Fire and Ice

by Mary Connealy

  11

  Bailey stared at Gage and saw a man who hated to admit the truth. Hated it, was embarrassed by it, and trapped by it. With his icy control wiped away, she saw all those things so clearly she couldn’t help but believe him. He’d have never said it if it wasn’t true.

  Yet none of that changed a thing.

  “Your mother is coming.” To her own ears, she sounded like the voice of doom. “That is the reason you want to marry me?”

  She really should have hit him harder when she had the chance. He was on guard now. Of course, her hand hurt so maybe she’d given him her best. But she’d never been so happy to see anyone in her life—so how hard could she be expected to punch? She’d been so desperately lonely for so long she’d been more tempted to throw herself into his arms than punch him, until he’d started talking.

  “Ma is going to turn up any day in Aspen Ridge, and I mean any day. Trails are passable now.”

  Bailey shook her head. “The snow is still too deep.”

  “Up here it’s deep. I barely made it, that’s true, but Aspen Ridge and my place are lower, and it’s warm enough the trails are opening. That’s how they got the mail through. I just got her letter today, first mail of the spring. And she’s coming with plans to”—Gage cleared his throat—“to meet my wife.”

  “You told her you were married?”

  “Yep.” Gage braced his elbows on the table and buried his face in both hands. “Last fall, I told her.”

  “Why would you do such a stupid thing?”

  Gage shrugged and slid his hands down and clenched them together on the table, not unlike a man who was begging. “I never dreamed she’d come for a visit. Now I’ve got to find a wife or she’ll think I lied to her.”

  “You did lie to her.” Bailey slammed the side of her fist on the table.

  “I know. But she never stops begging me to go home. She wants me back there. She’s so desperate, she threatens to move up here and put my life in order.”

  “Threatens? Your ma threatens you?”

  “Offers,” Gage said too quickly. “She offers to come. And if I’m not real careful, she’ll stay forever.” He paused, studying her. “So I told her my life was in good order, that I had a wife and was happy and settled. Then this letter comes, with her all eager to meet my wife and tell me she is headed up here. And in Texas there’s precious little winter, and I suspect she can’t quite imagine the winter up in the mountains. When I got her letter today telling me she’d set out, it had been sent weeks ago. She’s going to show up here any day and find out I lied—unless I do something fast.”

  “Like present her with a wife.” Something strange happened inside Bailey then, for as unthinkable as being married to anyone was, this proposal hurt her feelings.

  “Please, don’t look at me like that,” Gage said.

  “Like what?” Bailey wondered what showed, because she thought of herself as someone who kept her thoughts to herself real well.

  “Like this is an insult. I don’t mean it to be. It’s just . . .” Gage threw his arms wide. “I don’t know nuthin’ about women, Bailey. I’ve hardly ever even been around one ’cept Ma, and she’d so easily get upset that she wasn’t much good for teaching a man how to behave.”

  Bailey studied on that for a while. “Is that why you left Texas, not because of your pa and sharing the ranch—I’d heard that somewhere—but because of your ma?”

  “There was more than one reason,” he replied. His eyes went cold, and she saw the ghosts that haunted him. “But the one that matters most is why I’m here proposing. I need a wife and I need her bad. If you’re there, she’ll be satisfied. If you’re not, she’ll be so hurt by my lie. She’ll cry. And that I can’t bear to watch. Then after she’s done crying, she’ll decide she needs to run my home. She might never go back to Texas.” Gage got a stubborn look on his face.

  Bailey could out-stubborn him any day. “I’m not going to even consider your proposal if you won’t talk to me about what brought you here.” She crossed her arms and squared her shoulders.

  Gage sat up straighter. “You mean you’re considering it?”

  “I might be.” She absolutely was not. “Why did you leave Texas?”

  The idea of putting herself in the clutches of any man was out of the question. She couldn’t bring herself to risk it, not even to cure a loneliness that ate away at her soul. “And what makes you think a wife will be enough to make your awful ma go back to Texas?”

