Montana Bride

by Joan Johnston

  “It isn’t important how long ago you were widowed except—”

  “He died after Griffin was born,” Hetty blurted. “Of cholera,” she added, because she’d watched Hannah’s husband, Mr. McMurtry, die of cholera and could describe the symptoms if Karl asked.

  “I’m sorry for your loss.” Karl cleared his throat and added, “So it’s been a great many years since you’ve…been a wife.”

  What a tactful substitution for had intimate relations, Hetty thought. She cleared her own throat and answered, “Yes, it has.”

  “Perhaps we should wait a while. What do you think?”

  Hetty couldn’t imagine any other man being so considerate on his wedding night as to offer his bride the option of forgoing the whole thing. If that was, indeed, what Karl was doing. “What are you saying?”

  Karl let go of her and took a step back. “I’m proposing we postpone the wedding night.”

  Hetty felt enormous relief. And a startling amount of disappointment. What kind of man didn’t want to make love to his bride on his wedding night?

  A weak one.

  A considerate one.

  The warring thoughts led her to ask, “Is there something wrong with me?”

  “Lord, no!” he said. “I want to take you in my arms and—”

  “Then why don’t you?” Hetty interrupted.

  Karl looked taken aback, but that only lasted a second.

  Hetty found herself encircled by astonishingly confident arms. She felt Karl’s large hand—she’d noticed he had very large hands—on the back of her head, angling it for a kiss, and then felt his mouth capture hers.

  She wasn’t sure what she should feel, how she should act, so she followed Karl’s lead.

  It was a kiss that presumed experience. A kiss filled with need. A kiss that demanded a response.

  Hetty fought panic as a frisson of desire skittered up her spine. Her body felt taut and ached with wanting…something.

  Clive is barely cold in his grave. I shouldn’t be feeling so much pleasure. I don’t deserve a good man and a good marriage and a happy life.

  Her arms were caught between their bodies, which made her feel trapped. She resisted the urge to struggle free, but her body mirrored the tension she felt in Karl’s.

  He was breathing hard.

  She was afraid to take a breath.

  His lips were soft.

  Hers had pressed flat.

  His arms pressed her close.

  Her arms slid up to keep them apart.

  Hetty was aware that she was fighting Karl at every turn. Subtly. Slightly. But surely.

  She had to swallow, and did, but the kiss continued. This kiss was nothing like the two she’d exchanged with Clive. They’d both been short and furtive, a bare touching of lips in the darkness behind Clive’s wagon, the risk of discovery too great for more intimacy.

  This kiss seemed to go on forever, leaving her more and more terrified. She couldn’t catch her breath. Her knees wanted to buckle. Her hips strained toward Karl’s. Her breasts felt full, the tips hard and aching. Her heart pounded hard in her chest.

  When Karl finally broke the kiss, Hetty felt relieved. She was panting, breathless. And disappointed. And then relieved again. She kept her eyes lowered, unwilling to let him see either emotion.

  She quivered when she felt his knuckle beneath her chin, gently urging her face upward. She resisted only a moment, then met his searching gaze. She wondered what he was looking for. She wondered whether she ought to say something. She wondered if he could tell it was only the fourth time she’d ever been kissed. She wondered if he had any inkling how scared she’d been.

  And still was.

  He released her and took a step back. “It’s too soon.”

  Hetty knew she’d failed her first test as a wife. “I can do better.” Her voice sounded as uncertain as she felt.

  Karl shook his head, let out a deep sigh, and took another step back. “I can wait. Our first time together will be all the sweeter if you’re willing.”

  How could he tell that she wasn’t? “Are you sure you don’t mind waiting?”

  His features transformed into something quite extraordinary as his mouth tilted in a lopsided smile. “I keep reminding myself of something Bao once told me. Or rather, Bao quoting Confucius.”

  “What’s that?” Hetty asked.

  “ ‘The cautious seldom err.’ ”

  Hetty’s brow furrowed. Then she smiled at Karl and said, “Oh. I see. Better safe than sorry.”

