A Willing Wife

by Jackie Merritt

  “Forget it, Dallas,” Ruben said gruffly. “You’re a busy man, and I shouldn’t be laying a Perez family problem on your shoulders.”

  It was interesting to Dallas that he’d been thinking the word problem at almost the same moment Ruben was saying it.

  “I’ll talk to her, Ruben. I’ll do it as soon as I get back to the ranch.”

  “Well…I appreciate your concern, Dallas, but I shouldn’t be imposing on your time.”

  “It’s no imposition at all,” Dallas said, and changed the subject. “Looks like the crew is making good headway with this creek.”

  “It was almost dammed up tight,” Ruben said. “A couple of the others are just about as bad. It was one helluva storm, Dallas.”

  “Yes, it sure was. I’ll see you later, Ruben.” Dallas climbed on his horse and rode away.

  Maggie couldn’t shake the effects of that stormy day. She couldn’t remember ever feeling so down in the dumps before, not even on the day she’d lost her job in Phoenix, which had been one very tough nut to swallow. But she recalled herself snapping to and facing her dilemma without the awful despondency she felt now. It was when she’d decided to come home to her parents for a while, just until she got her bearings again.

  Of course, she thought with no small amount of bitterness, she hadn’t been worried about being pregnant then, had she? How could she have been such a fool that stormy day? Who knew better than she that making love without protection was as stupid as playing Russian roulette with a loaded pistol? Hadn’t she learned her lesson with Craig? Her parents and siblings had accepted one shotgun wedding without censuring her, but a second?

  Of course, she could find out for sure by borrowing her mother’s car and driving to Red Rock for a visit to a drugstore to buy a home pregnancy test. And maybe she would do that, she thought, heaving a disconsolate sigh. Knowing for certain, even if the test turned out positive, would be better than what she was going through now.

  Oh, Lord, what if the test did come out positive? She could never go to Dallas if it turned out that she had conceived! she thought, panicked by the mere thought. She would face the music on her own, even if it meant a break with her family so they would never know what had really taken place in that line shack during the storm.

  A break with my family? Oh, could I really do that? Terribly disheartened, Maggie watched through a window as her son tossed his beloved lasso at the post. In the back of her troubled mind she realized that he was getting better at it, looping the post at least as often as he missed it. Why is it that practice makes perfect in everything but human relations?

  Sighing heavily, she started to turn away from the window, but froze instead when she spotted a horse and rider coming toward the Perez house. In two seconds she recognized Dallas and Vic, and her first frantic impulse was to run. Leaving the window she dashed through the house, as though seeking a hiding place.

  When her ridiculous reaction caught up with her, she was in her bedroom, breathing as hard and fearfully as a trapped animal. Then, for some reason, her mind cleared a bit. She had to get hold of herself before Dallas knocked on the door. She might feel like a trapped animal, but she certainly shouldn’t let herself look like one.

  Hurrying to the bathroom, she brushed her hair and put on some lipstick. Not to impress Dallas, God forbid, but just so she wouldn’t give her true state of mind away by looking like she’d been moping around. Which was exactly what she’d been doing—but she certainly didn’t want Dallas knowing it.

  Then she waited. From outside came voices, Dallas’s and Travis’s, but she couldn’t make out their words. And she waited some more. As the minutes ticked by, her emotions whirled within her. One second she felt hot, the next cold. If it were anyone else outside with her son, she would go out herself and get this over with, whatever “this” was.

  And then she remembered telling Dallas that he could visit Travis anytime he wished, and she suddenly felt very foolish. He hadn’t come to see her, he’d come to see Travis!

  Collapsing on a chair in the living room, she finally admitted that her misery wasn’t all caused by worry about a pregnancy that, in all probability, didn’t exist. She was unhappy and restless and down in the dumps because of Dallas. Because she had memories that were almost too hot to handle. Because no matter how hard she tried not to think of him naked and on top of her on that bed in the line shack, she couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  Groaning, she covered her face with her hands. If he touched her now, she would do it again. She would open her mouth for his tongue, and open her legs for his body. Her frazzled nerves were caused by desire, not by resentment.

