The Maverick Marriage

by Cathy Gillen Thacker

  “Tastes a lot better than I figured on.”

  “What kind of potatoes?” asked another.

  “Onion-pepper hash browns.”

  “And the juice?”

  “Orange-peach.”

  “This is darn good, Ms. Hart.”

  “Call me, Susannah. And thank you.” Susannah headed down the rows of tables, handing out questionnaires and pencils right and left. “Don’t forget to fill out your menu requests before you leave, please, so I’ll know what kinds of things you like.”

  Watching from the adjacent cafeteria office, where he had settled down to go over the latest financial reports of the company he was inheriting from Max, Trace was amazed at how adroitly Susannah handled not just the loggers, but the whole operation. She had waltzed in at 5:00 a.m., dragging her crew of five sleepy males behind her, and hadn’t stopped since. First cooking, with the help of Gillian Taylor and three of the nine part-time cooks the cafeteria employed; supervising the boys as they readied the tables and put out the glassware, dishes and silverware; and then serving and interacting with the men.

  She was really in her element here, he thought, and never more so than when surrounded by a bevy of admiring males. It irritated him to see the other men shooting her love-struck glances. It annoyed him even more to realize how jealous he was, and that deep inside, where it really counted, there was a part of him that still considered her his woman, even after all this time.

  “You can come out and have some breakfast, too,” Susannah said to him from the doorway.

  Trace frowned at the message that popped up on his computer screen, that signaled he had just received an electronic-mail message from one Sam Farraday. “Thanks. I’ll be there in a minute.” His eyes still on the computer screen, Trace clicked into the document. His spirits plummeted as he read the message.

  From the doorway, Susannah was still tracking his every movement. “Problem?” she asked.

  Trace scowled. “Sam Farraday is having second thoughts about selling me the Farraday Timber operation.”

  Susannah’s sable brown eyes widened. “That’s a problem?”

  “You’re damn right it is.” Trace scowled. “My attorney just finished drawing up the final papers for me. They were supposed to be signed later this afternoon.”

  Thrusting her hands into the pockets of her white chef’s apron, Susannah edged closer. Trace caught a whiff of her perfume as she perched on the edge of the desk. “And now Farraday is backing out,” she concluded, still studying him intently.

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  Susannah rubbed at a spot of flour on the knee of her jeans, her fingertips moving in slow circular motions until the flour blended into the fabric. Finished, she looked back up at him. “How can you be so sure?”

  Trace’s throat was parched. He reached for the cup of coffee he had brought into the office with him. “Because I have worked damn hard on this deal,” he told her, not bothering to hide his confidence that all would work out eventually. “And I need that timber.” And he wasn’t going to give up until he got it.

  With a soft, unconscious motion, Susannah tucked the bobbed ends of her hair behind her ear. “What’s so special about the Farraday Timber operation?”

  “They’ve got western white pine.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “No. My company harvests western hemlock and Douglas fir.”

  “What about Uncle Max’s company?”

  “Western red cedar and ponderosa pine.”

  “I don’t see the problem. If you already have four varieties of wood—”

  “There are five types native to Montana,” Trace interrupted as he noted the time Sam Farraday’s e-mail message had been sent. It said shortly after midnight, which was, in Trace’s experience, the time of day when people were most likely to have doubts about anything and everything pertaining to business. Often, what seemed unsolvable late at night, seemed completely within one’s realm early the next day. Aware Susannah was still regarding him intently, he patiently finished his explanation, “The Farraday operation, when combined with Uncle Max’s lumber company, will enable me to produce all five types of timber.” And that, Trace thought, was a coup he couldn’t ignore.

  “What if this Sam Farraday doesn’t want to sell?” Susannah persisted matter-of-factly. “Can’t you get the western white pine somewhere else?”

  “No.” Trace exhaled and fixed Susannah with a steady gaze. “Not in that quantity.”