  “Exactly. Which means I need to ask, do you need privacy to get ready for bed?”

  Hetty felt her cheeks burning with embarrassment. She looked around the hotel room, which had a lacquered Chinese screen in one corner. She thought of how embarrassing it might be for Karl if he should run into Dennis downstairs, especially after all the jibes his friend had poked at Karl after their wedding. “I can change behind the screen,” she said.

  Was that relief she saw on Karl’s face?

  “Fine,” he said. “Let me know when you’re done, and I’ll turn my back while you slip under the covers.”

  Hetty glanced sideways at the bed, which Karl still apparently intended to share with her. She hoped her concern didn’t show on her face. After all, if Karl had wanted to consummate the marriage, he could have proceeded without stopping at a single kiss. He was her husband. It was his right to make her his wife. He’d said he was willing to wait. There was no reason to fear he would not.

  Except this man was a stranger. Who knew whether he would pounce once she was wearing only a nightgown and lying in bed beside him?

  “Karl,” she began, determined to clarify the situation before she undressed. “How long did you have in mind that we should take to get to know each other?”

  Karl shrugged. “I thought we’d let things progress naturally.”

  Hetty’s heart took an extra, panicked beat. “Naturally?”

  “You know, take one day at a time and see how we feel.”

  Hetty had no doubt how she’d feel tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. Reluctant. “How will you know when the time is right?”

  It took all Hetty’s willpower to stand still as Karl took the few steps to close the distance between them. He reached out and cupped her cheek, smoothing his callused thumb over the blush that had risen there. She felt caught like a fish on a hook, desperate to escape, but held fast by the look in his serious brown eyes. Finally he said, “The time will be right when you tell me it’s right.”

  Hetty heard herself swallow loudly over the painful knot in her throat. “You’re leaving the decision up to me?”

  “Entirely.”

  He turned her by the shoulders, gave her a friendly pat on the rump, and said, “Now go get ready for bed.”

  Karl lay stiffly on his back on his side of the bed, so he wouldn’t accidentally touch his brand-new wife. It had taken a long time for Hetty to fall asleep. Even so, she wasn’t sleeping restfully. She tossed and turned and made soft, anxious noises. Conscience bothering her, he supposed, from all the lies she’d told.

  Some wedding night. Not at all what he’d hoped, especially considering the fact that he wasn’t marrying a woman who could be expected to have the normal fears of an unbroached bride. Pretty disappointing, actually.

  The more Karl thought about it, the more he questioned why a girl—Hetty could only barely be called a woman—as beautiful as Hetty had been so willing to travel so far to marry a stranger. He felt sure she could have had her choice of men in Cheyenne, someone who would have provided a comfortable home for her and her children.

  Why had she chosen to become a mail-order bride? What demons had forced Hetty to leave Cheyenne? From what—or whom—had she needed to escape? What had happened to the two different men he was more and more certain had fathered her two children?

  Hetty must have been very, very young when she’d borne her daughter. And the boy must have gotten all his looks from his fath
er, since he bore no resemblance whatsoever to his mother, or to his sister, for that matter.

  Karl wished he wasn’t so analytical. A really smart man would close his eyes to all the anomalies he’d found in his bride and simply enjoy her. Karl couldn’t do that. Especially when it was so obvious that his bride found him wanting.

  He’d felt her resistance to his kiss. It had been devastating. It had seemed wiser—safer for his ego—to back off than to continue. She’d agreed so quickly to postpone their wedding night that he hadn’t tried to persuade her otherwise.

  Karl knew he could please his wife in bed, given the chance. He’d had a good teacher, an older woman who’d tutored him in all the ways he could bring exquisite pleasure to his partner. But he wasn’t going to force Hetty to accept his attentions. She’d clearly been reluctant even to kiss him, let alone venture into the sort of touching required to consummate their marriage.

  It was true they barely knew each other. The few letters they’d exchanged had only given him a suggestion of what she might be like, and he was sure the reverse was equally true. A wedding night could be daunting even when the parties were well acquainted.

