Page 54 of Conveniently Wed
“Why couldn’t that monster have been attracted to me instead?”
He laughed at the absurdity of her words. “You can’t be serious. You’d rather have a lunatic like that coming after you?”
“Better me than Emma,” she returned stubbornly.
She stepped away, leaving his hand to fall away from her elbow. “Look at me,” she demanded.
“I am looking,” he said over the lump that rose in his throat, half choking him. Her fierceness drew him. He should leave, but he couldn’t make his feet work right.
“What’s wrong with me?”
Nothing, far as he could tell.
“Tim didn’t want to marry me.Youdon’t want to be married to me.”
She’d worked herself up into a fine fit now, eyes sparking and hands gesticulating in front of her.
“There must be something wrong with me,” she concluded.
If there was, he couldn’t see it. That was his problem—he liked her, was attracted to her. And he shouldn’t have been. Hadn’t his past taught him anything?
But her words stirred up the unwelcome reminder of something he hadn’t had time to talk to her about earlier.
“You said you wouldn’t lie to me,” he reminded her, closing in on her and taking her upper arms in his hands. Her eyes widened as she recognized the gravity of his tone and expression.
“Y-yes.”
“Did that Tim fella ever kiss you?”
He saw the answer in her eyes, but waited for the minute shake of her head—barely—before he lowered his head to hers.
He crashed into the kiss, like she’d crashed into his life, upending everything in his ordered world.
She met him sweetly, passionately. Her arms clung to his shoulders. One hand even snuck up to the back of his neck and buried itself in his tangled hair. She knocked into the back of his hat brim and that small shift brought him back to his senses.
He set her away from him, untangling her arms from around him.
Her eyes were big, luminous in the moonlight.
“Don’t say that was a mistake,” she whispered, lips trembling.
He mashed his hat down on his head. Clenched his hands into fists to keep from reaching for her again.
“It has to be,” he said.
And turned and walked out into the darkness.
10
Fran was awake long before the cowboys began rolling out of their bedrolls, their murmurs soft in the semi-darkness.
She let Emma sleep for a bit longer and crept out of the wagon.
She had no desire to see her husband, so she snuck through the dew-wet grasses to find a bit of privacy. Even though he’d told her not to go off alone. She needed a moment to herself.
The sun was a slip of orange light on the horizon and she watched it grow. The fields all around her remained cloaked in gray as the sky’s blue lightened. A line of low-lying clouds at the horizon turned gold.
Bright white light slid into the growing blue in the sky and then began to slide in golden rays across the prairie, turning the green grass golden at its dewy tips. Spreading. Spreading.