  At long last she heard a knock on the door. Dragging herself to her feet, she crossed the room and opened it. Dallas was standing on the porch with a sober expression on his face and his hat in his hands.

  “Hello, Maggie.”

  “Hello.”

  “Could I come in for a minute? Ruben asked me to talk to you about something.”

  She certainly doubted the truth of that opening. Her father didn’t ask other people to talk to his children. Ruben Perez was a proud man, and he would never go to his boss with a problem. If the “something” Dallas had mentioned was a problem, of course.

  It just seemed like a trumped-up reason to talk to her, and Maggie couldn’t help saying so. “My father does not ask people to talk to his children,” she said coolly.

  “Well, today he did. Are you going to let me come in or not? If you say no, then I’ll just tell Ruben that I tried and failed. It’s really no big deal, either way.”

  Maggie suddenly wasn’t so certain. Maybe she didn’t know her father as well as she thought. “Did it seem like a big deal to him?”

  “It’s not a matter of life and death, if that’s what you’re getting at. But I do believe he’s worried about it.”

  “Papa doesn’t worry,” Maggie said thoughtfully. “Not that I know of. What is he worried about?”

  “You.”

  “Me!” Oh, no, did her father suspect—or know—what she and Dallas had done at the line shack? Why else would he involve Dallas in a family problem? “Come inside,” she said in an unsteady voice, and then stood back so he could enter. She gestured at the living room sofa. “Sit down.” Her trembling legs carried her back to the chair she’d just been using.

  “Does—does he know?” she asked anxiously.

  Dallas frowned. “Does he know what?”

  “That you and I…that we…” Maggie’s face turned crimson.

  Dallas finally caught on. He could easily put Maggie’s fears to rest on that subject, but he decided to let her fret for a while. As uptight as she was about him and their romantic interlude in the line shack, fretting a bit just might do her some good. Actually, even though he’d never laid a hand on a woman in anger, he felt like shaking some sense into Maggie.

  “Did you tell him?” he asked, frowning to add tension to his question.

  “My God, no! Do you think I’m crazy? It had to have come from you. Who did you tell? Papa must have heard it from someone else.” She got up to pace and wring her hands.

  Dallas liked the skirt she had on. It was blue with red and yellow flowers, and it flared enticingly around her legs as she moved.

  “I didn’t tell anyone,” he said calmly.

  She whirled to a stop. “You must have! If Papa heard about it this soon, it’s probably all over the ranch,” she moaned.

  “Well, no one heard it from me. If Ruben knows about it, then you must have let the cat out of the bag yourself.”

  “I most certainly did not!” Maggie frowned. “Wait a minute. You said if Ruben knows about it. Isn’t that why he’s worried about me?”

  “No, he’s worried about you blaming yourself because he had to put down the mare.”

  Maggie stared at him with her mouth open. “You deliberately led me to believe—”

  Dallas got up. “Sorry, but you did that to yourself. I’ll tell you something,
Maggie. If everyone on the ranch knew how we’d spent our time in the line shack, I would not give a damn.” He walked to the door, then turned around and looked at her before opening it. “If you are blaming yourself for the mare’s death, you shouldn’t be. I can at least tell Ruben we talked about it. But I know now what you’re really blaming yourself for—it’s for being human and making love with a man. I know something else now, too. It wouldn’t have mattered who the man was. For some damn reason you don’t want to be human.”

  Dallas looked pensive for a moment. “What I can’t figure out is, if you don’t want to be human, what do you want out of life? Maybe you should try figuring that out. See you later.” He paused one more time before leaving. “Incidentally, you look great in that skirt. I always did like a woman to dress like one.”

  Nine

  Maggie tried to be as enthusiastic as her mother was about Ruben’s upcoming birthday. But when she looked at the calendar during the weekend prior to the big day, all she really saw was the rapid passage of time. It worried her. Would she still be here for Christmas, still hoping to receive a job offer from a Houston bank, still on edge over Dallas, still living off her folks?