  But what about just pretending? She could see now what he meant by that. Could she possibly do it? Now that she knew his purpose wasn’t . . . what she’d first assumed. She massaged her sore hand, and confound it, she was considering it.

  “First off, my ma isn’t awful.” Gage sounded offended. “She’s the sweetest woman who ever lived.”

  Bailey laughed. “You’re willing to marry me to drive her off, and you left Texas because of her, but she’s the sweetest woman who ever lived?”

  Agitated, Gage shoved himself away from the table, grabbed his full cup, and walked the few steps to the fireplace to get the coffeepot. Bailey was pretty sure he didn’t need more coffee; he was just too worked up to sit still.

  “The reason I left Texas was because I was burning mad at the Union for dictating to the states, especially a state as fine as Texas. They had no business setting laws in Washington, forcing us to mind them. President Lincoln wasn’t elected king. I was crazy to go join the Confederate Army.”

  “Gage, President Lincoln didn’t issue any laws that drove them off. The South was just afraid he would. The South seceded.”

  “Lincoln should have let them go.”

  “The South fired the first shot.” Bailey watched him take a few desperate sips of his coffee, probably to make room in the cup. Then he fell silent as he poured. He brought the pot over to the table and refilled her cup, which was also mostly full. The man was thinking up excuses not to look at her.

  He hung the pot in the fireplace. Rather than come back, he stayed by the fire. He was probably chilled, but he wasn’t over there to warm up.

  “Let’s not refight the war right now, Bailey. You said you wanted to know what brought me to the mountains. I’m trying to tell you.”

  Bailey decided he had a point and stayed quiet.

  “Pa was all for me signing up. He was as stirred up as I was. But Ma . . .” Gage crouched by the fire and jabbed at the burning logs with the poker.

  He was quiet for so long, she finally asked, “What about your ma, Gage?”

  “She agreed with secession, but she hated war.”

  “Everyone hates war.” Bailey sure did.

  “Not like my ma.” He turned to look over his shoulder at her, then went back to poking at the fire. “She seems like a sturdy enough woman, but she’s got a fragile side, nerves, especially when it came to me and war. Her parents died at the Alamo. She was a half-grown girl, and they sent her and most of the other women and children away, but her ma refused to leave her pa. They both died. She got taken in by some folks, who made her life a misery, and she blamed it all on war. She got hysterical when I said I was going. Every young man around us left to go and fight. I was the only man under forty and over fifteen left in the territory. But Pa was afraid Ma might lose her wits, maybe even take her own life.”

  Bailey tried to imagine cool, controlled Gage Coulter with a ma so fragile. Of course, Bailey knew precious little about mothers. “So you agreed not to fight.”

  Gage stood and came back to the table, as if the part he couldn’t talk about while facing her was over. “The pressure to go was fierce. A few of my neighbors had sons die. I was branded a coward to the point I didn’t leave the ranch, didn’t even go to church anymore. It got so bad I was afraid someone might come gunning for me. Finally, Pa admitted I had to get away from Texas. He gave me a herd to push west, and I kept pushing until I got here. Winter was settling in, and I found grass for my cattle and built a small cabin.” Gage took a long pul
l on his coffee. “I’ve been here ever since.”

  “And now your ma is coming and you need a wife because . . .”

  “Ma cost me everything.”

  12

  Gage’s eyes locked on hers, his gaze as cold as a Rocky Mountain blizzard.

  “I shamed myself because of her,” he said. “I’ve been driven from my home, and I can’t ever go back because of her. The only good thing that came of it was being on my own, being able to stand on my own two feet without Ma’s fussing over everything, always in tears and half mad with worry. And it’s only me, too. She’s a good ranch wife. A great cook. Her and Pa get along fine in everything else. I can’t believe she’s coming out here. But I shouldn’t be surprised. I was her only child, and she’s always doted on me. She’s just desperate to”—Gage swallowed hard—“to take care of me. From her letter I can tell she’s imagining a harsh life for me up here.”