  Susannah pursed her lips thoughtfully; without lipstick, they looked soft and lusciously full. Recalling with disturbing clarity the kisses they had shared down by the lake the evening before, it was all Trace could do not to pull her into his lap and see if they could duplicate that flash of passion and sensuality once again. “So what are you going to do?” Susannah asked. Seemingly oblivious to the direction of his thoughts, she toyed with the diamond stud in her ear.

  Trace sighed and shoved back his chair. His body humming with a frustration that derived from several different sources, the current difficulties with his work being the least of them, he pushed to his feet. “I am going to make Farraday understand a deal is a deal.” Trace’s shoulders tensed as he moved around the small office. He hated to be thwarted on any level. He sat back down in front of his laptop computer, already contemplating what his reply to Sam Farraday would be. “We worked for weeks hammering out the terms of the sale,” he continued as he began typing his reply to Sam’s message with fierce hammerlike strokes. “Sam agreed to this. We even shook on it. So, like it or not, Sam is going to have to follow through.”

  “SO, WHAT’S GOING on with you and Trace McKendrick?” Gillian Taylor asked Susannah as the dining hall cleared out and the two of them headed back to the kitchen at the end of the breakfast shift.

  Her slender figure encased in hopelessly worn jeans, an oversize man’s plaid flannel shirt and boy’s Converse-style sneakers, her wildly curling auburn hair caught in a haphazard knot at the nape of her neck, Gillian looked more like a teenage waif than a successful thirty-year-old chef.

  She was also Susannah’s best friend, and had been ever since Susannah had given her her first job, a place to stay other than the women’s shelter where she had been living and helped her get through chef’s training. Gillian never talked about her past. Susannah just knew it had been enormously difficult and Gillian was as glad to have it behind her as Susannah was to have the naturally empathetic Gillian for a friend.

  Susannah and Gillian, who had yet to eat breakfast, either, took their trays to the butcher block in the center. Susannah pulled up a stool and sat down, while Gillian did the same. Aware she had yet to explain the reason for the sparks flying between Trace and herself, Susannah sighed as she stirred fresh strawberries into a piping-hot dish of cream of wheat, then confided, “He’s in his killer business mode again.” So what else was new? she wondered discouragingly.

  Gillian stirred a generous amount of cream and sugar into her coffee. “What’s that?”

  “The mode where no one and nothing gets in the way of him getting what he wants.”

  Gillian—who knew little of Susannah’s history with Trace—raised an eyebrow. “Sounds ominous.”

  Susannah sipped her juice contemplatively. “It usually is.”

  Gillian, who could eat like a trucker and never gain an ounce, spooned up a forkful of eggs. “You disapprove, I take it?”

  “When it comes to getting what he wants, Trace can be very single-minded.” And right now, Susannah thought, he didn’t just want the Farraday Timber operation, he wanted Scott, and perhaps her, too. That was very unnerving.

  Gillian added salt and pepper to her hash browns. “You sound as if you don’t approve of his ambition.”

  Susannah had told herself she was not going to get caught up, playing the same old games, the same old way, with Trace. She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s not up to me either to approve or disapprove.” Just try and find a way to live with it. />
  “I see, and yet, according to what I’ve heard from the boys, you and Trace were spotted kissing just last night,” Gillian murmured.

  Susannah blushed self-consciously. She should have known that Scott and Mickey, who had been baby-sat by Gillian many a time over the last ten years, would waste no time confiding in her. “There’s a reason for that,” Susannah said.

  “Really?” Gillian slathered butter and jam on a flaky golden biscuit. “I’d like to hear it.”

  Not wanting either the boys or Trace to overhear, Susannah stood, closed the door that separated the dining hall from the kitchen, sat back down. As they finished their breakfasts, she told Gillian about the terms of Max’s will.

  “So, you and Trace are going to go for the gusto, huh?” Gillian asked, amazed.

  Susannah ran a finger down the side of her tray. “I wouldn’t put it that way.”

  “But both of you do want your inheritances,” Gillian insisted.

  “Yes.”

  Gillian sighed as she got up to get them both more coffee. “No wonder he was shooting you all those looks, then,” she murmured as she set down Susannah’s mug in front of her.

