The Prodigal Wife

by Susan Fox

  It was a last chance to live up to her father’s final wish and fulfill her obligation to Gabe. The miserable knowledge made her feel as if she was being dragged down a steep incline toward what could only be the deadly cliff edge of a straight drop to disaster.

  Lainey had been racking her brain for weeks to think of a way to make up for what she’d done. She’d been willing to do anything, anything, to atone and to demonstrate to Gabe that she was truly sorry.

  She’d planned to hire a team to comb through the records of everything Gabe had spent and done to bring Talbot back so she could make him a fair financial offer to reimburse him. She’d been thinking in terms of money or land, but she’d never dreamed he’d want this.

  Tell Elisa to put your things where I sleep.

  Something completely feminine began to pulse deep inside that was a sensual mix of excitement, terror and thrill. The fantasies she’d had about Gabe from the time she was almost eighteen until her father had died when she was almost twenty, surged forcefully.

  The dark, possessive look Gabe had just given her made it impossible not to entertain thoughts of what it might be like to go through with their marriage, to sleep in his bed tonight with the expectations he must surely have about what would happen there.

  But those were expectations Lainey could in no way fulfill. Neither of them truly knew each other and she wasn’t certain of Gabe, however dependable his word was. And he couldn’t possibly love her. Indeed he might never be able to love her after she’d gone so far over the line.

  It was then that she realized how utterly worn out she was from all the horrors and fears and regrets that had battered and tormented her for so many endless weeks. And now all of them were rising to heights she’d never dreamed of.

  Lainey only briefly considered what turning Gabe down would do for her peace of mind, then finally stood and walked reluctantly toward the door to the hall.

  He was right. It was one thing to say the words and believe you meant them, but quite another thing entirely if someone expected you to live up to them. Hadn’t she somehow known, despite trying to talk Gabe out of this, that she’d end up complying with his expectations?

  She went to Elisa before she lost her nerve, but she’d go in search of Gabe afterward. Whatever he’d mandated for tonight, there had to be some way to win a promise from him that there’d be no intimacies between them before they could get to know each other. Perhaps if she could make Gabe understand that she was willing to go through with this marriage, he’d back away from his demand that she share his bed from the first night.

  The sun was still an hour or more from setting by the time she’d washed her feet and put on her boots for the walk to the barns. She eventually found Gabe in the colt pasture with the dozen or so weaned colts that had crowded around him.

  The sight of Gabe patiently touching or giving a calm rub to each of the youngsters reminded her of something she’d always admired about him. Gabe was good with any kind of animal, especially horses. He was uncommonly patient with them and had a knack for gaining their trust.

  He never tolerated abuse. Lainey and her father had been here on Patton Ranch the day a new ranch hand had beaten a horse with a gate chain because it had been startled by the start up of a tractor. Gabe had fired the man on the spot and only just managed to keep himself from using the piece of chain on the ranch hand.

  A man who could be outraged by the mistreatment of an animal yet had the self-control to keep from doing violence, was surely a man who was in control of his emotions and passionate urges. It helped a little to realize that.

  Gabe must have known she was coming the moment she entered the pasture because the colts’ attention had turned her way, but he ignored her approach until she’d almost reached him.

  The colts milled a bit when she joined them, and then a handful of velvety noses pressed toward her to give curious inspections. Lainey moved slowly and petted some of the bolder ones before she glanced at Gabe and caught him watching her.

  “I was wondering if you’d consider going on with this a bit slower,” she started, a little amazed that she’d kept the nervous tremor out of her voice. She saw the subtle tightening of the stern line of his mouth but went on.

  “I told Elisa precisely what you said, to show my good faith. Since I did, I hoped perhaps you might consider letting me use the bedroom that connects yours. Until we’re a bit more…comfortable with each other.”

  Gabe had watched her quietly but when she finished, he spoke.

  “I’ve never forced myself on a woman and I’ll not start with my wife.”

  The gruff words touched her in a sweetly peculiar way and she sensed a rare masculine tenderness beneath his rugged surface. It somehow hinted at both need and a shocking vulnerability, but surely she was projecting onto him the things she’d want in any husband. Lainey tried to ignore it and go on.

  “We’re virtual strangers,” she said softly, “and this is the first night we’ll spend beneath the same roof.”

  The tenderness she thought she’d seen in him fled as an implacable gleam came into his eyes, though it was in no way harsh.

  “Start as you mean to go. Works well with the stock and hired help. Ought to work with wives.”

  The blunt words almost startled a nervous laugh out of her, but the need to object to them overcame the reaction.

  “Maybe,” she conceded, careful to not sound confrontational. “But you aren’t out here putting a saddle on these colts,” she pointed out. “Though they’re too young, you also know they need time to get used to you and develop some sort of affec—trust—toward you.”

  His stony expression didn’t change. “You want me to pet you, handle your feet and run my hands all over you like I do the colts?”

  Heat flashed into her face as she prudently avoided a direct reply to that. “Those aren’t the first things you do, because I’ve watched you before. First you coax them close, but you move slow, very slow. You’ve never forced or crowded them. You wait and slowly persuade. When they come to you, and they do, they think it’s their idea.”