  But Hetty was no virgin bride. She’d been married before. She wasn’t unaware of what a husband might expect from her. Shyness he would have understood and respected. But Hetty’s behavior had gone a step beyond that.

  Karl hated to attribute her recoil to his looks, but that seemed the most obvious answer to the way she’d flinched from him. He knew physical attraction was a big part of sexual desire. How could he expect someone as beautiful as Hetty to find someone like him to her liking?

  The problem was, there was nothing he could do to change his appearance. It was what it was. His only hope was to show his wife that he had other attributes that would make him a good spouse. To have her learn to like and, if possible, love him, so that his looks became irrelevant.

  Karl made a disgusted sound, then looked at Hetty to see if he’d woken her. Looks were never unimportant, at least, not until old age. He and Hetty were both young, and she was even younger, he believed, than she’d claimed to be in her letters. He snorted softly. If she was twenty-eight, he was a cornstalk.

  I have to be patient, he told himself. I have to give her time.

  That solution was disturbing because of the evidence he had before him, in the persons of those two disparate children, that Hetty had a wandering eye. Was that why she’d wanted—needed—to leave Cheyenne? Had she been involved in some scandal with yet another man? What if she found someone more attractive to love, or make love to, before she fell in love with him?

  Like Dennis.

  Karl felt anew the annoyance—no, that word didn’t begin to describe his feelings—the anger he’d experienced when his friend had kissed his bride so soundly. Kisses meant nothing to Dennis. By the time his friend was seventeen and had left to seek his fortune as Jonas’s man, Dennis had cut a wide swath through the willing girls in their neighborhood. Dennis had never questioned whether a woman found him attractive. He knew he was.

  To Dennis, kisses were like stones along a riverbed, plentiful and common. To Karl, they were something precious, to be shared with someone special, like your brand-new wife. Karl hadn’t kissed Hetty on the lips at the church because he’d wanted their first kiss as husband and wife to be savored between them in private.

  Or maybe you had some inkling she might be unwilling, and you didn’t want to be embarrassed if she turned her head.

  That hadn’t stopped his friend. Dennis had simply given her the kiss, as though Hetty would be happy to have it. Or maybe taken the kiss, as though Hetty wouldn’t mind having it stolen.

  Karl resented the hell out of having it stolen. Not that he’d ever say anything to Dennis. His friend would only laugh at him for being ridiculous. Dennis didn’t take much of anything seriously. Except work. He took his work very seriously. His impressive physical appearance he simply took for granted.

  Karl had compared himself all his life to Dennis and inevitably found himself wanting. Nevertheless, he’d kept Dennis as a friend because he would have felt petty cutting the acquaintance simply because he felt self-conscious—usually invisible—standing next to Dennis in a roomful of people.

  Intellectually, Karl knew that looks didn’t define a person. Character and kindness and intelligence and imagination and a hundred other things were far more meaningful in a relationship. Except, even in his chosen life’s work, the study of flowers and trees and plants of every kind, appearance counted. The most colorful flowers attracted the most birds and butterflies and bees, which pollinated them, thus guaranteeing survival of the most stunning examples of the species.

  Nature knew what it was doing.

  Karl fisted his hands and clenched his teeth. He had to stop worrying about something over which he had no control. His wife would either fall in love with him, or she wouldn’t.

  Hetty moaned again in her sleep, and Karl carefully turned on his side to observe her in the moonlight streaming through the hotel window.

  Her skin was flawless. Her nose was small and straight. Her eyelashes were long and lush and lay on high, wide cheekbones. Her lips were full and tempted him to taste them. A riot of curls framed her heart-shaped face on the pillow. Her shoulders, one of which was bared by the too-large nightgown were…He was forming the words creamy smooth in his mind but stopped when he saw a puckered area of skin just below the line of her nightgown. He reached out and carefully moved the flannel lower, so he could see better in the moonlight.

