Marianne's Marriage of Convenience

by Lynna Banning

  Her knife clattered on to her plate. “You’re not? Did you just say you’re not sorry we got married?”

  “No, I’m not sorry.”

  “W-well, why aren’t you?”

  That made him laugh. “Well, I guess it’s because when it comes right down to it, I like you. Sure, you can be bossy and demanding and sometimes you think you know everything, but…I still like you.”

  She blinked hard and her eyes got all shiny. “Are you sure?”

  He chuckled. “Sure I’m sure.”

  Then she asked him a single question that made him wish he’d never brought up the subject of marriage in the first place.

  “Why do you like me?”

  “Hell if I know,” he muttered.

  What he really wanted to know was whether Marianne wanted him the way he wanted her. But a man didn’t just come right out and ask a woman that. She said she liked kissing him, but he wondered if that was all there would ever be to their marriage, just kissing?

  She’d gotten what she wanted, a husband and her inheritance. And according to the bargain they’d made, he got what he’d wanted. He now owned half of Collingwood Boots.

  But that wasn’t all he wanted.

  He didn’t know whether he could stand lying beside Marianne every night and just kissing her. He wanted to touch her, all over. He wanted her to touch him. Some nights while she slept beside him he lay awake for hours, physically aching for her.

  The truth settled in his chest like a rock. He was falling in love with Marianne, his marriage of convenience wife. And what he really wanted now was for her to love him back.

  They finished their coffee and walked back to the shop in a silence so thick it was like wading through melted cheese. He wasn’t about to give up on his Seduce Marianne campaign, but when she settled herself at the kitchen table with her notepad and a handful of pencils she’d worn down to a nub, he saw that, once again, nothing was going to happen between them tonight, and his heart sank into his boots. It looked like she’d retreated into herself the way she had back in St. Louis when something was on her mind. Guess he’d have to think some more about his seduction plan.

  He took one of Abe’s dime novels to bed, and for the next two hours he tried his best to concentrate on Chasing the Dakota Kid. He kept losing the plot, forgetting which character was the bad guy and not caring all that much about the outcome. After another hour Marianne gathered the pencils into a bunch, puffed out the lamp on the kitchen table and disappeared behind the folding screen in the corner to undress.

  Lance snapped his book shut, doused the lamp and shed his clothes. Then he stretched out full-length on the bed to wait for her.

  The rustles he heard coming from behind the screen were enough to inflame his imagination in ways a dime novel never could. What was she taking off? Her petticoat? Her chemise? He closed his eyes. Was there a lot of lace on whatever it was?

  He was so tense his muscles quivered. Why were women’s garments so complicated? They must be designed to drive men crazy by leaving them in a permanent state of arousal.

  He heard something soft plop on to the floor, and the little sigh after that made him smother a groan. Water-splashing noises followed. Oh, for God’s sake, she was standing there without a stitch on, taking a spit bath. The vision of her smoothing a wet cloth over her bare skin made his teeth clench.

  Then she stepped from behind the screen. Moonlight illuminated the thin nightgown she wore, and Lance feasted his gaze on the lush body he could glimpse through the gauzy fabric. She moved to the china cabinet, where she picked up a glass, pumped it full at the sink and drank it while staring out the window.

  After what felt like an interminable minute she set the glass in the sink and slowly turned toward him. “Are you awake?” she whispered.

  Lance bit the inside of his cheek. If he admitted he had been awake, watching her, she might put off coming to bed. But if she thought he was asleep, maybe she’d just walk across the room and get into bed next to him. So he said nothing.

  She slipped on to the double cot and with a sigh lay down beside him. Before he could second-guess himself, he twisted toward her and slid his arm across her waist.

  With a squeak she jolted upright, and he stuffed down a laugh.

  “Oh! You’re not asleep!” she accused.

  “Nope.”

  “I—I thought you were. You should have said something.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Oh.” She said nothing for a full minute, and Lance held his breath. Did she notice that his arm was still resting across her waist?

  “Did you want to, um, talk about something?” she asked.