  Relief began to ease through her then. She’d made a valid point in a way that she was certain Gabe, as a man who knew instinctively how to win animals over, could relate to.

  His stony expression gentled the tiniest bit. “You aren’t a baby anymore, Ms. Lainey.” That slow, smoky quality had come back into his low voice. “You were at twenty, but you’re five years down the road now.”

  Lainey was suddenly breathless because she sensed what was coming. He didn’t make her wait.

  “When a grown horse that’s never been handled or worked comes in, it’s best to start on ’em right away. Years of training to make up for, and since an adult horse is capable of being put under a saddle within a half hour, there’s no reason to delay making him useful. He never gets time to develop a habit of being aimless in the company of humans. Or spoiled.”

  It was amazing how easily he’d usurped her analogy and smoothly turned it back on her. She could tell by the sudden glitter in his eyes that there was more.

  “I’ve been a long time without sex, Mrs. Patton,” he said bluntly. “Years.”

  The candid declaration shocked her, but the word years reached for her and sent a bolt of sensual heat through her insides. Suddenly she felt dizzy and weak. Her shock must have shown because the glitter in his eyes intensified. She knew instantly that what he’d read in her expression had offended him.

  His voice was a growl. “I reckon I’ve still got some self-control left now that the drought is nearer an end.”

  “I don’t mean to suggest that you’re some kind of—”

  “The days start earlier out here than they do in the big city,” Gabe cut in as he nodded in the direction of the house. “Best you get ready for an early night before I come in.”

  Lainey stared at him in disbelief as he turned away. Oh, God, she’d just made things worse between them, and she hurried after him as he walked to t
he pasture fence.

  “I’m sorry, Gabe. I just seem to keep saying the wrong things.”

  He kept walking, a few of the colts trailing along to keep up with them, but his harsh profile showed no hint of softening. She tried again.

  “I’m trying to say that we’re strangers. I’m not opposed to…sharing your room, but I naturally feel awkward about it so soon. Surely you feel the same way? You don’t know me either, and what you know hasn’t been good. It can’t make you feel comfortable to think about sleeping next to me.”

  “Are you dangerous?” That came out in another growl, but he didn’t spare her so much as a brief glance.

  “Well, no, of course not. But even without our history, we’re strangers.”

  His profile was still set. “That’ll change tonight. And tomorrow and the next night and all the days and nights to come.”

  They’d reached the pasture gate. Lainey was so frustrated and intimidated by his ongoing edicts that she didn’t know whether to scream or cry. Gabe unhooked the chain to open the gate enough to let her walk through the narrow space ahead of him. She quickly did, then waited for him to secure the latch and set the chain in place.

  Once he had, he looked down at her, his stony, no-nonsense expression unrelenting. “You best get on up to the house.”

  Though delivered softly, it was an even stronger dismissal than the first one, and Lainey could tell he took a dim view of having to repeat it. It was also a not so subtle message that the subject of where he expected her to sleep tonight was firmly closed, though what she did about it—considering his wishes on the subject—was now up to her.

  Which essentially gave her no choice if she was sincere about living up to her long-delayed obligation to him, and they both knew it.

  Lainey took a step back, hesitating as she hoped for any sign that he might change his mind before she turned and walked to the house. Every step she took pounded home the reminder that this was part of the consequence for what she’d done to Gabe, but was there any hope that she could eventually pay in full?

  Show him what you’re made of…

  Whether she’d dreamed the sound of her father’s voice saying those words today or not, it was clear that living up to her vows with Gabe, on his terms now, was the only way to settle her debt.

  Lainey saw the benefit of taking her shower and preparing for bed before Gabe came back to the house. She would have felt even more self-conscious if he’d been waiting in the bedroom outside the master bath, able to hear her go through her nighttime routine.

  She’d thought over everything Gabe had said and done this afternoon and evening at least a dozen times. Though he seemed deadly serious about her living up to the marriage vows she’d taken with him, she couldn’t get away from the notion that this whole thing might very well be simple revenge to get back at her before he divorced her anyway.

  She wondered once again why a self-sufficient man like Gabe, who claimed he took his “till death” vows so seriously, would ever make a commitment to a woman he didn’t love, one he’d not been certain could ever love him. Particularly when a man like him could have had his pick of women.

  The answer hit her like a lightning strike: because of the bitter way he’d grown up and the utterly driven way Gabe had made something of himself, perhaps he’d not had time for the soft, civilizing social rituals that other men had passed through in their adolescence and early adulthood.

  Her marriage to Gabe had put a damper on her own social habits, because it had stopped the dating she’d done in school and after graduation. She’d at least gone through the social ritual of having young men show up for dates and proms who’d brought corsages or flowers, and endured her father’s “private words” with them before allowing her to go out with them.

  But who had Gabe ever been seen going out with? Lainey mentally raced to remember. She’d heard tawdry gossip at some point before he’d bought his ranch and also in the early years of ownership, that Gabe had only gone out with women who’d been savvy enough to know he might not have much money for classy restaurants; women who’d chased him anyway because he was so compellingly macho.

