Husband for Hire

by Susan Wiggs

  After driving away from Twyla’s house that day, he’d taken Lauren to see Lost Springs to show her where he came from.

  “I don’t want to get into the deep psychological implications of your returning here,” she’d said, clearly uncomfortable as she’d fiddled with the latch of her designer purse. “You’ve triumphed over your circumstances. That’s all that matters.”

  He used to believe that, but he knew better now. It wasn’t all that mattered.

  It had taken a hairdresser from Hell Creek, Wyoming, to make him realize that.

  Lauren had cried when he’d told her it was over, but she hadn’t tried to convince him to stay with her. She was no fool—she had probably seen the truth even before he had. She’d probably seen it the moment she’d walked up Twyla’s drive that day.

  Now September set the aspens aflame with bright golden color, and he still hadn’t been in touch with Twyla. He’d tried calling, but she’d hung up. A hundred times more he had picked up that phone. But when he did, he wondered what he could possibly say to her that would convince her that, in one weekend, he had fallen completely in love with her, that knowing her had changed his life.

  He knew damned well what she thought of him. Her face had said it all at their parting. He had betrayed her by not telling her about Lauren. Why should she trust him again?

  A week after the reunion, a package had arrived. Rob’s hopes had soared when he saw the postmark, then plummeted when he discovered the heavily insured contents: the ruby necklace he had given her, and the picture Gwen had taken of them before their weekend together. No note, no explanation. She really didn’t need to explain. She had swept her life clean of him.

  He knew he could go to her house, knock at her door, demand to be heard. But he wasn’t ready to do that, not yet. He couldn’t until he knew exactly what he had to offer her.

  He turned the horseshoe over and over in his hands. He’d had all summer to think, to plan, to wonder, but when all was said and done, plans could take him only so far.

  He glanced over at the fax machine to see that a message had come in while he was gone. Still holding the horseshoe, he looked at it—and his face broke into a huge smile. “Hot damn,” he said. “It’s about time.”

  Holding both his good-luck talisman and the letter, he experienced a strange lightness in his chest. Up until this moment, his life had been all about goal-setting and planning. Now he was about to take a blind plunge into a future he almost couldn’t imagine. He was about to follow his instincts rather than his intellect. It was either the biggest mistake of his life…or the best move he could make.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE BELL OVER THE SHOP door of Twyla’s Tease ’n’ Tweeze jangled as Gwen McCabe came in, bringing a fresh eddy of autumn air with her.

  “Look what the wind blew in,” Mrs. Duckworth declared, turning her head carefully under its covering of lavender-blue dye. “How’s every little thing, hon?”

  “Hectic,” Gwen said, her color high from working outside. Ruefully she held her hands out to Diep. “Gardening hands. I’m a mess.”

  “You been working too hard,” Diep said, leading her over to the manicure station. “All the time, work, work, work.”

  “I know,” Gwen said, waving to Sadie and Mrs. Spinelli, who sat under the dryers, playing a game of gin. She sat down and swiveled around in an empty chair. “Isn’t it glorious?”

  Twyla felt a rush of gladness as she watched her mother. Gwen still got a little jumpy when she was away from the house, but she loved coming in to the salon to get “fixed up,” as she put it.

  She had been doing a lot of fixing up over the summer. She and Twyla had decided to give the farmhouse and yard a face-lift. Gwen had taken charge of the whole operation, supervising yard workers and painters and doing much of the work herself. Her eye for design and color had been invaluable in dreaming up color schemes for the paint job and garden layout. The house now wore a gleaming coat of white paint and sharp new louvered shutters in bright lemon yellow. Flower beds and shrubs bloomed in profusion, tended by Gwen.

  Everything had improved over the summer—the house, the yard, Gwen, even Twyla’s outlook on life. Everything except the emptiness carved out by memories of her brief lost weekend with Rob Carter.