  Talk! Hell, no, he didn’t want to talk. He wanted to kiss her silly!

  “Nope.”

  “Lance, are you aware you are speaking only words of one syllable?”

  He almost choked. “No, I didn’t realize that.”

  She lay without moving for so long he wondered if she’d drifted off to sleep. Could she do that, with his arm draped across her? For the hundredth time in the last month he began to wonder just who Marianne Collingwood really was underneath the surface.

  “Marianne?” he whispered.

  “Y-yes?”

  “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

  “What is it? About the shop?”

  “Not about the shop, no. It’s about…us.”

  He felt her body tense. “Oh,” she breathed. “The ‘us’ of our business partnership? Or the ‘us’ of…well, us?”

  “The ‘us’ of us.”

  She lay without moving, and that puzzled him. Was she staring up at the ceiling? Or were her eyes closed?

  He rolled on to his side to face her and tightened his arm over her waist. “It’s like this,” he began. “I know we decided to be equal partners in the business.”

  “You don’t want to change that, do you?” she said quickly. “Lance, you’re needed at Collingwood Boots. Abe needs you. And…” She hesitated. “I need you.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  He found he couldn’t stop smiling. “No, I don’t want to change our partnership, Marianne. I want it to be… I want it to be more.”

  “You mean more than fifty-fifty, as we agreed?”

  Lance expelled the air in his lungs. “I want to change the arrangement about our marriage.”

  Her body jerked. “You can’t possibly want a divorce already? We’ve been married less than a month!”

  “Hell, no, I don’t want a—Marianne, I don’t want a divorce. But I also don’t want a marriage of convenience.”

  Her breathing changed, but she didn’t say a word. Had she heard him? Did she understand what he was driving at?

  “You don’t want a marriage of convenience,” she acknowledged, her voice quiet. “What…what do you want, then?”

  “Remember back in St. Louis when you railroaded me into marrying you? I didn’t fight against it too much because, to be honest, I kinda liked you all along.”

  She sat halfway up. “You did? Really?”

  “Yeah, really.”

  “But I was so hard on you,” she blurted out. “I ordered you around and complained about everything and—”

  “Yeah,” he said with a chuckle. “You were hard to get along with, all right. There are still times when that’s true.”

  Marianne bit her lip. Was she really hard to get along with? Oh, of course she was, she admitted. Sometimes she heard herself snapping out orders just as she had back at Mrs. Schneiderman’s.

  “Lance, why are you bringing this up again now?” She glanced at him, trying to see his expression, but shadows obscured his face.

  “Because I enjoyed getting married to you. I didn’t think I would, but I did.”

  “Yes,” she admitted. “That was very pleasant. The townspeople were nice to us, giving us that wedding reception.”

  “Marianne, that’s not what I’m talking about here, and you know
it.”

  Marianne let out a long breath. Yes, she did know it. The truth was she didn’t know what to say. An even bigger truth was that she didn’t have the first clue what to do. She had liked getting married to him, too. She had liked it so much she suspected she had been afflicted with “first man flush,” something the older women boarders talked about.

  She had never cared for a man before. Of course, she’d been so busy working for Mrs. Schneiderman she had never even walked out with a man. She had never attended an ice cream social or a church service or a dance with a man. She hadn’t had time to set foot outside the boardinghouse! Her girlhood had gotten gobbled up by endless batches of pancake batter and afternoons communing with furniture polish.

  But now…

  “I am failing at our bargain, aren’t I?” she said in a small voice.

  He squeezed his eyes shut. “Part of it, maybe,” he said. “But it’s not the business part I’m talking about. It’s the other part, the marriage part. And you’re not ‘failing’ at it, Marianne. I just want to change it.”

  For a moment she again couldn’t think of what to say. She’d never felt so unsure of herself. Underneath she felt she was unattractive as a woman. Past her prime.

  “Marianne, tell me what you’re thinking.” Then he laughed quietly. “Actually, I don’t figure I’m ever going to know what you’re really thinking. But, yeah, please tell me what you’re thinking.”

