Eternity

by Jude Deveraux

  “My—” Breaking off, he cleared his throat. “My wife.”

  “Mmmmm,” she said. “What’s her name?”

  He was staring at Carrie so intently that for a moment he couldn’t seem to think. “Whose name?”

  “Your wife. What is the name of your wife?”

  Reaching inside his coat, he withdrew the letter, then with obvious reluctance, he drew his eyes from Carrie’s and looked down at the letter. “Carrie. She’s named Miss Carrie Montgomery.”

  “You don’t seem to know much about her,” Carrie said teasingly.

  “Oh, but I do.” There was a heaviness in Josh’s voice that almost made Carrie giggle. “She can plow ten acres of farmland in a single day. She can raise hogs, slaughter them, and cook them, and she can doctor mules, chickens, and children. She can shear sheep, weave the cloth, and make clothes, and, in a pinch, she can build her own house.”

  “My goodness,” Carrie said. “What a competent woman she sounds. Is she pretty?”

  “I rather think not.” As he said this he looked Carrie up and down, and there was such hunger in his dark eyes that Carrie felt a little river of sweat run down the back of her neck.

  “Then you haven’t met her?”

  “Not yet.” As he answered, he took a step closer to her.

  At that moment Choo-choo decided to chase a rabbit that was running across the mountain grass, and when Carrie lost hold of his leash, he went flying across the countryside. Instantly she was on her feet and running after the dog that had become so precious to her. He was the only live thing that she had been able to bring from home with her.

  But Josh was running before she was. Taking off after the dog as though its recapture meant his life, he ran across the field after the animal.

  For several minutes the two of them were both running after the dog, Carrie in her hoop skirt, which gave her legs great freedom, and Josh in his black suit. It was Josh who caught the little dog before it went scurrying down a rabbit hole, and in gratitude, Choo-choo bit Josh’s hand.

  “Bad dog!” Carrie said, even as she scooped Choo-choo into her arms and turned to Josh. “Thank you so very much for saving him. He could have been hurt.”

  Holding his bleeding hand extended in front of him, Josh smiled. “There are rattlers around here. You’d better hold onto that leash.”

  She nodded, put the dog to the ground, hooked the loop of the leash over her arm then took out her handkerchief. “Let me see your hand.”

  After a token protest, Josh held out his hand to her, and she took it in both of hers.

  Carrie wasn’t prepared for the shock that went through her as her flesh touched his. They were standing under the shade of an old cottonwood tree, the high mountain air was fragrant, and it was silent and empty around them. For all they were aware of it, the rest of the world might not have existed.

  Trying not to tremble, but not succeeding, Carrie dabbed at the blood on Josh’s hand. “I…I don’t think the wound is too deep.”

  Josh was looking at Carrie’s hair. “He doesn’t have enough teeth to go very deep.”

  She looked up at him and smiled, and for a moment she was sure that he was going to kiss her. With every morsel of her being, she tried to send thoughts to him that would make him take her into his arms and kiss her until she couldn’t think any more.

  Abruptly, Josh stepped away. “I have to go. I have to see what’s happened to my…to my…”

  “Wife,” Carrie supplied.

  He nodded in agreement, but he didn’t say the word. “I have to go.” At that he turned on his heel and started back toward the stage depot.

  “I’m Carrie Montgomery,” she said.

  Josh stopped in his tracks, his back to her.

  “I’m Carrie Montgomery,” she repeated a bit louder.

  When Josh started to turn, she smiled in anticipation of his happy surprise.

  When he looked at her, his face was an unreadable mask. “What do you mean?” he asked softly.

  “I am Carrie Montgomery. I am the woman you’re waiting for. I am—” Her voice and eyes lowered. “I am your wife,” she whispered. She felt rather than heard him take a few steps toward her, and when he was so close that she could almost feel his breath on her face, she looked up at him. He was not smiling. In fact, had he been one of her brothers, she would have thought that the expression he wore was rage.