  “You did just ride halfway up a mountain on treacherous trails and risk your life. And the winter is hard; she’s not really imagining anything.”

  Gage shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t mind the cold, but she won’t see that. I’m sure she plans to take charge of the house and . . .” Gage glanced at Bailey, then away. “And my wife . . . and me.”

  Bailey had to fight not to laugh at the usually so cool Gage.

  “And if I object she’ll start fretting and crying, and I’ll end up doing almost anything to get her to stop. I suspect her real plan is to persuade me to go back to Texas, and I’m not going. No one will have forgotten. And besides, I like it here. I like having my own spread torn out of the mountains with the strength of my own back.” Gage reached across the small space on the table between them, trapping Bailey’s hands in his.

  “You’ve got to save me. I’m a desperate man.” He tightened his grip.

  Bailey didn’t try and pull away as she studied him. She saw more than she wanted to.

  It was a nice side of him. He honestly didn’t want to hurt his mother by having her find out he’d lied to her. And he was fretting about telling her to get out of his house and go back to Texas. At the same time, it appeared he didn’t think he could bear living with her.

  He really was a desperate man.

  “Maybe we could pretend,” she said.

  Gage shook his head almost frantically. “I said that on the spur of the moment, but we can’t pretend.”

  “Why not?” That was the only way she could imagine doing this.

  “Because that makes us both liars, and I have learned my lesson about lying to my mother!”

  Bailey had made it through four years of war keeping her thoughts to herself. She tried not to lie, but she could sure behave in such a way that folks believed something that was completely untrue. She veered her mind away from that, because she didn’t want to test it against God’s Word.

  “I’m sure we could convince her.”

  “No, you don’t know that woman. She’d catch on right away. And besides, you have to stay with me, in my room, and you can’t do that if we aren’t married. I’ve only got two bedrooms. If you don’t sleep with me, then you sleep with Ma, and she’s sure to notice if you’re sharing her bed.”

  “You can wait till she goes to bed, then sneak out to the barn to sleep,” Bailey said in an arch tone that seemed to calm him down a bit.

  “Nope, we have to be married. But, Bailey, is there someone else? Do you dream of someday finding the right man?”

  “No, absolutely not.” She said it with too much fire.

  “Why not?” He was paying real close attention.

  “I’m not going to marry you, so if we can’t pretend, then we can’t do it.” She thought of the long, miserably lonely winter and how his pounding on the door had been like God sending her manna from heaven. The bitter loneliness of the winter had been almost too much for her. It had started the day her sisters rode away, but from the time of that Christmas Eve blizzard when she’d slept in the barn beside her horse, she’d ached from the isolation.

  “Please, Bailey. I’ll be good to you. We can make a marriage work.” He sounded like a man hanging on to the knot at the end of his rope.

  She knew how that felt.

  Last winter she’d known her sisters were close, even if she couldn’t get to them. And she’d needed the quiet, for she had deep healing to do from what she’d seen in the war. Being alone for months, with no possible way anyone—any man—could get to her, had given her a feeling of safety that she’d treasured.

  But this year the solitude had almost broken her. And right now she’d agree to almost anything to keep Gage from riding off and leaving her.

  “You have nothing to fear from me,” he added.

  That jerked Bailey out of her weak moment of self-pity. “I’m not afraid of anything, Coulter.” She tore her hands free, and almost as if it was part of his promise, Gage let her go.

  “That’s not true. I’ve seen it in you a few times, mostly when my men are around.” His eyes narrowed. “What are you afraid of? I promise I’ll protect you from whatever it is.”

  “I can protect myself!” She clamped her mouth shut. She’d just as good as admitted she was saying no out of fear.

  He watched her intently. She’d never had attention paid to her like this before, never thought she wanted it. But something swelled inside, right in her chest, to have a man focus on her so completely. It was as if he could see every tiny ripple of feeling, as if he was trying his best to read her thoughts.

  “Tell me, is it something to do with the war? Were you . . . hurt? Did some man see through your disguise and harm you?”