  It was a scar all right, a bad one. He surveyed the jagged circle of shiny, raised skin, which appeared to be only part of a terrible, newly healed wound. Bullet? Knife? The possibility that his new wife had recently been attacked seemed preposterous. Except, right there before his eyes was the wound to prove it had happened.

  More alarming than the disfiguring wound was the fact that Hetty had chosen not to mention it. Surely such an assault would have merited a sentence in one of her letters. Unless this mutilation was the reason she’d needed to leave Cheyenne. It seemed more and more certain to Karl that his mail-order bride was running from someone in her past.

  He wondered when and how Hetty planned to explain the wound. Maybe she wasn’t planning for him to see it. Maybe she intended to stay garbed like a nun for the rest of their marriage. It was only by accident that he’d noticed the ragged, raised flesh in the moonlight. Ordinarily her nightgown would have hidden it.

  Well, they would just see about that. When he made love to his wife, he planned to do it without a lot of clothing between them. He would see what she had to say about that scar when she had nothing left to hide behind.

  Hetty rolled over and her nightgown fell open to reveal the luscious swell of her breast.

  Karl groaned softly when he realized his body had responded urgently—and predictably—to the sight. If only his bride had kissed him back. It was agony to have this beautiful woman lying next to him and know it might be a very long time before he would be able to make love to her.

  He slowly rose up on an elbow, leaving one hand free to reach for the curls on the pillow. Her hair was silky soft. He brushed a knuckle against her cheek, and she shifted her head back and forth, as though she’d been tickled by a feather.

  Then he heard her say quite clearly, “No.”

  He withdrew his hand abruptly, then noticed she was repeating the word, even though she was still sound asleep.

  “No no no No No NO!”

  Her voice rose and became increasingly distraught. Her head moved from side to side, tears streamed from her eyes, and her hands and feet struggled beneath the covers.

  Karl sat upright, laid a hand on one of her shoulders to shake her gently, and said, “Hetty, wake up. Hetty!”

  But she was lost in whatever misery held her spellbound in her dreams. Karl lifted her into his arms to comfort her, holding her despite her efforts to be free. “Shh,” he said. “It’s all right, sweetheart. I h
ave you.”

  Hetty’s cries grew more frantic, her struggles more desperate, and Karl wondered if he’d made a mistake by taking her in his arms. But it was too late to back away. She was still sound asleep, and writhing as she was, she might fall off the bed if he let her go.

  “Clive!” she cried. “Clive!”

  She grabbed Karl around the neck, sobbing and making keening sounds of mourning. He heard pounding at the door, heard Grace begging to know what was wrong, but there was no way he could let go of Hetty to answer the door. “Come in!” he called.

  Both children tumbled through the door. The boy kicked the door shut with his bare foot and stood there with his hands balled into fists. The girl crossed all the way to the bed, her eyes wide with fright, and demanded, “What are you doing to my mom?”

  Instead of answering, Karl asked, “Who’s Clive?”

  The girl frowned, rubbed her nose, and shrugged.

  Apparently, Clive wasn’t one of the two fathers. He turned to the boy and said, “Griffin?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “Don’t use that language,” Karl said in a voice made harsh by the children’s inability, or unwillingness, to identify the mysterious Clive. Whoever the man was, Hetty was grieving the loss of him. Karl wondered if Clive had wounded Hetty and run or whether Hetty had left an angry paramour behind in Cheyenne.

  “She’s wailin’ like somebody died,” Griffin said belligerently. “What did you do?”

  Karl noticed that despite the boy’s concern for his mother, he stayed out of reach. He wondered if Clive, or some other man, had hit Griffin in the past. He wanted to say, I won’t hurt you, boy, but the painful knot in his throat made it difficult to speak. At last, he was able to clear his throat and said, “She’s having a bad dream.”

  “So wake her up,” Griffin replied.

  Karl began, “I don’t know if I—”

  Grace simply took action. She grabbed her mother’s shoulder, shook her hard, and said, “Wake up, Mom! Wake up!”