  “You’ve never pulled a plow in your life,” he said.

  Carrie smiled at that. “True.”

  With shaking hands, Josh pulled the letter from inside his coat. “She wrote to me about what she could do. She said that she’d run a farm since she was little more than a child.”

  “Perhaps I embellished the truth a bit,” Carrie answered modestly.

  Josh took a step closer to her. “You lied. You bloody well lied to me!”

  “I think that’s a curse word. I’d rather you didn’t—”

  He took another step toward her, but Carrie was already in that space so she had to back up. “I wrote that I wanted a woman who knew about farming, not some…some socialite carrying a long-haired rat she calls a dog.”

  As though he heard himself mentioned, Choo-choo began to bark at Josh. “Now see here,” Carrie began.

  But Josh didn’t allow her to speak. “Was this your idea of a joke?” Putting his hand to his forehead as though he were in great agony, Josh stepped away from her. “What in the world am I going to do now? I was suspicious when I received that proxy marriage paper, but I thought it was because the woman was mud-ugly. I was prepared for that.” Turning back to Carrie, he looked her up and down with great contempt. “But you! I wasn’t prepared for you.”

  Shushing Choo-choo, Carrie looked down at herself, wondering if she’d suddenly turned into a frog, for she’d certainly never before had a complaint about how she looked. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “What isn’t wrong with you?” he said. “Have you ever milked a cow? Do you know how to chop the head off a chicken and pluck it? Can you cook? Who made your dress? A French modiste?”

  Carrie’s dressmaker at home was French, but that was of no consequence. “I can’t see that any of those things matter. If you’d just let me explain, I can clear up everything.”

  At that Josh went to the tree, leaned back against it, and folded his arms across his chest. “I’m listening.”

  After taking a deep, calming breath, she told her story. She started by telling him how she and her friends had organized the mail-order bride office, hoping that it would show him that she was good at a great many things. He didn’t speak, nor could she read his thoughts, but she continued by telling him how she had seen the photo he’d sent and known from the first moment that she loved him. “I felt that you and your children needed me. I could see it in your eyes.”

  He didn’t so much as move a muscle.

  She told him in great detail of her indecision, of how she had given the matter great consideration. (She didn’t want him thinking that she was a featherbrain who did things without thinking them through first.) Then she told about all the complicated arrangements she’d made in order to marry him, and when she told of leaving her family and friends and home to come to him, there were tears in her eyes.

  “Is that all?” Josh asked, his jaw rigid.

  “I guess so,” Carrie answered. “You can see that I didn’t do this to be mean. I felt that you needed me. I felt that—”

  “You felt,” he said, moving away from the tree toward her. “You decided. You and you alone decided the fate of everyone around you. You gave no consideration to anyone else. You put your friends and your family through hell all because of some romantic notion you had that a man you never met—” He glared at her. “Needed you.” He said the word with a great deal of derision.

  Stepping toward her, he leaned over her so that she bent backward. “For your information, you spoiled, overindulged, little rich girl, what I need is a wife who can run a farm. If I needed some emp
ty-headed, worthless bit of fluff like you, I could pick her up anywhere in the world. I could have had a half-dozen women like you right here in Eternity. I don’t need a feisty bed partner. I need a woman who can work!” With that last declaration, he turned away and angrily started walking back to the stage depot.

  Blinking in bewilderment, Carrie stood where she was. No one had ever talked to her as this man had just done—and no one was going to. Pulling her bodice down as though to emphasize her resolve, she went after him. Since he was walking very quickly, he wasn’t easy to catch, but she managed. She stepped in front of him.

  “I don’t know how you decided that you know all about me, but you don’t. I—”

  “Appearances,” he said. “I have judged you on appearances. Isn’t that how you judged me? You took one look at my photograph and decided to alter the course of my life. You never so much as considered that I might not want my life altered.”