  “What looks?” Susannah asked in surprise, stirring cream into her coffee.

  Gillian gave Susannah a knowing look. “The love-struck ones.”

  Susannah flushed. Despite her effort to be cool, calm and collected, she found herself getting embarrassed. “Trace McKendrick is not in love with me,” she told Gillian sternly. Nor was he ever. If he had been, their marriage would have lasted.

  Gillian grinned skeptically and lifted her mug to her lips. “If you say so.”

  Susannah pushed away from the counter. “I don’t want to talk about it.” Mug in hand, she pushed open the screen door and stepped outside.

  Gillian followed her into the crisp, clean air, also holding her mug. “You don’t really have to. I know what I see, on both sides,” she relayed as she paced, the pine needles on the ground crunching beneath her tomboy shoes. “Lots and lots of sparks.”

  The problem was, Susannah thought, she didn’t know if those sparks were all for show so that people would not be surprised when she and Trace announced their intention to make their hasty marriage a real one, and not just a means to inherit.

  Trace’s kisses last night had not felt as if they were for show. They had felt all too real. She’d been up half the night replaying them over and over in her mind. And though she would die before admitting it, she still couldn’t stop thinking about how good it felt to be in his arms again. To be near him, even when he annoyed her, which was often. If he kept this up, she knew she was going to have a very hard time resisting him when he finally did make his move, and she knew that time was coming, too. If not before their wedding of convenience, then certainly after, because Trace was not the kind of man who would share a home with a woman, and a life, and not end up making love with her eventually.

  And that worried her. She was not the kind of woman who could make love to someone without also giving him her heart.

  If only Trace felt the same, it might have been different, but he didn’t. To him, there was a clear separation between pleasure and business, and with Trace, business always took center stage. Whether it was the business of reclaiming his son or securing his inheritance or acquiring that Farraday Timber operation he had his eye on, didn’t seem to matter. Trace was happy as long as he was chasing some goal.

  Susannah did not want to go back to that kind of life. She did not want to be a distant second—or maybe even third or fourth or fifth—in his life. Nor did she want to feel like some obligation to be met. She’d had enough of that with her mother, when she was growing up.

  Gillian continued to pace between the row of trees that separated them from the rest of the logging-camp headquarters. “Trace aside, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  Susannah heard the undertone of worry in her friend’s voice and lifted her chin. “What’s the matter?”

  “Lots, quite frankly. You said there would be no problems if I took this job,” Gillian told Susannah.

  Susannah knew how Gillian felt about background checks; because of the secrets in her past, they absolutely undid her. “There isn’t anything to worry about, Gillian,” Susannah soothed. “Max gave me carte blanche to hire whoever I wanted to run the dining hall. I talked to him about you before he died. He knew you were unwilling to divulge any of the details of your early life, and he was fine with it. Totally cool.”

  “Well, someone needs to tell that hotshot lawyer of his,” Gillian grumbled as she knocked back the rest of her coffee.

  “Why? What’s Cisco done?” Susannah couldn’t imagine Cisco being rude to anyone.

  Gillian released the clip holding her unruly hair at her nape. It tumbled down past her shoulders as she pocketed the clip. “Listen, I’ve got to go finish getting settled in, if I’m going to start work here full-time on Monday. Are you going to be okay for the rest of the weekend?”

  Susannah nodded. “Pearl’s Diner is catering the rest of the meals this weekend. They just needed us to do the breakfast shift, which we’ve done. So go on, get out of here.”

  “Okay. I’ll probably come here tonight anyway and lend a hand. I want to start to get to know some of the guys and get the place a little better organized.”

  “Sounds good.”

  The two women hugged. Gillian took off. Her mind still on Trace, Susannah went back inside to supervise the boys, and found them in the dining hall. Their work busing tables finished, their breakfasts eaten, they were doing Stupid Egg Tricks to the delight of the three part-time cooks and few remaining loggers, and to the detriment of several dozen eggs.