  She shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that he was involved with Lauren DeVane, as beautiful and sophisticated as an ad in Town & Country magazine. Lauren was precisely the type of woman for him. She hobnobbed with the Fremonts and the Duncans. Twyla knew without asking that Lauren had been to finishing school, that she flew to New York City to shop, that she knew how to ski, and that she made regular trips to Europe. Twyla could even understand—or at least pretend to—why Rob hadn’t told her about Lauren. The weekend in Hell Creek was a one-time event.

  Still, the hurt had cut deep. He should have attended the reunion with her but left her heart alone. That was what an honorable man would have done. Instead, he’d taken all of her—body, heart, soul—and left nothing but emptiness. All along, he’d known he would go back to Lauren.

  Even the well-meaning matchmakers had backed off from fixing Twyla up with more dates because she’d told them, “Don’t do this to me anymore. I can’t take it.”

  She pushed aside a feeling of melancholy and concentrated on Mrs. Duckworth’s hair. Twyla wasn’t the sort to drown in sorrow. It simply wasn’t part of her makeup. With an almost defiant gratitude, her spirits lifted with each twist of the foil wrap. The women gossiped in low murmurs, and she thought how much she loved the sound of their voices and occasional laughter.

  It was foolish to complain. Perhaps her life had not turned out as she’d thought it would, but like one of her mother’s quilts, it was stitched together from bits and pieces, forming a whole that made her feel proud and fulfilled. She was a daughter, a mother, a business owner, and she liked the way things were.

  Just as she was peeling off her gloves, a shadow fell over the front window of the shop. A gleaming black Lincoln Navigator parked in front. The back of it appeared to be crammed with boxes and luggage. Pressed against one window was a quilt.

  Twyla did a double take. It was the quilt from the Lost Springs raffle.

  “Would you look at that,” Sadie Kittredge said, coming out from under her hair dryer. “Twyla, it’s—”

  “I know who it is.” Her heart knocked almost painfully in her chest.

  “Well, get out there and see what he wants, dear,” Mrs. Spinelli said bossily. “Unless you want him to come in here.”

  “Let him come in here,” Diep cried. “I want to have a word with this Dr. Hunk.”

  Twyla looked helplessly at her mother. Gwen inclined her head toward the door. “You’d better go out there,” she said simply.

  Twyla wiped her hands on her smock. She resisted the urge to glance in the mirror, but she couldn’t keep from wishing she had time to freshen her makeup. She walked the walk of a condemned prisoner as she left the salon and stepped out on the sidewalk.

  Rob got out of the truck. His hair was a little longer. His smile still made her feel as if she were looking into the sun.

  Please, she thought. Please, just let me get through this. Let me survive to the other side of the moment.

  “I would have called first,” he said, “but I haven’t had much luck getting through to you.”

  He held out his hand to her, and like a fool, she took it.

  Mistake. Alarm sirens shrieked through her. Let go, turn away, save yourself while you can.

  “So how’ve you been?” he asked.

  Outwardly nothing had changed. She still had the shop, still volunteered at the hospital. Brian was in second grade now. Her mother went to the grocery store once a week, to Quilt Quorum, to church. She had worked all summer on the house, and it had never looked better. No dramatic changes, but everything had started on that strangest of days, the day of the bachelor auction.

  “I’ve been fine,” she said.

  “Let�
��s walk,” he suggested.

  “No, thanks.” She extracted her hand from his.

  “Fine, we’ll talk here. It’ll give the ladies in your shop and the customers at the Grill something to gossip about.”

  She opened her mouth to protest but decided against it. He was right, damn him. The idea of making a scene in the middle of town made her feel faint. Still refusing to see or speak to him was childish. Cowardly. She had conquered her fears by going to her reunion. Learned to face the things that hurt her—like Dr. Robert Carter.

  “All right,” she said levelly, “why are you here?”

  He didn’t waste any time. He took out a black velvet box with a familiar logo.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I sent the necklace back to you because I never want to see it again.”

  “I traded it in for this.” He snapped open the box.

  Before she could stop herself, she gasped with unguarded surprise. From the corner of her eye, she saw someone come out of the feed store, and a car drove past. Suddenly she wished she’d taken him up on his offer to go somewhere private.