  “I didn’t decide to alter your life. I decided—”

  “Yes?” he asked, his eyes blazing. “What did you decide if not to change my life? And the life of my kids.” He gave a snort of laughter. “I told them that I would bring someone home tonight who could cook dinner for them, and I swore that they’d never have to eat my cooking again.” Roughly grabbing her hands, Josh looked at them as though her hands were his enemy. Carrie’s hands were creamed and soft, the nails trimmed and filed. “I have a feeling that I’ve cooked more meals than you have.” Tossing her hands down in disgust, he started walking again.

  Determinedly, Carrie moved in front of him again. “But you liked me. I know that you did. I didn’t tell you who I was immediately because I wanted to see if you liked me or not.”

  At that Josh’s face changed from anger to almost amusement. “Is that what you thought, that when you met me I’d be so bowled over with your beauty that I wouldn’t notice that your only use is to sit in some rich man’s parlor and play minuets on the spinet? Did you think that I would be so blinded by your beauty and my raging desire to get you into bed at night that I’d not be able to hear the hungry cries of my two children?”

  “No,” Carrie said softly, but he had hit nearer to the truth than she liked to think. “I didn’t think that. I thought—”

  The rage came back to his face. “You didn’t think at all. It never seems to have occurred to you that I could have taken a wife here. Did you think that no woman would want to marry me? Do you think I’m too ugly to attract a woman?”

  “Why no, I think you’re—”

  He didn’t allow her to finish her sentence. “Yes, of course you do. A lot of women do. I can get a woman if I want her, but I have neither the time nor the inclination for courting, and all women want courting, no matter how ugly they are. I sent to that lunatic company of yours so I could get a helpmate, not a girl with a head filled with romance, so I could feed my children and myself.” With what was close to being a sneer, he gave her one more look up and down. “Now, Miss Montgomery,” he said, tugging on the brim of his hat, “I bid you good day, and good-bye. I hope in the future that you think before you act.”

  He walked away from her, leaving her standing there, her little dog at her feet.

  Carrie wasn’t sure what she was to do now because what had just happened was not something that she had considered. Trying to give herself time to think, she wondered when the next stage ran. She dreaded going back to Warbrooke, but she guessed she’d have to. Looking up, she glared at the back of Josh as he walked toward the depot.

  “Mrs. Greene,” she said softly to his back, then called out louder, “My name happens to be Greene. Mrs. Joshua Greene.” By the time she said the last, she was fairly shouting.

  Stopping where he was, Josh turned and looked at her.

  Carrie crossed her arms over her bosom and glared at him defiantly.

  With anger in his every step, he started back toward her. There was so much anger on his face and emanating from his body that Carrie stepped away from him.

  “If you touch me, I’ll—”

  “Half an hour ago you were practically begging me to touch you. If I’d started undressing you, you wouldn’t have protested.”

  “That’s a lie!” Carrie said, but her face turned red.

  “You should know about lying if anyone does.” Reaching out, he clamped his hand on her upper arm and began pulling her along behind him as he started toward the stage station.

  “Release me this instant. I demand—”

  Halting, he put his nose almost to hers. “As you reminded me, you did such a thorough job of hornswoggling me that I find I am now married to you. You are going home with me until next week when the stage runs through here again and I can send you back to your father where you belong.”

  “You can’t—”

  “I can and I’m going to,” he said, dragging her along behind him as he walked. When he reached the depot, he stopped. “Where are your bags?”

  Carrie stopped trying to push his hand off her arm and looked about her. While they had been under the tree, her baggage wagon had arrived, and, when she looked at it, she saw that the driver’s seat was empty so the man must be inside the depot. “There,” Carrie said, nodding toward the wagon. “I can take care of myself. I can—” She broke off at the look on Josh’s face, for he looked as though he had just seen a swamp monster. He was horrified, shocked, immobile with disbelief. Following the direction of his eyes, she saw nothing unusual, only her baggage wagon.