  Being laid off from her job in Phoenix had been the catalyst that had brought her back to Texas and her parents’ home, and only another job would give her the means to leave again. It really had been silly—and probably childish—of her to think that all her problems would disappear if she was with her family, but she had definitely left Phoenix with very high hopes.

  She’d been doing pretty well, too, until Dallas entered the picture. He certainly wasn’t her path to happiness. He hadn’t even been nice the day he’d come by to talk to her about the mare. He had deliberately let her think that her father had somehow found out what she and Dallas had done the day of the storm, and then he’d had the nerve to tell her she didn’t even want to be human. Maggie hated him for that, and realized for the first time in her life that it was possible to hate and love a man at the same time.

  Not that the feeling she recognized as love would be cherished by any sensible, sane woman. There were no soft, sweet emotions connected to the sensation; instead she suffered a red-hot ache in the pit of her stomach that nearly drove her crazy.

  She could only conclude that what she felt for Dallas wasn’t the sort of love that inspired poets. What she felt was almost pornographic. Dare she even call it love?

  “And so no one will be here for the weekend,” Ryan Fortune explained to Rosita after telling her that he and Lily were flying to Bermuda the following day. “Since there’s no reason to either cook or clean while we’re away, I’m giving the entire household staff a four-day break from routine.” Ryan smiled. “You, especially, deserve a nice long weekend with your family, Rosita. And with Ruben’s birthday coming up, I’m sure you’ll have plenty to do at home.”

  “Thank you, Ryan. Ruben will be pleased.” Rosita frowned then. “What about Matthew and Claudia? They’ll still be here, won’t they?”

  “Matthew and Claudia feel that they need to get away for a few days, and have made reservations at a nice resort on the Gulf. They will, of course, take Taylor with them. And they’re using the Fortune airplane so they can return immediately if there is any word on Bryan. There’s no reason for my other children or Lily’s to visit the ranch while she and I are away, so the house is going to be quite empty. I’d like to simply close it up while we’re all gone.”

  “Dallas will be on the ranch alone,” Rosita murmured.

  “Yes, but Dallas has his own home and seems to prefer being alone, Rosita. He hasn’t even been much for family get-togethers since Sara died,” Ryan said quietly.

  “Ryan, Dallas has mourned long enough,” Rosita said sadly.

  “I know he has, but what I don’t know is what I can do about it, Rosita. He has to find his own way back, just as everyone does who loses a loved one.”

  “That is true,” Rosita murmured. “He’s just so alone in that beautiful house of his. I worry about him.”

  “I think we all do, Rosita.”

  “Maybe he would come to my house for Ruben’s birthday dinner,” she mused.

  “I’d be surprised if he said yes, Rosita.”

  “Oh, no, Ryan, Dallas ate supper with us not too long ago.”

  “He did? That’s great, Rosita. How’d you get him to agree?”

  Rosita smiled with motherly pride. “I’m sure he came because of Maggie.”

  A slow smile appeared on Ryan’s face. “Well, now, isn’t that interesting?”

  “It might turn out to be interesting, Ryan. It just might.”

  Seated at the kitchen table and making a list of groceries needed for the birthday celebration, Rosita said casually, “Dallas will be eating dinner with us, Maggie, so there will be seven of us.”

  Maggie choked on the water she was about to swallow. After coughing a few times, she asked in a thin, breathless voice, “You invited him to Papa’s birthday dinner?”

  “Are you all right?” Rosita asked.

  “I’m fine. Mama, why did you invite Dallas?”

  Rosita smiled serenely. “Because his entire family is leaving the ranch for four days, and he’s going to be the only Fortune on the place. Inviting him to dinner just seemed like the right thing to do. Anyway, I had your papa ask Dallas to come, and he said yes.”

  An overwhelming feeling of nature’s forces working against her came upon Maggie. Obviously she could tell herself a thousand times that she would never speak to Dallas again, and nothing would come of her determination.

  “For a supposed loner, he sure does show himself a lot,” she said flatly.

  “Now, Maggie, Dallas saved your life during that horrible storm. I can’t believe you would begrudge him a fine meal.”