  Scrambling to gather her wits, she tried to pretend she wasn’t interested. But no amount of pretense could mask her amazement at the beautiful oval-cut ruby ring encrusted with diamonds.

  He took her hand and slid it on her ring finger, and like an idiot, she let him.

  He kept hold of her hand and said, “I want to marry you, Twyla.”

  First longing—just a painful flash—seized her. Then a car horn sounded somewhere, and reality set in. She forced out a burst of laughter and snatched her hand away. “Okay, very funny. How much did Mrs. Spinelli pay you to say that?”

  “I mean it, Twyla.” Those eyes. Deep velvet brown, and so sincere she wanted to smack him.

  “Our relationship—if you can even call it that—started out a lie. How can you want to marry me?”

  “Twyla, knowing you for just one weekend changed my life. I want to be with you and Brian. I want to give you everything. Your degree in psychology. A trip to France. Your dream house, anything—”

  She laughed again, but heard bitterness beneath the laughter. “You’re too late,” she said, trying not to love the rich weight of the ring on her finger. “Everything changed for me that weekend, too. I discovered I’m perfectly happy here, doing what I do. It’s probably hard for a busy city doctor to understand, but there you are. My place is here, in this small town, doing people’s hair and listening to their troubles.”

  She could feel the tears pressing and burning at the backs of her eyes. She prayed she wouldn’t shed them. “I don’t need to get a degree to turn me into a good friend and a good listener. I already know how to be those things. I don’t need to go to Paris in order to be more sophisticated, because I found out I don’t much care for sophistication.”

  “But, Twyla—”

  “No, let me finish.” She had to get it all out before she broke down. “I agonized, wondering if you would have come to me on bended knee if I had a degree, if I’d been to Paris, if I’d been somebody important. And then I decided I am somebody important, just not to you.”

  He stuck his thumb into his belt and stood straighter, his posture mildly daunting. “Who the hell told you what I think, what I feel?”

  The postman walked by, slowing his pace as he passed them. Twyla figured he was straining to hear the conversation. Then a waitress came out of the Grill, choosing that precise moment to sweep the sidewalk, stirring the smell of dry autumn leaves with a wide push broom.

  Flushing with embarrassment, Twyla dropped her voice. “Intuition. I don’t need a degree to tell me that.”

  “Then your intuition is way off.” He ran his finger down her arm, and she braced herself, hoping his touch wouldn’t make her shiver. But it did, just as it had the first time he’d touched her.

  “Couldn’t you feel it happening that weekend?” he asked. “The last thing I expected was to meet someone like you. Someone I can trust…tell about Lost Springs. Someone who can show me the things that are real. The last thing I expected was to fall in love with you.”

  She bit the inside of her cheek, staving off sobs of surprise and yearning. Oh Lord, she thought, don’t do this. Don’t let me want this to be real.

  “I’m not good at long-distance relationships,” she stated. “And I really don’t want to live in Denver.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Because I don’t live in Denver anymore.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Nope. Sold my condo and my interest in the practice. I’m looking for a new place.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “It would be too long a commute to Converse County Hospital.” He handed her a wrinkled fax with an official-looking letterhead. “It took me all summer to get everything arranged. My license to practice in Wyoming is being approved.”

  “My Converse County Hospital?”

  “Yep. I’m getting out of lab work. I’ll be on staff beginning next month.” He stroked her arm again, lightly coaxing. “So what do you say? Can we start over? Swear to God I’ll get it right this time.”

  “Give me a minute.” Shaking, terrified, she went into the shop, pressing herself against the wall and closing her eyes while the tears squeezed out from under her lids.

  “Twyla, honey, what’s wrong?” asked her mother.

  Everyone gathered around. Diep grabbed her hand. “A ring! He gave you a ring!” They oohed and aahed over it while Twyla tried to collect herself.

  “He says he fell in love with me,” she confessed.

  Her mother began to cry, too, hugging Twyla. “Oh, sweetie. I knew it. I just knew it.”

  “He wants to marry me.” Twyla could barely say it aloud.