  But what Josh saw was a mountain of trunks, all of them tied down with heavy rope onto a big wagon drawn by a four-horse team. He doubted if the sum total of all the belongings of the people of Eternity was enough to fill that many trunks. “Heaven help me,” he whispered, then looked back at her. “What in the world have you done to me?”

  Chapter Four

  By the time Carrie was seated atop Josh’s old buckboard, she was beginning to wish that she had never seen his photograph. He was so angry at her that he wouldn’t look at her or speak to her. He yelled at the horses and snapped the reins as though the horses were the cause of his problems, and they rode off into the setting sun, Carrie’s baggage wagon following them.

  “I really didn’t mean—” Carrie began, but Josh cut her off.

  “Don’t say a word to me. Not one word. I need to think what to do about this.”

  “You could let me prove myself,” she said under her breath.

  When Josh heard what she’d said, he gave her a sideways look of such contempt that Carrie tightened her lips, refusing to say another word to him.

  After a long ride over a dusty, rutted road, they turned down a weed-infested road that was hardly more than a path and slowly made their way into the tall trees. After some minutes the trees cleared away, and Carrie could see the house.

  Never in her life had she seen such a forlorn, unhappy-looking place as that dilapidated little house. She had seen poverty in Warbrooke; some of her Taggert cousins were poor, but their houses didn’t have the miserable, sad, forlorn look about them that this place did.

  All the ground in front of the house and surrounding the little shed behind the house was bare of grass and plants, and the cheerless house itself had no glass in the windows, just oiled paper. There was light coming from inside the house, but not much, and there was no smoke coming from the ragged-topped chimney.

  The house itself was nothing but a box, with a door and a window on each side. Another perfectly square, perfectly boring box was attached to the back of the house, and she wondered if it was a bedroom.

  Turning, she looked at Josh in the moonlight, her face showing her disbelief at what she was seeing. For the life of her she could not picture this man living in a place like this.

  With a set-jawed straight-ahead stare, he refused to meet her glance, but she knew he was aware that she was staring at him. “You see now why I wanted someone who knew how to work. Could you, Miss Rich Princess, live in that?”

  Carrie thought it was odd that
he could see how appalling the place was yet he hadn’t done anything about it. Her Taggert cousins lived in semisqualor, but they all seemed to love the mess. When they visited her house, they were uncomfortable and couldn’t wait to leave.

  Angrily, as though the house and everything about it was somehow her fault, he halted the wagon in front of the house and got down. When she was closer to the place, Carrie could see that the house was even worse than it had looked from a distance. The missing roof shingles made her wonder if the house leaked. The front door was hanging by one hinge, giving the place a drunken appearance. Since there was no porch on the house, there was what looked to be a permanent mud puddle in front of the door.

  With what seemed to be a permanent mood on his part, Josh angrily came to her side of the wagon and lifted her down. But there was no lingering of his hands on her waist this time. In fact, he didn’t so much as look at her as he left her standing while he went to the baggage wagon.

  After one more look at the house, she turned to the baggage wagon and asked the driver to hand her the two small carpet bags that were loaded on the front of the wagon. One was full of her night things and the other contained her gifts for the children.

  “Are the children inside?” she asked Josh.

  “Inside waiting in the cold and the dark, and I’m sure they’re hungry.” The anger and bitterness in his voice made it sound as though the condition of the place was Carrie’s fault.

  She didn’t say any more to him, but turned and went toward the house. It wasn’t easy trying to balance the two bags and Choo-choo at the same time, but Josh made no effort to help her. He was giving orders to the baggage wagon driver about where to unload Carrie’s trunks, and he let everyone within hearing distance know what he thought of all her baggage. The broken hinge of the front door made it nearly impossible to open, and when she did get the thing open, the frame nearly hit her in the face. It was a struggle, but she managed to get it open enough to go inside the little house.