  “I don’t begrudge him a fine meal, for Pete’s sake! I just don’t want him eating it with us!”

  “Why are you so angry?”

  “Because—because…” Maggie sputtered, then closed her mouth. Any anger she felt toward Dallas had to be contained. Anything she felt for or about Dallas had to be contained. It would not do at all for her mother to get an inkling of how far things had gone between her daughter and Dallas.

  In the next heartbeat, Maggie realized that she herself was going to give it away by coming down hard on Dallas without a reason that Rosita would see as logical or deserved. She forced a smile and an apology. “I’m sorry, Mama. You have every right to invite anyone you please to Papa’s birthday dinner. I’ll take Travis, drive to Red Rock tomorrow and do the shopping for you.”

  “That would be very helpful, sweetie,” Rosita said. She checked her grocery list and murmured, “Let me see now. Have I forgotten anything?”

  “Travis, please leave that hat at home,” Maggie pleaded after a simple request had merely made her small son look stubborn. “Tell you what, why don’t I buy you a new one today in Red Rock. Wouldn’t that be fun? Wouldn’t you just love to pick out a brand-new hat?”

  “I don’t want a new hat. I like this one. But if you want to buy me something, Mama, I would like some chaps, like Uncle Cruz wears.”

  “Would you also like them in an extra-large size, as your hat is?” Maggie asked dryly.

  “Sure,” Travis said cheerfully. “Just so they’re like Uncle Cruz’s.”

  “Wonderful,” Maggie mumbled under her breath, realizing that the word size meant very little, if anything, to a five-year-old child. “Come on, son, let’s go. We have a lot of shopping to do.”

  One of the items Maggie planned to buy was not on her mother’s list—a home pregnancy test. Fear of a positive result made Maggie jittery, but she had to find out for sure.

  It was a traumatic experience to lock herself in the bathroom and read the directions on the test box that evening, and Maggie’s hands were shaking. She lowered the seat of the commode and sat on it to ponder how she would deal with a positive result. She’d previously decided that she would never go to Dallas, but lookin
g into the face of reality, as she was doing at the moment, wasn’t that a rather ridiculous decision? After all, if she was pregnant, she hadn’t gotten that way by herself.

  And yet, the thought of approaching Dallas with that sort of news gave her cold chills. The thought of approaching any man with news of that nature gave her cold chills. She’d gone through it once—with Craig—and she honestly didn’t think she could do it again. Recalling Craig’s initial reaction—his curled lip and sardonically raised eyebrow, as though she’d deliberately gotten pregnant to entrap him— Maggie thought of the same awful expression on Dallas’s face. Oh, she would die, she thought with tears in her eyes. She would just die if she ever caused a man to display such disgust for her again. And, stupidly she’d married Craig anyway, when she and Travis would have been much better off if she’d told Craig to stuff his halfhearted, “Well, guess I’ll have to marry you,” up his nose and raised her son on her own.

  So, no, she would not go to Dallas if the test was positive. That decision hadn’t been ridiculous at all, and she would stick by it. Wiping the tears from her eyes, she took a breath to calm her distraught soul, and started the test.

  A short time later she had her answer: She was not pregnant.

  What took her totally by surprise was that she didn’t feel elated. A little relieved, yes, but not at all thrilled or exhilarated. In fact, she felt rather down and strangely empty.

  She simply did not understand herself, she thought, frowning intently while she got ready for bed. She didn’t understand herself at all.

  When Maggie got up the day of Ruben’s birthday celebration, she told herself that she could deal with Dallas for one more meal, and, for heaven’s sake, to relax and just let things happen. Anything else would alert Rosita, and the last thing Maggie felt she needed right now was her mother catching on to what had really taken place in that little line shack.

  Quickly Maggie made her bed and picked up after herself. When the room was in order, she went to the kitchen, where Rosita was already beginning to prepare Ruben’s favorite dishes. There would be no presents, everyone knew, because years ago Ruben had declared that all he wanted on his birthday was one of Rosita’s delicious dinners.