right key, but thinking maybe he'd just poked in the wrong one in his hurry.
He jiggled it again, twisted the knob. Nothing happened.
He frowned and banged on the door. Her car was in the lot, so she had to be home. "Milly!" He banged again. "Hey, Milly! It's me. Open up."
When she finally opened the door, he was amazed. She had her hair pulled up in a red ribbon and tied in some fancy ridiculous knot! Cash reckoned he could make quick work of that ribbon!
"What the heck's goin' on?" he asked. "Things gettin' so urban you had to change the lock?"
"No. I didn't want you barging in."
He stared at her, shocked.
"And I don't have time to talk to you now, either," she said. She picked up her purse and hugged it against her breasts. "I have a date."
"A date?" His brows drew down. "What do you mean, you have a date?" How the hell could she have a date? She was his girl!
"I have a date," Milly repeated firmly. "I just got home from work about half an hour ago. I'm in a hurry. So, please excuse me."
"The hell I'll excuse you! What do you mean, you're goin' out on a date? You can't go out on a date. You're marryin' me!"
"No," Milly said. "I'm not. You never asked me to marry you."
"Never stopped you assumin' before," Cash snapped.
"My mistake. Obviously," Milly said, green eyes flashing. "And now I realize it. I'm sure you're happy to know that."
"Well, of course I'm happy, but—" Cash began, relieved and annoyed as hell at the same time. Yeah, she was supposed to realize it, but she wasn't supposed to use it as an excuse to date some other guy, for heaven's sake!
THE COWBOY CRASHES A WEDDING Page 12