  “No!” The shout was another mistake. He was poking at her and opening up wounds.

  “Tell me, Bailey. I swear to you I’ll listen. And whatever you’re scared of, I’ll see to it you never have to face it, at least not alone.”

  That he’d speak of her fears and of being alone in the same sentence—it was like he saw exactly what was roiling inside of her. It drew her to him so hard that she could barely stop herself from standing from the table, wrapping her arms around him and holding on.

  With a wry smile, he said, “My most fearful trait is my temper, and that doesn’t seem to bother you overly.”

  Could she do it? The temptation was almost overwhelming to let it all pour out—what she’d seen, the horror of men it had given her, especially a crowd of them. She’d never talked of it. Shannon and Kylie had known there was something, but they’d never pushed her to share it. They’d let her be the mannish rough-talking sister, though she knew they’d listen if she wanted to talk. Even so, they had their own burdens, and she’d die before she added to them.

  No words came out. In fact, the very idea of saying out loud the worst of what she’d seen was unimaginable. And that she was even considering it scared her to the bottoms of her booted feet. If she could only have some kind of promise that if things didn’t work out . . .

  And then it hit her, harder than that punch she’d thrown at Gage. “I’ll marry you, but I have some conditions.”

  Gage recoiled as if her words almost knocked him over. His eyes darkened and sparked with gray fire. A smile broke out like sunshine after a long, dreary winter. Leaning forward, he grabbed both her upper arms.

  “Really? You’ll marry me?” He dragged her to her feet to face him, sounding like the happiest man alive, almost like a man might sound who’d talked the woman he loved into marrying him, rather than a man arranging his own marriage because he’d trapped himself with a lie.

  The big idiot.

  She slapped both hands flat on his chest. “I said I had some conditions, Gage, and I’m not one bit sure you’ll agree to them.”

  “Name it.” He held her solid in front of him, a firm grasp on each of her arms. He was so happy, she almost hesitated to say what her conditions were.

  “If I don’t like being married, you let me leave.”

  His grip loosened. “What?” He sounded a lot like she had w
hen she’d first heard his proposal. “Marriage is forever, Bailey. You can’t just leave.”

  “Of course I can. But that’s not my only condition.”

  His brows arched almost to his hairline. “There’s more?”

  Nodding, she gave him a few seconds to get used to the idea she might leave. Because leaving was the only way she could even consider this. The idea of signing on to sharing a home with him, with any man, forever, was impossible.

  “I’ll agree to marry you if, before we get married, figuring you’ll buy my homestead when I give up the claim—”

  “I intend to do just that.”

  “First, once you own it, you have to sign my homestead over to me.”

  “Now, Bailey, I don’t think—”

  “Along with,” she said, cutting him off, “the title to this canyon.”

  Gage’s eyes turned to pure ice. “You want my canyon in your name?”

  “Yes.” Bailey knew he’d never agree.

  “No.” His smile shrunk away.

  “And I want the title in my hand before I speak a single word before a parson.” Now for sure he’d leave, and without forcing her to tell of all the things she feared, the things she’d seen. And if Gage leaving in a fury made her heart lurch with regret, well, so be it.

  “That canyon belongs to me,” he said.

  “Indeed it does, and you don’t need my land to get in and out. I know. But you can run your ranch without that canyon. You may need to cull your herd a bit, although you’ll still be the biggest rancher around. But I need that land, Gage. If I can’t have it, I might as well give up and leave the territory right now, because after a winter of trying, I know I can’t make a living or run a ranch the way I want to on the land I have left. For the security of owning that canyon if I find myself unhappily married to you—that is the kind of thing that would make me take a chance on marriage.”

  “You fully intend to marry me.” His frigid eyes stabbed her with icicles. “And at the first sign of trouble, light out with the canyon signed over to you.”

  That quieted her, because she did have something about exactly like that in mind. And that wasn’t the deal he was after. Finally she said, “I promise I’ll stay until your ma heads for home. After that, it’ll depend on how we’re getting along.”