  Sadie rolled her eyes dramatically. “Oh, there’s a disaster.”

  “A fate worse than death,” Mrs. Duckworth added, handing her a tissue.

  “And to think she could have had that bald mortician bachelor from Terre Haute,” Mrs. Spinelli pointed out.

  “Yeah, any woman in her right mind would take him over George Clooney,” Sadie said.

  “Aw, come on, Twyla,” Diep said. “If you say yes to Rob, you get to keep the ring.”

  “Do you know how much I’d like to have that man for a son-in-law?” Gwen added.

  “Well.” She snuffled into the tissue. “Since you put it that way…”

  She put her hand on the doorknob and turned to her mother one last time. “Okay, Mom, this is it. You can still try to talk me out of it.”

  Gwen shook her head, a telltale gleam of happiness in her eye. She patted Twyla’s cheeks, drying the tears. “Fat chance, dear. Fat chance indeed.”

  Twyla stepped cautiously onto the sidewalk again. Rob leaned against his truck, ankles crossed, looking nonchalant—except that his temples glistened with sweat.

  “Sorry,” Twyla said, a crazy smile trying to break free. “You just sprang this on me so suddenly.”

  “And you had to consult with the committee.”

  She gave a watery laugh and resisted the impulse to pinch herself. “My mom, mainly.”

  “It’s nice, having a mom. So what’d she say?”

  “That she’d love to have you for a son-in-law.”

  “What about you, Twyla?”

  “I love you, period. I do, Rob. I love you so much I can’t think.”

  “Good. Get in the car.”

  “What? But I—” She glanced uncertainly at the shop. In unison, the ladies inside made vigorous shooing motions with their hands. Embracing the insanity of the moment, she climbed in, and he drove down the dirt road he’d shown her after giving her the tour of Lost Springs.

  Giddiness rose in her. “I remember this place. This is Lovers’ Lane.”

  He grinned, parking in a shaded spot on the bluff overlooking Lightning Creek. He turned off the car but left the radio playing softly. He slid his arm across the back of the seat and put his mouth so close to hers she could almost taste him. “Then you know
,” he said, “why I brought you here.”

  He spread the raffle quilt on the ground. She took off her shoes and ran her bare foot over the soft, worn surface. “You must have thought I was so gauche the day you bought all those tickets from me,” she said.

  “I remember thinking a lot of things about you when we first met.” He put his arm around her waist and brought her swiftly against him. “But ‘gauche’ wasn’t one of them. Earnest, maybe. Also funny and sexy and smart.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” With slow deliberation he undid the buttons of her uniform, one by one. “Do you think I could’ve made myself go to your ten-year reunion if I’d thought anything less of you?”

  Her skin heated where his fingers brushed over it. “That was definitely beyond the call of duty. I thought you were so polished and sophisticated. I was sure you were laughing at me behind my back the whole time.”

  “I was putty in your hands from the first moment I saw you, Twyla,” he whispered, his breath warm in her ear. “Putty in your hands.” His slow deliberation shifted into high gear, and suddenly Twyla couldn’t wait to be out of her clothes, to be with him. After all the weeks of thinking she’d never see him again, never be like this again, she needed to be close to him, next to him…now.

  They made love like a couple of teenagers, with that level of arousal and urgency and probably, she thought without regret, that same lack of grace and finesse, barely even removing their clothes in their eagerness. Except that when Twyla was a teenager, it had been nothing like this afterward. Instead of a guilty, embarrassed ride home, they lazed, half-clothed and fully sated, in the autumn sun. The hollow of his shoulder cradled her head so perfectly she never wanted to move.

  He picked up one of the red clogs she wore to work. “When I caught myself fantasizing about red shoes all summer,” he confessed, “I knew it had to be love.”

  She laughed and shifted position so she could look at him—open shirt, jeans unbuttoned and half-unzipped. And that face. How could she have survived a whole summer without seeing that face? But her common-sense fairy came knocking, and she felt compelled to say, “This is all happening so fast, Rob. Maybe we should make sure it isn’t just hormones, that it’s the real thing.”