  Women who’d apparently reacted to him in a sexual way, but who didn’t care that he’d had very little or that he’d sweated and dirtied his hands for a living, because something about him had thrilled them until some richer, easier man had come along. Later, after Gabe had sweated himself into a fortune, they’d come after him again, but this time as a meal ticket. Her father had remarked on that part more than once.

  Perhaps the opportunity to get a wife he considered suitable without risking the social delicacies of actual courtship had seemed pragmatic and ideal to him, and preferable to running a gauntlet of gold diggers.

  Gabe was so much harder and no-nonsense than he’d been years ago, so perhaps he preferred even more the efficiency and lack of emotion such a marriage match would make.

  Lainey hoped he’d actually courted at least one nice woman chastely with flowers and formality over a period of time. If all he’d ever done was run with oversexed women who didn’t mind one-night stands—or who’d slept with him a few times before moving on to someone with more money—Gabe might have more carnal notions about what “getting to know each other better” meant.

  Whatever Gabe’s reasons for marrying her in the beginning, the fact was she’d shamed him and everyone knew it. His pride had taken blow after blow, and though she honestly and bitterly regretted it now, it would be just deserts if he turned the tables and dealt her a strong taste of public humiliation.

  Dread made her increase her pace in the nervous circle she walked in the open space of the large bedroom. It was impossible for her to think they could ever trust each other. Still perpetually obsessed by the guilt of what she’d done, Lainey wondered again whether it was safe to risk that Gabe would somehow avenge himself on her, or whether she should just grab her things and run back to Chicago.

  Surely her lawyer could untangle the mess she’d made of both her inheritance and her marriage. Though she’d doomed the marriage even before they’d taken vows, it was only right that Gabe was fairly compensated for what he’d done to save Talbot Ranch, if not receive the lion’s share of her inheritance.

  And if she gave him the lion’s share, what would she ever want with perhaps only the main house and a few acres when she might never have the courage to live there and face everyone after what she’d done? Because she already owed Gabe a vast fortune, it might be more efficient to just let every bit of it go to him.

  Nerves and exhaustion intensified everything. Since she couldn’t seem to stop fretting over it all on her own, Lainey was almost relieved when she heard Gabe’s bootsteps on the flat stones outside the French doors that opened from the master bedroom onto the patio.

  Taking a hasty second to tightly cinch the belt of her silk robe securely over her pajamas, she stopped pacing and turned toward the doors when she heard the click of the latch. Belatedly she realized she should have opened the heavy drapes enough for him to get in.

  Lainey rushed toward the doors to at least catch the edge of the drape and move it out of the way, but Gabe easily dealt with it himself and came in. Lainey stopped halfway to him and gripped her hands together to keep them from visibly trembling. It wouldn’t be a good idea to insult him with a show of nervousness.

  Gabe closed the door and let the drape fall back into place before he looked over at her. The distant chime of the grandfather clock in the living room marked the ten o’clock hour and reminded Lainey that it was much later than just after dark.

  And much later for her than she’d feared.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE glittery look in Gabe’s eyes softened into smoldering heat as his gaze took note of her brushed hair and then trailed slowly over her from face to bare toes. It was a look that missed no detail, and left her feeling as if he’d put his hands in every place that it lingered.

  “What do you call that color?”


  The trivial question threw her. “The salesclerk called it gold, but I think it’s a little too yellow to be…gold.” She tried not to let her dismay over her babbling answer show.

  “That the only kind of nightclothes you brought with you?”

  Lainey hadn’t given a thought to her full-length pajamas and the long robe, but the outfit was probably more modest and concealing than most husbands would prefer. Particularly a husband who seemed determined to make up for lost time.

  “I usually wear this style.”

  “Next time we’re in San Antonio, we’ll shop for something more…womanish.”

  Lainey glanced down. She’d never considered her preference for pajamas over gowns as being less than feminine. Or less than “womanish.”

  “A man likes his woman to wear a little lace and ribbon for him in private.”

  Lainey looked up. His candid remarks suggested not only a very male craving for womanly softness, but a deep appreciation of femininity. They also hinted faintly at the vulnerability she kept sensing beneath his tough guy exterior.

  “You gonna ask me again about the other bedroom?”

  The sudden switch was another surprise. His dark gaze held hers as he reached up to take off his Stetson. She gripped her fingers together more tightly.

  “Do you want me to?”

  As if it was such a regular habit that he no longer thought about it consciously, Gabe upended the Stetson on the wing chair set at the side of the French doors as he said, “No, ma’am, I do not.”

  The gravelly softness of his low voice and his use of “ma’am,” made her feel warm toward him. He was suddenly not a dictator issuing edicts, but a hard man who’d set aside a little of his complexity to be a bit more approachable.

  She sensed the subtle invitation to closeness in the softening of his gaze. It was almost as if he knew precisely how hard it was for her to think about sharing his bed tonight, so he might be thinking of some way to reassure her somehow, though they both knew he’d never back down on the subject of where she’d sleep.