  She kept him waiting for a minute while she considered what to share with him. “I am thinking that I don’t know what to do when I’m not in control of things. It makes me uneasy.”

  “Yeah, I understand that. Being in control of pies and roast chickens and a lot of dusty furniture is what you’ve been used to, but maybe that isn’t very satisfying.”

  “But it’s what I know. That’s all I’d been doing for years and years before Uncle Matty’s telegram came.”

  He said nothing.

  “There’s something else, too,” she said. “I—I hate feeling that you’re not happy with me.”

  He chuckled at that, and all at once she was afraid she’d said the wrong thing. When he raised his head and pressed a kiss on to her cheek, a warm glow of relief swept over her.

  “I’m not unhappy with you, Marianne.”

  “You’re sure? I thought—”

  He pulled her down beside him. “You know what?” he said quietly. “You think too damn much.”

  “Oh.” That was true, she acknowledged. But that was how she had survived after losing Mama and Papa, by thinking. Using her brain. She had put her wits to use and come to work for Mrs. Schneiderman.

  “Lance, do I really think too much?”

  “Sometimes, yeah.”

  She sighed. “I—I don’t know how to be any other way,” she admitted in an uneven voice.

  Lance didn’t speak. After a moment he leaned over and pressed his lips against her forehead. And then he moved lower and found her mouth.

  He kissed her until he thought he would explode, but when he felt tears on her cheeks he lifted his head and wrapped both arms around her. Turning on to his side, he pulled her toward him until her bottom was tucked into his groin.

  This wasn’t seduction, exactly, but it was getting closer. He tightened his arms around her, and after a long while her breathing evened out.

  For the next hour he lay thinking about partnerships and marriage and Marianne. There had to be a lot more to marriage than just seducing a woman. Especially if the woman was Marianne.

  And because the woman he’d married was Marianne, he guessed he was in for a long ride and even more surprises.

  Chapter Seventeen

  After another largely sleepless night, Lance again woke from a fitful doze to find Marianne gone. She had left a pot of coffee on the stove, but her sturdy work oxfords no longer sat beside the folding screen in the corner, and he knew without looking that her clothes weren’t there, either.

  He listened for the tap-tap of Abe’s hammer from below, but all was quiet. The clock read half past eight; why was it so quiet?

  By the time he pulled on his jeans and a shirt, an irregular thumping sound below told him something unusual was happening down in the shop. The question was, what?

  What he found when he reached the shop floor made him scratch his head. Marianne was bent over a sawhorse with a hammer in one hand and a short nail in the other, which she was positioning on top of a scrap of lumber.

  “Marianne, what in blazes are you doing?”

  She jerked upright and gave him a grin. “I’m practicing how to pound nails into this piece of wood. Abe said to pretend it’s the sole of a riding boot.”

  The old man popped up at her elbow. “Don’t know as them delicate little hands of yours are gonna be much good at boot-making, Miss Marianne. Why don’tcha stop and make us a pot of coffee?”

  The hammer clunked down on to the piece of wood, and Marianne straightened, her mouth unsmiling and her eyes like two shards of green granite. “I will have you know, Abe Garland, that these ‘delicate little hands’ have scrubbed more floors and beat more carpets than you have walked on in your entire life!”

  Abe backed away, and Sammy, working in the far corner on a piece of cowhide stretched across a table, looked up with an expression like a startled deer caught in the sights of a rifle. But Marianne wasn’t finished.

  “I own this business. I will not be relegated to housemaid duties,” she pronounced in careful, clipped tones. “Don’t any of you ever, ever ask me to make coffee again! Is that clear?”

  Abe thrust both hands in the air. “Yes, ma’am, Miss Marianne, that’s plenty clear.”

  She swept her gaze from Abe to Lance to Sammy and back to Abe. “We will all share coffee-making duties.” She punctuated each syllable with short, chopping motions of her hand.

  Whew! When she was mad, Marianne was hell on a fast horse. Lance had seen her this angry only once before, and that was when one of the boarders, who claimed to be an actress, wanted to practice a scene from a play and had insisted Marianne play the part of the wicked witch. The woman left the boardinghouse soon after.