  “IS GILLIAN TAYLOR here yet?” Cisco asked Trace quietly as he stepped into the dining hall office and closed the door behind him.

  Trace finished typing the letter he’d been writing to Sam Farraday and did a save. “Been here and gone.” Trace looked up from the computer screen. “Why?”

  His expression unaccountably serious Cisco pushed back the edges of his Western-cut suit coat. “What did she seem like to you?”

  Trace shrugged his broad shoulders noncommittally. “Nice. Efficient. Good-looking, if the waif look appeals to you.” Trace sat back in his chair and pushed away from the desk. “Kind of sassy in the same way that Susannah and Patience and Callie and all women worth their salt are.” He folded his hands behind his head, still studying his former nemesis and now friend carefully. “Why?”

  Cisco let out a weary breath and scowled. “I wanted to talk to her,” he said.

  “What about?” Trace asked, understanding this was not a social call Cisco was intending to make.

  Cisco’s frown deepened. Abruptly, he looked older than his thirty years. “I went over that résumé she gave Susannah, and not everything on it checks out the way it should.”

  Despite Cisco’s suspicions, Trace found it hard to connect the Gillian Taylor he’d met with anything criminal, particularly when she was so close to Susannah. Susannah did not have criminals for friends. Trace’s glance narrowed as he inquired, “Did Max know this?”

  “He told me not to worry.” Cisco yanked at the string tie around his neck. “He said if Susannah trusted Gillian, after they had worked together for nigh on ten years, that was good enough for him.”

  “But you’re not satisfied,” Trace concluded, moving back to his laptop computer.

  Cisco folded his arms in front of him and lounged against the wall. “I think the discrepancies I found bear checking out. I’ve already done some digging, but to go any deeper I’m going to have to talk to her.”

  Trace thought it was ironic that Cisco would be making this particular complaint, since Max had rescued Cisco off the mean streets of Butte some fourteen years ago, when Cisco was just sixteen. To this day, Trace and his brother and sister were not sure exactly what kind of trouble Cisco had been in when Max found him, or even if he actually had been in trouble. They
only knew that Cisco, who’d been something of a surly teenage delinquent at the time, had refused from the start to talk about his past. And that Max had also been mum about the subject, though mostly Max seemed just as in the dark about Cisco’s background as the rest of them.

  Despite all that, Max had taken Cisco Kidd—whose name bore, to Trace’s thinking, anyway, a suspicious resemblance to the famed outlaw the San Francisco Kid—under his wing, straightened him out and eventually sent him to college and law school. In the process, Cisco had become not only Max’s protégé” and attorney, but also a highly regarded and trusted member of the McKendrick “family.”

  Trace found it odd, given the two men’s close relationship, that Max had not mentioned Cisco in his will. Thus far, however, Cisco had not seemed to be at all concerned about that, either.

  “You’ve met this Gillian Taylor, Trace. What’s your opinion? Do you think I’m overreacting?” Cisco asked.

  Trace shrugged and typed in the command Send. He stared at the screen, waiting for the flashing message that would tell him the letter had been sent. “I think you need to do what you feel you have to do.”

  Cisco frowned. Arms still folded in front of him, he moved away from the wall. “Then I’m going to have to follow my instincts and check her out,” he said, opening the door to the dining hall once again.

  “In the meantime, how about I get those boys off yours and Susannah’s hands?” Cisco continued affably from the open door. “And give them a driving tour of the Silver Spur, starting here at the logging camp, then going over to the horse-breeding and cutting operation, and from there to the cattle ranch.”

  The prospect of spending more time with Susannah was a pleasant one. He wanted to get their relationship in order before the wedding, if at all possible. Cisco taking the boys off their hands for a while, would give them the time and space to do so. “It’s okay with me,” Trace said.

  “What’s okay with you?” Susannah asked, coming up behind Cisco.

  Briefly, Trace explained.

  The boys, overhearing their names, crowded into the tiny office to join in the discussion. “As hard as we all worked this morning, we deserve a break!” Scott said.