  While Abe and Sammy goggled at her, Lance retreated to Abe’s tiny room, filled the coffeepot and set it on the small potbellied stove. Before he left he scanned the stack of dime novels in the corner and sighed gloomily. With Marianne so out of sorts, he figured it was going to be another long, lonely night planning the next step in his Seduce Marianne campaign.

  When he returned, he found Abe and Sammy sweeping up leather scraps and sawdust around the shop with unusual vigor. Marianne propped her hands on her hips and confronted him.

  “Don’t you want to see what my ‘delicate little hands’ have accomplished?”

  He hesitated, trying to catch Abe’s eye, but the older man was industriously dumping his dustpan into the trash bin and avoided his gaze. She grabbed the scrap of lumber and thrust it under his nose. “Look! See all those nails?”

  Lance looked. Sure enough, a double row of perfectly pounded ten-penny nails studded its length. He shook his head in disbelief.

  “You hammered in all those nails?”

  “I most certainly did! Aren’t they beautiful?”

  Behind her, Abe nodded and rolled his eyes. Lance wondered how long it had taken him to teach her how to handle a hammer. Tonight he’d check her thumb and forefinger for black-and-blue marks.

  “Marianne, I never stop being surprised by you.”

  To his amusement she lit up like a kid at Christmas. “Did you ever think I could learn to hammer nails like that?”

  “Nope. Not in a month of Mrs. Schneiderman Sundays.” He meant it. He really was surprised.

  “I can pound in tacks, too,” she said proudly. “Tacks are lots easier than those big nails.”

  He bit back a chortle. “I’m doubly impressed.”

  “And,” she added with a wicked twinkle in her eyes, “I can even make passable coffee! When it’s my turn to make the coffee, I wil
l do so.”

  Sammy and Abe dissolved in laughter, and then the front door flew open and their male guffaws in the shop were cut short as Eugenia Ridley bustled in. An over-feathered hat bobbed precariously on her graying head.

  “I hear you’re sponsoring a horse race on Fourth of July,” she announced in an imperious voice.

  Lance stepped forward. “Good morning, Mrs. Ridley,” he said, his voice silky. “Beautiful morning, isn’t it?”

  She ignored him. “Well, are you or aren’t you?” the woman demanded.

  Marianne moved toward her. “Why, yes,” she said in her most refined voice. “We are sponsoring a horse race, Mrs. Ridley. Do you ride?”

  “Ride?” she snapped. “Of course I ride. This is Oregon, dearie. Everyone out here rides.”

  Unperturbed, Marianne smiled at her. “And do you own a horse? I understand many women out here in the West own their own mounts.”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed. “I most certainly do own a horse,” she retorted. “As a matter of fact, I own two horses.”

  “Oh, how interesting. Perhaps you have heard there will be a ladies competition? Will you be entering?”

  The woman took a step backward. “Oh, well, I—I haven’t ridden in some time.”

  “What a pity,” Marianne said. “Then some other lady will win first prize. Young Annamarie Panovsky, perhaps. Or maybe Rosie Greywolf, Sammy’s mother.”

  Eugenia Ridley’s mouth opened and then clicked shut. “Really!” she said between clenched teeth. “Rosie Greywolf is fifty if she’s a day. Besides, she’s an Indian. I doubt if she is qualified. Indian women are not good horseback riders.”

  Sammy uttered something that was choked off when Abe poked his elbow in his ribs. Marianne turned a bland face on the woman before her. “I am so sorry you will not be entering. Young Miss Panovsky is a city girl, from New York City, I understand. And of course Rosie Greywolf is…”

  She let her sentence trail off and waited, still smiling.

  Mrs. Ridley’s generous bosom swelled up into a broad shelf of red-and-yellow printed calico. “On second thought, I believe I will enter the women’s race. My husband has been suggesting I get out of the house more now that our oldest daughter has married and moved to Gillette Springs.”